Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  Self Self Full, they said. Take your pick.

  Jimmy was a little underdressed, a suit, no tie, but didn’t have any trouble crashing the do in the St. Francis ballroom. It was a fund-raiser for some charity, something with Heart in the name. He wasn’t on the list. He wrote a thousand-dollar check. Suddenly they knew him. A smiling woman who reminded him of Patricia Hatch from Graceful Exits pinned a red ceramic heart on his lapel.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Jimmy said. He was looking down at his new lapel jewelry.

  “I mean in the auction,” she said.

  It wasn’t hard to blend in, stay concealed. He had put on a black suit that morning and looked like every other man in the room, even the ones who’d thrown on a tux. You had to get close to see that Jimmy’s shirt was taupe and that he wasn’t wearing socks with the loafers. He hit the hosted bar for a champagne and crème de cassis, which is what everyone else seemed to be drinking, and found a shaggy arica palm to screen him.

  Mary and her husband were at one of the front tables. With two other couples. Jimmy was across the broad room, with twenty tables between them, but he thought she looked his way once, fixed her eyes in his direction. But then someone in the foreground waved, and Mary waved back. So much for I somehow sensed you were there. She went back to her conversation with the man next to her. They were seated boy/girl.

  Jimmy looked at her husband again. He was caught up in a conversation with the woman seated to his right. Or was pretending to be. Who was he? So far, Jimmy had held himself back from thinking too much on it. That was too high school, too. What difference did it make? He hadn’t seen Mary in almost ten years. So what if she still looked the same to him? Ten years had passed. She had found someone. What did he think, that she had joined some I-can-never-love-another order? What was that phrase that everyone used now? She had moved on.

  She flashed a smile to the others at the table and pushed back and stood. She took her clutch bag off the table. She moved toward opened double doors, the exit.

  It was risky business, but Jimmy moved out from his blind and started on a line that, if he kept on it, would intersect her path. She stopped to talk to someone. She was only thirty feet away from him. He stopped. If she looked any direction except straight ahead when she finished talking, they’d be face-to-face. It would make for a dramatic scene, if drama was what he wanted.

  So. It’s you.

  But she didn’t look his way, walked straight out the exit.

  He went through another open door into the hallway. He looked for the doorway where she would have come out. There were restrooms there.

  Jimmy ducked back into the ballroom, found another potted plant to meld with. And snagged another kir royale from the tray of a passing waiter.

  Mary’s husband was impatient, maybe even suspicious of where his wife had gone. He kept up his end of the conversation with the woman next to him but still managed to look over at the exit every ten seconds. He did everything but check his watch.

  Then he checked his watch. He got up, tossed the napkin in his lap onto the table. Jimmy realized he was older than he’d thought. Older than Mary. She’d be in her early thirties. Her husband was in his mid-forties.

  He touched the shoulder of the woman he’d been talking with and said something and started off where he’d been looking all along, toward the exit.

  And then she appeared in the doorway. She looked altogether innocent, refreshed, touched-up, relaxed. Until she saw the look on her husband’s face, coming toward her.

  He smiled but meant something nasty by it.

  When he got close enough, she said something to him.

  It didn’t change the look on his face.

  They were stopped beside one of the buffet tables, the dessert table. She said something else to him. Her tone had changed. She walked past him, or tried to. He took her by the wrist to stop her.

  She said one word, glaring at him. Jimmy guessed it was probably his name.

  He let go of her wrist.

  Now it was his turn to say her name, as she walked away from him. She kept going.

  Maybe it was the light, or that there was a tall ice sculpture behind him, but there was blue behind his head and shoulders, a blue edge. Blue.

  But when Jimmy looked away, at Mary, and then looked back at her husband, the blue was gone.

  Was it too late to get simple back?

  On his way, he looked them up on the seating chart out in the foyer, where he’d laid down his check.

  Dr. Marc Hesse and Mary Hesse.

  When he drove onto the plaza in front of the Mark Hopkins, to leave the Porsche with the valet instead of driving down into the garage himself, Machine Shop was there. Pacing. Scrubbed out of his silver paint.

  He had a wild look in his eyes.

  It was late. Jimmy was tired. When he got out, left the motor running, Shop was right there.

  “Your girl killed herself,” he said. “Your Lucy.”

  TWELVE

  It was too nice a night for it, hot as hell, but clear. Jimmy roared up Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills in the huffing old Cadillac, fouling the air behind him. It was a cruising car, not a ride-to-the-rescue car. Or whatever it was that he was riding to. In his head he could still hear Mary screaming on the phone. It was uphill all the way, twisting and turning. He stuffed the gas to the floor, and the land yacht shuddered, downshifted itself into fir st. It was like an old surfer digging hard to get a fat classic long board up and over a wave. Strange, the things you think of when you’re thinking everything at once. Jimmy remembered a toast Ronald Reagan used to give, “May the road rise up to meet you . . .” He must not have meant this.

  There were headlights way behind him. He was afraid he’d blown past a cop hiding on a side street, but he didn’t slow down. He wasn’t going to stop.

  It was a cop. A black-and-white. It overtook him. The cops never even looked over at him.

  We’re headed the same place, Jimmy thought.

  The cops’ Gran Fury bottomed out on a dip in the road with an ugly sound and a splash of sparks, but the driver never let up.

  There were eight cop cars under the streetlights at the end of the cul-de-sac, at the end of the road, counting the plain-wraps and the higher-up suits’ cars with all the antennae. No press. Yet. Jimmy had gotten the screaming phone call at one ten. It was one twenty-five.

  The gate was open for all the coming and going. A uniformed officer stood there, dead center.

  “You can’t park there.”

  Jimmy had just stopped the Cadillac in the middle of the street and gotten out. He took a step closer, saw the look on the cop’s face. It seemed like a good time to lie.

  “My sister lives here,” he said.

  The cop gave in quickly, too quickly, so quickly it scared Jimmy about what was inside.

  “Go on,” the cop said. “Just give me the key.”

  Jimmy didn’t know he had it in his hand until he looked down.

  The white house was doused in blank light from double floodlight fixtures on the corners of the garage and the far end, by the pool. There was another cop at the front door, after you crossed the driveway. A cop in a suit. The door stood open behind this one. It was a Dutch door, cut sideways across the middle so the top half could open on its own. They made doors like that for families with kids, to keep them in but to let air and light in, too. The two halves weren’t lined up, locked together. There was blood around the knob outside but so dark it looked like chocolate. All the shine had gone out of it. What it looked like was shit. The cop in the suit wasn’t standing guard; he was working, taking notes. He had twenty years on the officer out in the street, at the gate. He was a detective, a lieutenant.

  “You can’t go in there,” he said, not looking away from whatever he was seeing on the face of the lower half of the door.

  “My sister lives here.”

  Now the cop in the suit looked up at him but still used the same v
oice. “What’s her name?”

  It was only then that Jimmy realized how quiet it was, how nothing was coming out from the house. You’d think there’d be voices. Somebody. Something. There was a smell coming from the house he’d never smelled before.

  He told him Mary’s name.

  A bit of the cop’s steel shield came down, the slightest softening of his reserve, his self-protective distance. He was relieved.

  “She’s alive. She’s all right. She’s in the den.” He even put his sentences in the right order, to save Jimmy the pain of even a half second of suspense.

  Jimmy shifted, as if to go past him, through the door.

  “Don’t go in here,” the cop said. “Go around.”

  “Thanks,” Jimmy said.

  “Better yet . . .” He called over another of the uniformed cops, who stood in front of the closed garage, his hand resting on his holstered revolver, as if something else was going to come out of the night.

  “Yessir.”

  “Go in; if they’re done with her, tell her that her brother is here.”

  The uniformed cop slipped in through the open door without touching it.

  “He should have gone around, too,” the veteran cop said, going back to the work. “Nobody needs to see that.”

  Jimmy knew what he meant by it, knew it was a tough guy’s way of saying, You’re going to have to take care of your sister.

  Mary came around the corner of the house, but it took a few minutes. She stopped, just stood there in the middle of the driveway, her arms limp.

  They let Jimmy take her through the gate, out to the end of the cul-de-sac, to the empty street across from the white house.

  It wasn’t something she could tell. Not yet. He saw that. She was trembling, but then it would stop, and she would be so still he would have shaken her if her eyes were closed. To see if she was alive. She just stood there, her back to the house, her eyes on the opposite ridgetop. It was only now that Jimmy realized where the city was, by the blue-gray edge to the scrub at the top of the hill. As if L.A. itself was a Sailor. It was what she was looking at.

  “Which room were you in?” Jimmy said. He put his arm around her. She was as tall as he was, but that night, now, she seemed diminished.

  “The study, the office,” she said.

  Maybe this was the way to let her unburden herself, a piece at a time. He didn’t ask another question for a long time, long enough for a helicopter to fly over, coming in from the south, headed for Mulholland or the valley beyond. Jimmy wondered how long it would take for the first news cameras to arrive. He didn’t want to be out in the open like this then.

  “You were asleep?”

  She nodded. She’d gone slack again, still. He dropped his hand from around her waist. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “David and Michelle were in my room,” she said. “Off the hallway. So I went to the other end, to the office to sleep. The couch. I told them all this.” She said the last imploringly, exasperated.

  Then she seemed to remember who he was, who he wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry.”

  There were voices from somewhere. They both turned. Shafts of light were projected on the slab of hillside behind the house, sweeping flashlights. The cops were in the slice of concreted “backyard” between the house and the rock. The pool was on the other end of the house. Their voices, indistinct, guttural, masculine, rude, were rebounding off the rock, amplified somehow by the arrangement of things.

  “I have to find someplace to go,” Mary said, a crack of panic in her voice.

  “You’re going to stay with me,” Jimmy said.

  He took her home.

  People always think someone should sleep when a thing like this happens, that the person can sleep. But Jimmy had been through his own version of a world-wrenching blowup. The ground had opened up in front of him once, too. He knew what it meant, knew what you saw when you closed your eyes in those first hours. Everything can change in an hour, if it’s the wrong hour. So when he got Mary home, he asked her what she wanted to do. The bedroom door was open behind them.

  “I guess lie down,” she said.

  He left her sitting on the bed, sitting in the center of it, with her legs crossed under her. He left the door open halfway. Something else he knew to do.

  As he walked away, she came out of the bedroom, went into the bathroom. He listened at the door. He wasn’t sure what he was listening for, but thought he should listen. She washed her hands for a long time, with the water on full.

  “At first, they put my hands in plastic bags,” she had told him before, as they were backing away down the cul-de-sac in the Cadillac. “Then they took them off. They never said why.”

  In the kitchen, Jimmy took a bottle of water from the icebox, left the door open for the cool and the light. He didn’t turn on the overhead, sat at the turquoise Formica table, cracked the seal, and drank it down. He looked out at the lights of the city below his house. The kitchen window was closed. The little house didn’t have air-conditioning, or even a wheezing window unit in the bedroom. He didn’t know if opening the window would make it cooler or hotter. He reached back into the refrigerator, opened the freezer door, and pulled out an ice tray. He held it upside down over the table and twisted it. The cubes clattered out like dice in a complicated game. He picked up one and sucked it like a Popsicle.

  He knew the layout of the house up in Benedict. Two nights ago there’d been a party he didn’t want to go to, but went to anyway. It was Thursday night now, so that would have made it a Tuesday. Nobody in that crowd seemed to notice it wasn’t the weekend. There were thirty people there, inside/outside, around the pool, a few of them famous, or at least famous somewhere. Recognizable. Actors, musicians. A high-hair metal band, whose look said they hadn’t checked in at the record label lately, hadn’t gotten the memo, came late and stayed late. Throughout the night they went everywhere together, side by side, in a cluster. Maybe they’d just shot a video that day and were still unnaturally synced. They stayed until the end. Or at least they were still there when Jimmy left.

  That night Mary had met him at the door, at that Dutch door, and had kissed him. Other people were in the room, the living room. The girls. Michelle, April. In front of them, Mary had kissed him on both cheeks, Euro style. It had ticked him off. Somehow two kisses were less than one. He didn’t see much of her for the next hours. He spent the first half of the night alone out by the black-bottomed pool, posing for a Hockney, a drink in hand, staring down at the reflective surface, maybe waiting for a coyote to come down out of the brush to drink. The rest of that night he spent in the office, the “study,” though the director wasn’t the type to study much of anything. He ended up being alone there, too. It was tucked away, off the master.

  So he knew the rooms. He knew the layout. Stage right, stage left. The long hallway with its blank walls, where the director would have hung his awards if he had any. (That Tuesday night, he was off with some woman agent in his bedroom. Having sex would have been the least vulgar thing they could have been doing.) At one end of the hall was the living room, opening to a dining room and the kitchen, all opening onto the pool. At the other end of the hall were the bedrooms, two next to each other on the right, the “kids’ rooms,” the master at the end on the left, across the back of the house, with French doors to the concrete area behind the house, where the cops toward the middle of the night had focused their attention.

  So he knew the layout.

  Jimmy tried to put it together. Maybe make it up would be more accurate. He tried different scenarios, different entry points for the killer, different paths through the house. Different orders to the deaths. Who was first?

  Then he realized something. The coroner’s vans had never come the whole time he was there.

  He was moving the melting ice around on the Formica tabletop. There was a siren somewhere down the hill or ripping across on Sunset, above the house. Maybe that was what had triggered the realization abou
t the body wagons.

  He had been on the scene for two or three hours, and no coroner’s van had arrived.

  What did that mean?

  Jimmy and Mary stayed inside for the next three days. The scene had very little drama, only quiet talking, talk about nothing at all, about music, about the neighbor’s cat who, even though Jimmy’s kitchen window was twenty feet off the ground, came twice a day to tightrope-walk across the sill. Three days. Three days that way. Just the two of them. Angel brought in food sometimes. They drank a little. Mary started reading a book, something on the bookshelf left over from high school for Jimmy. The first day, in the first hours of pink light coming over the city, he had unhooked the television so neither one of them had to see the pictures from the news helicopters of the desecrated bodies spread-eagled on three road cuts in three disparate parts of the county. The director, Michelle, April.

  THIRTEEN

  There are rules; we just don’t know what they are.

  That was Angel’s line. Over the years, he’d said it ten different ways to Jimmy. He’d said it the first night, when he’d found Jimmy on the street in Hollywood, standing across from the Chateau Marmont, in the crowd watching the ambulance, when he’d seen in his eyes whatever it is they see. Angel had spent the first three days with him. First Days. Angel had been the one who walked him through the first blue moon, though they didn’t have a name for that person, that role. Hand-holder? You were lucky if you had one, if you weren’t going through it all completely on your own, that first blue moon (and the ones after it), when some of the Sailors were called home, when some of them left whatever this was for whatever was next.

  Everyone should have someone saying, “There are rules; we just don’t know what they are.” Whether it’s true or not.

  They were riding north on the 5, Jimmy and Angel, just now climbing up out of the San Fernando Valley.

  It was night, when you think of the past.