Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  There was a bleached-out plastic For Rent sign out front stapled to an oak, as if anyone could just happen by the place. Word must have gotten out. There had been no takers in three months. Jimmy parked the Cadillac, turned off the engine and the music with it.

  There was a cicada somewhere, with that high-tension sound, like a rattler on crank. He left the driver’s door open, stood in place, turned a full circle. You could see the rooftop of another cabin halfway up the side of another canyon across the way, but that was it. Nothing else that had anything of a human stamp on it. Hard to believe the towers of Century City were three or four miles from here, in the air anyway. It was a good place to kill somebody.

  “Hello?” he said, louder than he’d intended.

  There was a little yodel slapback from the other hillside, but nothing else, not even a dog barking back at him. As he started toward the cabin, he stopped to pick up a straight length of branch dropped out of one of the oaks. What was he going to do with a stick? Use it the way a kid uses a stick to poke a dead thing? To make sure? He was more spooked than he’d thought he’d be. Detective Dill had done too good a job at painting a picture of what had gone down inside.

  He tried the knob on the front door. It was locked. The door was baby blue with hand-painted flowers, years old. Temescal had been a favorite hippie canyon in the ’70s. Hippies and bikers. After that, it was rich Hollywood types, weekenders, weed smokers. Who told themselves their new jobs hadn’t changed them. It hadn’t changed them. Then they got bored, and the drive was too much trouble. (It won.) And the next wave moved in, whatever it was. That the actress lived up here told Jimmy she’d probably come from someplace real and missed it, real like trees and birds that go to sleep and shut up when the sun goes down. Real like mice. And mud daubers.

  Real like dying of old age. With your clothes on. With your heart still on the inside of your body.

  There was a back door to the cabin, but it was locked, a dead bolt and a clasp and padlock to boot. New locks, a little late. Jimmy found a loose window, old rippled glass, and was just about to get it forced open when it decided to shatter instead. He reached in, unlatched it, pushed it up, and crawled through. And it wasn’t until he was inside, standing in the cabin’s one bedroom, that he saw that he’d cut himself, cut his hand, badly enough to bleed all over his T-shirt, where he’d scratched himself on his shoulder. He looked down at the flo or. There was a puddle like a rose petal under where his hand hung down.

  He didn’t learn anything in Temescal Canyon. Or at least nothing that clicked into place at the time, anything that meant anything to him then.

  So he went to the movies.

  The Vista. They showed foreign films and American classics, double bills that didn’t seem at first to belong together. This week it was The Searchers and The Road Warrior. It was a Monday night. He was all but alone in the place, just three or four film buffs sitting in their favorite seats, and the kid from behind the popcorn counter who was a film buff, too, who knew so much about movies that it crowded out the unimportant stuff like human relations and the future. Jimmy sat dead center, two-thirds of the way back. The four hours of screen murder and mayhem for some reason felt like a nice, long, warm, cleansing shower.

  Not that he didn’t keep thinking about the Temescal Canyon girl. He hoped she wasn’t the kind of aspiring actress who just wanted to be famous. He had stood in her living room. The cabin really only had one main room, with the kitchen against one wall, and the bedroom and bathroom. (It was like the low-ceilinged cabin in The Searchers John Wayne kept coming back to, without an answer.) Jimmy had stood there, in the middle of that front room. It was sad. It was easier to get inside the actress’s head than the killers’. She was only twenty-four, but Jimmy’s mother was twenty-one when she became a star. A star. Miss Temescal, or Miss Wherever She’d Come From, was only twenty-four but must have wondered if she was already too late.

  And, as it turned out, she was.

  The bathroom had a big old porcelain tub with claw-and-ball feet. Jimmy had crawled into it. From it, you could see up the hillside out a high, sideways window. Up there was a firebreak cut into the scrub brush, a gap to stop the fla mes from eating up and over the crest line. In fire season, the manzanita and scrub ground cover got a new name: fuel. Detective Dill had told Jimmy and Angel where the young woman was killed, the bedroom, but he had said they didn’t know the particulars, or not all of them. And not the beginning of the slaughter, the horror. Maybe she had been here, taking a bath. Candles? Maybe she’d pushed open the window to let in the smell of the trumpet vine that curled up over the back of the cabin. Had she heard something? The hills would be filled with coyotes. She would have gotten used to them right away, heard their yipping and seen them for the dogs they were. Had she heard something else? A car coming up the hill? There were no tracks, just the tracks of her Jeep CJ-7. Had they come down on foot on the firebreak? They pulled casts of the Converse shoe prints from behind the cabin, from under the window where Jimmy had come in. The cops knew from the beginning this was going to be bad. And showy. Her brown heart had been left on the counter beside an antique tortoiseshell comb and a burned-down candle.

  He left twenty minutes into The Road Warrior. The rescue motif had got to him. And the burnout in the two heroes’ eyes.

  Jimmy drove by the house in East L.A. that held Mary. He didn’t stop. He’d had the feeling someone was following him earlier in the day, and it still hung over him. Two of Angel’s men were out front, leaning against the fender of a glossy lowrider. They knew him, raised their beers in salute. Or to tell him she was OK. There was a light in the third-floor window. It was an apartment building. He wasn’t sure, but he told himself that the light was her. That she was reading.

  The next to die, after the actress, was inland, Ontario, out halfway to Palm Springs. It was a good thing he liked to drive, had nowhere else to be. And the third was south, halfway to Orange County, a teenager on the streets, a girl in the hard-core surf scene, down in Redondo.

  An actress.

  A middle-aged man, a fifth-grade teacher.

  A street girl.

  White.

  Black.

  Filipino.

  It was a triangle, if that mattered. On a map. West, east, south. The cop Dill had said that the beginning and the end, the old alpha and omega, was always motive. The job was to find the logic. What you were looking for was the obvious.

  Four, five, six. Seven, eight, nine.

  No more triangle. The murder scenes were all over the place.

  The surfer girl was the youngest, seventeen. The oldest was ninety, snatched from his bed in a convalescent hospital in Long Beach.

  Eight women, five men.

  Then there was the couple in Encino, the ones who didn’t make it onto the official list, into the papers, onto the TV. (The cops liked to keep a card or two facedown.) The scene was out in the Valley, a house south of Ventura Boulevard, a quarter-way up into the hills, in a neighborhood of big houses but close together, which is maybe why the couple never ended up on a road cut, were left there in the house where they were eviscerated.

  Jimmy came in from the back, came in across the golf course. He stopped fifty feet out. The house was Moderne. Most of the rear of it was glass, floor-to-ceiling, tinted black squares tucked under the flat roof. It was three in the morning. The man had been a television writer, hour cop shows when what they wanted was hour cop shows, true-crime woman-in-jeopardy movies of the week when their time came around, shifting as easily as he’d gone from Mercedes to Lexuses. Or would it be Lexi? When the long-form writing work ended, nothing much else came his way, but he had money in the bank and this house, for which he’d paid seventy-six thousand dollars. His wife sold real estate. Jimmy wondered if her agency was handling the house. There was a For Sale sign in the backyard, aimed toward the water hazard. Apparently no buyers for this one yet, either.

  He was about to move closer to the house when a light snapped o
n. Jimmy jumped, though he was still fifty feet out. The windows weren’t covered, no drapes or shades, or they were pulled open. The light had come on in what was the den. It was a table lamp. No one was visible. Jimmy waited. Maybe the light was on a timer. But set to snap on at three a.m.?

  Then an overweight kid stepped into the frame of the interior doorway. He just stood there, looking into the big, wide room, as if he was uncertain about stepping in. He wasn’t a kid exactly, except in L.A. showbiz terms. He was probably in his late thirties. He wasn’t overweight exactly either, just fleshy. In L.A. showbiz terms. He was barefoot and wore silky running pants, a white T-shirt.

  The light went out. Jimmy waited.

  The light came on in the kitchen. There was the fridge, a stainless steel side-by-side Sub-Zero. Jimmy expected the kid to come in, go over, open it, look in, the way people do in the middle of the night. But he stayed standing in the doorway again, this time with his hand still hovering over the wall switch. The rooms were all bare, stripped down, hyper clean. Open House clean. Show ready. The light went out.

  Now the kid picked up the pace. He went from room to room, light on, a beat, light off. He was like a scared little boy or girl looking for the source of the out-of-place noise he’d heard, home alone, hoping there’d be reassurance at the end of the search, when he’d checked everywhere.

  Jimmy knew what it was. He had run through this routine himself. It wasn’t about what was there, under the bed or in the shadows in the closet. It was about what was missing. Jimmy called it the I-can’t-believe-it dance, though he threw an obscenity in the middle.

  They’re gone.

  The light came on upstairs, in the upper right-hand corner of the house, where there was a balcony. It went out. Ten seconds later it came on again. This time the kid stepped in, left the doorway, crossed the room, and stood at the foot of a king-sized bed. The bed where they’d been found, in that horrible configuration. (Jimmy had seen the picture, could see it too clearly still.) He just stood there.

  This was the second part of the story.

  The first part was the actual loss of the thirteen human lives. The reality of what they did in life, their jobs, their work, what they filled their days with. And the potential. What the writers at the papers and the TV stations like to call “the hopes and dreams.” Maybe she would have been a star. He might have been Teacher of the Year. She didn’t get to see her daughter graduate from preschool. Maybe they would have made a movie remake of one of his TV shows.

  But the second part of the story was the subplot, the story of those who’d been left. Left in pieces. Left not understanding much of anything anymore. Left with your heart ripped out, too, or at least a deadweight in your chest. Left in a foreign country where somehow you don’t speak the language and the people don’t like you. Left with pictures you can’t look at. Left with songs you can’t stand to hear anymore.

  Left to stand in his parents’ bedroom, “house-sitting” in his own life.

  Jimmy ended the night, or at least the night ended around him, standing outside another house, standing at the foot of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset, his eyes on the penthouse and the railing.

  FIFTEEN

  “Where’s your little doggy?”

  It took Jimmy a second to hear the spite in her voice. She was in her sixties, maybe seventies, and stood an arm’s length away from him with her feet apart and her hands on her hips, as if braced against a wind or on the pitching deck of a ship. She wore all black, a dress, a sweater, a shawl over that. Old Country. He was on the sidewalk across the street from a pricey condo building in Brentwood, a four-story taupe job with black trim, black wrought iron around the windows.

  The seventh of the dead. A twenty-year-old woman.

  “I don’t have a dog.”

  “Today you don’t,” the woman said. “The other nights you did.”

  “Must have been somebody else,” Jimmy said. What he didn’t say was that, generally speaking, dogs don’t like Sailors.

  “I saw you,” the woman said. She pointed her finger at him.

  Jimmy just let her go on to her next line.

  “I think it’s revolting, you coming around here, over and over,” she said. “Let the dead bury the dead.”

  Jimmy decided to take a shot with her. Maybe there was something here. “I don’t even like dogs,” he said.

  She tilted her head.

  Jimmy pressed on. “I think they’re a menace, fouling people’s yards with their feces. Snarling, snapping. Urinating willy-nilly.”

  She liked the sound of this. “It wasn’t you?” she said.

  “Not if the person had a dog,” Jimmy said.

  “I don’t like dogs,” she said.

  “I’m like you, then,” he said. “You live in the neighborhood?” Jimmy asked.

  “Right behind you,” she said. Right behind him was a cute little Spanish-style bungalow. Covered with tile. From top to bottom, side to side. Ceramic tile, blue and white and green and yellow, every inch of the face of the house, every surface, and out into the yard, up and over fountains and benches and from the front steps to the street on a curving sidewalk. Tile. If it had had a pattern, it would have been a mosaic, but there was no pattern to it. It was a crazy-quilt house.

  Jimmy hadn’t really looked at it when he’d parked the car and gotten out, his eyes on the condo, checking the number.

  “Damn,” he said now, scanning the tile house. He tried to add a flip to it, to make it sound like he meant it admiringly.

  “You’re as bad as him,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Coming out here, drooling over this. The death of that poor girl.”

  “I was just going for a walk . . .”

  “No, you weren’t. You were rubbernecking. Or worse. Let the dead bury—”

  “I am the dead,” Jimmy said.

  She took a step back.

  He let her wonder for a minute.

  “I write television scripts,” he said. He named a show with a creepy attitude, then tried to look as much like Rod Serling as possible. He tossed his head in the direction of the condo. “I thought this might make a good episode.”

  “But you’d change the names,” she said. There was something plaintive about the way she said it.

  “So you knew her?”

  The woman shook her head. She pointed toward an arched-top picture window on the front of her house, a table, a chair, a Tiffany lamp there. “I sit there. I would see her come and go, out of the underground parking. She never walked anywhere.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Who?”

  “The one you thought was me.”

  “Like you. But with motorcycle boots.”

  He knew he wasn’t going to get much else out of her. The “colorful” have their limits as information sources.

  “How many times did you see him?”

  “Three nights. Just standing there, where you are.”

  “When?”

  “The night after it happened. And then the next night. And then a week later.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “Are you going to use him in your story, too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not with that dog, I wouldn’t talk to him. That was the idea. The idea of the dog. To keep you back. To scare you.”

  “What kind of dog was it?”

  “Some black kind, the kind you don’t even see until it shows its teeth.”

  There was steady west-side traffic up and down Barrington the whole time they stood there talking. Brentwood had its gentle hills, curving streets, all very easy. If you had the money. The tile house was one of the last of the single homes left on this stretch of Barrington. The rest were condominiums. She probably didn’t even know that the developers called her a holdout.

  A car stopped in the middle of the street right in front of them. A Bentley, a ten-year-old Bentley. Black. Waiting for oncoming traffic to clear before it
turned left. It made the turn. The window came down as the driver stopped in the driveway beside a keypad switch on a post. A hand came out and tapped a code onto the keys. A hand with a Rolex. The iron gate of the car park rose in recognition.

  “That’s him,” the neighbor lady said. “Her father.”

  The Bentley went down the sloping drive. The gate closed.

  The woman turned to go. “You can stand out here and embarrass yourself all you want,” she said, hard-ass again. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are. Boots or no boots, dog or no dog.” She walked away up her tiled walk, which looked from this distance like walking on broken glass.

  Twenty minutes later, the Bentley came back up out of the building. The window was coming up.

  You didn’t have to see any more of the man at the wheel behind the black-tinted glass to know who he was. He was everywhere, or his face was. Looking down from billboards, on the sides and backs of buses. And always with a single word across his chest, over his heart: trust. The dead girl’s father was Mike Roberts. Of Channel 8. Now he’d gone white-haired and slipped from the network wholly owned and operated down to an independent station, but he’d brought half of his viewers with him, and whatever the ratings were or weren’t, he was still The Anchorman in Los Angeles for anyone who’d been here longer than five years. For the new arrivals, he must have seemed like El Presidente or El Jefe or The Pakhan, staring down at his people from every rentable, printable surface.

  He was no pretty boy. He had a face like a marine, or a movie star playing a marine. And they did trust him. He was the one who went out and stood in the rain for the rest of them, hillsides sliding in the b.g., the one who raced in a panel van on the crest line in Angeles Forest with the flames “leaping across the highway, Trish!” for the sake of the safe at home in their living rooms. Even if all that was years ago.