by Dan Vining
Then they were crossing the Bay Bridge back toward the City.
“How did she get in touch with you?” Jimmy said. It was almost the first thing he said to Angel.
“What do you mean?”
“How did you know she was in trouble?”
“Lucy never got in touch with me,” Angel said. “A friend of hers come to me.”
“And said what?” Jimmy said.
Jimmy’s tone had some accusation in it, but Angel didn’t let himself react to it. He knew what it was, what was behind it. Guilt. Jimmy’s anger at himself. Angel cut people a lot of slack.
“It was one of Lucille’s girlfriends, a girl I didn’t really know but who knew about me,” Angel said.
“Knew what about you?”
Jimmy had two hands gripping the wheel. He noticed them, his hands, as the Porsche rolled under another pole light on the bridge, as the orange light flared in the cockpit and he got a shot of the taut skin across his knuckles.
“I just meant—” Jimmy started.
“I loved her,” Angel said, cool and calm. “But where’s that gonna go? She was young. I’m old and a Sailor on top of that. Or, I’m a Sailor and old on top of that. You know how that works.” The last was as much a rebuke of Jimmy (and his own past, his own history with women) as Angel would offer in this story. “So I never told her right to her face. I was ‘her friend,’ helping her out when I could, talking to her when some guy did her wrong one way or another. This girl, Mariel, she knew that, the last part, that I cared about Lucy.”
Jimmy stared at the backs of his hands, willing some of the tenseness out of them. He stared until one relented and let itself drop off the wheel onto the leather-wrapped shifter knob.
“I even introduced her to the last guy,” Angel said. “Guy I stripped and cleaned the Skylark for.”
“So what happened, after the other girl came to you?” Jimmy asked. “I’m just trying to start at the beginning.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Angel said. He reached to the floor between his knees for his leather gym bag. He unzipped it and took out a pint of Courvoisier. Jimmy had smelled the sweet stink on Angel when he’d embraced him on the concrete in the front of the station in Oakland. Angel never drank at home. Too many of the people around him, the boys and men he was trying to help, had drink and drug problems. Things were confused enough for them. He never offered the bottle to Jimmy. Angel unscrewed the cap and took a sip. “You’re trying to start at the beginning. You’re trying to find the beginning.” He had a little edge to his voice. He took a second hit.
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. It had a kind of all-purpose quality to it.
They rode in silence for half a minute, crossed Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the two halves of the bridge. It was like a fist of rock in the middle of the Bay.
When they went through the tunnel, there were no cars close around them in the lanes going into San Francisco. The Porsche engine sounded a good rumble.
“Love that tuned exhaust,” Angel said. “L.A. Symphonic.” He screwed the metal cap back on the cognac and dropped it into his bag.
“Lil’ Bitch,” Jimmy said. It was what Angel had named the car when it had been reborn in his shop back in L.A. years ago. James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder was named Lil’ Bastard. Jimmy and Angel never said the name to anybody else.
Out the tunnel, off to the right across the slate water, was Alcatraz. And, dark at its side, Angel Island.
“There’s your island,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, I wonder if they’d let me camp out,” Angel said.
“I got a room for you,” Jimmy said.
“So after I got the call from Mariel,” Angel said, “I went all crazy-like and drove over there, right then, that night. I took this old piece of shit car of my neighbor’s so Lucy wouldn’t look out the window and know it was me. I parked up the hill a little bit, but I could see everything. She was in her front room. She has this house.” He paused. Jimmy knew Angel was adjusting the tenses in his head. Has to had. Or trying to.
“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “I don’t need to know any more.”
“She was sitting right in the front window, where I could see her, like a picture in a frame,” Angel said. “Like she was waiting for me. But, of course, she was waiting for this guy. To come back. Or just, I don’t know, waiting for things to get better again for her.”
“Yeah, I saw that look,” Jimmy said.
“She just sat there.”
“So when was that?”
“The night before she left. To come up here. Last week. The Skylark was parked out front of her house, and I was on the other side of the street. She shouldn’t have left it out like that, where people could see it.”
“You talk to the boyfriend?” Jimmy said.
“The dead don’t talk,” Angel said. Then he said, the way he always did, one of his jokes, “Oh, yeah, I forgot, sometimes they do.”
“He was a gangbanger?”
“Yeah. But he was just out with his sister, down in San Diego, leaving SeaWorld, in the parking lot, when they hit him. Friend of mine down in Diego said it was another gang.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know, sometime. A week before she left to come up here.”
“She was waiting for him to come back to her. But he was already dead, and she knew it.”
“Well, you know how that is, don’t you? Holding out hope.”
“You didn’t go to him before? To find out what the problem was between them, what broke them up?”
“Never thought of it. I guess, inside, I was glad about it. That they broke up.” Angel looked at Jimmy. “So I feel it, too,” he said. “Responsible. Guilty. Like I could have done something. Should have.” He looked out at the lights of the City to the right flashing through the bars of the railing, the curve of the waterfront, the Embarcadero. “And that don’t make any more sense than you feeling the same thing.”
Jimmy wondered if Angel knew he was looking at where it had happened.
“What about her brother?” Angel said.
“He’s out there somewhere. I don’t know where.”
“I didn’t know she had a brother, until you told me,” Angel said. “She never talked about him.”
Jimmy told him about The Wind Cries Mary.
“So we find him,” Angel said. “Bring him in, get him home.”
Jimmy had gotten Angel a room next door to his at the Mark.
“I’d rather sleep in a ten-dollar-a-night place, down around Market,” Angel said, standing in the middle of the room with Jimmy and a bellhop.
“You gotta get out more, bud,” Jimmy said. “The ten-dollar-a-night places are forty now.”
“Sixty, I believe, sir,” the bellman said.
“I was going to say five,” Angel said and tossed his leather bag on the turned-down bed. And Jimmy tipped the boy.
By then it was eleven thirty. They came downstairs again. They’d left the Porsche in front of the hotel.
“I guess you can’t do that down in the Tenderloin,” Angel said.
They went across town to The Wind Cries Mary. It was about all they had to run with when it came to finding Les Paul. (Finding him and then getting out of San Francisco, while they still could?) He wasn’t there. They sat through the second half of a set by a doodling jazz player who played too many notes. For Jimmy’s ear, anyway. There were three or four other Les Pauls there. They were hanging around the front when Jimmy and Angel pulled up, kids fifteen or sixteen, a couple of them with guitars in cases. And it was a school night, too. The doorman seemed to have been hired for the flat look on his face and the size of his biceps, especially when his arms were folded across his chest. But at least one kid had made it in. He stood in the back next to the door in and out of the kitchen. The mesmerized look on the boy’s face made Jimmy think maybe he was missing something when it came to the jazzbo onstage with the fat hollow body. But none of the boys was the
ir Les Paul.
The star of the night came on, a black player with a scarred Strat that looked like it had already been on the road ten years by the time Hendrix was joining the army. And the player was older than his guitar. Jimmy wondered what the man looked like in daylight, out front under the stage light. Maybe he never saw daylight. He was out there with just a bass player and a drummer, both white. The bass player was in his twenties, the drummer a chewed-up-and-spat-out rocker with dyed black hair, maybe a wig. The band played almost nothing, just stood back, literally, figuratively, while the man went where he went. For most of an hour, an idiot in the crowd called out the name of a song, the song, the one the Rolling Stones had “discovered” and covered and hit with. And everybody else before the Stones and after. When the player finally got to it, the idiot shouted, “Hoo!” for a half minute until Jimmy threw a wadded napkin at the back of his head and told him to shut up.
The guitar player managed an impossible thing: he somehow went back to the original ache, the initiating heartbreak behind the song, however many years ago it was. His guitar had a baby picture laminated onto the front of it. The mother of his new baby couldn’t even have been born when the other she broke his heart, but the way he played and sang, the wound sounded fresh, still sore to the touch.
“Let’s go,” Jimmy said when the song was done.
He had told Angel about Les Paul and about The Wind Cries Mary, but she was the only Mary Jimmy told Angel about that night.
NINETEEN
The night Lucy had died and Jimmy had ended up in the library at the Chron with Duncan Groner, they’d talked Sailors, suicides, and San Francisco.
But Jimmy hadn’t left it at that. At the end, as they were walking out to go get that drink, Jimmy spoke her name, almost as if it was just an afterthought.
Mary Hesse.
Or rather, he spoke his name, Dr. Marc Hesse.
There was a beat. “Don’t personally know him,” Groner said.
He plopped down into an armless roll-around chair and rolled over to one of the terminals. His two index fingers went to work, typing hunt-and-peck at a furious speed, more peck than hunt. He hit Enter with his elbow, to be funny.
“There used to be black steel file cabinets in here, wall to wall, floor to ceiling,” he said. “Mother of God, I miss them. Now you put in a name and you end up with pictures of some gentleman servicing his wife in Quito, Ecuador.”
The screen filled up in front of him. Text and pictures. But fully clothed.
“Cardiologist,” Groner said first. “Who is he to you?”
Now it was Jimmy’s turn to hesitate, to shove aside all the words that were gathering around the truth. To come up with the right lie.
“Something I’m working on,” was the one he settled on. It was true in its own way. He’d been working on the idea of Mary over all the years since they’d been together, trying to tame it in his head. Trying to get over it.
“I thought what you were working on was a sad little Mexican girl who came up here and killed herself,” Groner said.
“It goes where it goes,” Jimmy said. He was looking past Groner to the image of Hesse on the screen, a color shot of the doctor in another tuxedo at another charity event. Or maybe the same tuxedo. Jimmy couldn’t help but see a cold, unpleasant look in the other’s eye, in the shape of his face, in the reluctance of the muscles around his mouth to gentle into anything remotely like a real smile. That face said, I can do anything I want to you. To Jimmy, anyway.
“Cardiologists are cold bastards,” Groner said, like he was inside Jimmy’s head. Maybe the San Francisco Sailors had come up with some powers their brothers to the south had missed out on, like mind reading.
Another screen full of information replaced the first.
“Not much about his years back East,” Groner said, reading. “Sketchy. A liberal arts college in central Florida, then Duke for med school. He’s thirty-eight, one kid.”
Jimmy held himself back from asking what he really wanted to know. About Mary. Her past. What she had been doing since their time together in L.A.
“He’s on boards, professional and philanthropic, loves stray animals apparently, believes in neutering, plays tennis.” The bony index fingers went to work again. “Oh, this is rich. He’s a Mormon. So that means he has a year’s worth of food and water in the basement of the nine-bedroom house in Hillsborough.”
Jimmy waited.
“He has a house on Tiburon, too,” Groner said, reading. “And probably a cabin up in Sebastopol, where he dances naked in a fern-ringed redwood glen with a secret assemblage of men at solstice.”
Groner spun in the chair to look at Jimmy. “His wife is beautiful,” he said after a long beat. Then he looked back at the screen.
“Mary,” Groner said. “He doesn’t deserve her. Maybe none of us do.”
Jimmy took the reporter’s obvious, immediate dislike of Marc Hesse as an act of friendship, though Groner couldn’t know why Jimmy hated him.
“Any chance he’s a Sailor?”
Groner shook his head and said, “I’d know.”
And then they’d gone off into the night for that drink.
Hesse had offic es downtown, in a building across from the TransAmerica Pyramid.
Midmorning, Jimmy was standing out front. Groner had called him at the Mark with the address. Hesse had just moved from previous digs. This new place wasn’t even listed yet.
Jimmy knew enough about movies to know it was the building with the “florist’s shop” on the ground floor where Dirty Harry had faced down somebody, said something sharp while the punk was left to stare into the holey end of the .44 magnum. It wasn’t Dirty Harry itself or even Magnum Force. It wasn’t “You have to ask yourself, do I feel lucky?” or “Go ahead, make my day.” The movie was probably Sudden Impact, and the line wasn’t good enough to get remembered, the way it was with sequels.
He should have been off with Angel, looking for Les Paul. He hadn’t even knocked on Angel’s door when he left the Mark.
Jimmy rode up in the elevator. He felt lucky.
He didn’t know what his intentions were, what the plan was. What was he going to do, slap Hesse in the face with a glove? Challenge him to a duel? Go ahead, make my midmorning.
It never came to that. The doctor was in surgery.
The waiting room was empty. Everything was perfect. The magazines were unmussed, in neat stacks. Unread. Even the sports magazines. Even the swimsuit issue. Everything had a new smell to it. The receptionist was cute, didn’t have a drop of blood on her. She was a little flirty, maybe bored with a long, slow morning. Or it could have been that everybody who came in was old and pale and short of breath. Jimmy’s breath was just fine.
The art on the walls was original. Oils. One canvas pulled Jimmy closer. It was of a boat entering a harbor, a black-and-white sloop, a storm behind it like a giant with a puffed-out chest. The painting even had a name: In Time. It wasn’t pretty, as pictures went. It went right up to the edge of pretty, stopped just short; art that way, not decoration or entertainment. Jimmy wondered why a doctor, a cardiologist, would choose it for the eyes of those waiting. We found the blockage just in time? You’re safe here?
It made Jimmy want to eat a steak, drink a martini, Celebrate Life! with the new hippies in the Haight. What he remembered of it.
It made him want to hold Mary.
“Bye,” the flirty receptionist said to his back.
A call to Groner on the run got him the name of the hospital where Hesse was. Under the hood of some poor bastard. Valve job.
Groner kept the info coming, a second call. He told Jimmy to look for a deep dark red, big-dog Mercedes, a CLS500.
“A color called Bordeaux Metallic.”
“Sounds delicious,” Jimmy said. “Fruity, but not casky, I hope. But how am I going to find out what row he’s parked in?”
Jimmy was already at the hospital, in the corner of the lot. He was making a joke.
�
�Where are you?” Groner said.
Jimmy told him.
“Look straight ahead, on the right,” Groner said. “Under the carport.”
“Now you’re starting to creep me out,” Jimmy said.
“I can see through walls, across town, but only if the conditions are exactly right,” Groner said. “A friend works there, in the ER. I just called her. Hesse’s name is on a parking place.”
“Your friend a Sailor?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re sure Hesse isn’t a Sailor.”
“I would say no,” Groner said.
“Would you say any more?”
“I’ve never heard of him, never heard anybody speak of him,” Groner said. “Remember, I’ve been here a very long time. And then there’s the boy.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said.
Sailors were sterile. Some cosmic safeguard. Or joke.
“Of course, the boy is six. Hesse could have fathered him Before.”
“Yeah.”
“But then why would they so resemble each other? You haven’t seen the boy. I’m sitting here looking at a picture of him.”
Of course Jimmy had seen him. The boy didn’t look anything like Mary, but Jimmy wondered if he’d just thought that because he liked that idea, because it made the reality of the situation a little less painful for him. So the boy looked like his father.
“I have work to do,” Groner said. “People to bury, mysteries to demystify. Good luck. With whatever it is you’re doing.” And he was gone.
Hesse didn’t appear for two hours, two hours before he got into the bulbous new Mercedes and backed out of a reserved parking place. (His name wasn’t on it.) The hospital was the medical center at UCSF. On Divisadero.
He came back toward downtown. He disappeared into the Sequoia Club on Hyde, the private club, pulled up in front, left the Mercedes with a valet. He stayed inside for a half hour and came out into the afternoon looking fresh, clean shirt, pressed suit. Came out under the SC’s arched doorway, under the letters cut into the stone . . .
GREAT GEARS TURN