by Dan Vining
“I was just reading about the future,” Jimmy said. “We’re all going to have personal helicopters by nineteen eighty.”
“Nineteen eighty! It sounds so futuristic . . . I was seven in 1980. I was born in 1973. When were you born?”
He had made a pitcher of martinis. He had found the glasses and everything behind a little bar, the kind covered in black pleat-and-tuck leatherette. He’d delivered one to her in the kitchen while she was cleaning up. Now she took a sip of his. First, she kissed him. He could smell the gin on her breath.
When were you born?
“I don’t think June and Ward Cleaver were drinkers,” he said, letting her question evaporate.
She plopped down into his lap. “Sure they were. The Beav drove them to it.”
He kissed her.
After a second, she said, “I love you,” and said it in a way that made him think she wasn’t used to saying it. He thought that, even after the voice in his head ridiculed him for it.
“I love you, too,” he said.
“I feel safe,” she said. “I feel safe.”
“Nobody knows we’re here. In the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s like we’re lost,” she said, against his neck. “Or is it saved? Can you be lost and saved at the same time?”
“I’ll ask Angel.”
She jumped up. “Check this out!”
She was like a girl again, more girlish than before. Than when they met. She went over to the stereo on the bookcase. She turned on the amp. The speakers thumped, then buzzed up to attention.
“I figured this out, how to do it, all by myself this afternoon,” she said.
She took hold of the mechanical control on the side of the turntable and shifted it out of gear. “You put it between forty-five and thirty-three and a third . . .”
She took The White Album off the shelf. She unsheathed one of the disks, checked the label.
“Wait,” she said, to herself.
She reengaged the speed control lever. When it got up to speed, she put the needle down. After a second of click and sputter, it began.
“Revolution No. 9.”
She waited until it came to the refrain, “Number nine . . . number nine . . . number nine . . .”
“OK,” she said. “Got it? Now . . .”
She disengaged the speed lever again, slipped it into neutral. Then she put her finger in the center, on one side of the label, right on the bright green apple, and turned it backward, counterclockwise.
“I didn’t know you could actually do this,” she said over the wobbly, warpy backward noises, music for aliens.
“All right, I hear it, stop,” Jimmy said, with an edge to his voice she didn’t understand. And a sadness she couldn’t understand.
“Not yet,” she said. She was still spinning the record backward with her finger, coaxing the guttural discord out of the vinyl, trying to keep the rhythm, what there was of it.
Jimmy sank into himself.
She reached the place in the “song” where the announcer spoke, said his syllables over and over atop the orchestral noises, atop Beethoven’s Ninth or strings tuning or whatever it was.
“Turn me on, dead man . . . Turn me on, dead man . . . Turn me on, dead man . . .”
She turned her face to him. She looked like a teenager, so happy in the moment. “It’s one of the clues! ‘Paul is dead.’ Remember?”
Turn me on, Deadman.
He went outside, out onto the deck, beside the pool. The bleached-out water was just a step down from a huge rock that jutted out of the side of the hill, looked like a natural pool that way, in that “California perfect” way. A dragonfly skimmed the surface, like something out of a future war.
The windows were open. The music came out after him. Mary had fli pped the record, and now she played the side over and over, Disk 2, Side 1, lifting the needle over “Helter Skelter” each time “Sexy Sadie” ended.
TWENTY-FIVE
This time on the night run over the desert mountains north on the 5 to his new cop friend, Jimmy was alone. Angel was elsewhere. L.A. was panicky again. The suicide toll was climbing. And there were frayed nerves in the Sailor world, too, a generalized high anxiety that meant Angel had home calls to make, hands to hold, people to talk down off the ledge. It was what Angel did.
Nobody seemed to know what it was. Sailors were just wound up tight, waiting for something. Looking for somebody who could change things or even bring back the old status quo, when things were straight. Maybe they’d caught the same bug that was testing the nerves of the rest of L.A., driving even the Norms to start thinking the unthinkable.
Angel had handed him the key to the “new” Porsche, the ’64 Cabriolet with no top, primer red, halfway to restoration. No top, no leather on the seats, a metal floor, but with the motor there, twenty foot-pounds past tight.
“I got a ticket on the way up,” Jimmy said, when he dropped into a lawn chair in Detective Dill’s backyard.
“The down side of Boiling Point Ridge?”
“Bingo.”
“Rookie,” the cop said. “Fish in a barrel, man.”
They had walked straight through the house from the front door. The divorced cop hadn’t done a bunch of decorating since the last time. Dill lagged behind a beat, then came out after Jimmy onto the patio with two bottles of beer and a brown leather briefcase. He handed one Negra Mod elo to Jimmy and held out the neck of his for a clank.
“You know, Boiling Point’s actually a town a mile or two from here,” Dill said. “What’s left of it. They could have named the subdivision Boiling Point Estates or some such, but they didn’t. I don’t know why.”
“Well, I’m not a marketing person,” Jimmy said.
“So what do you want to know?” the cop said in one of his other voices, a cop voice. “What else?”
Jimmy told him everything Mary had told him.
The question was: Had they really caught the killers? Or could they still be out there? Could they be somebody else?
Dill opened the briefcase. He flipped through some papers, but when he spoke it wasn’t as if he was having to look at anything to refresh his memory. “They had knives and saws, including a Czech-made, Russian Army-issue bayonet, with blood and tissue, matches to victims one, seven, and eleven. Cleaned with paint thinner, but not enough. The girl up in Temescal Canyon. The schoolteacher out in Riverside, the woman but not the man. The old lady Jehovah’s Witness in Santa Monica.”
He handed Jimmy a police photo, color. A power tool.
“Milwaukee Sawzall. Cordless, so they could take it with them. A number fourteen drywall blade. Blood and organ tissue from the last victim on the blade.”
Dill dealt out another photo. It was of a section of floor, kitchen floor from the looks of the linoleum, ripped up, a hidey-hole space between the floor joints exposed. And a tin box with the lid ajar.
“New blades, used blades,” Dill went on. “Victims four, five, nine, and ten.”
“How noisy is a Sawzall?”
“They never had to worry about noise.”
“The news just said saw. Nobody said anything about power tools.”
“There’s always what’s real and what’s news. It’s the way we play it. One advantage we keep.”
Dill handed Jimmy some photocopies. “Receipt from the Sherman Way Home Depot for the Sawzall with the signature of one of the Russian brothers. Receipt from Home Depot for blades, the other brother. A second battery pack, the first brother again. The tin box is what a kind of Russian cookie comes in. They call them biscuits. The receipt is from a Russian specialty store in Glendale. They taste like they were baked under Khrushchev, but what do I know?”
“Why didn’t they confess?” Jimmy said, handing the pictures back. “With all this against them.”
“They usually do,” Dill said. “I don’t know. They got a famous lawyer. Early. They went quiet . . .”
“What do you have on the copycats?”
“N
ot as much, but enough. Whoever it is—and it’s the same person both times—he’s missing some of the details.”
“Which means he isn’t inside,” Jimmy said, forgetting in the moment whose backyard he was in.
“Cops wouldn’t kill like this,” the vet detective said. “Cops like to save people. Even bad cops. Bad cops do things like kill the wives of dirty bookstore owners for five hundred bucks and all the videos they can carry. But even then, they think they’re performing a service for society. Say what you want about those of us who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, nobody thinks we should have our hearts cut out and left on the side of the road.” The last was the cop’s idea of a joke. He wasn’t a Witness.
Dill sat back. “What’s it say on the car door?”
“To protect and serve.”
“That’s right,” the other said. “There’s no inside in this one. These two are all the way outside. You can see it in their eyes. I don’t know who the copycats might be, but the Russians are locked-down bad guys.”
The cop saw what was on Jimmy’s face, saw the way he was sitting, the way he had lined up the photos and photocopies on the low white plastic Costco table. Jimmy looked like a lawyer who wished he’d drawn a different case.
“But . . . but . . . but . . . But what?” Detective Dill said.
“What if the people killing now are the real ones? What if these Russian brothers were made up, set up?”
“Come here,” Dill said, halfway out of the chair already.
Jimmy followed Dill into his bedroom. High angled ceiling, a ceiling fan on high, sounding frantic. Not much else. There was a king-sized bed with a pressed wood headboard and just a white sheet stretched tight across the mattress. And a single pillow.
Across from the bed was a tall dresser with a Costco TV/VCR combination on it, nineteen-inch. It opened its mouth and took the unlabeled VHS tape from Dill’s hand.
Jimmy stood there. They both stood there, holding their beers, glad to have them once it started.
The Russian brothers had seen a few too many movies. Or too much “reality TV.” Somehow they’d gotten the idea that what they were doing would make a good show, even if no one could ever see it. Or maybe some part of them wanted to make sure they’d be convicted, when the time came. Wanted it certain, that would be another theory.
Their shooting style favored the extreme close-up.
The cop and Jimmy Miles stood out in the front yard beside the Porsche at the curb. It was almost three in the morning.
“Sprinklers are going to come on in a minute here,” Dill said.
“When do you work next?”
“Six. Third shift.”
“So what should I do?” Jimmy said. “About this girl.”
“Your sister.”
“Got any ideas?” Jimmy said.
“You moved?”
Jimmy told him a limited version of where he’d gone.
“Stay there,” Dill said. “There is more shit hidden in Angeles Forest than even God knows. Stay up there. Let her forget about it, or at least file it away. Kill your TV. Let the panic blow over. It’ll come to trial.”
Jimmy nodded. The scene felt so empty, so desert, it was hard to remember there were a couple of thousand others sleeping all around them. Norms.
“In my experience, people—and by ‘people’ I mean ‘women’—are always afraid of the wrong things. Afraid when they shouldn’t be, not afraid when they should be. Of course, when I said that to my wife one time, when we were out with some friends, she said, ‘What I’m afraid of is twenty-odd more years of that rich of bullshit.’ So there’s that.”
“What about the men?”
“They’re afraid of everything,” Dill said. “At least the ones I have any respect for.”
It was still hot. The streetlights staggered down the streets in the subdivision were the yellow/orange kind, the kind that gave everything that sickly look city planners seem to prefer. Even the Porsche looked tired, out-of-date, sad, there in the driveway.
Jimmy was staring at something out in the road, something four or five feet long, stretched out, like a strip of shredded tire or something. There was another a few feet away.
“Those are rattlers,” Dill said. “They like the heat soaked up in the asphalt all day. I used to run over them but then I . . .” He trailed off. “Live and let live. Some time of year, I forget when, they shed their skins. You find them under the bushes and hedges and shit. They look like the rubbers in the parking lots out at the beach.”
Jimmy said, “Got any idea what’s up with Sailors these days?” Dill hadn’t been a Sailor all that long as these things went, four or five years, but he’d been on the streets as a cop a lot of years before that. One thing Sailors all did, the good and the bad ones, was respect experience.
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” the cop said. “I’ve never seen it like this. People I trust say they haven’t seen anything like this for a lot of years.”
“Since when? When was the last time?”
“When the man stepped up, the Passing. Fifty years ago.”
Jimmy dug in his pocket for the loose key to the Porsche.
“I know your man in black with the dog,” Dill said.
It stopped Jimmy.
“They call him Kingman. For Kingman, Arizona. Bad town for a Sailor.”
“He’s a Sailor?”
“Old salt. Made his way out here twenty years ago.”
“But he has a dog.”
“I don’t get it, either,” Dill said. “Maybe it’s the one dog in the world that likes us. Maybe it’s a Sailor dog, something new. I hate new.”
“What time is it?” Mary said when she felt him move in against her in bed.
“After midnight,” Jimmy said.
“It was after midnight when I went to bed.”
“That was the last song on the radio, coming up the road. ‘After Midnight. ’ ”
She made a sound like a laugh. “Don’t wake me up,” she said, dreamy.
TWENTY-SIX
There was a place called the Pipe in Long Beach. Jimmy waited until late afternoon before he rode down out of Angeles Forest. There wasn’t much use in going in earlier.
He figured he’d start at the sea, out on the edge, and work his way inland, looking for Kingman.
Just because. Because the son of a bitch had stood in his yard, looking up at his troubled girl in the kitchen window.
Because maybe he’d planted a gun in Jimmy’s house, where Mary could find it.
Just because.
There was still a little light left in the sky. It was pretty, the last light of the day, the light of surrender, as night moved in. The light was pretty, but nothing else was. The Pipe was wetlands, soggy marsh littered with what floats, whatever is cast aside and floats. Sailors, a certain kind of them, lived down here in the hulls of beached boats, boats on their sides, demasted sailboats and the rusting iron skin of a trawler. The “leaders” would be there, the dominant ones. There was a chance Kingman would be among them.
There were different kinds of Sailors, different levels. Ranks wouldn’t be the right term, because it would imply they were linked in service to some mission. In the end, Sailors were all just dealing with themselves, in it for themselves, trying to make sense of it. Even Jimmy Miles. Even Angel Figueroa.
But there was a kind of Sailor easy to spot: Walkers. Everybody said there were more of them in Los Angeles than almost any other city. Go figure, the one place where nobody walked. They’d lost all hope, given up, gone slack, checked out of the whole world of Good or Bad, and were a real danger because of it. The Pipe was always thick with them. Down here they tended to stand around fires, hard as it was to keep them going with everything wet, staring into the flames as if waiting for the fiery face of a god to appear, to tell them at last what to do.
“I’m looking for Kingman,” he said, to anybody who would let their eyes meet his.
Jimmy didn’t like doing this alone, but
he hadn’t been able to find Angel. He called him. He kept calling him. Angel’s phone rang and rang. And he wasn’t in his usual haunts. His men didn’t know where he was, just that someone had come for him at noon.
There were a lot of ragged-looking Sailors down at the Pipe, shaking their heads no. But no Kingman, no black dog.
Jimmy cruised through Hollywood, down a back alleyway in the shadow of the Hotel Roosevelt, another gathering place for Sailors. The alleyway, not the hotel, which had gotten almost toney again. He was driving the Porsche. Angel had thrown a race-tuned exhaust on it. In the canyon of buildings, it provided a rolling thunder effect that made the men and the few women who were down here turn and look. He parked and got out.
Up close, the men looked like they were all on speed. Full-on jittery. Dilated pupils. Moving hands. It was what Angel had been talking about, the jitterbugs in the Sailor world.
“Who are you, Brother? What do you hear?” one of the men said before Jimmy could even get out of the car.
Two other men gathered closer, in anticipation of an answer.
No Kingman.
Jimmy drove by his house, stopped out on the street but didn’t turn off the motor. One of Angel’s men was staying there, in case anybody showed up who wasn’t on the guest list. After a moment, some fingers came around the corner of the heavy drapes in the window in the front room, moved them a half inch.
“Water the plants out front, bud,” he said, letting out the clutch to pull away. “They’re looking a little brown.”
The Sailors downtown that night were the worst off.
Same as it ever was.
Jimmy didn’t come down here unless he had to. The downtown Sailor scene had a certain drama to it that he tried to avoid. And so far he had avoided it, except for the couple of times they had dragged him into it, into the arch ceremonial bullshit they reveled in. Their headquarters was an “abandoned” courtroom with its high soiled marble walls on the top floor of the old Hall of Justice building. On Spring Street.
Jimmy kept going right on past it. Even sped up a little.