by Dan Vining
He went in on foot. His hands were sweaty. It was a funky neighborhood. Sixth Street. He’d done what he could, put the Porsche right across from Cole’s, a street-level, five-steps-down antique saloon with a bloodred mahogany bar and booths carved with the initials of traveling salesmen and USC frat boys from the thirties. But it was a Wednesday night and early yet, not even ten, and Cole’s was still dead. The Porsche looked wide-eyed as he walked away from it.
He came east two blocks. He’d been down here enough to know it wasn’t as dangerous as it looked. Most of the people whose eyes met yours weren’t thinking what you thought they were, didn’t want your watch, weren’t trying to guess which pocket you kept your cash in, weren’t drawing lots for your garments. The dangerous ones you probably never saw coming. Street people were mostly just people on a street.
He stopped in front of the hollow, dead building where he and Angel had climbed the stairs and found what they thought was the “home” of the man with the black dog, and the body of the North Hollywood street person who’d directed Jimmy there.
The House of Kingman.
The homemade video Dill had shown to Jimmy to close the deal with him had had the opposite effect. It had blown the deal apart, and just when Jimmy had the pen in hand, too, hovering over the long sideways line with his name under it. It didn’t happen right away, not even on the ride home. It came later that night, or maybe came the same hour dawn came to the house in Angeles Forest, while Mary still slept beside him.
Jimmy knew something about movies. His mother was a star. His father was a director. There was a screening room in the house Jimmy was born into. A studio nanny pushed him around the Fox lot in a French perambulator. All of his parents’ friends, and all of their enemies, were in the business: actors, directors, shooters, composers, editors.
Editors. What was missing were the two-shots. There were no shots of either one of the brothers and a victim in the same frame. The shot list: A brother alone. A victim alone, usually in close. A wide shot, pulling out, a brother looking down at the floor. An extreme close-up of an incision. Sometimes the brother would be looking at the camera, sometimes waving it off. Sometimes there’d be a smile, a kind of sour smile that gave off a sex vibe. Naughty. There was one shot of blood on hands, in close. Holding a gutting knife. Someone’s hands.
There were no two-shots.
Jimmy was circling the base of the building, outside. The House of Kingman. You could walk all the way around it, alleys on the sides and on the back, Sixth Street out front. He and Angel had come in from the back. Jimmy headed that way. He didn’t think Kingman would still be there, but maybe there’d be somebody else inside who knew something. Or maybe there was some value to standing again over the spot where they’d found the body.
Where Jimmy had had to look at the face of someone who’d died because of him.
It was dark ahead. The light on the corner of the building was out. A black, dead bulb. (Shouldn’t that be the ultimate version of a stoplight?) But Jimmy had a light in his hand, his own light, a foot-and-a-half-long Maglite he’d thrown onto the other seat of the Porsche when he left the cabin to drive down into whatever was supposed to happen next. Half light, half club, a cop flashlight.
He came around the corner with the light. Somebody scurried away at the other corner of the back of the building.
There was a flash of blue.
“Brother!” Jimmy called out.
The door was closed. A metal fire door. Jimmy watched his hand reach out toward it.
A shoe crunching glass. A sound effect.
Behind him. He spun around.
The shape had already stopped. It spoke.
“Knock knock,” Dill said.
Jimmy felt the way a Rhodesian Ridgeback looks, bowed up.
“Come on,” the cop said, stepping forward out into a little more light. “There’s nobody in there. Certainly not Kingman.”
He turned and walked back up the alley toward Sixth. “Come on, let’s get in out of the rain,” Dill said. It hadn’t rained in three months. Jimmy fell in behind him.
A black-on-black LAPD detective’s Crown Vic was on the street.
“Get in,” Dill said and got behind the wheel. Jimmy got in up front. He left his door open out onto the sidewalk. Cop cars don’t have automatic dome lights. Nothing dings or talks.
“You been busy tonight,” Dill said. “Forget about Kingman. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Jimmy thought a second before he did it, but he began to spit out his doubts about the videotape. He only got two sentences in when Dill leaned forward and started the engine.
Jimmy closed his door, and they pulled away.
“I have the Porsche up here on the street,” he said.
“It’ll be taken care of,” Dill said.
It was about the last thing Dill said as they drove across downtown to the 101 north. Traffic was light. Dill slid straight over to the inside lane and stayed there, rolled up to seventy, seventy-five.
All the way to Universal City. Maybe he was going to take Jimmy on the Psycho ride, take him in through the midnight VIP gate, buy him a churro.
They drove east on North Glenoaks Boulevard. And pulled into a motel, an old-style, single-story, U-shaped motor court.
A dark motel. With the sign off. Not even a No Vacancy.
A man dressed in LAPD blues but without a badge on his chest, stripped of anything that shined or named, stepped out of the office. On Dill’s side of the car. Jimmy looked to his right and saw another cop next to the ice machine with a pistol in his hand, down at his side. They both wore body armor vests.
Jimmy liked drama as much as the next guy, but . . .
“What’s this?”
“The Federovs.”
“Here?”
“Live and in color.”
“So who’s in the special cells they built down at Terminal Island?”
“Russians all look alike,” Dill said. “Actually, the Federov brothers aren’t Russians. They’re Ukrainians. That’s one of the things that honks them off. So I make sure and call them Russians.”
By then, they were out of the car and walking toward the back of the U. Another guard stood in front of the door to a unit.
They’d ripped out the partitions between three or four units across the back of the motel, taken them down to the studs, and pulled out the ceiling up to the rafters. They’d sprayed what was left of the framing flat black. The cage that held the two brothers was dead center in the space, built out of gate and handrail iron and metal mesh. And painted black. They’d left the motel carpet on the floor, the bathroom in the corner. The carpet was dirty green. Another guard was fussing over a coffeemaker in the corner, in what remained of a kitchenette.
The brothers were playing chess at a Formica table. They didn’t look up until the door opened again, and the guard stepped outside for a second, on some signal from Dill.
“I brought a friend of yours to visit,” Dill said. “He thinks you’re being framed.”
“Yah,” one of the brothers said, the younger one, the bigger one. Everybody knew all about them.
“He loves Russians,” Dill said.
“He’s right,” the other brother said. “Innocent. Not guilty.”
“Leave us alone!” the first bellowed.
“Go ahead,” Dill said to Jimmy. “Look them in the eye. You tell me.”
“Yah!” the first brother said. “Innocent!”
And then he laughed.
When Jimmy came out, there was the Porsche, waiting for him. It was such a Sailor thing to do.
Jimmy opened the door.
“So. You all right, Brother?” Dill said, right behind him. “Did you see what you needed to see?
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. And he almost meant it.
What did he know about cracking a case?
Or even about guilt or innocence?
When Jimmy made it to the gate at the end of the long private road up in Angel
es Forest, he yanked up the parking brake and killed the headlights but left the motor running. He got out. The gate wasn’t automatic. There wasn’t a remote control. In fact, he’d locked the gate when he left, a length of chain and a padlock. He unlocked it, shoved it open. He stood there a moment in the open gateway. After being in the city and then in the traffic, it all looked really dark. He thought he heard something out in the trees. The woods were thick all around him. He listened for the sound, but it didn’t repeat.
He’d had enough of noises, enough of suspicions.
Mary was in a deep sleep, but a gentle one. In the bedroom. With just a low light on beside the chair. She’d felt safe enough to turn out all the lights in the rest of the house and go to sleep in the bedroom. He pulled the wool Pendleton Indian striped blanket up over her shoulder, to send her even deeper into that peace.
He was about to sit in the chair at the end of the bed, to read away what was left of the night, when he heard their footsteps on the deck.
Loud. There was no intention to be quiet. Loud enough to make Mary stir.
He leaned over her, awakened her the rest of the way.
“Get in the closet,” he said when her eyes came open.
There was a sliding door from the living room out to the deck, to the pool. He could see them out there as he crossed the room.
Six of them.
He opened the door and stepped out.
He had already recognized one of the shapes: Angel. Detective Dill was next to Angel. Even in the dim light, Jimmy could see that Dill had an embarrassed look on his face. It was harder to say what the look on Angel’s face meant.
The blue edge around them was vibrant, all of them. This was official business.
Angel waited for Jimmy to look at him directly. When Jimmy did, Angel’s face said, It’s all right.
Whether it was or not.
The other men were less . . . conflicted.
There was a round man, cartoonishly large, Orson Welles-size. And in a suit with a vest, like some Daddy Warbucks. They were in a semicircle, facing him, like a tribunal. Next to the fat man was a man who had cop written all over him, but ranking officer. Next to him was a man, not small, not big, who didn’t give off much.
And then there was the biggest man.
Who wore a hat. Whose face, save the eyes, was covered by a wool scarf, like this was London. Who even wore gloves, gray doeskin, lest his hands somehow give him away.
It was Walter E. C. “Red” Steadman, who in a way was their king. It was the first time Jimmy had ever been face-to-face with him.
It turned out Steadman was just there for the visual effect. And the scent of almost ultimate power he gave off. Steadman nodded to the nondescript man, who delivered the word.
“You are not incorrect in your conclusions,” the mouthpiece said, “but this matter suits our larger purposes at this particular point in time.”
A hoot owl picked now to hoot. “Who?”
“And now it’s over,” the nondescript man finished. “Your part in it, at any rate. It is over. Do you understand?”
He said the last with a surprising kindness.
“What about the threats?” Jimmy said.
“There were no threats,” the high-rank cop said.
Red Steadman looked at the ranking cop to silence him. Jimmy noticed that Steadman didn’t move his neck, as if he’d been injured somewhere along the line. Or as if he was very old. The “chief” wouldn’t speak again.
“Who?” the owl said again.
“It’s over,” the mouthpiece said. “Anything that happens now will not happen to you.”
Jimmy looked like he was about to jump in with something.
“Or to yours,” the man added.
“Why are the two Russians going along with it?” Jimmy said. “Just curious.”
No one thought it was necessary to answer.
“You should, in the morning, go back to your house,” the mouthpiece finished. “Stop trying to see the bigger picture. Just live for yourself, for as long as you are here.”
It was a line Sailors told each other, the last phrase anyway.
The nondescript man turned to Angel. “And you, too. Bless you, Brother.”
Jimmy wouldn’t let it go. “Why do Sailors want people murdered, and other people, Norms, panicked, killing themselves? Why do you want all these people to die?”
Jimmy was looking Steadman in the eye when he said it.
This time, there wasn’t any thought any of them would answer. Their eyes had moved to the house behind him.
Mary stood in the open doorway.
She ran out of the house and past them.
Jimmy came after her. “Mary!”
It was steep, it was downhill, it was dangerous. And the woods had gotten even darker.
TWENTY-SEVEN
There is an angry, ugly rhythm to an argument. You don’t have to hear the actual words; the sounds are enough. They’re like blows in a fight. Three or four jabbing syllables and then the louder thud of the knockout punch. But the other isn’t knocked out. Not yet. It’s never over that quickly, no early-round knockdowns. There’s always more. You rephrase. You repeat. Redundancy is a given. You aren’t judged on grammar, maybe on the number of fricatives and glottal stops. The percussion. Or the footwork, the angry, ugly dance of it. There’s a reason arguments end in violence, in hurled glassware, in slammed doors, in slaps, in gunshots. Punctuation is everything.
Dr. Marc Hesse slammed the bedroom door on his way out, and Mrs. Mary Hesse came to the window and looked out at the night, tears running down her cheeks like commas.
Jimmy was across the street but fifty yards away, close enough to hear the angry, ugly sounds but not to see those tears. So maybe he just filled in the blanks, seeing what he wanted, what he needed to see. Just enough to hate Hesse.
The other night in front of the Victorian apartment house, with the Greek father and Machine Shop packed into the Porsche, Jimmy had remembered the ride with his own father when he was ten or eleven, when his father told him he and Jimmy’s mother were divorcing, that speech that begins, “Sometimes a mother and a father grow apart . . .” Jimmy remembered something else. When he was sixteen, he told his mother what his father had said that night, and what she had said back to Jimmy was, “Les chaînes de mariage sont si lourdes qu’il faut deux pour les porter. Et parfois trois.” They were in a car, too, the huge white Chrysler 400 that was her last car, top down, somewhere in Hollywood. “The chains of matrimony are so heavy it takes two to carry them. And sometimes three.”
The garage door came up. The Mercedes’s red taillights and white backup lights flared, and the SUV charged out, the automatic radio antenna extending so fast it dragged across the last of the garage door hurrying to get out of the way. Mary stood witness in the upstairs window, in the master suite, over the garage. It was a big window, with true divides, beveled leaded glass, black frames dividing her into eight-by-tens.
Jimmy hated him for making her cry, for bringing her to the window to watch him go. He hated him.
Given what he was about to do, it was a useful emotion.
A sound made Mary turn toward the door. A woman stepped into the bedroom, a young woman wearing a dark suit, a uniform of some kind. A nanny? They spoke. Something was determined. Mary came out of the house a few minutes later, a sweater over her shoulders. Jimmy stepped back into the deeper shadows. The street they lived on, Alcatraz Lane, went two ways down the hill. She started off to the right, toward San Francisco, toward the view rustling through the gaps in the evergreens. Jimmy went the other way. All the streets out on the point of Tiburon emptied down onto the drive that circled the tip of the peninsula and led to the village.
Mary walked along the fronts of the shops and restaurants. It was eight or nine. The shops were closed, the restaurants busy. With the indoor smoking ban, every place now had tall stools and tables out front, where the happiest people seemed to gather. Or at least the loudest.
Jimmy was a hundred yards behind her, coming up the same side of the street. He saw her look over at them, the happy, loud people. She kept on walking.
There was a compact marina just past the traffic roundabout and the heart of the village. She walked out to the end of a dock. It should have gotten cooler out on the dock, with the wind off the water, but somehow it felt warmer. Maybe it was just Jimmy. The air smelled fresher here than on the other side of the Bay.
Mary stood there with her back to him. There was the sound of the wind, the sound of the boat tackle banging against itself, but still, she had to have heard his footsteps on the planks, coming toward her. Didn’t she? But she didn’t turn. She must have known it was him. At last. Again.
When he was five feet away, she turned.
He stopped.
There was a moment. The sliver of a moon over her shoulder clicked into a new phase.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
He didn’t say anything, let her make up her own answer.
“This isn’t a good night,” she began, as vague as that.
He crossed the last few feet between them. Could be she moved at least a step closer to him. He put his arms around her and drew her in. There was some exotic perfume behind her ear, somewhere on her, that he almost knew, though not from their time together. Not from the past, at least not their past.
He waited. And then he kissed her.
He hadn’t kissed anyone in months. When it’s that way, you could forget how smooth lips were, how warm. How unlike any other skin.
“Besides that,” she said. Her voice had changed into something more comfortable. “What are you doing here? San Francisco.”
Jimmy wished she’d asked something else, almost anything else. He wished he had it in him to lie. “Angel had a friend,” he said. He noticed the tense. “A girl, a girlfriend maybe. She had just broken up with somebody else, came up here. She was kind of messed up. I was keeping an eye on her.”
Mary waited.
“She killed herself,” Jimmy said. “Down on Fisherman’s Wharf.”
“That’s sad,” Mary said. “That’s sad.” It was something else he had remembered about her, the way she repeated lines sometimes. She pulled away from him, turned back toward the water, the lights across. It was as if the word about Lucy had broken her will about something. “There have been so many of them lately. It’s all people are talking about.”