by Dan Vining
Jimmy had half talked himself into the idea that the flower had come from Mary.
He took a shower. A midnight shower. He was going to go look for Angel. He felt bad about the way he’d left him the last time he’d seen him, never even looked back as he walked away from him down on the docks on the second stretch of waterfront, the old navy base or whatever it was. When Jimmy had followed the two cute girls into the mess hall full of women.
Over the downpour of the shower, he heard a thud, the outside door slamming closed. It shook the wall. He listened, but there wasn’t anything else. He turned off the water.
He’d left the bathroom door standing open, the door into the bedroom. He wrapped a robe around himself and came out.
The door to the living room was open. There was Angel.
Angel stood looking at the rose.
“What’s this shit?” Angel said, feeling Jimmy’s presence behind him.
“I thought maybe you’d know,” Jimmy said.
“Did she send it?” Angel was changed. He turned with a look on his face Jimmy had never seen before. He looked like he’d been beat up. And left ready to dish some out.
Angel didn’t look like Angel.
“I’m sorry I left you back down there, at the navy base, or whatever it was,” Jimmy said. After the scene with the women in the dining hall, he’d looked for Angel but couldn’t find him.
“Is that what you’re sorry for?”
Jimmy didn’t say anything.
Angel advanced on him, shoved him. “Is that what you’re sorry for?” he said again.
“What happened? Where have you been?”
Angel pushed him again. Jimmy stayed on his feet.
“You go chasing after her, and Lucy dies!”
It hit Jimmy like an iron bar, hurt all the more because Angel had waited so long to throw it in Jimmy’s face. Jimmy didn’t say anything, didn’t try to counterpunch. Because Angel was right. Once Jimmy had seen Mary, everything else had fallen away. He had wrapped himself in the past from then on, walked those streets again, not these. He had looked for her, not for Lucy. He worried about her, not Lucy. Before long Lucy had her new best friends whispering in her ear, and he was glad. Let them take care of her. He had stood by and watched a slow-motion murder. Was it only in that moment, standing there in his hotel room, that he was able to admit what was obvious, that the two women were agents of . . . Of what? Of something that wanted death.
And that he had stood by and watched it, like it was slow-motion crash test footage, projected drive-in style onto the end of a building. Onto Pier 35.
“Tell me what you know,” Angel said. “About Lucy. What happened to her?” Angel was shorter than Jimmy, but somehow now he loomed over him. “All of it.” His fists were still clenched at his sides.
So Jimmy told him.
He told him all of it. About the first day, about Sexy Sadie and then Polythene Pam outside the Golden Gate gift shop, felt foolish using the nicknames, but what else was he going to say? The woman in the yellow dress, matching purse? The cutie in the too-short skirt and Doc Martens? He could have taken the trouble that first day to find out their names, but he was content calling them Beatles names, from The White Album. Because that was the trip he was on. He told Angel the real deal on the two women, how they’d started out looking like helpmates for Lucy, sympathetic ears, but then transmuted into something else. Into the opposite. (He left out the part about not fig uring it out in time.) He told Angel about the last night when he had seen Lucy with the two of them, down at Fisherman’s Wharf, the night the man had been cleaved in two by the streetcar. On the suicide list, it would have been number . . . What was it? He even told Angel about the second time he’d tailed Lucy and the women to the grass out on Tiburon, how he never looked over at Lucy again once he’d seen Mary and her boy playing fifty yards away.
That day.
They were in the Porsche, Jimmy and Angel, just driving, a loop around the fingerprint of the City, the perimeter, then into the center, driving nowhere, until most of Lucy’s story had been told. It was after two.
Angel had lost his anger, or buried it. “The radio is better here,” he said. “Why is that?”
“Everything is better,” Jimmy said. “I think that every time I come here.”
“Then, after a while, you start missing L.A.”
“I start missing L.A.”
“Everything is too free here, that’s the problem,” Angel said.
Jimmy looked over at him.
“Everything comes too easy,” Angel said. “Back home, you have to earn everything. Work for it, fight for it. A lungful of good air, a piece of shade, something green. Somebody nice. Here it’s like they just give it to you.”
Jimmy had told Angel everything about Lucy, everything he had, even about the day in the waterfront park when it was Lucy and the women and Mary. But he hadn’t said anything about Queen Mary, about the night sail, about where he’d been just a few hours ago.
He was still trying to figure out what it meant.
Jimmy stopped at the top of a hill. It was the rise above the Victorian on Central. He hadn’t realized he was headed here until he turned the last corner, looping around little Buena Vista Park. He was on autopilot.
“This is the apartment,” he said. “Lucy’s.”
Angel got out of the car, gently closed the door behind him. He looked across at the top-floor windows. There was a light on. In the living room.
“Who’s in it now?”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “It belongs to a lady two doors down the street. Or she manages it. Lucy got the key from her. And the combination to the alarm, which Lucy never set again. I never talked to the woman, the landlady, never found out what the connection to Lucy was. The light’s probably just on a timer or something.”
A single table lamp burned in the foyer of the Catholic Home, a light that seemed to say, We’re here, anytime. Jimmy wondered if it was true, if the door was unlocked, if they’d come if you rang, even now, at two in the morning.
“Across the street that’s some kind of home for pregnant girls.”
Angel turned to look at the home, but not for long. A two-second look.
Angel had seen enough. He got back in.
Jimmy rolled on down the street, not even starting the engine. Quiet. He stopped at the corner. Haight and Central. He looked left.
“There’s a guy, white hair, ponytail, lives above the store.”
“Yeah?” Angel said, looking over.
“If I was back home, I’d think he was a Sailor. The kind that watches everything. Reports in.”
“Yeah.”
“Except he’s got a dog, kind with the black tongue.”
“You never know,” Angel said, uninterested.
Jimmy turned left on Haight Street, drove by the coffee place where Lucy had had her “date” with Machine Shop. While Polythene Pam watched. Jimmy spotted the culty girls again, the “sisters” who held hands, the wispy-dress girls from the other night down at the shipyard. Tonight they were hanging with the central casting hippies, the Sailor hippies, at the mouth of an alley. The leader with the Vandyke, Shakespeare in his pointed shoes and his bells, gave them the old I know you smile as they passed.
“He may be a Brother,” Angel said. “Hippie Boy. Something about him.”
Jimmy looked up in the mirror. One of the sisters was watching him go with an imploring look. Jimmy wondered why.
“Sailors are all acting hinky up here, too,” Angel said.
“Yeah.”
They drove by the black house a few blocks over, down on the Panhandle. Jimmy pulled to the curb.
“What’s this?” Angel said. “Besides about the weirdest house I ever saw.”
“One of the girls I told you about who hung out with Lucy lives here. Pam. Or at least I tracked her back here.”
“It’s black, right?”
“Yeah, I came back in daytime, hoping it was purple.”
So they made the loop, hit the highlights, did the tour. The Lucy tour. The apartment on Central, the coffee place, the black house. They’d already cruised by the place where she’d died, Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 35. It was what Jimmy should have done the first night when Angel came in on the Amtrak Coast Starlight, would have if it wasn’t for his mind being elsewhere.
They had the top down on the Porsche. They kept hearing sirens. Echoing. In a city built on hills, sound moves curiously. They stopped at a blind intersection, hearing the wail. Both of them looked left, but then it came in from the right, two city ambulances, racing west, nose to tail.
Jimmy took Van Ness and then Mason and drove out along the water to Fort Point, not because Lucy had ever been there but because he’d run out of places to go.
Except for the morgue. Which was where Jimmy already knew he would end the chapter.
Fort Point. A cop stopped them in the parking lot before they even made it close to the redbrick fort, raising a hand. He was just standing there, no car, nothing. His uniform wasn’t even all there. He looked as if he’d come over from home on his bicycle. Extra duty.
“What’s up?” Jimmy said.
“Private party,” the cop said.
It was a quarter mile away, whatever it was. At the far end of the parking lot under the rumbling undercarriage of the bridge there were a couple of buses, curved metallic shapes catching the light. You couldn’t see much of anything else from here. A few knots of people.
The officer leaned over and looked into the interior of the car, just enough for Jimmy to catch the scent on him, the marker. A Sailor cop.
“What year is this?” the cop said. “Sixty-five, sixty-six?”
“Sixty-four,” Jimmy said. “Three fifty-six C. The first 911s came along in sixty-six.”
“Sweet.”
“We’ll just turn around,” Jimmy said, and eased forward.
“Have a nice night,” the cop said.
But instead of turning around, Jimmy went straight. Gunned it. Charged toward the far end of the lot like it was a gymkhana in a shopping center parking lot. The cop shook his head but didn’t run after them, didn’t unholster his service piece, didn’t even radio ahead.
“Guy just flipped me off,” Jimmy said, watching in the rearview.
Sitting there were two old-style streamline buses, one in front of the other. Polished aluminum. Without markings. People were disembarking, orderly, in line, joining those who’d already stepped off.
Blue people.
“Those are Chick Warren’s buses,” Angel said. “Tito Nava did the roll and pleat on the seats. They’re tricked out. Blue lights in the headliners.
“They’re all L.A. Sailors,” Angel said. “What are they doing here?”
Another group watched the new arrivals, from a distance, standing together, silent. Not blue, most of them, but on fire in their own way. San Francisco Sailors.
“Field trip, I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “It doesn’t involve us.”
He popped the clutch and roared out of there. The SFPD cop stepped out of their way with a sweeping gesture, like a wiseass matador.
There was a helicopter overhead, a news helo.
There was a line of ambulances, like a parade, lights spinning, splashing light onto the buildings that surrounded it. There were already spectators on the sidewalks.
The morgue.
“What’s this?” Angel said.
“I got a call,” Jimmy said. “They’re shipping Lucy’s body out in the morning. To Paso Robles.”
It was Angel’s turn to look like he’d been struck between the eyes.
Jimmy said, “But I don’t know what all this is.”
He parked, got out. Angel took a minute in the front seat, alone, then got out, too.
“Maybe you don’t want to do this,” Jimmy said.
Angel just shook his head.
“She’ll be dressed up and everything,” Jimmy said. “A guy here took care of her. A friend of Shop’s.”
They had to walk past the line of ambulances. There were five or six of them, waiting, engines running, lights rotating like idling helicopter blades. Every thirty seconds, the news copter came round again with that thudding Vietnam sound. It hurt the head. It felt like being inside a lawn mower.
Duncan Groner was on the loading dock. When they got closer, up to the ambulance at the head of the line, they could see the first of the bodies.
Wrapped in white, like mummies. Head to toe.
Groner waved to Jimmy. The old reporter was trying for cool and collected, but the story had him excited. The lights from all the ambulances made him look like he’d been doused in blood, standing there.
“What happened?” Jimmy said.
“Eighteen,” Groner said. “Eighteen of them.”
“What happened?”
“A cult,” Groner said. “Over on Fulton Street. They have a house, a four-story Victorian, five bedrooms, four to a room. A flying saucer-tethering pylon on the roof, everything inside painted white, like John and Yoko.”
A wrapped body was rolled past and through the double doors. A wheel on the gurney squeaked. The body was small.
“The youngest was sixteen, the oldest twenty-eight, except for their maximum leader. He’ll be bringing up the rear. He and his lovely assistant, Rita.”
“Suicides?” Jimmy said.
“Drink the Kool-Aid,” Groner said. “The cosmos awaits.”
Jimmy looked at the spectators across the street, saw a familiar face or two. When he turned back, Angel wasn’t there.
“What are you doing here?” Groner said, but Jimmy was already headed inside.
The latest suicides had brought out the senior coroners. And deputy coroners and body probers and morticians and, already, politicians in suits. Angel stood in the middle of them, lost.
The late-shift Sailor mortician named Hugh was there, Machine Shop’s buddy. He and Jimmy saw each other. Hugh raised his hand, high, like a kid in class. Jimmy led Angel over to him.
“It’s kind of wack here, but I already had her out,” Hugh said. “I put her in the D Room.”
Angel had a freaked-out look in his eyes.
“Come on,” Jimmy said. “Then we’ll get out of here.”
There was a commotion behind them, at the pneumatic doors, which kept trying to close but never got a break. Another body had come in on a gurney. This one wasn’t skinny, but he, too, was wrapped like a mummy. And tight, as if this was some ultimate spa treatment. Some final reduction. The cult’s leader. Groner walked alongside, enjoying all this more than was becoming. Rolling in immediately behind the fat man was, just a guess, Rita. Whose wrap could not fully blunt her curves.
As Jimmy and Angel walked down the hallway, away from the action, the volume came down.
From the many to the one.
The black linoleum was shined to an absurd pitch, the way it is in prisons, that shine that can only come from people with all the time in the world. It was like walking on obsidian in some Egyptian temple.
Here was the D Room.
The door was closed but unlocked. The lights were on. It was the bar est room in the world. The room at the end of the world.
She was covered. On a wooden table.
Propped against her hip was a hand-lettered index card with her name and vitals, if that was the word.
Somebody had taken a calligraphy class.
Lucílle Estella María Valdez
Her elbow stuck out from under the covering. Her sleeve. White satin. She was dressed in white satin now. At least Jimmy wouldn’t have to look at that baby-blue dress again.
There was motion beside him, Angel crossing himself.
It was Angel who peeled down the covering sheet.
And it was Angel who said, after a second, there at the end of the world, “That’s not her.”
TWENTY-NINE
Think dark. Darker.
Who did this? What exactly happened?
&nbs
p; When a big question was thrown in Jimmy’s face, his usual first response was to look for the answer in Coincidence. Shit happens, wasn’t that the bumper sticker? You find out something wasn’t at all the way you thought it was, and you’re scrambling to make sense of it. And you think, Coincidence. You think that if you pull back a little bit, go over all the pieces, see this leading to that leading to this and this, you’ll see that it was coincidence, chance, the roll of the bones that made it happen. That made this particular shit happen.
So some other Lucy-looking girl with a 1978 baby-blue Buick Skylark convertible just happened to plow into the flat face of Pier 35 right around the time the real Lucy, Lucille Estella Maria Valdez of Paso Robles, was getting suicidal?
What’s next?
Think dark. When Coincidence isn’t the answer, look next for a human explanation. Skullduggery. Conspiracy. Men in shadows pulling strings for dark purposes. Jimmy Miles probably had a lower opinion of the human animal than most people, men in or out of shadows, pulling strings or dancing on the ends of them, but it didn’t wash. Why? How? Who? For what purpose? If this wasn’t Lucy, the Lucy he’d followed here all the way from her house in L.A., who was it? Why wasn’t it Lucy? Who would it profit? How would they do it?
Coincidence. Conspiracy.
Too many questions, you went to Cosmic. Some cosmic Somebody is working out His (or Her) will, moving chess pieces on a whole other plane. You only thought that was Lucy you were seeing on the slab in the morgue in the baby-blue dress, her face smashed in. It was just a trick of the gods, a bit in a skit that amuses them ever so slightly. Part of the plan. What they wanted you to see and think about and act upon, for some reason. There was a time when Jimmy’s mother went religious, Angelus Temple religious. Jimmy was ten or eleven. She dragged him down there with her to Echo Park for three-hour Sunday services for the half year it lasted. He remembered some of the songs, the old rawboned hillbilly hymns. One of them said,
Farther along we’ll know all about it,
Farther along we’ll understand why.
But Jimmy didn’t have the luxury of waiting for it all to make sense later. This was way too here and now. And human. On this plane.