Nothing Lost

by John Gregory Dunne

  J.J. returned to Parker County when his suspension was up and he was free to practice law again. After an appropriate interval he and Poppy quietly divorced, an action filed in Hermosillo, the capital city of Sonora, where Poppy’s maternal family still had extensive interests; the suit did not even make the South Midland papers until months after it was concluded. I ran into him once in the checkout line at a Rite Aid drugstore in Cap City. I turned around and he was standing behind me. There were three other cash registers taking customers, so I can only assume that when he saw me he deliberately pushed his shopping cart into my line. He was buying the usual toiletries, plus, I could not help but notice, a box of Tampax. Hello, Max, he said. J.J., I said. We went and had coffee at a diner down the street. I did not mention Poppy nor did he ask about Teresa, I think because we both knew the other would volunteer nothing. I also refrained from asking what he was doing in Cap City. Surprisingly, the conversation was easy. J.J. was always good value, and the missteps of the Worm’s campaign for governor were a subject made for him. He told me that Patsy Feiffer was so devastated by the Worm’s defeat that she had gone back to Connecticut, where her father pulled some strings and got her an appointment to the state parole board.

  No early releases in Connecticut, J.J. said with a smile.

  What about you, J.J.? I said.

  I’m just a country boy, Max, J.J. said, counting out his half of the check. Can’t wait to get home and do country things.

  What country things he might be doing he did not say.

  Then Allie sent me a photograph of him from a newspaper in eastern Montana. How she had come upon it I have no idea. I think perhaps she just liked to keep up with her past, and she searched the Internet like a code breaker. The photo was of J.J. at a cattle sale in Miles City. He was wearing a shearling coat and a cowboy hat and reading glasses that made him squint. He had gained weight. His face was jowly and he had a mustache. He went by the name of Jim McClure. Jim McClure was a cattle lawyer and head of the cattlemen’s committee of a rangeland anti-environmentalist group. His wife Linda had recently died of cancer. Linda McClure had been a county supervisor in Parker County, South Midland, when she had married Jim McClure and moved with him to a small spread on the Powder River.

  Linda Kronholm puts out.

  Jim McClure.

  Teresa would keep in touch by postcard. There was one of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Finally got to Israel. A suicide bomber blew up a coffeeshop across the street from my hotel the night I arrived. I slept through it. I hope that’s not a metaphor. xoxox T. The postmark was not from Jerusalem but from Trieste, with an Italian stamp, which suggests that she held it for a while before she mailed it. Another showed the changing of the leaves in Vermont. This is so beautiful. To think I never saw it. xoxox T. In fact she must have seen the leaves in autumn every fall when she and Martha Buick were at Smith. This card was postmarked Lake Louise. Occasionally there were notes scribbled on hotel stationery, from the Bristol in Paris, say, or the Kahala Mandarin in Honolulu. Have you ever seen the Musée de Camondo? the note on the Bristol paper said. It made me cry. xoxo T. The postmark was from Delhi. And in the Kahala Mandarin envelope: I saw the Pacific Fleet Band doing Mozart’s Symphony29 in A at the Foster Botanical Garden. They all arrived at the ending at the same time. xoxo T. Postmarked Mantoloking, N.J.

  We talked only once.

  The telephone rang and the voice at the other end said, “Hi.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right. I missed the sound of your voice.”

  “I’m hard to reach from Delhi. Where are you, now?”

  “Teaching English to little Mexican kids.”

  “You don’t speak Spanish.”

  “The object is to teach them English, not teach me Spanish. Anyway. I pick up languages fast.”

  “Where are you, Teresa?” I made the inductive leap. “Randado, Texas. Jim Hogg County. Over by the Rio Grande. Your father said it was the perfect place for witness protection. Who’d want to go there? I remember that. We talked about it.”

  “You don’t forget much, do you?”

  “True?”

  “It’s good talking to you, Max.”

  “Wait a minute. Teresa. I can fly there. Where do I go? DFW?”

  “Laredo.”

  “I can get a plane tomorrow.”

  “Don’t come, Max. That’s a favor. I just wanted to hear your voice. And remember how smart you were. Are.”

  “Teresa.”

  “I’ll keep in touch.”

  When she hung up, I got the area code for Jim Hogg County, Texas: 361. I dialed information. There was one Kean. T.M. Kean in Randado. It was the last time I heard from her. A month later I called the number in Randado.

  It had been disconnected.

  “Max,” Allie Vasquez said on the telephone from San Diego. “Teresa Kean. What do you hear from her lately.”

  It was best to wait Allie out. Press her and you would get a lot of mouth. I wondered how the admiral coped with Allie’s mouth. Maybe she spared him because it was worth it to her being Mrs. Cunningham. Allie already knew it had been two years and counting since I had last heard from Teresa. No postcards, no hotel notepaper. “Not much.”

  “That hotel in Vegas that her father built. The hood. Playland, right?”

  “King’s Playland,” I said.

  “Got him whacked.”

  “It did.”

  “It got torn down, right.”

  “Imploded.”

  “On the History Channel. Great Demos. I saw it.”

  I tried to contemplate Allie watching the History Channel. Hand in hand with Admiral Cunningham. Great Naval Battles. The Age of the Dreadnoughts. The War Under the Sea. History’s Mysteries. Great Demos.

  “You know what’s there now?” Allie said. “The Angkor Wat. Built on the ground where King’s Playland once stood.”

  I knew where this was going.

  I had read the item.

  An AP story about an unidentified and unclaimed Jane Doe in Las Vegas.

  I had not put it together.

  ANGKOR WAT

  No one has come looking, the lead Clark County detective said. You’re the first. Her fingerprints don’t match any in law enforcement files. There is no missing persons report that matches her description. She could have come from anywhere. We don’t know who she was, where she came from, and what, you know, made her do it. She left a SportSac bag on the roof, one of those big jobs, over the shoulder, like. There was nothing in it. No wallet, no ID, no driver’s license, no money, no note, no cosmetics. Just a small bottle of saline solution, you know the stu f you use when you wear contact lenses, but she wasn’t wearing contacts. And some kind of votive candle, you know, you go to mass and light a candle, that kind of candle, all twisted out of shape. Now it’s possible someone inside the parking structure rifled the bag when there was all that commotion downstairs on the ground. You saw the surveillancetape. There was an abandoned Toyota Camry on the top-floor parking roof, but it had been there for two weeks and was traced to a gamblerwho had tapped out and left it there. She wasn’t a street person, she had nice clothes. Her body has gone unclaimed for forty-three days. The holding period in the Clark County morgue is forty-five days. If she goes unclaimed, she will be sent to a local funeral parlor and be buried in potter’s field. The county will pick up the tab. Her stone will read 08-12517.

  We call her Jane Doe Jumper, the younger detective said.

  We do not call the victim that, the lead detective said.

  I meant around here, the younger detective said.

  The lead detective stared him down.

  With all due respect, the younger detective stammered.

  She was sober, the medical examiner said. Unlike most impulsive suicides.There was nothing in her stomach, and no alcohol or controlled substancesin her system. She doesn’t fit the demographic profile. Your typical suicide victim is a male Caucasian, sixty-five years of
age or over. No indicationof prior injuries, nothing to suggest a struggle, nothing to indicate any sexual activity in any time frame the post-mortem could discover. This wasn’t out the third floor, this was off the roof of a twelve-story structure, this was a woman who knew what she was doing, wanted to do it. It took a lot of courage.

  I buried Teresa in Mantoloking, N.J., alongside Brendan Thomas Kean and Moira Twomey Kean. Stanley came with me to Mantoloking. I always wanted to meet Teresa Kean, he said, bundling himself against the cold. She always wanted to meet you, too, Stanley, I said.

  Allie Vasquez was the only other person I told. For a long time, she didn’t speak, and then she said, I’m sorry, Max.

  I thought of calling J.J. up in Powder River country, but there was no reason to.

  He was Jim McClure.

  I think Teresa was the victim of her own blood.

  She was her mother’s daughter.

  She was her father’s daughter.

  In the end Blue Tyler and Jacob King drew her in, drew her under.

  Push me pull me.

  Would she have gone to the Angkor Wat had the father she never knew not been murdered there?

  Going to the Angkor Wat had a perfect symmetry to it.

  Would she have defended Alice Faith Todt’s psychotic half brother had the mother she never knew not come to mind every time she looked at Carlyle?

  Carlyle in the perfection of her self-absorption. Who had no sense that acts have consequences. Who treated the acceptance of responsibility as if it were a disease. Who thought life a game in which she was always the winner. Who was ignorant of and uncaring about the devastation she had left in her wake.

  All that was a long time ago.

  I think of Teresa every day.

  JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

  NOTHING LOST

  John Gregory Dunne wrote five other novels—Vegas; True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue ; and Playland—and seven works of nonfiction, among which are the memoirlike Harp and two books that look at Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Princeton in 1954. He collaborated with his wife, the writer Joan Didion, on many screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park and True Confessions. John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003.

  ALSO BY JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

  Monster

  Playland

  Crooning

  Harp

  The Red White and Blue

  Dutch Shea, Jr.

  Quintana & Friends

  True Confessions

  Vegas

  The Studio

  Delano

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2005

  Copyright © 2004 by The John Gregory Dunne Marital Trust

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Dunne, John Gregory, [date]

  Nothing lost / by John Gregory Dunne.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. African American men—Crimes against—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.U493N68 2004

  813’.54—dc22

  2004000552

  www.vintagebooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42707-6

  v3.0