Т Паркер - The Fallen

While in prison Vic wrote Fall to Your Life! It’s about his difficult life and how he turned it around after setting fire to the hotel and throwing me out the sixth-floor window. It’s all about having a can-do attitude. He self-published the book as soon as he was released and he sells it at the tourist places around town. He arrives in a sputtering ancient pickup truck with a small card table, a folding chair, a change box, and a box of books. The cover of the book is a picture of me falling from the hotel, used with the photographer’s permission. I appear oddly calm — faceup, legs and feet out, and though you can’t see my exact expression, I seem to be looking up at something small and puzzling.

I get uncomfortable looking at that picture. I’ve tried to imagine what I was thinking about when it was taken. But again, it all went by so quickly there’s no way to tell. I could have been thinking about anything from the way the back of my mother’s blouse used to crease in alternating directions as she walked away from the Normal Heights bus stop each morning, to the flag atop the bank building above me that was rapidly getting smaller as I fell, to my first Little League home run. Gina made me a copy of the video that was shown widely on local and national news, but I still hadn’t gotten up the courage to watch it. She has suggested more than once that viewing it might make me “whole” again, but I honestly don’t want to see it. I’m not a hundred percent proud of some of the things I thought of on my way down and would prefer to keep those difficult memories to myself.

“Here,” he said.

“No, I wasn’t—”

“Come on, Robbie, I know you don’t need it, but take it.”

We agreed a month ago, when Vic started selling the books, that we’d share the proceeds. I told him I didn’t want money from his work, but he insisted and I could see that it was morally imperative for him to pay me. He suggested a seventy-five / twenty-five split, with the larger portion going to him. I figured that was fine since I didn’t want his money in the first place.

Fall to Your Life! sells for ten dollars even, so Vic handed me forty-five. Our best week, which coincided with a street fair in Little Italy, was one hundred and ten dollars. Seemed like everybody in San Diego bought his book that weekend.

He smiled.

“Thanks, Vic.”

“Well, you know. I still got NBC, the Union-Trib, and the Reader interested in doing a story on us. Esquire is a maybe.”

“I’ve got nothing to tell them, Vic.”

“I know. I respect that.”

“Any word from the federation?”

“I sent them the newspaper articles about me, so we’ll see. I think my publicity would be good for wrestling. You know, a guy getting his act together. They’re always looking for another angle.”

We took our coffees outside and stood by the brick wall. The cold front was still hovering over the city and the fog moved down Fourth Avenue like something dreamed. I looked north in the direction of the Salon Sultra then checked my watch. Gina would be coming in to work in just a few minutes.

“Robbie, did you hear about the Ethics guy who got shot?”

“It’s my case, Vic.”

“Oh, man. A former cop. A city employee. Anything to do with a government agency is scary if you ask me.”

“What have you heard?”

I asked because Vic lives downtown and he talks to a lot of people on the street, many of whom treat him like a celebrity. I’ve watched him from a distance, standing tall above his audience. They’re mostly the lost and lonely and destitute, but they’re an oddly curious bunch. They love to know and to pretend they know.

“Micro says the guy busted him once.”

Micro is a small man named Mike Toner, who rotates between the homeless shelters and the jails and the churches and the sidewalks.

“For what?”

“Panhandlin’. Not really busted, just ran him off his corner. Micro recognized him from the picture in the paper. The guy, his daughter drowned and it ruined him.”

“I guess that’s true,” I said.

“He shouldn’t have let that get him down,” said Vic. “Look how you pulled yourself back up. And me.”

“I’d rather get thrown out a window than have my little girl drown,” I said. I don’t know how I knew this, not being a father, but I did.

Vic nodded, lost in thought. “I saw the Union-Trib article. It said there was a broken-down car, maybe a guy who saw something.”

I silently thanked George Schimmel. “We’re hoping someone will step forward. Keep your eyes and ears out, Vic.”

“I’ll do anything to help you.”

A black VW Cabriolet convertible picked its way down the avenue. The top was down in the chill and the woman driving it wore a black leather coat. She had a string of pearls around her neck and a pair of dark sunglasses. She gave us a tired smile. I wondered what the life was like once you got past the cool clothes and cars — men, cash, rubbers, AIDS, drugs, danger, vice, jails, bonds, lawyers, madams, pimps, sleep all day, then do it again.

“Seems like half the pretty women in San Diego drive those little convertibles,” said Vic. “Man, they really get your attention.”

“Yes, they do.”

I watched her drive away and thought again of Carrie Ann Martier and the place in Hawaii she was going to buy no matter how much it cost her.

“Thanks for the royalty,” I said.

“Thanks for the coffee, Robbie.”

“Next Friday?”

“Sure. See you then. Robbie? You saved me, man. I love you. I really do.”

I walked north to Market then toward San Diego Bay. From half a block away I watched Gina go into the salon. Her head was down and her steps were quick and short. That made me feel slightly better. If she had come striding along the sidewalk, chin up and smiling at the world, I might have run down to the Execu-Suites, gone to the sixth floor, and jumped out again, away from the awning. Not really, but my heart hurt just watching her go through that door because I knew her heart hurt too.

I wanted to go after her but I didn’t. Sometimes, no matter how bad you want something, you just have to wait.

The Salon Sultra door is made of mirrored glass and when it closed behind her it completed the building’s larger reflection of Market Street and Gina was gone.

McKenzie met me outside Uptown Management over on Fifteenth. Al Bantour was a slender man in an old blue suit. Sixties, gray hair and eyes. He mouthed an unlit cigar and gave us a canny once-over as McKenzie explained what we needed. He smiled around the cigar, then explained that yes, Garrett Asplundh had a place at the Seabreeze Apartments down in National City. Too bad what happened. Garrett was the last guy in the world he thought would get murdered. When the cops are getting killed it’s a bad situation, most bad. Bantour said the on-site manager at the Seabreeze was a guy named Davey, and Davey ought to have an extra key. Any problems, just call. Wasn’t I the guy who got thrown out of the hotel?

We headed down I-5. Light traffic and the fog still thick out over the ocean.

I told McKenzie about my meeting with Carrie Ann Martier, about the sex videos made for Garrett, the Squeaky Clean Madam, her spot callers, and the girls in convertibles. McKenzie shook her head and exhaled in disgust. She told me she’d run across Squeaky Clean Madam’s enforcer and he was a real cool guy.

“Cool, like he’d cut your nipple halfway off to teach you respect,” she said. “Cool, like he’d break some ribs and toss you into Glorietta Bay to watch you suffer. Six-four, three hundred. Half of him’s tattoo. One of those big dudes with too small a head but he shaves it anyway. He’s got a carjack crew that works San Diego and TJ, and he runs cockfights out in east county. And an occasional gig for Jordan Sheehan because he likes pretty girls. Chupa Junior. Short for chupacabra . And ‘Junior’ because his daddy was just like him.”