Dan Vining: Among the Living

He put the cue in the rack.

“Are you in business?” he said.

“I own a company.”

“I’m sure you know some investigators, security companies. There are some good ones.”

“This isn’t about my business,” she said. “It’s about something that happened a long time ago.”

Each one of the words of that second sentence came hard for her. But he still just looked at her and smiled and left her standing there.

A Mexican maid was watching a little TV on the counter in the kitchen. On screen was a school picture of a Latino boy ten or eleven, an image that has come to mean “missing child” or “dead boy.” The story was being told in Spanish. The picture of the boy gave way to a family crying in front of a little house, then an angle on a relative arriving, caught in the first moment he stepped from the car and got the news. On the L.A. Spanish stations the crime coverage was always more explicit, more theatrical, more frightening: Monsters walk among us! was the theme.

Jimmy came in. The maid tensed, but smiled. He opened a couple of cabinets until he found a glass. She watched as he filled it at the sink and drank it down.

She had a Band-Aid on her finger. He asked her about it. “ Te cortaste el dedo? Penso que era un hot dog?”

She laughed and shook her head.

Then Jean came in.

She stopped under a bright recessed ceiling light, stood under its glare like a defendant in a sci-fi scene.

“In 1977,” she said, “my father, Jack Kantke, was convicted of killing my mother and a friend of hers. In Long Beach. I was five.”

There.

Jean looked at the maid. The maid looked at the TV.

Jimmy drew another glass of water and looked out at the backyard. A fog was filling the back of the canyon, rolling down from on high like a very slow waterfall. It was always sad when you heard what it was.

“My father was Assistant D.A.,” Jean continued. “Mother was a dress designer. It was in all the papers, even Time magazine. There were appeals. He was executed in 1992. The gas chamber.”

It was so matter-of-fact. So repeated.

“I know people say you shouldn’t go back into the past,” she said.

“I never say that,” Jimmy turned and said.

“I just — ”

“Were you there? When it happened?”

“No. I was at my grandmother’s.”

She’d lost some of her force from before. He liked her this way. This was the big hurt in her life. Most people, you’d have to know them for months or years to find out what it was. Maybe it was why he did this, looked into things. He liked knowing, even when in the end sometimes it tore him up.

“So what do you want to know?”

“If he really killed her,” Jean said. “Killed them. He swore he didn’t.”

Jimmy said, “You know, innocent people don’t get executed.” He watched for some reaction to the word innocent. She didn’t have one. “You would think it would happen and people like to talk about it all the time, but it really doesn’t happen.”

He looked at her until she nodded.

“It would be an enormous surprise if he didn’t kill them,” he said.

There was a long moment. She nodded again.

“So you just want to know how much to hate him?” Jimmy said.

“No.”

“What then? What difference would it make? Everybody’s dead.”

He waited for some reaction to that word, too. To dead.

“I just think it would be better to know,” she said.

Jimmy put his glass in the sink. “We could have a long conversation about that sometime,” he said. “Sorry.”

And he left her again.

Jean looked over at the maid, who was still pretending she didn’t speak much English. Now on the TV there was a picture of the missing boy in a Cub Scout uniform. And then they were on to some other story.

At the end of the night, Jimmy waited out front surrounded by his new best friends, a circle that included Ben the JPL engineer and both murder victims, still in their bloodstained clothes. The fog had them all wrapped up. The TV comic was just hauling himself up into a caution-sign-yellow Hummer.

After Joel and the comic told each other they’d call, the Hummer pulled out and rumbled off to war down the drive. Joel came over to Jimmy’s circle. He put his arm around the murder girl and kissed her on the cheek.

“Wasn’t she good?” Joel said to everyone.

The actress smiled.

“You broke my heart,” Joel said.

“I’m going to go get cleaned up,” the girl said and started away. Joel looked hurt. She came back and kissed him on the forehead.

“She’s going to be big,” Joel said, once she was gone.

“You mean when she grows up?” Jimmy said.

“Funny.”

“ Don’t hate me because I’m promiscuous, ” Jimmy said.

“She loves me.”

The valet brought up the Porsche, left the driver’s door open. The engine growled low, warm and friendly, like a dog waiting for its master.

“Thanks for inviting me, Joel,” Jimmy said.

“I never know when you’re screwing with me,” Joel said.

“I just said thanks.”

“See?”

Jimmy got into the Porsche, closed the door, punched the gas a couple of times because he liked the sound. “You ever think maybe you were too smart?”

“Now I know you’re screwing with me,” Joel said.

Jimmy sped away. The radio came up, loud.

Jean Kantke stepped out of the house just in time to see the taillights disappear down the smooth curving drive.

In the belfry of the Hollywood United Methodist Church above Highland and Franklin, an owl with luminous eyes scanned the scene below: the river of taillights coming down from the Bowl, cop cars and an ambulance, their red lights slicing up the night, a body under a sheet, a cop drawing chalk rings around spent shells. In the hills to the right was the Magic Castle. Down from that, the façade of the Chinese Theater, seen from behind. This was inland and there was none of the Malibu fog. The night was especially clear. The lights of the city south seemed to crackle.

The owl took off. Hung on the side of the church’s tower was a fifty-foot AIDS ribbon. All the way down below, a signboard announced this week’s sermon:

“THE LAST MINUTE OF ETERNITY”

Jimmy drove the Strip with the radio loud, the top down, past famous haunts, rolling eastbound. It was a Friday night so things were happening but everyone seemed to be headed in the opposite direction, headed west. From the looks on their faces they were happy.

He stopped on a yellow at Sunset and Crescent Heights. In the side mirror, the red neon sign for the Chateau Marmont shimmered. Jimmy looked back over his shoulder at the hotel on the rise above the Strip, its turrets and towers, the awnings on the penthouse patio, the roofs of the bungalows behind for the long-termers and New York actors and French directors. They’d just hauled down the tall Marlboro Man billboard who’d stood over the hotel for years, replaced him with a state-sponsored rant about secondhand smoke, a dolled up couple close enough to kiss.

“Mind if I smoke?” the guy was saying.

“Care if I die?” says the girl.

Then Jimmy saw him, a man in a Navy peacoat and watch cap. And this a warm night, too. He leaned against a wall next to a turquoise nightclub. This one was young, in his twenties. He drank from a bottle of water, his eyes on Jimmy, a sour expression on his face, a sour smile, as though remembering a sick joke.

They were called Sailors.

A trio of Valley teenagers walked past him, stopped to read the names of the bands on the club marquee. The man in the peacoat ignored them, took another drink of water, kept his eyes on Jimmy.