Dan Vining - Among the Living

“You all right?” Angel said. “You seem a little down.”

Jimmy didn’t answer. He stared at the bare metal curve of the car, old and new at the same time.

“Come on,” Angel said. “Say it out loud.”

“You know how sometimes you forget about it?” Jimmy said.

Angel nodded.

“And then you remember. ”

“What happened?”

“A girl kissed me on the cheek,” Jimmy said. “And she knew. ”

“What girl?”

“Girl on Sunset. A hooker. Jumped in my car.”

Angel waited a minute and then he said, “They see a lot of dark shit. They get tuned in to it.”

“Maybe she saw what’s really there. You ever think about that?”

“Not about you, ” Angel said.

A few hours later, the moon had set, the women were gone, the men were lifting weights. Angel stood over the bench press spotting a fearsome man grinding out a last rep. Jimmy was up on the deck. The Hollywood Freeway was a half mile away and the traffic, even late, threw up a sound like the ocean. When you first heard it, it was exciting in a way, the sound of energy, of motion, of intention. But, like the kids out wild on Sunset, ten seconds later it felt like something else, something to turn away from before it pulled you down. He watched Angel and the men for a minute, listened to them teasing each other in Spanish, and then put down his beer, went down the steps to go.

He waved to Angel, started up the side of the house.

“Let’s make a run to Tecate some night,” Angel called after him. “Eat at that fish fry place.”

Jimmy walked up the sidewalk alongside the white house. He brushed aside a branch of trumpet vine that arched overhead. He looked at his fingers.

Wet, from the leaves.

A little TV offered up the first newscast of the morning. The sound was down but the visuals said enough: the school picture of the missing boy giving way to a live shot of helicopters combing brown hills somewhere in the Inland Empire, Verdugo or San Bernardino or Riverside. Jimmy sat at one end of the long table in the big dining room, eating toast, wearing the same clothes from last night.

The weather came on. Jimmy turned up the sound in time to hear, “A surprise trace of rain last night in parts of Hollywood …”

He left it on, walked away from it.

The bedroom was stark, a large room with expensive furnishings out of the past, huge pieces carved from some rain forest hardwood, dark, almost black. Jimmy stood at the tall windows, looking down at the backyard as the daylight burned off the dew. He yanked closed the blackout drapes and lay back on the bed, still in his clothes.

Jean Kantke’s office was in an industrial building just east of downtown on a street of rag trade shops, down where they made bathing suits and neckties, kiddy backpacks and knockoff men’s jeans and underwear. The office was on the third floor, the top floor, and it was crisp and clean and high style, metal frame windows, old-style wide silver Venetian blinds dicing the morning light, and a desk that was silver, too, all curvy, looking like it came out of the purser’s office of an ocean liner.

An assistant showed Jimmy in.

Jean kept her eyes down, busied herself with some papers on the desk. She wore a light blue suit, a blue the color of iceberg ice.

“What changed your mind?” she said, still not looking up. She was treating him like an employee. He was used to it. He understood it. People hated to need help, especially in daylight.

“My mind is in a constant state of change,” Jimmy said. “Is that an oxy-moron?” He was still trying to impress her. And still noticing it.

He looked around. “Nice office,” he said.

“Perfume,” she said. “I do very well.”

“And you smell good, too.”

Jimmy inspected a collection of perfume bottles from the past in a tall glass case, all the shapes and colors, cut glass and crystal. On the highest shelf, all by itself, was a black cat. Down low there was a shelf of goofy Avon cologne bottles, VW bugs and banjos and little businessmen with briefcases and black plastic stingy brim hats that unscrewed, a riff on the ordinary people and what they splashed behind their ordinary ears.

Jean was used to getting answers to her questions. “What made you change your mind?” she said again.

Jimmy picked up the black cat bottle. “It rained the other night,” he said. “Somebody told me it did, and I didn’t believe her.”

Now she looked at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Me either.”

Jean pushed back from the desk and stepped to a file cabinet. She found a folder, opened it, glanced at it, closed it. She offered it to Jimmy.

He didn’t take it.

“You were five.”

“Yes.”

“Where’d they send you?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You were five. They sent you somewhere.”

“I grew up in my grandmother’s house.”

“In L.A.?”

“San Francisco. Tiberon, actually.”

“Is she still alive?”

“No.”

“You said you had money. Did it start with her?”

“She had money. But I have my own.”

“Any brothers or sisters?” he said.

“A brother, Carey. He lives in Arizona.”

Jimmy didn’t say anything else. Sometimes when you let silence rise up, people will fill it and some people will say things, sometimes more than they meant to say.

“I left my grandmother’s as soon as I could,” she said. “A boarding school in Atherton and then Stanford. When I was sixteen.” She added the last with an impossible combination of pride and embarrassment.

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” Jimmy said.

“I never thought it was supposed to be,” she said.

“I didn’t exactly make it to college,” he said.

She didn’t have anything to say about that.

“Can you tell?” he said.

“I don’t really know what to think about you,” she said.

“But that could be a good thing, right?” he said.

They both listened as “La Cucaracha” was played on the horn of a truck in the parking lot below. Jimmy went over to the window and spread the blinds. It was a lunch truck, chromed up, fancy. When you started your shift at five in the morning, you had lunch at ten-thirty. A Mexican man with a coin belt around his waist set up a folding table as the workers came out, all women as far as Jimmy could see. At least now she was talking to him like a person and not like a servant. Or a doctor. Or a priest. But he could tell she wanted this to be over, maybe was wishing she hadn’t even thought of this, had never had these questions about her father and murder and a time out of time, or at least had not given in to them.

“Why me? Why do you want me to do this?” he said.

“I asked a few people to recommend someone. I asked Joel — ”

He turned away from the window and looked at her. “Joel said he didn’t put me up for this. He said you came to him, asking about me. Not about investigators. About me. ”

She just stood there. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to say it.

He held out his hand. She gave him the file.

“Do you need a retainer or — ”

“Kiss me on the cheek,” Jimmy said.

She just waited.

“At the party at Joel’s,” he said, “before you revealed your ulterior motive, I thought you liked me a little. It’d be nice if it all wasn’t just a smart girl’s trap.”

The phone buzzed. She didn’t look at it.

“I don’t see — ”

“You have to kiss me,” Jimmy said.

She kissed him on the cheek. There was a kind of defiance in it, as if she’d made herself believe that it was her idea.