Dan Vining - Among the Living

“I saw her picture in the Times a few years ago. The business section. She’s very pretty.”

He didn’t deny that either.

“What does she want to know?” she said.

“ Who. It’s who she wants to know. Her mother,” Jimmy said. “Or maybe her father.” He hadn’t thought of that angle until just that moment, that Jean was doing this to get closer to her father. Or close enough to never come close to him again.

Jimmy walked away from her and into the living room. It was big enough for jai alai. Except for a planter with a ficus in it, which looked brought in for the sale, there was no furniture, no coverings on the windows, nothing but a brass telescope on a mahogany tripod in front of floor-to-ceiling glass tinted the merest green.

The gas fireplace was lit, though it was summer and even here along the coastline there was no chill in the air. Jimmy stared at the stone logs, burning yet not consumed, like something in the Bible. Like me, was what he was thinking. He heard her follow him into the room, heels clicking on the wood floors.

“So,” Jimmy said without turning from the fire, “did Jack Kantke kill them?”

“No.”

Now he turned to look at her. If there was any pain in her memory of those days, of those people, she had found a way not to betray it.

“How do you know?”

“I knew him,” she said. “Very well. We all knew each other very well.” She gave the last line room to breathe, opened up a space for speculation. “Jack didn’t care about Elaine and Bill.”

“So he knew about the affair?”

“Of course.”

“And he didn’t care?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Does that shock you? Sometimes I shock my daughter.”

Jimmy wasn’t shocked.

“I think Jack thought Bill Danko was rather … below all of us,” she said. “But Elaine enjoyed him. And Jack had other fish to fry, as we used to say.”

“He had a girlfriend, too?”

She smiled a quick, complicated little smile Jimmy would think about later. “Actually,” she said, “I wasn’t referring to his love life. Jack was very ambitious. Ten years after the fact, he was still out on the New Frontier. I think he would have been governor eventually. Or he thought so.”

She sat on the corner of the planter with her hip out. Jimmy thought again of the picture of the four of them, posing, full of themselves, at the bar.

“Was the Yacht Club The Jolly Girls’ clubhouse?”

“Only in an emergency.”

“Where then? Where did you hang out?”

“It’s embarrassing to say.”

“Where?”

“A place called Big Daddy’s.”

Jimmy remembered it. Marina Del Rey. A good forty-five-minute drive up the coastline, far enough away to see and be seen by a whole new crowd, and not be seen by people who knew your husband.

“That’s where Elaine met Bill actually,” she said.

“How close were you to her, to Elaine?”

“Not the closest of the group, but we were all close.”

Jimmy said, “So who killed them?”

She said, “I have no idea.”

There was a sound from the front of the empty house.

“It came out of nowhere, as so many things do,” she said.

A man and a woman stepped in. The man had a phone to his ear.

It was Jimmy’s cue. He touched Vivian’s arm. “Thanks, the house is perfect,” he said, loud enough for the prospective buyers to hear. “We’ll talk.”

She appreciated the gesture. “I’ll be in the office until six, Dr. Miles,” she said.

Nice touch.

Jimmy nodded to the couple and saw himself to the door.

Out front in the circular driveway was a cream-colored Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible with plates that read: “BUY BUY.”

The potential buyers’ Jag was parked behind it.

Jimmy drank a Cel-Ray soda in a booth at the window under a sign that said, “We Never Close.” Canter’s was where John Belushi had spent some of the last hours of his life. There was the deli and then the bar in the other room, The Kibitz Room. There had been a time when Jimmy collected last hours facts, Belushi downing a pastrami at Canter’s then going out to Westwood for a chocolate-dipped doughnut at Dupar’s, Janis Joplin shooting pool at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica before the drive up Highland to the hotel, James Dean stopping for a burger at the diner in Saugus before the run to Paso Robles. But the fun had gone out of it in time, after the list of the famous dead got a little too long, or death a little less of a gag.

The waitress came. She was young and Israeli. He didn’t want anything else but he ordered a bowl of soup and another Cel-Ray. The place was empty for some reason and he liked her and it wasn’t going to be much of a night for her.

He’d picked up a couple of tails, pale men in matching cheap suits, one tall enough to joke about, the other with a shock of bleached hair black at the roots in the style that had passed through the club scene two summers ago. Sailors. They were at a table for two in the middle of the room. They’d been down in Long Beach, on the bridge just as he was leaving Naples to go out to meet Vivian Goreck. After he’d left the house for sale, he’d stayed up on the cliffs at Palos Verdes until the sun dropped and then gone by Ike’s, his hangout. They were parked on the street in a white Escort when he came out.

They weren’t any good at this. Jimmy gave the tall one a look and made him knock over his water.

The second soda came and the soup, a pair of bagel chips speared by the handle of the spoon. The tails decided to pretend they were finished and they got up and left, pretending not to look over at him.

Jimmy slid a Time magazine out of a cellophane wrapper. He’d bought it at a collectibles store down in Long Beach. The cover was black with one little dim light, a candle, a hand cupped around it. It was from the week in July of the New York City blackout. He turned over the pages, stepped in. Here was another time capsule, images of 1977, the worries and frivolities of the day. Watergate hearings were grinding on. Miss America Phyllis George married producer Robert Evans “under a four-hundred-year-old sycamore” in Beverly Hills. War between Ethiopia and Somalia. The Sex Pistols arrived in America, in New York, sneering in their Wild One black leather jackets, looking scary and silly, like something New Yorkers had found when the lights came back on.

The story on the murders was halfway through. This was just the kind of California story the East Coast loved. There were pictures of the house front and back and a smiling Elaine Kantke and a half-smiling Jack Kantke and a potato-faced Bill Danko.

The picture of Danko was a mugshot.

The overline read:

LA DOLCE VITA, RIVO ALTO STYLE

“Did I wake you?”

It was a hot night and Jean Kantke had the lights off. She wore a sports bra and three-stripe Adidas silks. She was in the living room in her apartment, the penthouse of a four-story building on a curving street in the hills above Sunset, above the Strip. She pushed aside the sliding glass doors — the apartment had a fifties feel to it — and walked out onto the deck with the portable phone. It was a killer view, the Strip below, the orange and yellow lights of the city stretching all the way down to Compton.

“I never know when people sleep,” Jimmy continued. “I mean, regular people.”

“Is that what I am?” Jean said into the phone.

“You have a job,” Jimmy said. “An office. Hours.”

She stepped to the south end of the wraparound terrace, went to the railing. It wasn’t that late, a little before midnight. She could hear laughter every once in a while from the open-air cafés on the boulevard with their tables on the sidewalks.