Among the Living (58 page)

“Who was the last one Lucy talked to?” Angel said. They were driving through a corridor of waterfront Sailors now, waiting for them to part like herd animals on a Land Rover safari. The men opened a path. They seemed to be a polite lot, for beasts. Almost intentional. It was after two in the morning. Another hour or two, they’d have the world to themselves.

“Did you try to find out?” Angel pressed when Jimmy didn’t say anything.

“No.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

Jimmy felt like he was in the dean of boys’ office. Or a cop station.

Then he remembered. “Down here,” he said. “The night of one of the suicides. A guy stepped in front of a streetcar.”

“Did you ever talk to her, face-to-face?”

“No.”

“Machine Shop said he talked to her, had a cup with her one night.”

“I was across the street,” Jimmy said defensively.

“He said she was a real talker,” Angel said. “Baring her soul.” He was quiet for a minute. “She was never that way with me, just said something when it needed to be said, not even then most of the time. She was real sweet.”

What do you want me to say?
Jimmy was thinking.

The Sailors were packed in tight around the car now. And not so fast to move out of the way. Angel saw where they were. Pier 35, where Lucy had died.

“I don’t need to
see
it,” Angel said.

“Shop called, thought he saw Les Paul down here. With the woman in the white dress.”

“She was with Lucy, the last time you saw her?”

“Yeah. And another woman. Short black hair.”

Les Paul. Sexy Sadie. Polythene Pam. The Leonidas girls. Truth was, Jimmy was looking for everybody.

Anybody
except Mary.

Turn the page, you got another day. Whether you wanted one or not. Duncan Groner had had his own way of bringing Jimmy back to the case, of pressing his fingers down on the fiery Braille again, of dragging him back across the bridge from Marin to San Francisco.

“Page A-6,” Groner had said, a wake-up call at the hotel, though Jimmy had never turned toward the bed that night. “The
Chronicle
, All the News That’s Fit for Fools.”

It was a full page of faces. The dead. The suicides.

“Some friends of yours . . .” Groner said.

Jimmy opened the newspaper standing in the doorway to the suite, and there they were, all the suicides, in clean rows with their names underneath, way too much like a high school yearbook. He’d expected something else, the latest edition of
the present
maybe, not the past.

What he’d expected was something about Mary. Or her husband.

The accompanying copy was bylined. Duncan Groner apparently had become the go-to guy for self-murder. There wasn’t much “story” to the layout, one long graf in which the reporter laid out the terms: San Francisco proper usually had eight to ten suicide deaths a month. (The Golden Gate had its own segregated stats,
two a month
since the plain-clothes patrollers had been instated, “blending in” with the despairing.) Since the first of September, all told there’d been forty-eight suicides,
successful suicides
was the term, bringing to mind dozens more with
half
-slashed wrists, with only a
half
bottle of pills to be suctioned out in the ER, jumpers off one-story roofs, shooters firing starter’s pistols at their temples. Groner ended the lead-in with a few sentences of behind-the-scenes stuff, the disclosure that the editors “vociferously debated” the “dangers” of “publicizing” the suicides (of telling the truth, in other words), for fear that the “suggestible” in San Francisco might think the unthinkable, and act on it, join the club. Even if the initiation ceremony was a tad severe.

Faces. Hairstyles, forced smiles. The retoucher’s craft. Lives smoothed out, flattened onto cheap pulp paper, tamed in black and white, gussied up. There was the old lady, the ninety-year-old chorus girl. The young man with AIDS. The German tourist. All the pictures shaved off years, decades in some cases. Now the AIDS man from the hospice was outdoors, resurrected into a brighter yesterday, coastal cliffs behind him, his perfect thick hair wild in the wind up off the water, a white smile on his face that made you wish you could see the cutoff person at his shoulder, the man, Jimmy guessed, who’d gone through the drawer of pictures to pick this one. There were the Greek twins. There they
all
were.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Angel said.

“New,”
Jimmy said. It was a vulgar term.

Some of the Sailors, the more dramatic ones, used the word
aboard
when they were talking about new Sailors: a new Sailor was “aboard.” New meant “new meat.”

“You don’t think Lucy’s down here, do you?” Angel said. For Angel, the whole thing had more than enough drama on its own, he didn’t go seeking more in language.

Lucy
could
be down here, Lucy as a Sailor. A lot of them were suicides,
successful
suicides. The murdered were another contingent, especially among the darkest of the Sailors, the ones who liked the shadows. The rest had died in accidents. But a loose definition of the term. More than a few had been the ill “misdiagnosed” into this state. Before their time.

Everybody had their own unfinished business, even if none of them knew exactly what it was.

Jimmy had only glanced at her picture in the
Chron
, Lucy’s picture. A portrait from a few years after high school. From Sears? Kmart? Old enough and fuzzy enough almost to be someone else. (He wondered where they’d gotten it. From family in Paso Robles?) He didn’t look at it long because in the picture Lucy looked a little like Mary. Not the hair, but . . . Why hadn’t he seen it before? (Or had he? He’d flashed on
something
in the café down in Saugus.) More likely, it was some trippy side effect brought on by the acid of his guilt. He was supposed to save Lucy, and Lucy
wasn’t
saved.

“Did you see the pictures of all of them? In the paper?” Jimmy said. “They had a picture of Lucy.”

Angel shook his head. “I got my own pictures of her.”

The Sailors were blocking the way now. Jimmy thought about a tap on the horn. Maybe in San Francisco they wouldn’t kill you for it.

Then he saw the Sailor right in front of him, across the hood. This one was very tall. He was black, but light-skinned. He had spotted skin, looked particularly African.

And he carried a staff, a wooden rod taller than he was.

Jimmy and Angel looked at each other.

“Let my people go,” Angel said.

But this Moses wasn’t there to part anything, not yet anyway. He just stared at Jimmy and Angel. The other Sailors seemed to press in closer, surround the car. Moses stayed where he was, in front of the hood, one of the Porsche’s chrome sissy bar bumpers against his leg. Against his calf. That was how tall he was.

“I guess this is the valet parking,” Jimmy said, and turned off the engine.

They both opened their doors at the same time, pushing back the men on the side, and got out.

There didn’t seem to be any women Sailors down here. It was a rough-looking crowd.

“They’re going to mess with the car,” Angel said.

“Maybe not,” Jimmy said. “Maybe they’ll cut a couple of out-of-towners some slack.”

“It’s not going to be here when we get back,” Angel said.

The man with the staff had started away. Jimmy and Angel set out after him, figuring that was the plan. Somebody’s plan.

There were hundreds of them down there. Something about the gathering, the whole scene, felt ceremonial. The general agitation in the air, in the San Francisco night, seemed to have found a focal point.

But they were all silent. Like obedient spectators for a play.

“Maybe we should do this tomorrow,” Angel said.

“This isn’t something
we’re
doing,” Jimmy said. Now the San Francisco Sailors were moving the two outsiders along. Jimmy and Angel were just going with the flow. There wasn’t any resisting, no use. It felt inevitable, whatever it was.

Jimmy lost sight of the tall African.

One of the grimmest-looking Sailors got right in Jimmy’s face. “We fell away,” he hissed at Jimmy. Or at least that’s what Jimmy thought he said.

Jimmy tried to get past him. The man said his line again.

This time Jimmy heard it right. “We follow Wayne,” the man was saying.

The others around him joined in. “We follow Wayne . . .”

“Good for you,” Angel said. “I follow Jesus.”

A brutish Sailor shoved him. Angel shoved back. “Step off.”

“We serve the Russian!” one of the few women said defiantly.

“Look,” Jimmy said.

Just in time. The tall black man with the staff was waiting next to a door in the front of one of the waterfront warehouses. Jimmy and Angel and their escorts had crossed two hundred yards of pavement. The Sailors had closed in behind them. Wherever the Porsche was, it was swallowed up.

The door on the front of the warehouse was closed.

Jimmy walked to it. He expected it to open. It didn’t.

“Knock,” Moses said.

Jimmy went along with the gag.

Even before the door opened, Jimmy and Angel heard it. Wailing, spacey guitar. Live. They’d found Les Paul.

He played real good.

Through the doorway, there was a corridor. There was a nobody dressed all in black. They followed him. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the floor. After a few yards, another door, with a raised threshold, like a hatch, like the mouth of a trap. From here on, the walls seemed cold, slippery. Not that Jimmy or Angel were reaching out to touch them. Everything from the door on in was painted black. Or, if not black, some deep red.

The crying guitar got louder.

They stepped over another threshold and found themselves in a space three levels high, a single room a hundred feet from end to end. They still couldn’t spot Les, but the sound had a location now, the far end of the big, hollow room. The chamber was lit by gaslights positioned along the side, flamboyant brass curves, feminine shapes, clear glass globes. And real flame, not some electric update. Now they could see that the walls were metal. Iron or steel. There didn’t seem to be any windows, but there were drapes, red velvet, to match what furniture there was, preposterous curvy Victorian divans and claw-foot mahogany tables atop thick rugs, like the great rooms halfway down the coast at San Simeon or, farther down, in Hollywood, in Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. Somebody had a flair for the dramatic.

The room was a great jam room. Some combination of the slick walls and the baffles created by the yards of pleated velvet made the guitar notes swoop around the room like a special-effects ghost. Like the ghost of Jimi himself, because what the boy was playing was soaring and free-form. A sound to match, to fill the plush void of the space.

“There,” Angel said.

Lucy’s baby brother was on a second-level landing, behind an iron railing, beside a lowboy Fender amp with a red-glowing jewel light on its face. He had his eyes open as he played but wasn’t looking at anything, certainly not at them. Jimmy realized he had never gotten the kid’s real name. The kid had on his black porkpie hat from that first day up in Paso Robles. He still looked fourteen, even if he sounded ninety-nine.

Then they weren’t alone anymore.

It was Jeremy. Cape-wearing Jeremy. All-in-black Jeremy, who whispered in your ear and told you to jump.

He came in from offstage, stage right, walked with an ivory-headed cane, looking, in that setting, like a turn-of-the-century opium dealer who pimped on the side. But without the happy-go-lucky disposition.

But it turned out this wasn’t
his
play, Jeremy’s. He was just a supporting character. He greeted Jimmy, “met” Angel, which meant he saw him and nodded in his direction. Les reached the end of his jam, let the last of it sustain for twenty or thirty seconds, then killed it off with a last strike at the strings.

“Cool,” Jeremy said.

The kid started sketching out something else, heading off elsewhere, a new set of chords and changes.

Everyone seemed to know what they were doing there, everyone except Jimmy and Angel.

Someone else was coming, footsteps on the hard floor. Was the floor metal, too?

“Whitehead,” MC Jeremy said to Jimmy and Angel a second before the man himself appeared.

Whitehead.

He looked to be in his sixties, thin but with weight to him. The skin on his face was tight and smooth, his hair silver, buzz-cut. His eyes were pure black at the center, at least looked so here, on this stage. He wore a suit that fell the way expensive suits fall, a politician’s suit, the color of coal, black or blue, depending on where the light was. He seemed to hesitate under one of the flickering gas wall lamps, his hands folded in front of him, as if to let Jimmy and Angel get the full effect. Jimmy knew the type, the kind of man who liked to think a person would remember forever the first time he saw him. The tip of his third finger on his right hand was gone, from the knuckle out. He wore an onyx ring, to draw attention to it.