Among the Living (6 page)

When they’d finished their salmon and salads, the pink coat man got up and stood next to the picture.

“I remember when my boy Spence went sailing with Crabby the first time,” the pink coat man began, his eyes on the big picture. “Spence was twelve or thirteen.”

Everyone started nodding their heads. They knew the story. They weren’t unhappy. They were too old. Too much had happened. Too many sailors had sailed off to Happy Harbor.

“When they were coming in, Crabby gave Spence a loose ten-foot coiled line, told him to stand in the bow, told him to get ready.”
Here it was.
“Twenty feet out from the dock, Crabby said, ‘OK . . .
Jump!
’ Spence jumped in, still holding the loose line.”

It got its laugh.

“That was Crabby. If you jumped when he said to, you were all right.”

The people nodded. That was Crabby.

“Spence wouldn’t ever do what
I
said,” the pink coat man said. “Still won’t.”

One of the women daubed at the corner of her eye, but she might have been crying about Spence. Or her own Spence.

When it was over, Jimmy bought a round in the bar.

“Everybody liked Jack and Elaine,” the pink coat man said.

Everyone nodded.

“His lawyer proved he was in Las Vegas,” the white-haired man said. “At the Rotary convention.” He and his wife were drinking tall club sodas. He’d sent the first ones back when they came without limes. “The prosecution had to admit there wasn’t enough time to drive there from Long Beach after the murders were committed.” He sounded like he was still mad about it. Or mad about something.

“The desk clerk testifie d,” another man said. This one looked as if he’d literally stepped off the deck of a boat to be there, sawdust in his eyebrows and in the hair on the back of his hands. Teak. You could smell it on him. “There wasn’t enough time.”

The pink coat man shook his head. They all shook their heads. Everybody knew all the same things.

“Even with the time change,” the sawdust man added.

“We’re in the same time zone as Vegas, Ted,” the white-h aired man said. He was still mad.

“I don’t believe so,” the sawdust man said.

“Yes. Same. All of Nevada,” the white-haired man said. “Including Las Vegas,” he added.

“Well, I don’t gamble,” the sawdust man said.

“You probably
shouldn’t,
Ted,” the white-haired man said.

The sawdust man
could
have said, “Well, at least my boat isn’t made out of
plastic,
” but he didn’t. He just filed it away. And took a sip of his free beer.

“And there was the guy in the gas station in Barstow,” a fourth man said, to bring it back around. “The gas station guy also verified the time line. Tell him about that.”

“I believe you just did, Ev,” the pink coat man said and traded a look with the white-haired man.

“What was his lawyer like?” Jimmy said.

“Harry Turner,” the white-haired man said.

Jimmy waited.

“You don’t know Harry Turner?”

“He’s too young,” the pink coat man said.

“I’ve heard of him,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t think he—”

“He
didn’t.
” It was the white-haired man. “Harry Turner was behind the scenes. But everybody who knew anything knew Harry Turner was running Jack’s defense. Well,
Jack
was running it but he had sense enough to know to go to Harry. But up front was . . . The guy at the table in the courtroom was . . . What was his name?”

“Upland. Or Overland,” the sawdust man said.

“Harry Turner never lost a case,” the pink coat man said.

“Still hasn’t,” the white-haired man said with a harsh little laugh.

“He’s retired now,” one of them said.

“Yeah,
retired,
” the white-haired man said.

A silence rose up. They all knew something that Jimmy didn’t know. Maybe someone would say it out loud.

“Up
church,
” one of the women said. None of the wives had said anything until now, just sipped their G&Ts and traded looks while the men talked.

The men nodded. Up
church.

And then things got too quiet again.

“None of you thought Jack Kantke did it,” Jimmy said.

“Not then,” the pink coat man said. “Nobody could believe it.”

“And now?”

There was a long moment.

“Well, there’s a system, isn’t there?” the white-haired man said.

The woman in the poppy-colored dress took her sunglasses off. She smiled at Jimmy, a smile not connected to anything in the scene but which now made it about her. Her hair still had life to it and whoever had done the work around her eyes had The Touch. She knew what he was thinking and enjoyed it.

“So,” Jimmy said, with a look that included all three women, “any of you in The Jolly Girls?”

On the microfiche at the newspaper library there was a sidebar on Elaine Kantke and her best friends. More importantly,
a picture.
Four vivacious, frisky babes at the selfsame Yacht Club bar, four of them on four stools, their hips stuck out.

That was what they called themselves, “The Jolly Girls.”

The woman in the poppy dress was quick and apparently spoke for all of them.

“No.”

Jimmy stood looking down into the water beside a black-bottom pool in a spectacular backyard in Palos Verdes, a bluff overlooking the battered green Pacific.

“You’re early,” a voice behind him said.

Jimmy turned.

Vivian Goreck approached with a professional smile. She was another striking woman in her fifties. She didn’t offer her hand, was from a time just before that. She wore a print dress, bright, tropical.

“You’re the same color as the wall behind you,” Jimmy said.

“All part of the plan,” she said brightly. “Like a spider. Did you look inside?”

“Nope,” Jimmy said.

She stepped back slightly and put a new smile on her face and he went where she wanted him to go.

The house was empty, high ceilings, blond floors, a lot of glass, Moderne. A man had lived here, alone, Jimmy could tell that right away. If a woman had lived here anything more than overnight she would have found something to take away at least some of the
edge,
to get the willful solitariness out of the air. A woman who cared about you, if you wanted her, alone was enough to do it.

There was an open kitchen with a pair of chrome sinks sunk in granite. Jimmy turned on the water, cupped his hand, bent and drank.

Vivian watched him.
You see it all.
Besides, she could tell he had money.

“The stove’s a commercial Wolf,” she said. “The fridge is Subzero. There are double Blankenship disposals, double Nero trash compactors.”

Jimmy turned off the water. “Was there a murder or divorce in the house? I always heard people ask that.”

She handed him a black dish towel. “They do. No, the house was owned by the builder and—”

Jimmy stopped the pretense. “My name is Jimmy Miles,” he said. “I’m not your buyer, I just wanted to talk to you. Your office told me where you were.”

She didn’t even blink. She was solid. Secure. Jimmy wondered what had made her that way. It was something else you didn’t see much anymore.

“Talk to me about what?” she said.

“The Jolly Girls.”

She stood up straighter, almost laughed. “Really. Why?”

“I’m an investigator.”

“I’m sure there’s a statute of limitations on public drunkenness . . .” she said. Here was another beauty who still had her looks but kept reminding you of what had been, the way the fire must have flared once and how everybody, or at least the men, had gathered round to watch it. Jimmy liked her, wanted the time back when she was young.

“Gee, I sure hope so,” he said.

“So what is it?” she said.

“The Kantkes.”

“Really?”

Jimmy nodded. And waited.

“Who wants to know about that? Why now?”

Jimmy didn’t answer.

She leaned back against the counter and crossed her still pretty legs at the ankle. “I used to always say I don’t talk about those days,” she said. “And now it’s been ten years since anybody asked.”

“We all used to be jolly,” Jimmy said.

“You’re a little young to be world-weary, aren’t you?” she said in a voice, a
Mrs. Robinson
voice he could hear her using in a bar. “I have a daughter your age.”

Then somehow she guessed it. Her mind had been working though she hadn’t let him see it.

“Jean,” she said.

Jimmy didn’t say yes, didn’t say no.

“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.