Tropical Depression (11 page)

I stared at him. In spite of wanting to kill him for interrupting, I couldn’t see any harm in the guy. He was even trying not to sweat on me. On the other hand, I could still see that old-coin profile out of the corner of my eye. She was turned to the window, obviously listening, a small smile teasing the side of her mouth. The smile was wonderful, but slightly wicked, like the smile of the Roman senator’s daughter when she sees the face of a sassy Christian as the lions come into the arena.

“Excuse me,” I said to the actor. I turned towards the face at the window. “Pardon me, ma’am,” I said to the woman, dropping my voice and sounding as much like Gary Cooper as I could manage, “but if you don’t strike up a conversation with me immediately, I’m going to have to kill this guy.”

She turned slow, smiling golden eyes on me. I felt the impact of her all the way down to my toes. She gave me a huge, wonderful smile, a smile that was pure mean in the nicest possible way. “In that case,” she said, in a voice like rum and honey, “I have nothing to say to you.”

She turned and looked back out the window.

I was in love.

I mean, I wasn’t in love, not really. I couldn’t be. I didn’t even know her name. She had perfect hands, the most delectable neck I had ever seen, and a great sense of humor. After thirty seconds she seemed so close to my ideal woman that the difference made no difference. But all that was behind me. I couldn’t imagine ever dating again. It was foreign country to me, and the only map I had led to those two graves along Sepulveda. The thought of the territory of Love was still tied up with the sound of dirt hitting wooden boxes.

And yet—

“Listen,” I said, leaning closer to her and just barely restraining myself from putting my mouth on her neck, “I’ll put it another way. If you don’t speak to me, I’m going to switch seats with this guy again. Let him sit here in the middle the whole flight. It’s five hours to L.A.”

She turned back and looked at me. Time slowed. I watched in helpless fascination as she moved her golden eyes across my face, pausing on the scar, down to my neck and shoulders, back up to my eyes.

“You play dirty,” she said finally.

“I play for keeps.”

“Well, then,” she said, and gave a low, throaty laugh that made the skin walk on the back of my neck. She slid a perfect hand over towards me. My mouth felt dry.

“Nancy Hoffman,” she said.

Hoffman, I thought. Hoffman, with that olive tawny skin. I would have thought Mediterranean. Nancy DeLucia. Nancy Sintros. Maybe she was German-Italian. Maybe she was Southern Swiss. Maybe on the day that she was born the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true. It didn’t matter. It had never mattered less in my life.

I don’t think she noticed me gasping for breath as I took her hand. If she did, maybe she thought it was just the heat. At least my hands weren’t clammy. But if this kept up my voice would crack and I’d break out in pimples. “Billy Knight,” I said, concentrating on not holding onto her hand for too long. “You’re not an actress, are you?”

She laughed again. It sounds stupid to say her laugh was musical, but there it was. Her laugh was as full of wistful harmony as Glenn Miller, as raw as Chuck Berry, soulful as Billie Holiday, pure as Ella Fitzgerald, and clean and light as Mozart.

“An actress? Me? Lord, no. What did I say to offend you? I’m a nurse.”

“Fantastic,” I said. I don’t think I use that word twice a year, but that’s what came out. I could feel this thing slipping away from me fast. “And what does your husband do?”

I think I must have said that to hear her laugh again. It worked.

When she was done laughing I felt like applauding. “You cut right to the chase, don’t you, Billy?”

While I was trying to think of a clever answer the plane lurched. The air-conditioning came back on, and we were moving out onto the runway again at last.

There was a ragged, sarcastic cheer from some of the passengers and the intercom came on.

“Sorry for the delay, folks,” the voice said. “We are now first in line for take-off.”

“Hmmph,” said Nancy, “Apology goes a lot further with a complimentary drink.”

“Flight attendants, prepare for departure,” said the intercom, and we were pressed back into our seats as the plane headed down the runway.

We were up in the air very fast. I could just see the clutter of Miami Beach out the window, and then we stood on one wing and turned west: west to the setting sun, west to darkness. I turned and looked at the face between me and the window.

I caught her eye again, that warm golden eye. It held me. “So, uh—you’ve been on vacation? In Miami?”

“No, in the Virgin Islands. Miami isn’t my idea of a vacation.”

“Oh, you don’t like automatic weapons?”

“I get enough of that at home,” she said. “I work at a free clinic and believe me, I get plenty of gunshot work.”

I knew the free clinics. They’re a leftover from the power-to-the-people stuff that was always a little more potent in L.A. and San Francisco than back east. Some of the clinics are pretty good.

“Which one?” I asked her. “I used to live in L.A.”

She made a face. “Crenshaw District.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. I started out there all full of idealism and—I don’t know. I’ve been there for five years and things just get a little worse every year. I think I’m ready for a change. In fact, I’ve started looking around for something else, maybe in a nicer place. Maybe someplace tropical. I don’t know.” Her eyes drifted away and she seemed lost for a moment, whether in her past or her future, I couldn’t say.

She snapped out of it abruptly, with another of those glorious smiles.

“Anyway. What about you, Billy? Visiting family in L.A.?”

“No. No, I’m, uh—” I had a little flash of thinking I should try to explain it all to her. The feeling went away. “I just, uh, have some stuff to take care of.”

It seemed like a bad start. But it got better quickly. Maybe I talked too much to make up for the bad start. Maybe she talked too much to keep me from switching seats with the actor. Whatever it was, we filled up three thousand miles with our life stories. She had a brother who was a reporter, her folks lived out in the Valley.

For my part, I left out a lot; marriage, the Rossmore, that kind of thing. But the rest just poured out. I found it easy to be a human being with her. It was something I hadn’t been in a long time.

And far too soon, well before I was ready or thought it was possible, we were sliding down over that red desert, over the last range of mountains, and into LAX.

I leaned over Nancy and looked out the window. The smell of her still made me dizzy—or maybe it was just the plane’s loss of altitude.

It was dusk outside. It always seems to be dusk when you land in L.A. They call it the City of Angels, but that’s just cheap sarcasm. L.A. is the City of Night.

Something about that last approach to LAX always gets to me. You see the red desert, the soft tan and green and gray of the mountains, and suddenly there it is, the biggest man-made sprawl the world has ever known. From the center of the L.A. basin you can drive for an hour in any direction and nothing changes. There is a bank, a gas station, a convenience mart and a mini-mall at every intersection in all that vast spread.

From the air it is a grid of lights that stretches neat and symmetrical for as far as you can see, from the edge of the mountains down to the ocean. The freeways and larger surface streets are lined by pink lights and marked by the thick ribbons of traffic, yellow dots of headlights running one way and red the other.

Even in a jet it takes a long time to cross that huge and foul basin. It seems even longer when you are trying to think of something to say so the flight doesn’t end when the plane lands.

I didn’t want to say so long to Nancy and have it end. But the closer I got to L.A. the more that old feeling of dread closed in. As we went into our final approach I couldn’t think of anything except that double-casket funeral. Out the window I thought I could see the cemetery along Sepulveda. I knew that was stupid, but I thought it anyway.

So the plane taxied up to the terminal and stopped, and the big guy in the next seat lurched off, sulking. The other passengers jammed into the aisle and started shoving for the exits. I looked for something to say, some way to climb out of the cloud that had settled on me as we landed. I couldn’t find it.

Nancy gave it a good long three minutes. She pretended to be watching for an opening in the line of passengers kicking and elbowing past us. She gave me plenty of time to say something to her. I started to say something twice, but I suddenly felt like Jennifer was watching me. The thought paralyzed me. I couldn’t even stand up.

Nancy finally gave up. “Well,” she said firmly, “thanks for a lovely talk.” She stood up. I moved aside to let her out and she grabbed a bag from the bin above our seat. Something witty and endearing was on the tip of my tongue, but it stayed there. She was down the aisle and off the plane and I just sank back into the seat and sat there.

I watched her go. She moved carefully up the aisle, and just before turning left off the plane she looked back at me with a brief, unreadable expression. Then she was gone.

I just sat for three or four minutes. There was no one else left on the plane. I thought I had felt bad when I was trying to talk to her. Suddenly I felt much worse. I grabbed my bag and pushed off the plane, pretty sure I’d just blown some kind of last chance.

The feeling grew on me as I walked into the terminal. LAX is one of the biggest and most modern airports in the world. It always makes me feel fat, cheap, and guilty of something. But this time I didn’t pause to watch the anorexic fur-bearing bimbos in their leather jeans. I hurried, just short of running, all the way down the long corridor. I took the escalator two steps at a time.

I found her again outside baggage claim. She had crossed over to the traffic island. One brown canvas bag with leather straps was beside her on the pavement. She was about to climb into a blue van with gold lettering on the side saying
SUPER SHUTTLE
. The electronic destination sign on the front of the van said
WILSHIRE DISTRICT
in letters made of yellow dots.

“Hey,” I said, sprinting across the road between a stretch limo and a Bentley. “Hang on. Just a second. Wait up.” The words tumbled out stupidly as she turned and looked at me, arching one perfect eyebrow. Her right foot was on the step leading up into the van, presenting me with a view of her leg. I took back everything I had ever said about legs just being something you walk around on. Hers were a lot more than that.

“Yes?” she said. There was polite curiosity in her voice, as though the interlude on the airplane was long past and nothing more was supposed to happen.

I came up to her, breathing a little hard. A bus went by. Its exhaust washed over me and I got my first L.A. headache in a year and a half.

“Uh,” I said. Not original, not very witty, not a good start. I coughed.

“I think my shuttle is leaving,” she said, a light brush of throaty giggle dragging across her words.

“Uh,” I said again. “Uhm, I.” I stopped. I couldn’t say any more to save my life. I looked at her; actually, I goggled at her. My tongue felt like it was twice the size of my mouth and made from some rare heavy metal. She started to smile; that made me blush. I looked away. Another bus went by, followed by a van, a Mercedes, a battered Chevy, a Corniche, and two shuttles.

“You’re not very good at this, are you?”

“No. No. I’m not, no.”

“Never asked anybody for a phone number before?”

I looked at her, then looked away again. “Not for a long time.”

The shuttle driver leaned over, a lean young black man with a goatee. “We leaving now, miss. Got to close the door,” he said.

I looked back at Nancy in a panic. I could feel sweat break out over the entire surface of my body. She smiled at me, and for a half-second a different kind of sweat took over.

“Could I, uh—” And I stopped dead, looking into her golden eyes. It had never been this hard the first time around, when I was a teenager.

“Call me sometime? Absolutely. Here.” She rummaged in her shoulder bag and tore a deposit slip out of her checkbook. “My number’s on here,” she said, handing it to me. “Don’t wait too long, Billy.”

And she was gone into the shuttle. Before I could even take another breath of acid brown bus fumes, the shuttle driver slammed the side door shut, ran around and hopped in the driver’s seat, and the shuttle was gone in traffic.

I stood there and watched the spot where it had gone for a good ten minutes before it occurred to me that I didn’t know where I was going. I had been so concerned with Nancy that I hadn’t thought about what happened next. It hadn’t even hit me yet that I was here, back in this place I said I’d never see again.

But here I was. And now I had to figure out what to do with me.

I walked back into the terminal.

Somebody once said Los Angeles isn’t really a city but a hundred suburbs looking for a city. Every suburb has a different flavor to it, and every Angeleno thinks he knows all about you when he knows which one you live in. But that’s mostly important because of the freeways.

Life in L.A. is centered on the freeway system. Which freeway you live nearest is crucial to your whole life. It determines where you can work, eat, shop, what dentist you go to, and who you can be seen with.

I needed a freeway that could take me between the two murder sites, get me downtown fast, or up to the Hollywood substation to see Ed Beasley.

I’d been thinking about the Hollywood Freeway. It went everywhere I needed to go, and it was centrally located, which meant it connected to a lot of other freeways. Besides, I knew a hotel just a block off the freeway that was cheap and within walking distance of the World News, where Roscoe had been cut down. I wanted to look at the spot where it happened. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t learn anything, but it was a starting place.

And sometimes just looking at the place where a murder happened can give you ideas about it; cops are probably a little more levelheaded than average, but most of them will agree there’s something around a murder scene that, if they weren’t cops, they would call vibes.