Among the Living (25 page)

Jimmy nodded.

“Get her in the
now,
” Angel said.

“I’m trying.”

“Get
yourself
in the now.”

Jimmy smiled. “I’ve never had much luck at that.”

“Then you can maybe see what there could be with her. You could use some
love
in your life.”

“I already got you,” Jimmy said.

The music inside started, drums, piano and guitar.

“You wanna come in?” Angel said.

Jimmy shook his head.

Angel pulled him close for an embrace, then pushed him away.

Jimmy started toward the Mustang down the street.

“ ‘
Someday this wall shall crumble, tumble and fall
. . .’ ” Angel called after him.

Jimmy turned. “What book of the Bible is that from?”

“Los Lobos,” Angel said.

Ike’s was dead and Scott wasn’t behind the bar.

Jimmy drank a beer. The handful of people who were there all had the same guilty look, embarrassed that they’d not known what everyone else apparently had known, that tonight you didn’t go to Ike’s.

The cop Connor came in. He was out of uniform, wearing his out-of-uniform uniform, a starched Brooks Brothers button-down shirt with the tail out over ironed, creased jeans.

“Nobody’s seen him,” Connor said. “His neighbor said he didn’t come back last night, after his shift.”

They were talking about Scott.

Jimmy turned around on the stool to face the bar, but avoided the image of himself in the mirror that was waiting there.

“What the hell is going on?”

“It’s getting close,” Connor said. “People are getting stressed. Let’s go look for him.”

Jimmy put some money on the bar and got up.

Then Jean came in. Angel and two of his men were behind her. The bodyguards were Hispanic. Big arms. Angel saw Jimmy and Connor, tipped his chin up to say hello. He and his men took a table out of the way as Jean came to the bar.

Connor stepped away to leave them alone. He went over to the jukebox. After a minute a saxophone piece started, so sentimental and blue the few people in the place turned to look, wondering if it was meant to be a joke.

“I was thinking about you all day,” Jimmy said to Jean. The way he said it didn’t have all that much romance in it.

She nodded in a way that meant she’d been thinking about him, too, and maybe the other way.

“I called,” she said. “Then I thought you might be here.”

“I came by a few times,” Jimmy said. He came by
once.

“I’ve been staying in a hotel. I found myself leaving all the lights on at home,” she said.

“Come stay with me.”

He didn’t say anything else.

She nodded.

He was still standing. He looked over at Connor.

“We have to go see about a friend of ours,” Jimmy said. “We’ll come back for you here.”

“Can I come with you?”

They left Angel’s truck and Connor’s red Corvette in the lot behind Ike’s and the four of them took the Mustang, Jean and Connor in the tight backseat. The traffic was light, even down the Strip. Angel’s friends followed closely in a low-slung Chevy for a block or two then flashed their lights and peeled off.

Scott’s apartment was on Doheny Drive at the corner of Elevado three or four short blocks up from Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, a cool white tower ten stories tall, lights in the landscaping shining on its face.

Jimmy stayed behind the wheel while Angel and Connor got out. Connor rang the bell downstairs and waited. Angel looked over at Jimmy, then got out a ring of keys and unlocked the outer door and went in. They all had each other’s keys.

Jean took this in, put it with the other things she’d learned that deepened the mystery.

“Scott is the bartender at Ike’s. He didn’t come in today.” Jimmy didn’t turn around when he spoke to her, didn’t even look at her in the mirror. “Nobody’s seen him since he left work last night. A neighbor said he’d looked a little shaky the last few days.”

Jean just looked at the back of Jimmy’s head.

Angel and Connor came out. Connor stepped into the backseat again, Angel got in front.

Angel shook his head.

“Maybe we’d better—”

“Yeah, I know,” Jimmy said and put it in gear.

He made a U-turn on Doheny and then a left on Santa Monica Boulevard, drove past The Troubadour, then across West Hollywood into Hollywood.

To the foot of the Roosevelt Hotel.

And the
Walkers.

This time there were dozens of them in clusters in the alleyways in the three blocks around the hotel, the men (and a few women) Boney M had wanted Jimmy to be reminded of from that perch up on the roof.

They never stopped moving, Sailors ashore forever. They wore whatever they wanted, whatever they had. They lived on the street or in a few hotels the other Sailors kept open in an act of kindness. And
fear,
fear that any Sailor could end up with the same dead look in his eyes, the same lack of purpose—either for good or for bad—that was in their shuffling movements. This was the worst the worst Sailors could wish on you, what they could threaten you with, what they could hold you out over a precipice and make you see, what they could drive you toward, what they could hand you instead of death. It was a mystery how it happened but some Sailors saw something that made them fold, made them shuffle like this, made them
walk.
Death would be a step up.

Jimmy drove slowly past one knot of men.

“Did the kid come back?” Angel said to Jimmy.

“No,” Jimmy said, knowing Angel was thinking maybe Drew was down here, too.

“Stop,” Connor said. “
There.
”

“Scott’s not here,” Jimmy said.

There was a man apart from the others who was probably Scott’s age, who at least looked up at the Mustang. He was dark with filth. He didn’t look like anybody anyone could recognize anymore.

“That’s not him,” Jimmy said.

“Let me check,” Connor said.

Jimmy stopped and they let him out and the cop walked over to the blackened man.

“He couldn’t have fallen that far in a day,” Jimmy said.

Then he remembered Jean in the backseat.

Jimmy turned to look her in the face. She had that
world-hurt
face again, but brave, taking her medicine. He felt ashamed of himself for not having the courage to tell her a better,
easier
version of the truth of who he was.

Connor came back. He got into the backseat beside Jean. She could smell the men on him.

Connor shook his head.

“He’s not with them,” Angel said.

“I believe I just said that,” Jimmy said.

He sped away from the men, faster than he meant to.

“What about his old place?” Connor said.

Jimmy nodded.

When you were one of them, you knew everyone’s story, how
It
had happened. Five years before this night, Scott had put a bullet in his head. His boyfriend had died exactly a year earlier.

And now here was the apartment building where they’d lived together. It was a twenty-unit four-story box of a design duplicated all over L.A., screaming
seventies!
The front was all glass, the foyer two stories tall. A long light fixture hung from the ceiling looking like an protoplasmic explosion. It was on a street called North Rossmore, a
transitional
street, also duplicated all over L.A. A block north was a golf course edged with million-dollar houses, a block south the last funky half mile of Hollywood.

Jimmy tried a key in the glass door of the entryway. They’d changed the locks. Angel came around from the side of the building. “Over here, door into the garage.”

Jean came with them this time. They all went down some steps and in through the garage. They came out into the entryway where the mailboxes were and the elevator.

Angel hit the button. They rode up, not talking.

Jimmy knocked on the door to the apartment. There wasn’t any sound from inside. A stereo thumped somewhere down the hall, or maybe it was just someone thudding a fist against the common wall.

Jimmy was about to try his key when the door in front of him was yanked open.

A man with bugged out eyes.

“Just
leave
it!” He was what they used to call a
hype.
“Just
leave
it, man!”

Jimmy asked the wired man if anyone out of the past had been by the apartment that night. He got the door slammed in his face. The pounding down the hall stopped, took a breath or two, started again.

Angel was ready to go but Connor, who had cop instincts, who remembered things other people didn’t, looked at Jimmy and shot his eyes up toward the ceiling, the roof. They were on the fourth floor. There were stairs up.

The door at the top was jammed. Angel put a shoulder against it and it opened and the four of them came out onto the roof.

The building wasn’t deluxe enough for any decking or patio furniture or umbrellas, or tall enough to offer much of a view.

While Angel and Connor stepped off in different directions, Jimmy went over to the edge and looked down at the traffic on Melrose. There was a car double-parked in front of a restaurant, five cars behind it, honking, nobody willing to give in and pull around it in the open inside lane. Across Rossmore and down a ways was the Ravenswood with its neon rooftop sign, where Mae West had lived out her life. Next to that, the El Royale, where George Raft had kept a bachelor’s pad.

Jean came up behind Jimmy, put her arms around him.

He didn’t expect it. Later, when he thought about it, maybe when he thought about it too much, he remembered it feeling in the moment like she was holding someone else.

“Jimmy,” Connor said.

Angel had found Scott at the other edge of the roof, sitting cross-legged, his back against a TV antenna.

Jimmy left Jean and went to him. She stayed where she was.

The three men stood over their friend a moment and Jimmy said something and Scott nodded. Angel squatted beside him. Jimmy crouched down and offered his hand. Scott took it and they held hands that way a moment. Connor seemed to stand guard, though against
what
wasn’t clear.

Jimmy pulled Scott to him and said things into his ear in a voice so low Jean couldn’t hear any of it, just as it had been with the kid Drew standing in the middle of the canyon road, trying to put it together, eyes on the moon.

There was a fuzz around the green letters on the El Royale sign and, up Vine, the Hollywood Hills were wrapped in something. Maybe it was going to rain overnight. But the weather had gone a little haywire. No one was predicting anything with much confidence.

Even she felt it, that everything was lurching toward something, not out of control exactly, just out of
our
control, in the control of something very very basic, like a car coming down out of the hills on a rain-slicked street.

It was morning and raining. Jean brought a cup of coffee into the living room in Jimmy’s house. She looked out the tall window. Two more of the weight lifters from Angel’s backyard stood guard under the dripping overhang of the four-bay garage. The garage doors were up. There was the Mustang and empty spaces for the wrecked Dodge Challenger and the Porsche Drew had taken. In the last bay was the tarp-covered car with the high fins. Jean watched as one of the iron men lifted the corner of the cover for a look.

The rain helped, made her feel safer. She’d lived years in Northern California and so she liked the rain. Here, when it rained everything fell apart. The weathermen apologized, the freeways clogged with spun-out cars, mudslides slopped across the curvy foothill roads. Everybody either drove too fast or too slow and everyone bitched. People walking their dogs looked out from under their umbrellas and rolled their eyes instead of saying
Good morning,
if they looked at you at all.