Among the Living (19 page)

Price looked at it, handed it back. “I never saw her. Or didn’t know I was seeing her if I did. I didn’t even think about anybody being married. It wasn’t about that.”

“You said you remembered something,” Jimmy said.

The kid Drew came into the room, looking like he just woke up. He stood a foot inside the doorway. He ran his hands through his hair, standing there, and then shook it out. He wore it in a long, shaggy skateboard er’s cut.

“My hair stopped growing,” Drew said.

Jimmy nodded.

Drew glanced at Darren Price, then walked out again.

Price tried for a second to fit this new piece into the Jimmy Miles puzzle, then gave up.

“Do you want to hear this or not?” Price said.

“Sure.”

Price woke up a little more. “OK, I was telling this girl about how I was working with you on something, on the thing,” he said.

Jimmy let that pass without comment.

“She wasn’t even
born
then, but she said something that made me think of something.”

Jimmy just looked at him. He liked him better in the middle of the night. He guessed that almost everyone did.

“Anyway. This girl, I told her about that time, what we talked about, and she said, ‘Four girls wouldn’t be friends.’ ”

Jimmy didn’t have much of a reaction.

“The Jolly Girls,” Price said, said it the same way he’d said it at the radio station, The
Jolly
Girls.

“OK.”

“Then I remembered.
Michelle.
”

“The one who did the most drugs.”

“Yeah. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes.” Jimmy waited. “What about her?”

“Michelle hated Elaine—and, you know,
not
in that way girls are.
‘I hate you!’ ‘I love you!’ ‘You are
so
my best friend!’ ”
He said it in a funny voice-over voice, good enough for a cartoon. “There at the end, Michelle really hated Elaine Kantke. It was real.”

“Why?”

Price took a beat, knowing he had something.

“Bill Danko. Michelle liked Danko. I couldn’t see what the attraction was with him but, anyway, they both liked him. And,
sorry Elaine,
Michelle saw him first.”

“Maybe he was with both of them,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t think so. He was love-struck by Elaine from what I saw. He stopped dancing with Michelle. That means something, or meant something then.”

Jimmy found the copy of the shot of the four Jolly Girls on the stools at the Long Beach Yacht Club.

“Which one was she?” he said.

Before he answered, Price said, “This was before Slip Tone, before they hooked up. You knew they were married, right? Michelle and Tone?”

Jimmy didn’t. “When?”

“Right when he quit. To be a cop. And then she died, after like only a year.”

“Died how?”

“Swimming. At Mothers’ Beach. Right there in the Marina.”

Price bounded out of his chair and came around and looked over Jimmy’s shoulder at the picture, standing too close.

“The short one. That’s why she
loved
platform shoes.”

There were too many dead.

Coming back from the desert and the mountains, Jimmy thought it was pretty simple. He’d find Bill Danko’s short little jealous wife. Maybe she’d be a nurse somewhere, estranged from her daughter, wondering where she was, and Jimmy would be able to tell her, after she’d let him see her guilt about the murders without ever exactly admitting it. But now the Estella Danko story had come and gone, felt like it anyway, like time-lapse film footage of a storm out over the desert, arising out of nowhere, building fast into something dark and big and full of heat lightning, and then dissolving away again to nothing, as quickly as it had come. Estella Danko was dead, past admitting anything, even with her eyes. And now there was Michelle. He wished he was driving across town to meet
her
now, wished she had a store somewhere or was a decorator or a lawyer or somebody’s mother or a school administrator, straight-arrow and proper, even square, giving nobody in her life now any reason to suspect she’d once been a disco dolly in tall shoes with a tingling nose. But she was dead, too. He wasn’t going to get the chance to look into her eyes either and ask about those old murders.

Sgt. Tom Connor coached a kids’ soccer team. It was late in the day but there was still another hour of daylight left. They were practicing in a city park in Van Nuys. He came over to the sidelines as Jimmy stepped away from the yellow Dodge Challenger.

Walking up to him, Connor said, “What I like about soccer is that most of the fathers don’t really know anything about the game.” The kids kicking goals behind him were nine or ten. Even the goalie would laugh when they scored on him. “I think that’s what they like about it, too. The boys, not the dads.”

Connor went right to it. Jimmy had called him, filled him in on what he’d learned about Michelle Espinosa.

“Homicide detectives came in, but they didn’t end up with anything,” Connor said. “On paper, it was a drowning. She went out, pretty deep, out into the channel, in among the sailboats in the slips. There wasn’t anybody around her. It was a little cold. Nobody else was in, all of them up on the beach with their kids, in the shallows or digging in the sand.”

Jimmy knew there was something else.

“But . . .”

“But she was a swimmer and diver in school,” Connor said. “USC on a scholarship. And it was a
marina.
It’s not like there were waves or undertow or anything.”

A ball came over. The cop kicked it back.

“What about drugs?”

“Supposedly she had cleaned up her act,” Connor said. “She and Espinosa were married by then but he wasn’t a cop yet.”

And then he was a
dead
cop, Jimmy thought, somebody else he wasn’t going to get to look in the eye.

“She was pregnant.”

Connor let that hang in the air for a minute.

They both thought about the name.

“Maybe losing her was what made him want to be a cop.”

“Did you check on the Kantke thing?” Jimmy said.

“I did. A guy’s still alive who was the second lead detective on it.”

“And . . .”

Connor shook his head.

“They had their killer. And they were good cops.”

Jimmy thanked him, was ready to go.

“You think what?” Connor said. “This Michelle did it? Shot dead her ex and her ex-friend?”

“I don’t know.”

“And then,
what?
Someone drowns her for that?”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

“You’re forgetting something.”

Jimmy waited.

“Jealousy wasn’t that big around then,” the cop said. “Remember?
If it feels good, do it.
”

“I think that was the sixties, Tom.”

“The sixties was weed. The seventies was blow. But same difference.
‘Oops, I screwed your girlfriend. Sorry.’ ‘No problem.’ ”

Jimmy nodded.

Connor said, “I guess there could have been some other motive.”

“For which one?” Jimmy said. “For Michelle murdering them, or for someone murdering her?”

Jimmy rang the bell downstairs at Jean’s and waited.

Nothing.

Just as he turned to go, it buzzed open.

He rode the elevator up. It was unlocked right into the penthouse, opening onto a foyer, the living room beyond. Jean wasn’t there, wasn’t in the living room anyway. The sun was just going down and the light looked like tea, made the room look like something out of an old magazine. The elevator doors closed behind him. It was quiet enough to hear the gears and pulleys as it took itself all the way down to the first floor.

“Where are you?” Jimmy said.

She didn’t answer.

On the desk were a dozen books about Hollywood,
new
books, open. He got the idea they were meant to be seen. He clicked on a light. There was his mother’s face under his fingers, black-and-white, high-glam portrait more shadow than light. The other books were opened to other pictures of Teresa Miles, with a famous French actor, with a famous American director, slant-back wooden chairs on a round rock beach somewhere in the South of France. She had close-cut blond hair, eyes that looked away in every shot, that very commercial, very exploitable look that said
Save me
and
I’m too much for you
in the same moment.

There was a Xerox of a fan magazine article from the late sixties with the headline:

And a paparazzo’s photo of the actress coming out of one of the bungalows at the Chateau Marmont, shaken, eyes on the ground.

In the background was a teenager in bellbottoms.

There was a reprint of the newspaper obituary:

Jimmy tossed the obit into the desk. It was covered with papers and books. It was like his desk only
he
was the subject under investigation.

He heard something above him.

He stepped out onto the patio. Jean was up on the sloped roof overlooking the deck, sitting with her knees drawn up to her, with a glass of wine, looking out at the pastel haze.

The way up was to step onto the low wall around the patio and then walk along it to where you could step up onto the roof.

Jimmy joined her, silent for a long time.

“I came by a couple times. Called.”

“I know,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I mean, if I hurt you.”

“Is that what you think happened?”

She kept her eyes on the streaked sky. It looked like it had been painted by a child.

“I don’t know. I’m only inside
me,
” Jimmy said.

She looked at him, for the first time since he sat beside her. And she smiled.

“What happened to that kid?”

“He’s staying at my house.”

She waited for him to say more.

“He’s all right,” Jimmy said.

That was all he was going to say about it. An ambulance screamed up Sunset. They listened until it faded.

“Why the books? In the living room.”

“Just trying to understand,” Jean said.

“Understand what?”

“You. This.”

He wondered what all she meant by
this.

“It isn’t supposed to happen, is it?” she said. “Getting involved this way.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It happened. I’m happy.”

“You don’t look happy.”

“It’s my facial structure,” Jimmy said.

She stood. She offered him her glass of wine.

“You look like her,” Jean said.

He took the glass of wine, took a sip. It was as warm as the air.

“I remember what you told me in my office,” she began, “that first day, that maybe it wasn’t always better to know everything.”

“You
can’t
know everything so it doesn’t really matter.”

“I don’t care about the murders anymore,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.”

“The woman in the house is Bill Danko’s daughter,” Jimmy said. “Her name is Rosemary.”

“I don’t care.”

“She was nine or ten when he was killed. Her mother died a year or so ago. Maybe that pushed her over the edge, sent her looking for the house in Naples.”

“I want this to end,” Jean said. “This is my choice. I don’t need to know any more.”

“I don’t think your father did it. Your mother was probably just in the wrong place with the wrong guy. There’s a woman who may have done it, one of her friends. Actually, there were
two
women who may have done it. Bill Danko had a wife.”

“Stop.”

“There’s some link to now, to today.”

“Stop it.”

“To the people who run things. But I don’t know why.”

“
Stop!
” Her fists were clenched.

But he wasn’t finished. He wanted to
tell her.
He wanted her to know
all
of it.

But he stopped himself.