Among the Living (27 page)

The valet pulled up with the white Porsche. Jimmy drank the rest of his milky, too sweet
horchada,
left two bucks for the man behind the counter. Carey never saw him, never looked around as he dropped behind the wheel. This wasn’t a wary man.

The white Porsche humped up and over the concrete bridge on East Street, into Naples, then right onto the perimeter loop called The Toledo.

And then right again, onto Rivo Alto Canal.

Maybe Carey Kantke had his own version of
returning.

Jimmy dropped back and parked the Mustang and jumped out and followed the Porsche on foot. The lanes behind the houses were narrow and the pace was slow, slower even than the three-mile-per-hour speed limit posted on funny hand-painted signs.

Carey drove past the house at One-Ten, the murder house, and parked behind the garage of the two-story house two doors down. He got out and went up the walkway between the houses leading to the front, to the canal and the waterfront sidewalk.

It was the house where Jimmy had heard Abba’s “Dancing Queen” drifting out of the upstairs window.

Jimmy watched the house from a rental boat, cruising in the canal. Carey Kantke had been inside forty-five minutes. Jimmy cut the engine and let it coast until it thunked into an empty dock. He took the housing off the little outboard and pretended to adjust the carb while he kept his eyes on the house.

In time, Carey came out onto the porch with a Coke. He unbuttoned his shirt and dropped into a pink Adirondack chair, lifting his face into the sun.

Right at home.
Why?
What was Carey Kantke doing there, two doors down from the house where his young life and his sister’s had been blown apart with a pair of gunshots in the middle of a summer night?

Then the answer, at least part of it, came out the front door. A young woman. She was in her early twenties but with this kind of good looks it was hard to tell. She could have been sixteen. Or thirty. She wore white shorts and a short top that tied up high enough to show her stomach. She handed Carey a portable phone with someone on the line. Carey said hello, listened, said a few words and handed it back to her. She sat in a second matching Adirondack chair, a long tan leg over the armrest. There was something very familiar about her.

Then the next part of the answer came out.

Vivian Goreck.

The real estate lady Jimmy had talked with at the empty Palos Verdes house. Former Jolly Girl.

She was the young woman’s mother. It was obvious when they were next to each other. Vivian stood over her daughter and brushed her fingers through her blond hair until the young woman pushed her mother’s hand away.

Jimmy would learn that her name was Lynne.

Vivian sat on the low wall that edged the porch and joined in the conversation between the young people. No one was in much of a hurry. A seagull landed on the neighbor’s fountain, atop a
cement
seagull, balancing on the other gull’s back. They all watched it, enjoying the joke. It drank. It flew.

After a few more minutes the young woman and Carey got up. He kissed Vivian Goreck on her cheek and they left. The Jolly Girl stayed seated on the low wall. She looked down, pulled out a dandelion growing from a crack in the concrete.

Jimmy got the boat to a dock and then ran between the two closest houses.

He came out onto the alleyway just as Lynne and Carey got into the white Porsche and drove off.

The garage was open. There was Vivian’s Rolls, with its BUY BUY license plates.

On a bluff above the ocean at Palos Verdes was a glass and steel house with an angular face like the prow of a ship. Jimmy was above it on the adjacent point, an empty lot muddied from the overnight rain. He scanned the scene with binoculars. The white Porsche was in the driveway.

This was Carey’s other address.

He stepped into view in the glass living room. He went to the tall window, looked out at the expanse of ocean with his hands behind his back like a captain of a ship.

But wait.

Lynne Goreck came into the room. She went to him at the window, went into his arms. They kissed. She stepped away. He turned again to look out at the Pacific, then followed her, moving out of view.

A minute passed. Jimmy heard an engine start. The white Porsche curled around the circle drive and sped away up to the coast road, Carey behind the wheel, alone now.

Jimmy looked back at the living room. The room was empty.

But then they were back, the man and Lynne Goreck.

The phone in Jimmy’s pocket rang.

It was Jean.

He listened for a long time.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.

The back of the house at one-ten Rivo Alto Canal was blackened but not burned out. A fireman kneeled just inside the backdoor, beside the water heater.

“What was it?” Jimmy said.

The fireman looked the two of them over.

“I own the house,” Jean said.

“Oily rags under the water heater,” the fireman said.

“Was anybody—”

Jimmy pushed past him and headed upstairs.

“No. They got out,” the fireman told Jean.

Jean followed Jimmy. She slowed as she moved through the living room. It hadn’t been burned but the smoke had crawled across the ceiling and stained it. Her eyes went over the pictures on the walls, the coffee table, the divan. She’d never been back.

Jimmy was already at the door of the back bedroom upstairs. The door-frame was blackened and some of the dirty carpet had been burned over to the doorway.

Jean came up behind him.

“They said she got out.”

They stepped into the room together. The fire had burned the shades off the windows so there was light. The TV was melted, the recliner singed and blackened and its plastic melted, too.

A voice startled them. “You the owners?”

A fir e marshal, a handsome man in a perfectly white shirt with a badge on the pocket, stepped out of the second bathroom. He wore rubber gloves.

“I am,” Jean said.

“Who was she?”

Jean said, “No one. No one was supposed to be living here.”

“It was a woman. I guess a transient,” the fire marshal said. “Living here.” He looked around the room. “And six or seven cats. So far.”

Jean turned and walked out.

“It burned itself out up here,” the fire marshal said to Jimmy. “There’s not much structural damage. It came straight up from the water heater below, rode up the stack.”

“Was the backdoor locked when you got here?” Jimmy asked.

“Yeah, it was. Pulled tight.”

Jimmy looked into the bathroom. It was smoke-damaged but not burned. A yellowed shower curtain with flamingos on it still hung on its rings. The mirror above the sink over the years had lost most of its silvering. There was a splotchy black hole in its center where your face would be.

The fire marshal squatted next to the carcasses of two cats at the base of the bay window, trying to decide what to do with them.

“Her name was Rosemary Danko,” Jimmy said.

The fire marshal stood.

“You knew her?”

“I talked to her once.”

“You want to tell me why?”

Jimmy told him. Some of it.

Jean was in the car when he came down. He got in without saying anything, started the engine and pulled away.

He looked in the mirror. Vivian Goreck was standing with the other neighbors in the middle of the lane.

“Where are we going?” Jean said.

“She had another place,” Jimmy said.

And another fire.

A red L.A.F.D. Suburban was parked in front of the apartment building in Garden Grove Jimmy had followed her to, crossing town on a hot bus.

Jean stayed in the car.

Jimmy walked around the side of the building. On the service porch of the corner ground-floor unit another fire marshal stood beside another water heater.

“Who are you?”

“I knew the woman who lived here.”

“Where is she? We thought it was vacant.”

Every time Jimmy heard that word
vacant,
he thought of the look in Rosemary’s eyes.

He came in off of the service porch through the kitchen and into the living room. It was gutted, burned to the studs, and the cabinet that had been full of pictures was now a collapsed, empty box.

It would have been neater if there was a body in one of the two places—
If I just could be sure
—but whatever threat in her madness Rosemary Danko had been to them, it was gone, as gone as she was. They’d cut her out of the story. And the traces of her mother with her.

Five-foot-one
.

Jimmy stood in the warm sun out front for a moment. It was good to breathe the open air.

He got in the Mustang. Jean looked at him and he shook his head, though it wasn’t clear what he meant by that.

It just meant
no
.

Nine o’clock at night and the traffic on the 405 north was still clogged. It should have opened up hours ago. They were stopped cold in the fast lane at the top of Sepulveda Pass, up where Mulholland crossed overhead with a high bridge. The line of cars ahead of them stretched for two miles down across the San Fernando Valley, the spaces between the sets of red taillights never expanding beyond a car length.

Jean had a beach house north of Malibu at Point Dume. Jimmy was taking her there the back way over Kanan Dume Road,
the fast way
he had thought, until a half hour ago. This time she hadn’t said no when he told her what to do, when he told her she had to leave town because they’d kill her, too, if they thought she knew something, if they thought she was in their way, cut
her
out of the story, too. He had said she should go to San Francisco, had said something that made no sense to her—
They won’t follow you out of the city
—but she told him about her house at the beach.