Among the Living (37 page)

He stood. The second glass of wine was untouched, catching the light.

The bartender looked sorry to see him go. “Aren’t you going to drink it? Maybe she’s coming back.”

“Chianti makes me sentimental,” Jimmy said. “I’ve had enough. Next thing you know, I’ll be quoting poetry . . .”

On his way out, Jimmy went by the empty table. Where his admirer had been? A table in the corner. There was only an empty glass.

And, improbably, a scent still hanging in the air, the scent of a woman.

He stood outside, looked up Columbus, the rise up the hill, a bigger hill to the right and the Financial District to the left, the point of the TransAmerica Pyramid piercing the lifting fog.

A bit more of the Dante he’d rattled off inside found its way into his mouth. Standing there looking up Columbus, he translated it . . .

His new best friends were waiting in the shadows across the street. Jimmy set out to walk the rest of the way back to the Mark Hopkins, up and over another hill, Nob Hill, which took up most of two hours and what remained of the night, and left Red Boots and the other Sailor thoroughly winded.

He decided not to think about the dead girls. And he didn’t.

The morning broke eternal, bright, and fair.

Or so it looked to Jimmy. He was on the open top deck of the red-and-white ferry that crossed the Bay from Pier 41 to Sausalito. He’d gone back to the hotel to change, to shower, to go from the black linen suit he’d worn yesterday to another linen suit, this one the color of the little spoon of cream on the Irish coffee at the Buena Vista. A cream-colored suit over a black shirt, like today was going to be the opposite of last night.
As if
, as the kids say.

But it
was
a beautiful day; a few clouds pushed all the way back over to Oakland. Tiburon was in front of them, Alcatraz sliding by to the left. On the Rock, another red-and-white boat off-loaded the 10:10 crowd as the first-run-of-the-day people queued up for the trip back across to San Francisco. (Did they still call it that, “the Rock,” after the movie, after the wrestler who’d named himself after the movie and then become a movie star?) Jimmy could hear the voices of the kids on the Alcatraz dock, loud, vacation loud.

Down below him a deck, Lucy
almost
looked caught up in the new morning thing herself. She sat out in the open in the middle of the first row of fib erglass benches, ten feet back from the splash zone, the V of the bow. She’d made a friend, a white-haired lady in a spiffy blue-and-white Nautica windbreaker, a happy lady, a talker. Lucy said a few words in reply now and then and nodded every few seconds. Women liked her, Lucy. Jimmy wondered why, what it was that was in her eyes or the shape of her mouth or the way she held herself that made women like her. And want to help her. He hadn’t really looked her in the eye. Up close. Maybe it’d move him, too.

The boy Jimmy was calling Les Paul for the shape of his guitar case came out onto the deck with two hot chocolates in his hands and a frosted, sprinkled donut stuck in his mouth. It was a little cool out here on the water, but he was wearing just a T-shirt. He handed off one of the cocoas to his sister and sat a few places away on the end of the bench, so as not to intrude in the back-and-forth between the women. He sat there and went to work on his donut, eating the way kids do, taking a bite and then looking at the thing, studying it while he chewed. He looked over at Lucy and the Nautica lady. Jimmy got the sense that the boy knew his sister was hurting, off balance, and that he didn’t much relish the role of helpmate, was glad for some help.

Training for the women ahead for you
, Jimmy thought.

Les only stayed on the bench a minute. Too much energy. Too much juice running through the lines. He took his breakfast snack up to the bow, lay forward into the angle of the hull on the port side. A gull found him immediately, with that bright donut, took up a position in the air two feet above the boy’s head, locked on, even when the boat rose or splashed to one side, powering through a swell.
This is his job
, Jimmy thought about the bird,
as much as popping and locking for the tourists is Machine Shop’s job nights down on the waterfront.

Les broke off a piece of the donut and ate it very deliberately and then another and then another until it was gone, and then the bird moved on to the next mark.

Jimmy lifted his gaze to Tiburon, getting bigger in the frame. It was like another Alcatraz in size and the lift of its hump, but an island of a whole other order in its hospitality, its richness. And its freedom? It was green, for one thing, and dotted with houses. Old Money. San Francisco doctors and lawyers. Second and third generation. Maybe fourth.

He saw that Lucy was looking at it, too, even as the white-haired lady prattled on.

“Is that Tiburon?” Lucy interrupted her to ask.

“Yes, it is,” Jimmy saw the white-haired lady reply.

There was a change in pitch, and the boat slowed. It was a commuter ferry, with a stop in Tiburon before the turnaround in Sausalito. They were a good half mile out from Tiburon but, even over the sounds of the water, the engines, the wind across the decks, they could hear hammering. And old-school hammering, too, with a hammer, not an air gun. Jimmy scanned the houses up and down the hill and down to the rocks, the water’s edge, until he found it, the grand old moss-green Craftsman “cottage” with a scar of new wood on one side of its face and a carpenter, now a third of a mile away, in khakis and a white sleeveless tee, raising and dropping that hammer, a half beat off from the sound that crossed the water.

Sausalito was Sausalito. You had to look hard to see how it could be a real place to real people, a place to live and not a happy hologram that zapped back into the projector once the last tourist turned his back to go up the ramp to the boat.

Lucy and Les had fish and chips at an H Salt Esquire that faced the waterfront and the marina. It was early yet, right at twelve, and there wasn’t much of a line. They brought the food outside, very accommodating for the investigator tailing them. Lucy seemed to fall back into herself over lunch. She stopped eating and pushed away her little newspaper-lined basket of greasy fish.

Jimmy hated to say it, but he was already tired of her here-we-go-again soul-sink act. Les reacted to it immediately. Maybe that was what irritated Jimmy, how the boy scrambled each time to find in himself some sense of what to do to help.

“It’s just a piece of fish,” Jimmy said aloud.

The panhandler on a break on the bench beside him stirred. “You sure you can’t help me out with gas money, man?” he said. “I’m stranded.”

Jimmy got up, never even really looked at him.

“God bless you,” the panhandler said.

Next, there was some jewelry for Lucy to look through, a rack out under the perfect sun alongside the very clean sidewalk in the bank of stores and bars along Bridgeway, the main drag. Jimmy strolled along across the street, stopping when she stopped, catching the mundane details to pass on to Angel. Lucy fingered a necklace while the bosomy young hippie woman who’d made it told her how good it looked on her. Les stood by, patient, putting on a good show of having no place he’d rather be than with his depressed sister in Disneyland. The boy pointed to another necklace, and the hippie girl took it down and handed it to Lucy. Lucy undid the clasp and held it up around her neck, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it anymore.

A passerby offered an opinion. “It looks good on you,” Jimmy saw her say.

She was a real beauty, the passerby. Alone, too. With an expensive, trendy, flat leather bag over her shoulder, matching her expensive, trendy, pointy shoes, Jimmy guessed. The bag and shoes were bold yellow, golden-rod. She took off her sunglasses, shook out her hair. It was women like this with hair like this who made them come up with a new name for
brown
. She wore a white dress, full in the skirt, belted, V-necked, summery, so white it splashed light onto the storefront. She was Lucy’s age, maybe a little older. The dress was long and had something of a
Town & Country
classy modesty about it. But it didn’t stop Jimmy from imagining her legs pretty much all the way up to the top.

Lucy smiled and thanked the passerby but didn’t want to talk. The woman smiled in return and walked on.

Lucy and Les took the bus.

Jimmy took a cab.

Right across the Golden Gate.

There was the city, off to the left. The day was still wonderfully, deceptively beautiful, clear and blue. And that moon. A daylight moon, almost full, sitting atop the point of the TransAmerica Pyramid like a balloon. The window was down, and the air smelled good. Jimmy realized he was happy. Go figure.

It was even a nice taxicab, patchouli and all. The driver was a Mr. Natural with dishwater blond dreads. The picture on his license had him with the same look, five or six years earlier. In the movie playing in Jimmy’s head, here was the long-term live-in “husband” of the busty jewelry maker on the street back in Sausalito. He had the Pacifica station on the radio. They were against the war.

Lucy and Les’s bus was four car lengths ahead. It was a commuter. With a rainbow running down the side. It changed lanes. The cab driver changed lanes with it.

“You’re from L.A.,” Mr. Natural said. He had his window down, too, enjoying the sea stink, too, the cool air. The cab was an excellent old Checker, with wing vents, as God intended, so there wasn’t a roar that had to be shouted over.

“Yeah,” Jimmy admitted.

“I can read people.”

“So what was it? What said L.A.?”

“The suit, I guess. The extra button undone on your shirt. Your shoes. A little showbizzy but not executive suite. But not actor, either.”

“You’ve been reading my mail,” Jimmy said.

“I used to be a haberdasher. Eleven years.”

“Do they really call them haberdashers?”

“They did when I was doing it.”

“Here? San Francisco?”

“Right on Union Square,” the cabby said.

Jimmy tried to do the math. The driver looked late thirties at the most.

“You ever see that movie
The Conversation
?” the cabby-haberdasher said, taking one hand off the wheel, turning, looking back, getting eye to eye.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Gene Hackman.” He waited.

“I love that movie,” the other said.

The Sausalito bus blew by the toll booths in the far right lane and pulled over. There was a plaza at the head of the bridge and a small commuter parking lot.

There wasn’t any chance of the bus pulling out anytime soon, so the cabby just slowed and picked a lane and waited through the minute that it took to come up to the toll booth.

“Be here now!” he said to the toll taker, a gruff-looking 1950s-looking man, probably Italian, as he handed over five bucks.

“Baba Ram Dass,” the toll man said. “He’s sick, you know. And broke.” Mr. Natural just shook his head sadly.

He held up his right hand so you could see it in the rear window and started across three lanes to the outside. Remarkably, people yielded. He left a car’s length between him and the bus, so they had a clear view.

When the bus’s door opened, the first one off was a leathery little man in his sixties in a serious bike rider’s frog suit. He went around to the front of the bus and started unhitching his lean red-and-green Euro bike off the rack.

“Some don’t like to ride across the bridge,” the cabby said, narrating. “Guy that size, he might be right.”

“When I was here before, they didn’t used to let you ride across,” Jimmy said.

Mr. Natural shook his head. “You got it wrong,” he said. He turned around to look at Jimmy. “Unless you haven’t been here in twenty years and you’re a whole lot older than you look. They put the bike lane in, in 1992.”