Among the Living (41 page)

But why would a Sailor, even a bad Sailor, want two innocents to die, to throw off their own lives? Why would a Sailor, even the darkest, the blackest-souled amongst their kind, climb up on a roof to encourage a suicide?

What would it profit?

Jimmy knew the Greek had already heard enough things he didn’t understand, already had enough questions, standing there in the parking lot, on the waterfront. He didn’t need to hear the rest of it, not yet. Maybe ever.

“Do you have a wife?” Jimmy said.

George Leonidas nodded. His hands were still throbbing with the flesh-memory of the beating. And hurting themselves, but he was in so much other pain that it didn’t register.

“Go sit with her,” Jimmy said. “Your wife.”

Leonidas nodded.

“Don’t tell her any of this, what I said to you,” Jimmy said. “It won’t help her. She’ll believe it even less than you do.”

“I tell her everything.”

“Then tell her you met a crazy man, who talked crazy,” Jimmy said.

“A man who just let me beat him . . .” Leonidas added.

Jimmy looked him right in the eye. “Don’t tell her you saw your daughter. Christina. It will only make for more pain. Neither one of you will ever see either one of them again, do you understand that?”

“I understand the words,” Leonidas said.

“Believe me,” Jimmy said. “Neither one of you will ever see either one of them again. Not in this life.”

Leonidas suddenly reached toward him. Jimmy flinched, thinking another blow was coming, but George the Lion just gripped him by the upper arm. “If they are where you say they are, then just tell me they are at peace. Go there and see them and come tell me that.”

His grip hurt. “I will,” Jimmy said.

If Jimmy had had his own nagging voice of conscience like Machine Shop did, now he would have taken it back. Because there was no way he could do what he said he would do, and Jimmy knew it. There wasn’t even any reason to believe both girls were Sailors now, just the one. The other was probably just gone.

“Where can I reach you?” Jimmy said. He knew he’d probably never even try.

Leonidas had business cards in a leather fold-over holder. He handed one over. He was in plumbing supplies. Across the Bay. He put the card holder back in his front pants pocket and nodded at Jimmy and turned and walked away.

Card. Nod. Turn. Walk.

Jimmy watched him go, watched to see if he would look over at the pier where it had happened, Pier 35, where the girls had jumped, where the seams of his world had been rent. But he didn’t look over.

Jimmy let him get some distance ahead, then followed him. He didn’t exactly know why. He followed Leonidas through the crowds of tourists, who only seemed to have grown in volume and
volume
in the last hour, past the street performers, past everything his daughters had passed the night before, past the last things they had seen in life, across a packed open parking lot to a parking structure, open on the sides, to a dark silver Cadillac DeVille, four or five years old, the last of the “old man” Caddies. He unlocked it and got behind the wheel, started the engine, pulled on the lights, never breaking down, never looking back.

Leonidas had never looked back.

How do you do that?
Jimmy thought.

He thought it through three Chiantis, a few hours later, sitting in a bar, looking back in spite of himself, remembering more than he wanted to about a very specific time and place. And a person. And
Chianti
. What he was drinking tonight was good wine, but then it was cheap, youthful wine, Chianti out of basket-wrapped bottles, Italian-movie Chianti.
La Dolce Vita. 8½.
Dan Tana’s on Santa Monica in L.A. when it was still just a good red-checkered-tablecloth Italian restaurant music business and below-the-line movie people went to. Cheap, youthful. She was the one Lucy had reminded him of, starting back in Saugus Café. Mary.

He was outside with the smokers. At one of those tall tables with tall chairs designed to keep you from ever relaxing.

There Lucy was, right across the street. At a table in front of the Starbucks wannabe in the Haight.

With Machine Shop.

The coffee joint was packed, every table full, inside and out, busier than Jimmy’s bar. Lucy and Machine Shop were about the only ones without big Friday night smiles on their faces.

Big surprise, she was a little down.

But Machine Shop was on the job, even if this wasn’t exactly what Jimmy had in mind when he told him to look after her. They were like new best friends. They had coffees in front of them. Shop would stir his thoughtfully while she talked, stirring and nodding, just like a gal pal. Then Lucy would stop, get to the end of something, end it with a question. Jimmy could tell even from across the street that her voice raised at the end of the line. Machine Shop would stop stirring, nod a couple of times more, and then say a line or two. He was a good listener, leaning in, eye contact. Once he even reached a hand across the table to pat the back of hers, completely nonsexual. Two pats and out. His posture and performance made Jimmy think
Twelve Step
again. Shop had a sponsor somewhere, probably was a sponsor to somebody else, probably a good one, too.

Jimmy drained his glass. The first step is admitting you’re powerless . . . Across in the coffee bar, a fat guy moved, and Jimmy saw somebody else. Polythene Pam. Alone. She was inside, right on the other side of the window, watching Lucy and Machine Shop, watching them to the exclusion of everything else. She had a little demitasse in front of her, a shot.

A guy came up, stood over her. (There was an empty chair across from her.) He had an espresso of his own, had the cup and saucer on his flat palm, an odd way of presenting it. Maybe he was a waiter somewhere. In L.A., he would have been an actor. He was nice enough looking and expected more from her than he got. She didn’t even shake her head no, just gave him a chilly “smile” that ended long before it got to her eyes. Dismissed.

She
did
look good tonight, very tempting, even hotter than out on that sunlit bench in front of the Golden Gate gift shop with Sexy Sadie. Even more mod. Tonight she wore a little plaid skirt, a Scottish schoolgirl’s skirt. And a fuzzy sweater. And over-the-ankle Doc Martens.

“She’s killer-diller when she’s dressed to the hilt . . .” Jimmy sang. He tried to take another drink but found his glass empty.

He thought he had sung it to himself, but apparently it was loud enough for a young woman and her date two tables over to hear. The girl looked at him with some pity.

Time to go. He left a couple of bills on the table, weighted them down with the red glass bowl candle, and exited out the front, all but hopped over the low iron railing just to show anybody watching that he was in complete control of his faculties. He didn’t look back to see if the girl had any parting pathos for him.

He found a wedge of shadow, even if it did smell pissy, in the entryway of a storefront next to the Chianti bar. From there he could watch the rest of the play over at the coffee joint. Everyone was still on their marks, Shop and Lucy talking, Pam looking a little put off, stirring her little coffee with a little spoon.

Then he figured it out. The empty chair across from Pam was meant for Lucy. It was a date. Spoiled by Machine Shop.

A band of hippies came past Jimmy, six or seven of them, girls and guys. Central casting. Freaky and fun. Hendrix headbands, striped bellbottoms, fruit boots. One even clinked finger cymbals. If Disneyland had a Haight-Ashbury section, hippies like these would stroll past, saying things like “What’s
happening
, man?” and “Be groovy.”

The leader wore a fringey vest, a puffy-sleeved shirt, and a sho-nuff Vandyke. His right-hand girl, who wasn’t much older than thirteen, blew Jimmy a kiss. Leader Hippie pulled her back in line. As the troupe moved on, there was a little edge of color to him, but not Sailor blue. Or maybe it was just the streetlight.

When the retro hippies had cleared the frame, over at the coffee bar the little scene was ending. Lucy was standing now. She said another line or two to Machine Shop, and he said something back to her. She smiled, and it looked like it was over, but then she tipped her head toward him and leaned into him for a hug, more her idea than his was the way Jimmy read it. Shop kept watching her as she walked up the sidewalk in the direction of the apartment. When she turned the corner at Central Avenue, a block and a half away, he left his place by the little round table and started after her. He was going to watch her all the way to her door. On the job.

Polythene Pam stood up to go.

People make friends. People run into each other, find out they live a few blocks apart, make a date for coffee and commiseration. It happens all the time.

Or take a ride over into Marin on a beautiful, sunny day, like this morning . . .

Maybe he was seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe it was innocent.

He didn’t think that for a minute.

Jimmy kept ten cars back. Traffic was light. Last night, he had followed Polythene Pam away from the coffeehouse. She’d split a few minutes after Lucy. She was on foot, too. Pam stayed on one side of Haight Street, and Jimmy tailed her on the other, until she crossed the street in the middle of the block and came across to his side. She took the next right, walked across the wide greenbelt, the Panhandle, the eastern end of Golden Gate Park. There were a few street people out and people who lived in the park, but she never hurried her pace. Or looked back. (Here was another somebody who went through life looking straight ahead. With a purpose.) She turned left on Fell and walked two more short blocks.

To a black house.

The house had two-story columns out front and was painted black. There may have been some red trim here and there that didn’t read in the darkness, but the house was
black
. And black lacquer at that. It shined. Pam opened the iron gate and let herself in the outsized front door.

So she lived in the Haight. Innocent? Her house looked like a frat house in New Orleans, like a Goth sorority at Tulane.

Jimmy spent the rest of the night on the street. At dawn, he went home to the Mark for a change of clothes and to pick up the Porsche.

Maybe it was time to introduce himself to Lucy.

He made it back to the Haight just in time to watch the Catholic home for unwed mom-ettes come to life. (It didn’t look as if anyone was awake up at Lucy’s. He parked up the hill.) They had those girls up at the crack of dawn, scrubbing the sidewalks out front, watering the plants in the planters, scattering some bread crumbs for the birds who lived in the trees in the park behind them. They washed the windows.
All the better to see the bright future ahead.
The nun who acted as boss to the detention detail didn’t seem too bad, called all the girls by name, even spoke Spanish to two of them, making them laugh. You never know. They say sometimes you’re entertaining angels unaware.

There were some signs of life at Lucy’s. Jimmy was
this close
to getting out of the car, to walking down the hill to the front door at 52 Central, when Pam pulled up.

Girls’ day out. It was nine, a very civilized hour for an excursion. Pam drove a Land Rover County, dark green, deep dark forest green. She was alone. She parked at the curb, and Lucy came out the front door a second later, a sweatshirt tied around her waist, over sporty pants. Bright, springy, coordinated, Gappy colors. She got in the front seat, and Pam revved the engine and backed up a foot to straighten out the wheels, and away they went. The nun was back in her third-floor window, watching the whole thing with a neutral, preternaturally patient look.

Jimmy wished
he
knew how to do that.

Once across the GG, the Range Rover passed through the tunnel to Marin, under the rainbow painted on its concrete face. There was a second and a third exit for Sausalito, but Pam kept going.