Among the Living (5 page)

After a week or two, the evidence had been assembled. You took your time when your murderer was an assistant district attorney. The case they had against Jack Kantke was only sketchy at this point, at least what was in the papers, but it was enough to arrest, enough for another banner headline.

And enough for most people to make up their minds about Jack Kantke. There he was, if you needed something more, in a shot on the steps of the downtown Criminal Courts Building, his hands cuffed in front of him, an odd half smile on his face. One side of his mouth was grinning, the other wasn’t. It was like those tragedy and comedy masks in one man.

He had short hair, shiny, combed left, a white tab collar shirt, a skinny black tie, a style more sixties than seventies. He looked a little like Jack Webb, not the face, just the gray suit and the ramrod backbone.

Or maybe Rod Serling.

They had arrested him at his office. Of course they knew where he lived—he was still living there, in the murder house on Rivo Alto Canal—and they could have done it yesterday, Sunday, when he was home, probably sitting in the sun out front, but they showed up downtown on Monday morning, came right in and walked past his secretary and opened the frosted glass door with his name in gold on it. They would have yanked him right up out of his swivel chair if he wasn’t standing already, waiting for them, for
it.
Everybody knew this was high drama.

On down the page were the first pictures of Jack and Elaine Kantke in, as they say,
better days,
alive, smiling, chic, attractive. Party people, yacht clubbers. The shots were from what used to be called the
Soc
section of the paper, Society.
Where were the piña coladas?
One shot was from some official function, the assistant D.A. and his designer wife, Jack in a tux, Elaine Kantke in a black shoulderless gown wearing a loose watch with diamonds on it and diamonds at her ears. This being Southern California, they were probably overdressed.

And then there was a pretty picture of Elaine Kantke they hadn’t used in the first go-around, a glamorous headshot with highlights in her hair and angled lighting, maybe a George Hurrell shot. It made Jimmy wonder if she’d been an actress, or had tried to be. When she smiled, at least for this, she smiled with everything. She looked young and happy and healthy. But she wasn’t anybody’s girl-next-door. She had what used to be called
sophistication,
not always meant as a compliment. She looked a little French. She looked like she smoked.

Jimmy tried to find something of Jean in her mother’s face but didn’t see it.

He didn’t look for Jean in Jack Kantke’s face. Jimmy didn’t like him.
That didn’t take long.
It wasn’t the murder so much as the hurt he’d caused a little girl.

And that he couldn’t seem to wipe the other half of that smile off his face.

Jimmy sped through to December, a year-end wrap-up, another banner headline:

Cute.

Jimmy looked over at the
Queen Mary
across the harbor as he drove down Ocean Boulevard. He was in his Mustang, a dark green 1968 GT 390 fast-back. It was a big sky day, all blue except for a few clouds trying to build into something out over the shipping channel. The Catalina boat cruised toward the end of the breakwater, white as a wedding cake in the clear light.

Long Beach changed block by block, sometimes cleaned-up and rich and then the next street tired, sad, sorry. In one block, it’d be bright white BMW convertibles with blue tops, like they were little ski boats. The next block, left-behind grocery carts. Jimmy couldn’t get the pictures of the murders out of his head. It was always like this. It always came to life right in front of him and stayed there until it was over.
Death came to life.
Funny. He tried to find something on the radio to splash a little light his way but it was all talk, talk about money and violence. When he was working, the world seemed made up of nothing but grief and greed and malice. Maybe it set him up to do the job, to see what he had to see, to go where he always had to go. He didn’t like it, but when he wasn’t on a case, there was something in him that missed it, wanted it. It put him at risk, body and soul, and there was something in him that wanted that because it made him feel more alive.

A narrow thirties-era concrete bridge humped up and over a twenty-foot-wide canal into the “Naples” area of Long Beach. That was what the real estate people called it, since the thirties when it was thought up and built, ten or twelve short blocks of big houses on narrow lots on finger canals, sailboats and harbor cruisers tied up in their “front yards.” No abandoned grocery carts here.

Jimmy cruised down a skinny one-way lane. The houses had garages opening in the back onto the alley. It was a Monday but the neighborhood had more signs of life than most moneyed L.A. neighborhoods in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. The people who lived here now were retired people or widows or people married to widows. You got a coffee and went by the broker’s office in the village around ten, read the
Times
outside somewhere and then killed a couple hours before a late lunch. If you had a wife, she laid out your clothes on the bed in the morning, the bright slacks, the knit shirts, and sometimes they matched hers. You stayed away or out in the yard cutting back the bougainvillea long enough to keep her happy. The first drink of the day usually came at about four, unless you counted lunch.

There wasn’t a 110 Rivo Alto Canal anymore. The ceramic plaques on the garages skipped from one oh eight to one twelve, probably more out of respect for property values than for the dead.

But there was the house.

Spanish-style, two-story, fading pink. It looked abandoned.
Could it have sat empty all these years?
Jimmy parked where the intersecting street dead-ended at the canal. Across the lane of water, a man hosed off a twenty-two-foot day-sailer. He was close enough to say something friendly, but didn’t. A gull wheeled and dropped, threatening to land. The man flicked the hose in its direction.

An arica palm next to the house had a full head of brown fronds ready to crack off with the next real wind, but the hedges and a bird-of-paradise were hacked back and the little patch of grass out front was green so the house wasn’t abandoned exactly. Someone was dealing with it.

Jimmy stood before it a long moment and then sat on the seawall. Spanish-style houses always had a nice balance. There was a big picture window to the left, an archway, a little portico, a heavy door behind it, a door with black iron strap hinges and black iron nailheads and a “speak-easy grill” to look out at the Fuller Brush Man through, iron, too, heavy and lacy at the same time. That was Spanish. The walkway and steps were painted red to look like tile or clay.

Jimmy looked up at the second-floor window, another picture window curved at the top to match the arcs below. That was the front bedroom, where it happened. One of the pictures in the paper had a uniformed cop standing at the window, looking out, looking
up
for some reason, as if the murderer had somehow flown out across the canal.

Jimmy walked to the picture window and looked in. Dark drapes faded to green/gray stood open a foot. It was the living room. There were a few pieces of old furniture, what they used to call a divan,
Look
and
Life
magazines on the coffee table, a couple of Klee prints on the walls. It was like a museum of the mid-1970s. Untouched. The table lamps were tall and bulbous, glassy gold dripping over aquamarine. The carpet was white shag. The rotary phone was pink. Over the fake fireplace with its dead and dusty electric log “fire” was a pen and ink sketch of the Left Bank.

Off a dark hallway, a staircase stepped up through deep angular shadows to the second flo or. If there were any kids in the neighborhood, maybe
grandkids,
they were sure to swap stories about ghosts. You wouldn’t think so, but there were houses like this all over L.A., left-behind houses,
dead
houses. Sometimes it was about uncollected taxes. Sometimes it was about crazy. Usually it was about bad blood running through the constricted veins of bitter heirs.
If I can’t have it, you can’t have it.

A spider stepped across the sill. Time meant nothing to it.

Jimmy stepped back. There was music from somewhere close, Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” more of the past pushing into the present. It was coming from the house two doors down, out an open upstairs window. The song ended and another Abba song started. It was an album.
Who listens to Abba albums?

There was a sound from across the canal, a sound Jimmy was meant to hear, the sailboat man slapping the hose into coils on the dock. Jimmy looked over. The neighborhood watchman tested the valve again to make sure the water was off and then walked up the short walk into the house, stepped out of his Topsiders outside the door and went in. After a few seconds the white shutters in the upstairs window tipped open a crack.

Jimmy suppressed the urge to wave.

He walked down alongside the canal to the Abba house. A low stucco wall surrounded a small porch, a patio with Adirondack chairs and a little table for the drinks. He knocked on the door. He waited but nobody came. After a minute, the side ended. It was a record player. The needle lifted—you could hear it—and then a click.

“She was there a minute ago.”

A young workman with his shirt off was sanding the dock in front of the next house down. He had KROQ on the box, the Chili Peppers.

“Try again.”

“That’s all right,” Jimmy said.

“She was there a minute ago. She likes the sun,” the workman said. He made it sound a little nasty.

“Is there still a Yacht Club around here?” Jimmy said.

The workman pointed down the walk.

Jimmy walked away from 110 Rivo Alto Canal but it stayed with him. He couldn’t shake it. Instead of the sweet little walk under the trees beside the canal, he might just as well have been walking down that upstairs hallway toward that front room where it had happened, where the lightning had flashed.

He was already inside.

Through the tinted glass of the tall windows of the bar Jimmy watched the Hunters and Catalinas and Ericsons motoring out toward the bight. He drank his beer and swiped a few olives from the tray.

The bartender was on a cell phone to his girlfriend.

“I know,” he said every once in a while.

He was too young to know anything about the Kantkes.
Star Wars
was 1977.
Hotel California.
Elvis dying in August.
Car Wash. Saturday Night Fever. Roots. Laverne & Shirley.
Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time” and K.C. & the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man.”

And
Abba.

Jimmy got up, took his beer with him, and looked at the pictures along one wall, the Long Beach Yacht Club over the years. In the old days, what you had was Old Money enjoying itself. The men wore yachting caps with a straight face, only nobody had a straight face. Then New Money started elbowing in. There went the dress code. The fifties were very black and white and the sixties were . . .

The seventies and eighties looked even more confused and even drunker. The nineties saw a bit of a return to the old order, at least a stab at it, more contained hair, better clothes, straighter lines, a serious, unblinking
White
look, particularly on the two or three Black members who’d made their way in.

The current crowd in the latest pictures made no sense at all, like the rest of L.A. now, the only center being a lack of center. There were South Americans with ponytails like movie coke dealers shoulder to shoulder, drinks in hand, with USC frat boys and their old men, next to real life hippies in tie-dye next to leathery world-cruisers next to a lesbian couple all in white, she a little taller than
she.
Old salts, new salts, Russians, Armenians, Redondo car dealers, Indian ophthalmologists. And a dignified-looking Mexican man in a blue double-breasted jacket with gold buttons.

And Ernest Borgnine.

There was a picture labeled “Offic ers 1975-1976” but no Jack or Elaine Kantke.

A white-haired man and his wife came through the bar, dressed up. Jimmy smiled. They smiled back. A second couple followed the first. The second man wore a pink sports coat, the woman a dress the color of poppies with shoes to match and a pair of sunglasses that remembered the arched-eyebrow tail of a 1959 Chevrolet.

They said hello, too, and seemed to mean it.

“Something going on?” Jimmy said.

“Crabby Lewis,” the white-haired man said.

Jimmy followed them into the banquet room.

Up front was a three-foot-tall picture of a tanned ancient mariner in blazer and turtleneck and yacht cap. Jimmy hung around in back. There were only ten or twelve of them, with four waiters.