A TRUMPET SCREAMS.
Ramshackle hip, hep, bright-shiny and raucous as the best of the jazz clubs packed tight along Central Avenue, the shoebox Fall-Out (its “Shelter” implied) is packed to overflowing even this early in the evening. Supple big-grilled cars are nosed into it like black and chrome fish feeding. Neon leers off all their arcs and angles, as the soft, luminous night crawls in over downtown Los Angeles.
Inside: cosmic kitchen, concrete and chrome—space-age mock-nuclear decor, dry-ice drinks that will peel paint, and tiny isolate islands of pale Anglo float in a vast sea of roiling, moiling brown and black. Foxy, angular Lily Himes, headliner, owner, siren, the rock on which many a metaphorical sailor has willingly crashed and drowned in vain, brings Cole Porter sluiced with Monk and Miles, her shimmering sequins and violet eyes and chiaroscuro curves backed by an airtight quintet, her voice a darting hummingbird, in and out of the instrumentation, weightless.
It’s “Too Darn Hot.” The dance floor jumps.
Squeezed to the end of the long, blunt bar, Lovely, one of those few white faces, hat on his knee and a regular from the way his glass is never empty, doesn’t much like jazz but can’t take his eyes off Lily.
Lily. Who has recently decided there was no point to their continuing, no future in their attachment, the world was wrong, but they were in it: à la guerre, comme à la guerre. Lily is as different from Isla as Lovely is from the boy Isla married.
When the set ends she finds him. Her body glows, slick with a sheen of perspiration, despite all the doors thrown open and the big overhead fans kicking on.
“You.” She tries to throw him indifference, but her post-performance verve is intoxicating. Electrifying. Singing sets her on fire, and while his instinct is to move back from her, there’s no place for him to go. Or that he wants to go.
“Nice set.”
“Was it? Says the man who says jazz ain’t his thing.”
Lovely shrugs, they’ll never agree. A bartender brings Lily tonic with a twist. She leans back against the bar, looking out at the crowd, her body making soft contact with Lovely not entirely by accident, Lovely notes, despite their supposed estrangement.
“I took care of that thing with your nephew.”
“Mmm. I figured as much. Oscar come through here briefly, late this afternoon.”
After running from me, Lovely thinks. “I tailed him. I scotched his score. He wasn’t too happy about it.”
“I’m right?” She says it sadly.
“Yes.” Lovely shifts to give her body room, his thoughts interlaced with Isla guilt. “I kept Johnny Stompanato from braining him, I guess that counts for something.”
“Send me the bill.”
“On the house,” Lovely says. “I doubt I more than delayed his fall, though.”
“We’ll have a fine talk, him and me.”
Where Isla was a gentle, awkward beauty, everything about Lily is improvised and lyrical, even her toughness, and including the way she moves, turning back toward Lovely, close, all arc and flow. She crunches ice and they stare at each other blankly for a moment, black and white, improbable, Lovely thinks, and rife with problems—she’s right. But in an H-bomb world, aren’t all bets off?
“You okay?”
Caught short, he says, “Yeah,” but it’s unconvincing. “Just tired,” he adds, trying to sell the lie.
“You don’t want to talk about it,” Lily interprets.
The truth is, he does, but only to her. “I saw my wife today.” Lovely watches his words make her whole body tense, defensive. She doesn’t know much about him. The existence of a missing wife never came up, he never had a reason to raise it.
“You better keep talking,” she said.
“Her name is Isla. I saw her, she’s dead.” It’s the best way he can think to tell it, but understands that it might be a little lacking in the details.
“Did you love her?”
It’s an excellent question. Lovely is flooded with memory: eyes, lips, hands, the sharp inward curve of her waist, just above the hip. Her hard-won smile.
“Yes, I did.” Nothing more or less.
Lily blinks, turns her back to the room, and leans on the bar, shaken. No tears, but a true sadness; one of the things Lovely most admires is her ability to feel: loss, love, outrage, betrayal. Sometimes all at once. So much of his last ten years have been spent with the calculated dispassion those of higher pay grades believe is required to bend the world’s will.
Lily turns back to him and shakes her head again, touching his hand with hers, long perfect nails dusted with glitter. “You can’t stop there, baby,” she says softly. “She deserves better. So do I.”
Lovely drains his drink, stalling to gather thoughts he’d hoped he wouldn’t ever have to gather again. A couple of the guys from Lily’s band are back onstage, tuning a guitar, thrumming a stand-up bass. The clatter of the crowd roils like a waterfall on rocks. “We were high school sweethearts. Colorado. Same town, same neighborhood, same schools, fourth to twelfth grade. Companions. Friends. You know. That small-town thing.”
“I don’t,” Lily says. She’s a city girl, West Coast, Baldwin Hills, working-class parents, a brother who died in the Pacific war.
“Fall of our junior year. It came out of nowhere, one night, I don’t know. Stuffing tissue paper in the chicken wire of a homecoming float, I just looked at her and everything changed.”
“You are romance with an exclamation point,” Lily says, dry.
“I made her my war bride.” Lovely’s voice is raw. He remembers them: Isla, Buddy, so young. The half-assed wedding. And making love for the first time when that was a thing that people did that meant something.
Eighteen years old.
He stares at his knuckles. “Two days after, we shipped out to basic. Me and my best friend—who was also her best friend.” Buddy, now so blind and bitter. “But . . .”
Grand Junction Station, they stood in uniform while the cameras flashed and goodbyes were said, light, airy, nobody looking into the certain darkness that waited to swallow them because to do so would have broken the fragile patriotic façade. Isla, his parents, festive, as if he and Buddy were off to great adventure on the Denver & Rio Grande, soon to return. Grinning, devil-may-care.
“Somewhere north of Anzio, on patrol, Buddy took a face full of shrapnel meant for me.”
He takes a moment, remembering. Lily’s fingers stay on his hand, warm. A cymbal brush sighs and the Fall-Out band, reassembled, begins a slow groove on Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn.
“I carried him ten miles back through enemy lines to the mobile surgery unit. To this day he thinks that I saved him.” He stops again.
“You tell your personal stories,” Lily says, “like LADWP rations water.”
“His eyes were the price of his ticket home,” Lovely says, ignoring her. “Isla came west on a Greyhound, found him in rehab at the VA, he gave her all my letters, broke down in tears, and Isla stayed to help his sightless transition.”
“You ever come back into this?”
“I soldiered on, through V-E Day. Got extended. Or maybe extended myself. Worked some occupation, Berlin and Tokyo. Here and there.”
A there and where that Rylan Lovely will not talk about, at all, Lily chides.
Lovely shrugs, his default with her, and rotates his empty glass to make the bevels flare. The bartender asks a question from a distance; Lovely faintly nods for a refill. Lily waits. She knows him well enough by now to wait.
He inhales the stale, smoky club air. “Came home after four years to find that my wife had fallen hard for my blind best friend.” Captain’s uniform and flowers, raw anticipation, no knock, walking in the door of her Lexington bungalow, the address he’d memorized, discovering Isla and Buddy on the divan, laughing, kissing—
—Lily lifts and brushes the soft of her hand across his cheek tenderly, bringing him back. “I am sorry.” She’s sorry. Everybody’s always sorry, Lovely thinks absently.
“Vapor trails,” Lovely says.
“Life,” Lily counters. “You going to find who killed her?”
“We have cops who get paid for that.”
Lily stares at him doubtfully. Lovely avoids her gaze. “I don’t even know her anymore.”
“Sure.”
“Seven years.”
“Yes, I see.”
The snare drum snaps, the band picks up pace. Horns rise, bark like Griffith Park coyotes. Lovely finally looks into the violet eyes and says simply, truthfully, “Buddy needed her more. That’s the kind of girl she was.”
Lily considers this. “Sure. But what kind of guy does that make him?” Lovely has no ready answer for her. She leaves him and slips through the crowd and steps up onto the stage in perfect rhythm to start, “I fall in love too easily . . .”
By the time she gets to “my heart,” Lovely has gone.
—
WARM LIGHT GLOWS from the window of the flat opposite Isla’s: the actress, inside, furniture pushed to the walls, leopard leotard, she’s dancing with a lean, supple instructor and singing some show tune Lovely doesn’t know; it bleeds soft and lonely over him in the shadows at Isla’s front door, where he fumbles to pick the lock and wonders if this looks as amateurish as he feels.
Restless night Santa Anas rattle the palms that picket the Diablo Bonitas, flailing them into pointless frenzy. The city sky glows terra-cotta, cloud cover reflecting all the light back down.
He lets himself in and shuts the door with a gentle click. There whispers a squeeze of wind through the kitchen door louvers, and the pock pock pock of the Wedgewood stove’s clock.
Never much of a black bag man in his service to democracy and a better world, he has also always been too impatient to be a solver of puzzles. He’s not sure how to proceed. Mysteries confound him, he prefers problem solving: abduction, extraction, elimination, hammer to nail.
But he’s read enough detective stories to take a stab at this, even if Lily teases him for always getting fooled by the twists at the end.
He can change; he was changed; he is, he’s been told his whole life, obstinate to a fault.
In the bedroom, on the vanity, is a silver-framed wedding photograph he must have missed seeing when he was here before on account of the body that caught his eye; a posed portrait of Lovely, Isla, and their best man, Buddy Dale.
On the floor, taped crudely, is the outline of Isla’s body, half on the Chinese rug, half on the bare, varnished oak. The dry stain of her blood. The lingering scent of her lavender soaps and the sweat of the cops and technicians who probably spent the whole hot day here spinning their wheels.
Under the bed Lovely finds an empty velvet-lined box that once held a soldier’s standard-issue U.S. Army service revolver.
In the closet, Lovely goes right to the huge hanging shoe rack that covers one wall—he still knows where Isla hides her important things—checking the pumps and flats, discovering the jewelry she’s hidden in them: bracelets, brooches, pearl strands, and the diamond ring Lovely gave her to get married with, but which she never wore, only kept. None of this is what he wants now.
Lined up, on the closet floor, are her boots, all empty . . . except an old pair of English riders that Lovely can, holding one of them in each hand, feel are different in weight. He takes up the heavier one to confirm it; turns the boot over and shakes it, hard—out tumbles a small, locked diary, a new passport, and a fat white envelope.
In the kitchen, light from a glass-shaded gooseneck spills across Lovely and the Formica breakfast table Isla has turned into a work desk: typewriter, stack of blank sheets, carbon paper, pencil holder, plenty of white correction fluid.
Lovely glances inside the envelope to confirm what he already suspects from the feel of it: three thick bundles of hundred-dollar bills. He puts it aside.
The passport is newly issued. Isla looks tired in her photograph. There are no customs entry stamps, but there’s a fresh, folded-up visa for France.
It takes him a moment to jimmy the diary open with his pocketknife. She has always kept diaries as far as he knows; however, she didn’t write so much as archive her days: cryptic fragments of prose in a cramped, barely legible cursive, newspaper and magazine clippings, snapshots, her childlike drawings, scraps of wrapping paper, canceled stamps, postcards, recipes, reminders, bar coasters, greeting cards, receipts, check stubs, pressed flowers, lost feathers, doctors’ prescriptions, and fortune-cookie platitudes.
She filled most of the pages of the new book and it’s only June. Lovely stalls, reluctant to read it. But he can’t avoid the two yellowing news clippings taped inside the front cover: SEARCH CONTINUES FOR MISSING PACOIMA GIRL and PACOIMA GIRL FOUND DEAD IN DESERT. Yearbook picture of the victim, a fetching Sarah Blohm, seventeen, stares out at him, too happy.
He closes the diary and places it on the table in front of him. He runs the tips of his fingers across the typewriter keys his wife was recently touching, then thumbs through the carbon paper. All fresh, unused. But there’s a folded handbill slipped in the stack. Lovely smooths it out:
CHURCH OF THE COSMIC EVOLUTION
FAITH IN THE FUTURE
at which altar
the HON. A. R. DRUMMOND presides
A crumpled collection of similar flyers fills half the wastebasket beneath the table.
Tumble of the front door lock. Voices. Men.
Lovely puts the handbill back where he found it, drops the diary into the toaster (and yanks the power plug from the wall socket), reaches for the gooseneck light switch, and then sees, for the first time, on the floor along the wall near the back door, easily missed: a long, thin smear of blood.
As if somebody dragged a body out, or in, that way.
The front door opens. Lovely kills the light.
In the resulting darkness, listening as a couple men enter blithely, Lovely rises and creeps to the kitchen entry and peers into the living room as a light comes on in there, illuminating two linebacker-sized men in dark suits they’ll surely never get used to wearing.
“Twenty thousand bucks cash, she’s not gonna carry it around in her ever-loving purse.”
Stiff creak of their dress shoes. Too much aftershave cologne that Lovely can already smell from where he waits.
“My opinion, she’s not gonna keep it in her apartment. Is all I’m saying.” It’s hard to tell them apart. Gauging the pros and cons of taking these two, Lovely draws back as they move deeper into the living room, feels the warm outside air on his neck too late, and can only twist and get an arm partway up in time to blunt the blow that sings down hard on the base of his neck, sparking shooting stars, like in a cartoon.
“Gotcha.”
A third man, the angry Buick driver Lovely remembers from the traffic snafu out in the street earlier, has crept in the back door and struck with a crushing sap smack that sends Lovely stunned, staggering and sprawling into the living room, where he crashes into a lamp, then the wall, finds his balance, and drops into a defensive boxer’s crouch, lashing out as Mr. Buick comes stalking in after him.
“Hey, look what the cat drug—”
Lovely flattens Buick’s nose with two hard jabs, blood sprays—the man’s a bleeder—then pivots and wheels a stiff roundabout right into the ribs of one of the big mooks rushing in to help his friend.
His fist goes deep into extra flesh, his target doubles over, wheezing: “Hey hey hey hey!”
Lovely tucks in, feinting, punching. At four o’clock, with bravado, comes, “Big mistake, buddy—” and again Lovely pivots to tag the remaining big man under his left eye—but this one’s got a badge out, he’s flashing it as he staggers back—and now Buick is upright again and snotting blood, his wavering .38 pointed into Lovely’s face.
“FBI! FBI! Get on the floor!”
Whereupon the wheezing big man wraps Lovely in a bear hug and they both go crashing to the carpet.
“Criminy. Who the hell-o are you?”
Steel cuffs cut into Lovely’s wrists. The names sort out quickly: Agent Buddiger, with the new shiner, flops Lovely onto his back as Agent Johnson, more fat than muscle, finds his wind and straightens painfully to hand Agent Kapnik—of the Buick—a crusty handkerchief from an inside pocket. Kapnik has to think for a moment before committing to shove it against his already swelling nose.
The three Feds stare down at Lovely. Breathing hard.
“What is he doing here?” Kapnik asks his crew, evidently just to establish that he’s in charge. “What are you doing here?”
He drops Isla’s envelope of cash onto Lovely’s chest.
“Yours? Where’s the rest, huh?”
Kapnik toes Lovely in the ribs with his wingtip, but his heart’s not in it. Buddiger roots out Lovely’s wallet and holds up the California State PI license for all to see.
“Snooper. Snooping?” Kapnik seems to be the only one allowed to talk.
“Why do the Feds need to come tidy up a murder scene, I wonder?” Lovely says aloud. “Or run a moving pick for some dandy in a Hudson Commodore?”
Stronger than he looks, Buddiger hauls Lovely up by the shirt, frog-walks him back, and pins him against the wall as if to study him.
“Snooper,” Kapnik cracks, the airways in his nose all swollen up now, and bleeding only a mucous thread. “He’s a wise guy. Are you a wise guy?”
“Me?” Lovely shakes his head. “No. I’m dumb as dirt. I mean, look at the company I’m keeping.”
Which prompts Johnson to haul off and hit Lovely as hard as he can. Which, when Lovely will think back on it later, was pretty fucking hard for such a soft man.