Already Dead

  —I’m convinced of it, everybody’s dead inside. Jerking, empty carcasses. Their souls have gone out like lights.

  Fairchild knocked on the door. He watched through the window as Frankheimer went about lighting his fire. He knocked again. Drew back a foot to kick at the door and then his guts subsided and he tapped on the window. Frankheimer must have made him out, if vaguely, beyond the glass. He raised one finger and crossed to the door and opened it.

  “Well. Here’s somebody I don’t owe money to.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “That might be interesting. Sure.”

  He left Fairchild to shut the door after himself and reached to pull the cord at the window and shut the drapes. Now it was nearly dark in here. Frankheimer perched on the stone lip of the fireplace and picked up a hurricane lamp and occupied himself with the business of getting them some light.

  “A little early for curtains,” Fairchild said—“or a little late,” and sat some feet away in an easy chair with his hands in his lap.

  Without having to stand up to accomplish this, Frankheimer set the lantern on the mantel. The living room wasn’t in process at all. It had served as ground for some manner of apocalyptic visitation. “Yeah. PG&E resents me. The power’s off. I haven’t been functioning.”

  “But didn’t I just hear the TV? Among other things?”

  “It’s been off for two minutes. They don’t turn you off till you’re in the middle of a program.”

  “Not that you were watching.”

  From the study, no sound came. He might have confronted her then and there. But he had no curiosity about how she’d act.

  Frankheimer said, “This is fun!”

  He regarded Fairchild, smiling, and moved away from the fire, as it was quite hot now.

  A curious trick of Fairchild’s mind suddenly rendered the fireplace irrelevant, and he witnessed a man seated next to some burning wood. The man’s eyebrows were arched in a fixed expression of curiosity, and when he leaned back into the shadows the sockets filled with darkness, making him look masked, giving his features the aloof inquisitiveness of a raccoon’s.

  “Is your father living?” Fairchild felt moved to ask him.

  The giant reached up with thumb and forefinger and removed from his mouth two widely spaced artificial teeth wired to a plastic upper plate. He replaced them and shut his lips around them. “My father’s alive. He’s a Southern Californian. I owe him money.”

  “My father’s dead. Three days ago I attended his funeral.”

  “Funeral for a snake.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you’re talking about my father.”

  “He was a snake before he was your father.”

  “I’ll tell you something else.”

  “Will you.”

  “Billy blew his own head off. I just saw him with his brains coming out the back. Sitting at his own table. And I don’t understand it.” The sobs came up now. “I can tell you that much for goddamn sure.”

  Frankheimer scowled and coughed, but didn’t speak. He used a sliver of redwood to drag something from the fire’s edge. A cigarette butt. He skewered it and put its end into a flame.

  “I want to find that friend of yours. And I know goddamn well he’s your friend or at least well known to you, so just fuck any attempt to fucking mislead me, just fuck that.”

  “Okay. Consider it fucked.”

  “Carl Van Ness. Where is he.”

  “Unknown.”

  “Give him up. He’s dead sooner or later.”

  “Sooner’s fine with me.”

  “You think I’m that gullible.” Fairchild raised his voice. “Hi, Melissa!” He stared at Frankheimer. “I know she’s there.”

  “She won’t come out.”

  “I know that too.”

  Frank brought his cigarette butt to his lips, puffed up a glow. “Did Billy really kill himself?”

  “Billy. He really really did.”

  “You saw him.”

  “All messed up and completely dead, I mean it.”

  “Shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they say it was suicide?”

  “They? The authorities? The authorities who authorize nothing? They don’t even know he’s dead.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t him who pulled the trigger.”

  “Maybe it was Carl Van Ness.”

  “If that’s what you really think, don’t worry. I don’t care, pal, I’d roll over on him in a heartbeat, but I don’t know his whereabouts.”

  “Is Van capable of that in your opinion?”

  “Oh yeah. He’ll end up at Quentin. In the gas chamber.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No question. He’s all twisted up. He’ll see. Van worked this strange trick on himself a long ways back. I’ll tell you how to understand it. He’s not psycho, not warped, wasn’t brought up bad, no. He’s not corrupted by this or that, like a politician, or a priest. But it’s like this. Did you ever get a thing going with yourself where, let me make up an example, you start to feel that if you tie the left shoe first, something bad’s gonna happen, so you tie the right shoe first? Then you’re about to catch the doorknob with your right hand, but no, that’s gonna fuck things up, so you have to”—he made a motion—“gotta use the left hand. Gotta pay with this dollar, leave this other dollar alone. Can’t scratch my head till I count to five. Stuff like that all day long?”

  “Some days. Many days. Quite often.”

  “So what do you do to keep from turning into one big neurotic knot?”

  “Me? I resist.”

  “Exactly, man. You say fuck it. You override the impulse as a general thing. That’s where Van is at, right there, but on another level, much further on down. He’s turned that inside out. It’s genius. He overrides any override, see boy? He actualizes every impulse. Years ago he started this—I knew him—we were comrades—I’m privy to this. Man. He’s made himself into a knife. Just cuts right on through. Do it, don’t think twice. That’s his idea of freedom.”

  “You’re absolutely right. I recognize him there. You’re right.”

  “I don’t admire it. Just on paper. No tragedies on paper. But life ain’t paper.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yeah. He’s not a crook—he’s a demon. Transformed from the flesh.”

  “He’s beyond good and evil.”

  “Right, how many’s that—four words. He read four words of Nietzsche and ran out and built a life.” Frankheimer laughed now. “I was the one who made the mistake of introducing him to Nietzsche.”

  “Nietzsche! I shit on Nietzsche. Have you ever tried to spell Nietzsche? Good luck!”

  The door to the study opened. Melissa came out, looking at neither man, and sat by the fire staring into it. Fairchild leaned forward. He held out his hands for her to see. “I have been inauthentic. This isn’t me.”

  She looked up at the ceiling and sang out, “Right now, it’s impossible!”

  Fairchild wept. “Nothing can hide it from me now: I loved my father. I love my wife. I know what love is. I see what it is—” Apologetically, with his dirty forearm, he wiped at his lips and nose.

  Melissa and Frank were like two spectacularly unmatched andirons, he on the raised hearth and she on the floor.

  “You don’t know how tiny you are,” Fairchild told her.

  Frankheimer laughed. Melissa regarded her knees and very nearly smiled.

  “Let’s think about this,” Frankheimer said. “You up for that?”

  “Thinking?”

  “About Van Ness. You really want him? All his life, he’s worked the water. Water is his element.”

  At half past six, very near to sunset, Navarro turned onto the road down to Arena Pier with his stomach growling. Mo waited up at her place with two ribeye steaks, but he had to take care of this thing—because Merton had received the call, taken his own pulse, and diagnosed himself with a headache, putting Navarro’s own status at on-call and unfed. Also pissed
off. But as he rolled past the water-treatment facility and left behind its tainted atmosphere and felt himself dropping out of sight of the town itself, dropping into the twilight and into the quiet of an hour that truly felt like autumn, his irritation gave over, and he was surprised to find himself drifting with a sickly and fascinated heart in the big machine along the flanks of tattered homes. Where the hills on either side opened out toward the harbor, the haphazard rows of rootless dwellings, trailers founded on cinder blocks and unmatched rounds of timber, and the kennels with their wire fences bellied out or torn, and the trucks without tires or windshields, and the axles, engines, and appliances stashed under fraying plastic, and the wood smoke, and the bleary windows, all of it tugged at him as if he’d lived here once and missed it ever since. In this light it looked like somebody’s idea of art, maybe his own. It all seemed all right—depressing, yet special—it all seemed out of reach. At the road’s end the new pier, its wood still clean, strode out over the purple water. He drove down there and stood by the cruiser’s open door studying the harbor’s surface, but saw nothing floating on it other than dark quiet vessels, no more than a dozen of them. He got behind the wheel again.

  The trailers had no numbers, but according to his directions it was only a matter of locating the one with an aluminum canoe out front. This he managed, and got out of the car and stood listening to small sounds which, by their separateness, made everything seem all the more quiet: a voice; a faucet; another voice; a refrigerator door; a TV hiccuping through the channels. A dog lived under the canoe, a small husky that didn’t bark at him but just pulled at its chain, panting. Its bucket had toppled and rolled beyond its reach. Navarro set it right, and the animal plunged its head into the dark to chop at the inch of water remaining.

  He knocked on the door in anticipation of the usual tableau, a couple of sad angry women, a couple of terrified kids, a couple of exhausted drunks with ripped shirts and rug burns. Only this time one of them would be wet from the sea.

  But when a woman in a long quilted robe opened the door, the space behind her undisturbed and almost somber, he sensed he may have awakened her from a nap.

  “Katrina Wells?”

  “Mom.”

  “Okay. Mom. Who’s fighting, Mom?”

  “Mom called it in.”

  “Anybody requiring assistance inside your house?”

  “Let me locate my slippers.” The woman turned away, keeping the door open with her hand, and next came out wearing black rubber boots on her feet. “She’s over here.”

  He made way for her and followed across the yard to the adjacent trailer, the door of which she slapped with the flat of her hand. “Mom! Your police have arrived!” She opened the door herself and went through. Navarro stood at the threshold and looked inside to find no recuperating combatants, only a teenaged boy on a kitchen stool, and a woman standing beside the gas range and saying, “Hah! Hah!”

  “Katrina Wells?”

  “Hah!” She gestured toward the youngster with her cigarette, which she held in the V of her thumb and index, the palm of her hand cupped beneath it. He’d seen monocled Nazis in the movies holding their cigarettes like that.

  “I tell him fix his hair, his hair is silly. So he put on a hat. But the hat is silly, too! You see?”

  “You’re not my mother,” the boy said.

  “What is this about?” Navarro asked.

  “You take your time, hah?”

  “Previous shift took the call.”

  “Well, he left a long time. He go. He gone.”

  “She looks sillier than me,” the boy said. His grandmother, if that was the relationship, wore baggy jeans and what Navarro guessed must be a Mexican vest, and those pug-nosed duck boots. She looked like anybody. And the boy’s hat looked like anybody’s hat.

  “You reported a fight?”

  “Fighting. Two men.”

  “Two people,” her daughter said, “maybe two men.”

  “Two people! Men are people!”

  “Wait, now. Who witnessed this?”

  “I witness this. I.”

  “Just her,” the daughter said.

  “Did you recognize them?”

  “They stand on the pier. Fighting.”

  “Were you on the pier at the time?”

  “No. Just here, from the kitchen. He had a stick, a pipe, something.”

  “Okay, you think two men. Probably.”

  “He hit him like a baseball.”

  “Then what?”

  “He fell in! Then he stand there waiting to see is he coming up or is he drown.” She clamped her cigarette between her lips, hunched her spine, and raised her clasped hands to the level of her right ear. “Like this. Batter up!”

  “What is your nationality, Mrs. Wells, may I ask you?”

  She took a step closer, fixing him dead-on with a hooded gaze. “I—em—a—United States.”

  In order to keep from laughing, Navarro opened his mouth and breathed through it. His training had included this. “You a baseball fan?”

  Mrs. Wells vigorously nodded, sucking at her cigarette, and spoke through her smoke. “Very much. Eighty-eight I saw Oakland sweep Boston. I was there in Candlestick. Game number four.”

  “Are you Italian maybe?”

  “She’s not Italian,” the boy said. “She’s Slavic, and she’s crazy.”

  “My dad married her about five years ago. He brought her from Yugoslavia.”

  “Yugoslavia! So what?” Mrs. Wells asked.

  “So one guy knocked another guy off the pier with a pipe or a stick and waited to see if he came back up. Did he?”

  “Who? What?”

  “Did the man who fell in come back up?”

  “What am I telling you? No! Please understand me—this description is a major crime. I witness a murder.”

  “And the guy with a stick—”

  “Him? He throws it away. And I don’t know after that. I called the telephone to report my findings.”

  “Did you see him leave the area?”

  “I didn’t see—no. But he left—yes. I heard a car.”

  “But you didn’t see him get into the car, or see who was in the car that you heard, is that right?”

  “God! I’m sorry, but how did they give you a job on the police? What am I saying to you? He’s drown in there right now! Go get him out!”

  “I already had a look. There’s nobody floating in the immediate vicinity.”

  “Hah! But what about if he’s far away?”

  “Exactly. That’s just the thing. So listen to me now, Mrs. Wells. I want to nail it down as to when this happened, because if there’s a chance somebody’s floating around out at sea who can still be rescued and revived, then I’m gonna have to call for an operation that’s gonna keep a lot of people up working all night and run the county and state about fifteen thousand dollars. How long ago did you see this fight?”

  “Thirty minutes. Nobody came!”

  “Thirty minutes at least?”

  “Even forty-five minutes. You didn’t come! Then you came and had a nice long discussion! About Yugoslavia! About baseball!”

  “Don’t anybody leave, please. I’ll take another look.”

  He drove back the hundred meters or so to the water’s edge and sent the spotlight’s shaft along the pier’s pilings. The water sent it back. He left it lighting the pier, lifted the mike from its cradle. Cleared his throat. How would they be addressed? “Boats on the harbor”? He thumbed the button: “Boats on the harbor. Any occupants of boats in the harbor. Is there anyone on any boat out there?” And then he added as if ashamed, “This is the police.”

  Among the trailers to his right he noticed doorways lighting up and one or two silhouettes in them; but the boats only floated in the dark. Taking his flash, he left the car and walked to the phone booth in front of the Cove Restaurant, a large building that had been closed for some weeks in anticipation of an overhaul. He squinted at the water as he dialed Merton at his home
.

  “Mrs. Merton?”

  “No. It’s me. Who’s that? Navarro?”

  “Yeah. Look—”

  “Did I sound like a woman?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “What’s going on? You get to the pier?”

  “I’m at the pier right now. Look, can I get a boat out here with a good spot on it? Just a private boat, gimme a suggestion who to call. Somebody may or may not have witnessed a possible attack nearly an hour ago where a guy went in the drink, possibly unconscious.”

  “I thought it was a trailer-court beef.”

  “It is and it isn’t.”

  “Man overboard, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t want to call in the Coast Guard or whoever. I guess he’d be ashore by now or drowned, one of the two, huh?”

  “Unless he revived, and washed out past the easy water. So then he’d be swimming around out there.”

  “Shit.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “Did you check the shore?”

  “I’m at the shore. I’m sweeping my flash around as we speak. A lot of rocks is all I see.”

  “You better get me a corpse, or we’re gonna have a major production.”

  “Could he last an hour? I mean, it’s pretty cold water.”

  “It’s pretty cold, yeah.”

  “Could he last?”

  “I’d say no.”

  Before he went back among the trailers he walked the pier, a solid and expensive structure some two hundred yards long, with a kiosk halfway down, and he burned the water with his light, but couldn’t break its surface. No ghostly hand ascended. The rocks all looked like rocks. The tide’s edge came not much closer than beneath the kiosk.

  Katrina Wells stood on her doorstep when he drove up. He rolled down his window and motioned her over. “I’m gonna go right back down there,” he said, “but let me just check this with you. The two guys fighting. They must have been this side of the cabin, am I right?”

  “The cabin?”

  “The hut there, I guess it’s the harbormaster’s office?”

  “They were this way.”