“What was your name again, please?”
“Wilhelm Frankheimer.”
“Wilhelm. I gotta tell you. Do you have anything physical to show me? Something that’s been damaged? Because it’s all sounding very unreal.”
“Just stake the place out,” Frankheimer insisted.
“Again, I’d have to say we’re dealing with suspicions here. Probably not too rational ones.”
Frankheimer executed an abrupt shift in his focus. “Now there’s something for you, Officer.” He swung his head around slowly, following the progress of a pale convertible sports car as it passed.
“I’ll stick with General Motors,” Navarro said.
Already Dead / 103
“That’s Nelson Fairchild. I just got a message that that guy is plotting something nefarious. Do you know what he’s doing right now?”
“He’s going to the store.”
“He’s picking up the Barron’s financial weekly for his dad, I bet.”
“I gotta do something similar, Wilhelm — errands and such. We’re always available if something specific turns up. Until then—”
“Was it his dad who died? Was it old Fairchild?” Navarro flashed him a false smile. “Nobody dead around here lately.” The tall man raised up one finger in front of Navarro’s face. “By way of a simple farewelclass="underline" don’t get your lips frozen on me. And don’t run over my foot.”
“Great,” Navarro said, and started across the street thinking that anybody who hung out in a Laundromat deserved exactly this.
The kid he’d caught peeping the other night was also on the scene.
He stood over by the gas station, his gaze avoiding Navarro’s, trying to look as if the man with him, obviously his dad, was no acquaintance at all. Navarro decided to let him shape his own zone, and crossed to the cafe without looking back.
He thought he’d better not start with the Coors. Better get a piece of pie, check out the cafe’s fragile-looking waitress, avoid having to arrest himself later. It was warm inside, and the place smelled good. The waitress was a little older than he’d thought. Or at least not too well made-up.
He’d talked to her before and had felt, at that time, that he was getting somewhere. In fact she’d practically agreed to host an orgy. “How’s the pie?” he asked her.
“I wouldn’t lie about it,” she said. “I don’t own the place.” He hadn’t stopped in again, so he guessed she’d put them back at square one. But she smiled halfway when she set down his pie and coffee.
She had a tattoo on her right hand, a tiny peace symbol. And it looked like one nostril was pierced, though she didn’t have a ring in it. In L.A., cops didn’t date such women.
Here they did. Here he was opening up to aberrations, transforming under the unrelieved stress of these absurd people and their New Age ideas, which seemed less and less outlandish beside the genuine psycho driveling of the Wilhelm type, not to mention the pounding surf, squawking seals, laughing crows, and the aliveness of all these 104 / Denis Johnson
monster trees. In L.A., it — these people, this scene — would all fit, all of it and much, much more, into the category of senseless Martian crap, this category a kind of fishbowl in which almost everything swam except you and a few other cops. You had to cut yourself off in L.A., stay outside the glass. But here the majority of these thousands of lives are only big, slow trees. Slow isn’t even right, the concept probably hasn’t got a word, it’s just that the aliveness of these millions of cedars and redwoods is hardly happening. So you find yourself dropping your defenses, opening up, breathing things in.
He sat at the counter jabbing with a fork at his apple pie. When the waitress came down to his end of things with the coffeepot, he lifted his hand to detain her wordlessly while he wiped his lips with his napkin and swallowed. She was svelte. Okay, bony. But definitely beautiful. “What’s your name?”
“Mo. But everybody calls me Maureen.” She laughed wildly. “I’m sorry!” she said quickly. “Cops make me nervous. I mean, it’s the other way around, they call me Mo.”
Her smile hit him right in the gut. She definitely had the face. He’d always been a face man, come to think of it. “Mo,” he repeated.
“And you’re Officer Navarro.”
“But everybody calls me Off.”
“No. But really.”
“John.”
“Okay, John. Cops make me nervous, John.”
She left him and went to take care of a young couple way over by the window, the only other customers.
And of course every once in a while you breathe something of these people into you, their kinky exhalations. You don’t breathe in anybody in L.A. Breathe? Breathe people in? Christ. He was starting to think like them. Which only proved he was breathing them in, a concept which, itself, he had breathed in. It was a vague deal, but then too he sensed that if he had to shoot somebody around here in the line of duty, if he killed one of these types, he’d stop turning into one of them.
What about the big man and his lurching accusations? What had he said? Anything real? Maybe drawing attention to himself, maybe trying to get himself some help or just his way of saying, Stop me before I do something too uncontrolled? Sometimes the twisted ones accused everybody else of doing what they really, in their hearts, Already Dead / 105
wanted to do themselves. These berserkers were infants in big bodies, that’s what the condition chiefly consisted of. Imagine a six-month-old with manual dexterity and an arsenal. He’d get his bottle all right. Then the SWAT people, and everybody dead and nobody knows why.
“Mo—”
She brought over the coffeepot.
But he covered his cup with his hand and said, “Remember when we talked before?”
She didn’t answer. Because they were virtually alone she was, he could see it, reluctant to be flirtatious now.
“I’d still like to see you sometime. Tonight, even.” She wouldn’t quite look at him, not directly.
“What do you think about that?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly her loneliness stank all over the room.
He told himself: let’s get out of here.
“Save my seat,” he said to her. “I gotta move my clothes around across the street.”
He left a five by his plate. Because he wasn’t coming back.
“Wait a minute,” she said when he had his hand on the doorknob.
He could feel his shoulders hunching and knew she could see it — he’d be looking yanked back, stopped against his will. “You left too much,” she said.
“No — keep the change.”
“This is a five.”
“I’ll be back in a second.”
“It doesn’t seem like you will.”
He had to go back and break it.
“If you’d really like to get together sometime,” she said.
“Sure,” he agreed, revolted with himself.
“I get off at nine.”
“Okay. Yeah. Fine.”
The look in her eyes was friendly and not that stupid. “You sure you’re up for it?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“You look like you’re under arrest.”
Navarro got back up the coast with his laundry before 5 P.M. to check in with Merton, nominally his boss but no one’s boss, 106 / Denis Johnson