“Everybody liked him,” the giant in leather repeated defiantly. “There was something really sweet about him. Not just the way he looked, either. I’ve seen lots of great-looking kids who gave off negative vibes, but this kid was really…”
“Sweet,” offered the man at the table. He nodded his head. “I guess he was.”
“Okay,” I said, “he was sweet.”
“You ever like anyone on first sight?” the man at the table asked me.
“My job doesn’t really lend itself to snap opinions.”
“Well, everybody here liked him on first sight.” He lifted a broad hand and massaged a scar on his cheek. “Funny thing, charm.”
“It certainly is,” I said. “How tall?”
“Stand up.” That was Stan again. I did. “Same as you,” he said. “Six feet or so.”
“What color eyes?”
Stan lifted a hand. “Who could see?”
“Blue,” said the man at the table.
“Ho, ho,” the giant said softly.
The man at the table blinked up at him. “Same color as mine.”
“Blond hair, blue eyes, six feet, seventeen or eighteen. Build?”
“Strong,” the man at the table said. “I told you. Like a farm boy.”
“Anything else?” I asked the room at large. No one spoke.
I turned to face the bartender. “How much do I owe you?”
“On Max,” he said mournfully.
So, everybody loved Max, I thought outside, squinting against the glare. So, a farm boy.
Twenty-five cents in a pay phone bought me two messages on my answering machine. Christy, sounding brisker than he had last night, said he’d found a place to stash himself for the meantime, and he’d call later, he didn’t want to leave the number on a machine. I was commending him for his discretion when the machine beeped and my mother’s distinctive cigarette rasp asked if I was there. When I wasn’t, she snorted impatiently and ordered me to call. If I still remembered the number.
I dropped another quarter into the phone and dialed, inhaling the reek of ammonia and remembering a time when phone booths didn’t double as public urinals. Phone booths probably thought of it as the golden age.
“This is your son,” I said when my mother answered. She wore her hearing aid in the ear she didn’t put the handset against, and lately she sometimes failed to recognize my voice.
“Oh,” she said. “Hold on.” The phone clattered to the surface of her kitchen counter. I used the idle moment to watch a young businessman in a Heineken-green Mazda Miata gently rear-end a large truck on Santa Monica Boulevard. The truckdriver climbed deliberately down from his cab, an unusually wide man with a Marine buzz cut, wearing camouflage combat fatigues and seven-league boots, and stalked slowly back toward the Miata. The yuppie in the Miata took one horrified look, reversed out from under the truck, and backed away rapidly, cutting the wheel sharply and bumping up into the parking lot of a minimall.
“Had to turn off the stove,” my mother said.
“I don’t know how you can cook in this heat,” I said, just to be polite.
“And you don’t much care, either. Are you sitting down?”
“No. Why?”
“I just wondered. I thought perhaps you were ill or something.”
“No, I’m fine.” The man in the Miata threw the car into first and squealed off down Santa Monica Boulevard.
“Or had broken your leg.”
“Both legs in working order, thanks.”
“Or your dialing finger.”
“Here I am, Mom,” I said. “Standing on a sweltering corner in West Hollywood, up to my ankles in urine, calling my dear old mother.”
“I want to see you.” Mom didn’t waste a lot of time on chat.
“Fine. When?”
“Whenever you can spare a moment for your only mother.”
“Anytime that’s good for you.”
“Well, as you know, we have a very crowded social schedule, your father and I. Channel nine is showing back-to-back reruns of M*A*S*H.”
The truckdriver had run out of profanity after unleashing a long and inspiringly original stream of invective. “Just say when.”
“Three,” she said. “ M*A*S*H starts at four-thirty.”
I checked my watch: one-forty. “Fine,” I said.
“Three sharp,” she said. “You know how your father feels about Alan Alda.”
The man who answered the line at the Long John Connection was even less chatty than my mother. A shrill chorus of phones rang insistently in the background.
“Yeah, I heard about Max,” he said. “Awful, just awful.”
“I need to talk to the owner.”
“That’s me. I’m a little short on help here.”
“It won’t take much time.”
“I doubt that. Look, I can’t keep this line tied up. It’s costing money. Can you come over here?”
“Where’s ‘here’?”
“Kings Road. Just north of the Boulevard.”
“Which boulevard?”
There was a pause. “Santa Monica,” he said patiently. “The Boulevard.”
“Sorry, I’m a little addled today. See you in five minutes.”
Addled was an understatement. The bullshot had cooked up in the sunshine, sending its fumes directly to my frontal lobe, by the time the door to apartment 8 opened to reveal a man who looked like Grizzly Adams’s more poorly groomed younger brother: maybe forty-five, beard to mid-chest over an Alvin Ailey T-shirt, thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail, tinted aviator-style glasses over odd gold-colored eyes.
“You’re the pay phone?” The gold-brown eyes flicked over my shoulder, making sure I was alone.
“About Max,” I said.
He ran the name through his frontal lobe while he looked at me. It was a speculative look. Finally he nodded. “I’m Jack.” He put out a hand and mauled mine with it. “Come on in, air-conditioning’s expensive. I can give you ten minutes.”
Four men sat on couches and director’s chairs, talking on phones. “Oooh, I’d like that,” one of them said in a seductive voice. “Do you think you could do it twice?”
I closed the door behind me. “You knew Max?”
Jack straightened his glasses, which were already as straight as a plumbline. “Everybody knew Max.” It was beginning to sound like a litany. “The saint of the sidewalks. What’s your connection?”
I told him. He never took the gold-brown eyes from my face. No polite nods, no reflexive sounds of agreement. When I was finished, he said, “Christy,” in a noncommittal tone.
“That seems to be the general opinion.”
Jack turned toward the kitchen, and I followed. “He’s a Jonah. You a sailing man?”
“I know what a Jonah is. Bad luck.”
“More than that.” He reached back and pulled fingers through his ponytail. “Bad luck for other people, too. Some people trail clouds of it, like scent.” The kitchen was white and spotless, with three electric coffee makers on the tile counter. Labels on the pots read cinnamon, decaf, and ecstasy blend. At the far end of the kitchen was one of those little greenhouse windows people are so fond of these days, jammed full of terra-cotta pots sprouting foliage. Jack pulled up a stool at the counter and indicated another for me.
I eyed the coffee. “Who had it in for Max?”
He shrugged. “Nobody. What was there to hate? He was generous, good-hearted, and stupid. The perfect mark.”
“He didn’t strike me as stupid.”
“About himself. He was brilliant about everybody else.”
“You know that personally?”
He looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Was he brilliant about you?”
Jack chewed the inside of his lip, looking dubious, and followed my gaze toward the coffeepots. “You’re confusing me. You want some coffee?”
“I’d love some. I’m recovering from a bullshot.”
“Lady Ecstasy for you,” he said, getting up to pour.
“So what about Max?”
“I’m not sure why you’re here.” He held out a heavy white mug.
“I told you.” I took the mug and wandered toward the greenhouse window.
“Max,” he said, weighing his words, “Max just had to help people. There weren’t enough hours in the day, you know?”