The Fallen

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She said she was sorry again, and then she hung up.

7 (#ulink_20061301-782a-5cab-bf56-37af63b0edf7)

The man who threw me out of the Las Palmas Hotel is named Vic Malic and he lives in a rented room in the Gaslamp Quarter. It’s not far from the former Las Palmas, which was rebuilt as an Execu-Suites.

After his arrest Vic was overwhelmed with grief at what he’d done and he waived his right to a trial, pleading down to charges of aggravated assault, arson, public endangerment, larceny, and destruction of property.

He was somber and repentant during the proceeding and he explained himself with apparent honesty. He had been under terrible stress at the time. He was recently separated from his wife of six months, had gone bankrupt, and had just been denied his World Wrestling Federation certification, which would have allowed him to work. Apparently he had hurt a fellow wrestler during his tryout match, resulting in an unofficial black-balling of his career. He was down to his last sixty dollars. He had consumed nearly a liter of gin on the day he set the hotel on fire. He had no idea the natural gas submain that ran behind the sixth-floor rooms would blow. He had fully intended to jump out his window when the flames got bad enough but he had lost his courage after seeing me rip through the awning below. A suicide note had supported his story. In the end Vic had walked downstairs, looked down at me, and surrendered to a fireman.

I noticed him in the courtroom one day at lunch. The deputies had legcuffed him to a table in Courtroom Eight, then gone off to have lunch in the cafeteria. This was an accepted practice until a man on trial for stabbing a fourteen-year-old girl to death had slipped out of his cuffs and walked outside a free man. Now the San Diego accused are never left alone at lunch.

Anyway, I was walking by the courtroom and saw him through the door window, examining a sandwich that looked tiny in his huge hand. I went in and Vic hung his head and tried to turn away, though the leg cuffs didn’t leave him much wiggle room. It was my first time alone with him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, and the huge fury I had hoped to feel never came to me.

We talked for just a minute. It was very strange to be close to him again, close to that face that had been burned into my memory in such vivid detail. For a moment I smelled fire, and my heart beat wildly. He could hardly look at me. He asked if I could ever forgive him and I said sure, I forgive you right now, for whatever it’s worth.

‘I’ve got no grudge,’ I said. ‘But you shouldn’t take out your problems on other people. Even a child knows that.’

He was shaking his head, still looking down. ‘No. No, I’ll never do that again. I swear to God. Never, ever.’

When he told me that, it was approximately two months after throwing me from the window. And when he spoke, his words were accompanied by an outpouring of pale blue ovals. Since the fall I had been seeing a lot of pale blue ovals when people spoke and I was just beginning to understand that they meant sincerity.

So I believed him. I also know that insane people can be very believable and there was some doubt as to Vic Malic’s sanity. Two psychiatrists gave depositions, one for and one against him, but the actual condition of Vic’s mental health remained vague and disputed.

The next day, by coincidence, I had to be in court on another case. I’d bought a roach-coach burrito and was looking for a place to eat it in private and walked by Courtroom Eight to find Vic chained to the table again, fiddling with another tiny sandwich. So we had lunch together. He was an oddly gentle conversationalist, very curious and nonjudgmental. We talked mostly about the pro-wrestling circuit and his hope of getting that certification someday. Vic had begun a fitness program in his cell and he was already up to a thousand sit-ups and five hundred push-ups a day. He looked strong.

During the hearing, old Judge Milt Gardner listened with his usual wrinkled calm. Vic’s public defender noted that there was no loss of life, only two minor injuries besides my own – which was, thank God, far less damaging than it first appeared – and the aging, long-out-of-code Las Palmas was actually being wooed by Execu-Suites at the time of the fire. Vic’s apology to me and the court was lengthy and very moving. He said so many nice things about me I sort of wished he would stop. Gardner questioned Vic in depth, and I never sensed dishonesty in him. I never saw any shapes and colors that didn’t match his words.

Vic was given seven years in the state prison up in Corcoran. A few months in, he helped expose a ring of correctional officers who were staging fights between the inmates and betting on them. As an almost-professional wrestler Vic was heavily pressured to fight, but he turned state’s witness instead. It was an ugly story, went on for weeks, made the papers and TV.

He was released two and a half months ago, the day before Christmas, for good behavior and for helping to crack the fight ring.

I met Vic at the Higher Grounds coffee shop around the corner from his place. He lives on the fourth floor of his building, and though he’s invited me, I’ve never had the courage to go up and see how he lives. I like him, but I still can’t imagine being in the same room with him again, four stories up from the pavement. I’ve met him once a week for coffee, always on Fridays like today, for a couple of months now. It was Vic’s idea but I agreed to it. He needs me more than I need him and that’s okay, though we quickly run out of things to say.

‘Hello, Vic.’

‘Hi, Robbie, how’s it hangin’?’

‘The usual, you know.’

‘And how’s Gina?’

‘Great as ever.’

‘Tell her I said hi.’

Vic and Gina have never met but Vic always asks about her. I keep waiting for the red squares of deception or the black rhombuses of anger to spill out, but they never have.

I thought of Gina’s letter and the unhappiness and pain it contained.

‘How’s the book?’ I asked.

‘Sold eighteen this week.’

While in prison Vic wrote Fall to Your Life! It’s about his difficult life and how he turned it around after setting fire to the hotel and throwing me out the sixth-floor window. It’s all about having a can-do attitude. He self-published the book as soon as he was released and he sells it at the tourist places around town. He arrives in a sputtering ancient pickup truck with a small card table, a folding chair, a change box, and a box of books. The cover of the book is a picture of me falling from the hotel, used with the photographer’s permission. I appear oddly calm – faceup, legs and feet out, and though you can’t see my exact expression, I seem to be looking up at something small and puzzling.

I get uncomfortable looking at that picture. I’ve tried to imagine what I was thinking about when it was taken. But again, it all went by so quickly there’s no way to tell. I could have been thinking about anything from the way the back of my mother’s blouse used to crease in alternating directions as she walked away from the Normal Heights bus stop each morning, to the flag atop the bank building above me that was rapidly getting smaller as I fell, to my first Little League home run. Gina made me a copy of the video that was shown widely on local and national news, but I still hadn’t gotten up the courage to watch it. She has suggested more than once that viewing it might make me ‘whole’ again, but I honestly don’t want to see it. I’m not a hundred percent proud of some of the things I thought of on my way down and would prefer to keep those difficult memories to myself.

‘Here,’ he said.

‘No, I wasn’t—’

‘Come on, Robbie, I know you don’t need it, but take it.’

We agreed a month ago, when Vic started selling the books, that we’d share the proceeds. I told him I didn’t want money from his work, but he insisted and I could see that it was morally imperative for him to pay me. He suggested a seventy-five/twenty-five split, with the larger portion going to him. I figured that was fine since I didn’t want his money in the first place.

Fall to Your Life! sells for ten dollars even, so Vic handed me forty-five. Our best week, which coincided with a street fair in Little Italy, was one hundred and ten dollars. Seemed like everybody in San Diego bought his book that weekend.

He smiled.

‘Thanks, Vic.’

‘Well, you know. I still got NBC, the Union-Trib, and the Reader interested in doing a story on us. Esquire is a maybe.’

‘I’ve got nothing to tell them, Vic.’

‘I know. I respect that.’

‘Any word from the federation?’

‘I sent them the newspaper articles about me, so we’ll see. I think my publicity would be good for wrestling. You know, a guy getting his act together. They’re always looking for another angle.’

We took our coffees outside and stood by the brick wall. The cold front was still hovering over the city and the fog moved down Fourth Avenue like something dreamed. I looked north in the direction of the Salon Sultra then checked my watch. Gina would be coming in to work in just a few minutes.

‘Robbie, did you hear about the Ethics guy who got shot?’

‘It’s my case, Vic.’

‘Oh, man. A former cop. A city employee. Anything to do with a government agency is scary if you ask me.’

‘What have you heard?’

I asked because Vic lives downtown and he talks to a lot of people on the street, many of whom treat him like a celebrity. I’ve watched him from a distance, standing tall above his audience. They’re mostly the lost and lonely and destitute, but they’re an oddly curious bunch. They love to know and to pretend they know.

‘Micro says the guy busted him once.’

Micro is a small man named Mike Toner, who rotates between the homeless shelters and the jails and the churches and the sidewalks.

‘For what?’

‘Panhandlin’. Not really busted, just ran him off his corner. Micro recognized him from the picture in the paper. The guy, his daughter drowned and it ruined him.’

‘I guess that’s true,’ I said.

‘He shouldn’t have let that get him down,’ said Vic. ‘Look how you pulled yourself back up. And me.’

‘I’d rather get thrown out a window than have my little girl drown,’ I said. I don’t know how I knew this, not being a father, but I did.

Vic nodded, lost in thought. ‘I saw the Union-Trib article. It said there was a broken-down car, maybe a guy who saw something.’

I silently thanked George Schimmel. ‘We’re hoping someone will step forward. Keep your eyes and ears out, Vic.’

‘I’ll do anything to help you.’

A black VW Cabriolet convertible picked its way down the avenue. The top was down in the chill and the woman driving it wore a black leather coat. She had a string of pearls around her neck and a pair of dark sunglasses. She gave us a tired smile. I wondered what the life was like once you got past the cool clothes and cars – men, cash, rubbers, AIDS, drugs, danger, vice, jails, bonds, lawyers, madams, pimps, sleep all day, then do it again.

‘Seems like half the pretty women in San Diego drive those little convertibles,’ said Vic. ‘Man, they really get your attention.’

‘Yes, they do.’

I watched her drive away and thought again of Carrie Ann Martier and the place in Hawaii she was going to buy no matter how much it cost her.

‘Thanks for the royalty,’ I said.

‘Thanks for the coffee, Robbie.’

‘Next Friday?’

‘Sure. See you then. Robbie? You saved me, man. I love you. I really do.’

I walked north to Market then toward San Diego Bay. From half a block away I watched Gina go into the salon. Her head was down and her steps were quick and short. That made me feel slightly better. If she had come striding along the sidewalk, chin up and smiling at the world, I might have run down to the Execu-Suites, gone to the sixth floor, and jumped out again, away from the awning. Not really, but my heart hurt just watching her go through that door because I knew her heart hurt too.

I wanted to go after her but I didn’t. Sometimes, no matter how bad you want something, you just have to wait.

The Salon Sultra door is made of mirrored glass and when it closed behind her it completed the building’s larger reflection of Market Street and Gina was gone.

8 (#ulink_61387f45-593e-50d1-b7a2-0f8c1a48cef4)

McKenzie met me outside Uptown Management over on Fifteenth. Al Bantour was a slender man in an old blue suit. Sixties, gray hair and eyes. He mouthed an unlit cigar and gave us a canny once-over as McKenzie explained what we needed. He smiled around the cigar, then explained that yes, Garrett Asplundh had a place at the Seabreeze Apartments down in National City. Too bad what happened. Garrett was the last guy in the world he thought would get murdered. When the cops are getting lulled it’s a bad situation, most bad. Bantour said the on-site manager at the Seabreeze was a guy named Davey, and Davey ought to have an extra key. Any problems, just call. Wasn’t I the guy who got thrown out of the hotel?

We headed down I-5. Light traffic and the fog still thick out over the ocean.

I told McKenzie about my meeting with Carrie Ann Martier, about the sex videos made for Garrett, the Squeaky Clean Madam, her spot callers, and the girls in convertibles. McKenzie shook her head and exhaled in disgust. She told me she’d run across Squeaky Clean Madam’s enforcer and he was a real cool guy.

‘Cool, like he’d cut your nipple halfway off to teach you respect,’ she said. ‘Cool, like he’d break some ribs and toss you into Glorietta Bay to watch you suffer. Six-four, three hundred. Half of him’s tattoo. One of those big dudes with too small a head but he shaves it anyway. He’s got a carjack crew that works San Diego and TJ, and he runs cockfights out in east county. And an occasional gig for Jordan Sheehan because he likes pretty girls. Chupa Junior. Short for chupacabra. And ‘Junior’ because his daddy was just like him.’

I’d heard tales of the chupacabra. It meant ‘goatsucker’ in Spanish. It was a vampirelike creature with huge red eyes and a row of spines down its back. They were reputed to stand five feet tall and suck the bodies of goats, sheep, and other animals almost completely dry.

I thought about Carrie Ann Martier versus three hundred pounds of Chupa Junior and hoped she wasn’t foolish enough to run a hustle on her boss. She couldn’t win that one.

I thought of Gina again. I imagined her at work now, standing beside her chair, arms raised, shears and comb in hand, snipping away. Last year for her birthday, I bought her a pair of Hikari Cosmos scissors, among the best money can buy. They had molybdenum-alloy blades that were said to be able to ‘melt’ through hair. The Rylon glides were for accuracy from pivot to point. They cost twelve hundred dollars. They fit her small hands particularly well without the inserts she sometimes had to use. I’d had them inscribed along the inside of the tang, which is where the cutter rests his or her finger. It said Hugs and Kisses, Me, though because of limited space the words were hard to read. She somehow left them at the Mick Jagger trimming up in Beverly Hills not long after. The next day she’d made a dozen phone calls to the hotel but had never gotten them back. She was crushed. She couldn’t believe she’d just forgotten to put them back into their case and box. I couldn’t either so I scanned eBay for them and sure enough, there they were, with ‘genuine hair from Mr Jagger.’ I tried to quickly trump all bids by offering five hundred dollars over the asking price of thirty-five hundred, so long as I could authenticate the engraving first. I was willing to travel at my own expense and would of course pay in cash. The owner of the shears and hair turned out to be in Culver City. When I got to a squalid apartment I felt bad for the young maid who had found or more likely stolen them. Her muscular husband suddenly demanded seven thousand so I thanked the woman, put the shears in my pocket, and headed for the door. When the husband charged me I finally lost the temper I’d been trying so hard to keep and I punched him sharply in the solar plexus, pulled his shirt over his head, and pushed him to the floor. He was balled up and gasping when I walked out. I’d committed more than one crime in all of this, including assault and battery, and I drove home to San Diego with my stomach in a knot.