Digging James Dean Read online

  I suspected that was one of the tricks of her trade, the parolee gambling the replay wouldn’t be legally compromising and playing back drug buys or sex dates. “They would have called my cell if it was important,” I said.

  She glanced around the apartment one last time, tapped the envelope against the palm of her hand, asked, “How’s your love life? Seeing anybody?”

  “Nobody. How about you?”

  She snorted, the closest she ever came to laughing. As though she’d tell me anything about her personal life. “You’re going to Indiana?”

  “Small town called Fairmount.”

  “Notify the local police department when you arrive. They like to know when felons come to town.” She pointed the envelope toward me like a finger.

  I took it.

  “And report back in when you return,” she said.

  I waited until she reached her car before I played the messages on my machine. My life then was reasonably clean but I expected to hear from my local fence, who had promised to see whether a new Nikon had recently fallen off the back of a truck. The first message was from my mother. I leaned against the wall, then sat down. I hadn’t heard from her in six months. I closed my eyes and let her voice wash over me. She and Pop were fine, she said. She wished she could talk to me rather than the machine. She was sorry we’d fallen out of contact, hoped I was okay. I could call tomorrow, if I liked. Pop would be out. She’d be in all day. The next message was from my fence.

  I leashed the Rott and eased down the steps, past the flashing colored lights behind the ground-floor apartment’s barred windows. I walked slowly to minimize the pain each step jarred into my head. The last time my mom and I had spoken she’d been in the hospital with a broken hip and laceration above her left eye. She’d fallen off the front step, she claimed, but I knew Pop had hit her. He hit everybody. When I was a child, I’d accepted it as one of the laws of life, as certain as gravity. Every man lost his temper, Pop more than most. He hit me one day, my older sister the next, the day after that my brother. If my mother provoked him he’d beat her, too. She never left him. The last time I’d seen her, in the hospital, we’d argued about that. I’d just been released from prison. She probably didn’t think I had a right to lecture.

  My fence sat three rows high in the stands overlooking the blacktop basketball courts, watching a pickup game of shirts and skins. I tied the Rott to a palm tree and folded a hundred-dollar bill into my palm. The fence nodded once when I neared the steps, giving me permission to approach. Wraparound sunglasses shielded his eyes and he didn’t turn his head from the game, seemingly absorbed in the flow of action.

  “Still got that dog?” he asked.

  I dipped the bill into the side pocket of his black leather trench coat, a liberty he wouldn’t have allowed with less regular clients. I told him I did.

  “Don’t like dogs,” he said.

  I could have pointed out that most housebreakers and fences didn’t. Dogs are bad for business. I thanked him for the service and left with a new, boxed Nikon in a plastic bag.

  A neighbor sat perched on the lower two steps when I returned to the apartment building, a mug of what smelled like mint tea warming his hands. The steps overlooked the strip of plants that made his a garden apartment. “You’re the one with the dog,” he said, his voice friendly and completely unaware of the obviousness of the statement. The building housed the eccentrics typically found in Venice Beach and a few young urban professionals, whose recent arrival was driving up the rents, making it uninhabitable for those making less than six figures a year. With curly gray hair swarming about his head like a cloud and mystic blue eyes that seemed to see everything and nothing at the same time, I guessed my neighbor was one of the eccentrics.

  “Not for long,” I said, and pulled the Rott to my side. “I expect to be out next week sometime.”

  “I heard about the eviction notice.” He stood as though about to offer his sympathies, but his first good look at my face paused him. His glance lifted just above my head, the tint of his eyes darkening as though an invisible something hovered there and that something was worrisome. “Oh, no,” he said.

  “Oh no what?”

  “Somebody hit you on the back of the head.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Your aura,” he said. “Forgive me for not introducing myself earlier. I’m Dr. James Whitehead. I’m an aura healer.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  His glance dropped to meet my eyes just long enough to be polite and drifted again to the space above my forehead. “We really have to take care of that.”

  “Take care of what?”

  He raised his hand cautiously and pointed to the side of my head. “Your aura is so badly cracked it’s almost separated.”

  “You can see my aura?”

  He nodded, no doubts at all. “You have a lot of anger, don’t you?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Your aura is so red it’s pulsating.” He moved his hand lightly over my head and above my shoulders. “Thank God you have some blue in there to compensate. Let’s just hope it’s enough, eh? A couple days of treatment should tell, a week at the most.”

  Every day, diviners of Tarot, palm reading, astrology, numerology, and every other variety of psychic seer lined the Venice Beach boardwalk, waiting patiently for customers. I guessed his angle. “I don’t have any money,” I said.

  “We’re neighbors. I’ll do it without charge.” He darted through the door of his apartment before I could object.

  Through the crack in the doorway I noticed a battery of colored lights pointing at an aluminum pole. The pole stretched from the floor to the ceiling, squares of what looked like photographs clipped to the metal. Dr. Whitehead emerged from the apartment carrying an antique Polaroid camera. “The sequencing of lights bathing the photograph is what heals the aura,” he said, as though it made perfect sense. He framed a close-up and pressed the shutter. The camera spat out a tongue of film and for a moment both of us watched the old but still compelling magic of a photograph emerging from the black.

  “What’s so bad about having a cracked aura?” I asked.

  “That’s how the demons get inside your head.” He waved the Polaroid to speed the drying. “Through cracks in the aura. And once they’re in, they’re hell to get out again.”

  I gave that a moment of thought, asked, “If new demons get in, any chance they’ll kill the ones already there?”

  Four

  ISLEPT that night curled toward the window on a red-eye flight into Chicago, woke just long enough to drag my camera bag from the terminal, crashed out again slumped against the passenger window of Frank’s rental car. I opened my eyes a couple hundred miles later to the film-strip jitter of telephone poles clipping by. Farmland lined the highway, the fields fallow in midwinter, and the sky hovered, low and gray, above the land. A half mile from the road, grain silos flanked a barn painted Andrew Wyeth red. Awareness returned to me like a series of lights thrown on, one by one. I felt anxious about something I couldn’t identify, but my headache was gone and my arms tingled with energy. Sleep cures most ills and it was curing mine. I asked, “Where are we?”

  “A few miles outside Kokomo, Indiana.” Frank leaned against the door, his head tilted toward the side window and right wrist draped over the wheel, the posture of a man in the middle of a long drive. I reached into my camera bag on the backseat, slid out the hot Nikon, and focused on Frank’s profile. When he yawned I released the shutter.

  “The Raelians,” he said, like the punch line to a Surrealist joke.

  I knew community service clubs were big in the Midwest so I asked, “You mean the Rotarians? What do they have to do with anything?”

  “Not the Rotarians. The Raelians. They’re a religious sect that believes scientists from another planet created all life on earth.”

  I figured he was just talking, trying to stay awake. I said, “That doesn’t sound so screwy. In fact, it sounds almos
t normal.”

  Frank glanced away from the road to judge whether or not I spoke seriously. “When that guy hit you on the head, did it turn your brain into cottage cheese?”

  “You know what I heard the Scientologists say?”

  “That’s it, first hospital we pass, I’m committing you.”

  “A hundred billion space aliens were kidnapped in ancient times, brought to Earth, and blown up with hydrogen bombs.” Dr. Whitehead had told me that the day before. “We can’t see them, but that’s the reason we’re all so screwed up, because we’re infested with the souls of murdered space aliens. And those murdered space aliens? They’re not very happy about being murdered, which is why they insist we can’t be happy either, until the Scientologists chuck ’em all out. Compared to that, the idea of alien scientists sounds almost sweet.”

  “The Scientologists aren’t cloning themselves, at least, not yet. God help us if they find a way to bring L. Ron Hubbard back.”

  I remembered what Frank had said the day before, his claim that a group of cloners had broken into James Dean’s grave. “That’s what the Raelians do? They’re cloners?”

  “They say we’re all clones of alien scientists. It’s their religious duty to clone themselves, a point of honor.” He stretched the word honor around a wry smile.

  “Little harder to do than say, isn’t it? It’s not like you can go out to the local electronics store, buy yourself a do-it-yourself clone kit.”

  “The Raelians have one thing not even the most sophisticated research labs can produce.” He jutted his chin toward my abdomen. “Wombs. Hundreds of them, donated by volunteers culled from the sect.” The face of James Dean flashed by on the right, appended to a town-limits sign welcoming us to Fairmount. At first sight, the town didn’t present itself as more than a few grain silos, vacant fields, and real estate signs. “This first piece needs to be visually compelling—desecrated grave sites, spooky shots suggesting aliens in the cemetery, that sort of thing. We’re going to ride this story for a couple issues, whether it’s true or not.”

  I didn’t have a problem with that, not then. I glanced out the window. Fairmount was a farming community, not more than five thousand people in the town itself, and like most farming communities the only structure of any size in what passed for downtown was the bank, a Victorian-era brick building two stories tall topped by an onion-domed turret, as though the architect’s steady and sober Midwestern vision had suddenly slipped into Slavic fantasy.

  The town marshal worked out of a two-room office around the corner from the bank, close enough to come running in the event someone wanted to rob it or just needed help with their deposit bags. His uniform—a snappy green number with triangular arm patches and big gold badge—clung to a slim, muscular build, the type of beautiful young body most men lose in their thirties. Portraits of his wife and abundant children on the wall framed him like a halo. I knew by the family photos that I’d left L.A. far behind; no officer of the law in L.A. would leave photos of his family in plain sight. Too dangerous. I’d thought towns like Fairmount existed only in old Hollywood, as fictitious backdrops for Jimmy Stewart movies. He stood from behind his desk when we entered his office and without waiting for an introduction said, “You must be the reporter from Scandal Times.”

  Frank stopped dead still, his eyes widening in mock wonder, and asked, “How did you know?”

  “We don’t get a lot of strangers this time of year, not until spring, when the tourists come. The lady, now,” he said, nodding at me, “I suspect she’d probably be your photographer.”

  I looked at him through the Nikon’s viewfinder. “Lucky guess. What was it gave me away, the camera?”

  The marshal laughed at the remark as though he truly thought it funny and introduced himself as Tom Tuchman. “Just call me Tuck,” he said. “Everybody else does, whether I like it or not.” His vehicle was parked outside. Maybe we’d like to drive out to the crime scene? He could brief us on the status of the investigation on site, answer any questions we might have while we took a look firsthand. Neither Frank nor I were accustomed to such hospitality from the law and mostly kept our mouths shut as he drove the streets of Fairmount, afraid that if we said anything, he’d change his mind about cooperating and drop us on the highway leading out of town. Wisely or not, I refrained from disclosing, as my parole officer demanded, that I was a convicted felon serving out my parole under the guidance of the California Department of Corrections. Given the peacefulness of the town, he might be shocked to meet a real criminal.

  James Byron Dean’s grave lay in a small tree-lined cemetery at the edge of a field that may have grown corn in the summer but in February stretched frozen and bleak to the horizon. His name and the brief dates of his existence had been engraved into a stumpy block of polished beige granite mounted on an unpolished granite pedestal. Behind Dean’s name the headstone had been painted white, like a single page in the Book of Judgment. The headstone was neither larger nor smaller than those surrounding it, nor was its position within the cemetery in any way privileged. As a monument to one of the most famous figures of the twentieth century, a symbol of beautiful but doomed youth not just to his generation but to succeeding ones as well, the grave site was a bit underwhelming.

  Tuck kicked at the edges of a gently packed mound of dirt in front of the headstone, the entire grave site fenced by the yellow tape that marked it as a crime scene. “By the standards of a big city like Los Angeles, the theft of a couple bones might not seem like the crime of the century, but around here it’s pretty big news.” He pointed to the surrounding fields. Near the western horizon a pale silver light glimmered through the haze; sunset, or what passed for it during a Midwestern winter. “As you can see, we’re pretty isolated out here. They came on a Sunday night, about midnight, maybe a little later, figuring everybody would have done their visiting over the weekend. As a matter of fact, the robbery wasn’t spotted until the following afternoon.” He sidestepped to the headstone and sat on his heels. “See this red stuff here?” He pointed to five puddles of congealed wax on the headstone’s granite base.

  I lay on the frozen grass for a low-angle shot of the marshal, his finger pointed ominously toward the headstone. “It’s candle wax,” he said. “They set five red candles on poor Jimmy’s headstone, probably part of some Satanic ritual, before they broke the earth. The ground is pretty well frozen here, so they came well equipped. It’s not as though they had a bit too much to drink, suddenly decided to go digging for souvenirs.” He stepped over the crime-scene tape and fingered through the mounded earth until he uncovered a long splinter of wood. “Whoever done it took the time to fill the grave back in but they couldn’t do anything about the grass. When I found pieces of wood mixed in with the dirt, I knew they’d broken all the way through to the coffin.”

  “What bones they take?” Frank cupped his reporter’s notebook in his left palm, pencil tip poised to record the reply.

  “The entire set of bones from the left hand were picked clean as corn by a crow. The right foot, too. Two ribs, five vertebrae, some small bones from the neck, I forget what they’re called, hyoids or something, both femurs, a tibia, and five teeth.” Tuck palmed dirt over the piece of coffin he’d uncovered and stood. “I asked a doctor to come out from Marion. Don’t know what the right word is for what he did. An inventory, I guess. That’s how we learned what was missing. He said digging up a corpse was common in Satanic rituals.”

  “That was smart, getting the doctor to examine the body, but did you ever stop to think the people who lit these candles might be setting a trap for you?”

  Tuck dug a white handkerchief from his left hip pocket and used it to wipe his hands. “How so?”

  “Simple misdirection,” Frank said. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? They want you to think it’s witchcraft because that’s what they know you’ll expect to see. Everybody knows devil worshippers are more likely to steal the skull than the bones of the hand or foot.” Frank turned
to me and winked. “How about a picture of the marshal here, next to the headstone?”

  “Already got it,” I said.

  Frank turned a serious look on Tuck, asked, “What do you know about cloning?”

  “Not much,” Tuck said.

  “Did it occur to you that Mr. Dean’s grave might have been robbed by a rogue sect of cloners, intent on artificially reproducing a new copy of the actor?”

  Tuck smiled, thinking the big-city reporter was making fun of his small-town gullibility, but when Frank didn’t acknowledge the joke his grin turned more wary. “I’m familiar with the kind of stories Scandal Times likes to print.” He knew he was being had, his grin said, it had just taken him an extra moment to figure out how. “Given my druthers, I’d be talking to reporters from the New York Times or Chicago Tribune, but I know that’s never going to happen. Fairmount’s just not big enough.”

  “A hundred million eyes,” Frank said.

  Tuck looked up, wondering what that had to do with anything.

  “That’s the number of eyes that scan the Scandal Times headlines at the supermarket checkout counter, and this is a front-page story for us, not something we’d bury like the Times, on page forty-two between ads for men’s underwear.”

  Tuck folded the handkerchief, taking care to get the creases right, said, “I get your point, and I sure appreciate you taking the time to come out here. If you want to get down to the truth of it, those bones are a major part of who we are as a town, and to have them stolen, even just some of them, it hurts like the dickens. The more press we can get, letting people know what happened, the better. How you cover the story is your business. My job is to tell you the facts. And right now, your guess is as good as mine.”