Try Dying Read online

  I thought of Jacqueline then, how proud she’d be of me. I’d tell her all about it at dinner. We were going to discuss wedding plans over oysters in a restaurant by the sea in Malibu. And then we’d watch the moon rise over L.A., huddled together on the beach.

  It was going to be the perfect night.

  4

  HOW DOES A hot young lawyer on the rise, a guy with a future draped with Brioni, go from the twentieth floor to the county jail? How does a guy become something he’s never been, more animal than man, able to and wanting to hurt people? Kill people? How does he go from light to darkness as fast as you can flip a switch in a mortuary basement?

  It begins with a phone call.

  “Oh God, Ty.”

  “Fran?”

  Fran was Jacqueline’s mother.

  “Oh God, oh God.”

  I was in my office, about to leave in the glow of deposition victory, when the call came. I knew from Fran’s voice it was about Jacqueline. Accident maybe. Slip and fall. In the hospital.

  “Fran, what is it?”

  “She’s dead, Ty. Oh God . . .”

  Her voice was spectral now. I could hear her crying.

  “Can you talk to me?” I managed to say.

  “An accident,” she said. “On the freeway.”

  Jacqueline.

  “Where is she? Where’d they take her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Someone . . . I don’t know . . .” She was lost to tears and I knew she couldn’t say any more.

  “I’ll be right over,” I said and hung up. I was vaguely aware that light was fading outside my office windows. The phone may have rung a couple of times, but I didn’t pick up.

  I heard some part of myself suggest I was sitting on a movie set, and they’d remove the walls any second now and the director would yell Cut and the lights would switch off and we’d all go home with cheerful good-byes.

  Nobody yelled Cut.

  What was I supposed to do now? Go identify the body? Look at Jacqueline on one of those beds they slide out of the metal drawer?

  The world receded like a stinking tide.

  All that was left was memory. That’s where I wanted to hide.

  5

  WE HAD MET a year before at a Mexican place on Pico. Usually three or four of us from the office would head there, order up the “grande sampler,” and start ragging on the Dodgers.

  On this particular night there were three of us —Danny, the geek genius who was head of the firm’s IT; Al, another associate; and me. Al was into his third maggie (Al always started quoting Charles Bukowski on his third margarita —“Love is a dog from hell” —but we allowed him to stay anyway) when a vision of unbelievable loveliness walked in with a second vision almost as beautiful. But only almost.

  My eyes must have bugged because Al grabbed my arm. “Listen!” he said. “These are the dead, the lepers. Seagulls are better. Seaweed is better.”

  “Will you shut up?” I said. Al was married to money and always joked about the graveyard of marriage. His Bukowski obsession was based on the poet’s misogyny, no doubt.

  Danny laughed.

  “You’re missing the point,” Al said.

  I shook my head. “The point is the hottest woman in the world just walked in here and you, my friend, do not appreciate it.”

  Al said, “If you do this, you are the dead.”

  His words stick with me, even now.

  But I was not dead then, anything but. I was in love (I usually fell in love during the second pitcher, but somehow knew this was going to be different—real). I called the waiter over and told him to send two margaritas to the two women who had just come in.

  “Fool,” Al said.

  I could see her face a few tables away. She had dark hair, long. Made me think of walking on the beach at night when the moon is full. Her eyes were feline, which made my heart kick even faster. When she smiled, she seemed to add another light to the building.

  Al kept quoting poetry. Danny tried to start a conversation about the Dodgers’ starting lineup. I only half listened as I watched the waiter deliver the drinks.

  The waiter pointed at me.

  The vision looked my way. I smiled at her, trying not to let her see my chest heaving as my pulse raced toward stroke level.

  She looked back at the waiter, shook her head, said something to him.

  The waiter looked confused for a moment, then sheepishly came back to me with the margaritas still on his tray.

  “They say thanks,” the waiter said. “But they don’t drink.”

  “Good,” said Al, reaching for the maggies. “More for me.”

  Don’t drink? I looked toward her again, feeling exposed, like one of those dupes on reality TV who allows cameras into his bathroom.

  The vision smiled at me and mouthed, “Thank you.”

  “Tyler!” Al wailed. “Don’t go there. Disaster awaits!”

  And those words haunt me. And probably always will.

  I did go over and attempted to put on my best George Clooney. “Ladies,” I said, “I hope that I did not offend by my offer, but I . . .” Suddenly, my tongue felt like a tree sloth. I just stood there, staring dumbly, a target for hunters.

  The other vision said, “But you just wanted to meet Jacqueline, right?”

  Jacqueline. Classic. (I never called her Jackie. Not once.)

  I noticed the other vision had a wedding ring on her finger. Was I too obvious when I looked at Jacqueline’s left hand? And saw no ring? And said to myself, There is a God?

  “Was I that transparent?” I said.

  “Like Glad Wrap,” the other vision said, but I wasn’t offended. Because I was still standing there. Jacqueline had not indicated I should take a flying leap.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I did want to meet you. Ty Buchanan.” I extended my hand to Jacqueline. She took it firmly and said, “Nice to meet you, Ty Buchanan. This is Rachel.”

  I shook hands with the other vision.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” I said, “I don’t do this. I mean, I guess I do because, here I am, right?” Idiot. Make a point! “I mean I’m not usually this forward.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Rachel said. She had curly blond hair and an impish smile.

  There was a silence, during which someone shouted an epithet in Spanish from the kitchen. The three of us laughed.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Jacqueline said.

  Al was glaring at me from our table, pointing at the pitcher of margaritas, only half empty. Be here now, he seemed to be saying, you dead, you leper.

  I sat. “You sure this isn’t an intrusion?”

  Rachel spoke first, which was to be the pattern. “Frankly,” she said, “you’re an interesting experiment.”

  The experiment, it turned out, was something Rachel had cooked up and Jacqueline was embarrassed to have revealed. It boiled down to the fact that Jacqueline had broken up with a boyfriend of three years —There is a God—and had not dated anyone for over five months. Rachel had decided it was time, but Jacqueline was not so sure.

  “I think she’s ready,” Rachel said. “What do you think Ty?”

  Jacqueline’s face was turning red, and I was more deeply in love than at any time in my entire life. “I think,” I said, “that I would like to take Jacqueline to lunch and get to know her better.”

  6

  I HELD FRAN all through the funeral. Her poor body shook the entire time. Fran Dwyer was a good woman who had endured more pain than anyone ever should. Twenty years of an abusive marriage. And now this, the death of her only child.

  For Fran’s sake, and maybe for my own, I wished with all my being that I could switch places with Jacqueline. If one of us had to be dead, let it be me. At least Jacqueline would have Fran, and they could go on together.

  Now life had no meaning. No, that’s too generic, too Philosophy 101. It was that life had no flavor, no color; no
texture or taste. With Jacqueline I’d been on a bridge, walking across a gorge, she leading me, holding my hand, helping me to pass from one state of being to another. Through Jacqueline I was walking away from the blithe selfishness that had been my mental landscape toward an unfamiliar place I could barely see. I could only perceive that the light was better over there, that the colors were richer, the smells sweeter. And while it was going to mean setting up in unfamiliar territory, she would be with me and we would be there together forever and that was all that mattered.

  Now that was gone, the bridge had fallen down the gorge, I was back on my side again, and it wasn’t home anymore. It was lifeless, colorless.

  I stared at Jacqueline’s coffin, up in front, covered with flowers, and a big framed portrait of her for all to see.

  The portrait was beautiful but still could not do justice to the woman I loved.

  The firm—I always spoke of it as an entity, with its own personality and ego and vindictiveness—had given me a week off, but I didn’t know how I was going to be able to work again.

  They say time heals all wounds.

  They’re full of it.

  I kept thinking of that first lunch. It was the day after I met her. A seafood place in Santa Monica. Lunch dates are a good invention. Low pressure, and you have a chance to see if things should go further.

  There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to go further with Jacqueline. And not in a sexual way. That was the weird part, for me at least. Usually sex was the first thing I thought about, but when I saw Jacqueline walk in for lunch my knee-jerk reactions melted away like butter sauce. I was feeling something deeper.

  And if lunches were opera singers, this one was Placido Domingo. The term click seemed invented for Jacqueline and me.

  We talked about a whole range of things. She wanted to know all about me and what she called my ruling passions. I told her about my days as a rock drummer in high school and college, about my love for the Dodgers. She seemed most interested in the drumming part and begged to hear me play.

  I found out why she didn’t drink.

  Her father had been a raging alcoholic. Raging in every sense of the term. Jacqueline and her mother, who still lived in the Reseda home Jacqueline grew up in, had never left. Once Jacqueline had run away, but she willingly came back because she couldn’t bear to have her mother living with him alone.

  Her father died when she was in high school. And unlike most of her friends, she had never had the desire to drink.

  We didn’t just talk about that, of course. We spent three and a half hours at that lunch. Jacqueline was on summer break from teaching, so the time didn’t matter to her.

  I was expected back at the office for a two o’clock meeting, which didn’t matter to me. I skipped it.

  When we parted, she let me kiss her and then she said, “Keep warm.”

  Those were always her parting words, for some reason. No matter what the weather was. I liked it. It fit her.

  Keep warm.

  Two weeks after our lunch she was at my house and I got out my old practice pad and sticks, and gave her my imitation of Neil Peart.

  She ate it up, and that’s when I asked her to marry me. She said No. Six weeks later I tried again, and she said Wait.

  Eventually she said Yes.

  And now she was dead.

  She had so many friends, and they all came it seemed. Many of them had a few words to say before they lowered the coffin. The cemetery—Eternal Valley, it was called, which messed with my mind—was just off the 14 Freeway, overlooking Santa Clarita. The day was sunny and clear, the kind Jacqueline loved.

  When it was my turn I tried to say something. Everyone looked at me with complete understanding and support.

  “I just want to say, first off, how much I appreciate all of you being”—a knot in my throat. I looked down, breathed deep—“for being here. So many of you are lucky. You knew Jacqueline longer than I did. Her whole life some of you. I really envy you that.”

  The faces in the chapel pews started to go fuzzy. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

  “I mean, everything Jacqueline was, as a person, you can see just by looking around. Seeing her family and friends. And that means I was the lucky one after all. That she chose me to spend her life—” The knot came back. The tears kept coming. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish.

  “I just want to say, I hope she can hear us now. Because I want her to know I loved her more than anything.”

  That was all.

  7

  RACHEL CAME TO me after and held me close. “Ty, she loved you so much. She told me how much.”

  I just closed my eyes and felt the last of my tears fall into her hair.

  “Want me to drive you?” she said. Rachel was having the reception at her house.

  “I can make it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Take Fran, will you?”

  “Of course. See you there.”

  I waited until everyone left and sat in the chapel alone for a while. Looked at the stained-glass window. Jesus, with a halo, hand held out to comfort the bereaved.

  It wasn’t working for me. But I didn’t blame Jesus or God or the glass or the chapel. I blamed myself.

  For not telling Jacqueline more how I felt about her. For not telling her from the deepest part what she meant to me. I’ve never been accused of wearing my emotions on my sleeve. Iceman, like in Top Gun. I wish I’d killed that guy off when I met Jacqueline.

  Now it was too late.

  When I finally left the chapel, I saw the guy in the dirty clothes again. I say again because I’d noticed him at the beginning of the ceremony, standing outside the chapel, across the drive. I figured him for a maintenance guy at the cemetery. But here he was again, at the grave site, watching from afar as I made my way back toward the parking lot.

  There are people who frequent cemeteries. They get vicarious pleasure from watching the mourners. Hey, whatever works to take away pain. I can understand that desire.

  So I didn’t pay the guy much mind at first, until I saw him following me.

  He didn’t get too close. Not right away. I’d take a few steps, stop to talk to one of Jacqueline’s friends, and notice he was a few steps closer, too.

  Looking at me.

  That’s when I started to burn. What right did he have to intrude? I was this close to turning around and smashing him one in the mouth.

  Now, stepping out of the chapel, seeing him again just looking at me, I knew I was still close.

  “Hey, what’s your problem?” I said.

  He was Latino, maybe forty, maybe homeless. He had that look, though it was just an assumption on my part. His flannel shirt was splotched with black stains, like deep fried grease. The front of his jeans almost glistened with oily residue of some kind.

  And his eyes. They were haunted, like he’d seen things a person should never have to see. His eyes froze me.

  “Please,” he said.

  There was something in his voice that was either insane or a call that I absolutely needed to hear. Maybe some of both.

  “Please what?” I said.

  “You are him?”

  “Who?”

  “The man of the woman?”

  Somehow this made sense. “Yes, yes. What about it?”

  “She die in the car.”

  How did he know this? “Who are you?”

  “I see it.”

  “See what?”

  “See her die.”

  Unreal. If he was telling the truth and not just making a play for inclusion in my misery, he was a witness to the defining moment of the rest of my life.

  “You saw the accident?”

  “Sí.”

  “So?”

  He shook his head hard.

  “What!” I spat.

  “She no die like they say.”

  My hand squeezed the car keys, causing pain.

  “They kill her,” he said.

&n
bsp; 8

  MY INSTINCT WAS to grab the guy by the shirt and shake him until his neck cracked. But his shirt was filthy. I kept thinking rat as heat ripped through my chest.

  He must have seen something in my eyes. What I felt was a blinding whiteness. Not anger as much as anguish, mixed with grief. A mourning cocktail. He took a step back, put his hands up.

  “Who are you?” I matched his step with one of my own.

  “Look—”

  “How did you get here? What do you mean kill?”

  My hands were clenching and unclenching.

  “I want to tell you, man.”

  “Then come on.” A thousand things were flashing through my mind at once. This guy was nuts. This guy knew something. Jacqueline was killed by somebody on purpose. It couldn’t be, a sick guy’s body fell on her car—

  “Hey, man, I came for you,” the guy said, pleading now.

  “All right,” I said. We were the only ones left in the parking lot now. “Start with, Who are you?”

  He put his hands in his pockets and looked down.

  “What about Jacqueline getting killed. How do you know anything?”

  “Look, man, you help me little?”

  “Help you out?”

  “You know.” He pulled out one of his grungy pockets.

  “Money?” My fists were now clenched big-time. “You came here to try and get money from me?”

  “I saw, you want to know or no?”

  “You tell me, right now, how you found me. Or you get nothing.”

  He shrugged. “The paper.” He motioned at the ground, like he was a real estate agent showing the place to a buyer. “You need to know, man.”

  I made the decision. I took out my wallet, snatched a crisp twenty. “I give you this, you tell me something I think I need to know.”

  His eyes narrowed in rodent-like displeasure. “You got to trust me.”

  “I don’t got to trust you or anybody.”

  “You need to hear.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Forty.”

  I’ve negotiated with Koreans, New Yorkers, and the California Highway Patrol. But never with a guy whose only bargaining chip was my insane misery.