Among the Living Read Free

twenties, brown hair, tight low jeans, black Gap shoes, one of those skimpy, navel-baring tees the kids called “a wife beater.” If she was breathing it was very shallow. Here was another actor thinking this would do her some good. Her eyes were closed. She was cute dead.
    Jimmy and Jean stepped in at the back of the crowd.
    The man in the guayabera plopped down in the wingback chair directly over the body. He was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.
    “Don’t touch anything, Ben,” a woman said.
    “I wouldn’t think of it, Deborah,” JPL Ben said.
    Joel was up front playing host. He stepped up onto the first rung of the library ladder.
    “Well? Anyone?”
    “She looks dead, ” the TV comic said. They all laughed like it was the funniest thing.
    “I talked to her,” a young man said. He was tall, red-haired, still in his teens. He wore corduroy shorts down over his knees, Birkenstocks with white socks, a T-shirt with a word on it that made no sense. He had a squat brown bottle of Bohemia by the throat, propped against his leg.
    “What did she say?” the woman asked.
    The young man hesitated.
    “Wouldn’t you like to know,” someone else said.
    “What happened to the third shot?” Deborah said. “Give us something to start with, Joel.”
    Kinser was enjoying himself more than he should have been. “I will tell you this,” he said. “She’s a screenwriter.”
    “What’s her name?”
    “Rosie Scenario,” the red-headed teenager said, very dry.
    Ben bounded up out of the wingback chair. He had already made a discovery behind the couch, was just waiting to reveal it.
    “So this would be her agent . . .”
    The amateur sleuths gathered around the half-hidden second body, a young Latino in khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt, new running shoes on his feet, stage blood on his temple.
    The gore was threatening to drip onto the off-white carpet. Joel lifted the lifeless head and put an Architectural Digest under it.
    “What’s in his hand?” one of the women said.
    Someone opened the dead fingers. A computer disk.
    “ Datum! ” Ben said.
    The air was mock electric.
    Joel stepped up another rung. “OK, listen, everyone, tonight we have with us a professional investigator, my friend, Jimmy Miles.”
    Everyone turned to look, but Jimmy was gone.

    The cue ball struck the five ball, which clipped the eight, sending it into the side pocket.
    “I meant to do that,” Jimmy said.
    Jean had stepped in. It was the game room. They were alone. He retrieved the eight ball and lined up another shot.
    She waited, expecting him to speak. He didn’t.
    “We were hoping you might give us a fresh perspective,” she said. “Some original ideas.”
    “The butler did it.”
    “Joel said—”
    Jimmy took his shot, sank the ball. “I used to have original ideas,” he said. “Then time and the world conspired to beat them out of me. Now I think the same thing as everybody else, only a little later.”
    He was still trying to impress her. He sank the three. It made a nice click.
    “Kantke,” Jimmy said. “Is that German?”
    “Yes.”
    “Nice to meet you.” He gave her a smile and offered her the cue.
    She didn’t take it.
    “I asked Joel to invite you,” she said.
    In a beat, he changed, went cold, pulled inside. A familiar sadness overtook him, the way a cloud slides over the moon.
    He went back to his game.
    “I knew you and Joel were friends,” she said, as he closed down. “I’d like for you to look into something for me. Joel said—”
    Jimmy sank a shot and cut her off. “I helped Joel with something a while back and he’s had the wrong idea about me ever since,” he said. “I gotta talk to him about that.”
    “Please,” she said. “I know all about you.”
    Now he gave her a challenging look.
    “You only take cases every once in a while,” she said.
    He waited. He wasn’t going to make it any easier for her.
    “Nobody seems to know why you take the cases you