Mike Finnegan’s Los Angeles apartment building was on Aviation Boulevard near LAX. Hood stood outside and looked at the complex, fifty years old at least and in disrepair, with peeling paint and a grassless dirt courtyard littered with plastic toys and brooded over darkly by a large magnolia.
Hood climbed the stairs and opened the door with Reyes’s key. He entered and stood in a rhombus of soft L.A. sunlight while the jets rattled the window glass and vibrated the floor.
The carpet was blue shag and the walls were white. There was a worn red vinyl sofa that sagged and was stretched in the middle, and on the wall behind it a framed print of a big-eyed Mexican girl holding a puppy. The TV was a vintage black-and-white with a rabbit-ear antenna set on top. The walls were taken up with bookshelves that went to the ceiling, mostly inexpensive and unmatched but full of mostly hardcover volumes of history, biography, warfare, natural science, and drama. There were two small stools so the little man could reach the upper shelves. In the middle of the room, between the TV and the sofa, stood a small card table and one folding chair. The table was stacked with books and spiral notebooks.
The kitchen was neat and foodless. The refrigerator had ice cube trays in the freezer and that was all. There was a small kitchen table and two chairs, and on the table was a telephone and answering machine. Hood pushed the PLAY button and listened to the one new message, from Owens, saying she was sorry to have left so abruptly but she was in a good place in a desert and happy and not to worry. Hood pictured her lovely face and arresting eyes and the scars on her wrists. You will have a reason. There were no old messages.
The bedroom was curtained with bamboo-look plastic blinds and contained a twin bed neatly made up. The olive-colored bedspread was without wrinkle and the pillow was plump and perfectly centered. Hood saw his own military training in this, wondered if Uncle Sam might have more information on Mr. Finnegan. There was a small dresser and more bookshelves. In the closet were pants and shirts on hangers, a heavy canvas jacket with fleece lining, a few pairs of shoes.
Hood saw an odd glint beneath the canvas jacket and he lifted it open for a look. Hanging under it was a garment of dull gray mesh. Hood lifted out the coat and the gray garment. They were surprisingly heavy. Hood peeled off the jacket and tossed it to the bed. The garment was a vest, apparently made for a tall and slender man. Hood held it to his nose and smelled the flat metallic scent of steel. Down one side were buttons made from large silver Mexican fifty-peso coins. Down the other were thickly braided steel loops. Hood let the hanger drop and shrugged on the vest and buttoned up the side. It was snug and weighty but also supportive, the tail firm against his lumbar vertebrae. The arm holes were small, so the vest rode up almost to his armpits. He could imagine no use for such a thing except to repel bullets or blades. He wondered if it would work.
He walked back and stood in the patch of sunlight in the living room, and when he looked down, he could see rounded indentations roughly the size of bullets. The steel mesh had spread and flattened but held. One mark was right over his heart. There were sharper dents that could have been made by knives. He took off the vest and read the date on the top button: 1851. In the bedroom he hung it back up, then photographed it with his cell phone, then hung the canvas jacket over it and set the hanger back on the dowel.
Hood thought about the 1849 bullet in Mike’s head and the 1851 vest in his closet and Mike’s detailed recounting of the hanging of Tiburcio Vasquez and Mike’s tales of drinking in Wyatt Earp’s San Diego saloon. Here was a pattern that Hood’s ATFE task force trainers would have loved. But a pattern establishing what? Mike the history buff? Mike the collector of Western lore and things? But there were other Mikes. Such as Mike the bathroom products guru who knew far too much about Operation Blowdown and Jimmy and Benjamin Armenta. And Mike who wondered what Zetas dream about. And Mike who had been at the Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was murdered and could describe a sunset viewed from Spahn Ranch with Charlie Manson. And of course, perhaps the simplest and most definitive Mike-the Mike pronounced insane by his own daughter.
But in the second bedroom, Hood found no evidence that Owens or anyone else had recently lived there. The cot bed was neatly made, but the dresser and closet were empty of clothes. There were eight pasteboard boxes stacked in the closet and Hood found them full of books. The walls were bare and there was no TV and no reading lamp and no radio and no clock. He took more pictures.
Hood walked into the bathroom, wondering what a bath products broker would have in his own home. There were mismatched bath and hand towels, some old enough that threads dangled at the edges, a faded green oval rug, shaving products, and a large bar of blue soap in an upturned clamshell on the sink. The shower had a sliding glass door, frosted and clean, and inside was nothing but one economy-size bottle of shampoo. There was an ornate brass towel hook in the shape of a horse’s head on the wall near the shower, but this single item was the only thing in the room that wasn’t commonplace.
Back in the living room, Hood sat at the card table and browsed the top notebook. Inside he found a handwritten ledger that was cramped but legible-billables and receivables, dates and dollar amounts, notes. The most recent entry was two months ago and the oldest dated back to early last year. The largest transaction involved $5,999. There were illustrations of various bathroom products, such as shower curtains and rings, soap dishes, standing and built-in toilet paper dispensers, bath mats for tub and shower, medicine chests and wall cabinets, towel racks. These drawings were rendered in the same small tight hand as the notes, but they were simple and expressive. The other ten notebooks stacked there contained nothing but blank pages and folded clippings from newspapers and magazines. Hood opened and read through them. Finnegan had written the source and date on the top of each clip. Most of the stories were from small California towns, many of which Hood had never been in: Ravendale, Tollhouse, Ivanhoe, Trona. He made a note of these.
Some clippings dealt with small-time crime, most of it white collar-embezzling, fraud, forgery. Most of the perps were women. Some dealt with violent criminals and most of these were men, and educated. Some were about precocious children. Some dealt with quirky inventions such as a personal jet pack, a machine that could synthesize water from the air, a time-released multivitamin and mineral tablet that had to be taken only once a year. One was a feature titled “Saturday Night Special,” about Ron Pace, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout manufacturing/design whiz who was running his family’s hugely profitable gun company. This was Pace’s second unscheduled flight into Hood’s airspace in the last two weeks, so Hood read the article slowly and carefully. Pace was quoted as saying that “making guns is harder than making pizza but what I’d really like to make is history.” Company president and CEO Chester Pace said that Pace guns were “the workingman’s equalizer.” The article touched on the suicide of Ron’s father. There were pictures of Ron and Chester and Ron’s pretty, unhappy mother, Maureen. Hood rose and stood back from the table and he took pictures of it and of the room.
He heard the knock on the apartment door and he rose and answered it. A small boy stood outside. He looked ten. He wore a Kobe jersey and shorts to his skinny calves and basketball shoes that made his feet look gigantic.
“Where’s Finn?”
“In a hospital.”
“Been gone a long time. He okay?”
“He’s doing fine. I’m a friend.”
“You look like a cop.”
“What about you? Are you his friend?”
The boy looked past him into the apartment, then at Hood. “Yeah. He’s gone a lot so this is no surprise. He gave me this.”
The boy pulled his hand from his pocket and showed Hood the knife. It was an old-fashioned pocketknife with an elk horn-look handle and blades at opposite ends.
“It needs sharpening. Mike sharpens it. He says a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. He’s got a sharpenin’ stone in the kitchen drawer where the forks are.”
“Come in.”
Hood found the stone and whet the knife, circling one blade then the other across the grinding surface while the boy watched.
“Mike does it slow like that.”
“There’s no hurry. I’m Charlie. What’s your name?”
“Marlowe.”
“Your mom know you have this?”
“She’s dead so she don’t know anything. Dad’s cool.”
“How long have you known Mike?”
“Since forever. He sleeps all day sometimes. Mostly he’s gone at night. Sells them towel holders and dishes you put your soap in.”
“He got hit by a car down in the desert. Lots of damage but he’s healing up.”
“Mike’s good at healin’. I seen him with a cut on his lip once, and it was so deep you could see his teeth through it. Said he got punched. Two days later it was almost all healed up and after that no scar or nothing. He don’t hardly eat. He’s read every one of these books and more. I’ve been coming up here for maybe five years now, yeah, ’cause I’m ten, and let’s see… three… no, four times Mike’s packed up all his books in boxes and took ’ em away. Because he read them all. I helped him load up his truck. Then he gets all new books and reads those. We watch TV sometimes. My dad and uncle come over and Mike gets beer. He listens to stories, but he almost never tells one. He asks a lot of questions. He wants to meet certain people. He says he likes getting people together. He brought over a kid one day for me to hang with. We’re friends now. Mike understands kids. He told me if I got straight A’s next year, he’d give me a hundred bucks for each one, and if I don’t get straight A’s, he won’t give me nothing.”
“Have you met his daughter?”
“I can’t because he doesn’t have one.”
“Does he ever have friends over, or family?”
“Sometimes I seen a person here. But not much. He’s mostly alone, sleeping all day and doing his bathroom things at night. He says there’s certain kinds of people he can’t be around.”
“What kind of people?”
“I never ast.”
Hood handed Marlowe the knife. The boy licked his forearm and shaved off some thin hairs with the long blade, then the short one.
“Mike’s got red hair. When the knife is sharp, it leaves an empty spot with freckles. And guess what, the next day all that hair is back. Every hair of it. He doesn’t know I know it.”
Hood thought about this.
“Thanks, man. You did a good job on this. It ain’t as good as Finn can do, but it’s still good.”
“Don’t take it to school.”
“A knife ain’t nothing.”
“It’s enough to get you kicked out. Then you won’t make the big money from Mike.”
“Oh, I’ll get that money. I’m getting all A’s and Mike always does what he says. He’s never lied to me, not once.”
Owens Finnegan answered the door of her El Centro home. Her face was made up and her lipstick was red. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress and wide carved African tribal bracelets and she was barefoot again. Hood stepped in and saw no change: same boxes stacked, same bare walls, same director’s chairs. The kitchen was still bare as she led him outside to the picnic table.
“I made some iced tea since I knew you were coming.”
She poured two tumblers from the glass pitcher. There was a sugar bowl and spoons on the table.
Hood brought up the image of the steel mesh vest on his cell phone and set the phone on the table in front of Owens. She turned it and shaded the small screen with one hand.
“That’s from your father’s closet in L.A. What is it?”
“A vest of some kind. I’ve never seen it.”
“You never lived in that apartment on Aviation, either.”
“No.”
“But he’s been there since the 1960s, when that black-and-white TV was new and he was ten years old?”
“That’s always been his place of business, Charlie. Since seventy-something. He buys old stuff because he likes it. That old TV never even worked. We lived in various places-Sierra Madre, Glendale, Los Angeles -not on Aviation.”
“I don’t enjoy being lied to. It wastes my time and it pisses me off.”
“I never told you I lived in that apartment. I can’t control what Dad said. I’m sorry if I’ve never seen that article of clothing before.”
“What about the clips? The stories from the small towns in California? All the inventors and promising children and small-time criminals?”
“Dad’s interests are across the board.”
“No shit, Owens.”
Hood drank some tea and put his glass down, then stood and walked across the dead brown grass and looked out to the desert beyond the wall. To the southeast, thunderheads loomed out of Mexico, great white anvils climbing the blue.
She stood facing him and handed him his tea.
“Mike knows way too much about Mexican drug cartels, and the ATF,” said Hood. “He seems almost fixated on a man I work with. Mike knows things about him he just shouldn’t know. Did he do investigations? Do you have law enforcement in the family?”
“None that I know of.”
“Government, military, intelligence?”
She shook her head, and the dry desert breeze lifted her hair. “It was always passion and bluff. He wants to be an insider. He has an extravagant and sometimes powerful mind. I’ve never known anyone as intelligent as he is. Or as crazy. I’ve seen him lie in bed for days, crying and never eating. I’ve seen him stay awake for days, making phone calls and doing sketches and reading, reading, reading. He doesn’t invent stories or friends or incidents. He invents entire worlds. They are populated and specific.”
Hood looked into her eyes, now almost silver in the bright sunlight. She took his glass and flung the tea and ice against the wall and dropped the glass to the dry grass. He felt her hands cool on his cheeks again and the warmth of her breath on his face, then the softness of her lips on his. He lifted her hands off his face and felt the risen cords of scar-flesh under his fingers.
“They’re me, Charlie. Past, present and future, all in one. Don’t be afraid of them.”
“I respect them.”
She took his face in her hands again and kissed him again. Hood broke it off and lifted her hands away and kissed the underside of the left wrist, then the right wrist, and as he did this she closed her eyes and exhaled quietly.
“There might be another day for this,” he said.
“Tell me when you find it, Charlie.”