The bus let Thorsen off at Union Station at ten past six in the morning, and the city smelled the way it always had, of exhaust and warm concrete and something sweet rotting under it.
He had one bag. A canvas duffel, half full. He put the strap over his shoulder and stood on Alameda and looked at the skyline for about as long as it took the light to change. There were four towers he didn’t recognise. Six years would do that.
He walked. He could have taken the Gold Line, or whatever letter they called it now, but the funeral wasn’t until eleven and he had never trusted a city he hadn’t walked through first. He went south and then west, past the tents on the overpass, past a man hosing down the sidewalk in front of a place that sold twelve-dollar coffee where a bail bondsman used to be.
Nobody looked at him. That was the thing about Los Angeles. You could be six foot three and built like something that had come ashore off a longship, with a nose that had been broken twice and a suit jacket that didn’t quite close across the shoulders, and nobody looked.
The suit was from a thrift store in Barstow. Eleven dollars. The tie had cost two.
Ray Okafor’s house was in Highland Park, on a street that climbed steeply enough that the parked cars all had their wheels turned to the kerb. Thorsen had not planned to go there. He had planned to go to the church, stand at the back, shake Denise’s hand, and be on a bus to somewhere else by dark.
He went to the house anyway. Nineteen years of habit. You start at the scene.
There was no tape. There wouldn’t be, eight days on, for a suicide. The front blinds were down. A stack of supermarket flyers had gone soft with dew on the step. Thorsen stood on the sidewalk across the street with his hands in his pockets and looked at it the way he used to look at all of them, not for anything in particular, just letting the place tell him what was ordinary so that he would notice what was not.
The lawn had been mowed. Recently. Ray was a man who would mow his lawn the week he meant to die, so that told him nothing.
The garage door was shut. The department’s version, the one Denise had read to him over a bad phone line in a truck stop in Kingman, was that Ray had gone into the garage on a Tuesday night, sat down in the folding chair by his workbench, and put his old service Beretta under his chin.
Thorsen crossed the street.
The side gate had a latch you could lift with one finger. He lifted it. The yard behind was small and neat, tomato plants staked in a row, a hose coiled on its bracket. The garage had a side door with a window in it, and the window had been cleaned by someone who was paid by the hour and wanted to go home. He cupped his hands against the glass.
Workbench. Pegboard, every tool outlined in black marker. A folding chair, pushed back in under the bench now. A darker patch on the concrete that somebody had scrubbed with bleach and not quite beaten.
And on the bench, at the right-hand end, a coffee mug, a pair of reading glasses, and a ballpoint pen laid parallel to the edge.
Thorsen took his hands off the glass.
He had sat across two pushed-together desks from Ray Okafor for eleven years. He had watched him eat ten thousand lunches, sign ten thousand reports, and field-strip that Beretta on a sheet of newspaper every other Friday. Ray did every one of those things with his left hand. He kept his pen on the left. He kept his coffee on the left. He had once driven forty minutes back to a diner in Pomona because he’d left a left-handed can opener on the counter.
Somebody had sat at that bench and put things down on the right.
It wasn’t evidence. He knew that. A wife tidies. A crime scene tech moves a mug. Eight days is a long time. If he’d still had a lieutenant, the lieutenant would have told him it was nothing, and the lieutenant would probably have been correct.
Thorsen stood in the dead man’s yard and listened to a mockingbird run through its whole repertoire on the telephone wire, and felt something he had not felt in six years settle back into place behind his breastbone, heavy and familiar, like a door closing.
“Help you with something?”
He turned around. A man was standing at the gate. Forties, grey polo shirt, sunglasses pushed up on a shaved head, the kind of forearms you get from a gym and not from work. He was holding a set of keys in one hand. The other hand was loose at his side, a little further back than was natural.
“Friend of the family,” Thorsen said.
“Family’s at the church.”
“So I hear.”
The man looked at the duffel. He looked at the suit. He took his time over it. “Then I guess that’s where you ought to be.”
“You a neighbour?”
“I’m watching the house for Mrs. Okafor.”
“That’s good of you,” Thorsen said. “What’s her dog called?”
A half second. It was only a half second, but Thorsen had spent two decades in small rooms measuring exactly that.
“I don’t get into it with the dog,” the man said.
“No,” Thorsen said. “I don’t suppose you do.”
Denise Okafor was allergic. She had never owned a dog in her life.
Thorsen picked up his bag and walked to the gate, and the man in the grey polo stepped aside for him, just barely, just enough. Up close he smelled of gun oil and spearmint gum. There was a silver Tahoe at the kerb that had not been there ten minutes before, and Thorsen read the plate once as he passed it and did not look back.
The church was a mile and a half away. He had plenty of time.
He was not going to make the bus.