He came at the house from below, the way he had left it, up through the terraced yards with the dogs already tired of him. It was past two. The street in front was empty. He lay along the top of the back fence for a full minute, looking, before he let himself down among the tomato stakes.
The kitchen light was on.
Denise was sitting at the table in a quilted dressing gown, with her back straight and her hands round a cup. She was facing the door. She had the look of someone who had been facing it for some time.
She got up before he could knock.
“Shoes off,” she said. “You’re dripping.”
She gave him a towel and a pair of Ray’s socks, thick grey wool, rolled into a ball. She put a second cup on the table and poured from a pot that was still hot. She did not ask where he had been. He supposed she had heard four car doors and feet in her yard and a man going over her fence, and she had got up, put the kettle on, and waited to see which of them came back.
He sat. The clock on the cooker said 2:19. The spoons from Wednesday were back in their drawer.
“They took the van,” he said.
“I know. Mrs. Aguilar across the street telephoned me. She doesn’t sleep.” Denise sat down opposite. “They’ll say it was abandoned. They’ll bring it back to me on Monday with a form.”
“I’m sorry. He wanted me to have it and I had it two days.”
“He wanted you to have it so you would look in it. Did you look in it?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s done what it was for.”
He drank some of the tea. It was strong enough to stand a spoon in. His hands were coming back to him slowly.
“Denise. I know he signed it.”
She did not flinch. She closed her eyes, briefly, like someone hearing a door shut in another part of the house.
“Who told you?”
“Art. And then I read it. Four pages. His typing.”
“And you’re still here.”
“I’m still here.”
She looked at him for a long moment. He had the feeling he was being weighed, carefully, on a scale she had set up some time ago.
“I didn’t think you would be,” she said. “I thought, the day Danny finds that out, he’ll be on a bus by supper. You always were all or nothing. Ray said so. He said, Danny will forgive you for anything except the one thing.”
“I haven’t forgiven him.”
“No. But you’re sitting in his socks.”
He let that go by.
“Why did he sign?”
Denise turned her cup a quarter turn, set it down, and squared the saucer under it with one finger.
“I’m going to tell you,” she said. “I’ve thought about whether I would. I’m going to tell you because he’s dead and my son’s dead and there’s nobody left it can hurt but me. And then you’ll know what kind of people you came all this way for.”
“Six years ago in March. A Tuesday into a Wednesday. I was on earlies that week so I was asleep. I woke up because somebody was being sick in the bathroom.
“It was Marcus. He was twenty-three. He’d been out of the academy eight months. He was on his knees on the tiles in his good shirt with blood down the side of his face from a cut over his eye, and he was so drunk he didn’t know me.”
She said it in the level voice of a woman giving a handover at the end of a shift.
“I cleaned the cut. Four stitches’ worth, I closed it with strips. I got him into his old room. His car wasn’t in the drive. I asked him where it was and he said he didn’t know. I asked him how he got home and he said he didn’t know that either. He couldn’t tell me one thing about that night after ten o’clock. He cried. He said, Mama, I think I did something.”
“What time was this?”
“I don’t know. Late. I didn’t look at a clock, Danny, I was looking at my son.” She breathed. “In the morning Ray had already gone in. You’d both been called out in the night. A girl in Frogtown.”
Thorsen sat very still.
“I didn’t put them together. Why would I? Marcus slept till noon and went and found his car himself. It was in a yard somewhere. The front was all pushed in. He said he must have hit a pole. He paid cash to have it fixed, at a place in Pacoima, not through the insurance. I thought, he’s frightened for his job. I thought that was all it was.”
“When did you find out it wasn’t?”
“A week later. The Wednesday evening. You were away. Ray said Art had sent you fishing.” She looked at the table. “The doorbell rang, and there was a man on my step in a very good suit, holding a folder. I knew his face from the newsletter. He said, Mrs. Okafor, I’m sorry to come to your home. He asked for Ray. He asked if there was somewhere they could sit.”
“Brandt.”
“Commander Brandt, then. He was very kind. That’s what I remember. He was so kind to me in my own hallway that I knew it was going to be something terrible.”
She got up and stood at the sink with her back to him, as she had on Wednesday.
“They went in the front room and shut the door. I stood in this kitchen. I could hear his voice but not the words. It went on for twenty minutes, very even, like a doctor. I never heard Ray at all. Then the front door, and a car.
“Ray came in here and sat where you are. He put a piece of paper on the table. It was a laboratory report. It had the city seal on it. It said paint. Paint from a vehicle, found on the girl’s backpack and on the wall, and they had matched it, and it was the paint from our son’s car.”
The clock on the cooker clicked over.
“He said the Commander had come as a friend. He said a Metro unit had Marcus’s car on a camera half a mile from that street, at the right time, weaving. He said there was a stolen truck that had been found burned and a car thief who had been shot, and it could all be the thief. One report. Nobody would ever look at it again. A boy with eight months on the job gets one mistake, the Commander said. He said the department looks after its own.”
“Ray told me he asked about the truck. Of course he did, he was Ray. The Commander said the truck was a gift. A way out. He said the lab had found the black paint on the first day, and somebody had kept it out of the book for a policeman’s son. He said, who do you think kept it out, Ray?” Denise looked at the table. “I think that was when he believed it.”
“And all Ray had to do was write it.”
“All he had to do was write it. And there was one detective who wouldn’t let it lie, and that detective was his partner.” She turned round. Her eyes were dry and terrible. “He sat at this table all night. I watched my husband decide between you and Marcus. In the morning he put his coat on and went in and typed it.”
Thorsen found that he had no anger to hand. He looked for it. There was only something cold and very large, like the bottom of that channel.
“Did Marcus know?”
“Somebody told him. Not Ray. Not me. He came to this house about a month after, and he looked at his father, and I saw that he knew.” Her mouth worked once. “He never drank again. He never missed a shift. He went to Mass every Sunday of his life and sat at the back. He lasted four years. Then he drove into a bridge on the 134 at four in the morning with nothing in his blood at all, and no skid marks, and they wrote it up as a man who fell asleep.”
No skid marks. Thorsen heard it and set it down very carefully where he would be able to find it again.
“So now you have it,” Denise said. “My son killed that girl. My husband hid it, and he lost his partner to do it, and it didn’t even save the boy. That’s who we are. That’s what’s in the photographs on my mantel.”
It was a long time before either of them spoke.
He was thinking about a burned truck with the seat racked all the way back. He was thinking about a laboratory report with the city seal on it that had never been in any murder book he had seen. He was thinking that a Chevrolet Silverado had run that girl down, that he had stood where its wheels went up the kerb, and that somebody had gone to a great deal of trouble to steal one for the purpose.
He did not say any of it. Not yet. Not to her, at this table, on the strength of a feeling.
“A month ago,” he said instead. “Something changed. He went to see the girl’s mother. He started going out at night. What happened a month ago?”
“The boxes came.”
“What boxes?”
“Marcus had a girl. Tasha. They’d broken up before he died but she had some of his things, and she kept them, and then she was moving and she brought them here. Three boxes. Clothes, mostly. Papers.” Denise sat down again, slowly. “Ray took them out to the garage. He was out there all night. In the morning he looked ten years younger and twenty years older, both, I can’t describe it. I asked him what he’d found and he wouldn’t say. He said, I’m going to put it right, Dee. He said, I can’t tell you until I can prove it, I won’t do that to you twice.”
“Where are the boxes?”
“Gone. I looked, after. Two of them are on the shelf with his sweaters in. The third one isn’t anywhere.”
“Where’s Tasha?”
“Inglewood. I have her address in the book.”
He pushed up his left sleeve and laid his forearm on the table.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
She put on the glasses that hung round her neck and read it twice. She shook her head.
“Where was it?”
“Behind the pegboard. Behind the one empty hook.”
Something went across her face, quick, and was gone before he could name it. Not surprise. Something nearer to relief.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “But he knew you’d find it. He said to me, about two weeks ago, out of nowhere, at this table. He said, if anything happens, you get Danny. I said, Danny’s been gone six years, I wouldn’t know where to send a letter. He said, find him. It took me four days and a retired dispatcher who owed Ray a favour. He said, don’t tell him anything, he’ll only argue. Just get him here and let him look.”
“That was all?”
“He said one more thing.” She took the glasses off. “He said, Danny doesn’t believe people. He believes rooms.”
Thorsen looked down at the numbers on his arm until they stopped moving.
Denise stood. She went to the dresser, wrote an address on a pad in a small upright hand, tore the sheet off along a ruler, and put it in front of him.
“You can sleep three hours on the couch. Then you go out the back before it’s light, and you don’t come here again until it’s finished. They’ll be watching me now.” She paused in the doorway, small and straight in the quilted gown. “I buried my son a killer, Danny. I’ve made a kind of peace with that. Don’t you bring me anything to disturb it unless you can put it on this table and it’s true.”