He went out of Denise’s back door at half past five with a cheese sandwich in a paper bag that he had not asked for. He went down through the yards the same way and caught the first bus on Figueroa with the night-shift people, and nobody looked at him.
It took three buses and two hours to get across the city. He had forgotten that. You forget, in a van, how big Los Angeles is when you are only a man.
Holy Cross was on a hill above Culver City, green lawns kept green at great expense, the flat bronze plaques set into the grass so that the mowers could go straight over. A woman at the office looked up the name for him without asking why.
Marcus Okafor was in a newer section, near a row of young sycamores. Beloved Son. Officer, Los Angeles Police Department. The dates. Twenty-seven years. Somebody had left a small LAPD patch, the kind they sell at the academy shop, pressed into the soil at the corner of the plaque. Somebody else had left a single white carnation, still fresh, which would have been Denise.
Thorsen stood with his hands in his jacket pockets.
He had been working it on the buses, the way you work a knot. He had it in two pieces and neither would go into the other.
In the first piece, Marcus did it. A drunk young man in a fast car at the wrong hour, on a street he did not remember driving down. Brandt had a lab report with a seal on it and a camera that saw the car weaving. Ray believed it, and Ray was nobody’s fool. A boy who believes it of himself does not go to Mass every Sunday for four years for nothing.
In the second piece, a white Silverado with its lights off and its seat racked back. A driver who never touched the brake. A stolen truck stolen for the purpose, then burned. A phone taken and forty-one dollars left. That was not a boy blacked out at the wheel. That was a job.
Both could not be true. One of them had been built to look true.
And if he pulled on this hard enough to find out which, there was a version where he found the first. Where he ended up in a courtroom, or in front of a camera, saying out loud the thing that Ray had sold his partner to keep quiet. That Marcus Okafor, Beloved Son, Officer, ran down a nineteen-year-old girl and lived four more years on the strength of a lie.
Denise had said it already. Don’t bring me anything unless it’s true. She had not said, don’t bring me anything.
He looked at the patch in the grass for a while.
Then he thought about a shelf on a cinder-block wall, and a candle going in the daylight.
It was not his to choose which truth turned up. That was the whole job. That was the only thing he had ever been for. You did not start by deciding who you could bear to have done it.
He said, “Sorry, Marcus,” quietly, to nobody, and walked back down the hill to the bus.
Tasha Greene lived in a second-floor apartment on a quiet street in Inglewood with a view of the stadium roof. She was not happy to see him. She opened the door four inches on the chain, as everybody seemed to that week, and looked at his size, and asked him to show her something with his name on it.
He did not have anything with his name on it. He said, “I worked with Ray Okafor. Marcus’s father. I taught Marcus to throw a curveball,” and something in her face gave, and she let him in.
She was a dental hygienist. She was getting married in the spring. The apartment was half in boxes again; she was moving a second time, to the fiancé’s place in Hawthorne. She made him stand in the kitchen and did not offer coffee.
“I already told his dad everything. I don’t know what else I can say.”
“Tell me what you told him.”
She folded her arms. “I had Marcus’s stuff in my storage unit for two years. I couldn’t throw it out and I couldn’t look at it. When I was packing up I thought, that’s his mom’s, not mine. So I drove it over. Three boxes. I left them on the porch because I couldn’t face going in.” She looked away. “That was the Sunday. On the Tuesday his dad was at my door.”
“What did he want?”
“He had a piece of paper in a sandwich bag. Pink, like a carbon copy. A receipt.” She shrugged. “From a tow yard. Marcus kept every receipt he ever got, he had a shoebox. His dad’s son, he used to say. His dad wanted to know if there were any more like it. Anything else from that same time. I said everything I had was in the boxes.”
“Did you see what it said?”
“Not really. A date. A truck number. A signature. Some yard on San Fernando Road, I think, there was a little logo with a hook on it.” She frowned. “He held it like it was going to blow away. He kept looking at it while he talked to me. I remember thinking he looked sick.”
“What else did he ask?”
She hesitated. She had the look of a person deciding how much of a dead man’s privacy was hers to give away.
“He asked if Marcus ever talked about how he got home. That one night. The night Marcus messed up his car.”
“Did he?”
“Once. We’d only been together a few months. He didn’t drink, ever, and I asked him why, and he told me he’d had one night where he lost the whole thing. Woke up at his mom’s with stitches. Car gone.” Tasha’s arms tightened. “He said a cop drove him home. Somebody in a uniform put him in the back of a patrol car and drove him to his mother’s and let him go. He thought it was a guy from his academy class covering for him. He asked around for years. Nobody ever said it was them.”
Thorsen kept still.
“He said it like it was the worst thing,” she said. “Like somebody did him a favour he couldn’t ever pay back. I didn’t get it. I still don’t.”
“Did Marcus ever say anything about a girl? An accident?”
She looked at him properly then.
“No. What girl?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“His dad asked me that too.” Her voice had gone careful. “What is this? What was Marcus supposed to have done?”
“I don’t know yet,” Thorsen said. “That’s the truth. I’m trying to find out whether he did anything at all.”
She studied his face for a while, and whatever she found there made her unfold her arms.
“He was a good guy,” she said. “He was so sad. All the time, underneath. I couldn’t fix it. That’s why I left. And then he died, and I thought, you just didn’t try hard enough, Tasha.” She wiped her eye with a knuckle, angrily. “If somebody did something to him, I want to know.”
“So do I.”
He sat on the low wall outside her building in the sun and ate Denise’s sandwich.
A patrol car. A cop drove him home.
A blackout drunk, at some hour of that night, sitting in the back of a police car being driven to his mother’s door. A car that would have a log. A unit that would have a call number, and a time. And a tow yard, with a receipt, and a truck number, and a time on that as well.
Ray had found the receipt and gone white. Not when he read about the girl, six years before. When he read a pink carbon slip from a tow yard on San Fernando Road.
Thorsen did not know what the time on it said. He knew what it would have to say, to make a man look like that.
The third box was gone from Denise’s garage. Whatever Ray had found, he had kept it close, and somebody had taken it, along with his little book.
But a tow yard writes things down twice. Once for the customer, on a pink slip. Once for itself.