They spent the day apart, because a big man and a boy together were easier to remember than either one alone.
Mateo went home to his mother and ate Sunday lunch and said nothing. Thorsen went back under the freeway and slept for five hours on the dead man’s mat, properly this time, the sleep of something that has been hunted, and woke at dusk with Deacon sitting on his crate outside reading the same paperback.
“You snore,” Deacon said. “Thought you’d want to know. Hard to hide from people when you sound like a leaf blower.”
He gave Thorsen a bowl of beans and two flour tortillas, and looked at the dressing, and grunted, and said nothing else. When Thorsen tried to thank him he held up a hand without looking up from the page.
San Fernando Road runs north from the river for miles beside the railway, and along that stretch it is a road that does not care what anybody thinks of it. Body shops. Scrap metal. A tortilla factory. Bail bonds. Long walls topped with razor wire, and behind them, lot after lot of cars that somebody, somewhere, wanted back.
They started at the bottom at nine o’clock. Mateo did the talking at the first two. He had a good story, about his uncle’s car and a lost receipt, and a good face for it, young and anxious. Thorsen stayed outside the light in Deacon’s cap.
The first yard had changed hands three years ago and kept nothing older than that. The second was a franchise with a computer, and the computer began four years ago, and the night man laughed at the idea of paper.
The third was a mile further north, past the Glendale line, behind a sheet-metal fence painted a dark green that had faded in patches to grey. Above the gate was a sign: VERDUGO TOWING & RECOVERY, EST. 1971, CITY OF GLENDALE ROTATION. And beside the words, in red, a cartoon tow hook.
Thorsen looked at the hook for a moment. Then he went in himself.
The office was a plywood shed with a counter across it and a window of bulletproof plastic gone yellow and scratched. Behind the plastic, in a lamp’s circle, a very old man with a white moustache was watching an Armenian news channel on a small television and eating sunflower seeds out of a paper bag, splitting each one with his front teeth.
He looked at Thorsen over his glasses. He looked for a while. Then he turned the television down.
“You want your car,” he said. “Cash only after nine. Card machine is broken since Christmas.”
“I don’t want a car. I want to look at a book.”
“What book?”
“Six years ago in March. A Tuesday night into Wednesday. Glendale called you for a single car into a pole on San Fernando. A black Dodge Charger. The driver’s name was Okafor.”
The old man stopped chewing.
He put the bag of seeds down very slowly on the counter. He looked at Thorsen again, longer, all of him, the size and the cap and the grey sweatshirt that did not fit and the face underneath.
“Last month,” he said, “another man came in here and asked me exactly this. Same night. Same name.”
“Older than me. Black. Wrote with his left hand.”
“Yes.” A pause. “He was the father.”
“He was my partner. He’s dead.”
The old man said something under his breath in Armenian. Then he got up, with difficulty, and went to the back of the shed, where a steel shelf ran along the wall loaded with ledgers. Big, cloth-bound, green, one for every year, the years written on the spines in white paint. Fifty of them, perhaps. He ran his finger along until he found the one he wanted, and pulled it out, and brought it back, and opened a door in the plastic, and laid it on the counter between them.
“Fifty-five years I keep these,” he said. “My son says, Papa, put it on the computer. I say, a computer, somebody presses a button, it’s gone. A book, they have to come and burn the building.” He turned the pages with a licked thumb. “Here. I put a paper in it for the father. I thought he would come back.”
A strip of newspaper marked the page.
It was a ruled ledger, columns down the page, filled in by hand in blue ballpoint in a careful old-fashioned script. Date. Time call received. Agency. Unit. Location. Vehicle. Plate. Driver or owner. Driver disposition. Time hooked. Time in yard. Released to. Date. Amount.
The old man put a finger the colour of walnut on one line, halfway down.
The date was the date. The night Marisol Reyes died.
Time call received: 00:31.
Agency: GPD. Unit: 3A21.
Location: San Fernando Rd n/o Fairmont. Veh vs. light pole, single.
Vehicle: Dodge Charger, blk. A plate. Reg. owner / driver: OKAFOR, Marcus.
Driver disposition: Transported by GPD 3A21. Courtesy.
Hooked: 00:58. In yard: 01:20.
Released to: owner, 13:40. Paid cash.
Thorsen read it.
Then he read it again, every column, slowly, the way he had once read the four pages of a closure report in a parked car.
Twelve thirty-one in the morning. A black Charger wrapped round a lamp post in Glendale, a mile north of here, and a Glendale police unit already on the scene and calling for a tow. A young man pulled out of it with a cut over his eye, too drunk to stand, put in the back of a patrol car and driven home to his mother as a favour from one cop to another.
At twelve-forty, nine minutes later and four miles south, a white Silverado with no lights came down a dark street in Frogtown and put its wheels up on the pavement.
Marcus Okafor had been sitting in the back of a police car when Marisol Reyes died.
He had never touched her. He had never been on that street. He had been, as he said to his mother on the bathroom floor, somewhere he could not remember, doing something that was only stupid. And somebody had taken that one stupid night and found it lying in a Glendale log, and carried it to Walter Brandt, and Brandt had wrapped a dead girl round it and walked into a house in Highland Park with a folder.
Ray had believed it. Ray had sat at the kitchen table all night and chosen his son over his partner and over that girl, and typed four pages with two fingers, for a thing that had never happened.
And Marcus had believed it. For four years. Every Sunday at the back of the church. Every shift without a drink. Until a night on the 134 with no skid marks.
And last month a man of sixty-three had come into this shed and read this line, and understood that he had sold his partner and that girl and his own son’s soul for nothing, for less than nothing, for a lie on a piece of paper with the city seal on it.
Thorsen did not know how long he stood at the counter. The old man did not hurry him. The television murmured in Armenian. A freight train went by outside, slowly, for a long time, wagon after wagon.
When he looked up the old man was watching him with an expression he could not read.
“The father,” the old man said. “He stood there like you. Then he sat down on that chair. And he cried like a child. I gave him my handkerchief.” He shrugged. “He kept it.”
“Can I take a picture of the page?”
“Take ten.”
Thorsen went to the door and whistled once, and Mateo came out of the shadows by the fence and in under the light, and took the photographs with the frog phone, one after another, the whole page and then each line close. His hands were steady. He did not ask anything. He had read it over Thorsen’s arm.
When he was done he looked up.
“Then who,” he said quietly. “If it wasn’t him. Who killed her?”
“Whoever was driving the Silverado.”
“Vane?”
“Vane’s people. I think so.” Thorsen closed the ledger, gently. “But somebody had to know about this first. Somebody had to know that one night, a young LAPD officer wrapped his car round a pole in Glendale, blind drunk, and a Glendale unit took him home. Glendale doesn’t report that to LAPD. That’s the whole point of a courtesy. It stays between the two cops on the street. Maybe a sergeant.” He looked at the line again. GPD 3A21. Courtesy. “So somebody in Glendale picked up a telephone that night, or the next morning, and called somebody they trusted in our department, to say, quietly, your boy’s all right, we took care of it.”
“Who’d they call?”
Thorsen thought about a man who had been a lieutenant at Northeast for fifteen years. A man who had grown up in Glendale and still drank with half its retired sergeants at the VFW on Colorado. A man who knew Ray’s son from a baby.
A man whose name was on the second line.
He slid the ledger back across the counter to the old man, and thanked him, and gave him the last of his money, eleven dollars, which the old man refused, and then took, and then put into the pocket of Thorsen’s sweatshirt when he was not looking.
Outside the night was cool and the train had gone. Mateo stood beside him on the cracked pavement, holding the phone against his chest like something alive.
“Where are we going?” he said.
“You’re going home.”
“And you?”
Thorsen looked east, across the railway, to where the hills of Eagle Rock rose dark against the glow of the city, with a few lights scattered up their sides. One of them was a porch light on a hill street, beside a lemon tree and a flagpole.
“I’m going to see an old friend,” he said.