It was a little after eleven when he came up the hill street in Eagle Rock on foot, keeping to the side without streetlights.
The flag was still at half-mast. The porch light was on. Through the front window, between the curtains, he could see the blue flicker of a television and the back of Carol Delgado’s reading chair, and the top of a grey head above it.
He went round the side, past the bins, into the back yard. A lemon tree, heavy with fruit nobody picked. A concrete patio with two plastic chairs. The kitchen window above the sink, the row of African violets in their pots on the sill, dark purple in the light from the hall.
He stood under the lemon tree and took the peppermint tin out of his pocket.
He had not switched it on since Wednesday night. He had carried it for four days without knowing why, the way you carry a key to a house you have not found yet. Now he knew. He had no other way to keep a man’s voice.
He also knew what it was. A company phone, belonging to a company that tracked its own trucks to the inch. The moment it found a signal, it would tell somebody in a glass building on Brand Boulevard where it was.
He thought about that for a full minute.
Then he switched it on, and turned the screen brightness right down, and found the voice recorder, and pressed the red button, and put it in the breast pocket of Deacon’s sweatshirt with the microphone end up.
The back door was unlocked. Of course it was. Art had never once locked a door in his life. He said it was the one advantage of being a policeman, that the burglars knew.
Delgado did not turn round when he came in. He was in the reading chair in his cardigan with a glass on the arm and the bottle from Thursday beside it on the floor, nearly empty. The television was showing a cooking programme with the sound off.
“I wondered which of you it would be,” he said to the screen. “You or them.”
Thorsen stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He did not sit.
“You knew I’d come.”
“I knew you’d find it eventually. You always did.” Delgado picked up the glass and looked at it and put it down again. “I just hoped I’d be dead first. I’m seventy-one. It wasn’t a stupid bet.”
Thorsen said, in an even voice, as though he were reading it off a page:
“Zero zero thirty-one hours. Glendale PD, unit three Adam twenty-one. San Fernando Road north of Fairmont. Vehicle versus light pole. Black Dodge Charger, registered to Marcus Okafor. Driver transported by three Adam twenty-one. Courtesy.”
Delgado closed his eyes.
“Nine minutes before she died,” Thorsen said. “Four miles away. In the back of a Glendale police car.”
“I know.”
“You knew then.”
“Yes.”
The word sat in the room between them. The cooking programme showed a woman folding egg whites into chocolate, very gently, so as not to knock the air out.
“Tell me,” Thorsen said.
It took a long time, and Delgado told it to the television, not to him.
“Frank Lusk. Sergeant, Glendale, retired now. We were at Hoover High together. He called me at home at ten past one in the morning. He said, Art, your guy Okafor’s boy just wrapped his Charger round a pole on San Fernando, drunk as a lord, cut his head. My unit took him home to his mother. No paper. I’m only calling so you know, so somebody keeps an eye on the kid.” He swallowed. “That’s all it was. One old cop being kind. That’s how it starts. It always starts kind.”
“And you told Brandt.”
“Not then. Not for a week.” Delgado’s hand moved on the arm of the chair. “You remember what that week was like. You were climbing the walls. You’d told me twice it was no joyrider, no lights, no brakes. You were going to go over my head, you said so in my office, you were going to go to the captain and the DA and the newspapers if you had to. And on the Monday Brandt calls me down to the tenth floor. Just me. And he says the Reyes case closes on Ochoa this week. He says there are reasons I don’t need to know. He says Thorsen’s a problem and I’m to deal with Thorsen, and Okafor’s the lead, and he wants to know what it’ll take for Okafor to sign.”
“Monday,” Thorsen said. “Ochoa was alive on the Monday.”
“Yes.” Delgado did not look away from the screen. “He was alive on the Monday.”
“And you said, I know something about his son.”
“I said I’d think about it.” Delgado laughed, a terrible small sound. “Carol was sick, Danny. You knew she was sick. You didn’t know how sick. The insurance had turned down the trial at Cedars. Three times. It was the only thing left. And Brandt knew, because Brandt made it his business to know everything about everybody. He said, Art, I know a man on the board of that insurance company. He said, I’ll make a call.” He looked at his hands. “I went home and sat with her. She was asleep. She weighed ninety pounds. On the Tuesday I went back down to the tenth floor and I told him about Frank’s call.”
“And he took it from there.”
“I thought he’d lean on Ray about a DUI. I swear to God, that’s what I thought. We know about your boy’s little accident, it stays buried, help us out. Dirty, but ordinary. That’s what I’d have done.” His voice cracked. “I didn’t know about the report. The paint. The camera. I didn’t know he was going to tell Ray that Marcus killed that girl. Not till Ray came into my office on the Thursday with the four pages and wouldn’t sit down, and I read them, and I understood what had been done to him.”
“And you knew the times.”
“Yes.”
“You could have told him. That morning. One sentence. Ray, Frank Lusk had your boy in the back of his car at half past twelve.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Delgado was crying now, without any sound, his face quite still and the tears simply running.
“Because Carol got the trial,” he said. “The letter came on the Friday. She got three more years. She saw our granddaughter born.” He turned his head, at last, and looked at Thorsen. “I bought my wife three years with Ray’s son. And I signed the second line. And then I sent you fishing so you’d never see it, and you walked out, and I let you, because if you’d stayed you’d have found it. You’d have found it in a month.”
Thorsen did not move. Something very large and cold was going through him, slowly, like a train through a station without stopping.
“Ray,” he said. “Last month.”
“He found the receipt. He went to the yard. He read the book. He came here.” Delgado gestured at the room. “He sat where you sat on Thursday and he asked me who in Glendale would have taken his boy home. He trusted me. He’d always trusted me. He wanted me to help him find the unit, so he’d have it all, chapter and verse, before he went to anybody.” He breathed. “And I called Brandt. That night. I called him because I was frightened, Danny. I’m an old man and I was frightened of what Ray would find out about me.”
“And then.”
“Vane called me. The Tuesday. He said they only wanted to talk to Ray. Make him an offer. He said Ray wouldn’t open the door to Vane, but he’d open it to me.”
The cooking programme had finished. A car commercial played to the silent room.
“He opened the door,” Delgado said. “He was so pleased to see me. At that hour. He said, Art, you heard something, didn’t you, from Glendale. He took us through to the garage because Denise was asleep. Vane and another one. And when Ray saw Vane come in behind me he looked at me, and he knew. Just like that. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.”
“Who held his wrist?”
“The other one. Vane put the gun in his hand. The left. Vane said it had to be the left, he knew Ray, he’d read his file.” Delgado shut his eyes. “I held the door, Danny. That’s all I did. I stood with my back to the door into the house, so Denise wouldn’t come in. That’s what I did with my hands.”
Thorsen heard his own voice from a long way off.
“Did anyone touch the bench? Afterwards?”
Delgado opened his eyes, puzzled. “No. Vane said leave everything. Exactly how he’d have left it. He took a box from the shelf, and a little notebook out of Ray’s shirt pocket. That’s all.”
Thorsen nodded slowly.
“And Saturday,” he said. “The zoo.”
“They said they’d only take you somewhere and talk.”
“That’s what they said about Ray.”
“I know.” It came out as a whisper. “I know. I sat here all evening by the phone. I thought, if it rings, it’s done. If it doesn’t, he got away. It didn’t ring till midnight. It was Vane. He said, he’s alive and a man of mine is dead, and you’d better pray he comes to you first, Art, because I’ll know if he does.”
It was a moment before the meaning of it reached Thorsen.
Then he heard the car.
It came up the hill fast and stopped hard outside, and a second engine behind it. Doors. Not softly this time.
The phone in his pocket had been on for twenty-six minutes.
Delgado was looking at him, and Thorsen saw him understand it too, all of it, the way a good lieutenant understands a room. The old man got up out of the chair. It took him two tries.
“Back door,” he said. “Down the yard, over the wall, the Hendersons’ drive comes out on Hill Drive. Go.”
“Art —”
“Go, Danny.”
The front window came in.
It came in all at once, glass and curtain and a sound like somebody tearing a sheet of tin, and the television went out in a burst of sparks, and Carol’s reading lamp jumped off its table. Thorsen was already moving, low, towards the kitchen. He heard Delgado say something, sharp, a single word, and turned his head.
The old man was standing in the middle of the room in his cardigan, between the shattered window and the kitchen door, with his arms a little out from his sides, the way a crossing guard stands. As if that were his job. As if there were children behind him.
The second burst took him in the chest.
He sat down on the carpet, quite slowly, and then lay back against the arm of Carol’s chair.
Thorsen went back for him. He should not have and he did. He got him under the arms and pulled him round the end of the dresser, behind the wall, out of the line of the window, with glass going everywhere and the noise filling the house like water. Delgado’s cardigan was soaked through already. His face had gone the colour of paper.
He was still talking. His lips moving, his eyes fixed on Thorsen’s.
“It was never the girl,” he said. “Danny. Listen to me. It was never about the girl. It was what she filmed.”
“What did she film?”
“Ibarra.” A bubble of red at the corner of his mouth. “Tommy Ibarra. Brandt told me. The day he took the paper. He said a Metro officer’s family. He said it like it was a kindness. Tommy Ibarra.”
The front door went in. Boots in the hall.
Delgado’s hand found Thorsen’s sleeve and held it with surprising strength.
“The violets,” he said. “Carol’s. Somebody has to water them.”
Then the hand let go.
Thorsen went out through the kitchen, past the row of small dark flowers on the windowsill, and through the back door, and down the yard, and over the wall into the Hendersons’ drive, with the phone still recording in his pocket over his heart.