“Ray’s garage,” Brandt said. “Half past twelve. Mrs. Okafor is spending the night with her sister in Pasadena. One of Curtis’s people drove her there this evening, at her request. The house is empty.”
“And Mateo Reyes?”
“Will be released to his mother within the hour. I made the call before I made this one.” A small pause, as if to let Thorsen admire it. “He isn’t a bargaining chip, Mr. Thorsen. I don’t use children.”
Thorsen said nothing.
“Come alone. Curtis will be at the gate, and he’ll want to check you for a wire, and I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let him. I’ll be alone inside. You have my word.”
The line went dead.
Thorsen switched the phone off and stood on the footbridge in the wind for a while, looking at the river. Then he walked back south, to the fire under the freeway, and gave both telephones to Deacon.
Deacon looked at them in his palm as if they were a pair of small dead birds.
“If I’m not back by three,” Thorsen said, “call the only number in the little one. Tell her where I went. Tell her I said to bring the paper anyway.”
“And if you are back?”
“Then I’ll need them.”
Deacon put them in the inside pocket of his vest and zipped it, and went back to his book.
He walked to Highland Park. It took an hour. He came up the steep street from below at twenty-five past twelve, and a silver Tahoe was parked at the kerb outside the Okafor house with its lights off, and Curtis Vane was leaning against the side gate with his arms folded, chewing.
He did not straighten up as Thorsen came. He looked him over in the streetlight, slowly, the stained work trousers and the too-small sweatshirt with the college crest and the Dodgers cap.
“Christ,” he said. “You look like something I’d scrape off my boot.”
“I’ve been living rough. Some people want to kill me.”
“Arms up.”
He did it thoroughly. Collar, sleeves, waistband, the small of the back, both legs to the ankle, the boots. His hands paused over the dressing under the sweatshirt and pressed, once, hard, exactly on the wound, and Thorsen breathed through it and did not move.
“Shane was a friend of mine,” Vane said quietly, close to his ear. “Nine years.”
“Your man shot him. Through the bars. I watched.”
Vane stepped back. His pale eyes rested on Thorsen’s face for a long moment, without any expression at all.
“He’s clean,” he said, over his shoulder, to the dark yard. Then he opened the gate and stood aside, just barely, just enough, exactly as he had on Wednesday morning.
The garage light was on. The side door stood open.
Walter Brandt was standing in the middle of the floor, near the pale patch on the concrete, in a navy sweater and grey trousers, with his hands in his pockets. He looked like a man in his own garage on a Sunday afternoon, considering whether to build a shelf. The folding chair was still pushed in under the bench. He had not sat in it. Thorsen gave him that much.
“Mr. Thorsen. Thank you for coming.” He did not offer his hand this time. “I thought it should be here. It seemed honest.”
“You’ve never been in here before.”
“No.” Brandt looked round, at the pegboard with its outlines, at the white square of new paint on the ceiling. “He was a very orderly man. I always respected that about him.”
“You blackmailed him with his son.”
“I did.” Brandt said it simply, without hurry, as though agreeing about the weather. “I’m not going to stand in this room and lie to you. You’d know. And I think you’re owed better than that.”
He walked slowly to the bench and stood looking at the mug and the glasses and the pen at the right-hand end.
“Let me tell you what I’m offering,” he said, “and then let me tell you why, and then you can decide. The offer first. Arthur Delgado was killed on Sunday night by rounds fired from a weapon registered to Castellan Risk Group and issued to a contractor called Royce Dwyer. The ballistics report will say so by noon. Mr. Dwyer has a history of violence and a grudge against you, as his face will testify. He will be charged with Lieutenant Delgado’s murder, and with the death of his colleague at the zoo. The department will publicly withdraw its interest in you. The Okafor case will be reviewed and quietly returned to undetermined. And there’s this.” He took a folded sheet from his trouser pocket and laid it on the bench. “Nineteen years and eight months. You walked out of this department four months short of a full pension. It’s been bothering me since I pulled your jacket on Thursday. Something like that can be corrected, administratively. It happens more often than people think.”
Thorsen did not look at the paper.
“And the yard?”
“The yard gets its cap at five o’clock, as approved by three city departments and the state. And I become chief of police at ten.”
“And Judge Park’s warrant?”
Brandt smiled very slightly. “Signed at twenty to eleven. Adele has wanted my head on a plate for fifteen years. I don’t blame her, I’d have done the same. But paper is paper, Mr. Thorsen. By the time anybody serves it, there’ll be two feet of state-certified concrete on that ground. Breaking a certified cap takes a hearing, an environmental review and the state’s consent. Eighteen months, my lawyers tell me. By then I’ll have been chief for eighteen months, and whatever comes out of that hole will be whatever my lab says it is. That’s not a threat. It’s a schedule.”
“And Art?”
“Whatever you think you recorded in Art’s living room,” Brandt said mildly, “is a fugitive with a stolen phone and a dying old man who’d been drinking since lunch. My lawyers would enjoy that.”
“Now tell me why.”
Brandt nodded, as if that were a reasonable thing to want.
“Six years ago,” he said, “I commanded a division of two hundred and forty officers. About forty of them, over a period of years, had been stealing from the people they raided. Cash, mostly. Drug money, which nobody reports. I didn’t start it. I found it when I took the command. And I made a decision, which was to manage it rather than blow it up, because blowing it up would have meant a federal consent decree and ten years of monitors and a department so busy filling in forms that it would stop policing at all. People die when that happens. More people than you’d think. Mostly in neighbourhoods like Frogtown.”
“And Ibarra?”
“Tommy Ibarra was stealing with the rest of them. When he got frightened, he went to Internal Affairs to buy himself immunity, and Internal Affairs, in its wisdom, routed his complaint to his commanding officer. Which was me.” Brandt spread his hands. “What happened to Tommy happened. I didn’t order it. I didn’t stop it. I learned of it afterwards, which is the way a commander learns most things.”
“And the girl.”
For the first time something moved in Brandt’s face. Not much.
“That girl was a tragedy,” he said. “I didn’t order that either. Curtis is a soldier. He solves the problem in front of him the way soldiers do. By the time I knew, she was dead, and the only question left was whether her death would also take down a police department that keeps four million people alive. I chose the department. I’d choose it again.” He turned from the bench and looked at Thorsen directly. “You can call that evil. I’ve called it worse myself, at three in the morning. But I’ve cut deaths in custody by a third since I made Assistant Chief. I’ve put body cameras on every officer in this city. I’ve done more for Frogtown in five years than Marisol Reyes’s three hundred complaints would have done in fifty. I’m the adult in the room, Mr. Thorsen. Somebody has to be. Ray understood that, at the end of that night at his kitchen table. I’d hoped you might.”
The garage was very quiet. A moth was beating itself against the fluorescent tube.
Thorsen looked at him for a long time. A good-looking man of sixty in a navy sweater, who believed every word.
“Did you tell Marcus yourself?” he said.
Brandt did not answer.
He did not look away, either. He stood in the middle of Ray Okafor’s garage and met Thorsen’s eyes, steadily, and said nothing at all, and the silence went on and on until it was not a silence any more. It was an answer.
A young officer, a month after the worst night of his life, called in to see a commander on the tenth floor. Coffee. A kind voice. Son, I think you should know what your father did for you. I think you should know what you did.
And four years at the back of a church.
Thorsen walked to the bench.
Brandt watched him, puzzled, his hands still in his pockets.
Thorsen did not touch the folded paper. He picked up the mug, and moved it, and set it down at the left-hand end of the bench, a hand’s width in from the edge. Then the glasses. Then the pen, laid across where a newspaper would have been, at an angle, any old how, the way a man drops a pen when he means to pick it up again.
He looked at it for a moment. It was right now. It was the room the way Ray had left it.
“What’s that?” said Brandt.
“Where he kept it.”
He went out through the side door into the yard. The tomato stakes. The coiled hose. Vane was still at the gate, and he straightened up as Thorsen came, and his hand went to his hip, and stopped there, waiting.
Behind Thorsen, in the doorway of the garage, Brandt said, quite calmly:
“Let him go, Curtis.”
Vane’s hand stayed where it was.
“Let him go. He’ll go to the yard. He hasn’t anywhere else.” A pause. The voice was tired, and kind, the voice of a man making a difficult decision for the good of everybody. “Finish it there.”
Vane looked at Thorsen over the gate. Then he stepped aside.
Thorsen walked out through it, and past the Tahoe, and down the steep dark street with his back to both of them, and did not hurry, and did not look round. He could feel the place between his shoulder blades where a bullet would go, all the way to the corner.
None came.
It was ten past one. The pour started at five.