The building was two storeys of pink stucco round a concrete yard, with an outside staircase at each end and washing strung between the railings. It had been pink six years ago. Somebody had repainted it the same pink since, which told you the landlord had bought the paint in bulk.
Apartment eleven was upstairs at the back. There was a pair of work shoes on the mat, white, rubber-soled, placed side by side.
He knocked and stood back so that whoever looked through the spyhole could see all of him.
It took a while. Then the door opened on its chain, and a woman’s face looked up at him through the gap, and he watched her go through it. The size of him first. Then the nose. Then, slowly, the rest.
“Detective,” Rosa Reyes said.
“Not any more, Mrs. Reyes.”
“No.” She closed the door, slid the chain, and opened it wide. “The other one said the same. Come in. You’ll have coffee.”
She was smaller than he remembered, or he had got it wrong. Grey now at the temples, hair tied back, a cleaner’s tunic with a company name on the pocket. She had the heavy, careful walk of someone at the end of a night shift. He understood about the candle.
The room had barely changed. Same couch under a crocheted blanket. Same table with four chairs, though only two had cushions that looked sat on. On the wall above the television was the photograph from the shelf in the street, larger, the girl in pale blue scrubs, and beside it a certificate in a frame. Los Angeles City College, Department of Nursing. Awarded posthumously. He had not known they did that.
He sat where she pointed. She brought the coffee in a mug with a pharmacy logo and set a plate of sweet bread beside it that he had not asked for.
“He’s dead,” Thorsen said. “Detective Okafor. Last week. I’m sorry, I didn’t know if anyone had told you.”
She was still for a moment. Then she crossed herself, quickly, and sat down opposite him with her hands folded on the table.
“How?”
“They say he shot himself.”
“They say.”
“Yes.”
Rosa looked at him for some time. “He was not a happy man,” she said. “But he was not finished. A man who is finished does not write things down.”
“He came here.”
“Three times.”
“When?”
“The first, a month ago. A little less. I come home from work, he is sitting on the stairs outside like a boy waiting for his mother. An old man in a jacket. I did not know him at first. He stood up and took off his hat.” She turned her mug a quarter turn on the table. “He said he was sorry. I said, for what, it was six years, you did your job. He said no. He said he had not done his job. He said it like you say it in church.”
Thorsen kept his face still. “Did he say what he meant?”
“I asked. He said he would tell me when he could prove it. He said I had been told enough things that were not true.”
“And the other times?”
“Questions. He had a little book.” She almost smiled. “He wrote with the wrong hand. I remembered that, from before. Marisol also.”
“What did he ask?”
“About her letters. Her complaints to the city.” Rosa lifted one shoulder. “She was like that from a child. A streetlight is broken, she reports it. Somebody leaves a mattress, she reports it. There is a thing for it, on the telephone, you take a picture and you send it and they give you a number. She had hundreds. She would show me the numbers like they were grades. I said, mija, they give everybody a number. It doesn’t mean they come.”
“What did he want to know about them?”
“Which was the last. What she was angry about that week. If she kept them on paper, on a computer.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know. I told her to stop, so she stopped telling me. That is what I have to live with, Mr. Thorsen. She stopped telling me. Everything was on her phone.”
“And the phone was never found.”
“No.”
“Did he ask anything else?”
“If she had been afraid. If anyone had come to the kitchen where she worked, asking for her.” Rosa’s hands tightened on each other. “You asked me the same thing, six years ago. I gave you the same answer. She was nineteen. She was afraid of her exams.”
She got up then, and he thought he had been dismissed. But she went to the counter and came back with a mobile phone, an old one with a cracked corner, and laid it on the table between them.
“I want you to hear something. I played it for him also.”
She pressed a contact and put it on speaker. It rang four times, in the room and nowhere else. Then a click.
“Hi, it’s Mari. I’m in class or I’m at work or I’m asleep, so, you know. Leave one. Be nice.”
A laugh at the end, cut off by the tone. A young voice, quick, a little hoarse, the voice of somebody who had been talking over kitchen fans all night.
Rosa ended the call before it could record.
“Thirty-one dollars a month,” she said. “The company sends me letters. Do I want to upgrade. Do I want a new telephone for her. I pay it. My son says I am crazy. But if I stop, a machine somewhere takes that away, and then it is nowhere. So I pay.”
Thorsen found he had no sentence for that either. He drank the coffee instead. It was strong and too sweet and he finished it.
“Mrs. Reyes. The last time he came. Did he leave anything with you? A paper, a number, anything to keep?”
“His card. I put it with her, at the wall.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.” She considered. “He said if he did not come back, somebody else would. I thought he meant the police.” Her eyes moved over the eleven-dollar suit. “I see he did not.”
The boy was waiting on the stairs.
He was not a boy. He was seventeen and nearly six feet, thin as a rail, in a black hooded sweatshirt with the hood down and his hair cut close at the sides. He was sitting on the fourth step from the top with his forearms on his knees, so that Thorsen would have to step over him or ask.
The face was the same. That was the strange part. The same level stare from a bedroom doorway, moved up two feet and hardened.
“Mateo,” Thorsen said.
“You remember my name. That’s nice.” He did not get up. “I remember yours. You’re the one who was going to find him.”
“Yes.”
“You said that. In there. To my mother. We’re going to find who did this. I was eleven, man, I believed you. I told kids at school.” He spat neatly through the railings into the yard. “Then it’s some dead guy from the Valley and nobody comes any more. And now six years, and the old one starts showing up with his sorry, and now you.”
“I left the department. A week after.”
“Good for you.”
“It wasn’t. I should have stayed and made a noise. I walked instead.”
Mateo looked at him as if that were a trick. Then he looked away, across the yard, and his jaw worked.
“She pays that phone bill,” he said. “You know what she makes?”
“She told me.”
“Yeah. She tells everybody.”
He shifted on the step, and the sweatshirt pulled tight across the small of his back. Thorsen saw the shape there. It was not a phone and it was not a wallet. It sat at an angle, the way a pistol sits when you have pushed it into a waistband with no holster and have not yet learned how badly that goes.
He did not say anything about it. Not here, twenty feet from the boy’s mother, with nothing to offer in exchange.
“The old one,” Mateo said. “The cop. He was being followed. You know that?”
“Tell me.”
“Every time he came. He’d park that blue van out front, he’d go up. Ten minutes later, there’s a silver SUV down the end by the hydrant. Big one. Black windows. Just sits. He leaves, it leaves.” He held up three fingers. “Three for three. I told him the last time. He said he knew. He said don’t go near it.”
“Did you?”
“I walked past. There’s a guy in it chewing gum. Bald head. He looked at me like I was a dog on the freeway.” The boy’s hand drifted towards the small of his back and stopped. “I got the plate. You want the plate?”
“I’ve got the plate.”
That surprised him. It was the first thing that had.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s what I thought.” Mateo stood, at last, and stepped aside against the railing. He was looking over Thorsen’s shoulder, down into the street, and his face had gone flat and old. “Better think fast, detective.”
Thorsen turned.
At the end of the block, in the red zone by the hydrant, a silver Tahoe was sitting with its engine running.