The Famous and the Dead (31 page)

“That's ridiculous,” said Erin. “It's not possible that Suzanne was a descendant of Joaquin Murrieta.”

Hood watched as Bradley put his hands on Erin's face, looked into her eyes, and smiled. “After a lifetime of lying to you, I never thought it would be so hard to convince you of the truth. Look, honey—this saddle here was Joaquin's. And those are his six-guns and holsters. And his hemp lariat and leather bullwhip. He was very good with that lariat, known for it. That deck of cards belonged to him. He was a terrific gambler, used to deal Monte games in the Gold Rush country before they raped and murdered Rosa. His wife. My great-great-great . . . well, you know.”

Bradley let go of Erin, lifted another blanket, and dropped it to the floor. “And that's his bulletproof vest. See the big dent in the middle? That was from Joaquin's own forty-four—the gun you see right here. Before paying for the vest, Joaquin ordered the blacksmith who made it for him to put it on. Then he shot him, to make sure the workmanship was high quality. Look! It held. And see the new pockmarks? The fresh ones that haven't tarnished yet? Those came during a gunfight in Lancaster two years ago, remember, the big car-wash shootout where two deputies and three drug runners died? That was
me
wearing the vest, Erin. Bradley Jones, direct descendant! See that, Thomas? That's what your daddy used to do.”

“Not funny, Brad,” said Erin.

“Erin, this is the last time he'll hear about any of this.” Bradley looked back at Hood, then with a flourish pulled the last blanket from the workbench. The glass jar was just as Hood remembered it, the head pale and hairless and stripped of hope.

“Jesus Christ,” said Reyes, crossing himself.

“Ouch!” said Owens.

“My
God
,” said Beth.

“Don't let Thomas see it!” said Erin.

Hood sheltered the baby deep in his arms, hiding him from the world and the world from him. He watched Erin take a step toward the jar. She reached out her hand but stopped it short of the glass. “You came from
him
?”

“But tonight and here, all of this ends. It should. Mom couldn't decide if knowing was a curse or a blessing. It is not a blessing. And I won't let Thomas carry it.”

Hood watched as Erin turned away from the jar and toward Bradley. She looked up at him for a long beat, then touched his face. Hood thought her hand looked like a blind woman's, touching an unknown face for the first time. Then she came past the others and took Thomas from him and climbed back out of the bunker. Owens followed.

Bradley spread his arms. “Hey, everybody! Show's over. Help me load all this stuff into the tractor outside. Everything on the workbench, everything in the safes, all of it. Right down to the blankets.”

•   •   •

Within five minutes the tractor's front loader was heaped with the known physical history of Joaquin Murrieta, and the proceeds from Bradley Jones's life of crime. Hood carried the big jar, as no one else seemed inclined. Reyes, his arms cradling bricks of cash, gave him wide berth. Hood came back and got the blankets, too. Bradley started up the clacking diesel and the dogs ran around the machine barking. In the faint moonlight Hood could see Joaquin's head bobbing with the rhythm of the engine. Bradley slowly drove the tractor across the barnyard toward the house. Hood saw Erin and Owens standing in the porch light.

At the water's edge Bradley stopped and reversed so the front loader bearing his past faced his home and his wife and son. He backed into the water. Then he waved at Erin and shut down the tractor and jumped off. Hood saw the gas can in his hand. Bradley sloshed ashore, set it on the ground and pulled out the nozzle, then lifted and upended the can over the front loader. Hood watched him drench it all, shaking out the last of the fuel before tossing the empty can up onto the barnyard grass where it landed with a hollow thump. Bradley waved back at Erin again, then turned to the tractor. Hood saw him bring his left hand from the duster pocket, and the motion of his shoulders, and a moment later the big bucket burst into flames. Bradley called the dogs as he backpedaled away and slipped and fell, then he was up again. The fire, momentarily confined and angry, roared and whirled upward, and Hood could see the writhe and curl of the blankets, and the journals sparking and smoking, and the quick surrender of the plastic wrap. It took some time for the densely packed cash to catch, but finally it did, with a sudden concussive
whump!
Bradley and his dogs had scrambled almost to the big oak tree when Joaquin's jar exploded and the sky was filled with burning fragments of him and fiery glass and bits of paper, all reflected in the water. Hood saw the lariat, aflame and uncoiling through the darkness on its way back to earth.

T
he nex
t morning at LASD headquarters in Monterey Park, Hood was questioned by Chief Miranda Dez and Jim Warren. They were very interested in his transportation of alleged drug money to a known drug kingpin in Mexico. Confronted with the video and photographic evidence, Hood confessed to being the bag man in a kidnapping ransom payment. “It was a private thing, not a department action,” he said.

“Everything a deputy does is a department action,” said Warren. “Were Bradley Jones, Caroline Vega, and Jack Cleary involved, too?”

“They were part of it.”

“Why don't they appear in any of this material?” asked Dez.

“Bradley edited them out so they could perjure themselves and avoid blame.”

“Who was kidnapped?”

“Erin.”

“His
wife
? Why didn't he tell us?” asked Warren.

“You know why he didn't. You just can't prove it.”

“Charlie,” said Warren. “More coffee? Something to eat? You're going to be here a long time.”

At the end of the long time, Hood was suspended with pay for one week and ordered back to L.A. for desk duty, pending a full investigation by CID. Hood stood and dropped his gun and badge to Warren's desk.
Second time in four days
, he thought. “This job isn't worth the heartache or the paycheck. I'm out. I'll be at home if you want to arrest me for something.”

Afterward he drove to Bakersfield and met his siblings and mother at Applebee's for dinner. They stayed up late, reminiscing. His brothers and sisters struck him as predictably advanced versions of what they had always been, and he was certain that he appeared that way, too. He slept in his boyhood bed. Lying in the dark in the small, familiar room, he was effortlessly transported back through the years and he dreamed the dreams of his childhood. The next day they spread his father's ashes up on the Kern River, where he had loved to fish.

•   •   •

Back in Buenavista, Hood learned from Owens that Mike Finnegan had at least five residences in Southern California, her favorite being a remote cottage near Piru that backed up to Piru Creek and the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge. Ventura County, thought Hood—he and his father had fished Piru Creek when Hood was just a boy. According to Owens, Mike had purchased the cottage in 1887 when Piru was being developed as “a second Garden of Eden” by a wealthy publisher of Sunday-school tracts. Mike had told her that the nutcase publisher had planted the surrounding valley only with fruits identified in the Bible—dates, figs, grapes, olives, and pomegranates. Mike could see the original vineyard from his back patio. Owens said that Mike, even to this day, was still proud of his subterfuge in purchasing a home in the middle of enemy territory.

There in the cottage, she said, Mike now spent long stretches of downtime—reading, writing, researching on the Internet, daydreaming, hiking the rugged hills, and swimming most mornings in cold, fast Piru Creek. He used a mask and snorkel and diving weights to get down and observe the fish and aquatic insects, often photographing them with a waterproof point-and-shoot camera. Owens told them that Piru was the only one of Mike's homes she knew of where he allowed himself to sleep—sometimes for up to two hours at a time. He slowed down and relaxed when he was there.

She said Mike believed that some places had certain powers and that these powers were determined by history. He had told Owens that the indigenous people of Piru—the Tataviam—had been free and spiritually advanced until their conversion to Christianity through the San Fernando Mission. He called that a tragedy. So, in Piru, Mike liked to let his mind ride back in time to before the King had ruined the Tataviam. He would sit out on the back patio of the cottage for hours on end, staring out at the fertile valley and the biblical flora and the more distant peaks of the mountains, a legal pad in his lap and his pencil held between his fingers like a cigarette. His eyelids would gradually close but never all the way. After hours of utter stillness, Mike would often suddenly sit up straight and start writing, filling page after page with his tight, clear print while he muttered and chuckled and hummed. Owens admitted to have peeked at the writings later in secret but Mike had never once written in a language she recognized.

Owens told Hood that Mike also had an apartment down in National City, two-level with a view of the shipyards; an active-seniors condo in Laguna Woods Village in Orange County where he played golf and made friends with older people; a little stucco 1950s tract house in Torrance; and a place somewhere on the Pearblossom Highway near Palmdale, though this was the one home he had never shown her. She suspected he had other houses though she couldn't be sure.

So Hood Google-Earthed all of the homes and saw that the Piru cottage would be the best place to surprise Mike. It was out of the way and tucked up tight to the woodlands and the creek. A good road in and out, a low chance of witnesses, and plenty of places to hide and stage. Besides, Mike would be in one of his pensive phases—resting and ruminating and daydreaming and swimming in the creek. The only thing Hood didn't like was the long drive back to Buenavista. He had friends with helicopters and light aircraft but he couldn't expose them to danger.

•   •   •

That evening in the kitchen, while Hood stood vigil over a prime rib and made up the horseradish sauce, Beth and Gabriel started in on potatoes, asparagus, and salad. Bradley came back from town with cheese, crackers, wine, beer, and various liquors and mixers, for which he took orders, then served with an unusual—for him—air of concern. Hood saw trouble in his eyes and noted that Bradley kept looking out the windows. Owens made an apple pie and a peanut butter pie, then set a boom box on the breakfast bar and found Mozart on the classical station. Erin hovered about with Thomas in her arms until he fell asleep, and she put him in the portable crib set up in the living room, close by, where she could easily see him. Daisy and Minnie lay down beside the crib. Bradley delivered a rather large glass of white wine to Erin and she took it with the first smile Hood had seen her offer him in recent history. Beatrice flitted about, “testing” the food and gulping zinfandel. With Thomas asleep, Owens found some rowdy Mexican music and cranked it up. “About time,” said Reyes. “Does anyone ever get the feeling that just below the surface here, everything is crazy?”

“Duh,” said Beatrice, who had heard Bradley use this current expression, and was quick to pick up on such things. “Gabe, would you teach me to drive a modern car while there's still a little light? I've never gone over twenty-six miles per hour.”

“Easy on the wine, angel face,” said Reyes. “Or you'll be DUI.”

Hood and everyone else followed them out, Erin holding sleeping Thomas against her shoulder. Gabriel made Beatrice take the passenger seat of his pickup and when she had her shoulder restraint fastened he commenced an overview of the modern automobile. Hood looked out at the desert in evening light, the backlit peaks of the Devil's Claws touched with orange and their bases locked in purple shadows. He looked south to Buenavista in the middle distance, its nineteenth-century church with the bell tower jutting up just beyond the Burger King and the Blockbuster and the Chevron station. He thought about having quit the LASD. He hadn't planned to quit, but wasn't enough enough? He liked L.A., but he liked Buenavista better. But what to do? He wondered again about selling cars, and wondered whether, with the sudden death of Israel Castro and change of ownership at Castro Ford, a fresh salesman might be needed. Could a physician and a car salesman be happy together? If not, why not?

A minute or two later, Beatrice slid over and Gabe came around. She took forever with the power seat, moving it every which way and back again. She started up and jumped into reverse, tires throwing gravel against the undercarriage, then made a neat highway-patrol turn and accelerated down the rough dirt road. Daisy and Minnie ran alongside barking. Hood watched the dust rise behind the truck and the serpentine course she steered, left and right and left and right. Overcorrecting due to the power steering, he thought, then wondered if she was just doing it for fun. A half a mile out the truck stopped, then swung onto paved Sunset Rim Drive, and the panting dogs came over the rise back to the house.

•   •   •

Dinner was the most unusual of Hood's life but one of the most pleasant. The women took over the conversation, all of them except Erin drinking briskly. Beatrice set the pace on the wine and out-ate the others, roughly five to one, including half of the peanut butter pie. She reminisced on the Portuguese in San Diego and the Apaches at Yuma. Owens told amusing Hollywood tales from her acting jobs and Beth became excited by her own ER stories and Erin described for them in fascinating detail the decaying castle in the Yucatán jungle where she'd been held captive by the drug lord Benjamin Armenta. Bradley continued to fill their glasses. Soon all four of them were telling four stories more or less at once, a layered narrative that reached Hood's ears as pleasant near-chaos:
Geronimo scalped him, then yawned and lay down in the shade and took a nap. Quentin takes my wrists in both hands and kisses them! I yell out, two pints, stat—blood, not bourbon, you fool! The black jaguar looks at me again, and I swear he's sizing me up for dinner.

Hood sipped a little wine and kept an eye on the windows. He put Mary Kate Boyle on speakerphone while he did dishes—she sounded happy and relieved, and the rehearsals were going well. She'd gotten back her job at KFC, no problem, just like Hood said she would. She still had headaches from Clint's blackjack, but less than before. She'd let him know about opening night. Hood thanked her again for her courage and good humor over the last weeks and she seemed disappointed by this.

Hood noted that Bradley drank nothing but coffee and was ankle-strapped and rarely had his back to a window or the front door. Reyes had a few beers but he made his limping rounds every forty minutes or so, flashlight in hand and .38 holstered to his hip.