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‘Will you talk to me about it? All of it?’
She gave him a business card and asked him for his home and cell numbers. He gave her his home but not his cell.
‘I can’t pay you for the interview,’ she said. ‘But I’d appreciate it if you don’t talk to other media. You’ll have offers from TV - real dollars.’
‘I turned them down.’
She smiled. ‘I’ll call you this afternoon, after you’ve had time to settle in and get some rest. You’re going to need rest, Matt.’
‘Give me a few days.’
‘Absolutely.’
3 (#ulink_aa34cb9e-8de8-5d93-aaa7-e4f313d81cfc)
It took Stromsoe a full month to find the strength to talk to the reporter. At first he couldn’t say anything to anybody, could hardly order a combo at the drive-through window.
Two weeks after coming home he had scattered the ashes of his wife and son at sea, as Hallie had requested in a living will. The Neptune Society ship was filled with friends and family, and dipped and rolled noticeably in the big swells off of Newport while the minister spoke. Several people became sick. It was the worst two hours of Stromsoe’s life.
He continued to drink on top of the Vicodin, a little more each night. He thought about the big sleep, saw some advantages to it. He thought about a lot of things he’d never thought about before.
Among them was the idea that the only way to save his sanity was to tell the story of his wife and son, staying his execution like Scheherazade.
‘We got to be friends our freshman year,’ he said to Susan.
They faced each other at a picnic table in the small courtyard of his Newport Beach home. Susan’s tape recorder sat between them, next to a cobalt-blue vase filled with cut wildflowers. She also had a pen and notebook.
Across the courtyard from where he now sat, Stromsoe’s garage was still under reconstruction. His parents had begun the project weeks ago as a way of doing something optimistic but there had been some trouble with the original contractor. Around the partially rebuilt garage, trampled yellow crime scene tape had been replaced by very similar construction site tape. The muffled blasts of a nail gun popped intermittently in the cool afternoon.
The bomb had taken out one wall of the garage, blown a big hole in the roof, and shredded the bodies of two cars with thousands of tacks. What it had done to Hallie and Billy was unimaginable, but sometimes, against his will, Stromsoe did imagine it. Billy was ten. Stromsoe hadn’t gone into the garage since that day. He was afraid he’d find something.
Stromsoe inwardly shivered at the sound of the nails going into the drywall. None of the reconstruction men had ever spoken to him or looked him directly in the eye. They were all Mexican, and familiar with the presence of the dead.
Use your words, he thought: tell the story and save your self.
‘The marching band wasn’t a very hip thing back then,’ he said. ‘It was us and them. But I liked us and them. That made it easy for me to become a cop. Anyway, the band members made friends pretty easy. One night some of the football players bombed our practice with rocks. We were under the lights, marching and playing, and these goofballs stood off behind the chain-link fence in the dark and let the rocks fly. A dumb thing to do. We didn’t know what was going on at first - just a bunch of yelling and screaming about what fags we were. But then Kristy Waters sat down on the grass and covered her face and the blood was coming out from between her fingers. Kristy was first flute, a real sweetie, her dad ran a tire shop on First. I jumped the fence and caught up with a couple of those guys. I messed them up fairly well. I wasn’t the type to get angry but I got very angry then. It seemed wrong that they’d thrown a rock into Kristy’s face because she played the flute in the marching band. Three of my musicians stuck with me - he was one of them.’
‘Mike Tavarez?’
Stromsoe nodded and touched the vase. He looked at his four-fingered hand then slid it casually beneath the bench.
‘Yes. It surprised me because he was small and quiet. But he fought like a demon. It said something about him. Anyway, he was a good musician and nice kid, a real wiseass when you got to know him. So we became friends. That seems like a hundred years ago, you know? Part of another world, or someone else’s past.’
‘I can only imagine what you’re going through, Matt.’
Stromsoe met her gaze and looked away. She had arrived today with the wildflowers in the vase, and a bag of fancy cheeses, salami, and crackers from an overpriced market nearby.
For relief he looked at his house. It was an older home on the Newport peninsula, on Fifty-second Street, two blocks in from the ocean. It was white. There was a fence around it and you could hear the waves. It was a nice little place, yet in the month that Stromsoe had been home from the hospital, he had come to hate it because it seemed complicit in what had happened.
But he loved it too - it had been their oftenhappy home - and the power of the two emotions made him feel paralyzed.
He thought about selling the place, fully furnished and as is, and moving away. He thought of selling the place but renting storage space for Hallie’s and Billy’s things, so he could visit them when he wanted to. He thought of just staying here andliving in it as it was. He thought of burning it down and never coming back, and of burning it down with himself in it. The idea of never seeing his son’s stuffed bears again broke his heart a little more, and the idea of seeing them every day broke it again in a different place.
He took off his sunglasses and noted again the odd sensation of breeze cooling his good eye while his prosthetic eye felt nothing at all.
‘How long did your friendship with Mike last?’ asked Susan.
‘Four years. It was a good friendship. We disagreed about a lot of things and argued about everything. But always the big stuff - does God care or does God laugh at us? Is there heaven and hell, do we determine our lives or is there a divine or a satanic plan?’
‘I had a friend like that too,’ said Susan. ‘Funny how we talk about those things when we’re young, then stop talking about them when we get older.’
Stromsoe thought back to the endless games of eight ball on the slouching table in Mike’s garage. The talk, the competition. Two boys looking for a way to face the world.
‘We both went nuts for Hallie Jaynes when she transferred in but we were good friends by then. We figured she was out of our reach. That was our sophomore year. She was pretty and smart. Stayed above things, had an edge. Unafraid. Unfazable. Always said what she thought - called Mike and me the marching gland. Sarcastic twinkle in her eyes. Nice face, curly blond hair, pretty legs. Our senior year, I finally got her to go steady. I knew her heart wasn’t in it, but I was flattered that she’d do it for me. We didn’t want to leave Mike out, so the three of us did a lot of things together. The summer after we graduated, Hallie took up with him.’
Sometimes, as he remembered something good about his wife, terrible visions rushed in and destroyed his pleasant memories. How could he keep Hallie in his heart with these hideous pictures attached?
He cleared his throat and focused his attention on a hummingbird.
Talk on, he thought. Tell the story, shed the skin.
‘That must have hurt,’ said Susan.
‘Sure. But I was busy. I was getting ready to go to Cal State Fullerton. I was set to study prelaw because I wanted to be a cop. He was on his way to Harvard on scholarship because his grades were high and he was a great musician. He made the news - barrio kid bound for Harvard, all that.’
‘Did you see it coming, Hallie and Mike?’
Stromsoe nodded. ‘I wasn’t totally surprised. Hallie always liked the hidden side of things and he had secrets. One of them was that at the same time he took up with Hallie, he was taking up with the Delhi F Troop. He hinted what he was doing. She dug it at first - the secrecy, the whiff of violence.’
‘Unafraid and unfazable.’
‘The minute that game started, she was out of her league.’
Susan finished writing and looked at him. ‘You don’t like to say his name, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Does it bother you when I say it?’
‘That’s okay.’
‘I’ll get you another beer if you’d like.’
A minute later she was back with a cold bottle, then she set out the cheese, meat, and crackers on a plate that she had found in his kitchen. Stromsoe was annoyed that this reporter would commandeer a dish last touched by Hallie.
‘When did Mike join Delhi F Troop?’
‘They jumped him in that summer.’
‘Jumped him in?’
‘They’d beat the shit out of you to see if you fight back. If you fight back, they give you a heavy job to do - an armed robbery, a retribution, maybe a killing. Once you do it, you’re in. Usually, the kid is thirteen or fourteen. He was old. But they wanted him because he was smart. His parents tried to keep him away from the gangsters. They had him attend Santa Ana High instead of Valley, because Valley had the gangs. But Flora Street was Delhi turf, so he was surrounded by them anyway.’
‘What did he do to get in?’
‘He held up three stores at gunpoint down in San Diego, where the Ten Logan 30s would get the blame. He did a good job, got some old plates for his car, cased the stores, waited until the end of the night. He hit the mom-and-pop places that didn’t have fancy safes. He dressed preppie for the jobs, never banger, so it was a big surprise when the gun came out from under his sport coat. He got eleven hundred bucks, something like that. Turned half of it over to his homies, and he was in.’
‘They let him keep half?’
Stromsoe nodded. ‘He was supposed to give them all of it but he learned early to pay himself first.’
Susan wrote quickly. ‘Did Hallie go east with him when school started?’
‘No. But he came back to Santa Ana often while he was a Harvard student.’
‘To run with the Delhi F Troop and rob liquor stores,’ said Susan.
‘And to be with Hallie.’
Stromsoe sipped the beer. He allowed himself a memory, one that seemed useful: after Hallie had taken up with Tavarez, Stromsoe understood that she would come back to him someday. He didn’t know when or why, only that she would.
Susan frowned, tapped her pen on her notepad. ‘How did Mike Tavarez go from being a clarinet player to an armed robber? And so quickly? Why?’
Stromsoe had given these questions more than a little thought over the last fourteen years, since he’d learned that Mike Tavarez had pulled off a string of nine armed robberies in Southern California while posting a 3.0 GPA as a Harvard undergrad.
‘The robberies were a rush for him,’ said Stromsoe. ‘He told me that in jail. He said they were better than coke or meth or Hallie, or any combination thereof.’
Susan nodded. ‘But he was giving up his future.’
‘He thought he was making his future. He hated Harvard. He felt dissed and out of place. He told me he just wanted to be a homie. Not a poster boy for Equal Opportunity. Not a newspaper feature about the poor kid in the Ivy League. He felt like a traitor to la raza, being singled out for all that praise and promise.’
He didn’t tell her that Hallie liked it when Mike came back from those robberies, jacked on adrenaline. She didn’t know exactly what he was doing out there, but the mystery turned her on. Hallie told him so. And Mike had told him how much he enjoyed fooling her. A binding secret.
‘What did he do with the money?’
‘He told the court that he’d robbed to help his mother and father. But he didn’t - he bought stocks and did well for himself. Most of that money he lost under asset forfeiture laws. His attorney got the rest. That was the last time he did anything traceable with cash. Anyway, the judge hit him pretty hard. Mike got ten, did a nickel, and walked in ‘93. By the time he left prison, Mike Tavarez wasn’t a Delhi street hood anymore. He was La Eme.’
‘The Mexican Mafia. The most powerful prison gang in the country.’
‘They made the Delhi F Troop look like Campfire Girls.’
‘And by the time he got out, you were married to Hallie.’
‘Yes,’ Stromsoe heard himself say. ‘Billy was one and a half. It took us a long time to have him. Hallie had a hard time getting pregnant after what he did to her.’
‘Tell me about that,’ said Susan Doss.
‘I can’t,’ said Stromsoe. Exhaustion closed over him like a drawn blind. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe later.’
‘Tomorrow? Same time. I’ll bring lunch, how’s that?’
4 (#ulink_20081ab8-bee2-5516-8a21-a4706cf525fe)
That evening, Dan Birch, Stromsoe’s good friend and former narco partner, arrived unannounced. It was the third time he’d come to the house on Fifty-second Street since Stromsoe had been released from UCI Medical Center. Birch and his wife and children had been guests here for the better part of twelve years. Birch now stood in the kitchen and surveyed Stromsoe with his usual heavybrowed glower.
‘You look bad,’ he said.
‘I feel bad sometimes,’ said Stromsoe.
‘What can I do?’
‘There’s nothing, Dan.’
‘I can put you to work when you’re ready.’
Stromsoe nodded and tried to smile. ‘A one-eyed security guard?’
Four years ago Birch had quit the Sheriff’s Department and started his own security company. Thanks to an engaging personality and some family connections to Irvine high-tech companies, his Birch Security Solutions had billed $1.15 million in its first year, and tripled that number since. They did some of everything: residential and industrial security, patent and copyright protection, patrol, installations, and private investigations.
Birch chuckled. ‘I can do better than that, Matt.’
‘Divorce work?’
‘We’ve got some interesting industrial espionage going down in Irvine. And some jerk-off at the med school selling cadaver parts, but the university can’t afford the scandal of busting him. We’re going to…dissuade him from further business.’
‘No cadaver parts, Dan.’
‘I understand. I shouldn’t have said that. What can I do to help? I’m trying here.’
‘Let me make you a drink. It’s only the Von’s brand. I’m trying to reduce my dependence on foreign vodka.’
They drank late into the night, Stromsoe outpacing his friend roughly two to one. He laid off the painkiller as long as he could but by midnight the pins in his legs were killing him so he took more pills.
‘One for the road?’ he asked Birch.
‘No.’
Birch came over and knelt next to Stromsoe. ‘I didn’t know it was this bad.’
‘It’s temporary. Don’t worry.’
‘I’m so fucking sorry, Matt.’
‘I’ll get there,’ he said, wherever there was.
‘Tavarez is an animal,’ said Birch. ‘And Ofelia’s death wasn’t our fault.’
‘No,’ said Stromsoe. ‘Not our fault at all.’
