“Mr. Ford,” said Lark. “Please meet Max Taucher. Sir, this is the private investigator that Joan spoke so highly of.”
He turned his gaze from an ocean-view window to me, brought a gnarled hand to his brow and back down in a slow salute. “You’re not as old and ugly as she said you were.”
“Neither are you, sir.”
“Sit,” he said. “You’re just in time to see the atmospheric river slam the coast.”
“It hit two days ago, Max,” said Lark.
“There will be another,” said the old man. “Just who are you, Ford?”
I sat. “A licensed private investigator. Locally sourced and hopefully sustainable.”
“Done anything interesting in your life?”
I tried to sum up the interesting things in my life in less than five minutes. Which is hard if you’re not prepared. What is mundane and what is telling? One man’s highlights are another man’s edits. Max Taucher stared out one of the windows as I talked.
A hefty young man came into the room, a tablet in his hand and a stethoscope hanging around his neck. Langdon Bissett, RN. Big hands, polite shake. He motioned Mike to a far corner, where they had a brief, hushed talk.
“They talk behind my back all the time,” said Max. “I don’t really care.”
The nurse excused himself. Mike brought coffee and we talked shop. An address found in Hector’s home had led San Diego JTTF to a Chula Vista storage unit containing bomb-making materials and instructions. And ten formerly dummy U.S. Army hand grenades repacked with gunpowder. And one still-in-the box Baby Coo at You doll that could make five different baby sounds at the squeeze of any hand, foot, or its tummy, and came with four ready-to-wear outfits.
“We’re burying Joan here in San Diego on Friday,” said Lark. “She would have liked you to come.”
Max watched us with a stoic, faraway look that I guessed wasn’t faraway at all.
“You’re invited,” he said without looking at me. “Joan has literally thousands of admirers, but she admired you.”
A beat then, as we all no doubt thought of Joan Annabelle Taucher and how she had lived and died. A few years ago I took part in a Gold Star Families memorial ceremony on Pendleton, staged for the families and buddies of Marines recently killed in action. Young guys, brave guys, the 3/5 Dark Horse Battalion. That day on a hill overlooking the base and the ocean, I looked around me at the battle crosses — the boots and tags and rifles of the dead Marines — then at the heartbroken and the scarred and the blind and the amputated and the paralyzed, all remembering someone they had lost. It was the most wrenching and wretched experience I’ve ever gone through. Mountains of grief, unclimbable.
“Are your tenants traumatized?” asked Lark. “Joan told me a little bit about them while you were waiting for Caliphornia. The Ping-Pong guy, and the drone operator, and the funny old couple. And of course Lindsey Rakes. Joan was worried about them. With all of the... possible danger involved. Something about them affected her.”
“They’re a tough old crew,” I said.
And that they are. Christmas Eve day they had all pitched in to help me scrub the blood and related matter off the pavers, patch and paint the bullet holes in the walls and the palapa uprights, and replace some of the barbecue bricks and tiles. Clevenger, who had apparently apprenticed as a mason before turning filmmaker, got that barbecue looking good again in less than a day. Burt replaced the window that Zeno had blasted through on his quest to defend Lindsey. The Ping-Pong table, which had been folded in half, covered, and rolled far under the palapa against the next round of rain, had taken ricochets that tore six ragged holes about a foot inside each baseline. I ordered a new one — Merry Christmas from your landlord — and it had arrived just this morning, before I’d come to Taucher’s home. Liz made Moscow Mules for the work party. Dick wandered from project to project with advice and direction.
“Mike? I’m tired,” said Max.
“You’ve been up since sunrise.”
“Wake me up as soon as that storm hits,” he said.
Bissett and Lark got Max into his wheelchair. He was a tall man and it took the two of them to do it. His legs were wrapped in a Pendleton Indian-patterned blanket. The nurse backed him around to face me and the old man nodded and gave me another slow salute. His pale brown eyes caught the muted light coming through the curtains and I saw that they were the raptor eyes of his daughter, clear and intent as they studied me.
“It’s the love you make,” he said.
“I’ll bear that in mind,” I said.
“That’s how I got Joanie. She wasn’t like anyone else in the world. I should know. Now they took her away from me.”
“Come on, Mr. Taucher,” said Bissett.
Lark walked me to my car. America’s Finest City stood proudly before us, scrubbed clean and bright by the storm. A bright orange and blue passenger jet came in from the southeast and seemed to thread the buildings. A vigil for the agents and visitors killed in last week’s attacks in San Diego, and for Joan Taucher, was set for this evening on the Midway. Already the streets were jammed with motorists trying to park. Sidewalks filled with people bundled in heavy coats, toting folding chairs and blankets. Cops in cars and on foot and on horseback. Hundreds, it seemed. The police and media choppers dipping low, coming and going like bees.
“Joan liked working with you,” said Lark. “She knew you could do things that our hands were tied on at the federal level. You saved a lot of lives when you broke into that storage unit and found the guns and the attack plans. We wouldn’t do that. Joan said thank God for good outlaws.”
For a brief moment I pictured the Glorietta dinner ship gliding across the bay while hundreds of the unsuspecting partied and two men down in the little hold got their balaclavas on and their weapons ready.
“She always kicked herself for not telling the people she liked that she liked them,” said Lark.
“I didn’t understand you were close to her,” I said. “Until now.”
“We’re private people.”
I studied Lark, his hair tossed by the wind, his twenty-four-year-old face, his hard brown eyes, not unlike Joan’s.
“I loved her. Very much,” he said. “Still do and always will. She was so intense. So vivid. So absolutely funny sometimes. Seventeen years between us. But I knew that woman. And I actually made her happy, occasionally. Max and I connected right off, though sometimes he thinks I’m the son he never had. Joan was afraid I’d find someone younger, and she told me she would never let me get my eyes checked or buy a pair of glasses. That was one of our standing jokes.”
I felt a great relief that Joan had more than her job and her demons. Much more.
“It crushed her when the SAC showed her the door,” Lark said, an edge to his voice I hadn’t heard before.
“Will you stay on here with Max?” I asked.
“Sure,” said Lark. “We’ve got our routines, and twenty-four-hour care. Max inherited this house from his parents. And lots of money. It’s his world. Joan grew up in it. She loved her mother, who died young. Leaving her a daddy’s girl, all the way.”
“I’m glad she had you.”
“Please come to the service,” said Lark. “Joan would have liked that.”
“I’ll see you there.”
Lark nodded, let his eyes wander my face for an unhurried moment, then turned and walked back toward his house.
Later that day I decided to get that beautiful red sports car out of the barn and say hello again. I keep her clean and covered and the battery charged and the tires full. Fuss over her quite a bit sometimes. But I hadn’t driven her since the day I brought her home from Fallbrook Airpark.