I nearly walked past Frank's gravestone. I hadn't expected it to be any different from all the others, but I also somehow had. No wreath, no flowers. Just his name, indented in a plug of marble. My chest tightened, and I realized I was breathing hard. Fumbling out a notepad, I jotted down the information I needed. Company C, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, United States Army. Vietnam.
Slapping the notepad closed, I turned swiftly to go, almost striking an old man making his fragile way up the row of graves. His cheeks were hollow, his jaw pronounced and skeletal, and he wore an ancient cloth hat weighed down with military pins. He looked into my face, then glanced past me at the headstone and shook his head, his lips bunching. "Them boys caught a lotta shit they didn't deserve," he said.
He winked jauntily and continued up the row. I was staring at the grass, and then it got blurry, and I forced my eyes back up to the date of birth, the date of death, the name stamped in block letters on the cold white marble.
Chapter 16
I sat in my car in the sweltering Valley heat, the photo package in my lap. The cheery yellow envelope featured sample photos of a hot-air balloon and a golden retriever shuddering off sprinkler water. But I wasn't looking at the samples. I was looking at the one slot on the front form that had been filled out, the handwritten block letters that spelled out NICK HORRIGAN.
Breaking the gummy seal, I extracted the inner envelope. I ran my thumb under the flap, hesitant to lift it. What if it contained pictures of a mangled corpse? Someone being shot? A child being molested? I hadn't considered a frame-up. Charlie probably hadn't either. My heart thudding, I glanced around the parking lot but didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
Bracing myself, I tugged the set of pictures from the envelope. Whatever I was expecting, it was nothing compared to the jolt I got from looking at my own face.
A zoom-lens close-up of me walking down the street, hands shoved in my pockets.
I jerked my head around, craning to take in the full parking lot. The mother loading groceries, the kids angling in on tacos outside the comic-book store, the businessman at the meter-all of a sudden, no one was outside suspicion. It wasn't until I looked back at the photo that I saw that it captured me passing in front of Charlie's house. The picture had been taken from a good distance. Although it was blurred at the edge of the frame, I could make out a sliver of the Dumpster that the photographer had hidden behind. A second shot showed me ducking the crime-scene tape into the garage. Then there I was, coming back out with a rucksack hanging heavily off my shoulder.
With shaking hands I flipped to the next picture.
A nighttime shot of the Sherman Oaks post office, no more than ten blocks from here. The flash illuminated the Magnolia Boulevard address painted on the beige wall.
The burn in my chest alerted me that I'd been holding my breath. I shook my left Puma, felt the rattle of the key there inside the air pocket.
The rest of the pictures were black. Unexposed.
Eager as I was to get moving, I headed back inside the photomat, passing the overnight drop box outside the front door where the film had been left last night. The guy behind the counter was overweight, a wispy blond beard framing his round face.
I handed him the film and asked, "Is there any way you can tell what kind of camera was used to take these pictures?"
The guy studied them. "Not really. He's got a pretty good zoom lens going, maybe a Canon, but you can't really tell."
"You mean a zoom lens separate from the camera?"
"Yeah, there's no way he got this clarity from a built-in."
He handed the pictures over, and I caught the faint lettering on the back of the top print. Kodak Endura. I pointed to it. "What can you tell me about this type of film?"
"That's just the kind of paper it's printed on. But let me see the slides." He removed from the envelope's inside pocket a few old-fashioned slides-I hadn't thought to look. "Since there were only a few shots, I just tucked the slides back here." His tongue poked out as he squinted at them. "Kodak Ektachrome 100. A daytime-balanced color transparency. Fine grain, high sharpness, makes your colors pop."
"So someone who uses this knows what they're doing? This isn't a film you'd pick up to snap casual pictures?"
He shook his head, used his cupped hands to slide his dangling hair back over his ears. "Nuh-uh. Mostly commercial photographers use it."
"Would you choose this film if you were a paparazzi? Or a cop on stakeout or something?"
He gave me a weird look. "Paparazzo's the singular. And not really. More like if you're shooting clothes or curtains or something where you need really accurate color."
I thanked him and walked back to my pickup.
Five minutes later I was parked outside the post office, staring at the same view as the photograph in my hand. Casting glances over my shoulder, I entered. The sudden chill of the air-conditioning underscored the dead heat outside. There was a line of annoyed customers, people bickering over forms. I veered left, into the banks of P.O. boxes. The second alcove held Box 229, a double-wide bottom unit. The half walls afforded privacy and muted the sounds from the rest of the building. I crouched and worked the key from my shoe.
I slid it home, paused for good luck, turned it.
The little door swung open.
The box was empty.
I sat, putting my back against the wall, allowing myself a few moments of despair. Then I sighed and started to swing the door closed so I could retrieve the key.
A yellow edge protruded ever so slightly from the roof of Box 229. Getting down on all fours, I peered in. Taped to the top of the unit, a manila envelope. I reached in, tugged it free, and opened it. A partial sheet of paper covered with columns of numbers slid out. I scanned down the rows. 1.65, 4.05, 3.49, 1.80, 2.71-they were all numbers less than five, not a single integer. Only one stood out, both in size and in its own column: 99.999. The top part of the page had been torn off, and the paper was brittle with age. An electronic date stamp on the bottom read DECEMBER 15, 1990.
About five months before Frank was murdered.
Holding the stiff sheet in my hand, I slumped back against the wall. "Well," I said, "this clears up everything."
Chapter 17
I drove home with the torn page of numerals staring at me from the passenger seat, in case it decided to explain itself. Rolling down the window, I let the stale Valley air blow across my face.
Your life is now on the line. That's what Charlie had said when he'd shoved the key into my hand. Over a sheet of numbers? This grid of digits had put a charge into the Service, scrambled a Black Hawk, led to a standoff at a nuclear power plant? Were they missile launch codes? Kickback tallies? Or a cipher for government documents? And who the hell was leading me to this stuff? Charlie's confederates? Or his killers? It was like that Tetris game I used to play on Nintendo, puzzle pieces falling one after another, defying order.
Miraculously, I found a parking spot on my street. When I got off the elevator upstairs, Homer was slumped against what appeared to be my new front door, his coat loose around him like a sack.
"You're late," he said. "But I exercised restraint."
As I regarded the new door with surprise, Evelyn emerged from her apartment, a pendulous knockoff Gucci at her elbow. She disapproved of Homer's Thursday appointments with my shower and did her best to ignore us.
Homer stared at her with great humility. The smell coming off him was sour, whiskey pushed through dried sweat. "Ma'am, can you spare a dollar? I haven't eaten in two days."