The Jaguar (6 page)

Another picture showed Finnegan/Leftwich at a home Dodgers game in July of the previous year, roughly one month before he arrived in Costa Rica. The subject of the photographer was not Mike at all, but a small boy and his parents, sitting two rows in front of him. Mike was trying to avoid the camera, turning his face away in clear annoyance at being shot. This image was submitted by the boy’s mother, a Ventura County assistant DA who recognized the face from one of Hood’s insistent e-mails.

Another picture was of Mike and Owens, standing arm-in-arm at
a cocktail party in Beverly Hills. In the picture Owens was a full head taller than he was. Finnegan was smiling resignedly, as if he didn’t want to be photographed but knew he should submit to it, but he also appeared happy. The photographer was a professional freelancer who had come across Hood’s plea for “Finnegan/Leftwich images” buried in a “Photographs Wanted” search of Google, and recognized Mike.

Hood had not posted the other two pictures, and it wasn’t likely he ever would. In some ways, they were his favorites.

One was a group shot that showed Charlie Manson and some hangers-on at Spahn Ranch in the summer of 1969. An L.A. assistant district attorney had come across the picture while digitizing old forensic photos, and seen that one of Manson’s groupies looked a lot like the guy that Charlie Hood had been badgering her about. The groupie was obviously a different man, but she sent a digitized copy along as a lark. Hood was flabbergasted to see a dead-ringer for Mike Finnegan right in the middle of the hippies, sporting a “Freewheelin’” T-shirt, and his hair grown out in a frizzy halo. He looked to be about forty years old. Hood knew that if Mike had been forty in the Manson picture he would have been around eighty when they met at Imperial Mercy Hospital. Not likely. But even allowing for his own gnawing obsession with Mike Finnegan, Hood could see with his own two eyes that the faces belonged to the same man.

The last image was an even worse conundrum. It was taken in San Jose, California, in 1875, at the hanging of the outlaw Tiburcio Vasquez. It was one of several taken by a newspaper photographer who covered the event. Mike was among the onlookers gazing up at the gallows in a dramatic composition that used the noose itself as a blurred up-front framing device and focused on the well-dressed spectators waiting for the execution. Finnegan. Clearly. Dressed and groomed in the fashion of the day. He looked about fifty years old. Which would have made him 184 years old when, two years
ago, lying in his Imperial Mercy ICU bed and tipsy with wine, Mike had recounted for Hood the hanging of his friend, Tiburcio. Mike had quoted the outlaw’s last words by memory and this had haunted Hood. So, a few months ago, on a long shot, he had finally ferreted out this collection of photographs. In so doing he had found this image and begun to question the soundness of his eyes and of his reason.

Yet he saw what he saw.

He had had his eyes examined and had spent fifty expensive minutes with a psychiatrist. His uncorrected vision was his usual 20/15. The shrink told him he seemed “sound,” given his stressful occupation, ailing father, and troubled relationship with Beth. He said depression was possible, and that Hood should try to experience his emotions rather than direct them. He recommended pleasant outdoor activities but no medication.

In addition to his digital searches, Hood had been handing out Mike Finnegan photo albums wherever he went for about six months now—to law-enforcement people he met through work, to his contacts and informants, to people he met socially through Beth and their growing circle of friends, to waiters and waitresses, clerks and bartenders, once at his own door to Jehovah’s Witnesses, trading them for their Watchtowers. Two hundred and forty-eight booklets distributed so far. To manage costs he ordered fifty at a time from the print shop. But the picture books had gotten him nothing, nothing and more nothing.

A familiar chill ran through him as he stared at the Vasquez photograph. He breathed in deeply then slowly out. “Back in ten days,” he said. “But you’ll keep, Mike, won’t you?”

Daisy’s tail slapped the tile three times, then stopped. She looked at Hood with a devotion that made him feel undeserving. She sat up and encouraged his self-forgiveness by letting him scratch her throat.

He checked the e-mails and Facebook again and found nothing helpful regarding Mike Finnegan. He got less of everything these days. He wondered if in another year there would be nothing at all. But he knew that Finnegan had not vanished. He knew the man was real and living, perhaps still in L.A. Bathroom fixtures.
It’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds.

In one of the e-mails on his screen now, Hood’s contact suggested that he would notify Hood if anything popped, that the weekly reminders were not needed and in fact were a bit of a nuisance. He sent out a fresh blast anyway—982 friendly reminders of who he was looking for, all with the six photographs attached. And another Facebook posting—2,499 people like the last one! More tweets in the thinning search for Mike.

He sighed and found Erin’s webpage and looked at the pictures of her performing, and played a video. Not for the first time he was angry at Bradley for putting her in harm’s way, and not for the first time he wished that he’d met her first. He felt some shame in this.

Later Hood watched the clear desert stars awhile, then slept poorly, visited by dreams he did not own or understand.

A
FTER SUNRISE SOMEONE KNOCKED ON
her door and Erin rose from a deep sleep and sat up on the bed. She had no idea where she was. She touched the long white nightshirt that she wore but that did not belong to her. When she looked out and saw the palm trees swaying in the orange light and the water glittering between the mangroves she remembered, and her heart tried to climb out from its cage inside her.

A woman’s voice.
“Desayuno.”

“Yes, breakfast, thank you.”

The lock whirred and clunked and in walked not a woman but a slender teenage boy with a golden pompadour and a shy smile. He held a folding stand in one hand and with the other he balanced a large waiter’s tray over his shoulder. The tray was stacked with stainless-steel warmers that clinked as he crossed the room. At the table he set the tray on the stand and took his time arranging her meal. He changed his mind twice on the placement of side dishes. With a flourish he snapped the napkin and folded it into a loose scallop and set this to the left. Then the flatware.

Erin caught the scent of the meal as it went by and thought it was the best breakfast she’d ever smelled. Her stomach moaned and gurgled. She watched him pour the coffee and the juice. Last he lifted the warmers and stacked them on the tray, then with a matadorial flair swept up the stand and smiled shyly at her again on his way out.

She ate piggishly, slopping the ranchero sauce onto her nightgown and shoveling down fast the tortillas heaped with sweet preserves. She drank the juice and sighed with the pleasure of it: tangerine. She finished it and held her free hand to her belly.

She drew a bath and dried off the derringer and set it on the deck of the beautifully tiled Roman tub. She lifted off the nightshirt and threw it over the shower curtain rod. Her right upper calf still stung from where the taped gun and cash had rubbed and pulled. She disliked guns and the sounds they made. She floated freely in the great deep tub listening to the amplified slurp of the bathwater going in and out of her ears. In these sounds and in their echoes she heard melodies as she had always heard them, the gifts of her nature coming from a universe that, even as a small girl, she had understood was made not only of matter but of music. Straight above her was a raised plaster ceiling painted with the likeness of a young Mayan woman looking down on a warrior who knelt before her. She was long pregnant and she held an urn but Erin could not see into it. This brought tears to her eyes and terror to her heart so she sat up suddenly in the water and slapped herself in the face, hard. You will not come apart. You cannot come apart. She slapped herself hard again.

She dressed in new clothes from the wardrobe, pulling off the tags as she went. They were designer garments, fashionable and well made. She was slender and long-legged and flat-chested but the clothes fit right, even the sandals. The clothes were in colors she liked. She lifted the blouse and stood sideways to the mirror and wondered if they knew.

She pushed aside the breakfast dishes and sat for a long while at the table by the window. She had been to Cancún twice in her life and
this place reminded her of it. She and Bradley had stayed at the Camino Real and snorkeled at Isla Mujeres and rented a jeep to drive to Chichen Itza and Tulum. The jungle around Cancún looked like this jungle, only flatter. She remembered the cloud-muted sunlight and the heat. This morning’s light was filtered by clouds too and when she touched her hand to the window she could feel the warmth of the day already on the glass.

She reached to open the window but it was not made to be opened. She picked up one of the stainless-steel plate warmers and flung it hard against the glass, to no effect. She lifted a chair and threw it against the glass hard but the glass, if it was glass at all, was very heavy and did not break. She turned and ran to the door and lowered her shoulder and tried to knock it down. She kicked it and hit it with the sides of her fists. She screamed and cursed for anyone to hear and was answered by dead silence. In the bathroom she vomited. She paced the perimeter of her quarters several times, then squeezed into the corner between the wall and the bed and pulled the colorful woven bedspread down over her, curled into a ball on the floor and wept.

Hours later she awakened and threw off the cover and stood. She saw that the breakfast dishes were gone and a light lunch had been left in their place. The chair was back at the table and the plate warmer had been picked up from the floor by the window. She was a heavy sleeper, but she was surprised to have slept through all this. Or maybe not, she thought. You don’t get kidnapped every day. You don’t see your husband beaten bloody by drug traffickers. She looked outside. From the sun she guessed it was closer to evening than morning. She wondered if the breakfast had been drugged but that made little sense. There was a vase of fresh cut tropical flowers on the table.

She walked the room again and felt the sudden rush of abandonment. She’d never felt abandoned in her life. Not for a day, not for an hour. She had never really even been alone, either. And you have to be alone to be abandoned, she thought, although they were not the same thing. She wanted someone to talk to. And someone to listen to. Maybe if she divided the lunch into two meals and set a place across from her someone would appear and they could lunch. To lunch, she thought. A verb.

She stood for a moment in front of the Hummingbird. It was a beautiful instrument, large and resonant and aesthetically dazzling. It looked fairly old, as did the case. She reached for it, then stopped herself. She felt like Pandora, or maybe like Eve herself, confronted with a thing of temptation that had been forbidden to her. But why forbidden? Who had forbidden it? Herself? Some distant God? She had no memory of the forbidding. In fact, she thought, it hasn’t been forbidden; it’s been offered.

She picked it up and sat in the handsome leather chair. The strings were new and out of tune. She tuned it and played softly without singing, letting her fingers chase down the music as her ears heard it. The sound led to the feelings and thoughts, and she fetched the paper and pen from the desk and set them on the table in front of her.

Hours became minutes as they always did. There was terror, anger, shame, even hope. She tried to slow the rush of emotion enough to capture the last two days with words, not so much capture as synopsize, sketch, represent. Notes into music. Thoughts into rhyme. Later could come the clarity and the accuracy, the shading and wit.

Later, lost to all this, Erin heard another knock on her door.

“Go away! Marcharse!”

“Mr. Armenta will be here in one half hour.” It was the soft high voice of the room-service boy.

“For what? Why?”

Silence.

Think.
She put the guitar back in its case and pulled off the three sheets of paper upon which she had written, then put the pad and pen back on the desk. The lyrics she stashed under the bed.

Think.
She found a blue dress and bit off the Bloomingdale’s tag. It was modest and fit loosely around her middle. Then a pair of new sandals. She turned sideways to the mirror to see her profile and she pulled her stomach in again and when she felt the tears starting up she whacked herself on each cheek and this helped.

From the wardrobe she retrieved the used medical tape and in the bathroom she hiked up the blue dress and used its fading adhesive to fasten the derringer around her unchafed calf. She brushed her hair and pulled it back into a pony tail. She thought for a moment, then changed her mind about the gun and removed it and put it and the tape back where they had been.

Five minutes later she heard the whir and clunk of the door lock and Armenta pushed into the room. He wore a black open-collared dress shirt instead of the Pacifico T-shirt, and a pair of wrinkled linen pants instead of the shorts. His hair was still a mess and his face still unshaven and jowly and his eyes haunted. His sandals were a burnished orange color, similar to that of a sunburst Gibson ES-335 guitar. His matching belt was tooled with crocodiles. Three phones hung from it: one satellite and two cell phones, she guessed.

“I will show you my home.”

“Let me go.”

He wagged a thick finger at her and shook his head slightly. “You will now see my home.”

T
HEY TOOK THE ELEVATOR TO
the basement kitchen. It was large and two black women labored over the stoves and another operated a tortilla maker. It was hot and fragrant. Two young men sat in folding chairs by a far wall, weapons across their knees.

“A large kitchen,” said Armenta. “Yes, very large.”