The Famous and the Dead

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “I didn’t own a bat until they took my guns.”

  “What kind of guns?”

  Rovanna declared them, twelve in all, semiauto assault-style rifles, semiauto handguns. He gave makes, model numbers, calibers.

  “Describe Dr. Stren in more detail.”

  Rovanna addressed the navy suit and white shirt, the matching blue tie and patch, the small black shoes, the old-time gangster hat like Virgil Sollozzo wore in The Godfather.

  “You said he wore glasses.”

  “Big ones. Greek billionaire glasses. Or that movie director. They made his eyes bug out. He’s little, like I said. He has a deep, clear voice that seemed too big for this room. He wrote with a black pen in a black notebook. And that’s about it. I think I’ve told you everything I can think of about him. Now, Mr. Hood—it’s your turn to tell me what you know.”

  Hood declined a refill and told Rovanna how he’d first met Mike Finnegan in the Imperial Mercy Hospital in Buenavista. Mike had been hit by a car while changing a tire out in the desert, and was nearly killed. Broken bones, severe concussion, serious internal damage. He was in a full body cast, head to toe except for one good arm. Mike had been carrying Hood’s address and phone number in his wallet. He claimed to have gotten the information from a mutual friend who worked part-time for Hood’s Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He said he sold bath and shower products in L.A.—Mike Finnegan Bath was the name of his company. For a man who had cheated death just a few days earlier, Mike was lucid and humorful and apparently unpained, Hood said. Mike had asked him to find his daughter—she had run away before and Mike was sure she had run away again. He even had a possible address for her but now, well, he wouldn’t be getting out of bed and walking anytime soon. That’s what he said he’d been doing out in the infernal Imperial County desert, Hood told Rovanna—looking for his daughter. Lovely, troubled Owens.

  “He’s a good actor,” said Rovanna. “You should have seen the way he looked at me. And around this place. Just like a doctor. You can’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know. The only thing he got wrong was his signature. Doctors can’t write, they can only scribble. His signature looked like something an engineer would have—perfect slant and perfect letters.”

  Hood poured himself a short second drink. He told Rovanna that Mike had broken out of his body cast and walked out of intensive care a few days later. Checked himself out of the hospital, paid ninety thousand in cash for his treatment.

  “Broke out of a full body cast with half his bones broken?”

  “Correct. I saw the remains of the cast. He’d ripped it off with his bare hands, dressed himself, and left. Scared the hell out of the nurses. The security camera caught him getting into his daughter’s car.”

  “Those five guys who follow me around? I call them the Identical Men. They tried to tell me they were IRS. Like I’m going to fall for that. They’re not IRS. They’re Langley. Pure and simple. Or worse. I think Finnegan could be with them. They all have the same attitude. They try to treat you like a piece of shit. Same with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Like they know God himself. Like they’re going to introduce you to Him. They’re all part of the same game, Mr. Hood. They’re all out to control our minds. They’ll use radios, they’ll hide inside the walls, they’ll change and morph and lie.”

  “A year later Mike was in Central America, posing as an Irish priest named Joe Leftwich,” said Hood. He thought of the utter destruction that Leftwich had wrought upon his friends, the Ozburns.

  “No surprise.”

  “Where did he sit?”

  “Here, where I am. I sat where you are.”

  “Did he leave you a card? Or any way to contact him?”

  Rovanna blushed and shook his head and looked down at the worn oval rug. “I forgot to ask. He didn’t offer. Sorry. You could just call the court.”

  “Did you see his car?”

  “No. I can’t see the street from here.”

  “Did he give you anything?”

  Rovanna looked up. “Give me? You mean like . . .”

  “Anything.”

  “No. No. He didn’t give me anything. Nothing.”

  Hood watched Rovanna’s eyes lose their conviction and his gaze find the frayed carpet again. “He just said he was going to write up something to help me get the guns back. He said my chances weren’t so good.”

  “But he didn’t give you anything?”

  When Rovanna looked at him again, Hood saw the anger in his face. And something along with it he couldn’t quite ID—sadness maybe, or guilt. “I said he didn’t. Is there any way to be more clear on that?”

  Hood nodded absently.

  Rovanna again took the bat in his hands, choking his hands all the way down. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Hood stood and Rovanna leaned forward to stand also. But Hood put a hand firmly to his shoulder and pressed him back down to the couch. He took the bat from Rovanna and set it beside him. Hood walked into the kitchen and looked around. Having been invited into Rovanna’s home, pretty much anything in plain sight he could legally take a look at. But there was nothing unusual in the small, poorly lit kitchen. He thought of another poorly lit kitchen, in Mike Finnegan’s Veracruz flat, where they had fought and Mike had run the knife along his scalp. He remembered the bony grind of the blade, a sound he would take to his grave.

  Hood came back into the living room and saw Rovanna staring down once again at the floor. Hood could sense the disorder in the younger man, the teetering imbalances inside him. He wondered, If Finnegan would tear apart a young, strong, faithful man like Sean Ozburn simply because he could—then what might he do with Lonnie Rovanna? Hood walked down the small dark hallway and poked his head into a bathroom. It smelled bad. He turned on the light and saw the counter dirty with soap scum and toothpaste and the white-brown toilet bowl and the water-stained tub choked at its drain by hair.

  The first bedroom looked unused. He couldn’t legally open the closet but he did anyway. A few clothes hanging. Scores of wire hangers. Some old sneakers on the floor. Nothing unusual. Nothing under the bed but dust balls. Back in the hallway he looked in to the living room and saw Rovanna looking back at him.

  “I’m almost done, Lonnie.”

  “Okay.”

  He walked into the second bedroom. He smelled the unwashed sheets, cut with a popular antiperspirant. There were posters of baseball players and beautiful actresses tacked crookedly to the walls. A bookcase rested along one wall, its bottom shelf fallen at one end, the volumes slouching precariously but still contained. He read some titles. Then more. Half were paperback thrillers. But of the sixty or so volumes, the other half were accounts of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hood had many of the titles in his own library.

  Rovanna stood in the doorway with the bat over his shoulder, his hands low on the handle.

  “I’m not a threat to you,” said Hood softly.

  “It’s time to go, though.”

  “I really want to thank you for what you did. Mike Finnegan can be imposing and sometimes downright scary. You did well with him. He didn’t crack you. You did the right thing when you called me.”

  “Good-bye, then.”

  “Did you serve?”

  Rovanna colored deeply and Hood saw his hands relax around the handle of the bat. “What makes you think I didn’t?”

  “You got your battalions mixed up.”

  “Easy, if you experience the level of fire that I did.”

  “No, Lonnie. Very hard to forget your own battalion, whether you go through heavy fire or not. I see your books here. You read a lot. You strike me more as a student than a soldier.” Rovanna looked down for a long moment, then shrugged.

  “I don’t care that you weren’t in Iraq, Lonnie. It doesn’t matter one bit to me. You don’t need to be a soldier to be brave. I was there and I’m not one ounce more brave than you.”

  “It’s just too bad I’m crazy.”

  “Yes,
it is. I’ll be walking out now, Lonnie. Careful with that thing.”

  Rovanna backed into the hallway, and when Hood came to him, he offered his hand and Rovanna let go of the bat to shake it. His grip was strong and damp.

  “If you remember something, call me,” said Hood. “If Stren calls or comes again, call me immediately. He’s evil, Lonnie. He will hurt you.”

  “I sensed that.”

  “If you want to just talk, call me. Really. I mean it. I always have time to talk. I like baseball.”

  “I have prayed and have never been answered. Not once.”

  “I’ve never been answered, either. I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “There’s supposed to be more in this life.”

  “More what?”

  “More good.”

  Hood clasped Rovanna on the shoulder, then walked past him into the living room and out the door.

  • • •

  The San Diego Superior Court clerks were getting ready to close for the day, but Hood badged his way through to the chambers of the Honorable Fritz Johnson. Johnson was an older man with brisk gray hair and prying eyes and mounted game birds everywhere: turkey, pheasant, quail, chukar, band-tailed pigeons. “We’ve never worked with a Dr. Stren. I assign the psychiatrists from Sorrento Valley Medical and he’s not one of them. Why?”

  Hood briefed the judge on an apparently troubled young El Cajon man, Lonnie Rovanna, who claimed to have been visited by Dr. Stren, with regard to his Firearms Rights Restoration form.

  “No,” said Johnson. “Rovanna’s doctor is Darnell, not Stren. There is no Stren at Sorrento, unless he’s brand-new. At any rate, he wouldn’t have seen Rovanna without my knowing it.”

  “Rovanna claimed to have seen combat in Iraq. And says he’s being treated at the naval hospital.”

  Johnson shook his head. “Those are delusions.”

  “I thought so.”

  “I guess if you’re ATF, you’re interested in his guns.”

  “I’m more interested in the doctor that doesn’t exist.” Hood took one of his Mike Finnegan photo albums from a side pocket of his suit coat. Each album contained six images of Mike, four-by-six inches, housed in clear protective plastic. He handed it to Judge Johnson, who flipped through it quickly and chuckled.

  “He was a janitor here for a while last year. Did a good job and didn’t steal one thing. I haven’t seen him in months. Never asked his name. We talked bird hunting, among other things. He used to run his family’s vineyard up in Napa Valley, or so he said. There were valley quail and mourning dove to be shot. I remember he knew the Latin for all these birds. Odd, for a janitor. Is this him? Stren? Yes? Well, kind of odd he’d show up as a bogus psychiatrist. If you want to know more about him, talk to Kim out front. She’ll know who we contract for janitorial.”

  Kim gave him a contact and number for La Jolla Custodial. On his way home Hood called and got right through. He talked to one of the managers, then sent him his clearest Finnegan photo over the phone. A moment later the manager called back to say he’d never seen or hired such a man.

  9

  That evening and part of the night Hood sat at the desk in his wine cellar, using his Justice Department–issued laptop to flesh out Lonnie Dwight Rovanna. Hood was privy to the fine and various databases to which U.S. Marshals have access. It took just a few minutes to find Rovanna’s basic biography: He was born in Los Angeles to an aerospace test engineer and a high school counselor. His Stanford-Binet IQ was 126. He was now twenty-nine years old. He had grown up in Orange County, California, attended public school until age sixteen, then . . .

  Then it was as if Lonnie Rovanna had fallen off the edge of the world for ten years, only to resurface three years ago in El Cajon. And during that decade, Hood could find no prison time, no military service, no credit agency records, no filings with the IRS. The gap smelled institutional. He poured a bourbon and called an old friend in Sacramento who owed him one good favor. It was a long conversation. By the end of it, Hood was reading Lonnie Rovanna’s state mental hospital records on the laptop screen.

  At sixteen, Rovanna had suffered his first psychotic episode, which lasted three weeks. Neither parent had a history of mental illness. His original diagnosis had been brief psychotic disorder, but less than two months later he again reported delusions and hallucinations, and exhibited disorganized speech and behavior. After two years in a private hospital, psychotherapy, and antipsychotic medications, Rovanna’s diagnosis was changed to schizophrenia, paranoid type with a delusional disorder, grandiose type. He was admitted to a San Diego–area state hospital at age eighteen and remained there for eight years. Medications and treatment had had positive effects, according to two of three doctors. Three years ago, when changes in California law enabled him to get a monthly check and qualify for state-assisted housing, Rovanna had found the rental in El Cajon.

  None of which had shown up on his background check when Rovanna purchased a semiautomatic nine-millimeter handgun shortly after leaving the state hospital. Hood knew that the biggest problem with the mental health component of background checks was that nobody cooperated—state agencies shielded mental health records from one another and from county and federal agencies, including the FBI; not all branches of the military fully disclosed the mental health histories of their soldiers to state or other federal agencies, either, and some didn’t disclose any at all. Not even government background checkers had friends in every state capital. It was no surprise to Hood that Lonnie Rovanna had illegally purchased four semiautomatic assault-style rifles and eight handguns in the last three years—people like him sometimes fell through the cracks.

  Hood exited the state health records and went back to a California law-enforcement-only site that had links to DMV. Rovanna had purchased and registered a used Ford Focus one year ago.

  Hood called him. “I just wanted to thank you again for letting me know about Finnegan.”

  “He’s not a good man, Mr. Hood.”

  Hood heard a TV in the background, then the rattle of ice in a plastic cup and liquid being slurped. He sipped his own drink and commented on mankind’s nearly universal addiction to alcohol. Rovanna chuckled and said he’d had his first drink at twelve and instantly recognized a lifetime companion. By fourteen he was shoplifting the stuff and selectively pinching from his parents’ prescription sleeping pills. Hood told Rovanna that he hadn’t missed much by not fighting in Iraq. The insurgents were ruthless against the Americans and their own people, he said. He told Rovanna about some of the investigations he did. And about playing tennis in Baghdad inside the Green Zone, where he helped organize a tennis league of soldiers and local Iraqis—they even had an Olympic hopeful, but he’d been assassinated for cooperating with the Americans. Rovanna asked intelligent questions and listened patiently for the answers.

  “I played Ping-Pong a lot,” said Rovanna. “Every rec room in every loony bin in California has one. No pool tables though. They’re afraid we’ll skewer each other with broken cues. Isn’t that a hoot? They worry about us with pool sticks, so they cut our brains away. Mr. Hood, can I tell you my deepest fear? My very deepest fear is of Dr. Walter Freeman and his orbitoclasts. It’s difficult for me to say that word out loud. The tool I refer to is a long, slender piece of steel they use to perform lobotomies. It’s sharpened on one end like a small chisel, and the other end flares into a heavy butt about the size of a quarter. This is where, after they’ve inserted the blade between your eyeball and your brain, they tap it with a mallet to get it in. Then they move the orbitoclast back and forth to sever the prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobes of the brain. Dr. Walter Freeman performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the United States. My body shivers when I hear his name. It literally quakes. Truly, it did just now. And listen to this, Charlie Hood—that first prefrontal lobotomy performed by Freeman was on a woman named Hood! Alice Hood. Hood. Funny how all things circle back sooner or later, isn’t it? How they connect to form a
pattern. I hear her voice sometimes, oddly enough—Alice’s. Now the story gets even stranger, Charlie. Later, Freeman simplified the prefrontal into the transorbital lobotomy for patients in insane asylums. It was a cost-cutting measure. There were around six hundred thousand asylum patients in the nineteen-forties. He wanted them all to have lobotomies. Freeman got rid of the need for cranial drilling and anesthetic by using electroshock, much cheaper, then going in behind the eyes. So what had been a surgical procedure became an outpatient office visit. Freeman drove a van around the country, from mental institution to mental institution, performing lobotomies and giving lectures on his miracle procedure. He called his van the ‘lobotomobile.’ He charged twenty-five dollars for each one. He personally did three thousand four hundred of them, though he was never trained as a surgeon. His partner finally left the practice because of the cruelty and overuse of the lobotomy.” Rovanna went silent for a long moment. Hood heard the ice crunch and a loud swallow. “Say the word orbitoclast, Mr. Hood. Hear the way it lends itself to clear, syllable-by-syllable pronunciation, the way the tongue strikes the palette just behind the front teeth, not once but three times. That, Mr. Hood, is what I live in terror of. Of Freeman and men like him, of horrors sold cheaply and pushed upon all.”

  “I understand your terror, Lonnie. But lobotomies are not performed anymore.”

  “Don’t be naive. There are many forms and manifestations. Remember Alice Hood.”

  “Do you have information I don’t?”

  “The more I think about Stren, the more I think he’s linked to Dr. Freeman and of course to the Identical Men. It makes sense if you think it through, one connection at a time.”

  “I’ll write down those three things—Finnegan, Freeman, and the Identical Men. I’ll see if I can connect them like you do.” Hood wrote them down on a legal pad.

  “Are you mocking me? You think I’m crazy.”

  “I think you’re at a disadvantage but still in the game, Lonnie.”

  “What do you mean by that?”