The Famous and the Dead

8



Hood sat on a white resin chair in Rovanna’s living room. The house was old and small and had the dusty burnt breath of the space heater that glowed orange in its corner. There was a layer of dust on everything—on the paperback thrillers grown plump with age and use, and the newspapers and magazines piled everywhere.

Rovanna sat on a slouching plaid couch with a baseball bat leaning against the pad beside him. He allowed Hood to place a digital recorder on the low coffee table between them. Then Rovanna spoke briefly of growing up in Orange County, California, his service overseas, subsequent troubles adjusting back to civilian life, a suicide attempt, and a later assault on two Jehovah’s Witnesses. The police had arrested him and the court had committed him involuntarily to a hospital for evaluation. He was able to keep up the rent because of his disability checks. When he got home, his guns were gone. Lonnie Rovanna seemed straight to the point and factual.

“Iraq?” asked Hood.

“Two rotations. Mahmudiya District, then Anbar Province.”

“Anbar and Hamdinaya for me. Infantry?”

“Five Hundred Second, Hundred and First Airborne.”

“Which battalion?”

Rovanna looked at him levelly, took up the Louisville Slugger, gripped it like a batter, then set it back down. “First. Bravo Company, First Platoon. Triangle of Death. We found PFC Tucker and PV2 Menchaca after the rag heads tortured and beheaded them. They put IEDs in one of their crotch cavities. That was oh-six. Then I deployed again a year later, but after the triangle I was already a wreck.”

Hood nodded. He remembered clearly that 1st Platoon of Bravo Company—Rovanna’s outfit—had suffered terrible casualties in the so-called Triangle of Death. They had been isolated, outnumbered, terrified by videotaped beheadings circulated by the insurgents, and castigated by other B Company platoons. Four of them finally snapped, raping and killing an Iraqi girl and her family. It had been one of the darkest and most reported episodes of that long, dark war. But Hood also knew that Rovanna and his men had not discovered the bodies of the soldiers Tucker and Menchaca—that was 2nd Battalion. This atrocity had been reported in agonizing detail as well. As a part of NCIS, Hood had studied both of the terrible incidents as points of both personal and world history. Now these two events occupied dark compartments in his psyche, as Hood figured they must for many of the enlisted men of the 502nd Infantry. So how could Lonnie Rovanna get them mixed up?

“I was earlier,” Hood said.

“The first deployment was the worst. Misplaced my mind. Still looking for it. Don’t know how I made it through that last rotation. But I got out, got meds and a good doctor. I’ll be fine. I filed my Firearms Rights Restoration application about three weeks ago. Dr. Stren came three days ago to ask questions. He’s assigned by the Superior Court. He had a signed affidavit from a judge. He interviewed me, wrote in a little black notebook, and said he would be writing up his report later that day.”

“What did he ask you? What did you talk about?”

Rovanna went to his kitchen and returned with two large superhero drink containers from Mr. Burger filled with ice and a plastic half-gallon bottle of vodka, new. He sat back down and cracked the seal and unscrewed it and poured half a glass for each of them. They touched the cups and drank. Hood felt the cold liquid burn down. He looked outside to the dirt-speckled Ford Focus in the gravel driveway and the big sycamore looming beyond.

Rovanna talked about Stren’s prying, know-it-all attitude, and his interest in Rovanna’s state of mind and behavior, his curiosity about the radios that Rovanna had locked away in the toolshed out back, and about his medications and alcohol use. He told Hood that his personal physician at the VA, Dr. Webb, had told Stren many private things about him—hearing voices from unplugged radios and demons in the walls, being followed by five men with identical clothing and faces. Rovanna said that Stren predicted his Firearms Rights Restoration application would be denied. Rovanna shrugged, then drank, then looked out the window to the sycamore standing almost leafless in the waning afternoon light. Hood studied him, trying to vet Rovanna’s words and his grossly faulty remembrance of the war and the thousand-yard stare with which he now gazed outside.

After a long minute Hood pressed on. “Why did they take your guns away?”

Rovanna drank again, then told Hood in more detail about his assault on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were quite possibly imposters. People were sometimes not what they pretended, he said with a bitter smile, like this Finnegan or Stren man. Rovanna spoke more informatively about his suicide attempt—flinched at the last second—then brushed aside his thick blond hair to reveal the brief scar above his right ear. “So after the Witnesses they put me in the loony bin for two weeks of evaluation. They always take your guns away when that happens.”

“What did you use the guns for?”

“Oh, nothing really. They mainly just stayed under the bed in their cases.”

“You didn’t brandish them to the men posing as Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“Naw. No time. Slugged one and tackled the other. Neighbors ratted me out.”

“Did you use the bat?”

“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.