When he lifted his face, he was pale as death and bawling.

Stormy put her arms around him. “Oh, Mickey, I’m so sorry.”

16

It took Sandoz about an hour to piece himself together, hunched over on a concrete slab with fits of shivering and tears. The muscles, the tattoos, the hard leathery shell had released, gone slack, and he looked weak, disoriented, in the throes of sudden mourning and maybe also some kind of drug comedown. He tried to apologize for what he called “rassling” me, said he’d thought I was a debt collector, said incarceration had turned him into a monster, that he hated himself.

Then he said, “Is he really gone?”

I nodded. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Ah, Dev cut me off a few weeks ago.”

“How come?”

“Usual arguments, stupid shit. He was always on a mission to straighten me out.” Sandoz bristled, clutched himself. As the wayward crowd around us finally dispersed, he looked at me from the corner of his eye. “You don’t think I’d hurt him, do you? That why you’re here?”

I spoke in a terse whisper. “I don’t know, man. You tell me.”

He stared at me through watery eyes, rocked with pain, gasping jagged at the unleaded night air. “I could never hurt Devvy, man. That’d be like killing myself. Worse. I…Dev was my brother. And we didn’t even say goodbye.”

The tears started streaming again, and I felt compelled to put an arm around him—this strange, wizened tough guy that had only just threatened to shoot me in the head.

He looked up at me, emptied of life, corpse-like. “The dream is gone, man.”

I took it in and said, “When was the last time you ate something?”

We drove down Santa Monica toward the ocean until we reached a revolving sign—Rick’s Charbroiled: Burgers “is” us. We ordered and I picked up the tab. Then we took our grub to a dirty, scratched-up, blue-green Formica picnic table outside the shack, surrounded by bumper-to-bumper drive-through, late-night burger freaks. Between bites of the greasiest chow on Planet Earth, he said, “I just don’t see who would do this.”

“I need to tell my lawyer about the band and everything,” I said. “He’s not sure it lines up.”

“And you are?”

“I don’t know. But two weeks ago, Hawley went to Emil’s dad, saying he could prove Emil’s innocence. And then…this?”

Sandoz morphed for a third time before my eyes. First, he’d been rough street animal, a chain swinger. Then, suddenly, he was broken, the aging addict, a wreck. Now something else came through, somebody who still cared about something.

I said, “Mickey, I want to understand exactly what happened to your band. To Emil and Reynaldo, all of it.”

“It’s a long time ago. I don’t know where to begin. Plus…”

“What?”

“Man, by the time we made the recording, I was already high. That’s when I really started using, maybe right after that, and then there were some heavy-duty sessions, a high-level recording studio or some shit, but I swear, man, other than that, I do not remember one fucking thing.”

“But you remember that Reynaldo Durazo was killed.”

“Honestly? I know it in here—” He pointed a bony finger at his temple. “But that whole time is just one bad blur.” He popped the top off his strawberry shake and considered the cold pink foam. “Only thing I really remember is how unhappy I was.”

I said, “The papers wrote that Reynaldo was a drug dealer. Was he the one you were scoring from?”

Sandoz rolled his eyes as he shook out fries onto a bed of ketchup. “Rey-Rey was no drug dealer. Rey-Rey was just some dork we went to school with.”

Sandoz gave me a weak smile.

“Couldn’t keep a beat to save his life. He begged to be in the band, told us he had a kit. That was good enough for us. ‘You’re hired.’ ”

“But did he and Emil have some kind of beef?”

“No way. Elkaim was Mister Mellow. I never saw him have beefs with anyone, ever. He wouldn’t have punched Rey, let alone kill him. Emil was kind of, not our leader exactly, but he was the courageous one. We ran through a lot of guitarists before he showed up, but once we heard him play, it was over, man; he was the heart and soul of the band.”

“So what the hell happened?”

Sandoz whispered, “I don’t know, man.”

He ate his Double Chili in a kind of meditative stupor, but he was slowly coming back to life. The right burger could do that to an Angeleno. I watched him and wondered what he was remembering, or trying to remember.

I said, “Is it true you had a thing with Marjorie Persky?”

“Who?”

I raised eyebrows.

“I knew Cinnamon Persky—you mean her mother?”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s who I mean.”

“I didn’t know her.”

“What about after the band. You served,” I said, pointing at the tags.

“Yeah. Wrong decision number five hundred fifty-two.”

“So why’d you do it?”

“After all the shit went down, losing Rey and Emil, I quit high school, I tried to sober up. Then I enlisted. I was totally lost. I didn’t think there was gonna be a real war. All of a sudden, Desert Storm, I’m stationed in Mina al Ahmadi, driving a T-72—the skinny rock dude who never should have been sent into combat.”

He laughed, but under the goof, the permanent wound to his safety vibed through.

“A long way from The Daily Telegraph,” I said.

“After what happened, there was no Daily Telegraph.”

“I got your LP.”

He groaned. “I haven’t heard that piece of shit in years.”

“But it’s great.”