Road Dogs

THIRTY

ONCE THE BODIES WERE RELEASED, CUNDO AND TICO WERE given separate parlors in LoCicero & Sons Funeral Home in Santa Monica. Jimmy Rios testified as an eyewitness to Cundo's murder: shot and killed by Dawn Navarro one night while Jack Foley was visiting a friend in Beverly Hills, a famous film star, who said yes, it was true, Jack Foley was helping her accept her husband's death.

"If Jack had been here for the dinner," Jimmy told the police, "Cundo, like a father to me, would still be alive."

Tico Sandoval, they believed, fell to his death while measuring the roof for Cundo's welcome-home party.

Dawn Navarro, who had hidden the bodies in a freezer, was the prime suspect in Cundo Rey's death. The pistol used in his murder was found in the canal in front of his house.

Sierra Sandoval came to mourn her boy. She stared at him in the casket, Tico wearing his lavender scarf around his neck like an ascot. Sierra stayed an hour, watching the boys from the hood passing through to look at Tico, Sierra imagining one of them on the roof with her baby, playing that game.

Mike Nesi came, his left arm in a cast, his right hand sticking out of his open shirt, the rest of the arm taped to his body. He said to Foley, "You owe me nine bills for the hospital and two bills the Cuban squirt owes me." Foley and Zorro threw him out the front door of the funeral home.

A photo of Foley with Jimmy Rios appeared in the Los Angeles Times over the story of the bodies found in the freezer. He wondered if Karen Sisco saw it and might give him a call. It would be up to her; he wasn't making any moves in that direction.

When Lou Adams and Ron Deneweth dropped in, Lou stood looking at Cundo waiting for his eyes to open, his lips to come unglued and tell him Foley was in on his death. Lou would turn Foley around on the spot and cuff him and he'd have the ending for his book. Lou waited. Cundo refused even to blink.

Lou went up to Foley and said, "I'm going back to Miami and you're on your own. You'll hit another bank 'cause it's your nature. Go ahead, I don't give a shit what you do."

"You have an ending for your book?"

"Not yet, I can't wait for you, I got to think of something."

"How about this," Foley said. "Because of the awful pressure you put on me, I've given up robbing banks for good."

Lou squinted as Foley told him, "Don't ever doubt the power of prayer. I asked God to help me stay out of banks. I prayed to find honest work I could do, and the next day Jimmy offers me one of his homes. I can take my pick, the white one full of pictures of Dawn and a painting of her bare naked. Or I can have the pink one."

"He gives you a million-dollar house free?"

"Jimmy feels he owes me for standing behind him. He said,

'Jack, I love you, man. You save me from that bitch wanted to take my homes and kill me. Which one you want?' I took the pink one worth four and a half mil," Foley said. "I had to, it's my favorite."

"It's the pressure I put on you," Lou said, "turned you away from a middle-age life of crime. That's not a bad ending."

Every half hour Jimmy played a recording of "Alto como la luna," done in a slow tempo for the warmth of it, Cundo Rey's favorite.

There were women who came to kneel by the casket and look at Cundo. They made the sign of the cross, kissed the tips of their fingers, some of them, and touched their fingers to his lips glued shut. There were more women than Foley imagined Cundo had known, Foley looking for a girl with dyed hair wearing dark glasses.