Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

married three times, he always said, “Because they were there .” When people asked if he was going to do it again he always said, “Islam permits four wives and every Arab and Iranian in California drives a Mercedes, so maybe four’s a magic number.”
    But to friends, Fin said he’d get married again when Cher had her new lips deflated. The pope would get married before Finbar Finnegan, he told them.
    While he was driving back home to south Mission Beach in rush-hour traffic, Fin slipped a Natalie Cole tape into the deck and relaxed the instant he heard her father sing the first lyric of “Unforgettable.” Fin had grown up listening to Nat Cole, Sinatra, Tony Bennett.
    A baby boomer of the Bill Clinton/Al Gore generation, he had three older sisters, the youngest of whom was ten years older than himself. Their mother had become pregnant with him in her forty-first year, and two years after his father was killed in a boatyard accident, his mother died of breast cancer. Fin had been raised by his sisters, who treated him more like a son than a brother. He’d listened to their music, gone to their movies, read their books. And each of them felt free to kick his ass when she felt like it.
    Finbar Finnegan had spent so many years being bossed around by women that as soon as he got old enough he joined the marines, even though it was a dangerous time, at the height of the Vietnam War. Like most people who’d been in that or any war, Fin hadn’t fired a shot in anger. Near Danang there was the occasional incoming rocket, but being in a support batallion, he’d never even seen a live V.C. Only dead marines in body bags, being made ready for their trip home.
    Although Fin hadn’t had a John Wayneish marine career, although he’d bitched about the war as much as anybody, he was still vaguely uneasy about today’s new breed of police officers, particularly the young sergeants and lieutenants with laptop computers and no military experience. Somehow they all looked too much like Bill Clinton. Finbar Brendan Finnegan was casting his November ballot for Ross Perot, mostly because of Perot’s running mate, Congressional Medal of Honor winner James Stockdale.
    That night, after eating some leftover meat loaf, Fin stared into the mirror and wondered if Orson Ellis would actually follow through and get him the part. This time, if he got to play a character who was going to be in future TV episodes, who knows, something might happen!
    Fin slapped at the flesh between his chin and Adam’s apple, wondering what a little tuck would cost, and whether he could make his medical insurance cover it. After all, he had legitimate acting credits, so why shouldn’t cosmetic surgery be covered as a job-related medical expense?
    Orson Ellis had been right. The benchmark birthdays were harder on actors than on normal sane people. It was no consolation to remind himself that Clinton and Gore were considered young by every journalist in America. Forty-five was not young for a cop, and not young for a failed actor.
    His middle sister, Bess, the most sympathetic of his three siblings, offered some advice on the subject after he’d mournfully confessed to her how he’d dreaded the last birthday.
    Thirteen years older than Fin, and silently suffering the misery of hot flashes, Bess studied her baby brother for a moment and said, “Fin, honey, only sea anemones don’t age. How many movie roles’re out there for sea anemones? Now stop all this male menopause bullshit and have a piece of blueberry pie.”
    While Fin Finnegan was contemplating the injustice of being a human being and not an ageless anemone, a Mexican thief named Pepe Palmera had already spotted the abandoned bobtail van on the street in the Rio Zone just below Colonia Libertad . Within a few minutes the van was making its third trip of the day up the hill.
    The first thing that Pepe did that evening, after he