So parking wasn’t its usual awful and automatic hassle. Today Mickey pulled up into a spot by the emergency entrance to the UC Medical Center, only a couple of blocks from their apartment. By this time, Jim was snoring.

Fifteen minutes later, the old man was in his bed, still dressed except for his shoes, and with the covers pulled up around him. Mickey closed the bedroom door and, sweating from having basically carried Jim up to the second floor where they lived, he took a dispirited glance around the cluttered living room: Tamara’s Murphy bed pulled down from the wall and unmade. Newspapers from several days scattered around. Coffee mugs on just about every flat surface.

He straightened up, and when he’d finished, he opened the door to his own bedroom, essentially a large closet with a window facing the wall of the apartment behind them. Here was his bed, a board-and-cinder-block bookcase, a small dresser/desk combo unit, a few prints on the walls.

But he didn’t go into his room. Dead in his tracks, he stopped in its doorway. No wonder he fled from this place as often as he could.

This was no way to live.

The death of Dominic Como, now confirmed as a murder, led off the five o’clock news. The cause, as Mickey had suspected, was not drowning, but rather someone had hit him with a blunt object on the back of the head. Como had already been missing for four days by the time he was found partially submerged in the lagoon at the Palace of Fine Arts by…

Mickey, sitting in front of his television, came forward in mild shock as his own image appeared on the screen as part of the big story of the day. He had talked to several reporters that morning at the scene, of course, but never really believed that they’d run with any of the footage of him, since his own role in the larger story was at best only a footnote. But there he was on TV, describing how he’d come upon the body. He thought this was pretty cool in spite of how young he looked, and how disheveled, which he suddenly realized was what sleeping out under trees could do to you.