She couldn’t argue with that, but it was a different thing somehow. The police chief, the war veterans, the men with flags on their lapels—they were here for other reasons. Still, if this is what it took.
The reporter eyed them now, looking Elise up and down in her yellow dress, but Iverson steered her away. Behind her, Assemblywoman Golan stepped into the brink. “It’s about self-sacrifice,” she was saying. “It’s about standing together. All of us.” Elise saw Iverson cast an envious glance backward. He was ambitious, she knew; he wanted his moment. Regardless, when the reporter came, Iverson sent him away.
Iverson had his fingers on her forearm. It seemed they were always there. “After you speak at the podium, the press is going to come at you again. Tell them no comment.”
“All right.”
“You don’t want to say anything to jeopardize the case.”
“Okay.”
“I’m glad you understand.”
Though the distance was not far, the group crawled slowly in the October heat. Cars honked, people waved. Pamphleteers worked through the crowd from the opposite direction, slowing them down, handing out religious fliers. When they reached the stairs at last, there was a podium set up already, a microphone, but Elise and the others had to wait for the rest of the crowd to catch up. How many there were, she didn’t know; several thousand, perhaps. The sun was hotter now, and the sunlight gleamed off the marble, and Elise smelled the stench again and felt the dampness of the yellow dress where it clung to her arms, to her stomach. Her perspiration would leave salt rings, she feared, all over the yellow dress.
The governor’s man had come down and was waiting to say a few words.
Elise had been inside these halls on more than one occasion. The officials and their secretaries had dealt with her politely, at first. When she persisted, though, when she returned, they regarded her as a nuisance, it was clear—as someone who did not understand social boundaries. Someone who had been damaged in some way, but for whom their sympathy had worn out. Someone who did not understand the limits of what could be done.
The speech she had prepared was not long. It told of her struggle, a struggle that went back to that day twenty-seven years ago … but it told the story with the anger trimmed out because the people who had ignored her once, they had taken on her cause now, they had chosen to listen, and she could not afford to make them angry. It was a speech that thanked all of those who had stood beside her for so long; but it was a lie.
No one had stood beside her these last few years. Only Guy Sorrentino. And him, she had been forced to push away.
She had another speech inside her head, different from the one on paper.
The crowd had gathered, and the governor’s man was at the podium now. “This day, this gathering, it really isn’t about our grief. Or even about those whom we have lost.”
Then what’s it about? What?
For what reason had she been shuffled from office to office in these halls? For what reason had she suffered the condescending stares of secretaries and the condolences of people who squeezed her in between appointments? Why had she listened to a counselor saying it was time to go, to move on—to the implication that after a point the problem was not what had happened to her mother, no, but instead an indication of a problem within, a deformity, an inability to cope, a flaw that needed to be healed. They all stood behind her now, but she was the one who had broken down, who had been reduced to following Owens and his wife in a shopping mall, full of some awful revenge.
What was it about, then?
She knew the answer. It was not about her mother, no. It was not about herself or the people in the crowd. The governor’s man was right about that.
No, it wasn’t about us, it was about them.
About the prosecutor and his promotions, the newspaperman and his story, the next election and the allocation of the budget. About this assemblywoman whom she would never see again, more than likely, once this march was over.
Elise stood at the podium.
The people were below her, on the steps, gathered along the sidewalk, standing in the grass, under the sun. There was a line of trees in the distance, and the sun came hard over the buildings. For an instant, she remembered old Sacramento; she remembered the heat and dust and her mother’s face as they drove along Interstate 99 through the tomato fields. Now she squinted into the light. She shielded her eyes, but it was hard to see their faces. She could no longer make out the writing on their placards, or the pictures of their loved ones.
“My mother,” she said. “Twenty-seven years ago, she was my age. She walked into the bank…”
She paused.
Iverson looked at her with a glimmer of panic, worried she was about to stray.
She searched the crowd. There was a girl in the audience below, off to the side in the shade, a small girl, maybe ten years old. She had brown hair and was wearing a white hat and held in her hand a photograph. Elise lowered her eyes, trying to glimpse the face in the picture—a parent? a child?—then all of a sudden, without explanation, Elise began to sob.
Then Barbara Golan was at her side, and despite herself, Elise tilted toward the woman. The assemblywoman put an arm around her, and for an awful instant Elise sobbed into the woman’s shoulder, into her bright red blouse. The woman smelled of perfume, of dry-cleaning fluid. Elise could hear the cameras clicking, she could hear the stirring of the crowd. She tried to pull away but the assemblywoman held her close.
“Just read the speech, honey,” she whispered. “Just read what’s on the page.”
* * *
Afterward, lying on the bed in her hotel room at the Sacramento Sheraton, still in her yellow dress, unbuttoned now, she did not remember the details of what had followed so much as the sensation: the feeling that something had been let loose in the air as she stood at the podium. She had stayed on message, as the expression went, but the truth was she did not remember speaking. She did not remember the moment so much as the moment after, the applause, Iverson nodding his head, Golan smiling, the people pressing around after she was done, and the feeling of celebrity, later, as she walked away, head down, and Iverson led her through the crowd.
So now she lay on the bed, exhausted, arms at her sides.
She had a tremulous feeling and remembered how it had been at the time of her breakdown. She felt that feeling again now, the rootlessness. A week ago she had seen that man Dante Mancuso at the sidewalk memorial in front of the construction site. She had seen him kneel down and pick up the portrait of her mother, the flowers that had been knocked over by the wind on the corner out in the Sunset District. What right did he have to touch her mother’s memorial? That had been her first thought, and when their eyes met, perhaps he’d seen that in her posture. But there was something else about the man, too.
There had been something gentle in the motion, something sad. His fiancée had been injured in the bombing, she knew that. For an instant, she thought, perhaps he is not the enemy. Then the anger got ahold of her … and she found herself in the darkness again, watching from the shadows. Mancuso worked with Owens. Likely he knew where the man was staying now. Likely they met for coffee, for lunch …
She knew where that train of thought was leading, but she had a hard time pushing it away. If she was not careful, the feeling grew. Sorrentino had kept her grounded, in some odd way. She fought the panic in her chest, breathing deep, like the psychologist said, then pulled one of those little bottles of Cuervo from the minibar by the bed.
Later the phone rang. It was Blackwell, back in San Francisco. There was something unpleasant in his voice.
“You spoke with the Chronicle?” he asked.
“Iverson was with me the whole time, I didn’t speak to anyone.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it. The Chronicle’s breaking a story, in tomorrow’s paper.”
Again, there was the scolding tone, as if he were talking to a child. She had had enough, really.
“You should have been here,” she sneered. “You could have your picture in Newsweek, too. Instead they’re running Barbara Golan, standing with me out on their platform.”
There wasn’t any truth to it, so far as she knew, but speaking to him like this gave her a momentary satisfaction. Then he was silent, and his silence made her uneasy.
“The breaking story, it has to do with your finances,” he said at last. “It has to do with you and Sorrentino.”
“What finances?”
“It has to do with the fire bombing over at the Owens house.”
“What?”
Her uneasiness turned to dread. She thought of the anonymous donation, and it occurred to her that she’d been duped. Guy had been right. There were strings attached to everything, everyone had a motive.
But who? Why?
“I am taking a drive down there. Soon as I get there, one o’clock, two, I’m coming over to your hotel room, and we’ll stay up all night if we have to,” Blackwell said, and she could hear his contempt, his utter lack of regard. “I am going to stay there until you tell me who you are in bed with.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I want to know where you’ve been getting the money. I want to know what the hell you’ve been doing.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
That same evening, Guy Sorrentino spent some time with a girl he’d picked up at the Belmont Flats, a lackadaisical young woman whose face he forgot almost as soon as she’d left his room at the Lamplighter Motel. It was not a very rewarding encounter. Sorrentino had drunk too much beforehand and afterward had trouble sleeping.
He’d left his apartment at twilight, first buying a pack of Parliaments and a pint of Dewar’s at Ace Liquors, then driving to the mudflats next to the 101. He’d checked for Dante in the rearview mirror, but the man was off him now, and anyway, what did it matter?
He cruised slowly. The Flats was a mixed neighborhood of warehouses and two-story apartment buildings not too different from the one in which he lived, only these had been built on bay fill and were inhabited by immigrants sleeping six or seven to a room. Girls walked the streets, runaways mostly, loitering in the driveways, and it was surprising how many of them were white. A lot of the girls gathered in clusters, but Sorrentino avoided them. It was too conspicuous, and he didn’t like having to pick one from the others as they pushed at the car.
Up ahead, a girl in a blue T-shirt stood alone in the middle of the block. He pulled to the curb and waited for her to stick her head in the Torino’s window.
Sorrentino allowed himself these encounters every few weeks, for the liquor and cigarettes as much as anything, because the encounters themselves were seldom satisfying. Officially he did not smoke anymore. Officially he did not drink. But he allowed himself on these evenings out. Then in the morning he would empty the rest of the bottle into the toilet. He would save a single cigarette for later, after breakfast. The rest of the pack he put under the faucet, filling it with water—so he would not be tempted to take it with him. Then he would not smoke again, he would not drink, he told himself, until his next visit. It was his way of keeping his vices under control.
Last night, though, he had bought himself a second pint and had smoked most of the pack. Now his stomach was queasy, and he could hear the traffic throbbing on the El Camino. His hangover reminded him of the old days, after his dismissal, when he’d spent all that time in Cholino’s Bar in the Tenderloin.
He looked for a paper, but it was midmorning now and the box was empty.
Inside the café, there was a waitress about his own age. She had large breasts and dyed red hair and maybe she had been good-looking once. She was nothing special, but he fantasized about her sometimes as he lay on his back in the Lamplighter, with a girl straddled on top of him. It was not unusual for him to fantasize during sex, to think of different women, never really settling. His ex-wife—no. Elise—for a moment, maybe, but no, she was like a daughter to him. Stella—no. Absolutely not. The waitress in her ochre uniform …
The waitress asked for his order. She did not smile. She wore blue eye shadow and she was all business. You would not know that he had been here a couple dozen times before, and that she had taken his order in just this way, and that the order was always the same.
“A paper?” he asked.
“In the box.”
“It was empty.”
“You can check the counter.”
She said it without looking and he thought of the girl then, in her pale T-shirt and her thin hair, hovering over him, eyes fixed on the wall.
Not seeing him. Guy Sorrentino. An old man full of rage and grief.
Part of the reason he checked the paper these days was for news of the Owens case—to watch the dance in the press. Lately the story had dropped back to the middle of the paper, and often there wasn’t anything at all. He unfolded the paper, preparing to leaf through, then noticed with a flush of panic the headlines on the front page, just below the fold:
QUESTIONS ARISE IN PROSECUTION OF OWENS CASE
Funding Links Victim’s Daughter to Right-Wing Violence
The newspaper reporter, through an unnamed source, had managed to trace activity in Elise Younger’s bank accounts, and apparently she had received a deposit for twenty grand via money order just a few weeks back—the money order itself having been purchased via traveler’s check in Palo Alto. And that traveler’s check had originally been issued to an Ed Metzger of Yreka.
Sorrentino sickened.
He blamed Mancuso, the goddamn defense, dragging names out of nowhere, nosing in his past. He had known Metzger, sure—he’d had a brief encounter with the man some half-dozen years ago, down at Cholino’s, but so had a lot of people in the department. Metzger was a former revenue agent who had been dismissed for laundering money on behalf of a survivalist group suspected in the bombing death of a liberal judge in Humboldt County.
Though the article didn’t say so directly, the inferences were clear—that Metzger had been behind the bombing out at Owens’s house, and that his group was giving money to Elise, to assist with her case: “According to bank records, money from the Eleanor Younger Justice Fund was used in part to pay for a private detective named Guy Sorrentino, who had done the groundwork for the prosecution case. Sorrentino, like a lot of other San Francisco police at the time, had an association with Metzger in the midnineties. While details are not clear…”
Sorrentino cursed. It was the kind of thing defense lawyers did all the time, impugning the prosecution, but Owens and his bunch were clever bastards. They had their friends at the paper … No scruples in the world … And that son of a bitch Mancuso …
The waitress came with his order, and he felt himself redden, worried that she had seen his picture in the paper. She had the same crooked smile as always, the same dark eyes. She put down the eggs, she poured the coffee, but did not give him a sideways glance. He looked around the restaurant. There was a man reading a paper on the empty table across from him, people at the counter. No one paid him any mind. Still, people would see the paper: his ex-wife, friends from the old days, men on the force, Stella, the old fools at Serafina’s, his obese neighbor, the apartment manager. There would be strangers looking at his picture, shaking their heads, amused smiles, clucking tongues.
He was in no mood for breakfast but he ate, anyway. Because it was in front of him. Because he needed to fill the emptiness. The food did not go down well, but he ate it greedily. When he was done, he did not wait for the bill but scattered money over the table before going to the restroom and evacuating everything all at once, all of it streaming through bowels already inflamed with nicotine and alcohol.
His cell phone was in the Torino.
People had called, left messages. Blackwell himself. The feds’ press liaison. Some joker from the newspaper.
And Elise.
He dialed her number.
“Where have you been?”
“With friends.”
“Your ex-wife?”
She asked him this sometimes. He had hinted once at the nature of his nights out, in an odd, self-revelatory moment, but she had misinterpreted it—deliberately, perhaps—to mean he and his wife got together sometimes. It was better, he guessed, than having her think he was with a prostitute.
“I don’t talk to my ex-wife, you know that.”
“That’s what you say.”
“I have other friends.”
She lowered her voice. “I’ve been trying to call you, that’s all. I tried your house, your cell. Blackwell even sent someone out to your place, and when they couldn’t find you…”
“I just now read the paper,” he said. “This man Metzger, he was the one who sent you money?”
“The donation was anonymous, I told you that.”
He stood with his cell to his ear, feeling fat and foolish. A gap had been growing between them for some time, and in the silence now he felt that gap grow wider, filling with suspicion, as she wondered what machinations he’d been hiding, and he wondered the same about her.
“You know Metzger?” she asked.
“The newspaper … the reporter, he didn’t even contact me. What kind of journalism is that?”
“The money was anonymous,” she said again. “There was no name on the check.”
“What does Blackwell want?”
“He wants you to call him, right way. There’s going to be a press conference.”
“He wants me there?”
“No. But he wants to talk to you. And he wants you to stay away from the press meantime.”
Sorrentino knew how these things went. The prosecution was going to get in front of the microphones and read some kind of prepared statement, controlling the damage. Meanwhile they would need a scapegoat, someone to blame, and he already had a pretty good idea who that might be.
“I’m worried, all this publicity. It’s going to hurt the case.”
“It’ll be all right,” Sorrentino said, though he had his doubts.
“We shouldn’t have taken the money. You told me.”
The Ancient Rain Page 16