The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  “This man Metzger … why would he do this?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t Metzger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sorrentino didn’t know for sure, but it didn’t feel right to him. Metzger wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave his name all over the receipt. And even if he were, how would the reporter have found out so soon?

  “All the things in the article, the personal stuff—about me, about you?” She asked. “How did they find out about that?”

  “They hired an investigator.”

  “The one from North Beach? His fiancée—I saw her once…”

  Later, Sorrentino would wonder if he should have paid more attention to Elise then, that sudden lilt in her voice. He knew how much the case meant to her, how fragile she was. But he was thinking about himself. He was thinking ahead to the conversation he would have with Blackwell. It was not going to be pretty. And chances were Blackwell would not talk to him alone; no, there would be others there, they would be pressing to see if he were involved in some way with Metzger, they would push him hard. They would find nothing of course, but that wouldn’t matter. Iverson would ridicule him. He had done what no investigator was supposed to do: He had become part of the story. No matter that the story was a lie.

  “I’ll see you,” said Elise.

  “Yes.”

  Truth was, Sorrentino did not think he would be seeing her soon, and expected Elise knew this as well. Blackwell would not want him at the press conference, and it would not be wise to return to his apartment. The press would be hovering. No, his job now was to lie low, here at the Lamplighter, in the motel room, and wait for Iverson and Blackwell and the rest of the squad.

  He went back to the lobby desk and asked for a cheaper room.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The street was unusually quiet, the sky unusually black. There was no moon, and a dark fog lay over the hill. Dante could not shake the feeling, as he stood at Marilyn’s window, studying the empty street, that something was about to happen. La Seggazza, in the language of the crones: the wisdom, so-called. The old woman’s name for that certain intuition, that feeling of inevitability that overcame a person sometimes—standing on a street corner, maybe, hesitating in the market—the notion that some secret was about to be revealed. Something set in motion.

  Often as not, nothing came of the foreboding. An illusion, perhaps. Some chemical loose in the brain.

  Behind him, Marilyn sat on the sofa. She had put on music, an opera—an obscure aria Dante could not put a name to—from the CD that the man David Lake had given to her. She had been listening to the music a lot lately, the choral swellings, the strings low and brooding, building in intensity, falling away—then all at once, the solemnity giving way to something that sounded like hysteria. The soprano in the throes of death. Followed by the chorus, a long, mournful note.

  Marilyn had gone inward since her return home from the hospital. She had lost weight and her clothes were loose. She resembled from certain angles a younger version of herself—gangly, uncertain, on the verge of transforming into someone else.

  “Come away from the window,” she said. “Come sit with me.”

  Straight on, her looks were disconcerting. Without the makeup, without the scarf, he could see the sutures and the places where the skin still puckered. It was healing nicely, the doctor said, but she would need more grafts, and the surgeon could not guarantee there would be no scars. Her right eye was covered with a vermillion patch. Marilyn had an assortment of these patches—pink, carmine, blue. Her skin had begun to itch—a good sign—but there was still sporadic pain, unpredictable, damaged nerves inside the muscles on her forearms and thighs.

  He went to her on the couch.

  They kissed—a lingering kiss, gentle and tender, but with something fierce in its tenderness, controlled but not controlled. Then, fearful he might be hurting her, he pulled away. She did not look at him, and he could not escape the feeling that he was losing her: that whatever had been between them was slipping away.

  “I love this music,” she said.

  “My mother—she used to sing sometimes, walking up and down the stairs.”

  “Have you been over to the house?”

  “Owens moved out,” he said.

  It had happened quickly. There were reasons for being surreptitious, keeping the family’s movements out of the public eye. And reasons, too, for not informing him of the Metzger story before it appeared in the paper. Still, he felt shut out.

  “Jensen found them another place.”

  “It’s empty?”

  “All their things are gone.”

  After the Metzger story broke, Jensen had made a motion for dismissal, but the judge denied it. Blackwell quickly distanced the prosecution from Sorrentino, then fought back in the press by claiming the story had been planted, implying the information had come from Jensen as a way of discrediting the case and smearing Elise Younger herself.

  In fact, much of the information had come out of the file Dante had collected. Not the financial stuff, though, not the bank records or the alleged stubs connecting Metzger to Elise. You had to have insiders for that.

  Sprague’s people, Dante guessed.

  The whole business made him uneasy, as if he were back working deep cover, in that underworld where intention and action, means and end, became increasingly difficult to sort out. He liked to think that kind of ambiguity had disappeared when he’d left the company.

  “It all comes back, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The things we do.”

  “Maybe. But sometimes it’s just happenstance. Sometimes it’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Like me at the window.”

  “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “Maybe not. I would not have gone, if not for you.” She said it without resentment, at least on the surface. But Dante had thought the same thing. If he had never answered the phone that gray morning … if he had not taken her out to pick up the kids …

  The music swelled again, male voices, rival suitors. Their voices rose, and then there was a lull—the soprano from beyond the grave.

  “Do you believe in anything?” she asked.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Everywhere, it’s one group against another. You can’t untangle it.”

  “You have to take a stand,” he said, but then he realized it was the same nonsense everyone spouted these days. We can’t let them get away with this … we have to stand firm, or else everything we believe in … all our stuff …

  “Beatrice Prospero goes to church every Sunday, you know, she and her father.”

  “They’re fishing for clients,” said Dante. “Weddings and funerals. The exchange of property.”

  “It’s something, at least.”

  “Isn’t that where they found Mr. Lake—after his wife died?”

  “You don’t have to be so cynical.”

  Outside, the blackness got blacker. The soprano’s voice grew more angelic, ghostly, fading as the tenors renewed their battle. Fiercer now, louder. Do nothing. But it was impossible. Things had their own momentum once they got going. People wanted vindication, they would not let you stay out.

  “What are you thinking about?” she whispered into his ear. He felt the brush of her lips against his cheek.

  “Spain?” she whispered. “Barcelona?”

  He was filled with longing, regret. He thought of Cicero on his boat.

  “You remember the hospital?” she asked.

  They had discussed this once, her delirium at the hospital, and he had humored her, lightheartedly. A game. He was surprised now that she would go back to that moment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She knew it wasn’t true. She had to know it had not happened. That he could not have made love to her that way, on the hospital bed, so soon after the fire.

  “Let�
��s go upstairs.” She smiled. “Let’s do that again.”

  She took his hand, and they went upstairs, and he lay beside her on the bed. He touched her face, put his fingertips on her cheeks, his lips to her scars. He kissed the eye patch, then ran his fingers over her body, over the places the fire had touched, following the gasoline, the trails of grease and tar. He ran the tip of his nose along the scabrous tissue. Her legs widened. “I don’t know,” he said, but she pulled him toward her. His chest grazed hers. She winced painfully but did not let him loose. She had described to him that imaginary moment in the hospital, but this moment was real, he could feel the rawness of her body, the wounds oozing, the scabs. He felt the fierceness in her, or perhaps it was within himself, trying to possess something that had already slipped away. He wanted to believe that there had been such a moment between them. She arched toward him, she shuddered all over—and then he, too, let himself go.

  In a little while she fell asleep. She lay there on her back, snoring in her nightgown, the bandages disarranged, her eye patch a bit too low.

  He walked about the house, turning out the lights, then stood a long time at the window staring out at the darkness, and he entertained for a moment the idea that life was somehow normal—that he and Marilyn might somehow be all right. Then he checked his phone, looking at himself in the reflection of the window as he did so—at the small blue glare of the cell reflected in the glass.

  He dialed up his voice mail.

  Elise Younger had found him. She had tracked him down through the office and left a message on his cell.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Dante met Elise Younger the next day at Nico’s, a Japanese restaurant at the back of a strip mall beneath a yellowing hill on the outskirts of Vallejo. The place was just off Highway 37, not far from the Napa junction, but not so close that a tourist was likely to stumble upon it.

  Elise lived in an apartment not far away, and he guessed that must have been the reason she had asked to meet him there.

  She was not there when he arrived, so he waited in his car, half thinking the meeting might be a ploy. In a little while, a late-model Toyota pulled into the lot. Elise Younger climbed out and stood with her purse held in front of her. It was a small black purse, and Dante noticed how she played with the metal catch. He kept an eye on her hands.

  She stood very straight, stiff-backed, her hair curled tight. She wore slacks and a blazer cut in the nautical style, but her clothes were somewhat rumpled. Up close, he noticed the array of freckles across her cheeks, unusual in a woman her age. Her skin was sun damaged, her eyes bright. A girlish, scattered look.

  “Dante Mancuso?”

  “Yes.”

  Inside, the restaurant wasn’t particularly fancy, but it was nicer than he had expected. There were paper lanterns on the wall, and the tables were clean, and Japanese beer was on the menu.

  They sat in a booth, and she set the purse on the table, just letting it lie there. Dante had looked into her background fairly closely these last weeks. He remembered how, at the time of the breakdown, she’d filed the paperwork to buy a gun down at Vallejo Gun & Sport, but had never picked up the weapon.

  It was possible she’d been back recently, he supposed. Possible, too, she’d found some other way to secure a firearm.

  “I saw you out on Judah that day, at the sidewalk shrine.”

  “I noticed you as well.”

  “You were rearranging the flowers.”

  “It’s windy out there, one of the vases had fallen over. So I picked it up.”

  “Does that make you feel better about yourself?”

  Dante let the remark pass. He had all but stumbled on the sidewalk shrine: the yellow flowers and the placard with her mother’s picture; the candles and the glass statues and the newspaper articles; the paper hearts trimmed with lace. He’d bent over all that to put the vase upright.

  “You gave Jensen information for the article, didn’t you?”

  “Some of it.”

  “The way that story was put together, the innuendo, it’s not true … The aim—it’s to poison the case…” She moved the purse off the table, putting it on the seat next to her.

  “I didn’t write the article.”

  “So what else did you find out—about me, I mean? Did you talk to my divorce lawyer, my psychiatrist?”

  She was baiting him, trying to find out just exactly what he knew, maybe, and how he had discovered it. It was possible Blackwell had sent her out on a kind of mission, but he doubted that. It would not be a wise thing to do.

  “How can I help you?” He heard the good cop in his voice, the man who had come to listen. It was not convincing. “Why did you call me out here?”

  She leaned forward, and the way her chin jutted, and the shape of her head, the manner in which she wore her hair, the curls permed tight against her crown, reminded him of the picture of the dead woman at the center of the shrine.

  “Guy Sorrentino is a sweet man,” she said, squaring her shoulders, as if to challenge him in some way. “Before my breakdown, I ran into Owens at the mall. But you know that. The rumors, how I followed Owens and his family.” She peered across the table. “But the thing is, I was this far away from him. He looked right at me, right into my eyes. With that empty look of his. Like I wasn’t there. Like he didn’t see me.”

  He knew the look she meant—the way Owens retreated, the seeming vacancy behind the pale eyes. But what had she expected from such an encounter?

  The waitress brought their drinks and some appetizers arranged on a plate. Elise did not seem much interested in her food. She was drinking gin, and it occurred to him then that this wasn’t her first drink of the day. She had her hands on the table, and the small black purse remained out of sight. He kept an eye on her hands.

  “Why did you call me out here?”

  She hesitated. “I wanted to tell you I didn’t have anything to do with the firebomb,” she said. “I’m not saying I don’t hate Owens, I’m not saying that there haven’t been times when I would do anything—I admit it. But I wouldn’t go after those kids. And I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to your fiancée. I didn’t know Metzger, and Guy only knew him in passing.”

  “The money came from somewhere.”

  “I’m not naïve,” she said. “I know people are using this case. Using me. But there are people using you, too.”

  She gave him an odd smile, waiting for his reaction. She believed what she said, maybe, or wanted to believe, but he could see that the recent fuss in the paper, all the publicity, the trial—the whole business was caving in on her. “Owens was staying for a while in North Beach, around the corner from you and your fiancée?”

  Dante didn’t answer the question, but he wondered how she knew this. She’d learned it from Sorrentino, maybe, or slipping around the streets on her own.

  “I know lots of little things,” she said. “Benny’s Café—that’s one of Owens’s hangouts isn’t it, down off Third, by the old wharf? He likes to meet people there, to slum it and show what a guy he is. But that work you’re doing for him, Owens and his attorney are using it to make it look like he is the victim. Maybe it will work. Maybe he can hide the truth in that empty face of his—but not forever. It will be revealed.”

  She didn’t sound entirely certain. He thought of all the times she had spent with Sorrentino, and the time they had spent nursing each other’s grief.

  “You live with your fiancée?” she asked.

  Again, he didn’t answer.

  “Or does the question bother you? Does it make you suspicious—me rummaging around in your life? Like you out there, at the shrine.”

  “You’ve made your point—if that’s what this was all about.”

  “No, I wanted you to tell Owens something.” She tilted toward him now, her eyes bright, a bit too much so. “I want you to give him a message from me. There was a time when I told myself I wouldn’t be satisfied until he was in jail. I wanted him punished. I wanted
him in a dark hole, and I wanted him to know he would be in that hole in hell till he died. I wanted him punished, that’s what I thought. But I was deceiving myself.”

  “Yes?”

  “The reason I want him in jail, the reason I want him locked away, it’s because—I’m afraid of what I’ll do. If he stays out here, I’m afraid I’ll become just like him.” Dante thought back again to their encounter the moment on that sidewalk. He had felt sympathy for her then, but at the same time he knew he couldn’t let that sympathy sway him. She might be dangerous. If not to him, then to someone else.

  “We’ve all lost people,” he said.

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know something.”

  She bit her lip.

  “You need to be careful,” he said. “This trial’s going to last for a while. It may not go the way you want it to go.”

  “You and Sorrentino, you’re not so different as you think.”

  She reached down beside her then, picking up the purse. Her fingers played with the clasp.

  THIRTY

  When Dante found Cynthia Nakamura, it was not through his own brilliance, or a sudden revelation, but on account of a certain long-nosed tedium—examining for a hundredth time the growing list of witnesses the prosecution had submitted as part of the discovery process. It had occurred to Dante that the prosecution might be hiding Lady Nakamura among the stiffs—and the list was rife with these, with misspellings, dropped surnames, people who had witnessed the crime but had since passed on or were otherwise incapacitated. Through this process he came back to a name he’d crossed off before but now examined again. Another name in the slough of names:

  Johnson, Robert. 350 Fourth St., Union City. Eyewitness, deposition forthcoming.

  The death certificate, however, suggested that Mr. Johnson wouldn’t be testifying anytime soon. Died April 20, 2002. Cardiac arrest. Unmarried. Sixty-eight years old. Identify verified by an estranged son.

  Dante phoned the son and discovered the dead man had a common-law wife, going by the name of Cynthia Johnson. According to the son, Cynthia had taken up residence at Hamilton Care Center in the South Bay: a state-funded holding place for the terminally ill.