The Big Boom

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Let’s talk about this tonight,” he said.

  “I really don’t want to go by myself, honey. I really want you to come.”

  He’d been on a cruise ship years ago, and he wasn’t crazy about it. Ports of call and duty-free liquor and overpriced artwork and long hours at dinner tables with strangers and not a fucking thing to say. It was no Orient Express.

  “You’re too young for a cruise. Why do you want to waste yourself on a boat full of old men?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re not so old.”

  Something about the way she said it put a knife through him. Earlier, he’d suggested she go on her own. That he wouldn’t mind. He had his business here to take care of. The truth was, though, he didn’t want her to go without him.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to know when you would be home.”

  “Around seven.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll be here, waiting.”

  The last time Louise had said that, though, she hadn’t been home. She’d been out with her girlfriends at the club. And Frank Strum, the attorney.

  “Oh Jake,” he whispered to himself again.

  He should turn his attention to his work, but he was thinking about Louise. He and she were alike in more ways than one. They’d both been married several times, and they both had lives they’d left behind. People they’d abandoned. Louise had resisted him at first, he remembered, same as his first wife.

  Jake thought of them sometimes, his various wives. Alice, his first, and their seven years together. Then Jeanine, with her blond hair and her blousy looks, who’d ultimately grown to regard him as a fool. And from those two marriages, three kids—none of whom regarded him as their father.

  Sometimes he wished he could go back in time and set all that straight.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Dante Mancuso entered. He was a sticky one, Mancuso. Cicero had known Dante when he was a young homicide cop. At the moment, Dante stood in the doorway with his fists all but clenched. He had penetrating eyes and an old-fashioned nose—the kind of nose you didn’t see much anymore, a fisherman’s nose, a big hook to drag in the sea. Dante smiled, somewhat thinly. Cicero had known Dante’s mother, too, and the smile reminded him of her. A beautiful woman, before she’d gone to the asylum.

  “Oh, the man of the hour,” said Cicero.

  “Why do you say that?”

  It was one of his stock phrases. Cicero had no idea why he said such things. Because it was what his own father used to say to him, maybe, when young Jake had found his way back to the house from some errand. Or for no reason at all. Because it didn’t make any difference, as soon as you walked into the door, whoever you were, you were the man of the hour, because you were the person who was there. Here. Now. You were the one who existed. Who stood in this room. Whose heart was beating.

  “The Antonelli case,” Cicero said. “I was just thinking about that. The father called twice this morning. He wants to know what you’ve got.”

  “I shouldn’t have told them about the body.”

  “Maybe not. But they’d be twisting either way. Meanwhile, Antonelli’s been hounding the cops, too. You know what kind of guy he is. Has to have everything. Have it now.”

  “I know.”

  “So what have you found out?”

  Dante caught him up. He’d been working all morning to track down the man on the phone machine, Jim Rose. So far, he didn’t have much. Rose didn’t have an address in the city, at least not one they could find.

  “According to the phone company, he called from his cell phone—one of those cash specials bought down at Radio Shack, a store down in the Castro. But no address on the application.”

  “But he called from within the city?”

  “That’s what the records indicate. And one of Angie’s last credit card purchases, it was at Dazio’s. A silk skirt. Beige.”

  “Any significance?”

  “The corpse was wearing one like it. It’s on the manifest. And so are the family pearls.”

  Jake Cicero lowered his head. Himself, he wasn’t wild about Nick Antonelli. The guy had had him investigate some of his business clients once upon a time, looking for dirt, and he’d put a fidelity tail on his own wife, though by any rights it should have been the other way around. Also, Cicero knew the stories about how Antonelli’s father had rough-handed things to get his way along the waterfront, and how Nick himself had maintained his father’s connections.

  To Chicago. To old man La Rocca.

  Truth was, La Rocca had died, and the son had moved to Vegas, and the talk probably was just talk, jealousy, people running down anyone who did well. Antonelli did nothing to discourage it. The way he blustered, it was tempting at times to wish the man ill. Even so, Cicero didn’t want to be the one to tell him about his daughter. It would be hard to take any pleasure in that.

  “Was the body good for prints?”

  “Yes.”

  “So—what’s keeping those sons of bitches? All they gotta do is throw the prints into the system. See if they match.”

  “You know how it is. Missing Persons. They’re not in a rush.”

  “Maybe the body … the prints…,” Cicero hesitated. “Maybe it’s not her.” He shrugged. It was always possible, after all, that there would be no match.

  Dante said nothing.

  “How about her boyfriend, what’s his name, Solano? You talked to him yet?”

  “I have an appointment this afternoon. He’s been in L.A. the last few days. New York before that—drumming up venture capital.”

  Cicero nodded.

  “Maybe you should go back to her apartment, see if you can find something else. Once the cops move on this—if they move on it—your access might be limited.”

  “All right.”

  “I got a retainer from Antonelli. It’s a good retainer. So … well…”

  “So you want me to burn some hours.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Mancuso was an edgy one, Cicero knew. Capable, but a bit of a wild card. He’d been an up-and-comer with the SFPD, a young cop with a chip on his shoulder. Too stubborn for his own good, and so he’d taken a fall. He’d left the force and gone to work down in New Orleans. Private industry, Dante claimed, but Cicero had tracked it down and he knew better. It was a government front, some kind of agency work. Rumor was, Dante had walked over the line in the way that happens in such work. He’d developed habits, dependencies. A taste for the street-corner wares that the agency had used at one time to finance its backdoor operations. Dante himself seemed clean now. Or clean enough. Anyway, Cicero had hired worse. Mancuso was a good investigator, and the Antonellis had requested him. Because Dante had been close to their daughter. Because their families had known one another and there’d been a romance of some sort back when Dante and Angie were kids.

  “How well did you know the girl anyway?”

  “Pretty well,” said Dante.

  Cicero waited for more but it didn’t come. Himself, he had seen the Antonelli girl, three, maybe four times, when her family still lived in The Beach. He had a memory of her—twelve years old, or thereabouts, on the cusp of bigger things, skinny legs and big brown eyes, restless in Washington Square with her mom and dad, but that could have been any mom and dad strolling with their just-blossoming kid in the park on a North Beach Sunday.

  “I’ll talk to the boyfriend this afternoon,” said Dante.

  “All right,” said Cicero. “Let me know how it goes.”

  Dante left, and Cicero put his feet back onto the desk. He closed his eyes. It was a morose business, his line of work. Maybe he should go on the cruise after all. It might be a pleasant thing. He could lean back in a deck chair with the sea breeze in his face. He could listen to the ocean, to the rattle of the ship and the clinking glasses at the bar, and not worry about conversations like the one he’d just had. Missing persons. Infidelities. Business deals gone rotten. Whatever it was people w
hispered about, he need not pay attention. He need not listen. It would all be someone else’s concern, details lost in the churning of the wake, in the cawing gulls, in the sound of the hot tub and the not-so-young honeymooners playing Ping-Pong on the deck. He could get some sleep. Even now, thinking about it, he began to nod off. He heard the foghorn out in the bay and smelled the sea air through the window. That was the thing about North Beach. It might not be a port town anymore, but the memory of what had once been mingled with the present. As he got older, this kind of thing seemed to happen more often. The brain got soft, and in his dreams the living mingled with the dead. People said this was a sign of deterioration, but maybe it was the opposite. Maybe he was moving toward something. Some reconciliation.

  He remembered a time some forty years ago, a Christmas Day in the little house down in San Bruno, his first wife and himself and his son around a brick fireplace, an image like something from a Polaroid, and all of the sudden now he gasped, like his father had, maybe—short of breath, a palpitation in his chest—a gasping set off, though he didn’t realize it at first, by the ringing of the phone.

  It was Nick Antonelli. Again.

  “I just talked to the police,” said Antonelli, and Cicero knew what was coming. He could hear it in the man’s voice. “My daughter …”

  “I know,” said Cicero. “I’m sorry.”

  “What do you mean, you know? What do you fucking know?”

  “What did the police say?”

  “If you knew, why didn’t you tell me? I am not paying you to learn things from the police.”

  “We had our fears… but the police, the final determination … We couldn’t say more until the identification was definitive.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you.”

  Cicero let it pass. The man was in the throes of grief, and people said funny things. Except, in Cicero’s opinion, Antonelli had always been somewhat of an asshole.

  “They want me to take the body. This is the first thing the cops say, I have to make arrangements. But how can I do that? These bastard police—they’re not interested in what really happened.”

  “They wouldn’t release her if they hadn’t completed the lab analysis. If there’s some other tests you want to run, in case of a criminal trial—”

  “No one’s rushing me. I am not burying her until I goddamn know what happened.”

  Cicero knew better than to argue. He’d had a client who kept her son’s body in cold storage for two years in the event a killer was found, and the body held additional evidence. Truth was, it wasn’t necessary. The coroner’s examination, his record, that was the forensic evidence.

  But sometimes people just did not want to bury their dead.

  “Dante’s investigating,” said Cicero.

  “I want a chronology. Every minute. She didn’t just fall into the bay.”

  “He’s out there this minute. He’s following the trail.”

  “Fuck you,” said Antonelli.

  Elegant, Cicero thought. Elegant fucking Italians. Dignified in death as in life. Masters of the oratorical phrase.

  EIGHT

  A half hour earlier, Nick Antonelli had been at his kitchen table, watching his wife. At that point, Antonelli had not yet talked to the police. At that point, he had not known, not for certain, that his daughter was dead. At that point, Barbara had been in the backyard, trying to retrieve the cat.

  The cat did not respond to her. Eccentric had spent the night before underneath the furniture, then bolted outside when she’d opened the slider. Now the cat had gotten itself on the diving board, and his wife stood at the edge of the pool, trying to coax him back. Instead the foolish creature crouched, and looked as if it were going to jump across the pool—a foolish thing to do in any event, but more foolish given what Nick had seen of its leaping abilities.

  Go ahead and jump, Nick thought. Go ahead.

  Then the kitchen phone went off.

  His wife turned toward him, watching. She wore a sleeveless dress, arms akimbo. Even after he turned away, phone in hand, he knew she was watching his every move, reading his posture. She didn’t come in right away, though. She waited till the conversation was over.

  “The police?” she asked.

  “Yes. They found Angie.”

  Barbara went past him and sat on the sofa—in the big room with its straw mat wallpaper and the black piano and the imported ceramics. Her dress was olive green, the color she always wore. She sat with her head bowed and her shoulders straight. Outside, on the patio, on the other side of the glass door, the cat slunk into the bushes, disappearing into a velvet area of moss and ferns.

  “She’s dead then,” she said.

  Nick walked away from her, back to the bedroom. There was a sliding door here, too, looking into the backyard. European style, the real estate agent had said, back when they bought the place. Courtyard living. A statue outside and a fountain. Just like the goddamn Romans.

  He’d torn it all out and put in a swimming pool.

  On the bureau was a family portrait, the three of them together—something his wife had arranged a few Christmases back. He’d never liked the picture. It was too formal, and he looked silliest of them all.

  And now his cell went off in his pocket.

  It was a new addition, the cell, something he had gotten on the insistence of Anne Marie, his secretary. He did not much care for it. The device gave him trouble, and he was tempted for a moment to smash it against the wall.

  On the other end was Mark Smith, down in Los Angeles.

  Smith the Invisible.

  Smith was Solano’s financial officer, but Antonelli had never met him. Solano was the CEO, but it was Smith the Invisible who controlled everything. Smith the Unknowable. Solano was the company’s public face, but the venture firm funding the operation had brought in Smith to watch the books. When the company needed office space, it was Smith who’d made the deal. It was a complicated transaction, but the essence of it was that Antonelli would use his holdings as collateral to buy the old Waterhouse Building, down in China Basin, then lease it back to Solano’s firm. No sooner had the ink dried, though, than Antonelli had gotten word that Solano’s funding was in jeopardy. Some insiders were causing trouble. It had been straightened out relatively quickly, though. Because of me, Antonelli thought. Because of my willingness to draw the line, to get tough. To make the calls that had to be made. But none of that mattered now.

  “My daughter’s dead,” Antonelli said.

  There was quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” said Smith.

  “I’m going to find out what happened.” The grief was apparent in Antonelli’s voice. “I’m going to goddamn find out.”

  He heard his wife out in the yard. Barbara was calling the cat. Nick could see her through the windows, crouched over, peering into the bushes where the cat had disappeared. Her voice was high and sonorous, but the sight of her, piteous, full of grief, calling that goddamn cat, filled him with rage. “Goddamn cat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Angie’s cat—my wife lets it in, lets it out. That’s all we have left of my daughter now. That goddamn cat.”

  The words came out peculiar. Like he cared about the cat. Like it meant something to him.

  “My daughter’s cat,” he said.

  “I see.”

  “I’m going to find out what happened to Angie. I told you a couple of days ago. I’ve hired a detective, and I’ll hire another. I’m going to find out what happened.”

  “These things…,” Smith spoke softly, with a certain coolness, a certain edge, like a man speaking from the ether. “Sometimes, maybe it’s better to let these things go.”

  “What did you say?” Antonelli shot back.

  There was no reply.

  Despite himself, Antonelli felt a little jolt of fear. Outside, the cat skittered out of the bushes, back toward the diving board. Nick felt again the dread that had been palpable in his chest since Angie disappeared.

  “Wh
at did you say?” Antonelli repeated.

  He never had liked these son of a bitches: the dot-com people with their smugness. They had this demeanor, this attitude—all the rules had changed and you couldn’t possibly know, couldn’t possibly understand. You should just be glad they talked to you. Count yourself blessed. He had structured the deal cleverly, dealing from his gut, but there’d been a rush to it, the way these new people rushed everything, and he wondered now, old bull that he was, if he’d charged too soon.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Smith.

  “Sure,” said Antonelli.

  Whatever Smith’s original reason for calling, he didn’t reveal it now. He let Nick go. Nick looked down at the family portrait. He batted it to the floor. Then he batted himself against the blue bedroom wall, wailing—and at length exhausted himself on the carpet. And when he was done, he lay with the picture in his hand. His poor daughter. Happy, smiling, full of vulnerability. That bastard Mancuso should have married her, he thought. Him and his ugly fucking nose.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  And then he rolled over on the floor. He wailed. A week ago he had had the world in his hands, but now …

  He walked over to the bedroom phone and called Cicero again, demanding action. When the conversation ended, he took the receiver and broke it against the wall.

  A couple of hours later the doorbell rang. Barbara was on the kitchen phone, speaking in that low, tender voice of hers, almost sensuous. Someone had called a few minutes before on the house line, but it had been for her apparently, not Nick. Something about his wife’s posture made him pause, but then the doorbell rang once more.

  A young woman stood in the entry, clipboard in hand. She was a rangy girl who wore her hair in a fall.

  She was looking for donations, for some clinic in the city. You didn’t get much of that up this way, and it made him wonder. When she smiled at him, though, he could not help it; despite everything, he smiled back.

  At the same time, though, he could hear Barbara. Something about arrangements. Something about papers that needed to be signed. Then he realized she was talking to Gucci’s kid, lousy-ass mortician down at the Diamond Mortuary.No, before anything like that, before they put Angie in the ground …