The Big Boom

by Domenic Stansberry

  Afterward Dante walked Marilyn up the hill. The wind had picked up and Washington Square had gone cold. There was a smattering of transients on the grass, sleeping under cardboard, and a young Chinese couple making out on a bench. Across from Fior d’Italia, a street-corner preacher was warning about the end of time. How blood shall rain from the sky and the dead shall walk the earth.

  “So,” said Marilyn.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to walk me all the way,” she said. “I can do it on my own.”

  Her eyes had an invitation in them, maybe, but there was also something else. A challenge. A demand. Before his father’s funeral, he’d been gone a long time and things had gone cold between them. Then he’d returned, and he and Marilyn had gotten close again, and for a while they’d talked of selling the house on Fresno Street, maybe leaving The Beach, but in the end Dante couldn’t do it, and he wasn’t sure, really, that was what Marilyn wanted either. But there was still the question: What next?

  He reached out and touched her face and wanted to walk with her on up the hill, but there was still the challenge in her eyes and also the feeling that never quite left him, that there was something just beyond the edge of his vision, something he could not quite see.

  “I won’t wait forever,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “The man in gray, the real estate agent?”

  “What about him?

  “He wants to fuck me.”

  Marilyn kept on up the hill. Dante watched her for a little while—how she diminished into the shadows—and he followed from a distance.

  He stood outside her darkened apartment, looking up.

  The light went on inside—and he saw her shadow cross the window and he felt some small comfort.

  She was safe, anyway, he thought. He did not have to worry about her going for a walk along the pier.

  n the way down the hill, Dante heard footsteps, but they turned away. Across the street from his apartment, two men loitered on the walk. Dante did the old tricks then, the ones he had learned during his time away from the city. He doubled back, then back again.

  He walked slowly, he walked fast. He lingered by magazine racks and walked by Angie’s apartment, and glanced down the alley where the night before he’d seen something move, and mistaken that movement for Jim Rose. There was no one down the alley now, and no one following him so far as he could tell. Still he could not shake the feeling, just as his mother had not been able to shake the necessity to climb the attic ladder. Down on Columbus, the two men were gone. Dante circled the block once more. He saw the blue van parked at the corner, but there was nothing remarkable about it. So he did not think anything of it, nor of the young woman in shorts and a peasant blouse, sauntering with her hands in her pockets, a cigarette hanging from her lips.

  EIGHTEEN

  Jake Cicero drove his Thunderbird through Cow Hollow. It was one of the new Thunderbirds, sloppy in the handling, floating over the street with a sense of indeterminate control. Up the big hills, then down—the vista wide in front of you just for a minute: the sailboats, the brown hills, the miles of stucco—and then down you went, wallowing into a dip. The car drove as if it were still 1977 and the streets were a million miles wide. It was a good ride. Cicero liked it. The T-bird was baby blue and it had a porthole in the hardtop.

  His wife was on the cell.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just a little bit of street work.”

  “I thought you weren’t doing that kind of thing any more. Haven’t you hired some other people to do that for you?”

  “You know how it goes,” he said.

  Cicero considered explaining it to her. How Nick Antonelli had wanted him on the case so badly, then all the sudden changed his mind. But it wasn’t just that. It was the fear he’d heard in Antonelli’s voice—there underneath the belligerence. And now this man Whitaker, he was missing too. Cicero knew better, of course, than to let a case get under his skin, but there was still time on the retainer. In the end, he did not explain any of this to Louise. She did not care about the details. He had not married her for her interest in the details.

  “I’ll be home about ten.”

  “Did you look at the brochure?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I looked at the brochure.”

  He had, in fact, spent more time with the brochures then he cared to admit. The brochures, in some odd way, were what had inspired him to get out of the office and onto the street. Color pamphlets picturing couples at play. Young couples. Middle-aged couples. Men with just a spike of gray in their hair, women with their heads thrown back in a wild moment of laughter as they headed, arm in arm, down the gangplank toward the ports of call. Couples by the pool, water sky blue as could be. Pictures so crisp you could see the ice cubes in the glass and the erections under the men’s swimsuits. Or lack thereof.

  Better to be on the case.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it looks swell,” he said. “I can’t wait.” The truth was, no, he thought the trip looked like misery, and she could tell by the sound of his voice.

  “Well, if you don’t want to go …”

  He hesitated. “Let’s talk about it later.”

  “Okay—but I have to make some kind of decision. Life’s not about chasing swine around the street,” she said. “If I have to, I’ll go alone.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. It’s just I want to enjoy myself, that’s all I’m saying. I think it’s time. For both of us.”

  “I do, too, honey—I’m not saying … Honey …”

  He was passing through the Presidio—six lanes of traffic merging in the inevitable swirl of fog on Doyle Drive, the on-ramp to the bridge; then the cell phone cut out, as it was prone to do down here.

  “Oh, hell,” he said, and tossed the phone into the empty bucket seat beside him. He knew Louise well enough to know that she wasn’t going to call back. She was going to let him stew. And he felt the familiar, claustrophobic feeling he remembered from his other marriages—when you felt suddenly as if you were trapped inside a dark closet.

  What was she up to? he wondered.

  Cicero headed his T-Bird across the Golden Gate into Marin County. He had an address for Whitaker’s ex-wife. The address was in Tiburon—and that usually meant certain things. The hills were covered with estate houses, and even the modest places, the little shoeboxes on concrete slabs, cost more than you wanted to talk about. Ann Whitaker didn’t live in one of these, but she didn’t live in a mansion either. She lived in a condo out at the point with a view over the water. It was a nice place, and she was a nice-looking woman, but in the end, it seemed, none of it had been nice enough. Whitaker had left her for a younger woman and a flat in the city.

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “He was here for the kids three weeks ago. Bill’s supposed to take them every other week—but what else is new?”

  The woman was a brunette in her early forties, thin and pretty except for her oversized jaw. Her clothes were expensive but on the matronly side, and her anger was apparent. Still, she had let Cicero in when he mentioned her ex-husband’s name. Maybe because she was still attached to him in some way. Or maybe because any trouble of his was good news to her.

  “He hasn’t been at his job, did you know that?”

  Her smile twisted. There was pleasure there, born of spite—but also worry. Mrs. Whitaker didn’t look like she spent much time reading the employment classifieds, and no doubt the alimony was what kept her going.

  “Who did you say you were working for?” Mrs. Whitaker asked.

  Cicero explained. He was investigating the death of a young woman who had been involved with the president of her husband’s company. Her ex-husband had worked closely with the dead woman. And now n
o one seemed to be able to find him either.

  “Was he sleeping with her?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing to suggest it.”

  Mrs. Whitaker sat down. She put her hands in her skirt. Cicero noticed a small version of Mrs. Whitaker in the kitchen behind her—a young girl, maybe ten years old, with her mother’s chin and the same puzzled, abandoned expression. Unlike her mom, though, the girl’s hair was blond.

  “He left two years ago—we had the biggest goddamn house on the hill—but he left, and now we’re living here.”

  It wasn’t exactly poverty, but he could see that she had taken a fall. Cicero started to feel bad, not so much for Mrs. Whitaker but for his own first wife, and his own kids. They didn’t talk to him anymore. They thought he was the louse of the earth. Maybe he was.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” he asked again. It was a habit you got into, repeating the question, because often enough the answer wasn’t the same.

  “Three weeks ago, like I said. Every other weekend, that’s our deal. He was supposed to show up last weekend, to take the kids, but he didn’t. Not a goddamn word.”

  “Did you call him?”

  “Sure. I called his place in the city. And I called the cabin.”

  “The cabin?”

  “Tahoe. It belongs to his family. The son of a bitch and his lawyers. I get the condo, the Mercedes. And he gets everything else.”

  “Nice car,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s great.”

  Her lips turned up and he realized he’d said the wrong thing, and he realized something else at the same time. Mrs. Whitaker—with her thin bones and her wide lips and her quick, distracted way of glancing about—had a resemblance to his first wife. His first wife had been born to wealth, or to the memory of it, and the two women had the same delicate arrogance.

  “So he never called you?”

  “Typical. He was working—caught up in one of his deadlines, I figured. That’s the way it was with him. Devoted to his work. And whatever woman was worshipping him at the time.”

  The little girl, the blond miniature, stood behind her. She had a dour, somewhat confused expression, and despite her lace collar and her plaid skirt, she looked like she was ready to give something a swift kick. The couch. Her mother. Cicero himself. Meanwhile, from a nearby room, he heard the steady click of the computer mouse and a small voice yelping along with the animations.

  “Go play with your brother,” said Ann Whitaker.

  The little girl went away, and it was just Cicero and Ann Whitaker. She wore her hair in a flip, a style that was both wholesome and out of date. Alone with her now, Cicero felt, suddenly, a hollowness in his chest.

  “He always makes such a deal out of it when he comes by. Like he’s the father of the century. But the truth of it, everything Bill does, it’s all about him.”

  Cicero felt bad. He hadn’t spoken to his own son in fifteen years.

  “Well, at least…” Cicero said.

  He fell silent, surprised at himself. He had been about to defend the man, maybe. Or to just tell her it wasn’t so great from the other side either—but the woman glared at him, and Cicero knew she was right. You could come by every other night, drain your pockets, but it didn’t matter. You had abdicated. Done it out of selfishness. For manly pleasure. For your dick. Or because you couldn’t look at the lot of them without going out of your skull.

  But it didn’t matter the reason. You were the loser. You were the fuck.

  “So you haven’t heard from him?”

  “Worse than that.”

  “Hmm.”

  “He hasn’t sent the check.”

  “Which check?”

  “Which check do you think?”

  “Is that unusual, for him to miss a payment?”

  “If the alimony’s going to be late, he usually calls. He sweet-talks,” she said. “I don’t know why he joined that goddamn startup. They don’t pay him right; they defer payment with stock options. It was all about ego. About being the man.”

  She sat down and he saw it clearly. Married for fifteen years to this woman with the flip in her hair. To the pretty brunette who once upon a time had sighed when she touched him. Who had crow’s-feet around her eyes and a bitter purse to her lips and two kids that left smudge marks on the walls. Sure, Whitaker had had his career and his family and his house on the hill, but the itch had got him. Young girlfriend and a job in the boom—why not take a chance and go for it? But the girl was gone, and the job hadn’t panned out, and the family money had been divided. So now he had an ex-wife with a used Mercedes in a condo in Tiburon and two kids that would never really like him very much. And in that minute, for a reason he did not fully understand, Cicero felt a great attraction to Mrs. Whitaker.

  “Where could he be?”

  “Tahoe,” she said. “It’s his special place, like I said. He used to meet her up there on the weekends. Of course, it took me a while to figure it out. I thought he was working.”

  That’s the way it happened, Cicero knew.

  An earring under the bed. A negligee in the closet. A stain on the underwear. And then it all added up.

  “He has a number up there?”

  “The only way to get Bill is on his cell—and he screens those calls. Try him if you want; he’s not responding to me.”

  She gave Cicero the number and he tried it right then. A recorded voice said the user had gone out of range.

  “Who knows where the hell he is.”

  “You haven’t called the police?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You might want to file a missing person report.”

  She blanched a little then. “As far as I am concerned, he’s been missing a long time.” She hesitated. “Maybe Jim would know.”

  “Jim?”

  “Jim Rose. Young friend of his. Hotshot engineer from out east someplace. Bill lets him stay at his place in the city. You know he’s a prince with total strangers—but his own family …”

  “Jim Rose has been staying at your husband’s flat?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “I’ve been out there several times,” he said. “There’s been mail piling up.”

  “I think Jim’s been working in the Valley,” she said. “But he was there last night. And he called here, looking for my illustrious ex-husband.”

  Cicero fought back his excitement, tried not to let it show. He glanced at Ann Whitaker. She gave him her twisted smile, but she wasn’t really looking at him. She didn’t really see him. He saw the lost look in her eyes, something like grief, or sorrow. The little girl appeared in the hall, along with her brother. A feeling of great remorse came over Cicero. He smiled vaguely. Then he let himself out, leaving the woman alone in the condo with her two kids and the used Mercedes out front.

  NINETEEN

  The next morning, about ten o’clock, Jim Rose trundled down the apartment stairs, headed for coffee. Rose was unaware, of course, that Cicero and Dante were outside, watching the building. There was someone else watching, too, from the café across the street, but Rose was unaware of that person as well. Rose was thinking only of coffee. As he stepped outside, he caught in the entry the sharp smell of urine mixed with the morning air. There was a crack freak who stopped every night to piss in the security of the building’s entry: long, luxurious pisses that in the freak’s imagination vibrated with a sinister, yellow energy. Rose of course didn’t know the addict’s fantasies—only that the doorway smelled of piss, and that sometimes there was dark fecal matter as well, smeared over the aging marble entry.

  Rose was growing a little weary of the city. Of its balmy light. Of its goofiness. Of its overpriced flats and the sense people had here that they were at the center of everything.

  That San Francisco was the place. The only place. This was it.

  Regardless, it was better than the South Bay. He had just spent the last week in Santa Clara on a high-paid consulting gig that had been sup
posed to last several months. They’d put him in a corporate suite down on the El Camino, expenses paid, then all of a sudden they’d gotten funny with him, like everybody was getting funny.

  Money issues, they said. And they hadn’t yet paid him the half of what they already owed.

  So now he was back in the giddy city, unemployed.

  Bad luck, he thought. Everybody else is rolling in venture cash, and I’m bouncing around. Going to miss the whole thing.

  Rose had heard whispers. Things were shifting, the pendulum swinging. But there were always whispers. What troubled him more was the way no one returned his calls. Not even Bill Whitaker.

  He wondered if maybe he’d been blackballed. If somehow Solano’s people had spread rumors. Poisoned the well.

  Such things happened, he knew, but he could not worry about it now. What he needed at the moment was coffee.

  Coffee solved everything.

  On the sidewalk in front of him were a half-dozen pigeons, scruffier and more stubborn than usual, refusing to scatter, absorbed as they were in a cinnamon roll someone had dropped on the pavement. As he pushed open the café door, Rose caught a glimpse of a man behind him. Where exactly he had come from, Rose wasn’t sure, but he was at any rate an older man with a wild shock of white hair. He gave Rose a wan smile and didn’t seem the slightest concerned with him. Another morning wanderer, after his caffeine.

  Rose got his coffee and sat down with the paper. There was a story about a sudden slide in the market. There had been a similar slide about a month back, then a rebound—and now it was sliding again.