“She was pretty old,” the kid said. “Not so old as the guy, but you know.”
“How old?”
The kid hesitated. “About thirty.”
Dante thought to give the kid a lecture on the nature of age, but why would anyone want to listen to that?
“What color was her hair?”
“Brown.” Sal spoke more firmly now. Then he touched the bill of his cap and peered out across the immensity of the lake. He toed at the ground. “Or maybe red. I don’t know. She had it all tied up in a scarf.”
TWENTY-ONE
Earlier that morning, a young woman by the name of Sylvia had spent several hours sitting in the café across from Bill Whitaker’s place, on the lookout for Jim Rose. Sylvia had met Rose once before but, today, like yesterday, she wore her hair in ringlets and did not much resemble the woman he had seen maybe ten days ago for fifteen minutes in Tosca’s. Anyway, Sylvia did not plan to talk to Rose. She was only watching at this point, trying to get a hold on his habits.
People were like clocks, Sylvia had learned. They went around in circles. Study them for a little while, and it wasn’t hard to figure out where they’d be next.
Sylvia had learned this bit of wisdom from Arturo, her mentor. Arturo knew all the tricks, and he had taught them to her like you would teach a daughter, but he’d been slipping, she knew that. And now he was late. He and Max. The two men were supposed to have been here an hour ago, with a little something to tide Sylvia over—something to kill the dull hours—but they were not here and her body was beginning to ache.
Still, Arturo was a pro. He’d taken her off the street, taught her everything. Before Sylvia had met him, Arturo had worked with his wife. The pair of them, husband and wife, had never been caught, and they’d never made a mistake. And they never carried guns. Drowning accidents, that was their specialty. In the swimming pool. The bathtub. The Jacuzzi. But when Arturo’s wife died from ovarian cancer, he’d needed someone to take her place. Someone to play the seductress. To befriend a lonely woman. To drop the GHB in a glass. It was a subtle thing, different every time, an interplay between two people, a dance with Arturo in the wings, watching, waiting.
Sylvia was grateful to Arturo. She enjoyed it, playing the part. Dressing up. Getting herself teed off in advance, finding the right buzz. Then after the gig she could just disappear. Hotel suite at the top of the Mark. All the high she wanted. Everything delivered. She and Arturo naked on the silk sheets, watching television. Maybe he put his hand on her breast once in a while, but it wasn’t the way it seemed. It was more a father-daughter thing.
But now, there was Max.
A new element. Wild, fucking Max. You have to keep fresh, Arturo had said, and Max adds a new dimension. The truth was Max had been foisted on them. Because Arturo was lost in the fog. Because his wife was dead and he wasn’t able to hold the balance anymore. Because he was using the needle, and “the Agent,” as Arturo called him, the man in charge, the one with the clients, was worried about the future.
As for this job …
The business at the lake had gone smoothly enough. The guy Whitaker had all but rolled himself off the boat. But here in San Francisco, things had gotten sloppy.
Max’s fault.
Or maybe her fault. Because she had started fucking Max back in Tahoe. Because she laughed when Arturo got all drifty and sentimental, talking about his years as a kid here in the city. Going on, tears in his eyes, about a little dog that used to follow him on the streets of North Beach.
She felt torn.
Then two things happened at once, more or less at the same moment.
Max and Arturo came around the corner in the blue van. And Jim Rose emerged from the apartment building across the way.
Jim Rose had decided he wasn’t going to stay at Whitaker’s anymore. He had his backpack with him and was headed over to the Mission. He had some friends over there, sharing a house, and he thought maybe he could stay with them. Rose was afraid the detectives who had cornered him yesterday were not done with him, and he did not really want to talk with those two again. He half-feared they might be tailing him. As he left the apartment, he noticed a woman emerge from the café. The woman in ringlets, he thought. When Rose turned again, though, she was gone. On the bus, no one seemed interested in him in the least.
He got off on Mission, out on Twenty-fourth, and headed into the Latin Quarter. The streets here made him uneasy. A lot of young hipsters were moving down here supposedly, buying places and fixing them up, but you couldn’t tell at first glance. The streets were colorful, sure: murals and decaying Victorians painted up like it was fiesta time, Latino music blaring from the little shops andtiendas, but himself, he did not feel easy. A group of teenagers were hanging on the corner ahead, posing and leaning against a grocery wall. Maybe they were gangbangers, maybe they were just kids. Either way, he crossed the street to avoid them.
Rose turned the corner opposite the Aztec Grocery and looked for the address. He cursed the detectives for driving him out of Whitaker’s apartment, and cursed his friends because their place was so goddamn hard to find. Meanwhile a blue van appeared on the street.
He found his friends’ place. Or what he thought was their place. There was no number on the door, but the house was the right color, in the middle of the block, like they had said, with the scallops over the porch.
There was no answer.
The detective, the one with the nose, had described Angie’s corpse for him. Told him how the cops had pulled her out of the water and laid her on a morgue slab with her designer skirt hiked up around her legs.
Rose left the porch now and went around to the back of the house. He tried the back door, but there was no answer.
He wondered who the two detectives were really working for. Maybe he was being paranoid, but there was a lot at stake these days. Part of him couldn’t help but think this somehow went back to Solano. Companies could be funny about proprietary information, especially in this kind of environment, when the tiniest little thing could give a competitor an edge, and there was so much venture money at stake. Carried away in the moment, he had talked too much to the detectives, maybe, but he hadn’t told them everything.
He had not mentioned Angie’s journal.
According to what Angie herself had told him, after Solano broke it off, she had gone off the edge. She’d threatened Solano, that last day in his office. She’d told him she’d been keeping notes, and she was going to write her story. Angie was going to expose the business: how there was nothing behind the company, nothing at all. And Whitaker would be her main source.
Rose had discouraged her. It’s not worth it, he had told her.You are angry, you are jealous, and in the end you will only hurt yourself. She had listened, he thought. She had dropped the idea.
But now she was dead. And Whitaker was missing.
Rose went around to the front of the house. The street was empty. He contemplated waiting, hanging out on the porch. He was pretty deep in the Mission District, though, and the emptiness made him wary. There were a lot of bohemians living here now, his friends had told him: old Beats, people from the mime troupe, revolutionaries from Latin America. But you wouldn’t guess by looking. A remodeling project across the street—maybe you could call it gentrification—seemed to have stalled. The site was abandoned, the job sealed in plastic. In reality, a lot of the old neighborhood people resented the newcomers. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but he knew their reasons. Two years ago nobody who had any choice wanted to live here. The lesbians had their enclave on Valencia Street, but in this part of the barrio it was poor families andcholo gangs and Filipino boys, back alleys full of crack vials and doorways that smelled of vomit. Then came the boom and suddenly a million somebodies were here. Kids from Spokane and Atlanta and Kansas City. From Los Angeles and Baltimore. They had dot-com jobs, or some of them did anyway, and those who didn’t were living off money from back home, from parents puzzled about how it cost their kids so much to live t
ripled up in studio apartments in the worst part of town.
And it was not just the rents that had gone up. The ratty sofa in the used furniture store down on Mission Street was suddenly worth eight hundred bucks. Four hundred for those old motel curtains. One-fifty for the rod to hang them on.
The rickety bar stools and plastic bus station chairs in the junk stores were articles of fashion, spray-painted, decoupaged, patched up with duct tape and glue.
Objets d’art. Objets du style.
And the newcomers decorated up their windows with the Virgin of Guadalupe, and put on their berets. And they walked up Valencia Street, hand in hand, tongue in mouth. Man with man. Woman with woman.
Suddenly he was disgusted with this whole place. With himself. With everything.
He started back toward Twenty-fourth.
I’ll walk up to Noe Valley, he thought. I’ll catch a taxi. I’ll go to the airport and leave this world behind.
It was pure impulse, but why not? It was impulse that had brought him here, after all, and he might as well leave the same way. Meanwhile, he had twenty thousand in the bank. Saved over six months.
Not a fortune. But something.
He had his clothes with him. His laptop. The job down in the South Bay was over, and all of the sudden he was in the middle of something ugly, he wasn’t sure what exactly, only that he didn’t want to be in the middle anymore.
Rose turned the corner and to his surprise there was a taxi parked in front of the taquería. The driver had purple hair, and on top of the vehicle was an advertisement forRed Herring magazine. About to go belly-up, Rose had heard, like the technology market it covered.
“The airport,” Rose said, though there was a quaver in his voice. Second thoughts, maybe.
“Climb in. I’ll just be a minute,” the driver said. “I was just going to grab something inside.”
The driver went into the taquería, and Rose climbed into the taxi. He closed his eyes, imagining for a moment the ground far below him, the plane ascending through the fog, the land of gold growing smaller beneath him, far away. He didn’t want to be a queen in the land of queens. Living alone in some apartment out in the Lower Haight. It was better to go home, to throw your cards out on the table. But he knew he couldn’t do this either. He would go back to the way he had been, folded inside, focusing on his computer in his apartment all alone, the occasional girlfriend, the occasional rendezvous with someone he found more alluring.
Then he glanced down Twenty-fourth at the wash of color, at the palms dipping into the blue light, at a woman swinging her mulatto ass, at the Latino boys lounging up and down—and he knew he’d been hooked.
No, he thought, I can’t go back.
He would go to his friend’s house. He would leave a note on their porch and come back later. Maybe have lunch in this taquería, check out the stores. Through the window, he could see the driver was still in line. He got out of the taxi and walked around the corner. Halfway down the block, there was the blue van again. A woman leaned from the passenger window.
“Hey,” she said.
There she was again, the woman in ringlets. Then the side door slid open and a man jumped out.
“Hey, Jimmy,” he said.
Jimmy backed away.
“Let’s go for a drink.”
Just around the corner there was Twenty-fourth Street, and the taquería, and the taxi, and the driver with the blue hair. There was the woman with the mulatto ass and hombres leaning against the Aztec Grocery. But the man in front of him blocked his way. Rose remembered him now. Max. He held a gun. The woman, though …
“Get in the van,” said Max.
Jimmy knew better. He took a step backward, and raised his hands. If he got in the van, he would never get out. His intention was to turn and run.
Silvia, he remembered. That was her name. From Tosca’s. And the driver …
Max fired then. Jimmy fell back. He fell against the wall. Jimmy thought of the taxi, maybe, of the airplane. Of his other self way up there in the airplane, the self that had escaped and looked down at poor Jimmy on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, Max leaned over. The woman in the ringlets was calling out from the van. Max didn’t seem to hear. He took Jim’s backpack, his wallet, stripping him of his identification. He gave a Jimmy a little pat. Then he fired again.
TWENTY-TWO
The next day, when Dante returned to San Francisco, he didn’t have a chance to seek out Marilyn, even if he had been so inclined. He’d thought about it, as he wound his way back through the Sierras—he’d thought of pushing this whole business over and disappearing into the pines, down this long lane, into those clouds, another life—but then Cicero had called on his cell. Jake had spent the last day or so out tracking Whitaker’s ex-wife, Ann, following her around Tiburon—from the grocery, to her kids’ school, back to the condo—but with nothing to show for it, and in the meantime Jim Rose seemed to have bailed. Of more immediate concern, though, was Nick Antonelli. The man did not return his messages, and he wasn’t in his office. So Cicero sent Dante to stop, unannounced, at the man’s house in San Mateo.
Barbara Antonelli answered the door.
“Just a minute.”
She did not let Dante in right away, but asked him to wait on the porch. The screen was open and he could hear her in the next room, shuffling things about. Meanwhile, Nick wasn’t here; Dante could see that. The garage door was open, and the BMW was gone. Finally, Barbara came back. They went to the living room, and she sat with her knees together on the big couch.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and she had a drink in her hand.
“I was just going though a few things,” she said. “You know. Photo albums, old pictures. I couldn’t help myself. And there’s the memorial service …”
Even in her grief, a little drunk, Barbara Antonelli had a voice like silk. Dante remembered it from when he was young. Angie’s voice had been rougher—with her father’s intonations, the quick starts and sudden stops. Dante remembered listening for the sound of her mother’s voice in Angie, for the soft lilt, and being disappointed when it was not there. Then, all of a sudden, he would hear it when he least expected: when she leaned forward to order a glass of wine, maybe; or at night, as she lay beside him in bed.
“Jake asked me to stop by. I haven’t been able to get in touch with Nick, and we wanted to give you an update on what we’ve been doing. I know Nick told us to discontinue the investigation. But he’d paid the retainer, and Jake felt—”
“He asked you to discontinue?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“My husband never mentioned anything to me,” Barbara said, then she seemed to give it a second thought. “Or if he did, I let it go. It’s possible, you know, that Nick told me but I didn’t hear. That it slipped away from me—given everything.”
From where he sat, Dante could see the swimming pool with the pergola in the background, and the bronze hills, and the embankment that hid the freeway. The curtains were brocaded and there was a hanging lamp in a style of thirty years before, resin and colored glass, that dangled like a balloon over the couch. Barbara wore a polo shirt and a denim skirt, and her eyes were hollow from lack of sleep.
“Angie—” Barbara stopped, as if unable to speak. Then she went on with it. “Her body is still with the city. We have to make some kind of arrangements or the city will bury her. They won’t hold her forever.”
“Have you scheduled the services?”
“I’m trying to. Day after tomorrow. But Nick … You see, the casket’s a special order. He had this thing—wood from Abruzzi. Italian oak, I don’t know. Meantime, the body’s in storage, and he won’t sign the release.”
“Why don’t you sign it?”
“How do you think he’d react if I went down and did that?”
Dante knew how Antonelli could be. Blowing up one minute, then sweet as hell the next. Hot-blooded, volatile. Didn’t want anyone taking action other than himself. Though Nick was a sharp b
usinessman, he would vacillate sometimes, swing back and forth, then act all of a sudden, on sheer impulse. It was one of the man’s strengths, Dante knew, that impulsiveness, but it also got him into trouble. He was self-assured, a blusterer, but at the same time that glint in his eyes betrayed him—as if there was something dark and secret inside, a reservoir of shame.
“I suppose I should be worried about him,” Barbara said.
“It’s a hard situation.”
“Nick’s been on a jag for months. For years really. And now, well. The doctor gave him some tranquilizers, but you can’t knock him out. He’s like a horse. And meanwhile, he keeps drinking.”
As she said this, she took another drink herself.
“From what Jake said, Nick wanted to move on. To accept what happened. He was worried about you—the stress of having things unresolved.”
Barbara laughed then. It was a dry laugh.
“That’s so very kind of him.”
“Yes,” Dante said.
Then he went on to explain to her what they had found out, from Rose, about the problems at Solano Enterprises. And he told her about Whitaker’s death. She listened with a vague discomfiture.
“It doesn’t prove anything, though, does it?”
“There’s one other thing,” he said.
“Just one?”
“You were out at Angie’s place before you took me there?”
“Yes.”
“Her laptop,” he said. “I know when Angie first met Solano, she was working on a story.”
“You asked me about the computer before.”
“It just seems odd to me that it would disappear.”
Barbara took another sip. It was just ice now and she rattled the cubes in her glass. “I would have told you if I had seen it, wouldn’t I?”
“Angie was always writing,” he said. “In those old journals of hers. I was just wondering, she probably kept her journal on the computer now. And maybe it would give us something to go on.”
She shook her head.
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