Hooked (10 page)

24

T
he caller ID read: Offices of Battat and Bard. The neurologist who treated Andy, and whom Leslie hooked me up with, getting back to me at 9 p.m., when doctors ended the workday. I let him off early and turned off my phone. I craved sleep. But the call had done its damage.

Suddenly, I was thinking about all the questions, the sudden urgency of my life. Notwithstanding Annie’s death, I’d lived the comfortable, relatively slow and lazy American life. Being a journalist was like being a stem cell. I was an unformed, infant organism, waiting for some subject or article or two sides of a debate to define me. What was my purpose?

I sometimes thought about a quote from John Adams, the founding father. I could never remember his exact phrasing but it went something like: Be soldiers and politicians. So your children can be lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. So their children can be poets, musicians, and artists.

The first generations build infrastructure, the later ones, with bellies full, write rock and roll and look for truth. The inheritors of stability would go where their fathers hadn’t gone. They’d write “Stairway to Heaven,” or articles on medical journalism. Nothing earth-shattering and plenty of time for soul-searching naps.

Erin stirred. She mumbled something sleepily, put a kiss on the side of my cheek, and said good night. I felt the memory of adolescent angst, the disappointment when you realize the girl’s going to get out of the car without you getting a kiss. It was pushed aside by another surge of adrenaline. The café explosion made everything fresh again. Restless, I pulled out my laptop and began to surf through memories, beginning with the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Or, at least, its Web site.

It was an April day on which Annie and I had gotten crepes. A beachside palm reader told Anne’s future: She would come into money. What did you expect for $3.50?

I clicked off the boardwalk Web site and found the site for the San Francisco Opera. Annie and I had giggled so loudly during the first act that we had to excuse ourselves.

I began to slide and squirm my way across cyberspace, driven by spasms of nostalgia. Memory linked to memory, minutes into hours, our relationship evolving in bits and bytes. A site for every occasion—the Lake Tahoe Inn, where we spent a Saturday night by the fire playing Scrabble; the Berkeley Bowl, where we listened to Jimmy Buffett and ate pot brownies; Squid Row, a fresh-fish market where we bought swordfish and learned how to blacken it—something we were so proud to have figured out we made it at least once a month.

Squid Row. One of those rare dark memories. We’d gotten fish there the night Annie had threatened to break up with me, after her father told her about the NotesMail deal.

I found myself at the Web site for Kindle Investment Partners. Still posted there, at a link you had to know how to find, was Annie’s obituary from the
Palo Alto Daily
. I read it for the umpteenth time. Glenn Kindle’s creeping venom could be felt even on the company Web site—a grand tribute to the man’s extraordinary public side.

There were links to recent news stories about his successes, and those of the companies he had backed. But since Annie’s death, his fortunes had languished, at least in relative terms. He wasn’t hitting the billion-dollar jackpots of the dot-com boom, and he wasn’t getting the kind of attention he’d grown accustomed to. He was still funding high-tech start-ups and preparing IPOs, but he was no longer the hero whose picture appeared on the cover of
Business Week
. Not entirely forgotten, just radically downsized.

The latest story posted to the site was about his relationship with Ed Gaverson—once one of the wealthiest Americans, whose fortunes had tumbled considerably in recent years. The company Gaverson ran, Ditsoft, had miscalculated demand for its software and watched its stock fall 90 percent in recent years. A puff piece in
U.S. News & World Report
discussed how Kindle and Gaverson had started a consortium of big technology and telecom companies—including search engines and cable and telephone providers—aimed at spurring 100 percent consumer adoption of the Internet. They were promoting what they were modestly calling the Next Next Big Idea.

Glenn Kindle and Ed Gaverson made hundreds of millions of dollars building computers and the programs that run them. So why do they want to start giving away technology for free?

Kindle, a venture capitalist whose fortunes rose and fell with the dot-com boom, and Gaverson, the mercurial founder of Ditsoft, are fast friends—and sometimes business rivals—with a novel idea. They believe that in the not too distant future, computers, mobile phones, handheld devices, and other gadgets will be free—and so will the Internet access that connects them together.

The pair have argued that government- or advertising- subsidized growth of Internet infrastructure will fuel advances in American productivity—spurred by the reliance in every facet of life on automation and inexpensive devices. They and their powerful corporate allies have rallied some interest in Washington by arguing that America’s per-capita penetration of high-speed Internet adoption is 8th in the world, risking the country’s competitiveness.

Kindle and his pals have profit on their minds too. They believe future returns will come when people use those devices to buy goods and services over the Internet, download video games and music, or watch advertisements while they surf the Net.

A tagline of their concept might fairly be: First connect, then collect.

Kindle prefers a loftier explanation. “Teach people to fish and they will eat. Connect them and they will create more efficient, as of yet unimagined ways to harvest the oceans—and the heavens,” he told a gathering at Stanford Business School earlier this year.

Among the companies helping to advance the concept are major Internet search engines. One search company, AmericaSearch, has floated the idea of offering free wireless access in major downtown areas in exchange for sending users advertisements targeted to them based on their location. The mobile phone companies too have been flirting with delivering not just text-based but voice-mail commercial messages.

But a prevailing question is how much of their idea is science and how much is fiction—and New Age marketing-speak—born of an effort to help them reclaim their mantle atop the technology economy.

I closed the link.

I had to—to keep my eyeballs from exploding. It wasn’t Glenn Kindle I hated. It was that tiny part of him that was manifest in Annie. My fists balled and an old fantasy surfaced—me holding Annie’s father by the feet over the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge. I hit my fist rhythmically on the desk.

I jumped out of my skin. Not from anger. From the hand on my shoulder.

“It’s 3 a.m.”

It was Erin.

“I’m just . . . ”

“You’re obsessing.” She looked at the computer. “Is this site important?”

I looked at the screen. It was a story about a recent award given to Kindle Investment Partners by the American Society of Software Engineers. It wasn’t important in the slightest. It was . . . distraction. It was crap. Erin closed the computer, took my hand, and pulled me toward the bedroom.

“I never visited.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“The place where Annie died. I never went back—after it happened.”

She got into bed next to me. She took my hand. “You can visit . . . ”

I finished her thought. “But you can never go back.”

Perhaps. But what if the past came back to me?

She said, “Tomorrow is going to be a big day.”

25

I
t was raining. I felt myself slip in and out of consciousness. Was it another watery dream?

If so, my dreams had gone from surreal—to very real. My face was wet. I opened my eyes and bolted upright. Erin stood beside the bed, dressed and armed with a glass of ice cubes. One was aimed at my face.

It should have been funny, but I felt a surge. I tried to get a grip. Was I really upset? More likely still tired. I shook my head—like a dog after a visit to the ocean—to reorient.

I’d had five hours of sleep during which Erin said I tossed and turned and chattered. I woke up as I’d gone to bed, fully clothed.

We drove in silence to San Francisco. I dropped her off at her car so she could run errands while I went to breakfast with Danny. I glanced at the headlines through the plastic of the newspaper magazine racks while I waited for him at Mel’s Diner. “Police Stumped by Café Explosion” (
Chronicle
); “Cops: Terrorists Didn’t Rock Tea Time” (
Examiner
); “Feds Lend Weight to Café Investigation” (
Oakland Tribune
); “Did We Bring It Upon Ourselves?” (
Weekly
).

I was about to put my token into the box to pull out a
Chronicle
when I saw Sergeant Danny Weller pull up in front of Mel’s. I didn’t need a paper—my information about the explosion was coming from the inside. Danny stepped out of a brown sedan with a red cherry on top. He had parked in a loading zone.

“I’m having ham and eggs,” he said by way of greeting. “Side of flapjacks.”

“You are a man of great vision.”

“Tell me about your conversation with Aravelo.”

Talking to the police is like talking to parents. And schoolteachers. And elected officials. Except none of those people carry .40-caliber Berettas. Police represent the ultimate authority figure. You like them, want to please them, and you hate them. Just for their mere existence.

I’ve had friends who are cops. I had one for a neighbor once. He liked to smoke dope and he was more than happy to share. I got pretty comfortable with him, but I always knew the pecking order. Same with Danny. He’d let me get pretty comfortable, but with a turn in his tone, I could see who was pecking at whom. What did he want to hear from me? What was I prepared to say? The road was forking. I went down the middle.

“It was more like a monologue.”

“Monologue?”

My head pulsed again, accompanied by a leg twitch. This was new—a rapid-fire jitter of my foot. I excused myself to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. When I got back, I told Danny that Aravelo had shown me a picture of a woman and asked if I’d seen her.

“Had you?”

A newfound intensity. I shook my head.

“Then Aravelo told you to stay out of his investigation?”

His
investigation. Not
our
investigation. Not
the
investigation.

“He accused me of causing the explosion,” I said. “Danny, I’m not really sure where this is . . . ”

“Unbelievable. Un. Fucking. Believable. How could he . . . ”

Danny understood.

“You mentioned a laptop. Tell me about it.”

I reiterated to Danny that it had belonged to someone at the café. Danny asked me if I thought it was connected to the explosion. It struck me as an odd question, coming from a cop. I thought: Danny is a cop, isn’t he?

I looked at my empty coffee cup. Two cups and still not thinking straight.

“I would very much like to see it—the laptop,” he said. “Actually, that’s not true. I don’t want to see it. I want a brilliant technician I know to see it.”

“What the hell is going on, Sergeant?”

It was about as much tough guy as I could muster.

Danny laughed.

“Story time,” he said.

He took a sip of water.

“I want to know what your angle is,” I said.

Danny put his hands forward.

“Hear me out. Do you remember Valerie Westin?”

Valerie Westin
.

“The Lingerie Larcenist,” I said.

“I busted her. Aravelo took the credit.”

The Lingerie Larcenist had gone into banks, opened her raincoat, and displayed a bodacious body—clad in black stockings and a lacy bra. She showed them a holster and a sexy little Glock .45 as well. She was more modest about her face. That remained covered with a ski mask. But the poor distracted bank tellers looked at her guns, and her gun, and forked over the dough.

“I put the case together. I found the tie to her earlier crimes in Omaha. I found her address through an ex. I’ve got zero to show for it.”

“That’s a great story,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“You want to see my cards. Here:

“Aravelo is a power broker inside the department. Maybe
the
power broker. That’s why he got this assignment. That’s why he controls who does what. And who gets what credit. And what promotion. And, by extension, what power and salary—and real money.”

Money, what money?

“I can’t prove anything. But Aravelo lives in a $750,000 pad on Fillmore, and I hear it’s mostly paid for. He’s just a savvier version of his punk brother.”

Implying what, exactly? Aravelo was dirty? That Danny would be willing to take graft too? He switched tones.

“If you want to swing in the wind,” he said, digging his fork into a pile of grease and cheese, “be my fucking guest.”

Interrogation. Peace offerings. Threats. Was Danny the good cop—just trying to set things right?

“Your father,” I said.

He put down his fork.

“What about my father? Leave him out of this.”

It was worth a gamble.

“You said he needed a transplant. You need the money.”

He took a long pause.

“Dad’s finances were vaporized by the dot-com bust. Netscape, the browser guys. The stock dove and dad chased after it. His whole life’s philosophy is that being right is less important than being decisive. Commit. FDR, JFK, McCarthy, Reagan, didn’t matter, if they had conviction, he respected it. He made up his mind about Internet stocks and away he went.”

He stopped himself by clearing his throat.

“I could have used my rightful promotions a long time ago. It won’t be near enough money to help my father. Not near enough. But every little bit helps. And there is a principle here. A man ought to have the right to take care of his family. I can solve this café explosion, and you can help me set things right.”

“What exactly are you asking from me? Why
me
?”

He had grown particularly calm. “Clues. Stuff Aravelo might be overlooking. Stuff I can put together with information I’m getting from inside,” he said. “Why you? Because you may have them—even if you don’t know it. Plus, this is personal for you.”

I flinched.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said. Did he know something about Annie? The note. I’d told him about the note. Is that what he meant?

“Jesus, Nat. You almost got blown up. And you’re a journalist. A good investigative journalist. I saw what you did to Aravelo’s punk-ass brother.

“And after the café exploded, you went out there and found that waitress. Didn’t you?”

That waitress.

“I need eyes and ears, Nat. My whole job is amassing eyes and ears, and putting together what they see and hear into a coherent picture,” he said. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t mind having an insight into what is really going on. We can work as partners on this.” The words were trite, but the tone sounded sincere.

“Horse trade,” I said.

“How’s that?” He leaned back.

“I’m not blindly feeding you information. You’ve got to give me something. At least to establish . . . ”

We both waited for me to finish my sentence.

“Trust,” I said.

Danny pulled out a wallet. He took out twenty and put it on top of the check. “The café is owned by Idelwild Corporation. It’s an investment arm of some of the major big-time corporations.”

Hardly a revelation. I’d already read it in the newspaper.

“C’mon, Sergeant. Is that a test to see if I’m paying attention?”

Danny put his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. He craned his neck back.

“Okay,” he said.

Okay. Okay what?

“The waitress,” he said.

The waitress.

What about her?

“Did she tell you about Michigan?”

“Yeah. She told me—she grew up there.”

“It’s also where she almost spent the rest of her life—in jail.”

“Erin? For what?”

“Blowing something up.”