The Big Boom (17 page)

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 for
Red 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.

T
he 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 businessman, 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.

Dante stood up. He went over to the dining room table now. She had been looking through the family photos, and there at the top was an old sepia tone, not of Angie but of Nick. Antonelli stood with his arms folded, a man on either side of him, dressed in the old style, with the old fedoras. It took Dante a minute, but then he realized the photo had been taken on the steps at the church. There
were some children off in the background, and it occurred to Dante the photo had been taken the same day as the communion photo.

“Who are these men?”

“I don’t know,” Barbara said. “Just some old-timers. You know how Nick was. Always schmoozing with everybody.”

He put the photo down.

“Do you want us to continue investigating?”

“You better ask my husband.”

“Do you know where he is?”

She shrugged—and Dante understood from that shrug. He could be slow on the uptake, but he understood now. Nick was with his mistress.

“I need to talk to him.”

Barbara swirled the ice and looked into the glass. She shook her head, walked away. Refilled her glass. She stood with her back to him. He studied the slope of her body. “It’s his secretary,” she said at last. “She has a place up on Russian Hill. I’ll get you the address.”

E
ccentric the cat lay on his side in the high grass. His fur had dried, and the skin was pulled back from the teeth. Barbara Antonelli had not yet located the cat, but this did not mean the animal had gone undiscovered. The insects had found him, the blowflies and the nettle bugs, and there had been some rats the night before, and this morning some kids had poked at his corpse with a stick. Then this afternoon the turkey buzzards had come, two fat and ugly and not particularly graceful birds with red wattles and oily skin. They squabbled as they ate and, when they were done, perched in the tree above, eyeing the sky and each other, waiting till they had room in their guts to gorge some more. Meanwhile they shat out their foul shit and peered at the neighborhood. At the houses and the tall grass and the oak. They saw it all through their turkey buzzard eyes. The sun was bright overhead and the sky was white. Once this had been church land, and Spanish padres had walked on this hill, and a rancher’s son had gotten lost in this canyon, and the ancestors of these birds had picked at the corpse in the same way these birds picked at the cat. It was still the same deadness
in the air, the same sense of nothing at the heart of the things. A hawk circled overhead, then two more buzzards appeared in an adjacent tree. The earlier vultures eyed the newcomers, then swooped down on the carcass with a graceless thud. They had been here first; after all, this was their territory, their feast. Soon all four birds were at it, hopping about, squabbling, tearing the cat apart. Occasionally one or the other would retreat to the tree, with a bit of the flesh hanging from its beak.

Meanwhile Barbara Antonelli stood in her backyard. She saw the birds, and they looked to her like something in a dream. It did not occur to her, not yet, what they were doing. She had already determined, though, that Eccentric was not going to come back. She did not call for him anymore. The cat had been her last connection to her daughter, or almost the last.

She had lied to Dante.

She had found the computer in her daughter’s car, in the trunk of the Corolla, in the garage over on Union. She had found it before they’d hired Dante, and started snooping through it idly at first, in the same way she used to snoop in her daughter’s dairies.

The journal was a rambling affair. It did not stay on one topic. Dante was right, though. Angie had been taking notes when she’d first met Solano, notes about the man himself, romantic stuff, mixed in with the mundane details of her day, her job, and the growing realization that Solano Enterprises was not what it seemed. At some point in the journal she had brought up her father’s association with the business, and the tone was sheer bravado, tongue-in-cheek.
They do not know who they deal with when they deal with Nick Antonelli.
Then she changed subjects, went off on a tangent about this, about that, about the coastline of Catalina. About her mother, Barbara Antonelli, and how she closed her eyes to things she did not want to
see. Then the journal changed. Things went sour with Solano, and all the details were there … how Angie went off the handle, threatening, meaning what she said but not really … trying to hurt back, to scare. Then she had gotten afraid herself. There were people behind Solano, and people behind those people … money at stake …