The Big Boom (21 page)

I
n the end, it was simply too much. You tried to resist. To avoid those things which seduced you with the sweet logic of your own demise. You hid your cigarettes in the filing cabinet, you walked a circle around the liquor store, you stayed away from the corner where the sweetest of dreams were sold in aluminum wrapping.

But you could not stay away forever.

Because these things, they conveyed a logic of their own. The logic was powerful. It was the logic of the moment. The logic of no tomorrow. It was the logic that said rot and decay were their own kind of beauty. And the hunger you felt—in your heart, in your gut—it was the hunger for that beauty.

After Dante left the scene on the sidewalk, he started walking. Aimless walking, at least at first, without a conscious destination. He was thinking of the stained nightgown, the missing computer, the mess Barbara had cleaned up from Angie’s floor. He was in SoMa, headed toward Brannan, and he saw the underpass ahead.

Suicide, the cops were saying.

He’d heard the talk at the scene, and did not doubt the determination.
Antonelli was depressed over his daughter’s death and had thrown himself from the window. Dante stood beneath the underpass now. There were some kids in the alley. Homeless, in sleeping bags. Ex-cons crouched around a fire. Meanwhile the dealer was watching. Waiting.

There was foil on the ground. He picked it up. There is something I am not seeing, he thought, something I am missing.

He felt the hollowness inside. It was a void, like oblivion itself, and he put the old foil to his nose now and closed his eyes, trying to remember Angie’s face. He looked at the dealer. The man was smiling. The man was coming toward him now. Dante dropped the foil.

He turned and left.

He’d resisted one temptation, but he could not resist them all. Back in North Beach, he went into Gino’s place on Broadway, on the old Barbary Coast, and started to drink.

T
he next day, when he felt the weakness in his knees, and the darkness in his head, and the girl’s tongue in his mouth, Dante would ask himself how he had let things come to this. How come he had not figured things out a little sooner, before he’d raised the glass to his lips. Maybe it was the grief. Or maybe it was just because the woman was beautiful and he had been drinking. Maybe it was that the part of his brain that recognized danger had shut down, as sometimes happens when people suspect that they themselves are somehow culpable, and so close their eyes to the punishment they have coming. At any rate, Dante was sitting in Tosca’s when the woman came in. It was just after five, and the crowd had started to pick up. On the television the Giants were involved in an early spring rout of the Padres—a mechanical thrashing in which
no one seemed to take any real pleasure. The Giants’ players were bigger and faster, and their pitcher bullied the ball across the plate.

Dante had gotten a glimpse of the young woman when she first walked in. She had dark hair and a white blouse and by the looks of her worked somewhere in the downtown district. She lingered at the end of the bar—as if waiting to meet someone, perhaps, or wondering if this was indeed the place she had been searching for. In a little while, she stood next to him, trying to get the bartender’s attention. By this time the bartender had moved away and was occupied at the well.

“Are you from the neighborhood?” she asked.

She was maybe ten years younger than himself. Her blouse was silk and her hair was up off her face. It was brown hair, longish, pulled up, but with a thin ringlet curling down either side of her cheeks.

“From the neighborhood, yes, I can see.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

“The way you hold yourself. Standing there.”

“There is no neighborhood.”

“That proves it then.”

“What?”

“That you’re from the neighborhood. The rest of us—we wouldn’t know. We’d think it was the real thing.”

“I guess you’ve got it nailed.”

“I guess I do.”

She smiled then, and he couldn’t help it, he smiled back. She had something about her, this stranger. A dark-eyed young woman with wide, thin lips that had a kind of wry twist—a Bess Myerson, all-American kind of look that made you feel like you were at a football game with the queen of the parade: the girl with the rich father and the big house at the end of the block.

Twenty-seven years old. White blouse and pencil skirt and a scarf suggestively draped about the neck. Cashmere pout.

“Yourself?” he asked.

“I’ve been here maybe a year.”

“What brought you?”

“Same thing that brought everyone else. What’s your business?”

“I used to be a cop,” he said, wary, watching to see the effect it had on her. None, it seemed. “Now I am in the private sector.”

“Detective?”

He gave the slightest nod.

“I’m a lawyer. Corporate. Used to be in the criminal end—but you know …” She shook her hair loose and something in the motion told him she was lying. In the first place, she wasn’t old enough. Then she changed all of a sudden, and her voice went soft. “Really, I’m just an assistant,” she said. “I haven’t passed the bar. I got out of school a year ago, and I spent a year as an intern, in the DA’s office.”

Maybe that was what disarmed him, that small maneuver—that seeming bit of honesty. Or maybe it was the small crescent of freckles on her cheek. Or the angle of her jaw, how he could see that underneath her well-chosen clothes, she was rangy and thin, and looked more like a kid than a woman.

“Why did you come here?”

“The pot of gold.” She laughed. “There’s been a lot of hiring, and Westin Financial, they hired me. Internet litigation.”

“I heard there was a lull.”

“Not for us,” she said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

She went away to corner the bartender, and Dante stayed where he was. This time of day, it wasn’t your usual North Beach crowd. Or not the one Dante was used to anyway. It was a look to the future kind of crowd. With hip haircuts and a vision of how things were
going to be, ignoring for the moment anything that contradicted that vision. And for a moment Dante wished he were one of them.

The young woman came back and handed him a drink. After a while she reached out and touched his nose.

“May I?” she asked.

She was coy, but he didn’t mind. He let her touch his nose. She ran her fingers over the appendage as if she were stroking something of great value. “It’s a beautiful nose,” she said, and there was a touch of mockery. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

He closed his eyes. He liked it, her fingers on his nose, there in the dark.

“I want to take you home,” she said.

He looked back at her now. Her eyes were very dark and her skin was pale and there was something wrong about the way she said it. Something off about her eyes. It was the look of a person who was perpetually hungry, like those people beneath the underpass. He should have noticed sooner.

“All right,” he said. “Take me home.”

“Drink your drink first,” she said. “I know a place we can get something to eat.”

They toasted and he drank a little, sipping it partway down. He looked at her again, and things which should have clicked earlier, clicked now.

“What’s that you’re drinking?” he asked.

“Mai tai.”

She gave him the Bess Myerson smile again. Mai tai. The same drink the girl had with Whitaker, first at the casino, then at the little bar across from the boat dock. Coincidence, maybe. But he did not think so. Last time around, she’d been working with two men—at least according to what Rose had told him. He glanced around, but
no one matched the descriptions. Maybe Rose had gotten it wrong, he thought. Or maybe the men were waiting outside.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“Taking your drink with you?”

“I am going to ask the bartender for a touch of ice.”

He went to the restroom and threw the rest of the drink into the sink. He’d drunk maybe half and wondered how much of a dose he’d gotten, or if he’d gotten any dose at all. When he returned to the table, the girl was still alone. He glanced about again, but again no one seemed to be paying them any mind.

“Your ice?”

“I got tired of waiting. So I drank it down. Where is this place?”

“The Mission.”

“We can take a taxi.”

“I have a car.”

“We’ll have more fun in a taxi.”

“No. My car—you’ll like it.”

“Okay.”

The smartest thing to do was to stay in the bar. Or call Cicero and get him to follow. But Cicero wasn’t answering, and working alone had an advantage. Besides, no one at the bar followed when they got up. Out in the street, it was the same thing. Meanwhile the woman was chattering. She wove her arm through his and smiled big. And he began to wonder if he was mistaken. They went up Fresno Street then, and as they walked he felt something like rubber in his knees. It was an odd sensation, accompanied by a giddiness in his head and a blackness underneath, a steel darkness where there was no feeling or thought. Then the giddiness was gone, and they were suddenly farther down the street, entering a parking lot. A small segment of time had just vanished, evaporated into nothing.

“Kiss me,” she whispered, or he thought she did.

She was leaning against him. Her smile was bigger than before, and there was that same off-kilter look, the same hunger. He pushed her against the car. And put his hand on her waist and got a glimpse of her red lips, the white teeth, and there was a moment of embrace in which he felt the rubber in his knees again and the darkness swelling up and then he was in the car with her and she had her hand under his belt, and whole pieces of the clock were vanishing. He’d been doped. Like a million gumshoe detectives in a million improbable stories, taken in by a woman from out of nowhere.

Like Bill Whitaker, he figured. And like Angie as well.

And then he was under.

S
ylvia kept driving. She glanced at Dante, how he sat with his head slumped against the window. The detective was not bad-looking, and she wouldn’t have minded fucking him. Maybe it was his nose, or his dark eyes, but she had enjoyed the way he assessed her: the penetrating glimmer there at the bar when he looked up from his drink, the way his lips twisted like maybe he’d just realized what was up, knew what was in that drink but couldn’t walk away because there was something else he needed to know, a secret he had to unlock. She liked the game of it, and would have liked to play longer, in a hotel room, maybe, riding him from above, his hands on her titties, her wet pussy on his face, that big nose up inside her. But that would have meant slipping him the drink later, after sex, then killing him in the hotel room—drowning him in the bathtub, maybe, like she and Arturo had done a couple of months back with that insurance executive in Sacramento. Drawing things out, though, would have been too much of a risk. There had been too many fuckups already.

Sylvia lit a cigarette and continued on down Highway 101, through Pacifica and up toward Devil’s Slide. Halfway up the grade, she pulled down a side road into the eucalyptus. It was a gravel road that ended about a hundred yards from the ocean.

Max and Arturo were supposed to be here by now.

She wished they would hurry. She wanted to get this over with. Aside from everything else, she needed a goddamn fix.

T
he truth was, San Francisco had been one problem after another. It had started that night at Tosca’s. There was always a certain amount of come and go, it was true, the element of chance, things you had to make up as you went along. Sylvia liked that element, she had to admit. She liked the improvisation, the wild swing of it, the feeling anything could happen. So when she’d seen Angie emerge from her apartment in that print skirt, she’d followed. Down the street, into Tosca’s. She’d called Max and Arturo on her cell, then she’d sidled up next to Angie girl. They’d started to talk, Sylvia playing the new friend, the girl on the town, making up her history on the spot, the way she could sometimes. Then Max had moved in with his big English mouth. My cousin from England, Sylvia had said. Truth was, she wished Max had hung back a bit longer, but Angie seemed to like him. They were flirting it up pretty well.

Then Jimmy Rose showed up. Not part of the deal, not part of the contract. Not at first anyway.

Probably they should have backed off then. Waited and tracked Angie down later, but the rule was, once you’re committed, you’re committed, and anyway Rose didn’t stick around long. So it worked out okay, it seemed: two couples arm in arm, wandering down to the waterfront. Sylvia and Arturo. Angie and Max. And the
rest was pretty easy. Angie started to weave a little bit, silly girl, and Sylvia could see she was going black, teetering, eyes still open but not really seeing, talking but not remembering. Angie girl walked up to the edge of the pier, Sylvia guiding her by the hand, sweet-talking, watching the light pool up in the doomed eyes.

“I love this city,” Angie said.

Then Sylvia gave Max the nod. Max came up from behind. He gave Angie the big push, but she did not go over. She staggered, and he pushed her again.

It was not a long fall. Angie made the faintest of cries on the way down, childlike and lonesome, then disappeared into the blackness with barely a sound, like a knife into water. Whatever her struggles, whatever the thrashing, it all took place beneath the surface.

Afterward, Arturo sent Sylvia and Max to Angie’s apartment. Arturo kept her in the dark as to the scene behind the scene—or maybe he was in the dark himself—all she knew was that their client, whoever it might be, wanted Angie’s computer destroyed as well. Only there was no computer. So she and Max had gotten high. Too high. And Sylvia had gotten into one of Angie girl’s nighties, there on the bed, and Max had come all over her leg.

But there was no computer.

They didn’t tell Arturo this. Everything went according to plan, they said. The job was done. Finished. Time to leave.

The three of them should have cleared out then, as far as Sylvia was concerned. It was what she and Arturo had always done in the past. Arturo, though, had spent a few years in the city when he was a kid, in North Beach. He hadn’t any friends back then, only his dog, a little black cocker, and Arturo grew all weepy talking about the dog. He wanted to spend a few days more in San Francisco. On account of the dog, and on account of his lost childhood, but more
than that, Sylvia knew: It was the needle. The hotel room had thick curtains, and Arturo liked to pull the curtains and lay there in the dark, thinking about that dog, with that little wet nose that used to nuzzle him when he was a kid.