The Big Boom (13 page)

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 no 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.

T
he 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 supposed 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.

People were getting jumpy.

The place smelled of coffee, though, and that was good. Nonetheless,
there was something off. Something had changed. Maybe it was his own perception. When he had come out from Cleveland, San Francisco had seemed wildly beautiful, flush with possibility, but now the bloom had faded. The young woman with the purple hair did not seem so much a hipster as she did a lonely kid, overweight. The man with the beret—openly gay, a queen who sometimes flirted with Rose, and just about anyone else who walked in—had developed lesions on his face. And the forty-year-old in the Buddha shirt pouring lattes behind the counter no longer seemed a free spirit, in search of transcendental karma, but a middle-aged loser, rooming in the Haight with kids young enough to be his children.