The Big Boom (15 page)

“Sometimes.”

“What kind of things did you tell her?”

“I’d rather not talk about that.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“No.” He laughed. “I already told you that.”

“What did you talk to her about then?”

He hesitated, then let out a sigh, a shake of the head. “It may seem quaint in this town. But I haven’t decided yet if I am out of the closet. Angie, she was somebody I could talk to that about.” Rose smiled. It was self-conscious smile, a bit uncertain though not without irony. “Except now, I guess, I’m coming out to you.”

“I guess you are,” Cicero said.

“How about Whitaker?” asked Dante.

“What about Whitaker?”

“Is he gay, too?”

Rose smiled again. “Not that I know of.”

The questioning died there. Cicero looked at Dante. He wasn’t satisfied, and neither was Cicero, and he began to suspect maybe Rose was holding back on them, there was something he wasn’t telling.

“Did Angie have her computer with her?” asked Dante. “Her laptop. Was she carrying some kind of case?”

Rose shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Not that I remember.”

A
fter they were done with Rose, Cicero and Dante went down to the bocce courts on Columbus, behind the North Beach Library. There were other, better courts out in the Marina, but Cicero liked the one in the old neighborhood, secluded behind the chain-link fence and the ivy. The court was in poor repair, sure, but
it felt more like the old world, like you were playing in the dust and the sand of some backwater village. Every once in a while, one of the old players still showed up, but not so often anymore.

Dante had been joining him recently.

He wasn’t much of a player, but it didn’t matter. Cicero enjoyed beating him. Today, though, Cicero was off his game. He had his practice set with him, the metallic balls and the retrieval chain. He had gotten the chain on account of his back, so he wouldn’t have to stoop to pick up the balls, and he had become pretty adept with it lately, walking past the ball and dropping the magnet between his fingers, snapping the bocce back like a yo-yo on a string. They took turns for a while, warming up, then Dante put the jack ball into play, the pallino, and Cicero followed with an off-line roll. It was not so bad, not so good. Cicero lit a cigar. Sometimes he played better with a stogie in his mouth.

“My wife wants me to retire.”

“Can you afford it?”

“She
thinks
I can,” he said and laughed.

If she had any misconceptions, though, they were his fault. On account of things Cicero himself had told her, back when they were courting. Exaggerations about his net worth. “She wants me to fold it up and go on a cruise.”

“That might be the thing to do.”

“What makes you say that?”

“A man your age,” said Dante. “I could see it.”

“You’re a jackass.”

Dante took his turn. It was a two-step toss, not exactly pretty, a hard throw designed to knock Cicero’s lead ball out of position, but Dante’s foot slid past the foul line. The shot was lost.

“Did you think Rose was telling the truth?”

“Mostly,” Cicero said. “But I’ve been fooled before.”

“The thing that puzzles me is the computer. If Angie didn’t have it with her, then where is it?”

Dante told Cicero about the mess in Angie’s apartment—and the foil with its chemical stink. Heroin, he was sure. It was possible, he supposed, that Angie had brought the three strangers back with her from Tosca’s. It was possible they’d gotten doped up together and gone out again later.

“The toxology report, though, it came up blank.”

“Those reports aren’t always correct.”

Cicero went into a deep crouch, deep enough so that it hurt his knees, and he pushed a slow roller through the middle of the pit, toward the jack ball. It was good enough, but no beauty. He took the cigar out of his mouth, then went over and sat next to Dante on the bench. Cicero reached into his shirt pocket. He handed Dante a photo of Whitaker he’d pulled off the Internet.

“Ordinary-looking guy.”

“We’re all ordinary looking,” said Cicero. “I’ve got the address of his cabin in Tahoe. His wife gave me his cell. But he’s not answering.”

“So what are you saying?”

“The wife, she filed a missing person report this morning. I am going after his credit card records. See if we can find out where he’s been.”

“Is she willing to pay us?”

Cicero shrugged.

“I thought you said Antonelli was finished with us. I thought he was pulling the plug.”

“I still have his retainer,” said Cicero. “He signed a contract. We have an obligation to give him his money’s worth, whether he wants it or not.”

“Something’s in your craw.”

“I guess so.”

“What is it?”

Cicero hesitated. He didn’t know how to answer that himself. He thought of Ann Whitaker again, of her two little kids. He thought of his wife, Louise, with her spinning classes and her trainer and her walking tours around the city and her sailing classes and her obsession with this cruise. It had always been this way. You had one life, but there was always another that beckoned. Another life beneath the surface of the one you lived, and people like him, fool that he was, he couldn’t help but pursue. You would think he would know better by now.

“Why don’t you hook up with Visconti? She’s a good-looking woman.”

“Changing the subject, aren’t we?”

“Possibly, but I’m the boss. What’s up between you?”

“Everybody’s been asking me that lately.”

“What’s the answer?”

Dante sat with his fingers laced together and his long nose pointed at the ground. Cicero followed the slope of the man’s nose down to its bulbous tip and it seemed to be pointing to the jack ball out there in the dirt. After a while, it became plain he wasn’t going to answer.

“Maybe you should have a life for yourself,” Cicero went on. “Maybe it would be good for you.”

“Maybe you should go on that cruise.”

Dante got up and tried another throw. It was a clumsy throw, a jackass throw, really, graceless as hell, but the ball rolled up close, and took the lead position. It doesn’t matter, thought Cicero, I can do better. I’ll knock it away. “Antonelli was tied to Solano’s business some way,” said Dante. “Maybe there’s a connection there.”

“To Angie’s death?”

“To something. I don’t know.”

“Maybe someone scared Antonelli off. Maybe someone didn’t want him to investigate anymore.”

“Could be,” Cicero said. “Could be the guy just wants to bury his daughter.”

Cicero tried to imagine himself there on that boat. In that deck chair, feet up. Dozing off. All around the sound of the gulls and the blue water and some little island off there in the distance. The sun shining down, warming his face. When you got to port, there were charters. Smaller boats that took you into the reefs, where you could drop a line and pull up anything you wanted. Except what came up, in his imagination, was not some goddamn trophy fish.

“I want you to go up to Tahoe,” said Cicero. “I want you to go up to Bill Whitaker’s cabin and see if you can find him.”

“Are you sure?”

Cicero nodded. Dante sat down once more on the bench, silent now. Thinking about that stinking foil, Cicero guessed, trying to imagine those people in Angie’s apartment, wondering about her computer. Obsessive son of a bitch. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Cicero could hear some Chinese kids playing and a mother scolding them. You could sit here for a long time before someone comes through that gate to play bocce, he thought. No one played this court anymore.

Maybe I’m done with Louise, he thought. Maybe that’s what’s in my craw. Maybe it’s the Whitaker woman.

Maybe it’s the dead girl they pulled from the bay.

He dangled the drop chain between his fingers. Maybe I’m just afraid to die. Maybe that’s why I can’t let it go. He let the magnet hang. Then he snapped up the steel ball and contemplated his roll.

D
ante took the trip up to Tahoe. It was some five hours from the city—a drive across the Central Valley that took him through tule land and cottonwoods, past the buff-colored houses and the Sacramento subdivisions that sat now on the old arroyos. When he was a kid they would take Highway 99 through Concord and Marysville, past the prison in Vacaville, then to Walnut Creek, until the groves gave way to tomatoes and grasshoppers and it was nothing but heat pouring through the open windows all the way to Sacramento. It was a quicker drive now, and more comfortable—in his air-conditioned Honda—but it was also uglier.

More than once along the way he stopped, ostensibly to get gas, to take a leak, to smoke a cigarette in the dust by the side of the road. In truth, it was his old habits getting the best of him. Looking back to see if he was being followed.

As far as he could tell, he was not. There was no one.

He got back into the Honda. He climbed for a while. Into the Auburn Hills. Then into the Sierra.

Then down again, following the Truckee River into the Tahoe Basin.

Dante arrived at Whitaker’s place in midafternoon. It was a little cabin in Tahoe City about fifty yards off the water. It was an A-frame, nothing fancy. The deck and the stairway were covered with pine needles and there was mail in the box. There was no car in the driveway, and it didn’t look as if anybody had been around for a while. He considered taking a closer look, but there was a yardman across the way who didn’t seem to have anything to do but look in his direction. So Dante walked up the road a little ways and took a path down to the lake.

The lake was quiet, except for the sound of a speedboat across the water, on the Nevada side. The sound was muffled and remote. The lake spread out over the basin, and reflected the mountains in the gray water. The forests were redwood and pine and they obscured the buildings along the shore, all but the casino, which was somehow both tall and squat and rose well above the tree line. The opposite shore was farther away than it looked. Tahoe was the largest freshwater lake in the west, or so they said, and the vast, colorless plane of water played tricks with the eyes, deceiving you as to distance and size, in much the same way the desert might deceive you, or a great expanse of snow.

Out on the lake, a speedboat moved slowly toward the casino. The sound of the motor was distant, like that of a gnat drowning in the water.

Dante went down the path, back the way he had come. On the way past Whitaker’s place he noticed one of the window screens was torn and the window itself sat crooked in its track. The yardman across the street was still at his job. Dante gave the guy a nod and drove away.

Before he’d left San Francisco, Dante had gotten some information on Whitaker’s expenditures these last weeks. The former VP and head engineer’s last withdrawal had been for six hundred bucks from a cash machine in the casino about twelve days back, not long before Angie disappeared. Whitaker had used his credit card once at the casino as well, at the Lookout Grill—and another time at a bar in Tahoe City. Then he’d used it again later that day at the rental dock. After that both accounts went dark.

Dante drove around the lake to the casino. He’d gotten the location number of the ATM and it turned out to be in the card room, not far from the blackjack table. That made sense to Dante. Whitaker knew numbers, and blackjack was the kind of game you could get a system and do pretty well, if you knew how to hop tables and avoid moving your lips while you were counting.

Dante showed Whitaker’s picture to casino security. Ordinarily security had no tolerance for private dicks, but Cicero knew the head guy, and the man let Dante talk to the table dealers. A couple of the dealers recognized Whitaker’s picture. He’d been playing the tables for years. Had a cabin down the road. Played in spurts, usually alone, a win-some, lose-some kind of player. The last time anybody had seen him was a few weeks back, playing with some young woman. Dante showed a few more pictures, one of Angie, the other of Whitaker’s ex-girlfriend that Cicero had lifted from Whitaker’s apartment when they’d been grilling Rose.

The dealers couldn’t place either woman and sent Dante over to talk to a bartender named Leroy Pink. Pink worked the Lookout Grill, which was not a grill so much as a counter overlooking the casino floor, and he knew most of the regulars.

“Oh, Bill Whitaker—yes,” said Pink. He was a man in his early sixties whose nose was of such a color that Dante wondered if this was where he’d gotten his surname.

“Did he have anyone with him?”

“Bill Whitaker always had someone with him. He’d drink, he’d hang out.”

The story didn’t exactly match what the dealers had said. Dante showed Pink the pictures of Angie and Whitaker’s girl, same as he’d shown the others.

“Neither of them,” he said. “Those two are blondes. And the woman he was with, she was no blonde.”

Angie wasn’t a blonde, either, but Dante didn’t argue.

“What color was her hair?”

“Brunette,” he said.

“What did she look like?”

“Nice-looking. So what is this, you working for the wife?”

Dante didn’t say anything. He just shrugged, as if maybe it were true—and let the guy think what he wanted.

“I thought Bill Whitaker was already divorced.”

“He is.”

“Then?”

“He’s missing. People are worried.”

Pink pushed out his lip. “What day did you say this was?”

Dante gave him the date and time. On account of the credit card, Pink was able to get pretty specific, down to the drinks they had ordered. A mai tai and a bourbon.

“So, what do you remember of this girl Whitaker had with him? What did she look like?”

“The blonde?”

“I thought you said she was a brunette.”

“She had a nice ass. I remember that.”

“Nothing else?”

“If she was with Bill, she had a nice ass.” Pink rested his hands on the bar. “You get to a certain age, a certain station in life, you don’t pay much attention to anything else.”

D
ante got back in his Honda. It was an unobtrusive car, not too clean, not too dirty, a straight-up Accord, a few years old, with nothing about it worth remembering. He appreciated the anonymity of the car and kept the radio off as he drove, his eyes on the highway, on the pullouts and the dirt roads, and on the cars behind him. It took Dante about forty-five minutes to get around to the other end of the lake, back to the California side, and locate a lounge where Whitaker had spent about fifteen dollars, according to the credit card company.