The Big Boom (16 page)

Enough for two drinks, Dante figured.

A mai tai and bourbon, as it turned out. He showed the pictures again but got nothing for his trouble. Then he walked over to the rental dock. It was across the highway, down in the cove.

The owner was working the dock and he found the invoice pretty easily. Dante showed him the picture of Bill Whitaker.

“Do you remember him?”

“No, I remember the boat.” The owner shook his head. He looked at the receipt. The way the man looked, he could have been Leroy Pink all over again, except his nose had a few less veins. “It was two weeks ago, we had to retrieve the boat. Son of a bitch left it out in Rich’s Cove.”

“What happened?”

“The kind of thing that happens every once in a while. Somebody
rents out a boat. They get shit-faced, or lost out on the lake, and they just leave it on the shore. Usually, they come back, they tell us. But sometimes they don’t bother.”

This didn’t sound like Whitaker, at least not from what Dante had heard. Whitaker was a Tahoe hand, knew the lake. Unless, like the owner said, he was shit-faced. Or distracted by the girl.

“So what do you do, a case like that?”

“We charge the credit card.”

“You don’t call the police?”

“If every rental outfit called the cops every time someone ditched their rental material—I mean, that’s what the deposits are for.”

“Do you know who he was with? Does it say on the invoice?”

“No.”

“Was he with a woman?”

“You’ll have to ask Sal, the boat boy. He’s the one who helped them. But he’s not going to remember much. Unless the girl’s sixteen years old, he don’t pay attention.”

“Where is Sal?”

“Day off. He’ll be by tomorrow.”

Dante stopped at a station and got directions to Rich’s Cove, just so he could get a look at where Whitaker had abandoned the boat. By the time Dante got there, the sun was going down. The lake was darkening and quiet, and just looking at the water, it didn’t tell him much. He thought of going back out to Whitaker’s place. It would be easy enough to break in, but it was night, and he figured he would raise less suspicion in broad daylight. He would be better off parking the car out front in the middle of the day, rather than fiddling around in the dark. By tomorrow, too, the yardman would likely have cleared out. So Dante drove back to the Nevada side and
checked into a hotel. It was a midrange place, relatively subdued: a card room and some slots and a roulette wheel drawing modest action. His room was up top, and the neon sign crackled outside his window. He pulled the blinds and slept. Sometime after midnight he heard a ruckus out in the parking lot. The happy shrieks of some drunken winner, or maybe some loser, it was hard to tell. Either way the noise did not last long, and Dante fall asleep to the sound of the neon crackling in its glass.

D
ante headed back the next day to Whitaker’s place. The location had seemed remote yesterday, but today it seemed more ordinary. Whitaker’s cabin was in a cluster of similar cabins down a private drive, most of them built as second homes in the seventies, small places on odd-shaped lots that shared a rock beach with a view of the water. Dante parked out front. The yardman was gone and the street was empty.

Dante rang the bell, not expecting anyone to answer, and no one did. He tried the front door, just in case, then walked around to the torn window screen. Someone had been here before him, maybe just Whitaker, of course—having locked himself out, then forced his way back in—but either way the damage was relatively recent. The window screen was torn, yes, but there was no sign of rust, and the slider was still bent in its frame. It was a simple matter to wiggle the latch and climb through.

Whitaker kept a neat house, but it was a bachelor’s kind of neatness, with a veneer of dust. There was a book by the bed, and a pair of slacks folded over a chair in the bedroom, and some other items here and there—like maybe he’d gone off unexpectedly. Otherwise the place was pretty much in order, and no doubt there were a hundred
other cabins just like this around the lake, part-time residences with field mice in the walls and milk going bad in the refrigerator. Dante stepped outside onto the deck and looked across the water at the casino, same as he had the day before. It was the same scenery, just a different time of day.

Then he heard a car pull up out front. It was a patrol car, and the cop nuzzled its bumper close up behind Dante’s Honda under the redwood tree.

The cop spotted him.

“Is this 419 Lakefront?”

Dante nodded his head.

The cop seemed at odds at what question to ask next.

“Is this your house?” he said at last.

“No,” said Dante. “I’m a private investigator.”

Dante handed him his card.

“What were you doing inside?”

“Looking for a man named Bill Whitaker.” That part of it was true enough, but the next part, he stretched. “Alimony case. I’m working for the wife and she asked me to come up to the cabin here. Apparently he thinks it belongs to him.”

“Well, I don’t think she’s going to be getting any alimony real soon.”

“No?”

The cop hesitated. Pursed his lips.

“A couple of hours ago. We pulled him out of the lake.”

I
t took a while for Dante to disentangle himself. From what he could tell, the cops were pretty much of the opinion that the death was just one of those things, guy gets drunk, slips off the boat.

Whitaker had been in the water almost two weeks, apparently; but they’d identified him easily enough, from a license in an inside pocket. The cops hadn’t figured out yet that the boat had been a rental, or that there had been a woman with Whitaker on the boat. There was a chance, of course, they might not figure these things out at all. Even so, Dante beat it around to the other end of the lake to talk to Sal, the dock boy, to see if he could get a description before the police came knocking.

Sal was a dopey kid, like the owner had said, but Sal remembered the missing boat and the couple that had rented it. Or so it seemed.

“She was pretty old,” the kid said. “Not so old as the guy, but you know.”

“How old?”

The kid hesitated. “About thirty.”

Dante thought to give the kid a lecture on the nature of age, but why would anyone want to listen to that?

“What color was her hair?”

“Brown.” Sal spoke more firmly now. Then he touched the bill of his cap and peered out across the immensity of the lake. He toed at the ground. “Or maybe red. I don’t know. She had it all tied up in a scarf.”

E
arlier that morning, a young woman by the name of Sylvia had spent several hours sitting in the café across from Bill Whitaker’s place, on the lookout for Jim Rose. Sylvia had met Rose once before but, today, like yesterday, she wore her hair in ringlets and did not much resemble the woman he had seen maybe ten days ago for fifteen minutes in Tosca’s. Anyway, Sylvia did not plan to talk to Rose. She was only watching at this point, trying to get a hold on his habits.

People were like clocks, Sylvia had learned. They went around in circles. Study them for a little while, and it wasn’t hard to figure out where they’d be next.

Sylvia had learned this bit of wisdom from Arturo, her mentor. Arturo knew all the tricks, and he had taught them to her like you would teach a daughter, but he’d been slipping, she knew that. And now he was late. He and Max. The two men were supposed to have been here an hour ago, with a little something to tide Sylvia over—something to kill the dull hours—but they were not here and her body was beginning to ache.

Still, Arturo was a pro. He’d taken her off the street, taught her everything. Before Sylvia had met him, Arturo had worked with his wife. The pair of them, husband and wife, had never been caught, and they’d never made a mistake. And they never carried guns. Drowning accidents, that was their specialty. In the swimming pool. The bathtub. The Jacuzzi. But when Arturo’s wife died from ovarian cancer, he’d needed someone to take her place. Someone to play the seductress. To befriend a lonely woman. To drop the GHB in a glass. It was a subtle thing, different every time, an interplay between two people, a dance with Arturo in the wings, watching, waiting.

Sylvia was grateful to Arturo. She enjoyed it, playing the part. Dressing up. Getting herself teed off in advance, finding the right buzz. Then after the gig she could just disappear. Hotel suite at the top of the Mark. All the high she wanted. Everything delivered. She and Arturo naked on the silk sheets, watching television. Maybe he put his hand on her breast once in a while, but it wasn’t the way it seemed. It was more a father-daughter thing.

But now, there was Max.

A new element. Wild, fucking Max. You have to keep fresh, Arturo had said, and Max adds a new dimension. The truth was Max had been foisted on them. Because Arturo was lost in the fog. Because his wife was dead and he wasn’t able to hold the balance anymore. Because he was using the needle, and “the Agent,” as Arturo called him, the man in charge, the one with the clients, was worried about the future.

As for this job …

The business at the lake had gone smoothly enough. The guy Whitaker had all but rolled himself off the boat. But here in San Francisco, things had gotten sloppy.

Max’s fault.

Or maybe her fault. Because she had started fucking Max back in Tahoe. Because she laughed when Arturo got all drifty and sentimental, talking about his years as a kid here in the city. Going on, tears in his eyes, about a little dog that used to follow him on the streets of North Beach.

She felt torn.

Then two things happened at once, more or less at the same moment.

Max and Arturo came around the corner in the blue van. And Jim Rose emerged from the apartment building across the way.

J
im Rose had decided he wasn’t going to stay at Whitaker’s anymore. He had his backpack with him and was headed over to the Mission. He had some friends over there, sharing a house, and he thought maybe he could stay with them. Rose was afraid the detectives who had cornered him yesterday were not done with him, and he did not really want to talk with those two again. He half-feared they might be tailing him. As he left the apartment, he noticed a woman emerge from the café. The woman in ringlets, he thought. When Rose turned again, though, she was gone. On the bus, no one seemed interested in him in the least.

He got off on Mission, out on Twenty-fourth, and headed into the Latin Quarter. The streets here made him uneasy. A lot of young hipsters were moving down here supposedly, buying places and fixing them up, but you couldn’t tell at first glance. The streets were colorful, sure: murals and decaying Victorians painted up like it was fiesta time, Latino music blaring from the little shops and
tiendas,
but himself, he did not feel easy. A group of teenagers were hanging on the corner ahead, posing and leaning against a grocery
wall. Maybe they were gangbangers, maybe they were just kids. Either way, he crossed the street to avoid them.

Rose turned the corner opposite the Aztec Grocery and looked for the address. He cursed the detectives for driving him out of Whitaker’s apartment, and cursed his friends because their place was so goddamn hard to find. Meanwhile a blue van appeared on the street.

He found his friends’ place. Or what he thought was their place. There was no number on the door, but the house was the right color, in the middle of the block, like they had said, with the scallops over the porch.

There was no answer.

The detective, the one with the nose, had described Angie’s corpse for him. Told him how the cops had pulled her out of the water and laid her on a morgue slab with her designer skirt hiked up around her legs.

Rose left the porch now and went around to the back of the house. He tried the back door, but there was no answer.

He wondered who the two detectives were really working for. Maybe he was being paranoid, but there was a lot at stake these days. Part of him couldn’t help but think this somehow went back to Solano. Companies could be funny about proprietary information, especially in this kind of environment, when the tiniest little thing could give a competitor an edge, and there was so much venture money at stake. Carried away in the moment, he had talked too much to the detectives, maybe, but he hadn’t told them everything.

He had not mentioned Angie’s journal.

According to what Angie herself had told him, after Solano broke it off, she had gone off the edge. She’d threatened Solano, that last day in his office. She’d told him she’d been keeping notes,
and she was going to write her story. Angie was going to expose the business: how there was nothing behind the company, nothing at all. And Whitaker would be her main source.

Rose had discouraged her. It’s not worth it, he had told her.
You are angry, you are jealous, and in the end you will only hurt yourself.
She had listened, he thought. She had dropped the idea.

But now she was dead. And Whitaker was missing.

Rose went around to the front of the house. The street was empty. He contemplated waiting, hanging out on the porch. He was pretty deep in the Mission District, though, and the emptiness made him wary. There were a lot of bohemians living here now, his friends had told him: old Beats, people from the mime troupe, revolutionaries from Latin America. But you wouldn’t guess by looking. A remodeling project across the street—maybe you could call it gentrification—seemed to have stalled. The site was abandoned, the job sealed in plastic. In reality, a lot of the old neighborhood people resented the newcomers. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but he knew their reasons. Two years ago nobody who had any choice wanted to live here. The lesbians had their enclave on Valencia Street, but in this part of the barrio it was poor families and
cholo
gangs and Filipino boys, back alleys full of crack vials and doorways that smelled of vomit. Then came the boom and suddenly a million somebodies were here. Kids from Spokane and Atlanta and Kansas City. From Los Angeles and Baltimore. They had dot-com jobs, or some of them did anyway, and those who didn’t were living off money from back home, from parents puzzled about how it cost their kids so much to live tripled up in studio apartments in the worst part of town.