The Ancient Rain (21 page)

“That's not what I mean and you know it. The
Chronicle
's breaking a story, in tomorrow's paper.”

Again, there was the scolding tone, as if he were talking to a child. She had had enough, really.

“You should have been here,” she sneered. “You could have your picture in
Newsweek,
too. Instead they're running Barbara Golan, standing with me out on their platform.”

There wasn't any truth to it, so far as she knew, but speaking to him like this gave her a momentary satisfaction. Then he was silent, and his silence made her uneasy.

“The breaking story, it has to do with your finances,” he said at last. “It has to do with you and Sorrentino.”

“What finances?”

“It has to do with the fire bombing over at the Owens house.”

“What?”

Her uneasiness turned to dread. She thought of the anonymous donation, and it occurred to her that she'd been duped. Guy had been right. There were strings attached to everything, everyone had a motive.

But who? Why?

“I am taking a drive down there. Soon as I get there, one o'clock, two, I'm coming over to your hotel room, and we'll stay up all night if we have to,” Blackwell said, and she could hear his contempt, his utter lack of regard. “I am going to stay there until you tell me who you are in bed with.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I want to know where you've been getting the money. I want to know what the hell you've been doing.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

That same evening, Guy Sorrentino spent some time with a girl he'd picked up at the Belmont Flats, a lackadaisical young woman whose face he forgot almost as soon as she'd left his room at the Lamplighter Motel. It was not a very rewarding encounter. Sorrentino had drunk too much beforehand and afterward had trouble sleeping.

He'd left his apartment at twilight, first buying a pack of Parliaments and a pint of Dewar's at Ace Liquors, then driving to the mudflats next to the 101. He'd checked for Dante in the rearview mirror, but the man was off him now, and anyway, what did it matter?

He cruised slowly. The Flats was a mixed neighborhood of warehouses and two-story apartment buildings not too different from the one in which he lived, only these had been built on bay fill and were inhabited by immigrants sleeping six or seven to a room. Girls walked the streets, runaways mostly, loitering in the driveways, and it was surprising how many of them were white. A lot of the girls gathered in clusters, but Sorrentino avoided them. It was too conspicuous, and he didn't like having to pick one from the others as they pushed at the car.

Up ahead, a girl in a blue T-shirt stood alone in the middle of the block. He pulled to the curb and waited for her to stick her head in the Torino's window.

Sorrentino allowed himself these encounters every few weeks, for the liquor and cigarettes as much as anything, because the encounters themselves were seldom satisfying. Officially he did not smoke anymore. Officially he did not drink. But he allowed himself on these evenings out. Then in the morning he would empty the rest of the bottle into the toilet. He would save a single cigarette for later, after breakfast. The rest of the pack he put under the faucet, filling it with water—so he would not be tempted to take it with him. Then he would not smoke again, he would not drink, he told himself, until his next visit. It was his way of keeping his vices under control.

Last night, though, he had bought himself a second pint and had smoked most of the pack. Now his stomach was queasy, and he could hear the traffic throbbing on the El Camino. His hangover reminded him of the old days, after his dismissal, when he'd spent all that time in Cholino's Bar in the Tenderloin.

He looked for a paper, but it was midmorning now and the box was empty.

Inside the café, there was a waitress about his own age. She had large breasts and dyed red hair and maybe she had been good-looking once. She was nothing special, but he fantasized about her sometimes as he lay on his back in the Lamplighter, with a girl straddled on top of him. It was not unusual for him to fantasize during sex, to think of different women, never really settling. His ex-wife—no. Elise—for a moment, maybe, but no, she was like a daughter to him. Stella—no. Absolutely not. The waitress in her ochre uniform …

The waitress asked for his order. She did not smile. She wore blue eye shadow and she was all business. You would not know that he had been here a couple dozen times before, and that she had taken his order in just this way, and that the order was always the same.

“A paper?” he asked.

“In the box.”

“It was empty.”

“You can check the counter.”

She said it without looking and he thought of the girl then, in her pale T-shirt and her thin hair, hovering over him, eyes fixed on the wall.

Not seeing him. Guy Sorrentino. An old man full of rage and grief.

Part of the reason he checked the paper these days was for news of the Owens case—to watch the dance in the press. Lately the story had dropped back to the middle of the paper, and often there wasn't anything at all. He unfolded the paper, preparing to leaf through, then noticed with a flush of panic the headlines on the front page, just below the fold:

QUESTIONS ARISE IN PROSECUTION OF OWENS CASE

Funding Links Victim's Daughter to Right-Wing Violence

The newspaper reporter, through an unnamed source, had managed to trace activity in Elise Younger's bank accounts, and apparently she had received a deposit for twenty grand via money order just a few weeks back—the money order itself having been purchased via traveler's check in Palo Alto. And that traveler's check had originally been issued to an Ed Metzger of Yreka.

Sorrentino sickened.

He blamed Mancuso, the goddamn defense, dragging names out of nowhere, nosing in his past. He had known Metzger, sure—he'd had a brief encounter with the man some half-dozen years ago, down at Cholino's, but so had a lot of people in the department. Metzger was a former revenue agent who had been dismissed for laundering money on behalf of a survivalist group suspected in the bombing death of a liberal judge in Humboldt County.

Though the article didn't say so directly, the inferences were clear—that Metzger had been behind the bombing out at Owens's house, and that his group was giving money to Elise, to assist with her case: “According to bank records, money from the Eleanor Younger Justice Fund was used in part to pay for a private detective named Guy Sorrentino, who had done the groundwork for the prosecution case. Sorrentino, like a lot of other San Francisco police at the time, had an association with Metzger in the midnineties. While details are not clear…”

Sorrentino cursed. It was the kind of thing defense lawyers did all the time, impugning the prosecution, but Owens and his bunch were clever bastards. They had their friends at the paper … No scruples in the world … And that son of a bitch Mancuso …

The waitress came with his order, and he felt himself redden, worried that she had seen his picture in the paper. She had the same crooked smile as always, the same dark eyes. She put down the eggs, she poured the coffee, but did not give him a sideways glance. He looked around the restaurant. There was a man reading a paper on the empty table across from him, people at the counter. No one paid him any mind. Still, people would see the paper: his ex-wife, friends from the old days, men on the force, Stella, the old fools at Serafina's, his obese neighbor, the apartment manager. There would be strangers looking at his picture, shaking their heads, amused smiles, clucking tongues.

He was in no mood for breakfast but he ate, anyway. Because it was in front of him. Because he needed to fill the emptiness. The food did not go down well, but he ate it greedily. When he was done, he did not wait for the bill but scattered money over the table before going to the restroom and evacuating everything all at once, all of it streaming through bowels already inflamed with nicotine and alcohol.

His cell phone was in the Torino.

People had called, left messages. Blackwell himself. The feds' press liaison. Some joker from the newspaper.

And Elise.

He dialed her number.

“Where have you been?”

“With friends.”

“Your ex-wife?”

She asked him this sometimes. He had hinted once at the nature of his nights out, in an odd, self-revelatory moment, but she had misinterpreted it—deliberately, perhaps—to mean he and his wife got together sometimes. It was better, he guessed, than having her think he was with a prostitute.

“I don't talk to my ex-wife, you know that.”

“That's what you say.”

“I have other friends.”

She lowered her voice. “I've been trying to call you, that's all. I tried your house, your cell. Blackwell even sent someone out to your place, and when they couldn't find you…”

“I just now read the paper,” he said. “This man Metzger, he was the one who sent you money?”

“The donation was anonymous, I told you that.”

He stood with his cell to his ear, feeling fat and foolish. A gap had been growing between them for some time, and in the silence now he felt that gap grow wider, filling with suspicion, as she wondered what machinations he'd been hiding, and he wondered the same about her.

“You know Metzger?” she asked.

“The newspaper … the reporter, he didn't even contact me. What kind of journalism is that?”

“The money was anonymous,” she said again. “There was no name on the check.”

“What does Blackwell want?”

“He wants you to call him, right way. There's going to be a press conference.”

“He wants me there?”

“No. But he wants to talk to you. And he wants you to stay away from the press meantime.”

Sorrentino knew how these things went. The prosecution was going to get in front of the microphones and read some kind of prepared statement, controlling the damage. Meanwhile they would need a scapegoat, someone to blame, and he already had a pretty good idea who that might be.

“I'm worried, all this publicity. It's going to hurt the case.”

“It'll be all right,” Sorrentino said, though he had his doubts.

“We shouldn't have taken the money. You told me.”

“It's not your fault,” he said.

“This man Metzger … why would he do this?”

“Maybe it wasn't Metzger.”

“What do you mean?”

Sorrentino didn't know for sure, but it didn't feel right to him. Metzger wouldn't be so foolish as to leave his name all over the receipt. And even if he were, how would the reporter have found out so soon?

“All the things in the article, the personal stuff—about me, about you?” She asked. “How did they find out about that?”

“They hired an investigator.”

“The one from North Beach? His fiancée—I saw her once…”

Later, Sorrentino would wonder if he should have paid more attention to Elise then, that sudden lilt in her voice. He knew how much the case meant to her, how fragile she was. But he was thinking about himself. He was thinking ahead to the conversation he would have with Blackwell. It was not going to be pretty. And chances were Blackwell would not talk to him alone; no, there would be others there, they would be pressing to see if he were involved in some way with Metzger, they would push him hard. They would find nothing of course, but that wouldn't matter. Iverson would ridicule him. He had done what no investigator was supposed to do: He had become part of the story. No matter that the story was a lie.

“I'll see you,” said Elise.

“Yes.”

Truth was, Sorrentino did not think he would be seeing her soon, and expected Elise knew this as well. Blackwell would not want him at the press conference, and it would not be wise to return to his apartment. The press would be hovering. No, his job now was to lie low, here at the Lamplighter, in the motel room, and wait for Iverson and Blackwell and the rest of the squad.

He went back to the lobby desk and asked for a cheaper room.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The street was unusually quiet, the sky unusually black. There was no moon, and a dark fog lay over the hill. Dante could not shake the feeling, as he stood at Marilyn's window, studying the empty street, that something was about to happen.
La Seggazza,
in the language of the crones: the wisdom, so-called. The old woman's name for that certain intuition, that feeling of inevitability that overcame a person sometimes—standing on a street corner, maybe, hesitating in the market—the notion that some secret was about to be revealed. Something set in motion.

Often as not, nothing came of the foreboding. An illusion, perhaps. Some chemical loose in the brain.

Behind him, Marilyn sat on the sofa. She had put on music, an opera—an obscure aria Dante could not put a name to—from the CD that the man David Lake had given to her. She had been listening to the music a lot lately, the choral swellings, the strings low and brooding, building in intensity, falling away—then all at once, the solemnity giving way to something that sounded like hysteria. The soprano in the throes of death. Followed by the chorus, a long, mournful note.

Marilyn had gone inward since her return home from the hospital. She had lost weight and her clothes were loose. She resembled from certain angles a younger version of herself—gangly, uncertain, on the verge of transforming into someone else.

“Come away from the window,” she said. “Come sit with me.”

Straight on, her looks were disconcerting. Without the makeup, without the scarf, he could see the sutures and the places where the skin still puckered. It was healing nicely, the doctor said, but she would need more grafts, and the surgeon could not guarantee there would be no scars. Her right eye was covered with a vermillion patch. Marilyn had an assortment of these patches—pink, carmine, blue. Her skin had begun to itch—a good sign—but there was still sporadic pain, unpredictable, damaged nerves inside the muscles on her forearms and thighs.