The Ancient Rain (28 page)

Dante got out of bed.

The phone was ringing.

He did not recognize the voice at first. It was Cicero, back from his cruise. The jury in the Owens case had finished its deliberations, the old man said. That was the inside dope. They could expect a verdict later that afternoon.

THIRTY-SIX

There was a mist in the air, a primordial grayness—a dampness that was not quite rain, but almost, as if the water were seeping through the air. The fog muffled the sound so that there was a kind of intimacy, a closeness. It was not a closeness that made you feel comfortable or cozy, but rather one that constricted the vision to a field of gray, so you were not sure what would come out of that grayness. Dante walked out of that gray field down Telegraph Hill toward Cicero's office.

Cicero had been mistaken.

The verdict had not come in that afternoon, but came several days later. Dante had seen the television footage—the thin, exhausted smile on Owens's face, while across the room Elise Younger let out a moan—and then the camera caught her as well, the anguished look, her head falling forward into her splayed fingers.

“Not guilty.”

Now, three weeks had passed. The case was not so much in the news anymore, and Dante walked up the long stairs to Jake Cicero's office. He had a check to pick up, and also a report to pass along concerning a case involving a man who had held up a bar down on Columbus Avenue. Dante's job was to find some mitigating evidence, but there had not been much.

“How's Marilyn?” asked Cicero.

“She's fine.”

“Healing up?”

“Last I saw.”

Cicero gave him a curious glance, but he did not press the matter. He leaned back in his chair, with his feet up on his desk, and his Genovese eyes staring at him, brown eyes, the color of the dirt. Cicero had gotten a tan out there in the Mediterranean, and he looked good—though Dante knew the man was worried about his heart and had lingering concerns about his marriage and the way his wife, a younger woman, had behaved on the boat. Still, he seemed happy to be back, with his line of bocce trophies on the wall behind him, and on his desk a picture of the stripper Carol Doda in her prime. Tits like melons, the big ones that had been genetically altered.

Perfect shape, perfect size. But touch one, put it in your mouth, and then you'd know it wasn't the real thing.

That was the joke, anyway—the one Cicero liked to tell.

Outside, a light had begun to shine beyond the mist, as if the sun might break through.

“Do you think it's going to clear up?”

“No,” said Cicero.

“I think that's the sun up there.”

“I don't know why everybody is so in love with the sun.”

“Not everybody is.”

Outside, there was a peculiar stillness. Cicero's place was on the third floor of a building that tilted precariously over the Broadway Tunnel. They were on the lee side, however, away from the traffic, and given the way the mist muted the noise, the rise and fall of the sound of cars rumbling in the tunnel, the grayness of the sky, the gulls squawking on the rooftop, it felt as if they were on a cliff at the edge of the sea. “Owens returned your call, by the way. He says he'd be glad to meet with you.”

“My call?”

Dante found this curious, as he had not called Owens. When he told Cicero, the man shrugged his shoulders.

“What does it matter? Go talk to him. All this attention Jensen's gotten with this case—he's going to be bringing in clients. Sooner or later, they're going to need us again.”

“I don't know.”

“You prefer the city case—this mugger? He's a better class of clientele?”

Cicero looked at him with his brown eyes, and it all passed between them in an instant. Dante could tell him about his reservations—how the information he had given to the defense had been manipulated, how he doubted Owens's innocence, how he felt somehow used—but they both knew this was part of the game, that your job was to collect information and let the lawyers figure out how it played.

“It could be Nakamura was lying.”

“Which time?”

Cicero shrugged once more. He was a relativist, so long as he got his money. So they talked of other things for a while. Cicero's cruise. The house on Fresno Street. The price of real estate. At length, there was another pause, and Dante feared the man would ask him about Marilyn.

“All right,” Dante said. “I'll go talk to him.”

Cicero handed him the note—the time, the place. But it was not for the sake of recruiting business, Dante told himself.

No—it was because Dante had questions of his own. Loose ends to tic up.

Outside, the sun had retreated again. The fog was thick. People, cars. Shadows, moving this way and that, at purposes hard to determine. Dante joined them, walking along in the mist.

*   *   *

At the appointed time, Dante headed out for Benny's to meet with Owens. Benny's was an all-night hash house out on Third Street, close to the water, halfway to Hunters Point. It was a working-class place, tucked in between the railroad lines and the piers, not so much a neighborhood as a tangle of truncated alleys—a handful of derelict Victorians standing among Quonset huts and corrugated shacks. Something resembling a main road led down to an old cigar factory that had been converted to general storage, and Benny's was there, on a little rise across the way from a makeshift church with a sign calling attention to the coming rapture. An old union hall stood nearby, its windows busted out, and there was a bar farther down, men loitering, and also a woman in an old raincoat, sunglasses, a red scarf covering her head. She shunted away at the sight of him.

The wisdom.

A moment when the heart stills and the voice within suddenly goes silent, and there is the feeling of prescience, as of something about to be revealed.

Do nothing.

Benny's itself was a lively place, drawing a mixed crowd—dockworkers from the surrounding area, delivery drivers, hardcore regulars, as well as men from the flophouses nearby.

Dante found Owens inside sitting at one of the linoleum tables, wearing a baseball cap. He had on a pair of shades as well, and a work shirt. If Dante had not been on the lookout for the man, he would not have noticed him. It wasn't that Owens blended in with the clientele, that he resembled a worker or a transient. He was just somehow nondescript. Your eyes tended to skim past him.

Owens greeted him warmly, but there was at the same time a sense of reserve—of something held back.

“How are the kids?”

“Good,” Owens said. “But homesick. We had to move again. After the verdict.”

“Threats?”

Owens looked away. “Some people, they make up their minds—it doesn't matter what the court says … It's something you can't escape.”

Dante did not know how much sympathy he felt. He thought about the man's kids and his wife, and he could see that Owens was trapped in his own way. His house out in Berkeley had been boarded up for the time being, and his family had no real home.

“We've been thinking about Florida.”

“Florida?”

“It's just a thought. Jill has an opportunity.”

“What about her job with Jensen?”

“I feel like I've gotten a second go at life. Also, the kids, the publicity—it might be better to get away.”

Dante had a hard time imagining Owens outside the Bay Area. He was too tied to the streets, to a certain way of being. Like it or not, he would not find someone like Jensen to give him the work he did. He could not see the man in Florida.

“You were in the bank that day—you were part of the robbery?”

Owens said nothing.

“Who fired the gun?”

Owens shook his head. The man has to realize, Dante thought, what I have come to suspect. The prosecution hadn't been too far from wrong. The fire bombings, the threats—all of it an elaborate bluff, designed to impugn the prosecution's case, to create sympathy for Owens.

He tried to read the man's face but got no further then he had before.

“Is this why you called me?” Owens asked.

“I didn't call you. You called me.”

Owens smiled—the same empty, soft look that had so infuriated Elise Younger. Everything was a dodge. But why this? Pretending it was Dante who had called to set this meeting up? Dante thought again about the way it had been arranged and how he'd felt driving up—an instant of prescience, the woman in the red scarf, back turned. An explanation occurred to him, or almost occurred, but then the thought scuttled away.

Do nothing.

“I appreciate everything you've done. If it wasn't for you, and all the other help I've gotten…”

The waitress brought their food. It was good food—fried chicken, hush puppies, collard greens cooked with ham. The last time they'd been here, Owens had told him the history of the place: started by a man out of prison, out in South City. How he'd eaten here once upon a time with Leland Sanford, years ago, not long after the man escaped from prison.

“There were things that happened a long time ago—and maybe I regret them,” Owens said. The words had a familiar ring, too familiar. “Maybe we were young and a little bit stupid, and there was a way of thinking in the air.”

Owens hesitated, then he fell silent, and Dante realized this was as much as he was going to get. Owens shook his head again. “But there are still demons out there. The same demons … and innocent people get hurt. When you fight back, innocent people get hurt. I don't know how much any of us can be held responsible for that.”

This was the moment. If he had a card to flip, he should flip it now—something joining together the cause and effect.

Dante thought of the dead woman. He thought of Marilyn. He thought of Sorrentino's son.

Wrong place, wrong time.

Unintended victims. Collateral damage.

He took out a picture of Montoya, the Sandinista's buddy, specialist in putting Molotov cocktails through enemy windows. Dante had found pictures, but not the man. Not just one picture, but several, from different angles. Some of them were not so recent, but between them all, you got the idea.

“Do you recognize this man?”

“No.”

“Annette and the Sandinista—he was with them, the day of the party?”

“I've never seen him,” said Owens.

“How about I ask Jill?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“How about the kids? They might remember?”

There was the slightest tic in the man's face, maybe. Or maybe not. He looked for signs of remorse or regret but there were none of these. A wistfulness, maybe, a look Dante could not penetrate, but which he saw again a few minutes later, after they'd finished eating, as they stood on the street corner, preparing each to go his own way. Dante did not know whether to despise him or admire him.

“You're right. Jill and I aren't going anywhere. We'll stick it out here. Jensen needs another investigator. And I have debts to pay.”

The man put out his hand.

Dante shook it.

Dante headed toward his car, parked down the rise that opened up toward Third Street. He did not glance back at Owens, though he did glimpse, perhaps, the figure hovering at the edge of his vision, the woman on the sidewalk.

He did not walk far before he heard the shot.

Dante turned, and he saw them, Elise Younger and Owens, and for an instant, the way they stood, facing each other, it was possible to mistake them for two people engaged in conversation. Then Owens staggered on his feet, backing away. Elise stood in front of him, in the long raincoat, her hair under the red scarf. She fired again, then a third time, point-blank. Owens fell onto the broken sidewalk. And the woman fired one more time.

Elise Younger stood maybe fifty feet away from Dante, across the street, and Owens lay on the sidewalk beneath her. She glanced at Dante. A group of African Americans on the corner had seen the whole thing, but they did not move. Neither did a woman sitting on the church stoop. They all stood as if frozen.

He could have charged her then, he supposed. But his instincts told him that if he did not rush her, she would not shoot. She had not come for him, and anyway she was already in a kind of reckless motion, trotting sideways toward her car.

It had been Elise, he realized. She'd set up the meeting, posing as the secretary on the phone. Arranging for the two men to meet. Because Owens had been incognito since the trial, still in hiding, and it was a way she could flush him out. Now she was in her car, veering toward Third Street. The light had already turned red, but she did not slow, trying instead to dodge the traffic, but it was a busy street, a hard turn across four lanes, and she did not make it. A pickup smashed into her from the side, and the little Toyota jackknifed, spinning into oncoming lanes, and then was hit again.

On the sidewalk, on the other side of the street, a crowd had started to gather around Owens. A man stood over him with a cell phone. On Third Street, traffic backed up behind the wreckage. In another minute, Dante would start in motion, glancing first at Owens, dying on the sidewalk, then toward the accident, where he would find Elise Younger, her legs crushed, wailing in misery, the gun just out of reach on the seat beside her. In another minute the sirens would be wailing, and everything would start in motion. There would be the notification call, and the memorial speeches, and the widow at the funeral, and after that, preparations for another trial, Elise Younger in a wheelchair, the families in the courtroom, the children who would grow up without their dad, forever returning to this moment. But none of that had started yet. For now, it was just Owens on the sidewalk, and the car at the other end of the street, gushing steam into the air. It was the instant before the sirens, and the question of what had gone wrong, who had done what to whom, who would be punished—none of that mattered quite yet.