The Big Boom (12 page)

There were more agents in the kitchen, grazing at a courtesy table—laid out with food from Molinari’s. This was where he found Marilyn, leaning against the refrigerator, talking to the man in the gray suit.

She met Dante’s eyes this time, but did not hold the glance.

Dante remembered the kitchen. He remembered the twins elbowing one another—noodles up their nose, noodles in their hair—and he remembered Mrs. Marinetti in her red-stained apron.

Dante leaned beside Marilyn. The man in gray was talking about his client. “A software engineer.” He dropped his voice. “Willing to match any offer.” The man no doubt wanted the sale, but his voice was suggestive of other things as well.

At length, Marilyn turned to Dante.

“This is a surprise,” she said.

“I just wanted to talk with you.”

“You avoid me like the plague. Now you want to talk.” She smiled when she said it, but Dante saw the flash in her eye.

“That’s what happens you got a house for sale,” said the man in gray. “People suddenly find you interesting.”

“I’m not in real estate.”

“That’s what they all say.” The man laughed, but Marilyn didn’t. For this Dante was grateful.

Another agent approached. Dante remembered her from outside.

“Are you entertaining offers?”

“Not till Monday after next. We want to go through a couple of Sunday opens.”

The woman did not look happy. She glanced around then, as if she knew better than to talk in front of the other agents but could not help herself. “My client wants to make a preemptive offer. He doesn’t want to get into a bidding war.”

“You can turn the offer in,” Marilyn said. “But I can’t guarantee.”

“If I give it to you now, you’ll just use it as a floor. You’ll use it to bid the price.”

“Would you do anything different?” said the man in gray. He touched Marilyn on the shoulder and let his hand linger. “Why don’t we talk about it over dinner?”

“No,” said Dante. “She’s going out with me.”

“I am?”

“Yes.”

The woman agent did not know what to make of this conversation. She looked at Dante as if perhaps he were an agent as well. “All right,” she said, “all right,” but then her composure collapsed. “These bidding wars are obscene. It isn’t right. Back in Spokane, I could buy an entire city block.”

“You’re not in Spokane,” said the man in gray.

The woman stormed off, taking her offer with her. The man in the gray suit was amused.

“You’ll be hearing from her. Don’t worry about that.”

“I’m not.”

“And you’ll be hearing from me, too. I’ll give you a call,” he said. He glanced Dante up and down, as if assaying the competition. Then he turned to Marilyn. “Wherever he takes you, I know someplace better.”

S
o why have you sought me out,” Marilyn asked. “I wanted to see you.”

“What for?”

“Old man Marinetti—it’s going to be hard on him when he leaves that place.”

“People like to say that,” she said. “But a lot of times it’s not so hard.”

“I don’t understand—if he’s broke, why can’t he just pull some equity out of the house?”

“It’s not just the money.”

“No?”

“He’s morose. And sometimes—his wife, he sees her ghost, there in the apartment.”

Dante had heard this before. Italian men and their ghosts. “He won’t see her ghost at St. Vincent’s?”

“Since when are you the defender of the aged?”

They were in one of the new restaurants, down off the square. It was a hot-ticket joint—one of those places Stella had complained about the other day down at Serafina’s. The crowd was good—but not like it had been just a few weeks back, when the lines stretched into the street. Maybe Stella was right. These new people, they loved you for a little while, then they moved on.

But Marilyn liked it here, and the food was good. It had been a month, maybe longer, since she and Dante had been out together.

“You’re right,” he said now. “It’s none of my business.”

“Marinetti needs to live somewhere he can get assistance. He knows that… But you didn’t ask me out to talk about George Marinetti. Did you?”

They’d known each other a while, Dante and Marilyn. Her family was from The Beach as well, and he’d known her almost as long as he’d known Angie. Angie had been the girl around the corner, with her lightness, her mercurial heart, and Marilyn was in some ways the opposite. More voluptuous by nature. More generous—and darker. She was seductive and unruly. Things between them had never been simple. And it had never been just the two of them, not for long. There had always been a third point on the triangle—a lover, an idea. As if they needed a centrifugal force to hold them in abeyance, neither too close together nor too far apart.

At the moment, it was the man in the gray suit, whoever he was. And if it wasn’t him, it would be somebody else.

“You’re investigating Angie’s death?”

“Word travels fast.”

“I guess it does.”

“But it’s not true. Not anymore.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Antonelli pulled us off the case.”

“Why?”

He explained it to her then, or some of it anyway. How Antonelli had hired Cicero Investigations to find his missing daughter. How for a while, after they identified the body, Antonelli had been convinced of foul play. He’d been pretty insistent. Now, suddenly, Antonelli had come around to the police view of things. Angie’s death was an accident. She’d tumbled into the water and drowned.

“So what are you going to do?”

“Drop it,” he said. “Leave it to the police.”

“Can you do that?”

Dante lowered his eyes. She knew how he was. Marilyn had known him when he was with Homicide. He’d been unable to drop anything then, and there was no reason to think he was any different now. He did not let things go. He drummed his fingers, mumbling to himself, counting his digits, like they were beads on a rosary. When he was into a case—and he always was—he counted every crack in the sidewalk, every blade of grass. He dwelled in an obsessive netherland—contemplating witness memories, bloodstains, rumors. Always sorting, looking for the thread. Once he had thought—they both had thought—as soon as he solved this… as soon as the next case was done … But it didn’t happen that way. There was always a loose end. An unexplained note. A scrap of cloth. A smear of blood that widened into a trail, and then vanished again, here in the neighborhood. But he couldn’t let it go. In the end, he could not separate himself from what he was investigating. It had gotten him in trouble, this persistence.

“She was dating Solano, I hear.”

“They had broken up.”

“These things happen.”

“I guess.”

“It must be hard for the parents, though. I mean she gets drunk, she falls in the water.”

“If that’s what happened.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Nick Antonelli is willing to accept it, maybe you should, too.”

Marilyn took a sip of her wine. She had never been one to be less than blunt, but he didn’t mind that. She was a beautiful woman. She had untied her hair, and her skin had a flush, healthy look, here in the candlelight. Her hair had just started to gray, and you could see the white, the silver, mixed in with the auburn and black. The light pooled in her dark eyes, and he wanted to touch her face.

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Yes.”

“Prospero Realty—they put together a deal for Antonelli recently?”

She nodded.

“Was it Beatrice?”

“No, no,” she laughed. “This was old boy stuff. Antonelli worked with her father. He worked with Joe.”

“I wondered if you know anything about that.”

She gave him the look then. She pursed her lips and put her wine down. Those dark eyes of hers were even darker, and he wanted even more to reach across the table. To touch her. To not stop touching.

“So that’s why you wanted to talk with me?”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“It’s just like you,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t that.”

“I thought you were off the case. I thought you were done.”

“Just table talk,” he said. “Curiosity—it’s only human.”

“No,” she said. “It’s the dead. That’s who you’re interested in. That’s all you’ve ever been interested in. Angela the beautiful. Angela the perfect.” She snarled. “But let me tell you something. They’re always perfect when they’re dead.”

She stopped then. He knew how Marilyn was. She let loose sometimes and you saw the heat in her, the quick flash. But sooner or later, she would come around. She wouldn’t apologize, though. She never apologized.

They were quiet for a while. They drank their wine, they ate their food, and Dante could see the heat in her and feel the attraction between them. He had been with Angie when he was young, and that was one kind of thing, but Marilyn and Dante had gotten together when they were older, and that was something different. They were entwined in ways that were not so easy to unravel.

“Antonelli bought the old Waterhouse Building out in China Basin,” Marilyn said at last. “The deal was just finalized.”

Dante knew the complex. The place had been damaged back in the ’89 quake—and had been sitting unoccupied for years. The site was unstable, and the building needed all kinds of environmental retrofit. It had changed hands a number of times in the last decade. The last owner had gotten part of the complex up to code, but had to bail out before finishing the job.

“What’s he going to do with it? It’s going to cost him a fortune to fix.”

“There’s such a shortage of office space—it’s worth the investment
now. Plus Antonelli’s got some kind of deal with Solano Enterprises. They signed a long-term lease.”

Dante remembered Barbara Antonelli had mentioned something along these lines, back when he first visited their house. Nick had looked uncomfortable and Solano, later, had skirted the subject altogether.

“My understanding, the computer business—the money’s tightening up.”

“It’s just a blip.”

“An arrow, straight up.”

“Sure.”

“Everybody gets rich.”

“That’s right. Be a cynic if you want.”

Around them, voices were subdued. They were into prime time, but the crowd was slack. Not empty, but not what it had been these last months. The owner stood surveying the café, and though it had to be good in a way—a slow night now and then, a little time to rest, to work the back office—he looked disconsolate. Then the waiter came over to refill their wineglasses, and just for a minute, for no reason at all, Dante had a feeling like old times. Or what he imagined of old times. The world outside passing, all the moments slipping away, but here, now, at this table, this food in front of you, this drink, for a little while, you held the tide. That business outside didn’t matter. Marilyn’s face glowed in the candlelight, the passing shadows fell against the window, and for a minute, anyway, he was happy.

A
fterward Dante walked Marilyn up the hill. The wind had picked up and Washington Square had gone cold. There was a smattering of transients on the grass, sleeping under cardboard, and
a young Chinese couple making out on a bench. Across from Fior d’Italia, a street-corner preacher was warning about the end of time. How blood shall rain from the sky and the dead shall walk the earth.

“So,” said Marilyn.

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to walk me all the way,” she said. “I can do it on my own.”

Her eyes had an invitation in them, maybe, but there was also something else. A challenge. A demand. Before his father’s funeral, he’d been gone a long time and things had gone cold between them. Then he’d returned, and he and Marilyn had gotten close again, and for a while they’d talked of selling the house on Fresno Street, maybe leaving The Beach, but in the end Dante couldn’t do it, and he wasn’t sure, really, that was what Marilyn wanted either. But there was still the question: What next?

He reached out and touched her face and wanted to walk with her on up the hill, but there was still the challenge in her eyes and also the feeling that never quite left him, that there was something just beyond the edge of his vision, something he could not quite see.

“I won’t wait forever,” she said.

“I know.”

“The man in gray, the real estate agent?”

“What about him?

“He wants to fuck me.”

Marilyn kept on up the hill. Dante watched her for a little while—how she diminished into the shadows—and he followed from a distance.

He stood outside her darkened apartment, looking up.

The light went on inside—and he saw her shadow cross the window and he felt some small comfort.

She was safe, anyway, he thought. He did not have to worry about her going for a walk along the pier.

n the way down the hill, Dante heard footsteps, but they turned away. Across the street from his apartment, two men loitered on the walk. Dante did the old tricks then, the ones he had learned during his time away from the city. He doubled back, then back again.

He walked slowly, he walked fast. He lingered by magazine racks and walked by Angie’s apartment, and glanced down the alley where the night before he’d seen something move, and mistaken that movement for Jim Rose. There was no one down the alley now, and no one following him so far as he could tell. Still he could not shake the feeling, just as his mother had not been able to shake the necessity to climb the attic ladder. Down on Columbus, the two men were gone. Dante circled the block once more. He saw the blue van parked at the corner, but there was nothing remarkable about it. So he did not think anything of it, nor of the young woman in shorts and a peasant blouse, sauntering with her hands in her pockets, a cigarette hanging from her lips.

J
ake Cicero drove his Thunderbird through Cow Hollow. It was one of the new Thunderbirds, sloppy in the handling, floating over the street with a sense of indeterminate control. Up the big hills, then down—the vista wide in front of you just for a minute: the sailboats, the brown hills, the miles of stucco—and then down you went, wallowing into a dip. The car drove as if it were still 1977 and the streets were a million miles wide. It was a good ride. Cicero liked it. The T-bird was baby blue and it had a porthole in the hardtop.