The Ancient Rain (16 page)

The milk was on his pants legs, all over his shoes. Meanwhile, the woman struggled with the cop. “Since when is it against the law to get sick?” she said.

Then she vomited again.

Sorrentino danced backward on his toes.

*   *   *

Inside, Sorrentino dampened a paper towel, cleaned his shoes, blotted his pants legs. After the incident, it had taken him another twenty minutes to get through security. He was going to be late as it was, but there were tiny flecks on his jacket still, and on his shirt. Dabbing these only seemed to make matters worse. As he rode up in the elevator, he noticed the damp spots still visible under the fluorescent light. Worse, he feared, was the lingering smell.

The smell seemed worse inside Blackwell's office when he leaned over to shake hands. Mike Iverson, the assistant prosecutor, sat at the table, too, and also the Chinese woman from Homeland Security.

Blackwell had a stack of trial folders at his elbow, and paperwork lay scattered about the table.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” he said. “There was an incident outside. The Code Pink…” He started to explain, then decided, no. It made him look like a buffoon. “I got tied up in security.”

Blackwell and the others did not respect him, he knew that. Never mind that he had practically dumped the case in their laps. Never mind that he was the one who had chased down the remaining witnesses after thirty years and told the prosecution about the new forensics that would link the Younger murder to the ammunition at the SLA safe house. More than that, he was the one who'd found Cynthia Nakamura.

He only hoped she didn't die before the trial.

“I brought all my case notes, like you asked.”

“We appreciate your cooperation.”

“Well, any way I can help.”

Sorrentino had never worked with Blackwell on the force, but he remembered department people grousing because he was always getting into their business, trying to federalize local investigations. A glance at Chin told him she understood the situation. Blackwell didn't work in the field so much as he once had, maybe, but behind a desk—and from that desk he pulled a lot of strings. But there was a string hooked to him as well, and that string went down the long corridor all the way back to those assholes in Justice. The only reason this was going to trial was because there was a certain spectacle the feds wanted everyone to see.
Don't fuck with us, do everything we say.
In some ways, these people were just as bad as those women out in the streets.

“I'm sure you know—in fact, we had this conversation once before: The government has its own folks on this now.”

“Yes.”

“But you've still been out fishing, haven't you?”

“Just some loose ends.”

“What kind of loose ends?”

“Leland Stanford, if you remember. I've been looking into the notion that he communicated with Kaufman, all that confusion about whether Sanford died in that raid. I mean, the first time around, the case never recovered from that.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

Blackwell had been involved in all of that, ridiculed in the press back then, and again more recently.

“You understand what you've been doing?” asked Blackwell. “Walking around North Beach, with a picture of Cynthia Nakamura? There's a reason we are holding her in protection, you know.”

Sorrentino hung his head a moment. How they knew about his efforts, he had no idea, but it was true he had not been particularly discreet. He tried to explain. “Those women, Annette Ricci, Jan Sprague, they were at the farm in Aptos.” He hesitated, unsure where he was going. “If Owens doesn't have an alibi, then neither do they.”

There was an exchange of glances then, between Iverson and the others, and Sorrentino got the impression he'd touched upon something. What? Identifying Sanford, locating him, had been integral to their case thirty years ago, and more recently as well, but now they seemed more concerned with keeping Cynthia Nakamura under wraps.

He didn't quite get Blackwell, the man's angle, his point of view—but he was starting to understand, whatever that view, it did not include Guy Sorrentino. His own interviews with Nakamura had been preliminary. She had not told him everything, he knew that. Blackwell came in later, and he wondered what he had gotten her to say.

“You are the ones who sent me after Kaufman,” he said. “It was your—”

Blackwell snapped now, cutting him off. “Are you trying to tell me that you are going to accomplish what the FBI hasn't been able to accomplish for thirty years? That you are going to pull Leland Sanford out of a hat?”

“All I'm saying—”

“You're out of your league,” snapped Blackwell.

“I know you are well intended,” said Iverson.

“Fuck his good intentions. You interfere with this case, Mr. Sorrentino, it's obstruction of justice.”

“I'm working for Elise,” he said.

“This isn't up to Elise. She interferes, we will file against her, too.”

Blackwell leafed through the file in front of him, pulled out an envelope, then pushed it across the table. Sorrentino opened it. Inside, he found pictures of himself—on the landing outside his apartment, on the streets of North Beach. In some of the pictures, items had been circled. A gray Honda Accord. A man's face. The same man later, on a street corner. Sorrentino in the foreground, oblivious.

“The man's name is Dante Mancuso.”

“I know who he is.”

“Another ex-cop. Not one of our favorite people.”

“He's been following you for a couple of weeks,” said Chin.

“This one was a lousy cop.” Blackwell pointed at Mancuso's picture. “And he was shitty undercover, not knowing when to back off. That nose of his, that face—how could you not notice somebody like that following you, a face like that?”

Sorrentino felt his own face burning. He thought of the check Elise had given him, and the little kiss on the cheek, and the vague look of sadness in her eyes. He had felt disloyal, not telling her about this meeting, but now he suspected she had known.

Meanwhile, he noticed a fleck of pink on his jacket. He brushed it from himself as the others watched. The damp spot on his polo had left a vague stain, and his pants legs were still damp.

The air around him smelled of sour milk.

“Listen, Guy,” said Iverson. “You've been invaluable, but we're moving past the investigation now, into the trial. And one of the things we are concerned with, like it or not, a case like this, is controlling the pretrial publicity. The firebombing—that works against us. It gives them sympathy. Meanwhile, Elise has this thing coming up in Sacramento … It's going to be very high profile.”

Sorrentino knew what was coming. They were prepping Elise for the final push. They were going to take his files and freeze him out. She had known.

Five thousand bucks.

“We think it would be better, for the case, for Elise, if you kept your distance.”

“Elise agrees?”

“Yes,” Blackwell said. “Elise agrees.”

PART FOUR

The Parade

TWENTY-ONE

Maybe it was the next afternoon, as Dante pulled out of the hospital lot, that the car first appeared behind him. Or maybe it was a little farther along, on Cathedral Hill, as he negotiated the long swoop down Gough Street, past churchyards and playgrounds and the sidewalk nobodies who slumped along in the shadows. Either way, he did not notice the car at first, preoccupied as he was with other things.

Marilyn would be released the next day. At the moment she was in session with a medical cosmetician—a woman who specialized in makeup for burn victims. “Girls only,” Beatrice had whispered to him in the hospital corridor, arms loaded with packages, clothing from Dazios. “Why don't you come back later, when she's all dolled up.”

Dante had promised to return.

In the meantime, he headed across town toward Annette Ricci's. He had tried to get access to Jan Sprague earlier, but the reception at the Sprague mansion on the Heights had been pretty chilly—and Jensen had called afterward, telling him to back off. It didn't make sense to Dante. Partly, he supposed, the sensitivity had to do with some of the stuff running in the paper lately, wide-swinging attacks from the law-and-order people, hyperbole suggesting the bombing was some kind of ruse, that the police had not looked hard enough at the people on the scene. Still, if the defense wanted him to find Nakamura, well, Sprague had known her back then. And so had Ricci.

Dante kept driving.

He remembered Annette and her Sandinista boyfriend chatting it up in Owens's kitchen. He remembered the Honduran tamales and the taste of the corn. He remembered Marilyn writhing on the lawn.

Dante had some questions for Ricci. He wanted to ask her about Cynthia Nakamura, true. But he had some other questions as well.

*   *   *

Halfway down Gough, rolling down that long hill, Dante spotted a green Torino in the traffic behind him. The car kept its distance—not rushing to make the light, but not falling off either, rising over the crest, disappearing again into the trough at the intersection. Then reappearing.

Sorrentino, he figured, but the car was too far back to tell, and San Francisco was a big city after all. There was likely more than one green Torino still on the road.

Near the McAllister projects, in the sump at the bottom of the hill, Dante pulled over. The Torino kept coming. It was a one-way street, and the car switched into the far left as it approached, but Dante got a good look at the man, anyway. It was Sorrentino. He drove with his hat on and his nose up, both hands on the wheel, eyes ahead.

Dante stayed put for five minutes, ten, waiting. It was possible, he supposed, that Sorrentino's appearance was coincidence.

Dante circled the block once, then parked again, waiting—but there was no sign of the Torino. He pulled into traffic. Then it was there again in the rearview, tagging him across Market Street into the Mission.

*   *   *

Annette Ricci's house was in the Inner Mission, in the old Irish neighborhood. When Dante was a kid, his father used to take him to the Longshoreman's Hall down on Mission Street, and sometimes after those meetings they went to Mackie's, a restaurant full of old micks, but the place had been an island even then. Irish waiters in their tuxes and their brogues, hostesses named Molly and Catherine and Margaret, hair gone gray, freckles gone to moles, long dresses wrapped in the middle with green sashes. The last of those places was long gone, the Irish having trundled south to Daly City, then vanished altogether, as far as you could tell, taking their potatoes with them and their kids and their green beer.

It was a Latino neighborhood now—Salvadoran and Guatemalan and Nicaraguan—refuges from Central America, dissidents, some of them right wing, some left, but mostly just villagers following their relatives north, working to send money back home.

Sorrentino followed him past Mackie's, then down Folsom. Toward the end, the man gave up on being inconspicuous and tagged up right behind him. On Ricci's street, Sorrentino swung a circle and parked halfway up the block. Dante could guess what had happened. Sorrentino had figured Dante as a tail, and now he wanted a few words. The man sat in his Torino, as if he expected Dante to walk over. Instead Dante walked the other way, toward Ricci's place on the corner. The son of a bitch could wait.

Annette Ricci's place was a large Victorian, a decaying house in the Eastlake style that had last been painted a couple of decades back—a painted lady gone to seed, the lower story done up hippie-style, bright colors, sunbursts in the friezes. The upper story, beyond the easy reach of ladders, was an older style, a muted brown, so there was a kind of schizophrenia to the place. A large magnolia tree grew in the yard. A canary palm. Boston ferns.

It had been a co-op at one time, Dante knew, actors' quarters up top, a studio in the back, but that arrangement had fallen apart, as tended to happen, and Ricci owned the property now. Over the gate hung an iron sign.

THE SAN FRANCISCO TROUPE

The Play's the Thing

Dante went through the gate and into the yard. In a little while, Annette Ricci herself opened the door.

Her hair had been restrained under a scarf, pulled in tightly, and this had the effect of accentuating the rawness of her features and a certain imperious beauty. She did not seem surprised to see him, but instead smiled easily—though she was an actress, of course, and thus possessed a plasticity of expression.

“Come in. But I have to warn you, we have a rehearsal in a little while.”

“This won't take long.”

“I can give you a few minutes now. Or if you'd rather come back later?”

“Now's good.”

“I'll tell Juan to begin the warm-ups without me.”

She left him alone in a small parlor decorated with kachina dolls—a considerable number, actually, all arranged rather precisely, too precisely—and also memorabilia from the troupe's earlier days. Ricci had been there from the beginning, he saw. She'd joined the troupe in the late sixties—a renegade from her father's ranch in Wyoming—a gangly young woman whose eyes in the photos glimmered with the air of the prankster. In person, the mischievousness had a harder edge—he'd seen that edge at the party—but he'd seen also her ability to act quickly, and the comfort she'd given Marilyn. Even so, as she walked into the room now, she held her head a bit too high, and he could see again in her the need to control.

“So what can I do?”

“Mostly,” he said, “I was hoping you could help me with the discovery material. There are a few witness names here, on the prosecution list, we haven't been able to identify.”

“You used to be a cop?”

“It shows?”

“I heard a rumor.” She laughed. It was a charming laugh, vulnerable. “And so why did you leave the force?”