The Ancient Rain (3 page)

“Their mother is out of town,” he repeated. “I need to contact someone to pick them up from school.” What he said next, he wanted to sound confident, but his voice cracked almost shamefully. “It will be unfortunate, you do the wrong thing with the kids. My lawyer…”

The woman bowed her head, and it occurred to him that they had known his wife was out of town, and they had chosen this time deliberately, because he would be with the kids, vulnerable, unable to run. And they could get a jump on the pretrial press.

Blackwell returned.

“Let me make a call.”

“Why would we do that?” asked Blackwell.

“My boy has a medication issue.”

“You can call after you've been booked. Put him inside.”

The cops did as they were told, but from inside the cage Owens could see Chin and Blackwell conferring. Owens could see by the way they stood that there was a jurisdictional issue of some sort—there always was with cops—and it was clear Blackwell called the shots. He had been an investigative attorney in the feds' criminal division back then. Blackwell basically ran the office now, if you didn't count the appointed guy from Washington. It was unusual, maybe, an office man out on the arrest, but back then he had been made to look like a fool. Given all this, Leanora Chin must have said something persuasive—raising the specter of the press, maybe—because in a little while the troopers pulled him back out of the car, then rearranged the cuffs, so that he stood bound with his hands in front. The woman handed him his cell.

“One call,” she said.

Owens flipped through the phone. His wife was in court, and he did not know how long before she would pick up a message. The same was true of Jensen. He considered his wife's sister, but she was an hysteric, and his brother, and the mothers of his kids' friends. But none of them would have the savvy to pull his kids out of the system.

There also among the names he found Dante Mancuso down at Cicero Investigations.

Mancuso had been to his house once. He had met the kids. Owens did not know him too well, it was true—a sad-eyed ex-cop like a thousand other sad-eyed ex-cops. With his own badgered history, and that impossibly long nose. But Mancuso would know how to get in touch with his wife, and with Jensen. More importantly, though, Owens had worked with him and knew how Mancuso was. Once a notion got hold of him, he had a hard time letting it go.

FOUR

Later that day, Dante found himself on the steps of the Burton Federal Building, on the wrong side of a concrete barrier. It was a low barrier, and he could see over it into the secured area, where the press had started to gather and a young man worked at setting up a microphone. Dante did not have press credentials, and so stood with some women from Code Pink, an antiwar group whose members wore pink T-shirts and black tights.

Earlier, the women had been gathered at the other side of the plaza, where the passing traffic could see their signs:
NO BLOOD FOR OIL. NO WAR IN THE MIDEAST.
They had been drawn across the square by the television cameras. There were some street people mixed in, yelling stuff just for the fun of it.

The cops were edgy.

It was the kind of job that made you edgy even under normal circumstances. With all the security measures, and the lack of personnel, everyone was working double shift. The public was full of fear, and the cops crankier than usual.

Anthrax in the post office. Poison gas at the Opera House. A terrorist lurking at the Golden Gate Bridge.

The anthrax turned out to be laundry detergent, the poison gas was a woman applying hairspray, and the terrorist was a park employee sneaking a cigarette.

Still, it all had to be investigated, and events like this, a simple press conference, once mundane, required a small army.

*   *   *

Dante himself had spent the morning down at the central jail.

At the end of it, he'd learned the feds were keeping Owens under wraps until they could announce the arrest at a press conference. They wanted to make a show for the cameras.

So Dante had come down here to the Burton Building—a tallish, nondescript building, steel girders and blue glass, with a windy, anonymous plaza out front. The vehicle barricades had been put in a few months back to protect the entryway, and now a small group emerged from that entry, gathering in the secured area near a makeshift podium. Dante felt a twinge. He had made the walk from those glass doors to the podium once upon a time, when he'd been on the force, a young man on the cusp. It had not been so long ago, really. There were some new faces but some old ones as well, people with whom he was not on the best of terms. A phalanx of go-getters, in uniform and out. Leonard Blackwell stood at the center, and nearby, off to the side, was Leanora Chin, all in blue, hands crossed at the wrist.

In their midst, a thin, blonde woman—toward whom they were all being quite solicitous, as if she had been injured in some way—wavered from one foot to the other, leaning raillike into the wind. Accompanying the woman, standing close to her, was an older man, out of place with the others, whom Dante recognized despite the fact it had been many years.

Guy Sorrentino, from the neighborhood.

Sorrentino had been with the SFPD at one time, too, and like Dante he did investigative work now. He was some twenty years Dante's senior, but their tenure at the department had overlapped. A long time back, when Sorrentino was a young man and Dante just a boy, he had worked a couple summers for Dante's father down at the Mancuso warehouse.

What Sorrentino was doing here, Dante had no idea. He behaved toward the younger woman in a fatherly way, a hand on her forearm.

On account of the wind and the rustling of the crowd, Dante could not catch her name as she took the podium. She was in her late thirties, with a haircut that was not fashionable, at least not in San Francisco, the hair too high off the head, the blond a bit too much from the bottle. Not unattractive, but with a rawness about her that suggested the regions beyond the city, past the suburbs, where the land was flat and the sunlight caked with dust.

“I have just heard news I have been waiting a long time to hear. I talked to the U.S. Attorney's office here in San Francisco, to Mr. Blackwell … Twenty-seven years ago, in 1975, my mother was murdered during a bank robbery. She was shot down, while I waited in the car. I saw the ones responsible,” she said. “I saw them leaving the bank. But I was young, and for reasons I have never understood, no arrests were made. Until today.”

The woman was Elise Younger, Dante realized, the daughter of the woman who had been shot to death in the robbery out on Judah.

She'd seen the gang through the windshield of her mother's car: four of them in the parking lot—according to her story; and possibly a fifth, a female lookout sitting on a bench at the corner. One of the men had stripped off his mask as he came out of the bank. With the help of a police sketch artist, she'd identified that man as Bill Owens. But she'd been barely eleven years old, and there'd been other, contradictory evidence.

Elise's story—her long struggle to bring the case to court—had been in the papers off and on. She had been portrayed variously over the years: as an innocent victim, a person obsessed with justice; as a woman who had lost touch with reality, casting stones haphazardly, looking for someone to blame. Whose view of what happened was no more reliable now than it had been then. Even those law officials who sympathized—who remembered the case—had grown weary of her. On more than one occasion she had criticized the judges and lawyers, the prosecutors and politicians.

Some of these same people stood behind her on the podium now.

“My mother—” She hesitated. “My mother was just going to the bank—to cash her overtime check. My father had finally just gotten a job, too, our lives were turning for the good, and we were going to have a celebration. But all that changed, in one awful instant…”

The woman was not a professional orator, but she had an earnestness that was hard to resist. Still, there seemed something strained, a modulation not quite under control. When Elise Younger left the microphone, she appeared to buckle for an instant, her knees weakening, or maybe just her heel giving way, catching on the concrete. Sorrentino was quick to take her arm, and as he did so, Dante saw the disdainful glances of Blackwell and his assistant. Sorrentino did not have the grace of the others on the stage. He was a working-class guy under it all, with a jacket that wouldn't button and a misshapen hat. And the way he hurried to Elise Younger, there was something a little too hungry there.

Guy Sorrentino was in his sixties, a small man, thick through the shoulders. An ex-cop. He'd lived in the Beach in the old days, but had been pushed off the force. Or had pushed himself.

Truth was, Sorrentino's son had died during the First Gulf War, in the early nineties, and things had fallen apart for him after that.

So what was he doing here with Elise Younger?

At this point Blackwell himself took the podium. He did what prosecutors always do, avoiding the particulars of the case—or pretending to—so as not to jeopardize the trial, but at the same time letting the public know his people were on duty, getting results. Seeking publicity while not seeking. Getting the jump on the defense. “We can't talk specifically about this case, about any of the details, because we do not have the slightest intention to try this case in public. I will just say the simple fact, and that is: Earlier this morning, Bill Owens was served with a warrant for his arrest by officers Leanora Chin and Steve White.”

Chin stood at his side, and everyone knew why. They wanted the Asian face in the camera.

The police were happy to oblige.

“But I would like to take this opportunity to make one thing clear. Law enforcement in San Francisco, together with federal officers and Homeland Security, are all committed to bringing terrorists to justice. No matter when the crime happened, no matter if the perpetrators walk among us, or on foreign soil. Decades might go by, but we will continue to be vigilant. We will find you.”

*   *   *

In a little while, they opened it up to the press, and it was the usual dance, with reporters pressing for details, and the police having little to offer. It was the kind of conversation he'd heard so many times it was like a voice in his head.
Why now? Are there more arrests coming? How can you reconstruct this, after almost thirty years?
As the questioning wore on, the Code Pink people began to wander away, back to their signs at the other end of the plaza.

Closer by, a woman cried out, “Fascists!” Then she yelled again, “Asshole pigs!”

She was not with the Code Pink people. Dante had seen her earlier, sitting on a mat just around the corner, an empty tin at her feet. Her hair was unkempt, and she yelled with both hands cupped around her mouth.

“Nine-eleven didn't happen! It's just an excuse to terrorize the people, to fill us with fear!”

Some of the Code Pink people started wandering back. Meanwhile Blackwell backed away from the mike. The press conference had ended. The woman continued yelling.

“Stooges … patsies. Don't you know it's just an excuse…? It's oil they want, the oil … I have X-ray eyes, I see through you all…”

The group at the podium broke apart, heading back toward the building. A couple of the Code Pink women, sensing the police's impatience, stepped in front of the woman, so as to make it more difficult for the police to intervene. The Code Pink women made the police nervous. Many of them were well connected in social circles and had to be handled gingerly.

Dante separated himself from the scene. He wanted to talk to one of the arresting officers, hoping to find out what had become of Owens's children. At the entrance to the Burton Building, he got hung up in security, then caught sight of Leanora Chin leaving through an exit on the other side.

Chin walked briskly and he did not catch up with her until the corner, where she stood waiting for the light.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She regarded him, businesslike in her blue skirt and blue jacket, her hair done up in a twist. Likely she didn't remember, but Dante had been in a room with her, maybe fifteen years back, when he was a young cop, at the North Beach Station. Back then she was a homicide cop with notoriety in the neighborhood for having arrested a local man accused of murdering his brother's wife.

“You're with the press?”

“No,” he said. “I prefer not to talk with them if I can help it.” He identified himself and handed her a card. “Bill Owens called me from the Bay Bridge this morning. And asked me to find his kids.”

A couple of patrolmen on mop-up duty lingered up the block. Chin glanced their way, as if she might gesture them over if this man in front of her proved to be a nuisance.

“What did you say your name was?”

He repeated it. If it meant anything to her, she did not show it. She was with San Francisco Homeland, he knew—a division carved up out of the local police force and given federal money. Before Homeland, she had been with Special Investigations. Dante had gotten involved with SI in the past—an ugly business, undercover, growing out of his time in New Orleans. All buried deep in the files. Or it was supposed to be, anyway. Even so, there were other reasons the San Francisco cops didn't care for him. If she knew anything about any of this, it didn't show in her face.

“The kids…” he said again.

She stepped back, appraising him, and Dante became aware of the patrolmen still back there, hovering.

“I was occupied with the arrest. At the scene, we allowed the subject to make a call, but apparently he was having trouble with his phone. So I turned the children over to the care of one of the patrolmen on the scene.”

“Do you know his name?”

“My understanding, the officer took them to school.”

“School?”