Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  The woman modeled a string of pearls now, holding them against her collar.

  “Not those.”

  “Why not?”

  “They belonged to her mother.”

  “Everything will be returned.”

  “Leave the pearls.”

  Dante carried her suitcase down the stairs, out to the car. A neighbor waved from across the way, and that was a good thing, for them to be seen, headed out like this, Dante and Marilyn.

  At the end of the block, the tourist couple sat drinking coffee at an iron table that Old Man Liguria had set out in front of his grocery. It was the same pair Dante had seen earlier, out on the walk, but if they were aware of him now, as he pulled around the corner, they made no sign. In a little while, though, a gray sedan appeared on the road behind him. The sedan lingered in the traffic past Geary, into Hayes Valley.

  The plan called for this woman to fly south to Long Beach, then take the ferry over from San Pedro to Catalina Island. Once there, in the hotel, her instructions were to make her presence known, out by the pool, in the lobby. When she was done, she could hang out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. Then, for all practical purposes, disappear.

  “Your face,” she said, “it’s like a postcard.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A nose like that, you could be on a postage stamp.”

  “I haven’t heard that before.”

  “Turn here.”

  “I know the way.”

  “We’re running late.”

  Somewhere on the freeway, he noticed the sedan again, showing up in his rearview, close one moment, then farther back.

  A single occupant, a man. Not close enough for Dante to see.

  He slowed to let it pass—to get a look at the driver—but the car slowed, too. Close to the airport, it vanished down an access road, snaking away.

  Inside the terminal, they made a show of it.

  He kissed her and they embraced.

  Himself and this woman he didn’t know.

  Her eyes were half-shut, and she brushed his lips with her open mouth. The first kiss was innocent, almost, but the second was not that way. Her touch stirred a desire he knew would not be satisfied. Marilyn and Lake had left just at dawn and would be somewhere over the Eastern seaboard by now, edging toward the Atlantic, onward to Paris, or Barcelona, or Rome, the exact destination he did not know, nor did Cicero. That had been the idea, for it to remain secret—for Lake to choose the place and keep it to himself.

  “At the hotel, make your presence known, but you don’t want to linger.”

  “You worrying about me now?”

  “I just want you to understand. The situation is not without risk.”

  Her assignment, the way it worked, after she checked in as Marilyn, the first two days, she would make an appearance or two, in costume, keep up the game. After that, she was free to disappear.

  “I’m going to Ensenada,” she said.

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “You get tired of this game, you can join me.”

  “You’ll be back.”

  “Sure, I’ll take off these clothes. I’ll do my hair. But there’s no reason I have to come back here.”

  She was toying with him. Holding on to his belt now, leaning in for one more kiss. It was gentle but not so gentle: a soft kiss, openmouthed, that smeared across his lips. He looked into those half-slanted eyes. They were Marilyn’s shades, Marilyn’s earrings. Marilyn’s perfume mixed with the scent of this woman, and he imagined for a second that he might join her in Ensenada. He might cross the border and let all this go. He touched her again. He put his hand on her waist now, letting it drift, almost, wanting under those layers. He smelled the ocean. He felt the hot sand under his feet. He saw Marilyn in her white dress, out in a plaza somewhere, in that picture how she wanted it to be. He touched her some more.

  “That’s good, Dante,” she said.

  He watched her go down the causeway, toward security. At the last minute, she turned and waved.

  But it was wrong.

  The way she waved, how she reached, the little flap of the hand, it didn’t look like Marilyn at all.

  In a vinyl chair, against the airport wall, sat a man in a suit coat. The man was not a traveler. He wore sunglasses and sat with a magazine in his lap, head tilted as if reading, though, in fact, he was looking forward through his dark shades at the couple saying good-bye.

  Dante had not seen him, the man knew. Or not recognized him, anyway, as involved as he had been with the woman at the security gate.

  Earlier, the man had dressed in a blue Windbreaker. He’d had a camera around his neck and wandered down the hill, his travel companion by his side, and together they had sat with the tourist guidebook there at the Liguria Bakery, drinking the hot espresso. Then Dante had driven by. At that point, the man left his traveling companion behind, walking briskly to the gray car. Following.

  Now he stood up.

  He had already bought a ticket, the cheapest fare, not caring about the destination, because he did not intend to use it. He needed the boarding pass only to get through security. He followed the woman with the dark hair and the hoop earrings and the wide belt, her hips swinging under the print skirt. She waited at the Long Beach gate, and he waited, too, until after she boarded, to be sure this was her flight. Then he made his call. It would have been a pleasure to pursue her himself, but the woman was not his job, not now. She belonged to someone on the other end. Meanwhile, he had his own work to do. And his companion was waiting.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Dante walked down along the west side of Portsmouth Square, in front of Cookie Picetti’s old place, where the cops and the city hall people had used to eat in the old days, just around the corner from the morgue. There was a rice parlor there now, and an empty storefront next to that, and across the way stood a hotel, from which only the day before the paramedics had wheeled an old woman who dropped dead on the interior stairs.

  He surveyed the hotel more carefully. In the front window stood a crowd of Buddhas, all shapes and sizes, large and small, exorbitantly priced.

  A man lurked behind the counter, bored as hell.

  There were places like this all over Chinatown, selling imitation jade, statues of the divinity in obscene positions. There was nothing much in there a tourist would want, or anyone else, for that matter.

  A front, he guessed, for laundering money.

  If you examined the books, they’d tell you the statues had been bought cheap, wholesale, for next to nothing. Then sold to tourists, paid for in cash. Except, of course, the books were a lie. No one ever bought the statues. The money that passed through the store, it was drug money. And the statues were thrown in the bay.

  He went inside and paid for the room.

  He circled the Benevolent Association. Steam hissed up beneath the grate at his feet. There was a light on up top, behind the slatted shades. Love Wu, with his ancient library, full of secret papers. If the mayor was right, Ru Shen’s diary was up there. Dante hung in the square, as he’d been doing these past days, surveying the building, watching the come-and-go. Tomorrow, he would check the manifest at the Chinese Historical Society.

  Now he headed back through the blue light, down Stockton. The vegetable stalls were not yet closed, and a woman sold moon cakes on the corner. Pigeons fluttered in the alley. Back in the tenements there was a squalling, as of an animal being butchered. A group of tourists walked relentlessly forward in search of the wharf. Dante went on toward Fresno Street. He would have to clear out soon. He touched his nose. He ran his fingers over the long bump and felt the slope of his nose drooping infinitely downward. There was a small buzz at the center of his forehead.

  The faintest whisper.

  I am already dead.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Lady in Blue, wearing no blue whatsoever. Chin the impeccable. She’d grown up around the corner and navigated the street as a child, no doubt, with its shadows and its c
rooked light. Dante regarded her from the darkness of his father’s porch, in her patrol flats and gray suit, her pencil skirt and white blouse. If not for the blouse, its white sheen in the dark, he might not have seen her coming up the alley. There was a reason cops wore blue. It made for less of a target at night, when the hard business went down.

  Chin, the unimpeachable.

  Out all hours, forever on the job. She lived on Mt. Davidson, where the sky was perpetually overcast, in one of those buildings, those lines of condos, that circled the hill at the top of the city. San Francisco was not a big town, its boundaries confined by the Bay on one side and the ocean on the other, and those sprawling suburbs to the south. Physically there was only so much space, the people lived crammed up close, the fog skittering overhead, the blue sky forever about to reveal itself, almost visible, up above the slipping clouds. Chin had lived all her life in the city, same as himself, walking these streets. People talked. She lived alone, and there were rumors about her on this account. About her sexuality, her private life. People in San Francisco did not care about such things, supposedly, but that was nonsense, because who you slept with, everyone cared about that.

  The rumor was, Chin slept with no one.

  Chin the Lonely.

  Cold fish, out of water.

  Last duck on the pond.

  It explained the late hours, the attention to detail, why all these years she’d dressed in the colors of a cop on duty. Lately, though, she blushed her cheeks, however faintly, put some pencil about the eye, however slight, and sometimes wore a blouse with fluted sleeves. The change had come with her promotion, people said. She wanted to move to the next level, so she had finally learned. You had to be attractive to someone.

  “Excuse the hour.”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Just a few questions.”

  “You don’t sleep?”

  “Loose ends.”

  “OK.”

  “Inside would be better.”

  She had come alone, no backup in the wings, no trace of Angelo and his boys. This meant she had come to talk, not to arrest him, though that could change quickly enough. He wondered if Angelo knew about this visit. When they were partners, Dante had learned there were times when it was best not to have him along. Angelo had a tendency to go upstairs, over your head, at the first chance he got, and to do so in surreptitious ways. Over the years, his ex-partner had developed contacts with the Feds, inside the Bureau, and a case like this, who knew whom he might pull in.

  Inside, boxes were scattered much as they had been during Chin’s last visit, only more so. The house was in disarray, and did not give the best of impressions.

  “Going somewhere?”

  “Just sorting. Between the robbery, and your warrant boys—it’s hard to keep up.”

  “Sorting?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were down to the bank yesterday. You cleaned out your account. And your girlfriend—her place is dark.”

  It was what he had wanted, for the word to spread, for people to think he and Marilyn were leaving town. Even so, it disarmed him how quickly Chin had followed the thread.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Everyone gets a vacation.”

  “The way it looks to me, you don’t plan on coming back.”

  “San Francisco is my home.”

  “They’ll come after you, you know that. Same as they went after your cousin.”

  “They?”

  Chin’s eyes were pale gray. He had noticed that paleness before, and noticed the emptiness in her expression—in the flat line of her lips, in the brow. It was tempting to think that this emptiness contained knowledge. That she knew things she was not saying, though he understood this was not necessarily so. It was the mark of a good investigator: the ability to look as if you knew something when, in fact, you knew nothing at all.

  Chin reached then into the pocket of her blazer. She had some photos, like last time, but these photos, they were not of his cousin. At least not the one on top, anyway, the one she flipped first. Rather it was a young woman, exposed from the chest up. Dante recognized her. A big-breasted young woman, dark-skinned, standing on a tabletop, her blouse undone, wearing short pants, very short, very tight. It was a portfolio photo of a certain sort, for a certain type of work.

  “Do you know this woman?”

  “She works at Gino’s. She’s a dancer.”

  “A dancer?”

  “Yes.”

  “In what capacity do you know her?”

  “In the capacity you might expect.”

  “You’ve been asking after her quite a bit lately. Down at Gino’s.”

  “You in vice now?”

  It was possible someone had filed a missing persons report on the girl, but Dante didn’t think so—strippers came and went—and anyway, that kind of report would not end up with Chin. Dante had not mentioned the girl to Chin in their earlier conversation. Apparently, she had retraced his steps that night, and had probably been retracing other things as well.

  “Where did you go with her?”

  “When?”

  “The night of the robbery.”

  He had been up to the hotel, of course, to the Sam Wong, but he wasn’t going to tell her this, or anything about the company. It would not be wise. Regardless, he could sense her determination, and he almost trusted her.

  Chin the dogged. Chin the pure.

  “We just stepped outside for a little bit.”

  “Did you get a room?”

  “You don’t have to go anywhere special to have sex. You know that.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Out in the alley. You want the details? Or should I leave it to your imagination?”

  “You have been back to look for her several times. You’ve been over to her residence. You’ve been down to Gino’s. Why?”

  “I have a crush on her.”

  It was a childish thing to say, though in some odd way, perhaps it was true. Meanwhile, the equanimity was still there in Chin’s face, but it had a different surface, as if carved from stone, and her eyes darkened. She leaned back, reaching into the blazer again, to the inside pocket, putting the picture away, pulling another. As she did so, Dante saw her holster, and the thin outline of her breast under the white blouse. She held the picture facedown, like a card, on the table.

  “What did you and your cousin talk about?”

  “I believe we’ve been over this.”

  “You didn’t tell me everything.”

  “I told you what I know,” he lied.

  “His wife, Viola.”

  “What about her?”

  “We released your cousin’s body to her yesterday, for the funeral. And I spent some time talking with Viola. She was a little more cooperative this time around.”

  Dante had forgotten about Viola. After the murder, Angelo and Chin had dragged her downtown, behind the glass window, and apparently the young widow had had some kind of fit. Viola was a redhead who wore her skirts tight and her boots high. She had a very sweet face, and a sweeter figure, but she was barely twenty-seven and prone to hysterics.

  “She mentioned your cousin, he’d developed some new associations shortly before he was killed. And I was wondering if you know anything about these.”

  Dante wondered how much Chin knew about Dominick Greene—if his corpse had been discovered, and if this discovery was what had brought Chin knocking.

  “According to Viola, Gary met with a woman.”

  “He always met with women.”

  “Viola said, this one, it might have been business.”

  “It was always business, those flings of his.”

  “Viola was suspicious, too. But this fling—if that’s what she was—this woman, she had an associate. A man. The two of them, she said, what Gary told her, the pair of them worked together. Viola didn’t necessarily believe him.”

  “Do you have a description?”

  “Viola saw the woman from
a distance, leaving their house—a couple of days before your cousin was killed. She had her hair up, in a twist. A brunette.”

  “That could be anyone.”

  “I know.”

  “The man?”

  “No. Viola didn’t see him. Viola thinks he never existed. That Gary made him up, to cover the affair.”

  “It’s possible,” Dante said. “It’s the kind of thing he might do.”

  “Your family warehouse—the Wus have brought shipments through there on a routine basis, we are sure of it. And your cousin got a cut.”

  “I’m not in the family business.”

  “Who employed you, while you were in New Orleans?”

  Straitlaced Chin. The little girl who had grown up around the corner. Who’d seen her own uncle shot to death in the Chinatown restaurant. Who looked, despite everything, like a girl in the uniform of the Salesian school. The earrings, the makeup—none of that changed anything. She was the sort who pieced things together. She worked in SI; she had access to records.

  “This investigation, I get close,” she said, “and people are killed, witnesses disappear. Files get pulled.”

  Her face remained placid. Her brows were a flat line over her eyes, and she sat very straight and still, stonelike, ancient, but at the same time, he could see the alertness, her lips trembling, the quickening of her breath. She understood, he thought. Like that statue in Yin’s office, facing every direction all at once, a multitude of outstretched hands, each of them empty, holding nothing. The truth wasn’t one thing but many. Not just the company, the Wus, the police, each a separate entity moving of its own accord, snakelike, but all moving at the same time, intertwined, so it was impossible to separate one from the other, to penetrate to the core of it, to eliminate your own desire, your past. Ru Shen. He wondered how much Chin knew.

  The moment passed. She was just a cop, sitting there.

  “There’s something else,” she said. “Your cousin, he told Viola, these people—they told him you had something they wanted.”