The Big Boom

by Domenic Stansberry

“That might be the thing to do.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “A man your age,” said Dante. “I could see it.”

  “You’re a jackass.”

  Dante took his turn. It was a two-step toss, not exactly pretty, a hard throw designed to knock Cicero’s lead ball out of position, but Dante’s foot slid past the foul line. The shot was lost.

  “Did you think Rose was telling the truth?”

  “Mostly,” Cicero said. “But I’ve been fooled before.”

  “The thing that puzzles me is the computer. If Angie didn’t have it with her, then where is it?”

  Dante told Cicero about the mess in Angie’s apartment—and the foil with its chemical stink. Heroin, he was sure. It was possible, he supposed, that Angie had brought the three strangers back with her from Tosca’s. It was possible they’d gotten doped up together and gone out again later.

  “The toxology report, though, it came up blank.”

  “Those reports aren’t always correct.”

  Cicero went into a deep crouch, deep enough so that it hurt his knees, and he pushed a slow roller through the middle of the pit, toward the jack ball. It was good enough, but no beauty. He took the cigar out of his mouth, then went over and sat next to Dante on the bench. Cicero reached into his shirt pocket. He handed Dante a photo of Whitaker he’d pulled off the Internet.

  “Ordinary-looking guy.”

  “We’re all ordinary looking,” said Cicero. “I’ve got the address of his cabin in Tahoe. His wife gave me his cell. But he’s not answering.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “The wife, she filed a missing person report this morning. I am going after his credit card records. See if we can find out where he’s been.”

  “Is she willing to pay us?”

  Cicero shrugged.

  “I thought you said Antonelli was finished with us. I thought he was pulling the plug.”

  “I still have his retainer,” said Cicero. “He signed a contract. We have an obligation to give him his money’s worth, whether he wants it or not.”

  “Something’s in your craw.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What is it?”

  Cicero hesitated. He didn’t know how to answer that himself. He thought of Ann Whitaker again, of her two little kids. He thought of his wife, Louise, with her spinning classes and her trainer and her walking tours around the city and her sailing classes and her obsession with this cruise. It had always been this way. You had one life, but there was always another that beckoned. Another life beneath the surface of the one you lived, and people like him, fool that he was, he couldn’t help but pursue. You would think he would know better by now.

  “Why don’t you hook up with Visconti? She’s a good-looking woman.”

  “Changing the subject, aren’t we?”

  “Possibly, but I’m the boss. What’s up between you?”

  “Everybody’s been asking me that lately.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  Dante sat with his fingers laced together and his long nose pointed at the ground. Cicero followed the slope of the man’s nose down to its bulbous tip and it seemed to be pointing to the jack ball out there in the dirt. After a while, it became plain he wasn’t going to answer.

  “Maybe you should have a life for yourself,” Cicero went on. “Maybe it would be good for you.”

  “Maybe you should go on that cruise.”

  Dante got up and tried another throw. It was a clumsy throw, a jackass throw, really, graceless as hell, but the ball rolled up close, and took the lead position. It doesn’t matter, thought Cicero, I can do better. I’ll knock it away. “Antonelli was tied to Solano’s business some way,” said Dante. “Maybe there’s a connection there.”

  “To Angie’s death?”

  “To something. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe someone scared Antonelli off. Maybe someone didn’t want him to investigate anymore.”

  “Could be,” Cicero said. “Could be the guy just wants to bury his daughter.”

  Cicero tried to imagine himself there on that boat. In that deck chair, feet up. Dozing off. All around the sound of the gulls and the blue water and some little island off there in the distance. The sun shining down, warming his face. When you got to port, there were charters. Smaller boats that took you into the reefs, where you could drop a line and pull up anything you wanted. Except what came up, in his imagination, was not some goddamn trophy fish.

  “I want you to go up to Tahoe,” said Cicero. “I want you to go up to Bill Whitaker’s cabin and see if you can find him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Cicero nodded. Dante sat down once more on the bench, silent now. Thinking about that stinking foil, Cicero guessed, trying to imagine those people in Angie’s apartment, wondering about her computer. Obsessive son of a bitch. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Cicero could hear some Chinese kids playing and a mother scolding them. You could sit here for a long time before someone comes through that gate to play bocce, he thought. No one played this court anymore.

  Maybe I’m done with Louise, he thought. Maybe that’s what’s in my craw. Maybe it’s the Whitaker woman.

  Maybe it’s the dead girl they pulled from the bay.

  He dangled the drop chain between his fingers. Maybe I’m just afraid to die. Maybe that’s why I can’t let it go. He let the magnet hang. Then he snapped up the steel ball and contemplated his roll.

  TWENTY

  Dante took the trip up to Tahoe. It was some five hours from the city—a drive across the Central Valley that took him through tule land and cottonwoods, past the buff-colored houses and the Sacramento subdivisions that sat now on the old arroyos. When he was a kid they would take Highway 99 through Concord and Marysville, past the prison in Vacaville, then to Walnut Creek, until the groves gave way to tomatoes and grasshoppers and it was nothing but heat pouring through the open windows all the way to Sacramento. It was a quicker drive now, and more comfortable—in his air-conditioned Honda—but it was also uglier.

  More than once along the way he stopped, ostensibly to get gas, to take a leak, to smoke a cigarette in the dust by the side of the road. In truth, it was his old habits getting the best of him. Looking back to see if he was being followed.

  As far as he could tell, he was not. There was no one.

  He got back into the Honda. He climbed for a while. Into the Auburn Hills. Then into the Sierra.

  Then down again, following the Truckee River into the Tahoe Basin.

  Dante arrived at Whitaker’s place in midafternoon. It was a little cabin in Tahoe City about fifty yards off the water. It was an A-frame, nothing fancy. The deck and the stairway were covered with pine needles and there was mail in the box. There was no car in the driveway, and it didn’t look as if anybody had been around for a while. He considered taking a closer look, but there was a yardman across the way who didn’t seem to have anything to do but look in his direction. So Dante walked up the road a little ways and took a path down to the lake.

  The lake was quiet, except for the sound of a speedboat across the water, on the Nevada side. The sound was muffled and remote. The lake spread out over the basin, and reflected the mountains in the gray water. The forests were redwood and pine and they obscured the buildings along the shore, all but the casino, which was somehow both tall and squat and rose well above the tree line. The opposite shore was farther away than it looked. Tahoe was the largest freshwater lake in the west, or so they said, and the vast, colorless plane of water played tricks with the eyes, deceiving you as to distance and size, in much the same way the desert might deceive you, or a great expanse of snow.

  Out on the lake, a speedboat moved slowly toward the casino. The sound of the motor was distant, like that of a gnat drowning in the water.

  Dante went down the path, back the way he had come. On the way past Whitaker’s place he noticed one of the window screens was torn and the window itself s
at crooked in its track. The yardman across the street was still at his job. Dante gave the guy a nod and drove away.

  Before he’d left San Francisco, Dante had gotten some information on Whitaker’s expenditures these last weeks. The former VP and head engineer’s last withdrawal had been for six hundred bucks from a cash machine in the casino about twelve days back, not long before Angie disappeared. Whitaker had used his credit card once at the casino as well, at the Lookout Grill—and another time at a bar in Tahoe City. Then he’d used it again later that day at the rental dock. After that both accounts went dark.

  Dante drove around the lake to the casino. He’d gotten the location number of the ATM and it turned out to be in the card room, not far from the blackjack table. That made sense to Dante. Whitaker knew numbers, and blackjack was the kind of game you could get a system and do pretty well, if you knew how to hop tables and avoid moving your lips while you were counting.

  Dante showed Whitaker’s picture to casino security. Ordinarily security had no tolerance for private dicks, but Cicero knew the head guy, and the man let Dante talk to the table dealers. A couple of the dealers recognized Whitaker’s picture. He’d been playing the tables for years. Had a cabin down the road. Played in spurts, usually alone, a win-some, lose-some kind of player. The last time anybody had seen him was a few weeks back, playing with some young woman. Dante showed a few more pictures, one of Angie, the other of Whitaker’s ex-girlfriend that Cicero had lifted from Whitaker’s apartment when they’d been grilling Rose.

  The dealers couldn’t place either woman and sent Dante over to talk to a bartender named Leroy Pink. Pink worked the Lookout Grill, which was not a grill so much as a counter overlooking the casino floor, and he knew most of the regulars.

  “Oh, Bill Whitaker—yes,” said Pink. He was a man in his early sixties whose nose was of such a color that Dante wondered if this was where he’d gotten his surname.

  “Did he have anyone with him?”

  “Bill Whitaker always had someone with him. He’d drink, he’d hang out.”

  The story didn’t exactly match what the dealers had said. Dante showed Pink the pictures of Angie and Whitaker’s girl, same as he’d shown the others.

  “Neither of them,” he said. “Those two are blondes. And the woman he was with, she was no blonde.”

  Angie wasn’t a blonde, either, but Dante didn’t argue.

  “What color was her hair?”

  “Brunette,” he said.

  “What did she look like?”

  “Nice-looking. So what is this, you working for the wife?”

  Dante didn’t say anything. He just shrugged, as if maybe it were true—and let the guy think what he wanted.

  “I thought Bill Whitaker was already divorced.”

  “He is.”

  “Then?”

  “He’s missing. People are worried.”

  Pink pushed out his lip. “What day did you say this was?”

  Dante gave him the date and time. On account of the credit card, Pink was able to get pretty specific, down to the drinks they had ordered. A mai tai and a bourbon.

  “So, what do you remember of this girl Whitaker had with him? What did she look like?”

  “The blonde?”

  “I thought you said she was a brunette.”

  “She had a nice ass. I remember that.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “If she was with Bill, she had a nice ass.” Pink rested his hands on the bar. “You get to a certain age, a certain station in life, you don’t pay much attention to anything else.”

  Dante got back in his Honda. It was an unobtrusive car, not too clean, not too dirty, a straight-up Accord, a few years old, with nothing about it worth remembering. He appreciated the anonymity of the car and kept the radio off as he drove, his eyes on the highway, on the pullouts and the dirt roads, and on the cars behind him. It took Dante about forty-five minutes to get around to the other end of the lake, back to the California side, and locate a lounge where Whitaker had spent about fifteen dollars, according to the credit card company.

  Enough for two drinks, Dante figured.

  A mai tai and bourbon, as it turned out. He showed the pictures again but got nothing for his trouble. Then he walked over to the rental dock. It was across the highway, down in the cove.

  The owner was working the dock and he found the invoice pretty easily. Dante showed him the picture of Bill Whitaker.

  “Do you remember him?”

  “No, I remember the boat.” The owner shook his head. He looked at the receipt. The way the man looked, he could have been Leroy Pink all over again, except his nose had a few less veins. “It was two weeks ago, we had to retrieve the boat. Son of a bitch left it out in Rich’s Cove.”

  “What happened?”

  “The kind of thing that happens every once in a while. Somebody rents out a boat. They get shit-faced, or lost out on the lake, and they just leave it on the shore. Usually, they come back, they tell us. But sometimes they don’t bother.”

  This didn’t sound like Whitaker, at least not from what Dante had heard. Whitaker was a Tahoe hand, knew the lake. Unless, like the owner said, he was shit-faced. Or distracted by the girl.

  “So what do you do, a case like that?”

  “We charge the credit card.”

  “You don’t call the police?”

  “If every rental outfit called the cops every time someone ditched their rental material—I mean, that’s what the deposits are for.”

  “Do you know who he was with? Does it say on the invoice?”

  “No.”

  “Was he with a woman?”

  “You’ll have to ask Sal, the boat boy. He’s the one who helped them. But he’s not going to remember much. Unless the girl’s sixteen years old, he don’t pay attention.”

  “Where is Sal?”

  “Day off. He’ll be by tomorrow.”

  Dante stopped at a station and got directions to Rich’s Cove, just so he could get a look at where Whitaker had abandoned the boat. By the time Dante got there, the sun was going down. The lake was darkening and quiet, and just looking at the water, it didn’t tell him much. He thought of going back out to Whitaker’s place. It would be easy enough to break in, but it was night, and he figured he would raise less suspicion in broad daylight. He would be better off parking the car out front in the middle of the day, rather than fiddling around in the dark. By tomorrow, too, the yardman would likely have cleared out. So Dante drove back to the Nevada side and checked into a hotel. It was a midrange place, relatively subdued: a card room and some slots and a roulette wheel drawing modest action. His room was up top, and the neon sign crackled outside his window. He pulled the blinds and slept. Sometime after midnight he heard a ruckus out in the parking lot. The happy shrieks of some drunken winner, or maybe some loser, it was hard to tell. Either way the noise did not last long, and Dante fall asleep to the sound of the neon crackling in its glass.

  Dante headed back the next day to Whitaker’s place. The location had seemed remote yesterday, but today it seemed more ordinary. Whitaker’s cabin was in a cluster of similar cabins down a private drive, most of them built as second homes in the seventies, small places on odd-shaped lots that shared a rock beach with a view of the water. Dante parked out front. The yardman was gone and the street was empty.

  Dante rang the bell, not expecting anyone to answer, and no one did. He tried the front door, just in case, then walked around to the torn window screen. Someone had been here before him, maybe just Whitaker, of course—having locked himself out, then forced his way back in—but either way the damage was relatively recent. The window screen was torn, yes, but there was no sign of rust, and the slider was still bent in its frame. It was a simple matter to wiggle the latch and climb through.

  Whitaker kept a neat house, but it was a bachelor’s kind of neatness, with a veneer of dust. There was a book by the bed, and a pair of slacks folded over a chair in the bedroom, and some ot
her items here and there—like maybe he’d gone off unexpectedly. Otherwise the place was pretty much in order, and no doubt there were a hundred other cabins just like this around the lake, part-time residences with field mice in the walls and milk going bad in the refrigerator. Dante stepped outside onto the deck and looked across the water at the casino, same as he had the day before. It was the same scenery, just a different time of day.

  Then he heard a car pull up out front. It was a patrol car, and the cop nuzzled its bumper close up behind Dante’s Honda under the redwood tree.

  The cop spotted him.

  “Is this 419 Lakefront?”

  Dante nodded his head.

  The cop seemed at odds at what question to ask next.

  “Is this your house?” he said at last.

  “No,” said Dante. “I’m a private investigator.”

  Dante handed him his card.

  “What were you doing inside?”

  “Looking for a man named Bill Whitaker.” That part of it was true enough, but the next part, he stretched. “Alimony case. I’m working for the wife and she asked me to come up to the cabin here. Apparently he thinks it belongs to him.”

  “Well, I don’t think she’s going to be getting any alimony real soon.”

  “No?”

  The cop hesitated. Pursed his lips.

  “A couple of hours ago. We pulled him out of the lake.”

  It took a while for Dante to disentangle himself. From what he could tell, the cops were pretty much of the opinion that the death was just one of those things, guy gets drunk, slips off the boat.

  Whitaker had been in the water almost two weeks, apparently; but they’d identified him easily enough, from a license in an inside pocket. The cops hadn’t figured out yet that the boat had been a rental, or that there had been a woman with Whitaker on the boat. There was a chance, of course, they might not figure these things out at all. Even so, Dante beat it around to the other end of the lake to talk to Sal, the dock boy, to see if he could get a description before the police came knocking.

  Sal was a dopey kid, like the owner had said, but Sal remembered the missing boat and the couple that had rented it. Or so it seemed.