The music and drinkers at Dick's were already loud by the time McMichael walked up Fourth. Some kind of rock bluegrass, heavy on the electric fiddle. Up and down the Gaslamp streets, the restaurant hostesses were setting up their sidewalk easels and the busboys were arranging flatware on the tables outside while the dapper managers ignored them, crossed their arms and surveyed the evening.
He could see Raegan's neon sign from a block away: a cobalt blue cigar wafting tracers of pink smoke, and the pulsing orange word Libertad. He found Raegan arranging big-ring robustos in a wooden box as one of the cigar makers set them in his finishing bin. She was dressed for Friday night in a black double-breasted suit with a lacy white blouse under it. Her thick red hair was loose and, as always, her skin so pale and smooth it looked like she'd never spent an hour in the sun. She was thirty-three.
"Check this, Detective," she said, sliding one of the big cigars past his nose.
"Mmm. Smells illegal."
The cigar roller looked at him matter-of-factly.
"You can't buy a better cigar at anywhere near a hundred a box," said Raegan. "Thanks to this guy."
Enrique shrugged and went on to his next robusto. Behind him were three more rolling stations, already shut down for the day. The sound system was playing Cuban music and the lounge smelled of cured tobacco and cedar. There were already some smokers at the bar and the book nook and the magazine table, mostly downtown professionals winding down from the week. The televisions were turned to business and sports. McMichael looked at the big humidors and the glass doors of the private lounges- the Cuba Room, Teofilo's, Papa's Place.
"Can we talk?"
"Well, nice to see you too, flesh and blood."
"I saw Dad last night. He looks good."
She locked her knowing green eyes on him, then led the way to the Cuba Room. "I can tell when you've got something on your mind, Tom, because you make worthless conversation."
"It's the Pete thing," he said, holding open the heavy glass door for her.
"I heard it was the nurse," she said. "Then it wasn't."
"I ought to just let you and Dad handle this case."
"I couldn't watch the autopsies."
He took a seat on one of the low modern sofas, purple and chrome. Raegan took a swivel recliner and propped her feet up on the ottoman, which gave her a view through the glass doors and into the lounge. McMichael could see the rolling stations and the big common area and the smoke rising into the slow blades of the fans.
"What do you need?" she asked.
"The Tunaboat Foundation still having its Friday-night board meetings here?"
"A few of them get drunk and BS, if you call that a meeting. They've got this room booked from seven to nine, every Friday. Something about Pete?" she asked.
McMichael nodded. "I'd like to listen in. But I wanted to clear it with you."
"Stay cool. Anybody finds out, that would be bad for business."
"Nobody'll know."
McMichael smiled at his pretty little sister. She was a gregarious and street-smart woman who had taken to the nightlife at a young age, liberated by Gabriel's spotty attendance at home and their mother's trust. She'd taken some business classes at state, did an internship at one of the stock-brokerage offices, sold new Porsches, ran the advertising department of a radio station. Just when cigars got popular, she'd hatched the Libertad. She'd lucked into a good lease on a prime Gaslamp location, and called on a Cuban ex-boyfriend to gather up some cigar makers in Florida. She'd traveled the Caribbean and Central America in search of her filler and binder tobaccos, and relied upon the time-honored Connecticut shade leaves for wrappers. McMichael had always figured that she got some of Grandfather Franklin's jovial publican's genes. But, hopefully, not his business sense.
She had dangerous taste in men- in McMichael's judgment- fake hard guys who always tried to run the show, then got mad when they saw that she was smarter and less dependent than they were. He'd offered to introduce her to a decent young Fraud detective a couple of years ago, but she'd laughed at the idea of dating a cop. She said she saw enough of those at the Libertad, and forbade McMichael to bring any prospective suitors into her store. The Metro/Vice guys had liked Raegan's lounge, back when McMichael was working the unit. Even the chief and some of his people occasionally booked Papa's Place for some smoke, scotch and gossip. McMichael had realized the eavesdropping potential of the attic when he installed the ceiling fans.
"Pete liked your number-seven pyramids," he said. "I saw two boxes of them in his humidor at home."
Raegan's brow furrowed and her plump little lips went tight. "He must have come in on my day off, because I wouldn't have sold to him. I'd have kicked him out."
"Maybe he didn't come in at all," said McMichael. "Maybe they were a present. I was thinking I could look at your customer list."
"What's that going to tell you?"
"Friends, enemies."
"What, buy him a box of pyramids one day, bash him the next?"
"It's connections I'm looking for. That's all. Pete had his fingers in lots of things."
She gave him a doubtful Irish squint, shaking her head. "Why do I have to have a brother who's a cop? Why do I have to love him and sometimes even think he's pretty cool for a nosy gun-slinging detective?"
"I don't sling. I carry. And I owe you."
"You've owed me for a long time."
"Just name it, Rae."
"Don't go sincere on me. Look, I've got all the customers on disc- I use it for my mailings. You can go alphabetical or by date of purchase or name. I've even got cigar preferences and price points. Start with the pyramids- they're not my most popular shape. But remember, if they paid cash, there's no record except of the sale and the product."
"Maybe I could just tinker upstairs in the office while you get ready for your big Friday night."
"So, is the nurse pretty or what?"
"She's pretty."
"Tommy, your face!"
"She's pretty. So what?"
"Oh, my God."
"I haven't done anything completely foolish yet."
"But close to?" Raegan asked eagerly.
"Actually, yes."
"Oh, brother. I'm so happy for you. I was wondering when you'd finally get a life."
McMichael waited for the warmth to leave his face. "Do you have one?"
Her smile outlasted her shrug. "I met a nice guy last week. Local restaurateur. Very French. Very handsome, very mysterious."
"Sounds bad."
"He looks to be a little on the bad side," said Raegan. "But in a good way."
"Dad always told me I didn't have the brains I was born with," said McMichael.
"And I don't, either?"
"You don't, either."
"Come on. We'll see. He's a nice guy."
By seven o'clock McMichael was sitting on an overturned bucket in the dark attic over the Cuba Room. He had his head up close to the AC vent and it was not comfortable. But he'd pulled the duct loose from its ceiling fixture so the acoustics were surprisingly good as the voices came up through the grille at him. The San Diego Tunaboat Foundation guys wandered into the Cuba Room one and two at a time.
Deep Bass:So I just told the mayor, look, you owe me at least four Super Bowl seats- good ones- or I'm going to get you voted out next time around. He laughs and says what if I get you a booth, and I say you'll be mayor of America 's Finest City for as long as I live!
Nasal Wiseguy:So he gets another few months.
Deep Bass:Hey, my scan's clean, my PSA's way down and I'm good for another ten.
McMichael sat still in the cold, dark attic, chin in his hands, listening and looking down at his tape recorder. He figured his chances of getting anything useful were pretty poor, but the murder would be big news here. And the Tunaboat Foundation was now two million richer so it wouldn't hurt to know what they were saying about Pete. It was also Friday night so he didn't have anything better to do. He wondered if this was the life that Raegan had congratulated him on. It was easy to think about Sally Rainwater now, with the mindless chatter going on beneath him, and he was thankful again that last night hadn't blown up in his face. We might do some good. Then again, this may be the dumbest thing either of us has ever managed.
Below him, laughter erupted as one of the men likened his wife to a twelve-year-old with a credit card.
Nasal Wiseguy:Well, just cut her off, Mike.
Deep Bass:That's what she'll do to him.
Young Man:She did that as soon as he married her.
McMichael wondered if the cops who met here sounded as jocular and retarded as the Tunaboat Foundation, figured they probably did. Something about a roomful of men seemed to drop the collective IQ by about half. Then again, he'd listened in on Steffy and her friends enough to know that women did the same thing, just in a different way. Four women in a room meant four conversations. He thought of the bullet hole in Sally Rainwater's elegant neck and wondered what it would feel like under his finger. He tried to ID the brain thorn that he'd gotten aboard the Cabrillo Star with Patricia. Something about the garage, the twenty large, the rats…
He became aware of the silence in the Cuba Room, wondered if the men were passing something around to look at, or maybe just staring at the table, smoking, out of topics for conversation.
Dom, with the big voice, was the one who broke the silence.
Deep Bass (confidentially):I feel terrible about what happened to Pete. It made me think about who I am and how much time I've got left. You never know- eighty-four years of kicking butt then something like that. We didn't agree on hardly anything, but Pete was Pete.
Young Man:They'll catch whoever did it. Give him the injection, like he deserves.
Nasal Wiseguy:Fuckin' bash his brains out is what he deserves. I'd do it. I'd volunteer for that one.
Young Man:Me, too. I keep thinking about the way I fought the old guy on just about everything. You know? It makes you realize how short your life is, like Dom said. Spend all this time fighting over shit you think matters but really doesn't. I don't know.
Deep Bass:So he leaves us two million in property and we're going to vote for something he'd have fought us on.
Young Man:You gotta do what you think is right. It's time to sell the acres. Let the city have its new hotels for the ballpark, get some payback for financing the Padres. Two million? We could use two million. Pete would have agreed, sooner or later.
Deep Bass:But part of me still sides with him, you know? That's the last of our ground, last of what we used to be. That was ours since, what was it-'thirty-two or 'three? We can lobby the Congress and make trade deals all over the world, but it still isn't going to bring our fleet back home or make jobs around here. We still have thirty-one big beautiful super-seiners off of American Samoa. Fifteen-thousand-ton boats, most of 'em built right here. What a waste. So why give up the last of it? I can see Pete's thinking, I really can.
Young Man:Well, you know, Dom, we're a dying breed.
Deep Bass:But there's different kinds of dying, Teddy. You looked at Pete the last few months it was like he was eighteen again, falling in love. Damned nurse of all things. I'm thinking maybe Pete was younger than all of us, not older.
Young Man:Cryin' shame. Really. Raegan's brother got the case.
Deep Bass: Dance on old Pete's grave, probably.
Victor Braga tapped his foot and looked at McMichael blankly as the detective walked up to him at the Waterfront bar. He was alone at an outside table, wearing a pea coat against the January chill. Tall like his father had been, with thinning gray hair and a remarkably unlined complexion. His eyes were light brown and gentle. Earphone wires trailed down to a disc player that sat on the table beside a glass of what could have been anything from apple juice to scotch.
"I'm Detective Tom McMichael."
"I can't hear you."
McMichael pointed to his own ears. Victor lifted one of the speaker pads and said, "It's too loud."
"Then turn the music down."
"Okay."
Victor slipped off the headset and put it on the table, then concentrated on the player and punched a button.
"I'm Detective McMichael. I'm investigating the murder of your father."
Victor's eyes widened and his lips hung apart. "McMichael?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Holy crap."
"Can I sit down?"
"You're the one that beat me up?"
"My father, allegedly. But that was never proven, Victor. He says he didn't."
"Oh," said Victor good-naturedly, as if considering this possibility with hopefulness. "You can sit down if you want."
"What are you listening to?" McMichael asked, settling into a chair. He saw the bartender looking at him through the crowd, talking on the phone.
"Bing Crosby."
"I like the Raspberries."
"Me too, with chocolate."
McMichael smiled and nodded. "I'd like to ask you about your father."
"You're a policeman?"
"In charge of the case, yes."
Victor's eyes lowered and his brows sagged into heavy crescents and his chin trembled. "I hope they get the electric chair."
"So do I. You going to be okay, Victor? You have plenty of people to do the things you need?"
Victor wiped a tear with his fist, looked at the knuckle. He sighed. "Well, at the hotel they do all the laundry and make sure I'm okay. They get me on the bus to work and have somebody pick me up off the bus later. After work I've got free time. But I have to be in by midnight or they call Papa or Pat. They feed me and the food's really good. Pat and Gar come over and take me places like the movies or sometimes the zoo."
"Where do you work?"
"Papa owns a car place. A dealership for Fords. I wash the cars for him. You know, some of them. I make enough for the hotel and all the stuff I need. It's the Horton Grand. The best."
"How long have you been at the Grand, Victor?"
"I don't know. A long time."
McMichael wondered at the living arrangements. It was hard to imagine someone with the capacity of a ten-year-old- just three years older than Johnny- living on his own in a hotel.
The waitress brought Victor another scotch rocks and McMichael a shot of Anejo.
"Was your dad worried about anything?"
Victor stared at him. His gentle brown eyes gave away nothing now, and his chin was still. "I don't think so. He was happy."
"Got along with everyone?"
"No, he hated lots of people, too. Hated McMichaels. Hated Irish people. Hated people who didn't know anything about fishing. He hated the cops because they wouldn't let him drive his own car. I think he hated doctors and the government, but I'm not sure."
"Anyone in particular?"
Victor eyed him with undisguised suspicion. "Now, the one who beat me up was your papa, right?"
"Pete believed that."
"Then him. Papa hated him for sure. Gabriel. It happened right behind this building."
McMichael waited for Victor to fully comprehend that he was talking to the enemy, but no emotion registered in his light brown eyes.
"Maybe your papa killed him," Victor said optimistically.
"He was drinking that night at Spellacy's."
"Me too. But here."
"Anybody else your dad was mad at?"
"Me."
"How come?"
"It really made him mad when the cars weren't clean by nine."
"Nine in the morning, before the dealership opened?"
"Uh-huh. Especially the dark ones."
McMichael saw the tremble of his chin. Victor looked at him and McMichael waited for him to cut his embarrassed glance away, but Victor stared straight back as the tears ran down his face. He thought of Johnny and how a child could cry without shame.
"Nobody's perfect, Victor."
"Usually by nine-thirty I could do it."
Distract him, McMichael thought, ask him a question like he would ask Johnny after he'd fallen and scraped a knee. "Use a pressure hose or a regular one?"
"Just a regular one," said Victor. "With a good chamois. The chamois's the secret. But they only soak up water when they're wet, not when they're dry. You'd never think of that, but they do."
McMichael sipped his liquor while Victor sighed, wiped his eyes with his fist again, then took two gulps of scotch.
A Jaguar U-turned out front and double-parked. Garland Hansen bounded out, his white hair catching the streetlights and his coattails flapping as he rounded the coupe.
He cleared a gutter puddle in one long stride and bent over the low wall, grabbing the tabletop. "You loser," he said to McMichael. "What do you think you're doing?"
"This is Victor Braga," said McMichael. "We're talking."
"Come with me, Vic."
"Okay, Gar."
"Drink up."
"I am, I am."
"A city full of shitbags and you have to hassle Victor?" Hansen asked. His thumbs were tight on the rim of the table.
The bartender was looking their way again. "We had a drink, talked Fords," said McMichael.
"Maybe the chief would like to know how you spend your time."
"Tell him Victor had scotch and I had tequila. And don't even think about trying to toss this table."
Victor drank down his scotch, burped, then stood. He was taller than McMichael had thought, thicker, too. "Can we get some ice cream, Gar?"
"We'll talk about that in the car."
"Get him some ice cream," said McMichael.
"See you, Detective," said Victor.
"Take care of yourself, Victor. When I make an arrest, you'll be the first to know."
Hansen pushed away from the table with a strenuous Nordic smile and turned back toward his car.
Back home McMichael poured another tequila and called Sally Rainwater. She was up to her shoulders in a molecular biology text but glad to hear from him. She said the peptones were interesting. McMichael, sitting in the dark and looking out a window past the swaying palm fronds, pictured Pete's painting and the director's chair and the dinette where she studied. He told her a little about Kyle Zisch and Patricia and Victor, feeling just exactly how he'd felt whenever he talked to Steffy about work- vague and controlled and editing as he went. No wonder they lose interest, he thought. Who wouldn't?
"Patricia Hansen said she wasn't happy about Pete giving you those things. Said she made some threats," he said.
"We both knew she couldn't do anything. Pete liked me and she couldn't change that. She called me some ripe names, though."
"She's got a foul mouth sometimes."
"Pete said she was a fisherman trapped in a woman's body."
"Might be some truth to that."
"And he told me about this guy she started to like back when she was twelve. A McMichael. How this guy's father had beaten up Victor, ruined him. But Patricia didn't listen, didn't care. She liked this guy. So Pete and her father stashed her on one of Pete's big tuna boats and hired a tutor and kept her out at sea- off and on- for almost a year."
McMichael smiled at the memory. And at how Patricia had returned home, bigger, more beautiful, and pointedly uninterested in him. How he'd suffered and dreamed and died a thousand heroic deaths for her. How he'd known it was wrong but loved her anyway. How Gabriel had caught him trying to call her and beat him; caught him trying to mail her a letter and beat him again. Most of all, he smiled at the memory of Patricia circling back at him a few years later, hormonally charged and wildly vindictive toward her family. He'd thought it was love.
"When you came to Pete's house that night I didn't put it together," she said. "Until later. I wondered if you were that McMichael."
"I am."
"Nothing's simple as it seems, is it? Not even a damned peptone. So, did you and Patricia get back together when she came off the boat?"
"It took a while, but yeah."
"Then what happened?"
"She dumped me."
"Because of the family feud?"
"Just because I was me."
"You don't want a fisherman in drag anyway."
"I married a woman named Stephanie and I have a son, John Gabriel. He's seven."
"Then you're a lucky man."
"He's really something."
A pause then, while McMichael wondered what Johnny would make of Sally Rainwater. It was a year since the separation, only six months since the divorce. McMichael had never tried such a thing. Maybe there was a book about how to do it.
"I know you're not a walk-in clinic," he said. "But invite me over. Right now."
"No. I'm free tomorrow night."
McMichael decided quickly between Sally Rainwater and his son.
"Can't do that," he said. "How about lunch? It would be Johnny and me."
"There's a good place down here called Mario's, right on Seacoast. Great pizza. Noon okay?"