McMichael found Dom da Rocha in the American Tunaboat Foundation building on the waterfront. The short, stout da Rocha was locking up the file cabinet in a back office when McMichael knocked on the door frame.
"Can I help ya?" Da Rocha had thin black hair, jug ears, a wide nose and thick black-framed glasses. McMichael guessed mid-seventies. Same deep, clear voice he'd overheard so easily from the attic at Libertad.
"Detective Tom McMichael. I'm in charge of Pete's case."
"Ain't that ironic?"
"I need your help."
"I'm sick of this office."
"Let's walk."
"I don't walk so good anymore. I can still drink."
"Name your place."
McMichael followed him across the parking lot to the Seafood Market. Da Rocha walked with a limp, his belly larger below the belt than above, but he moved forward with a determined momentum. McMichael wondered what it would be like to feel the cost of every step. The old fisherman was breathing hard by the time they sat down in the restaurant bar.
Da Rocha got a double vodka rocks, McMichael got a shot of tequila and a beer.
"What are your leads?" asked da Rocha.
McMichael stuck to generalities: it probably wasn't a robbery, it looked planned out, it might have been someone familiar with Pete or at least his house, most likely one guy.
"What I'm interested in," said McMichael, "is who profited from it. Pete was wealthy. A lot of people are going to get a lot of stuff."
"Yeah," said da Rocha. "The foundation, we get about two million dollars' worth of fancy houses. But I don't think any of us did it, to tell you the truth."
"No?"
Da Rocha smiled like a man with a razor in his boot. The lines were deep in his dark, weather-beaten face. "We're like a family, the foundation. We argue and fight all the time and nobody agrees on nothing. But when it comes time to get something done, we manage to get along. With Pete gone, we'll vote to sell the land you're sitting on right now. Yeah, this place and the foundation office where you found me, and this little harbor- we own the ground. Got it cheap back in 'thirty-three. Now it's worth about five, maybe seven million. Pete, he was against selling it."
"Wrong price?"
"He said he wanted to drive the price up, but that was bullshit. What Pete wanted was to build a new cannery and bring the tuna fleet back to San Diego. Which is a really dumb idea."
"How come?"
"Because the things that ran us out of business haven't gotten any better. You bring the fleet back here and open a cannery where we're sitting, you'd have to charge ten bucks a can of albacore. Labor costs here? Out of sight. Marine Mammal Protection Act and the damned porpoises? Nobody else plays by that stupid rule. And every country with a coast has got a two-hundred-mile limit now- we can't fish where we used to, soldiers board our ships and run us out at gunpoint. Foreign competition? Damned Japs undersell everybody because their government subsidizes their fleet, and that's after we subsidized it after the war. Damned Spaniards run circles around us. You tried to go back into the tuna business in San Diego, you'd get crucified."
McMichael pictured Pete Braga, seated in his trophy room, surrounded by fortune and the artifacts of a life gone by, trying to hatch a way to bring it all back home.
"Did he really believe he could do it?"
"How do you know what a man really believes? Pete, he hired this nurse. You know, mostly just to cook, keep him company. Well, he fell in love with her. Don't ask me about any details because I don't know any. But the last six months or so, Pete's hopping around like a goat, out of his head for this girl. He believes he loves her, so he loves her. He believes he can bring a dead business back to San Diego, so he tries."
McMichael sipped his tequila and looked across the harbor toward Coronado. "The foundation didn't like Pete's stand on its land here. The other port commissioners didn't like him rolling over for the new Airport Authority. Pete was surrounded by unhappy associates."
"That's right," said da Rocha. "The Port Commission, though, that's a whole different level. We're small-time here. We're a bunch of old fishermen with a good lobbyist. We own a little ground, we think about the old days too much. But the Port Commission, they got the whole waterfront. Most powerful seven people in the city. They're the big-time landlord- they got the harbor, the airport, fourteen hotels, fifty-something restaurants and businesses. They got thirty-three miles of waterfront. Miles, Detective. Every time a dollar changes hands, they get five, six percent of it. Hotel rents a room, Port Commission gets paid. Restaurant sells a drink, Port Commission gets paid. Airport, rental cars, everything- Port Commission gets paid off the top. Millions of dollars, pouring in. They got a building up on Coast Highway, hardly any windows in it. The meetings ain't open to nobody. They make a deal, it's a secret, too. They want to do something, you find out about it after it's done. You make enemies on the Port Commission like Pete did, look out."
"And Pete wanted to give away control over Lindbergh," said McMichael.
Da Rocha smiled. "Pete never gave anything away in his life."
"What would he get out of it?"
"How would I know? He didn't talk to me about stuff like that. Us foundation guys, we were small-time to Pete. I think we just reminded him of who he used to be."
Da Rocha drank, frowned. "See, Pete kind of sold us out."
McMichael studied Dom da Rocha's sun-toughened face, saw the dreamy backwash of memory come into his eyes.
"Pete was a captain by the time the war broke out- only twenty-three years old, but he knew fish and he knew clippers. That was back when they were using bamboo poles and barbless hooks. The hard part was finding the fish. No sonar or spotter planes or anything like that. So you'd cruise the ocean for weeks or months sometimes, looking for birds or a bait-fish boil or the best was a log or a little piece of driftwood. Because on the driftwood there'd be a few little crabs, and just under the crabs would be some anchovies or sardines trying to eat them, and under the bait-fish you'd have a school of mackerel or smelt and under that you'd have the bonito and under them you'd have the skipjack and the tuna. It was like a big triangle reaching down into the water, with the driftwood being the point at the top and the big tuna way down at the bottom. You found a log, everybody started gearing up to hit the racks. You could chum through with live bait, get the mackerel hopping and the bonito working, get them into a real frenzy until the tuna came up, the whole bottom of the triangle, and they'd go crazy, hitting hooks with no bait on 'em. Pretty soon you got thirty-pounders coming up, then hundred-pounders. Then the cows would come screaming up out of the depths and you'd have three, four, maybe five guys on one pole with a swivel and you'd have to get a rhythm or you'd break them off, you'd lose them if you weren't working as a team. And you'd pole this three- or four-hundred-pound tuna fish out of the water and into the boat behind you. Just about break your back, and if the fish hit you it would break your arms and your ribs, maybe your skull. Young Danny Hudson got his brains scrambled forever by a three-hundred-pound fish, didn't duck in time. Those cows would jump into the sky and come screamin' past your head and I don't know if you've ever touched a live tuna fish but they're one of the hardest things God ever made, just pure muscle with something like electricity running through them, the scientists spent years trying to figure out what made a tuna fish the strongest living thing and they still don't know. They're like rocks with lightning running through them, they can do fifty miles an hour underwater, think about that a second, you ever get a chance to catch one you'll know exactly what I mean. And all the way down the boat, you got teams of guys down in the rack, hauling up tons and tons of big fish. Four, eight, ten hours straight. You had a good trip, your boat sat lower in the water. Took you forever to get home. There was nothing like it."
Da Rocha was breathing hard, but he smiled at the waitress who brought him his drinks. "How are you, Marilyn?"
"I'm good, Mr. da Rocha. How about you?"
"Old, fat, blind and crippled. But I answer to the name of Lucky."
"If I look as good as you at seventy-nine, I'm going to be a happy lady."
"Flattery." He laughed. "I love it."
"Guys want some dinner?"
"Bring me the usual," said da Rocha. "Bring him the usual, too."
Da Rocha watched her walk away. "I'd like to do it all over again."
McMichael couldn't think of anything to say to that.
"What I would try to do," said da Rocha, "is slow down and love more things. I only loved maybe a few things- fishing, Madeline, my kids and grandkids. But you look at all the things around you, I mean, look at this salt shaker…"
He touched the ordinary wooden shaker, then drank a slug of the fresh vodka. "The war hurt us. The navy needed our refrigerated boats to move food to the Pacific. Pretty much just took them- crews and all. When Italy declared war on us, the Italian boats all got grounded and the men weren't allowed to work, even on the waterfront. The Jap boats got confiscated, and the families got sent away to Manzanar. All the rest of us were moving supplies instead of fishing. Canneries didn't have nothing to can. Those guys with families didn't do so good. So after it was over, we were glad to be back to work. By 'forty-seven Pete was an owner-captain, three boats, good crews, making good money. But he saw things ahead of time, like smart people do. He saw that the purse seiners were going to catch more fish than the pole-and-line teams. He saw that the big boats were going to do away with the clippers and the owner-captains like him. Because one guy couldn't buy a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot super-seiner unless he had about twenty million bucks. It cost five-hundred grand just for the net. The net! And they had spotter planes and helicopters and electronics and gas freezers you wouldn't believe. One boat could carry two thousand tons of frozen tuna. Then, when the Santiago Declaration got signed in 'fifty-two- that kept us from fishing off of Chile and Central America – Pete figured that our whole industry was in trouble. That's when he started making his exit."
'Fifty-two, thought McMichael: Franklin 's fateful year. Pete seeing the writing on the wall and a thirty-three-year-old quarter-sharer demanding his money. "Fords?"
"That came later, but by 'fifty-three or 'four, Pete was getting out of fishing. He sold his clippers for shares in one of the seiners, but he put most of his money into land in San Diego. I found this all out later. He didn't tell nobody. Pete always had this secret side. He never told us what he was doing or said to us- hey, you guys better figure out a better way to make money, because this industry is going to collapse in the next twenty years. By the time the fleet was all super-seiners, we were the crews and we worked for shares, but it wasn't our business anymore. The owners, they didn't sail with you. You were just a hired hand. The catch got smaller. We had all those problems with the porpoise and the government. Everybody was canning cheaper than we were. We had to go farther and farther for less and less. Last San Diego cannery closed in 'eighty-four. By then, Pete was selling cars, getting his picture taken with politicians and baseball stars, all that."
The waitress brought the dinner: tuna steaks still red in the middle, mashed potatoes, a goofy-looking salad.
Da Rocha examined the fish, thoughtfully cut off a piece. "This ain't frozen. It's probably off a Mexican boat, maybe American. The fresh boat guys, they fly them to market in a helicopter. You get a good one- big and perfect meat- you can get big money from the Japs. The record is forty grand, last I heard. Forty grand for one fish. You could trade it straight across for a fuckin' Lexus. For sushi, you know?"
"I didn't know."
"Yeah, well, thank Dom da Rocha for opening your eyes."
"Thanks, Dom."
"How about some port after this?"
McMichael signaled for Marilyn. "Do you think Pete wanting to bring back the fishing was his way of setting things straight with you guys? Even though it would never work?"
"Part of it. The other part was, he just missed the old days. Like everybody. Maybe when he fell in love with the nurse he started thinking he was young again. Love makes you dumb. You know how it is. Hell, maybe you don't."
After dinner the waitress brought the glasses of port. McMichael drank the sweet wine, thought it hit the spot after rare tuna and tequila and beer. He felt relaxed but alert. "Who on the Port Commission was lined up against Pete?"
"Beats me. I don't even know who's on it. Down here on the waterfront, they call the Port Commission the Brotherhood. Imagine that. A goddamned Brotherhood of politicians and businessmen and scammers all working together like Santa's elves. I just know they were pissed at Pete. From the newspapers and TV."
"Pissed enough to have him killed?"
Da Rocha shrugged. "Why not? You get to be my age you realize that everything's true."
"Except the stuff that isn't."
Da Rocha shrugged. "Things have a way of changing around."
When he had finished his port, Da Rocha stared at McMichael through his thick glasses.
"I was on the Cabrillo Star back in 'fifty-two with Frank McMichael," said da Rocha. "We'd gone to nets on the Star by then- good, strong nylons ones, but hard to handle and expensive. This was before the Puretic Power Block to haul ' em in. It was a lousy trip. So we blamed it on the new guy- Franklin. Fishermen are like that, superstitious and always looking to blame somebody. He was nice enough. He was friendly to a point, quick with a story or a joke. And not bad for a quarter-sharer- he worked hard. But you get on a trip like that, three or four months out, hardly any fish, you're burning up fuel and patience every hour, it gets bad. Like there's a black cloud hanging over you, and you can't find fish. Then you finally do and every set you make turns to shit and you finally get desperate and make too big a set and you can't get the fish in fast enough to keep them from gettin' crushed in the net so you end up with a fifty-percent loss, maybe higher. We had some crew fights. Pete, he stayed up in his quarters, we hardly saw him. He was probably thinking of ways to get out of the business. Like I should have been. I remember seeing Frank at the Waterfront the night we came in, already drunk and complaining about not getting paid any. Pete should have paid him something. I mean, he didn't have to. What he did was standard procedure, you don't pay the quarter share on a bad trip, you take the gas and food out of it and subtract that from the share and guess what? On a bad trip the quarter shares don't get a thing. But we all knew Frank was hurting. He had the pub that went under and the family and even a full quarter share isn't much for a guy with debts and a family. Pete could have helped him. He didn't have to make him beg. I don't know what happened later that night on the boat, but it was too damned bad. Pete, man, I didn't see Pete for weeks after that. Nobody did. He sent out the Star with another captain, late November. The word was, he just stayed in his room and stared out the window. Then Victor got beaten up behind the bar. Pete loved Victor more than anything. More than money, more than his wife. The boy was only thirteen, big and strong and smart. Doctors said ruined forever, wouldn't develop right. So Pete went kind of sideways after that. I mean actually sideways. His mouth wasn't the same and one ear- I swear to God- it got lower somehow."
McMichael looked into the deep red depths of his port.
"I'm not sayin' Gabriel did it," said da Rocha. "But whoever did, really got Pete where it hurt."
"No," said McMichael. "He says he didn't and I believe him."
"Yeah. Everything's true. Another glass of port?"
"Enough for me."
McMichael paid, then headed up Harbor toward the Santa Fe station and easy taxis. The wind came off the water with a smell that he had always loved. He ducked into one of the harbor cafes and called Sally Rainwater.
"I just wanted to say hello."
"Come over."
She let him inside, took his face in both hands and kissed him. He could smell perfume and see the top of her ear and the darker roots of her hair and the black shoulder of a satin robe, blurred, and beyond them the dinette and the Chinese vase and an open textbook. Her bedroom was cool. She turned off the little Tiffany lamp and in the near dark he watched her arms spread and her robe fall and her body curl then lengthen into the bed. He undressed without a wasted motion, wondering what she would think of him in the light, and how he'd do. Didn't feel his knuckles and elbows. He thought of Johnny and Stephanie, hoped they'd understand. The sheets smelled of laundry soap. Her arms were strong around his neck as she levered him up top, her feet startlingly cold against his. He kissed her mouth and her neck and the bullet hole. She shivered. He entered her and pushed himself up to see her face. All he could really make out was the glimmer in her dark eyes, and the plane of her jawline where it caught the faint light from the living room. She set up a rhythm and he followed, concentrating first on Sally Rainwater's mysterious wet universe, then on the Puretic Power Block, then the Super Bowl coming up, then he squeezed the end of his tongue between his teeth. Sally got a foil square into his palm. A while later, drenched in the unpleasant but affirming smell of latex, he quaked home a chaos of hope and thanks and pure animal pleasure. He barked once. Sally was shaking when he was done so he held still but firmly in place, propping up on his elbows so she could breathe and shake all she wanted. After that, wrapped close together, he listened as her breathing slowed. Nearly the same rate as his own. He thought that he could do this, be right here, a million times, and it would always be a journey into a world that wasn't there until they made it.
Half an hour later McMichael's phone rang. We're up next, he thought. He unclipped the cell from his pants, covered himself with them and sat down naked on the bed. How many times had he done pretty much exactly this?
It was the lieutenant, to say that Team Two had just taken a Clairemont strip-club shooting, so McMichael's people were next on the rotation.
"Someone shot the bouncer dead in the parking lot," the lieutenant said.
"Didn't the same thing happen two years ago?"
"Same club, different bouncer. Just a heads-up, Tom. I'll make the calls- probably catch Hector in bed with his latest meaningful relationship."
"Yeah," said McMichael. "Thank you, sir."
He hung up and told Sally.
"Same as being a doctor," she said. "At least you never have a chance to get bored."
"True, though some things are hard to interrupt."
"We already got away with one."
"Press our luck?"
She rolled over and sat up and ran her tongue down his spine. Reached both arms around him and brushed away his pants.
McMichael listened to the waves breaking and the wind rattling through the louvered windows of Sally's little house. He ran a finger through the hair above her temple.
"Who did it?" she asked.
"I don't know yet."
"Do you know why?"
"I think it had to do with money, but not the kind of money you find in someone's wallet or safe."
"Did they poison Zeke?"
"I don't know that, either."
McMichael told her about Pete's disagreement with the Tuna Foundation board over their five acres of waterfront. And about the struggle between the Port Commission and the Airport Authority, and the tremendous amounts of money and influence that Pete Braga had been dealing with for four decades.
"According to Pete, he only had one friend left on that Port Commission," she said. "The young one, the real estate developer- Malcolm Case. He came to the house maybe four times. Good-looking, great clothes. He flirted with me when his wife was out of earshot, propositioned me once when a bunch of us went for a sail around the bay. The last time I saw him was New Year's Eve, at the party."
McMichael's brain skipped like a flat rock on water, from the trophy room to the sconce to the security video. "Have you met the casino manager?"
"That's Alex Dejano, a Rio Verde Indian. He beat a man to death in a bar and has no sense of humor. Now he's a Christian. I remember him at the party- late, after midnight- giving Zeke shrimp and mushrooms off his plate."
McMichael made mental notes to watch the surveillance video again, and to talk to both Case and Dejano. Maybe Case, an alleged friend, could name Pete's alleged enemies.
"I have to ask you, Sally."
"What your partner asked me that night?"
"I want to know."
"It wasn't your business then, but I guess it is now. No. We didn't sleep together."
"How was Pete with that?"
"Unhappy at first, then okay with it. The subject came up just once. He had a girlfriend anyway- a professional girlfriend."
"She'd come to his place?"
"Yes. They'd go upstairs for a few hours, then she'd leave and he'd sleep."
"Describe her."
"She used the name Angel. Probably twenty-one or -two, Latina. Attractive in a whore's way- heavy makeup, naughty smile, hard eyes. I could throw her farther than I would trust her. I think she was smacked up most of the time. Pretty sad, it comes to that for a twenty-one-year-old."
"Victor ever come by his father's house when Angel was there?"
"Months ago. He thought Angel actually was an angel."
Victor gets a crush on Dad's girl, thought McMichael. Motive to moon after her? Motive to murder Dad?
"When was the last time you saw Angel?"
Sally was quiet for a while. "The Friday before New Year's Day. Red leather miniskirt and a faux fur coat. Let me get my calendar."
She slipped from under the covers and wrapped the Chinese robe around herself. He watched her vanish down the short hallway, then come back a minute later with a brown leather planner in one hand. Her hair was a mess and her lipstick and makeup had rubbed off and McMichael thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and he couldn't believe the good fortune that had come of bad fortune, the luck that had brought him here.
"December twenty-seven," she said.
He looked down at Sally Rainwater's calendar and her small, neat printing. Then he told her about Victor Braga and the three solicitations and Jimmy Thigpen's story about trying to help him out.
"Jimmy Thigpen had been there with her before," said Sally. "He said his name was Rex, but I recognized him from the papers when he got busted."
Pete and Jimmy socializing, thought McMichael, if that's what you'd call lining up a girl. "What if Angel wasn't available?"
"A girl who called herself Penny came a couple of times. Wore a copper-colored wig- Penny, get it?"
McMichael remembered Penny from Metro/Vice the same way he remembered Angel- young and hard and somehow cheated, and working themselves into early graves.
"How many times did you see Jimmy at Pete's?" he asked.
"Three or four. The last time was the night before he got busted- back in early December. Pete and the cop had a loud argument in the trophy room. Lots of yelling. I'm sorry- I couldn't make out anything they said. It was a closed-door session. I was trying to read a molecular biology text."
Moonlighting for Pete, thought McMichael. New cars, cheap leather, runs across the border and back.
Now, trying for balance, McMichael hopped to the nearest rock visible in this dark fast river. "Did you see other cops at Pete's? Or hear him talk about any?"
Sally threw an arm over him and rested her head on his chest. "Jerry somebody. On the phone. I got the impression that Pete was asking Jerry for help. Later, Pete said the guy was a good friend but a lousy cop."
"Pete ever mention business in Tijuana?"
"No."
McMichael listened to the wind again, felt the heaviness of Sally Rainwater's head.
"Your witness is going fuzzy," she said. "Maybe you could turn the interrogation lights back on in the morning."
"Sure."
She took a deep breath and let it out. He could feel the warmth of it on his skin.
"I've dreamed about it every night," she said quietly. "I walk into the trophy room with two bundles of firewood and see him in that chair. And always, in the dream, the blood on the floor is moving and boiling, like there are little fish in it. And Pete looks at me. And you know what he says?"
"Tell me."
"This is your fault."
"And what do you say back?"
"I don't say anything. I just walk past the blood boiling with little fish and I kneel down in front of the fireplace and I try to build a fire but it won't start."
"You tried to save his life."
"I think the dream is telling me there was nothing I could do."
"It wasn't your fault."
"But what if it was? Just a minute sooner home. A green light on Rosecrans instead of a red- five miles per hour might have made the difference. If I'd have used the less-than-ten-items line at the market, but this checker told me once never to use those if they've got more than-"
"It wasn't your fault, Sally."
"More than four customers because that takes longer than just one person with a whole cart full of things because that's only one trans-"
"No. You see, it wasn't your fault. You tried to save his life."
"He was my friend. He was my responsibility. They hired me to take care of him, not let him get murdered."
"You did what you could."
"Once, when I was hardly more than a girl, a man died and I could have prevented it."
McMichael felt her heart beating against his chest. "Tell me about it."
"Not now."
"Some other time, then."
"That would be up to me."
He felt the warm pool of tears on his skin, then the cool slap of air as she threw back the covers, walked into the bathroom and slammed the door.