Vince Renzetti, John Pilgrim’s old partner, lived in a comfortable vest pocket of a neighborhood just north of San Jose’s small downtown. On the train down the Peninsula from San Francisco, I got eyefuls of the squat flat-roofed, glass-skinned office parks from which Silicon Valley rules the world. But the center of San Jose seemed like the prosperous farm town that it would have been decades ago, when canning prunes meant more than thinking up software. At the least, the architecture was more appealing: a charming Spanish colonial railroad station, where I transferred to the light rail line; a handful of interesting old hotels and office buildings, well restored; an imposing old cathedral, and a sign that pointed to Peralta Adobe Historic Park. That last one brought me back to the business at hand.
Renzetti had one of those “go to hell, telemarketer” devices on his phone, which required you to dial in your phone number in order to complete the call. When I did, he had no reason to know who was calling or why-so, not surprisingly, he didn’t pick up. So there I was on his street. The address went with a little gray Deco Moderne house, all Buck Rogers curves and streamlines, deep in the shade of hundred-year-old trees. It was about two blocks off the light rail line, and the walk felt fine in the warming morning air. I didn’t know whether I would like this town or not-I didn’t know the way to San Jose and had never been there before. But I liked the vistas, yellow-brown hills lifting up in the east, and in the west a brooding line of blue-green mountains. The map told me the ocean was on the other side. An airport must have been nearby, as a succession of jetliners, silver bellies close, swooped across the sky.
I walked up a narrow brick sidewalk. You never know what you’ll find when you go calling on retired cops. The stereotype of the lawman who puts down the badge and ends up putting a gun in his mouth has more than a little truth to it. Cop work is a consuming calling, and some cops lose too much of themselves in a world that can be very insular and destructive. Sounded like universities, when you thought about it. Of course, there were happier outcomes. Two of the retired cops on my street had taken up art, one working in metal and the other in woodworking. Hell, they seemed healthier minded than me on a good day.
Vince Renzetti’s mailbox told me I was probably dealing with a by-the-book guy. A prominent decal proclaimed “Retired Special Agents of the FBI-Gold Member.” On the door, a hand-lettered sign said, “In the garden, to your left.”
Sure enough, another narrow brick sidewalk took me to the west side of the house, through a gate, and into a walled-in side yard. I stepped into an outdoor room: walls and ceiling of limbs and vines, wainscoting and floor of stalks, ferns and flowers, a vault of deep green, with splashes of purples, reds, and yellows. I don’t know much about gardening, aside from enjoying Lindsey’s handiwork back home. But it seemed as if this side yard could pass for a small city’s prized botanical garden. The rows of plantings and sandy pathways had a military precision that was very different from the cultivated wildness of Lindsey’s garden. I heard a loud snipping noise behind an extravagant stand of irises.
“Agent Renzetti?” I said to the back of the man making the snipping noise.
“That’s me.” The voice didn’t go with an old man. It was a powerful baritone. The man stood, unfolded himself, and looked me over.
“You don’t look like the man who’s supposed to be delivering my dirt.”
I held up my badge and ID card and told him who I was.
The man who took my badge case certainly didn’t look in his nineties. He looked like one of those heroic comic characters come to life: muscular chest sprouting out of a tiny waistline, thick jaw, gray hair combed in a Brylcreem pompadour. Only his hands seemed old: mottled, bony, arthritic walnuts where the knuckles used to be. And where his upper arms disappeared into his T-shirt, pale crepey skin draped down. He was tall and stood with an officer’s bearing. His eyes were a strange yellow-green-was that called hazel? — and they didn’t like what they saw.
“Maricopa County?” the baritone boomed. He held his garden shears as if he might use them on me. “What’s your business here, deputy sheriff?”
“I’m investigating the John Pilgrim case.”
“John Pilgrim?”
“I understand he was your partner, when you worked in Phoenix in the 1940s.”
“That’s an FBI matter,” he said. His lips barely moved when he talked. It was more a gentle bobbing of the jutting square jaw. “I can’t talk to local law enforcement about that.”
He handed back the badge case and turned back to his work, the comic book hero body kneeling down to a flower bed.
“Agent Renzetti, we found his badge.”
He stopped, then the bony hands resumed their snipping, picking up each dead stalk as he worked. “What are you talking about?”
“The missing badge. We found it a few weeks ago, on a homeless man who had died. I was hoping you could give me some insight into what Agent Pilgrim was working on when he died.”
“How the hell did you find me?”
I told him about Pilgrim’s son.
He turned his head toward me. The eyes studied me with disinterested hostility.
“What’s your name again?”
I gave it to him.
“Badge number?”
“I’ve been working with the Phoenix FBI.”
“Then you won’t mind giving me your badge number.”
I gave it to him. I was wasting my time in this pleasant little neighborhood a long way from home.
The hero turned back to his flowerbed. He just let me stand there. I watched a hummingbird, just over his shoulder, levitate amid some yellow trumpet-shaped blossoms.
“Good day, deputy.”
“Let me give you my card, with the number where I’m staying in San Francisco.” I pulled a card out of my blazer pocket and dropped it on a nearby potting bench.
As I walked away, I heard, “Please don’t bother me again.”
When I got back to the hotel there was a message from Eric Pham. Please call. I thought about calling-maybe it was about Lindsey. But I knew it was about Renzetti, as in, what the hell was I doing? If there were trouble with Lindsey, Peralta would call. I could count on that, couldn’t I? I ignored the message and called Sharon Peralta. We agreed to meet for dinner.
We met at Tadich Grille, a walk down a hill from the hotel on busy city streets. After a long enough wait in the noisy bar for me to finish a martini and for Sharon to sip a cosmopolitan, we were shown to a secluded booth in the back. Sharon was turned out elegantly, as always, in a black pantsuit with a simple turquoise pendent dangling from her neck. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon. Those huge, lovely dark eyes looked as they had when she was twenty-five. I hadn’t seen her for months, since she began commuting to San Francisco.
“So how is Mike?” she wanted to know. It was an odd question coming from his wife of, what, twenty-nine years? But, as she had said before, I had been his partner on the streets, and partners sometimes knew more than spouses did.
I settled for, “OK, I guess.” I wasn’t going to engage in special pleading with the sheriff’s wife, even if we had known each other for what seemed like forever. I had known her when she was my partner’s shy young wife. But her gradual transformation hadn’t surprised me. From persisting in getting her degrees, to establishing her practice in Scottsdale, to her debut on radio and writing the self-help book that was to become her first best-seller-I’d like to say I always knew it would happen. Sharon had grit.
“I know it must be frustrating for you, not being with Lindsey,” she said, reading me pretty well, as always.
“I don’t understand his obsession with this case,” I said.
“He’s not comprehensible by us mere mortals, David. You know that. I’m still waiting for him to mourn his father’s death. Not Mr. Tough. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve put up with his moods for the past five years.”
“You wanted me to come home to Phoenix as much as he did,” I said.
“I know,” she said, her huge liquid black eyes studying me. “But I’ve come to hate Phoenix. They’ve ruined it, David. We natives remember when it was wonderful. But now Phoenix has all the problems of a big city, and none of the culture, none of the edge. The politics are insane. There’s no economy. The heat is worse and worse.”
“But it’s a dry heat…”
She grimaced. “Oh, God. No I had to leave, David. That’s one reason I’m here.”
“Here is nice.”
“I could see you here, David.” She gave a mischievous smile. “You’re cultivated and quirky. You are such a big-city person.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Your Little Miss Perfect would like it, too.”
“Lindsey,” I said.
“Mmmmm. OK, no cattiness, I know you’re worried. And I must admit she’s been good for you.”
We ordered, and I ate too much. Sharon told me how her old practice had dwindled in the years she was doing her radio show, so she felt free enough to work from San Francisco and commute to Phoenix twice a month. “I’m not sure, after twenty years of practice, that I was doing most of my patients any good,” she said. Here she could focus on her radio show-“I know it’s entertainment,” she said-and writing. She was teaching a class at San Francisco State.
Then she wanted to know more about me, and I told her about Dan Milton’s death and my own questions about whether I should go back to teaching, my growing discontent with my hometown.
“Maybe it’s my midlife crisis,” I said.
“You should go to Portland,” Sharon said. “You need to be around smart, stimulating people.”
I just listened.
“Do you still have panic attacks, David?”
I hunched deeper into my seat. It wasn’t something I was proud of, despite the New Age of nonjudgmentalism. I said, “Not so much now.”
“See, I told you Lindsey was good for you.” She patted my hand. “You’re a Renaissance man, David. One of the last. You needed to come back to Phoenix when you did-you found Lindsey there, didn’t you? Somehow you needed the adventure of the sheriff’s office. You’re a man of action and a man of the mind. A thinking woman’s deputy.” She laughed, her full crystal laugh that I realized I had missed. “But you were gone from Phoenix for years before you came back. You just outgrew Phoenix. I did, too, in my way. Whatever comes next will become clear soon enough. I’ve lived long enough to know every day is a gift. I’m damned if I’ll mortgage my happiness to the future a day longer. That’s another reason I’m here.”
“And what about the sheriff?” I ventured cautiously.
She shrugged and made a little face. “He’s got his dream,” she said quietly.
Unease descended over me. God knows they’d had trouble before. But Mike and Sharon had always been together. All my adult life, really. I started blathering about my case. Then the check came.
Outside, a misty rain had begun. I started to hail Sharon a cab, but she put a hand on my arm.
“David, you need to know.”
“I don’t, Sharon.”
“Yes, you do. I have someone here. Someone I’m in love with.” She studied my face. “Don’t hate me,” she said.
“You know I don’t,” I said. “I’m just listening. Does Mike…?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think he cares. He doesn’t want to be here. And he had a fling years ago. But this isn’t payback. I really want to be happy, David. Nobody knows this yet, but I’m going to end the radio show. Money isn’t an issue now. I just want to finally live my life. My daughters are here. And now I feel like I have a real shot at something good.”
Sharon’s black hair glistened in the misty rain, and I saw clearly how it was shot through with gray, how her face was now a scrimshaw of subtle wrinkles. We’d all gotten older together, me and Mike and Sharon. But the world was moving at a thousand miles a minute. I felt a wave of love and sadness. I pulled her into me and hugged her. She cleaved close to me, and I could feel her tears on my neck.
“Time to get you out of the rain,” I said, holding my arm up. In a few seconds, a yellow cab pulled over.
***
I buttoned up my trench coat and walked, happy to be surrounded by the tall buildings and the lights. The detached scholar in me absorbed Sharon’s news with equanimity, while the edgy David was thrilled. A few couples walked by covered by umbrellas. Men and women. Women and women. Men and men. Better to muse on the many wonderful varieties of love in a beautiful city. The windows of an art gallery shimmered in the night, well-dressed patrons inside laughing and drinking wine. The narrow, crowded streets of Chinatown beckoned on one side. The towers of the financial district rose above me. Sharon was right, I could see myself here.
I turned onto a darker sidestreet and heard voices singing. Singing well. They seemed weirdly out of place on a deserted sidewalk. I recognized the grand nineteenth-century hymn, written before modernity and doubt: “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A church hulked against the street, its stones black from age and soot. But a stained glass window was brilliantly lit, and it let out the voices of the choir practice inside. It took me a moment to realize that one of the voices was closer, coming from a darkened portal into the church. My eyes adjusted to a raggedy man standing against the sooty stones. He had a beautiful voice. “’Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all who breathe away,’” he sang to the street.
At his feet was an upturned hat. I pulled out a bill and dropped it in. I walked on slowly, letting the rain mend my desert skin, hearing the voices fade.
When I got to the lobby, the desk clerk handed me a message. It was from Vince Renzetti.