Black River (14 page)

Friday, October 20

5:54 p.m.

S
he
was right where he expected to find her. Leaning back in a booth at
Vito’s, a half-empty martini glass on the table in front of her.
On the jukebox, Otis Redding was working his way through
“I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”

Corso stood in the doorway until his eyes adjusted to
the deep-space dark. Half a dozen regulars held down the bar stools.
Renee Rogers had the booths to herself.

He got all the way to the table before she looked up
and made eye contact.

“Well, well,” she said. “I guess
I’m going to have to work on being less predictable.” She
gestured with her hand for Corso to take a seat.

“Good thing Elkins didn’t want to
cross-examine,” he said.

“Mercifully.” She raised her glass in a
toast, took a sip of the clear liquid.

“Klein’s on a roll in there.”

Her eyes were suddenly serious. “It’s too
damn easy,” she said.

“How’s that?”

She thought it over. “It’s hard to
describe,” she said finally. “You do this for as long as I
have and you get a feel for the pace of a trial. The ebb and flow. A
trial falls into a rhythm, like a song.”

“And?”

She waved a hand and looked at the ceiling.
“Something’s not right. Raymond can feel it too. It’s
hard to describe. The timing is off. It’s like we’re
rolling downhill with no brakes.” She looked over at Corso and
made a face. “It’s a lawyer thing.”

“You shared this with Klein?”

She snorted. “Both Ray and I tried, but Warren
doesn’t want to hear about it. He’s convinced his case is
so airtight that Elkins’s finally giving up the ghost and facing
the inevitable.”

“Last time I saw the evidence connecting Balagula
to the construction companies, it seemed pretty thin to me.”

“It still is. It’s the weak link in the
case. Balagula did a great job of insulating himself from their
businesses. No matter how you look at it, the construction trail always
leads back to Harmon and Swanson.”

“The two guys they found floating in San Pablo
Bay.”

“And the only two people on earth who could tie
Balagula directly to the contractors.” She took another small sip
from her drink. “You were at the second trial. Elkins objected
to every chart, every graph, and every witness I put up there. He had
citations for every instance and objection.”

“I remember.”

“Today, he’s Mr. Rogers. He gets up just
often enough to look like he’s doing something. Last time out, it
took us two weeks to get through what we got through today in two
hours. He’s going through the motions. I don’t get
it.”

“Maybe Klein’s right. Maybe he has got
Balagula by the balls.”

She gave a grudging nod. “Maybe,” she said.
“If we can prove that Balagula and Ivanov arranged for the fake
inspections and the fabricated core tests, then by extension we prove
they must have had some interest in the companies involved; otherwise
there’d be no reason for them to be going to all that trouble and
taking all that risk.”

“And this Lebow guy is gonna make the
connection?”

“He says he was present when it was discussed.
That both Ivanov and Balagula were in the room at the time and that
Balagula gave the order.”

“That ought to do it,” Corso said.

Renee Rogers massaged the bridge of her nose several
times and then waved her hand disgustedly. “Enough
already,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m
obsessing over it. Either way, I’m out of here when the
trial’s over.”

The bartender wandered over. Corso asked for ice water.
Rogers covered her glass with her hand and shook her head. “What
about you?” she asked. “How’s your friend
doing?”

“The same.”

“You making any progress?” She ran her
finger around the rim of the martini glass, as he told her about what
he’d learned. “Sex and money,” she said, when
he’d finished. “The deadly duo.”

“None of it gets me any closer to finding out
what came down.”

“You sound like I feel,” she said.

They sat in silence for a moment. The ice water
appeared. Corso downed half of it.

“Where’s that market where they throw the
fish around?” she asked. “The one they always show on
TV.”

“First and Pike. Four blocks west and six blocks
north. Why?”

“Since I’m off for the weekend, I thought I
might do a little sightseeing. I spent four months here last summer
and never saw anything except the hotel, the bar, and the
courthouse.”

She watched as Corso took another sip of water and then
sat back in his chair. Her eyes sparkled.

“You’re not very quick on the uptake, Mr.
Corso.”

His face was blank. “How’s that?”

“This is the point in the conversation where
you’re supposed to go all gallant and offer to show me around
town.”

“I know,” he said, with a chuckle.

“If you’re not careful, you’re going
to have me worrying that I’ve lost my charm. I could get a
complex or something.”

He laughed again. “Your charms are
intact.”

“Well, then?”

“I’m not much on the tourist
traps.”

“Then show me something else. Something only the
locals get to see. Something known only to one of the city’s true
chroniclers such as yourself.”

Corso thought it over. “You bring a pair of jeans
and some real shoes?”

She looked down at her feet and then back up at Corso.
“Yes, why?”

Corso threw a five-dollar bill on the table and stood
up . “Come on,” he said.

“I’ll need an hour,” she said, as she
gathered her things.

He looked as if she were standing on his foot.

“You don’t spend a lot of time with women,
do you?”

Friday, October 20

7:32 p.m.

C
orso poked his head out the pilothouse
window. “Okay, now the stern line!” he shouted. Renee
Rogers freed the line from the cleat and looked up at Corso through a
cloud of diesel fumes. “Just bring it with you,” he said,
not wanting to risk her throwing the line on deck. If she missed, it
would end up in the water, uncomfortably close to the props.

She came down the dock and then up the stainless-steel
stairs to the deck. Corso opened the starboard door and pulled her
inside as he backed the boat out of the slip. A fender groaned as the
big boat rolled it along the dock. Corso dropped the engines to idle,
reversed the transmissions, gave the starboard engine a little diesel,
and swung the bow out into the channel.

Renee Rogers climbed the three steps into the
pilot-house. “This was not
quite
what
I had in mind,” she said.

“You said you wanted to see something only the
locals get to see.” Corso held the wheel straight and let the bow
thruster push the nose out into Lake Union. “Hold the
wheel,” he said.

“But I’ve nev—”

He hooked her with an arm and moved her behind the
wheel. Instinctively, she grabbed the big teak wheel with both
hands.

“Just aim at the other side of the lake and
don’t hit anything,” he said.

It took him less than five minutes to stow the stairs,
clean up the lines, and get the fenders back aboard. He swung the
hinged section of rail back into place and stepped into the galley.
Renee Rogers looked down from the pilothouse. “This is really
something,” she said. “I had no idea this huge lake was
right in the middle of the city.”

Corso stowed his coat in the forward shower. He climbed
into the pilothouse, slipped behind Renee Rogers, and settled into the
mate’s chair.

The lake was a choppy green field, foamy and frantic,
falling all over itself from a dozen directions.
Saltheart
bobbed slightly in the chop. Without
warning, a deepening roar began to fill the cabin. A Lake Union Air
Service seaplane buzzed over, not more than forty feet above the deck.
“Wow,” Rogers said softly, as she watched the
yellow-and-white De Havilland Beaver descend. Five hundred feet ahead,
the pontoons cut silver slices in the dark water. They watched as the
water pulled the plane to a halt and the pilot swung the plane on its
axis, until the whirling propeller was pointed back their way.

Above the taxiing plane, the city stood tall and
twinkling, the buildings shadowed by a black sky, glowing purple at the
edges.

Corso closed his eyes and allowed the water to pull the
weight from his shoulders, let the movement of the boat and the deep
rumble of the diesels loosen the grime of the day. And then he seemed
to swim downward in the thick green water, with the hum of the engines
in his ears and the taste of the water on his lips.

“Hey,” Rogers said. He opened his eyes.
They were coming up to the south end of the lake. The Wooden Boat
Museum loomed ahead.

“What now?” she wanted to know.

“Go around the red buoy,” he said,
pointing.

She gave the buoy a wide berth as she brought the boat
about. Corso reached over and eased the throttle forward. Eight hundred
rpms. About five knots across the surface.

“My father had a boat,” she said,
“when I was a kid.”

“What kind?”

“A ChrisCraft.” She waved a hand around.
“Not a palace like this. Just a little boat he and my Uncle
George used to go fishing in. Maybe twenty feet.”

“What’d your father do?”

“He was a county sheriff.”

“Where?”

“Anderson County, Virginia.”

“Where’s that?”

“Way down in the southern part of the state.
Almost in North Carolina.”

“Still alive?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “He died back in
’ninety-one.” She flicked a glance in his direction.
“Yours?”

He offered a wan smile. “Mine was a regular guest
of the county sheriff.”

“Still alive?”

He shook his head. “His liver gave out at
forty.”

“A pity.”

“We didn’t think so,” he said.

To starboard, the shoreline was awash with houseboats.
Once cozy weekend retreats, they were now gussied up into
million-dollar barges for the army of cellular-software-dot-com
millionaires who swarmed the city like portfolioed roaches.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I told you: to see something only seen by the
locals.”

“You’re not going to tell me, are
you?”

“No.”

“That’s very childish.”

“I know.”

She feigned annoyance, frowning and looking out the
windows into the bright moonlight, swiveling her head in an arc to take
it all in, until the frown disappeared and she said, “Look at
all these boats. Does everybody in this city own a boat?”

“Sometimes you’d think so,” Corso
said. “They say we’ve got more boats per capita than any
other place in the country.”

Corso played tour guide as they motored under the
freeway bridge into the west end of Portage Bay, past the University of
Washington and the Seattle Yacht Club and into the Montlake Cut, past
the massive steel chevrons of Husky Stadium and out into Union Bay,
where Corso reached over and pushed the throttles forward to fifteen
hundred rpms and a stately twelve knots. “Moon’s gonna be
just right,” he said.

For five minutes, they ran parallel to the 520 bridge,
where the headlights of the traffic formed a solid line of amber that
seemed to slide around the floating bridge’s elegant curves like
an android snake.

At the far end of the bridge, Corso finally took the
helm, motoring
Saltheart
under the east
high-rise and into the south end of Lake Washington. Ahead in the
gloom, Mercer Island floated low on the shimmering water.

Corso cut back on the throttles and angled closer to
shore. He checked his course and then set the autopilot. “Come
on. Let’s go down on deck. We can see it better from
there.”

The eastern shoreline was littered with million-dollar
mansions: sterile steel and glass monoliths, neoantebellum Greek
Revival Taras, fifties Ramblers, and Tudor reproductions all huddled
cheek-by-jowl along the narrow bank. Corso pulled open the port door
and followed Renee Rogers out on deck. He pointed to a break in lights
that lined the shore. “There,” he said. “You can only
see it from the lake, and only this time of year, when the leaves are
off the trees.”

Renee Rogers leaned on the rail and squinted out
through the gloom. At first it looked like a park. Then maybe a trendy
waterfront shopping center. Very Northwest. Lots of environmentally
conscious exposed rock and wood, meandering its way up and down the
cliff and along the bank for the better part of an eighth of a
mile.

She traced the outline with her finger. “Is that
all one—”

“Yeah, it’s all one house,” Corso
answered.

“Who—”

“Bill Gates,” Corso said. “Forty-five
thousand square feet. Somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred and ten
million dollars.”

“No kidding.”

“You get a little preprogrammed electronic badge.
As you walk around the house, it adjusts everything to your liking.
The temperature, the lights, even the electronic art on the
walls.”

“Wonder what it’s like to live in something
like that.”

“When he married Melinda, she said it was like
living in a convention center. She hired a team of decorators to make
parts of it into something more livable.”

“Funny how it’s all relative,” she
said. “An hour ago, I thought your boat was decadent.
Now”—she gestured toward the shore—“it seems
like a rowboat.”

“You think owning a house like that would change
your life?”

She looked at him like he was crazy. “What do you
mean?”

“Sometimes I cruise by here and wonder whether
having all that would really make any long-term difference in my
life.”

“About a hundred-million-dollar
difference,” she scoffed.

“Over and above the money.”

“There’s no such thing as over and above
the money.”