The Ancient Rain (23 page)

The death certificate, however, suggested that Mr. Johnson wouldn't be testifying anytime soon. Died April 20, 2002. Cardiac arrest. Unmarried. Sixty-eight years old. Identify verified by an estranged son.

Dante phoned the son and discovered the dead man had a common-law wife, going by the name of Cynthia Johnson. According to the son, Cynthia had taken up residence at Hamilton Care Center in the South Bay: a state-funded holding place for the terminally ill.

But Cynthia Johnson was no longer in residence there, either.

Some weeks before, she'd been moved all of a sudden to a much better facility in San Francisco. So at the end of the day, Dante found himself standing in front of the receptionist's desk at the acute care facility in La Honda.

“Whom may I say is visiting?”

“Dean Johnson,” he lied. “I'm her stepson.”

The receptionist buzzed Mrs. Johnson to make sure it was all right, then directed him down the hall.

“But don't keep her up too late. She has chemo in the morning.”

*   *   *

The hallway was long and wide, freshly papered, with handrails for the infirm and small alcoves that looked out toward Lake Merced, here on the gray side of the city, with the ocean just beyond those row houses on the other side of the trees. The place was a notch or two above the place where Dante's own mother had spent her final days, but he did not want to think about that. When he rang the door, no one answered. So he tried the handle.

It was a small apartment, a hospital efficiency, and he found the woman on the balcony, along with her oxygen tank. The evening fog had come in off the ocean and was settling over the lake, bringing a chill with it. The woman had a blanket draped about her shoulders and across her chest but showed no inclination of wanting to move.

“You're not Dean,” she said.

Her voice was hoarse and scratchy—a strained whisper forced up through what remained of her voice box.

“No, I'm not.”

“I didn't think he would come,” she said. “We weren't close.”

“The prosecution—they didn't make it easy to find you.”

“Yes. The prosecution. I don't care for them. I don't much care for your side, either.”

“I can understand that.”

“My voice.”

“It's not so bad.”

“It's hideous.

Dante had done his research and he knew Cynthia Nakamura had grown up in one of the garden houses along the Filbert Steps. Her parents had retired to the place down in Aptos, but the house on Filbert had remained hers for quite some time—a lush area, hidden on the west side of the cliff next to the concrete stairs, where parrots scurried helter-skelter among the trees and people left their screen doors open and drank wine on the steps. Or that's how it had been back then. Some time after the robbery, she'd sold it and moved away. Now her hair was gone from the chemo, but Dante had seen photos of her as a child. She had been small and delicate even then, a Japanese girl with skin the color of sand and eyes like glass. In the picture of her alongside Bob Kaufman, her hair had been long and black, and she stood leaning against him, a cigarette at the end of her nervous hand.

“Kaufman, he knew Sanford?”

“He wrote about him,” she said.

In a halting voice—hard to understand, bits and fragments—she told him more or less the same thing he'd heard from Owens. How the police had raided the place on Filbert and arrested Kaufman, confusing him with Sanford because they were both African American. There'd been rumors of a correspondence.

Did they know each other?”

“Bob corresponded with a lot of people.” She grimaced as she spoke. The muscles at her neck tightened, but eventually the words forced themselves through. “Those he didn't know … he talked to in his dreams. Nixon … Chairman Mao … Rimbaud … He talked to all of them. But if he met any of them, it wasn't in my presence.”

She laughed, and a wheezing sound came back up her throat. Inside the apartment the phone rang, or something like the phone but with a higher pitch, a sharper nag. “The steward,” she said. “He will be coming to tuck me in. There are people who don't want me to die.”

“That day,” said Dante. “In Aptos…”

Dante paused. This was the core of it, he knew. That day, twenty-seven years ago.

“I lied.”

“The alibi?”

She looked suddenly exhausted. “It was a lie.”

“Why?”

“I was a believer.”

“And now?”

“My cancer has metastasized.”

Dante thought of the figure this woman would cut in the courtroom, retracting her statement of long ago. Nakamura was in her midsixties, but looked yet older, unwell. The defense would not look good going after her on the stand—such a sick woman. “The prosecution—you've done a deposition?”

She stared at him blankly, a distracted expression that would be easy to attribute to her condition. Except he'd seen the same distracted look in the photo from long ago.

“Maybe I thought there was a greater truth. Back then, when I was young. Or maybe I was just following the crowd. But now…” She paused. Her head wobbled and she closed her eyes. “I don't want to do this, either way … I don't know what the fuck happened…”

“So Owens and the others, they weren't in Aptos the day of the robbery?”

“Only Rachel.”

“Excuse me?”

“His ex-wife. Sobbing night and day. She'd come a few days before. She wanted out. Bill was sleeping with one of the others.”

“Who?”

She shook her head. “Rachel was supposed to drive getaway but she wouldn't do it.”

“Who drove?”

The woman's eyes went black then, and Dante wondered how closely her recollection could be trusted, how much the prosecution had talked to her. Not just Sorrentino, but those who came afterward—people like Blackwell, more skilled in gaining a certain compliance, in shaping memories. It could be, too, that the woman was just buying a little comfort with her tongue, a softer pillow on which to expire. It was a nice facility.

“Leland Sanford was a pawn. All of us, really. Bob understood that.” The woman's eyes were wide. The doorbell rang. “The steward…”

Unlike Dante, the steward did not hesitate long at the door. “Visiting hours are over,” he said to Dante. “What are you doing here, Mrs. Johnson, what are you doing out on the balcony?”

The steward spoke quickly, in a manner that suggested neither affection nor its opposite, merely that he had a job to do.

“Time for bed, Mrs. Johnson. We can't be sitting out here in the cold.” He turned to Dante. “You must leave now, sir. Before your mother catches her death.”

Dante was about to correct the steward, but didn't bother. Cynthia gave him a smile.

“They're torturing me with the chemo,” she said.

THIRTY-ONE

It was the next day. The sun had been out earlier, but now clouds scudded overhead, and the tide pushed toward the seawall at Ocean Beach, on the western edge of the city. Anyone who had grown up in San Francisco knew how dangerous this beach could be if you turned your back: how the rollers swelled up out of nowhere. It wasn't quite riptide season, true, but there were stories every year about dabblers along the water's edge, people swept away without warning.

“This is a treacherous stretch,” said Owens.

“Yes,” Jensen agreed.

The attorney was a big man, but he could modulate his voice, so that it was at once both soft and expansive, reassuring.
Humoring me
. His wife and daughter were walking along some hundred yards behind. Zeke, his son, had yet to emerge from the Cliff House. The boy had lingered behind at the restaurant with Jensen's paralegal.

“Don't worry,” said Jensen. “She's going to bring him down the other way, along the seawall. They'll meet us in the lot. It will give us time to talk.”

Owens and his family were living now in a place Jensen had found for them, in Outer Richmond, not too many blocks away. Jill felt less cooped up there than on Fresno Street, but they still had to take precautions, and so did not go out much. Today Jensen had stopped by and insisted on taking them to lunch out at the Cliff House, and afterward this walk on the beach. He and Jill had worn their sloppies, as they called them—faces hidden beneath ball caps and wide-rim shades, dressed in sweatpants and Alcatraz T-shirts so as to fit in with the tourists. No one had turned a head. But then he'd always had that ability to blend in.

Inside the Cliff House, Zeke had become obsessed with the seals. They could be seen from the huge glass windows, out there in the ocean. Then, on the way out, the young woman had lingered with him so he could study the fish in the restaurant's aquarium. Owens worried now that this had been a mistake, but he had been eager to talk with Jensen regarding Dante and the man's conversation with Nakamura.

“I got a call from the prosecution,” said Jensen. “From Blackwell's man, Iverson.”

“Did you mention Nakamura?”

“No.”

“That's a violation of discovery, keeping her hidden the way they did.”

“Maybe. But that wasn't our focus. With a trial approaching, they want to know if you're going to pursue a plea.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I didn't see any reason for you to change your plea. But that I would present the notion to you.”

“Eight years?”

Jensen shook his head. “Twelve to fifteen.”

“That's not what they said before.”

“Blackwell's got a hard-on. He wants vindication. He wants it so bad he can't see straight. And the higher-ups are pressuring him. But the reality is, they don't have much of a case.”

Jensen might have his interests at heart, but Owens did not altogether trust him, because he had seen how the man slanted things when he talked to clients, to push them toward the action he thought best. Jensen had money troubles as well, all those wives, all those kids. The firm had been walking a tightrope lately, financially speaking, and only stood to gain if the trial continued, now that Sprague was paying. Then there was Jill. Those two had worked together for years. Late hours. Off to conferences. He glanced back again at his wife and daughter on the beach. Then strained ahead, trying to spot Zeke and the paralegal along the seawall.

Perhaps he was being overly edgy, but there had been a car lingering out front yesterday evening, despite the care they had taken to keep the move secret. Protective surveillance, maybe, but that had been curtailed since the move off Fresno Street.

“The ocean's a bit rough today, I can't tell if the tide, if it's coming in or out,” said Jensen. “Do you hear the seals?”

Owens listened. The rocks where the seals congregated were on the other side of the Cliff House, but somehow their racket carried, and he could hear them barking between waves. His son had been very curious about the seals.

“Relax,” said Jensen.

“How do you think the case will play with the jury?”

“You know my feeling. The case is mostly circumstantial. The evidence isn't there. And as far as the press goes, the prosecution has looked pretty foolish,” Jensen said. “But as your attorney, I would be remiss if I didn't let you know that anything can happen once we get to court.”

Owens understood, too, the deal the prosecution wanted to make, and he understood that there were reasons to take it, guilty or not—and part of him was tempted to grab it. You couldn't tell what a jury might do, or what a witness might say, even a friendly witness, and the public mood could always shift. All the things that had been going wrong in the paper for the prosecution—all the news that was not supposed to impact the trial but ultimately did—all that could change. There was a war in the offing, a certain hysteria in the air.

“There's the principle of the thing, I suppose, and your agreement with Sprague. It's important to take a stand.”

“I don't know if I care about principles anymore,” said Owens.

They headed across the sand toward the parking lot, then stood waiting on the concrete promenade, behind the seawall, watching his wife and daughter make their way across the sand, heads down, both of them with their honey-colored hair whipping behind them and their round shoulders slouched against the wind.

Jensen, too, glanced back at Jill.

“As far as the things you care about, eight years is the same as thirty. You go to prison. Everything will be different when you get out.”

The remark angered him, but he understood. Not many relationships survived a prison term of more than a couple of years.

“What about Nakamura?” Owens said.

Jensen's eyes penetrated him. He knew what the man was thinking.

“We can undermine her testimony if we have to. Her age, vulnerable, dying woman, manipulated by the prosecution. The care she's getting, the few extra months—she has reason to say what they want to hear. From what Dante said, she might have been coerced.”

“Is that what he thought?”

“She might not be as cooperative as the prosecution thinks. And if she is, it won't be hard to slice her up.”

“I don't know. Are you going to ask for pretrial access?”

“Yes and no.”

“I don't understand.”

“I'm going to ask for it, but I don't really want it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The way they've handled this—burying her in the list. That's not going to look good.”

“People do it all the time.”

“She's not going to last forever … And if we delay…”

Owens understood this, too. Jensen was full of tricks—ways of casting doubt through procedural delay—but sometimes these tricks could backfire.

His wife and daughter came up the stairs now, onto the promenade. Jensen's assistant appeared at the other end of the parking lot, coming alone down the walkway from the Cliff House.