The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry

case.
    â€œReal-estate business,” Marilyn told him. “I need to swing by Prospero’s office, just for a minute.”
    â€œI’ll walk up with you.”
    â€œIt’s client stuff.”
    â€œThen maybe not.”
    â€œI’ll meet you up there, on Fresno. I shouldn’t be too long.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œI’ll bring some pictures off the swap board,” she said. “That place in the Costa Brava, down along the Spanish coast…”
    Dante left her at the corner of Vallejo Street.
    Prospero’s was just a few blocks away, but as he watched her turn the corner, disappearing into the crowd, he felt a vague misgiving—as if she might disappear forever.
    Probably it meant nothing.
    Such feelings were common enough these days.
    *   *   *
    The house on Fresno Street was not what you might call tidy. His tenants had taken most of their belongings, but not all. The most conspicuous item was a large restaurant booth they had somehow gotten through the front door and into the living room. Maybe the original idea had been to put the booth in the kitchen, but they had not made it that far.
    The restaurant booth was the kind of thing you picked up at salvage somewhere, and did not look like it could be easily disassembled. Likely it weighed a thousand pounds.
    To make up for it, they’d left him a bottle of wine.
    Dante wandered downstairs to look among his father’s old things. Dante had moved them down there after the old man died. The stuff remained there, untouched—though he would have to do something with it someday, one way or another. In one of the cabinets, he found his mother’s old keepsake box. Inside there was a picture of his mother and father on their honeymoon, and a picture of himself as well—one of those two-by-two miniatures that had been popular, himself as a baby, no more than a few months old.
    His mother’s wedding ring was in the box, and his father’s ring as well. Dante had put them there after the old man died.
    Dante found a corkscrew. He opened the bottle of wine and sat down in the booth in the front room.
    He wondered how long it would be before Marilyn would return.
    Dante  …
    On the day they’d committed his mother, it had been raining … People were conspiring against her, she insisted … She had gotten her information from the dead … from the fish on its plate … from noodles covered with sauce … Her husband and the film star Ida Lupino were having an affair … Mussolini was sleeping with Jackie Kennedy … The Chinese had taken over the family warehouse …
    Dante  …
    The house creaked, and in that familiar noise, the creaking, he imagined his mother’s voice. Outside, a motorcycle went by, and he heard the singsong of a Chinese woman scolding her children on the street. A siren died away in the distance.
    He remembered his mother, head to the sidewalk, to the walls.
    Listen  …
    Maybe it was true, the inanimate world conspired with the living—but the tracings were hard to read.
    A shopping bag on the bank floor.
    Bullet casings. A woman’s blouse, bloodstained, held in a plastic evidence bag for twenty-seven years.
    Had Owens been inside that bank?
    Dante didn’t know. From what he could tell so far, the government’s case was weak. Meanwhile he had started tracking Sorrentino, and the man left a path a mile wide.
    Nakamura … Kaufman … Elise Younger …
    Where did it lead?
    Finally, Marilyn returned. She carried a folder she had not had with her before, full of listings, maybe, from Prospero’s office. Now, standing in the living room, she regarded the big booth with its maroon vinyl.
    â€œWhat’s this?”
    â€œA place to sit.”
    â€œMost charming.”
    They went around the house, from room to room. There was something cautious in her manner.