the ring of truth. It rang of hyperbole. Exaggeration.”
Before I could stop myself the words had leaped from my mouth like some fool on a bungee jump off the Grand Canyon. “You mean…exaggeration like those two fake fucking water balloons you have implanted in your bony chest?”
Thirty seconds later she was gone. She’d wordlessly scooped up her purse and her black coat and was out the door.
It took half of the following day, after threats of calls to David Koffman and accusations of a sexual harassment lawsuit, and a ten minute apology, to talk her down and get her to come back to work.
nine
I picked up the phone after midnight thinking it was one of the limo drivers calling in to report his hours at the end of a job. My sister, Liz, was crying softly. Whispering the words. Rick Dante, Jonathan Dante’s firstborn son, his favorite son, a chess expert at ten years old and one of the precision toolmakers who designed and fabricated the landing feet of the Mars rover, was dead. He had boozed himself into the emergency room after his ulcer exploded onto the beige carpet of his bedroom in Roseville. His wife, Karin, found him there doubled over and moaning.
This time he and Karin had been separated for three weeks. When he failed to answer his phone for a couple of days she set her anger aside and drove to the house with their daughter.
Rick was forty-six years old and a 24–7 drinker from the age of thirty. A guy filled with demons and genius and bitterness and rage and isolation, tortured by his own failures, a man whose feet and spirit never really connected to solid land.
The news of his death hit me like a club. I’d seen his strange look-alike sitting at the bar the night I’d cut my throat. Another coincidence in a series of weird coincidences I’d been experiencing lately. An omen perhaps. But this time it turned out to be one that was real. The recollection sent a cold chill through my body.
The next day I left my limo office and took a plane from LAX to Sacramento airport, then drove the twenty miles to Roseville in a black sedan furnished by one of our Northern California affiliate limo companies. It was 103 degrees outside while I smoked and sipped from a pint bottle of Schenley, watching the Sacramento Valley go by.
For the last few years Ricardo Dante had been the general manager of a factory that manufactured shipping pallets, a grunt job he’d taken for money to support his family after drinking himself out of the aerospace business.
At Rick’s home that afternoon I met a dozen people; friends and neighbors and a couple of my brother’s coworkers. They sat in the living room while the air conditioner screamed, sipping wine and ice tea and eating from two prepared supermarket trays of cheese and salami and crackers. There were no televisions in my brother’s house. All his life he’d detested their presence.
His best drinking buddy was an older guy named Cecil, a car collector and retired auto mechanic wearing overalls to a wake. He and Rick met at a Sacramento memorabilia trade show.
Cecil was working on a wine buzz and sported the red face of a lifelong juicer. He poured me a tall glass of the rosé then insisted we go outside to the shed behind the garage.
There it was. My brother’s pal pulled the tarp away to reveal a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk, complete with new paint and swooping fins and dripping with gaudy, replated chrome and a gleaming rebuilt motor. The two guys had spent the last eighteen months as partners working on weekends to restore the car. The only thing still left undone was to reupholster the seats.
Cecil located a small metal box hidden beneath the workbench, then grinning, tossed me the keys. “Start her up,” he said.
I thought about it for a few seconds. “No thanks,” I said finally, aware of the presence of my brother’s bad-tempered ghost. “Maybe some other time.”
The day of the dead tour continued. Back in the house Cecil directed me to a room on the ground floor at the end of a hall. Its door was made of thick wood and armed with a double lock denying access to his wife and daughter and any other uninvited meddler.
Inside was a sort of half museum, half shrine where Rick alone was boss. Everything in the room, even the stale cigarette smell, enforced