“That would be a pity, such a nice neighborhood.”
“Yes, you’re from awful Phoenix, so I’m surprised you can appreciate it.”
“I thought about what it would look like as a giant surface parking lot and Home Depot store.” He didn’t smile. Back to business. “Mr. Pilgrim, does the name George Weed mean anything to you?”
He shook his head. I told him who Weed was.
“Sounds like an alias,” the G-man’s son said.
“I realize you were only a kid, but do you have much memory of the time when your father died?”
“I remember everything,” he said simply. “They came to the door after we were asleep. Mother talked to them in the living room, I knew it was bad. We were living in a little duplex on…I think it was Culver Street. I’d been in four different schools by the fifth grade, he was transferred so much. I hated being in Phoenix. I hated the heat. They closed his coffin for the funeral, and I was afraid to touch it. They folded up a flag and gave it to my mother.”
“You said some memories weren’t so good.”
“I used the word ‘unsavory.’ My father had a drinking problem. He and Mother fought. He hit her. It’s not fun to see when you’re a little kid. He’d stay out, whoring around, I suppose. There were money problems. I remember once I followed him on my bike to one of his bars. Who knows what the hell I was thinking. Maybe that if I caught him everything could be made happy for us. The Pla-Mor Tap Room. I never forgot that name. When he realized I was behind him, he didn’t get mad, didn’t hit me-and believe me, he was capable of it. He took me in and bought me a beer, shot some pool, made me feel like a little man. I was ten years old. He was like that, too, could be fun as hell. Very charming. I didn’t know until years later it was classic drunk behavior.”
“What was your mother like?”
“She was small and pretty and kind,” he said, speaking rapidly. “She deserved better. After he was killed, she wanted to move us to Los Angeles, to live with her brother. But she took up with a man there in Phoenix, another version of my father.” He rubbed the loose face skin. “None of that matters to whatever investigation you’re pursuing.”
“Do you have any siblings?” I looked around for family photos, found none.
He shook his head, staring intently at the floor. “There was a lot beneath the surface. In his life. Don’t ask me what. Little kids pick up on these things, even if they lack the sophistication to know the specific details.”
“Did he ever mention his work? Anything you might have overheard.”
“Somebody named…Duke.” He raised his forefinger in a triumph of memory. I waited. “Duke somebody. I remember this terrible fight my parents had just before he walked out, for the last time. It must have been just before he was killed. They were yelling like furies, and this Duke person kept coming up.”
“A friend? Somebody your father was investigating?”
“I just don’t know,” he said, shaking his bony head, deflated.
“What did they tell you happened to your father?”
“He was killed in the line of duty,” Richard Pilgrim said. “And he was a hero. I never believed it. I thought he drank himself to death, or got into some kind of trouble. You need to believe me, Deputy, that I haven’t spent my life obsessing about this, like some low-rent Hamlet.”
He walked me to the door. “I’m sorry your trip was for nothing,” he said. “But maybe you’ll have better luck when you talk to Renzetti.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Didn’t they tell you? His old partner is retired in San Jose. Vince Renzetti. The old guy’s got to be ninety-five, but he’s still alive. Still wants to be the good FBI man, looking after the windows and orphans. I talked to him not more than a month ago.”
Chapter Eighteen
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 m
etal 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.