But all I found in the courthouse with Dixie Lee’s or Dio’s name on them were deeds or leases to house lots, corner business property, and a couple of marinas, nothing that surprised me, nothing that suggested anything more than investments in local real estate.
I drove up the east shore of the lake, through the orchards of cherry trees, past the restaurant built out over the water and the blue lagoon with the rim of white beach and the pines growing thickly up the incline back toward the road, and finally to the entrance of Sally Dio’s split-level redwood home built up on a cliff that overlooked the dazzling silklike sheen of the lake. I drove around the next curve, parked my truck off the shoulder, and walked back through a stand of pine trees that ended abruptly at the lip of a cliff that fell away to the lake’s edge. Green, moss-covered rocks showed dully in the sunlight just below the water’s surface.
Across the lagoon I could see Dio’s house and the cottage below where Clete and Darlene lived. I knelt on one knee among the pine needles and steadied my World War II Japanese field glasses against a tree trunk. An American flag popped in the breeze on Dio’s veranda, his flower boxes were brilliant with pink and blue and crimson petunias, and a cream-colored Mercury and black Porsche with Nevada plates were parked in the gravel at the edge of his lawn. I wrote the tag numbers down in a notebook, buttoned it in my shirt pocket, then watched a big van with bubble side windows, followed by a Toyota jeep, drive out on the beach. The side door, which was painted with a tropical sunset, slid open and a group of swimmers jumped out on the sand and began inflating a huge yellow raft with a foot-operated air pump.
I refocused the glasses on their faces. It was Dio and what Clete called the Tahoe crowd. Dio wore an open shirt, flop sandals, and a luminescent purple bikini that fitted tightly against his loins and outlined his phallus. He was in a good mood, directing the outing of his entourage, pointing at a milk-white two-engine amphibian plane that came in low over the hills on the far side of the lake, unlocking his father’s wheelchair from the mechanical platform that extended from the van’s open door and lowered to the sand. Clete walked from the Toyota, wheeled Dio’s father by a barbecue pit, lighted a bag of charcoal, and began forking a box of steaks onto the grill. He wore his crushed porkpie fishing hat, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and revolver under his sweater.
The amphibian made one pass over the beach, gunned its engines and banked into the cloudless sky over my head, then made a wide turn and came in over the top of a cherry orchard and a sailboat dock, flattening out and touching its belly and wing pontoons down on the water in a spray of white foam and mist from the back draft of the propellers.
While Clete cooked and attended to the elder Dio, who sat sullen and wrapped in a shawl with a glass of red wine in his hand, the others took rides on the plane. I was amazed at the carelessness of the pilot and the faith of those who flew with him. They lifted off the water and into the wind and cleared the pines by no more than thirty feet, then climbed high into the sun, banked at a sharp angle, and came back between a cut in the hills, dipping down over beachfront houses in a roar of noise that made fishermen in outboards pull their anchors and turn in to shore.
I watched them for two hours. They smoked dope in the lee of the van, drank wine and canned beer out of a washtub filled with crushed ice, ate bleeding steaks and tossed salads off paper plates, swam out breathlessly into the lake and climbed laughing into their yellow raft, their bodies hard and prickled with cold. The girls were pretty and tan and good to look at. Everyone was happy, except maybe Clete and the elder Dio. The Tahoe crowd were the kind of people who knew that they would never die.
The sun had moved into the western sky, which was absolutely blue above the green hills, and the light must have glinted on my field glasses because I saw Sally Dio look up suddenly and squint at the pine trees in which I knelt. I stepped back into the shadows and refocused through the branches. Dio stood by Clete and his father and was pointing in my direction. Clete stopped cleaning up paper plates from a picnic table, glanced up briefly at the cliff, then resumed his work. But Sally Dio and his father looked as if they were staring at an angry dog that was running against its chain. The elder Dio’s mouth was wide when he spoke to Clete again, and Clete flung a handful of picnic trash into a garbage can, walked down to the water’s edge where the swimmers had left the raft, dragged it up on the sand, and began pulling out the air plugs. Then he loaded the hampers, the washtub of beer and wine coolers, and the elder Dio back into the van.
I could have gotten out of there, I suppose, without being seen. But sometimes self-respect requires that you float one down the middle, letter high, big as a balloon, and let the batter have his way. I walked through the trees back to the road. The air was cool in the shade and heavy with the smell of the pine needles on the ground. Bluebirds with yellow wings flew in and out of the smoky light at the tops of the trees. I walked up the shoulder of the road, got in my truck, put my field glasses inside their case, put the case inside the glove box, and started the engine just as Dio’s van and Clete’s jeep turned out of the entrance to the public beach and headed toward me.
I saw Sally Dio’s face through the wide front window of the van, saw the recognition and anger grow in it as he looked back at me and took his foot off the accelerator. Clete was slowing behind him at the same time.
Dio stopped opposite my cab and stared at me.
“What the fuck you think you’re doing, man?” he said.
Through the bubble side window of the van I could see people sitting in leather swivel chairs. Their faces gathered at the window as though they were looking out of a fishbowl.
“Wonderful day,” I said.
“What the fuck you doing up in that woods?”
“What do you care? You’re not shy. Come on, Dio. That air show was first-rate.”
I saw his nostrils whiten around the edges.
“We told you the other day you don’t come around,” he said. “You’re not a cop. You seem to have confusion about that.”
I turned off my engine and clicked my nails on the window jamb. He t
urned off his engine, too. It was silent on the road, except for the wind blowing through the pines. The western sun over the lake made his waxed black van almost glow with an aura.
“I heard you like to take off parts of people,” I said.
“You heard what?”
“The Sal the Duck story. It’s the kind of stuff they enjoy at the DEA. It brightens up a guy’s file.”
He opened the door and started to step out on the road. I saw his father lean forward from the back and try to hold his shoulder. The father’s lips looked purple against his gray skin; his goiter worked in his throat and his eyes were intense and black when he spoke. But Sally Dio was not listening to his father’s caution, and he slid off the seat and stepped out on the road.
I set my sunglasses on the dashboard and got out of the truck. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Clete standing by his jeep. Dio had put on a pair of Levi’s over his bathing suit. His denim shirt was open, and his stomach was flat and ridged with muscle. I heard the van door slide open on the far side, and a sun-bleached boy and girl walked around the back and stared at me, but it was obvious they intended to remain spectators. Through the trees I could see the sun click on the deep-blue rippling sheen of the lake.
“You’ve got a serious problem,” Sally Dio said.
“How’s that?” I said, and I smiled.
“You hear an Italian name, you think you can piss on it. A guy’s been up the road, you think he’s anybody’s fuck.”
“You’re not a convincing victim, Dio.”
“So you keep coming around, provoking a guy, bothering his family, bothering his friends.” He touched me lightly on the chest with three stiff fingers. There were small saliva bubbles in the corner of his mouth. His ducktailed hair was the color of burnt copper in the slanting light.