“So, what’s the broad like?”
“Broad? Roy, nobody says ‘broad’ anymore. You spend too many nights watching old movies on your DVD player.”
“Okay, what’s the young woman like?”
Tom gave a brief description. Roy groaned theatrically.
“What I wouldn’t give to be built like a Greek god chick magnet, and get all the goddamned action—”
“Like a Norski god, not one of those Greek swishes; Baldur, I think—Asa-Thor was a redhead, and Tyr had a hand missing. When I get back to Aasgard, you can be one of the dwarf thralls. And get your mind out of the gutter, lest I smite thee with a lawsuit alleging the creation of a hostile work environment.”
Tully leered. Tom went on: “And her name is Adrienne… Adrienne Rolfe.”
With perfect timing, he’d caught his partner in the middle of a sip. Tully choked, staggering about the cubicle; Tom thumped him helpfully on the back.
“You’re not serious!” Tully managed at last.
“Eminently serious,” Tom said. “Yes, she knew who I was—it’s not really a secret, after the way the fire got into the papers. She’s working for the Pacific Open Landscapes League—”
“I know the outfit,” Tully said, his voice serious and his eyes level. “Didn’t know they were tied in with the Rolfes.”
“I looked that up myself, just before we had dinner. They’re good guys.”
“The league is, yeah,” Tully conceded. “That doesn’t mean the Rolfes are, necessarily.”
“Not necessarily,” Tom said. “But it’s the way to bet. You were going to tell me about their setup in Oakland?”
“Yeah,” Tully replied. “Let me call up my notes on your screen, and a skyview… OK, it’s here.” His finger traced an area of several blocks. “Used to be a run-down residential neighborhood in West Oakland not too far from the docks. A lot of what’s around it still is—they say crime’s down, but Kemosabe, I felt plenty nervous around there! Anyway, it was rezoned after 1946, and now it’s a big warehouse complex—they’ve got their own sidings to their own docks. Pretty massive, and their rent-a-cops are on the job, let me tell you. No in or out without clearance; but there’s a lot of traffic. Cargo containers, mostly, but trucks with loose cargo too. Anything could get lost in that shuffle.”
“There you are,” Tom said. “You said it could be an inside job—some ring or group inside using the company for smuggling. That’s what Adrienne thinks, too, and she wants the perps as bad as we do. God knows that sort of thing happens all the time with drugs… which, incidentally, we should check on too, you betcha.”
“I did,” Tully said. “Guy I know on the Oakland PD—don’t worry, strictly unofficial.”
“What did he say?” Tom asked.
“That RM and M is so clean it squeaks,” Tully said. “Pays all its city taxes, even ones it could get out of. Contributes to all the right charities, and has since the late 1940s. Gives the city libraries and fire engines. Does everything but help little old ladies across the street. Makes big donations to local politicians, but spreads them around so it doesn’t look funny if they get favors; mostly they insist on being left strictly alone.”
Tom remembered an elegant drawing room on Nob Hill, and a bewildered bitterness hiding behind good breeding. He pushed it aside, summoned logic and went on: “That fits with Adrienne being on the side of the angels,” he said. “Granted, she probably wants information from us, too, but that’s natural.”
Tully nodded, seeming oddly reluctant. “We don’t want a civilian getting under our feet,” he said. “Far be it from me to ruin your pickup line, Kemosabe—”
Tom snorted. “We do want access,” he pointed out. “We do not want RM and M pulling strings here in Sacramento to get us told to do something else. We—”
“OK, OK,” Tully said, grinning. “Guess it’s been a long time, huh?”
“I had a nice dinner with a nice young lady. Not impossibly younger. We talked about our families and our lives….”
“…and I do envy you that,” she’d said at one point in the evening, after he’d described a winter hunting trip he’d taken with his father and brother just before he joined the army back in the nineties.
“Envy me what?” Tom replied. “Growing up on our farm, or getting away to the Upper Peninsula?”
“Neither. I spent a lot of my childhood in the country too. And I’m California born and bred; I don’t like snow unless it stays on ski slopes where it belongs—my ancestors were all either Southerners or Italians. What I envy you is being so close to your father.”
“You weren’t?”
Adrienne propped her chin on a palm and looked past him. “I’m afraid not. My family was… is… sort of conservative. And I was a tomboy to start with, then a wild handful as a teenager, always in and out of trouble, and all my brothers and sisters—”
“How many?” Tom asked curiously.
“I’m the youngest of six: John, Robert, Lamar, Charles, Cynthia, and me. John—John Rolfe the Seventh—is forty-three.”
Tom nodded, hiding his surprise; with a brother and a sister, he’d had more siblings than most even in a deep-rural part of the northern plains.
She must have been born in the eighties, he thought. She’s definitely younger than me, and I’d say at least four, five years younger, Gen-Y. Well, statistically there have to have been some upper-crust Bay Area WASPs who had families that size in the post-baby-boom era, but it’s certainly unusual.
It wasn’t as if they were some variety of weird fundamentalist; she’d also mentioned that her family were Episcopalians.
She went on: “As I said, I was the youngest, and the rest were always much more… dutiful. My father’s no fool, but he’s, mmmmm, shockable, let’s say; and I just couldn’t resist shocking him and Mother, and everyone else who looked so smug—nobody’s more judgmental than a fifteen-year-old full of herself. Things went from bad to worse.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I was lucky; Lars and I had the usual head-butting you do with your father, but it was mostly good-natured. I’ve seen how things can get out of hand.”
“And Mother was worse than Dad, if anything; she kept trying to be so understanding, when she was obviously yearning to throttle me. If it weren’t for Grandmother—my mother’s mother—and Great-aunt Chloe, I think I’d have gone nuts.”
“What’s your grandmother like?” he asked.
“Was, I’m afraid. She was Italian—a contessa, no less, a war bride—although she always insisted on being called a Tuscan and claimed that everything south of Sienna was ‘baptized Arabs.’ Her family lived up in the hills east of Florence, because they’d lost their palazzo in town and pretty well everything else but a couple of olive groves and heirlooms; she met Rob Fitzmorton—he was my paternal grandfather’s cousin—when Uncle Rob drove a tank-destroyer into their courtyard.”
“That’s romantic enough,” Tom said.
“Well, Uncle Rob always thought so. I suspect the K-rations may have had something to do with it. They were probably literally starving then, what with the war. Living on olives and bread and what rabbits they could shoot, at least; and serving them on Renaissance silverware.”
Tom chuckled. “Sounds like an interesting old lady.”