“This is a very unexpected visit,” he said, once we were seated opposite each other in a high-ceilinged living room. The room was large but cramped with too much furniture, upholstered in very loud reds and greens, and stacks of books and newspapers. I noted art books, science-physics and astronomy-investing primers, children’s books, coffee-table photography books. A polymath.
“I didn’t know if the FBI had been in touch,” I explained. “A little more than two weeks ago, your father’s badge was found in Phoenix. It had been missing since his death.” I was calm and measured, using my counsel-the-victims voice that had also been useful with neurotic graduate students back in my professor days. The small eyes watched me. They seemed permanently wet. I went on: “The badge was being carried by a homeless man who was found dead in a swimming pool. We don’t know why this man was carrying your father’s badge.”
The broad mouth smiled. “Sounds like the perfect macabre Phoenix crime,” Richard Pilgrim said. “Is that all?”
I looked him over. He sat across from me perfectly compact, folded in on himself as neat as a shirt back from the cleaners. “That’s all,” I said. “Except for a few questions.”
“Always questions.” He sighed. “You’ll have to excuse me, Deputy, if I’m not playing the role correctly. My father was killed over half a century ago. I was ten years old. I have few memories of him, and those I have aren’t particularly…savory.” He was a man who chose his words. “You see, Deputy, there was a general once named Douglas MacArthur, and he had a son.”
“Arthur,” I said, more from reflex than a desire to be a show-off.
“One doesn’t expect a policeman to know such obscure knowledge,” Richard Pilgrim said.
“I play a lot of trivia games,” I said. “Arthur disappeared as an adult, lived a life of obscurity. Very different from his father’s grandiose life.”
“Exactly.” Richard said, tapping his slight knee. “In my small way, I was touched by that story. My father was a hero, so they said. A hero on a small scale. He was a tough guy. Loud. Athletic. I wanted none of that. In fact, I spent my entire life trying to get away from my father’s influence.’
“And here I am, waking the dead.”
“Exactly.”
“Seems as if you succeeded,” I ventured. “In getting away. What exactly do you do for a living, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Live each day gratefully.” He smiled. “I’m a freelance editor. The book business is awful, but I’ve managed to make a good living. I never have to leave my flat if I don’t want to.”
“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.