“What is the truth?”
“I didn’t know her. I didn’t kill her. The end.”
“Where were you the night she died?”
“At the beach house, reviewing a TV spot.”
“Alone?”
“Alone until almost midnight. Then home. I was with my wife from twelve o’clock on, but I’ll be extremely unhappy if she has to make a statement to that effect. In fact, if it comes to that, there are a few things I want you to know. Mr. Weir, you’re entitled to your own uneducated, undocumented opinions. But if anything about my ‘relationship’ with Ann gets to the press, or to my wife, I will take that as a personal attack. I will call on every resource I have, every bit of influence I’ve earned, every favor owed me, and employ every power of my organization to crush you, Becky, and your mother. Completely and without restraint. One fault of mine, Mr. Weir, is that I relish destroying my enemies, almost as much as I enjoy rewarding my friends. First off, my attorneys have drafted a defamation of character and slander suit that will take your last dime just to defend — whether I win it or not. And I will. We’ll be asking one hundred million dollars for personal and punitive damages — more than that if Prop A passes on the heels of a scandal. Named are Becky Flynn, Jim Weir, and Virginia Weir as chair of the Proposition A election committee. If the proposition fails, I’ll see to it that Dennison exercises the city’s right of eminent domain in your neighborhood, and that Virginia’s home, Becky’s home, Poon’s Locker, Ann’s Kids, and Raymond’s house are the first to be leveled. I can do these things, Weir, and I will. Maybe you forgot, but I own that land — you just lease it from me. I met with you here of my own free will, to clear up some very unfortunate suspicions. I guessed that you are a reasonable man, and I see no reason to change that supposition. I’m asking you to show me enough respect to examine any suspicions before you make me crush you. You might think this is an economical way to steal an election that will affect the way I make my living. But I’ll tell you — it will cost you, your mother, and Becky Flynn everything but your lives. Everything. I hope I’m communicating to you how serious this is.”
Cantrell knocked his knuckles on the partition and the driver moved into the left lane for a U-turn.
Jim watched Coast Highway revolve around the windows, saw the yacht basin to his left as they headed toward the peninsula bridge. “Nice town, isn’t it?”
Cantrell’s face hardened again: A vein that Jim hadn’t noticed before manifested itself above the pink shirt collar. “Let me guess what you’re thinking now,” said Cantrell. “You are sitting here in this pretentious limousine, realizing what a pig I am. How my vision for this county is an abomination. You see me and people like me, and the Irvine Company, and William Lyon and Kathryn Thompson as just pumping dollars out of the ground, cramming more and more paying customers into smaller and smaller places, ruining what was once a lovely, simple place. Close?”
“I see that, sure. Who couldn’t?”
“Consider this: I’ve built over eighty thousand homes in this county over the last twenty years of my life. People live in them, make love in them, and raise families in them. My homes keep people warm in the winter and cool in the summer; they don’t leak, they don’t crumble, and they don’t fall down. Every year, they’re worth more to the people who own them. I employ over twenty-five hundred people, from professional architects down to the night custodians. I pay close to sixty-five million dollars a year in various taxes, support artistic and charitable groups with another eight million, offer a scholarship fund every year for about a million more, and I offered to build a homeless shelter anywhere in the county, but the homeowners won’t let me because they don’t want it in their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that I built for them in the first place. This is what you call rape? I’m not a gangster. All I’m trying to do is build houses, for chrissakes.”
Jim watched Cantrell settle back into his leather seat. “There’s a point when enough is enough,” said Jim. “There’s a point when you’re selling an illusion and nothing more. I don’t think a man like you knows where the point is.”
“Becky does? Virginia does?”
“I think so. They just live here, like they always have. This land isn’t a business proposition to them. You people aren’t artists. You’re merchants.”
“High sentiments from a man who scrounges for gold that other men have died for.”
“I’ll die for it, too, if I stay in the game long enough. I’ve assumed that risk. Are you willing to die for the Balboa Redevelopment Project? Or when the pickings get slim, will you just pack it in and go somewhere else?”
Cantrell leaned forward and looked out the window. “Look at the peninsula, Weir. Look at that grotesque Fun Zone. Look at the bars, the beat-up old houses, the traffic piled up, and the air full of poison. What’s wrong with giving people a better place to live and work?”
“You’re selling it to them, Cantrell. Besides, people don’t want your gifts — they want you to leave them alone. And don’t try to tell me — like you’re trying to tell the voters — that all your new buildings and neighborhoods and shopping centers and roads are going to make the traffic better around here, are going to make the air cleaner.”
Jim was quiet for a long moment. The old neighborhood slid past the smoked glass of the limo. “Too bad you didn’t know Ann better,” he said. “She was a lovely person. She was smart and happy most of the time, and she worked hard. She didn’t complain. She enjoyed things. You’d have liked her.”
Weir studied the changes in Cantrell’s face. What he saw was confusion.
“I did like her.”
“Did you know she was pregnant when she died?”
The shock that registered on Cantrell’s face looked practiced. “No. Did she have kids?”
“You know she didn’t have kids.”
Cantrell said nothing.
“Ann grew up here. Right here. She was a child of this place. Every time I look around me, I see something Ann did, something Ann would have liked to see.”
Cantrell looked at Weir without speaking. Jim watched the hair on his suit wavering in the draft. He pointed. “Like right there, for instance. That little house coming up with the fence around it? That’s where Annie had her first babysitting job.”
Cantrell studied the house more thoroughly than Jim had expected, then turned back to him. “Nice place to grow up.”
“Then, there at the corner is where she wiped out on skates and got five stitches in her chin.”
Cantrell looked again, with apparent interest. Jim saw a distance in his eyes, a detachment.
“Over there was where her best friend lived, Becky Flynn.”
Cantrell was nodding now, still staring off at some indeterminate point. When he finally spoke again, it was in a dry, flat voice. “The thing I liked best about Ann was her sense of humor. She’d say things that would sound cruel coming from anyone else. She’d say things like that about herself. She could cheer me up, just waiting on my table.”
“Right there,” said Jim, “is where we got our first dog.”
When Cantrell turned to look, Jim leaned slightly toward him, pointing to the exact house. He gently swept his other hand through the beam of the reading light, just above Cantrell’s shoulder, then closed his fist and brought it to rest beside him. He smiled when Cantrell asked him what the dog’s name was.