Ross glanced at me. 'What're you thinking?'
'The same thing you are.'
She bit her lip, turned her face toward the side window.
'It's time you leveled with me,' I said. 'You pretended you had no ongoing relationship with D.A., that Mia's jealousy was unfounded. But not long after that I saw the two of you kissing down on the beach.'
'Where were you when this supposedly happened?'
'At the stables.'
'I thought I told you to leave when I rode off.'
'I stayed to look around your tack room.'
'You had no right-'
'I found the photograph of you, D.A., Perry, and Jenny. Who took it-Andy Wrightman?'
'… Yeah.'
'Why'd you keep it?'
She sighed. 'You wouldn't understand. You probably think I wouldn't want a reminder of those days, not after the way things turned out. That was what Glen-my husband- thought. It was him that didn't want to be reminded of my past, so I always kept the picture out in the tack room. I didn't mind remembering. Those were the best days of my life, back when we were young and going to change the world. Since then, nothing's been… anything.'
'When did you first figure out Wrightman and Grant were one and the same?'
'I'd never even heard of Grant until you came here the first time.'
'But when I described him, you suspected who he was.'
No reply.
'D.A. did, too.'
More silence.
I said, 'Why did you lie about your relationship with D.A.?'
'Because it's too damn hard to explain a relationship like that. What little we have isn't taking anything away from Mia. It's just our way of keeping the past alive.'
'D.A. did come to see you Wednesday afternoon, then. He'd been brooding about Andy Wrightman, hadn't he?'
She shifted in the cramped seat, shoved her hands between her bent knees.
'Did you tell him where to find Tom Grant?'
'In a way I guess I did. I told him what you'd said about where he lived, that he'd done well for himself after-'
'After what?'
Ross stared out the window at the buildings of Inverness. The lights of the Czech restaurant briefly washed over her dark blond curls.
'What you started to say was after Andy Wrightman went back to his true identity. Tom Grant was the man's actual name. Wrightman was just an alias he used.'
Ross glanced at me. Her eyes glittered in the headlight beams from a passing car.
'Grant graduated from the University of Illinois Law School in nineteen sixty-two,' I went on. 'It's my guess that he was recruited by the FBI; many law graduates are. He adopted the Wrightman name when he was sent to Berkeley to infiltrate radical student organizations. There were a lot of undercover agents on the campuses during those days. A man I know says most of them weren't very successful: they either didn't fit in and weren't trusted with any real information, or they fit in too well, became unreliable. Grant was effective for a while, but by fathering Jenny's child, in a sense he also joined forces with the people the Bureau perceived as the enemy.'
I stopped at the intersection with Highway One. There were no cars coming from either direction. I eased the clutch out and turned north, over the bridge and into Point Reyes Station. It was livelier than Iverness: lights shone in most of the houses, and a group of people congregated on the sidewalk in front of one of the bars. Ross was silent until after we came out on the other side of the little town.
'Do you have proof of all this?'
'No, but there's a San Francisco homicide inspector who probably does, whether he knows it or not. And I think you and D.A. realized it a long time ago.'
'Yeah, we always suspected Andy informed on us, D.A. and I. Why else would the feds have let him just walk away from Port Chicago? I saw that at the time. He just jammed his gun into D.A.'s hand and melted into the scenery. And why was his girlfriend the one they made the deal with, rather than either of us? If they wanted to make an example of somebody, the daughter of a rich family would have been a better choice. Except they didn't want that; it would have blown Andy's cover. And Andy probably urged it; he must have been scared to death that the depth of his involvement with her would come out and screw up his career.'
'You and D.A. never said anything about him to the authorities?'
She shook her head. 'It seems incredible now, but at the time we didn't know. Or maybe it was that we didn't want to believe what he was. Our rationale was, what if we were wrong? We'd have been informing on one of our own.'
'Andy left Berkeley when Jenny told him she was pregnant, didn't he?'
'Uh-huh.'
'He probably requested assignment to another campus. If it came out that he'd fathered a child by her, the Bureau would have terminated him. But he couldn't stay away from her-maybe he did care for her on some level, maybe he was curious about his child. He came back a few years later, and when you all started planning the bombing, he saw an opportunity to make some real career points.'
We were passing through Marshall now. The boarded-up oyster restaurant was a dark monolith. Tendrils of fog curled around the small cottages and drifted across the wet road.
I asked, 'When he came to see you Wednesday afternoon, did D.A. say he wanted to confront Grant?'
'… He wasn't making sense. D.A. rarely does.'
'When you told him where Grant lived, you must have known he'd go there.'
'I never thought he would.'
I wondered about that, but I let it go for now. 'What about the next afternoon on the beach-did he mention Grant?'
'No. He was in bad shape, had been doing booze and pills. I tried to slow him down, but when D.A. goes off on a jag…' She shrugged. After a while she asked, 'How come you're so sure D.A. was there at Grant's house?'
'That night, D.A. supposedly took Jake's truck and went barhopping. Mia told me he'd been in a fight, lost his jacket. A witness saw a truck like Jake's outside Grant's house just before he was killed. There would have been a lot of blood on the jacket if D.A. beat Grant to death-enough that he'd want to get rid of it.'
'God, then it's true.'
'You suspected all along. You should have told me.'
'I know, but my protective instincts kicked in. I've been trying to save D.A. for so long now that it's automatic.'
'You ought to know by now that it's a lost cause. The man doesn't want to be saved.'
'No, but here we both are, trying to save him one last time.'
We neared Nick's Cove in a few minutes. I asked, 'Is Mia still there, or did she walk back home?'
'Said she'd meet me at Taylor's.'
I accelerated up the hill.
Ross said, 'Thing that bothers me about Grant-there was nothing in the paper about him having been with the FBI.'
'I thought you said you didn't take a paper.'
'I saw the headline when I was shopping in Point Reyes yesterday, so I bought it. Picture didn't look much like Andy, but I recognized the name Grant from your visit.'
As I recalled, the story and picture had appeared on an inside page-a place Ross wouldn't have been able to see from a casual glance at a newspaper rack. I decided to let it go for a moment, however.
She added, 'Why all the secrecy about him being with the FBI? Given the political climate in this country today, you'd think he'd have written a book about his experiences, gone on talk shows. Man could have been a hero.'
'I think the FBI has restrictions on that sort of
