“On my best day and in very flattering lighting, maybe.” I glanced at him and asked, “Is it weird that I want to keep this?”
“Go ahead. I don’t need it anymore.”
“Thanks.” I put down the flyer and ended up knocking the journal off the small table. It had fallen open to a page with a list of names and addresses, and I picked it up and asked, “Who are these people with your last name? Dante, Vincent, Gianni, Michael—”
“They’re my half-brothers.”
“I thought you just had one brother named Romy.”
“He’s the only one I grew up with. Technically, he’s a half-brother, too. Mom dated Romy’s dad for about a year, but then he took off when she told him she was pregnant. Needless to say, she has pretty terrible taste in men.” Reno took a sip of coffee before continuing, “Anyway, they’re my half-brothers on my dad’s side. He was with his wife before and after the few months he spent with my mom, so two of them are younger than me, and two are older.”
“Are you close?”
“I don’t know them at all,” he said.
“Most of these addresses are in San Francisco. Were you planning to go see them while you were in town?”
“Actually, I hoped to avoid them. Remember when I gave the valet a fake name, the night we met? There are a lot of Dombrusos in San Francisco in addition to my half-brothers, so I thought it was a good idea to lay low.”
“Have you ever actually met any of them?”
Adriano paused before saying, “Don’t repeat this to my mom when you meet her, because she’d probably be upset. The summer after my high school graduation, I told her I was going on a road trip and drove to San Francisco. I wanted to meet the other side of my family, and I didn’t tell her because I didn’t know how it would make her feel. I didn’t want her to think she and Romy weren’t enough for me, you know?
“Anyway, I managed to track down my oldest brother, Dante. I used a fake ID to get into some club where he was holding court in the VIP section. He seemed like a real big shot, even though he would have only been about twenty-one at the time. I’d had this whole speech prepared, and I went up to him and said something like, ‘Paulie Dombruso was my dad. He met my mom in Las Vegas nineteen years ago.’ That was as far as I got before Dante leapt up and shoved me.
“He caught me off guard, so I lost my footing and fell on my ass. Before I could get up, he leaned over me and said I was full of shit. He told me his parents adored each other, and that his dad would never cheat on his mom with some whore in Vegas. Before he stormed off, he lifted his lapel to show me the gun in his shoulder holster and told me he better never see me again, or I’d regret it. And that was the end of that.”
“That’s a pretty extreme reaction,” I said.
“He was full of rage. I think that’s probably just how he went through life.”
“Are you thinking about contacting him again?”
“No. Why give him a chance to reject me a second time?”
“But that happened almost twenty years ago. Maybe he mellowed with age.”
“Or maybe he got tougher and meaner. I know I did.”
“You could have gone anywhere while things cooled off in Vegas,” I said. “Why’d you choose San Francisco?”
“I wanted to do some research on my half-brothers, because I thought it’d be a good idea to keep tabs on them. One thing I wanted to know was whether they still were involved in organized crime. With the same last name, there might be potential blowback on me if one of their business ventures were to go south.”
I didn’t think he was being totally honest with me, or with himself. There had to be more to it than that, maybe some curiosity about his brothers, but I didn’t push. Instead, I asked, “What did you find out?”
“As far as I can tell, they’re retired, but it’s not like they’d advertise it if they were breaking the law. I was worried about digging too deep and ending up on their radar.” He scrubbed his hands over his face and muttered, “Am I still speaking in complete sentences? I’m so tired that I barely know what I’m saying.”
“I’m sorry. This wasn’t the time for a million questions.” I got up and collected the breakfast dishes. “Let’s get out of here, so you can sleep. I’m going to go rinse these and put them in the sink while you gather your things.” He nodded and started packing the journal and tablet into his laptop case while I headed to the kitchen.
Reno was locking the door behind us when the day shift arrived—two big, burly men on his payroll who’d be watching the bar all day and making sure no more harm came to it. I waited in the convertible while he spoke to them. Then he climbed behind the wheel, let loose with a massive yawn, and started the engine.
It took about ten minutes to reach the edge of town from the bar’s working class neighborhood. Then we drove another ten or fifteen minutes into the desert before coming to a dusty sign with a dry fountain at its base. It was for something called “Dessert Heights,” which made me grin.
“I assume that was supposed to read ‘Desert Heights,’ not that the idea of a dessert-themed neighborhood isn’t appealing,” I said. “There could be Cheesecake Lane, Ice Cream Avenue—”
“Nope, not what they were going for. The developer was just a doofus and didn’t know how to spell that thing that’s all around us.”
Reno made a left turn into the residential development, and after we drove for another minute, I asked him, “Um, why do you live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?”