Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  Kelly had seen enough of show business to understand that when stars and the movie trade came into play, every key aspect of an investigation had to be approved by the tin gods above him. Slowly, ineluctably, this homicide investigation was starting to follow the familiar path from a tight, well-ordered police case to a public circus, one played out daily in the papers and on the TV. He had seen this happen often enough to know there was no way of turning back the clock.

  The conference room was packed. Standing room only. The event was, naturally, going out live, through the networks, and, he saw to his amazement, over the web, too. The crew at the very front wore bomber jackets bearing the logo of Lukatmi.

  “Wait a minute,” Kelly whispered to the police public affairs officer who was watching her minions trying to keep some kind of order in a rabble of more than a hundred assorted newspaper, TV, radio, and web hacks. “Josh Jonah’s got himself a TV station now?”

  “Since last month,” the woman whispered back. “Don’t you read the news?”

  “Only the stuff that matters. Who the hell let his ponytails in here? And why are they sitting up front like they own the place?”

  “I did. How am I supposed to keep them out? They’re media. They’ve got an audience bigger than ten local news stations. Besides, Lukatmi is backing that movie. They’re using this footage for some program on the ‘making of …’ or something.”

  Kelly stared at the woman in disbelief. “This is a homicide investigation. Not a reality show.”

  “You have your job. I have mine. We both report to the commissioner’s office. You want to sort this out there?”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen. Josh Jonah and Tom Black have been on all the networks, prime-time nationwide TV, telling the world what great pals they were with Allan Prime. They’ve delivered flowers by the truckload to Maggie Flavier. How do you think it’s going to look if we throw their TV crew onto the street?”

  “I don’t care about how it looks …” Kelly was aware his voice was rising. The lights came up just then and he found himself stared at by a multitude of faces in a sea of shining artificial suns. “And frankly,” he muttered, “I am starting to care even less with every passing minute.”

  “That’s your problem,” the public affairs woman snapped, then thrust an envelope at him. “They asked me to give you that.”

  “Who?”

  She looked a little guilty. “The commissioner’s office. After Bonetti and the Lukatmi people got in there. Via the mayor’s office, I ought to add. The governor’s been on the line, too.”

  Kelly blinked. The public affairs woman added something he didn’t quite catch, then waded into the audience, trying to instill some order. Gerald Kelly fervently wished he were anywhere else on the planet but in this room, with these people, knowing that, in between the crap and the prurience, there’d be a few good, decent, old-fashioned reporters who knew how to ask good, decent, old-fashioned questions. Ones he couldn’t begin to answer.

  He didn’t have the time to look at the sheet of paper the infobabe had handed him. The room had exploded in a frenzy. The media was hungry and demanding to be fed. Besides, the first question was prearranged: some guy from the Examiner, primed to ask the obvious. Was there any proven connection with Allan Prime’s death? Kelly liked to seed the openers. It gave him a slim chance to keep a handle on things. Normally.

  “Any connection is supposition at this moment …” he began, after the plant rose to his mark. He faltered. He was astonished to see Gianluca Quattrocchi reaching over to take the mike from him, talking in his florid English, saying the exact opposite. Kelly sat, dumbstruck, listening to the stuck-up Italian blathering on about poetry and motivation and the damned movie that seemed to overshadow one bloody murder and now a near-fatality, too.

  As he reached some obscure point about the relationship between the crimes and the cycle inside the book, the pompous Carabinieri man fell silent. He gestured to the Canadian at his side to finish the answer.

  “The links are implicit, obvious, and ominous,” Whitcombe announced, in his weedy, professorial voice. “In Dante’s Hell, the punishment fits the crime. Allan Prime died in the second circle, that of the wanton. He was led to his death by a woman, and the publicity we have since seen seems to indicate that Prime’s private life merited this description. The third circle is that of the gluttonous. Ergo …”

  Kelly muttered to Quattrocchi, “Ergo what? Maggie Flavier was eating an apple. This is not what we agreed.”

  “Listen, please,” the Italian replied, shushing him, almost politely, “the man is a genius.”

  “He’s a frigging …” Kelly began, and then shut up.

  The PR woman was actually pointing at him from the audience, her long finger erect in the bright lights of the camera, then running across her upper lip, as if to say “Zip it.”

  In the front row, McGuire, the crime reporter for the Chronicle, had started to snigger.

  Kelly picked up the envelope the infobabe had given him, ripped it open, and read the contents with growing disbelief.

  3

  Teresa Lupo wished the American policewoman hadn’t asked about Maggie Flavier’s poisoning. Teresa hated imprecision more than anything.

  So she simply said, “The poor woman met her wicked stepmother. Or stepfather. Who knows? Unless your people find the man who gave her that poisoned apple.”

  “Mobile caterers …” Catherine Bianchi sighed. “They’re minimum-wage businesses. What do you expect?”

  “Not much. The thing is …” She felt as if she were trying to analyse a scene from a movie, one that had been ripped out of context. Without knowledge of what preceded the event, she couldn’t begin to pull some logic out of what might follow. “… it’s a very strange way to try to murder someone. If that’s what it was. Particularly given the way they killed Allan Prime. A crossbow bolt through the skull. A poisoned apple given to someone with a food allergy. It doesn’t even sound like the same person to me. What they did to Maggie was horrifying. But …”

  The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. “If I were a betting person, I’d lay money against her being badly affected by a cruel stunt like that, much less killed. She spends most of her time near lots of people. She knows she has that allergy and she’s prepared to deal with it. Yes, she was at risk in the woods, alone with Nic. But who could have predicted she’d be there? The chances of her dying should have been quite slim.”

  Falcone finally took his attention away from the Lukatmi building. “You mean they weren’t trying to kill her?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. I just think it was a very odd way to go about it if that’s what they wanted. Perhaps they just planned to hurt her. They certainly managed that.”

  She tried to put the problem succinctly. “What bothers me most of all is the style. Allan Prime had no chance of survival whatsoever. He died from violence of the most extreme sort, the kind of brute force we see ten, twenty times a year because that’s the way the human race tends to go about eliminating one another. It’s quick. It’s easy. You don’t have to do much in the way of preparation. But poisoning … it’s rare. And tricky. I’ve only dealt with one case of willful poisoning in my entire career and that worked only because the victim was dying from heart disease already. Why now? Why here of all places?” One more thing bothered her. “Do they grow almonds in California?”

  “Of course,” Catherine answered. “Millions of them. Merced County. About an hour south. I go at the end of February, when the blossom’s out. You can do a tour. It’s beautiful.”

  “Farmed almonds? For sale?”

  “Sure. But you don’t need to go out and buy almonds to get almond essence. It’s on sale in any grocery store.”

  “Not this kind,” Teresa answered, wishing she had her lab and Silvio Di Capua. “Whatever was injected into that apple was homemade. There were traces of fibre. You don’t get that in essence. Also, there was a sma
ll but noticeable amount of prussic acid.”

  That silenced them.

  “Cyanide,” she explained.

  “Cyanide smells of almonds,” Peroni pointed out.

  “Or almonds smell of cyanide, whichever way you want to look at it. The native wild almond contains a substance that transforms into hydrogen cyanide when the flesh is crushed or bruised. Domesticated varieties have had that mostly bred out of them, though they retain the smell. That’s not what Maggie Flavier got. She was poisoned with the crushed fruit of a wild bitter almond. You can still buy bitter-almond essence in Rome. We use it, very carefully, in cooking. But it’s banned in the U.S., except in medicine, which is why I guess he had to make it himself.”

  “So she had cyanide poisoning, too?” Catherine asked, bewildered. “And you still think they weren’t trying to kill her?”

  “Not with cyanide. It was a minute amount. You can get exactly the same effect using standard almond essence from a grocery store. It was the allergic reaction that put Maggie in hospital. There wasn’t enough cyanide there to do much of anything. I don’t get it.”

  Falcone yawned. Details that went nowhere always bored him.

  The clock on the dashboard ticked over to one-fifteen. They were due inside Lukatmi.

  “That supermarket over there,” he said, reaching into his wallet and pulling out a fifty-dollar bill. “We need some shopping.”

  Teresa took a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself. “Are you going to do this to me every time there’s someone interesting to talk to?”

  “We scarcely have reason to be in that place,” Peroni said apologetically. “You certainly don’t.”

  “So I’m supposed to shop? While you question the Lukatmi guys?”

  “A suggestion only,” Falcone cut in. “I would never presume to give you orders. It would be impertinent. And also …” He mulled over the words. “… somewhat counterproductive. You fare best left on your own. Think about old films and bitter almonds, please. Just do it out of my earshot.”

  Muttering something obscene in which the phrase “stinking cops” was one of the milder rebukes, she got out of the car, slamming the door as hard as she could behind her.

  It was a bright, cold summer day. The chill of the strong sea breeze soon began to make her teeth ache. She thought of walking out to Fort Point, a mile or so towards the bridge, and trying to find the exact location for the haunting scene in which Jimmy Stewart rescued Kim Novak from the ocean. Much, it seemed to her, as Nic had apparently saved the stricken Maggie Flavier. Life imitating art. Quattrocchi believed that was happening. So did she, but in a different way. While Leo Falcone …

  Teresa Lupo wasn’t sure she was right. But she was certain they were wrong, at least in part.

  She walked back towards the Marina, thinking. Naturally, she’d keyed their number into her phone, under the single name HankenFrank.

  “Pronto!” said a voice on the other end.

  “What the hell are you doing talking Italian, Frank?”

  “What the hell are you doing being ignorant of caller ID?” the voice on the other end demanded. “And how did you know it was me, not zygote two?”

  “Because you sound different, even if you don’t know it. Can I buy you two coffee?”

  “Only if you have some interesting questions with which to entertain us.”

  “That,” Teresa said, pocketing Falcone’s fifty-dollar bill, “I can guarantee.”

  4

  Bryan Whitcombe was droning on about poetry again, things a homicide cop could never, Gerald Kelly felt, be expected to understand or take seriously. About how the fourth circle was to do with the avaricious and the prodigal. About how they should expect, given the rigid adherence to the subject matter of the structure of Inferno, that any next intended victim should somehow have fallen guilty to these sins.

  “That narrows it down in the movie business,” Kelly muttered. He didn’t mind that a couple of people in the front row got to hear, the furious-looking public affairs woman among them.

  Someone put up their hand and asked the kind of obvious question hacks always wanted to bring up: “And after that?”

  Whitcombe launched into the list. The fifth circle, the irascible. The sixth, the heresiarch, which he defined as the leader of some dissenting movement. Then the seventh, the violent. The fraudulent and the malicious, the eighth. Finally the last, the traitors.

  “And after that?” the same reporter asked.

  Kelly snatched the microphone and barked, “After that, there’s not a living soul left in the whole of California. Gentlemen. Ladies. I leave you with our Italian friends and their pet professor. Some of us have work to do.”

  He stalked out and went straight to his office three floors above. The conference was still going on. Quattrocchi and Whitcombe were fielding questions. The harpy from public affairs had press-ganged poor, meek Cy Fielding, one of Kelly’s oldest and softest detectives, onto the podium in his place. Not that anyone seemed remotely interested in what the man might say.

  Kelly looked at the letter from the commissioner’s office again and swore. The phone on his desk rang.

  “Yes!” he yelled into it.

  It was Sheldon from the commissioner’s office, all sweetness and sympathy.

  “Calm down. We would have told you beforehand, but you weren’t around.”

  “That’s because I was out doing my job. Believe it or not, murderers rarely walk into the office on their own or turn up as attachments in an e-mail.”

  Kelly hit the keyboard on his computer and brought up the video of the press conference. It was live on the screen in front of him in an instant, naturally. Geeks ran the SFPD. Like they ran the world. At that moment just about every police officer inside a station in San Francisco was doubtless watching this piece of vaudeville instead of walking the street looking for bad guys.

  “When a big movie company wants to drop a million dollars on the table as a reward for finding the bastards who butchered one of their stars and tried to kill another, we listen,” Sheldon said calmly. “We have no choice. These people have clout. Especially Quattrocchi. You have to work with them.”

  “A million-dollar reward,” Kelly spat back at the phone. He put on an accent he thought came close to Quattrocchi’s dainty English. “For information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone threatening the life or security of any cast members or associates of Roberto Tonti’s Inferno. Jesus. Hollywood’s writing the script for us now. Don’t you see that? They’re turning this into a freak show.”

  “Enough—”

  “No. Not enough. I won’t shut up. You’ve just taken away half my manpower. Maybe more. ’Cause now we have to field the phones listening to kooks who think their neighbour’s a star-killer.”

  “Enough!”

  That was loud, and Sheldon didn’t normally do loud. So, reluctantly, Kelly kept quiet.

  “I say this once and once only, Gerry. You’re too damned good to throw away your career over this. And it could happen. Believe me.”

  “Someone murdered Allan Prime. Maybe they tried to murder Maggie Flavier. We are not dealing with an episode of Columbo here.”

  “Maybe?”

  “You heard me.”

  “That’s your problem. These guys have got money. They’ve got clout. They’ve got the ear of the governor, the mayor, and God almighty for all I know. Deal with it, Kelly. Otherwise, these guys will eat you alive.”

  Captain Gerald Kelly slammed down the phone, then rolled his executive chair around and stared out the window.

  The worst thing was, Sheldon had a point.

  5

  “Ponytails,” Catherine Bianchi grumbled as they walked through the wide central hall of Lukatmi Building Number One. Three galleries ranged around the sides, each housing cubicles lit by the glow from ranks and ranks of computer screens. In the centre of the hall were scattered vast soft sofas in bright primary colours, pinball and foosball machines, places to e
at and drink coffee. The staff, all around twenty-five, rarely more, wore jeans and T-shirts and either lolled in the play area or dashed about looking deeply serious, often tapping away at tiny handheld computers. To Peroni, it seemed like a kindergarten for people who would never grow up. Except for the flashing sports-style scoreboard at the end of the vast interior, set against a window overlooking San Francisco Bay, with a rough grey chunk of Alcatraz, a lump of uninviting rock and slab-like buildings, intruding into the corner.

  High above the office the electronic scoreboard displayed the Lukatmi stock price in a running ticker alongside a host of other tech industry giants: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo.

  A skinny individual with greasy shoulder-length hair had been deputed to meet them when they arrived. He said very little and did so eating a sandwich that looked as if it were stuffed with pond weed. When he saw what had caught Peroni’s attention, he tapped the big Italian cop on the shoulder and nodded at the scoreboard.

  “Watch the totals. Dinosaurs down five percent average over the year. Lukatmi …”

  The numbers kept on flickering. There was a big “up” arrow next to the symbol that had the multiarmed logo by its side.

  “Sixty percent and rising.”

  Catherine Bianchi eyed him and said, “The dinosaurs have still got more money than you. They could buy out Lukatmi tomorrow if they wanted. Or invent something that kills you stone dead overnight. Beware old people. They don’t harbour grudges, they nurture them.”

  The geek shrugged. “You know, lady, when you’re living inside the e-conomy you soon get to realise there are some things people outside, old people in particular, never ever come to comprehend.”

  “Does that mean you’re up for sale or not?” Falcone asked.

  “I code,” he replied, after a bite of pond weed. “Nothing else. My old man told me anything’s for sale if the price is right. But I earn more in one year than he ever got in a lifetime. So who do you think I should listen to?”