Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  Teresa put a finger to her cheek, gave him a questioning look. “Let me make a suggestion. You have been granted the day off. There is, it seems to me, someone in your life again. You’re in a beautiful city most people would pay good money to visit. Why not go out and enjoy yourself? See the sights. Take Maggie to lunch. Do something normal for a change.”

  “I do normal things all the time,” he objected.

  “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  She left without another word. Costa thought about what she’d said. He’d never invited Maggie for a coffee, let alone a meal. In Rome it would have been different. No, he corrected himself, in Rome it will be different.

  He was reaching for the phone when it rang.

  “We need to meet,” Gerald Kelly said. “Right away.”

  2

  Teresa Lupo had summoned them to their usual table at the café on Chestnut. She couldn’t work out whether to feel mad or relieved. Hank and Frank sat there sipping coffee and picking at a couple of doughnuts, staring at the ceiling as if pretending that nothing had happened. Their hands were covered in scratches. Hank’s right cheek was red and inflamed from what he said was a reaction to poison oak. Frank’s eyes were watery and bloodshot. They looked a mess, and as guilty as a couple of schoolboys caught pilfering from the neighbourhood store.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” she wanted to know.

  “That maybe we could help,” Frank responded.

  “It was his idea,” Hank jumped in.

  “Don’t try that with me,” she warned. “You two work as a pair. I’m not stupid.”

  “We did help, didn’t we?” Hank seemed quite offended. “In a messy kind of way.”

  The death of two men had clearly upset them, in spite of Jimmy Gaines’s murderous intentions. It was impossible to escape the consequences. The shooting of Tom Black had headlined the morning TV news, and the recovery of Gaines’s body from a ravine in the Muir Woods hadn’t been far behind. Hank and Frank had spent half the night being interrogated and then, on the advice of the SFPD, found themselves somewhere private to stay in order to avoid the attentions of the news crews. “Somewhere private” had turned out to be a cheap motel in Cow Hollow, just round the corner from where they lived. Frank called it “hiding in plain sight.” Hank described the decision as pure laziness.

  “If they hadn’t shot that poor boy …” Hank grumbled. “He could have told them something.”

  She was not going to take this nonsense. “Someone who comes racing towards armed police holding a gun is asking for trouble. Don’t blame anyone else for that. Least of all yourselves.”

  “So is that it?” Frank asked. “Is it over? It was Josh Jonah, Tom Black, and Jimmy Gaines doing all this stuff? Along with that photographer guy who got killed?”

  Teresa shrugged. “Criminal investigations are based on assumptions,” she said, toying with some strange Middle Eastern pastry the café owner had thrust upon her. “They have to be. It’s how we make progress. We assume that when a series of killings occur inside the same circle like this, it’s all down to the same individual or group of people.”

  “That makes sense,” Hank agreed.

  “But what if the assumptions are wrong?” Teresa asked. “What if one person killed Allan Prime and another one tried to poison Maggie Flavier? They don’t look like the same person’s handiwork to me. Not for a moment.”

  Frank looked uneasy. “I don’t like complicated ideas. There’s a gratifying shortage of people willing to go around knocking off their fellow human beings. What are the odds of them all turning up in one place like this, all at the same time?”

  Hank nodded. “I’m inclined to agree. If this were fiction …”

  “It isn’t fiction!” she hissed. “If you’d got killed last night, you’d have known that.”

  The brothers stared at her, eyebrows raised in the same surprised, amused expression.

  “You know what I mean. Don’t ask me what people think right now. I have no idea.”

  “What did Tom Black tell your young friend?” Frank asked.

  “Not a lot. Yes, there was a conspiracy to hype the movie. No, they didn’t think anyone would get hurt. That’s about it.”

  Hank finished his doughnut, wiped his fingers daintily on a napkin, and said, “I still don’t know why Jimmy wanted to get us out of the way. Why he couldn’t just let us go once Tom was in police custody. He must have known it would come back to him in the end.”

  “He’d have been gone the moment he was out of Muir Woods,” Frank muttered. “Murderous bastard …”

  “Yeah, but why?” Hank shook his head. “Jimmy didn’t like the idea of shooting us. And he didn’t need to kill us, did he?”

  Frank scratched his nose. “No,” he agreed. “He didn’t.”

  Teresa watched them struggle with this idea, then suggested, “There has to be some reason. Something you knew …”

  “Like what?” Frank demanded. “We were wise to the fact Jimmy knocked around with Tom Black. We knew Jimmy was gay, or at least hung around in those circles. That’s no big deal. Nothing worth killing for.”

  “Frank’s right,” Hank added. “No answers there.”

  “Then it must have been something you said.”

  The two men grumbled to each other, then folded their arms in unison and gazed at her.

  “Think about it,” she urged. “When you went to see Gaines at Lukatmi. He surely wasn’t thinking of popping you two in the Muir Woods the moment you turned up.”

  “He looked pleased to see us,” Hank agreed. “Turned a touch cooler when we told him why we came. Not that that helps us any. He was keeping a big secret. Only understandable.”

  “Think back,” she told them. “Was there some point in the conversation when his mood changed?”

  The brothers looked blank.

  “What about later?” Teresa persisted. “On the way to the woods? When you got there? What did you talk about?”

  “Vertigo and how it wasn’t really shot where everyone thinks it was,” Frank answered. “Oh, and Thoreau. Tom Black loved Walden. Those secrets don’t merit killing two old colleagues.”

  “He’d already made up his mind by the time we got there,” Hank said. “It was in his eyes.”

  Frank nodded. “You’re right. He was odd with us even before we crossed the bridge. I can’t believe we were so stupid to just walk into that forest with him.”

  She didn’t like seeing them like this. “Never look back, boys. Stupidity is God’s gift to the world, ours to do with as we please. You’re dead tired. Are you going to go back to that motel of yours? Come round to our place if you like …”

  They didn’t budge. Something she said had set Hank thinking.

  “This is insane,” he said finally.

  “What is?” she asked.

  “The moment. When Jimmy Gaines got a look in his eye. I think I got it.”

  “You have?” Frank asked.

  “Maybe. Remember at Lukatmi? When he wanted to take us off for coffee?”

  “So?” Frank said, shaking his head.

  “You made some crack about there being no insurance against stupidity. Jimmy looked at you funny the moment you used that word. He asked what you meant.” Hank leaned forward. “Remember what you said?”

  Frank grimaced. “I told him he knew exactly what I meant. It was just a saying.”

  “He didn’t get the joke, brother. Not at all.”

  The three of them looked at each other.

  “Insurance?” Teresa asked, bewildered. “Is that the best you’ve got? I’ve spent the last two weeks screaming at people about how the human race doesn’t go around murdering itself in defence of poetry. They, in return, have been yelling at me for having the temerity to suggest it might have something to do with a 1950s movie. Now you’re throwing insurance my way?”

  Hank called out for more coffee and added, “Barkev? Is it OK if we use your machine out back?�
�

  The café owner walked to the rear of the room and opened a door to a tiny and very tidy office where a smart new computer sat on a clear and well-polished desk.

  “I don’t imagine either of you has ever read much Robert Louis Stevenson except for Treasure Island and Kidnapped,” Hank stated.

  Teresa exchanged glances with Frank. “I think I can speak for both of us when I say no,” she responded.

  Hank got up and stretched his scratched and swollen fingers, as if readying them for action.

  “There was a book called The Wrong Box. He wrote it with a friend. Read it years ago. Funny story, comedic funny, that is. Cruel and heartless, too.” He peered through at the office. “Guilty people get touchy, I guess,” Hank Boynton said. “They see spooks around every corner. Get twitchy at the slightest, most innocent of things. Maybe …” He looked at them, still working this out for himself. “Just maybe, it’s all in a name.”

  3

  Gerald Kelly owned an ordinary black sedan and drove it sedately through the city by a route so circuitous Costa couldn’t begin to identify any of the neighbourhoods they passed. This was a conversation the SFPD captain had wanted with someone for a long time. Listening to him spend the best part of an hour outlining what he knew, it was obvious why. Without Gianluca Quattrocchi’s conspiracy theory, homicide had precious little left to work on. There was a genuine crime inside Lukatmi — a missing fortune, and offshore agreements that were impenetrable to the U.S. authorities, and probably would remain so now the two founders of the company were dead. But those entailed financial offences and fell to a different team of investigators, probably federal ones. Kelly was a homicide man through and through, and in that field he was struggling for daylight.

  They travelled slowly down a long straight street. At the end the Pacific Ocean sat in a pale blue line on the horizon.

  “What do you think Black was trying to tell you last night?” Kelly asked.

  “That there was a conspiracy within Inferno designed to generate as much publicity as possible. As far as he was concerned, that’s all it was. He said Allan Prime wasn’t supposed to die.”

  Kelly reached the intersection, pulled to the curb, and stopped. “Don’t you love the sea?” he asked. “It’s so beautiful. I could sit here for hours. Used to when I was a street cop. You’d be amazed what you get to learn that way.” He looked at Costa. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. Here’s something that came in from the overnight people. James Conway Gaines. Former fireman who wound up working security at Lukatmi, who seems to have become some kind of lover-cum-father-figure for Tom Black. He had three convictions for violence, bar brawls, the usual. Some rough gay places mainly. Also …”

  Kelly’s mobile phone rang. He took it out of his jacket, answered the call, told someone he was busy and would be back within the hour.

  “Jimmy Gaines was in Italy for two weeks right when all this fun began. In Rome. We found an entry in his passport and stubs for some fancy hotel that ought to be beyond the reach of someone on a security guard’s wages. Flew back the day after Allan Prime died.”

  He wound down the window and breathed in the fresh sea air. “James Conway Gaines was crew, too, but for the publicity stunt, not the movie set. Just like our dead photographer friend Martin Vogel. Gaines fell over a cliff. Pretty clear it was an accident and those two friends of your pathologist got lucky. But why did Vogel get killed?”

  Costa thought of the conversation in the back of Gaines’s station wagon. There were so many questions he wished he’d asked.

  “Vogel was blackmailing Josh Jonah. However much he got paid to start with, it wasn’t enough. Jonah went round to see him. Maybe to kill him. Maybe to reason with him and it turned into a fight. Maybe …”

  He couldn’t shake the memories.

  “I still think there was someone else there that night.”

  Kelly watched a gull float past on the other side of the road, almost stationary in the light marine breeze.

  “I know you do. And I wish there was one scrap of evidence in that burnt-out mess to back you up. So let’s assume it was the fight idea. I don’t see those two geeks getting into the hit business. Dino Bonetti, on the other hand …”

  “Everything we have on Bonetti we gave to you. Our people in Rome had plenty of information. The mob connections. The history of fraud.”

  “Yeah. We had stuff of our own, too. Does it help? I don’t know. The guy’s a movie producer. Most of that business is clean. Some parts are as dirty as hell. Bonetti’s been dining with crooks here and back in Italy for two decades or more. There was a time when the Feds were thinking of refusing him entrance into the U.S. on grounds of his connections. Not that it happened. Maybe a movie wouldn’t have got made or something.”

  “What about Tonti?” Costa asked.

  “We all know he’s got mob links. His wife’s left him, so maybe brother-in-law Scarface isn’t too happy. But I don’t buy it. This is California, not Calabria. It’s not worth going to jail for wasting an in-law who’s a jerk. Tonti’s Italian by birth, living here, and he’s got friends with records. Doesn’t add up to much.” He waved his arm along the seafront. “There’s a dozen restaurant guys not a mile from here I could say the same thing about. We have no proof, only guesses. I’m sick of those.”

  He started the car and took a right along the seafront road. Ahead was an expanse of green hillside. It looked familiar.

  “Also,” Kelly added, “there’s the health thing. Roberto Tonti has advanced lung cancer. He wasn’t hopping in and out of Martin Vogel’s apartment when the shooting started. The guy’s got maybe three or four months, max. Little movie industry secret, one they’d like to keep quiet while they’re raising dough to make a sequel. Yeah, I know. Sometimes a dying man feels he’s been given the right to kill. We’d need a little more evidence than that, though. And a motive.” He shook his head. “Killing Allan Prime got these guys what they wanted. Why did they need more than that? How rich do you have to be? If it had ended with Prime, maybe Lukatmi wouldn’t have collapsed, not with all that nice publicity to keep it afloat.”

  He stomped on the horn as a skateboarder crossed the empty road directly in front of them.

  “Kids.” He peered at the ocean as if wishing he were on it. “Am I missing something?”

  “Carlotta Valdes,” Costa stated.

  They began to climb uphill. Costa had a good idea where they were headed. They drove past golfers playing through wisps of fog drifting in from the sea and drew up in front of the elegant white building at the summit. The Legion of Honor looked just as he remembered it. Images of the paintings it held, Maggie’s ghosts, flitted through his head.

  Kelly turned and pointed a finger in his direction.

  “I was not forgetting Carlotta Valdes. By the way, please tell your boss Falcone that I am mad as hell at him for mentioning that damned movie in the first place. So Tonti worked with Hitchcock fifty years ago. What’s the connection?”

  Costa took a deep breath. “Think about it. They’re the same story. Inferno and Vertigo. A lost man looking for something he wants. An ethereal woman he believes can provide some answers.” He thought of what Simon Harvey had told Maggie. “For both of them, it ends in death. Beatrice waits for Dante in Paradise. Scottie sees the woman he’s created in the image of Madeleine Elster die in front of his eyes, and stands alone in the bell tower, staring down at her body. He’s lost everything. Including the vertigo that’s been cursing him, that got him into the case in the first place.”

  Kelly seemed unmoved. “You’re starting to sound like Bryan Whitcombe.”

  “Not really. If someone’s obsessed with one, it’s understandable he might be obsessed with the other. There’s a connection. It’s obvious when you think about it. What it means …” His voice trailed off. He’d spent hours trying to make sense of the link. Something was missing. “I can’t begin to guess.”

  Another memory returned. “Tom Black said something. About how t
he movies screw you up. Screwed up Scottie. Someone called Jones …” He shook his head, trying to recall Black’s jumble of words.

  “Scottie’s in Vertigo,” Kelly suggested. “Is there a guy called Jones in the movie, too?”

  “There was an actor. He played the creepy coroner. He’s long dead.”

  Kelly gave him the kind of look Costa had come to expect from Falcone.

  “Are we shooting in the dark or what? I’ll check if the name Jones means anything inside the movie crew. You sure you heard it right?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s deal with something practical, shall we? Where’s Carlotta? Back in Rome and paid off? Dead?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Cherchez la femme. We don’t have one. Not anywhere.” He caught Costa’s eye. “Except for Ms. Flavier. We’re supposed to think someone’s tried to kill her twice, except neither time was quite what it appeared on the surface. Personal feelings apart, do you think it might possibly be her? I checked Quattrocchi’s files. Carlotta Valdes turned up at Allan Prime’s home first thing in the morning. Maggie Flavier was at home in her apartment until two that afternoon. Alone. No witnesses. That name could have been a joke.”

  “Whoever it was made a real death mask,” Costa pointed out. “Does that sound a likely skill for an actress?”

  “Maybe. Have you asked?”

  “No. No more than I asked whether she poisoned herself either.”

  The captain didn’t flinch. “If you wanted to put on some kind of show, isn’t that the way you’d do it? Carrying a hypodermic along with you and a tame cop to help out?” He leaned over the seat and said, in a low, half-amused voice, “You don’t mind me saying this, do you?”

  “No,” Costa answered, refusing to rise to the bait.

  “You don’t think it hasn’t run through the minds of your colleagues, do you? They’re not dumb.”

  “The Carabinieri were wrong when they told you Maggie had no alibi for that morning. She had flowers delivered around ten. Ordered them herself. Signed for them herself. We have a copy of the receipt back in the Questura and a statement from the deliveryman. Little details like that probably never occurred to Quattrocchi. I took the deliveryman’s statement myself before we even left Rome. Maggie could not have been the woman who signed herself in as Carlotta Valdes in that apartment in the Via Giulia. It’s simply impossible.”