“Simon Harvey organised the deal, didn’t he?”
“So I hear. Can’t get into directing, so maybe he fancies himself a producer now. He’d better not come near my clients again — I’ll claw his eyes out. Unless he’s got funding, in which case we’ll do lunch.” She laughed.
“Thanks for the insight.”
“I’ll tell you something else, too, Nic sweetie. I was talking to Allan Prime’s agent the other day. This is a small world. I wanted to commiserate.”
“Prime made the same deal,” Costa guessed. “Outside the usual rules. No money on the table. No money anywhere.”
Sylvie Brewster sounded impressed. “Maggie said you were a smart one. Be kind to her while it lasts, won’t you, babe?”
Then she was gone. Costa went to the waste bin and retrieved Falcone’s note. He was still reading it, half furious, half ashamed, when Teresa came back with two bags full of groceries.
She saw what he was doing and said, “Well, look on the bright side. At least you escaped getting it face-to-face. Leo was pretty mad at you. Even for him.”
“Sorry. I’ll have to find him and apologise.”
“No rush. Leo Falcone’s life consists of a series of small explosions. It always will. Particularly when he keeps getting knocked back. A woman who doesn’t fall for his well-oiled charms. We had to come all the way to California to find one.”
She didn’t say it with much relish.
“Is he upset?” Costa asked.
“About Catherine? He’s beside himself. I think the poor thing’s actually smitten. I’d like to say it serves him right for treating Raffaella Arcangelo so badly.” She screwed up her face. “But I don’t feel that way. Must be getting old. It’s difficult to work up the energy to be vindictive these days. He’ll get over it when he’s back home in Rome.” She took the note from his hands and put it back in the bin.
“Look. Leo wrote that thing out of hurt more than anything else. It’s forgotten now. You should do the same. Don’t expect me to make you coffee, either. I’m not stopping. I have identical twins to scold. And for that I do have the strength. Jesus …”
Costa didn’t say a word.
She sat down opposite him and grumbled, “Oh for God’s sake, what do you want?”
“I want to talk this through.”
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.”