“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.”