It was a beautiful April Sunday with towering cumulus clipper ships unusual for California. He and Moll had gotten a couple of beers and two poor boys and some potato chips and gone from the campus up to Tilden Park behind Kensington for a picnic. They’d hidden their bikes under some greasewood and climbed up a fire trail to the green brushy crest where they could spread out their blankets and see for miles across the Bay to the gleaming towers of the city.
Even then, Will had worshipped her, adored her, she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, like some exotic wood duck or Chinese pheasant, too glorious to be real.
But when she had come into his arms, she had been stunningly real, the most real woman he’d ever known. He didn’t hold hard, physical details of their first mating in his memory, just fragments of an almost unbearable poignancy. The apple-sweetness of a nipple between his lips, the vulnerability of a white flank as her panties came off, the heart-stopping moment when he entered her, he, Will Dalton, actually inside her, her, Molly St. John, the woman he would love and cherish for all…
Knuckles on the door thudded him to earth like a wing-shot mallard. They kept on. He opened it red-eyed and stone-faced, teetering on the edge of hatred for these men who had dropped him from the sky to the bitter reality of Molly gone, Molly dead.
“No,” he said, and started to shut the door.
A foot was in it. The men were holding up leather cases with gleaming shields. Recognition dawned.
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t…” He stepped back, nodding to the bulky one. “Inspector… Flanagan, isn’t it? And-”
“Lieutenant Stagnaro,” said the lean-faced taut-bodied one, vaguely remembered. A hunter, this one. Good. Moll’s murderer needed to be found, punished, even if it would never…
Will stepped aside so they could come in. “You have news?”
“News?” asked Flanagan in a surprised voice. “Yeah, you might say we got news.” He half turned to look back at his companion as they went through the archway into the living room. “Right, Dante, might say we got news?”
“And a few questions,” said Stagnaro in a tired voice.
Will, who had paused to pick up the mail in the hallway, tossed it on the coffee table and sat down, suddenly wary through his grief. He was a keen observer not only of action but of nuance; any student of primate behavior in the wild had to be. For some unfathomable reason, these men were not his friends.
“I can make some coffee if-”
“This ain’t exactly a social occasion, Perfesser.”
Flanagan, pretending a stupidity not really his own. The other, Stagnaro, could never make even the pretense. Too much lively wit and intelligence in those deceptively soft brown eyes. Rage, love, hatred, sorrow, joy, delight-but never stupidity.
“Then what sort of occasion is it?” Will asked with deliberate coldness. Steady. Hang on. Don’t give them any satisfaction. “My wife is dead, if you have no news about her murderer then why are you intruding on my grief two days before I… have to bury her…”
“Intruding on your grief? Hey, that’s very classy, isn’t it, Dante?” Flanagan’s mouth hung open ever so slightly after he had spoken, a look of remarkable stupidity. “I got a question maybe relates to her death, like. What’d you feel like when you walked in on Moll givin’ Kosta’s dick the old mouth massage?”
Will realized he was on his stomach on the floor with his arms pulled painfully up into the small of his back and a man’s knee keeping them there. Flanagan was sitting slack-legged under the window holding a red-splotched handkerchief to his nose. Will must have knocked him right off the couch.
“You have to admit you asked for that one, Tim,” Stagnaro said from Will’s back. Will raised his face off the dusty rug.
“I’m all right now. You can let me up.”
After a moment, the weight went away from his back. He got quickly to his feet, in case the fat cop wanted some more. But Flanagan now was standing by the window with his back half-turned, gently dabbing at his swollen nose.
“The bathroom is down the hall on the left.”
Flanagan looked grumpy but not terribly vengeful. His nose was red and puffy. He nodded and shambled off down the hall.
Stagnaro sat down, took out a notebook and ballpoint.
Will said, still sore, “What the hell was that all about?”
“He was looking for a reaction.” Stagnaro chuckled. “He got one.” He leaned forward, serious now, his elbows on the chair arms, his hands resting on the notebook in his lap. “I’m head of the SFPD Organized Crime Task Force-three guys working out of a cramped little office in the Hall of Justice. Any sort of organized crime, that’s our meat.”
“Organized crime? I don’t understand.” His bewilderment was real or he was damned good. “Some madman shot Moll-”
“A madman who coolly walks into a crowded restaurant and does his business with a. 22 target pistol that’s been sprayed with Armor All? A madman who then leaves the gun empty on the bar, warns people about seeing anything, then walks out?”
“Armor All?”
“Stuff they put on car finishes to seal-”
An impatient gesture. “Why put it on a gun?”
“The Hell’s Angels started using it in the sixties when they knew they had to leave the gun behind at a hit. Armor All prevents the metal from picking up the shooter’s body oil from his fingers. No oil, no fingerprints. Nowadays most pros who still use guns spray them before even handling them, even if they will be wearing gloves. Just a bit of added insurance. Your average crazy isn’t going to know that, or go to that much trouble even if he does know it.”
Will wasted no more time on needless objections. Sketched out that way by a man concerned with organized crime-did that include the mob, the Mafia, whatever they called it? Anyway, it made the point. It was just that the point made no sense at all.
“There’s very little Mafia activity in the Bay Area,” Stagnant was saying. “But I know of a meat wholesaler back east in New Jersey who moonlights as a hitman and fits the… parameters of the case. Eddie Ucelli-they call him Popgun. Only Ucelli never used more than one bullet for a hit, and this killer had two. Now, why do you think that might be?”
“I never heard of anyone named Ucelli, Lieutenant.”
He seemed to say it rather sadly, as if even this slight connection would be better than the bewilderment his wife’s death must be to him right now. If he wasn’t faking it, of course.
“Even so, I need whatever your wife said to you before…”
“She told me she wanted to see me and we made a date for the next night. We hadn’t spoken for a month, not since…” He made a vague gesture in the direction Flanagan had gone.
“So no reason at all for the man to want to kill you too?”
“ Me? Why in God’s name would anyone want to-”
“Why your wife?” To Will’s bewildered silence, he added, “Two bullets in the gun-if it was Ucelli, of course, or some other pro using his M.O. One for your wife, one-”
“No hard feelings, Perfesser?”
Flanagan’s nose was red and swollen, but it had stopped bleeding and obviously wasn’t broken.
“Not on my part.”
Will asked, in a voice so low he could barely be heard, “How did you… learn of it?”
“Gounaris.”
“In that sort of detail?”
Flanagan cleared his throat again and sat back down.
“It, uh, seems to be common knowledge at Atlas.”
The men were silent for perhaps as long as a minute. Dante couldn’t remember when he had seen such a bleak look on any man’s face, no matter how devastating a loss he might have suffered.
Will sighed. “So you thought that because I’d… found Moll with him, I’d brooded and finally had hired someone to-”
“We have to check out every possibility,” said Dante soothingly. “It’s just routine, Dr. Dalton. Nothing personal.”
“Maybe a little personal with me.” Flanagan’s voice was thick. He touched his damaged nose. “So I’m gonna hit you with something else you ain’t gonna like, Perfesser, and I hope you don’t try to take another poke at me because if you do I’ll break your fuckin’ arm and then take you in for assaulting an officer. We clear?”
“Clear.”
But Will was staring at the mail he had put on the coffee table. Suddenly he wanted the policemen out of there. Moll’s unmistakable back-slanted handwriting was on that small flat padded mailer on top of the stack.
“Okay, here we go. From the time you were first married your wife has been almost continually promiscuous.”
Will was on his feet again, all the blood drained from his face. It was a lie, a goddamned lie the fat cop had… Then he saw the look of pain for Will’s pain on the other policeman’s face. Endless infidelities by Moll over the years would explain so many things he’d steadfastly ignored. Ignored because…
“Is this true?” he asked Dante softly.
Both cops relaxed slightly. Dante sighed, nodded.
“So Gounaris was just the last… the worst… of a…” He took in as huge a breath as he could, held it until colored spots danced before his eyes. He let it out softly. “I don’t believe I can answer any more of your questions right now. Perhaps after the funeral…”
Dante paused to write on the back of one of his business cards, laid it on the edge of the coffee table as he followed his partner toward the foyer.
“I’ve left you my card, Dr. Dalton. With my home number on the back. If you think of anything… or just want to talk…”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
Going down the old wooden steps to the sidewalk toward their car, Dante asked Tim, “So, what do you think?”
“A very short fuse as regards his wife.”
“Which means if he was going to do her…”
“Yeah,” Flanagan said sadly, seeing the easy solution to the murder slip away, “he wouldn’t wait no friggin’ month.”
Will sat with the mailer in his hand, almost afraid to open it since Flanagan had taken the lid off his life and let him peer down into the murky depths of his marriage, his wife, their love- love? The images of Moll with Gounaris rolled quickly before his eyes like the picture on a badly adjusted TV set, except the man now was faceless. Could Moll love him and…
Yet what had changed so much, really? One man or five or fifty or five hundred, what did it matter when the central fact was infidelity? And a woman like Moll, looked at logically, how could his sole love have been enough for her? He knew about the hot-tub deflowering at thirteen, had seen the way her father looked at her, knew how many men had pursued her at Cal…
But logic had little to do with it. He realized he was damned mad at her-enraged, in fact. He’d loved her-did love her-with such intensity, such single-minded devotion, and she was fucking everybody in town…
No. He was who he was, Moll had been who she had been. He knew, despite everything, she had loved him as hard and as constantly as she was able. He, with his studies of primates and hominids, knew better than most what cold atavistic winds blow through the human psyche. Pneuma, the ancient Greeks had called it, the great wind of Nature, of the gods, of creation.
Female chimps in estrus copulated thirty, forty, fifty times a day, with all the males of the troop they could find. And a woman’s genetic code was over 99 percent the same as a chimp’s, but she didn’t have to wait for estrus, could copulate every day with…
And down below everything, below the massive human brain’s neocortex, was the much more ancient mammalian limbic cortex, and deeper yet, at the very base of the brain stem, was a reptilian core called the R-complex, which programmed basic sex, fear and aggression. The overlap between brains was not seamless; the lizard brain’s ancient neural impulses sometimes bled through to the higher control centers. Perhaps… with Moll… those atavistic urges…
He blew out a long breath, picking up the packet, and with resolute fingers opened the folded flap she had stapled shut.
It was four in the morning when Will finally made sense of the data on the disk Moll had sent. So simple yet so profound.
If she had only seen him the night she had mailed this, when, he knew now, she had been frightened-but also still in thrall to Gounaris. So she’d delayed a night, to ask Gounaris about it, tell him she was going to see Will the next night. And if Will was interpreting the disk’s data correctly, he’d had to act fast. A phone call back east to… what was his name, Popgun Ucelli. Allay Moll’s fears so she would divulge nothing until she could be…
If Gounaris had ordered Moll’s death, was Will Dalton ready to kill him? Oh, hell, of course not. Maybe it hadn’t been Gounaris at all, just someone he told about the discovery. Or maybe Stagnaro’s insinuations were wrong, maybe the floppy disk had nothing at all to do with her death.
Stagnaro had said there was almost no mob activity in San Francisco; but he had also said, two bullets in the gun. If Will had been there with her, would he now be dead, too? Then why hadn’t they done it since? Because it was too soon after Moll had been killed? Both at once, okay, but serially it would look suspicious. Eventually, when the case had gone into the open file-which meant closed, he’d read somewhere-a hit-and-run… a fall down the steps… a random mugging…
For the first time since it had happened, Will had something to think about besides his loss. The loss of himself. He was no hero, he didn’t want to die. He would give the disk to Stagnaro, tell him it had come from Moll, that its data was meaningless to him, but since it had been mailed on the night before her death he’d wanted to turn it in.
Stagnaro already suspected a professional hit, so give him the disk, let him do the rest. He knew his job, Will was sure, would be good at it. Just as Will was good at his, studying wild apes. Until Moll’s death, he had planned two years in Uganda with the forest chimpanzees, even had his grant; so why not now? Going to the rain forest would give him a sense of purpose. The time to stick around would have been when Moll was still alive; now it was just an empty gesture.
On the other hand, give the tape to Stagnaro and eventually everyone in the SFPD would know about it. That’s just the way bureaucracies worked. Since the tape had told him about a crooked cop on the force, Will might very well find himself worse off than he was now no matter how well Stagnaro did his job.
There was the smart thing to do and the professional thing to do. The obviously heroic thing to do and the perhaps cowardly thing to do. Through the long night they merged and separated and paired up again in unlikely combinations in his mind. He wrestled with them until dawn was lightening the room through the lace curtains, but he finally made a tentative peace with his options and with himself.
Dante went to Moll Dalton’s funeral, Tim Flanagan didn’t. Tim had no interest in an innocent Will, and he didn’t share Dante’s belief that Will had been slated as a second target for the hitman. Even if true, they’d be nuts to hit him this soon.
There was a tense moment when Gounaris showed up at the closed-casket service in the mortuary chapel. Will sat stony-faced in his pew staring straight ahead. He did the same when Moll’s father entered. Interesting, thought Dante. Even more interesting, Moll’s mother wasn’t there. Most interesting of all, neither were Will’s parents.
Afterward Dante went up to offer condolences as the others filed out for the cortege to the cemetery.
“You thought any more about what I told you, Dr. Dalton? About the possibility that you were a target yourself?”
“A great deal,” said Will. He was different today, lower-key, subdued. “Is there anything I can do to help with the investigation?”
“Yes.” Dante was a bit surprised, but seized his chance. “There was a padded mailer on top of the other letters you brought in from the hall the other day. From Atlas, looked sort of like your wife’s handwriting. If she sent you something before her death…”
The two men stared at one another; something electric passed between them, though neither would acknowledge it.
“Tell me one thing candidly, Lieutenant. Is there any real hope you’ll catch whoever did this-assuming you’re right and it wasn’t just some nut?”
“Possibly, if you help me out.”
“Possibly? I don’t hear a lot of conviction in that. Even you don’t believe you’ll get them. No, I have nothing to tell you.” Will gave a slight shrug. “I’m grateful for your concern about me, but I’m leaving shortly on a two-year grant to study a troop of wild chimpanzees in an East African rain forest, where I’ll be out of the way of any possible danger.”
Dante realized he had been outmaneuvered. He hadn’t known how much he’d counted on learning the contents of that mailer until he found out he wasn’t going to.
“I can’t stop you, of course. But before you go, please have the courtesy to stop playing goddam games with…”
He paused. They were the last ones left in the room, but the professional pallbearers who would take the casket to the cemetery had entered, and his voice had been rising.
“I have no games to play, but I do have professional obligations that don’t depend on your approval.” Will added, in a parody of his western background, “Anyway, Lieutenant, I reckon the danger’ll still be here when I get back.”
That evening, the first of the series of phone calls Dante would receive from the man called Raptor was waiting on his answering machine when he got home from the funeral. The voice was heavy, guttural, a parody of Arte Johnson’s Laugh-In Nazi.
“ Ich bin Raptor, Herr Policeman. I haff taken care uff de voman. Who iss next? You vill be hearink from me again, nein?”
Raptor. Wasn’t that some predatory bird, an eagle, a hawk, something like that? And “Ucelli” meant bird-an odd name for the superstitious Sicilian mafiosi to trust their hits to, wasn’t it? Birds sang, after all.
This Raptor was singing now, but not telling him anything. Trying to make Dante think he was Ucelli?
Maybe something like this had spooked Will Dalton; he’d have to ask. Probably just a kook; but even though he didn’t, take it too seriously, he was just as glad Rosie was at her Greek dance class and fourteen-year-old Antonio was out in the kitchen scarfing down the pasta Dante had made for their supper. In the organized crime squad, he dealt only with the scum of the earth; he didn’t like it coming into his house, touching his family in any way.
He erased the tape and went out to the kitchen to eat pasta and garlic bread and talk basketball with his son.