“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
