“Good guess,” Sam said. “But not entirely accurate.” Sam explained that he’d had his buddy Jimenez-the guy who got us involved in this in the first place-get some information about the Ottone family fortunes after he saw Dinino roll up and learned that while Gennaro certainly had money, much of it was tied to his wife. They had a prenuptial that paid him handsomely in the event of their divorce-a million dollars for every year of marriage-but Gennaro’s personal wealth was marginal in comparison and mostly generated from racing.
“Alone, he’s worth maybe two million dollars,” Sam said. “He owns the house he grew up in as a kid in California. That’s worth seven hundred fifty K. He’s got a few cars in his own name. A cabin in Tuscany. Keeps a small personal checking account. Everything else comes from the family. But he’s on the books as the half owner of his team, but it’s a paper ownership. He puts none of his own money in it, and when his team wins, which wasn’t very often before this year, he cuts his share of the purse to his teammates. The largest part of the purse goes to the team owner, which, of course, is all in the family pot.”
“Nice pot,” Fi said.
“Where’s the vast conspiracy, Sam?” I said.
“I was just getting to that,” Sam said. He turned his laptop around. “That’s Maria Ottone’s will.”
Fi scrolled through the pages. “It’s a hundred pages long,” she said. “I didn’t know you could read that many pages at one time, Sam.”
“I skimmed to the good parts,” he said, and then told us what those were. If Maria died, her daughter stood as the chief beneficiary of her estate and Gennaro would be subject to the terms of the prenuptial, plus costs to take care of their daughter through age eighteen, when her full inheritance would be available. And if the daughter were to die, too? The money stayed in the family.
“And what if Gennaro dies?” I said.
“Mr. Dinino ends up with full ownership of the team and is married to a woman without an heir or anyone who might reasonably make a claim to her fortune.”
“So,” I said, “everyone dies and Dinino stands to make money he doesn’t really need. Doesn’t add up.”
“That’s why you’re the spy,” Sam said.
“There must be a girl involved,” Fi said.
“Why?” I said.
“Because if there wasn’t,” she said, “no one would be acting this stupid.”
It is always slightly frightening when Fiona is the voice of reason.
“What do we know about Dinino?” I said.
“Not a lot outside the public image,” Sam said. “Married Maria’s mother five years ago. Dated supermodels prior to that. Family was in the cement business before selling out a few years before Dinino married Mrs. Ottone. One ex-wife, still living. No children. No scandals apart from a class-action lawsuit over poor cement composition in 1988.”
“No criminal involvement?”
“Nothing confirmed,” Sam said. “But being in the cement business in Italy is a little bit like being in the trash business in Las Vegas. Even if you’re not dirty, there’s a good chance you’re paying off someone to keep yourself clean.”
“Might make sense for him to have some contacts like Bonaventura, then,” I said. “Any reason to think he might be having money problems?”
“Apart from the wholesale crash of the world’s financial markets last year?”
“Apart from that, yes.”
“Seems solid.”
“Trust me,” Fi said. “At the end of this all, there will be a crying woman to blame.”
“When was the last time you cried?” Sam asked.
Fiona thought for a moment. “It had to do with a pony. Do the math yourself.”
“What did you get from the names of the people staying at the hotel?” I asked. “Anyone who might reasonably be going after Gennaro or the Ottones?”
Sam clicked open a new file on his computer. “Well, first thing, there’s an insane amount of shrimp consumed by the guests of the Setai.”
“If the crustaceans attack, we’ll know why,” I said. “What else?”
“No obvious red flags,” he said, “except for the movies Carson Daly rented.”
Sam went down the list of names and noted that in addition to half a dozen celebrities in for the week, there were also a good thirty private security personnel staying, too, including the body-guards that normally travel with Nicholas Dinino.
“Why didn’t we see any of them last night?” I said.
“Maybe they were hiding,” Fi said. She dusted off Sam’s second beer and was now poking around my cabinets for food. Something about this sort of talk always seemed to make Fiona hungry, which was funny since violence tended to make her aroused in an entirely different way. Figuring out Fiona’s wiring would require a forensic neu ropsychologist who also knew how to fight.
“I would have seen them,” I said.
“You didn’t see the man this morning,” she said. She found a box of saltines and was now back in the fridge. “Do you keep any kind of spreads, Michael? Butter? Jam? Nutella?”
“No.”
“What do you put on these crackers?”
“Nothing,” I said. “They were here when I moved in.” Fiona tossed the box in the trash and opted for my last serving of blueberry yogurt. “And I would have seen the man on my mother’s street if I hadn’t been busy chipping through the arctic circle of my mother’s freezer to remove Tater Tots that expired twenty years ago.”
Fi swallowed a spoonful of yogurt and made a dismayed face. “You need to diversify your palate,” she said, and handed me my own yogurt. “That man today, if he was any real trouble, would have done something when you were inside. The element of surprise is gone, so now they-whoever they are-must know you’re looking for them.”
“Or they don’t think anything at all,” I said.
Most people that get hired to intimidate other people aren’t exactly deep thinkers. If they were, they’d find another line of work. People who are hired to watch other people and get spotted immediately are even worse off-if you’re not proficient at sitting and staring, it likely means you have no training. Spies learn to watch not from a hiding place, but from a place where others aren’t likely to actually be looking. Sitting in a hundred-thousand-dollar car across the street from someone’s house isn’t exactly Langley training.
“When did Dinino check in?” I asked.
“Same day as Gennaro,” Sam said.
“Any idea where he was when we were in the hotel?”
“No,” Sam said. “But I have a buddy who might be able to find out.” Sam opened up another window on his computer and typed Nicholas Dinino’s name into Google’s Blog Search engine, and five seconds later we were looking at the society blog for Palm Life magazine, a local rag that covered the glamorous life in Miami, which typically meant they took a lot of photos of wealthy people trying to look casual. It didn’t really work, since it’s hard to look casual with an entire diamond mine on your body.
It’s nearly impossible to move about the world undetected if you’re the least bit famous. Anyone with a cell phone is seconds away from telling anyone who is interested-or completely uninterested, for that matter-your precise location. In this case, the Palm Life blog was one of just ten blogs that had photos of Dinino from the previous evening. It helped that he posed with a lot of actors, musicians, models and the professionally famous.
On Palm Life’s page, Dinino was squished between a rap music impresario, his girl-group girlfriend and the host of one of those shows on cable where chefs try to win prizes for being really great chefs. Just off in the back of the frame were two guys who looked rather odd contextually, since they were wearing black suits that clearly covered guns while everyone else was wearing all white. Shoes, shirts, pants, hats, gloves.
“Labor Day can’t come soon enough,” Fiona said.
“Says here it’s an annual party they have,” Sam said.
“Just because it happens every year doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” Fiona said. “The locusts used to come every year, too.”
