you are so sickened by the vicious things men of your blood habitually do?”
Dante smiled. “Organized crime is no longer essentially Italian, Mr. Gounaris. Equal opportunity employer. Irishmen, Jews, African-Americans, Latin Americans… Greeks…”
“Just what do you mean by that?” demanded Gounaris quickly, either angry again or faking it again.
Dante would give his fact away, but he would turn it around first. He was suddenly confidential.
“Let me make a suggestion, Mr. Gounaris. You might be wise to stay out of Vince O’Neill’s porn palaces for now. I imagine your sex life must be… somewhat curtailed since Moll Dalton’s death, but even so… they’re in a pretty rough part of town.”
He saw the tiny flicker of alarm mixed with anger in the dark alive eyes, instantly quelled, and spoke even more softly.
“Some unsavory sorts hang around there. Corrupt vice cops under secret investigation by the Internal Affairs Division…” He turned from those again-startled eyes, tossing “ Ciao ” over his shoulder as he strode out.
And almost just walked out into the bright San Francisco October sunshine. Instead, thinking about the vile bug juice dispensed at the Hall of Justice, he decided to get a decent decaf at the lobby’s tiny afterthought of a coffee shop.
Kosta fretted at his desk for ten minutes, trying to sort out exactly what he had learned and what he had given away. The damn cop was good, all right; he’d needled so skillfully that Kosta had lost it for a moment, had gotten personal.
He strode from the office, curtly telling the surprised Miss Pym that Taylor should go into a holding pattern until he got back. At the lobby pay phone bank he placed a call to Gideon Abramson in Palm Springs, caught him on the links. Gid kept a cellular phone in his golf cart, so the call was transferred direct from the clubhouse.
“Kosta!” he exclaimed in a delighted voice. “So these two married guys are talking, one of ’em says, ‘You mean you been married twenty-five years and your wife still looks like a newly wed?’ ‘ Cooks,’ says the other guy in a sad voice, ‘ cooks like a newlywed.’”
Kosta was finally able to tell him the latest problem: how he’d been chatting with Jack Lenington the day before, how Will Dalton was safely out of the country, and finally how Stagnaro had visited him that morning.
“I agree with you about Dalton-we can just file him and forget him, he poses no threat,” said Gid in his high, chirping voice. “As for Stagnaro, I know him by reputation, he’s highly thought of by Rudy Mattaliano in New York, which probably means he’s a very dangerous man. But what can he do you?”
“He told me Lenington is under surveillance by the Internal Affairs Division, and wanted me to know they saw him and me going into the same porn place. They didn’t see us together, but that’s got to be the end of Jack fucking Lenington.”
“I agree,” said Gid thoughtfully.
“Do we have to tell Mr. Prince?”
“Just that Jack should be eased out.” In a more hearty voice, he added, “Be well, Kosta. I’ll handle it from here.”
Gounaris hung up, feeling better as he always did after he had shifted some dangerous burden to Uncle Gideon, and turned away from the phone.
And stopped dead: sitting in the coffee shop not ten yards away was Dante Stagnaro, smiling and nodding at him like one of those idiotic toy dogs in the rear windows of automobiles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was a week before Jack Lenington had his first-and, as it developed, last-interview with Internal Affairs. In the interim, Dante had been busy. Checking phone company records for long-distance calls from the lobby pay phone bank in the Atlas Entertainment building had turned up three calls to the same country club in Palm Springs, one of them placed the night before Moll Dalton’s murder at Bella Figura.
Suggestive but not really indicative, because Tallpalms Country Club had no record of the calls, so of course they could not help with who the calls had been placed to.
Probably not Bob Hope.
Probably not Sonny Bono.
Probably not even Spiro Agnew. There were not as many retired mobsters in Palm Springs as there were in Vegas, but the number was not negligible. And by some strange chance, all of them happened to belong to Tallpalms.
Dante, the eternal optimist, hoped to winnow the possibles for a short list of probables he could work in earnest.
He had also called for everything LAPD might have on Moll’s father, Skeffington St. John, who had arranged her employment with Atlas Entertainment. That was just facts, but for himself he kept returning to the question of whether St. John had molested Moll as a child. Quite a heavy accusation for a man as bright as Will Dalton to level at his father- in-law unless there was something more than an intuition to back it up.
He kept wanting to ask Dalton more about it, but Dalton was in Africa: he faxed a request to Interpol for any facts on Gounaris instead. Then there was Lenington, corrupt in all the small ways a vice cop could be corrupt, from shaking down pimps to free sex from the hookers, but Dante hadn’t thought of him as involved with organized crime.
Jack was an angry and careful man. All they had was him entering and leaving one of Vince O’Neill’s legal porn palaces at about the same time that a man under investigation for possible organized crime ties had entered and left. Not illegal; merely suggestive.
The I.A. lived on that sort of suggestion, but Dante wasn’t watching through the one-way glass in the adjoining room when Lenington was brought in by the shooflies; he knew a transcript of the interrogation would be on his desk the next day.
I.A.:
Hello, Jack. Come in and sit down.
SUBJECT:
Hello, Simon, you fucking weasel.
I.A.:
No need to take that attitude, Jack. We’re all cops here. Somebody’s got to keep the department clean-
SUBJECT:
Yeah, somebody has to look up assholes for a living, too. You don’t have to be a cop to do it.
I.A.:
You know this is being recorded, Jack-
SUBJECT:
You gonna edit out all the dirty words afterwards, Irv?
I.A.:
You understand this is just a preliminary investigation, Jack, so we haven’t asked you to have your attorney present-
SUBJECT:
What I got to tell you guys, I don’t need an attorney.
I.A.:
Okay. On the twenty-second of last month-
SUBJECT:
Uh-uh. Somebody wants to go after me for dereliction of duty or some shit, that’s my watch commander or the Chief. Not you assholes. You wanta charge me with a crime, my lawyer’s here fast as you can jerk each other’s wienie. Which leaves you miserable fucks with my bank account, my mortgages, my spendable income.
I.A.:
We told you, Jack, this is just a preliminary-
SUBJECT:
I got like thirty-seven cents in my bank account, couple CDs worth one, two K. Mortgage on the house’s got
