policeman Dante Stagnaro.”
“Second,” said Spic Madrid quickly.
Bene. These two lusted after Martin Prince’s domain, and might align themselves together against him. Martin Prince was stimulated by the challenge. He smiled benignly.
“One motion at a time, gentlemen, please,” he said. After the vote, he signaled Enzo Garofano to stay on after the others had left. “You heard, Don Enzo?”
“The tinkle of a distant goat bell.”
“It will get louder.”
Garofano nodded judiciously. “Perhaps send a message… Si! We can trust Eddie Ucelli to take his time in finding the right moment. He will do it right. He and I go a long way back, I will call myself.”
Martin Prince bowed his respect and admiration.
“La cantatrice — she is waiting in your room to discuss her career, Don Enzo.”
Garofano nodded in turn, a sudden lustful gleam in his faded octogenarian eye.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
That same evening, out in San Francisco, Dante Stagnaro was having a high old time of his own. He had taken Rosa out for pizza on Columbus Ave a few blocks from the small bungalow in the steeply slanted 500 block of Greenwich Street where he had been brought up. Theirs now, his parents had moved down to the Valley near Modesto to raise walnuts. Dante and Rosa always went out for pizza when they wanted to celebrate something. Often, like tonight, the celebration was just Dante being willing to take a night off, and them being alive, and together, and still in love.
When Dante had fallen in love with Rosa Benvenuto, he had been nineteen and in his first year at community college, she had been seventeen and a high school senior. A thin quick Italian girl with a round face and great dark flashing eyes and clouds of curly black hair down her back. Pert, proud breasts under soft sweaters, a tiny waist, sweet flanks under tight jeans. He had asked her to marry him after his return from Vietnam two years later, on the day he had entered the police academy.
Motherhood and the relentless tug of gravity had made the breasts heavier, the years had thickened that tiny waist, good Italian cooking had widened those sweet flanks. But to Dante, she was only more beautiful now than she had been on the day he had taken her down the aisle at Saints Peter and Paul two blocks from the house he took her home to-Joe DiMaggio’s church, some of the old-timers still called it.
The thickening and softening of the body, the laugh lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth were to be treasured, for they spoke of living, of two wonderful children borne and being raised, of hard work and the wisdom only women can attain.
Rosa was not feeling wise tonight. She was feeling, truth be told, giddy from the wine-it didn’t take very much. She hated to admit it, it was such a cliche-like an African-American who loved watermelon-but a sausage/pepperoni with extra cheese and a bottle of Chianti in a straw basket were Rosa’s idea of absolute gastronomic heaven. Dante knew it, and whenever he was feeling really good he took her out for such a feast. And afterward, when they got home…
Right now he was regaling her with memories of pizza joints once known-when he was a tiny kid, to be exact.
“There were these two brothers down the Peninsula, Monte and Renato. Monte’s place was on the old Bayshore before it was a freeway, just across from Moffett Field in Mountain View when the Navy still had it Just called Monte’s. Renato had his place in Redwood City on El Camino Real, called himself ‘Renato, King of the Pizza.’”
He started to laugh at the memories the very names evoked, and she loved him passionately at that moment, his fine Italian eyes squinched up with laughing. He took a big gulp of Chianti.
“Thing was, they wouldn’t speak to each other. Family picnics, holidays, like that-one in each end of the room. It was wonderful!”
“What’s so funny about a brother-brother feud?” asked Rosa, but also laughing just because he was.
“The feud was about pizza crusts! Monte was a thick crust man, Renato was thin crust. Each thought the other was a fool, a charlatan, an imposter!”
They laughed together over this, ate pizza, drank wine. Finally he got down to his interview with Skeffington St. John.
“He pronounces it Sinjin.”
“As in unholy drink?” giggled Rosa. She was on her third glass of dago red, and her eyes shone like the candles on the tables, like the stars in the heavens.
“S-I-N-J-I-N. Unholy genie out of a bottle, maybe.”
“We agree on unholy,” said Rosa. She pointed at the last slice on the big round tin scored by countless pizza cutters through the years. “Anybody want this more than I do?”
Dante waved a hand, leaned forward across the table as she scooped it up. “Thing is, Rosie, I have that guy.” He closed his hand into a fist to show how he had a particularly vulnerable part of Skeffington St. John in his grasp. “He’s a degenerate and he’s falling to pieces. The people he’s associated with don’t like people who know a lot about them falling to pieces.”
“Can he give you what you want about Atlas Entertainment?”
“That’s the question,” admitted Dante. “He was the lawyer who set up the purchase of the corporate shell for-this is speculation-Martin Prince in Las Vegas. I don’t know how much he knows about what they’ve done with it since they bought it. If they do own it and if they’ve done anything with it.”
“Your obsession is showing again, darling,” said Rosa with a little chuckle.
“What? It’s an obsession to hate the bad guys?”
“You hate the bad Italian guys who screw up our good Italian name in this country,” she said, “so you just have to think Atlas Entertainment is a mob front.”
“That’s what I think,” he admitted with a wry chuckle. “I just can’t prove it. There’s no obvious illegality that would let me get inside their operation and look around. I can’t get a search warrant, I can’t get phone taps. I think they had Moll Dalton murdered-but I can’t prove it. I think they had Jack Lenington murdered-but I can’t prove that, either. I don’t have a motive for either killing-but hell, who needed one for Jack, you knew him from our academy days, he even made a pass at you, remember? A sleazeball even then. But Moll Dalton…”
“You’re projecting again, darling. Moll Dalton wasn’t corrupt, I grant you, but from what you tell me she was no maiden in distress. She was an ambitious, hard-driving woman who habitually cheated on her husband and would do anything to get to the top. You say Gounaris was using her sexually-well, maybe she was using him sexually, too. Maybe she overestimated how much power he had, and maybe that’s what got her killed.”
“He couldn’t protect her?” Dante nodded almost grudgingly. “Not bad, sweetie. But the point is that maybe I don’t have to prove the mob killed Moll Dalton. Maybe somebody will tell me. Her husband thinks she ended up being promiscuous the way she was because St. John had molested her as a little girl.”
“His own daughter? And you believe Dalton? Without any facts to back up his supposition?”
“Yeah, I believe him. I talked with Beverly Hills Vice, there’s rumors around St. John gets little girls for sexual purposes from a low-life talent agent.” He gave another chuckle. “Calls herself Charriti HHope.” He spelled it. “She’s a known-let’s say alleged-procuress, but she has a lot of powerful friends in LaLa Land so she’s never been busted.”
Rosa’s eyes flashed. “She gets little children for-”
“Yeah. For guys like Moll’s father, if the rumors are true, and I think they are. So Dalton was probably right about the molestation of the daughter as a little girl.”
“And this puts this St. John in your hand?”
“He’s juggling a dozen balls and he’s going to start dropping some of them. When he does, his playmates are going to decide he’s expendable. Then he’ll have to come to me.”
“Unless they kill him first.”
Dante sobered. “There’s that. But… a few months after his daughter is professionally hit?” He shrugged. “I’m
