almost ashamed of myself, but I told him his buddies had put out the contract on her even though I don’t know for sure that they did.”
“Did he believe you?”
“I’m banking that eventually he will. Whatever he did to her, I think he loved her. He was sure broken up when I told him she was dead. I’d love to put more pressure on him, but-”
“How long ago were he and his wife divorced?” interrupted Rosa with a thoughtful look in her eye.
“Um… twenty-five years ago, like that.”
“And you think he might have molested his daughter when she was a little girl? About four, maybe five?”
Dante leaned across the table and kissed her.
“You wonder why I love you? Of course. The wife. If I can find her and she confirms it…” He paused for a moment, then said uncomfortably, “Sweetie, there’s something else. I think I screwed up. After Moll Dalton was murdered, I got a message on the phone machine. From somebody doing Arte Johnson’s Nazi from Laugh-In and calling himself Raptor.”
“Raptor like in bird of prey?”
“Yeah. He said he was the one who’d killed her.”
“In a comic German accent?”
“That’s why I thought it was a crank call. So I just, uh, erased it off the tape.”
She met his eyes, held them with her own. Her face was serene and beautiful in the candlelight.
“And it wasn’t a crank call,” she said softly.
“I’m not sure. I got another call after Lenington was killed. This time it was a black talking, but it was a message from the same guy. He called himself Raptor again.”
“And you haven’t told Tim.”
“I had a hell of a time telling you, Rosie-that first call was probably Raptor himself. Now he’s using other people to make his calls so I’ll never get a voiceprint of him.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Rosa. “These men have egos. He’ll call you again.”
“You think so?”
“I would.” For a moment, her black eyes penetrated his soul, then she gave her chuckle that was almost a giggle, and stood to start putting on her coat. “Haven’t I always?”
She led him back, hand in hand, to the house in Greenwich Street where he had first dreamed of her.
In Vegas, Enzo Garofano had been seduced into his first dribbling orgasm in almost two years by the cantatrice Martin Prince had sent up to his penthouse atop Xanadu. Seduced as much by the memory of her fiery rendition of Carmen’s “Habanera” as by suckling like an infant at her magnificent meloni.
She had departed with his promise of getting her into a good opera company back east, and Enzo, after he had recovered from his sexual labors, had set out to honor his private arrangement with Martin Prince.
Mae’s Place had started life in the thirties as a roadhouse on the way to the Columbia turnpike, with good steaks on the first floor and high stakes on the second. Just “the Roadhouse” then, a rambling white frame building set in a nice grove of eastern white pines, plenty of parking. From her late teens Mae had been the hostess with the mostes’ in the downstairs lounge, and after legalized gambling in Atlantic City made the Roadhouse a losing proposition, bought in and changed the name to Mae’s Place.
Mae made the steaks even thicker downstairs, closed the unprofitable gaming rooms, and started running a different kind of beef on the second floor. Her girls were Grade A, some were Choice or even Prime, scrupulously clean and low-cholesterol. And her local protection was firmly in place: the county sheriff came out every Friday night for a thick T-bone and a thin blonde, on the house; and Mae had an excellent video of the reform mayor serving as the high-price spread between two of her girls, one whole wheat, one white bread.
Mae was now forty-nine, still flame-haired with a little help from her hairdresser, heavy-hipped and heavy- breasted, rings on every finger, expensive musk dabbled deep in her sensational cleavage, pink and voluptuous as a Rubens nude, randy as a goat. She indulged herself freely with a few old friends: if you were fortunate enough to be offered Mae, you didn’t pay.
One of her oldest friends was Eddie Ucelli. His company supplied her steaks, but he himself usually only came around when she called him, because she was his contact for the nowadays rare hits he was asked to perform. But sometimes he would come out for a sirloin with his wife, and Mae would sit down at their table to chat about the old days. And Eddie would get all steamed up.
So on nights such as this, Eddie would see his wife home, leave her in front of Jay Leno, and loop back for a little stroll down memory lane. Mae’s memory lane.
Because even though Eddie was fifty-seven years old, a little too squat, a little too wide, and naked a little too hairy, ah, good Christ, Mae could remember him when. Eddie had popped her cherry for her on a rooftop with a view of Manhattan across the East River when she was just entering her teens and he just leaving his. Even now, Mae could coax him alive as no other woman could-and most nights he needed a lot of coaxing even from her.
The phone call caught him on his back under Mae, who wore only her push-up bra pushed up so one of her enormous breasts was in his mouth seemingly by accident-Mae was inventive in ways like that. When she leaned back to take the call, Eddie slid a thumb into her luxurious bush and began rolling her clitoris because it took him a long time to get one of his partial hard-ons and he hated to lose his rhythm. Stifling a moan of pleasure, Mae leaned down to wedge the phone between his shoulder and chin.
“Ucelli,” he said into it.
He listened. His thumb stopped moving inside her. Mae didn’t mind; she could always get herself off if Eddie couldn’t do it for her. She sat placidly astride him; this was not the first of the many such phone calls that Eddie had taken himself here at Mae’s Place. He always came around to celebrate with her after he had completed his contract, but by then his sexual fervor inevitably had ebbed.
Now, before he hung up he said, “I understand. The Feebs got a fuckin’ tap on my line, I gotta duck ’em but it’s no problem.” He added in a guttural voice, “When the time’s right, I’ll do it right.”
At that same moment Mae felt something thick and heavy pressing up against her belly as it hadn’t in years.
“My God, Eddie!” she exclaimed in amazement. “You’re as hard as an iron bar!”
She quickly impaled herself on it, and then, ever so slowly and lasciviously, slid down the pole and started rolling those ample hips as if they were on oiled ball bearings. As she started to breathe very quickly, Mae knew they were both in for the fuck of a lifetime before she would let him die the little death.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Salvador Madrid was muy borracho. Shitface, in fact.
Spic was drunk because this night he’d had to put out a hit on Manuel Monteluego, one of his wife’s many nephews, and it made him sad and nostalgic at the same time. The hit was to be disguised as a drunken Saturday night stabbing outside a rural dance pavilion in Coates, a tiny crossroads place a score of miles south of the Twin Cities on Minnesota 62. Spic had rented the barnlike wood frame building for a baile following a wedding that afternoon only so that he could logically send Manuel down to Coates to pay for everything. And there be made to die.
“Can’ let her know,” he explained in drunken seesaw English to his bodyguard Alejo. He took another hit of tequila. They were alone in the shabby little bungalow on Robie Street that he used as an office. “She keel me dead she fin’ out.”
“Es verdad y jefe,” agreed Alejo obediently; he knew Spic was referring to his wife, Maria. Alejo was another nephew, but that was all right, he was from Spic’s side of the family in Guadalupe, Nuevo Leon; the soon-to-be- dead nephew was a hijo de puta from Sonora and there was little love lost between them.
Normally none of Spic’s people would be caught dead (pardon the pun) at Coates. But few of these would have green cards, so they would all melt away at the discovery of the body soon to be lying on the frozen ground between the dance hall and the gas station. Anyone estupido enough to be picked up by the county sheriff would no tengo, no entiendo, and would soon walk-or be deported as an illegal alien. Either way, no loss.
