Remembered being royally pissed off because Salvador Madrid was dead in Minnesota, unconnected to Moll Dalton’s death in any way Dante could imagine, yet Raptor had found another voice in which to send his third mocking message, four months after the first one last October. None of it made any sense. But he was still bugging Hymie about this latest tape.
“Got my voiceprint yet, Hymie?”
Hymie gave him a pained expression. “Sound spectrogram,” he corrected. “Yeah, I’ve got it-for what it’s worth.”
“Hell, Hymie, if they’re as individual as fingerprints-”
“A gross oversimplification.” Hymie opened his folder of printouts to jab a hairy-backed finger at the squiggles that looked like seismograph readings of earth movements. “This is a record of the frequency and strength of the voice signal through time. If the spikes and patterns don’t match, that means they contain frequencies not present in the target spectrograms.”
“And these don’t match?”
“Even you can see they don’t, even with the shitty samples you got me.”
“Shitty? They’re the originals right off my machine.”
“I need at least ten common words of exceptional clarity from each tape for a visual comparison of spectrographs. What have you given me?” He made a disdainful gesture. ‘“Raptor’ and a mittful of conjunctions.”
“Despite all the bitching, they’re two different people.”
“Two different people.”
“Any way to tell nationality or racial stock?”
“Just the obvious stuff-one sounds like an African-American, one sounds like a Latino.”
“Thanks, Hymie. Just hang on to them for me, will you?”
On the way to his office he stopped at Homicide to pick a fight with Tim Flanagan. He caught Tim behind the littered desk in his comer of the office, near a window looking out on the cold, gray, rainy day; the cars in the under-the-free-way parking lot gleamed like the arched backs of sounding dolphins.
Tim shoved a pink cardboard box of doughnuts toward Dante. “So I suppose now you want me to investigate that homicide back in Minneapolis for you.” He chuckled. “When I was a kid, I used to think it was Many-apples, Many-soda.”
Dante slid low in his chair, braced one knee against the edge of the desk and said in a disgruntled voice, “St. Paul.”
Without changing tone, Tim said, “So I suppose now you want me to investigate that homicide back in St. Paul for you.”
“I’d settle for you investigating my two homicides right here in your jurisdiction.”
“You think all I got to do is chase around after your nutty theories? I got too much stuff to handle as it is-”
“Yeah. Doughnuts. Pizzas. Week-old Chinese take-out.”
“Fuck you, chief.” Tim leaned forward across the desk, the weight on his elbows, bunching his open-collared dress shirt around his meaty armpits. “Remember that Chinese kid they found shot in Golden Gate Park?”
“Sure. You figured it for being gambling- related.”
“I figured wrong. The mother ran a Chinese gambling house, right enough, but her boyfriend, unbeknownst, as they say, to her, took out a big life insurance policy on the kid. With himself as beneficiary. Anybody can do that, you know.”
“And then had the kid snuffed?”
“Yeah. Insurance agent smelled a rat, came to us, we went after the guy, hard, he split open. I’d like to see the ratfink fucker fry, and he might just. But…” He shrugged, reached for a doughnut. “Fuck ’im. So you can’t connect Madrid in St. Paul with Dalton or our own Jackie-baby?”
“Madrid was in Vegas last week with three, four other mob figures who could be connected with Atlas Entertainment, but…” Dante shrugged in turn. “One was in for a new golf course opening, one to look at horses, one to hear an opera singer, Spic to ogle the showgirls…”
“They all stay at the Xanadu?”
Dante nodded. “And a few days after they leave, Spic gets wasted with Popgun Ucelli’s trademark M.O.-only the feds can’t get Popgun out of Jersey at the time of the hit. I think he knows they’re tapping him.” He stood up, started pacing. “If it’s a power play inside the mob, why Moll Dalton? Why Jack Lenington? If it isn’t mob-related, why the mob-style hits, why Spic Madrid by the same M.O.?”
Flanagan leaned back and put his elbows on the arms of his creaking swivel chair and tented his fingers in front of him.
“Maybe your givens are fucked. Maybe you gotta get some fresh data. See it in a new light. You ever check out that Interpol material on Kosta Gounaris you asked for?”
“Tim, sometimes you aren’t entirely stupid.”
“Yeah, I think you’re a great guy, too.”
Dante’s Organized Crime Task Force office was in a converted storage closet between two jury deliberation rooms on the court floor. To get there, a visitor had to go by the monitored desk from the public corridor to the private back hall connecting the judges’ chambers, and even then had to know precisely how to find him. No windows, but he liked it. It held three desks, four chairs, two three-drawer file cabinets with good locks, and a blackboard with the preliminary findings he didn’t mind being made public drawn neatly on it in red chalk.
In sharp contrast to Tim’s cluttered desk, Dante’s held a computer and screen, a Laserjet IIP printer Rosa had given him two Christmases ago, IN and OUT files squared on different corners, and a family portrait taken by a professional photographer for the church yearbook: Rosa, himself, and the kids when both of them had still been home.
Neither Danny nor his other inspector, Jamie Fraser, was in, so he started methodically through the Interpol response to his request for information on Gounaris.
Born of Greek parents in Istanbul just before World War II (no birth record available). Reputedly a child prostitute at the age of twelve in a brothel run by a Turkish pederast called Mustapha (last name not known). (Probably) disappeared from the brothel and Istanbul at age fifteen, just when Mustapha (maybe) was found in his bedroom with his throat slit (perhaps) and (rumor stated) the floorboards pried up to get at something hidden underneath.
Three years later, a teenager (reputed) to be Gounaris was in Greece, running cigarettes and booze into Turkey, raw opium back out. Was befriended (unconfirmed) by an American businessman (name unknown), who (supposedly) was in Athens to set up the importation of Greek cloth to the United States…
No birth record available… last name not known… probably… maybe… perhaps… rumor stated… reputed… unconfirmed… name unknown… supposedly…
The dossier didn’t become factual until the 1960s, when twenty-one-year-old Kosta Gounaris bought a single rusted old British tramp steamer and began hauling putatively legitimate cargoes in and out of the Levant. After that the file was mostly media coverage as he expanded, buying freighters and tankers, becoming Gounaris Shipping as his fame and wealth increased along with the inevitable Onassis comparison. The file ended with his sale of Gounaris Shipping to a consortium of other Greeks.
The portrait of a tough survivor who dragged himself out of the slums and ended up president of a huge multinational company. The American dream played out in a thousand American ghettos and exported all over the world ever since World War II.
Dammit, something of use had to be there…
Who did he know was Greek might help him out with Gounaris? There was the man’s discarded wife, of course, living in a suburb of Athens called Maroussi; but Dante spoke no Greek, could never get departmental approval to go to Greece and talk with her, and knew it was useless to ask the Greek cops to interview her for him. If he didn’t know the questions he wanted to ask, how could he expect them to?
He needed someone who might have been involved in Greek shipping after the war, might have known Gounaris firsthand, might have heard some rumors about him. There were Greek cops on the San Francisco police force, but he couldn’t go to them; his habitual M.O. and his cop’s paranoia made it essential that his informant be unconnected with the department.
