“I read an unconfirmed Interpol report about it, but-”
“True report! He used to brag about it when he was drunk. That was early days, he had the one freighter then, the Make-donia, he was captain, I was first mate…” He trailed off with a faraway look in his eyes. “Half a lifetime ago, Kostas was twenty-one when he got that freighter.”
“Where’d he get the money? From under the Turk’s floor?”
“Naw, that just got him out of Constantinople, financed the caique he used for his smuggling in and out of Turkey…” He cocked a quick inquisitive birdlike eye at Dante. “You prob’ly heard ’bout that too, didn’t you?”
“Another rumor, yeah.”
Georgie shook his head vigorously. “Also true. But he couldn’t have made the down payment on the Makedonia from that. Once he got his second tramp, he made me captain of the Makedonia and opened an office on a dock in Piraeus. Never went to sea again until years later when he got that yacht of his.”
“You sound like you’ve thought about this some.”
Stefanatos rapped himself vigorously on the temple with fisted knuckles. “Greeks are smart. We talk to everybody and want to know everything. Course I’ve thought about it.”
“So who would finance a freighter for a twenty-one-year-old kid with no history? Even just an old tramp steamer…”
Stefanatos nodded as if he’d made a statement rather than asked a question. “He wasn’t making enough out of the Makedonia to finance it, was he?” He cackled and clapped his hands again. “You could barely trust that old hulk out of sight of land. Hell, you hit the hull with a sledgehammer, anywhere, an inch of scale’d fall off. No holystoning those decks, I can tell you. You’d of gone right through.”
“You know where the money came from, don’t you, Captain?”
Georgios stared at him a long moment, then heaved himself to his feet and went toward the staircase leading below.
“You just pour another tot for each of us,” he said.
Ten minutes later, the old Greek captain slapped a beat-up logbook with a red-bound hard canvas cover down on the table between them with such triumph that it knocked over his snifter. He picked up the logbook, shook it, sending drops of Metaxas flying in every direction, then sat down with it.
“Log of the Makedonia, plenty of booze spilled on it in its day. Took it with me when I left.”
Dante asked the expected question. “Why was that?”
“Kostas wanted to overinsure the Makedonia and her cargo, then have me scuttle her the first big blow came along. Said I wouldn’t, said if he did I’d testify at the inquiry… Kostas wasn’t a bad guy, just was crooked as a snake.” He shook his head. “But you don’t ask me to scuttle my ship.”
Dante stayed silent. There were times to push your man, times to let him come to you.
“I got a command under Niarchos, when the Makedonia did go down in the North Atlantic I was at sea myself.” He righted his snifter, poured himself another measured tot, held it up to the light as if the smoky liquid held answers to his inner distress. “But I never felt right about just letting it go.”
“Not much you could do after the fact like that.”
“Yep.” He got a sly look on his face. “Y’know, Kostas was rich, but the richest man I ever met was a cloth buyer rode with me on a cargo run to Alexandria and back on the Makedonia. Right before Kostas got his second freighter.” The logbook was closed against the finger he had inserted between its pages. He opened it, tapped the page with a blunt curved fingernail. “It’s in here. In the log.”
The logbook was written in Greek. Dante looked up at Stefanatos with arched eyebrows. “Abramson,” the captain said. “Gideon Abramson.”
Dante got home in high spirits. Rosa was out, as was fourteen-year-old Antonio even though it was a school night. No note, which meant Rosa wasn’t gone for long. He’d been starving in Sausalito, but now he just wanted a long shower to wash the rest of the Metaxas out of his system. Then, if Rosa wasn’t home yet, he’d cook supper for everybody. But he was still sponging down the shower stall when the door opened and Rosa peeked in.
“You’re home!” she exclaimed in delight.
“Unless you got another guy uses this shower.”
“No one but you, alas.”
She had obviously been shopping, and was dressed in jeans and a frilly white blouse with long sleeves and a scoop neck. He could just faintly smell her perfume, something flowery their daughter had given her for her birthday. When she leaned in to give him a quick kiss, he peeked down her blouse like a sex-starved teenager. He started to get an erection.
“You want something to eat, sweetie?” she asked.
He did a Groucho eyebrow wiggle. “What’d you have in mind, m’dear?” and faked a grab for her. But she was gone, the shower stall door drifting shut behind her. He yelled after her, “What kind of woman leaves a man in a state like this?”
The door opened again so she could stick her head back in.
“Anticipation is everything, sweet lips.”
Gone again. Dante, chuckling, dressed in workout shorts and a tank top and floppy go-aheads, padded into the office he’d made of Giulietta’s bedroom. In one corner he had installed a straight-backed chair and a desk he’d bought for a few bucks at a library sale.
Dante put the growing stack of files connected with the Moll Dalton murder on the pink bedspread of the frilly canopy bed where Giulietta still slept when she came home from U.C. Berkeley on weekends. He switched on the old-fashioned gooseneck lamp.
Hymie the Handler had given him the numbers of Lening-ton’s $5,000 in small unsequenced bills, but none had shown up in circulation in the western states. Dante made a notation to circularize banks across the rest of the country also.
Nothing more on Spic Madrid. St. Paul cops and the FBI were writing it off as local; as a result the feds had turned down his suggestion that a tail be put on Eddie Ucelli for a couple of weeks to see if he went anywhere. The Bureau, they said, didn’t have the manpower for it.
Even if he were willing to tell them about the Raptor calls they would just laugh. Hoax confessions were a staple of murder cases, and these were oblique and after the fact.
His request for a tap on Gounaris’s home and office phones had been turned down. The same for a tap on the pay phones in the Atlas Entertainment building lobby. He hadn’t really expected either one, but he’d had to ask. Ditto for a tap on Skeffington St. John’s phones in L.A., home and office. Again, no surprise.
None of it high priority. High priority was his discovery of the American businessman who had been a guest of the twenty-three-year-old Gounaris aboard the Makedonia for a run to Alexandria and back in August 1962. Gideon Abram-son. A Gideon Abramson was one of the four known Mafia bigwigs who had stayed at the Xanadu Hotel owned by Martin Prince, acknowledged capo di tutti i capi for the current Organization west of the Mississippi.
Scanning his case notes, Dante realized that the meeting had taken place just a few days after he had jerked around Moll Dalton’s incestuous father. Cause and effect? Could be. It was hard to believe that if Atlas Entertainment was mixed up in organized crime, its chief counsel didn’t know about it.
He went through the FBI reports. They already had photos on file for three of the four Gideon Abramsons- loan shark in New York’s garment industry, retiree in Palm Springs, golf player in Vegas-and they were demonstrably identical. Now that Dante had the passport number of the cloth buyer in Greece, the FBI could get his picture, too. He was certain the fourth Gideon Abramson would complete the chain between Gounaris, Atlas Entertainment, and the Mafia.
It was a connection that suggested reasons why Moll Dalton might have been murdered. If the Mafia was in control of Atlas, and she uncovered proof of that control, she would have become a lethal liability. Could Moll’s father be part of the Outfit without her knowledge? Yes. But if she found out, and resentment of her childhood abuse still lived in her mind…
Nothing suggested that it did. And the scenario didn’t tell him a damned thing about why Jack Lenington and Spic Madrid had been hit. They weren’t his cases, but there were those damned Raptor phone calls. The calls tied the three murders together. If the calls weren’t a hoax.
But his mind wasn’t ready to let it go at that. He jotted down notes to himself. Try to find and interview Moll Dalton’s mother, still presumably living somewhere in the L.A. Basin, for more leverage on St. John. Write or call Will Dalton’s parents in Wyoming? No real reason to, except maybe they could tell him things about Moll that Will
