“He didn’t know. Suspected. From the way St. John looked at her… acted with her… more like a suitor than a father.”
“Just like that bloody bastard!” She caught herself again, looked over at him almost slyly. “Of course, that’s just… just Skeffington’s way with any woman. Like a tic, a reflex…”
“Will thought your daughter was unaware of whatever happened to her when she was a child, had blocked it all off…”
The idea seemed to disorient her and please her at the same time. For a giddy moment he thought he had her: there had indeed been something for little Molly to block off. Then she shook her head, almost like a fighter shaking off a punch, and again had control of herself. Lost her. It happened. She heaved a long, somewhat theatrical sigh.
“I’m afraid I have nothing to say about that, Lieutenant.”
“Terms of the alimony payments, maybe? If you talk about something that… might have happened, he can cut you off…”
She stood up. There was an odd dignity in her stance.
“I suppose you think I’m one of these pathetic women who are willing to give up her own future happiness just to stick it to her ex-husband. It’s not that, Lieutenant. The only way I could hurt him, back then, was financially. Nobody would have believed…”
“You hurt him by taking his daughter away from him.”
“He got her back.”
“And now she’s dead.”
A single tear rolled down her left cheek. She smeared it impatiently with the back of her hand.
“Yes, she is. Dead. And still the only way I can hurt him is financially.” Her face puckered up, but no more tears came. “For what he did.”
Dante made an instant decision. Sometimes you had to give something away to get something you needed. She had what he needed, he was sure of it.
“I think he’s mixed up with some very bad people. I think they had something to do with your daughter’s death. I can’t prove it yet. But-”
“Are you saying Skeffington knows they were involved and still has kept on with-with them?”
“If they were involved, I can’t see how he wouldn’t know it. And they’re bad enough he’d be afraid to cut himself loose.”
She started to curse in a low, hoarse voice. It was like the mindless swearing of soldiers under stress. Suddenly she demanded, “You think telling you will help to… to get them? Whoever they are?”
“I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think that. I wouldn’t have told you what I have if I didn’t need whatever you know to use as leverage on your ex-husband.”
“All right.”
Just like that. In the same low flat tones she had used to curse, she told Dante what she had walked in on that sunny California afternoon so many years before.
“I grabbed her up in my arms, naked as she was, and ran out of the house with her. I can still hear him crying out behind me.” She paused. Her eyes were focused on the past. “Screaming, almost. As a woman screams.” Her eyes came back to Dante. “I never saw him again without a lawyer present. I got uncontested custody, child support, alimony. He got no visitation rights, nothing. It was in the agreement that if I ever told anyone about… about that afternoon, I forfeited all rights to alimony. I would have had nothing to live on…”
“So when Molly was thirteen, you let her-”
“Damn you, I had to! I was afraid of losing her, not the money! Then I lost her anyway. Forever.” Her face tightened, she began slamming her clenched fist on the arm of her chair and chanting through clenched teeth, “Bastard, bastard, bastard…”
Dante said quietly, “Thank you, Ms. Crowley.”
There was no break in her litany. But as he walked out into the searing sunlight like a man leaving the dimness of a terminally ill patient’s sickroom, she called after him. He paused, turned.
“They say that Lou Costello’s radio show that night, Lieutenant, started, ‘Heeyyy, Abbott-I just took a shower wit’ my shirt, socks, and underwear on.’”
They stared at one another in the gloom; then Dante nodded at her, and was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Otto Kreiger was in a cab going down Sixth Street. In those three and a half months, not a move, not a peep, not a whisper, from the vast network of contacts and informants he maintained in the criminal and law enforcement communities, about any moves planned against him. Tiffany’s bodyguard had been reduced to carrying packages for her when she went shopping.
So he canceled the protection. Spic Madrid had been just a warning to keep his nose clean and stay in line. Sent to him from Martin Prince and, he was sure, ancient Enzo Garofano.
But he had been sick with terror-terror reduced to fear, fear to prudence, replaced by ire, elevated to anger, soaring to rage, and finally to full-blown fury. Now he was sending his own message, born of that fury at having been made to feel terror.
Kreiger paid off the cab, crossed the sidewalk where just two hours before old Kreplovski’s tattered carpet had been. Gone now, to line some homeless person’s shelter. He unlocked the street door of the deserted tenement and entered.
Probably as early as tonight homeless fucks would find ways to creep in, but now in daylight and still locked up it was deserted and echoing and shadowy, the stairwells still redolent of decades of cheap cooking and bad wine, not piss.
He paused to get his breath at the third-floor landing, went back to 333 at the end of the hall beside the fire escape.
“Farrow?”
Farrow didn’t answer, which angered him further. A real games player, this boy. He would get his bribe money, all right, but also someday soon would get a couple of knees bent backward for his bad manners.
“Farrow!”
Angry now, he tried to open the door. It stuck badly, just as Farrow had warned. Enraged, Kreiger jammed a shoulder against it to make it open.
Tiny flames spurted from the match heads stuck between the edge of the door and the thin strip of flint paper fixed to the frame. With a whoosh, gas that had been seeping for over an hour from the ruptured kitchen line just inside the door ignited.
The explosion rocked the deserted building. Raptor, wearing a flowing bandido mustache, his bulky PG amp;E repairman’s overalls draped with meaningless but picturesque tools and meters, had to duck back into the rear entryway across the alley to avoid being hit by one of the larger pieces of Kreiger.
He was two blocks away when the first emergency units arrived at the scene. They had received a call about a gas leak four minutes before Kreiger thrust open the door of Mr. Kreplovski’s murdered home.
Dante ended up having a great cheeseburger at a place called Hamburger Hamlet on Doheney Road just above Sunset. They had a sort of sunporch overlooking the street with hanging plants and wicker-like furniture that gave it a sunny, leisurely feel.
As he ate, he tried to visualize St. John’s face when he walked through the door armed with the wonderful new ammunition from the erstwhile Mrs. St. John. He remembered the phone conversation, setting up the meeting through St. John’s executive secretary, with a great deal of almost vindictive relish.
“And what will it be concerning, Mr. Green?”
“Money,” he had chuckled, “lots and lots of money.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Rightly so, young lady, working for a man like that.”
Then he had added, “Three p.m. sharp,” and chuckled again. “Time is money.”
