When Alex was done speaking, Hastings said, “Let’s go over a couple of things. Booker was already dead when you found him?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get inside the garage?”
“Through the side door,” Alex said. “It was open. I saw it as I pulled into the driveway behind Booker’s wagon.”
“Did you see anyone else in the vicinity?”
“No. No one.”
“Did you touch anything in the garage?”
“No.”
“Did you go inside the house?”
“No. I just . . . ran. I was confused and afraid; all I could think to do was to get away from there.”
“Do you have any idea who would want him dead?”
Alex shook his head.
“Or why he was murdered?”
“No. No.”
“Do you know a man named Mal Howard?”
“Howard? No, I’ve never heard that name.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Is he the man who tried to break in here?”
“Yes. Have you left this apartment since Friday?”
“No.”
“Not even for a newspaper or groceries?”
“Not at all. I didn’t eat much and I listened to the news on television.”
“Did you call anybody at all?”
Alex looked at me again. “Just him.”
“So no one knew you were here.”
“That’s right. No one.”
“Mal Howard knew it,” Hastings said.
That got him a couple of blinks and another bewildered headshake. “I don’t know how he could have. . .”
“The woman who lives here—what’s her name?”
“Virginia Davis.”
“How long have you been seeing her?”
“About six months.”
“Is your relationship an open one?”
“Open one?”
“Do other people know about the two of you? Friends of yours, relatives. Or have you kept it a secret for some reason?”
“Oh, I see,” Alex said. “No, we haven’t kept it a secret. I haven’t taken Virginia to meet my family or anything like that; it’s just a casual thing—you know, a sex thing. But I’ve mentioned her to people.”
“Would you also have mentioned where she lives?”
“I might have. I don’t remember.”
“If you did, it would indicate someone you know fairly well has it in for you, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess so. But it doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why anybody would want me dead. Except Booker, and now he’s dead himself.”
“Whoever it is must want you out of the way pretty badly,” Hastings said. “What happened here this afternoon makes two attempts on your life in three days.”
“I don’t know,” Alex said again, and there was desperation in his voice now. “I just don’t know.”
Hastings ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “Do you have any idea what the word ‘Twospot’ means, Mr. Cappellani?”
That was another one out of left field for Alex, apparently, because the police had not released anything about the Twospot note to the media. He just sat there looking blank. “Twospot?”
“That’s right.”
“Is that a name or what?”
“We’re trying to find out. There was a piece of paper on the floor beside Booker’s body, with the address of your Russian Hill house and the word Twospot typed on it.”
“Twospot,” Alex repeated, and the blank look transformed into a frown. “You know, it does sound vaguely familiar.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not sure. I may have heard it once—but I don’t know where”
“Think about it, Mr. Cappellani.”
Alex thought about it. And came up empty. He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.
On the stairs outside there were more sounds—thudding footfalls, the clatter of something bumping down the steps, a voice grumbling a warning to somebody else to watch out for his end of the stretcher. Which meant that the city ambulance had arrived. I listened to the sounds recede down the stairs to the privet hedge, and then shifted my gaze to Hastings.
“Frank,” I said, “do you think Howard might be the man who attacked Alex at the winery?”
“It’s possible,” he answered. “There’s no way of knowing for sure now.”
Alex said abruptly, “Maybe this Howard is the one who killed Booker too. Maybe somebody hired him to do it.”
“Howard killed Booker, all right. There’s not much doubt of that.”
I leaned forward. “How do you know, Frank?”
“We found his fingerprints inside the Cappellani house,” Hastings said. “And he had a gunshot would under a bandage on his left shoulder; I checked that before I came up here. It explains the different types of blood on the floor of the garage and what happened to the missing bullet from Booker’s gun.”
Relief had slackened the muscles in Alex’s face. “Christ,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me all of that before? I’ve been half out of my head sitting here, worrying that you still suspected me—”
“You’re not off the hook yet, Mr. Cappellani,” Hastings said quietly. “Running from the scene of a murder, hiding out the way you did, doesn’t make you look particularly innocent.”
“But I told you—”
“What you told me seems plausible enough, but it doesn’t clear you of complicity in Booker’s death. Not yet.”
Alex’s eyes turned plaintive again. “Are you going to arrest me?”
“Not exactly. I am going to take you in as a material witness, for further questioning. You can call your attorney from the Hall of Justice if you’ve changed your mind about wanting one present.”
Alex had nothing to say to that. He stared down at his hands, and the ostrich look came back onto his gray face.
I said to Hastings, “Do you want me to come down to the Hall, too?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll let you know later if we need you to sign a statement.”
So the three of us got on our feet and went out of there, Hastings locking the front door after us with a key Alex gave him. When we climbed up to Greenwich Street there were twenty or thirty people milling around, gawking, and half a dozen reporters and mobile camera crews from the local television stations. Alex covered his face with one arm as Hastings led him away to a parked police car. Most of the media people followed them, chattering questions and working their cameras, but a couple of them decided to come after me. I managed to get to my car before they reached me and locked myself inside. I started the engine, pulled away immediately through the crowd.
And damned if one of the cameramen didn’t stand in the middle of the street and film me all the way down to the corner and around it out of sight.
14
I drove straight home to my flat.
On the way the attempted break-in by Mal Howard, Howard’s apparent death, the things Alex Cappellani had told me, and then Hastings, kept replaying in my head. Along with the string of questions centering on this whole business: Who wanted Alex dead, and why? Why hadn’t his attacker killed him outright at the winery on Thursday night, instead of knocking him unconscious and trying to drag him off somewhere else? Why had Booker been killed? How and why had Howard been recruited as triggerman? What did Twospot mean? Was the Cappellani Winery a factor, or did the motive or motives behind the murder of Booker and the two attempts on Alex have to do with something else entirely?
Too many questions, no answers at all that I could see. Well, Hastings was in the best position new to get to the bottom of it, either through a break in further questioning of Alex and the others involved, or through police technology and legwork. And when the break came I’d have my answers. Meanwhile, there was not much point in brooding about the case. Now, finally, I was out of it, wasn’t I?
Sure I was.
It was after six when I keyed open my front d
oor; the day was pretty well shot. I had called Shelly Jackson last night and again this morning, with the intention of inviting her out for dinner tonight, but she hadn’t been home on either occasion; I had planned to try her again after I got home from the meeting with Alex. Only the events on Greenwich Street had robbed me of all enthusiasm for a Saturday night out on the town, and now I did not feel like doing much of anything except vegetating—curling up on my comfortable old couch with a beer and a stack of pulp magazines.
So I got a can of Schlitz out of the refrigerator and half a dozen issues of Black Mask and Dime Detective off the shelves, and did that. I read one of the 1931 Back Masks straight through from cover to cover—great stuff by Raoul Whitfield, Horace McCoy, Frederick Nebel, and old Cap Shaw himself. Then I had a sandwich and another beer, and came back and sampled stories from the other issues. Two reporters called on the phone, but I put them off with “no comment”; nobody came to see me. By midnight my eyes were a little strained but I was feeling considerably better than I had earlier. You can lose yourself in the melodrama and the machine-gun prose of the pulps, and sometimes when you come back to reality again you find you’ve left things that were bothering you with the ops and dicks and newshawks in those brittle pages. They’re not just fictional crime-solvers for me; they’re birds of my feather, and watching them shoulder the burden of their work helps to ease the burden of mine.
I went into the bathroom and changed the bandage on Shelly’s teethmarks; the wound was healing all right now. Then I got into bed and drifted off immediately. A long time later I dreamed I was a pulp detective who joined forces with Jerry Frost and Jo Gar and Captain Steve McBride to clean up a gang of Prohibition rum-runners. It was a good dream and I was enjoying it—except that the damned phone kept ringing while we were trying to interrogate the boss rum-runner. McBride answered it, but it kept on ringing anyway. Race Williams came in out of nowhere and blew it to pieces with one of his .44s, and it kept on ringing, and the dream got confused and mixed up with reality, and I woke up.
There was daylight in the room: morning, early Sunday morning. Seven A.M., for Christ’s sake, by the clock on my nightstand. Beside the clock, the phone kept on jangling. I scraped mucus out of my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose until I was awake enough to be coherent, and finally caught up the receiver and said hello.
A woman’s voice made a question out of my name. When I said yes, it was, she said, “This is Rosa Cappellani. I apologize if I’ve gotten you out of bed but it couldn’t be helped.”
God, I thought, now what? I threw the covers off and swung up into a sitting position with my feet on the cold hardwood floor. Outside the bedroom window tracers of broken fog chased each other across the roofs of the neighboring buildings. Which told me that in another couple of hours the fog would have blown inland and burned off and the day would be clear and windy.
I said, “What can I do for you, Mrs. Cappellani?”
“I’d like to see you this morning, as soon as possible.”
“About what?”
“I’d rather not discuss it on the telephone.”
“If it has to do with Alex and what happened yesterday, I can’t tell you anything more than you already know by now.”
“I don’t want you to tell my anything,” she said. “I want you to do something for me—something for which you’ll be well paid.”
The imperiousness was there in her voice, but it was muted somehow; I thought she sounded tired and worried. I ran my tongue over the sleep film on my teeth, thinking about it.
“Well?” she said.
Well. “Where are you?”
“At the winery.”
Another hundred-and-fifty-mile drive, round trip. But I was curious, and if she was willing to pay for my time I was willing to drive up to the Napa Valley again. I said, “Okay, Mrs. Cappellani. I should be able to get there by ten.”
“Fine,” she said, and she sounded relieved. “I’ll expect you then.”
She rang off before I could say anything else; I had wanted to ask her about Alex, if he was still in police custody or if the family lawyers had gotten him released. I sat there and looked at the silent handset for a couple of seconds, realized what a stupid thing that was to be doing, and put it down on its hook. Telephones. Every time one had rung the past few days, I seemed to get myself more deeply involved in the trials and tribulations of the Cappellani family.
Maybe Race Williams had the right idea, I thought. And got up and went into the bathroom to shower and shave.
In the glare of the morning sun the winery buildings had a dusty, ancient look that made them and the surrounding vineyards seem even more turn-of-the-century Italy or France. A few sunhatted grape pickers were spots of color here and there in the curving rows of vines, working with lug boxes; a group of men was doing something with one of the gondolas on the north side of the main cellar. Only the trucks and cars parked or moving in the area spoiled the illusion of things past and far away.
I drove down to where the gated lane branched off the road and led up to the old stone manorhouse. The gate was open; I passed through and pulled my car onto a cleared section beneath several of the shading oaks. There were two other cars parked there—a new silver Lincoln Continental and a Porsche a couple of years old.
A warm, vine-scented breeze fanned over me when I stepped out; you could not smell the fermenting wine at this distance from the cellars. I went up a stone pathway, past an old-fashioned basket wine press set on a kind of stone pedestal, with rose bushes and a dozen or so smaller, unfamiliar plants growing around it in a circle. There was nothing else in the way of decoration or garden, nothing at all except for the heavy old oaks.
I climbed two steps onto a sort of narrow, galleried porch, found a bell-push beside the black-painted door, and pushed it. The walls must have been a foot thick; I did not hear any bells or chimes ring inside, but the door opened after ten seconds and an elderly Chicano woman looked out at me with grave black eyes.
I told her who I was, and she nodded wordlessly and widened the door so I could come inside. The interior was cool and smelled faintly musty, like the inside of an old cedar chest. But there was not anything gloomy about the place, at least not in the foyer or the rooms off it that I could see into. Unshaded windows let in plenty of morning sunlight, and although the walls and ceilings were paneled in heavy dark wood and the floors were of stone, a number of cheerful-looking paintings—Napa Valley landscapes, mostly—and Indian-style rugs and upholstered furniture in whites and blues added a good deal of color.
The Chicano woman led me down a hallway, pointed to a closed door, and went away toward the rear of the house. I wondered pointlessly if she was a mute. Then I shrugged the thought away and knocked on the door, calling out my name.
Rosa Cappellani’s voice told me to come in. When I opened the door and stepped through, I found myself in a den or office filled with books and file cabinets and old furniture and a lot of military-type decoration: sabers cross-mounted on one wall, a glass case jammed with handguns and bayonets, old cavalry and World War II photographs. An American flag in a floor stand flanked one side of a battered oak desk that appeared as if it had been wounded in action on a number of different occasions. It was a man’s office, obviously, not unlike the one in the San Francisco town house; Mrs. Cappellani had no doubt inherited it from her late husband.
She was standing in front of the American flag, wearing a mannish gray suit and a stoic expression. And she wasn’t alone.
I shut the door and crossed to the desk. From where he was sitting sprawled on a creased leather sofa, Alex Cappellani watched me with dullish eyes. He looked as if he had been thrown there—legs splayed out, arms propped up at loose angles on the sofa’s armrest and back. Raggedy Andy. If he had slept much last night, his face belied the fact; the grayish pallor and the ostrich look were worse than they had been yesterday.
Mrs. Cappellani said, “Thank you for coming,” without inflection and witho
ut moving.
“Sure.” I looked over at Alex. “When did the police let you go?”
“Late last night,” he said. His voice was as dull as his eyes. “That lieutenant, Hastings, gave me permission to come up here.”
“Have they found out anything new?”
“From me? God, I told you and I told Hastings everything I know yesterday at Virginia’s place.”
“So you still haven’t remembered where you heard the word Twospot before?”
He shook his head loosely.
“And the police haven’t learned anything on their own about Howard or who hired him?”
“No. Howard died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”
Mrs. Cappellani came forward a couple of steps and said to me, “How efficient is this man Hastings?”
“Pretty efficient,” I said.
“Then you feel he and his people will find out who is behind Jason’s murder and the attempts on Alex’s life.”
“Eventually, yes.”
“Eventually,” she said. “And in the meantime?”
“Pardon?”
“Someone clearly wants my son dead, for whatever incredible reason. He doesn’t know; I’ve spoken to him at length and I’m convinced of that.” She was talking as if we were the only two people in the room, as if Alex were somewhere else. “That someone has tried twice to kill him or have him killed; it’s reasonable to assume that there will be a third attempt.”
“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. Two failures might have scared off whoever it is.”
She was silent. But her eyes said she was worried about a third attempt and she did not want any hollow reassurances from me to the contrary. I glanced at Alex. He was plenty worried about it too, you could see that plainly enough. Fear glistened like pinpoints of light in his pupils.
“Look, Mrs. Cappellani,” I said, “I can understand and I can sympathize with your concern. But if you asked me up here as an investigator, I’m going to have to turn you down. There’s nothing I can do. Even if the San Francisco police would sanction my involvement in a murder case, which they wouldn’t, I don’t have any facilities for—”
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