Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  It was a juicy story for the media, one bettered only by a more astonishing revelation: as well as being a corporate crook, Josh Jonah had turned out to be a real-life criminal, a man who’d been willing to murder a Hollywood movie star in a desperate attempt to save his company from collapse. The case was closed, or so Gianluca Quattrocchi, with Bryan Whitcombe in tow, had declared to the cameras. Gerald Kelly seemed somewhat muted in front of the press. But the arguments presented by Quattrocchi appeared solid: in spite of Costa’s protests, the evidence appeared to point to there being only two individuals in Martin Vogel’s apartment in SoMa. Forensic believed that Jonah had fatally wounded Vogel, who had returned one shot before he died. That had crippled the billionaire as he started to spread petrol around the apartment to destroy any evidence.

  “I still think I heard a third person there,” Costa said quietly.

  Teresa watched him; he was aware that he had, perhaps, protested this point too much.

  “It was dark. You knew something was wrong. When people are under stress …”

  “I know what I heard …”

  “Enough! If you were sitting in Bryant Street now, which way would you be leaning? Be honest with yourself.”

  Costa didn’t have a good answer for that. All the available facts suggested a failed murder attempt on Jonah’s part. Cell phone company records showed that, shortly before Costa’s arrival, the stricken man had tried to call his partner Tom Black from Vogel’s apartment, presumably seeking help. That was speculation, though. Black had disappeared completely the evening his partner died. Kelly had let it be known to Catherine Bianchi that he thought the man was out of the U.S. already. There were huge black holes in the Lukatmi accounts. The missing money could easily fund a covert flight from the country, enough to last a lifetime if Black was smart enough to keep his head down and choose the right, distant location.

  Quattrocchi’s theory was, predictably, one the media was growing to love. Jonah and Black had hatched the plot to hype Inferno, employing Vogel as their legman. A phony passport recovered from the wreckage in the photographer’s apartment had a stamp proving he’d flown to Rome one week before Allan Prime died, and left the day after. The picture snapped in the cemetery clearly revealed Vogel to be the man who had stolen the almonds that had very nearly ended Maggie Flavier’s life. Josh Jonah and Tom Black had enough access to security arrangements to provide Vogel with the means by which Maggie might be poisoned. His job as a paparazzo had proved the perfect cover to follow her afterwards. Records in Rome showed that he had also managed to obtain media accreditation there using his forged passport, giving him the opportunity to enter the restricted area by the Casa del Cinema and replace the genuine death mask of Dante with the fake one taken from Allan Prime that morning. Quattrocchi’s team had, in what Falcone declared a rare moment of investigative competence, discovered that Vogel’s alias was in an address book belonging to Peter Jamieson, the actor who had died in the uniform of a Carabinieri officer at the Villa Borghese. It seemed a logical step to assume that Jonah had recruited the actor to scare Maggie Flavier, perhaps as a way of distracting the police from Allan Prime, perhaps calculating, too, that his act might provoke a violent response the unfortunate Jamieson had never expected.

  The case remained open. Tom Black was still at large. There was still no sign of the woman calling herself Carlotta Valdes. Moreover, from the point of view of the state police, the genuine death mask of Dante was still missing, and causing considerable internal ructions with the museum authorities in Italy. But a kind of conclusion had been reached in terms of Allan Prime’s murder. As far as Quattrocchi was concerned, nothing else really mattered. Josh Jonah had used the cycle of Dante’s numbers as a code for his attacks on those associated with the production, knowing that this fed the idea the movie was either somehow cursed or stalked by vengeful Dante fanatics seeking to punish those associated with the perfidious Roberto Tonti. It was all a desperate publicity stunt, one engineered by Lukatmi. It had worked, too. Inferno was on every front page, every news bulletin.

  The pace of the investigation — one which had hung on the assumption that yet one more attack lurked around the corner — had slackened as the principal focus moved to the financial mess inside Lukatmi. They were now one day away from Inferno’s world premiere. Once that had occurred without incident, the cast and crew would hand over security arrangements entirely to the private companies. For Costa and his colleagues, Italy would beckon.

  Maggie Flavier had left innumerable messages imploring him to visit. He’d made a series of excuses, some genuine, some less so. In the hectic aftermath of the deaths of Jonah and the paparazzo Vogel, Costa had come to realize that he was beginning to miss Italy, miss Rome, with its familiar sights, the street sounds, the easy banter in cafés, the warm, comforting embrace of home. San Francisco was a beautiful, interesting, and cultured city, but it could never be his. Rome was part of his identity, and without it he felt a little lost, like Maggie Flavier attempting to find herself in the long-dead faces of the women in the paintings in the Legion of Honor. A movie was a temporary caravan, always waiting to disperse. If she came to Rome for some sequel, she would be there six, nine months, perhaps no more. And then …

  Life was temporary, and its briefness only given meaning by some short, often clumsy attempt to find permanence within the shifting sands of one’s emotions. He knew that search would never leave him. He knew, too, that Maggie Flavier would struggle to feel the same way. She would seek as she did character after character, personality after personality, through the constant round of work.

  “I can’t believe you’re not even up to an argument over this,” Teresa complained, jolting him back to the present.

  “We could be home in a few days. I’d like that. Wouldn’t you?”

  She screwed up her face in an awkward, gauche expression. “Not yet. Not till it’s over.”

  “You just told me I was wrong to think there was more to this case than Gianluca Quattrocchi would have the media believe.”

  “No. I merely said your supposition for the existence of a third party in Martin Vogel’s apartment was difficult to prove. I do wish cops would listen more carefully sometimes.” A familiar sly smile appeared. “May I remind you of some things we do know? One chief suspect is missing. Thanks to the gigantic amount of publicity this has generated, a stack of money has been thrown up in the air and no one knows where it’s going to fall. And you don’t have your precious mask.”

  Two points he appreciated. The third puzzled him.

  “What do you mean about the money?”

  “You should talk to Catherine Bianchi more. She has a firm grasp of finance. How you go about backing companies like Lukatmi. She even seems to understand how to raise money for movies, as much as anyone outside the business can.”

  He watched the private security guards working on the installation of CCTV cameras on the nearest tent. The place was bristling with the things. There were enough cameras to catch a squirrel sneezing. But the tempo of the investigation had changed. It felt … if not over, then at least more manageable, to some anyway.

  There was a minor commotion. Roberto Tonti strode through the door of the tent, followed by Dino Bonetti speaking in low, confidential tones by his side. Bonetti didn’t look his usual bouncy, arrogant self. This was surely going to be the most extraordinary and potentially lucrative movie he had ever produced. The newspapers were talking about a posthumous Oscar nomination for Allan Prime. The industry rags were predicting that Inferno could be the first movie to break a two-hundred-million-dollar weekend gross at the box office when it went nationwide.

  Perhaps it was the strain, but neither man looked like someone on the verge of breaking every entertainment industry record in the book.

  2

  The two brothers stood at the entrance to the main hall of the Lukatmi building. Bulky individuals in blue overalls appeared to be gutting the place. Furniture and phones and computer equipmen
t were disappearing out of the door and into moving vans at an astonishing rate.

  There was a supervisor by the entrance, his rank emphasised by the fact that he was so scrawny he couldn’t lift a thing except the clipboard in his hands. Hank Boynton tapped the man on the arm.

  “Didn’t these guys own anything themselves?”

  “Maybe a paper clip or two. But we’re taking them, too. This place stinks of rotten debt. I’ll have anything that’s not nailed down.”

  “The cops won’t like that,” Frank suggested.

  “The cops are in Building Two, where all the accounting and e-mail stuff got kept. We’re just taking the dweeb items they used to mess around with while they were pretending they were Fox or something.”

  “Computers …” Hank said.

  “Workstations,” the man emphasised.

  “I was gonna ask if you had one going cheap,” Frank intervened. “Not so interested now.”

  “You guys want something? Or you just here to yank my chain?” he asked, and not nicely.

  Hank pulled out an ID. “We’re safety officers here on an official visit. We’d like to check for fire hazards from any stray discarded ponytails left behind after the train wreck. You know the kind of thing. Just routine.”

  The man eyed the card and said, “That thing expired a year ago. There’s laws about impersonating a city official. Isn’t there a bingo parlour or somewhere you two could go and while away the hours?”

  Frank put his broad muscular arm around the little man’s shoulders and squeezed. “You know,” he confided, “I could say you’ll live long enough to feel old and useless one day. But maybe I’d be lying. We’re looking for a friend who quit the fire department for the joyous pastures of private enterprise. Jimmy Gaines. He did security here. We’d like to commiserate with him on the sad and premature loss of his stock options. Find him and we go away. Try to pretend we don’t even exist …”

  He caught Hank’s eye, removed his arm from the supervisor, and said, “Slip me some skin, bro.”

  Then the two of them grazed knuckles and made rapper-like noises.

  Mr. Clipboard watched, looking worried.

  “Folks keep going on about the young people these days,” Frank told him. “Why? It’s the old guys they got to worry about.”

  The removals man walked into the front vestibule and yelled, “Is there anyone here called Gaines?”

  To everyone’s relief, a sprightly upright figure in a dark uniform which contrasted vividly with his bright, bouncy grey hair emerged. He looked in their direction, then started to dance up and down with glee.

  “The old days,” Jimmy Gaines squealed as he came to greet them. “It’s like the old days.” He hesitated. “Are they cleaning that engine good and proper yet? Like we used to?”

  “Stop living in the past, you stupid old man,” Frank ordered. He watched the clipboard guy barking at his brutes to hurry up stripping the building. “What the hell are you supposed to be guarding anyway, Jimmy? This place is going to be bare in an hour or so.”

  “Nothing,” Gaines replied cheerfully, setting up a brisk pace away from the vast hall that had once been home to Lukatmi. “Come around the corner. There’s a café. A real one. No ponytails. No geeks or people drinking crushed wheatgrass. If it was later and I didn’t have a uniform, I’d buy you a beer.”

  “Coffee will do,” Hank said quietly.

  “You look serious,” Gaines declared as he cut behind the building, heading for a small door with the sign of a coffee cup above the threshold.

  “We need to give a nice Italian lady a present,” Frank said as the brothers struggled to keep up.

  “Chocolates,” Gaines suggested. “I’m told they come with a guarantee.”

  Hank caught up with him and placed his hand on Gaines’s arm. The man stopped and looked at them. They were alone now. No one could hear.

  “We want to find her a better present than that, Jimmy. We want to hand her Tom Black.”

  Jimmy Gaines gave them a hard stare. “And I thought this was a social call! Half of SFPD is looking for Black. I tried talking to them, but they looked so bored having an old fart like me wheezing away I gave up in the end. What makes you think you can find someone they can’t?”

  “Because six, maybe nine months ago,” Frank said, “we saw you and Mr. Black out together. Him looking at you as if he had stars in his eyes and all manner of that fancy exploration gear you love in the back of your station wagon. You looked like good friends going somewhere remote. Two and two going together the way they do …”

  “Hiking,” Jimmy Gaines snapped. “We both belong to the Sierra Club and a couple other things. You suggesting something else?”

  “Not for a moment,” Hank insisted. “You always did love the wild side of life. The great outdoors.” The Boynton brothers liked Jimmy Gaines, mostly, though not so much they wanted to see him more than a couple of times a year. “I remember you reading Henry David Thoreau on those long, empty night shifts. Things like that stick in the memory.”

  “If more people read Thoreau, we wouldn’t be in the shit we’re in now. The simple life and a little civil disobedience from time to time. You boys ever take a look at Walden like I told you to?”

  “I’m allergic to poison oak and air that doesn’t have a little scent of gasoline in it,” Hank confessed. “Wild things don’t agree with me. Was Tom a Thoreau fan, too?”

  “Damned right. Walden was his favourite book after I showed it to him. He isn’t a murderer either. Don’t care what those stupid cops say. That Jonah bastard … nothing would surprise me about him.”

  “That’s what we heard,” Hank said, urging him on.

  “Tom’s a decent human being. Just a little lost kid with too much brains and money and too little life. Didn’t have an old man. His mom was half crazy. Did you know that? Did you read that in the papers?”

  “I guess we didn’t,” Frank replied.

  “No. Kind of spoils the story, doesn’t it? So what do you really want?”

  “We want to find him,” Frank replied. “We want to know the truth. If it’s what you think it is — and our Italian friend believes that, too — we’d maybe hope we can help get him off the hook. So where is he, Jimmy?”

  Gaines shook with fury. He was fit and strong for his age. Sometimes, when much younger, he had been a touch free with his fists in a bar after work.

  “I don’t know! Why would he tell me where he was going? I’m just an old security guard he used to talk to about the mountains and the woods. When he wanted some new place to go, usually. He liked being on his own. Poor kid thought he was soft on that actress for a while, not that that was ever going to go anywhere. She was a tease. Led him on. Tom never should have gotten mixed up with that Hollywood crowd in the first place.”

  Hank and Frank looked at one another.

  “We need you to talk to us about those places you showed him,” Hank said.

  Gaines nodded in the direction of the great red bridge along the Bay and the wooded Marin headlands beyond.

  “Why? You think he’s up there somewhere? Scared and hungry and him a billionaire only four days ago?”

  Frank folded his arms. “I don’t think he’s in Acapulco. Do you?”

  Jimmy Gaines swore. “It was Josh Jonah, all on his own, I swear it. Tom was just a starstruck idiot. Kid didn’t understand the first thing about money. He actually believed all that new-world crap Lukatmi used to spout.”

  “We’re sorry, Jimmy,” Frank apologised. “Truth is, you can insure against anything these days except stupidity, can’t you?”

  Gaines stared at them and asked, “Insurance? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what we’re talking about,” Frank replied. “Sorting this thing out once and for all. Please. Just tell us where to look.”

  There was a short, unpleasant moment of laughter. Then …

  “Oh, what the hell, this was my last day anyway. I guess I
get to leave early. You two got good boots?” Gaines was stripping off his jacket. He was still a big man, all muscle under the cheap white security guard shirt.

  Hank and Frank looked at each other.

  “Just the old ones from the station,” Hank confessed.

  “Better go get them. And something for poison oak. Where we’re headed, things bite.”

  3

  Costa and Teresa Lupo got two cups of foul coffee from the food truck, then headed for a bench by the lake in front of the Palace, listening to the ducks arguing, glad to be away from the ill-tempered crowd.

  “Here’s something to think about,” Teresa declared as she sat down. “Josh Jonah told anyone willing to listen, including the papers, that fifty million dollars of Lukatmi money went into Inferno.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good. Well, it’s not there.”

  “They’ve spent it, surely.”

  “No. The SFPD can’t find any proof much Lukatmi money went into the movie in the first place. All they can track is a measly five million in the production accounts at Cinecittà. The rest of it doesn’t exist. Not in Rome anyway. They’ve located some odd currency movements out of Lukatmi, substantial ones into offshore accounts, in the Caribbean, South America, the Far East. But not to Rome. Not to anything that seems to go near any kind of movie production. They think that was just Josh Jonah thieving the bank to put something aside for a rainy day.”

  Costa found himself wishing he understood the movie industry better. “If they didn’t have the money, how did the thing get finished? What did they pay people with?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Bonetti’s the lead producer and he refuses to discuss the matter with the Americans. He says it’s none of their business. Strictly speaking, it isn’t. Inferno got made by committee. A string of tiny production companies, all set up specifically for the purpose of funding the movie, all based in places where the accounting rules tend to be somewhat opaque. Cayman. Russia. Liechtenstein. Gibraltar. Even Uzbekistan.”