That same evening, out in San Francisco, Dante Stagnaro was having a high old time of his own. He had taken Rosa out for pizza on Columbus Ave a few blocks from the small bungalow in the steeply slanted 500 block of Greenwich Street where he had been brought up. Theirs now, his parents had moved down to the Valley near Modesto to raise walnuts. Dante and Rosa always went out for pizza when they wanted to celebrate something. Often, like tonight, the celebration was just Dante being willing to take a night off, and them being alive, and together, and still in love.
When Dante had fallen in love with Rosa Benvenuto, he had been nineteen and in his first year at community college, she had been seventeen and a high school senior. A thin quick Italian girl with a round face and great dark flashing eyes and clouds of curly black hair down her back. Pert, proud breasts under soft sweaters, a tiny waist, sweet flanks under tight jeans. He had asked her to marry him after his return from Vietnam two years later, on the day he had entered the police academy.
Motherhood and the relentless tug of gravity had made the breasts heavier, the years had thickened that tiny waist, good Italian cooking had widened those sweet flanks. But to Dante, she was only more beautiful now than she had been on the day he had taken her down the aisle at Saints Peter and Paul two blocks from the house he took her home to-Joe DiMaggio’s church, some of the old-timers still called it.
The thickening and softening of the body, the laugh lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth were to be treasured, for they spoke of living, of two wonderful children borne and being raised, of hard work and the wisdom only women can attain.
Rosa was not feeling wise tonight. She was feeling, truth be told, giddy from the wine-it didn’t take very much. She hated to admit it, it was such a cliche-like an African-American who loved watermelon-but a sausage/pepperoni with extra cheese and a bottle of Chianti in a straw basket were Rosa’s idea of absolute gastronomic heaven. Dante knew it, and whenever he was feeling really good he took her out for such a feast. And afterward, when they got home…
Right now he was regaling her with memories of pizza joints once known-when he was a tiny kid, to be exact.
“There were these two brothers down the Peninsula, Monte and Renato. Monte’s place was on the old Bayshore before it was a freeway, just across from Moffett Field in Mountain View when the Navy still had it Just called Monte’s. Renato had his place in Redwood City on El Camino Real, called himself ‘Renato, King of the Pizza.’”
He started to laugh at the memories the very names evoked, and she loved him passionately at that moment, his fine Italian eyes squinched up with laughing. He took a big gulp of Chianti.
“Thing was, they wouldn’t speak to each other. Family picnics, holidays, like that-one in each end of the room. It was wonderful!”
“What’s so funny about a brother-brother feud?” asked Rosa, but also laughing just because he was.
“The feud was about pizza crusts! Monte was a thick crust man, Renato was thin crust. Each thought the other was a fool, a charlatan, an imposter!”
They laughed together over this, ate pizza, drank wine. Finally he got down to his interview with Skeffington St. John.
“He pronounces it Sinjin.”
“As in unholy drink?” giggled Rosa. She was on her third glass of dago red, and her eyes shone like the candles on the tables, like the stars in the heavens.
“S-I-N-J-I-N. Unholy genie out of a bottle, maybe.”
“We agree on unholy,” said Rosa. She pointed at the last slice on the big round tin scored by countless pizza cutters through the years. “Anybody want this more than I do?”
Dante waved a hand, leaned forward across the table as she scooped it up. “Thing is, Rosie, I have that guy.” He closed his hand into a fist to show how he had a particularly vulnerable part of Skeffington St. John in his grasp. “He’s a degenerate and he’s falling to pieces. The people he’s associated with don’t like people who know a lot about them falling to pieces.”
“Can he give you what you want about Atlas Entertainment?”
“That’s the question,” admitted Dante. “He was the lawyer who set up the purchase of the corporate shell for-this is speculation-Martin Prince in Las Vegas. I don’t know how much he knows about what they’ve done with it since they bought it. If they do own it and if they’ve done anything with it.”
“Your obsession is showing again, darling,” said Rosa with a little chuckle.
“What? It’s an obsession to hate the bad guys?”
“You hate the bad Italian guys who screw up our good Italian name in this country,” she said, “so you just have to think Atlas Entertainment is a mob front.”
“That’s what I think,” he admitted with a wry chuckle. “I just can’t prove it. There’s no obvious illegality that would let me get inside their operation and look around. I can’t get a search warrant, I can’t get phone taps. I think they had Moll Dalton murdered-but I can’t prove it. I think they had Jack Lenington murdered-but I can’t prove that, either. I don’t have a motive for either killing-but hell, who needed one for Jack, you knew him from our academy days, he even made a pass at you, remember? A sleazeball even then. But Moll Dalton…”
“You’re projecting again, darling. Moll Dalton wasn’t corrupt, I grant you, but from what you tell me she was no maiden in distress. She was an ambitious, hard-driving woman who habitually cheated on her husband and would do anything to get to the top. You say Gounaris was using her sexually-well, maybe she was using him sexually, too. Maybe she overestimated how much power he had, and maybe that’s what got her killed.”
“He couldn’t protect her?” Dante nodded almost grudgingly. “Not bad, sweetie. But the point is that maybe I don’t have to prove the mob killed Moll Dalton. Maybe somebody will tell me. Her husband thinks she ended up being promiscuous the way she was because St. John had molested her as a little girl.”
“His own daughter? And you believe Dalton? Without any facts to back up his supposition?”
“Yeah, I believe him. I talked with Beverly Hills Vice, there’s rumors around St. John gets little girls for sexual purposes from a low-life talent agent.” He gave another chuckle. “Calls herself Charriti HHope.” He spelled it. “She’s a known-let’s say alleged-procuress, but she has a lot of powerful friends in LaLa Land so she’s never been busted.”
Rosa’s eyes flashed. “She gets little children for-”
“Yeah. For guys like Moll’s father, if the rumors are true, and I think they are. So Dalton was probably right about the molestation of the daughter as a little girl.”
“And this puts this St. John in your hand?”
“He’s juggling a dozen balls and he’s going to start dropping some of them. When he does, his playmates are going to decide he’s expendable. Then he’ll have to come to me.”
“Unless they kill him first.”
Dante sobered. “There’s that. But… a few months after his daughter is professionally hit?” He shrugged. “I’m almost ashamed of myself, but I told him his buddies had put out the contract on her even though I don’t know for sure that they did.”
“Did he believe you?”
“I’m banking that eventually he will. Whatever he did to her, I think he loved her. He was sure broken up when I told him she was dead. I’d love to put more pressure on him, but-”
“How long ago were he and his wife divorced?” interrupted Rosa with a thoughtful look in her eye.
“Um… twenty-five years ago, like that.”
“And you think he might have molested his daughter when she was a little girl? About four, maybe five?”
Dante leaned across the table and kissed her.
“You wonder why I love you? Of course. The wife. If I can find her and she confirms it…” He paused for a moment, then said uncomfortably, “Sweetie, there’s something else. I think I screwed up. After Moll Dalton was murdered, I got a message on the phone machine. From somebody doing Arte Johnson’s Nazi from Laugh-In and calling himself Raptor.”
“Raptor like in bird of prey?”
“Yeah. He said he was the one who’d killed her.”
“In a comic German accent?”
“That’s why I thought it was a crank call. So I just, uh, erased it off the tape.”
She met his eyes, held them with her own. Her face was serene and beautiful in the candlelight.
“And it wasn’t a crank call,” she said softly.
“I’m not sure. I got another call after Lenington was killed. This time it was a black talking, but it was a message from the same guy. He called himself Raptor again.”
“And you haven’t told Tim.”
“I had a hell of a time telling you, Rosie-that first call was probably Raptor himself. Now he’s using other people to make his calls so I’ll never get a voiceprint of him.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Rosa. “These men have egos. He’ll call you again.”
“You think so?”
“I would.” For a moment, her black eyes penetrated his soul, then she gave her chuckle that was almost a giggle, and stood to start putting on her coat. “Haven’t I always?”
She led him back, hand in hand, to the house in Greenwich Street where he had first dreamed of her.
In Vegas, Enzo Garofano had been seduced into his first dribbling orgasm in almost two years by the cantatrice Martin Prince had sent up to his penthouse atop Xanadu. Seduced as much by the memory of her fiery rendition of Carmen’s “Habanera” as by suckling like an infant at her magnificent meloni.
She had departed with his promise of getting her into a good opera company back east, and Enzo, after he had recovered from his sexual labors, had set out to honor his private arrangement with Martin Prince.
Mae’s Place had started life in the thirties as a roadhouse on the way to the Columbia turnpike, with good steaks on the first floor and high stakes on the second. Just “the Roadhouse” then, a rambling white frame building set in a nice grove of eastern white pines, plenty of parking. From her late teens Mae had been the hostess with the mostes’ in the downstairs lounge, and after legalized gambling in Atlantic City made the Roadhouse a losing proposition, bought in and changed the name to Mae’s Place.
Mae made the steaks even thicker downstairs, closed the unprofitable gaming rooms, and started running a different kind of beef on the second floor. Her girls were Grade A, some were Choice or even Prime, scrupulously clean and low-cholesterol. And her local protection was firmly in place: the county sheriff came out every Friday night for a thick T-bone and a thin blonde, on the house; and Mae had an excellent video of the reform mayor serving as the high-price spread between two of her girls, one whole wheat, one white bread.
Mae was now forty-nine, still flame-haired with a little help from her hairdresser, heavy-hipped and heavy-breasted, rings on every finger, expensive musk dabbled deep in her sensational cleavage, pink and voluptuous as a Rubens nude, randy as a goat. She indulged herself freely with a few old friends: if you were fortunate enough to be offered Mae, you didn’t pay.
One of her oldest friends was Eddie Ucelli. His company supplied her steaks, but he himself usually only came around when she called him, because she was his contact for the nowadays rare hits he was asked to perform. But sometimes he would come out for a sirloin with his wife, and Mae would sit down at their table to chat about the old days. And Eddie would get all steamed up.
So on nights such as this, Eddie would see his wife home, leave her in front of Jay Leno, and loop back for a little stroll down memory lane. Mae’s memory lane.
Because even though Eddie was fifty-seven years old, a little too squat, a little too wide, and naked a little too hairy, ah, good Christ, Mae could remember him when. Eddie had popped her cherry for her on a rooftop with a view of Manhattan across the East River when she was just entering her teens and he just leaving his. Even now, Mae could coax him alive as no other woman could-and most nights he needed a lot of coaxing even from her.
The phone call caught him on his back under Mae, who wore only her push-up bra pushed up so one of her enormous breasts was in his mouth seemingly by accident-Mae was inventive in ways like that. When she leaned back to take the call, Eddie slid a thumb into her luxurious bush and began rolling her clitoris because it took him a long time to get one of his partial hard-ons and he hated to lose his rhythm. Stifling a moan of pleasure, Mae leaned down to wedge the phone between his shoulder and chin.
“Ucelli,” he said into it.
He listened. His thumb stopped moving inside her. Mae didn’t mind; she could always get herself off if Eddie couldn’t do it for her. She sat placidly astride him; this was not the first of the many such phone calls that Eddie had taken himself here at Mae’s Place. He always came around to celebrate with her after he had completed his contract, but by then his sexual fervor inevitably had ebbed.
Now, before he hung up he said, “I understand. The Feebs got a fuckin’ tap on my line, I gotta duck ’em but it’s no problem.” He added in a guttural voice, “When the time’s right, I’ll do it right.”
At that same moment Mae felt something thick and heavy pressing up against her belly as it hadn’t in years.
“My God, Eddie!” she exclaimed in amazement. “You’re as hard as an iron bar!”
She quickly impaled herself on it, and then, ever so slowly and lasciviously, slid down the pole and started rolling those ample hips as if they were on oiled ball bearings. As she started to breathe very quickly, Mae knew they were both in for the fuck of a lifetime before she would let him die the little death.