Armand “Red” Grant swung the cream-colored Lexus off Marina del Rey’s Via Dolce into Tahiti Way where Tosca was docked in Marina B. Tosca was a seventy-eight foot all-weather motor yacht custom-built for Mr. Prince by Hattaras for a million-two; RADAR, SONAR, a thousand-mile cruising range, slept a dozen people in luxury.
Red parked between a BMW and a Mercedes in the designated lot, went down the dock toward the locked gate protecting the moored yachts from vandalism, robbery, or casual rubberneckers. He was dressed in white topsiders and an aloha shirt with short sleeves that showed his massive arms. Above him gulls keened and swooped, around him bright blue water sparkled in the California sun. He breathed salt brine deeply into his nostrils.
Vegas was the vein of gold that never ran out, but Red dreamed of Mr. Prince moving his center of operations to L.A. He was sick of twenty-four-hour neon, casinos without clocks, people who never slept, the constant ringing bells and cascading coins of the jackpots, the faces, gray with shock as they hocked their watches to get back home, of the losers without jackpots.
Vegas, Death Valley, Palm Springs-maybe it was the depleted ozone and global warming and the greenhouse effect, but there seemed to be a hell of a lot more deserts around than anything else these days. Except oceans. Ah, oceans. Now you were talking! That’s why he loved the holiday season each year, he got to cruise ahead of Mr. Prince down to Baja on Tosca.
Red often thought he had the soul of a poet. Flying fish flashing across the waves in the mornings, whales blowing white spouts on the horizon. Once a whole school of orcas, the so-called killer whales, had raced Tosca for over a mile like sportive dolphins. He’d never forgotten it. He’d also killed two men, one with his. 45 and one with his bare hands, but that had been in the way of business for Mr. Prince.
He used his key on the heavy, boxlike steel lock and went through the thickly barred gate, whistling. His shoes made hollow thunks! on the boards of the dock; he was a big guy, six-six, weighed 250. Last night he’d attended a postmodernist opening at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. He’d enjoyed every minute of it, much more than he’d enjoyed the pro forma sex afterward with the pretentious blonde who’d accompanied him.
A lanky brown-haired man was hosing down the dock just beyond Tosca’s proudly curved prow. He was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and Nike Airs; his hair was cut so close to his head it looked like a boot camp Marine’s. Red was instantly alert; Mr. Prince had enemies and this guy was only a few feet from Mr. Prince’s boat and looked like he could make things happen.
When Red approached, the guy gestured at the wet planks.
“Can you believe? Some idiot left fish guts and scales all over the dock, somebody could slip and break their neck.”
Red could see the washed-away offal floating in the water below the dock. He asked, “You have a boat here on the pier?”
The guy waved a vague arm down the line of moored yachts. “I’ve been staying on a friend’s ketch, I quit my job to paint.” He stopped, frowning at Red in a quizzical way. “I know you.”
“No. I’m not from around here.” Red spoke curtly.
“The art opening last night! It’s your height. Well, just your overall size, and the red hair. You’re hard to miss even in a crowd, and the blond lady with you looked like a movie star.”
“Not a lady, not a movie star, not a real blonde.” Just for a moment, Red envied this guy: on a boat, alone, quiet hours just painting, doing art instead of blondes with I.Q.’s to match their bust size. “What’d you think of the opening?”
“Superb work, superbly mounted.” He gestured at Tosca, said wistfully, “Talk about superb… yours?”
Red chuckled. Here he was envying this guy, and the guy was envying him. What a strange world!
“I just get to ride on it. Just a hired hand.”
“Must be nice. No responsibility. Looks all ready to go.”
“Tomorrow, down to La Paz to wait for the boss.”
The lanky guy spread his arms wide. “The Jade Sea,” he said. “Three years ago, we drove down to the bay where the whales go. You can go out among them… Once in a lifetime.”
He gave a small almost sad shrug, a smile similarly sad, with a wave of his hand went away down the pier.
Red thought he’d sort of like to see some of the guy’s paintings. But, leaving tomorrow. Maybe he’ll take some art classes in Vegas after they got back. Fine art, not commercial; like the lanky guy who’d been at last night’s opening.
A week had passed since Ucelli’s death. Driving to Mae’s Place from the Newark airport, with a stop in South Orange to get a motel room right along 510, Dante Stagnaro was feeling guilty about Rosie. Here he was, on his own money and leave time he could have spent with her, poking around in the Ucelli hit, leaving the burden of Christmas preparations on her shoulders.
At least he hadn’t left his two Organized Crime Task Force inspectors in the lurch. Yesterday they’d broken a ring of Asian car boosters who had been plaguing the malls during the last-minute Christmas rush. The Asians stole Christmas presents from parked cars and returned them to the stores where they had been purchased to get cash refunds. If the store refused to refund, they kept and later fenced the goods.
A cruising Danny Banner saw two of them crowbar an auto trunk at the Stonestown mall, was behind them when they were refused cash for their plunder and went to store the stuff. He called Dante, baby-sat the drop house until Dante got there with the warrant.
When they went in, they got five of the ring, with more to come as the busted ones started to sing. A major coup for his task force, and after getting back from the raid, Dante had been up to his ears in processing paperwork until just before his mad dash to SFO for the eleven-thirty red-eye to Newark.
Now he was turning up the snow-covered drive to Mae’s Place, yawning with fatigue but driven by the same obsession that had sent him to Minneapolis after Spic Madrid had been killed. His tires spun briefly on the ice-slick surface; the coating of new snow over everything was kind to the joint, but it still looked tawdry in the bright cold December sunshine.
The local police had long ago come and gone, the feds had come and gone; none of them had found a damn thing giving them any lead to the identity of the man whom Mae’s girls had dubbed the P.W. Dante was there only on sufferance, because of a phone call to the local feds from Rudy Mattaliano, his convention-buddy federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
Mae turned out to be a blowsy overblown perfume-drenched broad with glittering fingers, glittering eyes, and a chest you could eat lunch off of. Dante was talking to her in the bar of her roadhouse, a funky ornate intimate room with red plush on the walls and lushly painted nudes of surprising quality above the bar. She was so hostile he knew it had to spring from fear; he could see it glinting in the depths of those glittering eyes.
“You know I don’t have to tell you a fucking thing, cop!”
Dante made a great display of checking around his belt. “Shit,” he said, “I left my rubber hose back in San Francisco.”
She cracked a little grin in spite of herself, jerked her head toward the back of the bar.
“I got coffee-nothin’ stronger while we’re closed down.”
Around them the roadhouse was silent as a tomb. He was sure the girls were moving around upstairs, but he couldn’t hear them. Mae, he knew, would soon reopen. Such sops to public conscience were bad for business, and she obviously had something heavy on the local power structure.
Dante made the thick black coffee blond and sweet, took a big gulp. “Why the red carpet for me all of a sudden, Mae?”
“You’re the first one didn’t look at me like I was shit on a stick.” She gave a big belly laugh that reminded him of Tim’s. “I’m insulted they didn’t try’n’ look down the front of my blouse while they were trashin’ me.”
Dante looked, bugged out his eyes. “Wow! Dolly Parton!”
Tears suddenly came into her eyes, impatiently wiped away with the back of a bejeweled hand. “Thanks, even if you’re shittin’ me. I miss the little fucker, is the thing.”
“You guys go back a ways?”
“Christ, almost forty years.”
“Then you just gotta have a few ideas who wanted him dead.” He added almost diffidently, “It ties in with a dead woman I got out in San Francisco that I figure maybe Popgun did.”
“Listen, he was retired from all that stuff years ago! He was an old man, for Chrissake! He sold wholesale meats!”
Dante stopped her with a palm-out traffic cop hand.
“Hey, Mae, I gotta ask, he was the best in his day. I was just hoping you knew how he stood with the boys these days.”
“Hell, top of the heap! Why the night he got it…”
Mae stopped herself abruptly. Dante didn’t even try to follow up on it. He didn’t want to let her know he had caught anything significant in her stifled sentence.
“So there was no reason for them to put out a hit on him.”
“Not a fuckin’ reason in the world.”
“Somebody from years ago, getting even?” mused Dante. “Trouble with that, the guy was so damn patient. Waiting around two, three weeks-”
“Fuckin’ freak, is what he was!” she burst out bitterly. “Comin’ around with his Soo Li shit…”
“Soo Li?”
She told him about the P.W.’s coming, his strange habit of seeing if each girl was some lost love named Soo Li.
“He scared me-and now see what he’s done!”
Leaving, Dante went downstairs to find Old Mose in the basement, tending a water heater that didn’t need tending.
“Don’t want to talk to me, huh, old-timer?”
“Jus’ doin’ my job, boss,” said Mose vaguely. “Yassah, dat’s de troof, jus’ doin’ Old Mose’ job. Pow’ful lotta work.”
“Ashcan the Amos and Andy, Mose. I know you liked the guy. But he’s a bad dude, going around killing innocent people-”
“People like Popgun Ucelli?” The Stepin Fetchit was gone from Mose’s voice. “Then I say, give that man a medal!”
He had Dante there. They chatted for half an hour about the great old blues men of Mose’s youth whose 78s Dante had grown up on because his grandfather had been a “race record” fan. Pegleg Howell, the Atlanta street singer who made twenty-eight sides between ’26 and ’29; Jaybird Coleman out of Gainsville, eleven sides in about the same years; Blind Willy Johnson, thirty sides, the best bottleneck guitarist of his day…
Mose extended one of his shattered claws to shake Dante’s hand when they parted, then called after him.
“Whatever that fat woman upstairs tell you, that Popgun was still doin’ people.” The faded brown eyes suddenly blazed with joyous light. “I’d wish you luck, Mist’ Stagnaro, but that wouldn’t be the truth. P.W. done me a mighty big favor.” Mose held up his claw. “Was Popgun Ucelli did this to me, nearly thutty years ago.”
Old Mose shuffled closer.
“Thutty years, then here come that P.W., take care of that little chore for me. When they laid Popgun to rest, I be taken me to the cemetery, had me a little dance on his grave.”