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Authors: Domenic Stansberry

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled

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BOOK: Naked Moon
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Someways, things had come full circle. Except now it was more complicated, more dangerous. Dominick Greene was still staying in the Wong, and spent his afternoons in the cafés and his evenings wandering the clubs along Broadway, and ended up often as not in the Melody Lounge. Dante knew this much about Greene already, and he would know more soon, he hoped, because he'd put in a call to Jake, down at Cicero Investigations, asking his boss to run a make. Meanwhile, a car pulled up, a Mercedes. Then in a little while, Marilyn came down with David Lake. Dressed for the opera.

Lake was a good man.

Dante knew this because he'd looked into Lake's past as well, playing it nosy, back when the man had first appeared in Marilyn's life. The fact of Lake's goodness, though, didn't make it any easier, watching the two of them climb into the car. The Mercedes drove down the hill, its taillights flaring in the twilight.

Then Dante went to the Naked Moon.

He still needed to talk to Rossi, but the man wouldn't be home, not yet, and in the meantime he still hoped to find the girl. But the dancer was not there, and she was not at her room down in the flats. Her disappearance was coincidence, he told himself again. Meanwhile, there were places girls like her ended up. He caught a taxi then down to South of Market, to a spot under the freeway, where the hard-core girls worked the corner, hailing passersby, and in between clients, the girls got on their knees, crawling through a break in the fence, to a concrete field where you could buy just about any drug you wanted.

“Slow down,” he said.

The driver obliged.

The girl was not among those on the corner. He peered through the taxi window toward the darkness underneath the freeway. Maybe the girl was there, with the users, and he was tempted for a minute to follow her into those shadows. Because he wanted to know if Greene had sent her, he told himself, though maybe that was not the reason at all. Because it was time for him to disappear, too. He'd seen Marilyn on Lake's arm. He closed his eyes, full of yearning, and his nostrils widened, as if taking in the acrid smoke from the foil, and he remembered the girl touching him, back in the elevator.

“What next?” asked the driver.

Dante reached into his pocket, touched the stilletto in its case. If I disappear, he thought, if I vanish from the face of the earth, Marilyn becomes irrelevant. They won't be able
to move against me by hurting her, but he wasn't sure how to accomplish that, not yet. Or maybe he still hoped there was another way.

“Back the way we came,” Dante said, and gave the man Rossi's address up on Russian Hill.

PART FOUR
FIFTEEN

I
n the end, it was the Sicilians. Not the Italians from Lucca, with their shops and their restaurants. Not the Calabrians, the peasants from the south. Not the Italian Swiss, the industrious ones, with their chocolate factories and canneries and their bank on the corner of Columbus. These others might have the good life, some of them, but it was not them, in the end, who owned the Beach. Rather it was the old Sicilians in their torn sweaters.

Old men lounging on the green benches in Washington Square.

A million dollars in torn sweaters.

Fish money.

The former mayor, Joe Rossi, was of this line. He lived in a yellow house at the top of Russian Hill—a gambrel-roofed Victorian with a private yard in the back. It was crab money, fisherman money, a share of the wharf, purchased
by Rossi's own father years ago. The Sicilians had outfished the Luccans and outbullied the Chinese, controlled the bay until the shrimp beds were dry and the sardines fished out, and then they'd made other arrangements. But it was all fish money when you got down to it. Dredged out of the sea and wrestled onto the wharf. It was fish money that had financed Joe Rossi's career, and fish money now that was financing his daughter's run. Fish money once removed, but it still had the same smell. You didn't get rich, unless you were willing to stink, Dante's father used to say, and you didn't stay rich if you dressed in anything other than a torn sweater.

Mayor Rossi had dispensed with the torn sweater part of this wisdom. He showed his money and thought himself a good man, though there were plenty of people who would tell you otherwise. Some of the enmity was personal, and some of it was for convenience' sake—because everyone had to hate someone—and some of it was over political business from long ago.

Good man or no, he would do anything for his daughter. Gennae Rossi was the light of her father's eye. She'd been a teenager when her father was mayor, and her picture had been in the society page when she married. She'd worked in the welfare kitchens after college and given her fish money to the poor. Barely thirty when she was elected to the city council, elegant and modest both at once, so poised, posture like a saint until the multiple sclerosis.

Rossi himself did not answer the door. Rather it was his wife, dressed in such a way—in a formal dress, sashed at the waist—that suggested they had just returned from the evening's
event. She'd had a mastectomy six months ago, and though you could not tell by looking, rumor among the old ones, down at Serafina's, claimed the long-range prognosis was not good, and old Mayor Rossi, these days, was sleeping in the study. Whether this was on account of his own trouble getting up the stairs or repulsion at his wife's cancer—this depended upon whom you talked to, but either way the couple was active in their daughter's campaign.

Given the hour, and the fact of his cousin's outburst, Dante half expected Mrs. Rossi might send him away. Her husband, though, had spent a long time in public life. She had seen people come and go, at all hours, and if she held his cousin's behavior against him, she did not show it. Mrs. Rossi was, at any rate, affable by nature.

“We just got back. Gennae was speaking this evening, at Il Cenacolo.” She smiled. “Joe introduced her.” Il Cenacolo was an Italian group that met once a month, businessmen mostly, political types, people with money. Gennae's candidacy was a long shot, and her father was not loved by everyone, but they'd turned out like in the old days, elbow to elbow around the white table cloths, raising their glasses. “It was nice,” she said.

“How's the campaign?”

“There's a surge.”

“Oh.”

“That's what Joe says. He can feel these things.”

“I imagine he can.”

His words came out wrong, too sardonic, and Mrs. Rossi became haughty then. She held her head in profile, nose
turned—but he felt no enmity toward her. She was one of the few who'd gone down to visit his mother after she'd been placed in the asylum.

“It's good to see you,” she said. Mrs. Rossi turned on her heel, as if to head up the long stairs behind her.

“Just go in.”

“Excuse me.”

“The study. He's resting in there. Only an idiot would climb these stairs.”

M
ayor Rossi lounged in his study, leaning back in his big chair, feet on the ottoman, shoes off. He lay with the chair tilted all the way back, hands folded on his paunch, eyes closed, shirt open at the collar. His pajamas and a night robe lay draped nearby, and there was a pillow on the sofa, suggesting that might be his later destination. He had not made it there yet, though, into his pajamas and onto the sofa, but instead had wheezed off in his chair. If Rossi had heard Dante come in, he gave no immediate sign.

The room had that old wop smell.

Tobacco. Wine. Fish.

“Mayor?”

Rossi opened his eyes, taking stock of the younger man, and Dante was aware of the gulf between them. The mayor had been friends with his father, back in the day. He did not look quite awake.

“Don't you knock when you come in?”

“I did knock.”

“That's what they all say.” Rossi rubbed his eyes with his fists. “What brings you, this hour?”

“Business.”

The old man grimaced up at him and struggled on the recliner, forcing the chair upright. “Your asshole cousin was here.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“My asshole cousin is dead.”

The mayor didn't know how to take this. He laughed, or started to, a guffaw really, an odd chortle, cut short in the throat. Then he coughed. There was an ugly rattle in his chest. “You're not joking?”

“No.”

The mayor leaned forward. The far wall, the other side of the room, chronicled Rossi's career—starting some sixty years back, just after World War II, black-and-white photos of a thick-chested man smiling into the camera, gung ho for the world. Closer by, on the desk itself, were pictures of the old man and his wife, at some lake in Italy, on their second honeymoon, wandering down the medieval streets. It was the kind of street on which Marilyn imagined herself, wearing a gown like the one Gennae Rossi wore in the wedding picture out in the hall.

“I'm sorry,” said Rossi. “I had no idea.”

“He came to see you?”

“The other day. We …” He shook his head. “What happened?”

Dante told him about the murder, and as he did so, he
studied Rossi's face. He studied it the same way Chin had studied his own, looking for what lay beneath the surface. There was always something hidden, but whether it mattered, whether it meant anything, that was harder to tell.

“What do the police think?”

“Gary was up here to see you, wasn't he?”

“Did you tell the police that?”

“What did he want?”

Rossi told him then, pretty much the same story Dante had gathered from Gary. Different in some particulars, but not the important ones. From the sound of it, his cousin had come up here, grabbing at straws, hoping the former mayor could somehow use his influence to squelch the investigation. “As if a word from me, his problems would go away. I wish people would listen to me like that.” Rossi laughed dryly. “When I told him no, well … You know how he could be sometimes.”

“Ugly.”

“Yes.”

“The police have already talked to me,” said Dante. “Sooner or later, I guess, they will talk to you as well. But there's no reason for the media to come along.”

“What are you saying?”

“I know how much you love your daughter.”

“Don't play that card on me.”

“A story like this—a time like this—the candidate's father, the ex-mayor, questions concerning the murder of a man seeking a favor in regard to a criminal investigation …”

Mayor Rossi had suffered a million accusations in the past,
charges of corruption, of playing his connections for financial benefit, and though some of them were true, at least in part, he'd walked the line and fended them all off. He glared at Dante with the old wop defiance, but at the same time his countenance was creased with exhaustion. He had pulmonary problems and his wife was dying of cancer, but none of that was what bothered him. He didn't want the campaign coming apart on their daughter.

“What, then, do you want?”

“Ru Shen's diary …”

The mayor shook his head. “What does that have to do with your cousin?”

“Someone's been leaking information.”

“Your cousin?”

“You tell me.”

During a trip to China, Ru Shen had disappeared. This was common knowledge. It was not widely known, however, that his body had been found in the cargo hold of a container ship, by the immigration authority. It had gone unidentified at first, and Ru Shen's effects—including the journal—had been bagged and stored, then subsequently destroyed. The mayor's fear of the journal back then, three years ago, had had little to do with the company. Rossi's concerns were more prosaic. He had been involved in a number of questionable deals over the years, but what worried him most was what had happened on a particular junket. Small stuff, ultimately, regarding a couple of girls in a Hong Kong hotel room.

“No,” Rossi said. “Your cousin said nothing about the journal.”

There was a tremor in the old man's voice. Near the picture on the desk, of himself and his wife in Italy, there stood a photo, Gennae, in her bright blouse, gold earrings. She smiled a big smile. Her father's smile.

BOOK: Naked Moon
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