Dunc spread the Las Vegas Pioneer for July 5, 1953, open on the library reading table. The headline was three inches high:
Ned was there, and Carny Largo. And Artis. And... And yes, Gimpy Ernest, throat slit in the parking lot at the ballpark where the fights had been held. Ten feet from him, car keys in hand, Rafe Raffetto, dead from repeated stab wounds to the heart. A Commando knife still in its sheath between his shoulder blades, but with traces of blood on the blade.
It couldn’t have been Rafe on the darkened stairwell of Artis’s house. He’d been dead for half an hour by that time.
It had been Pepe. Pepe, front man for the mob, the Mafia, put into places like the Gladiator to play his piano and learn everything his bosses had to know for a takeover. Put on the Sunset Strip to oversee grabbing off the jailed Mickey Cohen’s vice empire. Put into the Roundup for the same purpose — Drinker had speculated that the mob would soon grab it off.
But wherever he went, here was Dunc showing up. What would he have thought? That Dunc was there to spook him, or to confirm a suspicion aroused there on Artis’s stairs? Because Pepe could never be sure Dunc hadn’t recognized him, or someday might.
Dunc returned the newspaper to the research desk, went up a floor to the rental typewriters, and wrote what he thought of as his first professional piece of writing. Call it a story, call it fiction because of some guesswork, but he would be paid for it. Not in money, not in revenge, but in justice. Or in blood. Roll the dice.
He even figured he knew who his dream killer had been.
He finished the last page, separated the originals from their two carbons, and started his cover letter:
“Dear Lucius Breen, I need another favor...”
That finished, he went out into the soft Las Vegas night.
An hour later Henri, pit boss at the Flamingo, jerked his head across the restaurant and said, low-voiced, “There he is, Mr. David in the lean and hungry flesh.”
Dunc looked, casually. A long-boned, rather elegant man in a blue blazer. Wavy hair above a high forehead, assessing eyes, a sensuous mouth.
Henri said, “The only time you can get near him is at seven in the morning when he’s doing his laps in the hotel’s outdoor pool. There’s nobody else around at that hour.”
“How do I get by hotel security?”
“I’ll find you a bellhop’s jacket. After that, kiddo, you’re on your own.” He turned on his wide grin. “Dunc who?”
In the office behind a carefully locked and bolted street door, Drinker put on thin rubber gloves. From the satchel he took a shoe box holding Craven’s four sticks of dynamite. They were bright red and looked exactly like dynamite in the movies.
Drinker used his plierslike crimper to carefully angle a small hole into the side of one dynamite stick. Into this he inserted an electrical blasting cap, a small metal cylinder with a pair of insulated wires sticking out of one end. They were the ends of an uninsulated loop, called a noninsulated bridge wire, that was embedded in the cap’s flash charge. From this loop all good explosions flowed.
Drinker wound electrical tape around the four sticks of dynamite to form a compact bundle, then put it aside for a cheap twelve-hour alarm clock from Woolworth’s. He set the clock but did not wind it, then removed the back to expose the alarm bell and clapper. Around the alarm bell he wound the stripped end of one blasting cap wire; around the alarm clapper he wound the stripped end of a free length of insulated wire.
To arm his bomb, Drinker needed only to fasten the free end of the wire from the clapper to one of the two terminals of an ordinary dry-cell battery, and attach to the other terminal the remaining wilt from the blasting cap. Wind the alarm clock and leave. When the alarm went off, the clapper would hit the bell and close the electrical power circuit.
Mr. David finished his twentieth lap in the Flamingo’s outdoor pool at 7:30 A.M. and whooshed up out of the water sleek as a seal. In a profession where many died young, often violently, he intended to live forever. Dripping water, he lay back on his lounge chair and shut his eyes. He came down from San Francisco often to enjoy this perfect time of the year in Vegas, winter’s chill gone and summer’s intense heat not yet arrived.
“Mr. David?”
He opened his eyes. A Flamingo Hotel bellhop stood there holding a tray with a letter on it. Mr. David sat up, furious.
“Get out of here! I’m not to be disturbed for any reason.”
The bellhop just looked at him. A husky kid with close-cropped black hair, a wide neck, shoulders and arms too thick for his jacket. A new angry red scar above his left eyebrow ran up into his hairline. Jesus Christ, this was no bellhop!
And he without his bodyguards! But this was the Flamingo, for Chrissake, neutral ground. Who would have the balls to...
The kid sat down on the adjacent chair, still holding his tray. The fear drained out of Mr. David but left him too shaky for renewed rage. Dunc was shaky, too, but he had ice inside.
“I’m Pierce Duncan. I found two people for you. Kata Koltai and Jack Falkoner. Jack murdered Kata, you had Jack murdered in turn.”
Mr. David struggled for sangfroid. “You’re Cope’s man.”
“Two Saturdays ago, my girlfriend, Penny, and I got married.”
He found himself getting intrigued. This was the damnedest pitch he’d ever heard. He said, “Congratulations.”
“On that Monday, Penny was murdered. One of your men wanted me dead, and she happened to be in the way.”
Mr. David was actually shocked. “You think that I—”
“No.” He extended the tray with its envelope. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, so I wrote a story. You’re in it, and Kata, and Jack Falkoner, and Pepe the piano player...”
Mr. David read the pages. When he had finished, he sat with them in his hand for almost a minute, looking at the blue water and green grass and waving palm trees blooming here in the desert — and not really seeing any of it.
“Instead of Pepe, what’s to keep me from—”
“That’s a carbon,” Dunc pointed out.
“And the original—”
“Is in the hands of a man even you can’t touch.”
“I see.” Mr. David met his gaze. “I think I know what you want. No problem of course, but if you could spell it out...”
The cold inside Dunc was now glacial. “You said it yourself. You know who and you know why. Eye for eye.”
Mr. David nearly smiled. “You’re a careful, clever man.”
Chapter Fifty-one
They leaned back against the headboard of Drinker’s bed, naked, sated, sharing a cigarette. April giggled.
“On Friday evening we dine à la chinoise with Lee Fong, then go to the Alcazar Theater. Eight P.M. curtain. They plan to sleep on board the Doubloon, but it will be unguarded from six P.M. Friday until midnight at least.”
“Does murder always make you so happy?” Drinker growled.
“Only Harry’s. When will you go in? When will it go off?”
“Go in, nine-thirty. Go off, ten sharp Saturday morning.”
“Then I’ll have him call me on the ship-to-shore phone at nine-fifty-five for a big surprise. Harry loves surprises.” She sobered. “But you won’t love this very much, darling. This is the last time we can see each other until we open those lockboxes and get all that lovely money a week from Monday.”