He started the car and took a right along the seafront road. Ahead was an expanse of green hillside. It looked familiar.
“Also,” Kelly added, “there’s the health thing. Roberto Tonti has advanced lung cancer. He wasn’t hopping in and out of Martin Vogel’s apartment when the shooting started. The guy’s got maybe three or four months, max. Little movie industry secret, one they’d like to keep quiet while they’re raising dough to make a sequel. Yeah, I know. Sometimes a dying man feels he’s been given the right to kill. We’d need a little more evidence than that, though. And a motive.” He shook his head. “Killing Allan Prime got these guys what they wanted. Why did they need more than that? How rich do you have to be? If it had ended with Prime, maybe Lukatmi wouldn’t have collapsed, not with all that nice publicity to keep it afloat.”
He stomped on the horn as a skateboarder crossed the empty road directly in front of them.
“Kids.” He peered at the ocean as if wishing he were on it. “Am I missing something?”
“Carlotta Valdes,” Costa stated.
They began to climb uphill. Costa had a good idea where they were headed. They drove past golfers playing through wisps of fog drifting in from the sea and drew up in front of the elegant white building at the summit. The Legion of Honor looked just as he remembered it. Images of the paintings it held, Maggie’s ghosts, flitted through his head.
Kelly turned and pointed a finger in his direction.
“I was not forgetting Carlotta Valdes. By the way, please tell your boss Falcone that I am mad as hell at him for mentioning that damned movie in the first place. So Tonti worked with Hitchcock fifty years ago. What’s the connection?”
Costa took a deep breath. “Think about it. They’re the same story. Inferno and Vertigo. A lost man looking for something he wants. An ethereal woman he believes can provide some answers.” He thought of what Simon Harvey had told Maggie. “For both of them, it ends in death. Beatrice waits for Dante in Paradise. Scottie sees the woman he’s created in the image of Madeleine Elster die in front of his eyes, and stands alone in the bell tower, staring down at her body. He’s lost everything. Including the vertigo that’s been cursing him, that got him into the case in the first place.”
Kelly seemed unmoved. “You’re starting to sound like Bryan Whitcombe.”
“Not really. If someone’s obsessed with one, it’s understandable he might be obsessed with the other. There’s a connection. It’s obvious when you think about it. What it means …” His voice trailed off. He’d spent hours trying to make sense of the link. Something was missing. “I can’t begin to guess.”
Another memory returned. “Tom Black said something. About how the movies screw you up. Screwed up Scottie. Someone called Jones …” He shook his head, trying to recall Black’s jumble of words.
“Scottie’s in Vertigo,” Kelly suggested. “Is there a guy called Jones in the movie, too?”
“There was an actor. He played the creepy coroner. He’s long dead.”
Kelly gave him the kind of look Costa had come to expect from Falcone.
“Are we shooting in the dark or what? I’ll check if the name Jones means anything inside the movie crew. You sure you heard it right?”
“Not really.”
“Let’s deal with something practical, shall we? Where’s Carlotta? Back in Rome and paid off? Dead?”
“You tell me.”
“Cherchez la femme. We don’t have one. Not anywhere.” He caught Costa’s eye. “Except for Ms. Flavier. We’re supposed to think someone’s tried to kill her twice, except neither time was quite what it appeared on the surface. Personal feelings apart, do you think it might possibly be her? I checked Quattrocchi’s files. Carlotta Valdes turned up at Allan Prime’s home first thing in the morning. Maggie Flavier was at home in her apartment until two that afternoon. Alone. No witnesses. That name could have been a joke.”
“Whoever it was made a real death mask,” Costa pointed out. “Does that sound a likely skill for an actress?”
“Maybe. Have you asked?”
“No. No more than I asked whether she poisoned herself either.”
The captain didn’t flinch. “If you wanted to put on some kind of show, isn’t that the way you’d do it? Carrying a hypodermic along with you and a tame cop to help out?” He leaned over the seat and said, in a low, half-amused voice, “You don’t mind me saying this, do you?”
“No,” Costa answered, refusing to rise to the bait.
“You don’t think it hasn’t run through the minds of your colleagues, do you? They’re not dumb.”
“The Carabinieri were wrong when they told you Maggie had no alibi for that morning. She had flowers delivered around ten. Ordered them herself. Signed for them herself. We have a copy of the receipt back in the Questura and a statement from the deliveryman. Little details like that probably never occurred to Quattrocchi. I took the deliveryman’s statement myself before we even left Rome. Maggie could not have been the woman who signed herself in as Carlotta Valdes in that apartment in the Via Giulia. It’s simply impossible.”
The man in the driver’s seat creased with laughter. “Jesus … Jesus … And I picked Gianluca Quattrocchi …”
He started the engine. They drew away, in the opposite direction down the hill. The Golden Gate Bridge emerged in the distance. The car was headed for the Marina. He’d seen this road before, in Vertigo.
“I’ve got to get back to the office. I’m enjoying myself too much here,” Kelly said. “You want to know the truth? There’s only one thing we’re sure of right now. There was a conspiracy to hype Inferno. Somehow, somewhere along the way, it turned murderous.”
Costa shrugged and said, “Any way you look at it, one of three people has got to be at the heart of this case. Roberto Tonti, Dino Bonetti, or Simon Harvey. If they’d been cab drivers or office clerks, they’d have spent a couple of days in Bryant Street being sweated until they couldn’t sleep. Instead …”
“Not going to happen, Nic. Tonti and Bonetti are Italian citizens. They insist Gianluca Quattrocchi is present if we so much as ask them the way to the bathroom.”
“And Harvey?”
“I leaned a little hard on Harvey right at the beginning. One hour later I’m getting calls from God down asking me why I’m wasting my time. There’s not a scrap of hard evidence linking them to the case and you know it.” Despite his words, Kelly still looked interested. “You think you can do better?”
“I can try.”
“How?”
“By getting in their faces. The way I’d do if they were plain ordinary human beings like everyone else. When they don’t want it. Before they can call up a lawyer.”
They had reached a bluff overlooking the bridge. Kelly pulled in.
“Now, there’s something you don’t see often,” he muttered, pointing at the ocean.
A long white, smoky finger of mist was working its way across the Bay ahead.
“I’ll take you out there someday. We call that place ‘the slot.’ It runs from the bridge to Alcatraz. Windy as hell sometimes, and you don’t have a clue what’s going on until you’re in the middle of it.” He shook his head. “Fog? Now? I’d expect it from the west. And later. But hell. Welcome to summer in San Francisco.”
He took off his jacket, removed the tan holster, and held it out, gun first, to Costa.