“Only married once. Without issue, as they say.”
“That we know of, anyway,” Peroni said, studying the photo. “That’s a man and his son. Take it from me. They don’t see each other much. They don’t like each other much. But the same blood’s there and they both know it. You can see it in their faces.”
Costa thought he could make out some slight physical resemblance in the two narrow, lost faces.
“Scottie … Ferguson,” Peroni went on. “Whoever lives here is Roberto Tonti junior, living and working under another name just a mile or so from his father. He must be thirty or more by now.”
Catherine Bianchi was finally starting to punch the buttons on her phone. She looked up at them, excited, maybe a little anxious, too.
“Better not touch anything else, folks. I’ll be collecting unemployment if they realise I had this guy under my nose all along and never even noticed.”
Costa replaced the photograph. “No one would have noticed. That was the point. He was just one more extra in his father’s scheme.”
A player who, like the others, ceased to discern the line between what was real and what was invented. Everything in the apartment — the posters, the photos, the movies on the TV, the frantic scribbling on the walls — spoke of obsession. A compulsion that had prompted this man to take at least two false identities, one of them the name of Jimmy Stewart’s character in an old movie in which his father had been a minor technician, to buy an old green Jaguar and lend it to an actress in the hope of … what?
He thought of the mythical Scottie dogging Madeleine through the San Francisco of five decades before, peering at her compulsively through the windshield of his car as his curiosity turned to an irresistible desire, until the moment she fell in the ocean and then woke naked beneath the sheets in a scene meant to take place in the bedroom of this very apartment.
Some memory tweaked an anxious nerve. In Vertigo, Scottie had watched the sleeping, naked Madeleine avidly from the sofa in the living room, through an open door. The real door was closed.
Costa opened it and stepped over the threshold. The room was almost pitch black. Just the barest fringe of light seeped through what must have been a large window opposite, one blocked by heavy opaque blinds.
He found the switch and flipped it. In his astonishment he was scarcely aware that the others had followed and stood behind him, stunned, too, into silence.
This was the bedroom from the movie, copied with a precise and compulsive eye for detail. There was the same set of bureaus by the door, four small framed paintings on the facing wall, a plaid chair in red and white and brown.
And the bed. A double bed with a high walnut veneer foot. The sheets and pillows were as crumpled as they had been when Madeleine Elster was woken from beneath them by a phone call, puzzled, but not entirely ashamed of her nakedness after being rescued by Scottie from the Bay. In his own mind Costa half believed he could smell the ocean at that moment, rising from the creased linen.
But it was the walls that worried him. They were covered in photographs. Not of Kim Novak or anything else from Vertigo. It was Maggie Flavier, everywhere, so altered in some that he barely recognised her until he found the courage to stare into the frozen eyes of the figure they depicted and see that same mixture of courage and fear and resignation he had recognised in her from the start.
Some were so old they must have predated her acting career. There was one in which she stood with a group of schoolgirls outside Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, not far from her home. Maggie was immediately recognisable even though she couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Just another child among many, prettier, more striking than the rest, with a woman behind her, pale, sick-looking, a hand on her shoulder.
Costa turned away and forced himself to look at other photos. Maggie as a bright-faced girl on a farm, as a poverty-stricken teenager, as a rich young lady in an English mansion. And then the new images. The adult woman: her beauty strangely marred, as she moved through a series of roles that, seen in this cruel, linear fashion, in this gloomy private shrine, only underscored her fall from the innocence of childhood into a fragile, haunted maturity. No longer smiling, but looking now into the camera with a hatred that was sometimes pure and vitriolic, her face stared back at them from the walls. And her body, too, in some of the more lurid shots, blown up to display every open pore, every inch of her skin, its minor imperfections, the faint, discernible penumbra of blonde hair rising above a posed, bare arm.
There was scarcely an inch of the room that wasn’t covered with her presence in one way or another. The photographs spanned, as far as he could make out, almost two decades, from child to woman. Costa couldn’t take it anymore. He turned away, trying to grasp the memory that lay just out of reach.
When he tried to call her, there was no answer. He phoned Sylvie Brewster, her agent.
“It’s Nic,” he said urgently. “Where’s Maggie’s appointment today? I need to know.”
“You mean you didn’t think to ask over breakfast?”
“Please …” he begged.
The woman put him on hold for a moment, then came back and told him. Costa knew already somehow, and what he’d do. There could be no more police standoffs. Because of the police, the actor Peter Jamieson had died outside the Cinema dei Piccoli. So, in a way he still didn’t fully understand, had Tom Black.
The rest were still in the bedroom. He could hear their quiet, low voices, Falcone’s more prominent, more commanding.
Kelly’s team from Bryant Street couldn’t be more than a few minutes away.
Without saying a word Costa walked over to the desk, found Catherine Bianchi’s bag, and took the keys to her Dodge. Quickly, silently, he walked through the open door and down the stairs.
The sun was brighter than ever. The builder was back at work. Costa slid into the driver’s seat and worked the unfamiliar automatic vehicle out into the road. As the minivan wound round the side streets back to Chestnut and the long straight drive to the Marina, his hand reached over into the passenger side, found the glove compartment, flicked it open, and fumbled inside.
Gerald Kelly’s gun was still there.
5
She woke beneath the wrinkled sheets of an uncomfortable old double bed pushed hard against the corner of a cramped office that smelled of damp and sweat. As she tried to clear the fumes of the drug from her nose and throat, choking and nauseated, Maggie Flavier felt at her own body automatically, fingers trembling, mind reeling. She ached. She felt … strange.
Then she opened her eyes, knowing what she’d see. John Ferguson, whoever he was, sat opposite, his arms leaning easily on a chair back, watching her squirm as she tried to force herself upright on the stiff mattress. It took one look at herself to confirm what she suspected. She was now wearing the strange green dress and nothing else. He must have stripped her while she was unconscious, then put on the old silk garment.
She tried to move but something stopped her and it hurt. Rough brown rope, the kind construction people used, gripped both her wrists. He’d tied her to the iron bed-head, loose enough to let her move a little, but not much. Not enough to get off the bed entirely.
He had an expression on his face that suggested he knew the panic that was running through her head, and a part of him liked it. But there was some uncertainty there, too.
“I told you it was a nice dress.” He reached for a packet of cigarettes tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt, took one out, the last one, lit it, scrunched up the pack, and threw it on the floor. The smoke rose into the blades of a rotating ceiling fan performing lazy turns above them.