He took the thing and flung it with a vengeance across the room from him, hurling it by the point, throwing it with that practiced movement of the arm that he had developed over two decades throwing every type of knife — dagger, dirk, screwdriver, sharpened pencil, all manner of pointed and edged objects — and Pat bit into the wall with a comforting thwocking sound as the shadow of the cruciform fell against the wall, suggesting someone who had been crucified upside down and Spain set there staring at the stiletto in his wall, feeling a chill touch him there in the very warm, empty house. And Spain was now mad as a hatter. And he sat there quietly gritting his teeth, thinking about how good it was to stab the elevator operator whose tone of voice and coloration evoked the image of Gaetano Ciprioni. But he knew he would retain the professional control necessary to achieve his ultimate goal. That degree of controlled resolve would not desert him in his madness. Killing, after all, was what he did.
For three days Jack Eichord had been tied up with the flood of violence and then he had time to breathe and he called Rita.
"I've missed you desperately," she told him, and all he could do was breathe into the phone.
"I know, you've missed me too. I can tell by the way you're panting."
"Yeah," he told her very seriously.
"What is happening here?" she asked him.
"What?"
"What's happening to us?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean, you rascal you."
"Oh, you mean that?"
"Yes. That."
"It's a biological phenom that I've read about in books. It's quite natural."
"Oh, that's good, then."
"It's very good, in fact."
"Does it have a name?"
"Yes, it thurtently doth," he said, sounding for some inane reason like a cat in the cartoons. "It means we're falling in sex."
"How romantic."
"Would you like a little romance tonight?"
"I could probably squeeze you into my busy schedule."
"Squeeze me about seven, say?"
"Consider yourself squeezed."
"I've missed you too. A lot."
Even better the second time? he asked himself afterward. No way. But it had been. So wonderful. They lay there laughing like fools, so pleased with each other and the nice discoveries. She fingered his second belly button, a puckered navel where an old wound had eventually smoothed over.
"You've led an interesting life, I see."
"Unquestionably, my dear Watson."
"What made this? Did someone bite you here?" She touched its indentation.
"Probably." He said as he felt the small groove that was a long, forgotten souvenir from a blocked Fairbairn thrust. "Ancient history."
"I feel sure it must be from a woman. A bite."
They sought each other's mouths and her tongue zapped him like the touch of a high-voltage line and he was copper winding down to a long, coiled grounding shaft that took the power hungrily and fed on it and he reached deeply to take as much of her hot, sweet lightning as he could, letting the energy of the electricity charge them in a crackling surge of current.
"Who is it?" Eichord said to Bud Leech, who was already on the crime scene.
"Little joker named Betters. They really played Hurt You with this boy. Hope you've had dinner already."
"Hey, Bud," one of the Homicide people said to Leech, nodding to Eichord.
"Yo."
"Can they take him?"
"Uh, hold it. Not yet, babe. Tell 'em hold it a few minutes."
"Okay."
"Small time jive-ass little punk named Vinnie Betters. Some gofer in with Measure." He shook his head. "I don't know what this is about," he said, jerking his thumb toward the kitchen on the word "this."
"You get done dusting yet?"
"Naw."
"Smells great in here."
"Jesus." Eichord put a handkerchief up to his face.
"Herrrrrrrre's Vinnie."
Eichord looked and turned away after a bit.
"Obviously whoever did this —"
"Yeah." He laughed without humor. "You could say that, all right."
"Seriously. Whatever the reason why he was killed, whoever did it was trying to get something out of their system. Nothing professional about that."
"I figure two, three, maybe four guys taking turns. Really getting themselves worked up. Nothing professional about it, as you say. Unless they were pros trying to tell somebody something — that your point?"
"Right."
"Really did a J.-O.-B. on the little mother."
Vinnie was upside down, with maybe nine hundred puncture wounds in him, turning into maggot food under the kitchen counter there in his ex-wife's house.
"Who called it in?"
"His wife, er, uh, HEY!" He motioned to a detective. "Yo." He motioned for him to come over to the kitchen area.
"Tell him how you caught the call."
"Yeah. Well, it was his ex-wife. She said she'd just come in and found him. Claims she was shacked up with her latest old man in Atlantic City. We're checking it out. Vinnie's got a little yellow sheet. Little half-assed rat package."
"Maybe he ratted out the wrong dudes."
"Could be Rikla's people. I admit it don't look like no hit. Anyway, he was always trying to get made and didn't have the eggs for it, and — far as I ever heard — he just never had his shit together."
"He's got his shit together now." They laughed.
"F'r sure."
"Lynch Street people got here first. They called us. I came. You came. That's about the whole shot."
"Think they'll have anything on the street on this?"
"Naaaaaa. I doubt it."
"A payback thing. Somebody's gonna say somethin' otherwise it's all wasted. You know how the wise guys are."
"Nobody gives a shit about Vinnie. Nobody's gonna miss him. He was a schmuck. Even his ex-old lady pegged it. She said when she came home and found him gathering little white wormies and smellin', in her words "— the cop looked at a notebook — 'like ten bags of dead skunks.'" They chuckled. "It was no big surprise. She told the Lynch Street guys, 'Hell, he was lucky he lived THIS long.'"
"Quite an epitaph."
"Leech."
"Yo."
"Can we take this fucker yet?"
"NO, GODDAMMMIT YOU CAN'T TAKE THIS FUCKER YET, I done tol' y'all fourteen times. Whatsa big hurry, fi'r shit sake?"
"No hurry at all. We LIKE standing here smellin' this puke 'n' shit."
"Right. I know it's a revolutionary theory but what if we would bring latent in here and dust this scene and, you know, find the FINGERPRINTS of the dudes what did the crime. You know, like on TV?"
"Sure. Wonderful."
And that was what happened. Jackie Nails, a.k.a Jack Annelo, and Big Mike Stricoti of the Dagatina family —"alleged gunmen," as the papers worded it — had left their big guinea paw prints all over the house. It was enough to make a couple of tentative arrests and within twenty-four hours media was running neat little sidebars about the "big break in the mob slayings."
The entire unit was on hand by chance when the next "big break" took place. A lab finding nailing Annelo to one of the earlier shootings. In the best spirit of omerta he'd clammed up, and that made him look even better for the wise-guy killings. Except to Eichord.
He was prepared to believe almost anything, on one hand, and on the other his healthy skepticism had been replaced by a monumental paranoia about the case. For one thing, ever since the Ventura Boulevard hit in Studio, there had been no more EYEBALL murders. He kept thinking one of these gangland kills in St. Louis would tie to California, but it wasn't happening.
All the facts and the serious conjecture indicated solutions involving more than one perpetrator.
A: The street rumors floating back to Homicide at LAPD pointed to a couple of local punks for the Studio City job.