Ex-fighter, had to be.
He was wearing ragged leans, a faded and nicked denim battle jacket, no shirt under it, and a pair of
cowboy boots that must have set him back five hundred bucks. „The headband he wore had to be for
show—he didn‟t have enough dishwater-blond hair left to bother with. He also had a gold tooth, right
in the front of his bridgework. I was to find out later that he was a former Golden Gloves
middleweight champion, a West Coast surfer, and, for ten years, a bounty hunter for a San Francisco
bail bondsman before he went legit and joined the police.
Salvatore appeared through the bright lights, nosing around.
“I thought you were gonna check out Stizano,” Dutch said. “What the hell are you doin‟ here?”
“A look-see, okay? Where‟s Stizano gonna go anyway? He‟s an old fart and it‟s past ten o‟clock.”
“You don‟t think the whole bunch ain‟t hangin‟ on by their back teeth at this point? Somebody just
wasted their king.”
“They‟re on the phones,” Salvatore said confidently. “They‟re jawin‟ back and forth, tryin‟ to figure
out what the hell to do next. What they ain‟t gonna do at this point is bunch up. Jesus, will you look at
this!”
I was beginning to get a handle on Dutch‟s hooligans, on the common strain that bonded them into a
unit. What they lacked in finesse, they made up for with what could mercifully be called individuality.
There‟s an old theory that the cops closest to the money are the ones most likely to get bent. Dutch
went looking for mavericks, men too proud to sell out and too tough to scare off. Whatever their other
merits, they seemed to have one thing in common—they were honest because it probably didn‟t occur
to them to be anything else.
“First Tagliani‟s wife gets whacked,” Lange said. “And the old man‟s grandson almost got it here.”
“This here don‟t read like a Mafia hit t‟me,” Salvatore said. “Killing family members ain‟t their
style.”
“Maybe it was a mistake,” the Stick volunteered.
“Yeah,” Dutch said, “like Pearl Harbor.”
“More like a warning,” I said.
“Warning?” Lange and Dutch asked at the same time. A lot of eyebrows made question marks.
“Yeah,” I said, “a warning that he or she or it—whoever he, she, or it is—means to waste the whole
clan.”
“Tell me some more good news,” said Dutch.
“So why warn them?” Lange said.
“It‟s the way it‟s done,” said Salvatore. “All that Sicilian bullshit.”
“Now we got four stiffs, and we‟re still as confused as we ever were,” Dutch said. “Hey, Doc, you got
any idea what caused this?”
The ME, who was as thin as a phalanx and looked two hundred years old, was leaning over what was
left of the old man. His sleeves were rolled up and he wore rubber gloves stained red with blood. He
shook his head.
“Not yet. A hand grenade, maybe.”
“Hand grenade?” the Stick said.
“Yeah,” the ME said. “From up there. He was blown down here from the terrace. See the
bloodstains?”
“There were two,” Lange said.
“Two what?” the ME asked.
“Explosions. I was sittin‟ right down there. The first one was a little muffled, like maybe the thing
went off underwater. The second one sounded like Hiroshima.”
“Woke ya up, huh,” Dutch said.
The ME still would not agree. He shook his head. “Let‟s wait until I get up there and take a look. The
pattern of stains on the wall there and the condition of the body indicate a single explosion.
“I heard two bangs,” Lange insisted.
“How far apart?” I asked.
“Hell, not much. It was like. . . bang, bang! Like that.”
I had a terrifying thought but I decided to keep it to myself for the moment. The whole scene was
terrifying enough.
The woman screaming uncontrollably inside the house didn‟t help.
“Homicide‟ll clean this up,” Dutch said. “I‟m lust interested in the autopsy. Maybe there‟s something
with the weapons‟ll give us a lead.”
The homicide man was a beefy lieutenant in his early forties dressed in tan slacks, a tattersall vest, a
dark brown jacket, and an atrocious flowered tie. His name was Lundy. He came over shaking his
head.
“Hey, Dutch, what d‟ya think? We got a fuckin‟ mess on our hands here, wouldn‟t ya say?”
“Forget that Lindbergh shit, Lundy. This isn‟t a „we,‟ it‟s a „you.‟ Homicide ain‟t my business.”
Lundy said with a scowl, “1 need all the help I can get.”
Dutch smiled vaguely and nodded. “I would say that, Lundy.”
“Can ya believe it, Dutch,” Lundy said, “that little kid almost bought it!”
it occurred to me that nobody had expressed any concern for Grandpa Draganata, whose face was all
over the side of the house. I mentioned my feelings quietly to the Stick.
“What‟d you expect, a twenty-one-gun salute?”
“Four stiffs in less than three hours,” Dutch mused again. “This keeps up, I‟ll be out of work before
morning.”
“Yeah, and I‟ll have a nervous breakdown,” Lundy said.
1 looked over the entire scene. The pool was directly adjacent to the rear of the house; then there was
a terrace with a carousel, a miniature railroad, a gazebo, and three picnic tables. Beyond that, the land
rose sharply to the dunes above, maybe a hundred yards behind and above the house.
“I‟m gonna take the Stick and have a look-see up on the terrace,” I told Dutch. To the Stick I said,
“Get a light.”
A young patrolman came down the bill and said, “There‟s a couple of Draganata‟s goons up there,
acting like they own the place.”
“We‟ll talk to them,” the Stick said. “Let me bum your torch a minute.”
“Three gets you five they ain‟t sayin‟ a word about what happened. It‟s that damn wop salad code of
theirs,” Dutch growled. Lundy went back to the scene.
“Want to come along?” I asked Dutch.
He looked up the bill and laughed.
“In a pig‟s ass. Call collect when you get there.”
The Stick and I went up to the terrace and looked around. One of Draganata‟s bodyguards approached
me. He was no more than six four or five and didn‟t weigh a pound over two hundred and fifty, with a
face that would scare the picture of Dorian Gray.
A finger the size of a telephone pole tried to punch a hole in my chest.
“Private property,” he said.
I stared him as straight in the eye as I could, considering the eye was four inches above me.
“You jab me once more with that finger, I‟ll break it off and make you eat it,” I said in my tough-guy
voice.
The goon looked at me and smiled.
“Sure thing.”
“I‟m a federal officer and you‟re obstructing the scene of a crime. That‟s a misdemeanour. You jab
me again, asshole, that‟s assaulting a federal officer, which is a felony. Can you stand still for a felony
toss, sonny?”
He shuffled from one foot to the other for a moment or two, trying to work that out in whatever he
used for a brain. While he was sorting through my threat, the other gorilla came over.
“Don‟t take no shit, Larry,” he said. He was just as big and just as ugly.
“You two already fucked up royally once tonight,” I said. “How‟s it feel, knowing you screwed up
and your boss got his head handed to him.”
Larry‟s face turned purple. He made a funny sound in his throat and took a step toward me. But before
he could raise his hand a fist came from my left and caught him on the corner of the jaw. The top part