After a brief huddle below, Vane and Michael Esposito departed in opposite directions.
“You take the little one,” Stein ordered.
Morty bolted out of their little culvert in the direction of Paul Vane.
“No, the other little one,” Stein yelled, but Morty covered the ground across the open field with amazing speed and was nearly upon him.
Michael Esposito had undulated along the back side of the marble wall and was out of sight. Stein gauged where he would emerge, and lumbered down the grassy side of the hill, still favoring his injured ankle. The grade was steeper than it appeared and the grass concealed uneven contours of the hillside. He couldn’t break his hurtling momentum and had to throw himself to the ground and roll. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he felt like he had run into a stone wall. For a moment he feared he was paralyzed. He took mental inventory, discovered nothing was broken and pulled himself up by the handles of the sliding crypts.
Moments later Michael Esposito came around the wall and Stein stepped into his path.
“Hello, Michael,” Stein said.
If the little shit were frightened he didn’t show it. Stein grabbed him by the scruff of his shoulders and swore to him “If any harm comes to my daughter, I mean any harm, I will tear every inch of you apart, starting with your eyes. Where are they?”
Stein’s threat was met with a smile, a killer’s courtesy. “Lovely girl,” he said.
Morty Greene pushed a miserable Paul Vane into the picture. Vane’s eyes were red and he extended his hands to be cuffed. “I am the man you’re looking for. Michael had nothing to do with it.”
Vane’s eyes were on Michael Esposito, imploring him to look upon him with favor, which he did not.
“Are they in the car?” Stein directed the question to the one place he thought he might get a straight answer. He thought he saw a sympathetic response from Paul Vane telling him “no.”
Morty Greene’s investigation went along less subtle ground, He bent down and grabbed the elegant cuffs of Esposito’s pant legs and lifted up and inverted the man several feet off the ground. He shook loose his car keys and quite a bit of pocket change, a nail clipper and silver flask of brandy.
“Easy on the rough stuff,” Stein said. “He likes it too much.”
The electronic key set the welcoming lights flashing on Paul Vane’s Mercedes. They had parked it at the end of a row for easy egress. Stein ran to the car and threw open the doors to liberate his daughter and friend girl.
But the car was empty. He knuckled the hood of the trunk. He pressed the button enough times so it finally opened. He pulled up the platform that hid only the miniature spare tire, no prisoners
Morty was right behind him with the culprits in tow when out of the shadows of the “Walls of Eternity,” David Hart emerged.
“Oh Good Christ,” Morty gaped. “Another one.”
“I thought I might find you here,” Stein said.
“You should be more careful with the women you love,” Hart advised him cooly. “That’s three of them you’ve lost.”
Vane beseeched Stein to believe him as he grasped for Michael Esposito’s hand. “I never meant for them to put them in danger.”
“Ironic, isn’t it, how things work out?” said David Hart. And Stein watched as the picture was shifted one more time by the deft hands of the 3-card Monte dealer: Michael Esposito spurned the hand of Paul Vane and stepped into the embrace of David Hart.
“Did you think I was blind to your little game?” Hart flaunted his disdain at the flabbergasted and now twice-jilted Paul Vane. “You have such compassion, Paul. You didn’t want to witness my humiliation. Compassion must be a quality that comes with age. And God knows you have oodles of that. So much age that it makes me wretch every time you touch me. Your old alligator fingers. Your old smell. And I’ve found someone who will take care of me in perpetuity.”
David Hart kissed Michael Esposito on the face and neck, never taking his eyes off Paul Vane as he did. “You thought you were leaving me?”
“Oh my,” Paul Vane breathed.
Morty pulled the smoochers apart. “That is really disgusting.”
“You don’t like to see two gay men kissing?” Esposito taunted him.
“I don’t even like to see straight men kissing.”
The picture manifested itself to Stein for the eleventh different time, but this time he knew it had come to rest. Stein realized that once again he had allowed all his conclusions to rest on the outdated karmic principle that good prevailed and that people got what they deserved. Hence his unchallenged acceptance of the notion that Paul Vane had been the one to leave David Hart. It was obvious now that the reverse had been true, that David had left him. David and Michael Esposito were the molecule; Vane was the odd man out, a stray electron spinning in lonely orbit around them.
Stein stepped into the narrow space between Hart and Esposito. “The very next thing that’s going to happen is you are telling me where my daughter is or my homophobic friend will start bashing heads.”
“Yes, that’s very butch,” said Michael, “but Let’s talk about what’s actually going to happen. Your daughter’s safety is time sensitive. So the sooner we all agree, the happier we all are.” He saw Stein’s abhorrence and reveled in it. “You think you’re smarter and morally superior to everyone. You’re a joke. You’re a minstrel show. Everything you believe about the world is over.”
Stein made himself play “Moonlight Sonata” in his mind. Fingers moving slowly up and slowly down.
David Hart got cranky. “Hello. I believe I’m here.”
Michael smiled at his new lover then at the others. “In a few moments David and I are going to depart for destinations unknown, taking with us only the ten or twelve million we’ve garnered so far from our little moonlighting venture.”
“ Our little moonlight adventure,” Paul Vane amended, with just a bit of irony. “You said you were going to let him down easy and come back to me.”
At the end of every relationship, one lover is willing to take as many wrong roads as necessary to find the right way home; the other has already called off the search. Michael patted Vane’s perspiring pate. “Look at it this way, sweetie. Everybody wins. Mat-tingly gets his whole company. David gets taken care of in perpetuity. In your old age you’ve had both me and David in our glorious youth. And now you get the pleasure of knowing you’ve brought the two of us together. You’re thrice blessed.”
“My daughter,” said Stein.
Esposito went on with blithe unconcern “In an hour, when David and I are safely outside the reach of extradition treaties, you will be informed where to find your ill-mannered progeny and her disagreeable nanny, or whoever that cloying woman is.”
Vane looked at Michael, still trying to salvage a way to think of him kindly. “My dear boy,” he whispered, “you have to tell him where his daughter is now. An hour will be too late.”
“I’m not dear, I’m not a boy, and I’m not yours,” said Michael.
Vane turned to Stein. “I know where she is. I can take you to her.”
“You don’t know anything,” David Hart spat. His hand flashed into his pocket and emerged with a snub-nosed. 22 pistol. The report in the wide-open air sounded like a little pop. Vane clutched his chest and went down. Morty Greene engulfed Hart, took away his gun and then very nearly disarmed him in the literal sense. Michael tried to bolt, but Morty did a one-arm pushup, holding David to the ground and leg-whipping his fleeing accomplice. Small bodies lay strewn all about.
Stein knelt alongside Paul Vane and pushed a handkerchief against the wound to staunch the blood.
“Are you all right?”
“Just a glancing blow to the heart.”
Now the entire landscape began to vibrate. The SWAT helicopter swooped in over the top of the hill. Chief Bayliss leaped out again, trying to understand through the tableau in front of him what might have taken place. He saw Morty Greene on the ground holding Michael Esposito down with his legs and David Hart down with his arm