It was a shot out of left field, but a pretty good one. He reacted: even in the darkness I could see his head jerk, emotion ripple across his face, his eyes flick upward from the gun to meet mine. Then the mask came down again; he looked back at the gun and kept looking at it stoically until I slammed the lid to lock him in.
Alex said, “Twospot? You know what it means?”
“No, but Rosten does. And maybe you’ve got some idea.”
He shook his head. “I told you, I can’t remember where I heard it before.”
“Well, try — and keep on trying. Rosten’s not alone in this thing, and that means you’re not out of the woods yet.”
He fixed me with an alarmed stare. “Are you sure Rosten isn’t the only one?”
“Sure enough. You heard what I said to him; I overheard his end of that conversation.”
Alex said something sacrilegious in a nervous voice, but I did not bother to respond to it. I pushed him toward the passenger door, went around and took the wheel. And took us away from there.
I had to drive slowly with the lights broken and the front end in the shape it was; the car made a lot of noise but showed no signs of wanting to quit. Alex sat over against his door with his head in his hands, doing what I had told him to do: trying to remember about Twospot. I did not hold out much hope that he would get anywhere, in his condition.
But he surprised me, and probably himself. We were back into the vineyards, on the long rumpled section of terrain, when he said abruptly, “I’ve got it.”
I glanced over at him. “Got what?”
“Twospot. I remember now, I know where I heard it.”
“All right — where?”
“A dinner party down in the city, at the town house. It was Booker who said it.”
“Booker? In what context?”
“I can’t remember that. It was after dinner and we were having brandy in the living room. He said something like, ‘How’s the big Twospot project coming? You know, the one a week from Monday at noon.’ ”
“Who was he talking to?”
“I think it was Leo.”
“Who else was there?”
“Rosa. Brand and Dockstetter. But they didn’t hear it. They were on the other side of the room.”
“What was Leo’s reaction?”
“I’m not sure. I was only half paying attention.”
Twospot project, I thought. Monday at noon. And I remembered something myself, something from this afternoon. “Monday-noon project,” I said. “So that was what you meant at the fest.”
“Fest?”
“You said something to Leo about it while we were eating.”
“Did I?” He shook his head numbly. “I don’t remember.”
I was silent for a time, thinking. Then I asked him, “Why were you down at the cellar tonight? Did Rosten call you to meet him there?”
“No,” Alex said. “Leo woke me up and asked me to go down. He needed a statistical report prepared on our generic—” He stopped suddenly, as if the rest of the sentence had gotten clogged in his throat. When I glanced over at him again I saw that his face had twisted up and he looked even sicker than before. “Oh my God,” he said. “You don’t think Leo could be—?”
“I don’t think anything yet,” I said, but that was a lie. I was thinking Leo, all right — and something else occurred to me, a possible way to confirm my suspicions against him. It meant stopping at Rosten’s cottage, and unless the county police were already on the scene I would do just that on my own.
Alex had his head in his hands again; I let him alone with his thoughts. There was a kind of grim excitement inside me now, the sort that a cop feels sometimes when a case is about to break wide open. Things were beginning to make a certain sense to me: the random bits and pieces of this affair finally starting to slot together, like in those intelligence-test puzzles where you have to put multi-shaped blocks of wood into correspondingly shaped holes.
I began to work with the pieces as I drove. Leo has some sort of big and no doubt unlawful project going for noon tomorrow; Rosten is in it with him, and maybe Mal Howard too. And Booker? No. Booker had not gotten along with either Leo or Rosten, I had testimony to that. And he was a loner, a small-time opportunist looking to marry Rosa Cappellani. Blackmail? That added up: blackmail would fit Booker’s personality well enough. Figure, then, that he found out somehow about the project and put the screws to Leo. Maybe mentioned it to him in front of Alex at that dinner party to goad Leo, push him into paying off.
Only Leo isn’t having any of that; the project is too important to him and maybe he doesn’t trust Booker, and in any case he was the kind who would never stand still for blackmail. So he decides Booker has to die — and that Alex has to die too, because he’s afraid that Alex will tip himself to the project and jeopardize it. Which made Leo a sick, coldhearted son of a bitch, plotting the death of his own brother. But there are people like that in the world, too damned many of them; and it could be, too, that his evident dislike for Alex had evolved into a homicidal hatred. Whatever his exact motivations, he marks both Booker and Alex for execution.
On Thursday night he sends Rosten after Alex at the cellar. But wait, why not Booker first? Booker would be the logical first choice because he presented the major threat to the project. Unless Booker was also slated to die on Thursday. Unless Rosten was supposed to literally kill two birds with one stone: knock Alex out, take him away from the cellar to a prearranged meeting with Booker, and then eliminate both of them at once, maybe make it look like an accident. That would explain why I had heard Rosten dragging Alex’s body across the office floor. And why Booker had showed up in his car after the police arrived, looking agitated and perplexed: he could have been waiting for Rosten to come, could have been waiting for the promised blackmail payoff.
Okay, so far so good. Booker goes back to San Francisco after getting permission from Rosa to stay in the family town house. Figure he calls Leo and demands his payoff Friday night. So Leo sends Mal Howard to keep that appointment — not Rosten because Rosten has already fouled up once with Alex. Gives Howard the slip of paper with the address and the Twospot name typed on it. It would follow that Howard was not supposed to leave Booker’s body in the town house, because of the attention it would call to the Cappellani family; it could be he was to kill Booker and then take the body elsewhere and dump it. Only Booker is on his guard by this time and he’s packing a gun for protection; after a struggle during which he rips Howard’s pocket, Booker manages to wound Howard before Howard can finish him with a blow from the homemade blackjack. And Howard then panics and runs, leaving Booker and the Twospot note on the garage floor.
Leo has to be beside himself by then: two bungled jobs in two nights. But because Howard’s wound is superficial, Leo gives him another chance on Saturday: take care of Alex at Virginia Davis’s apartment on Greenwich Street. It was logical that Leo would be aware of Alex’s girlfriend and where she lived, and reason out that Alex might hole up there.
Now — today. Time is getting short; Monday noon is almost here. After three bungled jobs, maybe Leo doesn’t want to run the risk of ordering yet another try for Alex; too many things have happened already to focus police attention on the Cappellanis, and I’ve been hired to act as Alex’s bodyguard. But then, at the fest, Alex makes his comment about Monday-noon projects, and Leo decides he can’t take the chance of Alex remembering about Twospot and endangering his project. So he orders Rosten to kill Alex tonight; Rosten doesn’t like it, but for whatever reasons he goes along with it. Leo waits until he’s sure I’m out of the way — heading over to Rosten’s place, though he couldn’t have anticipated that — and then goes into Alex’s room and wakes him up and sends him down to the cellar. Which was what he told Rosten on the phone. The idea, again, is for Alex to just disappear: Rosten is supposed to take him to that backhill spot at the end of this road, shoot him, and hide the body somewhere so that there’s not another immediate murder investigation to threaten tomorrow’s project.