do you know?’
‘No tan. Just out from England?’
I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes. I’m interested in local conditions.’
‘By reading about a dead man?’ His voice was flat but the irony was not lost. ‘Taking notes, too.’
‘Is it illegal?’
He suddenly smiled. ‘I guess not. My name’s Jackson.’ He waved his hand. ‘I get into the habit of asking too many questions. I work here.’
‘A reporter?’
‘Sort of.’ He gestured at Salton’s obituary. ‘I wrote that.’
‘You write well,’ I said politely.
‘You’re a liar,’ said Jackson without rancour. ‘If I did I wouldn’t be in this crummy place. What’s the interest in Salton?’
‘You do ask questions,’ I said.
Unapologetically he said, ‘It’s my job. You don’t have to answer. I can find out another way if I have to.’
‘You didn’t come in by accident and find me here.’
He grinned. ‘Mary Josephine tipped me off. The girl at the desk. We like to know who checks our files. It’s routine.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes it even pays off. Not often, though.’
All that was quite possibly true. I said cautiously, ‘Well, Mr Jackson, if you were interested in the future of the late Mr Salton’s companies, wouldn’t you be interested in knowing how he died?’
‘I guess so.’ He looked at my notebook. ‘You don’t have to take notes. I’ll give you a copy of anything you want.’
‘In exchange for what?’
‘No strings,’ he said. ‘It’s in the public domain. But if you turn anything up – anything unusual – I’d be glad to know.’
I smiled at him. ‘I don’t think my principals would like publicity. Is anything unusual likely to turn up?’
Jackson shrugged. ‘If a guy turns over enough stones he’s sure to find something nasty some place.’
‘And you think there’s something nasty to be found by looking under Mr Salton’s stones. That’s very interesting. What sort of a man was Salton?’
‘No worse than any other son-of-a-bitch.’
My eyebrows rose. ‘You didn’t like him?’
‘He was a gold-plated bastard.’
I glanced down at the obituary. ‘You’re a better writer than you think, Mr Jackson. It doesn’t show here.’
‘Company policy,’ said Jackson. ‘Mrs Salton owns the Chronicle.’
That was a new one on me but I didn’t let him know that. I said, ‘If you talk like this to strangers you’re not likely to be on the payroll much longer. How do you know I’m not a friend of Mrs Salton’s?’
‘You’re not her friend,’ said Jackson. ‘You’re an insurance investigator. We’ve been expecting you to show up, Mr Ogilvie.’
He had the wrong man but the right occupation and I wondered how that had come about. I decided to let him have his cheap triumph for the time being and said evenly, ‘So?’
‘So she’s sticking your people for a lot of dough. You wouldn’t be human if you admitted to liking her for it.’
I looked down at the obituary. ‘Granting there’s a certain amount of bias here, Salton still doesn’t measure up to your personal description of him. What about the two hospitals he built, the university foundation, the low-cost housing? Those are facts.’
‘Sure,’ said Jackson. ‘He’s been buying votes. Was successful at it, too. A very popular guy. You should have seen his funeral.’
‘I’ve seen the photographs,’ I said.
‘That cheap housing was a surefire vote-catcher.’ Jackson leaned forward and rested his hands on the table. ‘Have you any idea of the cost of housing on this island? You’ll be damned lucky to get away with £10 a square foot. So he cut a lot of corners – he built cheap and he built nasty and he didn’t sell a single goddamn house he built.’
‘I don’t understand. If he didn’t sell any houses, where did he make his profit?’ I thought of Costello and the three millions and wondered if his ears were burning.
‘He didn’t,’ said Jackson. ‘He was losing like crazy. He rented those houses and the return was completely uneconomic. But it gave him a solid vote.’
‘He must have been rich,’ I commented. ‘That’s an expensive route to politics.’
‘He had a lot of dough,’ conceded Jackson. ‘But not that much. Mr Black was behind him with a slush fund.’
I sighed. ‘And who is Mr Black?’
Jackson stared at me. ‘Don’t you know anything about what goes on here? You’d better learn fast. Gerry Negrini is Mr Big in the casino crowd.’
‘Negrini?’
‘Negrini – Mr Black, get it?’
‘Oh, I see. But where do casinos come into it?’
‘Negrini represents certain New York and Chicago interests who are bucking Las Vegas and Reno.’
I still couldn’t see the connection. ‘But why should he support a liberal like Salton?’ I tapped the file. ‘I’ve read Salton’s speeches.’
‘You need a crash course in local politics,’ said Jackson earnestly. He was getting into his stride, teaching this dumb foreigner how things worked around here, and I wasn’t about to stop the flow. ‘Look, Mr Ogilvie, this island is wide open and a buck moves faster here than any other place in the world. Mr Black and his boys have got the whole thing sewn up – they’ve put Campanilla on the map for the jet set and all the well-heeled suckers who go for gambling.’
He hesitated. There was evidently more to come.
‘But there’s another angle. The bankers and the big corporations have also got it made here, and they don’t like gambling and the associations that go with it. They don’t want the off-shore trust funds confused with the spin of a roulette wheel. That’s bad for business.’
‘I can see their point.’
‘So they made sure they had their own man – Conyers. He was their boy, and he had his instructions: get the election out of the way and then crack down on the gambling. Mr Black had to pick an opposition leader and he picked Salton.’
‘Salton? But he’d only been back on the
