Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  Half an hour later he was sufficiently recovered to return, deadly of purpose, but by then the apartment was deserted. And by the next day he had convinced himself he wasn’t a true son of the Old West after all, where blood was the ransom of betrayed manhood, but rather was just another civilized modern urban wimp.

  Moll hadn’t seen her husband since that night, and he hadn’t been returning any phone calls. A month ago, an eon ago, for both of them. Tonight she’d caught him, but Will’s silence had become positively thunderous.

  “Need to see me,” he finally repeated in a flat voice.

  “ Need to,” Moll affirmed.

  At least he hadn’t hung up. Oh God, she thought, if only she hadn’t hurt him so. If only she’d just… just clung to his strengths, asked him to stay home with her. He would have. He was the only man who had ever truly loved her. Now…

  Now she said in a rush, “Please, please, meet me, Will. I need to talk… to ask…”

  “When?”

  “Tonigh-” She checked herself. “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock? That Italian place on Jackson where we used to…”

  He sighed. “All right, Moll. Tomorrow at seven. But I could be there tonight in thirty min-”

  “Tomorrow,” she said quickly, almost sharply.

  She hung up almost ashamed of herself, because she knew why she hadn’t made it tonight, right now, as he had offered, as she had intended when she had called him. In twenty minutes she wanted to be at the penthouse with Kosta’s cock buried in her up to the hilt. Needed to be at the penthouse.

  And maybe Kosta would have an explanation. Maybe… maybe she was misinterpreting the data she had run across by accident in the computer. Maybe…

  No. She was too smart to kid herself that much. She had found what she had found, and even though she would ask Kosta about it, she still had to tell Will about it too. At the last minute she put the disk she’d made into a mailer, addressed it, and dropped it down the mail chute in the hallway beside the elevator on her way to the penthouse and Kosta.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the penthouse, Kosta had mounted Moll from the rear in the dog style that was an unconscious preference from his early years as a koritsopoulo, a girl-boy in a Turkish brothel, thrusting into her with long slow almost lazy strokes. Over forty years before this night, his ticket out of that Istanbul slum had been the aging Turkish pederast who ran the brothel and kept his strongbox under the floor. Kosta had waited his chance.

  After they were finished, lying side by side on the bed, Moll panted out something about a “thing” in the computer she didn’t understand.

  Kosta asked, in an amused voice, “You sure it isn’t my thing in you-or did the mouse get off the pad and into the hard disk?”

  “No, in the data there was a… a sort of chart… A breakdown of percentages… names and figures… banks… all in a sort of code… I found it by accident, got intrigued, started playing around with it on my own time…”

  “What do you think it means?” he asked as if fascinated instead of feeling sick to his stomach. “You know I am an idiot with that demented little electronic jack-in-the-box.”

  “I think it means that the money behind Atlas Entertainment comes from organized crime, not the Common Market.”

  “What?” he cried, sitting bolt upright on the bed. “My God, what are you telling me?”

  “Finally, that was the only way I could interpret the entries.” She was delighted with his reaction; if Kosta had been involved himself, had started making excuses…

  He swung around to face her, took her hands in his.

  “I sold Gounaris Shipping, my Molly, because I was tired of being a playboy. I didn’t take your father’s offer to head Atlas Entertainment to become a pawn of the… what should I say, the mob.” He was off the bed, pulling on his clothes with manic energy. “I’m going to start finding out about this right now. If there is dirty money in Atlas Entertainment, they will have my resignation on their desks immediately.” He paused in zipping up his pants, frowning. “You haven’t told anyone else about…”

  “Of course not, not until I had a chance to talk with you.”

  “Good, good,” he said. “To be fair, I don’t think either of us should mention it until we’re sure that’s what the file really means.”

  Moll felt terrible. She had made that call to Will… Her voice stopped him as Kosta pulled on his shirt.

  “Sweetheart… I… made a date with Will for tomorrow night at Bella Figura. I was going to… talk with him about it, but now I’ll cancel it-”

  “No no no, my love.” He gestured expansively. “I will be back from Los Angeles with all the facts before then. If it is true, we will shout their perfidy from the rooftops. If I find there is a reasonable explanation…” He shrugged and finished buttoning his shirt and smiled. “Then you will just have a pleasant evening with another man.” He leaned down to take her chin in a lean brown hand and gently kiss her on the lips. “But no fooling around with your husband, you understand? Kosta Gounaris is a jealous lover.”

  After he was gone she remembered she’d mailed off the disk, but it didn’t matter since Kosta was not implicated.

  Outside in the corridor, he leaned against the wall beside the express penthouse elevator, weak as a baby, in much the same state as Will a month before but for very different rea sons. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Being a ruthless and powerful man himself, he knew the almost unspeakable ruthlessness and power of those to whom he had sold himself so many years before.

  How could he have been so unutterably stupid as to leave the original setup file in the computer when they had been working out the organization of the company? Once deciphered it was absolutely damning, naming names and estimating what each department could be expected to produce, and how much each could launder without the IRS suspecting that offshore millions were being funneled through this legitimately profitable shell.

  And how could she have uncovered it and broken their code so easily? Too damned intelligent for her own good, that was her trouble. The elevator came, he stepped aboard. Greeks liked their women smart, but she was too smart to live. He didn’t mean that literally, of course, but tou Theou, he didn’t look forward to the phone call- pay phone call-he would have to make to his spiritual godfather, Gideon Abramson, in Palm Springs.

  Gid Abramson was seventy-four years old, a diminutive gnome in loud aloha shirts and $400 plaid slacks and $900 shoes and a Dodgers cap, smoking a stogie the length of his arm, peering benevolently at the world through clear-rim trifocals. He was a grandfather eight times over, slept nine dreamless hours a night, swam ten laps in his pool every morning before his juice, dry toast, and decaf, and played golf or tennis five days a week like a man thirty years his junior. Gid was going to live forever.

  This evening he was sitting out the hand as dummy in his foursome at the country club’s bridge night, telling one of his usual infamous jokes.

  “So this guy is chewing out the shadchan, see, the marriage broker, for lying to him about this woman he had been planning to marry. The shadchan says, ‘By you, she didn’t graduate from Brandeis? By you, she’s not as beautiful as Julia Roberts? By you, she doesn’t sing like Barbra Streisand? Where did I lie?’

  “And the guy says, ‘You told me her father was dead-but she told me he’s been in prison for ten years!’

  “‘ Nu,’ says the shadchan, ‘you call that living?’”

  Under the dutiful laughter, the club steward whispered in Gid’s ear there was an urgent phone call from his nephew. He left the table feeling smug. He was up nearly $700 for the evening, and Charlie Hansen was looking a little green across the table. Gid had heard his Mercedes agency hadn’t sold a car in two weeks. Good.

  Let the bastard sweat a bit before suggesting a loan. Strictly legit interest, of course, because you didn’t shit where you slept-but he would end up owning 51 percent of the agency. Before his retirement he had controlled the rag trade loan-sharking on
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Gid just couldn’t seem to help making money.

  When he was in the manager’s office with the door closed, he picked up the private telephone and chirped into it, “So speak to me, bubela!”

  “Uncle Gideon, I’m in a lot of trouble!”

  Kosta did indeed sound scared over the phone-and it took a great deal to scare Kosta. He’d been the kind of dashing, adventurous kid none of Gid’s own nebbische sons had been. When Gid had run across him in the late fifties, Kosta, just a teenager, was using an Arab dhow with black sails and no outboard to run American cigarettes from Greece into Turkey, and opium out.

  Once, drunk on ouzo, he’d told Gid he’d slit a Turk’s throat in Istanbul for the money to buy the boat. Gid had never seen any reason to doubt him, so he bankrolled him through bigger and better boats to his first freighter. Then he’d taken 51 percent of Gounaris Shipping for the Family, finally had recommended Kosta for the presidency of Atlas Entertainment.

  And it was this man who now sounded scared. Just to test the waters, Gid said, “You hear the one about the gorilla walked into Goldman’s delicatessen and ordered a pastrami on rye with a pickle to go?”

  “Uncle Gideon, there’s no time for-”

  “Goldman says, ‘That’ll be six-fifty. And I gotta say, I never expected to have a gorilla in my store ordering a pastrami on rye!’ The gorilla says, ‘At those prices, you never will again!’” He paused. “ Nu. Tell me your story.”

  Kosta did. It left Gideon shaking his head at the phone.

  “You’re right, Kosta, that was really very stupid of you to leave the file in the computer. If any word of your doing that should get back to Martin Prince…” He paused for a moment, thinking. “I tell him the woman had been snooping around, asking questions, suspecting something, we had to move very quickly…”

  “But nothing about me leaving the file in the computer?”

  “Our little secret, Kosta,” he said gravely but with a wink in his voice. “Now, there’s one thing I want you to do…”

  “I already did, Uncle Gideon. Even before I called you. I erased the file and tomorrow will have a new hard disk installed and all the other files transferred to it individually so this file can’t be brought up later if the feds should ever come snooping around with one of their tame computer geniuses.”

  “Good, it sounds as if this woman has not totally addled your wits. In your opinion, has she spoken to anyone else?”

  Kosta told him about Moll’s date with her husband the next night, and what he had told her to do about it.

  “Very good!” exclaimed Gid with delight. “The perfect way to keep her quiet until we can talk to her.”

  “You think she’ll believe what I tell her when-”

  “We’ll make her believe it, sonny boy-I think you got nothing to worry about. You just let me handle this.”

  Before hanging up he told Kosta just what he should say and do the next evening, and also casually got from him the name of a corrupt Frisco cop, Jack Lenington. He would ask Otto Kreiger to contact Lenington-no use burdening Kosta with any of that. The goyische woman was obviously still leading him around by the schlong.

  Tapping out the number of Martin Prince’s safe phone in Las Vegas, Gid Abramson rolled his cigar between his lips and thought with delight, Intrigue! Threats! Danger! These were what kept a man young, made life worth living!

  Bella Figura was a lot of glass and stainless steel and designer chairs and elevated prices in the low-number high-rent end of Jackson Street. They put too much garlic in the sauces and you had to fight for your pasta al dente, but their drinks were generous and the service was good. And at Bella Figura, because of the high ambient decibel level, two people could put their heads together and talk without being overheard.

  Not that there was any need of that now. Moll would tell Will about it, of course, but it had all become academic. When she’d been getting dressed to come here and meet him, Kosta had burst into the penthouse with his black eyes snapping like firecrackers, tremendously exhilarated.

  He’d been in L.A. having it out with those bastards down there, he said, and she was right, Atlas Entertainment was just a fucking Mafia front! Tomorrow, by God, they would go to the FBI with what they knew! Until then, Moll should keep quiet about it, because they knew about Kosta but not about her. She might be in danger if they knew the information had come from her.

  Meanwhile, tonight… tonight he’d roughly shoved her forward over the back of the couch, pulled up her Laura Kiran skirt, jerked down her Victoria’s Secret panty hose, and rammed all that excitement into her from behind, the way they both loved it best. She exploded within ninety seconds, but he wasn’t done yet. He tumbled her onto the couch and went down on her, something he’d never done before, not once.

  He finished off by crouching over her face and coming in her mouth immediately, without ceremony or tenderness, snorting like a bull. Then he jumped off her as off a horse hard-ridden, zipped up, chuckled, kissed her cheek without love or passion.

  “Now I send you to see your husband, my little tart-now that I know you will think only of me as you do it with him.”

  So here she was in Bella Figura drinking her second Midori sour and thinking that Kosta knew her all too well. She indeed was planning, with a nasty little frisson in her soul, to get Will into bed tonight. Kosta had hurt her a little and scared her a lot with his wildness; she needed Will’s tender loving strength to restore her.

  The stranger in the light topcoat and tinted glasses came up behind her at 7:39. Expecting Will, Moll turned on her stool with a welcoming smile just as his gloved hand pressed a. 22 pistol against the bridge of her exquisite nose and pulled the trigger. During the nanosecond of searing pain as the bullet passed between her wide, beautiful eyes, she knew That’s why he was so wild, he was excited by

  Moll thudded to the floor, a brain-splattered bundle of ruined designer clothes. The assassin put the coup de grace into the base of her skull before staring around at the surrounding patrons frozen on their stools.

  “Dead men tell no tales,” he said. “Live men too, if they got any smarts.”

  He laid the empty. 22 on the bar beside Moll’s purse, and strolled out stripping off his topcoat. As he rounded the corner into Front, he handed it to a homeless man poking around in a trash barrel at the edge of green block-square MacArthur Park.

  Back in Bella Figura the screaming had begun, after several long moments of silence during which they all had looked at one another and then guiltily away. By the time the police arrived, no one had seen anything significant.

  Live men tell no tales. Nor, of course, dead women.

  Will had been held up on the Bay Bridge by a four-car crash blocking all lanes on the upper deck into the city. He got to Bella Figura just after the first black-and-white. When Homicide Inspector Tim Flanagan arrived, Will was cradling Moll’s ruined head in his arms and crying all over the crime scene.

  “Who the fuck is he?” Flanagan demanded of the uniformed team who had answered the original squeal. “The fucking Pope?”

  “The husband.”

  “Whyna fuck ya let him near the body?”

  The black patrolman said, with exaggerated courtesy, “’Cause we couldn’t come up with any way to keep him away from her, Inspector, short of shooting him in the fuckin’ head too.”

  Flanagan, who had a heavy round red face and a swag belly and pink tightly waved receding hair, looked and sounded like every casting director’s concept of the beefy, stupid, venal Irish cop with his hand out. He had, however, a degree in criminology from USF and was totally devoted to police work. His dumb act was strictly professional.

  He told them to secure the crime scene-and he did mean getting the fucking husband away from the corpse-and went to call Dante Stagnaro at home even though Dante wasn’t Homicide and Tim was, so this was his beef entirely.

  It was just that this looked professional, just the sort of homicide that Dante, with
his surprisingly moralistic stance toward crime and murder in particular, especially professional murder, loved to get in on early.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  That was fifteen months ago, and Lieutenant Dante Stagnaro, head of SFPD’s Organized Crime Task Force, still didn’t have anyone in the cage for Moll Dalton’s murder. Oh, he had a self-confessed assassin who called himself Raptor and left messages on his phone machine, and he was pretty sure he knew who had hired the guy-but he was as far from an arrest as when he had started.

  Dante drove around the block because the parking lot for the Institute of Human Origins was off Euclid just north of the Cal-Berkeley campus. Will Dalton’s green 4Runner with its license plate HABILIS was parked in the lot: the damn fool had shown up. On his own car’s bumper was a sticker put there by his sixteen-year-old son, Antonio, that he hadn’t had the heart to

  scrape off: BAD COP-NO DOUGHNUT.

  Organized crime in San Francisco didn’t mean the Mafia as it did in New York-traditionally, the mob didn’t have a strong enough presence in the Bay Area to merit a task force. What he and his two inspectors investigated was organized criminal activity in San Francisco of any sort-drug trafficking, chip theft and sales, car thefts, alien smuggling. Even murder, if there was a demonstrably organized conspiracy behind it.

  A sign directed him through a gate and along a walk to a doorway and the basement of the Graduate Theological Union. Dante found it either ironic or touching-he’d never made up his mind which-that IHO was housed with the Union. Some of the Union’s vocally Christian primates just had to be appalled by the Institute’s strictly Darwinian view of life. Tight budgets made strange bedfellows.

  On a stage, students and a faculty director were rehearsing a drama with song and modern dance that said something about God, man, and the human soul. At a desk alongside the stage, IHO was taking money and checking in attendees-$3.00 for members, $5.00 for non-for Will Dalton’s lecture in the next room on similar subjects from a very different perspective.