by Joe Gores
Just before the doors started to close, two black hookers and a pudgy white lawyer with garbage eyes got on. The hookers wore stretch body stockings, one black, one white lace, the lawyer a suit off the rack at Mervyn’s, a purple tie with BAM! WHAM! and ZOWIE! on it in neon-red letters. Purple and red. Dynamite.
“Where’s Marlene been keeping herself?” he asked.
“She broke her foot,” said the short wide hooker.
“Yeah, I know how, too,” the lawyer said sadly. “Kicking her attorney in the nuts.”
“Wouldn’t break no foot that way, Clyde,” said the taller of the women with an exaggerated slap on his arm. “Squirrel run up a lawyer’s leg, he’d starve to death fo sure! Kick a lawyer in the heart, that’d break a girl’s foot. Great big rock, a lawyer’s heart.”
Both girls were giggling as the threesome got off at the court floor where the Organized Crime Task Force had its makeshift office. Dante stayed on, got off at four. He went down the hall and around the corner to a plain wooden door with CRIME LAB on it. Inside, a mild-faced overweight man in chinos and a plaid lumberjack shirt nodded from behind the desk.
“Dante.”
“Norb. Hymie in yet?”
“Got here a little before six.” Norbert, who was thick and slow and hefty, talked exactly like the lean and snaky movie actor Bruce Dern, even to the timbre of the voice, but was totally unaware of it because he never went to movies and didn’t own a TV. “And Tom said the guy left after midnight last night. Glad I ain’t Hymie’s old lady.”
“So’s Hymie,” said Dante as he was buzzed through the waist-high gate.
He started down the interior corridor, then turned back to shut the door of the room where all the dope confiscated from dealers was stashed. He shook his head in mock disapproval.
“Norb! What if Al Fatah or somebody stormed the building and came busting in here-”
“Fuck ’em, Lou. Let ’em have it.”
They both laughed and Dante went on down the corridor past the deserted forensics rooms. In the open doorway of one lab was a shopping cart full of confiscated semiautomatic weapons, some with scopes, others with banana clips, all flat black in color and heaped in the cart like cordwood. He crossed another hallway to the larger lab where forensic chemists analyzed fibers, cloth, dust, hair, semen, and the like after the fact of murder.
Hymie the Handler, in white smock and thin physician’s gloves, was alone at a counter halfway down the room, snipping fibers off a stained automobile floormat. He looked up to grin at Dante coming down the deserted laboratory toward him.
“If these fibers match those caught in the panty hose of the dead woman, my dear Dupin, Mme Guillotine shall drink the blood of another murderer.”
“I think on the contrary, my dear Watson, they shall prove to be the hairs of a monstrous hound.”
“These hairs?” demanded Hymie in apparent astonishment.
“No, I refer to what you have mistaken for the panty hose of the murdered woman. I said monstrous”
Hymie laughed and put the hairs he had clipped on a slide, put another slide over it, laid it on the counter and stripped off his rubber gloves, began moving toward the back of the lab.
“Coffee?”
“Unless it’s from the stomach of a corpse.”
“This is the Crime Lab, not the Coroner’s Office.”
They sat in straight chairs on either side of a table that held a Mr. Coffee, cups, spoons, sugar and Equal, Pream. At this time of day the lab smelled rather pleasantly like Dante’s high school chem lab where he had once blown up some peanut brittle made with something besides baking soda, he couldn’t remember what it had been. Miss Tchinin had been furious…
“What would you substitute for baking soda in peanut brittle that would make it explode when you broke it?”
“Why ask me, I just work here.” Hymie’s intelligent black eyes sought Dante’s, and he sighed. “Okay, hit me.”
Dante laid the answering machine tape on the table.
“I need the call on this tape voice-printed.”
“Sound-spectrographed,” corrected Hymie automatically. “You have anything to match it with?”
“Not yet. I hope never.”
Interest sparked the dark eyes. “A call from a killer?”
“Or a hoax. Could you just file both the tape and the voice print here so I don’t have to worry about them?”
“Sure. What name for the file?”
“RAPTOR. And could you not mention this to anyone else?”
“You and Jack Lenington,” mused Hymie as he dug out an accordion file folder. Dante, who had started to turn away, stopped abruptly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Three, four days ago Jack brought in five K in old, small-denomination, unsequenced bills for analysis for black light, impermeable dyes, like that. Said it was evidence, asked I didn’t tell anybody about it. But since the guy’s dead-”
“Dead?”
“Yeah, last night, eleven p.m., a phone booth on Mission Street. Somebody blew his face off with a. 357 Magnum. Looked professional-no prints, the gun immediately dropped in the gutter. Funny thing, it had been sprayed with Armor All-”
“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Dante under his breath.
Uh-this is Raptor. Uh-I gave the, uh, gentleman the message. It, uh, really blew his mind.
Dante laid a hand on the bearlike technician’s arm, then laid a finger to his lips. “Hymie, my lips to your ear only on this phone tape, okay?”
“Sure,” said Hymie. When Dante was gone, he added, “Interesting,” to the tape in his hands, and starting making up the RAPTOR folder. That was it: he had the most interesting job in the Hall of Justice.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It wasn’t until three mornings later, after Lenington’s departmental funeral, that Dante finally went to see Tim Flanagan about the case. He’d had to organize his thoughts first, uneasy thoughts about Lenington’s execution inspired by the second Raptor phone call.
The call had come in before the media’d gotten hold of Lenington’s death-he’d checked. If it was genuine, did that mean Eddie Ucelli hadn’t hit either Lenington or Moll Dalton? Could he ask the Feebs about their phone taps on Ucelli again? Whoever had hired Eddie could be a nutcake, leaving phone messages for Dante once he was sure Eddie had made the hit. And so many of the characteristics of Moll Dalton’s murder had fit the Popgun’s M.O…
Or what if Tim had been right all along-that it was some psycho Will Dalton had hired to kill his wife? And what if Dalton had set up a second murder for when he was out of the country with a perfect alibi, just to confuse the issue?
Dante hadn’t told Tim, hadn’t told anyone about the first erased message from Raptor because he’d thought it was just a crank call. How could he now tell Tim about this second? But maybe he could pick Tim’s brains about the Lenington hit.
Only Tim wasn’t too cooperative; besides Lenington, he had a gambling murder of a small boy in the Vietnamese community-probably to show someone that someone else meant business-and a hotel arson fire in which two pensioners had died. So, the best defense being a preemptive strike, Dante asked Tim why he hadn’t been memoed on the Lenington investigation.
“Why would I think you’d be interested in a corrupt vice cop getting gunned down?” asked Flanagan patiently.
They were on either side of his desk in Homicide. The desk was as messy as Tim was, which was very messy indeed. Dante shoved aside enough paperwork, empty coffee cups, report forms, pizza boxes and doughnut bags to make room for an elbow.
“He was observed having a meeting with Gounaris, that’s why you should have thought I’d be interested.”
“Now, you see, I didn’t know that,” said Flanagan mildly. He took a big bite of sugar doughnut, spilled white sugar down his tie. The tie looked as if it had been used to mop up soup.
“You didn’t know that because I didn’t tell you about it.”
“Not surprising I
didn’t know.” He brightened. “Besides, I doubt it has anything to do with this case you don’t have. What I hear, they’re gonna proclaim Hooker’s Holiday in the Tenderloin, everybody half-price for a day in honor of Jack’s passing. The pimps figure their net’ll go up 10 percent without good old Jack there to take his cut off the top.”
Dante’s elbow slipped off the desk, and he demanded irritably, “Couldn’t you stack a little more shit on this desk?”
Flanagan leaned back in his swivel chair and on the corner stacked his size 13 shoes, one on top of the other.
“How’s that?” he asked sweetly.
There was little sweet about the phone conversation going on at the same time between Kosta Gounaris and Gideon Abramson.
“Mr. Prince is very upset, Kosta, and for once I have to agree with him.”
“Mr. Prince is upset?” demanded Kosta. “What about me? I thought we said nothing would-”
Gid, talking at the same time, was saying, “When you said that was the end of Jack Lenington, I didn’t think-”
“Wait a minute, are you saying-”
“Of course. Are you trying to tell me…”
They both fell silent at the same moment. Then Gideon said precisely, “You’re telling me you had nothing to do with Jack Lenington.”
“I am. And you’re telling me Mr. Prince didn’t either.”
“He did not.” There was another long silence on both ends of the line with the scramblers on either end. Then Gideon added, “At least not through me.”
“Do you think he went around you?” asked Kosta. He was pleased he was able to make his voice sound as though a little icy finger had just been run down his spine.
“Ummm… no. He would have no reason to do that.” Positive now. “No. I think definitely not.”
“Then who did order it?” asked Kosta.
“And who would dare to carry it out?” mused Gideon.
“It might have been Clint Eastwood,” said Flanagan, his shoes still on the corner of the desk but a frustrated look on his face. “This was a. 357 Magnum. But I still prefer some badass from the Tenderloin that Dalton paid before he left.”
“You’ve got Dalton on the brain,” said Dante quickly. Because he’d had the same unwelcome thought himself since the second Raptor call, he wanted to argue Tim out of it. “First of all, there’s no way he could know about Lenington being associated with Gounaris, and second-”
“Remember your favorite theory, chief? That his wife mailed him something that contained clues about what she was involved in that then got her killed?” He reached for the final doughnut, this one jelly-filled. Dante hadn’t eaten any of them. “What if she did, and Lenington’s name was there?”
“He still would have hired the hitter to take out Gounaris, not somebody on the fringes like Jack Lenington.” Dante leaned across the desk as much as its littered surface would permit. “He didn’t think Lenington had been sleeping with his wife.”
“Never can tell-she sounded like the town pump to me.”
But Dante had convinced himself by now: for Dalton as mastermind to work, it would have been Gounaris who had been killed. Back to square one. Popgun.
“I think it was Popgun Ucelli on behalf of somebody in the mob. Even the same M.O.-a shot to the head.”
“Sure,” sneered Tim. “Her in the face, Jack in the back of the skull. A. 22 and a. 357 Magnum respectively. Her twice, him once. Her in a crowded bar, him on a deserted street.” He gave his big braying laugh. “Identical.”
“Close enough,” insisted Dante.
“Maybe it was Dalton himself both times,” said Flanagan doggedly. “Did her, left, sneaked back into the country…”
Dante was sick of that game. He dug around in his pocket for his notebook, found his page, threw it open across the desk to Flanagan.
“There’s his contact number in Nairobi-the Kenya National Museum. I don’t know what the time difference is, but maybe you can catch him there.”
“I thought he’s supposed to be buried deep in the bush.”
“He was going to be in Nairobi for a month doing studies at the museum before he left.” He baited Flanagan some more. “Worth a try maybe, huh, Tim?”
And damned if Flanagan, with that same dogged look, didn’t take him up on it! He direct-dialed, with country and city code, and got the museum as easily as calling his wife out in the Avenues. He winked at Dante as he put it on speakerphone.
“Do you have a Will Dalton there at the museum?”
The crisp African voice, whose English had a lilting singsong and the elongated vowels of East Africa, said, “Dr. Dalton? I believe I just saw…” The voice receded. “Dr. Dalton?”
As Will started across the glass-walled lobby of the museum, the pert African receptionist began waving a hand at him. She had the telephone in her other hand. Through the tall floor-to-ceiling windows he could see the hot bright African sunlight outside. Inside the modern museum building, it was dim and cool.
“You have a telephone call…” As Will came up, she added into the phone, “Caught him on his way out. He’s been reviewing some of the Koobi Fora data…”
“Who is it, Mirinda?” Will asked as he took the phone.
She shrugged. “Not British.”
“Will Dalton here,” he said into the phone in the British manner. There was a very long silence on the other end. Then Dante Stagnaro’s unmistakable voice came bouncing down from a communications satellite a thousand miles above.
“Dr. Dalton, this is Dante Stagnaro in San Francisco. You’ve just struck Tim Flanagan dumb.”
“You got him!” exclaimed Will in a voice full of reprieve.
“The… Oh. No.” Genuine regret came over the wire. “I’m sorry. We… There’s been another murder…”
“Gounaris?” demanded Will in a hopeful voice.
“No. A policeman named-”
In a flash of insight, Will interrupted, “And you thought I wouldn’t be here. You thought-”
“Did you know a San Francisco vice cop named Jack Lenington?” Flanagan’s voice had the hollowness of tone peculiar to cheap speakerphones.
“No.” His voice was angry now. “What does this have to do with… with my loss?”
“Nothin’,” said Flanagan bluntly. “Not in my book.”
Will stood there in the cool dim museum by the reception desk, dressed in safari gear, a pained look on his face, trying to decide what he wanted to say. He finally burst out, “Goddam you people, I’m leaving for Fort Portal in the morning, I’m trying to get beyond…”
He slammed down the phone, stood beside Mirinda’s desk, breathing deeply, almost panting, as if he had been running. She started to raise a hand to touch his arm, then let it drop to her desk again. He found a small smile and a wry shrug for her.
“All the way from San Francisco,” he said.
“Where little cable cars reach halfway to the stars,” she said in her lilting voice, as if anxious to help him from his black mood. “Is there anything I can…”
“No, thank you. Just… policemen having silly ideas.”
“Policemen usually do,” she said precisely.
He shook hands with her formally in the British way and went out of the museum. Mirinda stared after him with brown wounded eyes full of unprofessional thoughts about the rugged, handsome widower. Since she had never met Mrs. Dalton, she had felt no urge to grieve when she learned of her death.
Outside, Will unlocked his beat-up old Land-Rover on the museum tarmac parking lot, hoping that phone call was the end of it. Maybe now they would let him get to Fort Portal, then off into the rain forest, and would forget all about him so he could get to work in earnest. All he wanted was to do his work.
And start forgetting. Maybe then the nightmares would start to ease up. He didn’t really believe they would, but all he could do was immerse himself in his work and… hope.
It would be so good to sleep without bad dreams…
“Got all
the egg off your face, Tim?” Dante asked in an overly solicitous voice.
“Get the fuck outta here, lemme work.”
“Maybe I can find a map of East Africa around here somewhere, you can look up Fort Portal, find out what country it’s in. Maybe they’ll have a store there or something along the road that has a telephone, you can call them up and ask them to have somebody stand in the doorway with the phone in his hand for the next few days, see if Dalton happens by-”
“Okay, okay, go fuck yourself, chief.”
He began ostentatiously burrowing into the paperwork that littered his desk. Dante dropped a final comment on his way out.
“I think you owe me another beer on bowling night.”
It was the measure of Flanagan’s demoralization that he didn’t even argue the point. But back in his own office on the court floor of the Hall, Dante stewed and stewed, and then, realizing he should have done it earlier, spent the rest of the day calling all airlines for the name of Will Dalton on any passenger list in or out of Nairobi during the past week.
Nothing. The name was on no manifest. So, finally, he could let Dalton go out into the rain forests with his chimps for good, and start trying to make sense of the Lenington hit.
Which actually made almost too much sense.
Lenington is all but seen conferring with Gounaris and is hauled up to I.A. at Dante’s instigation. Dante tells Gounaris about it-and almost immediately, Lenington is whacked.
What didn’t make any sense at all was the obscure game being played by the man who called himself Raptor, and what he could possibly have had to do with the two killings.
PART THREE
Late Devonian 362 m.y. ago
A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.
Ambrose Bierce
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dread naught, devoted fans, it is I, Peregrine Raptor, Esq., that extraordinary assassin, that bird of prey, that sardonic quipper of quips, who made strawberry yogurt of the Lenington brainpan and arranged the call to Stagnaro about it afterwards. Why does that silly policeman have so much trouble accepting me? Well, it is early days yet. Perhaps he has not had time to fully appreciate what a grand killing machine I really am.