Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  Spic couldn’t quite keep the gleam out of his eyes.

  “Magnifico!” he exclaimed. “Last night… there was one blond showgirl… she looked seven feet tall…”

  They all carefully laughed with him, not at him. Martin Prince nodded sagely. “I believe she might be waiting in your suite when this meeting is over.”

  Spic tried to look man-of-the-world, but his eyes had gone round at the prospect of feasting on a woman two feet taller than he, one who outweighed him by fifty pounds and carried no extra flesh at all except where it counted.

  To give Spic time to recover his poise without anyone seeming to be overtly aware he had lost it, Gid Abramson chirped up, bright as a bird.

  “Martin, that golf course! It is a dream, a treasure! I almost had a hole in one on my first round!”

  “And your stud farm is impeccable,” said Otto Kreiger. He sincerely meant it-and lusted after it. If Martin should ever stumble, Kreiger would pick up the pieces. If he stuck out a foot for Prince to trip over, Kreiger wondered, would he have any allies on the board to help him take over?

  After the waiters had brought drinks and had departed, Martin Prince pushed a button to play back his phone conversation with Skeffington St. John.

  “Mr…..Mr. Prince, this is Skeffington St. John-”

  “Skeffington! Always a pleasure.”

  “I thought I should notify you-that policeman from San Francisco was here yesterday. Dante Stagnaro. Trying perhaps to enlist me by suggesting that the Organization might be involved with Atlas Entertainment and also… also with… Molly’s, ah… my daughter’s, ah…”

  “With the death of your daughter? My God, man, I felt about Molly just as I do about my own daughter!”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Prince, I understand that totally! But I felt you should know so appropriate actions could be taken.”

  “Well, Skeffington, I want to thank you, and tell you again how keenly I feel for you in your loss. I hope to get you over here to Vegas soon, cheer you up a bit.”

  “Then you don’t think-”

  “That this Stagnaro is anything to worry about?” Martin Prince chuckled. “He knows Gounaris is connected to Atlas Entertainment, and he knows you are. But he doesn’t know any of you are connected to us. And he won’t know.”

  “But the things he said about my daughter-”

  “He’s just manipulating you, Skeffington. Shaking the box to see if anything rattles.” He added, with malice too delicate to be identified, “Unless you can think of something in your personal life that makes you vulnerable…”

  “Oh, no, no, there’s nothing like that, Mr. Prince.”

  “Then don’t give him another thought,” said Prince heartily. The tape clicked off. There was a long silence.

  “This is a badly frightened man,” chirped Gid finally.

  “Too frightened,” said Kreiger.

  “On the other hand,” said Prince, “he called me when Stagnaro came to see him. He told me that Stagnaro told him we had been instrumental in his daughter’s death. It takes a certain strength of character to make such a call.”

  “Or cunning,” said Spic, who’d had a brandy and felt himself an expert on cunning. With a sudden dazzling certainty, he knew that someday he would own this whole thing that was Prince’s. “He knew we’d hear one way or another about Stagnaro asking him questions.”

  “But perhaps too frightened to handle our affairs?” persisted Kreiger. His tone was deferential, but he wanted to establish his position as contrary to Prince’s, without doing so strongly enough to make it obvious that was what he was doing. Prince caught the subterfuge, but said nothing.

  “This guy is too frightened to live, perhaps?” suggested Spic Madrid.

  “First the daughter, then the father? Both associated with Atlas Entertainment?” Enzo Garofano shook his aged head.

  Fortunately, thought Martin Prince, Enzo didn’t know about that troubling hit on their bought policeman, Lenington. Also, indirectly, associated with Atlas.

  Garofano continued, “And with this organized crime cop, what’s his name, turncoat wop bastard, Stagnaro, with him snooping about…”

  “Yeah, what about doing him?” asked Madrid. “He’s the guy who’s scaring this St. John and pressuring Gounaris.”

  “Hit a policeman? Very chancy,” said Garofano.

  “I think we are going astray here,” said Prince.

  “How’d the woman find out about it in the first place?” asked Spic. “This Gounaris was fuckin’ her, was he stupid?”

  “She was a computer whiz,” said Gid very quickly but with a relaxed chuckle. This was dangerous ground for Kosta, he wanted to deflect the attention. “As we have been able to piece it together, she was looking not so much for something in the computer as for the space where she thought something should be in the computer if there was anything illegal going on.” He looked around the room. “If that makes sense to any of you.

  “It made sense to my computer man, that’s good enough for me,” said Martin Prince. He held up a hand to forestall further discussion. “Our immediate problem is the demoralization of Skeffington St. John, which I do not believe to be acute. He has been a very fine attorney for this organization. He set up the Atlas Entertainment deal in the first place. He got an injunction that stopped the pressure Stagnaro was putting on Gounaris.”

  “He’s a sexual degenerate of the worst kind,” broke in Kreiger. Prince knew he didn’t really care if St. John was a deviate, he was cautiously stalking out a position counter to Prince’s. “That makes him susceptible to the pressures a man like Stagnaro can bring. Promises of immunity…”

  Otto was getting hungry, looking for a way to move up. Probably seeing Prince’s stud farm for the first time had done it. So much better than Otto’s, his horses of such better bloodlines. Not that he cared much about horses himself. Martin Prince tapped on the side of his water glass with his pen. Everyone fell silent.

  “Let’s put to a vote whether Skeffington St. John is still a reliable part of this organization. Any seconds?”

  “Second the motion,” said Enzo Garofano.

  “Thank you. I believe a show of hands will suffice.”

  But then Otto Kreiger came out into the open. “I would also like a show of hands on the question of the policeman Dante Stagnaro.”

  “Second,” said Spic Madrid quickly.

  Bene. These two lusted after Martin Prince’s domain, and might align themselves together against him. Martin Prince was stimulated by the challenge. He smiled benignly.

  “One motion at a time, gentlemen, please,” he said. After the vote, he signaled Enzo Garofano to stay on after the others had left. “You heard, Don Enzo?”

  “The tinkle of a distant goat bell.”

  “It will get louder.”

  Garofano nodded judiciously. “Perhaps send a message… Si! We can trust Eddie Ucelli to take his time in finding the right moment. He will do it right. He and I go a long way back, I will call myself.”

  Martin Prince bowed his respect and admiration.

  “La cantatrice — she is waiting in your room to discuss her career, Don Enzo.”

  Garofano nodded in turn, a sudden lustful gleam in his faded octogenarian eye.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  That same evening, out in San Francisco, Dante Stagnaro was having a high old time of his own. He had taken Rosa out for pizza on Columbus Ave a few blocks from the small bungalow in the steeply slanted 500 block of Greenwich Street where he had been brought up. Theirs now, his parents had moved down to the Valley near Modesto to raise walnuts. Dante and Rosa always went out for pizza when they wanted to celebrate something. Often, like tonight, the celebration was just Dante being willing to take a night off, and them being alive, and together, and still in love.

  When Dante had fallen in love with Rosa Benvenuto, he had been nineteen and in his first year at community college, she had been seventeen and a high school senior. A thin quick Italian girl with a
round face and great dark flashing eyes and clouds of curly black hair down her back. Pert, proud breasts under soft sweaters, a tiny waist, sweet flanks under tight jeans. He had asked her to marry him after his return from Vietnam two years later, on the day he had entered the police academy.

  Motherhood and the relentless tug of gravity had made the breasts heavier, the years had thickened that tiny waist, good Italian cooking had widened those sweet flanks. But to Dante, she was only more beautiful now than she had been on the day he had taken her down the aisle at Saints Peter and Paul two blocks from the house he took her home to-Joe DiMaggio’s church, some of the old-timers still called it.

  The thickening and softening of the body, the laugh lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth were to be treasured, for they spoke of living, of two wonderful children borne and being raised, of hard work and the wisdom only women can attain.

  Rosa was not feeling wise tonight. She was feeling, truth be told, giddy from the wine-it didn’t take very much. She hated to admit it, it was such a cliche-like an African-American who loved watermelon-but a sausage/pepperoni with extra cheese and a bottle of Chianti in a straw basket were Rosa’s idea of absolute gastronomic heaven. Dante knew it, and whenever he was feeling really good he took her out for such a feast. And afterward, when they got home…

  Right now he was regaling her with memories of pizza joints once known-when he was a tiny kid, to be exact.

  “There were these two brothers down the Peninsula, Monte and Renato. Monte’s place was on the old Bayshore before it was a freeway, just across from Moffett Field in Mountain View when the Navy still had it Just called Monte’s. Renato had his place in Redwood City on El Camino Real, called himself ‘Renato, King of the Pizza.’”

  He started to laugh at the memories the very names evoked, and she loved him passionately at that moment, his fine Italian eyes squinched up with laughing. He took a big gulp of Chianti.

  “Thing was, they wouldn’t speak to each other. Family picnics, holidays, like that-one in each end of the room. It was wonderful!”

  “What’s so funny about a brother-brother feud?” asked Rosa, but also laughing just because he was.

  “The feud was about pizza crusts! Monte was a thick crust man, Renato was thin crust. Each thought the other was a fool, a charlatan, an imposter!”

  They laughed together over this, ate pizza, drank wine. Finally he got down to his interview with Skeffington St. John.

  “He pronounces it Sinjin.”

  “As in unholy drink?” giggled Rosa. She was on her third glass of dago red, and her eyes shone like the candles on the tables, like the stars in the heavens.

  “S-I-N-J-I-N. Unholy genie out of a bottle, maybe.”

  “We agree on unholy,” said Rosa. She pointed at the last slice on the big round tin scored by countless pizza cutters through the years. “Anybody want this more than I do?”

  Dante waved a hand, leaned forward across the table as she scooped it up. “Thing is, Rosie, I have that guy.” He closed his hand into a fist to show how he had a particularly vulnerable part of Skeffington St. John in his grasp. “He’s a degenerate and he’s falling to pieces. The people he’s associated with don’t like people who know a lot about them falling to pieces.”

  “Can he give you what you want about Atlas Entertainment?”

  “That’s the question,” admitted Dante. “He was the lawyer who set up the purchase of the corporate shell for-this is speculation-Martin Prince in Las Vegas. I don’t know how much he knows about what they’ve done with it since they bought it. If they do own it and if they’ve done anything with it.”

  “Your obsession is showing again, darling,” said Rosa with a little chuckle.

  “What? It’s an obsession to hate the bad guys?”

  “You hate the bad Italian guys who screw up our good Italian name in this country,” she said, “so you just have to think Atlas Entertainment is a mob front.”

  “That’s what I think,” he admitted with a wry chuckle. “I just can’t prove it. There’s no obvious illegality that would let me get inside their operation and look around. I can’t get a search warrant, I can’t get phone taps. I think they had Moll Dalton murdered-but I can’t prove it. I think they had Jack Lenington murdered-but I can’t prove that, either. I don’t have a motive for either killing-but hell, who needed one for Jack, you knew him from our academy days, he even made a pass at you, remember? A sleazeball even then. But Moll Dalton…”

  “You’re projecting again, darling. Moll Dalton wasn’t corrupt, I grant you, but from what you tell me she was no maiden in distress. She was an ambitious, hard-driving woman who habitually cheated on her husband and would do anything to get to the top. You say Gounaris was using her sexually-well, maybe she was using him sexually, too. Maybe she overestimated how much power he had, and maybe that’s what got her killed.”

  “He couldn’t protect her?” Dante nodded almost grudgingly. “Not bad, sweetie. But the point is that maybe I don’t have to prove the mob killed Moll Dalton. Maybe somebody will tell me. Her husband thinks she ended up being promiscuous the way she was because St. John had molested her as a little girl.”

  “His own daughter? And you believe Dalton? Without any facts to back up his supposition?”

  “Yeah, I believe him. I talked with Beverly Hills Vice, there’s rumors around St. John gets little girls for sexual purposes from a low-life talent agent.” He gave another chuckle. “Calls herself Charriti HHope.” He spelled it. “She’s a known-let’s say alleged-procuress, but she has a lot of powerful friends in LaLa Land so she’s never been busted.”

  Rosa’s eyes flashed. “She gets little children for-”

  “Yeah. For guys like Moll’s father, if the rumors are true, and I think they are. So Dalton was probably right about the molestation of the daughter as a little girl.”

  “And this puts this St. John in your hand?”

  “He’s juggling a dozen balls and he’s going to start dropping some of them. When he does, his playmates are going to decide he’s expendable. Then he’ll have to come to me.”

  “Unless they kill him first.”

  Dante sobered. “There’s that. But… a few months after his daughter is professionally hit?” He shrugged. “I’m almost ashamed of myself, but I told him his buddies had put out the contract on her even though I don’t know for sure that they did.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “I’m banking that eventually he will. Whatever he did to her, I think he loved her. He was sure broken up when I told him she was dead. I’d love to put more pressure on him, but-”

  “How long ago were he and his wife divorced?” interrupted Rosa with a thoughtful look in her eye.

  “Um… twenty-five years ago, like that.”

  “And you think he might have molested his daughter when she was a little girl? About four, maybe five?”

  Dante leaned across the table and kissed her.

  “You wonder why I love you? Of course. The wife. If I can find her and she confirms it…” He paused for a moment, then said uncomfortably, “Sweetie, there’s something else. I think I screwed up. After Moll Dalton was murdered, I got a message on the phone machine. From somebody doing Arte Johnson’s Nazi from Laugh-In and calling himself Raptor.”

  “Raptor like in bird of prey?”

  “Yeah. He said he was the one who’d killed her.”

  “In a comic German accent?”

  “That’s why I thought it was a crank call. So I just, uh, erased it off the tape.”

  She met his eyes, held them with her own. Her face was serene and beautiful in the candlelight.

  “And it wasn’t a crank call,” she said softly.

  “I’m not sure. I got another call after Lenington was killed. This time it was a black talking, but it was a message from the same guy. He called himself Raptor again.”

  “And you haven’t told Tim.”

  “I had a hell of a time telling you, Rosie
-that first call was probably Raptor himself. Now he’s using other people to make his calls so I’ll never get a voiceprint of him.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” said Rosa. “These men have egos. He’ll call you again.”

  “You think so?”

  “I would.” For a moment, her black eyes penetrated his soul, then she gave her chuckle that was almost a giggle, and stood to start putting on her coat. “Haven’t I always?”

  She led him back, hand in hand, to the house in Greenwich Street where he had first dreamed of her.

  In Vegas, Enzo Garofano had been seduced into his first dribbling orgasm in almost two years by the cantatrice Martin Prince had sent up to his penthouse atop Xanadu. Seduced as much by the memory of her fiery rendition of Carmen’s “Habanera” as by suckling like an infant at her magnificent meloni.

  She had departed with his promise of getting her into a good opera company back east, and Enzo, after he had recovered from his sexual labors, had set out to honor his private arrangement with Martin Prince.

  Mae’s Place had started life in the thirties as a roadhouse on the way to the Columbia turnpike, with good steaks on the first floor and high stakes on the second. Just “the Roadhouse” then, a rambling white frame building set in a nice grove of eastern white pines, plenty of parking. From her late teens Mae had been the hostess with the mostes’ in the downstairs lounge, and after legalized gambling in Atlantic City made the Roadhouse a losing proposition, bought in and changed the name to Mae’s Place.

  Mae made the steaks even thicker downstairs, closed the unprofitable gaming rooms, and started running a different kind of beef on the second floor. Her girls were Grade A, some were Choice or even Prime, scrupulously clean and low-cholesterol. And her local protection was firmly in place: the county sheriff came out every Friday night for a thick T-bone and a thin blonde, on the house; and Mae had an excellent video of the reform mayor serving as the high-price spread between two of her girls, one whole wheat, one white bread.

  Mae was now forty-nine, still flame-haired with a little help from her hairdresser, heavy-hipped and heavy-breasted, rings on every finger, expensive musk dabbled deep in her sensational cleavage, pink and voluptuous as a Rubens nude, randy as a goat. She indulged herself freely with a few old friends: if you were fortunate enough to be offered Mae, you didn’t pay.