Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  “We’ve shown a profit from the first week of operation.”

  The suave, imperturbable Prince suddenly shrieked, veins standing out at his temples, “I am talking here!”

  Gounaris felt the blood drain from his face. He had heard of these sudden flashes of rage, like Bugsy Siegel was supposed to have had, but it was the first he had witnessed.

  “I am sorry, Don Martin. I was just-”

  “No matter.” Prince gave a magnanimous wave of his hand.

  The gesture was casual, but those cold eyes were murderous. Speaking up had been a mistake; why had he? Remembering the tough kid he once had been, the glory days when his nuts were big as bowling balls and belonged to him alone? Dammit, those days didn’t have to be over!

  “Last February,” Prince continued, “after our meeting in Las Vegas, Spic Madrid was hit in Minneapolis.”

  Kosta felt cold again. What the fuck was going on? He was sure Prince himself had ordered the hit on Madrid, for opposing him at the Vegas board meeting.

  “And less than four months later, St. John and Otto Kreiger were hit on the same day. Now-”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Garofano, “I understood the police and fire people were satisfied that Otto’s death was an accident. Now you’re telling me-”

  “I’m telling you that he was hit,” snapped Prince. Both of the capos were ignoring the usual protocol now. “Based on the police department lab forensic workup of the gas explosion.”

  “Are you suggesting, Don Martin,” said Gideon, “that the same man carried out both hits?”

  “I’m suggesting that the same man ordered both hits.”

  “I think Kreiger was responsible for St. John,” said Gideon, showing more balls than Kosta would have credited him with. “He voted to have him hit at the board meeting at the Xanadu in February and was overruled. But the killer’s M.O.-”

  “It was not Eddie Ucelli,” said Garofano quickly. “He would never hit one of our own without full board sanction.”

  “With all due respect, Don Enzo,” said Gideon, “St. John was hardly one of our own. A paid employee-”

  “Who was branching out into new areas without informing us,” snapped Prince. By this time, they had all heard about St. John’s nascent personal management company.

  “Could it be someone in Atlas?” asked Garofano.

  “Possible, I suppose,” admitted Kosta. “But so few employees of the company know anything about… us…”

  “The woman found out,” said Prince.

  “ Was trying to find out,” said Gideon in a soothing voice.

  “Who else would have the guts to do it?” asked Gounaris, since protocol seemed to have been abandoned.

  “Who indeed?” mused Prince. But his eyes locked with Kosta’s for a long moment. “In any event, I want you to find out. Comb that company from top to bottom. Set people to watching other people. I want any word, any whisper, any breath about Otto’s death. And Gideon, I want you to check with our Los Angeles people on this St. John thing. It has brought a lot of federal heat into that town. Our financial involvement in his firm is extremely well hidden, but we need this resolved as soon as possible. Be casual but thorough.”

  “It will be like old times!” enthused Gid.

  The two Mafia soldiers looked like ravens in their black pants and their black shirts hanging out to hide the handguns on their belts. They patrolled the palm grove in a sort of figure eight, so nobody could point a shotgun mike at the windows of the suite.

  Pale green fronds clacked overhead, laid lacy patterns of light and shadow over the faces and somber clothes. They stopped to chat between the almost red trunks of the date palms. One man was short, wide, sloppy, with black hair sprouting at his wrists and on the backs of his fingers and growing low and curly over his forehead. More hair sprouted into the open V-neck of his black polo shirt. His Beretta 92 was considered a classic, but he couldn’t hit anything with it from over three feet away.

  “Hey, Red, I’m gettin’ fuckin’ sick of walkin’ around in circles in the fuckin’ desert,” he said.

  His partner was a very large redhead with an open face and twinkling blue eyes and a boozer’s complexion. His drink actually was carrot juice and he could bench-press six hundred pounds. On his hip he wore a Colt-clone. 45 auto loaded with subsonic rounds that made it effective yet remarkably quiet when fired. He was an excellent shot.

  “Tell it to Mr. Prince,” he said. “Hell, Tony, you’re in here under the trees, in an oasis-soft duty.”

  “This an oasis? So where’s the fuckin’ belly dancers?”

  A bluejay-sized bird with a long beak soared into the palm tree directly over their heads with a loud whistle. When he flew, red patches showed on his wings. Tony went into a shooter’s crouch at the cry, straightened up sheep-faced.

  “I didn’t know there was any fuckin’ birds in the desert except them ravens and those big buzzards always soarin’ around.”

  “How long you lived in Vegas, Tony?”

  “Three, four years.”

  “And you never see any birds?”

  “Just ones with tits an’ hair between their legs. Anyway, what’s eighteen inches long and makes a woman scream when she wakes up in the morning?”

  Before Red could answer, a man appeared, walking quietly through the trees, dark-haired and lean and moving like an athlete. A pair of binoculars was around his neck, a canteen was on one hip, and a skinny paperback book was in one hand.

  Red slid over to confront him without seeming to, beaming at the binoculars. “Those Zeiss-Ikon glasses?”

  “Good Lord no, I got ’em at Eddie Bauer’s!” The man held up the slim glossy paperback. “I use ’em for bird-watching.” At that instant the bird above them whistled again, then arrowed away. “Did you see that? A red-shafted flicker!” He opened the book to the back page and began writing in it with a ballpoint pen. “I can add it to my Death Valley life list.”

  “I heard they were pretty common here,” remarked Red.

  “Not indigenous at all-a late-autumn visitor from the Panamint Range. There’s almost three hundred species of resident and migrant birds in the Valley-”

  “Fuck the goddam birds,” said Tony in an aggrieved voice. “I’m tryna tell a fuckin’ joke here!”

  Red grinned and winked at the bird-watcher. “Okay, Tony,” he said, “what is eighteen inches long that makes a woman scream when she wakes up in the morning?”

  “Crib death!” crowed Tony.

  “Crib death?” exclaimed the redhead in a disgusted voice. Neither man had laughed. “That’s revolting.”

  “Hey, just fuck off, okay?” said Tony.

  Red’s beeper went off. The two buttons started away through the trees. When they had disappeared from view, the bird-watcher sought a point of vantage facing the inn.

  Dante kept out of sight behind a palm tree while he glassed the windows of the suite the inn’s front desk had told him was rented by Kosta Gounaris. Yes, people in there, but he couldn’t see who. So he refocused on the inn’s sweeping stone steps. Most of the front turnaround was taken up by a black stretch limo with a black-uniformed chauffeur lounging against the fender.

  Tony was just a stupid button man, but with a couple of short and seemingly casual questions, Red had elicited why Dante had binoculars, that he actually could identify the bird flying out of the tree, and that he knew it was not a year-round resident at the Furnace Creek oasis. The redhead was canny and quick-witted, dangerous, which meant the man who paid him was also dangerous.

  The chauffeur opened the back door, came to attention. Dante ground the glasses against his eyes; heat shimmers slightly distorted his view through the lenses, but he knew the four men coming down the wide stone front steps of the inn. Shaking hands with the two who obviously were depart ing was Gounaris. No surprise, since the fact he was flying himself down here was why Dante had been here before him.

  Dante had studied the second man’s face ranging fro
m his 1960 passport photo to an FBI surveillance picture taken a week ago poolside at the Tallpalms Country Club in Palm Springs. It was Gideon Abramson.

  The other two were astounding. First, the legendary Don Enzo himself, out from Jersey. Probably flown openly into Vegas by private jet, then whisked out of some underground garage in this anonymous limo and would go back in the same way so the surveilling feds would think he’d never left the hotel.

  The fourth was The Man himself, Martin Prince. Marcantonio Princetti. Dante could recite the man’s biography in his sleep.

  The limo disappeared around behind the hotel toward Highway 190 which eventually would take it back to Vegas. A cream Lexus followed, stuffed with Red and Tony riding shotgun. Dante considered alerting the feds, rejected it; the meeting was over. Nobody knew he was here, he wanted to keep it that way.

  Gounaris and Abramson were sitting down at one of the tables on the inn’s broad patio for a drink under a sun umbrella. He’d have given a year’s pay to hear what they were saying, but he couldn’t get close: Gounaris would see him, and he wanted to be the one doing the viewing.

  What was important enough to drag frail old Garofano out here from Jersey? The doubleheader on Kreiger and St. John? Was somebody within the Family trying to take down its leaders one by one, grab control? Did Prince call this meeting because these were the only men he could trust within the Organization? Or because he thought one of them was behind the murders?

  Or was he playing some dangerous game of his own?

  “I tell you he’s playing a fucking game, Uncle Gid!” exclaimed Kosta Gounaris. He was drinking beer in the thin dry desert air. Gideon was having iced tea.

  “To what point, Kosta? He already has all the power.”

  “To set me up for unsanctioned killings he ordered himself!” Gounaris mimicked, “‘I’m suggesting that the same man ordered both hits.’ He’s just putting on a show for the old man so there won’t be any heat when I get hit.”

  Gideon chuckled. “Who’s the unhappiest man in New York?”

  “New York? What the hell does New York-”

  “A man with an Irish psychiatrist and a Jewish bartender.” Gideon stirred his tea, sipped it. “Mr. Prince setting you up makes no sense. What does make sense is Kreiger having St. John hit, using Popgun. Ucelli is an old-timer, he would do it and deny it afterwards. And get away with it, because he’s tight with Don Enzo and St. John was not a made man.”

  “Then who had Kreiger hit?”

  “I fear Mr. Prince is starting to feel that perhaps you did. Out of ambition, a desire to move up… Let me tell you how he thinks. The killing was clever. You are clever. The killing was on your turf, San Francisco, where the Organization has very little influence. You fly your own plane, so he might even suspect you of Spic’s murder.”

  “That’s crazy! It’s all crazy! He had Spic hit!”

  “You know it’s crazy. I know it’s crazy. But Mr. Prince…” He shrugged. “In the morning-”

  “I’ve got to fly back up in the morning, Uncle Gid.”

  “Then let’s play a round of golf this afternoon.”

  With obvious relief, Kosta said, “I’ll get my clubs.”

  Gid thoughtfully watched his protege stride lithely across the patio toward his suite. So tough, so strong-but in many ways still so naive. Was his Kosta naive enough to be getting ambitious? Or was he maybe skimming, starting to panic and trying to cover it up with a little flurry of killings that would suggest a Mafia power struggle was brewing?

  Or was Kosta right about Mr. Prince being behind the killings? The trouble was that Gideon didn’t know enough about what was going on; so he would just stay here in Death Valley for a few days, tell jokes, play golf, until things got resolved. Gid was the ultimate survivor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Dante watched them tee up, then set out to explore a little of Death Valley. He wouldn’t have been there except that in collecting data on Kosta Gounaris he’d found out about the single-engine Mooney 250 turbo Gounaris had bought for over a quarter million cash in Los Angeles two years before.

  The Mooney was tied down at Marin Ranch Airport, a private airfield off Smith Ranch Road just north of San Rafael. Dante had spent a couple of hours poking around the little field with its tin-sided hangars and tiny office. With a twenty-dollar bill he’d recruited the skinny, engaging youth who pumped aviation gas into the planes. At seventeen, he had braces still on his teeth and was a chain-smoker. He had told Dante that Gounaris wanted his plane serviced and checked out thoroughly because he was planning to fly down to Death Valley midweek.

  Dante went to Zabriskie Point. It was only four miles down Highway 190 from the inn, and he’d loved the music in the movie of the same name. He turned right into the parking lot, climbed the short trail to the overlook. It was breathtaking. Soft layers of what looked like mud hills rather than rock stretched in every direction. Below the low wall of the overlook the bare tan dusty earth was crisscrossed with trails. Youthfully energetic hikers of all ages panted their way up them, dwarfed by distance.

  A slight sun-blacked man in his seventies, dressed in baggy red shorts and leather sandals and whose black T-shirt read GRATEFUL DEAD-WORLD TOUR came panting up the path leading to the overlook. He stopped to wipe his face with a red bandana and grinned at Dante. His skull showed beneath his leathery lizard’s skin like the Dead’s logo skull on his T-shirt.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Breathtaking-if I knew what I was seeing.”

  “You’re seeing ancient lakebeds that have been upended and eroded into sandhills.” He flung out a long skinny arm. “Those yellows and tans and browns are mostly from iron minerals that have been weathered by exposure to the air.” He pivoted to jab a forefinger to their left, where the softly serrated hills ranged from gray-green to dark gray. “Those, the color comes from volcanic ash and ancient lava flows sometime between 9 and 3 million years ago.”

  “You seem to have spent a lot of time here.”

  “My favorite spot in the world. I’m a retired geologist. In Death Valley Mother Nature lifts her skirts and shows you everything she’s got.”

  The little sun-dried raisin of a man headed down for the parking lot; Dante followed shortly. On his way back to the inn, he was surprised to see the old geologist walking along the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop. He stopped and opened a door.

  “Hop in. It’s too hot out here to walk.”

  The man slid gratefully into the car. “You’re right, it’s that afternoon sun. I parked at the foot of Golden Canyon, hiked up past Manley Beacon to the Point. Only about a mile and a half but mostly uphill. I do it every year. I tell myself that when I can’t make it any more, I’ll quit coming to the Valley.” He stuck out a hand. “Charles Thornton. Everybody calls me Chuck.”

  They shook. “Dante Stagnaro. Tell me, what’s the best thing to see if you’ve maybe only got one day?”

  “The sand dunes, just before dusk. I’ll show you.”

  The vast sloping floor of the valley was smudged with cloud shadow. Harsh dark mountains rimmed it to the west, stretching up a mile or more into the stunning blue sky and reaching great hands of denser shadow out across the sunken valley floor.

  “The Panamints,” said Chuck. “Death Valley isn’t the result of erosion, it’s what geologists call ‘basin and range’ huckcountry. The same forces that cause the California earthquakes are pushing the Black Mountains higher in the air and tilting the Panamint Range higher up on its side.”

  “Dropping Death Valley down lower and lower in between?”

  “Admirably put. Less than two inches of rain a year, evaporation a hundred times that, mean summer temperature readings the highest on earth. It’s a true desert. Lowest point in the United States is Badwater, south down the valley a ways-two hundred eighty feet below sea level. Dante’s View, straight above Badwater, is more than a mile above sea level.”

  “Dante’s View because you’re looking down
into hell?”

  Chuck grinned at him. “A minority opinion, I assure you.”

  They drove twenty miles north through the clear late afternoon light, with Chuck pointing out things they were passing.

  “Gravel road to the left leads to the Harmony Borax Works. That’s where the twenty-mule teams left from-eighteen mules and two horses, actually. Round trip to Mojave and the railhead was three hundred miles and took three weeks. The teams pulled two wagons and a water tank, total weight close to forty tons.”

  The road led across the lower slopes of alluvial fans spreading out from valleys in the Funeral Mountains to the east. The fans were dotted with desert holly, creosote bushes spaced out by massive ground-surface root systems stretching forty feet in every direction, and turtleback-great spreading bushes that looked much like their namesakes.

  At Sand Dune Junction they went north. Here the Cottonwood and Grapevine mountains forced the winds to switch direction, swirl and slow enough to drop the load of sand they were carrying from their sweep across the valley floor.

  “Hence, the Sand Dunes,” exclaimed Chuck. “Fourteen square miles of moving, billowing sand that look like ocean waves-but aren’t going anywhere. Oh, they shift around constantly, but because the winds turn on themselves here, the dunes never move far before getting pushed back.”

  Dante passed a little turnout to the right after Sand Dune Junction, blacktopped and with a single chemical toilet standing in lonely splendor. At Chuck’s direction, a hundred yards further he turned left on a narrow dirt track toward the yellow-white amazement of the sand sea.

  “Takes us to the original stovepipe well,” Chuck said as they bounced along the sandy track pursued by their own dust cloud. “It was an important water hole on the old cross-valley trail in the days of the mining towns of Rhyolite and Skidoo, so they set up a way station. Long gone now. Park here.”

  Dante pulled up and stopped. Their dust overtook them, gritting between their teeth and in the corners of their eyes. Theirs was the only car in the little parking area. They got out, stretched, started across the level sandy desert floor toward the great sloping dunes that rose up suddenly ahead of them. Chuck stopped at a rusted capped-off pipe.