by Joe Gores
Red parked between a BMW and a Mercedes in the designated lot, went down the dock toward the locked gate protecting the moored yachts from vandalism, robbery, or casual rubberneckers. He was dressed in white topsiders and an aloha shirt with short sleeves that showed his massive arms. Above him gulls keened and swooped, around him bright blue water sparkled in the California sun. He breathed salt brine deeply into his nostrils.
Vegas was the vein of gold that never ran out, but Red dreamed of Mr. Prince moving his center of operations to L.A. He was sick of twenty-four-hour neon, casinos without clocks, people who never slept, the constant ringing bells and cascading coins of the jackpots, the faces, gray with shock as they hocked their watches to get back home, of the losers without jackpots.
Vegas, Death Valley, Palm Springs-maybe it was the depleted ozone and global warming and the greenhouse effect, but there seemed to be a hell of a lot more deserts around than anything else these days. Except oceans. Ah, oceans. Now you were talking! That’s why he loved the holiday season each year, he got to cruise ahead of Mr. Prince down to Baja on Tosca.
Red often thought he had the soul of a poet. Flying fish flashing across the waves in the mornings, whales blowing white spouts on the horizon. Once a whole school of orcas, the so-called killer whales, had raced Tosca for over a mile like sportive dolphins. He’d never forgotten it. He’d also killed two men, one with his. 45 and one with his bare hands, but that had been in the way of business for Mr. Prince.
He used his key on the heavy, boxlike steel lock and went through the thickly barred gate, whistling. His shoes made hollow thunks! on the boards of the dock; he was a big guy, six-six, weighed 250. Last night he’d attended a postmodernist opening at the Los Angeles Museum of Art. He’d enjoyed every minute of it, much more than he’d enjoyed the pro forma sex afterward with the pretentious blonde who’d accompanied him.
A lanky brown-haired man was hosing down the dock just beyond Tosca’s proudly curved prow. He was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and Nike Airs; his hair was cut so close to his head it looked like a boot camp Marine’s. Red was instantly alert; Mr. Prince had enemies and this guy was only a few feet from Mr. Prince’s boat and looked like he could make things happen.
When Red approached, the guy gestured at the wet planks.
“Can you believe? Some idiot left fish guts and scales all over the dock, somebody could slip and break their neck.”
Red could see the washed-away offal floating in the water below the dock. He asked, “You have a boat here on the pier?”
The guy waved a vague arm down the line of moored yachts. “I’ve been staying on a friend’s ketch, I quit my job to paint.” He stopped, frowning at Red in a quizzical way. “I know you.”
“No. I’m not from around here.” Red spoke curtly.
“The art opening last night! It’s your height. Well, just your overall size, and the red hair. You’re hard to miss even in a crowd, and the blond lady with you looked like a movie star.”
“Not a lady, not a movie star, not a real blonde.” Just for a moment, Red envied this guy: on a boat, alone, quiet hours just painting, doing art instead of blondes with I.Q.’s to match their bust size. “What’d you think of the opening?”
“Superb work, superbly mounted.” He gestured at Tosca, said wistfully, “Talk about superb… yours?”
Red chuckled. Here he was envying this guy, and the guy was envying him. What a strange world!
“I just get to ride on it. Just a hired hand.”
“Must be nice. No responsibility. Looks all ready to go.”
“Tomorrow, down to La Paz to wait for the boss.”
The lanky guy spread his arms wide. “The Jade Sea,” he said. “Three years ago, we drove down to the bay where the whales go. You can go out among them… Once in a lifetime.”
He gave a small almost sad shrug, a smile similarly sad, with a wave of his hand went away down the pier.
Red thought he’d sort of like to see some of the guy’s paintings. But, leaving tomorrow. Maybe he’ll take some art classes in Vegas after they got back. Fine art, not commercial; like the lanky guy who’d been at last night’s opening.
A week had passed since Ucelli’s death. Driving to Mae’s Place from the Newark airport, with a stop in South Orange to get a motel room right along 510, Dante Stagnaro was feeling guilty about Rosie. Here he was, on his own money and leave time he could have spent with her, poking around in the Ucelli hit, leaving the burden of Christmas preparations on her shoulders.
At least he hadn’t left his two Organized Crime Task Force inspectors in the lurch. Yesterday they’d broken a ring of Asian car boosters who had been plaguing the malls during the last-minute Christmas rush. The Asians stole Christmas presents from parked cars and returned them to the stores where they had been purchased to get cash refunds. If the store refused to refund, they kept and later fenced the goods.
A cruising Danny Banner saw two of them crowbar an auto trunk at the Stonestown mall, was behind them when they were refused cash for their plunder and went to store the stuff. He called Dante, baby-sat the drop house until Dante got there with the warrant.
When they went in, they got five of the ring, with more to come as the busted ones started to sing. A major coup for his task force, and after getting back from the raid, Dante had been up to his ears in processing paperwork until just before his mad dash to SFO for the eleven-thirty red-eye to Newark.
Now he was turning up the snow-covered drive to Mae’s Place, yawning with fatigue but driven by the same obsession that had sent him to Minneapolis after Spic Madrid had been killed. His tires spun briefly on the ice-slick surface; the coating of new snow over everything was kind to the joint, but it still looked tawdry in the bright cold December sunshine.
The local police had long ago come and gone, the feds had come and gone; none of them had found a damn thing giving them any lead to the identity of the man whom Mae’s girls had dubbed the P.W. Dante was there only on sufferance, because of a phone call to the local feds from Rudy Mattaliano, his convention-buddy federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
Mae turned out to be a blowsy overblown perfume-drenched broad with glittering fingers, glittering eyes, and a chest you could eat lunch off of. Dante was talking to her in the bar of her roadhouse, a funky ornate intimate room with red plush on the walls and lushly painted nudes of surprising quality above the bar. She was so hostile he knew it had to spring from fear; he could see it glinting in the depths of those glittering eyes.
“You know I don’t have to tell you a fucking thing, cop!”
Dante made a great display of checking around his belt. “Shit,” he said, “I left my rubber hose back in San Francisco.”
She cracked a little grin in spite of herself, jerked her head toward the back of the bar.
“I got coffee-nothin’ stronger while we’re closed down.”
Around them the roadhouse was silent as a tomb. He was sure the girls were moving around upstairs, but he couldn’t hear them. Mae, he knew, would soon reopen. Such sops to public conscience were bad for business, and she obviously had something heavy on the local power structure.
Dante made the thick black coffee blond and sweet, took a big gulp. “Why the red carpet for me all of a sudden, Mae?”
“You’re the first one didn’t look at me like I was shit on a stick.” She gave a big belly laugh that reminded him of Tim’s. “I’m insulted they didn’t try’n’ look down the front of my blouse while they were trashin’ me.”
Dante looked, bugged out his eyes. “Wow! Dolly Parton!”
Tears suddenly came into her eyes, impatiently wiped away with the back of a bejeweled hand. “Thanks, even if you’re shittin’ me. I miss the little fucker, is the thing.”
“You guys go back a ways?”
“Christ, almost forty years.”
“Then you just gotta have a few ideas who wanted him dead.” He added almost diffidently, “It ties in with a dead woman I got out in
San Francisco that I figure maybe Popgun did.”
“Listen, he was retired from all that stuff years ago! He was an old man, for Chrissake! He sold wholesale meats!”
Dante stopped her with a palm-out traffic cop hand.
“Hey, Mae, I gotta ask, he was the best in his day. I was just hoping you knew how he stood with the boys these days.”
“Hell, top of the heap! Why the night he got it…”
Mae stopped herself abruptly. Dante didn’t even try to follow up on it. He didn’t want to let her know he had caught anything significant in her stifled sentence.
“So there was no reason for them to put out a hit on him.”
“Not a fuckin’ reason in the world.”
“Somebody from years ago, getting even?” mused Dante. “Trouble with that, the guy was so damn patient. Waiting around two, three weeks-”
“Fuckin’ freak, is what he was!” she burst out bitterly. “Comin’ around with his Soo Li shit…”
“Soo Li?”
She told him about the P.W.’s coming, his strange habit of seeing if each girl was some lost love named Soo Li.
“He scared me-and now see what he’s done!”
Leaving, Dante went downstairs to find Old Mose in the basement, tending a water heater that didn’t need tending.
“Don’t want to talk to me, huh, old-timer?”
“Jus’ doin’ my job, boss,” said Mose vaguely. “Yassah, dat’s de troof, jus’ doin’ Old Mose’ job. Pow’ful lotta work.”
“Ashcan the Amos and Andy, Mose. I know you liked the guy. But he’s a bad dude, going around killing innocent people-”
“People like Popgun Ucelli?” The Stepin Fetchit was gone from Mose’s voice. “Then I say, give that man a medal!”
He had Dante there. They chatted for half an hour about the great old blues men of Mose’s youth whose 78s Dante had grown up on because his grandfather had been a “race record” fan. Pegleg Howell, the Atlanta street singer who made twenty-eight sides between ’26 and ’29; Jaybird Coleman out of Gainsville, eleven sides in about the same years; Blind Willy Johnson, thirty sides, the best bottleneck guitarist of his day…
Mose extended one of his shattered claws to shake Dante’s hand when they parted, then called after him.
“Whatever that fat woman upstairs tell you, that Popgun was still doin’ people.” The faded brown eyes suddenly blazed with joyous light. “I’d wish you luck, Mist’ Stagnaro, but that wouldn’t be the truth. P.W. done me a mighty big favor.” Mose held up his claw. “Was Popgun Ucelli did this to me, nearly thutty years ago.”
Old Mose shuffled closer.
“Thutty years, then here come that P.W., take care of that little chore for me. When they laid Popgun to rest, I be taken me to the cemetery, had me a little dance on his grave.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Dante drove back toward South Orange’s urban sprawl through the bleak, snowy landscape. What was he to make of Mae’s slip of the tongue, old Mose’s insistence that Ucelli had still been working? Had Popgun aced all of them? None of them? Some? Why was he hit? To keep him from talking about what he had done? Or to keep him from talking about what he hadn’t done?
Dante had no idea of how to get to Raptor, even less idea of how to get to who had hired Raptor, but he was starting to get a pretty good idea of why. Somebody in Martin Prince’s arm of the mob wanted to move up or was trying to keep somebody else from moving up. As Tim had surmised, Moll Dalton had known something, probably unwittingly, that had placed her in the way of that grand design. If Lenington had been used in setting up her hit, he would have been a potential danger to be eliminated.
By this scenario, the first real target had been Spic Madrid. Solidly ensconced in four northern states, ambitious, ruthless, building a power base. Had just gotten elevated to the board. Had he let his ambition show too much at the Vegas meet?
Dante stopped at a truck stop called the Highway on the outskirts of South Orange. A low flat building with gas pumps out in front, the slush-covered blacktop lot crowded with semis from all over the country, some puffing diesel fumes into the cold morning air.
Inside, Mel’s Diner come to life; counter straight ahead, booths by the windows. Full of moisture from wet overcoats and windbreakers, the smell of grease and coffee, loud voices and cigarette smoke, the linoleum floor wet with muddy bootprints.
He was ravenous, ordered eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hash browns, white toast and coffee. Real coffee. With cream and real sugar. He’d be traveling the rest of the day anyway, the caffeine would be gone by nightfall. Maybe he’d send Tim a postcard describing his breakfast.
After Madrid, Otto Kreiger. Same reason as Madrid. A man with empire-building in his head. Out there on the edge of the Organization, almost in exile in San Francisco where his mob affiliation was little more than honorary: his real income was from defending scuzzballs and making astute real estate investments. But wanting to move into the center of power?
If so, Raptor had moved first.
St. John was easy. The reason Dante himself had advanced to the degenerate attorney and had explicated to Rosie. The man was a deviate whose sexual preferences would not only be distasteful to the mob, but dangerous; Dante had been close to breaking the man himself.
The middle-aged waitress came by to pour more coffee into his cup. She had impossibly orange hair, thick ankles, wrinkles on her face, and a junior version of Mae’s formidable bosom. A trucker grabbed her butt as she went by.
“Hey, Carla, when you gonna let me into your pants?”
“What for? I already got one asshole in there.”
Dante ignored the byplay. Gideon Abramson was a tougher call. While still just as vicious as in his garment-district days, he really had retired. From the FBI reports, his ambitions had lain with the grandchildren he had doted on, his golf and bridge, his swims and dry toast in the mornings.
On the other hand, he had delighted in Byzantine intrigues, plots, counterplots. After World War II he had chosen to operate in Greece and Turkey, where profits were large but risks equally large-and slyness the way to success. And there he had befriended Kosta Gounaris-which might be the key. Abramson might have had a fatherly impulse; no ambitions for himself, perhaps, but he might have had them for Kosta.
The Ucelli hit, on the other hand, made perfect sense. He could tell the authorities, if put in a real squeeze, who he had eliminated, and for whom. Or, perhaps even more dangerous for whoever had hired him, who he hadn’t eliminated.
Leaving, in that arm of the Mafia, who? Only Martin Prince and old Enzo Garofano. Prince, a ruthless, powerful man with the kind of subtle mind that could come up with the idea of using intertwined hitmen to mask his purposes. He could very well be the man behind the Raptor name and phone calls. Could even have scripted them. Garofano, old was the operative word. Too old to take Prince down, and Prince would know it.
Finally, if Dante’s beliefs about Atlas Entertainment were correct, Gounaris. If Prince was behind the killings, did he dare stop until Gounaris was also dead? Gounaris was potentially dangerous. Eliminate him, all threats were gone.
Dante knew his reconstruction was shaky, but he still felt he’d better make some phone calls. Just in case.
He slid out of the booth, found the pay phone on the wall between the rest rooms, got out his calling card. A man in a dark blue overcoat wearing a Russian-style hat with fur earflaps folded up over the top of it came in the back door, bringing an icy blast of air with him.
By luck, Dante caught Rudy Mattaliano at his office over in Manhattan. Rudy hated the Mafia with a fervor born of obsession, it was one of the things that gave him such a good record as a prosecutor, and it was why he was always willing to help Dante out. But this time he sounded hurried and not too interested.
“Listen, Dante, I’m due in court in ten minutes, so have a good flight home and-”
“I have something for you.”
“What?” Mattaliano was instantly fo
cused.
“Ucelli was still making hits for the wise guys. If you check Mae’s phone records at the roadhouse, I think you’ll find that she was Ucelli’s cut-out. That’s why you could never get anything off the phone taps at his house and meatpacking plant. I think he got a call from somebody big the night he died-maybe Garofano or even Prince.”
“How in Christ did you get this stuff? The FBI worked Mae over pretty good and got nothing but skinned knuckles. You ever want to get a real job, let me know.”
“I wouldn’t last in the Feebs for a week. I’d tell the SAC to go to hell and that would be that.”
“Especially if he was Jack-in-the-Box,” said Mattaliano with a laugh. “Hold off a day on going back, I want to talk and I’m willing to buy you one of the best steaks in Manhattan so I can do it. Eight o’clock at Morton’s, Fifth Ave at Forty-fifth.”
Dante agreed, then called his task force office in San Francisco and told Danny to reinstitute the loose tail on Kosta Gounaris. “I think somebody might try to take him out, and that’s the guy I want.”
“So let’s grab him after he does Gounaris.”
They hashed over the loose tail a bit more, Dante got updated on the Asian carboosters, gave Danny his motel.
It was after 10:00 a.m. when Dante clawed his way up out of sleep. His eyes felt as if there were lead weights on the lids; he hadn’t gotten back to his chain motel in South Orange until three in the morning. He and Mattaliano, a stocky hard-bodied aggressive man with deep-set brown eyes and thinning curly hair and political ambitions in New York, had closed up Morton’s after Dante had eaten the best porterhouse he’d ever tasted.
Then the prosecutor had insisted they catch old-time jazz great Mal Waldron at Sweet Basil in the Village. The aged black musician had slumped at the piano as his massive hands scooped music from the keys and hurled it around the room with casual genius and indifferent abandon.
“I put my people right to work on those phone records, Dante,” Mattaliano said over the applause for Waldron’s forty-minute set. “I think they’re going to pan out. There was a whole interconnected nest of calls to her number from various pay phones in Jersey-and a couple from Vegas. We’re checking them against the dates of the list of hits you gave us…”