Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  Dante laid down five bucks and went into the lecture hall, checking the possibilities for ambush with a professionally careless glance. Behind a lectern and a stand-up mike was a slide-projector screen on a round raised box. Off to the side was a video camera to record the lecture. Several feet behind the lectern and screen, curtains. The wall on the right was a plasterboard partition with a couple of bright watercolors on it; the other three were brick, the windows in the left one recessed and covered with drawn drapes.

  Rows of folding chairs in the body of the hall were filling up. In the rear were tables for hawking books, brochures, Institute T-shirts, calendars and the like.

  The audience was students and adults ranging from the mid-twenties to old white heads, wearing suits, dresses, sweatshirts and jeans. Dante knew the type from other lectures; most of them were vocal, well spoken, self-possessed. A university crowd, very unlike the students at his community college over twenty years before.

  Rosie said he had a better mind than any of them, but Dante always felt inferior in such gatherings. A sham. As if he had come in with a hick grin and mud on his shoes, tugging at a shoulder strap of his Can’t-Bust-Ems.

  Anyway, danger points: the curtains behind the lectern; the recessed windows. He casually wandered around behind the lectern. No exit. Raptor would never risk boxing himself into such a dead end. And the window drapes were pulled back.

  A shot from outside through the glass? No. Raptor had never endangered innocent bystanders; in that he adhered to the largely abandoned values and traditions of the Mafia when they only killed each other. But Dante was sure that his code could not exempt the dead Moll’s living husband. Dalton just had to be Raptor’s prime-indeed, final-target. Nothing else made sense. And if he was wrong?

  Then Tim Flanagan would get a few more belly laughs. Tim had the belly for it.

  The windows would be safe enough unless someone closed the drapes so Raptor could slip behind them. Checking them, he caught his own fleeting reflection in one of the panes. Early forties, medium height, an athlete’s body under slacks and jacket, narrow jaw, high cheekbones, black hair generously shot with silver, brown eyes under heavy brows.

  He turned away; Dalton had come in with a knot of other scientists; they had paused near the tables.

  Dalton hadn’t changed much during the fifteen months he’d been gone-five-eleven, 180, brown eyes, brown hair, still something of the real West about him, very tanned and fit, the brown hair shorter than when he’d left, almost brush-cut, the brown face leaner, harder than before, more closed.

  Dante’s grasp on a forearm cut him out of his confreres. He came along with a wry shrug back at them.

  “Good evening, Lieutenant.”

  “Welcome back, Professor. But tell the truth, I don’t like seeing you here in the target area. I spent half the day trying to reach you at home or here at the Institute to tell you not to give this lecture tonight.”

  Dalton grinned; it momentarily wiped the sadness from his eyes. “Why do you think I was dodging you all day?” His face changed; a bitter irony replaced the pleasure in his eyes. “I’ve been gone for fifteen months. If you haven’t been able to find Moll’s killer in all that time, what makes you think he’s going to show up here tonight?”

  “To take you off.”

  “And why would he want to do that, Lieutenant?”

  “You tell me.”

  He shook his head. “Always the same tune with you, isn’t it? I take it Gounaris is still out of jail.”

  “As of this afternoon, yes,” said Dante stiffly. He wasn’t going to go into his own history with Gounaris. “In California they don’t jail you for sleeping with another man’s wife. And Gounaris isn’t the point here. I know damned well that you lied to me about not knowing any reason for your wife’s murder, and that you changed your plans and went away so abruptly because you were afraid you’d be killed too if you didn’t leave the country.”

  Will gave a wry bark of laughter. “I see. I was a coward who fled with no thought of helping get my wife’s murderer-”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  Will took a deep breath, sighed. “Moll’s still dead, whatever we say here. I’m not comfortable with you in this gathering, Lieutenant, but I can’t make you leave. So…”

  He started to turn away; Dante thought, What the hell, go for the throat. “You could say that Moll’s dead because you left her alone here for long periods of time, so she…”

  Will tensed as if to swing at him, but a long-faced man with laugh lines but a worried expression tapped the mike.

  “Hel… Hello? Yes. It gives me great pleasure to start our spring lecture series in January this year.” He chuckled at his own wit. With his black fanny pack over his belly, he looked about as much like a scientist as Dante’s teenage son did. “Will Dalton is no stranger to this Institute, having spoken to us at various times on his work with the great apes in Rwanda-Burundi, the eastern Congo, and northern Sumatra. Before Dr. Dalton’s talk, I would like to briefly outline the Institute’s aims and accomplishments for the many new faces I see in the audience tonight.”

  Dante grabbed Will’s arm with sudden urgency.

  “Goddammit, if you’re going to make a target of yourself, before you go up there at least tell me what your wife left with you that…”

  The look on Dalton’s face stopped him. The deep-set brown eyes were deeper than they had been, as if used to looking through things to truths they had been unable to see before.

  “After I buried Moll I just felt damned fortunate to have a funded foreign research field project already set up to give me two years of rough, exacting, solitary work away from the memories here. Now here you are, stirring them all up again.”

  The damned man always had been able to put Dante on the defensive. All those years in university, perhaps, all those graduate degrees, as opposed to Dante’s two years of community college before he had quit to go to Vietnam? Or maybe just the fact that Dante was used to dealing with mob types who, although now often college men, still showed brass beneath the veneer.

  Dalton had changed his stance again. “I don’t really care what happens to me, Lieutenant, so maybe I’m not being fair to you. Stay for the lecture-we can chat afterwards. Who knows-maybe you’ll even find my talk instructive.”

  He went up past the windows as Dante slid back behind the sales tables, where he could watch both doors and see everything going on between him and the speaker. He couldn’t even give himself the luxury of a folding chair as he suffered through a lecture on some scientific subject in which he had no interest and probably wouldn’t understand.

  The man with the fanny pack was still at it.

  “Dr. Dalton has just spent fifteen months observing the forest chimpanzee of western Uganda, and tonight we will hear the first report of his findings. Dr. Dalton began his career…”

  At the front of the room a short well-fed man with gold-rimmed glasses and a black ponytail down the back of his neck leaped to his feet. Dante went into a half-crouch, his right hand sweeping toward the gun on his belt. He checked himself, glanced about, embarrassed. Hardly the stone killer Raptor. A member of the Institute about to videotape Dalton’s speech.

  Dante made himself slouch back against the wall, eyes busy and a hand near his gun in case Raptor might want to take Dalton out right now, before he had a chance to pass anything on. The hitman’s physical presence was almost palpable, but Dante was here first, ready…

  So why did he still feel he was just another bit player in Raptor’s latest scenario?

  Take Dalton out. As Raptor had taken out Dalton’s wife. One thing Dante was damned sure of, if someone killed Rosie he wouldn’t run off to Africa for fifteen months. But that was unfair. He was a cop, with a cop’s training and experience, a cop’s familiarity with guns and violence, a cop’s Old Testament eye for eye, tooth for tooth idea of justice.

  While in uniform he’d killed an armed robber in a 7-Eleven holdup; fifte
en years later he still lost sleep over his memory of the man’s face as the arterial blood pumped out on the dirty floor. That killing was why he had jumped at the chance to head up the Organized Crime Task Force ten years later.

  Yet he knew he would kill again in the same circumstances.

  And if it was Rosie who was at risk, or worse, Rosie who had been slaughtered as Moll Dalton had been slaughtered…

  Unbidden, Dante Stagnaro’s mind returned to that first night, fifteen months earlier, when his involvement with Moll Dalton’s murder had begun.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At night, Clown Alley at Lombard and Divisadero had the lonely, small-town, just-passing-through look of the all-night cafe in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Even the counterman looked as if Hopper had started to sketch him, then said to hell with it: unmoving in his stained white apron in front of his blackened and smoking grill, his arms folded, his cigarette lisping motionless smoke as he waited to flip a burger, his face unfinished, the features somehow merely suggested.

  Hopper could have done plenty with the only other patrons in the place, a pair of easy riders in stomp boots and black leather cut off to show arms made tree trunks by endless hours of pumping iron in some jailhouse yard. Their Harley hogs, agleam with chrome, were illegally parked at the curb outside.

  The two cops sat down and studied the menus brought by the dark slim intense waiter. Flanagan suddenly guffawed loudly.

  “Hey, check out your horoscope. You’re a Christmas baby, ain’t you?” Before Dante could answer, he started reading. “‘Capricorn. You are conservative and afraid of taking risks. You don’t do much of anything. There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. Capricorns should avoid standing still too long as they tend to take root and become trees.’”

  Flanagan roared with laughter again, but Dante was checking the back of his own menu.

  “‘Scorpio,’” he read. “‘You are the artistic type and have a difficult time with reality. If you are a man you are most likely queer. Chances for employment and monetary gains are excellent.’” He looked at Flanagan over the menu. “Wait ’til Internal Affairs hears about that.” He looked down again. “‘Most Scorpio women are prostitutes. All Scorpios die of venereal disease.’” He nodded solemnly. “And wait until Maureen hears about that.”

  “Up yours, chief,” said Flanagan as the waiter returned.

  “Just coffee for me.” Dante sighed and jerked a thumb at the pay phone and said to Flanagan, “I’ve put it off too long, I’ve got to call her father in L.A.”

  “I always have one of the detectives do that for me.”

  “That’s why I make the big bucks, Tim,” Dante said sadly as Flanagan burst out with his big braying laugh once again.

  Skeffington St. John (“Pronounce that Sinjin”) was on the phone with talent agent Charriti HHope when Dante’s call came in. Sinjin put Charriti on hold; after all, his business with her and her clients was long-standing and not in the strictest sense business. On the other line was someone who identified himself as a Dante Stagnaro of the San Francisco Police Department.

  “Mr. St. John, I have some rather-”

  “Please. It’s ‘Sinjin.’ The British pronunciation.”

  A pause. “I see. Your daughter Margaret Dalton…”

  “We prefer Molly Sinjin, Officer.”

  Another pause. “Yeah. Well, your daughter, Molly Sinjin…”

  “How’d St. John take it?” asked Flanagan when Dante got back to their table. He had a huge cheeseburger and fries in front of him, with a side of rings and a green salad. At this time of night all Dante could stomach was black coffee and a couple of Turns.

  “It’s ‘Sinjin’-British, you know.”

  “Yeah?” Flanagan nodded wisely. “An asshole.”

  Dante sighed, trying to wash St. John’s unexpected sobs from his mind with the thought, It’s just a game, pieces on a board. But he knew it was starting again, that intense involvement with a case that robbed his sleep and soured his gut.

  Flanagan bit hugely, wiped away beef juice with a paper napkin, gestured with the ruins of his burger.

  “Sorry I called you in on this one, chief. It’s the fucking husband did it.” Flanagan shook salt on his onion rings, belched, amended, “Had it done, anyway.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “He was too broke up.”

  “He explained that, Tim. He got held up on the Bay Bridge or he would have been there before the hitman. He was feeling guilty because-”

  “Because he wasn’t there to take one up the snout himself?”

  “I checked with the bridge cops. A four-car pileup closed down all westbound lanes just about the time Dalton said-”

  “See? You were bothered by him, too.”

  Dante nodded abstractedly, sipped his coffee. He should have asked for decaf. He’d be up half the night.

  “There was something with him… maybe what you say, too upset… or maybe he was holding something back.”

  “Yeah, like who he hired to do the dirty deed.”

  Dante took out his notebook and checked it, even though he needed no refreshment as to what was written there.

  “Just take a look at it for a minute, Tim. He’s a professor at Cal-Berkeley in paleoanthropology. His wife is-was-corporate counsel for some big entertainment conglomerate. No kids, he does a lot of field world out of the country…”

  Flanagan looked up from his meal. “Yeah. So?”

  “So where does this guy find a professional hitman?”

  “Some of them perfessers might surprise you. Hell, he just cruises the Tenderloin bars, waves a few C-notes around-”

  “And gets mugged and wakes up in an alley with a headache and no C-notes.” Dante shook his head again, decisively this time. “No way, Tim.”

  “So you’re buying it as big-time all the way.”

  “All the way.” Dante marked off his points on his fingers. “One. The hitman walked into the place knowing she’d be there and what she looked like. Two. He used a Jennings J-22 that you can buy anywhere for seventy-five bucks but, amazingly enough, is still a hell of a reliable pistol. Even so, you have to be sure of yourself to know you can make a clean kill with a. 22. Three-”

  “He shot her in the back of the head to make sure.”

  “I’ll get back to that in a minute, I’ve got a theory.” He paused, eyes almost dreamy. “You know it was Hymie Weiss back in 1922, working for the Dion O’Banion mob out of Chicago, who invented taking a guy for a ride? Invented the shot in the back of the neck with a. 22 to finish him off, too.”

  Tim stuffed in french fries. “Yeah? Fucking fascinating.”

  “Anyway, three. He leaves the gun behind, serial numbers intact, which means he knows it’s clean, can’t be traced beyond some gun shop robbery. Four. Only two rounds in the gun-confident he isn’t going to need more than two. Five. The gun had been sprayed with Armor All, even though the witnesses say he was wearing gloves. You’ve got to admit that’s a pro’s touch.”

  “Or a Hell’s Angel’s.”

  “They’re not pros?”

  Dante finished his coffee as Flanagan dabbed the last of his fries in his ketchup. Dante started over with his little finger again.

  “Six. No elaborate disguise, just tinted glasses that hide his eyes and make a lineup identification virtually impossible. Seven. He walked out of the place. No running, no guilty looks over the shoulder. Delivering the mail. Pro hit all the way.” He leaned closer. “I’ll even tell you who he was.”

  “A beer on league bowling night you don’t. But I gotta admit you could almost convince me the guy was pro. Except…”

  “Except?”

  “Pro hitters using guns do the old H and H-the head and the heart. But these days, most of ’em like to work close-a knife is so much more personal. Or they use ropes, garrotes, explosives… But this guy-”

  “That’s why I know who he is. You ever hear of ‘Popgun’ Eddie Ucelli?”

  F
lanagan thought. “Back east, right? Jersey, like that?”

  It was things like that made Dante like and respect Tim Flanagan, and work with him whenever he could. He nodded.

  “He runs a legit meat wholesale business-as legit as anything a wise guy owns is ever legit. But the story is there’s sections of the Jersey Turnpike didn’t need any rebar-the bones of Eddie’s victims were enough to reinforce the concrete.”

  “What makes this one Ucelli’s work?”

  “The Jennings J-22-it’s a trademark of his, since the Colt Woodsman became a collector’s item, it’s why they call him Popgun. Other trademarks: One up the nose into the brain. Lightly tinted glasses. Armor All on the gun because he knew he would be leaving it. Walking out afterwards. I bet he gave his topcoat to the first guy he saw-Eddie always does. And he prides himself on never needing more than one shot to complete his contract.”

  “This guy used two,” Flanagan pointed out again.

  “That’s where my theory comes in. I think he was supposed to take out the wife and Dalton. Dalton wasn’t there so he used the second shot as a coup de grace on the wife only to empty the gun, because he didn’t want some hero picking it up while he was on his way out the door and shooting him in the back with it.”

  Flanagan drained his coffee, was silent for a long moment.

  “That’s a pretty flaky theory you got there, chief.”

  “But mine own.”

  “You got that right,” said Tim with his big laugh.

  The bikers turned and looked at him, hopeful of an excuse to use their stomp boots, but saw cop in the bleak looks both men returned to them and hastily went back to their fries.

  Flanagan got serious again. “Somehow, Dante, it just don’t scan. Same question you asked me a few minutes ago about her husband-where does the woman tie up with the wise guys?”

  “She was a lawyer, what more do you need?”

  “Yeah, what’s the difference between a spermatozoa and a lawyer?” Dante shook his head. “The spermatozoa has a one-in-400-million chance of becoming a human being.”