Menaced Assassin

by Joe Gores

  Tim guffawed loudly at his own joke, wiped his mouth with a fistful of napkins, and squealed his chair back.

  “Okay, you go start drawing another one of your fucking flowcharts on your blackboard in the task force office, and I’ll track the husband and wife back to when they were wearing didies. Then maybe, a day or two depending what I find, we’ll go toss hubby around a little, see what falls out. Somehow I still favor him for it.” He gave another of his guffaws. “Either he was protesting too much, which means he hired it done and I don’t like him, or he meant all that pissing and moaning-which means he’s a sissy and I don’t like him.”

  “So either way you don’t like him.”

  “You think?” asked Flanagan in a mock-surprised voice.

  Will had bought the old boxy two-story Victorian in the Berkeley flats at a bargain price after one of the periodic riots that bubble up to keep the area so volatile and alive. He spent little time there anyway, what with Moll so much at her penthouse in the city (down payment by her father), and his frequent field trips, and most of his research material being at his office. But here he was, staring out the living room window at the drizzly autumn afternoon.

  Moll’s penthouse in the city.

  Oh God, if only he hadn’t gone there that day. Or had called her from the airport. Or, once there, had thrown that bastard Gounaris out and talked it through with Moll, shouted it through, screamed it through, anything to get through it with her and out the other side.

  Because adulteress, alive, dead, she was the only woman he’d ever love. Like a swan, he’d mated for life. And he knew she’d loved him too. Loved him, needed him-nobody could fake that kind of emotion… Yet she’d slept with Gounaris.

  He felt a rage inside himself, felt it froth over even as he snuffled and realized his face was wet with tears.

  Outside, the cold wind blew three female coeds down the gleaming street like autumn leaves. The phone started to ring. The women’s laughter tinkled distantly like icicles on fir boughs. There was a rattle and thunk at the front door as the mailman slid that day’s delivery through the slot. Will made no move to get it or the ringing phone.

  He fought his anger. Gounaris was the one to blame for Moll’s infidelity, not Moll. She had always been ambitious in her career, he’d cut her out of the herd, focused all that power on her, made her feel important, unique, seduced her…

  Hell, Will was as guilty of her death as Gounaris was. If he’d insisted on going over to the city as soon as she’d called him… or allowed enough time coming across the Bay so he wouldn’t have gotten held up on the bridge… Then that crazy guy with the gun would have had to find some other single woman to obsess on, and Moll would still be…

  How in God’s name would he get through the funeral two days hence? Just three days ago Moll had been alive, vital…

  The phone quit ringing. And he was sniveling again, for Godsake. He hadn’t done that since he was five years old.

  Will Dalton wasn’t answering his phone at home, but the people at the Institute said that’s where he’d probably go when he’d finished with the funeral arrangements, so they drew an unmarked sedan from the police pool. Flanagan turned left into one-way Harriett Alley from the garage under the Hall of Justice, made another left into Harrison, both men trying to talk at once.

  “Ucelli was off somewhere on a-”

  “Your fucking Professor Dalton-”

  Flanagan made yet another left, into Eighth, stayed in the left lane for the final ring-around-the-rosie left into Bryant and the on-ramp for the Skyway. Once on their way to the Bay Bridge, he gave his big laugh and made a courtly hand gesture.

  “Okay, you first, mon capitaine. Whatever you got is gonna look like shit when I get through talking.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” said Dante. “I checked with the Feebs-they’ve had a tap on Ucelli’s phone since Christ made corporal. They never get anything, but at least they know he was out of town for four days and just got back this morning. You have to admit, Tim, being gone like that spanning the time of the hit makes him look awful good for it.”

  “’Cause he went fishing or something? Hell, if he was burying guys in the Jersey Turnpike, he must be old as water.”

  “Made his bones with a barbershop hit in ’52,” said Dante with something like pride of race in his voice.

  Flanagan hit the horn at a slow car in the fast lane on the bridge’s lower deck, then passed him on the inside. He always drove as if responding to a silent alarm; Dante was used to it.

  “Fifty-two, huh? Over forty fucking years ago!”

  “It was his sixteenth birthday.”

  “So he’s pushing fucking sixty now. The old hand-eye coordination’s gotta be going-”

  “According to the feds, the mob uses him for jobs where they need someone with the balls to do it up close and right the first time. You don’t need an Olympic marksman for that.”

  They came out from under the top deck to the broad apron, nearly a quarter of a mile wide, where the tollbooths for traffic going the other direction were located. Water hit the windshield. Flanagan turned on the wipers, turned up his hand.

  “Don’t scan, Dante. You know the Mafia don’t do shit around here, it isn’t like Vegas or L.A. So what the hell would the woman know they’d need to kill her over? Atlas Entertainment sure as hell isn’t Mafia, it’s big Eurobucks. I got their brochures, financial statement, prospectus-not a sniff of mob. European money from Luxembourg or somewhere. I had a good reason to make a pain of myself, her murder and all, so I talked with the secretaries, the peons-finally went up against the big boss himself.”

  “Kosta Gounaris,” said Dante. “Former Greek shipping tycoon. Sold his shipping line four years ago. Kids grown, Greek wife he divorced when he sold his company. Gives a lot to charity, he’s in the papers a lot.”

  Flanagan was in a left lane so he could angle into the northbound traffic on I-80. They were a half hour before the main body of the rush hour started; the drivers sending up sheets of water ahead of them were mostly timid souls who treated the posted speed limits as hard fact instead of fiction.

  “Okay, lemme tell you what I found out. Past few years, Moll Dalton’s been sleeping with half the power brokers in San Francisco.”

  “You sure?” asked Dante, surprised. “The way Dalton-”

  “Way I see it, Academy Award all the way. None of the secretaries at Atlas liked her, she was just too fucking bright and too fucking beautiful, and her boss had been dicking her for three months.”

  “Gounaris himself?”

  “He didn’t want to talk to me at first, so I got a little nasty…”

  He wiggled his eyebrows, and Dante burst out laughing. He had seen Tim in action, many a time, and nasty was too kind a word for what he did. Tim swelled up and got as red in the face as a turkey wattle, his voice became a bullhorn. But what turned men’s guts to water was that he looked like a very big and extremely stupid man dangerously out of control.

  “What’d he say after he changed his underpants?”

  “Not this guy, Dante.” He was getting into the right lane for the Ashby Avenue turnoff. “He talked to me only because he knew he’d have to talk with someone sooner or later. Said, and I’m sorta quoting now, we’re all going to miss her terribly here at Atlas Entertainment. She was a very special person, an indispensable attorney, and a wildly inventive lover.”

  “Just like that, huh?” asked Dante, feeling a sudden deep antipathy toward Kosta Gounaris. Even if the dead woman had been just a sexual convenience, he had held her in his arms and entered her body and now she was dead in an ugly, violent way.

  “Just like that-I got the rest of it from the typing pool. Seems Dalton came home unexpectedly from Borneo, Sumatra, like that, he’s studying those fucking apes. Anyway, he catches Gounaris and his wife playing hide-the-salami in her penthouse.”

  “Somebody was watching through the keyhole?”

  “It gets better. She’s sucking Kosta�
��s knob, and she finishes him up and then says to hubby, ‘Welcome home, dear.’”

  Dante turned very quickly on the seat to look at him. They were stopped for the light at Adeline, and Flanagan was waiting for the look, grinning slyly at him.

  “Yeah,” said Flanagan. “Gounaris told it as a funny story in the locker room. One cold fuck. Here’s Molly Dalton crazy in love with this guy who don’t give a shit about her, here’s Dalton crazy in love with his wife who don’t give shit about him — and he walks in on them.”

  “So he stews about it for a month-”

  “You got it, chief. Then goes out and buys himself a shooter and gets stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge.”

  “Only one thing bothers me about your neat little package, Tim. Why didn’t he take out Gounaris instead of his wife?”

  “Sure he’d be pissed at Gounaris, but Christ, Dante, she’s the one who betrayed him.”

  “I don’t buy it. I think he was too much in love with her to kill her, no matter what she’d done to him. He’s a guy who digs up old bones, for Chrissake! A guy who watches chimps in the jungle. That’s patient, contemplative work. That sort of man doesn’t lose his head and go crazy with a. 22 pistol.”

  “No, he hires himself a hitter to go crazy for him.”

  Dante shook his head stubbornly. “Pro hit and Popgun Ucelli was out of town. I just don’t think Will Dalton is our man.”

  “Let’s find out,” said Flanagan, braking in front of the old brown two-story Victorian. “His 4Runner’s in the drive.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was a beautiful April Sunday with towering cumulus clipper ships unusual for California. He and Moll had gotten a couple of beers and two poor boys and some potato chips and gone from the campus up to Tilden Park behind Kensington for a picnic. They’d hidden their bikes under some greasewood and climbed up a fire trail to the green brushy crest where they could spread out their blankets and see for miles across the Bay to the gleaming towers of the city.

  Even then, Will had worshipped her, adored her, she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, like some exotic wood duck or Chinese pheasant, too glorious to be real.

  But when she had come into his arms, she had been stunningly real, the most real woman he’d ever known. He didn’t hold hard, physical details of their first mating in his memory, just fragments of an almost unbearable poignancy. The apple-sweetness of a nipple between his lips, the vulnerability of a white flank as her panties came off, the heart-stopping moment when he entered her, he, Will Dalton, actually inside her, her, Molly St. John, the woman he would love and cherish for all…

  Knuckles on the door thudded him to earth like a wing-shot mallard. They kept on. He opened it red-eyed and stone-faced, teetering on the edge of hatred for these men who had dropped him from the sky to the bitter reality of Molly gone, Molly dead.

  “No,” he said, and started to shut the door.

  A foot was in it. The men were holding up leather cases with gleaming shields. Recognition dawned.

  “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t…” He stepped back, nodding to the bulky one. “Inspector… Flanagan, isn’t it? And-”

  “Lieutenant Stagnaro,” said the lean-faced taut-bodied one, vaguely remembered. A hunter, this one. Good. Moll’s murderer needed to be found, punished, even if it would never…

  Will stepped aside so they could come in. “You have news?”

  “News?” asked Flanagan in a surprised voice. “Yeah, you might say we got news.” He half turned to look back at his companion as they went through the archway into the living room. “Right, Dante, might say we got news?”

  “And a few questions,” said Stagnaro in a tired voice.

  Will, who had paused to pick up the mail in the hallway, tossed it on the coffee table and sat down, suddenly wary through his grief. He was a keen observer not only of action but of nuance; any student of primate behavior in the wild had to be. For some unfathomable reason, these men were not his friends.

  “I can make some coffee if-”

  “This ain’t exactly a social occasion, Perfesser.”

  Flanagan, pretending a stupidity not really his own. The other, Stagnaro, could never make even the pretense. Too much lively wit and intelligence in those deceptively soft brown eyes. Rage, love, hatred, sorrow, joy, delight-but never stupidity.

  “Then what sort of occasion is it?” Will asked with deliberate coldness. Steady. Hang on. Don’t give them any satisfaction. “My wife is dead, if you have no news about her murderer then why are you intruding on my grief two days before I… have to bury her…”

  “Intruding on your grief? Hey, that’s very classy, isn’t it, Dante?” Flanagan’s mouth hung open ever so slightly after he had spoken, a look of remarkable stupidity. “I got a question maybe relates to her death, like. What’d you feel like when you walked in on Moll givin’ Kosta’s dick the old mouth massage?”

  Will realized he was on his stomach on the floor with his arms pulled painfully up into the small of his back and a man’s knee keeping them there. Flanagan was sitting slack-legged under the window holding a red-splotched handkerchief to his nose. Will must have knocked him right off the couch.

  “You have to admit you asked for that one, Tim,” Stagnaro said from Will’s back. Will raised his face off the dusty rug.

  “I’m all right now. You can let me up.”

  After a moment, the weight went away from his back. He got quickly to his feet, in case the fat cop wanted some more. But Flanagan now was standing by the window with his back half-turned, gently dabbing at his swollen nose.

  “The bathroom is down the hall on the left.”

  Flanagan looked grumpy but not terribly vengeful. His nose was red and puffy. He nodded and shambled off down the hall.

  Stagnaro sat down, took out a notebook and ballpoint.

  Will said, still sore, “What the hell was that all about?”

  “He was looking for a reaction.” Stagnaro chuckled. “He got one.” He leaned forward, serious now, his elbows on the chair arms, his hands resting on the notebook in his lap. “I’m head of the SFPD Organized Crime Task Force-three guys working out of a cramped little office in the Hall of Justice. Any sort of organized crime, that’s our meat.”

  “Organized crime? I don’t understand.” His bewilderment was real or he was damned good. “Some madman shot Moll-”

  “A madman who coolly walks into a crowded restaurant and does his business with a. 22 target pistol that’s been sprayed with Armor All? A madman who then leaves the gun empty on the bar, warns people about seeing anything, then walks out?”

  “Armor All?”

  “Stuff they put on car finishes to seal-”

  An impatient gesture. “Why put it on a gun?”

  “The Hell’s Angels started using it in the sixties when they knew they had to leave the gun behind at a hit. Armor All prevents the metal from picking up the shooter’s body oil from his fingers. No oil, no fingerprints. Nowadays most pros who still use guns spray them before even handling them, even if they will be wearing gloves. Just a bit of added insurance. Your average crazy isn’t going to know that, or go to that much trouble even if he does know it.”

  Will wasted no more time on needless objections. Sketched out that way by a man concerned with organized crime-did that include the mob, the Mafia, whatever they called it? Anyway, it made the point. It was just that the point made no sense at all.

  “There’s very little Mafia activity in the Bay Area,” Stagnant was saying. “But I know of a meat wholesaler back east in New Jersey who moonlights as a hitman and fits the… parameters of the case. Eddie Ucelli-they call him Popgun. Only Ucelli never used more than one bullet for a hit, and this killer had two. Now, why do you think that might be?”

  “I never heard of anyone named Ucelli, Lieutenant.”

  He seemed to say it rather sadly, as if even this slight connection would be better than the bewilderment his wife’s death must be to him right now. If he wa
sn’t faking it, of course.

  “Even so, I need whatever your wife said to you before…”

  “She told me she wanted to see me and we made a date for the next night. We hadn’t spoken for a month, not since…” He made a vague gesture in the direction Flanagan had gone.

  “So no reason at all for the man to want to kill you too?”

  “ Me? Why in God’s name would anyone want to-”

  “Why your wife?” To Will’s bewildered silence, he added, “Two bullets in the gun-if it was Ucelli, of course, or some other pro using his M.O. One for your wife, one-”

  “No hard feelings, Perfesser?”

  Flanagan’s nose was red and swollen, but it had stopped bleeding and obviously wasn’t broken.

  “Not on my part.”

  Will asked, in a voice so low he could barely be heard, “How did you… learn of it?”

  “Gounaris.”

  “In that sort of detail?”

  Flanagan cleared his throat again and sat back down.

  “It, uh, seems to be common knowledge at Atlas.”

  The men were silent for perhaps as long as a minute. Dante couldn’t remember when he had seen such a bleak look on any man’s face, no matter how devastating a loss he might have suffered.

  Will sighed. “So you thought that because I’d… found Moll with him, I’d brooded and finally had hired someone to-”

  “We have to check out every possibility,” said Dante soothingly. “It’s just routine, Dr. Dalton. Nothing personal.”

  “Maybe a little personal with me.” Flanagan’s voice was thick. He touched his damaged nose. “So I’m gonna hit you with something else you ain’t gonna like, Perfesser, and I hope you don’t try to take another poke at me because if you do I’ll break your fuckin’ arm and then take you in for assaulting an officer. We clear?”

  “Clear.”

  But Will was staring at the mail he had put on the coffee table. Suddenly he wanted the policemen out of there. Moll’s unmistakable back-slanted handwriting was on that small flat padded mailer on top of the stack.

  “Okay, here we go. From the time you were first married your wife has been almost continually promiscuous.”