by Joe Gores
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Fucking Miss Pym had developed into an ever-changing mystery over the months. It was ten in the morning and right now she was on her knees, bent over the bed, arms out wide and twisting the top sheet in her passion as Kosta crouched over her from behind. When he’d exhausted every orifice she had, and all the casual cruelty at his command, she laid him back on the bed to work on him for one last serving of dessert.
Kosta wasn’t sure whether he had corrupted or been corrupted by her. He certainly had uncovered in her a hidden passion for both degradation and domination. It was as if the sixties had returned, when everybody took their sex seriously and orgasm ranked right up there with Zen archery as a topic of serious discussion. He had been struggling with his shipping line then, married to a stern Greek woman whose passion was business, so he’d missed the revolution.
Miss Pym had blasted Moll Dalton right out of his sexual consciousness, made him wish he’d never heard of Moll Dalton, made him glad Moll Dalton was no longer around. Miss Pym knew nothing of Atlas Entertainment business, but she was shrewd in her suggestions for besting his enemies.
Right now she was sprawled sideways across his thighs in utter exhaustion and abandonment, her pale hair lank with sweat.
“Champagne,” he snapped. She leaped up, he watched her bottom wobble-flex across the room. As she went through the open doorway to the hall, he yelled after her, “Hypothetical!”
“Hypothetical” was a new game between them. She kept going without response so that tomorrow he would chastise her for ignoring him. She liked to be chastised. He liked the sixties a lot, even on rerun. But he was not obsessed by Miss Pym.
Oddly enough, his new obsession centered around Dante Stagnaro. He knew it was all projection, the guy was just another fucking cop, for Chrissake; but he couldn’t shake the feeling he had to do something about the man before Stagnaro somehow got into the Atlas Entertainment books.
He couldn’t have Stagnaro taken out, Mr. Prince had spoken. So he had to diminish him as a force. As a man.
The guy’s wife. Do something to her, that would cut his nuts off, geld him. Well, ever since the random thought about screwing her had entered his mind, he hadn’t gotten it out. He doubted he’d have much trouble seducing her, he seldom did with women. But there was that fucking Stagnaro lurking around like a leopard in the bushes.
But he had a plan. That’s why he was here with Miss Pym today. To check out his plan with her. At this sort of thing, she was excellent.
She returned with two fluted glasses and an icy bottle of Cordon Rouge put in the freezer an hour before. Sitting naked and cross-legged on the bed, he stripped the foil and untwisted the wire, gripped the cork as he turned the bottle beneath it. The cork came out with a dull thunk! and no spilled champagne. He poured them each a glass. They tinked.
“All right,” she said, eyes alight. “Your hypothetical.”
“There is a business rival a man is having trouble with.”
“Personal or professional?”
“Both.” He drained his flute, refilled. She drained hers, held it out for more. “His business associates have ruled out physical recourse…”
“So, no direct attack. What does he hold dear?”
Kosta held up a hand, three fingers open, marked off the possibilities. “Job, family, wife. Job, he could be compromised, but it would be difficult. His reputation is good. Even if well done, it might not stick.”
“Family?”
A second finger was folded down. “A son at home, a daughter in her first year at Cal.”
“Berkeley can be a very dangerous place,” murmured Miss Pym, her rather horsy face serious with thought. She licked her lips. They were dry and chapped from the various uses she had been putting them to during the last two hours.
“I believe our businessman was thinking more along the lines of his rival’s wife,” said Kosta.
“You want to fuck somebody’s wife!” she burst out.
“Not me. Hypothetical. And not just fuck. Our hypothetical businessman wants to rape somebody’s wife.”
She was frowning in concentration. “One sort of man would blame the wife…”
“Not this man,” said Kosta.
She met his gaze. “But… should he and his wife get an endless series of naughty phone calls afterwards, spelling out in precise detail exactly what was done, and how…”
“Excellent, Miss Pym!” Kosta cried. He fell silent, picturing it, all of it, his gaze turned inward.
“May I watch, then?” she asked, her eyes gleaming like a wolfs by torchlight.
“All of this is hypothetical, remember?”
“I insist you describe it to me afterwards, in detail.”
“Why-since it’s hypothetical?” he asked. She smiled almost shyly, and put her hand between her own legs. “Yes, of course.” The thought of watching her while he told her about it was exciting to him.
“Will it be soon?”
“Soon.” He could have told her tonight but didn’t.
His member was stiffening at the thought of what he would do tonight. Miss Pym gave a low throaty laugh and tossed aside her champagne flute to reach greedily for Kosta’s flute.
Martin Prince was getting a massage also, but it wasn’t sexual. The masseur gently pummeling him at the Xanadu’s health club was a black ex-NFL linebacker who had blown out his knee in a divisional game against Dallas three years before.
“A little on the backs of the legs if you could, Troy.”
Troy laughed and bobbed his head. “Overdid it on the thigh-curling machine today, Mr. Prince.”
“I can’t hide anything from you, Troy.”
“What I’m here for, Mr. Prince. What I’m here for.”
Prince relaxed, let his mind drift.
Half his Family’s income was legitimate these days; companies like Atlas Entertainment gotten for money-laundering purposes had proved to be income-producers in their legitimate guise. There would be more money to launder in the new year also, with the upsurge in heroin, dust and crank usage. The Latinos had no foothold in those areas.
Nothing more on the Gideon Abramson matter, and it had been two months. Myra had called to tell him that Gounaris had gone to Gideon’s wake or whatever the Jews called it, after Prince’s strict orders not to. Significant. But since no Family people had been there, Atlas Entertainment hadn’t been compromised.
But even so, now that Gideon was no longer around to keep him in line, Gounaris was a loose cannon. The cop, Stagnaro, less of a one. But still bothersome. Sounded like he was smart and got on good with the feds. Maybe… maybe he was a problem Prince didn’t want around any more. After the first of the year he’d have to make hard decisions about both of them.
Meanwhile, in another two weeks he would be in Hermosillo, dove hunting. Where he went, there were no bag limits. You stepped out of the plane, threw fifty pairs of sneakers on the blacktop beside the plane, local kids rushed in to grab them. Then you killed until your shotgun felt red-hot. Fifty, seventy-five, a hundred a day-it didn’t matter. The kids, in return for those sneakers, flushed the live birds, collected the dead ones. He went every year, he loved it. Maybe he’d buy a new shotgun for it.
Then, La Paz to meet the new governor of Baja, pay his respects. His seventy-eight-foot powerboat Tosca would take him from La Paz to the little sport-fishing hotel Pez Grande, forty miles north of Cabo, where he always spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s fucking and fishing while Tosca waited for him at Cabo. Last year he’d boated a record blue, had made the sports section of the LA. Times standing in front of his huge strung-up fish with Tosca in the background.
Time to send Red Grant to L.A. to make sure the boat was ready and then take it to Cabo as he did each year.
Finally, back to Vegas the first week of January to start the new year of work. Maybe he should make those hard decisions now, so his holiday season would be a carefree one. With the shift in emphasis, maybe this
would be the last time he’d have to resort to such old-fashioned remedies…
His mind drifted off as Troy pummeled gently away.
It was 10:00 p.m. and Greenwich Street slanting down the side of Telegraph Hill was silent and deserted. The night was clear, cold. Kosta, dressed in black and with a black ski mask rolled up on his head like a Navy watch cap, was waiting in the deeply shadowed entryway of the three-unit apartment building uphill from the Stagnaro house. Stagnaro rented this building’s garage for Rosa from the Chinese landlord, street-parked himself.
Kosta had broken the bulb over the inset door so it was dark. If anyone entered or exited the building, he would abort, but everybody was in for the night. Lights in the Stagnaro house, too. The boy, Tony, home studying. On Monday nights Rosa was out until ten, so Stagnaro caught up on paperwork at the Hall of Justice. Got home an hour after she did, steady as clockwork. A devoted husband.
Which was why this would work.
A car turned uphill from Stockton; Kosta scrunched back a little deeper in the inset doorway when the turn signal went on. It was Rosa. He felt her in his groin. He pulled down the ski mask to cover his face.
Her lights swept across the entryway as she turned in at the garage of the building where Kosta waited, but their probing eyes couldn’t quite reach into his angle of wall and door. She stopped the car crosswise over the sidewalk, killed lights and motor as she took her keys to unlock the garage door.
Kosta suddenly realized he really wanted to fuck her, not just to take Stagnaro out of the equation, but because he wanted to rip her panties off and open her legs cruelly wide and…
She fumbled her key into the garage lock, turned it. He tensed. When she pulled the counterweighted overhead door open, he would move. He had rehearsed it in his mind a thousand times.
Dart forward, shove her into the garage, pull the door shut. Leave the car where it was, on these San Francisco hills where parking was at a premium, many residents left their cars across the sidewalks all night.
Thirty minutes of doing anything he wanted to her.
The door creaked up. Now!
And Kosta Gounaris slammed himself back into the blackness of his little alcove.
A car coming down Greenwich from Grant had stopped behind Rosa’s. The driver called across to her through the open window.
“You leave your car there like that, lady, I’m gonna have to ticket it.”
“You’re home early!” exclaimed Rosa in delight.
“Just wanted a little extra time with you,” said Dante. “I’ll go find a place to park.”
Kosta stayed crammed back in his little triangle of darkness. The fucking bastard, somehow he’d known! Had known, had come home early.
Kosta watched Stagnaro’s taillights disappear down the hill, watched Rosa, unaware, drive her car into the garage.
What if Stagnaro’s intuition went further, centered on him as his own fucking obsessions had centered on Stagnaro, gotten him into this mess? Maybe he needed another hypothetical with Miss Pym. Maybe he needed to kill Stagnaro no matter what Mr. Prince said.
“It ain’t gonna kill you, suck my dick a little make it hard,” Eddie said to Mae in an almost plaintive voice.
“He’s gonna call any minute,” she said. She was astride him in her queen-size bed upstairs over Mae’s Place, both of them nude. “He said he’d call about one.”
“But afterwards,” insisted Eddie.
“Afterwards you won’t need it,” said Mae with a wink.
Oh, she’d given plenty of head in her day, nobody in her line of work hadn’t, it just had never been her favorite fuck.
The phone rang. “Yessir, Don Enzo, he’s right here.”
She handed it to Eddie, took his flaccid cock in her hand. It was pointing at her bush like a flabby little sea slug.
“Eddie,” said Eddie into the phone.
He listened to the squawks from the other end of the line. Mae began flexing her fingers expertly. Eddie put his hand over the phone mouthpiece.
“He’s gonna patch me through to Mr. Prince!” he whispered to her in hoarse, awed tones. It was like being introduced to royalty. His cock was stiffening just in anticipation.
“Yessir, this is Eddie, yessir…”
Mae lifted herself so that Eddie’s now-hard member could slide inside her. She started to rock almost dreamily on top of it as Eddie listened to his instruction.
“I gotcha, Mr. Prince! Both of ’em! Yessir! It’ll be a pleasure, Mr. Prince…”
Eddie, his call finished, had shut his eyes, going to work on her in earnest, starting to groan in anticipation. The door opened silently and the fucking freak, that P.W. guy, came shambling into the room! What a fuck of a time for him to do his google-eyes act on her! The asshole didn’t even seem to see Eddie, just kept staring at Mae in that intense, puzzled way he’d done with each of the girls in turn.
“Soo Li?” he asked her in his broken voice.
Eddie heard, opened his eyes, snarled, “Who da fuck-”
But the muzzle of a Jennings J-22 like the ones that had killed Moll Dalton and Spic Madrid and Skeffington St. John was already against the bridge of his nose. It said pop! as it spit another of those hypervelocity hollow-point Remington Viper rounds through Popgun’s brain and out the back of his head.
At the same time, the P.W.’s other gloved hand gently covered the mouth Mae opened to scream. He dropped the Jennings onto Eddie’s chest and then put the forefinger of that hand to his lips in the shushing motion Mae had seen so often, shook his head sadly, backed out of the room and was gone.
Mae started to reach for the telephone, then jerked back her hand. The man was a psycho, probably standing outside the door listening right now. She crawled heavily off Eddie’s corpse. The pillow was a red halo around his ruined head.
Eddie, deflowerer of her youth. Dead in her queen-size bed. Dead before they’d finished. The sight of Eddie dead excited her in a perverse way. Well, what the hell, he was gone and she was still here, and it was going to be a long night what with the cops and all that. So Mae, being au fond a practical soul, finished herself off before calling the Organization and then the cops, in that order. It was her best in years.
The sheriff found the P.W. gone, along with his sleeping bag. He found nothing else. No fingerprints; for the weeks he’d lived in Mae’s cellar, he’d always worn his gloves. No usable description apart from what the girls told him: big, shambling, blue eyes.
They kept at Old Mose until dawn without result, never thinking to inquire after Dietrich, the massive Rottweiler. When somebody did notice that Dietrich was gone, Old Mose said he’d run off two days before by hisse’f, yassuh, he mos’ surely did, dam’ fool dog run off into the night, yassuh…
Dante got Raptor’s phone message alerting him to the fact that another one had died before he even knew who. He only got Eddie’s name later, off a routine FBI printout.
The message was a quite creditable impression of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.
“I could’ve had class,” said Brando’s voice. “I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody. It was you, Eddie. You was my brother. You should’ve looked out for me a little bit…” A heavy, thuggish laugh. “I looked out for him tonight, Dante.” That laugh again. “Like I looked out for good old Gid in Death Valley…”
Hymie the Handler said it was yet another new voice.
PART SEVEN
Mid-Pleistocene 200,000-50,000 years ago
Whosoever you be, death will overtake you, although you be in lofty towers.
The Sacred Koran
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
To start, I know only Popgun Ucelli’s name and that he resides in New Jersey. I spend a day in a Jersey City library, checking the state’s phone books. No Ucelli listed, thus, no way to get him at home. I can hire a private investigator to check his driving and auto registration licenses through the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles, but then there will be
a record of my search. Not acceptable.
But I also know he is a purveyor of wholesale meats. Yes. Ucelli Meats, with an address in Orange. Now I face the same problem as with Herr Otto: how to identify Eddie Ucelli himself?
Tres simple. I check the company parking lot for the space with his name stenciled on the wall in front of it. He drives a new Cadillac Eldorado. I observe from afar. A squat, wide, hairy man. I follow, also from afar, only part of his route home each day so I will not be observed, until ultimately I watch him go up the drive of his upper-middle-class house.
A wife. A Puerto Rican housekeeper. Sometimes surly sons come visiting, looking like made men themselves. Not good. But at irregular intervals, Ucelli goes to an old-fashioned roadhouse some twenty miles away, with girls upstairs, called Mae’s Place. Sometimes he goes with his wife, sometimes alone. When alone, he stays several hours. A liaison, then. But with whom?
For several months my hair and beard have been flourish ing; they are easily made unkempt. A surplus store provides the rest of the P.W.’s ex-military persona, especially the gloves he is never without. No fingerprints will be left behind.
The approach, the entry, the acceptance by Old Mose… and the waiting. The listening. Waiting for another of the sexual couplings between Popgun and, as I have learned, Mae, empress of the establishment. Finally, he comes alone. And dies.
This death has made me decide, straight out, to tell you why I kill. I know, I say that before; but no games this time.
Following my senior year in college I go backpacking in Spain for a summer and find myself in Madrid. This beautiful old city has the Prado, one of the greatest of all art museums, available for a few pesetas admission. I plan to haunt its galleries, to spend countless hours with Goya, Velazquez, Bosch, Murillo, El Greco, the Breughels (father and son), Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Durer, Rubens… the list is essentially endless.
But on my first day there, as I am studying Goya’s twin masterpieces, The Naked Maja and The Maja Clothed, a female voice says to me in English, “Which do you prefer? Naked or clothed?”
