Menaced Assassin (10 page)

Why didn’t Uncle Gid eliminate that fucking Dalton so it was over and done with? “Patience,” he’d said, and Gounaris had replied, “No loose ends,” because he wanted Dalton off the face of this earth forever. He contemplated the idea with great personal satisfaction, but told himself that the real reason was just what he’d said to Gid, Dalton alive was a constant danger.

Martin Prince had bought Gid’s explanation of why Moll had to be hit, but Kosta knew he couldn’t trust even Uncle Gid if the FBI started an active interest in the case. And if Martin Prince even dreamed he’d been so stupid as to leave an incriminating file in a computer, Kosta’s own life would be on the line.

So right after the hit, despite Gideon’s admonitions of caution, Kosta had got hold of Jack Lenington and had told him to keep an eye on Dalton’s comings and goings. Ten days ago, and not a fucking word since. Maybe it was time to bring in some wrecking crew of his own. The Organization had probably used that guy out of Jersey—Ucelli, that was it—but he needed somebody Prince and the others, didn’t know about. Somebody as expert with accidents as Ucelli was with a .22.

Hell, there wasn’t anybody. He’d have to do it himself. He’d done the Turk in Istanbul at fourteen, he could do No-Balls Dalton at fifty-five. But first he had to know what was going on.

Ten days was long enough. He needed to see Lenington.

Sergeant Jack Lenington of the SFPD Vice Squad thought, Maybe fucking Kosta Gounaris wasn’t so hard-nose as
everybody said: he’d let the silence go ten days before asking for a meet. So Lenington would push it. He had a hard, lined face and doleful blue eyes that tipped down at the outer corners like a bloodhound’s, with none of the bloodhound’s sweetness of disposition, however: rage was his central metaphor. Whether forcing a hooker to go down on him in his patrol car or knocking her pimp around for a little rake-off of the profit, anger was his drug of choice.

Anger with caution. His suit was never quite expensive enough to raise Internal Affairs eyebrows, his boat was fiberglass with a 30-horse Evinrude, just possible on his department income, his home was a Sunset District stucco row house a few blocks from the similar house in which incorruptible Tim Flanagan lived.

But just wait until he had his twenty in. Then he’d dump his cow of a wife and head over to the Bahamas to his nice little offshore account. Buy a boat, get an all-girl crew…

He was almost smiling as he entered one of Vince O’Neill’s porn palaces on Mason Street in the Tenderloin. The garish red and yellow sign over the door read: HOT STUFF!!! XXX ARCADE!!! PHANTASY IN THE PHLESH!!! Covering the walls inside were intimate photos of women wearing only pubic hair, if that, and facial expressions seldom seen in full daylight. The middle-aged woman reading
The Wall Street Journal
in the raised change cage monotoned, “The-hottest-show-in-town-have-a-good-time,” without raising her face from the page. AT&T was down an eighth, but now that they were going into fiber-optic TV transmission…

Mobile masks of light flickered over male features from the eyepieces in the labyrinth of coin-operated peep-show machines, set up so each patron had his back turned to anyone passing by, thus assuring him a modicum of privacy. Perfumed disinfectant gave the place a county-jail smell.

Kosta Gounaris was at the end of the many-angled corridor, the only place where two machines stood relatively side by side. His eyes were glued on some unrolling endless loop of tape; throughout their discussion he seldom moved except to feed in coins when the machine clicked and went black.

Lenington jammed a fistful of quarters into the slot as fast as his machine would swallow them, ignoring what was behind the eyepiece. He was a hands-on, dick-in kind of guy; watching someone else do it did not interest him at all.

“You called,” he said to Gounaris in his flat angry voice.

“Tell me everything happened that night.”

He was instantly defensive. “There a fucking problem?”

“You’re here to answer questions, goddam you. Everything that happened that night.”

“Okay, okay.”

Lenington worked through Vince O’Neill since he was Vice and Vince was who he was supposed to be stamping out, and was a hardcase, so he’d been planning to push it with Gounaris; but now he wasn’t sure. The whisper was the tall, hard Greek had been a life-taker in his time. And he looked ready to do it again.

“Guy was supposed to have come in from JFK on a one-stop through Dallas, but I met him in the main concourse so I didn’t actually see him get off the plane.”

“You make him if you saw him again?”

“You think I’m fucking nuts?”

Gounaris nodded as if this were the right response, and fed in another quarter. “Go on.”

“I gave him the overnight bag, Naugahyde, some shit, I’d wrapped a pair of gloves around the handle like I was told, inside two photos, a man and a woman, the address of Bella Figura, street map with the route marked in yellow highlighter, gun, overcoat, spray can of Armor All. He put on the gloves before he touched anything else, then went in the men’s room. I went to one of the airport bars, gunned a couple drinks. You wanta know which bar—”

“No.”

“Couple hours, he’s back, hands me back the overnight bag without the overcoat. The gun was gone, too. He was still wearing the gloves. He caught the next shuttle to LAX. I returned the rental car, dumped the overnight bag. Next morning I read all about it in the
Chronicle
.”

Another quarter. “What about the husband?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? I directed you to—”

“Listen, you and me haven’t worked together before,” said Lenington, taking a chance. “I know you draw a lot of water, but I don’t eat
too
big a ration of shit from anybody, okay? I’m telling you there was no way I could keep tabs on him. Dante Stagnaro was in on this from the git-go.”

“I don’t know any Stagnaro. Just Flanagan.”

“Yeah, well, Flanagan’s just a cop, but Stagnaro’s a fuckin’ snake. You don’t see him, you don’t hear him, don’t know he’s near you, all of a sudden he’s lighting your fuckin’ cigarette. He heads up SFPD’s Organized Crime Task Force.”

Gounaris had returned to his machine. His voice tightened. “Organized Crime? And he’s been on it from the beginning?”

“Flanagan called him from the crime scene.” Lenington’s mouth twisted into a secret, angry smile. The fucker was worried, you could hear it in his voice, see it from the corner of your eye in the tension of his stance by the machine. “It looked like a pro hit to Tim, and they’re close, so he called him in. Anyway, Stagnaro on the scene I walk light, believe me. Day after the funeral, Dalton dropped out of sight.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No answer on his phone, just the machine. Never seen going to or coming from work. Not going home at night. Car in the driveway…” He paused for his secret angry smile again. He’d shake the fucker up good. “Until today.”

“What happened today?” Gounaris was again tense, alert.

“I sat near Stagnaro and Flanagan in the caf at the Hall this morning. Late yesterday, Stagnaro drove Dalton to the airport. He was flying to fucking East Africa—”

“
East Africa?
”

“For two fucking years. To study monkeys or something.”

Yeah, a goddamned bombshell. Gounaris was over there feeding in quarters like a fucking degenerate, and he didn’t say anything for over a minute. A full fucking minute.

Lenington finally said, “So what do you want me to do now, Mr. Gounaris? Try to find out where in East Africa he—”

“No. Don’t do anything else.”

“Nothing? I thought—”

“Don’t think, either.” After a moment, Gounaris said in an abstractedly impatient way, “Go on, get out of here. Go beat up a pimp or something.”

Kosta stayed behind for almost ten minutes, feeding in the rest of his roll of quarters, watching the filmed action through the eyepiece. He was better hung than the guy the girl with the pimples on her butt was blowing.

Any killing he’d have to do himself. Not just because of Martin Prince. Why the fuck hadn’t Lenington told him about Stagnaro ten days ago? He wasn’t sure what the Organized Crime Task Force did, but it had been in on the investigation since the very night of Moll’s death! Lenington was one stupid son of a bitch. Or else he was jerking Kosta’s chain…

Okay, okay, calm down. Africa wasn’t the moon. Send a man in after Dalton? Hell, he probably wouldn’t even be able to find the bastard out there in the jungle. What about lining up one of those game poachers on Channel 9, chop him down, bury him? Nothing was impossible, but the logistics were appalling.

On the other hand, with Dalton somewhere even the Mafia couldn’t reach him, any threat he had posed was also gone for two years. And maybe Moll hadn’t told him a damned thing. Or maybe she had, and her getting wasted had scared him so bad he’d chickened off to Africa. Yellow bastard. Well, Kosta could wait two years. What was that thing he’d heard? Revenge was a dish best eaten cold? Yeah. Dalton had killed Moll, sure as if he’d held the gun to her face himself.

Meanwhile, Kosta would order all surveillance off him and let Uncle Gid pass the news on to Martin Prince. And
even if Stagnaro could get subpoenas, with the file Moll had seen gone from their mainframe he wouldn’t find anything.

Moll. He realized he had an erection from thinking of her while watching the action on the tiny screen. He missed her, but it was time to think of his own future. Time to hang on to this power that was his own. Yes! It was good to be thinking independently again, like when he was a kid in Constantinople. He felt powerful, even invincible.

And his new British secretary, Miss Pym, with the horsy upper-class face and manner, already was letting her breast brush his shoulder when she leaned over him from behind to hand him some papers. Time to score again.

Dante hadn’t expected to score so soon, but Danny Banner, the black inspector who liked to say things like, “Don’t be dissin’ my ’do, Lou,” and was half of his task force and was on Gounaris, knew Lenington by sight.

“Gounaris in at ten-eleven
a.m.
,” said Danny. “Lenington in at ten-fifteen. I didn’t want to go in to see if they ended up together, but Lenington was out at ten twenty-seven, Gounaris at ten thirty-six.”

“Lenington have any legitimate reason to be in one of Vince’s places?” Dante had always avoided Vice and had a remarkably sketchy knowledge of its modus operandi, although he knew or suspected enough about Lenington to turn his stomach.

“Oh sure, check but the action, make a presence—you know. But it could also mean…”

“Yes,” said Dante in crisp comprehension. “And Gounaris had no reason to be there whatsoever. I think you can drop the Gounaris surveillance for now, Danny, but drop a word to I.A. about Lenington at the same time. It won’t do any good, I just want them to make a run on him to keep the bad guys confused.”

If there were any bad guys, of course. He might be looking under the beds in Atlas Entertainment for Mafia bogeymen who weren’t there. As Tim was fond of pointing out, Popgun Ucelli might just have gone fishing.

•   •   •

Diana Pym had a long face but lovely chestnut hair and very blue eyes and a touch of hauteur that Dante had a hunch Kosta Gounaris would soon take out of her. She served Dante an excellent cup of tea and was quite cosy this morning as they waited for Gounaris to show up. Dante made no attempt at all to pump her about Atlas Entertainment affairs. Tim Flanagan liked gossip, innuendo, coffee shop speculations, but Dante thrived on the half-heard word, the oblique, surprised glance, the shift of the eye, the dryness of the lips, the break in the voice.

It was after 10:00
a.m.
when Kosta Gounaris finally arrived. Four thousand dollars on his back, three times that on his wrist. Tall, whipcord, distinguished, a slight glint of silver here and there in otherwise coal-black hair. Thin black mustache. Disturbing eyes because they were full of life, intelligence, and wit instead of being the dead BBs that Dante had come to expect from connected men.

“Good morning, Miss Pym.”

Good, deep, masculine voice, a little of Zachary Scott in his
Mask of Dimitrios
role, maybe a pinch of Gregory Peck’s bluff, deep-voiced, sly elegance in
Roman Holiday
. Rosa often sat up watching American Movie Classics while waiting for Dante to get home on late nights, and they usually stayed through to the end of whatever film was on before going to bed.

“There’s a Mr. Stagnaro waiting to see you, sir.”

The head turned, those intensely alive eyes met Dante’s.

“That’s Lieutenant Dante Stagnaro of the Organized Crime Task Force, isn’t it?” said Gounaris. He waggled beckoning fingers over his shoulder as he headed toward his inner office. “I can give you… Miss Pym?”

She swept Dante with suddenly frosty eyes. “Mr. Taylor at ten-thirty.”

“So. Twenty-one minutes.”

Everything designed to put him at a disadvantage. Knowing his name, rank, affiliation; zinging him for not so identifying himself to Miss Pym; giving him a precise twenty-one
minutes as if he were a job applicant. Elegant. Impressive. A worthy opponent. Gounaris wouldn’t rattle easily; this first crossing of swords would be rapier work, thrust and parry, no slash and hack of sabers. A feint or two and Dante would be gone.

Twenty-one minutes would be more than enough. He only had one fact that would surprise, maybe shake Gounaris, and he wasn’t yet sure how to play that one to maximum advantage. If at all.

The office was at the top of the building, windows on three sides. Directly behind the antique desk that Gounaris claimed while waving Dante to a chair was a wonderful view of Yerba Buena, Treasure Island, distant Oakland. The day was clear, the air sparkled with sunlight, the cars on the Bay Bridge span clever moving toys in a master artist’s diorama.

“You’ve got an incredible view, Mr. Gounaris.”

“It is wonderful, isn’t it? That’s why I decided to work out of San Francisco rather than L.A. Being Greek, I need my mountains and water. Or at least hills.”