Menaced Assassin Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER TEN

  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.”

  “I’ll get right to the point. The death of Mrs. Dalton.”

  “Ah yes. Moll. Tragic.” Gounaris stood, turned to the window as if studying the tragic dimensions of her demise.

  “Also very professional,” said Dante. “Which is what brought me in on it and is still puzzling me.”

  Gounaris turned to frown at him. “Professional.”

  “As in hitman professional.” Dante shrugged, making himself as Italian as he could. “As in Mafia, Mob, Outfit, Organization, Cosa Nostra, the Family, Our Thing. But our task force looks into any organized criminal activities that would come und
er the RICO statutes. Which means it could be linked to Mafia-controlled operations in other parts of the country.” He leaned forward earnestly. “The trouble is, Mr. Gounaris, no matter how hard we look, we just can’t find anything in Mrs. Dalton’s private life that would account for anyone hiring a professional killer to murder her.”

  “You come to me because I was sexually involved with-”

  “Not at all,” cut in Dante heartily.

  He caught it in the eye, the flicker of surprise, maybe even annoyance, as if this stupid copper wasn’t sticking to the script Gounaris had written in his head for this interview. Because Dante wouldn’t, he’d have to make the obvious connection.

  “It is true that Dr. Dalton was very upset…” He lowered his voice. “He walked in on his wife and myself, you know.”

  “I know. Flagrante delicto, as they used to say. But even if he wanted his wife dead, he could never have found a killer of that caliber. And he hardly would have stopped with her.” Dante chuckled and spread his hands, a typical wop enjoying a good joke. “But here you are, safe and sound, and there Will Dalton is, in Africa.” He paused. “Safe and sound.”

  Gounaris chose to get angry. “Are you implying-”

  “Nothing at all, Mr. Gounaris. It’s just that nothing’s happened to you, nothing’s happened to him… the two principal players. So-nothing to do with her personal life.”

  “I see,” said Gounaris, then added, “Leaving, to your literal policeman’s mind, just her professional life.” He spread his hands in turn. “There I can’t help you, Lieutenant. Moll was an excellent attorney, very independent, so I have very little knowledge of what she was working on at the time of her death. If you-”

  “Bed and board strictly separate, as it were,” said Dante.

  “Strictly.” His tone was dry as British toast. “But if you feel it would help in your investigation, Atlas Entertainment would be perfectly willing to put at your disposal any papers she was working on when she was killed.”

  Meaning the papers would be worthless. “Thank you. I’ll have someone pick them up.” Dante was on his feet. “You have an appointment in a few moments…”

  And the brass showed through, as he had hoped it would. When Gounaris spoke again, Dante knew he was right that Atlas Entertainment and its president were somehow, someway, dirty.

  “You are of Italian blood, are you not, Lieutenant?”

  “As they say in Italy, Mr. Gounaris, Romano di Roma.”

  “That’s what I thought. So I wanted to ask you, did you get into the investigation of organized crime because you are so sickened by the vicious things men of your blood habitually do?”

  Dante smiled. “Organized crime is no longer essentially Italian, Mr. Gounaris. Equal opportunity employer. Irishmen, Jews, African-Americans, Latin Americans… Greeks…”

  “Just what do you mean by that?” demanded Gounaris quickly, either angry again or faking it again.

  Dante would give his fact away, but he would turn it around first. He was suddenly confidential.

  “Let me make a suggestion, Mr. Gounaris. You might be wise to stay out of Vince O’Neill’s porn palaces for now. I imagine your sex life must be… somewhat curtailed since Moll Dalton’s death, but even so… they’re in a pretty rough part of town.”

  He saw the tiny flicker of alarm mixed with anger in the dark alive eyes, instantly quelled, and spoke even more softly.

  “Some unsavory sorts hang around there. Corrupt vice cops under secret investigation by the Internal Affairs Division…” He turned from those again-startled eyes, tossing “ Ciao ” over his shoulder as he strode out.

  And almost just walked out into the bright San Francisco October sunshine. Instead, thinking about the vile bug juice dispensed at the Hall of Justice, he decided to get a decent decaf at the lobby’s tiny afterthought of a coffee shop.

  Kosta fretted at his desk for ten minutes, trying to sort out exactly what he had learned and what he had given away. The damn cop was good, all right; he’d needled so skillfully that Kosta had lost it for a moment, had gotten personal.

  He strode from the office, curtly telling the surprised Miss Pym that Taylor should go into a holding pattern until he got back. At the lobby pay phone bank he placed a call to Gideon Abramson in Palm Springs, caught him on the links. Gid kept a cellular phone in his golf cart, so the call was transferred direct from the clubhouse.

  “Kosta!” he exclaimed in a delighted voice. “So these two married guys are talking, one of ’em says, ‘You mean you been married twenty-five years and your wife still looks like a newly wed?’ ‘ Cooks,’ says the other guy in a sad voice, ‘ cooks like a newlywed.’”

  Kosta was finally able to tell him the latest problem: how he’d been chatting with Jack Lenington the day before, how Will Dalton was safely out of the country, and finally how Stagnaro had visited him that morning.

  “I agree with you about Dalton-we can just file him and forget him, he poses no threat,” said Gid in his high, chirping voice. “As for Stagnaro, I know him by reputation, he’s highly thought of by Rudy Mattaliano in New York, which probably means he’s a very dangerous man. But what can he do you?”

  “He told me Lenington is under surveillance by the Internal Affairs Division, and wanted me to know they saw him and me going into the same porn place. They didn’t see us together, but that’s got to be the end of Jack fucking Lenington.”

  “I agree,” said Gid thoughtfully.

  “Do we have to tell Mr. Prince?”

  “Just that Jack should be eased out.” In a more hearty voice, he added, “Be well, Kosta. I’ll handle it from here.”

  Gounaris hung up, feeling better as he always did after he had shifted some dangerous burden to Uncle Gideon, and turned away from the phone.

  And stopped dead: sitting in the coffee shop not ten yards away was Dante Stagnaro, smiling and nodding at him like one of those idiotic toy dogs in the rear windows of automobiles.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was a week before Jack Lenington had his first-and, as it developed, last-interview with Internal Affairs. In the interim, Dante had been busy. Checking phone company records for long-distance calls from the lobby pay phone bank in the Atlas Entertainment building had turned up three calls to the same country club in Palm Springs, one of them placed the night before Moll Dalton’s murder at Bella Figura.

  Suggestive but not really indicative, because Tallpalms Country Club had no record of the calls, so of course they could not help with who the calls had been placed to.

  Probably not Bob Hope.

  Probably not Sonny Bono.

  Probably not even Spiro Agnew. There were not as many retired mobsters in Palm Springs as there were in Vegas, but the number was not negligible. And by some strange chance, all of them happened to belong to Tallpalms.

  Dante, the eternal optimist, hoped to winnow the possibles for a short list of probables he could work in earnest.

  He had also called for everything LAPD might have on Moll’s father, Skeffington St. John, who had arranged her employment with Atlas Entertainment. That was just facts, but for himself he kept returning to the question of whether St. John had molested Moll as a child. Quite a heavy accusation for a man as bright as Will Dalton to level at his father- in-law unless there was something more than an intuition to back it up.

  He kept wanting to ask Dalton more about it, but Dalton was in Africa: he faxed a request to Interpol for any facts on Gounaris instead. Then there was Lenington, corrupt in all the small ways a vice cop could be corrupt, from shaking down pimps to free sex from the hookers, but Dante hadn’t thought of him as involved with organized crime.

  Jack was an angry and careful man. All they had was him entering and leaving one of Vince O’Neill’s legal porn palaces at about the same time that a man under investigation for possible organized crime ties had entered and left. Not illegal; merely suggestive.

  The I.A. lived on that sort of suggestion, but Dante wasn’t w
atching through the one-way glass in the adjoining room when Lenington was brought in by the shooflies; he knew a transcript of the interrogation would be on his desk the next day.

  I.A.:

  Hello, Jack. Come in and sit down.

  SUBJECT:

  Hello, Simon, you fucking weasel.

  I.A.:

  No need to take that attitude, Jack. We’re all cops here. Somebody’s got to keep the department clean-

  SUBJECT:

  Yeah, somebody has to look up assholes for a living, too. You don’t have to be a cop to do it.

  I.A.:

  You know this is being recorded, Jack-

  SUBJECT:

  You gonna edit out all the dirty words afterwards, Irv?

  I.A.:

  You understand this is just a preliminary investigation, Jack, so we haven’t asked you to have your attorney present-

  SUBJECT:

  What I got to tell you guys, I don’t need an attorney.

  I.A.:

  Okay. On the twenty-second of last month-

  SUBJECT:

  Uh-uh. Somebody wants to go after me for dereliction of duty or some shit, that’s my watch commander or the Chief. Not you assholes. You wanta charge me with a crime, my lawyer’s here fast as you can jerk each other’s wienie. Which leaves you miserable fucks with my bank account, my mortgages, my spendable income.

  I.A.:

  We told you, Jack, this is just a preliminary-

  SUBJECT:

  I got like thirty-seven cents in my bank account, couple CDs worth one, two K. Mortgage on the house’s got maybe thirteen years to run. My boat, another two years. The car, I paid that off last June. Four years. Neither of my kids are in college-they’re working stiffs, I couldn’t pay the freight. So fuck you guys very much. Take two nine-millimeter pills up the ass and call me in the morning.

  Sound of slamming door. Dante flipped the transcript onto his desk and chuckled despite himself. He’d been through the academy with Lenington, and knew him as a mean-minded man and a corrupt cop, but he’d also been on the street long enough himself to enjoy seeing the shooflies eat a little shit from another street cop. Lenington didn’t deserve the name. But he was tough, it would take a lot to bring him down.