Menaced Assassin (7 page)

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Authors: Joe Gores

BOOK: Menaced Assassin
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“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.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

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 wasn’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.”

Will was on his feet again, all the blood drained from his face. It was a lie, a goddamned lie the fat cop had… Then he saw the look of pain for Will’s pain on the other policeman’s face. Endless infidelities by Moll over the years would explain so many things he’d steadfastly ignored. Ignored because…

“Is this true?” he asked Dante softly.

Both cops relaxed slightly. Dante sighed, nodded.

“So Gounaris was just the last… the worst… of a…” He took in as huge a breath as he could, held it until colored spots danced before his eyes. He let it out softly. “I don’t believe I can answer any more of your questions right now. Perhaps after the funeral…”

Dante paused to write on the back of one of his business cards, laid it on the edge of the coffee table as he followed his partner toward the foyer.

“I’ve left you my card, Dr. Dalton. With my home number on the back. If you think of anything… or just want to talk . . .”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

Going down the old wooden steps to the sidewalk toward their car, Dante asked Tim, “So, what do you think?”

“A very short fuse as regards his wife.”

“Which means if he was going to do her…”

“Yeah,” Flanagan said sadly, seeing the easy solution to the murder slip away, “he wouldn’t wait no friggin’ month.”

Will sat with the mailer in his hand, almost afraid to open it since Flanagan had taken the lid off his life and let him peer down into the murky depths of his marriage, his wife, their love—
love
? The images of Moll with Gounaris rolled quickly before his eyes like the picture on a badly adjusted TV set, except the man now was faceless. Could Moll love him and…

Yet what had changed so much, really? One man or five or fifty or five hundred, what did it matter when the central fact was infidelity? And a woman like Moll, looked at logically, how could his sole love have been enough for her? He knew about the hot-tub deflowering at thirteen, had seen the way her father looked at her, knew how many men had pursued her at Cal…

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