Menaced Assassin (12 page)

“Or it was just by accident, but who the fuck knows who he is unless they’re already watching him? I got plenty of reason to hang around one of Vince O’Neill’s jerk-off shops anytime I want, shit, I’m Vice. But Gounaris is just a John, so why would anyone notice him—”

“Dante Stagnaro,” said Kreiger abruptly. There was almost admiration in his voice. “That would be quite like him—a loose tail on the Greek.” He nodded. “Yes. Then you going into O’Neill’s place at the same time suddenly gets important.”

“You know Stagnaro?” asked Lenington cautiously. Frankly, Kreiger scared the hell out of him. A phone call, he was meat. Just like Moll Dalton had become meat after a phone call.

“Not socially, of course.” Kreiger waved an arm. “He’s that most dangerous of men, an idealist smart enough not to be corrupted by his own obsession. Which is our destruction. He visited Gounaris shortly after you two talked.”

“There you are,” said Lenington in angry vehemence. He was damned glad he’d come in and told his side of the story. Then he paused, suddenly hesitant. But it had to be said; it was what he was here for. “I wanted to tell you about it, Mr. Kreiger. And I, ah, wanted to ask you… there hasn’t
been… I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to think
I
had led…”

“I can assure you that your reconstruction makes sense to me,” said Kreiger.

“So there’s no… uh… word out that—”

“I can assure you, Jack, none at all.”

He was on his feet, moving around the desk. Jack stood up, took the huge callused palm that was offered to him. He spoke as Kreiger put a hand on his shoulder to walk him to the door.

“I mean, if they want me to take an early retirement so the I.A. can’t keep—”

Kreiger chuckled to silence his plaint.

“Jack, Jack, quit looking under the bed. I have had absolutely no word about you at all. Everyone feels you have done an excellent job, you handled the matter of that visiting fireman very well indeed, he even remarked on your efficiency. We may not ask anything of you for a while, until this I.A. thing has passed, but don’t read anything into that, my friend. Not a rebuke, just a general precaution.”

“I was going to suggest the same thing myself, Mr. Kreiger,” said Lenington with relief in his angry voice.

When he was gone, Otto Kreiger sat down at his desk and thought for several minutes. In the middle of it he got up and poured himself a schnapps. You could compute the geometry of Jack’s revelations in only one of two ways.

So he called Abramson in Palm Springs. Since Gid was having people over, he made Otto wait while he took the call in the den. Kreiger could picture the old kike there among his worldly possessions like one of the Seven Dwarfs in the gem mine. He preferred real wealth. Horses. Clean, outdoors,
manly
.

“So, Otto,” chirped Gid’s birdlike voice, “why did God make the
goyim
?”

“Why did he?” asked Kreiger in ill-disguised impatience.

“
Somebody
has to buy retail.”

Into Gideon’s chuckles, Kreiger said heavily, “Abramson, we seem to have been told a conflicting pair of tales in the
Atlas Entertainment matter. You know Mr. Prince does not want that connection made public, so I think we’d better bring the matter to his attention.”

When the phone rang, a relaxed and reassured Jack Lenington—going to see the fucking kraut yesterday had been the thing to do, all right—was two-fingering a report while trying to remember if counselor, as in attorney, had one “1” or two. His spelling was atrocious but his reports, when he couldn’t get out of writing them, always managed to say what he wanted them to.

He grabbed up the receiver and barked, “Vice, Lenington,” into it. And heard for the first time the high-speed, high-pitched delivery of the man who never called himself anything but Burkie.

“My name is Burkie you got something I want sweetheart and I got something you want, cash.”

He stopped there as if he had said something significant.

“Yeah, Madonna’s got a red-hot snatch I want, too,” said Lenington in his angry voice, “but I ain’t liable to get it.”

He hung up. The phone rang again immediately.

Lenington picked up, snapped, “Vice, Lenington,” into it, and the same high-speed high-pitched almost-falsetto almost-fag voice began, “We got cut off I want—”

Lenington hung up on him again. When the phone rang a third time, again immediately, he snatched it off the hook. Some fucking guys never learned.

“Listen, asshole, I—”

“No, asshole,
you
listen,” said the voice, sounding suddenly not faggy at all. “Five large just to listen.”

This time the man calling himself Burkie hung up.

And then didn’t call again. Goddam him! Had he played the guy wrong? Jack already had started to think of those five dimes as
his
five dimes he didn’t have to do anything for except just
listen
. But how could he listen if the fuckhead didn’t call?

Couple of evenings later, Jack was gunning a few in Liverpool Lil’s, a neighborhood pub cattycorner across Lyon from the Presidio gates. It was a dark narrow place with red brick floors and wooden walls covered with photographs, and shiny wineglasses hanging upside down over the bar, and a good steak-and-kidney pie on the menu.

But he was here after making his monthly dual collections—gash and cash, Jack liked to call them—from a discreet high-price call girl who lived just up the street on the Presidio Wall. They’d have a drink, Jack would warn her if anything bad might be coming down, she’d take him home to lay him and pay him.

“Hey, Jack,” said the bartender, “telephone for you.”

Even though off duty, Jack had conscientiously left the number with Dispatch. Never knew when one of his other little arrangements might need servicing.

“Lenington,” he said in his hard, angry voice.

“Jack-baby—Burkie!” Then the familiar high-speed delivery began. “That secondhand store fronts a treasury book on Mission off Fifth near the old Remedial Loans around the corner from the Mint in the phone booth one hour.”

Dial tone.

Five large, just to listen. Against that, a setup. The mob? The kraut had assured him he had a plus ledger with them for his efficient handling of his part in the Moll Dalton hit.

The IAD? He takes the phone call in the booth, he gets five large, the bills are black-light or paint pellet, the numbers recorded, dirty money, he’s on his way to the slam. Trouble with that scenario, obvious entrapment by Internal Affairs. With the kraut as his attorney he would walk away laughing, and they’d know it.

Stagnaro?

For
it being him, he was a sly fucking fox, Jack had been through the academy with him and never met one slyer. Maybe he wanted to catch Jack dirty, force him to roll over on Gounaris, or worse, the mob. And the tidbit about the treasury book in the secondhand store would fit Stagnaro. Guy got around. Shit, even Jack hadn’t known about that
one, or he would have been leaning on the guy himself. Right around the corner from the fucking Mint! Somebody had some balls. Or a sense of humor.

Against
it being Stagnaro? Much as Jack hated to admit it, he wasn’t that kind of cop in the first place, and was a hell of a lot brighter than the IAD in the second place, which made him too bright to try that sort of cheap shit in the third place.

So who did that leave who might be trying to get something on him? And meanwhile, seventeen of Jack’s sixty minutes had evaporated.

Should he go there or not?

Fifty-nine minutes after Burkie’s call, Jack Lenington was leaning against the wall of the secondhand store on Mission Street, arms folded, the width of the sidewalk away from the phone booth. At 11:00
p.m.
there wasn’t much foot traffic, only a few cars. As his second hand hit twelve, the phone rang. Lenington got it on the second ring.

“Yeah.”

The same rapid-fire high-pitched voice. “What you listen to is this phone ringing every night at eleven o’clock don’t pick up unless it stops ringing and then starts again then pick up on the third ring and answer like you did tonight.”

“What will you want to know?”

“I’ll ask specific questions about Stagnaro’s investigation when I have them to ask and when I do you get ten large if you can answer them or not.”

This guy was really fucking desperate, thought Jack. He started, “Do you know…” then stopped. He’d been about to use the kraut’s name, for Chrissake! “You said something about—”

“Oldest gag in the book, envelope under the phone tray.”

Buzz.

Jack looked around as his hand found the envelope, his fingers felt around it for wires. Nothing. Just masking tape to hold it to the metal.

Nobody coming by right at the second except the god
damnedest white nigger you ever saw. Everything was black except his face, and sixties black at that! Fucking dreadlocks down to his ass, stacked heels made him six inches taller, floppy wool green, white, and purple beret, one of those varicolored robes, dashiki or some shit, shades, bopping down the street with a cellular phone pressed to his face.

“My man!” he was shrieking in a high skinny black voice as he went by, “the key is G sharp and the beat is dum-dum-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum-dum…”

He was gone in a cloud of reefer, and Jack had his envelope in hand, into his pocket, was walking away from there.

Jack did everything to the envelope except zap it with X rays, but he couldn’t find anything suggesting a letter bomb. Finally he put it in a pail of water in his postage-stamp backyard overnight. Next morning the manila envelope had disintegrated and the pail was full of soaking greenbacks. A few hundreds, a dozen fifties, the rest twenties, none new, none consecutive. No dye. Wearing gloves, he dried them out with his wife’s hair dryer, took them to Hymie the Handler at the Crime Lab as evidence in a case. Hymie loved to handle evidence of any sort from any source, hence his nickname.

“I want you to subject these to every fucking scrutiny known to man and have them ready for me this afternoon.”

Hymie was a hairy bear of a man in his mid-thirties, muscular and handsome if you liked hebes, not at all like his name. He looked mildly astounded that Jack finally had brought him some evidence, any evidence, of anything whatsoever.

“And for Chrissake keep it under your hat, Hymie. I don’t want
anyone
to know about these bills except you and me.”

“For you, Jack, anything,” he said wryly. “I’ll even give away my lunch hour to commemorate the day Jack Lenington actually brought in evidence to be analyzed. Must be your first bust, huh, Jack? Congratulations!”

“Go to hell” was Jack’s only comment, so mild because Hymie was, after all, doing him a favor.

The bills were clean as Christ’s conscience.

That afternoon at 3:00
p.m.
he mailed them off to the Bahamas, the zip code of the phony return address his account number instead of 94122, and that night at 11:00 he was back in the phone booth ready for more of them. What he knew about Stagnaro’s investigation you could cram up a gnat’s ass, but if Burkie had specific questions maybe he could find out…

The phone rang, went silent, didn’t ring again. Just as well, too many people going by on the sidewalk, made him nervous. So he scanned everybody, damned carefully. No familiar faces. No easy place for a shotgun mike to be set up, record whatever he said, either; but just the same he’d request a face-to-face on
his
turf if he had any information to give when the time came.

Next night, the same. Nice thing was, he was only at the phone for like twenty seconds. Minimum exposure.

On the fourth night there were no pedestrians on the street at all except the white nigger, who came bopping up as Jack waited out the preliminary rings. This time the beret was cherry red, otherwise he still had his splayfoot nigger walk, his stacked heels, his dashiki, his smell of grass, his cellular phone. Guy sure did a nigger good. Maybe he was a mulatto, not a white man at all.

The phone rang. As Jack turned back to it, the white nigger brought out of the sleeve of his dashiki an already-cocked short-barreled revolver, a .357 Magnum loaded with 125-grain hollow points and wrapped in a plastic supermarket bag. He pressed the muzzle against the back of Jack’s head and blew Jack’s brains all over the inside of the booth and beyond.

The assassin shook the gun out into the gutter, retaining his fingerprints only on the plastic bag, and kept on bopping. The first pedestrian by lost her dinner and the first black-and-white pulled up four minutes later, but the assassin was boarding a bus for the Outer Mission by then.

At three minutes before midnight, Raptor, his bebop persona safely stuffed into a Salvation Army bin in a Safeway lot a few blocks away, walked into the all-night Standard station on Army Street. It was a clean, sharp night, crisp as a new-crop Gravenstein. His gloved hands laid a fan of five twenties with a note clipped to them on top of the pump. The bills bulged the eyes of the night man, a husky African-American kid of seventeen. The note was typed, all in caps.

I
WANT YOU TO MAKE ONE MORE PHONE CALL. YOU WILL GET AN ANSWERING MACHINE OR A MAN’S VOICE. EITHER WAY, JUST SAY THE WORDS ON THE BACK OF THIS INTO THE PHONE AND HANGUP.

Dante didn’t monitor the answering machine down in the living room overnight because duty calls always were buzzed through on his beeper. But he was never a heavy sleeper when involved in a complex case, so the midnight ringing downstairs had jarred him awake and kept the rest of his night fitful. He was up at six, slurping instant and wandering through the house as he waited for the
Chronicle
to thump against the front door. The machine’s blinking green light reminded him of the call.

He ran the tape back, listened to it. The voice was husky but immature, obviously black or faking it, nervous and hesitant. As if reading the words when reading came hard.

“Uh—this is Raptor. Uh—I gave the, uh, gentleman the message. It, uh, really blew his mind.”