Menaced Assassin (22 page)

He went through a gate in the fence and up a walkway of slanting planks to a locked and heavily barred metal gate. Yellow light shone down on twin banks of aluminum mailboxes, twenty-five to a side, with name slots on their fronts. No Stefanatos.

Beyond the locked gate, the pier stretched away like the railroad tracks in an art-lesson perspective drawing. From far down the dock a man was approaching. Up close he was lean and balding and black, with a round face and gentle eyes and wearing a black and silver Raiders windbreaker.

When he opened the gate to come out, Dante slid through.

“I’m looking for a houseboat owner, but he’s not listed.”

“I’ve been here sixteen years, I know just about everyone on the pier. I guess I’m about the oldest one around.” He chuckled; he had a deep bass voice and
basso profundo
laugh. “
Both
ways, probably, it comes to that. If he’s got a boat here, I’ll know him.”

“Georgios Stefanatos?”

“Georgie? The only guy on West Pier older than I am—by age, not by longevity on the dock.” He gestured at the nearest houseboat. “You’re almost standing on his deck.”

The boat was some thirty feet long, built over a faded maroon metal hull with a somewhat upswept prow. The out-slanting wooden superstructure had been built on top of that, vertical boards going up to a steeply slanted cedar shake roof with two miniature chimneys. Lines ran down into the water for electricity, gas, water and sewage. Dante expected Popeye to pipe him aboard.

“It’s unusual compared to the rest of ’em—was a real boat before it was converted to a houseboat. Doesn’t look like Georgie’s home right now, but he never goes very far. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you waited on his afterdeck.”

A faded maroon awning covered half the boat’s stern; there was a riot of ivies and ferns and herbs in clay pots or tattered woven baskets. Two of them rested on old wicker chairs. A pair of gulls swam around in the seaweed behind the houseboat; in the gathering darkness, the water was a dirty green.

Dante sat down gingerly in a sag-bottomed old canvas lawn chair, and promptly fell asleep. Georgios Stefanatos woke him up an hour later when he wheeled his ten-speed aboard.

“I was up at the Cafe Trieste in town, you know it? On Bridgeway.” The old man chuckled. He was in his late seventies and had a gray beard and a blue denim Greek fishing hat smashed down on thick gray curly hair. His eyes were shrewd and dark and full of life. “I can bullshit about my seafaring days with the weekend sailors getting their lah-di-dah
lattes
up there.”

“No Greek coffee?” asked Dante with a grin.

“Sure! But I had to buy it for ’em at a Greek shop in the city an’ show ’em how to do it. Who the hell are you?”

“Dante Stagnaro. Anna Efstathiou and Nikos Xiotras—”

“Anna! Jesus, there’s a woman for you!” Stefanatos clapped his hands together once in delight. “And smart! Marry her, she’d make you rich. And Nikos is good people!”

He leaned his bike against the railing under one of the hanging plants as he unlocked the door.

“I used to go to Anna’s Greek dance class, had to quit when my knees went.” He looked back over his shoulder and winked as he snapped on the lights. “Now I only dance the
zembeikiko
and only after so much ouzo I don’t feel ’em ’til morning.”

The
zembeikiko
—the same dance Anna had remembered Gounaris doing at one of the Greek festivals. From Rosa, he knew it usually was danced by men alone, when moved by music to sudden otherwise inexpressible emotion.

Inside, he found the little houseboat beautifully laid out. He said almost wistfully, “Looks like a nice life here.”

“Oh, it is, it is.” Stefanatos jerked his head at a narrow stairway leading down into the hull of the boat. “Got a little bedroom down there, so I got water slapping the hull beside me when I go to sleep.”

Stefanatos went up to the prow, which had a tiny forward-
looking bay window framed by black metal racks holding spices. The similar bay windows on each side of the living room held decorative brass ornaments, seashells, netting, things picked up at most of the world’s ports during a lifetime at sea.

He brought back two brandy snifters and a bottle of Metaxas, poured without asking. They sat at a round wooden table beside a black iron potbelly stove. Like the other furnishings, it was miniaturized to studio apartment size. His pipe drifted aromatic smoke through the room. The bookshelves on either side of the kitchen doorway were filled with a seagoing man’s library in Greek and English.

Stefanatos drank Metaxas, swiveled a sudden sharp eye at Dante across the table. “Real close friend of Anna’s, you say.”

“Met her once.”

Dante stopped there; in interrogations, silence usually made the other person come to you. But Georgios Stefanatos merely stretched across the table to clink glasses.

“Yassou
.”

They drank. The Metaxas burned its way down into Dante’s empty gut. He’d missed lunch and hadn’t yet had supper. He broke first, finally saying, “Kosta Gounaris.”

“Agio Nikolao sosete mas!”
exclaimed a startled Stefanatos. He poured them each another tot, looked at Dante shrewdly. “Anna tell you I got my first blue-water command under Gounaris?”

Dante answered with a question of his own.

“You know he’s now living in San Francisco?”

Stefanatos gestured at the big color TV with a VCR on top of it backed up against the starboard bulkhead. “Hell, son, I’m old, I’m not dead. Uncle Al hasn’t come calling yet.” Uncle Al. Alzheimer’s. “You a real close friend of Kostas’s? Maybe like you’re a close friend of Anna’s?”

Fifteen years a cop counseled caution, but this was not a man who would be a friend, even if he had worked for him, of the Gounaris Dante had built up in his mind. And
if Dante’s picture of Gounaris was skewed, now was the time to have it corrected.

“I’m a cop on an investigation. Routine. I’m not accusing him of anything, just—”

“Too bad,” cackled Stefanatos. “There’s a lot you could accuse him of. He slit the throat of a fat Turk for the strongbox under the floor when he was fifteen, you know.”

“I read an unconfirmed Interpol report about it, but—”

“True report! He used to brag about it when he was drunk. That was early days, he had the one freighter then, the
Make-donia
, he was captain, I was first mate…” He trailed off with a faraway look in his eyes. “Half a lifetime ago, Kostas was twenty-one when he got that freighter.”

“Where’d he get the money? From under the Turk’s floor?”

“Naw, that just got him out of Constantinople, financed the
caique
he used for his smuggling in and out of Turkey…” He cocked a quick inquisitive birdlike eye at Dante. “You prob’ly heard ’bout that too, didn’t you?”

“Another rumor, yeah.”

Georgie shook his head vigorously. “Also true. But he couldn’t have made the down payment on the
Makedonia
from that. Once he got his second tramp, he made me captain of the
Makedonia
and opened an office on a dock in Piraeus. Never went to sea again until years later when he got that yacht of his.”

“You sound like you’ve thought about this some.”

Stefanatos rapped himself vigorously on the temple with fisted knuckles. “Greeks are smart. We talk to everybody and want to know everything. Course I’ve thought about it.”

“So who
would
finance a freighter for a twenty-one-year-old kid with no history? Even just an old tramp steamer…”

Stefanatos nodded as if he’d made a statement rather than asked a question. “He wasn’t making enough out of the
Makedonia
to finance it, was he?” He cackled and clapped his hands again. “You could barely trust that old hulk out of sight of land. Hell, you hit the hull with a sledgehammer,
anywhere, an inch of scale’d fall off. No holystoning
those
decks, I can tell you. You’d of gone right through.”

“You know where the money came from, don’t you, Captain?”

Georgios stared at him a long moment, then heaved himself to his feet and went toward the staircase leading below.

“You just pour another tot for each of us,” he said.

Ten minutes later, the old Greek captain slapped a beat-up logbook with a red-bound hard canvas cover down on the table between them with such triumph that it knocked over his snifter. He picked up the logbook, shook it, sending drops of Metaxas flying in every direction, then sat down with it.

“Log of the
Makedonia
, plenty of booze spilled on it in its day. Took it with me when I left.”

Dante asked the expected question. “Why was that?”

“Kostas wanted to overinsure the
Makedonia
and her cargo, then have me scuttle her the first big blow came along. Said I wouldn’t, said if he did I’d testify at the inquiry… Kostas wasn’t a bad guy, just was crooked as a snake.” He shook his head. “But you don’t ask
me
to scuttle my ship.”

Dante stayed silent. There were times to push your man, times to let him come to you.

“I got a command under Niarchos, when the
Makedonia
did go down in the North Atlantic I was at sea myself.” He righted his snifter, poured himself another measured tot, held it up to the light as if the smoky liquid held answers to his inner distress. “But I never felt right about just letting it go.”

“Not much you could do after the fact like that.”

“Yep.” He got a sly look on his face. “Y’know, Kostas was rich, but the richest man I ever met was a cloth buyer rode with me on a cargo run to Alexandria and back on the
Makedonia
. Right before Kostas got his second freighter.” The logbook was closed against the finger he had inserted between its pages. He opened it, tapped the page with a blunt curved fingernail. “It’s in here. In the log.”

The logbook was written in Greek. Dante looked up at Stefanatos with arched eyebrows. “Abramson,” the captain said. “Gideon Abramson.”

Dante got home in high spirits. Rosa was out, as was fourteen-year-old Antonio even though it was a school night. No note, which meant Rosa wasn’t gone for long. He’d been starving in Sausalito, but now he just wanted a long shower to wash the rest of the Metaxas out of his system. Then, if Rosa wasn’t home yet, he’d cook supper for everybody. But he was still sponging down the shower stall when the door opened and Rosa peeked in.

“You’re home!” she exclaimed in delight.

“Unless you got another guy uses this shower.”

“No one but you, alas.”

She had obviously been shopping, and was dressed in jeans and a frilly white blouse with long sleeves and a scoop neck. He could just faintly smell her perfume, something flowery their daughter had given her for her birthday. When she leaned in to give him a quick kiss, he peeked down her blouse like a sex-starved teenager. He started to get an erection.

“You want something to eat, sweetie?” she asked.

He did a Groucho eyebrow wiggle. “What’d you have in mind, m’dear?” and faked a grab for her. But she was gone, the shower stall door drifting shut behind her. He yelled after her, “What kind of woman leaves a man in a state like this?”

The door opened again so she could stick her head back in.

“Anticipation is everything, sweet lips.”

Gone again. Dante, chuckling, dressed in workout shorts and a tank top and floppy go-aheads, padded into the office he’d made of Giulietta’s bedroom. In one corner he had installed a straight-backed chair and a desk he’d bought for a few bucks at a library sale.

Dante put the growing stack of files connected with the Moll Dalton murder on the pink bedspread of the frilly
canopy bed where Giulietta still slept when she came home from U.C. Berkeley on weekends. He switched on the old-fashioned gooseneck lamp.

Hymie the Handler had given him the numbers of Lening-ton’s $5,000 in small unsequenced bills, but none had shown up in circulation in the western states. Dante made a notation to circularize banks across the rest of the country also.

Nothing more on Spic Madrid. St. Paul cops and the FBI were writing it off as local; as a result the feds had turned down his suggestion that a tail be put on Eddie Ucelli for a couple of weeks to see if he went anywhere. The Bureau, they said, didn’t have the manpower for it.

Even if he were willing to tell them about the Raptor calls they would just laugh. Hoax confessions were a staple of murder cases, and these were oblique and after the fact.

His request for a tap on Gounaris’s home and office phones had been turned down. The same for a tap on the pay phones in the Atlas Entertainment building lobby. He hadn’t really expected either one, but he’d had to ask. Ditto for a tap on Skeffington St. John’s phones in L.A., home and office. Again, no surprise.

None of it high priority. High priority was his discovery of the American businessman who had been a guest of the twenty-three-year-old Gounaris aboard the
Makedonia
for a run to Alexandria and back in August 1962. Gideon Abram-son. A Gideon Abramson was one of the four known Mafia bigwigs who had stayed at the Xanadu Hotel owned by Martin Prince, acknowledged
capo di tutti i capi
for the current Organization west of the Mississippi.

Scanning his case notes, Dante realized that the meeting had taken place just a few days after he had jerked around Moll Dalton’s incestuous father. Cause and effect? Could be. It was hard to believe that if Atlas Entertainment was mixed up in organized crime, its chief counsel didn’t know about it.

He went through the FBI reports. They already had photos on file for three of the four Gideon Abramsons—loan shark in New York’s garment industry, retiree in Palm Springs, golf player in Vegas—and they were demonstrably identical.
Now that Dante had the passport number of the cloth buyer in Greece, the FBI could get his picture, too. He was certain the fourth Gideon Abramson would complete the chain between Gounaris, Atlas Entertainment, and the Mafia.

It was a connection that suggested reasons why Moll Dalton might have been murdered. If the Mafia was in control of Atlas, and she uncovered proof of that control, she would have become a lethal liability. Could Moll’s father be part of the Outfit without her knowledge? Yes. But if she found out, and resentment of her childhood abuse still lived in her mind…