Menaced Assassin (23 page)

Nothing suggested that it did. And the scenario didn’t tell him a damned thing about why Jack Lenington and Spic Madrid had been hit. They weren’t his cases, but there were those damned Raptor phone calls. The calls tied the three murders together. If the calls weren’t a hoax.

But his mind wasn’t ready to let it go at that. He jotted down notes to himself. Try to find and interview Moll Dalton’s mother, still presumably living somewhere in the L.A. Basin, for more leverage on St. John. Write or call Will Dalton’s parents in Wyoming? No real reason to, except maybe they could tell him things about Moll that Will had been unwilling to do.

He realized with a start that it was nearly one in the morning, four hours since Rosa had brought him his dinner of
fettuccine con funghi
drenched in the dark mushroom sauce he loved. Rosa would be long since in bed, asleep.

But when he slid naked between the fresh fragrant sheets, as he always slept except for a T-shirt during the cold winter months, Rosa sighed in contentment and turned to him in silent hunger, still half-asleep, with open arms and hungry mouth, her tongue finding his, their hands finding each other’s bodies as she drew him with her into the silken wonder of their love.

Shady Lady was at it again. She was very obviously in estrus, the perineum around her genitals swollen into a great pink blossom. Will had named the chimp Shady Lady because when he had last seen her two years ago, she had been in the same state and methodically soliciting every stud in town for a quick wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Or rather, wham-bam-thank-you-sir.

“Town” for the moment was a giant
mucuso
fig spreading its great canopy arms over the forest floor in the middle of the Kibale Forest Preserve a lot of miles from any people besides Will. Fort Portal, the closest human town, was thirty miles of mud track away. The
mucuso
was crammed with ripe fruit, and first had attracted three male chimps, led by Randy Andy, a prime male with a sagittal crest more like a gorilla’s than a chimpanzee’s.

They had begun the haunting pant-hoot cries by which chimps communicate over long distances of forest, calling others to the feast, and soon nine males and three females were there, eating figs as fast as they could stuff them into their mouths.

Will shifted slightly in his uncomfortable perch two hundred feet away from the forest giant. He had bent African ginger and giant ferns down on top of one another to make a sort of nest offering partial concealment. The binoculars
brought the troop of apes up to within a few startling feet of him.

He got a tremendous jolt, as always, seeing these forest people in their natural habitat. It was nothing like
Bedtime for Bonzo
or the chimpanzee named Cheetah in the old Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies. These were wild animals and yet were so close to man in their actions, facial expressions, ways of moving and thinking and communicating, that it was like seeing your own slightly distorted mirror image, or looking down into the depths of your own being and seeing them crouched there.

The chimps had to use a close-by, smaller tree to gain access to the
mucuso
, which was smooth-boled, without limbs, its great crown spreading itself almost a hundred feet above the forest floor. It was a perfect scene of male bonding—the males were ignoring the females—until Shady Lady climbed up the egress tree to the feast from the wet, steaming jungle below.

Randy Andy, so named by Will because he was always ready for any quickie he could get, was the first to realize Shady Lady was in heat. Being a dominant male, he immediately began trying to monopolize her in what scientists like to call “possessive mating.” This meant staring at her intently as she sashayed around the giant limbs of the fig tree, until he was sure of her attention, then flicking his relatively large erect penis suggestively with his fingers.

This was all poor sex-crazed Shady Lady needed. She turned to thrust her hugely swollen perineum almost into his face, letting her sexual perfume waft past his nostrils, then pushed back against him. He thrust into her with great speed, thirteen times to completion, and she screamed—Will didn’t know if it was her own complementary completion or what—and moved away from him. Chimpanzees’ matings, though frenzied, were of very short duration. Often only ten seconds from intromission—another one of those sexy scientific words—to completion.

Randy Andy swaggered after her to prevent any other male from mounting her. But a particularly juicy fig dis
tracted his attention for a precious few moments, and Lefty, so named by Will because he had lost his right hand to a poacher’s wire snare, managed to grab Shady Lady from behind one-handed and pump into her for seven seconds before Andy charged him, screaming threats.

Lefty fled to safety by leaping into the egress tree and plummeting like a stone eighty feet to the ground, somehow making do for holds with his single hand, then disappearing between the giant buttress roots of the
mucuso
. Andy followed him partway down, baring his fangs and screaming extravagant insults, even throwing a fistful of underripe figs after him. Then he started back up with self-satisfaction oozing from every pore.

A victory, but bad tactics. Will’s glasses showed him that as soon as Andy had torn off in pursuit of poor old Lefty, Knuckles had sidled up to Shady Lady with his penis erect. She presented, he mounted her, thrust to completion. They uncoupled, turned away from each other as Captain Hook slipped up behind her to take his turn.

And to be charged by a roaring Andy, newly returned. But the Captain was no Lefty. He stood his ground for several seconds, jumping up and down and screaming insults in turn.

Long enough for Shady Lady to spot another as yet unseduced male eating figs behind a screen of foliage, and climb up to present. When he mounted her, Will saw that he was Zonkers, whose distinctively short, light hair showed his unusually well muscled physique to good advantage.

Will called him Zonkers because he was the first chimp crazy enough to take Will at face value when he had connected up with one of the troops in the forest. Zonkers not only tolerated him as a silent watcher, but by his nonchalance at Will’s presence made the scientist at least partially forgettable and thus partially invisible to the other chimps.

Then Zonkers became as curious about him as he was about them. Zonkers would fake charges, rushing along a limb toward him, slapping the smooth bark with his hands. Will would scratch under his arm and exhibit other nonaggressive behavior, and Zonk would return to his fruit, his sta
tus raised among the other males by his daring maneuver. Sometimes, if alone, he would sit in a tree for a half hour just staring at Will fifty yards away, then drop down to disappear into the understory foliage and pant-hoot away into the distance.

Zonk didn’t have his permanent canines yet, suggesting he was a couple of years from full adulthood—maybe thirteen years old. Since the chimpanzee life span, barring sickness or accident or fatal wounding, could reach around forty, he was a wonderful connection who could be a valuable asset for years to come.

But he was so much more than just an asset. After those first encounters, Will had seen him often enough that a sort of long-distance relationship had grown up between them. Then one day Zonkers had dropped out of a fig tree a hundred feet ahead and had strolled provocatively—if the chimps’ rolling side to side knuckle-walking could be called strolling—down one of the tunnel-like game trails through the thick underbrush. And Will had followed, crouched and stealthy, praising himself on moving so quietly that Zonkers didn’t even know he was back there.

After some twenty minutes, during which he never caught another glimpse of the ape, Will paused in a small clearing to stand erect and stretch his stiff back—he had to move through the tunnels bent over because he was so much taller than the chimps.

A dozen yards ahead was Zonkers, sitting on a tree limb that extended over the trail. He had his elbows on his knees and his chin resting on the backs of his crossed wrists, and was studying Will intently. When he met Will’s eyes, he made a funny grimace that was surely a grin, stood, stretched himself, and melted into the understory foliage without sound or even apparent movement. He obviously had arranged the whole scenario.

An even more remarkable encounter came a month later, when Will was hurrying back to his hut at dusk, having kept vigil at a huge
dawei
tree where the chimps were feeding. He had stopped to pick a pocketful of figs to stretch his own din
ner, and had no flashlight. Stumbling over a clump of twisted roots on the narrow footpath, he went down on one hand and one knee. When he started to push himself erect, Zonkers was sitting on the path only ten feet away, regarding him intently over one shoulder.

This was the sort of close encounter he had only dreamed of. Zonkers wrinkled his forehead and briefly scratched his left arm. His fingers sounded like sandpaper on his rough hide. Will immediately sat down and scratched himself vigorously in the same way. Zonkers didn’t move away and didn’t even look nervous, only unsettled. What further was possible?

Will slowly reached into his pocket for his figs. He had eight of them—which by chance was, observation had taught him, just about what a chimp could stuff into his cheeks at one time. Will held them in his open hand, then very very slowly leaned forward and even more slowly stretched out his hand and with a little flick of the wrist tossed the figs in a compact clump to the path about five feet from Zonk.

Neither moved for a full minute, although Zonk’s eyes, more calculating than cautious, flitted continually from the figs to Will and back to the figs again. Then, ever so slowly, he leaned toward Will and stretched out one of his long arms, and his long flexible hairy-backed fingers closed around the figs. He only got seven of them, one was left on the trail. He stood erect, stuffing the figs into his mouth.

Then he gave a sudden yelp, leaped toward the last fig—and incidentally, Will—scooped it up, and in a second bound was gone into the undergrowth. Will blundered home wet and muddy and insect-stung long after dark, finding the hut more by accident than skill, but happier and more excited than he had been at any time since Molly had died.

And now here was Zonk again, getting laid, if dog style—chimp style?—could be called by that term. Will marked the time in his notebook—twenty-seven seconds. World-class for a chimp. But when he reapplied the binocs to his eyes, Shady Lady already was having it off with another, Old Blue. Six seconds.

So much for true love. Will busied himself with his notes, but he was feeling something…
wrong
about the observing. As if he didn’t have the right. As if it violated something in his one-sided bond with the animals. So the next hour of Shady Lady’s sexual activities came to him almost as
tableux
, when he would look up from his notes and raise the binoculars to his eyes for the quick observation the scientist in him made
de rigueur
no matter what his personal feelings.

At first, Randy Andy was successful in his possessive mating strategy. For nearly half an hour he was making it with Lady about every ten minutes. None exceeded fourteen seconds in duration.

Finally Randy was all through—he couldn’t get it up any more. He returned to his figs. Shady Lady was of sterner stuff; she was insistent. He moved away, she followed; Will’s binocs were tight on his face at that moment, and he could have sworn he saw alarm there. He was sure of it when Shady Lady began tweaking Andy’s flaccid penis in hopes of getting a little action. Andy—Randy no more—fled, shrieking.

Will lowered his glasses, lowered his head, scribbled furiously in his notebook. He felt strange, had a choking sensation in his throat, a burning in his eyes.

When he looked up again, the other eight male chimps were lined up to take turns on the complaisant, indeed demanding, Lady in what scientists liked to call opportunistic mating. Will suddenly remembered a book by an apostate Hell’s Angel he had read years before. The man had turned state’s evidence against his former associates concerning a couple of cold-blooded murders, and had gone into the witness relocation program.

His book had been full of raunchy anecdotes about Angel activities in the swinging sixties, including that feature of every encampment, Angels lining up for a gang bang on some complaisant, indeed demanding, Mama. They called it pulling a train—because at the head of the line, on her back in some thicket, was the Mama taking them all on one after the other, puffing and chuffing like a locomotive.

Will was too far away from Shady Lady in her thicket of
mucuso
leaves to know if she was grunting like a locomotive pulling a train or not, but there were the males lined up with very little time between mountings, each taking ten to fifteen seconds for the act, then moving to the end of the line for another turn.

Will knew he was observing an extreme end of the chimp spectrum of sexual behavior in the wild; at the other end, as with humans, was pair-bonding. And unlike Shady Lady this time, most female chimps in heat would have a nursing infant doing his shrieking, biting, hair-pulling best to interrupt his mother’s couplings—a new baby would take her attention from him, thus reduce his chances for survival.

Finally all were through—worn-out. Exhausted. Not Shady Lady. She put a move on the closest ape, Captain Hook, but he gave a shriek of alarm and fled at her approach. She stood looking after him, one hand between her legs in momentary, absentminded masturbation, then spotted Old Gray higher in the tree and took off after him.

Damn! Raindrops were hitting the pages of Will’s notebook. Then he realized they were tears, not raindrops, and belatedly knew what the tightness in his throat and burning in his eyes had been.

For the second time in his adult life, Will Dalton was crying, silently at first, then sobbing aloud, shoulders hunched.

Moll. He had been seeing Moll there through his field glasses, Moll with a line of eager, raunchy men waiting their turn at her, Moll puffing and grunting and pulling her sexual train while he stood aside and watched, Moll whom he wanted and needed… Where was the difference?