Menaced Assassin (24 page)

And what difference did it make? He loved her, wanted her, craved her, lusted after her, needed her, no matter who she was or what she had done. And she was gone. Unfairly, undeservedly dead and gone and buried and he was still here.

So he cried, cried as if he would never stop, cried out of his grief and rage and loss and anger, cried there in his little crushed nest of ginger and ferns, cried at last for Molly as he had been unable to cry at her funeral. As he had begun to cry
for her at his home until the two cops had arrived with their good-guy bad-guy routine to disabuse him forever of his naive delusions of their love together…

He realized that for some time a consoling arm had been draped across his shoulders, long fingers had been gently patting his upper arm. Will turned his head, slowly, unbelievingly. Zonkers was sitting beside him, his long arm around Will’s quaking shoulders, offering silent comfort for his vocal grief. When, in his shock and amazement, he stopped wailing, Zonkers suddenly was gone, leaving only swaying branches behind him.

Will stood up also, almost overwhelmed by a great uprush of emotion. Chimps couldn’t cry, couldn’t possibly feel sorrow. Not as a human being did. Only Zonkers had. Had known those sounds Will Dalton was making were sounds of desolation, and had known, somehow, what desolation meant. And had offered comfort.

Will thought feverishly, he would stay here forever. His supplies were all but exhausted. So what? He would live as the chimpanzees did.

Better than that, he would make Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fantasy creation of Tarzan a reality. He would join the troop. Live on fruit, maybe the occasional monkey or small antelope the chimps and him, hunting in unison, could catch. He would lead them through the forest, learn from them, teach them to avoid poacher’s snares, would cut the snares that couldn’t be avoided off their arms and legs before the limb could drop off from lack of circulation…

Meanwhile, his notebook was bulging with new observations that would have to be rerecorded and systematized, but Zonk comforting him would never be passed on to his colleagues. Few would believe it, but beyond that, it would be a betrayal of whatever had reached across 5 million years to bind them together in mutual distress and comfort.

So it was Will Dalton, ethologist, who dazedly gathered up rucksack, notebook, pen, binoculars, moving on automatic. This was crazy stuff, this was total emotional breakdown. Yet the bursting forth of his desolation and loss, and
the ape’s genetic understanding of it, had told him he had to complete his work. He had been wavering, vacillating; now he knew he had made the right choice. It was as Ardrey had said: our hearts were indeed pledged to the animal world’s subtle, antique ways.

Meanwhile, he was down to a quarter kilo of coarse-ground white corn flour that he could cook with water to make
posho
, that standard of East African field cuisine. For now, it was time to leave.

He checked the
mucuso
one last time. It teemed with the two local monkey species, sooty mangabeys and redtails, gobbling the ripe figs left by the apes. The twenty-pound mangabeys wore their correct charcoal business suits, but the redtails, half their size, were dressed like clowns: long burnished coppery tails, white bellies and black backs, with a white spot on the end of their noses like clown makeup. Everyone chittered and called and scolded.

The chimps might never have been. So for now it was goodbye, Shady Lady and Randy Andy, Captain Hook and Brandy and Knuckles and Lefty. The vagaries of rain forest life, especially the poachers, meant any or all could be dead when he returned.

Robinson Jeffers’s line from “Hurt Hawks” leaped into his mind:
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk
… Or a chimp.

The chimpanzees were his godparents, his uncles and aunts, his cousins, his nieces and nephews, and he loved them.

Especially Zonkers. Twin. Brother.

Hey, brother, can you spare an apartment? Only kidding. The bothersome old man with the canary soon would be gone.

For some twenty hours he’d been defending what he’d called his “turf”—sitting on the sidewalk in front of Otto Kreiger’s building on Sixth Street south of Market. On paper, of course, the building belonged to the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in a Cayman Islands real estate office.

Really quite a comical old man, resting his canary cage on one thigh and his butcher knife on the other. Runover shoes and a three-piece suit, a tattered Persian mg under his rocking chair, both chair and rug from the apartment he had refused to quit until he’d been carried down to the sidewalk in his rocker. There, smelling bad, he’d stayed, courtesy of a temporary restraining order on his behalf by Legal Aid. But the TRO had expired an hour before without being translated into a preliminary injunction.

The slightly rotund but pretty-faced black woman cop was being a hell of a lot gentler than Kreiger would have been, probably because TV news cameras were recording the event even though it was only eight-thirty in the morning. Kreiger was just there, one of the crowd.

“Mr. Kreplovski,” the cop said, “won’t you give me the knife? You don’t want anyone to get hurt, do you, sir?”

Kreplovski just sat there looking bewildered. Kreiger hoped he would take a slash at the black broad, put himself
in the wrong. But just then the morning sun touched the cage and the canary started singing joyously. The old man looked at the bird with his mad blue eyes, then handed over the blade.

“Thank you, Mr. Kreplovski.”

Kreiger, standing in the crowd, said, “I bet she’s from hostage negotiations. Smart move to bring her in.”

“This fucking town,” said the man next to him.

The woman cop was saying, in the same reasonable tone of voice, “You know we’re going to have to remove you now, don’t you, Mr. Kreplovski?”

“I know my Sarah died in that apartment. I know I want to die there, too.”

“In a few days there won’t be any apartment,” she said brightly. Two burly uniforms were moving up on either side of her. Somebody jeered at them, but the presence of a black woman, though herself a cop, tended to dampen the crowd’s hostility.

“Why can’t they just let me die with the building?”

“Who would take care of your canary?” she asked in a reasonable voice.

That seemed to clinch it for the old man. The two burly blues crouched, got hold of the bottom of the chair and came erect with it, and Mr. Kreplovski, and the canary. They carried all three across the sidewalk toward the waiting ambulance.

“Clever,” said Kreiger to the man next to him. “Ambulance instead of a paddy wagon. Good public relations.”

“This fucking town,” said the man, shaking his head.

Old Kreplovski turned to look up at the vacated apartment building as they put him and his canary into the ambulance. Tears were running down his cheeks from his startling blue eyes. The crowd started to cheer, then to applaud him.

Kreiger sighed, “Progress.”

“You fucking asshole,” the man next to him said, and stalked off.

Kreiger toyed with the idea of calling up someone to teach him a lesson; but walking back up to his office on Sutter
Street, he forgot about the fool. He had won. Kreplovski had been the last tenant of the run-down old apartment building. Now it could be torn down to make way for the offices and arcade Kreiger already had gotten the permits for from the city. He’d had to pay a few people off, but it was just part of doing business in a candy-ass town prizing environmental awareness.

Whether it made money or not was largely immaterial anyway: he would be washing large sums from the newly reviving heroin trade through it during demolition and after construction.

It had been three and a half months since the hit on Spic Madrid, and today, finally, Otto Kreiger was making his move. At first, truth be told, he had been terrified. Unlike the FBI and the St. Paul police, he had no doubts at all about who had ordered the killing, and no doubts at all about why.

He stopped for the light on the corner of Third and Mission; across the intersection was the Rochester Big and Tall that had been there as long as he could remember. In the early days he’d bought his own suits there, 50 long.

Obviously, Martin Prince had seen in Spic’s muted opposition at the meeting of capos a direct challenge to his own authority. Kreiger had shown the same muted opposition. Spic had voted to have the baby-raper down in Los Angeles hit; so had Kreiger. They had been overridden, three to two, in the show of hands. Normally, that would have been the end of it.

But in this case, the end hadn’t come until a week later, when Spic had been gunned down in his St. Paul headquarters.

Otto Kreiger hadn’t been gunned down. Yet.

“Yet” was why, the day after Martin Prince had called with sadness in his voice to tell him of Spic’s sudden end, he had gone to a private security firm and had hired around-the-clock personal protection for himself and his family.

It was degrading, but getting dead was even more degrading.

Two days after he had hired them, his wife came striding
into his study straight from her stables, still in riding boots and jodhpurs, anger in her wide-set blue eyes, slapping her riding crop in her gloved left hand.

“Otto, that new stablehand you hired has to go!”

“Stablehand?” He felt a sudden sharp anxiety. “I didn’t hire any—”

“There was some large ugly man in ridiculous corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket and a cap hanging around the stables this morning. When I ordered him off the premises, he told me he was sorry, he couldn’t leave.”

“Good,” said a relieved Kreiger.

“When I demanded to know what he meant he said to ask…” Belatedly, she broke off to demand, “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Good.’ That tells me he’s doing his job.”

“You mean you
hired
him to stand around gawking at me?”

He said, with admirable mildness, “I’ll have a word with him about being less obtrusive, my darling.”

Like many Mafia wives, Tiffany had no real knowledge, only surmises, about what her husband did. She knew he was a powerful criminal defense attorney, and she knew most of his clients were not people she would ever invite to their Sunday afternoon pool party/barbecues. She also knew these clients did not explain his tremendous income, but she didn’t question it because she liked to spend it—on her face, on her body, on her horses.

For his part, Kreiger liked indulging her. She was a very handsome thirty-four, kept her figure and most of the time her place, and was wise enough to service him sexually when and how he liked it. Since he would have considered anything beyond me-Tarzan-you-Jane unmanly and maybe degenerate, missionaries would have approved.

In mollified tones, she said, “I don’t understand what he’s doing around the stables in the first place.”

“Well, actually, Tiff, he’s sort of looking after you.”

“What’s the matter?” she exclaimed in alarm. “Is there danger for the children? Shouldn’t we call the police or—”

“Nothing that troublesome, darling.” He came around the desk to her. “Nothing we need bother the police about. Just a rowdy element…”

“I… I don’t understand,” she said weakly.

She was Woodside born and bred, educated at Sacred Heart in the city, then Stanford, she had never seen any of the rougher edges of life. He put his arm around her shoulders, walked her slowly to the door of the study. He could feel her tremble against him, could smell the horses on her clothing, could very faintly smell the perfume of perspiration from her exertions in the practice ring. It was physically arousing.

“Now don’t you fret, my love. You know I’ve been buying some of those old fleabag rooming houses and commercial properties south of Market now that the Yerba Buena Center is up and running—”

“Well, yes, but…”

“There’s some radical homeless advocates who want to see it all upgraded to low-cost housing rather than torn down for new, significant development, and they have made some silly threats. So I just thought it prudent to provide you with around-the-clock protection until the problem is solved.”

There had been angry shouting matches in the Board of Supes over his permits, but the guards had really been to send Martin Prince the message that he was no stupid mark like the little beaner. A statement. A sort of deadly chess game.

He walked in the California sunlight down cleaned-up Market Street toward Montgomery, thinking that he liked the analogy. Almost poetic.

Down in Southern California, Dante was picking up his Avis rent-a-car at the Burbank airport. His elation at learning about the connection between Gounaris and the Mafia’s Abramson had subsided. The bubble had burst. So all the Abramsons were the same guy? Even if confirmed it didn’t prove anything at all about Abramson or anyone in the Mafia
being involved in Atlas Entertainment, let alone the murder of Moll Dalton.

Even at ten in the morning, it was blazingly hot in the Valley; as soon as he got into the car he had the windows shut and the A/C cranked up. He drove in on Airport Way, thinking that in three and a half months he had accomplished exactly nothing to unravel the connection between the murders of Moll Dalton
et al

Not that he had been three and a half months idle. He had been so busy with the
real
business of the Organized Crime Task Force that if any leads had developed he wouldn’t have been able to follow them up anyway. Rumors of a possible San Francisco link with the New York Chinese gangs smuggling freighters full of illegal Chinese immigrants into California. A goofy tip that an organized band of Latino ex-cons was extorting money from Valley farmers in some scam involving water rights, portable Johns, bogus green cards, and reporting legal workers to
la Migra
as illegals.

He passed over the Ventura Freeway; directly ahead was the old Burbank Studios—now Warner Studios—with its distinctive old-fashioned tan water tower. Alameda merged with Riverside to carry him through determinedly quaint Toluca Lake.