Menaced Assassin (44 page)

“Thank you for your attention here tonight. I will take questions…”

As an enraged female voice in the first row began, “How can you possibly suggest that…” Dante tuned out. Nothing had happened. Dante had miscalculated.

He waited patiently at the back of the lecture hall for almost half an hour as a core of hardy dissenters circled around Will like wolves, vociferous and finger-waggling as they disputed points of his thesis. Dante’s hand was on the automatic in its hip holster, but he was already quite sure that Raptor was not going to strike within this hall tonight. Why should he? Raptor need only trail Will Dalton back to the big old empty echoing house he had just moved back into…

Will finally broke free and came down the aisle between the folding chairs. Dante took his upper arm. “Now it’s my turn.”

“Not another critic, I hope.”

“Just a bodyguard. I’m going to follow you home.”

“I’m too tired to argue.”

They walked out to the now nearly deserted parking lot, Dante with his hand on the butt of his Sig-Sauer. Nothing. He swept his pocket flash under the 4Runner, in the backseat, before letting Dalton get in.

“Lock your doors. I’ll be right behind you.”

The big old rambling house was warm and homey; Dalton obviously had slipped in and turned the heat on even though ducking Dante all day. Homey, but empty. Waiting for the voice it would never again hear, the footfall it would never again feel on its polished hardwood floors. A fire was laid;
Will crouched before it, lit the newspaper under the kindling, stood up, brushed off his knees.

“Cognac good, Lieutenant?”

“Cognac is fine.” Dante wandered around the living room, looking at books on the shelves, touching artifacts from Will’s travels. “I saw your folks last month.”

“They told me.”

“They didn’t tell
me
anything. Not even when I said your life was in danger.” He accepted the brandy snifter from Will’s hand. “Do you think your life’s in danger?”

“No.”

Will reached into the inside pocket of the sports jacket he had worn to his lecture, brought out a 3.5″ floppy disk. He laid it on the coffee table in front of the couch where he had been sitting the last time Dante had been in this room.

“There’s the disk that got Moll killed, Lieutenant.”

Dante stood looking down at it, forgotten brandy snifter in hand. “Now you give it to me,” he said bitterly. “If you’d done this before you left, a lot of people would still be alive—”

“Moll wouldn’t. And now you can shut Atlas down. That’s your job, isn’t it, Stagnaro? Organized crime? Not murder?”

“Hard to tell the two apart sometimes,” said Dante.

His beeper went off. Will moved his head slightly, almost as if he had been expecting it.

“The phone is there.”

The police dispatcher said she’d patch Dante through to Tim Flanagan. Tim’s big voice boomed over the phone.

“Gounaris is dead at his tootsie’s place.”

“His tootsie?” Dante’s own voice sounded strange to him.

“Diana Pym. They were gonna have a party, but when she got home from Victoria’s Secret with a lot of fancy underwear without any crotches in it, a fax was waiting for her.” There was some paper-rattling, then Tim read to him: “‘GO TO MY APARTMENT AND WAIT FOR ME THERE. DO NOT CALL ME AT THE OFFICE. THE POLICE HAVE BEEN HERE AGAIN.’ So she goes there and waits, about
an hour ago she gets pissed with waiting and comes back here…”

He stopped. Dante said, “And?”

“Gounaris was here. Strangled with a wire garrote, pulled so tight it almost severed his neck. Then he was draped over an easy chair with his pants off, so he’d be the first thing she saw when she got home.”

“Nasty,” said Dante in his strange voice.

“Typical.” Tim gave his big laugh. “I think he spent a lot of time that way. His office log shows the killer got him up here with a phone call—”

“From Raptor?”

“From me. Musta been a good impersonation, huh?” His braying laugh. “Pym’s takin’ it a little hard, but what the fuck? Maybe Raptor’ll die of old age before he kills us all.”

He hung up. Tim was finally pissed off about Raptor—fifteen months too late. Dante returned his own receiver to its hooks.

“Gounaris is dead. Murdered. With a garrote.”

Will was meeting his eyes. “You want tears?”

Dante began, “If I didn’t know it wasn’t possible…” then trailed off.

“Anything’s possible, Lieutenant,” said Will with sudden decision. “In fact, if I were a betting man…”

Dante grabbed up the phone again, jabbed out the number he knew best. Rosie would still be at Greek Dance, or at coffee afterward. He added the code to activate his phone-machine playback. There was a single call.

“Remember the end of
Hamlet
,” said the voice, “when everybody’s dead and only Horatio is left to tell the tale?

“… let me speak to the yet unknowing world

How these things came about: so shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause.…

“Just ask me, I’ll tell you. This is Raptor.”

It was Will Dalton’s voice.

Dante automatically pressed the combination to save the tape, hung up. He began in a hushed voice, “But your… the Raptor message after your wife’s… after Moll was murdered…”

“I’d deciphered the disk by then. It told me who was involved in Atlas Entertainment, and I knew they’d murdered her. You’d told me she’d been promiscuous for our whole marriage… I was crazy with grief and love and hate… and guilt. If I’d been there on time she wouldn’t have died. If if if… I had to
do
something. Had to…” His voice was anguished. “I had all the money coming from Moll’s life insurance to spend, the name Raptor just came to me, so I used it… He was a sort of shorthand… Somebody who could do what I couldn’t do myself…”

Dante remembered giving Dalton his card on that other visit to this house, his card with his unlisted home telephone written on the back. He was still struggling with belief, assimilation.

“But… Tim and I talked to you on the phone. In Kenya. After Jack Lenington was hit…”

“I’d just gotten there the day before.”

“I put you on the plane myself—”

“To L.A. I didn’t fly on to Africa until after I’d killed Lenington.”

“I checked the plane manifests.”

“Kampala, not Nairobi. Uganda, not Kenya.”

Dante hadn’t moved from his place at the phone. He had only to pick it up, call for backup. His gun was on his belt, Dalton—Raptor—was relaxed in the leather easy chair.

“You flew back again to do Spic Madrid?”

“Not mine. Not involved in Moll’s death.” Will was on his feet, suddenly pacing, gesticulating, as if everything he had bottled up inside was bursting out after fifteen months. “I was still in Nairobi, saw a filler about it in the international
New York Times
, got a priest at a mission down the road from where I was staying to make the phone call.”

“The fucking dog!” Dante exclaimed suddenly. “That was what I missed at your folks’ place! The dog! He was the one at Mae’s Place that disappeared after…”

“I couldn’t leave him there. He’d come to depend on me.”

“Then your folks knew that…”

“That I was back from Africa some months ago, that’s all. What they might have guessed beyond that…”

“The fucking code of the West,” said Dante bitterly.

“The genetic code, more likely,” snapped Will. “My father killed men in the war. He said it never bothered him for a moment. He always felt that’s what soldiers did. I was in a war, too. They’d swatted Moll like a fly. To protect their fucking empire. So I pulled their empire down any way I could.”

“Just like that,” said Dante softly. He’d spent his whole professional life trying to do just that; Dalton had done it in fifteen months.
Let me speak to the yet unknowing world… of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts…
“Of course you killed a lot of people in the process…”

“People?” Will paced again, gesturing, face distorted. “Yes. Of course. You’re right. They were people, weren’t they? After Lenington I quit. I couldn’t stand it. I’d never known that killing another human being would be so… so
hard…
”

“But you got used to it,” said Dante coldly. He was waiting for the wave of hatred, of revulsion for this murderous bastard to hit him, but it hadn’t yet. Maybe now it would.

“I spent three months in the Kibale Forest. The nightmares stopped. I was getting immersed in my work. Then a female came into estrus. Chimps… they were all… All I could see was Moll… with Gounaris… with all of them… And I knew I had to come back, keep going until all the men who had killed her were dead.”

“Why Moll’s father?”

“Not me—I’d say it was Ucelli acting under orders from Otto Kreiger. But when I heard about it, on the same day I killed Kreiger, I just used that Hardy quote about pairings…”

“How’d you know about Ucelli? He wouldn’t have been on this disk.”

“You told me—remember?”

Dante remembered. Right here in this room. He could see it all now. How Dalton had worked it. Once everyone believed he was in East Africa, nobody would look in his direction again.

How
he had done it, yes. But that he’d been
able
to do it… Such a sustained rage, such a…

He remembered his secret contempt for Will when he’d heard the man was going to run off to Africa, leave his wife’s death unresolved. Remembered his own blustering thoughts about what he would do if someone did to Rosie what they had done to Moll…

Would he have done any different?

“If we weren’t here, if you hadn’t told me about this…”

“I’d go back to Uganda.” His eyes had, for a moment, an almost peaceful look. “Eventually, publish my findings. Keep looking for answers about us…” He met Dante’s gaze directly. “It’s important. After all of this”—he waved an arm—“I know just
how
important. How could I do it? Yet I’d do it again.
Knowing
it was wrong,
knowing
we have to find other ways to react to loss and pain and rage if we are to survive as a species, knowing all that I’d still do it all again. Because whatever has been driving me is in all of us. We have to understand it or we’re doomed.”

Dante thought of the Raptor messages. The lecture he had heard that night. The impossibility of getting evidentiary proof of any of the slayings Raptor had committed—he still couldn’t think of the assassin as Will Dalton. The Raptor tapes meant nothing, even those that could be shown by voiceprints to be in Dalton’s voice—just a man reading quotes from literature . . .

Will burst out, “Don’t you see it, Stagnaro? Young primates in the ghettos, forming bonds like chimpanzees on the
veldt
… Pockets of nationalism or race festering until they split open and spew violence… Spouses beating spouses,
stepparents killing children… Me murdering the men who murdered Moll…

“We can’t escape our animal nature, it’s like cholesterol in the blood—in times of stress it’s going to come out. But still we ignore the myths that told us who we were, where we came from. We try to live the myth of man, shiny and new, apex of life, different in kind, not degree. It doesn’t work. Our only hope is to recognize who and what we are, hope that we’re still evolving, that we still have time—just barely—to save ourselves and the world. Otherwise…”

He stopped, rubbed his eyes wearily. Dante took his hand from the phone, where it had been all of that time, crossed to the coffee table, picked up the disk. Dalton hadn’t been asking for absolution; just understanding. And not for himself. Just for…
us
…

Will Dalton spoke softly, almost indifferently.

“So what happens now?”

Dante wasn’t God. Just a cop. A cop who’d have a hell of a time proving anything he’d heard here tonight in a court of law. He hadn’t even read Dalton his Miranda rights. And for the moment, all his own enemies were dead. He put the disk in his pocket. He’d erase the message on his answering machine.

“What happens now? Atlas Entertainment goes in the toilet, my organized crime squad looks like champs. The Mafia’ll probably have a big war over who grabs Vegas now that you’ve taken Prince out, and the Feebies’ll think they’re gonna save the world. You’ll have to learn to live with what you’ve done—I, God help me, will have to learn to live with what I’m doing.”

He knew he’d tell Rosie. Eventually. And he knew she’d approve. Eventually. He’d never tell Tim; he wouldn’t approve. Or maybe he would. Dante wasn’t so sure about anybody any more.

“Not with a bang but a whimper,” said Will Dalton softly.

“Whatever the hell that means,” said Dante.

Neither man offered to shake hands. As he shut the door behind him, Dante heard Will Dalton, for the third time in
his adult life, start to cry. Moll was still dead, and Raptor was gone. Will Dalton was truly alone.

But he had avenged his dead wife, and could begin to grieve for her. After all the hatred and spilled blood, wasn’t that a human achievement of sorts?

It is the height of folly for a mystery novelist who writes escapist fare to take his work too seriously. On the other hand, what is escapist fare? Must it always be the latest bodice-ripper from the romance writers? The latest mindless sitcom or TV talk show parading moral cripples before us like county fair carnival freaks? In a 1944 essay for
The Saturday Review of Literature
, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler wrote:

“
All
reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, or astronomy. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

Menaced Assassin
is a mystery novel that happens to examine man’s origins, his nature, his relationship with the world around him, and the wellsprings of his almost unremitting violence against his own kind. It does so deliberately, by weaving these questions into the plot, so I have listed below those books from which I stole shamelessly during the writing. They have amused, astounded, delighted, educated, and excited me for countless hours,
entertained
me beyond measure. I list them here so they can give like pleasure and excitement to you. Any scientific accuracy is theirs; any theorizing, any errors, mine alone.