Menaced Assassin (5 page)

“Now I send you to see your husband, my little tart—now that I know you will think only of me as you do it with him.”

So here she was in Bella Figura drinking her second Midori sour and thinking that Kosta knew her all too well. She indeed was planning, with a nasty little frisson in her soul, to get Will into bed tonight. Kosta had hurt her a little and scared her a lot with his wildness; she needed Will’s tender loving strength to restore her.

The stranger in the light topcoat and tinted glasses came up behind her at 7:39. Expecting Will, Moll turned on her stool with a welcoming smile just as his gloved hand pressed a .22 pistol against the bridge of her exquisite nose and pulled the trigger. During the nanosecond of searing pain as the bullet passed between her wide, beautiful eyes, she knew
That’s why he was so wild, he was excited by

Moll thudded to the floor, a brain-splattered bundle of ruined designer clothes. The assassin put the coup de grâce into the base of her skull before staring around at the surrounding patrons frozen on their stools.

“Dead men tell no tales,” he said. “Live men too, if they got any smarts.”

He laid the empty .22 on the bar beside Moll’s purse, and strolled out stripping off his topcoat. As he rounded the corner into Front, he handed it to a homeless man poking around in a trash barrel at the edge of green block-square MacArthur Park.

Back in Bella Figura the screaming had begun, after several long moments of silence during which they all had looked at one another and then guiltily away. By the time the police arrived, no one had seen anything significant.

Live men tell no tales. Nor, of course, dead women.

Will had been held up on the Bay Bridge by a four-car crash blocking all lanes on the upper deck into the city. He got to Bella Figura just after the first black-and-white. When
Homicide Inspector Tim Flanagan arrived, Will was cradling Moll’s ruined head in his arms and crying all over the crime scene.

“Who the fuck is he?” Flanagan demanded of the uniformed team who had answered the original squeal. “The fucking Pope?”

“The husband.”

“Whyna fuck ya let him near the body?”

The black patrolman said, with exaggerated courtesy, “’Cause we couldn’t come up with any way to keep him away from her, Inspector, short of shooting
him
in the fuckin’ head too.”

Flanagan, who had a heavy round red face and a swag belly and pink tightly waved receding hair, looked and sounded like every casting director’s concept of the beefy, stupid, venal Irish cop with his hand out. He had, however, a degree in criminology from USF and was totally devoted to police work. His dumb act was strictly professional.

He told them to secure the crime scene—and he did mean getting the fucking husband away from the corpse—and went to call Dante Stagnaro at home even though Dante wasn’t Homicide and Tim was, so this was his beef entirely.

It was just that this looked professional, just the sort of homicide that Dante, with his surprisingly moralistic stance toward crime and murder in particular, especially professional murder, loved to get in on early.

That was fifteen months ago, and Lieutenant Dante Stagnaro, head of SFPD’s Organized Crime Task Force, still didn’t have anyone in the cage for Moll Dalton’s murder. Oh, he had a self-confessed assassin who called himself Raptor and left messages on his phone machine, and he was pretty sure he knew who had hired the guy—but he was as far from an arrest as when he had started.

Dante drove around the block because the parking lot for the Institute of Human Origins was off Euclid just north of the Cal-Berkeley campus. Will Dalton’s green 4Runner with its license plate HABILIS was parked in the lot: the damn fool had shown up. On his own car’s bumper was a sticker put there by his sixteen-year-old son, Antonio, that he hadn’t had the heart to scrape off: BAD COP—NO DOUGHNUT.

Organized crime in San Francisco didn’t mean the Mafia as it did in New York—traditionally, the mob didn’t have a strong enough presence in the Bay Area to merit a task force. What he and his two inspectors investigated was organized criminal activity in San Francisco of any sort—drug trafficking, chip theft and sales, car thefts, alien smuggling. Even murder, if there was a demonstrably organized conspiracy behind it.

A sign directed him through a gate and along a walk to a doorway and the basement of the Graduate Theological Union. Dante found it either ironic or touching—he’d never
made up his mind which—that IHO was housed with the Union. Some of the Union’s vocally Christian primates just had to be appalled by the Institute’s strictly Darwinian view of life. Tight budgets made strange bedfellows.

On a stage, students and a faculty director were rehearsing a drama with song and modern dance that said something about God, man, and the human soul. At a desk alongside the stage, IHO was taking money and checking in attendees—$3.00 for members, $5.00 for non—for Will Dalton’s lecture in the next room on similar subjects from a very different perspective.

Dante laid down five bucks and went into the lecture hall, checking the possibilities for ambush with a professionally careless glance. Behind a lectern and a stand-up mike was a slide-projector screen on a round raised box. Off to the side was a video camera to record the lecture. Several feet behind the lectern and screen, curtains. The wall on the right was a plasterboard partition with a couple of bright watercolors on it; the other three were brick, the windows in the left one recessed and covered with drawn drapes.

Rows of folding chairs in the body of the hall were filling up. In the rear were tables for hawking books, brochures, Institute T-shirts, calendars and the like.

The audience was students and adults ranging from the mid-twenties to old white heads, wearing suits, dresses, sweatshirts and jeans. Dante knew the type from other lectures; most of them were vocal, well spoken, self-possessed. A university crowd, very unlike the students at his community college over twenty years before.

Rosie said he had a better mind than any of them, but Dante always felt inferior in such gatherings. A sham. As if he had come in with a hick grin and mud on his shoes, tugging at a shoulder strap of his Can’t-Bust-Ems.

Anyway, danger points: the curtains behind the lectern; the recessed windows. He casually wandered around behind the lectern. No exit. Raptor would never risk boxing himself into such a dead end. And the window drapes were pulled back.

A shot from outside through the glass? No. Raptor had never endangered innocent bystanders; in that he adhered to the largely abandoned values and traditions of the Mafia when they only killed each other. But Dante was sure that his code could not exempt the dead Moll’s living husband. Dalton just had to be Raptor’s prime—indeed, final—target. Nothing else made sense. And if he was wrong?

Then Tim Flanagan would get a few more belly laughs. Tim had the belly for it.

The windows would be safe enough unless someone closed the drapes so Raptor could slip behind them. Checking them, he caught his own fleeting reflection in one of the panes. Early forties, medium height, an athlete’s body under slacks and jacket, narrow jaw, high cheekbones, black hair generously shot with silver, brown eyes under heavy brows.

He turned away; Dalton had come in with a knot of other scientists; they had paused near the tables.

Dalton hadn’t changed much during the fifteen months he’d been gone—five-eleven, 180, brown eyes, brown hair, still something of the real West about him, very tanned and fit, the brown hair shorter than when he’d left, almost brush-cut, the brown face leaner, harder than before, more closed.

Dante’s grasp on a forearm cut him out of his confreres. He came along with a wry shrug back at them.

“Good evening, Lieutenant.”

“Welcome back, Professor. But tell the truth, I don’t like seeing you here in the target area. I spent half the day trying to reach you at home or here at the Institute to tell you not to give this lecture tonight.”

Dalton grinned; it momentarily wiped the sadness from his eyes. “Why do you think I was dodging you all day?” His face changed; a bitter irony replaced the pleasure in his eyes. “I’ve been gone for fifteen months. If you haven’t been able to find Moll’s killer in all that time, what makes you think he’s going to show up here tonight?”

“To take you off.”

“And why would he want to do that, Lieutenant?”

“You tell me.”

He shook his head. “Always the same tune with you, isn’t it? I take it Gounaris is still out of jail.”

“As of this afternoon, yes,” said Dante stiffly. He wasn’t going to go into his own history with Gounaris. “In California they don’t jail you for sleeping with another man’s wife. And Gounaris isn’t the point here. I know damned well that you lied to me about not knowing any reason for your wife’s murder, and that you changed your plans and went away so abruptly because you were afraid you’d be killed too if you didn’t leave the country.”

Will gave a wry bark of laughter. “I see. I was a coward who fled with no thought of helping get my wife’s murderer—”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

Will took a deep breath, sighed. “Moll’s still dead, whatever we say here. I’m not comfortable with you in this gathering, Lieutenant, but I can’t make you leave. So…”

He started to turn away; Dante thought, What the hell, go for the throat. “You could say that Moll’s dead because you left her alone here for long periods of time, so she…”

Will tensed as if to swing at him, but a long-faced man with laugh lines but a worried expression tapped the mike.

“Hel… Hello? Yes. It gives me great pleasure to start our spring lecture series in January this year.” He chuckled at his own wit. With his black fanny pack over his belly, he looked about as much like a scientist as Dante’s teenage son did. “Will Dalton is no stranger to this Institute, having spoken to us at various times on his work with the great apes in Rwanda-Burundi, the eastern Congo, and northern Sumatra. Before Dr. Dalton’s talk, I would like to briefly outline the Institute’s aims and accomplishments for the many new faces I see in the audience tonight.”

Dante grabbed Will’s arm with sudden urgency.

“Goddammit, if you’re going to make a target of yourself, before you go up there at least tell me what your wife left with you that…”

The look on Dalton’s face stopped him. The deep-set brown eyes were deeper than they had been, as if used to
looking through things to truths they had been unable to see before.

“After I buried Moll I just felt damned fortunate to have a funded foreign research field project already set up to give me two years of rough, exacting, solitary work away from the memories here. Now here you are, stirring them all up again.”

The damned man always had been able to put Dante on the defensive. All those years in university, perhaps, all those graduate degrees, as opposed to Dante’s two years of community college before he had quit to go to Vietnam? Or maybe just the fact that Dante was used to dealing with mob types who, although now often college men, still showed brass beneath the veneer.

Dalton had changed his stance again. “I don’t really care what happens to me, Lieutenant, so maybe I’m not being fair to you. Stay for the lecture—we can chat afterwards. Who knows—maybe you’ll even find my talk instructive.”

He went up past the windows as Dante slid back behind the sales tables, where he could watch both doors and see everything going on between him and the speaker. He couldn’t even give himself the luxury of a folding chair as he suffered through a lecture on some scientific subject in which he had no interest and probably wouldn’t understand.

The man with the fanny pack was still at it.

“Dr. Dalton has just spent fifteen months observing the forest chimpanzee of western Uganda, and tonight we will hear the first report of his findings. Dr. Dalton began his career…”

At the front of the room a short well-fed man with gold-rimmed glasses and a black ponytail down the back of his neck leaped to his feet. Dante went into a half-crouch, his right hand sweeping toward the gun on his belt. He checked himself, glanced about, embarrassed. Hardly the stone killer Raptor. A member of the Institute about to videotape Dalton’s speech.

Dante made himself slouch back against the wall, eyes busy and a hand near his gun in case Raptor might want to
take Dalton out right now, before he had a chance to pass anything on. The hitman’s physical presence was almost palpable, but Dante was here first, ready…

So why did he still feel he was just another bit player in Raptor’s latest scenario?

Take Dalton out
. As Raptor had taken out Dalton’s wife. One thing Dante was damned sure of, if someone killed Rosie he wouldn’t run off to Africa for fifteen months. But that was unfair. He was a cop, with a cop’s training and experience, a cop’s familiarity with guns and violence, a cop’s Old Testament
eye for eye, tooth for tooth
idea of justice.

While in uniform he’d killed an armed robber in a 7-Eleven holdup; fifteen years later he still lost sleep over his memory of the man’s face as the arterial blood pumped out on the dirty floor. That killing was why he had jumped at the chance to head up the Organized Crime Task Force ten years later.

Yet he knew he would kill again in the same circumstances.

And if it was Rosie who was at risk, or worse, Rosie who had been slaughtered as Moll Dalton had been slaughtered…

Unbidden, Dante Stagnaro’s mind returned to that first night, fifteen months earlier, when his involvement with Moll Dalton’s murder had begun.

At night, Clown Alley at Lombard and Divisadero had the lonely, small-town, just-passing-through look of the all-night cafe in Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks
. Even the counterman looked as if Hopper had started to sketch him, then said to hell with it: unmoving in his stained white apron in front of his blackened and smoking grill, his arms folded, his cigarette lisping motionless smoke as he waited to flip a burger, his face unfinished, the features somehow merely suggested.