Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

Cops corrupt like Jack Lenington, as he was soon to learn.

Kosta was getting jumpy. Ten fucking days after Moll’s funeral, her husband was still alive, and no word from Jack Lenington. He’d put on a bland face for the fat cop, Flanagan, during the questioning following Moll’s… death-but he didn’t know if he could do it today.

He’d been almost crazed when he found out she’d been hit. He’d called up Gid, who’d told one of his fucking Hebe jokes, then added, “You knew damn well what would have to be done about Moll,” and hung up. But Kosta hadn’t known. He’d been crazy about Moll.

Of course the night they’d killed her, he’d told her Atlas Entertainment was dirty as Gid had told him to do, knowing she’d run to her husband with it. What did he think they’d do to the two of them? And he’d been crazy wild with her, even going down on her-he who never went down on anybody, not once since Constantinople and the fat greasy Turk. He must have known, somewhere deep inside, what was going to happen to her. But whoever pulled the trigger, it was her husband’s fault she was dead, right? You don’t walk off and leave a woman like that.

Why didn’t Uncle Gid eliminate that fucking Dalton so it was over and done with? “Patience,” he’d said, and Gounaris had replied, “No loose ends,” because he wanted Dalton off the face of this earth forever. He contemplated the idea with great personal satisfaction, but told himself that the real reason was just what he’d said to Gid, Dalton alive was a constant danger.

Martin Prince had bought Gid’s explanation of why Moll had to be hit, but Kosta knew he couldn’t trust even Uncle Gid if the FBI started an active interest in the case. And if Martin Prince even dreamed he’d been so stupid as to leave an incriminating file in a computer, Kosta’s own life would be on the line.

So right after the hit, despite Gideon’s admonitions of caution, Kosta had got hold of Jack Lenington and had told him to keep an eye on Dalton’s comings and goings. Ten days ago, and not a fucking word since. Maybe it was time to bring in some wrecking crew of his own. The Organization had probably used that guy out of Jersey-Ucelli, that was it-but he needed somebody Prince and the others, didn’t know about. Somebody as expert with accidents as Ucelli was with a. 22.

Hell, there wasn’t anybody. He’d have to do it himself. He’d done the Turk in Istanbul at fourteen, he could do No-Balls Dalton at fifty-five. But first he had to know what was going on.

Ten days was long enough. He needed to see Lenington.

Sergeant Jack Lenington of the SFPD Vice Squad thought, Maybe fucking Kosta Gounaris wasn’t so hard-nose as everybody said: he’d let the silence go ten days before asking for a meet. So Lenington would push it. He had a hard, lined face and doleful blue eyes that tipped down at the outer corners like a bloodhound’s, with none of the bloodhound’s sweetness of disposition, however: rage was his central metaphor. Whether forcing a hooker to go down on him in his patrol car or knocking her pimp around for a little rake-off of the profit, anger was his drug of choice.

Anger with caution. His suit was never quite expensive enough to raise Internal Affairs eyebrows, his boat was fiberglass with a 30-horse Evinrude, just possible on his department income, his home was a Sunset District stucco row house a few blocks from the similar house in which incorruptible Tim Flanagan lived.

But just wait until he had his twenty in. Then he’d dump his cow of a wife and head over to the Bahamas to his nice little offshore account. Buy a boat, get an all-girl crew…

He was almost smiling as he entered one of Vince O’Neill’s porn palaces on Mason Street in the Tenderloin. The garish red and yellow sign over the door read: HOT STUFF!!! XXX ARCADE!!! PHANTASY IN THE PHLESH!!! Covering the walls inside were intimate photos of women wearing only pubic hair, if that, and facial expressions seldom seen in full daylight. The middle-aged woman reading The Wall Street Journal in the raised change cage monotoned, “The-hottest-show-in-town-have-a-good-time,” without raising her face from the page. AT amp;T was down an eighth, but now that they were going into fiber-optic TV transmission…

Mobile masks of light flickered over male features from the eyepieces in the labyrinth of coin-operated peep-show machines, set up so each patron had his back turned to anyone passing by, thus assuring him a modicum of privacy. Perfumed disinfectant gave the place a county-jail smell.

Kosta Gounaris was at the end of the many-angled corridor, the only place where two machines stood relatively side by side. His eyes were glued on some unrolling endless loop of tape; throughout their discussion he seldom moved except to feed in coins when the machine clicked and went black.

Lenington jammed a fistful of quarters into the slot as fast as his machine would swallow them, ignoring what was behind the eyepiece. He was a hands-on, dick-in kind of guy; watching someone else do it did not interest him at all.

“You called,” he said to Gounaris in his flat angry voice.

“Tell me everything happened that night.”

He was instantly defensive. “There a fucking problem?”

“You’re here to answer questions, goddam you. Everything that happened that night.”

“Okay, okay.”

Lenington worked through Vince O’Neill since he was Vice and Vince was who he was supposed to be stamping out, and was a hardcase, so he’d been planning to push it with Gounaris; but now he wasn’t sure. The whisper was the tall, hard Greek had been a life-taker in his time. And he looked ready to do it again.

“Guy was supposed to have come in from JFK on a one-stop through Dallas, but I met him in the main concourse so I didn’t actually see him get off the plane.”

“You make him if you saw him again?”

“You think I’m fucking nuts?”

Gounaris nodded as if this were the right response, and fed in another quarter. “Go on.”

“I gave him the overnight bag, Naugahyde, some shit, I’d wrapped a pair of gloves around the handle like I was told, inside two photos, a man and a woman, the address of Bella Figura, street map with the route marked in yellow highlighter, gun, overcoat, spray can of Armor All. He put on the gloves before he touched anything else, then went in the men’s room. I went to one of the airport bars, gunned a couple drinks. You wanta know which bar-”

“No.”

“Couple hours, he’s back, hands me back the overnight bag without the overcoat. The gun was gone, too. He was still wearing the gloves. He caught the next shuttle to LAX. I returned the rental car, dumped the overnight bag. Next morning I read all about it in the Chronicle.”

Another quarter. “What about the husband?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? I directed you to-”

“Listen, you and me haven’t worked together before,” said Lenington, taking a chance. “I know you draw a lot of water, but I don’t eat too big a ration of shit from anybody, okay? I’m telling you there was no way I could keep tabs on him. Dante Stagnaro was in on this from the git-go.”

“I don’t know any Stagnaro. Just Flanagan.”

“Yeah, well, Flanagan’s just a cop, but Stagnaro’s a fuckin’ snake. You don’t see him, you don’t hear him, don’t know he’s near you, all of a sudden he’s lighting your fuckin’ cigarette. He heads up SFPD’s Organized Crime Task Force.”

Gounaris had returned to his machine. His voice tightened. “Organized Crime? And he’s been on it from the beginning?”

“Flanagan called him from the crime scene.” Lenington’s mouth twisted into a secret, angry smile. The fucker was worried, you could hear it in his voice, see it from the corner of your eye in the tension of his stance by the machine. “It looked like a pro hit to Tim, and they’re close, so he called him in. Anyway, Stagnaro on the scene I walk light, believe me. Day after the funeral, Dalton dropped out of sight.”