Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“I think on the contrary, my dear Watson, they shall prove to be the hairs of a monstrous hound.”

“These hairs?” demanded Hymie in apparent astonishment.

“No, I refer to what you have mistaken for the panty hose of the murdered woman. I said monstrous”

Hymie laughed and put the hairs he had clipped on a slide, put another slide over it, laid it on the counter and stripped off his rubber gloves, began moving toward the back of the lab.

“Coffee?”

“Unless it’s from the stomach of a corpse.”

“This is the Crime Lab, not the Coroner’s Office.”

They sat in straight chairs on either side of a table that held a Mr. Coffee, cups, spoons, sugar and Equal, Pream. At this time of day the lab smelled rather pleasantly like Dante’s high school chem lab where he had once blown up some peanut brittle made with something besides baking soda, he couldn’t remember what it had been. Miss Tchinin had been furious…

“What would you substitute for baking soda in peanut brittle that would make it explode when you broke it?”

“Why ask me, I just work here.” Hymie’s intelligent black eyes sought Dante’s, and he sighed. “Okay, hit me.”

Dante laid the answering machine tape on the table.

“I need the call on this tape voice-printed.”

“Sound-spectrographed,” corrected Hymie automatically. “You have anything to match it with?”

“Not yet. I hope never.”

Interest sparked the dark eyes. “A call from a killer?”

“Or a hoax. Could you just file both the tape and the voice print here so I don’t have to worry about them?”

“Sure. What name for the file?”

“RAPTOR. And could you not mention this to anyone else?”

“You and Jack Lenington,” mused Hymie as he dug out an accordion file folder. Dante, who had started to turn away, stopped abruptly.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Three, four days ago Jack brought in five K in old, small-denomination, unsequenced bills for analysis for black light, impermeable dyes, like that. Said it was evidence, asked I didn’t tell anybody about it. But since the guy’s dead-”

“Dead?”

“Yeah, last night, eleven p.m., a phone booth on Mission Street. Somebody blew his face off with a. 357 Magnum. Looked professional-no prints, the gun immediately dropped in the gutter. Funny thing, it had been sprayed with Armor All-”

“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Dante under his breath.

Uh-this is Raptor. Uh-I gave the, uh, gentleman the message. It, uh, really blew his mind.

Dante laid a hand on the bearlike technician’s arm, then laid a finger to his lips. “Hymie, my lips to your ear only on this phone tape, okay?”

“Sure,” said Hymie. When Dante was gone, he added, “Interesting,” to the tape in his hands, and starting making up the RAPTOR folder. That was it: he had the most interesting job in the Hall of Justice.

It wasn’t until three mornings later, after Lenington’s departmental funeral, that Dante finally went to see Tim Flanagan about the case. He’d had to organize his thoughts first, uneasy thoughts about Lenington’s execution inspired by the second Raptor phone call.

The call had come in before the media’d gotten hold of Lenington’s death-he’d checked. If it was genuine, did that mean Eddie Ucelli hadn’t hit either Lenington or Moll Dalton? Could he ask the Feebs about their phone taps on Ucelli again? Whoever had hired Eddie could be a nutcake, leaving phone messages for Dante once he was sure Eddie had made the hit. And so many of the characteristics of Moll Dalton’s murder had fit the Popgun’s M.O…

Or what if Tim had been right all along-that it was some psycho Will Dalton had hired to kill his wife? And what if Dalton had set up a second murder for when he was out of the country with a perfect alibi, just to confuse the issue?

Dante hadn’t told Tim, hadn’t told anyone about the first erased message from Raptor because he’d thought it was just a crank call. How could he now tell Tim about this second? But maybe he could pick Tim’s brains about the Lenington hit.

Only Tim wasn’t too cooperative; besides Lenington, he had a gambling murder of a small boy in the Vietnamese community-probably to show someone that someone else meant business-and a hotel arson fire in which two pensioners had died. So, the best defense being a preemptive strike, Dante asked Tim why he hadn’t been memoed on the Lenington investigation.

“Why would I think you’d be interested in a corrupt vice cop getting gunned down?” asked Flanagan patiently.

They were on either side of his desk in Homicide. The desk was as messy as Tim was, which was very messy indeed. Dante shoved aside enough paperwork, empty coffee cups, report forms, pizza boxes and doughnut bags to make room for an elbow.

“He was observed having a meeting with Gounaris, that’s why you should have thought I’d be interested.”

“Now, you see, I didn’t know that,” said Flanagan mildly. He took a big bite of sugar doughnut, spilled white sugar down his tie. The tie looked as if it had been used to mop up soup.

“You didn’t know that because I didn’t tell you about it.”

“Not surprising I didn’t know.” He brightened. “Besides, I doubt it has anything to do with this case you don’t have. What I hear, they’re gonna proclaim Hooker’s Holiday in the Tenderloin, everybody half-price for a day in honor of Jack’s passing. The pimps figure their net’ll go up 10 percent without good old Jack there to take his cut off the top.”

Dante’s elbow slipped off the desk, and he demanded irritably, “Couldn’t you stack a little more shit on this desk?”

Flanagan leaned back in his swivel chair and on the corner stacked his size 13 shoes, one on top of the other.

“How’s that?” he asked sweetly.

There was little sweet about the phone conversation going on at the same time between Kosta Gounaris and Gideon Abramson.

“Mr. Prince is very upset, Kosta, and for once I have to agree with him.”

“Mr. Prince is upset?” demanded Kosta. “What about me? I thought we said nothing would-”

Gid, talking at the same time, was saying, “When you said that was the end of Jack Lenington, I didn’t think-”

“Wait a minute, are you saying-”

“Of course. Are you trying to tell me…”

They both fell silent at the same moment. Then Gideon said precisely, “You’re telling me you had nothing to do with Jack Lenington.”

“I am. And you’re telling me Mr. Prince didn’t either.”

“He did not.” There was another long silence on both ends of the line with the scramblers on either end. Then Gideon added, “At least not through me.”

“Do you think he went around you?” asked Kosta. He was pleased he was able to make his voice sound as though a little icy finger had just been run down his spine.

“Ummm… no. He would have no reason to do that.” Positive now. “No. I think definitely not.”

“Then who did order it?” asked Kosta.

“And who would dare to carry it out?” mused Gideon.

“It might have been Clint Eastwood,” said Flanagan, his shoes still on the corner of the desk but a frustrated look on his face. “This was a. 357 Magnum. But I still prefer some badass from the Tenderloin that Dalton paid before he left.”

“You’ve got Dalton on the brain,” said Dante quickly. Because he’d had the same unwelcome thought himself since the second Raptor call, he wanted to argue Tim out of it. “First of all, there’s no way he could know about Lenington being associated with Gounaris, and second-”

“Remember your favorite theory, chief? That his wife mailed him something that contained clues about what she was involved in that then got her killed?” He reached for the final doughnut, this one jelly-filled. Dante hadn’t eaten any of them. “What if she did, and Lenington’s name was there?”