Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“He still would have hired the hitter to take out Gounaris, not somebody on the fringes like Jack Lenington.” Dante leaned across the desk as much as its littered surface would permit. “He didn’t think Lenington had been sleeping with his wife.”

“Never can tell-she sounded like the town pump to me.”

But Dante had convinced himself by now: for Dalton as mastermind to work, it would have been Gounaris who had been killed. Back to square one. Popgun.

“I think it was Popgun Ucelli on behalf of somebody in the mob. Even the same M.O.-a shot to the head.”

“Sure,” sneered Tim. “Her in the face, Jack in the back of the skull. A. 22 and a. 357 Magnum respectively. Her twice, him once. Her in a crowded bar, him on a deserted street.” He gave his big braying laugh. “Identical.”

“Close enough,” insisted Dante.

“Maybe it was Dalton himself both times,” said Flanagan doggedly. “Did her, left, sneaked back into the country…”

Dante was sick of that game. He dug around in his pocket for his notebook, found his page, threw it open across the desk to Flanagan.

“There’s his contact number in Nairobi-the Kenya National Museum. I don’t know what the time difference is, but maybe you can catch him there.”

“I thought he’s supposed to be buried deep in the bush.”

“He was going to be in Nairobi for a month doing studies at the museum before he left.” He baited Flanagan some more. “Worth a try maybe, huh, Tim?”

And damned if Flanagan, with that same dogged look, didn’t take him up on it! He direct-dialed, with country and city code, and got the museum as easily as calling his wife out in the Avenues. He winked at Dante as he put it on speakerphone.

“Do you have a Will Dalton there at the museum?”

The crisp African voice, whose English had a lilting singsong and the elongated vowels of East Africa, said, “Dr. Dalton? I believe I just saw…” The voice receded. “Dr. Dalton?”

As Will started across the glass-walled lobby of the museum, the pert African receptionist began waving a hand at him. She had the telephone in her other hand. Through the tall floor-to-ceiling windows he could see the hot bright African sunlight outside. Inside the modern museum building, it was dim and cool.

“You have a telephone call…” As Will came up, she added into the phone, “Caught him on his way out. He’s been reviewing some of the Koobi Fora data…”

“Who is it, Mirinda?” Will asked as he took the phone.

She shrugged. “Not British.”

“Will Dalton here,” he said into the phone in the British manner. There was a very long silence on the other end. Then Dante Stagnaro’s unmistakable voice came bouncing down from a communications satellite a thousand miles above.

“Dr. Dalton, this is Dante Stagnaro in San Francisco. You’ve just struck Tim Flanagan dumb.”

“You got him!” exclaimed Will in a voice full of reprieve.

“The… Oh. No.” Genuine regret came over the wire. “I’m sorry. We… There’s been another murder…”

“Gounaris?” demanded Will in a hopeful voice.

“No. A policeman named-”

In a flash of insight, Will interrupted, “And you thought I wouldn’t be here. You thought-”

“Did you know a San Francisco vice cop named Jack Lenington?” Flanagan’s voice had the hollowness of tone peculiar to cheap speakerphones.

“No.” His voice was angry now. “What does this have to do with… with my loss?”

“Nothin’,” said Flanagan bluntly. “Not in my book.”

Will stood there in the cool dim museum by the reception desk, dressed in safari gear, a pained look on his face, trying to decide what he wanted to say. He finally burst out, “Goddam you people, I’m leaving for Fort Portal in the morning, I’m trying to get beyond…”

He slammed down the phone, stood beside Mirinda’s desk, breathing deeply, almost panting, as if he had been running. She started to raise a hand to touch his arm, then let it drop to her desk again. He found a small smile and a wry shrug for her.

“All the way from San Francisco,” he said.

“Where little cable cars reach halfway to the stars,” she said in her lilting voice, as if anxious to help him from his black mood. “Is there anything I can…”

“No, thank you. Just… policemen having silly ideas.”

“Policemen usually do,” she said precisely.

He shook hands with her formally in the British way and went out of the museum. Mirinda stared after him with brown wounded eyes full of unprofessional thoughts about the rugged, handsome widower. Since she had never met Mrs. Dalton, she had felt no urge to grieve when she learned of her death.

Outside, Will unlocked his beat-up old Land-Rover on the museum tarmac parking lot, hoping that phone call was the end of it. Maybe now they would let him get to Fort Portal, then off into the rain forest, and would forget all about him so he could get to work in earnest. All he wanted was to do his work.

And start forgetting. Maybe then the nightmares would start to ease up. He didn’t really believe they would, but all he could do was immerse himself in his work and… hope.

It would be so good to sleep without bad dreams…

“Got all the egg off your face, Tim?” Dante asked in an overly solicitous voice.

“Get the fuck outta here, lemme work.”

“Maybe I can find a map of East Africa around here somewhere, you can look up Fort Portal, find out what country it’s in. Maybe they’ll have a store there or something along the road that has a telephone, you can call them up and ask them to have somebody stand in the doorway with the phone in his hand for the next few days, see if Dalton happens by-”

“Okay, okay, go fuck yourself, chief.”

He began ostentatiously burrowing into the paperwork that littered his desk. Dante dropped a final comment on his way out.

“I think you owe me another beer on bowling night.”

It was the measure of Flanagan’s demoralization that he didn’t even argue the point. But back in his own office on the court floor of the Hall, Dante stewed and stewed, and then, realizing he should have done it earlier, spent the rest of the day calling all airlines for the name of Will Dalton on any passenger list in or out of Nairobi during the past week.

Nothing. The name was on no manifest. So, finally, he could let Dalton go out into the rain forests with his chimps for good, and start trying to make sense of the Lenington hit.

Which actually made almost too much sense.

Lenington is all but seen conferring with Gounaris and is hauled up to I.A. at Dante’s instigation. Dante tells Gounaris about it-and almost immediately, Lenington is whacked.

What didn’t make any sense at all was the obscure game being played by the man who called himself Raptor, and what he could possibly have had to do with the two killings.

Dread naught, devoted fans, it is I, Peregrine Raptor, Esq., that extraordinary assassin, that bird of prey, that sardonic quipper of quips, who made strawberry yogurt of the Lenington brainpan and arranged the call to Stagnaro about it afterwards. Why does that silly policeman have so much trouble accepting me? Well, it is early days yet. Perhaps he has not had time to fully appreciate what a grand killing machine I really am.

But enough of that. I want to chat about the Lenington kill with you, hypocrite lecteur, because in his murder I was faced with a problem of great delicacy and finesse: how does one get close enough to fog a veteran police officer who is also wary and thoroughly corrupt?