Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“He pronounces it Sinjin.”

“As in unholy drink?” giggled Rosa. She was on her third glass of dago red, and her eyes shone like the candles on the tables, like the stars in the heavens.

“S-I-N-J-I-N. Unholy genie out of a bottle, maybe.”

“We agree on unholy,” said Rosa. She pointed at the last slice on the big round tin scored by countless pizza cutters through the years. “Anybody want this more than I do?”

Dante waved a hand, leaned forward across the table as she scooped it up. “Thing is, Rosie, I have that guy.” He closed his hand into a fist to show how he had a particularly vulnerable part of Skeffington St. John in his grasp. “He’s a degenerate and he’s falling to pieces. The people he’s associated with don’t like people who know a lot about them falling to pieces.”

“Can he give you what you want about Atlas Entertainment?”

“That’s the question,” admitted Dante. “He was the lawyer who set up the purchase of the corporate shell for-this is speculation-Martin Prince in Las Vegas. I don’t know how much he knows about what they’ve done with it since they bought it. If they do own it and if they’ve done anything with it.”

“Your obsession is showing again, darling,” said Rosa with a little chuckle.

“What? It’s an obsession to hate the bad guys?”

“You hate the bad Italian guys who screw up our good Italian name in this country,” she said, “so you just have to think Atlas Entertainment is a mob front.”

“That’s what I think,” he admitted with a wry chuckle. “I just can’t prove it. There’s no obvious illegality that would let me get inside their operation and look around. I can’t get a search warrant, I can’t get phone taps. I think they had Moll Dalton murdered-but I can’t prove it. I think they had Jack Lenington murdered-but I can’t prove that, either. I don’t have a motive for either killing-but hell, who needed one for Jack, you knew him from our academy days, he even made a pass at you, remember? A sleazeball even then. But Moll Dalton…”

“You’re projecting again, darling. Moll Dalton wasn’t corrupt, I grant you, but from what you tell me she was no maiden in distress. She was an ambitious, hard-driving woman who habitually cheated on her husband and would do anything to get to the top. You say Gounaris was using her sexually-well, maybe she was using him sexually, too. Maybe she overestimated how much power he had, and maybe that’s what got her killed.”

“He couldn’t protect her?” Dante nodded almost grudgingly. “Not bad, sweetie. But the point is that maybe I don’t have to prove the mob killed Moll Dalton. Maybe somebody will tell me. Her husband thinks she ended up being promiscuous the way she was because St. John had molested her as a little girl.”

“His own daughter? And you believe Dalton? Without any facts to back up his supposition?”

“Yeah, I believe him. I talked with Beverly Hills Vice, there’s rumors around St. John gets little girls for sexual purposes from a low-life talent agent.” He gave another chuckle. “Calls herself Charriti HHope.” He spelled it. “She’s a known-let’s say alleged-procuress, but she has a lot of powerful friends in LaLa Land so she’s never been busted.”

Rosa’s eyes flashed. “She gets little children for-”

“Yeah. For guys like Moll’s father, if the rumors are true, and I think they are. So Dalton was probably right about the molestation of the daughter as a little girl.”

“And this puts this St. John in your hand?”

“He’s juggling a dozen balls and he’s going to start dropping some of them. When he does, his playmates are going to decide he’s expendable. Then he’ll have to come to me.”

“Unless they kill him first.”

Dante sobered. “There’s that. But… a few months after his daughter is professionally hit?” He shrugged. “I’m almost ashamed of myself, but I told him his buddies had put out the contract on her even though I don’t know for sure that they did.”

“Did he believe you?”

“I’m banking that eventually he will. Whatever he did to her, I think he loved her. He was sure broken up when I told him she was dead. I’d love to put more pressure on him, but-”

“How long ago were he and his wife divorced?” interrupted Rosa with a thoughtful look in her eye.

“Um… twenty-five years ago, like that.”

“And you think he might have molested his daughter when she was a little girl? About four, maybe five?”

Dante leaned across the table and kissed her.

“You wonder why I love you? Of course. The wife. If I can find her and she confirms it…” He paused for a moment, then said uncomfortably, “Sweetie, there’s something else. I think I screwed up. After Moll Dalton was murdered, I got a message on the phone machine. From somebody doing Arte Johnson’s Nazi from Laugh-In and calling himself Raptor.”

“Raptor like in bird of prey?”

“Yeah. He said he was the one who’d killed her.”

“In a comic German accent?”

“That’s why I thought it was a crank call. So I just, uh, erased it off the tape.”

She met his eyes, held them with her own. Her face was serene and beautiful in the candlelight.

“And it wasn’t a crank call,” she said softly.

“I’m not sure. I got another call after Lenington was killed. This time it was a black talking, but it was a message from the same guy. He called himself Raptor again.”

“And you haven’t told Tim.”

“I had a hell of a time telling you, Rosie-that first call was probably Raptor himself. Now he’s using other people to make his calls so I’ll never get a voiceprint of him.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Rosa. “These men have egos. He’ll call you again.”

“You think so?”

“I would.” For a moment, her black eyes penetrated his soul, then she gave her chuckle that was almost a giggle, and stood to start putting on her coat. “Haven’t I always?”

She led him back, hand in hand, to the house in Greenwich Street where he had first dreamed of her.

In Vegas, Enzo Garofano had been seduced into his first dribbling orgasm in almost two years by the cantatrice Martin Prince had sent up to his penthouse atop Xanadu. Seduced as much by the memory of her fiery rendition of Carmen’s “Habanera” as by suckling like an infant at her magnificent meloni.

She had departed with his promise of getting her into a good opera company back east, and Enzo, after he had recovered from his sexual labors, had set out to honor his private arrangement with Martin Prince.

Mae’s Place had started life in the thirties as a roadhouse on the way to the Columbia turnpike, with good steaks on the first floor and high stakes on the second. Just “the Roadhouse” then, a rambling white frame building set in a nice grove of eastern white pines, plenty of parking. From her late teens Mae had been the hostess with the mostes’ in the downstairs lounge, and after legalized gambling in Atlantic City made the Roadhouse a losing proposition, bought in and changed the name to Mae’s Place.

Mae made the steaks even thicker downstairs, closed the unprofitable gaming rooms, and started running a different kind of beef on the second floor. Her girls were Grade A, some were Choice or even Prime, scrupulously clean and low-cholesterol. And her local protection was firmly in place: the county sheriff came out every Friday night for a thick T-bone and a thin blonde, on the house; and Mae had an excellent video of the reform mayor serving as the high-price spread between two of her girls, one whole wheat, one white bread.

Mae was now forty-nine, still flame-haired with a little help from her hairdresser, heavy-hipped and heavy-breasted, rings on every finger, expensive musk dabbled deep in her sensational cleavage, pink and voluptuous as a Rubens nude, randy as a goat. She indulged herself freely with a few old friends: if you were fortunate enough to be offered Mae, you didn’t pay.