Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Did Madrid deal to them, too?”

“Maybe,” said Carman without too much interest. “But word is they made him nervous, so the only people who ever came here were his direct lieutenants. Not so dumb, at that.”

“Until last night,” said Dante.

The body had been removed and the place dusted for prints and vacuumed for fibers, but otherwise was untouched. White tape outlining a hologram of someone sitting in the swivel chair tipped backward over the desk. There was quite a lot of black-dried blood puddled around the taped outline of the head.

“He was talking with his wife on the phone when he got it. And his bodyguard probably met the hitman coming down the walk.”

Dante looked sharply over at Carman. “Courtesy absence? Warned off by the killer?”

“The locals don’t think so. He’s Madrid’s nephew and was devoted to him. Madrid was drunk, sent him out for tequila and limes. Another nephew also was killed last night a few miles south of here in a little town called Coates.”

“Open season?” mused Dante.

“That one looks like a simple knifing after a wedding dance, but you could be right-a straight power play by other locals. Madrid was a vicious bastard, climbed over a lot of widows and orphans on his way to the top of the pyramid.” He stopped with a short, almost bitter laugh. “Allegedly.”

Dante was trying to visualize the hit from the taped outlines on chair and desk. “Anything else odd about this one?”

“The killer left the gun behind-no fingerprints on it.”

“Jennings J-22, maybe? Only one round in it? Sprayed with Armor All? And he gave his overcoat away afterwards, maybe?”

“Yeah, Armor All. And yeah, he gave the overcoat to the nephew.” He added sternly, “Okay, Stagnaro. Give.”

“Popgun Ucelli out of Jersey. Either him or someone who knows his M.O. and is using it. Your Organized Crime people have a running tap on his phone…”

Carman was already turning away toward the phone. Another airplane shrieked by low overhead, rattling the windows in their shrunken frames. A taped X on the edge of the desk marked where the killer had set down the murder gun after using it.

“He’s sitting at the desk, talking on the phone, hears something behind him,” Dante said aloud, more to himself than Carman, “and thinks it’s the bodyguard coming back. He turns, the pistol is pressed against the bridge of his nose, whap! he’s dead meat.” He shivered with the cold, looked over at Carman. “How many shots?”

Carman held up one finger, then opened his hand, palm toward Dante, in a stop motion as he listened to the phone. He grunted a few times, said thank you, and hung up shaking his head.

“They didn’t have an eyeball surveillance on Ucelli. They’ll send somebody out to see if he’s in town, but…”

“Yeah. If he was here he’ll be back in Jersey by now.”

Dante spent the day reading the papers they’d found in Spic’s office. Nada. Dinner was with Carman and the homicide cop in charge of the investigation, a thick-bodied German named Heidenreich. Ucelli was in residence in Jersey but could have been away for as long as a week before the Madrid hit. They’d had no eyeball of him during those seven days, hadn’t picked him up on any of the voice-activated surveillance tapes.

The next day with Heidenreich was fruitless. That night Dante caught the 10:15 Northwest nonstop to SFO. In-flight, in a New York Times the flight attendant brought, he read about the murder he had just been watching being investigated.

This one would go into the St. Paul Police Department open file. No one would bust his butt on it. Local slaying of local slime, no connection between Madrid and Atlas Enter tainment, the parallels with the Moll Dalton and Jack Lenington hits genuine coincidences. They happened.

Dante spooned up behind the sleeping Rosa in their double bed and went hard asleep, so it wasn’t until he got up the next morning that he saw the blinking light on the answering machine. He rewound the message without the slightest premonition.

The voice was obviously Latin, slurring the English words in that liquid south-of-the-border singsong now becoming so familiar to anyone living in California.

“Hey, senor, thees ees Raptor. I bushwack heem in the arroyo. Cure hees postnasal dreep. Mucho diversion, verdad?”

Much diversion indeed!

But listen; you want to know why I kill, I will tell you.

It is the summer between my junior and senior years in college, and I am seeing this great nation of ours firsthand in an old red Ford Falcon with one blue fender from a junkyard in Phoenix, Arizona. I work two weeks at a job, any job I can find wherever I am, then I move on: I wash dishes in Salt Lake City, I unload boxcars in Elton, Illinois, I pack corn in Rochester, Minnesota, where the canning factory has a water tower painted like a huge ear of corn, kernels, husks and all.

The night I leave Rochester I end up in a small, old-fashioned, midwestern bar in Austin, where Hormel has its headquarters. Long and narrow, with dark wood booths along the right wall, the bar along the left, a few tables down the middle, shuffleboard, in the back a golden oldies country-western jukebox-“Good Night Irene,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

But the evening’s real entertainment is two very drunken Great American Working Men with thick arms and beer bellies out over the tops of their Levi’s (Raptor’s rule: Wealthy American males of a like age have pear-shaped guts up over which they wear tailored slacks). These men don’t have tax consultants, but they do have their Detroit tin, their washer-dryer, their outboard motorboat on a trailer in the backyard.

Tonight they are drunk in a bar near Hormel’s, heads to gether to chuckle over one another’s dirty stories. Then the one with hair rears back on his stool, almost falling over.

“You summitch, ya can’t say that to me!”

“Say anything I wanna say, shitferbrains!”

They are off their stools, wild-eyed, lump fists faking jabs. Nobody moves to break them up. The Hairy Man’s roundhouse swing at the Smooth Man’s bald pate misses. The force of his own blow whirls him around so he knocks over two stools and lands on his derriere, startle-eyed.

“Get up’n fight!”

The Smooth Man shuffles like a trained bear. The Hairy Man rises. The Smooth Man swings at him, misses, spins, falls. Twice more each. They assist each other, ascend their stools.

“Onliest frien’ I got inna worl’.”

“Can’t count on nobody but you.”

They embrace, and weep upon one another’s shoulders. Quaff their beer. Heads together, they chuckle once again.

“Rotten bassard, can’t say that ’bout my wife!”

“You summitch, you said it ‘bout my wife firs’!”

In almost an hour, neither lands a solid blow.

Sitting beside me through this floor show is a lanky sandy-haired man with large knuckly hands scrubbed red and raw-looking. He thrums like a high-power line as he sprinkles salt in his beer to raise the head, drinks, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His change and cigarettes are in the wet puddle left by his glass.

“Every fucking Friday night,” he says. He has a low, hoarse voice that makes me want to clear my throat.

“Better than TV.” I gesture at the bartender for refills of his glass, my own. “Any work at the packing plant?”

“You don’t want to work there. I’m a plugger and…” I do not know what a plugger is. He starts to roll up his left sleeve. I do not know what he is doing. Stitched up his forearm is an orderly row of white dimples. “Gook AR rounds in ’Nam.”