Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Kostas wanted to overinsure the Makedonia and her cargo, then have me scuttle her the first big blow came along. Said I wouldn’t, said if he did I’d testify at the inquiry… Kostas wasn’t a bad guy, just was crooked as a snake.” He shook his head. “But you don’t ask me to scuttle my ship.”

Dante stayed silent. There were times to push your man, times to let him come to you.

“I got a command under Niarchos, when the Makedonia did go down in the North Atlantic I was at sea myself.” He righted his snifter, poured himself another measured tot, held it up to the light as if the smoky liquid held answers to his inner distress. “But I never felt right about just letting it go.”

“Not much you could do after the fact like that.”

“Yep.” He got a sly look on his face. “Y’know, Kostas was rich, but the richest man I ever met was a cloth buyer rode with me on a cargo run to Alexandria and back on the Makedonia. Right before Kostas got his second freighter.” The logbook was closed against the finger he had inserted between its pages. He opened it, tapped the page with a blunt curved fingernail. “It’s in here. In the log.”

The logbook was written in Greek. Dante looked up at Stefanatos with arched eyebrows. “Abramson,” the captain said. “Gideon Abramson.”

Dante got home in high spirits. Rosa was out, as was fourteen-year-old Antonio even though it was a school night. No note, which meant Rosa wasn’t gone for long. He’d been starving in Sausalito, but now he just wanted a long shower to wash the rest of the Metaxas out of his system. Then, if Rosa wasn’t home yet, he’d cook supper for everybody. But he was still sponging down the shower stall when the door opened and Rosa peeked in.

“You’re home!” she exclaimed in delight.

“Unless you got another guy uses this shower.”

“No one but you, alas.”

She had obviously been shopping, and was dressed in jeans and a frilly white blouse with long sleeves and a scoop neck. He could just faintly smell her perfume, something flowery their daughter had given her for her birthday. When she leaned in to give him a quick kiss, he peeked down her blouse like a sex-starved teenager. He started to get an erection.

“You want something to eat, sweetie?” she asked.

He did a Groucho eyebrow wiggle. “What’d you have in mind, m’dear?” and faked a grab for her. But she was gone, the shower stall door drifting shut behind her. He yelled after her, “What kind of woman leaves a man in a state like this?”

The door opened again so she could stick her head back in.

“Anticipation is everything, sweet lips.”

Gone again. Dante, chuckling, dressed in workout shorts and a tank top and floppy go-aheads, padded into the office he’d made of Giulietta’s bedroom. In one corner he had installed a straight-backed chair and a desk he’d bought for a few bucks at a library sale.

Dante put the growing stack of files connected with the Moll Dalton murder on the pink bedspread of the frilly canopy bed where Giulietta still slept when she came home from U.C. Berkeley on weekends. He switched on the old-fashioned gooseneck lamp.

Hymie the Handler had given him the numbers of Lening-ton’s $5,000 in small unsequenced bills, but none had shown up in circulation in the western states. Dante made a notation to circularize banks across the rest of the country also.

Nothing more on Spic Madrid. St. Paul cops and the FBI were writing it off as local; as a result the feds had turned down his suggestion that a tail be put on Eddie Ucelli for a couple of weeks to see if he went anywhere. The Bureau, they said, didn’t have the manpower for it.

Even if he were willing to tell them about the Raptor calls they would just laugh. Hoax confessions were a staple of murder cases, and these were oblique and after the fact.

His request for a tap on Gounaris’s home and office phones had been turned down. The same for a tap on the pay phones in the Atlas Entertainment building lobby. He hadn’t really expected either one, but he’d had to ask. Ditto for a tap on Skeffington St. John’s phones in L.A., home and office. Again, no surprise.

None of it high priority. High priority was his discovery of the American businessman who had been a guest of the twenty-three-year-old Gounaris aboard the Makedonia for a run to Alexandria and back in August 1962. Gideon Abram-son. A Gideon Abramson was one of the four known Mafia bigwigs who had stayed at the Xanadu Hotel owned by Martin Prince, acknowledged capo di tutti i capi for the current Organization west of the Mississippi.

Scanning his case notes, Dante realized that the meeting had taken place just a few days after he had jerked around Moll Dalton’s incestuous father. Cause and effect? Could be. It was hard to believe that if Atlas Entertainment was mixed up in organized crime, its chief counsel didn’t know about it.

He went through the FBI reports. They already had photos on file for three of the four Gideon Abramsons-loan shark in New York’s garment industry, retiree in Palm Springs, golf player in Vegas-and they were demonstrably identical. Now that Dante had the passport number of the cloth buyer in Greece, the FBI could get his picture, too. He was certain the fourth Gideon Abramson would complete the chain between Gounaris, Atlas Entertainment, and the Mafia.

It was a connection that suggested reasons why Moll Dalton might have been murdered. If the Mafia was in control of Atlas, and she uncovered proof of that control, she would have become a lethal liability. Could Moll’s father be part of the Outfit without her knowledge? Yes. But if she found out, and resentment of her childhood abuse still lived in her mind…

Nothing suggested that it did. And the scenario didn’t tell him a damned thing about why Jack Lenington and Spic Madrid had been hit. They weren’t his cases, but there were those damned Raptor phone calls. The calls tied the three murders together. If the calls weren’t a hoax.

But his mind wasn’t ready to let it go at that. He jotted down notes to himself. Try to find and interview Moll Dalton’s mother, still presumably living somewhere in the L.A. Basin, for more leverage on St. John. Write or call Will Dalton’s parents in Wyoming? No real reason to, except maybe they could tell him things about Moll that Will had been unwilling to do.

He realized with a start that it was nearly one in the morning, four hours since Rosa had brought him his dinner of fettuccine con funghi drenched in the dark mushroom sauce he loved. Rosa would be long since in bed, asleep.

But when he slid naked between the fresh fragrant sheets, as he always slept except for a T-shirt during the cold winter months, Rosa sighed in contentment and turned to him in silent hunger, still half-asleep, with open arms and hungry mouth, her tongue finding his, their hands finding each other’s bodies as she drew him with her into the silken wonder of their love.

Shady Lady was at it again. She was very obviously in estrus, the perineum around her genitals swollen into a great pink blossom. Will had named the chimp Shady Lady because when he had last seen her two years ago, she had been in the same state and methodically soliciting every stud in town for a quick wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Or rather, wham-bam-thank-you-sir.

“Town” for the moment was a giant mucuso fig spreading its great canopy arms over the forest floor in the middle of the Kibale Forest Preserve a lot of miles from any people besides Will. Fort Portal, the closest human town, was thirty miles of mud track away. The mucuso was crammed with ripe fruit, and first had attracted three male chimps, led by Randy Andy, a prime male with a sagittal crest more like a gorilla’s than a chimpanzee’s.