Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

Tim broke in with his big belly laugh once again, and slathered on the extra mayonnaise he’d asked for before slamming shut his cheeseburger. He waved greasy fingers in the air.

“Only in your diseased brain, chief.”

Dante had already admitted to himself that Tim was right, but he couldn’t give up that easy. Raptor rode his shoulder like a hooded falcon waiting to swoop on its prey.

“Kreiger was in Vegas along with Gideon Abramson a week before Spic Madrid was hit. Abramson was in Greece in the fifties and staked Gounaris to his first freighter-”

“So what? If the Abramson connection was vital, it’d be his brains on the car seat, not St. John’s. Drink your fuckin’ decaf and go home to Mama, little fella’s had a long day.”

Which, in the end, Dante meekly did.

There was just nothing to tie the two deaths together. But he would take a good long look at Kreiger anyway. See if he was connected with any of the other principals besides the dead Lenington in ways Dante hadn’t uncovered yet. But who were the other principals? He kept going around in circles, learning who was important only after their deaths made them so.

When he got home, there was a message from Raptor waiting. The voice was airy, British comedy stuff, actorish-perhaps even an American doing British.

“This is Raptor, old bean. Remember the line from that dreadful Thomas Hardy poem, ‘The Dynasts’? ‘One pairing is as good as another’? Fits quite nicely, don’t you think? Cheers, tallyho, and all that rot.”

It is 6:30 a.m. and my car has paused at a Bay Area pedestrian crosswalk, because in California the pedestrian crosswalk is more sacred than the Trinity. So even though I am on my way to San Francisco to kill Otto Kreiger, I honor it.

I am startled by a sudden passage on my right: a jutting beak of white smooth-capped half-oval helmet which in profile extends several inches horizontally above the brows and nose of a passing cyclist. He is followed by a cluster of others on similar lanky many-speeded racing bikes, all in black midthigh racing tights and jerseys of varied bright colors, moving very fast in a bunch, in a silent breath, no jerkiness like walkers or runners because there is no stride, only turning wheels.

A herd of animals in motion, but what animal moves in such fashion? From my childhood comes a memory, almost a shock of recognition. Like most American children, at about six I become besotted with dinosaurs. What now flashes through my mind from those long-ago years is one of the coelurosaurs, the ostrich dinosaurs, named Dromi-ceiomimus brevertertius. Dromiceiomimus, if I remember my Latin correctly, means “emu-mimic”-the emu being an ostrichlike ratite bird of the Australian grasslands.

It is hard to see how a ten-foot-high dinosaur from the dying days of the Cretaceous could mimic a five-foot-high flightless bird that came into existence 70 million years later, but there you have the casual idiocy of science.

Dromiceiomimus, running in herds and having a jutting ostrichlike beak, is stirred in my memory by the jutting helmets of the bike riders; as he ran, his head would not have bobbed. My flash of recognition is of a dinosaur I have never met.

Most apropos, do you not think? I am on my way to kill a man whom I have never met, although I have followed him about for two weeks. Otto Kreiger, who…

Oh, no. You first want to know about St. John? Goddam your eyes, I want to talk about Kreiger; but two lawyers for the price of one makes me mellow and cooperative. So by all means let us look at the finis of Skeffington St. John, whore to the mob and nasty pedophile to little girls. He parks in the garage under his building, as he starts to get out a Jennings J-22 is placed against the bridge of his nose, crack! Instant lobotomy.

Where is the fun in that, the challenge, the drama, the mystery for Raptor, that sly and clever assassin? On my own, I probably should not have wished poor fool Sinjin dead, despite what he is, but should I weep? Should I mourn? He is not near my conscience; he did make love to that employment. So sans compunction, I consign him to the other whores of Hades. After all, I am not God, I do not control all things, I only do my job.

And the Kreiger kill is doing my job excellently. Excellent work, challenging work, more challenging even than Jack Lenington. Jack was more wary, a rogue male with every man a potential enemy, but it took only imagination and cleverness to separate him from his wariness. Then I had him.

But first I must eyeball Herr Otto, not easy because he has surrounded himself with bodyguards since Madrid’s death. Kreiger takes Woodside Road home each evening; see that car with the flat tire? C’est moi, Raptor. See the florist, in brown uniform and peaked cap and bogus beard, who mis- delivers a dozen pink roses to Kreiger’s personal secretary? Raptor.

Now I can recognize him, I must figure out how to have him. Herr Otto himself shows me the way, because he cancels his bodyguards and he has two dangerous habits: he likes to walk the city streets of San Francisco; he likes to gloat.

Several of his walks-with me half a block ahead in what private-eye novels love to call “front-tailing”-take him to an aged apartment house on Sixth Street he is getting condemned so he can build a commercial arcade in its place. He is always getting into intense arguments with one of the few-finally, the only-residents left, Mr. Adam Kreplovski.

I know that when Kreplovski is finally ousted, Herr Otto must be there to gloat. So I start my campaign of circuitous and baffling phone calls in my persona as corruption-minded Ed Farrow of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Ed never quite comes out and flatly asks for a bribe to keep from stalling Kreiger’s project, but he obviously has his hand out.

When Mr. Kreplovski sets himself up on the sidewalk in front of the building, I go to his emptied apartment and make my little arrangements with flint paper and match heads and ruptured gas line. To set the farce in motion, it needs only my gloved hand twisting the gas line stopcock which I had closed before holing the line, then my openly demanding call to Herr Otto so he will go there, irked beyond caution, at the perfect moment.

Mr. Kreplovski wanted to die in his beloved Sarah’s apartment; but at least he has the pleasure of knowing that Herr Otto died in it in his stead. (One need not laugh at a farce, comprenez-vous?)

Over Irish coffee at the Buena Vista Cafe near the foot of Hyde Street, I have struck up an acquaintance with an out-of-work actor. He leaps at the chance to earn $100 by reading a few lines over the telephone to an answering machine in the plummy British accent that is his most prized thespian possession.

There is no way he, or anyone else, can think a Thomas Hardy quotation about pairings refers to the murder of a corrupt lawyer in Los Angeles, and the fake-accident murder of an even more corrupt lawyer in San Francisco. Only Stagnaro will make the connection. By now the joke will be wearing thin for him; but one must have some fun to keep killing from becoming a bore.

One other thing, mon gar. Because of my pledge to you of truthfulness, I must admit that after the message is delivered to Stagnaro’s answering machine, I have another bad night. A horrible night, in point of fact.

Indeed, when that rather large piece of Heir Otto almost hits me in the alley, I toss chunks. Fortunately the police buy accident, else they might have ended up trying to DNA-type my vomitus. Farcical indeed-and now you may laugh.