Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“He never ogles any of us no matter what we have on-or don’t have on. He’s like a horse with blinders.”

So the P.W. stayed. His only idiosyncrasy occurred the first time he saw each of the girls, and never again with any of them. He would stop in front of her and peer intently into her face for a moment with his shocked, faded blue eyes behind a pair of women’s lightly tinted sunglasses.

“Soo Li?” he would ask in a hoarse mumbling voice that sounded as if he either had vocal cord damage or didn’t use his voice much any more.

Whatever the girl answered, and many of them never got a chance to answer at all, he would immediately put his finger to his lips in a shushing motion as he had done to Mose that first evening. Then he would shake his head and turn dolefully away, never to speak to her again.

Within a week he had gone through them all except Mae, who never let him get that close to her because he gave her what she called “the willies.” Even so, he soon became as much of a fixture around the establishment as Mose or Dietrich, the massive and savage Rottweiler who guarded Mae’s Place after hours.

Until the P.W. arrived, nobody was able to touch Dietrich, and only Mose even dared get near enough to throw raw meat in his direction once a day. He was a huge, silent, morose, and savage attack waiting to happen, let out to roam only at night after all the clients had departed, otherwise kept locked away in a cage under the cellar steps to which he was lured each morning by a slab of bloody beafsteak left in his food dish courtesy of Mose.

The P.W. had laid out his sleeping bag that first night after Dietrich had been released to roam. When the huge dog returned to the basement, it immediately rushed him, roaring and snapping, sharp fangs gleaming. The P.W. dropped to one knee as Dietrich sailed at him, somehow swayed aside, getting a gloved hand behind Dietrich’s passing cocked front leg, and using the dog’s own momentum, smashed his 180-pound body nose-first into the concrete-block basement wall.

After this happened three more times, Dietrich stood panting in the middle of the floor, nose bleeding and a little spraddle-legged, staring at the P.W. with puzzled eyes…

Then he whined. The stub of what would have been his tail if they had left him one started, very slowly, very tentatively, as if he had used it no more than the P.W. had used his vocal cords, to wiggle back and forth. Had it been whole, it would have been wagging.

The P.W. finished laying out his sleeping bag and got into it, totally ignoring the dog. After a long time, Dietrich shuffled over and lay down beside him with a huge sigh of what sounded almost like relief. Sometime through the night, in his sleep, the P.W. draped one arm over the dog’s massive body.

After that, the P.W. always fed Dietrich, and together they patrolled the building and the grounds after hours, two silent primordial ghosts drifting in tandem through the icy darkness of the New Jersey night.

During the month before the P.W. arrived in Jersey, in San Francisco Dante’s bone-deep rage and resolution at the almost scornful blowing away of Gideon Abramson in Death Valley had made him fess up to Tim about the Raptor phone calls. To do it, he took Tim out to dinner at the Salonika on Polk near Green.

Since the film festival, Dante had been accompanying Rosa to festivals sponsored by various Greek Orthodox churches around the Bay Area. He’d gotten to like the food, and knew it would appeal to Tim’s gargantuan tastes. So he ordered a tray of mezethes — literally “starters”-to begin the meal. Sure enough, Tim was first enchanted with the dolmathakia, stuffed vine leaves, usually grape, and ate the whole plate of them himself.

“Delicious! What’s in ’em?”

“Long-grain rice, pine nuts, onions, dill, mint, parsley, lemon, pepper… Rosie makes them, but she adds ground lamb, too. Hers are better.”

So it went through the melitzanosalata — eggplant and feta cheese and a lot of herbs-the soutzoukakia of lamb and beef sausage served with pita bread, and a dynamite tzatziki of cucumber and yogurt that Dante fought him for.

“I know all this ain’t out of the goodness of your heart, chief,” said Tim, waving a greasy-fingered hand, “since we been eating forty-five minutes and haven’t gotten to our dinners yet. So c’mon-talk to Daddy.”

Talk Dante did, over kefthes, fried meatballs that released tantalizing aromas from the kitchen as they were cooked, and the horiatiki salates of tomatoes and cucumbers and black olives and onions and feta cheese topped with dried oregano, known to most people just as “Greek salads.”

“So this guy has called five times-”

“I think it was him after Moll Dalton,” said Dante, forking flaky-crusted spanakopita — spinach pie-into his mouth and talking around it, “but I didn’t save the tape. By Hymie’s voiceprints, all the others are different people. Raptor used Gideon Abramson’s own voice as his message. Telling a Jewish joke.”

“Recorded him off the phone, I bet,” mused Tim.

Main courses were kotopoulu fournou for Tim, roast chicken with potatoes, and baked lamb with pasta, giouvetsi, for Dante. Over impossibly sweet baklava served with thimble-size cups of thick Greek coffee, Dante told about the note pinned to his shirt while he slept in the Death Valley dunes. Tim started to guffaw.

“That’s one I would have liked to see, chief,” he chortled. “It’s only because of that note that I’m buyin’ into the calls. Otherwise I’d be laughin’ in your face while I’m readin’ these.” He was shuffling through the transcripts of the calls like a hand of cards. “None of them really say, bang, bang, I did it, do they? Uh-uh. But that note pinned to your shirt…”

“And doing Abramson from four hundred yards out.”

“Whadda they got on the slugs?”

“Not much so far. The ones they could find are badly distorted. Since the killing occurred in a national monument, the FBI’s involved, and you know their Forensics Ballistics lab takes its own sweet time to analyze and report.”

“Four football fields away, so we know high-velocity, scoped…” Tim shook his head. “Near a fifth of a mile? That’s shooting, it tells us stuff about him.”

“Like what?” Dante had ideas of his own, but he liked to watch the big homicide cop’s mind work.

“Probably a good ol’ southern boy from Arkansas, Tennessee, like that. Maybe sniper-trained, maybe by the Marines in ’Nam.”

“Lots of Marines in ’Nam weren’t from the South.”

Tim leaned back with a luxurious sigh, his belly out over his belt. “More than you’d think. And southern boys make about the best killers there are-of animals or men. Take one of ’em who really likes killing…”

“Yeah,” said Dante, “with maybe some seasoning as a CIA spook or mere or somebody before going to work for the mob.”

“I buy it-he’s too methodical for a guy just poppin’ caps ’cause he’s got a hard-on against somebody.”

“Somebody who knows Popgun Ucelli’s M.O. and has Raptor use it on the close-in hits.”

“All of a sudden you don’t think Popgun did any of ’em?”

“Not if we have one man here-and I think we do, because of the Raptor messages and note. Popgun wouldn’t be bright enough for the gas line trick, and from his federal rap sheet he sure as hell couldn’t make any four-hundred-yard rifle shots.”

“Unless this Raptor shit is just a smoke screen,” mused Tim. “Multiple hitters…” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Single perp.”

Dante paid their bill with a 20 percent tip. They kept at it on their way down Polk Street toward the Hall where Tim had to pick up his own car.