Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin

Dante’s grasp on a forearm cut him out of his confreres. He came along with a wry shrug back at them.

“Good evening, Lieutenant.”

“Welcome back, Professor. But tell the truth, I don’t like seeing you here in the target area. I spent half the day trying to reach you at home or here at the Institute to tell you not to give this lecture tonight.”

Dalton grinned; it momentarily wiped the sadness from his eyes. “Why do you think I was dodging you all day?” His face changed; a bitter irony replaced the pleasure in his eyes. “I’ve been gone for fifteen months. If you haven’t been able to find Moll’s killer in all that time, what makes you think he’s going to show up here tonight?”

“To take you off.”

“And why would he want to do that, Lieutenant?”

“You tell me.”

He shook his head. “Always the same tune with you, isn’t it? I take it Gounaris is still out of jail.”

“As of this afternoon, yes,” said Dante stiffly. He wasn’t going to go into his own history with Gounaris. “In California they don’t jail you for sleeping with another man’s wife. And Gounaris isn’t the point here. I know damned well that you lied to me about not knowing any reason for your wife’s murder, and that you changed your plans and went away so abruptly because you were afraid you’d be killed too if you didn’t leave the country.”

Will gave a wry bark of laughter. “I see. I was a coward who fled with no thought of helping get my wife’s murderer-”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

Will took a deep breath, sighed. “Moll’s still dead, whatever we say here. I’m not comfortable with you in this gathering, Lieutenant, but I can’t make you leave. So…”

He started to turn away; Dante thought, What the hell, go for the throat. “You could say that Moll’s dead because you left her alone here for long periods of time, so she…”

Will tensed as if to swing at him, but a long-faced man with laugh lines but a worried expression tapped the mike.

“Hel… Hello? Yes. It gives me great pleasure to start our spring lecture series in January this year.” He chuckled at his own wit. With his black fanny pack over his belly, he looked about as much like a scientist as Dante’s teenage son did. “Will Dalton is no stranger to this Institute, having spoken to us at various times on his work with the great apes in Rwanda-Burundi, the eastern Congo, and northern Sumatra. Before Dr. Dalton’s talk, I would like to briefly outline the Institute’s aims and accomplishments for the many new faces I see in the audience tonight.”

Dante grabbed Will’s arm with sudden urgency.

“Goddammit, if you’re going to make a target of yourself, before you go up there at least tell me what your wife left with you that…”

The look on Dalton’s face stopped him. The deep-set brown eyes were deeper than they had been, as if used to looking through things to truths they had been unable to see before.

“After I buried Moll I just felt damned fortunate to have a funded foreign research field project already set up to give me two years of rough, exacting, solitary work away from the memories here. Now here you are, stirring them all up again.”

The damned man always had been able to put Dante on the defensive. All those years in university, perhaps, all those graduate degrees, as opposed to Dante’s two years of community college before he had quit to go to Vietnam? Or maybe just the fact that Dante was used to dealing with mob types who, although now often college men, still showed brass beneath the veneer.

Dalton had changed his stance again. “I don’t really care what happens to me, Lieutenant, so maybe I’m not being fair to you. Stay for the lecture-we can chat afterwards. Who knows-maybe you’ll even find my talk instructive.”

He went up past the windows as Dante slid back behind the sales tables, where he could watch both doors and see everything going on between him and the speaker. He couldn’t even give himself the luxury of a folding chair as he suffered through a lecture on some scientific subject in which he had no interest and probably wouldn’t understand.

The man with the fanny pack was still at it.

“Dr. Dalton has just spent fifteen months observing the forest chimpanzee of western Uganda, and tonight we will hear the first report of his findings. Dr. Dalton began his career…”

At the front of the room a short well-fed man with gold-rimmed glasses and a black ponytail down the back of his neck leaped to his feet. Dante went into a half-crouch, his right hand sweeping toward the gun on his belt. He checked himself, glanced about, embarrassed. Hardly the stone killer Raptor. A member of the Institute about to videotape Dalton’s speech.

Dante made himself slouch back against the wall, eyes busy and a hand near his gun in case Raptor might want to take Dalton out right now, before he had a chance to pass anything on. The hitman’s physical presence was almost palpable, but Dante was here first, ready…

So why did he still feel he was just another bit player in Raptor’s latest scenario?

Take Dalton out. As Raptor had taken out Dalton’s wife. One thing Dante was damned sure of, if someone killed Rosie he wouldn’t run off to Africa for fifteen months. But that was unfair. He was a cop, with a cop’s training and experience, a cop’s familiarity with guns and violence, a cop’s Old Testament eye for eye, tooth for tooth idea of justice.

While in uniform he’d killed an armed robber in a 7-Eleven holdup; fifteen years later he still lost sleep over his memory of the man’s face as the arterial blood pumped out on the dirty floor. That killing was why he had jumped at the chance to head up the Organized Crime Task Force ten years later.

Yet he knew he would kill again in the same circumstances.

And if it was Rosie who was at risk, or worse, Rosie who had been slaughtered as Moll Dalton had been slaughtered…

Unbidden, Dante Stagnaro’s mind returned to that first night, fifteen months earlier, when his involvement with Moll Dalton’s murder had begun.

At night, Clown Alley at Lombard and Divisadero had the lonely, small-town, just-passing-through look of the all-night cafe in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Even the counterman looked as if Hopper had started to sketch him, then said to hell with it: unmoving in his stained white apron in front of his blackened and smoking grill, his arms folded, his cigarette lisping motionless smoke as he waited to flip a burger, his face unfinished, the features somehow merely suggested.

Hopper could have done plenty with the only other patrons in the place, a pair of easy riders in stomp boots and black leather cut off to show arms made tree trunks by endless hours of pumping iron in some jailhouse yard. Their Harley hogs, agleam with chrome, were illegally parked at the curb outside.

The two cops sat down and studied the menus brought by the dark slim intense waiter. Flanagan suddenly guffawed loudly.

“Hey, check out your horoscope. You’re a Christmas baby, ain’t you?” Before Dante could answer, he started reading. “‘Capricorn. You are conservative and afraid of taking risks. You don’t do much of anything. There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. Capricorns should avoid standing still too long as they tend to take root and become trees.’”

Flanagan roared with laughter again, but Dante was checking the back of his own menu.

“‘Scorpio,’” he read. “‘You are the artistic type and have a difficult time with reality. If you are a man you are most likely queer. Chances for employment and monetary gains are excellent.’” He looked at Flanagan over the menu. “Wait ’til Internal Affairs hears about that.” He looked down again. “‘Most Scorpio women are prostitutes. All Scorpios die of venereal disease.’” He nodded solemnly. “And wait until Maureen hears about that.”