Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“He’s gonna patch me through to Mr. Prince!” he whispered to her in hoarse, awed tones. It was like being introduced to royalty. His cock was stiffening just in anticipation.

“Yessir, this is Eddie, yessir…”

Mae lifted herself so that Eddie’s now-hard member could slide inside her. She started to rock almost dreamily on top of it as Eddie listened to his instruction.

“I gotcha, Mr. Prince! Both of ’em! Yessir! It’ll be a pleasure, Mr. Prince…”

Eddie, his call finished, had shut his eyes, going to work on her in earnest, starting to groan in anticipation. The door opened silently and the fucking freak, that P.W. guy, came shambling into the room! What a fuck of a time for him to do his google-eyes act on her! The asshole didn’t even seem to see Eddie, just kept staring at Mae in that intense, puzzled way he’d done with each of the girls in turn.

“Soo Li?” he asked her in his broken voice.

Eddie heard, opened his eyes, snarled, “Who da fuck-”

But the muzzle of a Jennings J-22 like the ones that had killed Moll Dalton and Spic Madrid and Skeffington St. John was already against the bridge of his nose. It said pop! as it spit another of those hypervelocity hollow-point Remington Viper rounds through Popgun’s brain and out the back of his head.

At the same time, the P.W.’s other gloved hand gently covered the mouth Mae opened to scream. He dropped the Jennings onto Eddie’s chest and then put the forefinger of that hand to his lips in the shushing motion Mae had seen so often, shook his head sadly, backed out of the room and was gone.

Mae started to reach for the telephone, then jerked back her hand. The man was a psycho, probably standing outside the door listening right now. She crawled heavily off Eddie’s corpse. The pillow was a red halo around his ruined head.

Eddie, deflowerer of her youth. Dead in her queen-size bed. Dead before they’d finished. The sight of Eddie dead excited her in a perverse way. Well, what the hell, he was gone and she was still here, and it was going to be a long night what with the cops and all that. So Mae, being au fond a practical soul, finished herself off before calling the Organization and then the cops, in that order. It was her best in years.

The sheriff found the P.W. gone, along with his sleeping bag. He found nothing else. No fingerprints; for the weeks he’d lived in Mae’s cellar, he’d always worn his gloves. No usable description apart from what the girls told him: big, shambling, blue eyes.

They kept at Old Mose until dawn without result, never thinking to inquire after Dietrich, the massive Rottweiler. When somebody did notice that Dietrich was gone, Old Mose said he’d run off two days before by hisse’f, yassuh, he mos’ surely did, dam’ fool dog run off into the night, yassuh…

Dante got Raptor’s phone message alerting him to the fact that another one had died before he even knew who. He only got Eddie’s name later, off a routine FBI printout.

The message was a quite creditable impression of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.

“I could’ve had class,” said Brando’s voice. “I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody. It was you, Eddie. You was my brother. You should’ve looked out for me a little bit…” A heavy, thuggish laugh. “I looked out for him tonight, Dante.” That laugh again. “Like I looked out for good old Gid in Death Valley…”

Hymie the Handler said it was yet another new voice.

To start, I know only Popgun Ucelli’s name and that he resides in New Jersey. I spend a day in a Jersey City library, checking the state’s phone books. No Ucelli listed, thus, no way to get him at home. I can hire a private investigator to check his driving and auto registration licenses through the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles, but then there will be a record of my search. Not acceptable.

But I also know he is a purveyor of wholesale meats. Yes. Ucelli Meats, with an address in Orange. Now I face the same problem as with Herr Otto: how to identify Eddie Ucelli himself?

Tres simple. I check the company parking lot for the space with his name stenciled on the wall in front of it. He drives a new Cadillac Eldorado. I observe from afar. A squat, wide, hairy man. I follow, also from afar, only part of his route home each day so I will not be observed, until ultimately I watch him go up the drive of his upper-middle-class house.

A wife. A Puerto Rican housekeeper. Sometimes surly sons come visiting, looking like made men themselves. Not good. But at irregular intervals, Ucelli goes to an old-fashioned roadhouse some twenty miles away, with girls upstairs, called Mae’s Place. Sometimes he goes with his wife, sometimes alone. When alone, he stays several hours. A liaison, then. But with whom?

For several months my hair and beard have been flourish ing; they are easily made unkempt. A surplus store provides the rest of the P.W.’s ex-military persona, especially the gloves he is never without. No fingerprints will be left behind.

The approach, the entry, the acceptance by Old Mose… and the waiting. The listening. Waiting for another of the sexual couplings between Popgun and, as I have learned, Mae, empress of the establishment. Finally, he comes alone. And dies.

This death has made me decide, straight out, to tell you why I kill. I know, I say that before; but no games this time.

Following my senior year in college I go backpacking in Spain for a summer and find myself in Madrid. This beautiful old city has the Prado, one of the greatest of all art museums, available for a few pesetas admission. I plan to haunt its galleries, to spend countless hours with Goya, Velazquez, Bosch, Murillo, El Greco, the Breughels (father and son), Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Durer, Rubens… the list is essentially endless.

But on my first day there, as I am studying Goya’s twin masterpieces, The Naked Maja and The Maja Clothed, a female voice says to me in English, “Which do you prefer? Naked or clothed?”

She is an American about my age, barely into her twenties, breathtakingly beautiful in a fragile way, gleaming black hair in a smooth waterfall halfway down her back, a heart-shaped face, huge dark eyes with long lashes and unknown hurts lingering in the corners of her glances. Willowy and warm, with an appealing inner dignity.

“Naked,” I say, “because her face is more demure.”

She claps her hands. “What a wonderful answer! When she is naked, a woman to survive must be more demure, not less!”

I tell her I am hitchhiking across Europe, she tells me she is a touring art history major with a month each in some of the great gallery cities: Madrid, Rome, Paris. It is the first high adventure of her young life. Despite her tiny budget, she already has one American, in Madrid studying the guitar, sleeping on her couch. If I need a floor to throw a sleeping bag on…

I assure her I am here just a few days, and have a room.

If she cannot give me accommodations, at least she can begin my art education. And she does. With, oddly-because I am a sunny chap in those days-the museum’s darker, more brooding works. El Greco’s San Sebastian with the murderers’ arrows buried deep in the naked saint’s flesh; Bosch’s grotesque Lust; Pieter Breughel’s macabre and frenzied Triumph of Death… What does she see in me, even then, that I do not see in myself?

And, of course, she shows me Goya’s “black paintings.” I cannot tear myself away from Saturn Devouring His Children: an aged, naked, demented figure with mad and terrified eyes, a flying mane of white hair, cramped, twisted limbs, screaming even as he bites the head off his own nude daughter.