Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“You know I don’t have to tell you a fucking thing, cop!”

Dante made a great display of checking around his belt. “Shit,” he said, “I left my rubber hose back in San Francisco.”

She cracked a little grin in spite of herself, jerked her head toward the back of the bar.

“I got coffee-nothin’ stronger while we’re closed down.”

Around them the roadhouse was silent as a tomb. He was sure the girls were moving around upstairs, but he couldn’t hear them. Mae, he knew, would soon reopen. Such sops to public conscience were bad for business, and she obviously had something heavy on the local power structure.

Dante made the thick black coffee blond and sweet, took a big gulp. “Why the red carpet for me all of a sudden, Mae?”

“You’re the first one didn’t look at me like I was shit on a stick.” She gave a big belly laugh that reminded him of Tim’s. “I’m insulted they didn’t try’n’ look down the front of my blouse while they were trashin’ me.”

Dante looked, bugged out his eyes. “Wow! Dolly Parton!”

Tears suddenly came into her eyes, impatiently wiped away with the back of a bejeweled hand. “Thanks, even if you’re shittin’ me. I miss the little fucker, is the thing.”

“You guys go back a ways?”

“Christ, almost forty years.”

“Then you just gotta have a few ideas who wanted him dead.” He added almost diffidently, “It ties in with a dead woman I got out in San Francisco that I figure maybe Popgun did.”

“Listen, he was retired from all that stuff years ago! He was an old man, for Chrissake! He sold wholesale meats!”

Dante stopped her with a palm-out traffic cop hand.

“Hey, Mae, I gotta ask, he was the best in his day. I was just hoping you knew how he stood with the boys these days.”

“Hell, top of the heap! Why the night he got it…”

Mae stopped herself abruptly. Dante didn’t even try to follow up on it. He didn’t want to let her know he had caught anything significant in her stifled sentence.

“So there was no reason for them to put out a hit on him.”

“Not a fuckin’ reason in the world.”

“Somebody from years ago, getting even?” mused Dante. “Trouble with that, the guy was so damn patient. Waiting around two, three weeks-”

“Fuckin’ freak, is what he was!” she burst out bitterly. “Comin’ around with his Soo Li shit…”

“Soo Li?”

She told him about the P.W.’s coming, his strange habit of seeing if each girl was some lost love named Soo Li.

“He scared me-and now see what he’s done!”

Leaving, Dante went downstairs to find Old Mose in the basement, tending a water heater that didn’t need tending.

“Don’t want to talk to me, huh, old-timer?”

“Jus’ doin’ my job, boss,” said Mose vaguely. “Yassah, dat’s de troof, jus’ doin’ Old Mose’ job. Pow’ful lotta work.”

“Ashcan the Amos and Andy, Mose. I know you liked the guy. But he’s a bad dude, going around killing innocent people-”

“People like Popgun Ucelli?” The Stepin Fetchit was gone from Mose’s voice. “Then I say, give that man a medal!”

He had Dante there. They chatted for half an hour about the great old blues men of Mose’s youth whose 78s Dante had grown up on because his grandfather had been a “race record” fan. Pegleg Howell, the Atlanta street singer who made twenty-eight sides between ’26 and ’29; Jaybird Coleman out of Gainsville, eleven sides in about the same years; Blind Willy Johnson, thirty sides, the best bottleneck guitarist of his day…

Mose extended one of his shattered claws to shake Dante’s hand when they parted, then called after him.

“Whatever that fat woman upstairs tell you, that Popgun was still doin’ people.” The faded brown eyes suddenly blazed with joyous light. “I’d wish you luck, Mist’ Stagnaro, but that wouldn’t be the truth. P.W. done me a mighty big favor.” Mose held up his claw. “Was Popgun Ucelli did this to me, nearly thutty years ago.”

Old Mose shuffled closer.

“Thutty years, then here come that P.W., take care of that little chore for me. When they laid Popgun to rest, I be taken me to the cemetery, had me a little dance on his grave.”

Dante drove back toward South Orange’s urban sprawl through the bleak, snowy landscape. What was he to make of Mae’s slip of the tongue, old Mose’s insistence that Ucelli had still been working? Had Popgun aced all of them? None of them? Some? Why was he hit? To keep him from talking about what he had done? Or to keep him from talking about what he hadn’t done?

Dante had no idea of how to get to Raptor, even less idea of how to get to who had hired Raptor, but he was starting to get a pretty good idea of why. Somebody in Martin Prince’s arm of the mob wanted to move up or was trying to keep somebody else from moving up. As Tim had surmised, Moll Dalton had known something, probably unwittingly, that had placed her in the way of that grand design. If Lenington had been used in setting up her hit, he would have been a potential danger to be eliminated.

By this scenario, the first real target had been Spic Madrid. Solidly ensconced in four northern states, ambitious, ruthless, building a power base. Had just gotten elevated to the board. Had he let his ambition show too much at the Vegas meet?

Dante stopped at a truck stop called the Highway on the outskirts of South Orange. A low flat building with gas pumps out in front, the slush-covered blacktop lot crowded with semis from all over the country, some puffing diesel fumes into the cold morning air.

Inside, Mel’s Diner come to life; counter straight ahead, booths by the windows. Full of moisture from wet overcoats and windbreakers, the smell of grease and coffee, loud voices and cigarette smoke, the linoleum floor wet with muddy bootprints.

He was ravenous, ordered eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hash browns, white toast and coffee. Real coffee. With cream and real sugar. He’d be traveling the rest of the day anyway, the caffeine would be gone by nightfall. Maybe he’d send Tim a postcard describing his breakfast.

After Madrid, Otto Kreiger. Same reason as Madrid. A man with empire-building in his head. Out there on the edge of the Organization, almost in exile in San Francisco where his mob affiliation was little more than honorary: his real income was from defending scuzzballs and making astute real estate investments. But wanting to move into the center of power?

If so, Raptor had moved first.

St. John was easy. The reason Dante himself had advanced to the degenerate attorney and had explicated to Rosie. The man was a deviate whose sexual preferences would not only be distasteful to the mob, but dangerous; Dante had been close to breaking the man himself.

The middle-aged waitress came by to pour more coffee into his cup. She had impossibly orange hair, thick ankles, wrinkles on her face, and a junior version of Mae’s formidable bosom. A trucker grabbed her butt as she went by.

“Hey, Carla, when you gonna let me into your pants?”

“What for? I already got one asshole in there.”

Dante ignored the byplay. Gideon Abramson was a tougher call. While still just as vicious as in his garment-district days, he really had retired. From the FBI reports, his ambitions had lain with the grandchildren he had doted on, his golf and bridge, his swims and dry toast in the mornings.

On the other hand, he had delighted in Byzantine intrigues, plots, counterplots. After World War II he had chosen to operate in Greece and Turkey, where profits were large but risks equally large-and slyness the way to success. And there he had befriended Kosta Gounaris-which might be the key. Abramson might have had a fatherly impulse; no ambitions for himself, perhaps, but he might have had them for Kosta.