Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

The Ucelli hit, on the other hand, made perfect sense. He could tell the authorities, if put in a real squeeze, who he had eliminated, and for whom. Or, perhaps even more dangerous for whoever had hired him, who he hadn’t eliminated.

Leaving, in that arm of the Mafia, who? Only Martin Prince and old Enzo Garofano. Prince, a ruthless, powerful man with the kind of subtle mind that could come up with the idea of using intertwined hitmen to mask his purposes. He could very well be the man behind the Raptor name and phone calls. Could even have scripted them. Garofano, old was the operative word. Too old to take Prince down, and Prince would know it.

Finally, if Dante’s beliefs about Atlas Entertainment were correct, Gounaris. If Prince was behind the killings, did he dare stop until Gounaris was also dead? Gounaris was potentially dangerous. Eliminate him, all threats were gone.

Dante knew his reconstruction was shaky, but he still felt he’d better make some phone calls. Just in case.

He slid out of the booth, found the pay phone on the wall between the rest rooms, got out his calling card. A man in a dark blue overcoat wearing a Russian-style hat with fur earflaps folded up over the top of it came in the back door, bringing an icy blast of air with him.

By luck, Dante caught Rudy Mattaliano at his office over in Manhattan. Rudy hated the Mafia with a fervor born of obsession, it was one of the things that gave him such a good record as a prosecutor, and it was why he was always willing to help Dante out. But this time he sounded hurried and not too interested.

“Listen, Dante, I’m due in court in ten minutes, so have a good flight home and-”

“I have something for you.”

“What?” Mattaliano was instantly focused.

“Ucelli was still making hits for the wise guys. If you check Mae’s phone records at the roadhouse, I think you’ll find that she was Ucelli’s cut-out. That’s why you could never get anything off the phone taps at his house and meatpacking plant. I think he got a call from somebody big the night he died-maybe Garofano or even Prince.”

“How in Christ did you get this stuff? The FBI worked Mae over pretty good and got nothing but skinned knuckles. You ever want to get a real job, let me know.”

“I wouldn’t last in the Feebs for a week. I’d tell the SAC to go to hell and that would be that.”

“Especially if he was Jack-in-the-Box,” said Mattaliano with a laugh. “Hold off a day on going back, I want to talk and I’m willing to buy you one of the best steaks in Manhattan so I can do it. Eight o’clock at Morton’s, Fifth Ave at Forty-fifth.”

Dante agreed, then called his task force office in San Francisco and told Danny to reinstitute the loose tail on Kosta Gounaris. “I think somebody might try to take him out, and that’s the guy I want.”

“So let’s grab him after he does Gounaris.”

They hashed over the loose tail a bit more, Dante got updated on the Asian carboosters, gave Danny his motel.

It was after 10:00 a.m. when Dante clawed his way up out of sleep. His eyes felt as if there were lead weights on the lids; he hadn’t gotten back to his chain motel in South Orange until three in the morning. He and Mattaliano, a stocky hard-bodied aggressive man with deep-set brown eyes and thinning curly hair and political ambitions in New York, had closed up Morton’s after Dante had eaten the best porterhouse he’d ever tasted.

Then the prosecutor had insisted they catch old-time jazz great Mal Waldron at Sweet Basil in the Village. The aged black musician had slumped at the piano as his massive hands scooped music from the keys and hurled it around the room with casual genius and indifferent abandon.

“I put my people right to work on those phone records, Dante,” Mattaliano said over the applause for Waldron’s forty-minute set. “I think they’re going to pan out. There was a whole interconnected nest of calls to her number from various pay phones in Jersey-and a couple from Vegas. We’re checking them against the dates of the list of hits you gave us…”

Dante showered, shaved, packed, went down to the office to check out. Mattaliano could push ahead on the Ucelli case, try to trace the labyrinthian ways through the phone lines to further taps on further phones so they could eventually come down on Mae and make her spill her guts to a grand jury, but, Dante suddenly realized, he was out of it.

If Atlas was a mob front it was beyond his powers to prove it. And apart from Moll Dalton, who had been getting killed here? A bunch of fucking mobsters. What did he care? He should be applauding. Time for him to get back to the Job, and to Rosie for Christmas.

“A fast-mail overnight package came for you.” The old clerk had despairing eyes and arthritic fingers. He handed Dante a small mailer. “From San Francisco. I peeked.”

Dante sat on the edge of his unmade bed to open the packet from the task force office. There was a small manila envelope inside with, THIS CAME TO YOU AT THE OFFICE. THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE IMPORTANT, scrawled across it in Danny’s back-slanted hand.

Inside was a bent and dirtied Christmas card with two gorgeous stamps on it-an elephant emerging from a thicket of tall trees, and a tall graceful crane or stork or something with a beautiful fan of feathers on its head that looked like a crown.

Inside was written: “I gave this to the duka owner in Fort Portal to mail when I was there to pick up supplies… I plan to be back earlier than first planned, mid-January in fact… if so, maybe you can catch me up on what-if anything-you’ve learned about Moll’s killer… Regards… Dalton.”

Dante sat in the cheap motel room across Jersey 510 from a HoJo’s festooned with Christmas lights, a resigned look on his face and a sinking feeling in his gut. Will Dalton, damn the man, was bringing himself back into the target zone months before Mattaliano’s RICO investigators would untangle the twisted skein of phone records. With Popgun dead, they would have to be extremely sure of the links in their chain of evidence before they could drag Mae up in front of a federal grand jury and exert enough pressure to make her crack.

Mattaliano was too good a prosecutor to take a weak case into court. He wasn’t going to get more than one chance, even if his team could put the jigsaw together correctly. And as soon as Mae started talking, her life would be at risk.

As could Will Dalton’s as soon as he returned, Dante was afraid. Dalton’s card had aroused all of his unease again. When Raptor had hit Moll, Dante was sure the man had fully expected her husband to be at Bella Figura with her. What if Will did know something? Maybe even something he didn’t know he knew?

Of course Tim didn’t agree with Dante about possible danger to Dalton, and Tim was a hell of a good homicide cop. Tim had to outthink the bad guys ahead of time as well as sweep them up afterward. Tim’s opinion had weight.

But could Dante take that chance with Dalton’s life?

Moll was gone. Her father was gone. Her mother had been squeezed dry. Dalton’s parents in Wyoming were the only people left to whom Dalton might have confided some part or all of whatever Moll had sent him in that mailer.

He sighed and called the airlines. More damned snow and wind and cold and blow for Dante.

Dry and still and sunny and hot all at the same time. The road twisted north out of La Paz along the cup of bay that Steinbeck had written about so movingly in The Pearl. Tony was behind the wheel, sitting beside him their Mexican guide in an ill-fitted, sloppy uniform with a lot of brass and braid on it. Red Grant sat in back with Mr. Prince, who he knew was worried about Popgun getting popped like that.