Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Okay, you go start drawing another one of your fucking flowcharts on your blackboard in the task force office, and I’ll track the husband and wife back to when they were wearing didies. Then maybe, a day or two depending what I find, we’ll go toss hubby around a little, see what falls out. Somehow I still favor him for it.” He gave another of his guffaws. “Either he was protesting too much, which means he hired it done and I don’t like him, or he meant all that pissing and moaning-which means he’s a sissy and I don’t like him.”

“So either way you don’t like him.”

“You think?” asked Flanagan in a mock-surprised voice.

Will had bought the old boxy two-story Victorian in the Berkeley flats at a bargain price after one of the periodic riots that bubble up to keep the area so volatile and alive. He spent little time there anyway, what with Moll so much at her penthouse in the city (down payment by her father), and his frequent field trips, and most of his research material being at his office. But here he was, staring out the living room window at the drizzly autumn afternoon.

Moll’s penthouse in the city.

Oh God, if only he hadn’t gone there that day. Or had called her from the airport. Or, once there, had thrown that bastard Gounaris out and talked it through with Moll, shouted it through, screamed it through, anything to get through it with her and out the other side.

Because adulteress, alive, dead, she was the only woman he’d ever love. Like a swan, he’d mated for life. And he knew she’d loved him too. Loved him, needed him-nobody could fake that kind of emotion… Yet she’d slept with Gounaris.

He felt a rage inside himself, felt it froth over even as he snuffled and realized his face was wet with tears.

Outside, the cold wind blew three female coeds down the gleaming street like autumn leaves. The phone started to ring. The women’s laughter tinkled distantly like icicles on fir boughs. There was a rattle and thunk at the front door as the mailman slid that day’s delivery through the slot. Will made no move to get it or the ringing phone.

He fought his anger. Gounaris was the one to blame for Moll’s infidelity, not Moll. She had always been ambitious in her career, he’d cut her out of the herd, focused all that power on her, made her feel important, unique, seduced her…

Hell, Will was as guilty of her death as Gounaris was. If he’d insisted on going over to the city as soon as she’d called him… or allowed enough time coming across the Bay so he wouldn’t have gotten held up on the bridge… Then that crazy guy with the gun would have had to find some other single woman to obsess on, and Moll would still be…

How in God’s name would he get through the funeral two days hence? Just three days ago Moll had been alive, vital…

The phone quit ringing. And he was sniveling again, for Godsake. He hadn’t done that since he was five years old.

Will Dalton wasn’t answering his phone at home, but the people at the Institute said that’s where he’d probably go when he’d finished with the funeral arrangements, so they drew an unmarked sedan from the police pool. Flanagan turned left into one-way Harriett Alley from the garage under the Hall of Justice, made another left into Harrison, both men trying to talk at once.

“Ucelli was off somewhere on a-”

“Your fucking Professor Dalton-”

Flanagan made yet another left, into Eighth, stayed in the left lane for the final ring-around-the-rosie left into Bryant and the on-ramp for the Skyway. Once on their way to the Bay Bridge, he gave his big laugh and made a courtly hand gesture.

“Okay, you first, mon capitaine. Whatever you got is gonna look like shit when I get through talking.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Dante. “I checked with the Feebs-they’ve had a tap on Ucelli’s phone since Christ made corporal. They never get anything, but at least they know he was out of town for four days and just got back this morning. You have to admit, Tim, being gone like that spanning the time of the hit makes him look awful good for it.”

“’Cause he went fishing or something? Hell, if he was burying guys in the Jersey Turnpike, he must be old as water.”

“Made his bones with a barbershop hit in ’52,” said Dante with something like pride of race in his voice.

Flanagan hit the horn at a slow car in the fast lane on the bridge’s lower deck, then passed him on the inside. He always drove as if responding to a silent alarm; Dante was used to it.

“Fifty-two, huh? Over forty fucking years ago!”

“It was his sixteenth birthday.”

“So he’s pushing fucking sixty now. The old hand-eye coordination’s gotta be going-”

“According to the feds, the mob uses him for jobs where they need someone with the balls to do it up close and right the first time. You don’t need an Olympic marksman for that.”

They came out from under the top deck to the broad apron, nearly a quarter of a mile wide, where the tollbooths for traffic going the other direction were located. Water hit the windshield. Flanagan turned on the wipers, turned up his hand.

“Don’t scan, Dante. You know the Mafia don’t do shit around here, it isn’t like Vegas or L.A. So what the hell would the woman know they’d need to kill her over? Atlas Entertainment sure as hell isn’t Mafia, it’s big Eurobucks. I got their brochures, financial statement, prospectus-not a sniff of mob. European money from Luxembourg or somewhere. I had a good reason to make a pain of myself, her murder and all, so I talked with the secretaries, the peons-finally went up against the big boss himself.”

“Kosta Gounaris,” said Dante. “Former Greek shipping tycoon. Sold his shipping line four years ago. Kids grown, Greek wife he divorced when he sold his company. Gives a lot to charity, he’s in the papers a lot.”

Flanagan was in a left lane so he could angle into the northbound traffic on I-80. They were a half hour before the main body of the rush hour started; the drivers sending up sheets of water ahead of them were mostly timid souls who treated the posted speed limits as hard fact instead of fiction.

“Okay, lemme tell you what I found out. Past few years, Moll Dalton’s been sleeping with half the power brokers in San Francisco.”

“You sure?” asked Dante, surprised. “The way Dalton-”

“Way I see it, Academy Award all the way. None of the secretaries at Atlas liked her, she was just too fucking bright and too fucking beautiful, and her boss had been dicking her for three months.”

“Gounaris himself?”

“He didn’t want to talk to me at first, so I got a little nasty…”

He wiggled his eyebrows, and Dante burst out laughing. He had seen Tim in action, many a time, and nasty was too kind a word for what he did. Tim swelled up and got as red in the face as a turkey wattle, his voice became a bullhorn. But what turned men’s guts to water was that he looked like a very big and extremely stupid man dangerously out of control.

“What’d he say after he changed his underpants?”

“Not this guy, Dante.” He was getting into the right lane for the Ashby Avenue turnoff. “He talked to me only because he knew he’d have to talk with someone sooner or later. Said, and I’m sorta quoting now, we’re all going to miss her terribly here at Atlas Entertainment. She was a very special person, an indispensable attorney, and a wildly inventive lover.”

“Just like that, huh?” asked Dante, feeling a sudden deep antipathy toward Kosta Gounaris. Even if the dead woman had been just a sexual convenience, he had held her in his arms and entered her body and now she was dead in an ugly, violent way.

“Just like that-I got the rest of it from the typing pool. Seems Dalton came home unexpectedly from Borneo, Sumatra, like that, he’s studying those fucking apes. Anyway, he catches Gounaris and his wife playing hide-the-salami in her penthouse.”