Menaced Assassin

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was a week before Jack Lenington had his first-and, as it developed, last-interview with Internal Affairs. In the interim, Dante had been busy. Checking phone company records for long-distance calls from the lobby pay phone bank in the Atlas Entertainment building had turned up three calls to the same country club in Palm Springs, one of them placed the night before Moll Dalton’s murder at Bella Figura.

Suggestive but not really indicative, because Tallpalms Country Club had no record of the calls, so of course they could not help with who the calls had been placed to.

Probably not Bob Hope.

Probably not Sonny Bono.

Probably not even Spiro Agnew. There were not as many retired mobsters in Palm Springs as there were in Vegas, but the number was not negligible. And by some strange chance, all of them happened to belong to Tallpalms.

Dante, the eternal optimist, hoped to winnow the possibles for a short list of probables he could work in earnest.

He had also called for everything LAPD might have on Moll’s father, Skeffington St. John, who had arranged her employment with Atlas Entertainment. That was just facts, but for himself he kept returning to the question of whether St. John had molested Moll as a child. Quite a heavy accusation for a man as bright as Will Dalton to level at his father- in-law unless there was something more than an intuition to back it up.

He kept wanting to ask Dalton more about it, but Dalton was in Africa: he faxed a request to Interpol for any facts on Gounaris instead. Then there was Lenington, corrupt in all the small ways a vice cop could be corrupt, from shaking down pimps to free sex from the hookers, but Dante hadn’t thought of him as involved with organized crime.

Jack was an angry and careful man. All they had was him entering and leaving one of Vince O’Neill’s legal porn palaces at about the same time that a man under investigation for possible organized crime ties had entered and left. Not illegal; merely suggestive.

The I.A. lived on that sort of suggestion, but Dante wasn’t watching through the one-way glass in the adjoining room when Lenington was brought in by the shooflies; he knew a transcript of the interrogation would be on his desk the next day.

I.A.:

Hello, Jack. Come in and sit down.

SUBJECT:

Hello, Simon, you fucking weasel.

I.A.:

No need to take that attitude, Jack. We’re all cops here. Somebody’s got to keep the department clean-

SUBJECT:

Yeah, somebody has to look up assholes for a living, too. You don’t have to be a cop to do it.

I.A.:

You know this is being recorded, Jack-

SUBJECT:

You gonna edit out all the dirty words afterwards, Irv?

I.A.:

You understand this is just a preliminary investigation, Jack, so we haven’t asked you to have your attorney present-

SUBJECT:

What I got to tell you guys, I don’t need an attorney.

I.A.:

Okay. On the twenty-second of last month-

SUBJECT:

Uh-uh. Somebody wants to go after me for dereliction of duty or some shit, that’s my watch commander or the Chief. Not you assholes. You wanta charge me with a crime, my lawyer’s here fast as you can jerk each other’s wienie. Which leaves you miserable fucks with my bank account, my mortgages, my spendable income.

I.A.:

We told you, Jack, this is just a preliminary-

SUBJECT:

I got like thirty-seven cents in my bank account, couple CDs worth one, two K. Mortgage on the house’s got maybe thirteen years to run. My boat, another two years. The car, I paid that off last June. Four years. Neither of my kids are in college-they’re working stiffs, I couldn’t pay the freight. So fuck you guys very much. Take two nine-millimeter pills up the ass and call me in the morning.

Sound of slamming door. Dante flipped the transcript onto his desk and chuckled despite himself. He’d been through the academy with Lenington, and knew him as a mean-minded man and a corrupt cop, but he’d also been on the street long enough himself to enjoy seeing the shooflies eat a little shit from another street cop. Lenington didn’t deserve the name. But he was tough, it would take a lot to bring him down.

Internal Affairs never did bring Jack Lenington down, or even back in for another shot. Jack knew they’d gone through his personal affairs with a vacuum sweeper, had found nothing because there was nothing to find. When he had gone to the Bahamas to set up his offshore numbered account, he’d done it by a small-plane commuter fight from Fort Lauderdale during a family vacation to Florida. Left the wife and kids-small then-at Disney World believing he was in the Keys angling for bonefish.

The I.A. turncoats didn’t worry him. What worried him was that his meeting with Kosta Gounaris must have been under surveillance. The I.A. hadn’t had a tail on him, he knew that; but did Stagnaro have a loose tail on Gounaris? Just like the fucker; and he would have tipped I.A. to the meet.

He’d better tell somebody about it, so they wouldn’t think he’d worn a tail to their meeting. They didn’t take kindly to having that sort of dumb fuck on the pad.

So he went to see Otto Kreiger. The I.A. probably knew Kreiger was his lawyer; what they didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that Otto Kreiger, through Vince O’Neill, king of the Tenderloin porn dealers, was also his mob contact. O’Neill had obliquely approached Jack, many years ago, about doing a couple of things for a couple of bucks for a couple of guys he knew. Kreiger was one of those guys, and it had grown into a lucrative proposition that carried, however, its own built-in risks.

He felt he was at risk right now.

Kreiger had offices in the old Hunter-Dulin Building at the foot of Sutter Street, an ornate art nouveau cakebox from the 1920s. Kreiger’s office was an unpretentious suite with windows looking down on Market Street; a far cry from the fifty acres in Woodside where Lenington knew the attorney raised horses. He didn’t know, nor could he have imagined, that Kreiger’s cheapest mare, a purebred Arabian, had been a steal at $758,000.

Kreiger had a brutal, booming voice that was extremely effective in court when carping about violations of his mobster clients’ civil rights. He used it now on Jack. “I hear you had a little

chat with the I.A.”

Jack rattled the ice in his bourbon, asked in his angry voice, “Those peep-show machines have fucking mikes in them?”

Kreiger shook his head and chuckled.

“You’re not the only man gets an envelope each month, Jack. I appreciate being alerted to the interview, even after the fact, but if you’ve been reasonably prudent-”

“Woulda looked bad, calling in my lawyer before I’d even had my first interview. I’m not worried about the I.A. It’s something else.”

“Indeed.” Kreiger was a large man with a square face and heavy lips and the coldest eyes with the palest lashes Lenington had ever seen. He interlaced beefy hands in front of him.

Jack said, “I had a meet with a certain guy-”

“I know.”

“I think we were clocked in and out.” To Kreiger’s narrowed eyes, he quickly added, “That’s why I had to see you. I wasn’t followed there-Gounaris was. And-”

“How can you be sure?”

“Jesus, Mr. Kreiger, I been a cop for-”

“Yes. Of course. The wolf knows its own excreta. So your feeling is that Mr. Gounaris was under surveillance.”

“Or it was just by accident, but who the fuck knows who he is unless they’re already watching him? I got plenty of reason to hang around one of Vince O’Neill’s jerk-off shops anytime I want, shit, I’m Vice. But Gounaris is just a John, so why would anyone notice him-”

“Dante Stagnaro,” said Kreiger abruptly. There was almost admiration in his voice. “That would be quite like him-a loose tail on the Greek.” He nodded. “Yes. Then you going into O’Neill’s place at the same time suddenly gets important.”

“You know Stagnaro?” asked Lenington cautiously. Frankly, Kreiger scared the hell out of him. A phone call, he was meat. Just like Moll Dalton had become meat after a phone call.

“Not socially, of course.” Kreiger waved an arm. “He’s that most dangerous of men, an idealist smart enough not to be corrupted by his own obsession. Which is our destruction. He visited Gounaris shortly after you two talked.”

“There you are,” said Lenington in angry vehemence. He was damned glad he’d come in and told his side of the story. Then he paused, suddenly hesitant. But it had to be said; it was what he was here for. “I wanted to tell you about it, Mr. Kreiger. And I, ah, wanted to ask you… there hasn’t been… I mean, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I had led…”

“I can assure you that your reconstruction makes sense to me,” said Kreiger.

“So there’s no… uh… word out that-”

“I can assure you, Jack, none at all.”

He was on his feet, moving around the desk. Jack stood up, took the huge callused palm that was offered to him. He spoke as Kreiger put a hand on his shoulder to walk him to the door.

“I mean, if they want me to take an early retirement so the I.A. can’t keep-”

Kreiger chuckled to silence his plaint.

“Jack, Jack, quit looking under the bed. I have had absolutely no word about you at all. Everyone feels you have done an excellent job, you handled the matter of that visiting fireman very well indeed, he even remarked on your efficiency. We may not ask anything of you for a while, until this I.A. thing has passed, but don’t read anything into that, my friend. Not a rebuke, just a general precaution.”

“I was going to suggest the same thing myself, Mr. Kreiger,” said Lenington with relief in his angry voice.

When he was gone, Otto Kreiger sat down at his desk and thought for several minutes. In the middle of it he got up and poured himself a schnapps. You could compute the geometry of Jack’s revelations in only one of two ways.

So he called Abramson in Palm Springs. Since Gid was having people over, he made Otto wait while he took the call in the den. Kreiger could picture the old kike there among his worldly possessions like one of the Seven Dwarfs in the gem mine. He preferred real wealth. Horses. Clean, outdoors, manly.

“So, Otto,” chirped Gid’s birdlike voice, “why did God make the goyim?”

“Why did he?” asked Kreiger in ill-disguised impatience.

“ Somebody has to buy retail.”

Into Gideon’s chuckles, Kreiger said heavily, “Abramson, we seem to have been told a conflicting pair of tales in the Atlas Entertainment matter. You know Mr. Prince does not want that connection made public, so I think we’d better bring the matter to his attention.”

When the phone rang, a relaxed and reassured Jack Lenington-going to see the fucking kraut yesterday had been the thing to do, all right-was two-fingering a report while trying to remember if counselor, as in attorney, had one “1” or two. His spelling was atrocious but his reports, when he couldn’t get out of writing them, always managed to say what he wanted them to.

He grabbed up the receiver and barked, “Vice, Lenington,” into it. And heard for the first time the high-speed, high-pitched delivery of the man who never called himself anything but Burkie.

“My name is Burkie you got something I want sweetheart and I got something you want, cash.”

He stopped there as if he had said something significant.

“Yeah, Madonna’s got a red-hot snatch I want, too,” said Lenington in his angry voice, “but I ain’t liable to get it.”

He hung up. The phone rang again immediately.

Lenington picked up, snapped, “Vice, Lenington,” into it, and the same high-speed high-pitched almost-falsetto almost-fag voice began, “We got cut off I want-”

Lenington hung up on him again. When the phone rang a third time, again immediately, he snatched it off the hook. Some fucking guys never learned.

“Listen, asshole, I-”

“No, asshole, you listen,” said the voice, sounding suddenly not faggy at all. “Five large just to listen.”

This time the man calling himself Burkie hung up.

And then didn’t call again. Goddam him! Had he played the guy wrong? Jack already had started to think of those five dimes as his five dimes he didn’t have to do anything for except just listen. But how could he listen if the fuckhead didn’t call?

Couple of evenings later, Jack was gunning a few in Liverpool Lil’s, a neighborhood pub cattycorner across Lyon from the Presidio gates. It was a dark narrow place with red brick floors and wooden walls covered with photographs, and shiny wineglasses hanging upside down over the bar, and a good steak-and-kidney pie on the menu.

But he was here after making his monthly dual collections-gash and cash, Jack liked to call them-from a discreet high-price call girl who lived just up the street on the Presidio Wall. They’d have a drink, Jack would warn her if anything bad might be coming down, she’d take him home to lay him and pay him.

“Hey, Jack,” said the bartender, “telephone for you.”

Even though off duty, Jack had conscientiously left the number with Dispatch. Never knew when one of his other little arrangements might need servicing.

“Lenington,” he said in his hard, angry voice.

“Jack-baby-Burkie!” Then the familiar high-speed delivery began. “That secondhand store fronts a treasury book on Mission off Fifth near the old Remedial Loans around the corner from the Mint in the phone booth one hour.”

Dial tone.

Five large, just to listen. Against that, a setup. The mob? The kraut had assured him he had a plus ledger with them for his efficient handling of his part in the Moll Dalton hit.

The IAD? He takes the phone call in the booth, he gets five large, the bills are black-light or paint pellet, the numbers recorded, dirty money, he’s on his way to the slam. Trouble with that scenario, obvious entrapment by Internal Affairs. With the kraut as his attorney he would walk away laughing, and they’d know it.

Stagnaro?

For it being him, he was a sly fucking fox, Jack had been through the academy with him and never met one slyer. Maybe he wanted to catch Jack dirty, force him to roll over on Gounaris, or worse, the mob. And the tidbit about the treasury book in the secondhand store would fit Stagnaro. Guy got around. Shit, even Jack hadn’t known about that one, or he would have been leaning on the guy himself. Right around the corner from the fucking Mint! Somebody had some balls. Or a sense of humor.

Against it being Stagnaro? Much as Jack hated to admit it, he wasn’t that kind of cop in the first place, and was a hell of a lot brighter than the IAD in the second place, which made him too bright to try that sort of cheap shit in the third place.

So who did that leave who might be trying to get something on him? And meanwhile, seventeen of Jack’s sixty minutes had evaporated.

Should he go there or not?