Menaced Assassin

CHAPTER TWELVE

Fifty-nine minutes after Burkie’s call, Jack Lenington was leaning against the wall of the secondhand store on Mission Street, arms folded, the width of the sidewalk away from the phone booth. At 11:00 p.m. there wasn’t much foot traffic, only a few cars. As his second hand hit twelve, the phone rang. Lenington got it on the second ring.

“Yeah.”

The same rapid-fire high-pitched voice. “What you listen to is this phone ringing every night at eleven o’clock don’t pick up unless it stops ringing and then starts again then pick up on the third ring and answer like you did tonight.”

“What will you want to know?”

“I’ll ask specific questions about Stagnaro’s investigation when I have them to ask and when I do you get ten large if you can answer them or not.”

This guy was really fucking desperate, thought Jack. He started, “Do you know…” then stopped. He’d been about to use the kraut’s name, for Chrissake! “You said something about-”

“Oldest gag in the book, envelope under the phone tray.”

Buzz.

Jack looked around as his hand found the envelope, his fingers felt around it for wires. Nothing. Just masking tape to hold it to the metal.

Nobody coming by right at the second except the god damnedest white nigger you ever saw. Everything was black except his face, and sixties black at that! Fucking dreadlocks down to his ass, stacked heels made him six inches taller, floppy wool green, white, and purple beret, one of those varicolored robes, dashiki or some shit, shades, bopping down the street with a cellular phone pressed to his face.

“My man!” he was shrieking in a high skinny black voice as he went by, “the key is G sharp and the beat is dum-dum-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum-dum…”

He was gone in a cloud of reefer, and Jack had his envelope in hand, into his pocket, was walking away from there.

Jack did everything to the envelope except zap it with X rays, but he couldn’t find anything suggesting a letter bomb. Finally he put it in a pail of water in his postage-stamp backyard overnight. Next morning the manila envelope had disintegrated and the pail was full of soaking greenbacks. A few hundreds, a dozen fifties, the rest twenties, none new, none consecutive. No dye. Wearing gloves, he dried them out with his wife’s hair dryer, took them to Hymie the Handler at the Crime Lab as evidence in a case. Hymie loved to handle evidence of any sort from any source, hence his nickname.

“I want you to subject these to every fucking scrutiny known to man and have them ready for me this afternoon.”

Hymie was a hairy bear of a man in his mid-thirties, muscular and handsome if you liked hebes, not at all like his name. He looked mildly astounded that Jack finally had brought him some evidence, any evidence, of anything whatsoever.

“And for Chrissake keep it under your hat, Hymie. I don’t want anyone to know about these bills except you and me.”

“For you, Jack, anything,” he said wryly. “I’ll even give away my lunch hour to commemorate the day Jack Lenington actually brought in evidence to be analyzed. Must be your first bust, huh, Jack? Congratulations!”

“Go to hell” was Jack’s only comment, so mild because Hymie was, after all, doing him a favor.

The bills were clean as Christ’s conscience.

That afternoon at 3:00 p.m. he mailed them off to the Bahamas, the zip code of the phony return address his account number instead of 94122, and that night at 11:00 he was back in the phone booth ready for more of them. What he knew about Stagnaro’s investigation you could cram up a gnat’s ass, but if Burkie had specific questions maybe he could find out…

The phone rang, went silent, didn’t ring again. Just as well, too many people going by on the sidewalk, made him nervous. So he scanned everybody, damned carefully. No familiar faces. No easy place for a shotgun mike to be set up, record whatever he said, either; but just the same he’d request a face-to-face on his turf if he had any information to give when the time came.

Next night, the same. Nice thing was, he was only at the phone for like twenty seconds. Minimum exposure.

On the fourth night there were no pedestrians on the street at all except the white nigger, who came bopping up as Jack waited out the preliminary rings. This time the beret was cherry red, otherwise he still had his splayfoot nigger walk, his stacked heels, his dashiki, his smell of grass, his cellular phone. Guy sure did a nigger good. Maybe he was a mulatto, not a white man at all.

The phone rang. As Jack turned back to it, the white nigger brought out of the sleeve of his dashiki an already-cocked short-barreled revolver, a. 357 Magnum loaded with 125-grain hollow points and wrapped in a plastic supermarket bag. He pressed the muzzle against the back of Jack’s head and blew Jack’s brains all over the inside of the booth and beyond.

The assassin shook the gun out into the gutter, retaining his fingerprints only on the plastic bag, and kept on bopping. The first pedestrian by lost her dinner and the first black-and-white pulled up four minutes later, but the assassin was boarding a bus for the Outer Mission by then.

At three minutes before midnight, Raptor, his bebop persona safely stuffed into a Salvation Army bin in a Safeway lot a few blocks away, walked into the all-night Standard station on Army Street. It was a clean, sharp night, crisp as a new-crop Gravenstein. His gloved hands laid a fan of five twenties with a note clipped to them on top of the pump. The bills bulged the eyes of the night man, a husky African-American kid of seventeen. The note was typed, all in caps.

I WANT YOU TO MAKE ONE MORE PHONE CALL. YOU WILL GET AN ANSWERING MACHINE OR A MAN’S VOICE. EITHER WAY, JUST SAY THE WORDS ON THE BACK OF THIS INTO THE PHONE AND HANGUP.

Dante didn’t monitor the answering machine down in the living room overnight because duty calls always were buzzed through on his beeper. But he was never a heavy sleeper when involved in a complex case, so the midnight ringing downstairs had jarred him awake and kept the rest of his night fitful. He was up at six, slurping instant and wandering through the house as he waited for the Chronicle to thump against the front door. The machine’s blinking green light reminded him of the call.

He ran the tape back, listened to it. The voice was husky but immature, obviously black or faking it, nervous and hesitant. As if reading the words when reading came hard.

“Uh-this is Raptor. Uh-I gave the, uh, gentleman the message. It, uh, really blew his mind.”

Raptor! A Raptor had called in a comic German accent after Moll Dalton had died. And Dante had erased the tape… He listened to this new one again, then ran the tape back and removed it and put in a fresh one-which he should have done with the first Raptor message, even though he was sure the hit had been made by Ucelli. But Ucelli didn’t leave cute messages on cops’ answering machines. Eddie delivered the mail and got out of town.

Even though he hadn’t told Tim, hadn’t told anyone about that first erased Raptor message-a crank call, right? — he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. Not even if he now had two crank calls. He’d go see Hymie the Handler.

At six-thirty in the morning the drive in to the Hall of Justice from North Beach was an easy one. It was not even seven when he went up the wide concrete steps of the Hall, winked at the fat black cop manning (womaning? personing?) the metal-check monitor, and crossed the lobby to the elevator bank.

Just before the doors started to close, two black hookers and a pudgy white lawyer with garbage eyes got on. The hookers wore stretch body stockings, one black, one white lace, the lawyer a suit off the rack at Mervyn’s, a purple tie with BAM! WHAM! and ZOWIE! on it in neon-red letters. Purple and red. Dynamite.

“Where’s Marlene been keeping herself?” he asked.

“She broke her foot,” said the short wide hooker.

“Yeah, I know how, too,” the lawyer said sadly. “Kicking her attorney in the nuts.”

“Wouldn’t break no foot that way, Clyde,” said the taller of the women with an exaggerated slap on his arm. “Squirrel run up a lawyer’s leg, he’d starve to death fo sure! Kick a lawyer in the heart, that’d break a girl’s foot. Great big rock, a lawyer’s heart.”

Both girls were giggling as the threesome got off at the court floor where the Organized Crime Task Force had its makeshift office. Dante stayed on, got off at four. He went down the hall and around the corner to a plain wooden door with CRIME LAB on it. Inside, a mild-faced overweight man in chinos and a plaid lumberjack shirt nodded from behind the desk.

“Dante.”

“Norb. Hymie in yet?”

“Got here a little before six.” Norbert, who was thick and slow and hefty, talked exactly like the lean and snaky movie actor Bruce Dern, even to the timbre of the voice, but was totally unaware of it because he never went to movies and didn’t own a TV. “And Tom said the guy left after midnight last night. Glad I ain’t Hymie’s old lady.”

“So’s Hymie,” said Dante as he was buzzed through the waist-high gate.

He started down the interior corridor, then turned back to shut the door of the room where all the dope confiscated from dealers was stashed. He shook his head in mock disapproval.

“Norb! What if Al Fatah or somebody stormed the building and came busting in here-”

“Fuck ’em, Lou. Let ’em have it.”

They both laughed and Dante went on down the corridor past the deserted forensics rooms. In the open doorway of one lab was a shopping cart full of confiscated semiautomatic weapons, some with scopes, others with banana clips, all flat black in color and heaped in the cart like cordwood. He crossed another hallway to the larger lab where forensic chemists analyzed fibers, cloth, dust, hair, semen, and the like after the fact of murder.

Hymie the Handler, in white smock and thin physician’s gloves, was alone at a counter halfway down the room, snipping fibers off a stained automobile floormat. He looked up to grin at Dante coming down the deserted laboratory toward him.

“If these fibers match those caught in the panty hose of the dead woman, my dear Dupin, Mme Guillotine shall drink the blood of another murderer.”

“I think on the contrary, my dear Watson, they shall prove to be the hairs of a monstrous hound.”

“These hairs?” demanded Hymie in apparent astonishment.

“No, I refer to what you have mistaken for the panty hose of the murdered woman. I said monstrous”

Hymie laughed and put the hairs he had clipped on a slide, put another slide over it, laid it on the counter and stripped off his rubber gloves, began moving toward the back of the lab.

“Coffee?”

“Unless it’s from the stomach of a corpse.”

“This is the Crime Lab, not the Coroner’s Office.”

They sat in straight chairs on either side of a table that held a Mr. Coffee, cups, spoons, sugar and Equal, Pream. At this time of day the lab smelled rather pleasantly like Dante’s high school chem lab where he had once blown up some peanut brittle made with something besides baking soda, he couldn’t remember what it had been. Miss Tchinin had been furious…

“What would you substitute for baking soda in peanut brittle that would make it explode when you broke it?”

“Why ask me, I just work here.” Hymie’s intelligent black eyes sought Dante’s, and he sighed. “Okay, hit me.”

Dante laid the answering machine tape on the table.

“I need the call on this tape voice-printed.”

“Sound-spectrographed,” corrected Hymie automatically. “You have anything to match it with?”

“Not yet. I hope never.”

Interest sparked the dark eyes. “A call from a killer?”

“Or a hoax. Could you just file both the tape and the voice print here so I don’t have to worry about them?”

“Sure. What name for the file?”

“RAPTOR. And could you not mention this to anyone else?”

“You and Jack Lenington,” mused Hymie as he dug out an accordion file folder. Dante, who had started to turn away, stopped abruptly.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Three, four days ago Jack brought in five K in old, small-denomination, unsequenced bills for analysis for black light, impermeable dyes, like that. Said it was evidence, asked I didn’t tell anybody about it. But since the guy’s dead-”

“Dead?”

“Yeah, last night, eleven p.m., a phone booth on Mission Street. Somebody blew his face off with a. 357 Magnum. Looked professional-no prints, the gun immediately dropped in the gutter. Funny thing, it had been sprayed with Armor All-”

“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Dante under his breath.

Uh-this is Raptor. Uh-I gave the, uh, gentleman the message. It, uh, really blew his mind.

Dante laid a hand on the bearlike technician’s arm, then laid a finger to his lips. “Hymie, my lips to your ear only on this phone tape, okay?”

“Sure,” said Hymie. When Dante was gone, he added, “Interesting,” to the tape in his hands, and starting making up the RAPTOR folder. That was it: he had the most interesting job in the Hall of Justice.