Menaced Assassin

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Hey, brother, can you spare an apartment? Only kidding. The bothersome old man with the canary soon would be gone.

For some twenty hours he’d been defending what he’d called his “turf”-sitting on the sidewalk in front of Otto Kreiger’s building on Sixth Street south of Market. On paper, of course, the building belonged to the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in a Cayman Islands real estate office.

Really quite a comical old man, resting his canary cage on one thigh and his butcher knife on the other. Runover shoes and a three-piece suit, a tattered Persian mg under his rocking chair, both chair and rug from the apartment he had refused to quit until he’d been carried down to the sidewalk in his rocker. There, smelling bad, he’d stayed, courtesy of a temporary restraining order on his behalf by Legal Aid. But the TRO had expired an hour before without being translated into a preliminary injunction.

The slightly rotund but pretty-faced black woman cop was being a hell of a lot gentler than Kreiger would have been, probably because TV news cameras were recording the event even though it was only eight-thirty in the morning. Kreiger was just there, one of the crowd.

“Mr. Kreplovski,” the cop said, “won’t you give me the knife? You don’t want anyone to get hurt, do you, sir?”

Kreplovski just sat there looking bewildered. Kreiger hoped he would take a slash at the black broad, put himself in the wrong. But just then the morning sun touched the cage and the canary started singing joyously. The old man looked at the bird with his mad blue eyes, then handed over the blade.

“Thank you, Mr. Kreplovski.”

Kreiger, standing in the crowd, said, “I bet she’s from hostage negotiations. Smart move to bring her in.”

“This fucking town,” said the man next to him.

The woman cop was saying, in the same reasonable tone of voice, “You know we’re going to have to remove you now, don’t you, Mr. Kreplovski?”

“I know my Sarah died in that apartment. I know I want to die there, too.”

“In a few days there won’t be any apartment,” she said brightly. Two burly uniforms were moving up on either side of her. Somebody jeered at them, but the presence of a black woman, though herself a cop, tended to dampen the crowd’s hostility.

“Why can’t they just let me die with the building?”

“Who would take care of your canary?” she asked in a reasonable voice.

That seemed to clinch it for the old man. The two burly blues crouched, got hold of the bottom of the chair and came erect with it, and Mr. Kreplovski, and the canary. They carried all three across the sidewalk toward the waiting ambulance.

“Clever,” said Kreiger to the man next to him. “Ambulance instead of a paddy wagon. Good public relations.”

“This fucking town,” said the man, shaking his head.

Old Kreplovski turned to look up at the vacated apartment building as they put him and his canary into the ambulance. Tears were running down his cheeks from his startling blue eyes. The crowd started to cheer, then to applaud him.

Kreiger sighed, “Progress.”

“You fucking asshole,” the man next to him said, and stalked off.

Kreiger toyed with the idea of calling up someone to teach him a lesson; but walking back up to his office on Sutter Street, he forgot about the fool. He had won. Kreplovski had been the last tenant of the run-down old apartment building. Now it could be torn down to make way for the offices and arcade Kreiger already had gotten the permits for from the city. He’d had to pay a few people off, but it was just part of doing business in a candy-ass town prizing environmental awareness.

Whether it made money or not was largely immaterial anyway: he would be washing large sums from the newly reviving heroin trade through it during demolition and after construction.

It had been three and a half months since the hit on Spic Madrid, and today, finally, Otto Kreiger was making his move. At first, truth be told, he had been terrified. Unlike the FBI and the St. Paul police, he had no doubts at all about who had ordered the killing, and no doubts at all about why.

He stopped for the light on the corner of Third and Mission; across the intersection was the Rochester Big and Tall that had been there as long as he could remember. In the early days he’d bought his own suits there, 50 long.

Obviously, Martin Prince had seen in Spic’s muted opposition at the meeting of capos a direct challenge to his own authority. Kreiger had shown the same muted opposition. Spic had voted to have the baby-raper down in Los Angeles hit; so had Kreiger. They had been overridden, three to two, in the show of hands. Normally, that would have been the end of it.

But in this case, the end hadn’t come until a week later, when Spic had been gunned down in his St. Paul headquarters.

Otto Kreiger hadn’t been gunned down. Yet.

“Yet” was why, the day after Martin Prince had called with sadness in his voice to tell him of Spic’s sudden end, he had gone to a private security firm and had hired around-the-clock personal protection for himself and his family.

It was degrading, but getting dead was even more degrading.

Two days after he had hired them, his wife came striding into his study straight from her stables, still in riding boots and jodhpurs, anger in her wide-set blue eyes, slapping her riding crop in her gloved left hand.

“Otto, that new stablehand you hired has to go!”

“Stablehand?” He felt a sudden sharp anxiety. “I didn’t hire any-”

“There was some large ugly man in ridiculous corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket and a cap hanging around the stables this morning. When I ordered him off the premises, he told me he was sorry, he couldn’t leave.”

“Good,” said a relieved Kreiger.

“When I demanded to know what he meant he said to ask…” Belatedly, she broke off to demand, “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Good.’ That tells me he’s doing his job.”

“You mean you hired him to stand around gawking at me?”

He said, with admirable mildness, “I’ll have a word with him about being less obtrusive, my darling.”

Like many Mafia wives, Tiffany had no real knowledge, only surmises, about what her husband did. She knew he was a powerful criminal defense attorney, and she knew most of his clients were not people she would ever invite to their Sunday afternoon pool party/barbecues. She also knew these clients did not explain his tremendous income, but she didn’t question it because she liked to spend it-on her face, on her body, on her horses.

For his part, Kreiger liked indulging her. She was a very handsome thirty-four, kept her figure and most of the time her place, and was wise enough to service him sexually when and how he liked it. Since he would have considered anything beyond me-Tarzan-you-Jane unmanly and maybe degenerate, missionaries would have approved.

In mollified tones, she said, “I don’t understand what he’s doing around the stables in the first place.”

“Well, actually, Tiff, he’s sort of looking after you.”

“What’s the matter?” she exclaimed in alarm. “Is there danger for the children? Shouldn’t we call the police or-”

“Nothing that troublesome, darling.” He came around the desk to her. “Nothing we need bother the police about. Just a rowdy element…”

“I… I don’t understand,” she said weakly.

She was Woodside born and bred, educated at Sacred Heart in the city, then Stanford, she had never seen any of the rougher edges of life. He put his arm around her shoulders, walked her slowly to the door of the study. He could feel her tremble against him, could smell the horses on her clothing, could very faintly smell the perfume of perspiration from her exertions in the practice ring. It was physically arousing.

“Now don’t you fret, my love. You know I’ve been buying some of those old fleabag rooming houses and commercial properties south of Market now that the Yerba Buena Center is up and running-”

“Well, yes, but…”

“There’s some radical homeless advocates who want to see it all upgraded to low-cost housing rather than torn down for new, significant development, and they have made some silly threats. So I just thought it prudent to provide you with around-the-clock protection until the problem is solved.”

There had been angry shouting matches in the Board of Supes over his permits, but the guards had really been to send Martin Prince the message that he was no stupid mark like the little beaner. A statement. A sort of deadly chess game.

He walked in the California sunlight down cleaned-up Market Street toward Montgomery, thinking that he liked the analogy. Almost poetic.

Down in Southern California, Dante was picking up his Avis rent-a-car at the Burbank airport. His elation at learning about the connection between Gounaris and the Mafia’s Abramson had subsided. The bubble had burst. So all the Abramsons were the same guy? Even if confirmed it didn’t prove anything at all about Abramson or anyone in the Mafia being involved in Atlas Entertainment, let alone the murder of Moll Dalton.

Even at ten in the morning, it was blazingly hot in the Valley; as soon as he got into the car he had the windows shut and the A/C cranked up. He drove in on Airport Way, thinking that in three and a half months he had accomplished exactly nothing to unravel the connection between the murders of Moll Dalton et al

Not that he had been three and a half months idle. He had been so busy with the real business of the Organized Crime Task Force that if any leads had developed he wouldn’t have been able to follow them up anyway. Rumors of a possible San Francisco link with the New York Chinese gangs smuggling freighters full of illegal Chinese immigrants into California. A goofy tip that an organized band of Latino ex-cons was extorting money from Valley farmers in some scam involving water rights, portable Johns, bogus green cards, and reporting legal workers to la Migra as illegals.

He passed over the Ventura Freeway; directly ahead was the old Burbank Studios-now Warner Studios-with its distinctive old-fashioned tan water tower. Alameda merged with Riverside to carry him through determinedly quaint Toluca Lake.

Three and a half months, nothing further from Raptor, no more hits in the organized crime community. No further leads developing. Nothing on the slim leads he already had.

Dante cut over to Moorpark, which was faster than the Ventura Freeway it paralleled, drove west.

None of the used tens, twenties, fifties handed to Hymie the Handler by Jack Lenington had turned up at any U.S. bank. Not one. Unless Lenington had buried them in a fruit jar in the backyard-not likely-he had maintained an offshore numbered account. Which made his corruption more sophisticated than originally thought, but it didn’t tell a damned thing about why he had been snuffed. Or if his death was in any way at all connected with that of Moll Dalton.

Dante turned south on Woodman, crossed Ventura’s tacky commercial blare of fried chicken joints and Chinese take out, at Valley Vista jacklegged uphill past bungalows, gardeners, and greenery irrigated so lavishly that Northern California water was running off in the gutters. Unseen smog stung his eyes.

Everyone had closed their books on the Spic Madrid killing, and Popgun Ucelli was staying home in Jersey, calling no one more exciting than a local steak house for occasional reservations, and his bookie for occasional bets. The Feebs monitoring his tap were eating well and having good luck following his ponies. No plane trips. No calls from a contractor offering him a hit.

Also, alas, no more trips to Vegas by the Mafia dons.

No corpses falling out of cabinets in locked rooms.

No bodies dead of exotic poisons.

No dogs doing curious things in the night.

No need for Dante’s deerstalker hat and magnifying glass.

Benedict Canyon Lane was a dead-end offshoot up in the hills where, he had finally learned from SAG, Moll Dalton’s mother was living as Gloria Crowley, a name she seemed to have picked out of a hat. He made the right turn into her street, seeing, up beyond the houses, the barren California hills where coyotes skulked that in drought times came down to dine domestic on pet pusses and pooches.

He began checking the house numbers painted on the curbs, squinting in the glare, hoping to talk to Moll Dalton’s mother cold. No advance notice. If you connected, you got them fresh before they’d had a chance to start image-polishing.

He had better connect. Under the name of Green, he had made an appointment with St. John for three o’clock, the earliest he could get. He hoped St. John would be stunned by what Dante Stagnaro, alias Mr. Green, brought with him from his interview with dead Molly’s living mother.