Menaced Assassin

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The P.W. appeared out of nowhere on the icy, windblown day after Thanksgiving, materializing out of a swirling snowstorm like a figure on a Polaroid photo gradually taking on definition once it has been pulled from the camera. He was walking as he would always walk, with his arms raised and bent at the elbows, his hands clasped behind his head in the traditional “surrendering prisoner” manner. Thus, P.W.-prisoner of war.

On that first late afternoon, with the light already fading and early snow on the ground, there was nobody to see him but Old Mose. Mose was seventy-eight, with a seamed chocolate face and frizzy hair turned white as the snow he was struggling with. When the Roadhouse had been one, Mose had played some mean blues piano in the lounge; but an irate customer, a made man-Eddie Ucelli (cool on the kill, a creep in his cups)-had taken care of that by repeatedly slamming the keyboard cover on Mose’s hands because Eddie wanted “O Sole Mio ” instead of “Hellhound on My Trail.”

Mae had kept Mose on as handyman-a misnomer if there ever was one, seeing the state of his hands-so on this snowy afternoon he was outside painfully clearing the front walk, holding the shovel awkwardly in his more or less useless claws.

That was when the P.W. appeared between the eastern white pines, crunching through the snow from the road that had once been a highway. He took the shovel from Mose’s twisted fingers with his strong gloved hands, and started shoveling vigorously.

“Hey, mister, ain’t no call for you to…”

The P.W. paused to lay a gloved finger to his lips, then returned to his shoveling. Mose didn’t have to shovel again as long as the P.W. was there. He didn’t have to tend the furnace, either, or the water heater, or carry in cases of booze or crates of frozen steaks from Ucelli’s meat wholesale company, or perform any of his other heavier tasks. The P.W., in the same plodding manner he did everything, took care of all of them.

It was hard to tell how tall or how heavy the P.W. was, or even how old. His scraggly hair was mostly hidden by a Navy watch cap he seemed to wear both day and night. He had a matted beard he never cut, wore God knew how many layers of clothes underneath an Army camouflage jacket and baggy camouflage combat pants. The soles of his battered Army boots were sadly run over on the outside edge. He never removed his gloves.

Old Mose told the girls in a self-important voice that the P.W. had confided he’d been tortured repeatedly by the V.C., and his hands were not something anyone would ever see again. How much of this was real and how much Mose had dreamed up because it seemed that’s the way it must have been, nobody ever knew, since the P.W. talked to Mose damned little and to anyone else not at all. But anyway, it made a nice story. And it made old Mose feel he had a coeval in the hands department.

The P.W. carried his head thrust forward on his neck like a lily on a stalk, walking with a stooped shuffle that neither slowed nor speeded nor turned aside. It seemed that if he had needed to walk through the building, he simply would have done so like a tank, trailing broken lengths of lath and uprooted wiring and odds and ends of plasterboard with him.

Nobody ever tested the impression, because Mose made sure on that first night that he got some of the half-eaten meals that otherwise would have gone into the garbage, and found a place in the basement by the furnace for him to lay out his grimy sleeping bag. The P.W. rigged a length of hose to fit over the overflow valve on the water heater, and thus could give himself a rudimentary shower-not that anyone ever saw him take one.

Mae didn’t even become aware of him until the third morning after his arrival, when she saw him carrying in cases of booze from the Acme Liquors truck-an Organization firm, of course.

“Mose, just who the hell is that?” she demanded.

“He jes’ show up t’other night, Miss Mae.”

“But who the hell is he?”

“He jes’ show up, Miss Mae,” repeated Mose vaguely.

Delia Ann, a short sturdy black girl much in demand because she had a big butt but was very supple and inventive, said, “The girls have started calling him the P.W.-for prisoner of war.”

“Why do you…” Then Mae saw him walking around to the back of the building to get another load, his arms in their invariable “I surrender” position, and she understood the name. So she changed what she had started to say, to, “I don’t care what the hell you call him, just so long as you call him gone.”

Old Mose said dolefully, “He be a pow’ful he’p to me roun’ de place, Miss Mae.”

“Be a sport, Mae,” said tall, stately, redheaded Clarisse. She was also very popular with the clientele because she could get up on a tabletop, squat naked over a long-necked beer bottle, and pick it up without a laying on of hands. “Let him stay. He’s harmless and a real gentleman.”

“How can you tell?” asked Mae.

“He never ogles any of us no matter what we have on-or don’t have on. He’s like a horse with blinders.”

So the P.W. stayed. His only idiosyncrasy occurred the first time he saw each of the girls, and never again with any of them. He would stop in front of her and peer intently into her face for a moment with his shocked, faded blue eyes behind a pair of women’s lightly tinted sunglasses.

“Soo Li?” he would ask in a hoarse mumbling voice that sounded as if he either had vocal cord damage or didn’t use his voice much any more.

Whatever the girl answered, and many of them never got a chance to answer at all, he would immediately put his finger to his lips in a shushing motion as he had done to Mose that first evening. Then he would shake his head and turn dolefully away, never to speak to her again.

Within a week he had gone through them all except Mae, who never let him get that close to her because he gave her what she called “the willies.” Even so, he soon became as much of a fixture around the establishment as Mose or Dietrich, the massive and savage Rottweiler who guarded Mae’s Place after hours.

Until the P.W. arrived, nobody was able to touch Dietrich, and only Mose even dared get near enough to throw raw meat in his direction once a day. He was a huge, silent, morose, and savage attack waiting to happen, let out to roam only at night after all the clients had departed, otherwise kept locked away in a cage under the cellar steps to which he was lured each morning by a slab of bloody beafsteak left in his food dish courtesy of Mose.

The P.W. had laid out his sleeping bag that first night after Dietrich had been released to roam. When the huge dog returned to the basement, it immediately rushed him, roaring and snapping, sharp fangs gleaming. The P.W. dropped to one knee as Dietrich sailed at him, somehow swayed aside, getting a gloved hand behind Dietrich’s passing cocked front leg, and using the dog’s own momentum, smashed his 180-pound body nose-first into the concrete-block basement wall.

After this happened three more times, Dietrich stood panting in the middle of the floor, nose bleeding and a little spraddle-legged, staring at the P.W. with puzzled eyes…

Then he whined. The stub of what would have been his tail if they had left him one started, very slowly, very tentatively, as if he had used it no more than the P.W. had used his vocal cords, to wiggle back and forth. Had it been whole, it would have been wagging.

The P.W. finished laying out his sleeping bag and got into it, totally ignoring the dog. After a long time, Dietrich shuffled over and lay down beside him with a huge sigh of what sounded almost like relief. Sometime through the night, in his sleep, the P.W. draped one arm over the dog’s massive body.

After that, the P.W. always fed Dietrich, and together they patrolled the building and the grounds after hours, two silent primordial ghosts drifting in tandem through the icy darkness of the New Jersey night.

During the month before the P.W. arrived in Jersey, in San Francisco Dante’s bone-deep rage and resolution at the almost scornful blowing away of Gideon Abramson in Death Valley had made him fess up to Tim about the Raptor phone calls. To do it, he took Tim out to dinner at the Salonika on Polk near Green.

Since the film festival, Dante had been accompanying Rosa to festivals sponsored by various Greek Orthodox churches around the Bay Area. He’d gotten to like the food, and knew it would appeal to Tim’s gargantuan tastes. So he ordered a tray of mezethes — literally “starters”-to begin the meal. Sure enough, Tim was first enchanted with the dolmathakia, stuffed vine leaves, usually grape, and ate the whole plate of them himself.

“Delicious! What’s in ’em?”

“Long-grain rice, pine nuts, onions, dill, mint, parsley, lemon, pepper… Rosie makes them, but she adds ground lamb, too. Hers are better.”

So it went through the melitzanosalata — eggplant and feta cheese and a lot of herbs-the soutzoukakia of lamb and beef sausage served with pita bread, and a dynamite tzatziki of cucumber and yogurt that Dante fought him for.

“I know all this ain’t out of the goodness of your heart, chief,” said Tim, waving a greasy-fingered hand, “since we been eating forty-five minutes and haven’t gotten to our dinners yet. So c’mon-talk to Daddy.”

Talk Dante did, over kefthes, fried meatballs that released tantalizing aromas from the kitchen as they were cooked, and the horiatiki salates of tomatoes and cucumbers and black olives and onions and feta cheese topped with dried oregano, known to most people just as “Greek salads.”

“So this guy has called five times-”

“I think it was him after Moll Dalton,” said Dante, forking flaky-crusted spanakopita — spinach pie-into his mouth and talking around it, “but I didn’t save the tape. By Hymie’s voiceprints, all the others are different people. Raptor used Gideon Abramson’s own voice as his message. Telling a Jewish joke.”

“Recorded him off the phone, I bet,” mused Tim.

Main courses were kotopoulu fournou for Tim, roast chicken with potatoes, and baked lamb with pasta, giouvetsi, for Dante. Over impossibly sweet baklava served with thimble-size cups of thick Greek coffee, Dante told about the note pinned to his shirt while he slept in the Death Valley dunes. Tim started to guffaw.

“That’s one I would have liked to see, chief,” he chortled. “It’s only because of that note that I’m buyin’ into the calls. Otherwise I’d be laughin’ in your face while I’m readin’ these.” He was shuffling through the transcripts of the calls like a hand of cards. “None of them really say, bang, bang, I did it, do they? Uh-uh. But that note pinned to your shirt…”

“And doing Abramson from four hundred yards out.”

“Whadda they got on the slugs?”

“Not much so far. The ones they could find are badly distorted. Since the killing occurred in a national monument, the FBI’s involved, and you know their Forensics Ballistics lab takes its own sweet time to analyze and report.”

“Four football fields away, so we know high-velocity, scoped…” Tim shook his head. “Near a fifth of a mile? That’s shooting, it tells us stuff about him.”

“Like what?” Dante had ideas of his own, but he liked to watch the big homicide cop’s mind work.

“Probably a good ol’ southern boy from Arkansas, Tennessee, like that. Maybe sniper-trained, maybe by the Marines in ’Nam.”

“Lots of Marines in ’Nam weren’t from the South.”

Tim leaned back with a luxurious sigh, his belly out over his belt. “More than you’d think. And southern boys make about the best killers there are-of animals or men. Take one of ’em who really likes killing…”

“Yeah,” said Dante, “with maybe some seasoning as a CIA spook or mere or somebody before going to work for the mob.”

“I buy it-he’s too methodical for a guy just poppin’ caps ’cause he’s got a hard-on against somebody.”

“Somebody who knows Popgun Ucelli’s M.O. and has Raptor use it on the close-in hits.”

“All of a sudden you don’t think Popgun did any of ’em?”

“Not if we have one man here-and I think we do, because of the Raptor messages and note. Popgun wouldn’t be bright enough for the gas line trick, and from his federal rap sheet he sure as hell couldn’t make any four-hundred-yard rifle shots.”

“Unless this Raptor shit is just a smoke screen,” mused Tim. “Multiple hitters…” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Single perp.”

Dante paid their bill with a 20 percent tip. They kept at it on their way down Polk Street toward the Hall where Tim had to pick up his own car.

“What can we maybe figure about who hired him?”

“Mob,” said Dante instantly. “Prince… or old Garofano.”

“Old, all right-old as water. Why’d he want to knock off a bunch of his compeers? He can’t have too many years left.”

“Maybe that’s why.”

“Go out with a bang? Maybe. How about your boyfriend?”

“Gounaris? I can see him hiring Raptor for the others, but Abramson was his mentor, his buffer with the big boys. If he screwed up and let Moll Dalton get too close to him, he’d need all the buffers he could get.”

“But what if he’s been skimming or something? If she nosed it out, that’s why she’d have to go. Then Lenington dug it out… Spic Madrid… right up to Abramson and St. John. I read him as a guy’d hit just about anybody who threatened him.”

“What about the calls? The note?” They were stopped for the light at Market. “If it’s Gounaris, there’s nothing I can do to confirm it; I’m gonna focus on Raptor. He’s made himself my business.”