Damn! I should have foreseen that none of them would honor the last wishes of a poor, dying, betrayed man.
It was one of the Victorian novelists, I believe, who said that when you go into an attorney’s office, you will have to pay for it, first or last.
What I have realized only too late, alas, is that this holds tree even if you’re the attorney.
Raptor
At eleven p.m., Spiro Gounaris, a hawk-nosed man carrying fifty years and forty extra pounds, locked the door of the second-hand store which fronted his treasury book. He crossed the sidewalk to the phonebooth, as he had done for six nights in a row. As he dropped his dime and tapped out the Federal Prosecutor Task Force number, Raptor came bopping along in shades and a floppy beret — on my way home from an early gig, man.
Unlike the previous nights, Raptor saw no other pedestrians on the street. Gounaris was saying, “Seven-thousand two-hundred and eighty” into the phone when Raptor pressed the muzzle of the short-barreled .357 Magnum against the back of his head and pulled the trigger...
At three minutes to midnight, Raptor walked into a gas station three miles away and laid five twenties with a note clipped to them on top of the pump the night man was locking up.
“The pay phone,” said Raptor.
The phone was saying, “Hello, this is Dunstan Trevis speaking,” as the night man, a kid in his twenties, came up tentatively. Raptor handed him the receiver to hear the rest of the message. At the tone, the kid cleared his throat and read from the note, “Uh... this is Raptor. Uh... I gave the gentleman the message. It... uh... really blew his mind.”
Dunstan Trevis was a compact man in his thirties, a shade over five-ten and under 170, with tired dispassionate eyes behind bookish hornrims in a cool, uninvolved face. He switched off the phone machine’s playback mechanism and walked through the apartment to his bedroom.
How now! A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!
He drew a mental line through Gounaris, S. on the list he carried in his head. Five dead rats in the two-plus years he’d been controller for Prince Industries. He felt as he always did when there was a message from Raptor on the machine: ready to throw up, yet determined to go on. No one on the Board knew it, but he’d set Gounaris up so that going to the Feds must have seemed the only way out. And so the Board had ordered the hit.
Trevis undressed and got into bed. Only five years before he’d been a computer software designer for United Electrodata, with a brilliant future, a growing portfolio, some very nice stock options, and a wedding date set.
Then Teresa had died.
Out of that terrible time had come his resolve. He started drinking, methodically, destructively. The folio dwindled, the options lapsed, the future disappeared. Once he was far enough down, he dried out, found a bookkeeping job with the Dahlgren subsidiary of Prince Industries, and in two months was head bookkeeper. He was made controller of Prince Industries when they realized he had a remarkable ability to invent new and startling ways to launder illicit cash.
Now, Trevis slept.
the dum dum smashed through her skull.
He came up out of it screaming. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he wiped the sweat from his face with a corner of the sheet. Always the same, it never varied — except they were more frequent.
He courted sleep, as usual, with Miyamotu Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, the great Seventeenth Century guide for samurai intent on defeating their enemies in battle. But sleep continued to elude him. It wasn’t fear of death — too much of him had died with Teresa for that. It was that he had to change the equation. When you cannot see the enemy’s spirit, said Musashi, make a feint attack to discover his resources. He will show his long sword, thinking he sees your spirit.
Risk everything in a feint, in hopes of uncovering whoever had been responsible for Teresa’s death.
But meanwhile, sleep. One of his functions was to act as the Board’s buffer man. Through him people who didn’t want to meet while conducting business didn’t have to. Hence, he was the buffer between Raptor and the Board. And between the Board and Letter-man, their tame cop who had fingered Gounaris to the Board. Tomorrow he had to meet Letterman, and Letterman would be howling.
Lieutenant Jack Letterman of the city’s Organized Crime Squad had a hard, lined face and doleful blue eyes tipped down at the outer corners like a bloodhound's. His suit was not quite expensive enough to raise questions about his income. He entered one of Vince O’Neill’s porn parlors past the garish yellow and red sign: HOT STUFF — 25¢ ARCADE — FANTASY IN FLESH! Covering the walls were intimate photos of women wearing nothing but expressions seldom seen in full daylight. In a raised change-cage, a stout middle-aged woman reading that morning’s Wall Street Journal said, “The-hottest-show-in-town-have-a-good-time” without looking up from her stock quotations.
Letterman entered the labyrinth of coin machines where mobile masks of light flickered over the features of the male viewers peering into the eyepieces. Perfumed disinfectant gave it a county-jail smell. In the rear was Trevis, showing no slightest interest in what he was seeing. Letterman fed three quarters, good for three minutes, into the machine next to his.
“I didn’t expect a hit on Gounaris,” he complained. “The boys down at the federal building are really burned. There’s going to be too much heat for me to pass anything on for a while. I’ve got a pension to protect.”
Trevis shrugged almost sullenly, handed him a newspaper with his blood money folded inside, and walked out.
Milton Prince was in his mid-fifties, dynamic, corrupt, kept fit by massages, saunas, and heroic avoidance of the pasta he loved. His name had once carried extra syllables — rhymes with spaghetti had been the schoolyard taunt of the predominantly Irish kids at St. Paddy’s across the river. The syllables had been dropped just about the time some of those erstwhile youthful taunters had started walking funny, or seen their businesses torched, or watched with a gun at their heads while three or four strangers entertained their wives.
“How was the weekend?” he asked Trevis.
Trevis removed his glasses to ponder the question, as he always did. He finally admitted, “I tried the intermediate run for the first time, Mr. Prince.”
Prince chuckled. “You? Skiing! I just can’t—”
But the time for small talk was past. The glasses had gone back on. Trevis, sorting through his paper-stuffed briefcase, said, “You’ll find Raptor’s payment on the Gounaris matter under Write-off Against Depreciation on page six of the printout.” He paused. “Our friend downtown tells me the Feds were very upset to lose their star informant before they could get him in front of the grand jury.”
Prince’s eyes sharpened. “How upset is very?”
“Letterman is trying to back away from us.”
“And if the Feds find out he’s on the pad?”
“He’ll get into bed with them.” Then, because Letterman, while venal, was not on his mental list, Trevis added, “I recommend no action by the Board at this time, Mr. Prince. It would remove the immediate problem but create a long-term one. The police are very stubborn when one of their own is taken.”
Not that Trevis expected Prince to follow his recommendation. Prince would do exactly as he wished. Prince was answerable only to the Board, locally.
“Uh... this is Raptor,” said the cassette player on Prince’s desk. “Uh... I gave the gentleman the message. It... uh... really blew his mind.”