The Hit

Chapter Two

Watching the car come up, I was counting on the mob’s need to keep things quiet. Ours was a city in which the Cosa Nostra overlords still maintained impunity, with bought-and-paid-for cops and politicians, and a degree of anonymity: the southwestern Families hadn’t hit Life magazine, local newspapers hadn’t started any crusades, and PR men for Madonna’s modernized mob gave enthusiastic support to the Anti-Defamation Committee when it insisted there was no such thing as “Organized Crime”; if the town had any crooks with Sicilian names that was just coincidence.

Maintaining good public relations and a peaceful surface of quiet was particularly vital to the mob right now: through his political mouthpieces, Madonna was exerting pressure to introduce legalized gambling into the state. It was sensitive; he couldn’t afford untoward publicity. Sal Aiello’s disappearance would be bad enough; the mob wouldn’t want to have to explain Joanne’s disappearance — and mine — along with it. So I didn’t really expect them to use too much muscle — unless they knew things I didn’t know. I glanced at Joanne in the shadows by the screen door; she was holding out on me, I knew that. I didn’t have time to press it out of her.

There were two of them in the car — Cosa Nostra soldiers modestly masquerading in Hawaiian sport shirts. I knew them by sight: Ed Baker and Tony Senna. Baker was a bookie and numbers runner, not long on brains; he was driving the car but I knew he would let Tony Senna do the talking — Senna, who must have been a carney barker in some prior incarnation, was one of the mob’s running dogs, an enforcer with a glib tongue and a cruel sense of humor.

The Ford rolled to a genteel halt ten feet from me and both men got out, not hurrying, not showing weapons, though it could be assumed they had guns under the flapping shirttails.

Tony Senna walked around the car with both hands in his pockets and glanced at Joanne before he formed a smile with his teeth and said to me, “Hello, flatfoot. Hot enough for you? I hear the burglars are only breaking into air-conditioned houses.” It elicited a bark of laughter from Ed Baker, a big-nosed brute with shoulders like a Percheron, who looked as if he belonged behind a butcher’s counter. Baker, a onetime prelim fighter, was a grade-B Hollywood gangster with the personality of a closed door.

Senna, sizing me up through his accidental smile, was another breed — a small, thin hood full of conspiratorial mannerisms; a sharpie. He had waxy Latin skin but you got the feeling you could have lit a match on his jaw.

He said casually, “How’re they hangin’, Crane?” and shot a shrewd glance past me at Joanne. “Pete thought we might find her here. Pete’s pretty smart sometimes.” He meant Pete DeAngelo, Madonna’s consigliore, the number two man in the Family.

Senna smiled again. “You ain’t talking much.”

“What kind of talk did you have in mind?” I said.

Ed Baker talked without moving his lips: “He’s got some heat in his back pocket, Tony.”

Senna chuckled. “See how long it took him to spot that, Crane? I swear, Baker’s the dumbest guy I’ve ever met. He can’t even remember what comes after Walla.” He chuckled and drew a circle in the sand with his toe, and looked up abruptly, as if trying to catch me off guard.

He said in a different voice, “You mind if we have a look around the place?”

“I mind,” I said, “but if it’ll clear things up, go ahead and search. Just put things back where you find them.”

Without turning his head, Senna spoke over his shoulder to Baker: “Look around, Ed.”

Baker went toward the house. I stood back and kept an eye on him while he went past Joanne. She was stiff but composed; she met his glance without flinching. Baker went into the house.

Senna was smiling again: “I’m glad you didn’t argue, Crane.”

“I never argue with a criminal type,” I said.

His smile disappeared instantly. “Save the cute answers,” he barked. “You wasn’t surprised to see us and you seem to know what Ed’s looking for in there, which makes it a good bet it ain’t here, and a better bet you know exactly what’s going on. Which puts you in a hard place. Now you want to say something funny?”

He whipped his small-eyed glance toward Joanne and said, “Dolly, you take some pretty dumb chances. It wasn’t smart for you to come here.”

“All right,” Joanne said coolly, “I’m not smart. Is that a crime?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Senna said. “I ain’t read up on the law.” He was, obviously, just talking to pass the time — he would make up his mind what to do with us after Baker finished his search. He probably had his orders from DeAngelo, and whatever they were, nothing we could say would change his mind; I intended to save my arguments for the higher-ups, if it got to that stage. But I backed up three paces to stand where I could watch both Senna and the front of the house; I didn’t want Ed Baker coming around behind us.

Ed Baker came out of the house after a while and shook his head. “Nothing.”

“You sure you looked everyplace?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“You’re a goddamned genius,” Senna said with vicious irony. “Can you think up anything else you ought to do now?”

“Naw. It’s clean.”

“Well, then, just to make sure, you might haul your ass over to that shack with the rock machinery in it.”

“Uh,” Baker said, and swallowed. Senna said, “And after that take a walk around the place and see if you spot any fresh-turned earth.”

Baker scowled and moved away toward the rock-tumbling shack. I made a half-turn to keep him in sight. I hadn’t seen any gun-bulge against his shirt but Baker was the type who could squeeze a tennis ball flat in one fist.

I said to Senna, “He won’t find anything. We haven’t got what you’re looking for.”

“We’ll see.” He turned again to Joanne: “One or two people ain’t going to like it much that you came runnin’ up here instead of going to your real friends right away and telling them what happened. You gave your solemn word you was going to stay away from this cop, and your friends respected your word. It ain’t likely to sit well.”

Joanne said, “If I knew what had happened I’d have told them. I don’t know.”

Senna’s look of sarcastic disbelief prompted me; I said, “Look, she didn’t know anything and she got scared. She thought she’d be blamed for it.”

“For what?” Senna breathed, and to Joanne: “How much you told the cop?”

“He’s not a cop.”

“Yeah. Ex-cop. He’s still got the odor from here.”

I gave him a cool smile, wanting to give him no satisfaction. He said to her, “One more time. How much you told him?”

She spread both hands. “How much do I know? Nobody lets me in on any secrets, you know that.”

I said, “She went to Aiello’s house at seven-thirty and found it empty. The place had been torn apart. She got scared and came here. That’s all there is.”

Senna considered it. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.” He turned and watched the shack, waiting, until Baker came out and shook his head and began to prowl the grounds, head down like a sniffing bulldog. Senna said abruptly, “Dolly, I’ll want your car keys a minute.”

“They’re in the car,” she said shortly.

Senna grinned “Don’t never leave your keys in the car,” he said. “Some crook might steal it. You know eighty percent of stolen cars had their keys left in them? Dumb.” He walked over to the convertible, glanced inside, reached in to get the keys, and walked back to the trunk. He opened it, looked, and shut it; put the keys back in the ignition and spent a moment bent over the car with his back to us, pulling up the seats and looking underneath and shoving them back in place. Then he lifted the hood and looked under it — an automatic gesture, I suppose, though I couldn’t conceive of anybody hiding valuable flammable papers in the engine compartment of a car. He slammed it shut and sauntered back toward us, smiling vaguely. “Ain’t no blood in the trunk, which could be a good sign.” He walked to my Jeep and gave it a cursory glance — there is no place to hide anything in an open Jeep — and came back.

He watched Baker for a few minutes and finally, evidently satisfied himself that Baker wasn’t going to find anything; he turned to me and said, “Aiello will turn up.”

“I guess he will,” I agreed judiciously.

“He’ll turn up dead, or he’ll turn up alive. I kind of suspect he’ll turn up dead.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If he does,” Senna said in the same regular tone, “you and the girl friend are the number-one suspects. Naturally me and my friends don’t fly off the handle, we don’t jump to conclusions, and maybe Aiello’ll turn up in Tijuana with a blonde on each arm havin’ a fine time. But it don’t look likely, does it?”

It wasn’t a question that required an answer. He went on:

“He had some goodies that belonged to some of us. Me and my friends, I mean. You know, like Pete? We’re kind of anxious to get it back. Now, if you two got it; it might be a good idea for you to give it back. You could pack it up and ship it to Pete anonymous, so we wouldn’t have any way to prove who sent it, but you’d be in the clear because the heat would be off — unless, of course, we happened to find out you killed Aiello and ditched him someplace. I’m just making suggestions, you understand. We’re all civilized people; we don’t give orders or make threats. But just as a suggestion I might mention it wouldn’t be considered friendly for either one of you to try to leave town before we find out what’s happened to Aiello and the stuff that disappeared from his house.”

Baker was still on the prowl; Senna called him over. They got into the car and Senna was smiling amiably when they turned the car around and drove away.

Joanne hadn’t moved an inch. Now her shoulders lifted defensively and she put the back of her hand to her mouth. I walked over to her and put an arm around her shoulders and walked her inside; this time she didn’t argue. I sat her down on the couch and said, “I think you could use a drink.”

“Make it a double,” she said in a small voice.

I made a drink for her and stood nearby while she gulped half of it down. I said, “Aiello will probably turn up soon, trying to get out of the country with the loot.”

“Don’t try to calm me down with lies.” Her hands dug out a mangled cigarette like an addict snatching an overdue fix. “They can’t let it lie, Simon. The things in that safe were too hot. They’ve got to. find them.”

“They won’t find anything by killing people. They know that.” I turned half away from her, hardening my gut consciously before I said, “Senna said we were the prime suspects but he was just making talk. If they didn’t have a line on somebody else, they’d have been a lot rougher on us. If they really thought you knew where the stuff was, they’d have put the snatch on both of us and you’d be sweating it out right now.”

I wheeled toward her and said flatly, “Who is it, Joanne?”

Her eyes flashed. “You’re babbling.”

“You’ve been holding something back.”

She put the drink down, jammed the cigarette pack into her purse and snapped it shut; got up and headed for the door, icy and stiff. I let her get as far as the door and then I said, “It’s Mike, isn’t it?”

It stopped her in her tracks.

Her teeth were white against the tan face. “What... what gives you—”

“He’s back,” I said, making it a statement.

She took a breath. “How did you find out? How long have you known?”

“I didn’t,” I said, “until you just said that.”

The menace in her eyes came and went quickly, and was replaced by self-disgust. “I never was a good liar.”

“I’m a hard man to lie to,” I said, not softening it. “Now sit down and finish your drink and tell me about Mike.”

She moved back to the couch like a mechanism, sat by reflex and leaned back; her eyes never left my face. I stared at her until she blushed. When she finally spoke it was without apologia or preamble:

“They let him out of prison yesterday. He came back to town last night. I honestly don’t think he meant to get in touch with me at all — he only wanted to see Aiello and try to straighten things out so they wouldn’t get after him all over again. But Mike always did have a talent for trying to soothe troubled flames by throwing oil on them. Simon, I swear to you he had nothing to do with Aiello disappearing.”

“Can you prove that?”

“No, but he—”

“Don’t swear to things you don’t know,” I said. “Christ, of all the asinine things to do. All this rigmarole just to protect Mike Farrell — why? You’re not even married to him any more?”

“He didn’t do it,” she said adamantly.

“Did you see him?”

“Only for a few minutes.”

“When?”

“Last night. He’d had a big argument with Aiello and he wanted a shoulder to cry on. My God, Simon, I wouldn’t even let him come in the house. He stood on the porch and bleated at me through the door — I had it on the chain — and when I wouldn’t let him come in he stormed back to his station wagon and went away with his tires squealing. I expect by now he’s halfway to the Mississippi River.”

“Yeah. Maybe carrying the loot from Aiello’s safe.”

“No.”

“Why for Christ’s sake didn’t you tell me all this in the first place?” I demanded.

Her answer was quiet and level: “Because I knew you’d jump to conclusions, just the way you have. I knew you wouldn’t understand. I knew you’d get stupid and blind jealous — it’s a weakness you’ve got.”

I didn’t have time to stop and ponder whether that was true or not; I swung around the room, wheeled to face her, and said with desperate rage, “Didn’t it matter at all to you that you might have got both of us killed? It may still happen! We’re talking about an organization that lives and breathes distrust — nobody believes anything. If they find out you held out on them about Mike being here, they won’t give you another chance to change your story.”

She said flatly, “Mike had nothing to do with it. If I told them about him they’d waste a lot of time hunting him down and they’d probably kill him, and it wouldn’t get them anywhere; they’d still need to find Aiello and the loot. And believe me, Simon, we’d be in much worse danger then than we are now.”

“You keep saying you know he didn’t have anything to do with it. Can you back that up with anything besides intuition and conceit?”

“Certainly.”

“Name it.”

“He couldn’t have done it, that’s all. I don’t mean he didn’t have the chance. I have no idea whether he has an alibi that will stand up. But I do know he’s terrified of the Mafia; the only thing he’s ever wanted was to keep them happy with him. He’d grovel and crawl if he had to — he’d be a sniveling yes-man, he’d polish Aiello’s shoes. He’d do anything in his power to avoid getting them mad at him again. Mike would be the last man in the world to try anything like this.”

“He’s been in prison. He could have changed.”

Her only answer was, “I saw him last night. You didn’t. Simon, you’ve got to understand Mike. You’ve never known him.”

That much was true: I had only seen Mike Farrell at a distance. Before he’d gone to the penitentiary he’d had a nightclub combo at the Moulin Rouge; he’d been a fair saxophone player.

She said, “He’s one of those nervous men who are forever lonely. Even when he wants to he can’t share himself. I guess I must have married him because I could see he wanted to break out of that frightened shell, but he never has. I was like a lot of girls who mistake long silences in young men for maturity, but I was wrong, he wasn’t mature at all — you have to remember I was only nineteen then, it was a long time ago.”

I sat hipshot against the windowsill and watched her. She wasn’t looking at me. She said, “People like Mike are — parasites, Simon. He’d never kill a man or rob a safe — it takes too much initiative. Mike never does anything on his own. He’s one of those people who feed on everyone they touch. It’s compulsive, they can’t help it — they hurt the people who love them until the love dies. I don’t know, maybe a psychiatrist would blame it on his parents — he took me back to Cincinnati to meet them once. His father’s a shopkeeper, a nice little man, about as ineffectual as wallpaper. Mike’s mother was one of those big loud clubwomen who remind you of express trains. A martinet. She only wanted to use Mike to feed her own vanity — he was just something for her to be proud of when he played solos with the school band. The rest of the time she didn’t want him around.”

She picked up her drink and drained it quickly. “He’s an insecure man — full of anxieties. He’s never had nerve enough to steal anything, let alone a gangster’s money. It took me a long time to find out what half the wives in the world can tell you — a woman can never change a man. I tried to give him some backbone because I thought I loved him, but it just didn’t work. He hated being a musician and he hated everything about his life, and finally he got involved with Aiello and the organization.”

“Aiello,” I said, “or Vincent Madonna?”

She gave me a sharp look. “Yes, him too.” The name made her uncomfortable; she hurried on, as if to fill the gap of silence:

“I was young and wild — that was six years ago, we’d been married two or three years. It was exciting to me, all those fast characters. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it in a way, but then it started to get dirty. I got trapped in — something I don’t want to talk about, something that got Mike scared of them.”

“Scared of who?”

She flapped a hand; her face was averted. “Aiello, Pete DeAngelo, you know. The organization. Mafia, Family, Cosa Nostra, whatever they’re calling it now.”

I said, “You’ve never told me much about Mike.”

“I wanted to forget it.”

“You’d better go on, now that you’ve started.”

When she glanced across the room at me I saw that her lip corners were turned down. She said, “I suppose so. I told you Mike got scared. He started drinking too much and making risky remarks about the mob — the kind of talk they didn’t want to get around. It was only bravado; he had no idea he was offending anybody. But he suffered for it — they threw him to the wolves. He went to prison.”

“It was a narcotics charge, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “Of course he was framed.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said wearily. “He’d gotten involved in some shady things but none of them had anything to do with dope.”

“Go on.”

“Well, he went to prison, and at first I enjoyed playing the role of waiting for an absent husband — it gave me a kind of untouchable immunity, but at the same time I didn’t have to put up with Mike. I know that sounds strange, but Mike did a good job of turning me sour on men. Even after he went up he kept browbeating me, accusing me of selling him into Egypt. By the time he relented and apologized, I was past caring any more. Imprisonment for more than two years is grounds for divorce here and I divorced him. But he kept writing letters, pleading with me to come on visiting days, and once in a while I did, until about a year ago. Then I met you, and I stopped going to see him. After that I didn’t get any more letters from him. The last time he wrote he said he was sorry for all the trouble he’d caused me and he wouldn’t bother me any more, wouldn’t even come to see me after he got out.”

She stopped long enough to light a new cigarette; then she said, “Simon, he’s a poor, twisted, frightened man. He’s bitter and neurotic and a fool, and far too much of a coward to have anything to do with a thing like this. I just felt I owed him this much, to keep from getting him involved if I could help it.”

Her hand still trembled, the cigarette wedged between two fingers. She seemed to have run down. I said, “You said you did something that got Mike scared before they railroaded him into prison.”

She composed herself. “It’s ancient history. I’ve forgotten it.”

“Sure you have.”

“It’s something you don’t need to know about, believe me.”

“Mike knows?”

“Of course.”

I just scowled at her. Finally, avoiding my glance, she made a gesture. “All right, hell, I was young and everything was exciting, the more thrilling the better. The company was fast and there was a sense of — well, violence in the air, and I liked it. And I admit I was getting damn tired of Mike and his whining.”

“And?”

She looked at me and her face changed. It became a self-conscious smile, crooked and wry and helplessly apologetic. “Aiello.”

“For Christ’s sake!”

“It wasn’t really an affair with him. We were both drunk and Mike was away somewhere running an errand for him.”

“Of all the wretched—”

“I was barely old enough to vote,” she said in a taut little voice. “I told you, it doesn’t do any good to go into these things.”

“Goddamn it, didn’t you know who he was?”

“I knew he was big. I guess I didn’t know how big. Look, Simon, at the time I was like a modern-day flapper and they were like harmless bootleggers with their big cars and parties and flunkies all over the place. I didn’t know about the sordid part then, the hard dope and the strongarm and the killings. They didn’t let you see that part of it. It was only after Mike was arrested that I found out—”

“Found out what?”

“Nothing. Let it drop — please.”

“You told me you didn’t know anything about Aiello’s operations outside of his legitimate fronts — was the whole story a tissue of lies?”

“Of course not,” she said wearily. “I told you the truth. Think, Simon — would they let me know anything else?”

I made a face. “So you don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve got that stupid, stubborn look on your face. I suppose wild horses couldn’t drag any more out of you.”

She gave me a mock-sweet smile, and remained mute.

With a sickening suspicion of what it might be, I didn’t press that line of questions. I dipped the toggle of the ancient Pilot radio and walked across the room. “Want another drink?”

“No.”

I poured half a glass of ginger ale, laced it with nothing stronger than ice cubes, and glanced at my watch: time for the ten-thirty news, which was why I had switched on the radio. The forty-year-old Pilot was my only concession to the electronic age; television, with all its implications, terrified me. My whole trouble, I thought, is I’m a hopelessly old-fashioned obsolete sumbitch. The radio took its time to warm up and finally said, “...in Paris this morning. The new French government disclaimed any connection with the pro-Viet Cong demonstration. Meanwhile, in Saigon...”

I quit listening; stirring ice-cubes with one finger, I was making my brain work. Assuming Joanne was right and her ex-husband was in the clear, what was left? I thought of a couple of long-shot possibilities. One, a quarrel inside the mob — a split between Aiello and the don, Madonna. It happened once in a while; and I recalled the rumors about bad blood between them. Perhaps Aiello had gone to the mattresses — taken cover in a prepared lair while he set up an ambush to trap Madonna, summoned the members loyal to him, and got ready to go to war for control of the Family.

It was possible, but I doubted that was the way it was. Joanne knew Aiello pretty well, and she had described him as a man who liked his comforts. He was rich — why should he take the chance?

There was another possibility. The structure of a Cosa Nostra Family was complex — rigid and codified. The top man passed instructions down the ladder of rank until finally they were delivered to the button who had to carry them out. There were a good many intermediaries between the don and the man who actually committed the crime. Sometimes the button didn’t even know why he was doing it; he almost never knew, for an absolute fact, where his orders initially came from.

It was simple insurance. If the button was picked up and decided to turn informer, he couldn’t identify anybody except the minor-league middleman who actually gave him his orders. Once in a while, when the heat became too intense, it was necessary to protect the top man. To do that, the mob only had to break off one step of the ladder, at any point at all, to guarantee the top man would never get involved — a middleman had to disappear. For example: the law might have traced some marked payoff money as far as Aiello. Aiello then would have to disappear, for Madonna’s protection.

The law. Most of the cops and judges sold themselves as casually and regularly as streetwalking whores. But the mob couldn’t always get to the federal bureau cops or the grand jury special investigators from upstate. Sometimes the organization just had to cover its tracks, hunker down and wait it out like a jackrabbit in a hailstorm. Of course, if that was the reason behind Aiello’s disappearance, then Madonna knew all about it, and the visit we’d just had from Senna and Baker was just camouflage. I was an ex-cop; perhaps Madonna thought I would get word of the visit back to the cops. It could help throw the cops off the track.

There were a great many ifs in that. As a hypothesis it didn’t work very well. If Aiello’s disappearance had been engineered by the mob, it would have been done in a neater way. There were too many loose ends. The mob would have set up a cover: Aiello was on vacation, or had gone to Grand Bahama on casino business, or had gone back to the Bronx to sit with a sick uncle, or was fishing in the Gulf of California. It would have been so easy to explain his absence that the lack of explanation was a pretty sure sign Aiello’s disappearance had taken the mob completely by surprise. Certainly if they’d planned the disappearance in advance, they’d have found some pretext to keep Joanne away from the house long enough to get things tidied up.

The more I went around in mental circles, getting nowhere, the more I resented getting implicated in the mess. I wanted to shout out, I’m me, I’m Simon Crane — I’m not your everyday skid-row patsy. I was working up a good angry steam when the radio announcer intruded his voice into my consciousness:

“...and on the local scene, this just in. The body of a man tentatively identified as Salvatore Aiello has been found by construction workers on the site of the new interstate highway in Mexican Hat Canyon. A construction company spokesman said a grader operator discovered the corpse buried in fresh-graded earth where the crew was about to lay down fresh pavement. According to the spokesman, in another few hours the body would have been permanently concealed under a new concrete highway.

“According to police reports, Aiello has been linked frequently with several alleged racketeers throughout the Southwest since he moved here from New York in the early nineteen-fifties. Police say a preliminary examination indicates the cause of death was two bullets, possibly thirty-eight caliber or nine millimeter, lodged in the brain after entering the skull above the left ear. The police will not confirm or deny the possibility of gangland execution, but if that is the case, it would be the first confirmed underworld slaying here in the last nineteen months. We have not yet been able to reach Aiello’s secretary or business associates for comment. Stay tuned to this station for further developments and all late fast-breaking news items. The gasoline price war continues unabated, and spokesmen for...”

I strode across to the radio and turned it off. Joanne was staring at it; her hands and body had become still. She hardly seemed to be breathing.

I went from the radio to the couch, picked up her cigarettes and matches and stuffed them in her handbag, pushed it into her hands and said, “Come on.”

“What? Where?” She seemed stunned.

“I want to get you to a safer place than this. Then I’ve got one or two things to do.”

She was not the kind of girl who had to reply to everything that was said to her; she trusted me enough to get up and walk through the door when I held it for her. Outside, I squinted in the sunlight and said, “We’ll take both cars. You go out first and I’ll follow you. Drive down to the Executive Lodge and wait for me in the parking lot — I’ll be right behind you.”

“Why both cars?”

“I’ll be going places from there and you may need yours.” I didn’t add that I wanted to hang back on the way down and make sure she wasn’t followed.

I didn’t bother to lock the house; I went over and climbed into the Jeep. She started her car up and gave me a long look through the windshield before she put it in gear and swung around past me and headed down the hill. Feeling the dig of the .38 in my hip pocket, I backed out and turned to follow her.