The Hit

Chapter Three

I kept the Jeep in second gear and lay well back to avoid Joanne’s dust cloud. She slewed around the bends faster than I liked to take them; by the time I reached the bottom of the dirt road she was a quarter of a mile down the county highway, roaring toward the city.

I was watching to see if any cars pulled out to follow her; watching my own rear-view mirror as well. If there was a tail, he was an invisible one. Joanne squealed under the freeway overpass and led me across the north side of the city on the six-lane boulevard known as the Strip, which was a raw, neon five-mile stretch of gas stations, hamburger joints, car lots, discount barns, loan offices, artsy-craftsy galleries and gaudy supper clubs. It was peopled by gaily-costumed sun-worshipers, small-time crooks and kids in riot-hued cars with bald tires. A block away to either side were the tract developments — sleazy cracker box houses with gravelly little desert yards, erected by speculators who put ten percent down, financed the rest, and made huge after-tax profits by deducting heavy depreciation. Future slums.

The Strip was notorious for its spectacular teenage murders and for the fact that Vincent Madonna’s stooges owned most of the car lots and all the supper clubs. Everybody knew it, but of course nobody could prove it. Brightly sunlit, brand new, and never more than one story, the Strip’s clean, modern buildings seemed incongruous to outsiders who felt underworld characters inhabited only shadowy alleys in tall concrete-and-brick slums. You had to travel the Strip at night to get the full effect — motorcycle punks circling with deafening roar, hippies wandering the beer joints, herds of fat Cadillacs browsing in front of the supper clubs, slick-haired hoods and very thin divorcées cruising the bars in search of kicks.

Thirty years ago it had been a cow town, 25,000 people. Now the population was swollen tenfold by the retired, the drifting, the failed, the health-seeking, the opportunistic, the escapist. Every year the number of retail bankruptcies was staggering. It had the fragile aura of impermanence — no yesterdays and no tomorrows; eat, drink and gather ye rosebuds. It was a slick, chromium imitation of Los Angeles in the desert.

Ahead of me, Joanne’s convertible turned past a gas station that had its pennants flapping, went around a divider and headed south through the housing tracts. The sun baked my head and shoulders — at 127º asphalt becomes muddy in the streets, and it was already tacky and soft. An Air Force jet whistled past at low altitude, climbing and shrieking, cracking eardrums and plaster and glass as it zoomed upward to clear the mountains. If you called the base and complained, you got the non sequitur of the decade: “Be glad they’re ours.” The boys were up there rigorously defending our country against air attack from Mexico. A few months ago one of them had crashed into a supermarket and killed eleven people.

The Executive Lodge sprawled near the south freeway cloverleaf. It was a big new motel with all the efficiency of an electronic computer, and all the warmth. I had picked it because I was fairly certain it didn’t belong to one of Vincent Madonna’s dummies.

An intense layer of heat lay along the parking lot. I pulled in beside Joanne’s convertible and spoke:

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

She gave me a startled-fawn look and glanced toward the street. She was thinking about the fact that she was in full view of the road. I pointed to the narrow covered paveway that shaded the ice and coke machines and said, “Try the shade,” and got out of the Jeep. I watched her walk into the passage, swing of hips and clip of calves; she didn’t ask any questions. The sun was miserably hot.

I folded the Jeep cushion down to keep the sun off the seat, and went up the sidewalk under the concrete eaves. The heat sizzled through the soles of my desert boots.

The lobby was sterile and cool, almost deserted. There was a coffee shop with a counter and a round rack of paperbacks at the cashier’s desk. The echoing imitation marble door and soft-lullabying Muzak gave the place a mausoleum air. The walls were fake rough-stucco ornamented with phony Mexican artifacts. There were the obligatory plastic flowers and potted plants.

The desk clerk had a crew cut, vest and tie, and an earnest chamber-of-commerce face. Groomed and tanned, he was probably the terror of the swimming pool. He gave me the subliminal leer which desk clerks practice for use on men without wedding rings who check in for a double before noon. Without making an issue of it I let it drop that my wife and I had driven overnight from Los Angeles, to avoid the day-driving heat, and wanted a quiet room — preferably in back — to get a few hours’ rest before an evening appointment. I didn’t care whether he bought the story. The important thing to sell was the Los Angeles idea; I signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden of Sherman Oaks, filled in a fictitious make and model of car with a California license plate number, and paid cash in advance. If the room clerk filed us in mind as two adulterous Californians having an affair, so much the better. The fact I paid cash instead of using a credit card would reinforce that idea.

Dangling the room key, I headed for the front exit, then made a detour toward one of the open acoustic phone cubicles along the front wall. I had picked up the receiver before I noticed that the phone had no dial; obviously it went through the motel switchboard. I was about to replace it on the hook when a girl’s voice chirped on the line and I thought, To hell with it, the risk was negligible; I gave her the number of police headquarters.

“Are you registered here, sir?”

I thought. “No. I’ll leave a dime at the desk when I finish the call.”

“Twenty cents, sir.”

“Yeah.” They must make a bloody fortune on phone calls.

I heard the girl chortle. “Ordinarily we don’t let outside people use the house phones, sir, but since this is the police number it must be all right.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I drawled. I could hang up, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble...

“Police headquarters, Patrolman Garcia. Hello?”

I said, “Lieutenant Behn, please.”

“Sure. You happen to know what division that’d be?”

“Homicide,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll get you Homicide, they’ll put you through to him.”

It took two more relays but finally I heard his voice: “Behn here.”

“Larry, this is Simon Crane.”

“Well, well.”

“Can I talk to you?”

“It’s your dime.”

Twenty cents, I thought. I said, “What have you got on the Aiello case?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Larry Behn was one of the handful who had decided to stick it out and fight from the inside. A long time ago I had decided to trust him. I said, “I used to be pretty close to Aiello’s secretary and it looks like they think she was involved in it.”

“And if she was involved, you were too, hey? All right — where is she?”

“She doesn’t know anything,” I said. “I can’t help you, anyway — I’m not with her now. I assume you’ve got it down as murder. I only heard the radio flash.”

“Murder, yeah. Two slugs in the head, no powder burns, and he sure didn’t bury himself.”

“Have you got anything? Not for broadcast.”

I heard him breathe. He was thinking. Finally he said, “Right now we haven’t got much worth talking about. They’re running the slugs through the lab for comparison photos. In a day or two we may find out something from the FBI central files. But if it’s a mob execution, I doubt it — they’d use a clean gun. Otherwise, what can I tell you? No tire tracks worth talking about, no footprints, no fingers. A little rubber from an automobile floor mat stuck on his belt, but it would take us twenty years to find the right car to match it. Nothing under the fingernails. Postmortem lividity shows he was killed someplace else and taken out there for burial. No sign of the murder weapon. We figured it for a mob hit at first but we’ve checked out people like Pete DeAngelo and Tony Senna and Ed Baker, and I think they’re all clean. They’ve all got alibis of one kind or another but they’re not the kind of alibis they’d cook up if they’d known they were going to need alibis, if you get what I mean. I even checked out Vince Madonna — he’s clean on it, too.”

“How do you know?”

“No comment,” he said, which told me the answer: Behn must have had surveillance on Madonna last night, for one reason or another, and the tail must have reported that Madonna hadn’t had any contact with Aiello.

“Any ideas, Larry?”

“Nothing worth the waste of breath. Maybe it was some sorehead that got muscled by the mob.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, thinking of Joanne’s ex-husband, Mike Farrell. Maybe.

“Time of death?”

“The medical examiner says between two and five this morning. Look, Simon, you haven’t talked to me and I haven’t told you a thing, all right?”

“Sure,” I said, frowning and thinking.

After a minute Behn said, “Look, I realize it’s your dime but I’ve got a few things to do besides sit here with a dead phone on my ear.”

“Sorry,” I said. “What was he wearing?”

“Aiello? Sport shirt, trousers and belt, slippers. No socks. Deceased had a handkerchief and some loose change in his pockets. No wallet, no keys. If it means anything, he usually wore a toupee and he didn’t have it on.”

“Dentures?”

“He had his own teeth.” I heard Behn hawk and spit — I could picture him aiming into the green metal wastebasket beside the cluttered desk. He would sit back now, phone hooked between shoulder and tilted head, going through papers and tossing them on various piles as he spoke to me. Behn was a freckled bony redhead with an undershot chin and a huge Adam’s apple.

I said carefully, “You’ve been over his house by now.”

“Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary. The place is empty, nobody home, but no sign it was messed up any.”

So, I thought, somebody cleaned it up before the cops arrived. I said, “Was the bed slept in?”

“Can’t tell. It was made up, but not with clean sheets. We got to the housekeeper an hour ago and she said she always makes the bed with hospital corners. Whoever made it up this time didn’t use them. So maybe he spent part of the night in bed and got up and somebody made the bed after he left.”

“Any bloodstains in the house?”

“Not so far. We’ve still got the crew out there.”

I said, “Okay, thanks. I’ll—”

“Not so fast. I’ve been patient and polite — now it’s your turn. How much do you know about this?”

“Less than you do, evidently.”

He grunted. “No. Won’t wash. You said the Farrell girl may be involved, and we’ve got a flyer here that says her exhusband got sprang from the state penitentiary yesterday. Too many coincidences, Simon.”

“It sure looks that way,” I said agreeably. “Any line on Mike Farrell?”

“Half the force is looking for him. So far, nothing. We checked the girl’s house but she hasn’t turned up.” And no doubt he had a stakeout on Joanne’s place now. Behn’s voice went on: “Farrell got off the bus yesterday afternoon at five and we lose him right there.”

I said, “I talked to somebody who saw him last night. He was driving a station wagon.”

He pounced: “How’d you get that? Who told you? Simon, where are you right now? Maybe you’d better come in and we’ll have a little talk—”

“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I haven’t got anything that could possibly help. We’d waste each other’s dime. I’ll be in touch.”

I hung up before he could protest; crossed the lobby, dropped two dimes on the desk, pointed a thumb at the phones, got the cashier’s nod and went outside into the broil.

Joanne was still in the roofed passageway, wearing her dark glasses and a scowl. I handed her the motel key and told her where to find the room, then went out to her car and drove it around back to meet her.

A weedy lot stretched to the back fence, beyond which half a mile of empty land separated the place from the near boundary of the Air Force base. The flayed, sunbeaten, baking pan of the desert reflected a shimmering heat mist into the air.

There was no one in sight. She unlocked the door and we went in. It was one of those interchangeable rooms, furnished in cheap modern pine with plastic tops and vinyl upholstery, watercolor prints on the walls. The full blast air conditioning had chilled the room to an inhospitable temperature; it had a vaguely antiseptic smell. Everything was very new: you could live forty years in a room like that and it would never be home. The aura of loneliness held ghosts of solitary salesmen, teenage assignations, conventioneering drunks, yapping vacationing kids.

Joanne sat on the bed, kicked her shoes off and crossed her fine long legs. Then she fished for a cigarette. During all this stage business she didn’t once look at me. She was, I realized, terrified. She nudged a discarded shoe with her toe and said absently, “I’m always cranky when my feet hurt.”

“Sure,” I said. “Look, there’s no such thing as a perfectly safe place for anybody. Nobody’s immune — there’s always random chance to mock you. But this ought to be as safe as anyplace for a few hours or even a few days. I’m pretty sure nobody followed us, and it would be a blind million-to-one shot if anybody saw us who’d recognize us and know what to do with the information.”

“All right,” she declared, “I’m safe. Until tonight or next week or whenever they find me. What happens in the meantime?”

“I’m going to try to take the heat off.”

“How?”

“There are a few things I can try,” I said, and let it ride like that; she didn’t press it. I said, “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden from Sherman Oaks if anybody asks. Do you know how to use a gun?”

I tugged the .38 out of my hip pocket and she looked at it without feeling. “I suppose so,” she said. “But if you’re thinking of bearding Madonna in his den, you’ll need it a lot more than I will.”

I put the gun on the bed beside her. “If that was what I had in mind,” I said with a little grin, “I wouldn’t get within a mile of him with a gun.”

She didn’t smile. “You’re a sweet, generous son of a bitch, Simon. I wish—”

Whatever she had meant to say, she didn’t finish it. I tried to dismiss it with an airy gesture and a casual voice: “The one born every minute, I’m him.” I bent down and gave her a quick brushing kiss, without force; she didn’t draw back, and I straightened quickly and went to the door. “Stay put until I call you. They’ve got a lunch counter in the lobby — room service might be better. Watch TV and don’t think about things, all right?”

“Sure,” she muttered. “Sure. I’ll be all right. Simon... be careful.” She sounded miserable.

I made a face and went. Got in the Jeep and pointed it out of the lot. As I stopped at the stop sign, I heard a car rushing forward from the left and turned in time to see a green sedan speed by — glimpse of a thick, red-nosed man, squinting and hard-jawed behind the wheel — then it was gone beyond the freeway overpass, the wind rush and dopplering-down engine roar fading. Nobody I knew. I chastised myself with profanity for being a jumpy fool and chugged onto the road, headed for the foothills east of the city.

As the Jeep surged along the eastbound boulevards I reviewed what I knew about Vincent Madonna.

Madonna, at fifty-five or thereabouts, had arrived in the States at the age of six or seven, grown up in East Harlem and the Bronx and graduated from hoodlum to crook to gangster. At various times he had been named publicly by the FBI and other agencies as a wartime gasoline ration-coupon racketeer (arrested in 1944; released when witnesses failed to turn up), as a labor union and slot machine boss, and — in the early fifties — as the top enforcer of the Mosto Family, which went west to Las Vegas in 1949 and moved into the Southwest. When Don Frank Mosto had died of natural causes a few years ago, the resulting gangland earthquake had settled with Madonna firmly established; even since then, he had stood on his empire like a crowing cock on a dunghill. He was big and powerful and had tried to polish himself with a surface of respectability, but he hadn’t succeeded; Madonna had come a long way up from the gutter but he never managed to wash off the smell. He lived in a world inhabited by dinosaurs and circumscribed by the law of omerta — the Cosa Nostra code of silence. He paid a New York outfit $20,000 a year to keep his name out of the papers; he put a price on everything, and a value on nothing. A nice cozy chap to deal with. I had never met him, but there wasn’t a cop south of Boise who didn’t know him by sight.

The foothill suburban ghetto which Madonna inhabited was singularly free of crime — a fact that had puzzled me when I was a cop, because it was the kind of rich folks’ neighborhood that normally makes fine pickings for cat thieves and night-crawling burglars. I soon learned the warnings had gone out: independent crooks were to stay out of the area and avoid giving it a bad name. Any lone wolf crook who ignored the warnings was likely to disappear permanently. Madonna didn’t want to give the cops any excuse to prowl the neighborhood, because he didn’t have all the cops in his pocket. It would have been not only expensive but impossible: there were certain cops he couldn’t get to. Not all cops were actively corrupt, although virtually all of them were passively corrupt: they couldn’t help knowing their buddies were on the take, but they did nothing about it. Corruption was not open, it was never admitted; a bribed cop stood on tenuous footing, and wasn’t likely to confess his corruption, not even to another cop he was sure was equally guilty. And no honest cop could feel safe in blowing the whistle; he couldn’t be sure of the superior officer to whom he had to blow the whistle. The power of graft-producing organizations like Madonna’s lay in that twilight dubiousness: no official could trust a fellow official enough to spell out what he knew.

Vincent Madonna’s command fortress was a sprawling foothill mansion perched on a cactus-studded knell with a view of the entire city. It was an architectural bastard — part Spanish adobe-mission, part Texas ranch style, part Sunday Times house-beautiful feature page. All on one story, it had several wings and outbuildings, spidering out with the shambling graceless opulence of a Las Vegas motel. There were sprinklers on the lawn, ticking loudly, and four or five cars cooling their wheels in the circular gravel drive, including Madonna’s 1941 Lincoln Continental, a painstakingly restored classic. Everybody’s got to have a hobby. The smell of the watered grass was a warm spice that registered keenly in my nostrils when I parked the Jeep behind the Continental and stepped out.

I had taken for granted that the place would be festooned with alarm systems and bodyguards; the latter assumption proved accurate enough — the door swung open before I got to it and a rum-looking Neanderthal gave me a sizing up which I associated in my mind with the look a hungry piranha would direct toward a raw hunk of bleeding flesh. He wore a sport jacket which he had obviously only put on in order to open the door so that his shoulder-holstered gun wouldn’t show.

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to see the Don. I’m not armed.”

“What name?”

“Simon Crane.”

“Mr. Madonna expecting you?”

“It’ll come as no surprise,” I declared.

The bodyguard looked uncertain; then, abruptly, he turned to look over his shoulder at someone who had come up behind him. It was hard to see inside against the blinding light of the exterior sun, but then I heard that wheeze of a voice and recognized it immediately: an old injury to the larynx had reduced Pete DeAngelo’s voice to a harsh whisper.

“Who’s all this?”

The bodyguard took a step backward to explain to DeAngelo who I was and what I wanted, but DeAngelo brushed him aside and came forward. His tall frame filled the opening. “Hello, Crane.”

DeAngelo was a sleek, cold man, hard and handsome and poison-cruel. He was a dandy: he was wearing white tapered slacks, white loafers with pointed toes, an ascot under a high custom shirt collar. His polished nails glinted. If MGM ever decided to make the Pete DeAngelo Story, the role might have gone to Robert Wagner. He had a deep suntan and opaque eyes; he revealed all the feelings of a marble slab.

I gave him plenty of time to look me over. We had met before a few times — twice at the station house when he’d come to bail out a couple of the boys. Among his other accomplishments DeAngelo was a bar-admitted lawyer. He was also Madonna’s consigliori — councilor and right-hand man. His reputation was for ambition, brains and smooth if ruthless efficiency.

I said, “I’d like a minute with the Don.”

“What for?”

“To save me trouble and save you people time and effort wasted on wild goose chases,” I said, watching his face. If there was any reaction inside him, he made no sign of it.

He glanced back at the bodyguard, who was tugging at his cuffs and scowling. The bodyguard had a disturbing way of leaning so far forward his feet seemed nailed to the door. Buster Keaton used to do that, I thought. DeAngelo said in his grating whisper, “Keep him company, Freddie,” and went back into the house without another glance at me. DeAngelo’s shoes had heels that clicked like dice.

Freddie propped himself in the doorway with his arms folded, keeping me out under the sun. I said, “You’re from Chicago.”

He shook his head and grinned. He looked like the type who was chronically on the lam. I said, “Hot, isn’t it?”

“Bet your ass,” said Freddie.

Presently DeAngelo clicked back into sight, an intense hungry panther, and nodded to Freddie. DeAngelo’s smile, pointed at me, was without menace; but I felt a chill. He rasped, “Okay, he wants to find out what you’ve got to say. Come on.” He turned without further remarks and walked to the center of the sepulchral living room. I went inside and heard the door click shut behind me. By then DeAngelo had turned and lifted one palm toward me to stop me. He said, “Mind a frisk?”

“No.”

“Go ahead, Freddie.”

I let Freddie paw me for guns and when he was finished I followed DeAngelo through an arched corridor to the back of the house. He opened a sliding glass door and led the way out onto a flagstone walk that ran along to the tiled apron around the swimming pool. It was a big blue pool shaped like a bell, with ladders and diving board. Heat bounced off everything — the water, the walls of the house, wings which enclosed the pool area in a U, the flagstones and gravel, and the barbed wire-topped brick wall that sealed off the far end of the patio. The place was an oven.

Vincent Madonna, the sun worshiper; lay fully clothed on a chaise lounge, shaded by a huge beach umbrella-table. As I approached he had the poolside telephone propped against his ear. The phone was doing most of the talking; Madonna listened. He gave me one glance with eyes hard as glass, nodded, waved a hand and turned his profile to me, listening to the phone.

Madonna was stout, his features fleshy, his chin dark with heavy stubble halfheartedly covered with talc. He was beginning to look jowly and fold-cheeked. His hair, black and thick and glossy, was combed carefully back over the small ears. The backs of his hands were hairy. He wore a suit with no tie; his wardrobe, rumpled and creased, represented an obvious outlay of about $800. He looked as if his life’s ambition — to be pictured in a full-color, full-page magazine advertisement for whisky — had been frustrated by the desert heat.

Madonna had closed his eyes in distaste; now and then he interrupted the telephone’s monologue with a baritone grunt. Agony and patience chased each other across his face. The phone complained lugubriously. Finally Madonna’s face assumed an expression of total tormented revulsion; he spoke briefly, and returned the receiver to the cradle before opening his eyes.

He looked up and beamed at me.

DeAngelo said, “He’s clean.”

“I’m immaculate,” I said.

“We’ll see,” said Madonna. He glanced past me — a skinny dark-complexioned sycophant scuttled out of the house with a document in one hand and a fountain pen in another. Madonna said, “Can’t that wait?”

“No, sir,” said the sycophant. He put the document down on the beach-umbrella table and held his hand on it while Madonna took the pen and signed at the tip of the sycophant’s finger. Madonna glanced at it and lay back on the chaise; the sycophant put the pen together, picked up the document, blew on the signature, folded it in thirds and went.

Not until that one was gone did any of us speak. Then it was Madonna, fingering a Frank Paradise billiard cue, who directed his affable avuncular voice at me: “How clean are you, Crane?”

“That’s what I came to see you about.”

Pete DeAngelo husked, “Now tell us something we didn’t already know.”

Madonna lifted a hairy hand to still him; he said to me, “Mentioning no names, let’s just say at the moment you and your little friend are alive on a rain check. I state that as a fact, not a threat.”

“I understand,” I said. “Look, this is all off the record. I’m not carrying a tape recorder around. I’m not interested in meddling in things that are none of my business. I’m sure Tony Senna reported on the visit he paid me this morning — he looked around and he didn’t find whatever he was looking for. All I want to do is put this to you: if Joanne Farrell and I had taken anything important out of Aiello’s safe, we wouldn’t be stupid enough to wait around afterwards — and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to come up here and argue about it. She had nothing to do with it, I had nothing to do with it, and I’d like the chance to prove that to your satisfaction.”

Madonna fixed me with his intent hard eyes; Pete DeAngelo moved forward, heels clacking, and said in his raspy whisper, “If that’s your best artillery, Crane, forget it, it’s a dud. You couldn’t sell that story to a hayseed who’s in the market for the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen — you’re in trouble with us, and you don’t slide out of it just by coming up here and bleeding on Mr. Madonna’s patio.”

Madonna shushed him again with a hand. “Let me have him for a few minutes, Pete.” He smiled amiably.

DeAngelo’s mouth pinched together, looking like a surgeon’s wound, but finally, giving no acknowledgment that he had heard the dismissal, he turned on his heel and left us. Madonna, for a brief moment, scowled toward the pool, and I knew why: DeAngelo had committed a faux pas. It was against the rules for the Cosa Nostra to let an outsider know about any division of opinion within the organization; that kind of knowledge could be dangerous — it could give outsiders a chance to set member against member.

The glass door slid shut. I figured at least one bodyguard was watching us but it was hardly worth staring to find out. I returned my attention to Madonna and said, “Look, if you really think I’m it, then you’ve not only picked the wrong horse, you’ve got the wrong track. Concentrating on Joanne Farrell and Simon Crane will never get your belongings back for you.”

“What is it you want me to do?” he inquired with his friendly businessman’s smile.

“Lift the heat,” I replied promptly. “You’ve got that girl scared to death.”

“Well, now,” he said, steepling his hands together and tipping his head back to look at me, “for the sake of argument we’ll assume we both know what you’re talking about. Understand, I admit nothing. But let’s you and me set up what the lawyers call a hypothetical case. Assume I’ve got some interest in some items that might be missing from somebody’s safe. Assume there’s been a lot of sensational publicity about somebody’s murder, and there’s going to be more publicity, and I don’t enjoy that at all — in fact you can assume somebody’s busy right now, planting news items about how the deceased must have had personal enemies from back east or something. Assume, in other words, I don’t want any more rumbles. You follow?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. So we’re prepared to be nice and quiet and civilized about it. If you turn in the missing items within twenty-four hours, or prove you and Mrs. Farrell couldn’t possibly have taken it, then you can assume I’d be willing to forget the whole beef.”

He smiled. I suppose he meant it to be an engaging smile.

I felt dismal but not surprised; it had never been anything better than a long shot.

He looked at his watch, shot his cuff, and said pleasantly, “It’s pushing noon. I’d be willing to go the few extra minutes — call it noon tomorrow, your deadline.”

“And if I can’t produce?”

He shrugged his meaty shoulders and picked at a hairy ear. “I don’t throw raw meat on the floor, Crane, it’s not my style. I leave it to your imagination. I only mention there are friends of mine who don’t mind putting the screws on people, hard, to find out what they know and what they did with stolen property.”

He didn’t have to spell that out. I said, in a lower voice, “You can’t get blood from stones. She doesn’t know anything — I don’t know anything.”

“Then all you’ve got to do is prove it.”

“How many people do you know who can prove where they were between two and five in the morning?”

“Too bad you’re not married,” he answered, smiling slightly. Then he tipped himself up on one elbow and said, “If some of the fellows decide they have to put the screws to you two, they wouldn’t leave you around alive afterward to testify about it. You understand that?”

“I understand it,” I said, “but I can’t buy it. You haven’t got enough evidence to justify it with the organization. You haven’t got any evidence at all, period. I know it wouldn’t have to stand up in court, but you’d have to show something.”

“Maybe if you two were members of my organization. But you’re not. You’re not wearing our silks, Crane. Nobody cares what happens to you and the woman.” He shook his head and said sadly, “The minute I laid eyes on you I knew you’d be one of those guys who had to do everything the hard way. I wish you wouldn’t keep arguing — you made your pitch, I didn’t buy it. That’s all there is to it. You came to the wrong store to sell your kind of merchandise.”

I took a breath. “Twenty-four hours isn’t enough time for a scavenger hunt. At least give us a couple of weeks.”

“To get out of the country with the stuff?”

“You know better than that. We—”

“Nuts. You two are the number one suspects. If you want it spelled out, it goes like this. Mrs. Farrell had the motive — things in the safe she wanted to get her hands on. She had the opportunity — she was one of only four people who had keys to the house and the alarm system, and the other three people are accounted for. I’m one of them, the housekeeper makes two, and then of course the deceased, he had keys, it was his house. You see, it’s those keys that narrow it down, Crane. The alarm system down there is wired on a direct circuit that sets off an alarm here in my house if anybody busts into Aiello’s place. Whoever went in there last night had to have a whole set of keys, not just something to pick the door locks with. There was no sign the place was jimmied or the wires cut. Aiello turned up dead wearing bare feet in slippers, which means he was in bed. If he’d had an appointment with anybody he’d have put socks on, he was the type; he didn’t go around in his bare feet when he had company.”

“It could have been anybody he knew,” I said. “Somebody gets him out of bed and he goes to the door and sees it’s a friend, so he switches off the alarm and opens the door and lets them in.”

Madonna shook his head. “No. There’s only a small number of people he’d have trusted enough to let them in the house alone with him at that hour of the night, and they’ve all been checked out. You see?”

I opened my mouth, but the phone beside him rang. Madonna picked it up and talked and listened. When he hung up his smile was fixed. He looked up at me and said, “Room Seventy-Two, Executive Lodge. Mean anything to you?”

I tried hard to keep it off my face. Madonna shook his head, making the kind of face he would use chastising an errant small boy. “A poor try, Crane — and maybe it’ll give you some idea how far you’d get if you tried to hustle Mrs. Farrell out of town. It wouldn’t be discreet.” Watching my face, he added gently, “You’re not a very good loser, are you?”

“I’m not playing a game,” I snapped. “Look, I’ll beg if I have to. At least give us the two weeks. Maybe the cops will turn up something by then.”

“Why should I bargain when I’ve got a corner on the market? No deals, Crane — no gentlemen’s agreement.”

I said bleakly, “What the hell do you expect to win by this?”

“It’s what I don’t expect to lose,” he said. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the chaise and stood up. He was a surprisingly tall man. He kept his voice friendly: “You made a mistake, Crane. You probably figured us for a pack of brainless thugs, and you should have known better — nobody gets where I am without brains. You made an error, you and the Farrell woman, trying to play cute and fast with us. Who do you think you’re dealing with? I started peddling the streets of Harlem when I was nine years of age. So let’s not insult each other. Where’s the stuff you took out of Aiello’s safe?”

“I don’t know.” I lifted both hands. “One week — at least give us that.”

“Like you said, the cops might turn something up if I let it go too long. And putting your same hypothetical case, we could assume I can’t afford to have the wrong people get their hands on the missing items. A week’s too long. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Crane, to prove we’re all civilized. I’ll double your time. Call it forty-eight hours.” Still smiling, Madonna put his thick arm over my shoulders and walked me to the sliding glass door.