The Hit

Chapter Four

When I stepped up into the ancient Jeep, flipped the key and punched the starter, all the while watching Freddie who stood leaning impossibly forward in the doorway like an ugly immutable gargoyle, I was reviewing in my mind the confrontation with Madonna and regarding myself, my performance, with dazed wonder. Here I was with forty-eight hours between us (Joanne and me) and our joint funeral, yet I seemed to be behaving with cool aplomb. I had faced Madonna not with ravings, and not with begging desperation, but with some kind of detached calm which had sealed itself around me like a plastic bubble.

It was, of course, the kind of deadpan repression that masked absolute hysteria.

I lifted one hand and flapped it nastily at Freddie, whose Neanderthal face made no acknowledgment but watched with bovine intensity while I backed the Jeep out of the drive.

I turned down the narrow curvy asphalt lane; my mind had gone into neutral, I wasn’t even attempting to lay plans. Paralysis; I suppose I had consigned myself to execution. I formed the vague idea of buying a half-gallon of tequila, taking it to Joanne’s room, and getting splendidly drunk. I thought of a rock patch back in the Peloncillos which I had always meant to explore but had never gotten around to; it welled up in me an almost nostalgic yearning for all the planned things I had never done and, now, never would do. Books I meant to read, places I meant to see, old friends I wanted to see again. Joanne’s image blossomed in my mind, vivid and sharp — the warmth of her body, the lusty bark of her laughter, flash of eyes, toss of head. Riding the Jeep through a low dip in the road, I had the sudden feeling she was sitting just behind my shoulder, and all I needed do was turn around and look into her smiling violet eyes, encircle her with my arms, fold her close against me, hearing her husky laugh, scenting the fragrance of her hair.

It came to me that the sharp sense of loss was stronger in me than my own private fear of danger. That lonely sense of imminent loss stunned me: I hadn’t let myself believe she had come to mean so much to me.

The feeling of having her just behind my shoulder became so strong that my eyes shifted involuntarily to the rear-view mirror. Of course there was nobody in the bed of the Jeep. What I did see in the mirror was the shark-toothed chrome snout of the big dusty station wagon, bearing down on me from behind.

Mike Farrell got out of the car and took me at gunpoint in the Jeep to the boarded-up old house in Las Palmas, and a few minutes later I was sitting there in a lawn chair holding Mike’s gun and waiting for Mike to struggle back to consciousness.

Mike sat up with a pained grimace. “Jesus.”

“How do you feel?”

He cringed when I spoke; his eyes dipped toward me, bloodshot. “I got a headache right down to my toenails.”

“You hit the door with your head.”

“You knocked me down and got my gun, huh? Trust me to do that right.” He gave a nervous, braying cackle.

The heat was close and oppressive. When he looked at the gun I had, he flinched.

I let him have a good look at it. Then I said, “What happened to Aiello, Mike?”

“I swear to God I don’t know.”

“What happened to the stuff in his safe?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Then why are you shaking like a jackhammer?”

“Because my head hurts, goddamn it.” He looked away from me. The room was enormous, with baroque arches and domed ceiling. Mike sat like a taut-wound watch spring, his face down, heavy with thought. When he looked up again, he studied me with skittish caution and an apologetic, cowardly half-smile. His face was sweat-drenched and greenish; his baggy trousers, unpressed and too big for him, gave him the pathetic look of a diminutive circus clown. He must have lost weight in prison.

Suddenly he said, “What he had in that safe, Crane, it was enough cash to make a fast down payment on an aircraft carrier. They think I’ve got it, don’t they?”

I said quietly, “How do you know what was in the safe?”

There was soft insinuation in my voice but he didn’t react. He said, “Aiello showed it to me,” in a morose off-hand tone. I went over to the window near him and perched on the sill — Mike’s head turned on bulging neck tendons to keep me in sight. I dangled the automatic over one knee. As a cop I had learned to sit above a man when questioning him.

I said, “How much?”

“What?”

“How much does it take to make a down payment on an aircraft carrier?”

“Someplace between two million and three million. Closer to three.” Seeing my look of disbelief he added quickly, “I swear it’s the truth — look, that’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you and me and Joanne, we’re all in the same fix. We got to get together on this. Maybe we can work it out if we put our heads together.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about what’s going on,” I observed.

“Look, Crane, I didn’t make the hit on Aiello and I ain’t got the money.”

I said, “Let’s hear the whole thing.”

“Okay — but first you got to tell me what you were doing up at Madonna’s. You working for him now?”

“No.”

“And I just take your word for that?”

“Suit yourself. Here’s one for you: what makes you think they’ve fingered you for it?”

“How else can they add it up? It’s what I’d think if I was in their shoes.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story.”

“If I get bored,” I said, “I’ll yawn.”

He swallowed and squeezed his hands. When he rubbed them together the sound was scratchy and dry. He kept staring abysmally at the gun in my hand; finally he said, “Look, all I want is off the hook and unless things have changed a lot in a couple hours, you’re in the same boat. Can we help each other, Crane?”

“How do I know unless you tell me what you’ve got in mind?”

“I hope to hell you can help,” he muttered. “I got nobody else.”

“You’ve got yourself.”

“Yeah,” he said, off-key. “I been having myself for years.”

I didn’t say anything. He tried to glare at me but he couldn’t hold my eyes. He lifted his shoulders and let them drop; juices seemed to run out of him and he said in a weary voice, “Let me tell it my own way. I got to start way back at the beginning or you won’t understand it. I been rehearsing this for two hours this morning. How much you need to know.”

When I made no answer he gave me a spasmodic shrug. “Look, I was a sax man, a pretty good sax man, and I used to be clean. I had this four-man combo and we booked around town, little toy wages but I had talent and I figured I’d make it. More talent than a lot of Charley the Stars ever had, but they eat. I didn’t know that then. I figured if you could blow good and hit all the notes that move, all you had to do was wait for some A-and-R scout from Columbia to sign you up.

“Things were going okay. We moved into the better clubs and cut a few sides and the money got good. I was young. I married Joanne about then — everything felt groovy. Jesus God how innocent we were! Did you know she was a virgin when I married her? She was nineteen years old.

“But then I lost two good men, the bass player got drafted and the piano man went to the Coast, and I had to break in a couple idiots that didn’t know their brass from their oboes. So okay, so we keep working, but all the time I keep seeing forty-year-old horn men dying from malnutrition and TB and alcoholism. Good bands are a dime a dozen. All of a sudden I could see I don’t want to spend twenty years playing crumb joints and have nothing to show for it except a mountain of debts and creases in my neck and maybe a habit for booze or hard dope. I had to do better than that for Joanne. You get what I mean? Or am I trying to describe a color to a blind man?”

He had warmed up; he was enjoying the sound of his own voice, but I had to let him go on at his own pace. I nodded at him and said, “I understand.”

“Okay. So I got sick and tired of the life we were leading, that’s all. Jesus, I was in love with Jo. But the way we lived, Sweet God. I figured she deserved better.”

His voice ran down and he sat scowling. I didn’t prompt him. After a while he said sourly, “You know, you really ought to pay extra for the story of my life.”

He looked up with a twisted smile and resumed:

“Then they went ape for rock. They brought in all these stupid long-haired kids where the drummer plays the melody in the band and all they know how to do is jiggle a lot and make enough noise to make you stone deaf. Now I’m too old to get in that bag, see? I’m a musician for Christ’s sake. It’s the last goddamn straw.

“Right then we were working the Moulin Rouge, which was the only room left on the Strip that wasn’t using rock. I could see it wouldn’t last — I learned about squeeze plays the first time I got jumped in an alley by five kids bigger than me. Man, I figured here I was making only a hundred a week but next month I could be starving to death.” He uttered a B-flat grunt of sour laughter and threw up his arms, gesturing. His arms fell to his sides and he said gloomily, “So one night Sal Aiello, he owns the Moulin Rouge, he comes to my door selling Mafia cookies.”

He looked at me to see what effect that had. “I’m not dense,” he said defiantly. “Look, Aiello offered me a chance to write my own ticket, and if I turned it down where was I supposed to go? I wasn’t about to go back to the bottom — I been there, it’s too crowded. So I gave my boys their closing notice. That’s one thing you learn in that business — how to get off.”

I said, “So then Aiello gave you a job. Doing what?”

“Bagman,” he said without hesitation. “I was clean, no criminal record. I was ideal — the cops wouldn’t shake down a guy like me at embarrassing times like when I’m carrying a satchel full of payoff money for the monthly sheet of potbelly politicians.”

“Who’d the money go to?”

He looked at me from under his thin eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s included in the price of your ticket.”

“All right,” I said, saving it for later. “Go ahead.”

“Okay, I’m on the payroll and then something happens that gets me sore at Aiello.” He squinted at me as if to divine how much I knew about that.

I decided it would help to tell him. “I know about Aiello and Joanne.”

“Christ. Everybody alive and his idiot half-brother seems to know about that. Hell, I guess I should have kept it to myself, but she was my wife. The bastard didn’t think I’d lift a finger. He thought I was too scared. He was right. Christ, that crazy Jo goes and shacks up with him just for kicks I guess because she didn’t know any better, and what do I do about it? Nothing. Oh, I belted Jo a few good ones, but I didn’t go near Aiello. If I had, I’d have ended up part of the pavement on a road-construction job. Like he did. But the trouble with me is, I didn’t know enough to keep my mouth shut. I got pissed off — hell, who wouldn’t? — and I loaded up with too much to drink one night and I started beefing in a bar about that bastard Aiello. I didn’t spell anything out, just called him some names, but Pete DeAngelo hears the tail end of it. That’s my luck. So Pete hears me beefing and he walks me outside and taps me around a little. Maybe I had that coming. It taught me my lesson. But right after that I find a couple cops waiting at my house with a warrant and a half a kilo of uncut heroin they claim they found taped inside my toilet tank. It was a railroad — you never saw anything that raw. I was clean, man, I never in my life messed with narcotics.”

“Who planted it? The cops?”

“No. Aiello or DeAngelo, one of them had it done. Then they phoned in an anonymous tip to the cops. They made sure Joanne was out of town that week so it wouldn’t get pinned on her — they wanted her around here handy where they could keep pins stuck in her.”

He turned palms up and looked at me. “And you ask me why I think they’re after me. I can’t pretend I didn’t have a beef against Aiello — it gives me a nice neat motive to go after him the minute I get out of jail, right? Good old Aiello. When I got arrested he was as nice and fatherly as you could ask. Comes to the visiting room and tells me it’s all for my own good, the organization likes to keep the hired help in line and once in a while it calls for teaching a little lesson. I’m the student. He gets me an organization mouthpiece and the guy pleads me guilty, which I was in no position to argue. I walk into Superior Court and the judge hands me seven to ten years, and then Aiello tells me the boys don’t hold any hard feelings, it’s just this is the way things get handled when you step out of line. He promises me there’ll be a good job waiting for me when I get out, and he gives me his word on his mother’s grave nobody’s going to touch Joanne while I’m away. Of course that’s to keep me from getting so unhappy I might decide to sing to the cops. Joanne’s their hostage to make sure I don’t talk right? But I figured Aiello meant what he said about treating me square when I got out — which is why I went up there last night.”

Maybe he thought he detected ironic disbelief in my face; he said angrily, “Hell, what else could I do?”

“You tell me.”

“If I’d turned state’s evidence they might have gone for Joanne or they might have gone for me — they can find a way to slip a hit man into a prison cell if they want to. Either one of us could’ve ended up with our heads in a basket. Okay, so I built up a reputation for keeping my mouth shut, but what choice did I have? It didn’t mean I was happy, I admit — if I was happy I wouldn’t be here talking to you like this. But goddamn it, I’ve seen them put the fix on when they wanted to. Tony Senna got arrested a few years ago and he’s got a record as long as your arm, but they bribed the Records Division to supply the court with a clean record sheet for the trial, and he got off with a suspended sentence as a first offender. First offender my ass. Then there was a bookie they caught chiseling on the receipts a few years back, so two torpedoes beat his head in with tire irons. Some cop caught them both red-handed, but the fix goes in and when the cop gets on the stand he testifies he saw the bookie fall on his head. They could have bought me the same kind of fix, but hell, they framed me in the first place, why should they?”

He was lying back now, sprawling, staring at the high sepulchral ceiling. “Five years is a long time when you break it up into hours, Crane. The only thing that keeps you going is knowing you’re going to get out. But I’m out twenty-four hours and already they’re writing up a contract on me. Look, I don’t want to go out in a blaze of glory — I don’t want to go out at all. That’s why I had to talk to you.”

“All right,” I said. “You’re talking. Where does it get us?”

“I ain’t finished,” he said. “I got us up to yesterday so let’s finish it.”

I nodded patiently.

“A guy owes me some bucks, see? Sal Aiello. He promised me a job and some bucks to get started again when I got out, and like I told you, I believed him. Why should he lie to me? So I been a good boy, I got my parole and I took the bus back here and I cruised around downtown yesterday afternoon looking for somebody that could give me a ride out to Aiello’s house. They don’t use buses in his neighborhood.

“Okay, I ran into Tony Senna, he’s cruising the taco district picking up shylock money and numbers payoffs. Right out in bare-ass daylight — man, you know the fix is in with the cops down there.”

“And?”

“I chased around with Tony, said hello to some of the guys, and finally he finished his rounds and DeAngelo picks us up in his Mercedes. Every time DeAngelo whispers at me I get the feeling he’s trying to sell me a used car, but I needed the ride out to Aiello’s and that was where they were headed. There was some small talk like how did I like stir and who’d I get to know up there. DeAngelo’s put on a little weight and wearing a fancy Sy Devore-type suit looking like a goddamn movie star and I could see everybody was doing fine while I was away. There’s a lot of talk about getting ready to legalize gambling. Finally we get out to Aiello’s place — big house, pool, panoramic vista, the works. About a mile north of Madonna’s place. It was dark by the time we got out there. DeAngelo goes right out to the pool and strips down and starts splashing around, striking poses for a chick Aiello’s got decorating the pool — you know Aiello, he’s always had a harem problem.”

He paused to marshal his memories, probably wondering how much I really knew about Aiello and Joanne. Aiello had been a relentless womanizer with a broken-down libido who used women and discarded them; sometimes I wondered how much satisfaction such men got from their compulsive conquests.

Mike muttered, “Aiello was kind of tilted about dames.” He sounded strangely wistful, but he didn’t follow it up.

He changed the subject harshly: “Anyhow, when I got there Aiello was as per usual, all jovial and friendly, wall-to-wall booze and this nice piece of fluff, Judy Dodson’s her name, pouring his drinks and lighting his cigars for him. A hot pillow dame with a topless neck — you know the type.”

When he looked at me, I gave him a nod.

He said, “Aiello gave me a drink and bragged about how the business has expanded since I went up. He’s built a new wing on the Moulin Rouge, where I used to work, so they can turn it into a casino soon as they buy enough legislators to push the gambling bill through the state house.

“DeAngelo and Tony Senna keep drifting in and out with phone messages. After a while it gets cool by the pool so we go inside, which is when Aiello goes over to the safe.

“It’s a great big bank vault, in the library. Covers pretty near the whole damn interior wall. Aiello signals DeAngelo and me and the Dodson chick to come look inside. Like I told you, enough cash to choke a whale. I counted the stacks, and if each stack was full of bills of the same denomination they had showing on top, then my estimate has got to be pretty close — somewhere around three million dollars, like I said. Most of it out in the open. There were a few lockboxes too, on shelves inside. I didn’t see what was in them. Aiello likes to show off stuff like that — liked, I mean, he’s dead. Anyhow he told me he knew I took a bad fall, the judge was too tough, and he says the organization wants to make it up to me now that I’ve showed how true-blue I can be. I kept my mouth shut, you see. So he takes a wad out of the sack and hands it to me.”

Mike reached into his baggy pockets and took out a thick sheaf of bills tight-bound with a rubber band. “Close to five grand in twenties and fifties,” he explained, and put it back where he got it.

“After that Aiello told me to keep my shirt on, they’d find me a good job shortly and in the meantime I should have a good time. Then DeAngelo starts to pump me — he seemed to think I’d spread all kinds of loose talk in stir. I told him I’d kept quiet — would I be that dense? DeAngelo and Aiello were like a pair of cops where one puts a cigarette in your mouth and the other slaps it out of your face. Right then I got a funny feeling down the back of my neck, you know?

“It took a while to convince them. Finally DeAngelo seemed to buy my story, and he left. Tony Senna was someplace around the house and he left with DeAngelo, in the Mercedes. Aiello takes me outside to see them off. Then he hands me the key to that station wagon and tells me I can use it as long as I like. So I get in the car and drive out. The girl was still there with Aiello. I came into town and stopped at a bar and had a few, and all the time I couldn’t get rid of the idea they were setting me up for a patsy. They don’t need me, see? I started thinking about how much sense it might make for them to kiss me off a mountain cliff one night. Maybe I was wrong but Joanne can tell you I was rattled as hell. I couldn’t think of what to do so I went to her place, but she wouldn’t let me in, I guess I don’t blame her. I made a bitch of her life.”

“Where did you go when you left Joanne’s?”

“Back to the Moulin Rouge.”

“They close at one,” I said. “Where’d you spend the rest of the night?”

He hesitated. “Look, I got to tell you the truth — hang me with it if you want to. When the Moulin Rouge closed I bought a bottle and took it with me. I drove up the Strip clear to the foothills and parked and had a little consultation with the bottle. I don’t remember how much of it I killed but I was pretty damn drunk by the time I decided to get it over with. Whisky courage. I drove up to Aiello’s house again.”

He let it hang in the air, watching me while I watched him. Finally he closed his lids down and said, “Crane, you’ve got to believe me. It was about four this morning. There was a car coming out of Aiello’s drive just before I turned in. I didn’t get much of a look at it — a Cadillac, I think; all I’m sure of is it was pink. My headlights picked it up and it was pink. I didn’t pay any attention to it just then because why was I supposed to suspect anything? I drove on in and got out of the car and the front door was wide open, the lights were on. I went inside. The place was a mess. Aiello wasn’t there, the safe was open, all that cabbage was gone, even the lockboxes — the safe was absolutely empty. I smelled sulfur, like powder-smoke after a gun goes off, you know? Man, I didn’t stick around — I went back to the station wagon and got the hell out of there. I went to Ed Baker’s place — he’s got a little house over by the university. Tony Senna and a couple others were there, playing cards — they’d been at it for hours. I grabbed a sandwich but I was too drunk and too bushed and too scared to sit down and play cards, so I went in the back room and went to sleep.

“When I woke up Senna and Baker were crawling all over my station wagon, tearing the damn thing apart. I guess they didn’t find anything — you got to figure there’d be bloodstains in the car if I’d carried Aiello’s corpse out to that roadbed and buried it. Of course I didn’t know what they were looking for at first, but then later I heard the radio news about the body and I knew that’s what they’d been looking for in the station wagon. All right, they didn’t find any stains, and that slowed them down. But the way Senna looked at me I knew I was a long way from being off the hook. I went in the john and I could hear them out in the kitchen. There was a phone call, probably DeAngelo, and after Senna hung up he told Baker to get his gun because they were going out to your place to pump you and Joanne and see if you had the money. So they went, and as soon as they were gone I got in the station wagon and came over here. I had to think.”

“Why here?”

“It used to be a drop. I’d pick up satchels here once in a while. I think a long time ago they used the place to pass dope from dealers to pushers.”

His voice ran down. He sat sweating in a dark pool of shadow. I said, “Three million dollars is a lot of cash. What was it doing in Aiello’s safe in the first place?”

“They used the vault for a collection point for everything this side of El Paso and Salt Lake.”

“They wouldn’t just let all that cash lie idle in the safe. What was supposed to happen to it?”

He looked at me; he was deciding whether to answer. He said, “Jesus, why not? Look, the way they worked it, Aiello would hold the stuff they collected from various enterprises all over the district. They kept it in cash because they didn’t want any records for the tax boys to dig in. This was the raw take, you understand. All sizes of bills, unmarked. The mob’s got its own legit banks back east, Long Island and New Jersey, but out here they don’t, so it was handy to have that big old bank vault in Aiello’s house. They’d let the cash pile up until there was enough for a shipment — maybe four million. Then they’d satchel it into a small van with two or three torpedoes and armor plate and more locks and electric guard systems than you ever saw, and Aiello and DeAngelo would ride with it over to Los Angeles. Over there they’d work through a dozen banks, change the money into cashiers’ checks and bank letters under phony names. They’d take a week, ten days to get it done, all in small batches so they wouldn’t attract attention. Then somebody flies it over to Switzerland — they’ve got dozens of numbered bank accounts in Zurich. It used to be Madonna who called the turns but he never touched the stuff with his own hands. Usually Aiello and DeAngelo would fly over to Switzerland.”

“And the safe was almost full last night?” I asked.

“Close. Like I said.”

“It all belonged to the mob?”

“Mostly. A lot of people had pieces of it. And Aiello used to keep money in the safe for people who didn’t want to report it for taxes — private money.”

“Who else?”

“I don’t know names. Outsiders, but I don’t know which ones.”

He got up and wobbled toward the door to get air. I stayed close with the gun. He said, “God, I feel like I just got out of the hospital after six months and fell down in the lobby on my way out and broke both legs. Only this time there’s no cure. Jesus H. Christ. I belong to the running dead, you know that?”

All this had been preamble; suddenly he wheeled to face me. He said in a sharper tone of voice, “Crane, I’ve leveled with you. When I heard Senna and Baker talking this morning, I knew the mob was trying to decide whether it was me that took the money, or you and Joanne. Or maybe all three of us. They want to play marbles with our eyeballs. Okay, listen, I played straight with those guys, I said I was sorry, but I’m not going to die for it and I’m not about to write it a hundred times on the blackboard. I want out. If you’ve got any brains, you do too.”

“Go on — spell it out, Mike.”

He nodded. “I talk a lot, I know. Reflex habit. But I’ve been sizing you up. I’m not as dumb as I look. You’re one of the mob’s prime suspects. I know that because I heard the boys talking this morning. This morning you went up to Madonna’s. What for? I asked myself. The answer was easy. You went up there for the same reason I did. When you drove in, I was parked up the road trying to work up the guts to go in and talk to Madonna, beg on my knees if I had to, just persuade them I didn’t do it. I didn’t have the nerve, but you did. Now, if you’d taken the loot you’d have been long gone by now, I figure. Besides, you’re tied up with Jo, and I know her well enough to know she’d never do a thing like this. So let’s lay it on the line. You didn’t do it and I didn’t do it and Joanne didn’t do it. What else is there? Madonna himself? I doubt it. Soldiers been drifting in and out of Madonna’s place all day, there’s a big flap, and I just don’t think it’s a mob operation. Some independent party is out there someplace with all that loot. But the mob doesn’t look at it that way — not yet, anyway. Too many coincidences for them. They know Joanne had keys to Aiello’s house and the alarm system — that was why Senna and Baker made a beeline for your place this morning. They know I just got out of the pen and went directly to Aiello’s last night and saw what was in the safe. Probably they figure all three of us were in it together, we pulled the caper, right? Just think about that, Crane.”

I had; I was. I said, “Go on, Mike.”

“Okay, the reason I opened up to you, I want to make a deal.”

“What kind of a deal?”

Now there was cunning in his eyes — anxious and fearful, but sly. “Together maybe we can find that loot,” he said. “If either one of us finds it and turns it over to the mob, do you think that’ll keep them from killing all three of us anyway, just to keep our mouths shut?”

“Keep going.”

“Okay. We find it, we split it down the middle, and we go our separate ways.”

I said, “What about the mob?”

He tried to smile. “Crane, forty thousand men disappear every year in this country, and a lot of them don’t ever get found unless they want to. If it helps you make up your mind, I got a good contact — not through the mob — with a plastic surgeon. You follow?” He dragged a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, glanced at it, and handed it to me. I looked at it — the name and address of a doctor in Studio City.

He said, “Keep it, I got another copy. Hell, tie it all up in nice neat ribbons — leave a suicide note if you want to and make it look like you took a Brodie off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

He was staring at me without blinking, almost holding his breath.

I said, “What about Joanne?”

“Joanne and me are quits. I won’t make waves. You cut your half with her or do it however you want.”

“I notice you didn’t offer to split it in thirds.”

“I didn’t think I had to. I thought you and Joanne were an item together. Making woo, all that crap.”

I didn’t press it; what I said was, “Suppose we look but we don’t find the money?”

“Then we get dead. I don’t know about you but I’m dead anyway. What have we got to lose?” He had a point.

I said, “You’ve leveled with me as far as I can tell. I’ll give you this much. Madonna gave me forty-eight hours to produce the money.”

“Or else what?”

“He didn’t specify. They’ll bring Joanne in and then bring me in and they’ll work us over to find out what we know.”

“And when they’re satisfied you don’t know anything, they’ll rub you out anyway because they can’t afford to let you go and blab what they did to you. A sweet pot, Crane. Look, the only chance we’ve got is to throw in together. We can’t go to the cops — they might help us find the stuff but we’d end up dead anyway, and most of the cops I know would keep the money and pretend they-never found it.”

Which was, I thought, exactly what Mike himself was proposing to do. I didn’t point out the irony of his indignation. I said, “Where do you figure to start looking?”

“Have we got a deal?”

“Let’s put it like this. We’ll work together. If and when we find the money we can decide what’s to be done with it. If it looks like we can guarantee our own safety by turning the money over to Madonna, then I’d suggest it’s better to be alive and broke than dead and rich.”

“That’d have to be a hell of a guarantee.”

“If we can work it out that way, will you go for it?”

He scowled. “If it’s the only way, hell yes. Have I got a choice?”

“All right. We’ve got a deal.”

He nodded. “Okay. Then the first thing you do is check out the Judy Dodson bird. She was still with Aiello when I left last night. Look, the reason I can’t do it myself, I got to stay out of sight. They might take a notion to haul me in any time. You’ve at least got forty-eight hours and they’ll probably keep their hands off you that long, just to see if you can come up with something.”

“Any other ideas if the girl doesn’t pan out?”

“One or two,” he said. “For instance, Frank Colclough and Stanley Raiford.”

I looked at him. He had uttered two prominent political names. Frank Colclough, the county supervisor, was a political kingmaker who bossed the county machine. Stanley Raiford, the ex-governor, had been in the news lately, making hard-knuckled speeches that sounded very much like the noises made by a man running for office. It was rumored he was about to throw his hat in the ring and run for the Senate against the aging incumbent.

Mike said, “There were money packages in the safe with their names on them.”

“Packages for what?”

“You’d have to find that out yourself. I don’t know. The money wasn’t payoffs, I know that much. The bag money doesn’t get listed like that in the safe. So it was something else, not bribe cash. But it had Colclough’s and Raiford’s names on it. Private money, probably, that Aiello was keeping as a favor to them. There were some others, but those are the only two names I remember.”

I scowled. They were leads but they didn’t sound very good. But at least it was a place to start.

Mike said, “I’m going to have to stay under cover. If it wasn’t for Jo I wouldn’t trust you, but I figure she’ll look out for my rights if you get any fancy ideas.”

It was a strange thing for him to say. I had no way of disproving the idea that he and Joanne had set the whole thing up, using me as their patsy; no way except the knowledge that it didn’t fit with Joanne’s character for a minute.

“All right,” I said. “You sit tight.” I turned to go.

He stopped me. “How about my gun?”

I studied him, then handed the gun to him. He stuck it in his waistband. He said, “I may not stay here, but I’ll get in touch.”

I said, “If I need to find you, where do I look?”

“Here. Then the Mariache Bar on South Tenth. An old buddy of mine owns it, he’s not in the mob. I’ll leave word for you with him if I have to move. His name’s Maldonado.”

I nodded and went.