The Hit

Chapter Five

Mike Farrell, I thought as I drove away, was a vexing character. If I’d still been a cop, and if I’d had time and facilities, I’d have taken him downtown, booked him as a material witness and sweated him a while to find out how much of his story was true.

I took back streets to get out of Las Palmas, found a phone booth in a shopping center and called the Executive Lodge. I asked for Mrs. Chittenden and when I heard Joanne’s voice I said, “Me. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, but I think our secret is out. Just after you left, I went to get some newspapers and a paperback, and a man saw me in the lobby.”

So that was how Madonna had found her — pure blind luck, and all of it bad. I said, “You recognized him?”

“I think so. What’s more important, I think he recognized me.”

“Is he hanging around?”

“He may be. If he is, he’s being discreet — I haven’t been pestered since I came back to the room.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’ve got my gun, you may as well just stay put a little while.”

“Simon, how is—”

“It going? We’re in trouble up to the hairline. Sit tight and I’ll see you in a little while. Have room service send you a sandwich.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then get loaded,” I said. “Keep the door locked and keep the gun handy, right?”

She said dismally, “All right, Simon,” and I hung up with a vivid tactile image of the rich warm tone of her flesh, the flash of her eyes.

Either way, I had to take a risk. If I tried to spirit her away and hide her someplace else, I’d probably have to ditch a tail and that would make Madonna angry. This way, leaving her where she was, he might get the idea we weren’t ducking out on him. It might persuade him to keep his word and give me free rein at least for a little while.

I looked up Dodson, Judy, in the phone book, found a number listed under Dodson, Judith, and let it ring eleven times. No answer. After a minute’s thought I looked up the Atomic Bar and when the bartender answered I said, “Is Phoebe there?”

“Who wants to know?”

“A friend. Tell her Simon says.”

“Tell her what?”

“Simon says.”

“Christ,” he said, and then: “Hang on, I’ll see if she’s here.”

There was some background noise and then Phoebe Willits’ whisky baritone voice roared out of the receiver at me:

“Simon, you bastard.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’d have to check that with Dad and Mom and they’re not here right now. Phoebe, I’m looking for a girl.”

“Isn’t everybody? Listen, you son of a bitch, if I wasn’t old and fat and ugly, somebody’d be looking for me, too.”

“Nonsense. You know you’re beautiful.” In the eyes of, say, a bull moose; I didn’t state that part out loud but she got the inference. I said, “The girl’s name is Judy Dodson and she was seen now and then with Sal Aiello. I tried her listed phone but nobody’s home.”

“She doesn’t work for me,” Phoebe said. “You working on the Aiello murder, Simon? I thought you quit the flat-feet.”

“I did. It’s personal.”

“Personal, sure. Hang on a minute, Simon, I’ve got a couple of my girls here, I’ll ask them.” I waited three minutes. Phoebe was the prototype for all the whisky-madam movies ever made; she was a lusty type, more character actress than madam. She worked a string of girls out of the Atomic Bar, which was a joint barely one step up from the pavement; she was devoted to espionage — a fact known not only to the police, who used her as an informant, but also to all the crooks, who played the game with her by allowing her to overhear harmless bits of information. She adored the game — maybe it gave her a sense of importance.

She barked into the phone in her parade-ground voice: “Big fluffy blonde girl?”

“I guess so. I haven’t seen her.”

“I’m told a girl like that works at the Moulin Rouge, Judy something. That help?”

“I hope so.”

“Simon?”

“Unh.”

“You sound like you’re in trouble. Anything I can do?”

“No,” I said, “but I love you. Thanks much. So long, Phoebe.” I hung up and went to the Jeep and drove north through a Mexican slum. It was a littered adobe neighborhood where the kids on the streets watched you go by with big blank eyes and studied contempt; they grew up quickly down here. Anything and everything was for sale, you only had to know where to go and what name to ask for. I’d driven a prowl car beat here for six months and now, driving through, I saw familiar faces. One or two nodded with reserve; the others pretended I was a stranger.

I reached the Strip and turned east, and drove a chromium-neon mile to the Moulin Rouge. It was a long flat building set back a hundred feet behind a wraparound parking lot. The huge sign at the curb was fifty feet tall and shaped like a neon-outlined champagne glass, with the name of the place spelled across it in script. A row of palm trees broke up the austere roofline, running across the front.

There was a thin scattering of cars on the lot. I parked by the side entrance and went in that way; otherwise I would have had to walk through the dining room to get to the bar, and my lack of tie and jacket might have provoked an argument with the major-general at the front door.

Just inside the door I stopped to give my eyes time to dilate. The place was dim; after the hot brilliance outside, it seemed pitch dark. The side door gave entrance through a dirty narrow corridor with doors on either side; the smell, essence of men’s room, told you where you were even if you couldn’t read the signs.

When I could see through the gloom I went along the short hallway into the bar room. The place was bathed in an unpleasant sea-green light, muted and indirect. The gaudy juke box played bedroom music with heavy bass thumping; loners sat on bar stools drinking steadily, staring straight ahead with drowned faces, and at a round corner table three floor-show ponies sat in the leather booth nursing pink drinks with their smiles glazed on, waiting to be picked up by men from the bar. The three fastened the smiles on me when I appeared.

The barkeep was a minor hoodlum I knew from the old days. If he was all broken up by the proprietor’s death he made no show of it. When I slipped in between two empty bar stools and hooked an elbow on the bar, he came down to me and gave me a mildly inquisitive look. I said, “Too bad about the boss.”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t giving away a thing, that bird, so I decided to change my tactics. Instead of asking him any questions I went straight back to the corner booth and said to the three girls, “Any of you know how I might find Judy Dodson?”

They got busy looking at each other. Two blondes and a redhead, none natural. One of the blondes was over-stuffed and ripe, barely tucked into a spare, tight dress which lifted and bunched her abundant soft breasts. She said, “Who are you?”

“Name of Simon Crane.”

“Do I know you from somewhere?”

“No. Are you Judy Dodson?”

“What of it?”

I gave her a closer inspection. When she looked up, the light caught the surfaces of her eyes — the most startling pale blue, as if she had gem crystals in the irises. It was easy to see why Aiello had picked her: she was a big, splendid animal, brimming with glandular equipment that suggested — by nature or design — that her sucking needs had made of her a container that had to be filled.

I said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

One of the other girls said, “Are you a cop?”

“No.”

Judy Dodson said, “What do you want to talk about?”

“In private.”

She looked at her companions, shrugged, and got up. She had a swollen hairdo and a pouty face. When she walked away her swelling buttocks writhed. I followed her to a little table opposite the bar and held her chair for her. She grinned. “Man, you are real uptown.” She sat; her breasts bubbled over the scooped neckline.

I pulled up the opposite chair and Judy Dodson said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance. Suppose you order me a drink before we start the dialogue. I like Scotch mists.”

I ordered from the barkeep and sat back, giving her a friendly scrutiny. Her body was too lush, the kind of figure that wouldn’t last, but right now it was ample and stunning.

Making it friendly, I said, “Nice dress.”

“Sure. I only shoplift at the best stores.”

Her smile seemed a bit cruel until I discovered that she was slightly, almost undetectably, drunk. The result of Aiello’s death? I wasn’t sure how to approach her with it. The bartender came; his arm dashed in twice between us. We sat jammed against the wall at a table hardly big enough for four elbows and two glasses. When the bartender straightened up, Judy Dodson said, “Gimme a quarter for the juke box,” and he handed her a quarter marked with red nail polish — a gimmick barkeeps use to separate shill coins from customers’ money when the juke box collections are made.

When he went, I said, “Sit still a minute and let me talk. Two or three people are the favorites for Sal Aiello’s murder but if they turn up with alibis you’re going to the head of the class. Understand? You were the last one to see him alive.”

She didn’t seem to react at all. She only brooded down at the tall misted glass. Her lips were parted, moist and heavy in repose. Abruptly she got up. I started to rise but then sat back down. She walked toward the juke box. I watched her buttocks as she walked. I could tell by the way she bent down and squinted at the juke box labels that she was nearsighted. By the time she came back to the table, the big speakers were thumping out a striding jazz waltz. She sat and spoke:

“I hate men. First they soften you up and then they belt you one.”

I took a drink of my vodka on the rocks; it was a mistake — the alcohol thundered through me. I said, “I didn’t mean to sound tough. I said it all at once so you wouldn’t get up and leave before I could ask you a few questions.”

“What questions? Who are you?”

“I’m a fellow who needs to find out what happened at Aiello’s house last night.”

“But you’re not a cop.”

“No.”

She made a face and tasted her drink and pushed her chair back. “Maybe I’ll call you in a day or two.”

“Call me now, Judy. You heard what I told you. All I need to do is make one phone call. Say to Pete DeAngelo.”

“Pete knows I was there.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know you were still there after Mike Farrell left.”

She sucked in her breath and drew the chair close to the table. “Okay. You win. What do you want?”

“Did Aiello have an argument with Mike Farrell?”

“I... yes, what the hell. Yes.” She opened her little sequined handbag and took out a pair of glasses with frames that pointed upward at the edges, put them on and studied me through them. “You’re physical, you know?”

I said, “What was the beef about?”

“Between Sal and Farrell? I don’t know, I didn’t pay much attention. Farrell just got out of jail and he didn’t seem to think Sal was treating him generously enough, you know? After the rap he took.”

“I thought Aiello handed him five thousand dollars and the key to a car.”

“That’s right, he did. How’d you know all this? You weren’t there.” Her powdered face scowled past the glasses. She added, “Pete told you, didn’t he? You’re working for Pete.”

I let her go on thinking that; I said, “What kind of mood was Farrell in when he left?”

“What do you mean?”

“Angry and shouting? Or was he resigned and disgusted?”

“You mean, did he look like he was about to come back and kill Sal? I really don’t know, mister. I never saw Farrell but once, and that was last night. I don’t know him well enough to tell. He wasn’t yelling threats or anything like that. He looked scared, I guess.”

“Scared enough to lose his head?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He just didn’t seem the type, you know? He looked like the type who’d go some place and get drunk and cry a lot.”

I nodded. “All right. What happened after he left?”

“Nothing.”

“You can do better than that,” I said, making it harsh.

She grinned. “You’re a doll,” she said. “Real physical.” She was as nasty and sarcastic as she could be. “Look, Pete DeAngelo knows me well enough to ask his own questions, and he sure as hell knows where to find me if he wants to spend a dime’s worth of gas. You tell him if he wants me he can come himself — the bastard pawned me off on Sal Aiello like an old pair of shoes when he got tired of me. Who does he think he is? He’s a doll, too, just like you — you seem to run in packs, don’t you?”

I said calmly, “What time did you leave Aiello’s last night?”

Her eyes went to the bartender. He was too far away to hear anything we’d said. She came back to me and said, “I left at maybe nine-thirty. I got to work here before ten. You can ask the bartender if you don’t believe me.”

I shook my head. “I don’t care what kind of phony alibi you set up with the bartender and your girlfriends. I want the truth. Do you think DeAngelo can’t sweat the truth out of the bartender if he decides he wants to?”

She picked up the glass and took a swallow and sat for a moment chewing crushed ice. Finally she said, “You bastard.”

“What time?”

“Look, I was there till one o’clock or so. Aiello was feeling his oats, you know? He called the club and told them I wouldn’t be coming in to work, they should get somebody to cover for me in the show. He had some kind of big deal set up and he always felt horny at times like that.”

“What kind of big deal?”

“How the hell should I know? Look, I’m a round-heeled pushover, and they all know I’m anybody’s girl. What kind of secrets are they going to let me in on?”

“Was it a deal he’d already made, or a deal he was about to make?”

“Something he was about to do, I guess. Something that was going to happen soon.”

“Like getting killed.”

She winced. “Look, don’t talk like that. I wasn’t in love with him but he wasn’t a bad guy.”

No, I thought. Gangsters are all great guys. I said, “Why did you go to all the trouble to set up a phony alibi for four hours last night?”

She shrugged. “He was killed, wasn’t he? How does it look if I admit I spent half the night there? Look, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t see anybody. I don’t know who killed him.”

“Nobody was coming in when you left?”

“No.”

“Then he was alone in the place. Wasn’t that unusual? Didn’t he usually have one or two hired hands around?”

“Usually. Not always.”

“When you left, did he lock the door and set the burglar alarm behind you?”

“I guess so. He always did. I didn’t particularly notice last night.”

“Did you leave because you wanted to, or did he tell you to go home?”

She gave me a look. “Well, he told me to go. You know, usually he liked to spend the whole night when he was feeling like that. He was really a cozy, cuddly kind of guy; he liked to sleep all wrapped up together. But at one o’clock last night he told me to get my clothes on and go. He kissed me and told me he’d see me tomorrow — I mean today, now. He was very up, you know, expecting something big.”

“Expecting visitors last night, then?”

“How should I know? He didn’t tell me anything. I didn’t ask.”

I settled back and had the last slug of vodka. There was one more line of questioning but I didn’t want to open it. Didn’t want to, but had to.

I said, “How long have you known Pete DeAngelo?”

“Ask him,” she snapped.

“All right, let’s do it another way. You must know Joanne Farrell.”

“Sal’s secretary? Sure.”

“How long have you known her?”

Her eyebrows went up. “A couple years, I guess. Why?”

“How did Aiello feel about her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You saw them together.”

“Sure. Far as I could tell it was strictly business. She seems like a cold bitch to me, if you want to know.”

A lot she knew. I said, “Then she wasn’t there last night?”

“Last night? Look, you tell Pete he sent a pretty dumb guy to talk to me. Pete knows Mrs. Farrell never stayed at the house past business hours. She always leaves around six. I didn’t get there till seven last night. She wasn’t there. I haven’t seen her in weeks. Look, what’s this all about? Did Pete send you or not?”

“In a way he did,” I said. It looked like a dead end from here on; I stood up, dropped money on the table, and said, “Thanks for the talk. I’ll be seeing you.”

“I’d just as soon Pete came himself next time. Tell him that for me.”

I went outside and had to close my eyes against the glare. The heat was a tangible force, like walking into a foam-rubber wall, after coming out of the icy air conditioning of the Moulin Rouge.

Maybe Mike Farrell, after he’d had half a bottle of whisky, had worked himself up into a state. Maybe he had gone back to Aiello’s, persuaded Aiello to let him in, and forced Aiello at gunpoint to open the safe. Maybe. But I doubted it. With all the alarm systems around the place, it was doubtful anybody could have forced Aiello to open the safe without giving him a chance to trip an alarm somewhere — an alarm that would have alerted Vincent Madonna.

If I believed Judy Dodson, I had a few facts. Aiello had been anticipating a big deal. He had been expecting visitors late at night — otherwise why evict Judy? — and a visit at that hour suggested the visitors were people who couldn’t afford to be seen meeting Aiello in daylight. I recalled the two politicians whose names Mike had mentioned. Ex-Governor Stanley Raiford, and County Supervisor Frank Colclough.

On the way I wolfed a takeout sandwich from a drive-in. I found Raiford’s house in the old part of town, just past a mobile home park where rusty steel trailers were propped in rows on concrete building-blocks, sprouting TV antennae like weeds, baking aridly in the sun glitter. Raiford’s street had been widened until the thin ribbons of sidewalk were pinched against the old houses; fences and front yards were long gone. It was a big two-story house shaded by cottonwoods on both sides; it looked worn and comfortable.

There was nobody home. He had no office listed. Rather than chase around asking questions, which might take too much time, I headed for Colclough’s place — it wasn’t far.

Not far in space, but a thousand miles far in time. Colclough lived in a rich folks’ slum. Blooming plastic flowers had been stuck into the yard, dyed to match the swimming pool, and the lawn had been faked on the theory that the grass is greener after it has been painted. The house was big enough to have been expensive; it probably had all the modern accoutrements — tile shower with sliding glass door, electric kitchen, four bedrooms, dish and clothes washers and dryer in the utility room, electric panel heat, central air-conditioning. There wasn’t a decent-sized tree for a mile in any direction; the cretins who built these $75,000 shacks just bulldozed everything away and rolled out the houses the way you would roll out linoleum flooring with repetitive patterns. Doubtless Colclough had obtained the house cheap, or free, from some fast-buck operator friend of his who slapped houses together by the hundreds, just squeaking past the building code by bribing inspectors. Long before most of the mortgages were paid up the houses would be crumbling, warped, leaking. By that time the Colcloughs would have moved on.

There were no cars in the two-car garage, no answer to my knock at the door. But when I turned back down the cracking concrete walkway the next-door neighbor turned off his gardening hose and said amiably, “Looking for the mister or the missus?”

I went across the green, dead lawn. He was a sunburned old man with several chins and an office paunch in paisley Bermuda shorts and a loud shirt. I said, “I was looking for the county supervisor. He’s not at his office.”

He nodded “He’s out of town, you see. Asked me to look after the swimming pool. It’s a nice pool isn’t it? We often sit around after the sun goes down, — watching the bugs on the pool. Nice and quiet and peaceful. Not like the pious rat race back east, not a bit, no sir. Boy, you couldn’t get me to go back, not me. Never, not for all the money in Wall Street.”

“You’re a broker?”

“Retired customer’s man,” he said, and beamed at me, wishing with all his might he was back in the pious rat race with something to do besides watch bugs skim the surface of a rectangular swimming pool.

The senior citizen said, “If you need him in a hurry, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. He’ll be gone a couple of weeks.”

“How long ago did he leave?”

“Frank and Edith went upstate three days ago with Governor Raiford to organize the election campaign.” He was name dropping, of course, but I couldn’t complain; at least he was talkative.

“He didn’t come back to town last night by any chance? Just for a brief business appointment?”

“If he did he didn’t stop by here. My wife and I were home all night. Look, I’ll tell you what you do, you can call him at the Stone Mountain Hotel up at the capital, that’s where he’s staying. We’re forwarding the important mail. I’m assuming you want to talk to him about something important — otherwise you wouldn’t have come to his home?”

He made it a question but I didn’t let him draw me into conversation; I thanked him kindly and strode back to the Jeep. When I got to a phone booth I called Joanne to check on her.

Her voice sounded strange. “Oh— Simon.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Why, nothing, I only—”

“Is somebody there with you?”

“Yes,” she said, eager.

“With a gun?”

“Yes, exactly. Simon, can you come right away? There’s something I have to talk about and I’d rather not do it on the phone.”

“It’s a set-up — he’s waiting to trap me?”

“Yes, fine, I’ll see you in a few minutes, then?”

“Hang on, darling,” I said. “Do you think he’ll use the gun? Should I send cops?”

“No, it’s all right, I’ve already had lunch. But thank you for thinking of it. You’re sweet.”

“Is it anybody I know?”

“No, really, I promise you I’m not hungry, and besides, it would take too long to stop and pick up a sandwich for me. I’ve got to see you right away — it’s important.”

“Is this guy alone, no help outside?”

“That’s right.”

“What does he want? Just talk, not a fight?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, I’ll be right there. It’ll take me twenty minutes.”

“Bye, darling.”

“Take care,” I murmured, and hung up. My hand was trembling on the receiver. I made it to the Jeep and pulled away from the curb and almost collided with a bus that roared by with a swish of pollutant exhaust.