The Hit

Chapter Seven

I held her in my arms until she stopped honking and trembling. When it seemed safe enough, I lowered her into the armchair. I said, “Okay, you sit still a minute and collect yourself.”

I picked up the phone and gave the operator a long distance number at the state capital. After the usual confusions between the switchboard at my end and the switchboard at the other, I finally made connection with Jerry Sprague, a former cop-colleague of mine who now held down the city desk on the Sun-Telegraph. He was happy to hear from me. After dispensing with amenities I said, “I’m trying to pin something down, Jerry. Can you give me a fast tracer on the movements of Stanley Raiford and Frank Colclough over the past thirty-six hours? I understand they’re up in your bailiwick.”

I heard his chuckle. “Minute-by-minute, you mean? How come you always want the hard ones?”

“Do I?”

“I don’t know if we’ve had legmen on them straight through. You may be asking for the impossible.”

“With parsley,” I agreed. “But it’s important. Mainly what I want to know is if either one of them had an opportunity to leave the city last night sometime around midnight, by plane, and return before dawn.”

There was an underlayer of excitement in his voice when he shot back: “You’re sitting on something, Simon, I can smell it.”

“When it’s available for publication I’ll let you have it first. If it gets there. It’s probably nothing — I’m just trying to rule things out.”

“The time period you’re asking for — that would be the time Salvatore Aiello was murdered. For Christ’s sake, you don’t think—”

“I don’t think anything, Jerry, and your guesses are your own. I didn’t mention Aiello’s name, you did. How about it?”

“I’ll see what I can dig up. It may take time — most of the legmen are home by now, we’re wrapping up the early edition now.”

“Okay. I’m not sure where I’ll be so I’d better call you back. When can I catch you in the office?”

“I’ll be here till midnight. After that — here, I’ll give you my home number.”

I took down the number on a motel notepad, tore it off and pocketed it. He asked a few more questions and I put him off without specifically denying anything; as long as I left the bait dangling and let him jump to conclusions he’d be excited enough to dig for the answers I needed. We traded a few wisecracks and I hung up and smiled at Joanne.

I had been watching her face during the conversation with Jerry. She had reacted when I’d mentioned the names. I said to her, “What about it?”

“About what?”

“Colclough and Raiford. When you heard the names, you jumped.”

“Did I?”

I shook my head. “Do I have to pry everything out of you with a can opener? Look, you and Mike and I are all in the same boat with no bait and no hooks. Forty-one hours and ten minutes to go. How much of it do I have to waste arguing with you?”

She was apologetic. “Keeping secrets gets to be such a habit I’ve learned automatically to pretend I don’t know anything. I’m sorry, Simon. You want to know about those two greasy politicians. Certainly. I’ve seen both of them, at different times, at Aiello’s house. Naturally Aiello impressed on me that I was to forget I’d ever seen them there. You know what the penalty was to be if I ever mentioned it.”

I nodded. “Good. Okay. Now let’s go back to the safe for a minute, the things in it. Do you want to change your story? You told me this morning you’d never seen the inside of that safe, but I don’t believe that.”

“You’re right, of course. But what makes you so sure I didn’t tell the truth about that?”

“One or two things I’ve picked up about Aiello’s character. He loved to show things off.”

She made a face; obviously she was thinking about the TV-bugged bedroom. I hadn’t been thinking about that; I’d been thinking about what Mike had said about the way Aiello had shown him the contents of the safe and bragged about it. If Aiello would be that expansive with Mike, it wasn’t reasonable to suppose he hadn’t displayed the wealth for Joanne.

She said, “I’ve seen the safe, when he had it open, quite a few times. Most recently two days ago. DeAngelo was there putting some money in, for Madonna, I suppose. Aiello never missed a chance to point to the little black steel box with the roll of film in it. He didn’t have to say anything because I knew what was in the box and he knew I knew. He just pointed and grinned.”

“This may disappoint you,” I stated, “but I’m not particularly interested in that. What I want to know is what else you saw in the safe.”

“Money, mostly, and half a dozen metal boxes.” Her answers were coming easier, more smoothly, all the time. There was no hesitation. She went on: “The boxes were different shapes and sizes but they were all the same kind. Black-painted steel with locks. Like safe-deposit boxes. Each one had a little cardboard label in a brass slot, like the labels on office file drawers.”

“And there was a name on each label,” I said.

She nodded. “I suppose you want to know whose names they were. I wish I could remember, Simon. You’ve got to understand, every time he opened that safe and dragged me up to look inside, there was only one thing that drew my eye. It was that little square box with my name on it. He always kept it right out front, on a shelf at eye level, so I couldn’t possibly miss it. The rest of the boxes were farther back inside, on different shelves, and you had to walk inside to see what was written on them, all but one or two, and one of them just said ‘S. Aiello.’ I suppose it was his personal property, and the other one had Frank Colclough’s name on it, but you already know about him.”

“How about bundles of money with people’s names on them?”

She nodded. “There were four or five of those. I don’t remember seeing that doctor’s name anywhere, what was it, Brawley? I’ve never seen him before, I’m sure. Of course I’ve heard of him. He’s very high class in the trade, the kind of surgeon all the rich, fashionable people go to. He’s on the boards of both hospitals and he’s active in charities. I suppose if you don’t read the society page you might not have heard of him, but believe me, he’s well known by all the Somebodies.”

“But you never had reason to suspect any connection between him and the mob before.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“Can you remember any of the names that were on the bundles of cash?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. There’s a reason, of course. You just said Aiello liked to show things off. But obviously there were certain things he wouldn’t want to give away, and those would include the names of people who had money in his safe, wouldn’t they? Usually the bundles were turned so that the names didn’t show. Once or twice he got careless and flipped one over by mistake, but I don’t recall — no, wait. Yes I do. The other day, when DeAngelo brought the briefcase full of cash, Aiello had to make room for it, and he moved several of the bundles. He stacked them up on a front shelf down at the bottom, and three of them had the names showing. Now let me think. One was Colclough, I remember that, and another one — yes, I’m sure it was Raiford.”

“What about the third one?”

She shook her head, concentrating. I said, “Brawley?”

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.” She looked up at me and shook her head again. “I just can’t remember. Maybe if we leave it alone it will come back to me.”

“Okay. Let’s try something else. When you went to the house this morning the safe was empty. Did you mean that literally? Everything gone?”

She nodded. “Of course the shelves were still there and I didn’t get down on my hands and knees to make sure they hadn’t left something on the floor at the back, but it looked to me as if everything was gone. The works.”

“All the money and all the black lockboxes.”

“Yes.”

“All right, now think a minute. If all that stuff were stacked up in one heap, instead of spread out on shelves, how much space would it take up?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, could you fit it all in the trunk of a car, or would you need something bigger?”

“Oh— I see. Well, of course I don’t really know. I’d imagine if you had a big car with a big trunk compartment, and you didn’t mind stuffing wads of cash in all the funny little nooks and corners, you might get all of it in. But it would have to be big.”

“Like, say, a Cadillac?”

“I suppose so. I don’t think I’ve ever looked inside the trunk of a Cadillac.”

“Who do you know that drives a pink Cadillac?”

“I... I’m not sure I know anybody. I don’t really pay much attention to the make of cars. I can’t tell one make from another.”

Neither could I, any more. Fifteen or twenty years ago you could, but nowadays they were all pressed out by what looked like the same cheap stamp mills. I said, “Any large pink car, then. Pink cars aren’t all that common.”

She took a while to think about it and there was no doubt she was giving it full effort, but she came up empty. I said, “It’s okay,” and went back to the phone. This time I gave the switchboard Vincent Madonna’s number.

I had to run the gauntlet of Freddie, the Neanderthal, and DeAngelo, whose hoarse whisper sounded a bit out of breath, before I got put through to the big cheese. Big, I thought, green and moldy. Madonna snapped at me without friendliness and I said, “I need a fact. It may help both of us get what we’re looking for if you can answer a question.”

“Where are you?”

I grinned at the phone. “Don’t play games. You’ve got Ed Behrenman and I don’t know how many other goons glued to this place. You know damn well where I am.”

I had to hand it to him. He actually chuckled into the phone. Then he said, “What fact?”

“Who do you know that drives a pink Cadillac?”

“What?”

I just waited, seeing no point in repeating it, and after a moment his basso profundo resumed: “Offhand, I don’t know anybody who’d be seen dead in a pink Cadillac. Are you serious?”

I recalled the classic Continental in his drive and knew I’d hit on a sore spot. If Madonna had any taste, aside from his weird preoccupations with voyeurism, it seemed concentrated in his worship of fine automobiles. I could see how a car painted pink might offend him. It also indicated he would probably have noticed it if any of his acquaintances had driven into his driveway in such an abomination.

I thanked him and got off the line after he recited the expected litany of veiled threats. Naturally he didn’t commit himself to anything actionable over the telephone but the meaning was clear to both him and me. I couldn’t help feeling more shaken than ever when I hung up, and Joanne couldn’t help but notice it.

She was giving me a cool stare. She said, “So you did go to see him. What kind of deal have you made with him?”

“You don’t trust anybody, do you?”

“Simon, I want to.”

Her faith was so tattered I couldn’t keep attacking her. Instead, I gave her a brief resumé of the day’s unhappy events. I condensed it but left out nothing important. At the end I said, “There’s no question I’ve been floundering. We’re still in that boat without hooks or bait. The only clue that makes any sense is that pink Cadillac Mike saw leaving Aiello’s when he went there the second time last night. If he was telling the truth, and if it was a pink Cadillac. He was a bit vague about it and it was the middle of the night. Headlights might make a car look pink even if it was orange or red or yellow. Of course, the chances are even if we do find a pink Cadillac we’ll discover it was stolen three hours before the robbery. But it’s just about the only lead we have, and we’ve only got” — I looked at my watch — “a little over forty hours to settle this.”

I got up, picked up the .38 from the newspaper on the bed, and stuffed the gun into Joanne’s handbag. It made a tight squeeze and I thought of substituting the little .25 Beretta I’d taken from Brawley, but decided against that for a variety of reasons, one of which was that if a woman unfamiliar with guns has to shoot one, she’s better off with something that makes a lot of noise; it may scare off an attacker if it doesn’t hit him. Another was that a .38 police bullet will make a man stop and think even if it just pinks him, while a pipsqueak .25 is only a bee sting if it doesn’t hit a vital spot.

So I gave her the .38 and told her to use it if she had to, trusting she’d learned from the mistake with Brawley. When I handed her the handbag she said, “Where are we going?”

“Dinner, first. Even if we find the loot we can’t carry it on an empty stomach.”

She shuddered a little. “It’s all so — callous, Simon. We keep talking about the money and never say a word about the man who was murdered.”

I said, as harshly as I could, “I don’t gave a damn about the poor unfortunate victim and I see no reason why you should. If ever a man deserved to be killed—”

“All right,” she said, snappish. “Let’s not argue about it.”

“I just want it clear. We’re not a couple of hawkshaws investigating a murder mystery. The only reason it might help us to know who killed Aiello is that it might lead us to the loot. I’ve got no interest in bringing anybody to justice — if there is such a thing — all I care about is your life and mine. Understood?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, of course. I get stupid sometimes.”

No wonder, I thought dismally. Buffeted back and forth by one shock after another. Most of the girls I knew would have ended up in a rubber room long ago, going through what Joanne had had to suffer the past few years. Yet, through it all, she remained vivacious, even wholesome to the casual eye — certainly not undone to the point of hysteria.

I put an arm around her shoulders and held her tight, walking her to the door and outside. The sun was going down behind a layer of diaphanous cirrus clouds. I made a remark about the spectacular sunset and she was not too immersed in fright to agree, even stop a moment to stare and drink it in. With sudden savage conviction I said to myself, We will make it through this.

We ate in the motel dining room. We didn’t have much to say. I was trying to work out the next moves, and Joanne drew into herself and huddled over a whisky sour until the food came. The only time she roused herself to speak was when there was motion at the bar, beyond the fake flower planter, and she nudged me with her foot and told me not to look but she knew the girl at the end of the bar — she’d seen the girl at Aiello’s several times in company with Tony Senna. I nodded and went on chewing celery. When the time seemed right I glanced over my shoulder. She was just another girl who probably spent half her time working the bars and the men in them, a brittle, black-haired borderline alcoholic. She was making a point of not watching us, staring instead at the Geriatric Five on the bandstand. But the tip-off came when she rejected a pickup. The guy shrugged and went away.

I had spotted one outside when we’d walked to the lobby from the room — a paunchy, purple-nosed man standing with his hip against the fender of his car, trying not to look interested in us.

When we were out of his earshot Joanne had identified him for me — Ed Behrenman. So we were well-covered — Behrenman in front, with the car; the girl in the bar; watching us; and doubtless a third man somewhere in back where he could watch the room and my Jeep and Joanne’s car.

I wanted to get us out from under Madonna’s surveillance, perhaps for no reason other than that it made me nervous. But this wasn’t the place to do it. If we’d had a reliable friend with a car we might have pulled it off, and I thought of two or three but ruled them out. On the road was better, I decided. So while Joanne did her lips, I went out into the lobby and paid the room phone charges at the desk, telling the clerk we planned to leave very early in the morning and wanted to take care of this now. By the time I paid the dinner bill at the dining-room cashier’s desk, Joanne was up and walking. We went outside without paying any attention to the bar girl, who followed us at a discreet distance until she made sure we were out the front door and within Behrenman’s view.

We went through the ice-machine alley and as we approached the room I said, “We’re not going inside, but make it look as if we’re headed for the room until we get parallel with the Jeep.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’ll drive around and ditch our friends, then go pick up Mike. I want to hide both of you out.”

She didn’t get inquisitive. We walked past the winch on the front bumper of the Jeep, walking as if we intended to turn into the room, but then I grasped her elbow lightly and gave her a half-turn, making it look as if I’d changed my mind at the last minute. I climbed into the driver’s seat and by the time I had fitted the key into the ignition, Joanne had walked around and got in. I backed out and headed diagonally across the concrete parking area, not wasting time but not in an obvious hurry. We drove around the back of the place to the far end and went out to the road there.

It would take the watcher in back a few moments to hot-foot through the alley to the front and alert Behrenman, who had the car. I didn’t want to make it obvious we were trying to shake them, so I didn’t pour it on when I pulled out on the road and headed south, toward the freeway interchange. It took us right past the front of the motel and of course by the time we started up the ramp Behrenman was rolling out onto the road. Now I knew where I’d seen him before. It was the same green sedan that had buzzed past when I’d driven out of the motel before noon. He’d probably spotted me coming out of the place, recognized either me or my Jeep, and made a U-turn beyond the cloverleaf to come back and investigate. That must have been when he’d picked up Joanne, phoned Madonna and then phoned Dr. Brawley.

The freeway had a moderate after-dinner traffic load. Teeny boppers and men from the nearby Air Force base cruised up and down the pavement in hopped-up cars, looking for competition for drag-race money. It was a good Southwest night, stars glistening, moon on the rise, the sky vast and velvet; at such times, under better circumstances, a vehicle as open all-around as a Jeep was worth twenty closed Detroit sedans.

But the Jeep wasn’t built for acceleration or speed. I couldn’t ditch Behrenman by running away from him; he had a big car with probably five times as much horsepower under the hood as he would conceivably need for any purpose short of breaking the land-speed record. Still, a freeway — particularly one going through the heart of a city with interchanges every quarter-mile — was virtually the ideal place to ditch a tail. Behrenman knew that; he was sticking much closer than is usually done — partly because he didn’t care if I spotted him, partly because he was afraid of losing us. Madonna had probably made it clear what would happen to him if he blundered.

I swung out in the far left lane — there were three lanes in each direction — and stayed there, doing sixty-five, judging the gaps in the traffic roaring along the two lanes to my right. I had to pass four interchanges before the cars were spaced right. A glance in the mirror placed Behrenman for me, and I was glad to see he was in my lane, separated from me by one car. With a little more experience and brains, he’d have known enough to stay in the middle lane, from which it would have been easier to maneuver.

It was simple. I waited till we were perilously close to the exit, then dodged into the center lane through a narrow gap in the long line of cars, cut sharply in front of a big semirig — earning a blat of his air horn — and squealed wobbling into the off-ramp. I had to hit the brakes hard to bring it down from sixty-five to thirty-five, and even at that we almost lifted two wheels off the ground on the sharp ramp turn. But the traffic had blocked Behrenman from getting to the right fast enough, and he would have to go on to the next exit. We had lost him.

I drove under the freeway and got back on, going in the opposite direction from my previous heading. We went east three quarters of a mile and got off to head north. I kept an eye on the mirror but we had no company. I turned into Las Palmas at nine forty-five and found the boarded-up hideout without too much trouble — a feat accomplished only because I’d spent most of my thirty years in this town and knew the back streets by heart.

We were going slowly enough so that Joanne could speak without fighting the wind. She said, “That was very neat.”

“Thank you, ma’am. For my next number I whistle and the Jeep gets up on its hind legs and dances in time to the music.”

“Are you as collected as you’re trying to make me think you are, Simon?”

“No,” I said shortly, and turned into the gap in the high oleander hedge.

The place was dark and silent, which meant nothing. When I turned the engine and lights off, I sat motionless long enough for him to get a good look at us from whatever crack he was using in the boarded-up windows. Then I got down and walked to the door, avoiding the broken glass easily by moonlight. The door was open, sagging. I waited outside and said, “Mike? It’s Simon. Joanne’s with me. Okay to come in?”

No answer; no sound at all. I went inside. It was black in there, I stayed near the door and lifted my voice — possibly he was asleep. “Mike!”

Finally I went back to the Jeep and got the flashlight from its clamp under the seat, told Joanne to wait, and went inside with the light. He wasn’t in the front room. I made my way through the rest of the place, picking a path carefully over piles of fallen ceiling plaster. After fifteen minutes I was satisfied he wasn’t there. It left me in a sour mood; I didn’t want to waste half the night tracking him down. I went back into the main room and flashed the light around once more, ready to leave; the flashlight beam picked up something out of place on the seat of the old couch and I went to have a look.

It was a piece of paper torn off the corner of a newspaper. On the white margin was written in pencil, in a crabbed hand, C–I’m going to your place. Meet you there. Mike.

I took the note outside, got into the Jeep and showed it to Joanne. She said, “I suppose ‘C’ is you?”

“I can’t think of anybody else it’s likely to be. But it raises a question or two. Why my place? And where could he have got transportation from here to there? He left his car up in the foothills.”

She said, “Something may have frightened him. That’s his handwriting, I guess, but it’s much shakier than I remember it.” She stirred, hugging herself; nights cool down fast in the desert. “Do you suppose he’s remembered something important?”

“We’ll find out,” I replied, and pushed the starter. Might as well head home, anyway, I thought; I needed a quiet place to think and if Madonna thought we were on the run after ditching Behrenman, my house was the last place he’d look for us.

I kept a careful eye out for surveillance on the way but spotted none. We took back streets and roads across town — the Jeep was too conspicuous. It took forty minutes to get to my dirt road, and when we passed Nancy Lansford’s lonely outpost I turned off the headlights and drove the rest of the way by moon and stars. It was no great feat, with the silver desert glowing with pale reflection.

From a mile away I could see there were no lights on at my place, and I applauded Mike for having that much sense. In some ways it doesn’t pay to have a home which is also a goddamn beacon. The view of the city from the house is marvelous; the view of the house from the city, of course, is equally distinct.

There was no car in the yard. “He must have hitched a ride. Who with, I wonder?”

We dismounted from the Jeep and I called out, “Mike?”

There was no reply. Joanne looked at me. I said in a murmur, “Stay put,” and went forward, pulling the Beretta out of my hip pocket, not liking the distant sensation that had begun to crawl through me — a feeling like ice across the back of my neck. I headed for the nearest corner of the house, got into the shadows where moonlight didn’t reach and sidled along the wall toward the door.

The screen was shut but I heard the buzz of flies heavy in a swarm, and as I got closer I saw them, hanging angrily in a knot above a thick mound on the doorstep. I took in my breath sharply and bent down to look.

The body lay drawn up, fetal. The side of his head, above the ear and just behind the temple, was a sickening, jellied crater, faintly glistening in the starlight. Death had sucked all expression off his boyish face. The sour odor was subtle but impossible to disregard, any more than the lurching of sick spasms in my belly could be ignored. One sock, bunched, had fallen down around his ankle; the trouser leg was crushed up to the knee and the hairy leg was a spiderweb of half-scabbed blood. His left hand, visible, was twisted awkwardly, with the thumb, and index finger bent back beyond the natural possibilities.

I rolled back his eyelid but there was no need. There wasn’t any question of his death. He had been tortured, systematically bludgeoned and lacerated. Automatically my stricken mind catalogued the evidence and calculated the method: brass knuckles, a knife and something heavy enough to cave in his head. The blood on the rest of him was ample indication that the other injuries had been sustained before the final massive blow which had, mercifully by then, killed him.

The first I was aware of Joanne’s nearness was when I heard her begin to choke. I straightened, wheeled and got an arm around her, pushing her back away from it.

She forced enough control of her voice to say, “It’s Mike, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, my God, Simon.” I heard a faint jangling and after a moment recognized it — the ring of the telephone in the house. It rang a second time, and stopped. My head snapped up; I stepped out into the yard and threw my glance downhill, and spotted it — the hill-crest overglow of headlights, coming up, and mingled in the glow the rhythmic flash of red and blue. Police car, with the rooftop dome light flashing.

Joanne had one arm outstretched against the wall of the house, bracing herself, looking faint. I put sympathy aside and snapped at her: “We’ve got five minutes, maybe less. You’re going to have to act a part. Come on, snap out of it — we’ve got a lot to do and no time.”

She stirred and blinked. “Yes. All right. What do you want me to do?”

I told her, in a rush of words; and we did it.