The Hit

Chapter Nine

I woke up drowsily when she came burrowing down under the sheet with me like a warm, furry, inquisitive pet, creeping into my arms, fitting against me with close-together warmth. I felt the soft tickle of her hair on my skin. Burning slivers of daylight lanced into the room through cracks at the edges of the blanket-drape. I looked at her over a stretching interval. Her flushed, unsmiling face was inches from mine. Inside, I felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her. The macabre ghost of Mike threw a shadow across my thoughts, but the terrifying threat that hung over us, the urgency of hard danger, created in me — and in her — an urgency of blood needs. Joanne sighed and wriggled and gave me a serene unhurried kiss; she stirred against me, her mouth softened and parted; we were drugged with panic. Her short breaths beat a fiery rhythm; her throat pulsed. We moved together and I felt the pound of her blood and mine. The cruel drive of urgency: she gave herself to me with a newer, deeper, more brutal abandon than ever before.

Afterward she said, “Love is a tough animal,” in a puzzled, drunken murmur. “This was crazy — my God, we just performed a funeral! I think now I understand why people have wakes. We — needed this. Am I babbling?”

“Yes. Go on and babble.”

“God, Simon, I’d forgotten all about your — about that son of a bitch last night with his combat boots and his huge revolver. You must hurt like hell.”

“I wish I was one of those movie cowboys who take eight tons of punishment and come right back without a hair out of place and wreck the whole saloon. What time is it?”

“You asked me that yesterday morning, remember? It must be about eight. I slept on the couch because you’d passed out and I didn’t want to disturb you. But I woke up with the sun in my eyes and it was — lonely.” I remembered the tumultuous months we had had together, in what now felt as if it must have been a prior incarnation, a different world — a world without grim, frightful terror.

We dressed and went outside under the burning sky. Heat pressed down. I drove her down to Nancy Lansford’s. Nancy came around from the back of the house, big and shapeless and happy to see both of us. I told Joanne to stay out of sight — I would return by midnight at the very latest; I left her in Nancy’s care and drove alone toward the city.

Almost half my forty-eight-hour grace period was gone, but I had set my own deadline well in advance of Vincent Madonna’s. If by midnight I did not feel substantially closer to finding the loot than I was now, I would give up the search; Joanne and I would run for it. I hadn’t decided where, or how; I knew we had to disappear. I still had in my pocket the name of the plastic surgeon Mike had mentioned, but surgery required more money than I had. As for Mike’s $5,000 roll of cash, only the murderer knew what had happened to it; I hadn’t found it on Mike’s body.

I couldn’t assume that Mike and Aiello had been killed by the same person. It was possible — if Mike knew too much, he could have been killed to shut him up. But the waters were muddled by the unmistakable signs of torture. The obvious questions, then, were: (1) what had Mike’s murderer expected to learn by torturing him, and (2) had the murderer learned it?

I stopped at a filling station near the freeway, its price war pennants flapping. The attendant ambled forward with much less enthusiasm and haste than he would have displayed had I been driving an $8,000 Kluge with a slurpy twenty-six-gallon tank. While he filled the Jeep I put a dime in the newspaper vendor and pulled out a copy of the morning paper. I scanned the Aiello story — three front-page columns, cont. on p. 5 — but there wasn’t much I didn’t already have. The police had found a station wagon abandoned a mile from Aiello’s house. It had been wiped but they had found two fragmentary fingerprints identified as Michael Farrell’s. Farrell was being sought for questioning. There followed a garbled version of Farrell’s history and hearsay assumptions that Farrell had a gripe against Aiello. No mention anywhere that Aiello had a safe, or that it had been robbed. Either the cops still hadn’t learned that part or they were saving it. There were a few details I hadn’t known, like the bullet that had killed Aiello: a 9 mm bullet fired by a “German automatic pistol,” unspecified make. That would probably be either a Luger or a Walther. So far, in my encounters with various personae, I had not seen any German automatics.

There was something obscene about the way the gas station attendant shoved the hose nozzle into the gas tank tube to sell me the last possible drop. I paid him, looked up an address in a phone booth by the curb, and drove under the freeway and across the north side of town toward the fashionable foothills.

Cliff View Terrace was a middle-sized shopping center built on the leveled top of a steep hill. The buildings, all one story, were faced with the pink-streaked gray brick that is used when you want to be ostentatious about your construction costs. There was a good deal of landscaped greenery; shops and offices fronted on eccentrically laid out walkways under awnings and shade trees. I parked the Jeep in a strip of shade and spent five minutes on foot finding what I sought. I finally located it near the back of the shopping center in a small quadrangular building introduced by a tall signpost from which, on chains, hung the names and occupations of occupants: Sylvester Johnson, D.D.S.; Julius Stein, M.D.; Fred Brawley, M.D., F.A.C.S.; and six more.

Brawley had a corner office at the back of the square. A narrow asphalt lane went past the backside, near the door marked PRIVATE; I saw I could have parked right there, on the lip of the hill.

I walked into the front office. The waiting room was just a waiting room. Indirect lighting, modern furniture built for design rather than comfort, magazines mildewing with age, carpet and walls done in pale hospital green. The receptionist-secretary was a starched fat blonde girl with an antiseptic polite smile, seated in a small cubicle behind a little glass window like a bank teller’s. There were three patients waiting — a teenage girl and a matron, both reading magazines, and an old woman with cyanotic skin who sat with her legs crossed and stared at the tremor in her left hand.

I put an elbow on the sill of the receptionist’s window, stuck my head in and said, “Doctor in?”

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“No, I’m not a patient. But if you’ll—”

“Doctor Brawley sees pharmaceutical salesmen only on Thursday afternoons. If you’d care to leave whatever literature you have and come back Thursday afternoon, I’m sure—”

“I’m not selling,” I said. “Look, just tell him Mr. Crane’s here about the missing property he wanted investigated. Will you do that?”

“Mr.... uh...?”

“Crane. Simon Crane.”

She masked her confusion by reaching for the phone, pushing a buzzer and turning away from me in her swivel chair so I couldn’t hear her speak.

When she put the phone down she gave me a startled look and said, “He’ll be right out Mr. Crane.”

“Thank you.” Obviously she was dying to know what missing property it was. I didn’t oblige; I went to a chair and sat.

It took six minutes. Then Brawley appeared in a doorway and beckoned. The old woman beside me started to get to her feet and Brawley said, “I’ll be with you in just a moment, Mrs. Chandler.”

I followed him down a corridor. Doorways on both sides led into examination rooms, an X-ray room with a fortune in equipment, two labs, several bathrooms, a small operating room. At the back in the corner of the building, he had his office and consultation room. It was large and luxurious, like the office of a senior corporate executive. Picture windows in two walls gave a wide view of the city, a few hundred feet below. Brawley’s desk was placed in front of one of the windows, just enough to one side so that a patient looking at him wouldn’t be blinded by the glare behind.

He didn’t sit, or offer me a seat. As soon as he closed the door behind me he said, “Well?”

“I’m still looking for your money,” I said, which was true enough as far as it went. “Maybe you can help me find it.”

“Me?” He laughed; he was trying to act affable but he was too ill at ease to bring it off; he hadn’t quite settled down yet from the minor manhandling I’d given him yesterday. Trying to look casual, he leaned a crooked elbow across the top of a brown metal filing cabinet. Just behind him, set in the wall, was a three-foot office wall safe, the combination-dial showing. On an impulse I said, “Is that safe locked?”

“Not now. I only lock it when I’m out of the office.”

“Mind if I look?”

His eyebrows went up. “Certainly I mind.” Then he waved a hand through the air. “But go ahead if you must.” He pulled the round door open. There wasn’t much inside — a green lockbox and two stacks of papers and a row of small bottles which, it could be assumed, contained prescription narcotics.

I nodded. “Just a stab in the dark. Obviously I can’t be sure you didn’t steal the money yourself.”

“I’d hardly be looking for it if I already had it.”

“Smokescreen,” I replied.

He smiled. “Have it your way. What progress have you made?”

“I don’t know yet. But you were tied up with Aiello one way or another — don’t bother to argue the point, Doctor — and you must be acquainted with some of the other prominent people who had dealings with Aiello.”

“Assume whatever you want. It may not get you very far.”

“Let’s put it this way. You must have visited Aiello’s house quite a number of times.”

“I did, yes. To put things in his safe and get things out. They weren’t social calls. If he had other people in the house he didn’t introduce me to them — he kept them out of my sight, or vice versa. What are you trying to do, compile a list of his associates? I’m a rather poor subject for that sort of interview, I can assure you.”

“Just tell me this. On your various visits up there, did you ever notice a pink Cadillac parked near his house?”

Brawley’s eyes gave away brief alarm. He frowned to cover it. “What’s that got to do with my money?”

“What kind of car do you drive?”

“Why, a Jaguar. Didn’t you see it parked outside? An XKE sports model.”

“Yeah. You’re quite the image of a sport, Doctor. Who owns the pink Cadillac, then?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Try again. You telegraphed the first time I mentioned it. It rang your bell.”

He clamped his mouth shut. I pulled the Beretta out of my hip pocket and got tough. “I’m not playing a game. It would be a shame if you got shot with your own gun, Doc, but it’s important to me to find that car. You’re the only one I’ve met who knows anything about it. Now let’s have it.”

He licked his lips; his eyes were fixed on the gun. I took a pace toward him and lifted the Beretta, making an effort to look menacing, and after he backpedaled and put up both hands, palms out toward me, he said, “All right... all right. I do know a man who owns a pink Cadillac, but I’m sure he couldn’t be the man you want. He couldn’t have stolen my money.”

“Why not?”

“He’s too rich to need it.”

“Nobody’s too rich to need three million dollars.”

“Three million? Good Lord, is it that much?”

“Who is he?”

Brawley frowned at me. “Look, I’m sure it’s not the man you want. This man is very rich, very prominent. He’s an old friend of mine, and I must say a lucrative patient — he’s a notorious hypochondriac.”

“The name, Doc.”

“Baragray.”

“John-Ben Baragray?”

He nodded, tight-lipped.

I said, “Well I’ll be damned.”

John-Ben Baragray was a sort of ambulatory national monument. I had never seen him, let alone met him, but I was well versed in the Baragray folklore. He was a mossy-horn Texan who’d made his first fortune in east Texas oil then come west. One of those sleepy old back-porch kingmakers who owned half the land and most of the politicians in his rural bailiwick, he lived on a sixty thousand-acre ranch in the next county, fifty miles from the city. His fortune allegedly measured in the hundreds of millions. Among other things he was one of the state’s most powerful bankers. His wealth was mostly tucked away in a variety of tax-dodge foundations that owned not only most of his own county but half the capital city as well.

When I stopped to think about it, it seemed only natural there could be a connection between a man like Baragray and the Madonna-DeAngelo-Aiello mob. Both were exponents of political bossism; both exemplified the feudal way of life.

It took me an hour and a half in the Jeep to reach the gate of Baragray’s fence. It was a working gate, thrown across a cattle guard, built into a four-strand barbwire fence that stretched in both directions along a straight line to the horizons. This eastern county of the state was plateau land, six-thousand-foot high country carpeted in tall yellow grass. Darker spots on the distant hills were Hereford and Brahma cattle grazing. Three small airplanes buzzed around in the sky — modern cowboys, air-dropping rock salt, herding cattle, reconnoitering the herds.

Beef-raising, for those in the know and those rich enough to do it on a scale of massive efficiency, was one of the most highly profitable ventures available to a man with large capital — certainly by far the most lucrative of all agricultural pursuits. John-Ben Baragray, on this ranch and seven others scattered throughout the West, was one of the country’s biggest cattlemen.

I drove several miles on Baragray’s property, on a road he must have paved at his own expense, before I reached his headquarters. It was more of a village than a ranch. There were an airfield, a filling station, a company store with post office, and a town-sized scattering of small but sturdy frame houses for married employees, as well as a bunkhouse and a far-flung litter of workshops, barns and miscellaneous outbuildings. A forest of windmills sprouted throughout the camp. Most of the vehicles in sight were pickups, Jeeps, trucks and power wagons. There were a few souped-up automobiles.

It was, all together, a nice little baronial empire, all belonging to one man. The master’s mansion was in keeping and in scale. It was a three-story splendor of sprawling wings, screened-in verandahs and balconies.

The ground floor of one wing was a garage, its five doors open against the heat. All five stalls contained cars. A Rolls or Bentley, an Alfa Romeo, a Jeep station wagon and two Cadillacs.

Neither Cadillac was pink.

A butler, in livery, answered my knock and looked me up and down without expression. It was the first time in my life I had ever met a liveried butler. I gave him my name. He asked what it was with reference to. I said it was personal and private and I had been sent by Dr. Brawley. He said I could wait in the parlor, showed me in and went.

The walls were studded with Renoirs. It was the sort of house which could easily have been ugly and baroque, but whoever had decorated it had owned taste enough to stop well short of that. Impressive as it was, the house — at least as far as I could tell from this part of it — had been designed with one paramount purpose: comfort. The furniture was massive, upholstered, but not overstuffed; most of it was covered with leather. The high ceiling was supported by dark beams at least eighteen inches thick. The carpet was the most enormous Chimayo Indian rug I had ever seen.

The room was cool, fanned without drafts by unobtrusive central air conditioning. The far wall, to which I walked now, was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

By their books shall ye know them. John-Ben Baragray had a catholic collection on his bookshelves. Philosophy, science, literary scholarship, and one section very heavy on military history. There were three shelves of novels, but none of them could have been classified as light reading. All the books looked as if they had been read. None seemed to be rare or expensive editions; they were books that had been accumulated by a reader, not a collector.

There was a deep leather reading chair, well worn, and a chair-side table that supported two cork coasters and a collection of pill bottles. I bent down to look. There were nitroglycerine pills, stimulants, depressants and amyl nitrate capsules. I frowned. Brawley had called him a hypochondriac — but you didn’t prescribe nitro and amyl-nitrate for psychosomatic disorders. Those were remedies for severe heart disease. A violent murder, transportation and burial of the body — all these committed by a man with a weak heart? It didn’t—

“Mr. Crane? Simon Crane? Do I know you, sir?”

The voice was a deep round boom. I straightened up and turned.

He was an enormous old man. He towered over me. He wore shirt and trousers of what looked like death-wish black. His hair was a full gray mane; he had a sweeping mustache. His face was crosshatched with weathered creases, and his hand, which he offered, was powerful and horny.

“I’m John-Ben Baragray. You mentioned Fred Brawley’s name.”

“How are you?” I said by way of greeting.

He answered the question literally: he made a good-natured groan, which resonated off the rafters, and said confidentially, “Truth told, I’m a sick man. A very sick man. You were looking at the pharmacy over there — I’ve got a bum ticker of course. If I was a building the doctors would condemn me. Do you know how close I am right now to having a coronary? But to hell with it. Modern medicine — hogwash. Of all the false gods we worship, the most false is the idea that man progresses. An African witch doctor has as high a percentage of cures as the highest-priced physician in the world today.”

He lowered his head to examine me from beneath his heavy unruly eyebrows. “You’re not falling apart with sympathy at all. Hell, that’s the penalty for being an oversized man — you don’t get appreciation of your misery when you’re ill. Well, if you let me I’ll spend the whole day talking about my numerous ailments, and I suspect that’s not what you came here for. You’ve had a long drive in an open Jeep under a goddamn hot sun and therefore I deduce it must be something too important for the telephone. Can I get you a drink?”

He was already walking, with short paces for a long-legged man, to a bar beyond the front window. I said, “Just beer, if you’ve got it.”

“A man shouldn’t drink anything but beer on a day this hot,” he agreed. He removed two bottles of beer — some foreign brand I’d never heard of — from a small concealed refrigerator. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d opened the bottles with his teeth, but he used an ordinary five-cent church key, handed me a bottle without bothering about a glass, and lifted his bottle in toast. “I drink to you, sir. Your life expectancy is longer than mine.”

That was doubtful. I tasted the beer and it was excellent. John-Ben Baragray pointed to a chair. We sat, facing each other; I said, “I’ve got a crapshooter’s instincts and sometimes I play by them. I came here with something in mind but I’ve changed my mind.”

“You’re not a doctor, of course, even if Fred Brawley did send you.”

“He didn’t send me. He suggested your name when I put a question to him.”

“What question?”

I considered his wise, tough, worldly face. I said, “You’ve probably heard, Salvatore Aiello was murdered.”

“Yes.” He watched and listened expressionlessly, slightly skeptical but not aroused. I felt disconcerted.

I said, “I’m not a cop, but I’ve got an important stake in finding out who killed Aiello. The only lead I’ve got is a pink Cadillac that was seen leaving his house at about the time of the murder. Brawley told me you had a pink Cadillac.”

“I did,” he said, without emphasis. “Anything else?”

“What’s your connection with Aiello?”

The bushy brows lifted; nothing else moved. After a moment he said, “None whatever. Of course I know who he is — was. I won’t deny I’ve had a few dealings with an associate of his, but I’ve never had anything to do with Aiello.”

“Vincent Madonna?”

“If you like naming names,” he said. “Yes.”

“Politics?”

“Naturally,” he said. In the back of his tone there was the hint of a Texas drawl, but it wasn’t pronounced. He had a voice like a bassoon. He said, “Madonna and I are on different sides of the fence. It’s no secret. He wants to bring the gamblers into our state, legally, and I want to keep them out. I’ve met Madonna a few times, tried to negotiate the question, but he doesn’t believe in negotiating. That’s all right — I can be pretty stubborn myself. I don’t like those bastards but I respect them. Do you want to know anything about my pink Cadillac?”

“Sure.”

“I sold it a month ago.” He gave me a look that might have passed for a fleeting smile; he said, “I can prove it if necessary.”

“Who’d you sell it to?”

“The Cadillac agency. I swapped it for a new car.” His chuckle was a thunderous rumble. “Naturally the word went around that I traded it in because the ash trays had filled up. That’s the curse of wealth in this country. The fact was, the car was several years old and I don’t treat cars gently. It needed replacement. Well, never mind. The rich are always hated, you know, and I’ve learned there’s no way to prevent it. You can donate a lot of money to good causes but you’re accused of dodging taxes. You can drive around in a cheap used car and wear old clothes and act like one of the boys and they say you’re cheap or phony or trying to suck up to somebody or crazy or insecure. If you’ve got good manners you’re a snob and if you’ve got bad manners you’re nouveau riche and that makes you a slob. If you live according to your income you’re conspicuous and vulgar, and if you don’t you’re a tightwad. There’s only one answer to it and that’s to quit giving a good goddamn what anybody thinks and just do the hell what you feel like doing, because that’s the only thing money can do for you anyway — buy you freedom.”

He stopped suddenly and gave me a sharp glance. “Hell, you didn’t come here to listen to a sick old man bleat about the poverty of riches. Is there anything I can do for you besides tell you about pink Cadillacs? Another beer? A bite of lunch?”

“No. No, thanks.” I got up, feeling like an intruder. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I had a feeling before you walked in the room that I’d been given a bum steer.”

“It happens,” he said, “all the time. I’m sorry I couldn’t help more. You’re sure you won’t stay and put on the feedbag with me?”

“No, I’ve got to—”

“Nobody around here eats with me any more,” he said, overriding me with the parade-ground strength of his big voice. “The hired help think it ain’t proper and I’ve got no family left. My wife died two years ago and my only son was an Air Force colonel, shot down in Vietnam. How about a bite of lunch? You look like a man who can make good conversation.”

The poor, sick, lonely old fossil. I shook my head and declared, “I’ll take a rain check. If we’re both still alive next week I’ll take you up on it.”

“By God, I’ll hold you to that.” He smiled for the first time.

Heat clung to the ground like melted tar. It was past one o’clock; I felt the crowding press of time as I drove out the front gate and turned left on the highway, pushing the Jeep up to speed. One or two thoughts had begun to jell in my mind and I knew where I wanted to look next.

Ten miles west of Baragray’s gate the plateau ended abruptly at the Mogul Rim. The desert lay beyond, below the three-thousand-foot scarp. The highway made several sharp turns and went down the face of the rim with long slopes and hairpin switchbacks, hugging the cliffs. I’d started down the steep narrow pitch, with the sheer drop at my left, and a green car ahead of me pulled out onto the road, going in my direction. I braked and mouthed an oath. The car ahead built up a little speed but after that I knew I was stuck. He wasn’t much of a mountain driver. I had to keep it down to twenty-five to accommodate him, and I couldn’t see any place to pass. I chafed. This was no time to get stuck behind a schoolteacher. I could see vaguely past the sun glare on his back window the faint shape of his head and shoulders hunched nervously over the wheel.

The road bent around a promontory and kept going down; we crawled around two tight hairpins and then I spotted a straight stretch approaching, where I might be able to get by. Impatient, I moved up close behind him, downshifted, hit the horn button and pulled into the left lane, gunning it.

It was downhill; the Jeep shot forward. But as I pulled parallel, the green car accelerated.

I turned my head to yell at him — and saw his wide, florid face.

It was Ed Behrenman — the tail I’d shaken off last night. The crimson face broke into a taut grin. I saw a gun in his right hand, coming out across the sill, a big Army .45 automatic. He tugged the wheel over, bringing his car across the white stripe, crowding me onto the edge.