Hit and The Marksman (3 page)

The wind had roughed up her hair; there was a thread of moisture on her upper lip. She looked heat-flushed and scared. I couldn't really make out her eyes through the big sunglasses. She looked faint. “I feel like such a fool. Nothing can happen on a beautiful day like this, can it?” Her smile was quick and nervous. She kept looking down the road, as if somebody were chasing her. “Can't we talk inside?”

“Sure.”

She had a curious detached fortitude; I had seen it before: the world could be falling down around her and she would still have to set the stage, get everybody in position before telling them about the disaster. We walked toward the house. I was sharply aware of the quick rat-tat of her heels on the gravel and the nylon whispers of her thighs. Her head hardly came up to my shoulder; the skirt was tight, but she moved along quickly with crisp lithe strides.

I went inside after her and let the screen door slam behind me with a weatherbeaten, slapping sound. It made her jump; she smiled apologetically and slumped against the doorjamb, leaning against it with her shoulder propped up. She said, “I'm in a state of absolute utter panic,” and shoved herself toward the kitchen. She marched in and disappeared around the corner. I followed scowling, and when I reached the kitchen door she was filling the percolator.

“I don't even know how to begin. I suppose that's why I'm puttering around like a madwoman.” She put the sunglasses away in a pocket sewn in her skirt. Her big violet eyes were provocative, more from habit than design. She measured the coffee and put it on to boil.

I said, “Why don't you sit down and get a grip on yourself. I'll do that.”

“You've got no talent with coffee,” she said. “I've got to have something strong and hot or I swear I'll collapse right here.” She shook out a cigarette and found a match by the stove. Her hands trembled violently. I took the match away from her; she clamped the cigarette in her teeth while I lighted it.

She shook her head in violent angry defiance, as if to clear it. She took a deep drag on the cigarette and let it out slowly; she gave the coffee a waspish glance, because it hadn't already come to a boil, and when she had exhaled the lungful of smoke she said in a half-hysterical airily light way, “Aiello is gone.”

“What?”

“Gone. Just … gone. The house is empty and the safe's wide open. Empty.”

She tipped her head far over to one side like a little girl and gave me a peculiar, savage grin. “Isn't it lovely?”

My pulse thudded. “Great,” I agreed. “You'd better tell me about it.”

She waved a hand in an arch gesture and turned to face the stove; over her shoulder she said vaguely, “They'll think I did it, naturally. Got rid of Aiello somehow and robbed the safe.”

“Naturally?” I echoed dryly. “Sure. Naturally they'll pick you first—I mean, you being an expert safecracker and all—”

“Don't make jokes,” she snapped.

I scraped a hand across my mouth. She lifted the coffee off the stove. I couldn't see her face, but the line of her back was taut, tense, brittle, like a cornered animal.

The coffee smoked as it poured out of the pot; it was black and oil-thick. She carried the mug into my small living room.

I followed, stopping in the doorway. The roof cooler pushed a slow damp breeze across the room. I waited until she sat down on the couch and then I said, “All right. Go over it again—try to make some sense. What happened?”

She tucked her feet under her and held the coffee in both hands and blew on it. “I got to the house at seven-thirty, as usual. Aiello likes to work before ten and after four—he hates the heat, he spends the middle of the day in the indoor pool with the air conditioners blowing on his vodka collinses.”

“Only this morning he wasn't there.”

“It isn't that so much; he often spends the night out, but when he does, he always leaves somebody in the house on guard. This time there was nobody. And the safe, wide open and empty. Papers scattered around the office. The place has been ransacked.”

“Maybe he cleared it out himself and took the stuff somewhere else for safekeeping. Maybe he got word there was going to be a raid.”

“I don't think so,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I just don't.” She looked up momentarily. “I know him—you don't.”

“Uh. What was in the safe?”

“You'd be better off not knowing.”

I shook my head. “If it's what you think it is, the mob will react. The kind of reaction will depend on what was inside the safe.”

She took a suicidal drag on her cigarette and stabbed it out in the ash tray. With smoke trailing from her mouth she said, “Let's just say there was enough to make it worth their while to kill half the population of this town to get it back.”

“Cash?”

“A lot of cash. And files—the kind they couldn't afford to see in print.”

“How much cash?”

“I never counted it,” she said, snappish. “It was a hell a lot, millions I suppose, but I don't know. I'm supposed to be Sal Aiello's secretary but there are a lot of things I don't get to see.”

“Go on.”

“Look, Simon, I'm only part of the front. All the big shots try to look like legitimate businessmen, and part of the act is having a pretty secretary who doesn't look as if she came out of a reform school typing course. Aiello has his finger in quite a few legitimate businesses, enough to keep me busy with correspondence and phone calls and filing. I know it's all a front and he knows I know it, but it's the kind of thing you never say out loud. I don't get to see the books and I've never even been in the same room when he had the safe open. The safe isn't in the office, you know—it's in the library. But I've absorbed enough loose talk to know they keep dynamite in that safe. Aiello isn't the only one who uses it. Vincent Madonna has things in it. So does Pete DeAngelo and any number of others. It's like a central clearing station for all of them—it's an old vault they bought from a California bank that went out of business.”

“How old?”

She blinked. “How should I know?”

“It's not a silly question. If it's old enough, it's easy to crack—and they wouldn't keep top-secret dynamite in a cracker box.”

“Of course they would,” she snapped. “My God, Simon, sometimes Aiello keeps a hundred thousand dollars in cash lying around the office in unlocked drawers. Nobody has the nerve to rob the Mafia.”

“Apparently,” I remarked, “somebody did.” It occurred to me this was the first time I'd ever heard her use the word “Mafia.” I said, “Who else knows about this?”

“I don't know. Maybe they haven't discovered it yet. What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“He didn't have any appointments for today. But Madonna and DeAngelo drop around when they feel like it. So do a lot of other people; it's like a clubhouse up there. I know I haven't got much time—God, Simon, when I saw the mess I knew all of it, right in that split second, I knew I was in terrible trouble. I don't know what to do.”

I watched her for a moment, then headed for the bedroom. “Stay put a minute,” I told her, and went to the phone by the bed. I dialed Nancy Lansford, my neighbor down the road, a two-hundred-pound spinster who lived on a small inheritance and spent the winters taking tourists and school children on nature walks in the desert. She owed me a few favors—her house was full of polished rocks I'd given her. She was a relaxing old windbag, tart and practical as only a fanatically conservationist old maid could be.

She answered breathlessly on the fifth ring; I identified myself.

“Oh, Simon, good morning, isn't it a beautiful day?” She had a reedy, chirping voice. “I was outside watching a buzzard with my field glasses. Aren't they remarkable birds? Why, only last week I—”

I cut her off: “Nancy, I need a little help.”

She answered immediately: “Name it.”

I grinned into the phone. “I may have some visitors this morning and I'd like to have a little advance warning if they decide to come. Would you let me know if any cars start up the road toward my place?”

“Of course. But why—”

“I haven't got time to explain,” I said. “If anybody drives by your house, just dial my number, let the phone ring twice, and hang up. Don't wait for me to answer, just hang up after two rings. Got it?”

“I've got it. I must say you sound very mysterious.”

“I'll tell you about it later,” I said, thanked her and hung up.

When I looked around, Joanne was standing in the doorway, her eyes wide. She narrowed them and said, “I was eavesdropping.”

I nodded. “If they want to find you, this is one of the first places they'll think of looking. I'll feel better with a few minutes' warning.” Nancy lived three miles away, at the foot of my road.

She said, “I'm glad—because I'm sure they'll be after me.” She went back into the living room. When I got there she was back on the couch with her coffee, lighting another cigarette. She was addicted to menthol cigarettes and strong coffee.

She said, “You never asked me any questions, but I suppose you must have figured out that they had something on me, to keep me—loyal.”

“Yeah,” I said, without inflection.

“It was in that safe.”

“What was it?”

“I don't want to tell you. What difference does it make? Papers, tape recordings, pictures, movie films. It was there. Now whoever took it has it, and I'm scared of what they may do with it.”

There wasn't much for me to say. I waited. Presently she resumed: “Naturally they know I knew it was there. They'll assume I wanted to get my hands on it so they wouldn't have a hold over me any longer. And they'll assume I told you about it, and you and I cracked the safe, to get it, and got rid of Aiello somewhere. They'll assume that,” she added with a shudder, “because if fantasies came true, it's exactly what I would have done.”

“You mean you were planning to burgle the safe?”

“Don't be silly, I wouldn't know how. But I wanted to—a silly dream, I guess, but it was the only hope I had. I even thought of conning you into helping me do it.” She slanted a smile at me, twisted and nervous. “The irony is, I didn't do it, but they'll blame it on me, anyway.”

She made a face, drew her shoulders together, and sat hunched forward with her elbows between her knees. “Simon, I'm scared to death they'll kill me for something I didn't do.”

I sat down by her and squeezed her arm. She pulled away, out of my reach. “Don't—please. Don't try to comfort me, I didn't come here for that.”

“What do you want me to do, Joanne?”

She shook her head violently. “God knows. I'm just running blind. I ran to you because I thought you could protect me. Just another stupid dream—what can you do? Nothing. But here I am. Simon, I haven't healed over—I'm still in love with you, if it has to be said—but I don't want this madness to be an excuse for us to start things up again. I meant what I said last winter and I want to leave the air clear, not have that hanging between us, because I just don't have the strength. That empty safe has nothing to do with the way you and I feel about each other, or did feel or will feel. I know we gave each other something we both needed—anyway, something I needed—to feel alive again and persuade myself there was some little bit of hope left somewhere.”

Her voice trailed off; she was tense, expecting an argument. I wanted desperately to give her one. But I had my own injuries. I looked down at her: she sat hunched, brooding, ready to jump, hating the dismal trap she was in. She couldn't accept it with the bleak resignation of a tough alley broad because that wasn't her style; she had never belonged in the world they had trapped her in, which was one reason, I supposed, why she was valuable to the mob. She was animated, tidy and alive, slightly vain, often careless with risks, ruthlessly amorous yet amazingly—even after all of it—innocent of malice. She drove too fast and drank too much; she ran a headlong race with life, graceful in spite of the daily bitterness she must have felt, chained to them; and incredibly, all of it had left few marks on her. I hadn't seen her in months before this morning; she hadn't changed at all, except for the tight lines around her mouth and eyes that were evidence of the strain of the moment. She was still, as always, girlish, lively, saucy, defiant. “Remember me?” she had said once—“I'm the girl with the cauliflower heart.”

I stood up. “All right,” I said. “Neutral corners—I'll keep my hands to myself. Let's get this figured out.”

She gave me a quick grateful look, and became smaller and heavier with relief, strain flowing out. She was looking with preoccupied anger into the coffee dregs and she was arrestingly beautiful in profile. I looked away and said, “If you want me to do you any good you'll have to lay everything out on the table. You're holding a lot back.”

“What is there to hold back? I've told you what happened. You always have to make things so damned complicated.”

“There's got to be more than you've told me. Nothing you've said so far convinces me you're in too much trouble. If the house is empty and the safe's open, why not assume Aiello just skipped? Took the money himself?”

“Aiello? You couldn't get him outdoors in this heat.”

“He disappeared in the cool of the night. Maybe he's holed up with a nice cuddly air conditioner—or on a plane to South America.”

“He'd never get all that stuff through customs,” she said. “Believe me, he didn't do it himself. He had no reason to. He'd have been stealing from himself, and from his friends. Vincent Madonna had things in that safe—Aiello wouldn't have the guts to steal a ten-cent stamp from Madonna.”

I recalled the front-page stories of automobile death traps wired with bombs. The rubouts and hits, attributed to the Madonna mob but, of course, never proved. Madonna was the head of the local Family: the don
vin done
. Salvatore Aiello was his
caporegime
—one of his field commanders in the Cosa Nostra pseudo-military setup. I had heard rumors about rumors—that there was bad blood between them, for no known reason other than the fact that Madonna was Sicilian while Aiello was Neapolitan. But she was probably right: no hood like Aiello would risk the wrath of the entire international organization by absconding with his boss's money. But what the devil could I do about it? Joanne couldn't hide from them any more than Aiello could. What chance did we have?