Hit and The Marksman (6 page)

I strode across to the radio and turned it off. Joanne was staring at it; her hands and body had become still. She hardly seemed to be breathing.

I went from the radio to the couch, picked up her cigarettes and matches and stuffed them in her handbag, pushed it into her hands and said, “Come on.”

“What? Where?” She seemed stunned.

“I want to get you to a safer place than this. Then I've got one or two things to do.”

She was not the kind of girl who had to reply to everything that was said to her; she trusted me enough to get up and walk through the door when I held it for her. Outside, I squinted in the sunlight and said, “We'll take both cars. You go out first and I'll follow you. Drive down to the Executive Lodge and wait for me in the parking lot—I'll be right behind you.”

“Why both cars?”

“I'll be going places from there and you may need yours.” I didn't add that I wanted to hang back on the way down and make sure she wasn't followed.

I didn't bother to lock the house; I went over and climbed into the Jeep. She started her car up and gave me a long look through the windshield before she put it in gear and swung around past me and headed down the hill. Feeling the dig of the .38 in my hip pocket, I backed out and turned to follow her.

Chapter Three

I kept the Jeep in second gear and lay well back to avoid Joanne's dust cloud. She slewed around the bends faster than I liked to take them; by the time I reached the bottom of the dirt road she was a quarter of a mile down the county highway, roaring toward the city.

I was watching to see if any cars pulled out to follow her; watching my own rear-view mirror as well. If there was a tail, he was an invisible one. Joanne squealed under the freeway overpass and led me across the north side of the city on the six-lane boulevard known as the Strip, which was a raw, neon five-mile stretch of gas stations, hamburger joints, car lots, discount barns, loan offices, artsy-craftsy galleries and gaudy supper clubs. It was peopled by gaily-costumed sun-worshipers, small-time crooks and kids in riot-hued cars with bald tires. A block away to either side were the tract developments—sleazy cracker box houses with gravelly little desert yards, erected by speculators who put ten percent down, financed the rest, and made huge after-tax profits by deducting heavy depreciation. Future slums.

The Strip was notorious for its spectacular teenage murders and for the fact that Vincent Madonna's stooges owned most of the car lots and all the supper clubs. Everybody knew it, but of course nobody could prove it. Brightly sunlit, brand new, and never more than one story, the Strip's clean, modern buildings seemed incongruous to outsiders who felt underworld characters inhabited only shadowy alleys in tall concrete-and-brick slums. You had to travel the Strip at night to get the full effect—motorcycle punks circling with deafening roar, hippies wandering the beer joints, herds of fat Cadillacs browsing in front of the supper clubs, slick-haired hoods and very thin divorcées cruising the bars in search of kicks.

Thirty years ago it had been a cow town, 25,000 people. Now the population was swollen tenfold by the retired, the drifting, the failed, the health-seeking, the opportunistic, the escapist. Every year the number of retail bankruptcies was staggering. It had the fragile aura of impermanence—no yesterdays and no tomorrows; eat, drink and gather ye rosebuds. It was a slick, chromium imitation of Los Angeles in the desert.

Ahead of me, Joanne's convertible turned past a gas station that had its pennants flapping, went around a divider and headed south through the housing tracts. The sun baked my head and shoulders—at 127 degrees, asphalt becomes muddy in the streets, and it was already tacky and soft. An Air Force jet whistled past at low altitude, climbing and shrieking, cracking eardrums and plaster and glass as it zoomed upward to clear the mountains. If you called the base and complained, you got the non sequitur of the decade: “Be glad they're ours.” The boys were up there rigorously defending our country against air attack from Mexico. A few months ago one of them had crashed into a supermarket and killed eleven people.

The Executive Lodge sprawled near the south freeway cloverleaf. It was a big new motel with all the efficiency of an electronic computer, and all the warmth. I had picked it because I was fairly certain it didn't belong to one of Vincent Madonna's dummies.

An intense layer of heat lay along the parking lot. I pulled in beside Joanne's convertible and spoke:

“I'll be out in a minute.”

She gave me a startled-fawn look and glanced toward the street. She was thinking about the fact that she was in full view of the road. I pointed to the narrow covered paveway that shaded the ice and coke machines and said, “Try the shade,” and got out of the Jeep. I watched her walk into the passage, swing of hips and clip of calves; she didn't ask any questions. The sun was miserably hot.

I folded the Jeep cushion down to keep the sun off the seat, and went up the sidewalk under the concrete eaves. The heat sizzled through the soles of my desert boots.

The lobby was sterile and cool, almost deserted. There was a coffee shop with a counter and a round rack of paperbacks at the cashier's desk. The echoing imitation marble door and soft-lullabying Muzak gave the place a mausoleum air. The walls were fake rough-stucco ornamented with phony Mexican artifacts. There were the obligatory plastic flowers and potted plants.

The desk clerk had a crew cut, vest and tie, and an earnest chamber-of-commerce face. Groomed and tanned, he was probably the terror of the swimming pool. He gave me the subliminal leer which desk clerks practice for use on men without wedding rings who check in for a double before noon. Without making an issue of it I let it drop that my wife and I had driven overnight from Los Angeles, to avoid the day-driving heat, and wanted a quiet room—preferably in back—to get a few hours' rest before an evening appointment. I didn't care whether he bought the story. The important thing to sell was the Los Angeles idea; I signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden of Sherman Oaks, filled in a fictitious make and model of car with a California license plate number, and paid cash in advance. If the room clerk filed us in mind as two adulterous Californians having an affair, so much the better. The fact I paid cash instead of using a credit card would reinforce that idea.

Dangling the room key, I headed for the front exit, then made a detour toward one of the open acoustic phone cubicles along the front wall. I had picked up the receiver before I noticed that the phone had no dial; obviously it went through the motel switchboard. I was about to replace it on the hook when a girl's voice chirped on the line and I thought, To hell with it, the risk was negligible; I gave her the number of police headquarters.

“Are you registered here, sir?”

I thought. “No. I'll leave a dime at the desk when I finish the call.”

“Twenty cents, sir.”

“Yeah.” They must make a bloody fortune on phone calls.

I heard the girl chortle. “Ordinarily we don't let outside people use the house phones, sir, but since this is the police number it must be all right.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I drawled. I could hang up, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble …

“Police headquarters, Patrolman Garcia. Hello?”

I said, “Lieutenant Behn, please.”

“Sure. You happen to know what division that'd be?”

“Homicide,” I said.

“Okay. I'll get you Homicide, they'll put you through to him.”

It took two more relays but finally I heard his voice: “Behn here.”

“Larry, this is Simon Crane.”

“Well, well.”

“Can I talk to you?”

“It's your dime.”

Twenty cents, I thought. I said, “What have you got on the Aiello case?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Larry Behn was one of the handful who had decided to stick it out and fight from the inside. A long time ago I had decided to trust him. I said, “I used to be pretty close to Aiello's secretary and it looks like they think she was involved in it.”

“And if she was involved, you were too, hey? All right—where is she?”

“She doesn't know anything,” I said. “I can't help you, anyway—I'm not with her now. I assume you've got it down as murder. I only heard the radio flash.”

“Murder, yeah. Two slugs in the head, no powder burns, and he sure didn't bury himself.”

“Have you got anything? Not for broadcast.”

I heard him breathe. He was thinking. Finally he said, “Right now we haven't got much worth talking about. They're running the slugs through the lab for comparison photos. In a day or two we may find out something from the FBI central files. But if it's a mob execution, I doubt it—they'd use a clean gun. Otherwise, what can I tell you? No tire tracks worth talking about, no footprints, no fingers. A little rubber from an automobile floor mat stuck on his belt, but it would take us twenty years to find the right car to match it. Nothing under the fingernails. Postmortem lividity shows he was killed someplace else and taken out there for burial. No sign of the murder weapon. We figured it for a mob hit at first but we've checked out people like Pete DeAngelo and Tony Senna and Ed Baker, and I think they're all clean. They've all got alibis of one kind or another but they're not the kind of alibis they'd cook up if they'd known they were going to need alibis, if you get what I mean. I even checked out Vince Madonna—he's clean on it, too.”

“How do you know?”

“No comment,” he said, which told me the answer: Behn must have had surveillance on Madonna last night, for one reason or another, and the tail must have reported that Madonna hadn't had any contact with Aiello.

“Any ideas, Larry?”

“Nothing worth the waste of breath. Maybe it was some sorehead that got muscled by the mob.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, thinking of Joanne's ex-husband, Mike Farrell. Maybe.

“Time of death?”

“The medical examiner says between two and five this morning. Look, Simon, you haven't talked to me and I haven't told you a thing, all right?”

“Sure,” I said, frowning and thinking.

After a minute Behn said, “Look, I realize it's your dime but I've got a few things to do besides sit here with a dead phone on my ear.”

“Sorry,” I said. “What was he wearing?”

“Aiello? Sport shirt, trousers and belt, slippers. No socks. Deceased had a handkerchief and some loose change in his pockets. No wallet, no keys. If it means anything, he usually wore a toupee and he didn't have it on.”

“Dentures?”

“He had his own teeth.” I heard Behn hawk and spit—I could picture him aiming into the green metal wastebasket beside the cluttered desk. He would sit back now, phone hooked between shoulder and tilted head, going through papers and tossing them on various piles as he spoke to me. Behn was a freckled bony redhead with an undershot chin and a huge Adam's apple.

I said carefully, “You've been over his house by now.”

“Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary. The place is empty, nobody home, but no sign it was messed up any.”

So, I thought, somebody cleaned it up before the cops arrived. I said, “Was the bed slept in?”

“Can't tell. It was made up, but not with clean sheets. We got to the housekeeper an hour ago and she said she always makes the bed with hospital corners. Whoever made it up this time didn't use them. So maybe he spent part of the night in bed and got up and somebody made the bed after he left.”

“Any bloodstains in the house?”

“Not so far. We've still got the crew out there.”

I said, “Okay, thanks. I'll—”

“Not so fast. I've been patient and polite—now it's your turn. How much do you know about this?”

“Less than you do, evidently.”

He grunted. “No. Won't wash. You said the Farrell girl may be involved, and we've got a flyer here that says her exhusband got sprang from the state penitentiary yesterday. Too many coincidences, Simon.”

“It sure looks that way,” I said agreeably. “Any line on Mike Farrell?”

“Half the force is looking for him. So far, nothing. We checked the girl's house but she hasn't turned up.” And no doubt he had a stakeout on Joanne's place now. Behn's voice went on: “Farrell got off the bus yesterday afternoon at five and we lose him right there.”

I said, “I talked to somebody who saw him last night. He was driving a station wagon.”

He pounced: “How'd you get that? Who told you? Simon, where are you right now? Maybe you'd better come in and we'll have a little talk—”

“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I haven't got anything that could possibly help. We'd waste each other's dime. I'll be in touch.”

I hung up before he could protest; crossed the lobby, dropped two dimes on the desk, pointed a thumb at the phones, got the cashier's nod and went outside into the broil.

Joanne was still in the roofed passageway, wearing her dark glasses and a scowl. I handed her the motel key and told her where to find the room, then went out to her car and drove it around back to meet her.

A weedy lot stretched to the back fence, beyond which half a mile of empty land separated the place from the near boundary of the Air Force base. The flayed, sunbeaten, baking pan of the desert reflected a shimmering heat mist into the air.

There was no one in sight. She unlocked the door and we went in. It was one of those interchangeable rooms, furnished in cheap modern pine with plastic tops and vinyl upholstery, watercolor prints on the walls. The full blast air conditioning had chilled the room to an inhospitable temperature; it had a vaguely antiseptic smell. Everything was very new: you could live forty years in a room like that and it would never be home. The aura of loneliness held ghosts of solitary salesmen, teenage assignations, conventioneering drunks, yapping vacationing kids.