Hit and The Marksman (8 page)

The glass door slid shut. I figured at least one bodyguard was watching us but it was hardly worth staring to find out. I returned my attention to Madonna and said, “Look, if you really think I'm it, then you've not only picked the wrong horse, you've got the wrong track. Concentrating on Joanne Farrell and Simon Crane will never get your belongings back for you.”

“What is it you want me to do?” he inquired with his friendly businessman's smile.

“Lift the heat,” I replied promptly. “You've got that girl scared to death.”

“Well, now,” he said, steepling his hands together and tipping his head back to look at me, “for the sake of argument we'll assume we both know what you're talking about. Understand, I admit nothing. But let's you and me set up what the lawyers call a hypothetical case. Assume I've got some interest in some items that might be missing from somebody's safe. Assume there's been a lot of sensational publicity about somebody's murder, and there's going to be more publicity, and I don't enjoy that at all—in fact you can assume somebody's busy right now, planting news items about how the deceased must have had personal enemies from back east or something. Assume, in other words, I don't want any more rumbles. You follow?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. So we're prepared to be nice and quiet and civilized about it. If you turn in the missing items within twenty-four hours, or prove you and Mrs. Farrell couldn't possibly have taken it, then you can assume I'd be willing to forget the whole beef.”

He smiled. I suppose he meant it to be an engaging smile.

I felt dismal but not surprised; it had never been anything better than a long shot.

He looked at his watch, shot his cuff, and said pleasantly, “It's pushing noon. I'd be willing to go the few extra minutes—call it noon tomorrow, your deadline.”

“And if I can't produce?”

He shrugged his meaty shoulders and picked at a hairy ear. “I don't throw raw meat on the floor, Crane, it's not my style. I leave it to your imagination. I only mention there are friends of mine who don't mind putting the screws on people, hard, to find out what they know and what they did with stolen property.”

He didn't have to spell that out. I said, in a lower voice, “You can't get blood from stones. She doesn't know anything—I don't know anything.”

“Then all you've got to do is prove it.”

“How many people do you know who can prove where they were between two and five in the morning?”

“Too bad you're not married,” he answered, smiling slightly. Then he tipped himself up on one elbow and said, “If some of the fellows decide they have to put the screws to you two, they wouldn't leave you around alive afterward to testify about it. You understand that?”

“I understand it,” I said, “but I can't buy it. You haven't got enough evidence to justify it with the organization. You haven't got any evidence at all, period. I know it wouldn't have to stand up in court, but you'd have to show something.”

“Maybe if you two were members of my organization. But you're not. You're not wearing our silks, Crane. Nobody cares what happens to you and the woman.” He shook his head and said sadly, “The minute I laid eyes on you I knew you'd be one of those guys who had to do everything the hard way. I wish you wouldn't keep arguing—you made your pitch, I didn't buy it. That's all there is to it. You came to the wrong store to sell your kind of merchandise.”

I took a breath. “Twenty-four hours isn't enough time for a scavenger hunt. At least give us a couple of weeks.”

“To get out of the country with the stuff?”

“You know better than that. We—”

“Nuts. You two are the number one suspects. If you want it spelled out, it goes like this. Mrs. Farrell had the motive—things in the safe she wanted to get her hands on. She had the opportunity—she was one of only four people who had keys to the house and the alarm system, and the other three people are accounted for. I'm one of them, the housekeeper makes two, and then of course the deceased, he had keys, it was his house. You see, it's those keys that narrow it down, Crane. The alarm system down there is wired on a direct circuit that sets off an alarm here in my house if anybody busts into Aiello's place. Whoever went in there last night had to have a whole set of keys, not just something to pick the door locks with. There was no sign the place was jimmied or the wires cut. Aiello turned up dead wearing bare feet in slippers, which means he was in bed. If he'd had an appointment with anybody he'd have put socks on, he was the type; he didn't go around in his bare feet when he had company.”

“It could have been anybody he knew,” I said. “Somebody gets him out of bed and he goes to the door and sees it's a friend, so he switches off the alarm and opens the door and lets them in.”

Madonna shook his head. “No. There's only a small number of people he'd have trusted enough to let them in the house alone with him at that hour of the night, and they've all been checked out. You see?”

I opened my mouth, but the phone beside him rang. Madonna picked it up and talked and listened. When he hung up his smile was fixed. He looked up at me and said, “Room Seventy-Two, Executive Lodge. Mean anything to you?”

I tried hard to keep it off my face. Madonna shook his head, making the kind of face he would use chastising an errant small boy. “A poor try, Crane—and maybe it'll give you some idea how far you'd get if you tried to hustle Mrs. Farrell out of town. It wouldn't be discreet.” Watching my face, he added gently, “You're not a very good loser, are you?”

“I'm not playing a game,” I snapped. “Look, I'll beg if I have to. At least give us the two weeks. Maybe the cops will turn up something by then.”

“Why should I bargain when I've got a corner on the market? No deals, Crane—no gentlemen's agreement.”

I said bleakly, “What the hell do you expect to win by this?”

“It's what I don't expect to lose,” he said. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the chaise and stood up. He was a surprisingly tall man. He kept his voice friendly: “You made a mistake, Crane. You probably figured us for a pack of brainless thugs, and you should have known better—nobody gets where I am without brains. You made an error, you and the Farrell woman, trying to play cute and fast with us. Who do you think you're dealing with? I started peddling the streets of Harlem when I was nine years of age. So let's not insult each other. Where's the stuff you took out of Aiello's safe?”

“I don't know.” I lifted both hands. “One week—at least give us that.”

“Like you said, the cops might turn something up if I let it go too long. And putting your same hypothetical case, we could assume I can't afford to have the wrong people get their hands on the missing items. A week's too long. But I'll tell you what I'll do, Crane, to prove we're all civilized. I'll double your time. Call it forty-eight hours.” Still smiling, Madonna put his thick arm over my shoulders and walked me to the sliding glass door.

Chapter Four

When I stepped up into the ancient Jeep, flipped the key and punched the starter, all the while watching Freddie who stood leaning impossibly forward in the doorway like an ugly immutable gargoyle, I was reviewing in my mind the confrontation with Madonna and regarding myself, my performance, with dazed wonder. Here I was with forty-eight hours between us (Joanne and me) and our joint funeral, yet I seemed to be behaving with cool aplomb. I had faced Madonna not with ravings, and not with begging desperation, but with some kind of detached calm which had sealed itself around me like a plastic bubble.

It was, of course, the kind of deadpan repression that masked absolute hysteria.

I lifted one hand and flapped it nastily at Freddie, whose Neanderthal face made no acknowledgment but watched with bovine intensity while I backed the Jeep out of the drive.

I turned down the narrow curvy asphalt lane; my mind had gone into neutral, I wasn't even attempting to lay plans. Paralysis; I suppose I had consigned myself to execution. I formed the vague idea of buying a half-gallon of tequila, taking it to Joanne's room, and getting splendidly drunk. I thought of a rock patch back in the Peloncillos which I had always meant to explore but had never gotten around to; it welled up in me an almost nostalgic yearning for all the planned things I had never done and, now, never would do. Books I meant to read, places I meant to see, old friends I wanted to see again. Joanne's image blossomed in my mind, vivid and sharp—the warmth of her body, the lusty bark of her laughter, flash of eyes, toss of head. Riding the Jeep through a low dip in the road, I had the sudden feeling she was sitting just behind my shoulder, and all I needed do was turn around and look into her smiling violet eyes, encircle her with my arms, fold her close against me, hearing her husky laugh, scenting the fragrance of her hair.

It came to me that the sharp sense of loss was stronger in me than my own private fear of danger. That lonely sense of imminent loss stunned me: I hadn't let myself believe she had come to mean so much to me.

The feeling of having her just behind my shoulder became so strong that my eyes shifted involuntarily to the rear-view mirror. Of course there was nobody in the bed of the Jeep. What I did see in the mirror was the shark-toothed chrome snout of the big dusty station wagon, bearing down on me from behind.

Mike Farrell got out of the car and took me at gunpoint in the Jeep to the boarded-up old house in Las Palmas, and a few minutes later I was sitting there in a lawn chair holding Mike's gun and waiting for Mike to struggle back to consciousness.

Mike sat up with a pained grimace. “Jesus.”

“How do you feel?”

He cringed when I spoke; his eyes dipped toward me, bloodshot. “I got a headache right down to my toenails.”

“You hit the door with your head.”

“You knocked me down and got my gun, huh? Trust me to do that right.” He gave a nervous, braying cackle.

The heat was close and oppressive. When he looked at the gun I had, he flinched.

I let him have a good look at it. Then I said, “What happened to Aiello, Mike?”

“I swear to God I don't know.”

“What happened to the stuff in his safe?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Then why are you shaking like a jackhammer?”

“Because my head hurts, goddamn it.” He looked away from me. The room was enormous, with baroque arches and domed ceiling. Mike sat like a taut-wound watch spring, his face down, heavy with thought. When he looked up again, he studied me with skittish caution and an apologetic, cowardly half-smile. His face was sweat-drenched and greenish; his baggy trousers, unpressed and too big for him, gave him the pathetic look of a diminutive circus clown. He must have lost weight in prison.

Suddenly he said, “What he had in that safe, Crane, it was enough cash to make a fast down payment on an aircraft carrier. They think I've got it, don't they?”

I said quietly, “How do you know what was in the safe?”

There was soft insinuation in my voice but he didn't react. He said, “Aiello showed it to me,” in a morose off-hand tone. I went over to the window near him and perched on the sill—Mike's head turned on bulging neck tendons to keep me in sight. I dangled the automatic over one knee. As a cop I had learned to sit above a man when questioning him.

I said, “How much?”

“What?”

“How much does it take to make a down payment on an aircraft carrier?”

“Someplace between two million and three million. Closer to three.” Seeing my look of disbelief he added quickly, “I swear it's the truth—look, that's why I wanted to talk to you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you and me and Joanne, we're all in the same fix. We got to get together on this. Maybe we can work it out if we put our heads together.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about what's going on,” I observed.

“Look, Crane, I didn't make the hit on Aiello and I ain't got the money.”

I said, “Let's hear the whole thing.”

“Okay—but first you got to tell me what you were doing up at Madonna's. You working for him now?”

“No.”

“And I just take your word for that?”

“Suit yourself. Here's one for you: what makes you think they've fingered you for it?”

“How else can they add it up? It's what I'd think if I was in their shoes.”

“Why?”

“It's a long story.”

“If I get bored,” I said, “I'll yawn.”

He swallowed and squeezed his hands. When he rubbed them together the sound was scratchy and dry. He kept staring abysmally at the gun in my hand; finally he said, “Look, all I want is off the hook and unless things have changed a lot in a couple hours, you're in the same boat. Can we help each other, Crane?”

“How do I know unless you tell me what you've got in mind?”

“I hope to hell you can help,” he muttered. “I got nobody else.”

“You've got yourself.”

“Yeah,” he said, off-key. “I been having myself for years.”

I didn't say anything. He tried to glare at me but he couldn't hold my eyes. He lifted his shoulders and let them drop; juices seemed to run out of him and he said in a weary voice, “Let me tell it my own way. I got to start way back at the beginning or you won't understand it. I been rehearsing this for two hours this morning. How much you need to know.”

When I made no answer he gave me a spasmodic shrug. “Look, I was a sax man, a pretty good sax man, and I used to be clean. I had this four-man combo and we booked around town, little toy wages but I had talent and I figured I'd make it. More talent than a lot of Charley the Stars ever had, but they eat. I didn't know that then.

“I figured if you could blow good and hit all the notes that move, all you had to do was wait for some A-and-R scout from Columbia to sign you up.