Hit and The Marksman

by Brian Garfield

  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?

  I turned toward her, opening my mouth to speak, and that was when the phone jangled in the bedroom.

  She shot off the couch. I froze. The phone rang a second time. I turned my face toward the bedroom.

  After a minute I realized I was holding my breath. The phone had not rung again. Two rings, and silence.

  I strode across the room. “It could be anybody at all,” I said, “but let’s not take a chance.”

  “I’ll get out of here.”

  “No. They’d see your dust.”

  “Then I’ll hide.”

  “Can’t hide your car,” I said. I had gone into the bedroom; I opened the footlocker. Cops have to buy their own side arms; I still had my .38 Police Special. I checked to make sure it was loaded, put it in the hip pocket of my Levi’s and went back into the living room. She was chewing her lip. I said, “We may as well face it now,” and opened the front door. “Stay behind me.”

  I held the screen open for her and then walked down past the rose bushes and stood watching the dark blue Ford come snarling up the dusty grade toward us.

  Chapter Two

  Watching the car come up, I was counting on the mob’s need to keep things quiet. Ours was a city in which the Cosa Nostra overlords still maintained impunity, with bought-and-paid-for cops and politicians, and a degree of anonymity: the southwestern Families hadn’t hit Life magazine, local newspapers hadn’t started any crusades, and PR men for Madonna’s modernized mob gave enthusiastic support to the Anti-Defamation Committee when it insisted there was no such thing as “Organized Crime”; if the town had any crooks with Sicilian names that was just coincidence.

  Maintaining good public relations and a peaceful surface of quiet was particularly vital to the mob right now: through his political mouthpieces, Madonna was exerting pressure to introduce legalized gambling into the state. It was sensitive; he couldn’t afford untoward publicity. Sal Aiello’s disappearance would be bad enough; the mob wouldn’t want to have to explain Joanne’s disappearance—and mine—along with it. So I didn’t really expect them to use too much muscle—unless they knew things I didn’t know. I glanced at Joanne in the shadows by the screen door; she was holding out on me, I knew that. I didn’t have time to press it out of her.

  There were two of them in the car—Cosa Nostra soldiers modestly masquerading in Hawaiian sport shirts. I knew them by sight: Ed Baker and Tony Senna. Baker was a bookie and numbers runner, not long on brains; he was driving the car but I knew he would let Tony Senna do the talking—Senna, who must have been a carney barker in some prior incarnation, was one of the mob’s running dogs, an enforcer with a glib tongue and a cruel sense of humor.

  The Ford rolled to a genteel halt ten feet from me and both men got out, not hurrying, not showing weapons, though it could be assumed they had guns under the flapping shirttails.

  Tony Senna walked around the car with both hands in his pockets and glanced at Joanne before he formed a smile with his teeth and said to me, “Hello, flatfoot. Hot enough for you? I hear the burglars are only breaking into air-conditioned houses.” It elicited a bark of laughter from Ed Baker, a big-nosed brute with shoulders like a Percheron, who looked as if he belonged behind a butcher’s counter. Baker, a onetime prelim fighter, was a grade-B Hollywood gangster with the personality of a closed door.

  Senna, sizing me up through his accidental smile, was another breed—a small, thin hood full of conspiratorial mannerisms; a sharpie. He had waxy Latin skin but you got the feeling you could have lit a match on his jaw.

  He said casually, “How’re they hangin’, Crane?” and shot a shrewd glance past me at Joanne. “Pete thought we might find her here. Pete’s pretty smart sometimes.” He meant Pete DeAngelo, Madonna’s consigliore, the number two man in the Family.

  Senna smiled again. “You ain’t talking much.”

&n
bsp; “What kind of talk did you have in mind?” I said.

  Ed Baker talked without moving his lips: “He’s got some heat in his back pocket, Tony.”

  Senna chuckled. “See how long it took him to spot that, Crane? I swear, Baker’s the dumbest guy I’ve ever met. He can’t even remember what comes after Walla.” He chuckled and drew a circle in the sand with his toe, and looked up abruptly, as if trying to catch me off guard.

  He said in a different voice, “You mind if we have a look around the place?”

  “I mind,” I said, “but if it’ll clear things up, go ahead and search. Just put things back where you find them.”

  Without turning his head, Senna spoke over his shoulder to Baker: “Look around, Ed.”

  Baker went toward the house. I stood back and kept an eye on him while he went past Joanne. She was stiff but composed; she met his glance without flinching. Baker went into the house.

  Senna was smiling again: “I’m glad you didn’t argue, Crane.”

  “I never argue with a criminal type,” I said.

  His smile disappeared instantly. “Save the cute answers,” he barked. “You wasn’t surprised to see us and you seem to know what Ed’s looking for in there, which makes it a good bet it ain’t here, and a better bet you know exactly what’s going on. Which puts you in a hard place. Now you want to say something funny?”

  He whipped his small-eyed glance toward Joanne and said, “Dolly, you take some pretty dumb chances. It wasn’t smart for you to come here.”

  “All right,” Joanne said coolly, “I’m not smart. Is that a crime?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Senna said. “I ain’t read up on the law.” He was, obviously, just talking to pass the time—he would make up his mind what to do with us after Baker finished his search. He probably had his orders from DeAngelo, and whatever they were, nothing we could say would change his mind; I intended to save my arguments for the higher-ups, if it got to that stage. But I backed up three paces to stand where I could watch both Senna and the front of the house; I didn’t want Ed Baker coming around behind us.

  Ed Baker came out of the house after a while and shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “You sure you looked everyplace?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “You’re a goddamned genius,” Senna said with vicious irony. “Can you think up anything else you ought to do now?”

  “Naw. It’s clean.”

  “Well, then, just to make sure, you might haul your ass over to that shack with the rock machinery in it.”

  “Uh,” Baker said, and swallowed. Senna said, “And after that take a walk around the place and see if you spot any fresh-turned earth.”

  Baker scowled and moved away toward the rock-tumbling shack. I made a half-turn to keep him in sight. I hadn’t seen any gun-bulge against his shirt but Baker was the type who could squeeze a tennis ball flat in one fist.

  I said to Senna, “He won’t find anything. We haven’t got what you’re looking for.”

  “We’ll see.” He turned again to Joanne: “One or two people ain’t going to like it much that you came runnin’ up here instead of going to your real friends right away and telling them what happened. You gave your solemn word you was going to stay away from this cop, and your friends respected your word. It ain’t likely to sit well.”

  Joanne said, “If I knew what had happened I’d have told them. I don’t know.”

  Senna’s look of sarcastic disbelief prompted me; I said, “Look, she didn’t know anything and she got scared. She thought she’d be blamed for it.”

  “For what?” Senna breathed, and to Joanne: “How much you told the cop?”

  “He’s not a cop.”

  “Yeah. Ex-cop. He’s still got the odor from here.”

  I gave him a cool smile, wanting to give him no satisfaction. He said to her, “One more time. How much you told him?”

  She spread both hands. “How much do I know? Nobody lets me in on any secrets, you know that.”

  I said, “She went to Aiello’s house at seven-thirty and found it empty. The place had been torn apart. She got scared and came here. That’s all there is.”

  Senna considered it. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.” He turned and watched the shack, waiting, until Baker came out and shook his head and began to prowl the grounds, head down like a sniffing bulldog. Senna said abruptly, “Dolly, I’ll want your car keys a minute.”

  “They’re in the car,” she said shortly.

  Senna grinned “Don’t never leave your keys in the car,” he said. “Some crook might steal it. You know eighty percent of stolen cars had their keys left in them? Dumb.” He walked over to the convertible, glanced inside, reached in to get the keys, and walked back to the trunk. He opened it, looked, and shut it; put the keys back in the ignition and spent a moment bent over the car with his back to us, pulling up the seats and looking underneath and shoving them back in place. Then he lifted the hood and looked under it—an automatic gesture, I suppose, though I couldn’t conceive of anybody hiding valuable flammable papers in the engine compartment of a car. He slammed it shut and sauntered back toward us, smiling vaguely. “Ain’t no blood in the trunk, which could be a good sign.” He walked to my Jeep and gave it a cursory glance—there is no place to hide anything in an open Jeep—and came back.

  He watched Baker for a few minutes and finally, evidently satisfied himself that Baker wasn’t going to find anything; he turned to me and said, “Aiello will turn up.”

  “I guess he will,” I agreed judiciously.

  “He’ll turn up dead, or he’ll turn up alive. I kind of suspect he’ll turn up dead.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If he does,” Senna said in the same regular tone, “you and the girl friend are the number-one suspects. Naturally me and my friends don’t fly off the handle, we don’t jump to conclusions, and maybe Aiello’ll turn up in Tijuana with a blonde on each arm havin’ a fine time. But it don’t look likely, does it?”

  It wasn’t a question that required an answer. He went on:

  “He had some goodies that belonged to some of us. Me and my friends, I mean. You know, like Pete? We’re kind of anxious to get it back. Now, if you two got it; it might be a good idea for you to give it back. You could pack it up and ship it to Pete anonymous, so we wouldn’t have any way to prove who sent it, but you’d be in the clear because the heat would be off—unless, of course, we happened to find out you killed Aiello and ditched him someplace. I’m just making suggestions, you understand. We’re all civilized people; we don’t give orders or make threats. But just as a suggestion I might mention it wouldn’t be considered friendly for either one of you to try to leave town before we find out what’s happened to Aiello and the stuff that disappeared from his house.”

  Baker was still on the prowl; Senna called him over. They got into the car and Senna was smiling amiably when they turned the car around and drove away.

  Joanne hadn’t moved an inch. Now her shoulders lifted defensively and she put the back of her hand to her mouth. I walked over to her and put an arm around her shoulders and walked her inside; this time she didn’t argue. I sat her down on the couch and said, “I think you could use a drink.”

  “Make it a double,” she said in a small voice.

  I made a drink for her and stood nearby while she gulped half of it down. I said, “Aiello will probably turn up soon, trying to get out of the country with the loot.”

  “Don’t try to calm me down with lies.” Her hands dug out a mangled cigarette like an addict snatching an overdue fix. “They can’t let it lie, Simon. The things in that safe were too hot. They’ve got to. find them.”

  “They won’t find anything by killing people. They know that.” I turned half away from her, hardening my gut consciously before I said, “Senna said we were the prime suspects but he was just making talk. If they didn’t have a line on somebody else, they’d have been a lot rougher on us. If they really thought you knew where th
e stuff was, they’d have put the snatch on both of us and you’d be sweating it out right now.”

  I wheeled toward her and said flatly, “Who is it, Joanne?”

  Her eyes flashed. “You’re babbling.”

  “You’ve been holding something back.”

  She put the drink down, jammed the cigarette pack into her purse and snapped it shut; got up and headed for the door, icy and stiff. I let her get as far as the door and then I said, “It’s Mike, isn’t it?”

  It stopped her in her tracks.

  Her teeth were white against the tan face. “What—what gives you—”

  “He’s back,” I said, making it a statement.

  She took a breath. “How did you find out? How long have you known?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, “until you just said that.”

  The menace in her eyes came and went quickly, and was replaced by self-disgust. “I never was a good liar.”

  “I’m a hard man to lie to,” I said, not softening it. “Now sit down and finish your drink and tell me about Mike.”

  She moved back to the couch like a mechanism, sat by reflex and leaned back; her eyes never left my face. I stared at her until she blushed. When she finally spoke it was without apologia or preamble:

  “They let him out of prison yesterday. He came back to town last night. I honestly don’t think he meant to get in touch with me at all—he only wanted to see Aiello and try to straighten things out so they wouldn’t get after him all over again. But Mike always did have a talent for trying to soothe troubled flames by throwing oil on them. Simon, I swear to you he had nothing to do with Aiello disappearing.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “No, but he—”

  “Don’t swear to things you don’t know,” I said. “Christ, of all the asinine things to do. All this rigmarole just to protect Mike Farrell—why? You’re not even married to him any more?”