Hit and The Marksman

by Brian Garfield

  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.

  Joanne sat on the bed, kicked her shoes off and crossed her fine long legs. Then she fished for a cigarette. During all this stage business she didn’t once look at me. She was, I realized, terrified. She nudged a discarded shoe with her toe and said absently, “I’m always cranky when my feet hurt.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Look, there’s no such thing as a perfectly safe place for anybody. Nobody’s immune—there’s always random chance to mock you. But this ought to be as safe as anyplace for a few hours or even a few days. I’m pretty sure nobody followed us, and it would be a blind million-to-one shot if anybody saw us who’d recognize us and know what to do with the information.”

  “All right,” she declared, “I’m safe. Until tonight or next week or whenever they find me. What happens in the meantime?”

  “I’m going to try to take the heat off.”

  “How?”

  “There are a few things I can try,” I said, and let it ride like that; she didn’t press it. I said, “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden from Sherman Oaks if anybody asks. Do you know how to use a gun?”

  I tugged the .38 out of my hip pocket and she looked at it without feeling. “I suppose so,” she said. “But if you’re thinking of bearding Madonna in his den, you’ll need it a lot more than I will.”

  I put the gun on the bed beside her. “If that was what I had in mind,” I said with a little grin, “I wouldn’t get within a mile of him with a gun.”

  She didn’t smile. “You’re a sweet, generous son of a bitch, Simon. I wish—”

  Whatever she had meant to say, she didn’t finish it. I tried to dismiss it with an airy gesture and a casual voice: “The one born every minute, I’m him.” I bent down and gave her a quick brushing kiss, without force; she didn’t draw back, and I straightened quickly and went to the door. “Stay put until I call you. They’ve got a lunch counter in the lobby—room service might be better. Watch TV and don’t think about things, all right?”

  “Sure,” she muttered. “Sure. I’ll be all right. Simon … be careful.” She sounded miserable.

  I made a face and went. Got in the Jeep and pointed it out of the lot. As I stopped at the stop sign, I heard a car rushing forward from the left and turned in time to see a green sedan speed by—glimpse of a thick, red-nosed man, squinting and hard-jawed behind the wheel—then it was gone beyond the freeway overpass, the wind rush and dopplering-down engine roar fading. Nobody I knew. I chastised myself with profanity for being a jumpy fool and chugged onto the road, headed for the foothills east of the city.

  As the Jeep surged along the eastbound boulevards I reviewed what I knew about Vincent Madonna.

  Madonna, at fifty-five or thereabouts, had arrived in the States at the age of six or seven, grown up in East Harlem and the Bronx and graduated from hoodlum to crook to gangster. At various times he had been named publicly by the FBI and other agencies as a wartime gasoline ration-coupon racketeer (arrested in 1944; released when witnesses failed to turn up), as a labor union and slot machine boss, and—in the early fifties—as the top enforcer of the Mosto Family, which went west to Las Vegas in 1949 and moved into the Southwest. When Don Frank Mosto had died of natural causes a few years ago, the resulting gangland earthquake had settled with Madonna firmly established; even since then, he had stood on his empire like a crowing cock on a dunghill. He was big and powerful and had tried to polish himself with a surface of respectability, but he hadn’t succeeded; Madonna had come a long way up from the gutter but he never managed to wash off the smell. He lived in a world inhabited by dinosaurs and circumscribed by the law of omerta—the Cosa Nostra code of silence. He paid a New York outfit $20,000 a year to keep his name out of the papers; he put a price on everything, and a value on nothing. A nice cozy chap to deal with. I had never met him, but there wasn’t a cop south of Boise who didn’t know him by sight.

  The foothill suburban ghetto which Madonna inhabited was singularly free of crime—a fact that had puzzled me when I was a cop, because it was the kind of rich folks’ neighborhood that normally makes fine pickings for cat thieves and night-crawling burglars. I soon learned the warnings had gone out: independent crooks were to stay out of the area and avoid giving it a bad name. Any lone wolf crook who ignored the warnings was likely to disappear permanently. Madonna didn’t want to give the cops any excuse to prowl the neighborhood, because he didn’t have all the cops in his pocket. It would have been not only expensive but impossible: there were certain cops he couldn’t get to. Not all cops were actively corrupt, although virtually all of them were passively corrupt: they couldn’t help knowing their buddies were on the take, but they did nothing about it. Corruption was not open, it was never admitted; a bribed cop stood on tenuous footing, and wasn’t likely to confess his corruption, not even to another cop he was sure was equally guilty. And no honest cop could feel safe in blowing the whistle; he couldn’t be sure of the superior officer to whom he had to blow the whistle. The power of graft-producing organizations like Madonna’s lay in that twilight dubiousness: no official could trust a fellow official enough to spell out what he knew.

  Vincent Madonna’s command fortress was a sprawling foothill mansion perched on a cactus-studded knell with a view of the entire city. It was an architectural bastard—part Spanish adobe-mission, part Texas ranch style, part Sunday Times house-beautiful feature page. All on one story, it had several wings and outbuildings, spidering out with the shambling gra
celess opulence of a Las Vegas motel. There were sprinklers on the lawn, ticking loudly, and four or five cars cooling their wheels in the circular gravel drive, including Madonna’s 1941 Lincoln Continental, a painstakingly restored classic. Everybody’s got to have a hobby. The smell of the watered grass was a warm spice that registered keenly in my nostrils when I parked the Jeep behind the Continental and stepped out.

  I had taken for granted that the place would be festooned with alarm systems and bodyguards; the latter assumption proved accurate enough—the door swung open before I got to it and a rum-looking Neanderthal gave me a sizing up which I associated in my mind with the look a hungry piranha would direct toward a raw hunk of bleeding flesh. He wore a sport jacket which he had obviously only put on in order to open the door so that his shoulder-holstered gun wouldn’t show.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like to see the Don. I’m not armed.”

  “What name?”

  “Simon Crane.”

  “Mr. Madonna expecting you?”

  “It’ll come as no surprise,” I declared.

  The bodyguard looked uncertain; then, abruptly, he turned to look over his shoulder at someone who had come up behind him. It was hard to see inside against the blinding light of the exterior sun, but then I heard that wheeze of a voice and recognized it immediately: an old injury to the larynx had reduced Pete DeAngelo’s voice to a harsh whisper.

  “Who’s all this?”

  The bodyguard took a step backward to explain to DeAngelo who I was and what I wanted, but DeAngelo brushed him aside and came forward. His tall frame filled the opening. “Hello, Crane.”

  DeAngelo was a sleek, cold man, hard and handsome and poison-cruel. He was a dandy: he was wearing white tapered slacks, white loafers with pointed toes, an ascot under a high custom shirt collar. His polished nails glinted. If MGM ever decided to make the Pete DeAngelo Story, the role might have gone to Robert Wagner. He had a deep suntan and opaque eyes; he revealed all the feelings of a marble slab.

  I gave him plenty of time to look me over. We had met before a few times—twice at the station house when he’d come to bail out a couple of the boys. Among his other accomplishments DeAngelo was a bar-admitted lawyer. He was also Madonna’s consigliore—councilor and right-hand man. His reputation was for ambition, brains and smooth if ruthless efficiency.