Брайан Гарфилд - The Hit

“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.”