Брайан Гарфилд - The Hit

I got out carrying the briefcase, walked around and opened Joanne’s door. She turned sideways on the seat and came out legs first, moving prettily, a girl of supple grace. With my back to Freddie, I tried to reassure her with a smile. She reached for my hand and clutched it hard. We went up to the door and Freddie said in a monotone, “I got to frisk you.”

“Frisk me if you want. But the briefcase stays locked and you’ll keep your paws off the lady.”

“Now you know I can’t—”

I cut him off harshly: “You’ve got enough torpedoes inside the house to cut us to pieces before we make the first half of a false move. Hold your gun on us if you want.”

He looked us up and down. Pointing to the briefcase he said, “What’s in there?”

“Papers. For the Don’s eyes only.”

The husky rasp of Pete DeAngelo’s ruined voice shot forward from the room behind Freddie: “Okay, Freddie, never mind. Let them in and keep both eyes on them.”

Freddie stepped aside. We walked into the house. I felt the cold clutch of Joanne’s tensing hand in mind.

There were deep vertical lines between DeAngelo’s eyebrows. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and his arm was thickened by a bandage where I’d shot him last night. Cold, ruthless, hard and direct, DeAngelo gritted his neat white teeth in a satanic grin. He pointed to the antique Seth Thomas clock above the marble mantel and said, “The race is just about over, Crane, and you’re about to finish out of the money.”

So he had decided to bluff it through. That was all right by me.

Two men walked in from one of the house wings and posted themselves, without comment, on either side of the door through which they had just come. Ed Baker and Tony Senna. They both wore guns in unconcealed shoulder holsters. Senna looked into the doorway and nodded his head, and only then did Vincent Madonna make his entrance.

Madonna looked tired. His wrinkled suit jacket was undone and, as before, he wore no tie; his open collar revealed a tangled mat of dark hair. Big-rumped, he moved to the fireplace, ten feet in front of us, and set himself in a hipshot pose with one arm on the mantel. There was no preamble; he only said, “Okay, you’ve got the floor.”

I squeezed Joanne’s hand and set the briefcase down on a chair-side table by my right hip. I said, “You want to know who made the hit on Salvatore Aiello. You want to know who robbed his safe, and where the loot is now. Okay, that’s what I’m going to give you. But I’m going to give it to you in detail, because you’ll want to be able to check my story and find out if it’s true, and you can only do that if I give you all the details. It’s going to take a little time and it’ll go faster if there are no interruptions. If you’ve got questions save them till I’m finished. Check?”

“Go ahead,” he said, expressionless.

“Some of this is guesswork but if I’m wrong you can correct me. The important facts I have. It’s the background that’s guesswork because I haven’t had time to check it out. All right, here we go. Background. Aiello had an important appointment for some time after one in the morning, the night he was killed. You can check that with Judy Dodson. She doesn’t know who the appointment was with or what it was for. I’m not sure myself what it was for, but I know who it was with. Doctor Fred Brawley. Brawley went to Aiello’s house late at night because a man in his position couldn’t afford to be seen going there in broad daylight. The appointment was all set up and Brawley arrived, probably carrying some important information that Aiello wanted — blackmail, evidence against the lieutenant governor, who up to now has been opposing your attempts to get gambling legalized. I assume that’s what Brawley had because that evidence is part of the loot from the safe, but if it had been there earlier than that night you’d have used it, and the lieutenant governor would have switched his stand before now. Okay. That explains why Aiello was anxious to see Brawley, and why he let him into the house at that hour. What Aiello didn’t know was that Brawley had a beef against him. I don’t know why but I can guess. Aiello was probably screwing Brawley’s wife. Am I right about that?”

“Keep talking,” Madonna said.

“If it wasn’t that it was something else, but Brawley definitely had a beef. He went to Aiello’s and got Aiello to open the safe under the pretext of putting the blackmail evidence in and maybe getting some money out. As soon as Aiello opened the safe, Brawley shot him. I suspect that when Brawley first worked out the plan, all he wanted was to get back the abortion-malpractice dirt Aiello had in the safe. But then he got greedy. Three million dollars is an attractive lure to anybody, let alone a man saddled with a wife like Sylvia Brawley. Brawley probably figured with all that money he could disappear, go to Europe with a new identity and live like a king. So when he went to Aiello’s house he didn’t take his own car, which is a sportscar without much space in it. He took his wife’s car because it was a tremendous big Cadillac with plenty of room in the trunk. He put Aiello’s body on the floor of the back seat and filled the trunk with the loot from the safe. Then he buried Aiello out on the road project so that if the body did get found, it would look like a mob hit.”

Madonna’s head was lifted; he was listening to the run of my voice. I glanced at Pete DeAngelo, whose eyes were narrowed to slits. Nobody asked any questions so I went on: “Brawley thought he was in the clear. Nobody had known about his appointment with Aiello except the dead man, and as far as he knew, nobody had seen him go in or come out. One person did see him, though. Mike Farrell. He didn’t recognize Brawley but he remembered the pink Cadillac.”

I heard DeAngelo grunt but I didn’t wait. I said, “Brawley wanted to make sure nobody was on his trail. He planned to wait around town until the heat died down, then disappear. He was planning to disappear last night — but we’ll get to that. In the meantime, the morning after the murder, Brawley made some arrangements with a man named Ed Behrenman, a minor soldier in Aiello’s regime. Brawley gave me a cock and bull story about how Behrenman owed him a favor. The truth was Brawley probably had blackmail evidence against Behrenman and forced him to cooperate. At any rate, it was Behrenman who spotted me and Joanne at the Executive Lodge the other morning. While I was here talking to you, you got a phone call. It was from Behrenman, right?”

“You’re telling the story,” Madonna said, but then his lips peeled back and he said, “Yeah, it was Behrenman. Go ahead.”

“After I left you called Behrenman back and told him to stake out the motel.”

“Sure.”

I nodded. “It all fits together like a watch. Behrenman phoned Brawley and told Brawley he had instructions to stake out Joanne and me. That gave Brawley an idea what was up, and he went over to the motel. He wanted to talk to us because he had to know how much we knew, how close we were to finding him out. He must have felt fairly satisfied when he left, because he didn’t panic. He figured he’d thrown us off his trail for good with his elaborate yarn about the money he had in the safe that he wanted to get back. It almost worked — he was a good actor. Almost as good as Pete DeAngelo.”

I shifted my attention to DeAngelo. He had his slitted eyes on me like blades, motionless but ready to cut.

I said, “I can’t prove this but I think DeAngelo must have talked to Judy Dodson after I did. She thought I was working for DeAngelo but when DeAngelo told her I wasn’t, she told him everything I’d said to her. Right, Pete?”

“Go ahead. Dig your grave.”