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.”
I went back to Madonna. “DeAngelo knew Mike Farrell was mixed up in this somehow. He found Farrell sometime in the afternoon, probably about the time I was talking to Brawley at the motel. Don’t ask me how DeAngelo found Farrell. He probably just used his head and went looking in all the places he expected Mike to hide, and found him. DeAngelo put the screws to Mike. I don’t know if he had help but I suspect he did. Mike was roughed up pretty hard and it probably took at least two men to give him that kind of going over. You, Tony? Ed Baker? It doesn’t matter. DeAngelo squeezed Mike Farrell dry. He found out everything Mike knew, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, but he did learn that Mike had made a deal with Joanne and me, that the three of us were working together to find the loot. That must have convinced DeAngelo that none of the three of us actually had the loot. From that point on we were expendable — all three of us. He didn’t figure we had any better chance of finding the loot than anybody else, so why leave us around to mess things up?
“By this time Farrell was so badly tortured they couldn’t do anything else but kill him. DeAngelo had to get rid of the body, and he wanted Joanne and me out of the way, so he did the obvious thing: he planted Mike’s body at my house, then phoned the cops and talked to Joe Cutter because he knew Cutter had a personal grudge against me. Cutter came up to my place but he didn’t find the body.”
My eyes roamed from face to face. I returned to Madonna and said, “Now this is important. Everything I’ve told you can be checked — by you, not me. You’ve got the leverage and the manpower for it. Now here’s a question for you. I’ve just told you what Pete DeAngelo was up to. How much of it has he told you?”
Madonna’s glance whipped across to DeAngelo. DeAngelo opened his mouth and began to say something; Madonna said, “Sit down and give your mouth a rest, Pete.”
DeAngelo closed his mouth slowly, gave me a dark scowl and held it on me while he moved to the nearest chair and sat. Freddie the Neanderthal moved up to stand behind his right shoulder, only a few feet to my left. I turned to keep them in view, and resumed:
“If DeAngelo didn’t keep you posted on events, it was because he wanted to find the loot and keep it for himself. He’s too ambitious to be satisfied with being anybody’s number two man. He remembers how you took over this mob and he figures to do the same to you. With the money from Aiello’s safe, and the incriminating documents that went with it, DeAngelo would be in a hell of a strong position to move right in and take over the organization. Wouldn’t you, Pete?”
DeAngelo’s left hand reached the table beside him and gripped its edge. He didn’t speak.
To Madonna, I said, “Nobody likes to think himself a poor judge of human nature, and you probably don’t want to buy this, especially since Pete’s an old friend and I’m just a troublesome outsider. But think about this. The other night when I phoned you to ask you about the pink Cadillac, DeAngelo answered the phone. He sounded out of breath. I’m willing to bet he had just come in after planting Mike Farrell’s body.
“DeAngelo had learned one vital fact, either from Mike Farrell or from my telephone call here. The pink Cadillac. He knew, or he made it his business to find out, who owned that car. It’s my guess he had to do some detective work to find out, because otherwise he’d have gone after Brawley sooner than he did.
“In the meantime, yesterday morning, I went to Brawley’s to ask him who owned a pink Cadillac. Brawley’s own car was a Jaguar, and that threw me off. He sent me off on a wild goose chase to the boondocks. I was coming back from that when Ed Behrenman tried to run me off the highway over a cliff. Behrenman ended up dead at the bottom of the cliff. There was only one way Behrenman could have known where to find me. Brawley was the only man alive who knew where I’d gone, and I already knew there was a connection between Brawley and Behrenman. So then I knew who’d killed Aiello and taken the loot. I searched Brawley’s house but it wasn’t there, so I went straight to his office. DeAngelo knows what I found when I got there, because DeAngelo got there ahead of me. DeAngelo probably waited out back of the office until the last of Brawley’s patients and employees left for the night. Then, when Brawley came out the back door, DeAngelo shot him. He had a silencer on his gun and he knew nobody was likely to hear the shot. He was so sure he’d find the loot in Brawley’s office he didn’t even bother to keep Brawley alive long enough to make sure. The pink Cadillac was parked right there and that was all DeAngelo wanted to know. He put Brawley’s body in the car, jimmied the door and went inside. He was working on Brawley’s safe when I got there. That’s how he got that hole in his arm, in case he’s told you something to the contrary. We had a little shoot-out and DeAngelo went out the window. He didn’t stay long enough to find out what was in Brawley’s safe, but I can answer it if he’s still interested. There wasn’t anything interesting in the wall safe except a gun. It was a Walther nine millimeter and I suspect it was the gun that killed Aiello.”
“That’s fine,” Madonna murmured. “Only where’s the money?”
“It was right where it’d been all the time. In the trunk of the pink Cadillac. Brawley had a suitcase and a coat in the back seat. He was ready to take off for good when DeAngelo found him. Too bad DeAngelo didn’t keep him alive long enough to ask him a question. Incidentally, by now I’m sure you know they found not only Brawley’s corpse but Joe Cutter’s. I think DeAngelo must have shot Cutter, too.”
DeAngelo shot erect in the chair. “That’s a goddamn lie,” he rasped. It was the first reaction I’d had out of him.
Madonna told him to shut up and said to me, “Where’s the money now?”
I heard the raspy growl in DeAngelo’s throat before I saw him start to move with the corner of my eye. He had a gun under the loose tail of his sport shirt and he was hauling it out. Big Freddie, slow to react, was taking a surprised backward step when I shot my arm out, extracted the gun from Freddie’s shoulder holster, and snapped it downward just as DeAngelo’s gun leveled on Madonna’s belly.
The report of the gun was startling in that enclosed space. Bone fragments and blood sprayed from DeAngelo’s head. His bodily functions instantly lost their control; his sphincter relaxed and there was immediately the stink of human urine and manure.
Chickens will suspend their pecking order whenever one of their number gets sick. They all turn on the weak chicken and peck it to death. Ed Baker and Tony Senna had their guns in their fists before the echo died, but they were pointed at DeAngelo, not at me. DeAngelo’s actions, and the expression of his face, had been all the admission of guilt any of them would ever need to see. Before the body even began to slump in the chair, Senna and Baker had put bullets into it.