Hit and The Marksman (5 page)

“When?”

“Last night. He'd had a big argument with Aiello and he wanted a shoulder to cry on. My God, Simon, I wouldn't even let him come in the house. He stood on the porch and bleated at me through the door—I had it on the chain—and when I wouldn't let him come in he stormed back to his station wagon and went away with his tires squealing. I expect by now he's halfway to the Mississippi River.”

“Yeah. Maybe carrying the loot from Aiello's safe.”

“No.”

“Why for Christ's sake didn't you tell me all this in the first place?” I demanded.

Her answer was quiet and level: “Because I knew you'd jump to conclusions, just the way you have. I knew you wouldn't understand. I knew you'd get stupid and blind jealous—it's a weakness you've got.”

I didn't have time to stop and ponder whether that was true or not; I swung around the room, wheeled to face her, and said with desperate rage, “Didn't it matter at all to you that you might have got both of us killed? It may still happen! We're talking about an organization that lives and breathes distrust—nobody believes anything. If they find out you held out on them about Mike being here, they won't give you another chance to change your story.”

She said flatly, “Mike had nothing to do with it. If I told them about him they'd waste a lot of time hunting him down and they'd probably kill him, and it wouldn't get them anywhere; they'd still need to find Aiello and the loot. And believe me, Simon, we'd be in much worse danger then than we are now.”

“You keep saying you know he didn't have anything to do with it. Can you back that up with anything besides intuition and conceit?”

“Certainly.”

“Name it.”

“He couldn't have done it, that's all. I don't mean he didn't have the chance. I have no idea whether he has an alibi that will stand up. But I do know he's terrified of the Mafia; the only thing he's ever wanted was to keep them happy with him. He'd grovel and crawl if he had to—he'd be a sniveling yes-man, he'd polish Aiello's shoes. He'd do anything in his power to avoid getting them mad at him again. Mike would be the last man in the world to try anything like this.”

“He's been in prison. He could have changed.”

Her only answer was, “I saw him last night. You didn't. Simon, you've got to understand Mike. You've never known him.”

That much was true: I had only seen Mike Farrell at a distance. Before he'd gone to the penitentiary he'd had a nightclub combo at the Moulin Rouge; he'd been a fair saxophone player.

She said, “He's one of those nervous men who are forever lonely. Even when he wants to he can't share himself. I guess I must have married him because I could see he wanted to break out of that frightened shell, but he never has. I was like a lot of girls who mistake long silences in young men for maturity, but I was wrong, he wasn't mature at all—you have to remember I was only nineteen then, it was a long time ago.”

I sat hipshot against the windowsill and watched her. She wasn't looking at me. She said, “People like Mike are—parasites, Simon. He'd never kill a man or rob a safe—it takes too much initiative. Mike never does anything on his own. He's one of those people who feed on everyone they touch. It's compulsive, they can't help it—they hurt the people who love them until the love dies. I don't know, maybe a psychiatrist would blame it on his parents—he took me back to Cincinnati to meet them once. His father's a shopkeeper, a nice little man, about as ineffectual as wallpaper. Mike's mother was one of those big loud clubwomen who remind you of express trains. A martinet. She only wanted to use Mike to feed her own vanity—he was just something for her to be proud of when he played solos with the school band. The rest of the time she didn't want him around.”

She picked up her drink and drained it quickly. “He's an insecure man—full of anxieties. He's never had nerve enough to steal anything, let alone a gangster's money. It took me a long time to find out what half the wives in the world can tell you—a woman can never change a man. I tried to give him some backbone because I thought I loved him, but it just didn't work. He hated being a musician and he hated everything about his life, and finally he got involved with Aiello and the organization.”

“Aiello,” I said, “or Vincent Madonna?”

She gave me a sharp look. “Yes, him too.” The name made her uncomfortable; she hurried on, as if to fill the gap of silence:

“I was young and wild—that was six years ago, we'd been married two or three years. It was exciting to me, all those fast characters. I won't pretend I didn't enjoy it in a way, but then it started to get dirty. I got trapped in—something I don't want to talk about, something that got Mike scared of them.”

“Scared of who?”

She flapped a hand; her face was averted. “Aiello, Pete DeAngelo, you know. The organization. Mafia, Family, Cosa Nostra, whatever they're calling it now.”

I said, “You've never told me much about Mike.”

“I wanted to forget it.”

“You'd better go on, now that you've started.”

When she glanced across the room at me I saw that her lip corners were turned down. She said, “I suppose so. I told you Mike got scared. He started drinking too much and making risky remarks about the mob—the kind of talk they didn't want to get around. It was only bravado; he had no idea he was offending anybody. But he suffered for it—they threw him to the wolves. He went to prison.”

“It was a narcotics charge, wasn't it?”

She nodded. “Of course he was framed.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure,” she said wearily. “He'd gotten involved in some shady things but none of them had anything to do with dope.”

“Go on.”

“Well, he went to prison, and at first I enjoyed playing the role of waiting for an absent husband—it gave me a kind of untouchable immunity, but at the same time I didn't have to put up with Mike. I know that sounds strange, but Mike did a good job of turning me sour on men. Even after he went up he kept browbeating me, accusing me of selling him into Egypt. By the time he relented and apologized, I was past caring any more. Imprisonment for more than two years is grounds for divorce here and I divorced him. But he kept writing letters, pleading with me to come on visiting days, and once in a while I did, until about a year ago. Then I met you, and I stopped going to see him. After that I didn't get any more letters from him. The last time he wrote he said he was sorry for all the trouble he'd caused me and he wouldn't bother me any more, wouldn't even come to see me after he got out.”

She stopped long enough to light a new cigarette; then she said, “Simon, he's a poor, twisted, frightened man. He's bitter and neurotic and a fool, and far too much of a coward to have anything to do with a thing like this. I just felt I owed him this much, to keep from getting him involved if I could help it.”

Her hand still trembled, the cigarette wedged between two fingers. She seemed to have run down. I said, “You said you did something that got Mike scared before they railroaded him into prison.”

She composed herself. “It's ancient history. I've forgotten it.”

“Sure you have.”

“It's something you don't need to know about, believe me.”

“Mike knows?”

“Of course.”

I just scowled at her. Finally, avoiding my glance, she made a gesture. “All right, hell, I was young and everything was exciting, the more thrilling the better. The company was fast and there was a sense of—well, violence in the air, and I liked it. And I admit I was getting damn tired of Mike and his whining.”

“And?”

She looked at me and her face changed. It became a self-conscious smile, crooked and wry and helplessly apologetic. “Aiello.”

“For Christ's sake!”

“It wasn't really an affair with him. We were both drunk and Mike was away somewhere running an errand for him.”

“Of all the wretched—”

“I was barely old enough to vote,” she said in a taut little voice. “I told you, it doesn't do any good to go into these things.”

“Goddamn it, didn't you know who he was?”

“I knew he was big. I guess I didn't know how big. Look, Simon, at the time I was like a modern-day flapper and they were like harmless bootleggers with their big cars and parties and flunkies all over the place. I didn't know about the sordid part then, the hard dope and the strongarm and the killings. They didn't let you see that part of it. It was only after Mike was arrested that I found out—”

“Found out what?”

“Nothing. Let it drop—please.”

“You told me you didn't know anything about Aiello's operations outside of his legitimate fronts—was the whole story a tissue of lies?”

“Of course not,” she said wearily. “I told you the truth. Think, Simon—would they let me know anything else?”

I made a face. “So you don't want to talk about it.”

“That's right.”

“You've got that stupid, stubborn look on your face. I suppose wild horses couldn't drag any more out of you.”

She gave me a mock-sweet smile, and remained mute.

With a sickening suspicion of what it might be, I didn't press that line of questions. I dipped the toggle of the ancient Pilot radio and walked across the room. “Want another drink?”

“No.”

I poured half a glass of ginger ale, laced it with nothing stronger than ice cubes, and glanced at my watch: time for the ten-thirty news, which was why I had switched on the radio. The forty-year-old Pilot was my only concession to the electronic age; television, with all its implications, terrified me. My whole trouble, I thought, is I'm a hopelessly old-fashioned obsolete sumbitch. The radio took its time to warm up and finally said, “… in Paris this morning. The new French government disclaimed any connection with the pro-Viet Cong demonstration. Meanwhile, in Saigon …”

I quit listening; stirring ice-cubes with one finger, I was making my brain work. Assuming Joanne was right and her ex-husband was in the clear, what was left? I thought of a couple of long-shot possibilities. One, a quarrel inside the mob—a split between Aiello and the don, Madonna. It happened once in a while; and I recalled the rumors about bad blood between them. Perhaps Aiello had gone to the mattresses—taken cover in a prepared lair while he set up an ambush to trap Madonna, summoned the members loyal to him, and got ready to go to war for control of the Family.

It was possible, but I doubted that was the way it was. Joanne knew Aiello pretty well, and she had described him as a man who liked his comforts. He was rich—why should he take the chance?

There was another possibility. The structure of a Cosa Nostra Family was complex—rigid and codified. The top man passed instructions down the ladder of rank until finally they were delivered to the button who had to carry them out. There were a good many intermediaries between the don and the man who actually committed the crime. Sometimes the button didn't even know why he was doing it; he almost never knew, for an absolute fact, where his orders initially came from.

It was simple insurance. If the button was picked up and decided to turn informer, he couldn't identify anybody except the minor-league middleman who actually gave him his orders. Once in a while, when the heat became too intense, it was necessary to protect the top man. To do that, the mob only had to break off one step of the ladder, at any point at all, to guarantee the top man would never get involved—a middleman had to disappear. For example: the law might have traced some marked payoff money as far as Aiello. Aiello then would have to disappear, for Madonna's protection.

The law. Most of the cops and judges sold themselves as casually and regularly as streetwalking whores. But the mob couldn't always get to the federal bureau cops or the grand jury special investigators from upstate. Sometimes the organization just had to cover its tracks, hunker down and wait it out like a jackrabbit in a hailstorm. Of course, if that was the reason behind Aiello's disappearance, then Madonna knew all about it, and the visit we'd just had from Senna and Baker was just camouflage. I was an ex-cop; perhaps Madonna thought I would get word of the visit back to the cops. It could help throw the cops off the track.

There were a great many ifs in that. As a hypothesis it didn't work very well. If Aiello's disappearance had been engineered by the mob, it would have been done in a neater way. There were too many loose ends. The mob would have set up a cover: Aiello was on vacation, or had gone to Grand Bahama on casino business, or had gone back to the Bronx to sit with a sick uncle, or was fishing in the Gulf of California. It would have been so easy to explain his absence that the lack of explanation was a pretty sure sign Aiello's disappearance had taken the mob completely by surprise. Certainly if they'd planned the disappearance in advance, they'd have found some pretext to keep Joanne away from the house long enough to get things tidied up.

The more I went around in mental circles, getting nowhere, the more I resented getting implicated in the mess. I wanted to shout out, I'm me, I'm Simon Crane—I'm not your everyday skid-row patsy. I was working up a good angry steam when the radio announcer intruded his voice into my consciousness:

“… and on the local scene, this just in. The body of a man tentatively identified as Salvatore Aiello has been found by construction workers on the site of the new interstate highway in Mexican Hat Canyon. A construction company spokesman said a grader operator discovered the corpse buried in fresh-graded earth where the crew was about to lay down fresh pavement. According to the spokesman, in another few hours the body would have been permanently concealed under a new concrete highway.

“According to police reports, Aiello has been linked frequently with several alleged racketeers throughout the Southwest since he moved here from New York in the early nineteen-fifties. Police say a preliminary examination indicates the cause of death was two bullets, possibly thirty-eight caliber or nine millimeter, lodged in the brain after entering the skull above the left ear. The police will not confirm or deny the possibility of gangland execution, but if that is the case, it would be the first confirmed underworld slaying here in the last nineteen months. We have not yet been able to reach Aiello's secretary or business associates for comment. Stay tuned to this station for further developments and all late fast-breaking news items. The gasoline price war continues unabated, and spokesmen for …”