“May I come in?” he asked Wendy Austin politely when she opened the massive oak door. “My name is Dan Kearny.”
“Go screw yourself.”
He pushed past her into the hallway to stand with his hands in his coat pockets, puddling water on the hardwood parquetry. Her lovely face was as hard as the floor, sullen in repose, as if genuine emotion were a language foreign to it.
“Flip will want to see me,” he said.
“A lot of guys lost an ear or the end of a nose for using that name in the old days, Kearny.”
Fazzino was in the archway, dressed in slacks and a pastel shirt with a cashmere cardigan over it that would have cost more than Kearny’s suit.
“It isn’t the old days,” he said flatly. “I’ve got some things to say.”
Fazzino made a studiedly weary bow to usher him in.
“Thanks.” He added to the girl, who had made no move to take his coat, “No, no, that’s all right, I’ll keep it. I’m not staying.”
“You’re goddam right you’re not staying,” she snapped.
The living room was gorgeous, running the width of the house from above the garage to the far end. Forty feet long, Kearny guessed, at least half that wide. The paintings looked like originals; the furniture was elegant, old-fashioned, period. A few feet inside the door he leaned his backside against the edge of the rather spindly-legged white antiqued table which held the brass French-style telephone.
Fazzino sat down in one of the half-dozen easy chairs scattered around the huge room. The girl sat on the arm. She had truly beautiful legs. Fazzino idly put an arm around her waist.
Kearny looked at them. “I’m blowing the whistle on both of you.”
“This is your big speech?”
“Two things bothered me from the beginning. First was Chandra’s phone call to Giselle about five minutes before Heslip found her body. It kept you in the clear even after we realized you weren’t in the Jag that Ballard was tailing, because it came fifteen minutes after you were seen leaving the alley in your little-old-man disguise.”
Fazzino said lightly, “In case you’re wearing some sort of recorder, Kearny, I want to state categorically that I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A yawn lurked just behind his words.
“But then Ballard got the phone call Friday night from her sister.” Kearny looked at the girl for the first time. Totally cool, so he’d been right about their weekend plane flight. “That, and using the mannequin to rub our noses in the fact we’d come up empty, were both bad mistakes.” Fazzino showed interest. A spark glowed behind the usually flat black eyes. The egoist, the chess player. Not bothered, interested — as he might be by a chess gambit he’d never seen before.
“Why was the mannequin a mistake?”
“Because it shows you’ve seen our file, and the only place you could have done that was in the D.A.’s office. Since you let Wendy have her fun with Ballard on Friday night, that must have been the day you learned there isn’t any evidence for the D.A. to take into court.”
Fazzino chuckled. “There isn’t, is there? I was in a car down south of Soledad when Chandra died. Under oath, your man Ballard would have to testify to that. As for this nonsense about phone calls—”
“Flip! Flip!” said Kearny chidingly. “Didn’t you know they record the long-distance numbers called from pay phones?”
He’d finally gotten to the girl. “Phil,” she said angrily, “make him leave.”
“I like him. He’s cute.”
And getting cuter, Kearny thought. She said what she thought he was. He said, “No good as evidence, of course, Flip, but a call was placed to DKA at five fifty-nine on the evening of Tuesday, October thirtieth, from a phone booth near a gas station just off the freeway south of Soledad. We also know that it was little Wendy here doing her famous Chandra impression for Giselle. Just as last Friday she did her famous Bridget impression for Ballard.”
“As you say,” Fazzino drawled, “no good as evidence.”
“My people caught on because Bridget reconciled with her husband on Friday. He was home with her that night. She wouldn’t have been calling Ballard, not even to set him up for a kick in the balls.”
“Phil, make him get to hell out,” she said. “He gives me the creeps.”
“We should have had it all the time,” said Kearny inexorably. “When we first got a line on little Wendy from a porny-film producer, we found out she was a fantastic mimic. You needed that phone call to Giselle. You wanted Chandra’s body found at an exact time, a time one of our men would have to swear he was tailing you a hundred fifty miles away. It was your bad luck that a witness in the alley could swear nobody could have got in to kill Chandra between her phone call and Heslip finding her. That made Chandra’s phone call impossible, since she obviously was killed.”
Fazzino sounded genuinely amused. “How could I be so sure that Chandra would accommodatingly wait at home, alone, to be hit? I mean, if I planned all this I would have had to be sure—”
“The final notice from the bank that you arranged. It gave her until Wednesday morning to get her account current. She’d phone you, of course, demand another five hundred bucks or so — and you’d tell her to be home alone all afternoon Tuesday and you’d come in the back way and give it to her.” He laughed without mirth. “You did.”
The girl was finally on her feet, eyes blazing. “Throw him out!” she shrieked at Fazzino.
Kearny just looked at her. “Don’t you realize, honey, that sometime he’ll have to take you out, too? You’re the weak link. You can testify.”
Fazzino chuckled and drew the raging girl back down to the arm of his chair. He turned her hand so the glint of gold caught Kearny’s eye. “My divorce became final Friday,” he said pleasantly. “We flew to Vegas. A simple but moving ceremony. So if there’s nothing else...”
“There is — just one thing,” said Kearny. “The second fact that has bugged me right from the start.” He paused. “No soldiers.”
The girl laughed as if he had said something funny, a jeering laugh because she didn’t understand. Fazzino didn’t laugh. He understood. His eyes tightened fractionally. Kearny casually took his butt off the edge of the table.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Fazzino’s voice had tightened too.
“No soldiers?” Kearny showed his teeth in a grin that had nothing to do with amusement. “No regime, no crew — no heavies, you follow me? Nobody following us around when they should have been crawling all over us.”
Fazzino was very good. He almost carried off his blasé pose. Kearny took a casual step to one side so he was beside and to the right of the ornate little table which held the phone. Only a slight hoarseness in Fazzino’s voice betrayed him. “I understand it was a capo and a soldier who... mistakenly roughed up an old man outside your office...”
“Thinking he was a debt-welsher. Yeah. That’s what Hawkley told me: a routine enforcement job where they got the wrong guy.” That had scored. “You didn’t know Hawkley and I knew each other? Maybe you should have had some soldiers tailing me.”
Fazzino didn’t answer. He licked his lips nervously.
“But you couldn’t risk that, could you, Flip? Not after one of the soldiers you sent after me got busted. I kept thinking, Mafia hit on Padilla, organization hit, even after Hawkley said the Dorsey beating was a simple case of mistaken identity. I knew it wasn’t. I’d been threatened. Yet Hawkley believed what he told me. So what did that make Padilla? A private kill, unauthorized, because you wanted to be West Coast top dog. You couldn’t risk using any organization people on Chandra any more than you had on Padilla, because they thought Padilla really was an accident. So now—”