He looked up and beamed at me.
DeAngelo said, “He’s clean.”
“I’m immaculate,” I said.
“We’ll see,” said Madonna. He glanced past me—a skinny dark-complexioned sycophant scuttled out of the house with a document in one hand and a fountain pen in another. Madonna said, “Can’t that wait?”
“No, sir,” said the sycophant. He put the document down on the beach-umbrella table and held his hand on it while Madonna took the pen and signed at the tip of the sycophant’s finger. Madonna glanced at it and lay back on the chaise; the sycophant put the pen together, picked up the document, blew on the signature, folded it in thirds and went.
Not until that one was gone did any of us speak. Then it was Madonna, fingering a Frank Paradise billiard cue, who directed his affable avuncular voice at me: “How clean are you, Crane?”
“That’s what I came to see you about.”
Pete DeAngelo husked, “Now tell us something we didn’t already know.”
Madonna lifted a hairy hand to still him; he said to me, “Mentioning no names, let’s just say at the moment you and your little friend are alive on a rain check. I state that as a fact, not a threat.”
“I understand,” I said. “Look, this is all off the record. I’m not carrying a tape recorder around. I’m not interested in meddling in things that are none of my business. I’m sure Tony Senna reported on the visit he paid me this morning—he looked around and he didn’t find whatever he was looking for. All I want to do is put this to you: if Joanne Farrell and I had taken anything important out of Aiello’s safe, we wouldn’t be stupid enough to wait around afterwards—and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to come up here and argue about it. She had nothing to do with it, I had nothing to do with it, and I’d like the chance to prove that to your satisfaction.”
Madonna fixed me with his intent hard eyes; Pete DeAngelo moved forward, heels clacking, and said in his raspy whisper, “If that’s your best artillery, Crane, forget it, it’s a dud. You couldn’t sell that story to a hayseed who’s in the market for the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen—you’re in trouble with us, and you don’t slide out of it just by coming up here and bleeding on Mr. Madonna’s patio.”
Madonna shushed him again with a hand. “Let me have him for a few minutes, Pete.” He smiled amiably.
DeAngelo’s mouth pinched together, looking like a surgeon’s wound, but finally, giving no acknowledgment that he had heard the dismissal, he turned on his heel and left us. Madonna, for a brief moment, scowled toward the pool, and I knew why: DeAngelo had committed a faux pas. It was against the rules for the Cosa Nostra to let an outsider know about any division of opinion within the organization; that kind of knowledge could be dangerous—it could give outsiders a chance to set member against member.
The glass door slid shut. I figured at least one bodyguard was watching us but it was hardly worth staring to find out. I returned my attention to Madonna and said, “Look, if you really think I’m it, then you’ve not only picked the wrong horse, you’ve got the wrong track. Concentrating on Joanne Farrell and Simon Crane will never get your belongings back for you.”
“What is it you want me to do?” he inquired with his friendly businessman’s smile.
“Lift the heat,” I replied promptly. “You’ve got that girl scared to death.”
“Well, now,” he said, steepling his hands together and tipping his head back to look at me, “for the sake of argument we’ll assume we both know what you’re talking about. Understand, I admit nothing. But let’s you and me set up what the lawyers call a hypothetical case. Assume I’ve got some interest in some items that might be missing from somebody’s safe. Assume there’s been a lot of sensational publicity about somebody’s murder, and there’s going to be more publicity, and I don’t enjoy that at all—in fact you can assume somebody’s busy right now, planting news items about how the deceased must have had personal enemies from back east or something. Assume, in other words, I don’t want any more rumbles. You follow?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. So we’re prepared to be nice and quiet and civilized about it. If you turn in the missing items within twenty-four hours, or prove you and Mrs. Farrell couldn’t possibly have taken it, then you can assume I’d be willing to forget the whole beef.”
He smiled. I suppose he meant it to be an engaging smile.
I felt dismal but not surprised; it had never been anything better than a long shot.
He looked at his watch, shot his cuff, and said pleasantly, “It’s pushing noon. I’d be willing to go the few extra minutes—call it noon tomorrow, your deadline.”
“And if I can’t produce?”
He shrugged his meaty shoulders and picked at a hairy ear. “I don’t throw raw meat on the floor, Crane, it’s not my style. I leave it to your imagination. I only mention there are friends of mine who don’t mind putting the screws on people, hard, to find out what they know and what they did with stolen property.”
He didn’t have to spell that out. I said, in a lower voice, “You can’t get blood from stones. She doesn’t know anything—I don’t know anything.”
“Then all you’ve got to do is prove it.”
“How many people do you know who can prove where they were between two and five in the morning?”
“Too bad you’re not married,” he answered, smiling slightly. Then he tipped himself up on one elbow and said, “If some of the fellows decide they have to put the screws to you two, they wouldn’t leave you around alive afterward to testify about it. You understand that?”
“I understand it,” I said, “but I can’t buy it. You haven’t got enough evidence to justify it with the organization. You haven’t got any evidence at all, period. I know it wouldn’t have to stand up in court, but you’d have to show something.”
“Maybe if you two were members of my organization. But you’re not. You’re not wearing our silks, Crane. Nobody cares what happens to you and the woman.” He shook his head and said sadly, “The minute I laid eyes on you I knew you’d be one of those guys who had to do everything the hard way. I wish you wouldn’t keep arguing—you made your pitch, I didn’t buy it. That’s all there is to it. You came to the wrong store to sell your kind of merchandise.”
I took a breath. “Twenty-four hours isn’t enough time for a scavenger hunt. At least give us a couple of weeks.”
“To get out of the country with the stuff?”
“You know better than that. We—”
“Nuts. You two are the number one suspects. If you want it spelled out, it goes like this. Mrs. Farrell had the motive—things in the safe she wanted to get her hands on. She had the opportunity—she was one of only four people who had keys to the house and the alarm system, and the other three people are accounted for. I’m one of them, the housekeeper makes two, and then of course the deceased, he had keys, it was his house. You see, it’s those keys that narrow it down, Crane. The alarm system down there is wired on a direct circuit that sets off an alarm here in my house if anybody busts into Aiello’s place. Whoever went in there last night had to have a whole set of keys, not just something to pick the door locks with. There was no sign the place was jimmied or the wires cut. Aiello turned up dead wearing bare feet in slippers, which means he was in bed. If he’d had an appointment with anybody he’d have put socks on, he was the type; he didn’t go around in his bare feet when he had company.”
“It could have been anybody he knew,” I said. “Somebody gets him out of bed and he goes to the door and sees it’s a friend, so he switches off the alarm and opens the door and lets them in.”
Madonna shook his head. “No. There’s only a small number of people he’d have trusted enough to let them in the house alone with him at that hour of the night, and they’ve all been checked out. You see?”