I opened my mouth, but the phone beside him rang. Madonna picked it up and talked and listened. When he hung up his smile was fixed. He looked up at me and said, “Room Seventy-Two, Executive Lodge. Mean anything to you?”
I tried hard to keep it off my face. Madonna shook his head, making the kind of face he would use chastising an errant small boy. “A poor try, Crane—and maybe it’ll give you some idea how far you’d get if you tried to hustle Mrs. Farrell out of town. It wouldn’t be discreet.” Watching my face, he added gently, “You’re not a very good loser, are you?”
“I’m not playing a game,” I snapped. “Look, I’ll beg if I have to. At least give us the two weeks. Maybe the cops will turn up something by then.”
“Why should I bargain when I’ve got a corner on the market? No deals, Crane—no gentlemen’s agreement.”
I said bleakly, “What the hell do you expect to win by this?”
“It’s what I don’t expect to lose,” he said. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the chaise and stood up. He was a surprisingly tall man. He kept his voice friendly: “You made a mistake, Crane. You probably figured us for a pack of brainless thugs, and you should have known better—nobody gets where I am without brains. You made an error, you and the Farrell woman, trying to play cute and fast with us. Who do you think you’re dealing with? I started peddling the streets of Harlem when I was nine years of age. So let’s not insult each other. Where’s the stuff you took out of Aiello’s safe?”
“I don’t know.” I lifted both hands. “One week—at least give us that.”
“Like you said, the cops might turn something up if I let it go too long. And putting your same hypothetical case, we could assume I can’t afford to have the wrong people get their hands on the missing items. A week’s too long. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Crane, to prove we’re all civilized. I’ll double your time. Call it forty-eight hours.” Still smiling, Madonna put his thick arm over my shoulders and walked me to the sliding glass door.
Chapter Four
When I stepped up into the ancient Jeep, flipped the key and punched the starter, all the while watching Freddie who stood leaning impossibly forward in the doorway like an ugly immutable gargoyle, I was reviewing in my mind the confrontation with Madonna and regarding myself, my performance, with dazed wonder. Here I was with forty-eight hours between us (Joanne and me) and our joint funeral, yet I seemed to be behaving with cool aplomb. I had faced Madonna not with ravings, and not with begging desperation, but with some kind of detached calm which had sealed itself around me like a plastic bubble.
It was, of course, the kind of deadpan repression that masked absolute hysteria.
I lifted one hand and flapped it nastily at Freddie, whose Neanderthal face made no acknowledgment but watched with bovine intensity while I backed the Jeep out of the drive.
I turned down the narrow curvy asphalt lane; my mind had gone into neutral, I wasn’t even attempting to lay plans. Paralysis; I suppose I had consigned myself to execution. I formed the vague idea of buying a half-gallon of tequila, taking it to Joanne’s room, and getting splendidly drunk. I thought of a rock patch back in the Peloncillos which I had always meant to explore but had never gotten around to; it welled up in me an almost nostalgic yearning for all the planned things I had never done and, now, never would do. Books I meant to read, places I meant to see, old friends I wanted to see again. Joanne’s image blossomed in my mind, vivid and sharp—the warmth of her body, the lusty bark of her laughter, flash of eyes, toss of head. Riding the Jeep through a low dip in the road, I had the sudden feeling she was sitting just behind my shoulder, and all I needed do was turn around and look into her smiling violet eyes, encircle her with my arms, fold her close against me, hearing her husky laugh, scenting the fragrance of her hair.
It came to me that the sharp sense of loss was stronger in me than my own private fear of danger. That lonely sense of imminent loss stunned me: I hadn’t let myself believe she had come to mean so much to me.
The feeling of having her just behind my shoulder became so strong that my eyes shifted involuntarily to the rear-view mirror. Of course there was nobody in the bed of the Jeep. What I did see in the mirror was the shark-toothed chrome snout of the big dusty station wagon, bearing down on me from behind.
Mike Farrell got out of the car and took me at gunpoint in the Jeep to the boarded-up old house in Las Palmas, and a few minutes later I was sitting there in a lawn chair holding Mike’s gun and waiting for Mike to struggle back to consciousness.
Mike sat up with a pained grimace. “Jesus.”
“How do you feel?”
He cringed when I spoke; his eyes dipped toward me, bloodshot. “I got a headache right down to my toenails.”
“You hit the door with your head.”
“You knocked me down and got my gun, huh? Trust me to do that right.” He gave a nervous, braying cackle.
The heat was close and oppressive. When he looked at the gun I had, he flinched.
I let him have a good look at it. Then I said, “What happened to Aiello, Mike?”
“I swear to God I don’t know.”
“What happened to the stuff in his safe?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Then why are you shaking like a jackhammer?”
“Because my head hurts, goddamn it.” He looked away from me. The room was enormous, with baroque arches and domed ceiling. Mike sat like a taut-wound watch spring, his face down, heavy with thought. When he looked up again, he studied me with skittish caution and an apologetic, cowardly half-smile. His face was sweat-drenched and greenish; his baggy trousers, unpressed and too big for him, gave him the pathetic look of a diminutive circus clown. He must have lost weight in prison.
Suddenly he said, “What he had in that safe, Crane, it was enough cash to make a fast down payment on an aircraft carrier. They think I’ve got it, don’t they?”
I said quietly, “How do you know what was in the safe?”
There was soft insinuation in my voice but he didn’t react. He said, “Aiello showed it to me,” in a morose off-hand tone. I went over to the window near him and perched on the sill—Mike’s head turned on bulging neck tendons to keep me in sight. I dangled the automatic over one knee. As a cop I had learned to sit above a man when questioning him.
I said, “How much?”
“What?”
“How much does it take to make a down payment on an aircraft carrier?”
“Someplace between two million and three million. Closer to three.” Seeing my look of disbelief he added quickly, “I swear it’s the truth—look, that’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you and me and Joanne, we’re all in the same fix. We got to get together on this. Maybe we can work it out if we put our heads together.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about what’s going on,” I observed.
“Look, Crane, I didn’t make the hit on Aiello and I ain’t got the money.”
I said, “Let’s hear the whole thing.”
“Okay—but first you got to tell me what you were doing up at Madonna’s. You working for him now?”
“No.”
“And I just take your word for that?”
“Suit yourself. Here’s one for you: what makes you think they’ve fingered you for it?”
“How else can they add it up? It’s what I’d think if I was in their shoes.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story.”
“If I get bored,” I said, “I’ll yawn.”
He swallowed and squeezed his hands. When he rubbed them together the sound was scratchy and dry. He kept staring abysmally at the gun in my hand; finally he said, “Look, all I want is off the hook and unless things have changed a lot in a couple hours, you’re in the same boat. Can we help each other, Crane?”