I said calmly, “What time did you leave Aiello’s last night?”
Her eyes went to the bartender. He was too far away to hear anything we’d said. She came back to me and said, “I left at maybe nine-thirty. I got to work here before ten. You can ask the bartender if you don’t believe me.”
I shook my head. “I don’t care what kind of phony alibi you set up with the bartender and your girlfriends. I want the truth. Do you think DeAngelo can’t sweat the truth out of the bartender if he decides he wants to?”
She picked up the glass and took a swallow and sat for a moment chewing crushed ice. Finally she said, “You bastard.”
“What time?”
“Look, I was there till one o’clock or so. Aiello was feeling his oats, you know? He called the club and told them I wouldn’t be coming in to work, they should get somebody to cover for me in the show. He had some kind of big deal set up and he always felt horny at times like that.”
“What kind of big deal?”
“How the hell should I know? Look, I’m a round-heeled pushover, and they all know I’m anybody’s girl. What kind of secrets are they going to let me in on?”
“Was it a deal he’d already made, or a deal he was about to make?”
“Something he was about to do, I guess. Something that was going to happen soon.”
“Like getting killed.”
She winced. “Look, don’t talk like that. I wasn’t in love with him but he wasn’t a bad guy.”
No, I thought. Gangsters are all great guys. I said, “Why did you go to all the trouble to set up a phony alibi for four hours last night?”
She shrugged. “He was killed, wasn’t he? How does it look if I admit I spent half the night there? Look, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t see anybody. I don’t know who killed him.”
“Nobody was coming in when you left?”
“No.”
“Then he was alone in the place. Wasn’t that unusual? Didn’t he usually have one or two hired hands around?”
“Usually. Not always.”
“When you left, did he lock the door and set the burglar alarm behind you?”
“I guess so. He always did. I didn’t particularly notice last night.”
“Did you leave because you wanted to, or did he tell you to go home?”
She gave me a look. “Well, he told me to go. You know, usually he liked to spend the whole night when he was feeling like that. He was really a cozy, cuddly kind of guy; he liked to sleep all wrapped up together. But at one o’clock last night he told me to get my clothes on and go. He kissed me and told me he’d see me tomorrow—I mean today, now. He was very up, you know, expecting something big.”
“Expecting visitors last night, then?”
“How should I know? He didn’t tell me anything. I didn’t ask.”
I settled back and had the last slug of vodka. There was one more line of questioning but I didn’t want to open it. Didn’t want to, but had to.
I said, “How long have you known Pete DeAngelo?”
“Ask him,” she snapped.
“All right, let’s do it another way. You must know Joanne Farrell.”
“Sal’s secretary? Sure.”
“How long have you known her?”
Her eyebrows went up. “A couple years, I guess. Why?”
“How did Aiello feel about her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You saw them together.”
“Sure. Far as I could tell it was strictly business. She seems like a cold bitch to me, if you want to know.”
A lot she knew. I said, “Then she wasn’t there last night?”
“Last night? Look, you tell Pete he sent a pretty dumb guy to talk to me. Pete knows Mrs. Farrell never stayed at the house past business hours. She always leaves around six. I didn’t get there till seven last night. She wasn’t there. I haven’t seen her in weeks. Look, what’s this all about? Did Pete send you or not?”
“In a way he did,” I said. It looked like a dead end from here on; I stood up, dropped money on the table, and said, “Thanks for the talk. I’ll be seeing you.”
“I’d just as soon Pete came himself next time. Tell him that for me.”
I went outside and had to close my eyes against the glare. The heat was a tangible force, like walking into a foam-rubber wall, after coming out of the icy air conditioning of the Moulin Rouge.
Maybe Mike Farrell, after he’d had half a bottle of whisky, had worked himself up into a state. Maybe he had gone back to Aiello’s, persuaded Aiello to let him in, and forced Aiello at gunpoint to open the safe. Maybe. But I doubted it. With all the alarm systems around the place, it was doubtful anybody could have forced Aiello to open the safe without giving him a chance to trip an alarm somewhere—an alarm that would have alerted Vincent Madonna.
If I believed Judy Dodson, I had a few facts. Aiello had been anticipating a big deal. He had been expecting visitors late at night—otherwise why evict Judy?—and a visit at that hour suggested the visitors were people who couldn’t afford to be seen meeting Aiello in daylight. I recalled the two politicians whose names Mike had mentioned. Ex-Governor Stanley Raiford, and County Supervisor Frank Colclough.
On the way I wolfed a takeout sandwich from a drive-in. I found Raiford’s house in the old part of town, just past a mobile home park where rusty steel trailers were propped in rows on concrete building-blocks, sprouting TV antennae like weeds, baking aridly in the sun glitter. Raiford’s street had been widened until the thin ribbons of sidewalk were pinched against the old houses; fences and front yards were long gone. It was a big two-story house shaded by cottonwoods on both sides; it looked worn and comfortable.
There was nobody home. He had no office listed. Rather than chase around asking questions, which might take too much time, I headed for Colclough’s place—it wasn’t far.
Not far in space, but a thousand miles far in time. Colclough lived in a rich folks’ slum. Blooming plastic flowers had been stuck into the yard, dyed to match the swimming pool, and the lawn had been faked on the theory that the grass is greener after it has been painted. The house was big enough to have been expensive; it probably had all the modern accoutrements—tile shower with sliding glass door, electric kitchen, four bedrooms, dish and clothes washers and dryer in the utility room, electric panel heat, central air-conditioning. There wasn’t a decent-sized tree for a mile in any direction; the cretins who built these $75,000 shacks just bulldozed everything away and rolled out the houses the way you would roll out linoleum flooring with repetitive patterns. Doubtless Colclough had obtained the house cheap, or free, from some fast-buck operator friend of his who slapped houses together by the hundreds, just squeaking past the building code by bribing inspectors. Long before most of the mortgages were paid up the houses would be crumbling, warped, leaking. By that time the Colcloughs would have moved on.
There were no cars in the two-car garage, no answer to my knock at the door. But when I turned back down the cracking concrete walkway the next-door neighbor turned off his gardening hose and said amiably, “Looking for the mister or the missus?”
I went across the green, dead lawn. He was a sunburned old man with several chins and an office paunch in paisley Bermuda shorts and a loud shirt. I said, “I was looking for the county supervisor. He’s not at his office.”
He nodded “He’s out of town, you see. Asked me to look after the swimming pool. It’s a nice pool isn’t it? We often sit around after the sun goes down,-watching the bugs on the pool. Nice and quiet and peaceful. Not like the pious rat race back east, not a bit, no sir. Boy, you couldn’t get me to go back, not me. Never, not for all the money in Wall Street.”