I got up, picked up the .38 from the newspaper on the bed, and stuffed the gun into Joanne’s handbag. It made a tight squeeze and I thought of substituting the little .25 Beretta I’d taken from Brawley, but decided against that for a variety of reasons, one of which was that if a woman unfamiliar with guns has to shoot one, she’s better off with something that makes a lot of noise; it may scare off an attacker if it doesn’t hit him. Another was that a .38 police bullet will make a man stop and think even if it just pinks him, while a pipsqueak .25 is only a bee sting if it doesn’t hit a vital spot.
So I gave her the .38 and told her to use it if she had to, trusting she’d learned from the mistake with Brawley. When I handed her the handbag she said, “Where are we going?”
“Dinner, first. Even if we find the loot we can’t carry it on an empty stomach.”
She shuddered a little. “It’s all so—callous, Simon. We keep talking about the money and never say a word about the man who was murdered.”
I said, as harshly as I could, “I don’t gave a damn about the poor unfortunate victim and I see no reason why you should. If ever a man deserved to be killed—”
“All right,” she said, snappish. “Let’s not argue about it.”
“I just want it clear. We’re not a couple of hawkshaws investigating a murder mystery. The only reason it might help us to know who killed Aiello is that it might lead us to the loot. I’ve got no interest in bringing anybody to justice—if there is such a thing—all I care about is your life and mine. Understood?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, of course. I get stupid sometimes.”
No wonder, I thought dismally. Buffeted back and forth by one shock after another. Most of the girls I knew would have ended up in a rubber room long ago, going through what Joanne had had to suffer the past few years. Yet, through it all, she remained vivacious, even wholesome to the casual eye—certainly not undone to the point of hysteria.
I put an arm around her shoulders and held her tight, walking her to the door and outside. The sun was going down behind a layer of diaphanous cirrus clouds. I made a remark about the spectacular sunset and she was not too immersed in fright to agree, even stop a moment to stare and drink it in. With sudden savage conviction I said to myself, We will make it through this.
We ate in the motel dining room. We didn’t have much to say. I was trying to work out the next moves, and Joanne drew into herself and huddled over a whisky sour until the food came. The only time she roused herself to speak was when there was motion at the bar, beyond the fake flower planter, and she nudged me with her foot and told me not to look but she knew the girl at the end of the bar—she’d seen the girl at Aiello’s several times in company with Tony Senna. I nodded and went on chewing celery. When the time seemed right I glanced over my shoulder. She was just another girl who probably spent half her time working the bars and the men in them, a brittle, black-haired borderline alcoholic. She was making a point of not watching us, staring instead at the Geriatric Five on the bandstand. But the tip-off came when she rejected a pickup. The guy shrugged and went away.
I had spotted one outside when we’d walked to the lobby from the room—a paunchy, purple-nosed man standing with his hip against the fender of his car, trying not to look interested in us.
When we were out of his earshot Joanne had identified him for me—Ed Behrenman. So we were well-covered—Behrenman in front, with the car; the girl in the bar; watching us; and doubtless a third man somewhere in back where he could watch the room and my Jeep and Joanne’s car.
I wanted to get us out from under Madonna’s surveillance, perhaps for no reason other than that it made me nervous. But this wasn’t the place to do it. If we’d had a reliable friend with a car we might have pulled it off, and I thought of two or three but ruled them out. On the road was better, I decided. So while Joanne did her lips, I went out into the lobby and paid the room phone charges at the desk, telling the clerk we planned to leave very early in the morning and wanted to take care of this now. By the time I paid the dinner bill at the dining-room cashier’s desk, Joanne was up and walking. We went outside without paying any attention to the bar girl, who followed us at a discreet distance until she made sure we were out the front door and within Behrenman’s view.
We went through the ice-machine alley and as we approached the room I said, “We’re not going inside, but make it look as if we’re headed for the room until we get parallel with the Jeep.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll drive around and ditch our friends, then go pick up Mike. I want to hide both of you out.”
She didn’t get inquisitive. We walked past the winch on the front bumper of the Jeep, walking as if we intended to turn into the room, but then I grasped her elbow lightly and gave her a half-turn, making it look as if I’d changed my mind at the last minute. I climbed into the driver’s seat and by the time I had fitted the key into the ignition, Joanne had walked around and got in. I backed out and headed diagonally across the concrete parking area, not wasting time but not in an obvious hurry. We drove around the back of the place to the far end and went out to the road there.
It would take the watcher in back a few moments to hot-foot through the alley to the front and alert Behrenman, who had the car. I didn’t want to make it obvious we were trying to shake them, so I didn’t pour it on when I pulled out on the road and headed south, toward the freeway interchange. It took us right past the front of the motel and of course by the time we started up the ramp Behrenman was rolling out onto the road. Now I knew where I’d seen him before. It was the same green sedan that had buzzed past when I’d driven out of the motel before noon. He’d probably spotted me coming out of the place, recognized either me or my Jeep, and made a U-turn beyond the cloverleaf to come back and investigate. That must have been when he’d picked up Joanne, phoned Madonna and then phoned Dr. Brawley.
The freeway had a moderate after-dinner traffic load. Teeny boppers and men from the nearby Air Force base cruised up and down the pavement in hopped-up cars, looking for competition for drag-race money. It was a good Southwest night, stars glistening, moon on the rise, the sky vast and velvet; at such times, under better circumstances, a vehicle as open all-around as a Jeep was worth twenty closed Detroit sedans.
But the Jeep wasn’t built for acceleration or speed. I couldn’t ditch Behrenman by running away from him; he had a big car with probably five times as much horsepower under the hood as he would conceivably need for any purpose short of breaking the land-speed record. Still, a freeway—particularly one going through the heart of a city with interchanges every quarter-mile—was virtually the ideal place to ditch a tail. Behrenman knew that; he was sticking much closer than is usually done—partly because he didn’t care if I spotted him, partly because he was afraid of losing us. Madonna had probably made it clear what would happen to him if he blundered.
I swung out in the far left lane—there were three lanes in each direction—and stayed there, doing sixty-five, judging the gaps in the traffic roaring along the two lanes to my right. I had to pass four interchanges before the cars were spaced right. A glance in the mirror placed Behrenman for me, and I was glad to see he was in my lane, separated from me by one car. With a little more experience and brains, he’d have known enough to stay in the middle lane, from which it would have been easier to maneuver.
It was simple. I waited till we were perilously close to the exit, then dodged into the center lane through a narrow gap in the long line of cars, cut sharply in front of a big semirig—earning a blat of his air horn—and squealed wobbling into the off-ramp. I had to hit the brakes hard to bring it down from sixty-five to thirty-five, and even at that we almost lifted two wheels off the ground on the sharp ramp turn. But the traffic had blocked Behrenman from getting to the right fast enough, and he would have to go on to the next exit. We had lost him.