I stopped at a filling station near the freeway, its price war pennants flapping. The attendant ambled forward with much less enthusiasm and haste than he would have displayed had I been driving an $8,000 Kluge with a slurpy twenty-six-gallon tank. While he filled the Jeep I put a dime in the newspaper vendor and pulled out a copy of the morning paper. I scanned the Aiello story—three front-page columns, cont. on p. 5—but there wasn’t much I didn’t already have. The police had found a station wagon abandoned a mile from Aiello’s house. It had been wiped but they had found two fragmentary fingerprints identified as Michael Farrell’s. Farrell was being sought for questioning. There followed a garbled version of Farrell’s history and hearsay assumptions that Farrell had a gripe against Aiello. No mention anywhere that Aiello had a safe, or that it had been robbed. Either the cops still hadn’t learned that part or they were saving it. There were a few details I hadn’t known, like the bullet that had killed Aiello: a 9 mm bullet fired by a “German automatic pistol,” unspecified make. That would probably be either a Luger or a Walther. So far, in my encounters with various personae, I had not seen any German automatics.
There was something obscene about the way the gas station attendant shoved the hose nozzle into the gas tank tube to sell me the last possible drop. I paid him, looked up an address in a phone booth by the curb, and drove under the freeway and across the north side of town toward the fashionable foothills.
Cliff View Terrace was a middle-sized shopping center built on the leveled top of a steep hill. The buildings, all one story, were faced with the pink-streaked gray brick that is used when you want to be ostentatious about your construction costs. There was a good deal of landscaped greenery; shops and offices fronted on eccentrically laid out walkways under awnings and shade trees. I parked the Jeep in a strip of shade and spent five minutes on foot finding what I sought. I finally located it near the back of the shopping center in a small quadrangular building introduced by a tall signpost from which, on chains, hung the names and occupations of occupants: Sylvester Johnson, D.D.S.; Julius Stein, M.D.; Fred Brawley, M.D., F.A.C.S.; and six more.
Brawley had a corner office at the back of the square. A narrow asphalt lane went past the backside, near the door marked PRIVATE; I saw I could have parked right there, on the lip of the hill.
I walked into the front office. The waiting room was just a waiting room. Indirect lighting, modern furniture built for design rather than comfort, magazines mildewing with age, carpet and walls done in pale hospital green. The receptionist-secretary was a starched fat blonde girl with an antiseptic polite smile, seated in a small cubicle behind a little glass window like a bank teller’s. There were three patients waiting—a teenage girl and a matron, both reading magazines, and an old woman with cyanotic skin who sat with her legs crossed and stared at the tremor in her left hand.
I put an elbow on the sill of the receptionist’s window, stuck my head in and said, “Doctor in?”
“Do you have an appointment, sir?”
“No, I’m not a patient. But if you’ll—”
“Doctor Brawley sees pharmaceutical salesmen only on Thursday afternoons. If you’d care to leave whatever literature you have and come back Thursday afternoon, I’m sure—”
“I’m not selling,” I said. “Look, just tell him Mr. Crane’s here about the missing property he wanted investigated. Will you do that?”
“Mr .… uh …?”
“Crane. Simon Crane.”
She masked her confusion by reaching for the phone, pushing a buzzer and turning away from me in her swivel chair so I couldn’t hear her speak.
When she put the phone down she gave me a startled look and said, “He’ll be right out Mr. Crane.”
“Thank you.” Obviously she was dying to know what missing property it was. I didn’t oblige; I went to a chair and sat.
It took six minutes. Then Brawley appeared in a doorway and beckoned. The old woman beside me started to get to her feet and Brawley said, “I’ll be with you in just a moment, Mrs. Chandler.”
I followed him down a corridor. Doorways on both sides led into examination rooms, an X-ray room with a fortune in equipment, two labs, several bathrooms, a small operating room. At the back in the corner of the building, he had his office and consultation room. It was large and luxurious, like the office of a senior corporate executive. Picture windows in two walls gave a wide view of the city, a few hundred feet below. Brawley’s desk was placed in front of one of the windows, just enough to one side so that a patient looking at him wouldn’t be blinded by the glare behind.
He didn’t sit, or offer me a seat. As soon as he closed the door behind me he said, “Well?”
“I’m still looking for your money,” I said, which was true enough as far as it went. “Maybe you can help me find it.”
“Me?” He laughed; he was trying to act affable but he was too ill at ease to bring it off; he hadn’t quite settled down yet from the minor manhandling I’d given him yesterday. Trying to look casual, he leaned a crooked elbow across the top of a brown metal filing cabinet. Just behind him, set in the wall, was a three-foot office wall safe, the combination-dial showing. On an impulse I said, “Is that safe locked?”
“Not now. I only lock it when I’m out of the office.”
“Mind if I look?”
His eyebrows went up. “Certainly I mind.” Then he waved a hand through the air. “But go ahead if you must.” He pulled the round door open. There wasn’t much inside—a green lockbox and two stacks of papers and a row of small bottles which, it could be assumed, contained prescription narcotics.
I nodded. “Just a stab in the dark. Obviously I can’t be sure you didn’t steal the money yourself.”
“I’d hardly be looking for it if I already had it.”
“Smokescreen,” I replied.
He smiled. “Have it your way. What progress have you made?”
“I don’t know yet. But you were tied up with Aiello one way or another—don’t bother to argue the point, Doctor—and you must be acquainted with some of the other prominent people who had dealings with Aiello.”
“Assume whatever you want. It may not get you very far.”
“Let’s put it this way. You must have visited Aiello’s house quite a number of times.”
“I did, yes. To put things in his safe and get things out. They weren’t social calls. If he had other people in the house he didn’t introduce me to them—he kept them out of my sight, or vice versa. What are you trying to do, compile a list of his associates? I’m a rather poor subject for that sort of interview, I can assure you.”
“Just tell me this. On your various visits up there, did you ever notice a pink Cadillac parked near his house?”
Brawley’s eyes gave away brief alarm. He frowned to cover it. “What’s that got to do with my money?”
“What kind of car do you drive?”
“Why, a Jaguar. Didn’t you see it parked outside? An XKE sports model.”
“Yeah. You’re quite the image of a sport, Doctor. Who owns the pink Cadillac, then?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Try again. You telegraphed the first time I mentioned it. It rang your bell.”
He clamped his mouth shut. I pulled the Beretta out of my hip pocket and got tough. “I’m not playing a game. It would be a shame if you got shot with your own gun, Doc, but it’s important to me to find that car. You’re the only one I’ve met who knows anything about it. Now let’s have it.”
He licked his lips; his eyes were fixed on the gun. I took a pace toward him and lifted the Beretta, making an effort to look menacing, and after he backpedaled and put up both hands, palms out toward me, he said, “All right—all right. I do know a man who owns a pink Cadillac, but I’m sure he couldn’t be the man you want. He couldn’t have stolen my money.”