Madonna’s head was lifted; he was listening to the run of my voice. I glanced at Pete DeAngelo, whose eyes were narrowed to slits. Nobody asked any questions so I went on: “Brawley thought he was in the clear. Nobody had known about his appointment with Aiello except the dead man, and as far as he knew, nobody had seen him go in or come out. One person did see him, though. Mike Farrell. He didn’t recognize Brawley but he remembered the pink Cadillac.”
I heard DeAngelo grunt but I didn’t wait. I said, “Brawley wanted to make sure nobody was on his trail. He planned to wait around town until the heat died down, then disappear. He was planning to disappear last night—but we’ll get to that. In the meantime, the morning after the murder, Brawley made some arrangements with a man named Ed Behrenman, a minor soldier in Aiello’s regime. Brawley gave me a cock and bull story about how Behrenman owed him a favor. The truth was Brawley probably had blackmail evidence against Behrenman and forced him to cooperate. At any rate, it was Behrenman who spotted me and Joanne at the Executive Lodge the other morning. While I was here talking to you, you got a phone call. It was from Behrenman, right?”
“You’re telling the story,” Madonna said, but then his lips peeled back and he said, “Yeah, it was Behrenman. Go ahead.”
“After I left you called Behrenman back and told him to stake out the motel.”
“Sure.”
I nodded. “It all fits together like a watch. Behrenman phoned Brawley and told Brawley he had instructions to stake out Joanne and me. That gave Brawley an idea what was up, and he went over to the motel. He wanted to talk to us because he had to know how much we knew, how close we were to finding him out. He must have felt fairly satisfied when he left, because he didn’t panic. He figured he’d thrown us off his trail for good with his elaborate yarn about the money he had in the safe that he wanted to get back. It almost worked—he was a good actor. Almost as good as Pete DeAngelo.”
I shifted my attention to DeAngelo. He had his slitted eyes on me like blades, motionless but ready to cut.
I said, “I can’t prove this but I think DeAngelo must have talked to Judy Dodson after I did. She thought I was working for DeAngelo but when DeAngelo told her I wasn’t, she told him everything I’d said to her. Right, Pete?”
“Go ahead. Dig your grave.”
I went back to Madonna. “DeAngelo knew Mike Farrell was mixed up in this somehow. He found Farrell sometime in the afternoon, probably about the time I was talking to Brawley at the motel. Don’t ask me how DeAngelo found Farrell. He probably just used his head and went looking in all the places he expected Mike to hide, and found him. DeAngelo put the screws to Mike. I don’t know if he had help but I suspect he did. Mike was roughed up pretty hard and it probably took at least two men to give him that kind of going over. You, Tony? Ed Baker? It doesn’t matter. DeAngelo squeezed Mike Farrell dry. He found out everything Mike knew, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, but he did learn that Mike had made a deal with Joanne and me, that the three of us were working together to find the loot. That must have convinced DeAngelo that none of the three of us actually had the loot. From that point on we were expendable—all three of us. He didn’t figure we had any better chance of finding the loot than anybody else, so why leave us around to mess things up?
“By this time Farrell was so badly tortured they couldn’t do anything else but kill him. DeAngelo had to get rid of the body, and he wanted Joanne and me out of the way, so he did the obvious thing: he planted Mike’s body at my house, then phoned the cops and talked to Joe Cutter because he knew Cutter had a personal grudge against me. Cutter came up to my place but he didn’t find the body.”
My eyes roamed from face to face. I returned to Madonna and said, “Now this is important. Everything I’ve told you can be checked—by you, not me. You’ve got the leverage and the manpower for it. Now here’s a question for you. I’ve just told you what Pete DeAngelo was up to. How much of it has he told you?”
Madonna’s glance whipped across to DeAngelo. DeAngelo opened his mouth and began to say something; Madonna said, “Sit down and give your mouth a rest, Pete.”
DeAngelo closed his mouth slowly, gave me a dark scowl and held it on me while he moved to the nearest chair and sat. Freddie the Neanderthal moved up to stand behind his right shoulder, only a few feet to my left. I turned to keep them in view, and resumed:
“If DeAngelo didn’t keep you posted on events, it was because he wanted to find the loot and keep it for himself. He’s too ambitious to be satisfied with being anybody’s number two man. He remembers how you took over this mob and he figures to do the same to you. With the money from Aiello’s safe, and the incriminating documents that went with it, DeAngelo would be in a hell of a strong position to move right in and take over the organization. Wouldn’t you, Pete?”
DeAngelo’s left hand reached the table beside him and gripped its edge. He didn’t speak.
To Madonna, I said, “Nobody likes to think himself a poor judge of human nature, and you probably don’t want to buy this, especially since Pete’s an old friend and I’m just a troublesome outsider. But think about this. The other night when I phoned you to ask you about the pink Cadillac, DeAngelo answered the phone. He sounded out of breath. I’m willing to bet he had just come in after planting Mike Farrell’s body.
“DeAngelo had learned one vital fact, either from Mike Farrell or from my telephone call here. The pink Cadillac. He knew, or he made it his business to find out, who owned that car. It’s my guess he had to do some detective work to find out, because otherwise he’d have gone after Brawley sooner than he did.
“In the meantime, yesterday morning, I went to Brawley’s to ask him who owned a pink Cadillac. Brawley’s own car was a Jaguar, and that threw me off. He sent me off on a wild goose chase to the boondocks. I was coming back from that when Ed Behrenman tried to run me off the highway over a cliff. Behrenman ended up dead at the bottom of the cliff. There was only one way Behrenman could have known where to find me. Brawley was the only man alive who knew where I’d gone, and I already knew there was a connection between Brawley and Behrenman. So then I knew who’d killed Aiello and taken the loot. I searched Brawley’s house but it wasn’t there, so I went straight to his office. DeAngelo knows what I found when I got there, because DeAngelo got there ahead of me. DeAngelo probably waited out back of the office until the last of Brawley’s patients and employees left for the night. Then, when Brawley came out the back door, DeAngelo shot him. He had a silencer on his gun and he knew nobody was likely to hear the shot. He was so sure he’d find the loot in Brawley’s office he didn’t even bother to keep Brawley alive long enough to make sure. The pink Cadillac was parked right there and that was all DeAngelo wanted to know. He put Brawley’s body in the car, jimmied the door and went inside. He was working on Brawley’s safe when I got there. That’s how he got that hole in his arm, in case he’s told you something to the contrary. We had a little shoot-out and DeAngelo went out the window. He didn’t stay long enough to find out what was in Brawley’s safe, but I can answer it if he’s still interested. There wasn’t anything interesting in the wall safe except a gun. It was a Walther nine millimeter and I suspect it was the gun that killed Aiello.”
“That’s fine,” Madonna murmured. “Only where’s the money?”
“It was right where it’d been all the time. In the trunk of the pink Cadillac. Brawley had a suitcase and a coat in the back seat. He was ready to take off for good when DeAngelo found him. Too bad DeAngelo didn’t keep him alive long enough to ask him a question. Incidentally, by now I’m sure you know they found not only Brawley’s corpse but Joe Cutter’s. I think DeAngelo must have shot Cutter, too.”