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?”
“How do I know unless you tell me what you’ve got in mind?”
“I hope to hell you can help,” he muttered. “I got nobody else.”
“You’ve got yourself.”
“Yeah,” he said, off-key. “I been having myself for years.”
I didn’t say anything. He tried to glare at me but he couldn’t hold my eyes. He lifted his shoulders and let them drop; juices seemed to run out of him and he said in a weary voice, “Let me tell it my own way. I got to start way back at the beginning or you won’t understand it. I been rehearsing this for two hours this morning. How much you need to know.”
When I made no answer he gave me a spasmodic shrug. “Look, I was a sax man, a pretty good sax man, and I used to be clean. I had this four-man combo and we booked around town, little toy wages but I had talent and I figured I’d make it. More talent than a lot of Charley the Stars ever had, but they eat. I didn’t know that then. I figured if you could blow good and hit all the notes that move, all you had to do was wait for some A-and-R scout from Columbia to sign you up.
“Things were going okay. We moved into the better clubs and cut a few sides and the money got good. I was young. I married Joanne about then — everything felt groovy. Jesus God how innocent we were! Did you know she was a virgin when I married her? She was nineteen years old.
“But then I lost two good men, the bass player got drafted and the piano man went to the Coast, and I had to break in a couple idiots that didn’t know their brass from their oboes. So okay, so we keep working, but all the time I keep seeing forty-year-old horn men dying from malnutrition and TB and alcoholism. Good bands are a dime a dozen. All of a sudden I could see I don’t want to spend twenty years playing crumb joints and have nothing to show for it except a mountain of debts and creases in my neck and maybe a habit for booze or hard dope. I had to do better than that for Joanne. You get what I mean? Or am I trying to describe a color to a blind man?”
He had warmed up; he was enjoying the sound of his own voice, but I had to let him go on at his own pace. I nodded at him and said, “I understand.”
“Okay. So I got sick and tired of the life we were leading, that’s all. Jesus, I was in love with Jo. But the way we lived, Sweet God. I figured she deserved better.”
His voice ran down and he sat scowling. I didn’t prompt him. After a while he said sourly, “You know, you really ought to pay extra for the story of my life.”
He looked up with a twisted smile and resumed:
“Then they went ape for rock. They brought in all these stupid long-haired kids where the drummer plays the melody in the band and all they know how to do is jiggle a lot and make enough noise to make you stone deaf. Now I’m too old to get in that bag, see? I’m a musician for Christ’s sake. It’s the last goddamn straw.
“Right then we were working the Moulin Rouge, which was the only room left on the Strip that wasn’t using rock. I could see it wouldn’t last — I learned about squeeze plays the first time I got jumped in an alley by five kids bigger than me. Man, I figured here I was making only a hundred a week but next month I could be starving to death.” He uttered a B-flat grunt of sour laughter and threw up his arms, gesturing. His arms fell to his sides and he said gloomily, “So one night Sal Aiello, he owns the Moulin Rouge, he comes to my door selling Mafia cookies.”
He looked at me to see what effect that had. “I’m not dense,” he said defiantly. “Look, Aiello offered me a chance to write my own ticket, and if I turned it down where was I supposed to go? I wasn’t about to go back to the bottom — I been there, it’s too crowded. So I gave my boys their closing notice. That’s one thing you learn in that business — how to get off.”
I said, “So then Aiello gave you a job. Doing what?”
“Bagman,” he said without hesitation. “I was clean, no criminal record. I was ideal — the cops wouldn’t shake down a guy like me at embarrassing times like when I’m carrying a satchel full of payoff money for the monthly sheet of potbelly politicians.”
“Who’d the money go to?”
He looked at me from under his thin eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s included in the price of your ticket.”
“All right,” I said, saving it for later. “Go ahead.”
“Okay, I’m on the payroll and then something happens that gets me sore at Aiello.” He squinted at me as if to divine how much I knew about that.
I decided it would help to tell him. “I know about Aiello and Joanne.”
“Christ. Everybody alive and his idiot half-brother seems to know about that. Hell, I guess I should have kept it to myself, but she was my wife. The bastard didn’t think I’d lift a finger. He thought I was too scared. He was right. Christ, that crazy Jo goes and shacks up with him just for kicks I guess because she didn’t know any better, and what do I do about it? Nothing. Oh, I belted Jo a few good ones, but I didn’t go near Aiello. If I had, I’d have ended up part of the pavement on a road-construction job. Like he did. But the trouble with me is, I didn’t know enough to keep my mouth shut. I got pissed off — hell, who wouldn’t? — and I loaded up with too much to drink one night and I started beefing in a bar about that bastard Aiello. I didn’t spell anything out, just called him some names, but Pete DeAngelo hears the tail end of it. That’s my luck. So Pete hears me beefing and he walks me outside and taps me around a little. Maybe I had that coming. It taught me my lesson. But right after that I find a couple cops waiting at my house with a warrant and a half a kilo of uncut heroin they claim they found taped inside my toilet tank. It was a railroad — you never saw anything that raw. I was clean, man, I never in my life messed with narcotics.”