And missed.
With his left hand he reached for his waistband. The hand disappeared inside his jacket — then reappeared, holding a revolver.
“Howard. Drop it.”
Still hanging grotesquely on the fence, clinging to the top by an arm and a leg, he swung the big revolver toward me.
And fired. Once. Twice.
Close behind me, branches snapped, bullets whined.
I raised my revolver, steadied the sights squarely on his chest, and squeezed the trigger. I watched his body convulse, heard him sigh—
— and saw him slowly surrender his ape’s grip on the wire, then suddenly fall. The ground was rocky where he fell. He landed flat on his back, spread-eagled. His neck snapped; his head struck the rocks with terrible force. For a moment he lay motionless, staring straight up into the sky. Then, when his eyes began to glaze, his arms and legs began to twitch.
“Policeman. Hey. You got him.”
Part Three
The Private Detective
13
When the shooting started in the woods down behind the apartment building, Alex Cappellani jerked and twitched on the settee as if he were imagining the bullets thudding into his own body. His eyes were dark and frightened; his face had a grayish pallor. He had been edgy when I got here an hour ago, but the sandy-haired guy with the gun had completely unnerved him. He had that ostrich look — like he wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and hide himself from the world.
I said to him, “I’m going to have a look back there. You stay here, don’t move.”
He gave me a convulsive nod.
Still carrying the fireplace poker, I left him and went into the dining area that was part of the L-shaped living room. The rear windows looked out over the woods, and in the distance over the Bay and the Bay Bridge and the hills of Oakland and Berkeley; I peered through them, but I could not see any sign of Hastings or his partner or the sandy-haired guy — just a uniformed cop with his service revolver drawn, running through the gate in the privet hedge below. There was the sound of distant shouting, and two more echoing shots; then the shooting stopped altogether and there was nothing to hear but the shouts.
I turned away from the windows and hurried back into the living room proper. Alex was up on his feet, one hand pressed against the bandage that encircled his head, his mouth pulled into a painful grimace. He said shakily, “What’s happening? Is it over?”
“I couldn’t see much,” I told him. “But it’s over, all right, one way or another.”
He sat down again and clasped his hands between his knees. “God,” he said. “God.”
It got very quiet in there for a couple of minutes. I replaced the fireplace poker and paced around on the balls of my feet, looking over at the front entranceway. Nothing happened. My stomach was knotted up and I wanted a cigarette in the worst way; the craving was sometimes intense in moments of stress.
Another minute crept away. Then there was the sound of heavy footfalls on the stairs outside, and seconds after that somebody pounded on the door. Alex’s head jerked up, but I gestured for him to stay seated; I went over into the entryway, up to the door.
“Who is it?”
“Hastings.”
I let out a breath and unlocked the door and opened it. Hastings was alone out on the landing. His big athletic body was tight-drawn and his squarish face was grim, damp with sweat. He gave me a brief nod and came inside past me. I shut the door again after him.
“You get him, Frank?”
“Yeah,” he said, “we got him.”
“Alive?”
“Barely. I had to shoot him. I don’t think he’s going to last long enough to answer questions.”
“Christ. Do you know who he is?”
“His name is Mal Howard. Strong-arm hoodlum, gun-runner, you name it.” Hastings looked past me to where Alex was visible in the living room, watching us with his frightened eyes. “That Alex Cappellani?”
“That’s him.”
He nodded. “Let’s have your story first, before I talk to him. What’re you doing here?”
“Alex called me at home a little after two,” I said. “Out of the blue. He said he’s been holed up here since Friday night. The apartment belongs to a girlfriend of his; she’s a model, in New York now on some sort of magazine assignment. He’s had her key for months, apparently.”
“Go on.”
“He swore to me he hadn’t killed Booker — that he found the body at the Cappellani house, lost his head because he was afraid he’d be blamed, and came here. But he’s not the fugitive type, and he said he’s been having second thoughts. He wanted my advice about what to do.”
“Why you?”
“I suppose because I was working for him and because I had something to do with saving his life the other night,” I said. “Anyhow, I told him to turn himself in, but he wasn’t ready to do that, not without talking to me in person. He sounded sincere and I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“So you agreed to come over here.”
“Right. It seemed the best way to handle it.”
“And you convinced him to give himself up?”
“Yeah. He balked at letting me escort him down to the Hall, but I talked him into calling your office. While we were waiting for you to come the sandy-haired guy — Howard — showed up and tried to get inside. Only he made too much noise doing it and we heard him. I armed myself with that poker, ran into the kitchen, locked the cellar door, and made a lot of noise about having a gun. I thought it was him coming up to the front door when I heard you on the stairs.”
Hastings inclined his head again, slowly, digesting all of that. Satisfied, he said at length, “Okay. Now I want—”
Outside, on the stairs, there had been more running footfalls, and now somebody else began pounding on the door. Hastings turned and opened it. Past him I saw the other plainclothesman, the one I didn’t know, and a uniformed officer farther back on the landing, standing against the redwood fence. With the door open I could hear the excited babble of rubberneckers up on Greenwich Street, the pulsing wail of approaching sirens.
Hastings and the plainclothesman held a hurried conference. What they were saying was none of my business; I went back to where Alex was sitting. He looked up at me in a plaintive way, so I let him have a small, reassuring nod. The tension had gone out of me, if not out of Alex, and I felt limp and tired — the way Hastings looked. You don’t go up against somebody armed with a gun, whether directly or indirectly, without a drained physical reaction setting in.
When Hastings finished talking to the plainclothesman he shut the door and came in to where we were and stood in front of Alex. For several seconds he gave him a long, probing look; then he dragged up one of the free-form chairs — the apartment was furnished in somebody’s idea of ultra-modernism, all black and white and chrome, with huge impressionistic paintings that took up most of the wall space — and sat down. I sat down too, on the opposite end of the settee from Alex.
Hastings introduced himself. And immediately took a Miranda card from the inside pocket of his suit coat and read Alex his rights. “You understand all of that, Mr. Cappellani?” he said then.
Alex looked at him in a numb way. “Yes.”
“Would you like an attorney present?”
“No. No, that’s not necessary. I want to cooperate with you.”
“Fine. All right, to start with I want to know everything you’ve done since Thursday night.”
In a low, nervous voice Alex told him essentially the same story he had told me on the phone and after I arrived here. It still sounded reasonable and sincere. And foolish. Leo Cappellani had been one hundred percent right about his brother: Alex, it seemed, more often than not acted without good judgment.