Vincent Madonna’s command fortress was a sprawling foothill mansion perched on a cactus-studded knell with a view of the entire city. It was an architectural bastard—part Spanish adobe-mission, part Texas ranch style, part Sunday Times house-beautiful feature page. All on one story, it had several wings and outbuildings, spidering out with the shambling graceless opulence of a Las Vegas motel. There were sprinklers on the lawn, ticking loudly, and four or five cars cooling their wheels in the circular gravel drive, including Madonna’s 1941 Lincoln Continental, a painstakingly restored classic. Everybody’s got to have a hobby. The smell of the watered grass was a warm spice that registered keenly in my nostrils when I parked the Jeep behind the Continental and stepped out.

I had taken for granted that the place would be festooned with alarm systems and bodyguards; the latter assumption proved accurate enough—the door swung open before I got to it and a rum-looking Neanderthal gave me a sizing up which I associated in my mind with the look a hungry piranha would direct toward a raw hunk of bleeding flesh. He wore a sport jacket which he had obviously only put on in order to open the door so that his shoulder-holstered gun wouldn’t show.

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to see the Don. I’m not armed.”

“What name?”

“Simon Crane.”

“Mr. Madonna expecting you?”

“It’ll come as no surprise,” I declared.

The bodyguard looked uncertain; then, abruptly, he turned to look over his shoulder at someone who had come up behind him. It was hard to see inside against the blinding light of the exterior sun, but then I heard that wheeze of a voice and recognized it immediately: an old injury to the larynx had reduced Pete DeAngelo’s voice to a harsh whisper.

“Who’s all this?”

The bodyguard took a step backward to explain to DeAngelo who I was and what I wanted, but DeAngelo brushed him aside and came forward. His tall frame filled the opening. “Hello, Crane.”

DeAngelo was a sleek, cold man, hard and handsome and poison-cruel. He was a dandy: he was wearing white tapered slacks, white loafers with pointed toes, an ascot under a high custom shirt collar. His polished nails glinted. If MGM ever decided to make the Pete DeAngelo Story, the role might have gone to Robert Wagner. He had a deep suntan and opaque eyes; he revealed all the feelings of a marble slab.

I gave him plenty of time to look me over. We had met before a few times—twice at the station house when he’d come to bail out a couple of the boys. Among his other accomplishments DeAngelo was a bar-admitted lawyer. He was also Madonna’s consigliore—councilor and right-hand man. His reputation was for ambition, brains and smooth if ruthless efficiency.

I said, “I’d like a minute with the Don.”

“What for?”

“To save me trouble and save you people time and effort wasted on wild goose chases,” I said, watching his face. If there was any reaction inside him, he made no sign of it.

He glanced back at the bodyguard, who was tugging at his cuffs and scowling. The bodyguard had a disturbing way of leaning so far forward his feet seemed nailed to the door. Buster Keaton used to do that, I thought. DeAngelo said in his grating whisper, “Keep him company, Freddie,” and went back into the house without another glance at me. DeAngelo’s shoes had heels that clicked like dice.

Freddie propped himself in the doorway with his arms folded, keeping me out under the sun. I said, “You’re from Chicago.”

He shook his head and grinned. He looked like the type who was chronically on the lam. I said, “Hot, isn’t it?”

“Bet your ass,” said Freddie.

Presently DeAngelo clicked back into sight, an intense hungry panther, and nodded to Freddie. DeAngelo’s smile, pointed at me, was without menace; but I felt a chill. He rasped, “Okay, he wants to find out what you’ve got to say. Come on.” He turned without further remarks and walked to the center of the sepulchral living room. I went inside and heard the door click shut behind me. By then DeAngelo had turned and lifted one palm toward me to stop me. He said, “Mind a frisk?”

“No.”

“Go ahead, Freddie.”

I let Freddie paw me for guns and when he was finished I followed DeAngelo through an arched corridor to the back of the house. He opened a sliding glass door and led the way out onto a flagstone walk that ran along to the tiled apron around the swimming pool. It was a big blue pool shaped like a bell, with ladders and diving board. Heat bounced off everything—the water, the walls of the house, wings which enclosed the pool area in a U, the flagstones and gravel, and the barbed wire-topped brick wall that sealed off the far end of the patio. The place was an oven.

Vincent Madonna, the sun worshiper; lay fully clothed on a chaise lounge, shaded by a huge beach umbrella-table. As I approached he had the poolside telephone propped against his ear. The phone was doing most of the talking; Madonna listened. He gave me one glance with eyes hard as glass, nodded, waved a hand and turned his profile to me, listening to the phone.

Madonna was stout, his features fleshy, his chin dark with heavy stubble halfheartedly covered with talc. He was beginning to look jowly and fold-cheeked. His hair, black and thick and glossy, was combed carefully back over the small ears. The backs of his hands were hairy. He wore a suit with no tie; his wardrobe, rumpled and creased, represented an obvious outlay of about $800. He looked as if his life’s ambition—to be pictured in a full-color, full-page magazine advertisement for whisky—had been frustrated by the desert heat.

Madonna had closed his eyes in distaste; now and then he interrupted the telephone’s monologue with a baritone grunt. Agony and patience chased each other across his face. The phone complained lugubriously. Finally Madonna’s face assumed an expression of total tormented revulsion; he spoke briefly, and returned the receiver to the cradle before opening his eyes.

He looked up and beamed at me.

DeAngelo said, “He’s clean.”

“I’m immaculate,” I said.

“We’ll see,” said Madonna. He glanced past me—a skinny dark-complexioned sycophant scuttled out of the house with a document in one hand and a fountain pen in another. Madonna said, “Can’t that wait?”

“No, sir,” said the sycophant. He put the document down on the beach-umbrella table and held his hand on it while Madonna took the pen and signed at the tip of the sycophant’s finger. Madonna glanced at it and lay back on the chaise; the sycophant put the pen together, picked up the document, blew on the signature, folded it in thirds and went.

Not until that one was gone did any of us speak. Then it was Madonna, fingering a Frank Paradise billiard cue, who directed his affable avuncular voice at me: “How clean are you, Crane?”

“That’s what I came to see you about.”

Pete DeAngelo husked, “Now tell us something we didn’t already know.”

Madonna lifted a hairy hand to still him; he said to me, “Mentioning no names, let’s just say at the moment you and your little friend are alive on a rain check. I state that as a fact, not a threat.”

“I understand,” I said. “Look, this is all off the record. I’m not carrying a tape recorder around. I’m not interested in meddling in things that are none of my business. I’m sure Tony Senna reported on the visit he paid me this morning—he looked around and he didn’t find whatever he was looking for. All I want to do is put this to you: if Joanne Farrell and I had taken anything important out of Aiello’s safe, we wouldn’t be stupid enough to wait around afterwards—and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to come up here and argue about it. She had nothing to do with it, I had nothing to do with it, and I’d like the chance to prove that to your satisfaction.”

Madonna fixed me with his intent hard eyes; Pete DeAngelo moved forward, heels clacking, and said in his raspy whisper, “If that’s your best artillery, Crane, forget it, it’s a dud. You couldn’t sell that story to a hayseed who’s in the market for the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen—you’re in trouble with us, and you don’t slide out of it just by coming up here and bleeding on Mr. Madonna’s patio.”