Chapter Nine

I woke up drowsily when she came burrowing down under the sheet with me like a warm, furry, inquisitive pet, creeping into my arms, fitting against me with close-together warmth. I felt the soft tickle of her hair on my skin. Burning slivers of daylight lanced into the room through cracks at the edges of the blanket-drape. I looked at her over a stretching interval. Her flushed, unsmiling face was inches from mine. Inside, I felt a visceral quiver, the slow coil and press of wanting her. The macabre ghost of Mike threw a shadow across my thoughts, but the terrifying threat that hung over us, the urgency of hard danger, created in me—and in her—an urgency of blood needs. Joanne sighed and wriggled and gave me a serene unhurried kiss; she stirred against me, her mouth softened and parted; we were drugged with panic. Her short breaths beat a fiery rhythm; her throat pulsed. We moved together and I felt the pound of her blood and mine. The cruel drive of urgency: she gave herself to me with a newer, deeper, more brutal abandon than ever before.

Afterward she said, “Love is a tough animal,” in a puzzled, drunken murmur. “This was crazy—my God, we just performed a funeral! I think now I understand why people have wakes. We—needed this. Am I babbling?”

“Yes. Go on and babble.”

“God, Simon, I’d forgotten all about your—about that son of a bitch last night with his combat boots and his huge revolver. You must hurt like hell.”

“I wish I was one of those movie cowboys who take eight tons of punishment and come right back without a hair out of place and wreck the whole saloon. What time is it?”

“You asked me that yesterday morning, remember? It must be about eight. I slept on the couch because you’d passed out and I didn’t want to disturb you. But I woke up with the sun in my eyes and it was—lonely.” I remembered the tumultuous months we had had together, in what now felt as if it must have been a prior incarnation, a different world—a world without grim, frightful terror.

We dressed and went outside under the burning sky. Heat pressed down. I drove her down to Nancy Lansford’s. Nancy came around from the back of the house, big and shapeless and happy to see both of us. I told Joanne to stay out of sight—I would return by midnight at the very latest; I left her in Nancy’s care and drove alone toward the city.

Almost half my forty-eight-hour grace period was gone, but I had set my own deadline well in advance of Vincent Madonna’s. If by midnight I did not feel substantially closer to finding the loot than I was now, I would give up the search; Joanne and I would run for it. I hadn’t decided where, or how; I knew we had to disappear. I still had in my pocket the name of the plastic surgeon Mike had mentioned, but surgery required more money than I had. As for Mike’s $5,000 roll of cash, only the murderer knew what had happened to it; I hadn’t found it on Mike’s body.

I couldn’t assume that Mike and Aiello had been killed by the same person. It was possible—if Mike knew too much, he could have been killed to shut him up. But the waters were muddled by the unmistakable signs of torture. The obvious questions, then, were: (1) what had Mike’s murderer expected to learn by torturing him, and (2) had the murderer learned it?

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.