“Found out what?”

“Nothing. Let it drop—please.”

“You told me you didn’t know anything about Aiello’s operations outside of his legitimate fronts—was the whole story a tissue of lies?”

“Of course not,” she said wearily. “I told you the truth. Think, Simon—would they let me know anything else?”

I made a face. “So you don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve got that stupid, stubborn look on your face. I suppose wild horses couldn’t drag any more out of you.”

She gave me a mock-sweet smile, and remained mute.

With a sickening suspicion of what it might be, I didn’t press that line of questions. I dipped the toggle of the ancient Pilot radio and walked across the room. “Want another drink?”

“No.”

I poured half a glass of ginger ale, laced it with nothing stronger than ice cubes, and glanced at my watch: time for the ten-thirty news, which was why I had switched on the radio. The forty-year-old Pilot was my only concession to the electronic age; television, with all its implications, terrified me. My whole trouble, I thought, is I’m a hopelessly old-fashioned obsolete sumbitch. The radio took its time to warm up and finally said, “… in Paris this morning. The new French government disclaimed any connection with the pro-Viet Cong demonstration. Meanwhile, in Saigon …”

I quit listening; stirring ice-cubes with one finger, I was making my brain work. Assuming Joanne was right and her ex-husband was in the clear, what was left? I thought of a couple of long-shot possibilities. One, a quarrel inside the mob—a split between Aiello and the don, Madonna. It happened once in a while; and I recalled the rumors about bad blood between them. Perhaps Aiello had gone to the mattresses—taken cover in a prepared lair while he set up an ambush to trap Madonna, summoned the members loyal to him, and got ready to go to war for control of the Family.

It was possible, but I doubted that was the way it was. Joanne knew Aiello pretty well, and she had described him as a man who liked his comforts. He was rich—why should he take the chance?

There was another possibility. The structure of a Cosa Nostra Family was complex—rigid and codified. The top man passed instructions down the ladder of rank until finally they were delivered to the button who had to carry them out. There were a good many intermediaries between the don and the man who actually committed the crime. Sometimes the button didn’t even know why he was doing it; he almost never knew, for an absolute fact, where his orders initially came from.

It was simple insurance. If the button was picked up and decided to turn informer, he couldn’t identify anybody except the minor-league middleman who actually gave him his orders. Once in a while, when the heat became too intense, it was necessary to protect the top man. To do that, the mob only had to break off one step of the ladder, at any point at all, to guarantee the top man would never get involved—a middleman had to disappear. For example: the law might have traced some marked payoff money as far as Aiello. Aiello then would have to disappear, for Madonna’s protection.

The law. Most of the cops and judges sold themselves as casually and regularly as streetwalking whores. But the mob couldn’t always get to the federal bureau cops or the grand jury special investigators from upstate. Sometimes the organization just had to cover its tracks, hunker down and wait it out like a jackrabbit in a hailstorm. Of course, if that was the reason behind Aiello’s disappearance, then Madonna knew all about it, and the visit we’d just had from Senna and Baker was just camouflage. I was an ex-cop; perhaps Madonna thought I would get word of the visit back to the cops. It could help throw the cops off the track.

There were a great many ifs in that. As a hypothesis it didn’t work very well. If Aiello’s disappearance had been engineered by the mob, it would have been done in a neater way. There were too many loose ends. The mob would have set up a cover: Aiello was on vacation, or had gone to Grand Bahama on casino business, or had gone back to the Bronx to sit with a sick uncle, or was fishing in the Gulf of California. It would have been so easy to explain his absence that the lack of explanation was a pretty sure sign Aiello’s disappearance had taken the mob completely by surprise. Certainly if they’d planned the disappearance in advance, they’d have found some pretext to keep Joanne away from the house long enough to get things tidied up.

The more I went around in mental circles, getting nowhere, the more I resented getting implicated in the mess. I wanted to shout out, I’m me, I’m Simon Crane—I’m not your everyday skid-row patsy. I was working up a good angry steam when the radio announcer intruded his voice into my consciousness:

“… and on the local scene, this just in. The body of a man tentatively identified as Salvatore Aiello has been found by construction workers on the site of the new interstate highway in Mexican Hat Canyon. A construction company spokesman said a grader operator discovered the corpse buried in fresh-graded earth where the crew was about to lay down fresh pavement. According to the spokesman, in another few hours the body would have been permanently concealed under a new concrete highway.

“According to police reports, Aiello has been linked frequently with several alleged racketeers throughout the Southwest since he moved here from New York in the early nineteen-fifties. Police say a preliminary examination indicates the cause of death was two bullets, possibly thirty-eight caliber or nine millimeter, lodged in the brain after entering the skull above the left ear. The police will not confirm or deny the possibility of gangland execution, but if that is the case, it would be the first confirmed underworld slaying here in the last nineteen months. We have not yet been able to reach Aiello’s secretary or business associates for comment. Stay tuned to this station for further developments and all late fast-breaking news items. The gasoline price war continues unabated, and spokesmen for …”

I strode across to the radio and turned it off. Joanne was staring at it; her hands and body had become still. She hardly seemed to be breathing.

I went from the radio to the couch, picked up her cigarettes and matches and stuffed them in her handbag, pushed it into her hands and said, “Come on.”

“What? Where?” She seemed stunned.

“I want to get you to a safer place than this. Then I’ve got one or two things to do.”

She was not the kind of girl who had to reply to everything that was said to her; she trusted me enough to get up and walk through the door when I held it for her. Outside, I squinted in the sunlight and said, “We’ll take both cars. You go out first and I’ll follow you. Drive down to the Executive Lodge and wait for me in the parking lot—I’ll be right behind you.”

“Why both cars?”

“I’ll be going places from there and you may need yours.” I didn’t add that I wanted to hang back on the way down and make sure she wasn’t followed.

I didn’t bother to lock the house; I went over and climbed into the Jeep. She started her car up and gave me a long look through the windshield before she put it in gear and swung around past me and headed down the hill. Feeling the dig of the .38 in my hip pocket, I backed out and turned to follow her.

Chapter Three

I kept the Jeep in second gear and lay well back to avoid Joanne’s dust cloud. She slewed around the bends faster than I liked to take them; by the time I reached the bottom of the dirt road she was a quarter of a mile down the county highway, roaring toward the city.

I was watching to see if any cars pulled out to follow her; watching my own rear-view mirror as well. If there was a tail, he was an invisible one. Joanne squealed under the freeway overpass and led me across the north side of the city on the six-lane boulevard known as the Strip, which was a raw, neon five-mile stretch of gas stations, hamburger joints, car lots, discount barns, loan offices, artsy-craftsy galleries and gaudy supper clubs. It was peopled by gaily-costumed sun-worshipers, small-time crooks and kids in riot-hued cars with bald tires. A block away to either side were the tract developments—sleazy cracker box houses with gravelly little desert yards, erected by speculators who put ten percent down, financed the rest, and made huge after-tax profits by deducting heavy depreciation. Future slums.