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“Mostly. A lot of people had pieces of it. And Aiello used to keep money in the safe for people who didn’t want to report it for taxes—private money.”
“Who else?”
“I don’t know names. Outsiders, but I don’t know which ones.”
He got up and wobbled toward the door to get air. I stayed close with the gun. He said, “God, I feel like I just got out of the hospital after six months and fell down in the lobby on my way out and broke both legs. Only this time there’s no cure. Jesus H. Christ. I belong to the ru
All this had been preamble; suddenly he wheeled to face me. He said in a sharper tone of voice, “Crane, I’ve leveled with you. When I heard Se
“Go on—spell it out, Mike.”
He nodded. “I talk a lot, I know. Reflex habit. But I’ve been sizing you up. I’m not as dumb as I look. You’re one of the mob’s prime suspects. I know that because I heard the boys talking this morning. This morning you went up to Mado
I had; I was. I said, “Go on, Mike.”
“Okay, the reason I opened up to you, I want to make a deal.”
“What kind of a deal?”
Now there was cu
“Keep going.”
“Okay. We find it, we split it down the middle, and we go our separate ways.”
I said, “What about the mob?”
He tried to smile. “Crane, forty thousand men disappear every year in this country, and a lot of them don’t ever get found unless they want to. If it helps you make up your mind, I got a good contact—not through the mob—with a plastic surgeon. You follow?” He dragged a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, glanced at it, and handed it to me. I looked at it—the name and address of a doctor in Studio City.
He said, “Keep it, I got another copy. Hell, tie it all up in nice neat ribbons—leave a suicide note if you want to and make it look like you took a Brodie off the Golden Gate Bridge.”
He was staring at me without blinking, almost holding his breath.
I said, “What about Joa
“Joa
“I notice you didn’t offer to split it in thirds.”
“I didn’t think I had to. I thought you and Joa
I didn’t press it; what I said was, “Suppose we look but we don’t find the money?”
“Then we get dead. I don’t know about you but I’m dead anyway. What have we got to lose?” He had a point.
I said, “You’ve leveled with me as far as I can tell. I’ll give you this much. Mado
“Or else what?”
“He didn’t specify. They’ll bring Joa
“And when they’re satisfied you don’t know anything, they’ll rub you out anyway because they can’t afford to let you go and blab what they did to you. A sweet pot, Crane. Look, the only chance we’ve got is to throw in together. We can’t go to the cops—they might help us find the stuff but we’d end up dead anyway, and most of the cops I know would keep the money and pretend they-never found it.”
Which was, I thought, exactly what Mike himself was proposing to do. I didn’t point out the irony of his indignation. I said, “Where do you figure to start looking?”
“Have we got a deal?”
“Let’s put it like this. We’ll work together. If and when we find the money we can decide what’s to be done with it. If it looks like we can guarantee our own safety by turning the money over to Mado
“That’d have to be a hell of a guarantee.”
“If we can work it out that way, will you go for it?”
He scowled. “If it’s the only way, hell yes. Have I got a choice?”
“All right. We’ve got a deal.”
He nodded. “Okay. Then the first thing you do is check out the Judy Dodson bird. She was still with Aiello when I left last night. Look, the reason I can’t do it myself, I got to stay out of sight. They might take a notion to haul me in any time. You’ve at least got forty-eight hours and they’ll probably keep their hands off you that long, just to see if you can come up with something.”
“Any other ideas if the girl doesn’t pan out?”
“One or two,” he said. “For instance, Frank Colclough and Stanley Raiford.”
I looked at him. He had uttered two prominent political names. Frank Colclough, the county supervisor, was a political kingmaker who bossed the county machine. Stanley Raiford, the ex-governor, had been in the news lately, making hard-knuckled speeches that sounded very much like the noises made by a man ru
Mike said, “There were money packages in the safe with their names on them.”
“Packages for what?”
“You’d have to find that out yourself. I don’t know. The money wasn’t payoffs, I know that much. The bag money doesn’t get listed like that in the safe. So it was something else, not bribe cash. But it had Colclough’s and Raiford’s names on it. Private money, probably, that Aiello was keeping as a favor to them. There were some others, but those are the only two names I remember.”
I scowled. They were leads but they didn’t sound very good. But at least it was a place to start.
Mike said, “I’m going to have to stay under cover. If it wasn’t for Jo I wouldn’t trust you, but I figure she’ll look out for my rights if you get any fancy ideas.”
It was a strange thing for him to say. I had no way of disproving the idea that he and Joa
“All right,” I said. “You sit tight.” I turned to go.
He stopped me. “How about my gun?”
I studied him, then handed the gun to him. He stuck it in his waistband. He said, “I may not stay here, but I’ll get in touch.”