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DeAngelo’s left hand reached the table beside him and gripped its edge. He didn’t speak.
To Mado
“DeAngelo had learned one vital fact, either from Mike Farrell or from my telephone call here. The pink Cadillac. He knew, or he made it his business to find out, who owned that car. It’s my guess he had to do some detective work to find out, because otherwise he’d have gone after Brawley sooner than he did.
“In the meantime, yesterday morning, I went to Brawley’s to ask him who owned a pink Cadillac. Brawley’s own car was a Jaguar, and that threw me off. He sent me off on a wild goose chase to the boondocks. I was coming back from that when Ed Behrenman tried to run me off the highway over a cliff. Behrenman ended up dead at the bottom of the cliff. There was only one way Behrenman could have known where to find me. Brawley was the only man alive who knew where I’d gone, and I already knew there was a co
“That’s fine,” Mado
“It was right where it’d been all the time. In the trunk of the pink Cadillac. Brawley had a suitcase and a coat in the back seat. He was ready to take off for good when DeAngelo found him. Too bad DeAngelo didn’t keep him alive long enough to ask him a question. Incidentally, by now I’m sure you know they found not only Brawley’s corpse but Joe Cutter’s. I think DeAngelo must have shot Cutter, too.”
DeAngelo shot erect in the chair. “That’s a goddamn lie,” he rasped. It was the first reaction I’d had out of him.
Mado
I heard the raspy growl in DeAngelo’s throat before I saw him start to move with the corner of my eye. He had a gun under the loose tail of his sport shirt and he was hauling it out. Big Freddie, slow to react, was taking a surprised backward step when I shot my arm out, extracted the gun from Freddie’s shoulder holster, and snapped it downward just as DeAngelo’s gun leveled on Mado
The report of the gun was startling in that enclosed space. Bone fragments and blood sprayed from DeAngelo’s head. His bodily functions instantly lost their control; his sphincter relaxed and there was immediately the stink of human urine and manure.
Chickens will suspend their pecking order whenever one of their number gets sick. They all turn on the weak chicken and peck it to death. Ed Baker and Tony Se
Tony Se
“Not more than once,” he said with a grimace. “You have to understand the rules of the game, honey. The wi
I set the briefcase on a round metal umbrella table and opened the hasp with a key. Se
I said, “That’s a sample, mainly to prove to you that I really do have the stuff. You can do whatever you want with this. Most of it’s worthless now. The blackmail evidence against Doctor Brawley is somewhere in here, and quite a bit of stuff that would have nailed Aiello for tax fraud if he were still alive. Now, of course, it’s useless. The film you had on Joa
Mado
“No. The rest of the documents from Aiello’s safe are still under my control. They’ll be turned over to the appropriate federal agencies if my contact doesn’t hear from me regularly. I’ve got you over a barrel. You know as well as I do what’s in that collection. If it’s released, some prominent noses are going to bleed, yours included. It’ll crack the whole state open like an oyster—it’ll blow your whole stinking mess of an organization ten miles in the air.”
“Then why don’t you release it?”
“Because it’s my life insurance. Mine and Mrs. Farrell’s.”
“You’re a pretty smart son of a bitch, aren’t you? What about the cash?”
“It comes to three million, one hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars, in unmarked, untraceable bills.”
“That’s not what I asked and you know it.”
“It’s in a safe place,” I said. “You don’t need it. And I can’t think of anybody it ought to be turned over to. If it went to the law it’d just end up lining some crooked politician’s pocket. So I’ll tell you what’s going to happen to the money. Mrs. Farrell and I plan to honeymoon in Las Vegas a few weeks from now. I plan to win one hell of a lot of money when I’m there. Say a quarter of a million dollars, this trip, and I’ll repeat it every year or so until I’ve won three million, one hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars across the roulette tables. I’ll declare it as income and pay taxes on it. I leave it to you to make the arrangements and see to it that Las Vegas comes across. Any slip-ups and a few pieces of warm information will start to dribble into the FBI’s hands until you straighten out.”
I gri
He said in a low growl, “What the hell do you need all that money for?”
“I want to buy my kid brother an operation so he can play the trumpet again.”
I took Joa