Madonna shushed him again with a hand. “Let me have him for a few minutes, Pete.” He smiled amiably.

DeAngelo’s mouth pinched together, looking like a surgeon’s wound, but finally, giving no acknowledgment that he had heard the dismissal, he turned on his heel and left us. Madonna, for a brief moment, scowled toward the pool, and I knew why: DeAngelo had committed a faux pas. It was against the rules for the Cosa Nostra to let an outsider know about any division of opinion within the organization; that kind of knowledge could be dangerous—it could give outsiders a chance to set member against member.

The glass door slid shut. I figured at least one bodyguard was watching us but it was hardly worth staring to find out. I returned my attention to Madonna and said, “Look, if you really think I’m it, then you’ve not only picked the wrong horse, you’ve got the wrong track. Concentrating on Joanne Farrell and Simon Crane will never get your belongings back for you.”

“What is it you want me to do?” he inquired with his friendly businessman’s smile.

“Lift the heat,” I replied promptly. “You’ve got that girl scared to death.”

“Well, now,” he said, steepling his hands together and tipping his head back to look at me, “for the sake of argument we’ll assume we both know what you’re talking about. Understand, I admit nothing. But let’s you and me set up what the lawyers call a hypothetical case. Assume I’ve got some interest in some items that might be missing from somebody’s safe. Assume there’s been a lot of sensational publicity about somebody’s murder, and there’s going to be more publicity, and I don’t enjoy that at all—in fact you can assume somebody’s busy right now, planting news items about how the deceased must have had personal enemies from back east or something. Assume, in other words, I don’t want any more rumbles. You follow?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. So we’re prepared to be nice and quiet and civilized about it. If you turn in the missing items within twenty-four hours, or prove you and Mrs. Farrell couldn’t possibly have taken it, then you can assume I’d be willing to forget the whole beef.”

He smiled. I suppose he meant it to be an engaging smile.

I felt dismal but not surprised; it had never been anything better than a long shot.

He looked at his watch, shot his cuff, and said pleasantly, “It’s pushing noon. I’d be willing to go the few extra minutes—call it noon tomorrow, your deadline.”

“And if I can’t produce?”

He shrugged his meaty shoulders and picked at a hairy ear. “I don’t throw raw meat on the floor, Crane, it’s not my style. I leave it to your imagination. I only mention there are friends of mine who don’t mind putting the screws on people, hard, to find out what they know and what they did with stolen property.”

He didn’t have to spell that out. I said, in a lower voice, “You can’t get blood from stones. She doesn’t know anything—I don’t know anything.”

“Then all you’ve got to do is prove it.”

“How many people do you know who can prove where they were between two and five in the morning?”

“Too bad you’re not married,” he answered, smiling slightly. Then he tipped himself up on one elbow and said, “If some of the fellows decide they have to put the screws to you two, they wouldn’t leave you around alive afterward to testify about it. You understand that?”

“I understand it,” I said, “but I can’t buy it. You haven’t got enough evidence to justify it with the organization. You haven’t got any evidence at all, period. I know it wouldn’t have to stand up in court, but you’d have to show something.”

“Maybe if you two were members of my organization. But you’re not. You’re not wearing our silks, Crane. Nobody cares what happens to you and the woman.” He shook his head and said sadly, “The minute I laid eyes on you I knew you’d be one of those guys who had to do everything the hard way. I wish you wouldn’t keep arguing—you made your pitch, I didn’t buy it. That’s all there is to it. You came to the wrong store to sell your kind of merchandise.”

I took a breath. “Twenty-four hours isn’t enough time for a scavenger hunt. At least give us a couple of weeks.”

“To get out of the country with the stuff?”

“You know better than that. We—”

“Nuts. You two are the number one suspects. If you want it spelled out, it goes like this. Mrs. Farrell had the motive—things in the safe she wanted to get her hands on. She had the opportunity—she was one of only four people who had keys to the house and the alarm system, and the other three people are accounted for. I’m one of them, the housekeeper makes two, and then of course the deceased, he had keys, it was his house. You see, it’s those keys that narrow it down, Crane. The alarm system down there is wired on a direct circuit that sets off an alarm here in my house if anybody busts into Aiello’s place. Whoever went in there last night had to have a whole set of keys, not just something to pick the door locks with. There was no sign the place was jimmied or the wires cut. Aiello turned up dead wearing bare feet in slippers, which means he was in bed. If he’d had an appointment with anybody he’d have put socks on, he was the type; he didn’t go around in his bare feet when he had company.”

“It could have been anybody he knew,” I said. “Somebody gets him out of bed and he goes to the door and sees it’s a friend, so he switches off the alarm and opens the door and lets them in.”

Madonna shook his head. “No. There’s only a small number of people he’d have trusted enough to let them in the house alone with him at that hour of the night, and they’ve all been checked out. You see?”

I opened my mouth, but the phone beside him rang. Madonna picked it up and talked and listened. When he hung up his smile was fixed. He looked up at me and said, “Room Seventy-Two, Executive Lodge. Mean anything to you?”

I tried hard to keep it off my face. Madonna shook his head, making the kind of face he would use chastising an errant small boy. “A poor try, Crane—and maybe it’ll give you some idea how far you’d get if you tried to hustle Mrs. Farrell out of town. It wouldn’t be discreet.” Watching my face, he added gently, “You’re not a very good loser, are you?”

“I’m not playing a game,” I snapped. “Look, I’ll beg if I have to. At least give us the two weeks. Maybe the cops will turn up something by then.”

“Why should I bargain when I’ve got a corner on the market? No deals, Crane—no gentlemen’s agreement.”

I said bleakly, “What the hell do you expect to win by this?”

“It’s what I don’t expect to lose,” he said. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the chaise and stood up. He was a surprisingly tall man. He kept his voice friendly: “You made a mistake, Crane. You probably figured us for a pack of brainless thugs, and you should have known better—nobody gets where I am without brains. You made an error, you and the Farrell woman, trying to play cute and fast with us. Who do you think you’re dealing with? I started peddling the streets of Harlem when I was nine years of age. So let’s not insult each other. Where’s the stuff you took out of Aiello’s safe?”

“I don’t know.” I lifted both hands. “One week—at least give us that.”

“Like you said, the cops might turn something up if I let it go too long. And putting your same hypothetical case, we could assume I can’t afford to have the wrong people get their hands on the missing items. A week’s too long. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Crane, to prove we’re all civilized. I’ll double your time. Call it forty-eight hours.” Still smiling, Madonna put his thick arm over my shoulders and walked me to the sliding glass door.

Chapter Four

When I stepped up into the ancient Jeep, flipped the key and punched the starter, all the while watching Freddie who stood leaning impossibly forward in the doorway like an ugly immutable gargoyle, I was reviewing in my mind the confrontation with Madonna and regarding myself, my performance, with dazed wonder. Here I was with forty-eight hours between us (Joanne and me) and our joint funeral, yet I seemed to be behaving with cool aplomb. I had faced Madonna not with ravings, and not with begging desperation, but with some kind of detached calm which had sealed itself around me like a plastic bubble.