Mike muttered, “Aiello was kind of tilted about dames.” He sounded strangely wistful, but he didn’t follow it up.

He changed the subject harshly: “Anyhow, when I got there Aiello was as per usual, all jovial and friendly, wall-to-wall booze and this nice piece of fluff, Judy Dodson’s her name, pouring his drinks and lighting his cigars for him. A hot pillow dame with a topless neck—you know the type.”

When he looked at me, I gave him a nod.

He said, “Aiello gave me a drink and bragged about how the business has expanded since I went up. He’s built a new wing on the Moulin Rouge, where I used to work, so they can turn it into a casino soon as they buy enough legislators to push the gambling bill through the state house.

“DeAngelo and Tony Senna keep drifting in and out with phone messages. After a while it gets cool by the pool so we go inside, which is when Aiello goes over to the safe.

“It’s a great big bank vault, in the library. Covers pretty near the whole damn interior wall. Aiello signals DeAngelo and me and the Dodson chick to come look inside. Like I told you, enough cash to choke a whale. I counted the stacks, and if each stack was full of bills of the same denomination they had showing on top, then my estimate has got to be pretty close—somewhere around three million dollars, like I said. Most of it out in the open. There were a few lockboxes too, on shelves inside. I didn’t see what was in them. Aiello likes to show off stuff like that—liked, I mean, he’s dead. Anyhow he told me he knew I took a bad fall, the judge was too tough, and he says the organization wants to make it up to me now that I’ve showed how true-blue I can be. I kept my mouth shut, you see. So he takes a wad out of the sack and hands it to me.”

Mike reached into his baggy pockets and took out a thick sheaf of bills tight-bound with a rubber band. “Close to five grand in twenties and fifties,” he explained, and put it back where he got it.

“After that Aiello told me to keep my shirt on, they’d find me a good job shortly and in the meantime I should have a good time. Then DeAngelo starts to pump me—he seemed to think I’d spread all kinds of loose talk in stir. I told him I’d kept quiet—would I be that dense? DeAngelo and Aiello were like a pair of cops where one puts a cigarette in your mouth and the other slaps it out of your face. Right then I got a funny feeling down the back of my neck, you know?

“It took a while to convince them. Finally DeAngelo seemed to buy my story, and he left. Tony Senna was someplace around the house and he left with DeAngelo, in the Mercedes. Aiello takes me outside to see them off. Then he hands me the key to that station wagon and tells me I can use it as long as I like. So I get in the car and drive out. The girl was still there with Aiello. I came into town and stopped at a bar and had a few, and all the time I couldn’t get rid of the idea they were setting me up for a patsy. They don’t need me, see? I started thinking about how much sense it might make for them to kiss me off a mountain cliff one night. Maybe I was wrong but Joanne can tell you I was rattled as hell. I couldn’t think of what to do so I went to her place, but she wouldn’t let me in, I guess I don’t blame her. I made a bitch of her life.”

“Where did you go when you left Joanne’s?”

“Back to the Moulin Rouge.”

“They close at one,” I said. “Where’d you spend the rest of the night?”

He hesitated. “Look, I got to tell you the truth—hang me with it if you want to. When the Moulin Rouge closed I bought a bottle and took it with me. I drove up the Strip clear to the foothills and parked and had a little consultation with the bottle. I don’t remember how much of it I killed but I was pretty damn drunk by the time I decided to get it over with. Whisky courage. I drove up to Aiello’s house again.”

He let it hang in the air, watching me while I watched him. Finally he closed his lids down and said, “Crane, you’ve got to believe me. It was about four this morning. There was a car coming out of Aiello’s drive just before I turned in. I didn’t get much of a look at it—a Cadillac, I think; all I’m sure of is it was pink. My headlights picked it up and it was pink. I didn’t pay any attention to it just then because why was I supposed to suspect anything? I drove on in and got out of the car and the front door was wide open, the lights were on. I went inside. The place was a mess. Aiello wasn’t there, the safe was open, all that cabbage was gone, even the lockboxes—the safe was absolutely empty. I smelled sulfur, like powder-smoke after a gun goes off, you know? Man, I didn’t stick around—I went back to the station wagon and got the hell out of there. I went to Ed Baker’s place—he’s got a little house over by the university. Tony Senna and a couple others were there, playing cards—they’d been at it for hours. I grabbed a sandwich but I was too drunk and too bushed and too scared to sit down and play cards, so I went in the back room and went to sleep.

“When I woke up Senna and Baker were crawling all over my station wagon, tearing the damn thing apart. I guess they didn’t find anything—you got to figure there’d be bloodstains in the car if I’d carried Aiello’s corpse out to that roadbed and buried it. Of course I didn’t know what they were looking for at first, but then later I heard the radio news about the body and I knew that’s what they’d been looking for in the station wagon. All right, they didn’t find any stains, and that slowed them down. But the way Senna looked at me I knew I was a long way from being off the hook. I went in the john and I could hear them out in the kitchen. There was a phone call, probably DeAngelo, and after Senna hung up he told Baker to get his gun because they were going out to your place to pump you and Joanne and see if you had the money. So they went, and as soon as they were gone I got in the station wagon and came over here. I had to think.”

“Why here?”

“It used to be a drop. I’d pick up satchels here once in a while. I think a long time ago they used the place to pass dope from dealers to pushers.”

His voice ran down. He sat sweating in a dark pool of shadow. I said, “Three million dollars is a lot of cash. What was it doing in Aiello’s safe in the first place?”

“They used the vault for a collection point for everything this side of El Paso and Salt Lake.”

“They wouldn’t just let all that cash lie idle in the safe. What was supposed to happen to it?”

He looked at me; he was deciding whether to answer. He said, “Jesus, why not? Look, the way they worked it, Aiello would hold the stuff they collected from various enterprises all over the district. They kept it in cash because they didn’t want any records for the tax boys to dig in. This was the raw take, you understand. All sizes of bills, unmarked. The mob’s got its own legit banks back east, Long Island and New Jersey, but out here they don’t, so it was handy to have that big old bank vault in Aiello’s house. They’d let the cash pile up until there was enough for a shipment—maybe four million. Then they’d satchel it into a small van with two or three torpedoes and armor plate and more locks and electric guard systems than you ever saw, and Aiello and DeAngelo would ride with it over to Los Angeles. Over there they’d work through a dozen banks, change the money into cashiers’ checks and bank letters under phony names. They’d take a week, ten days to get it done, all in small batches so they wouldn’t attract attention. Then somebody flies it over to Switzerland—they’ve got dozens of numbered bank accounts in Zurich. It used to be Madonna who called the turns but he never touched the stuff with his own hands. Usually Aiello and DeAngelo would fly over to Switzerland.”

“And the safe was almost full last night?” I asked.

“Close. Like I said.”

“It all belonged to the mob?”