Chapter Seven

I held her in my arms until she stopped honking and trembling. When it seemed safe enough, I lowered her into the armchair. I said, “Okay, you sit still a minute and collect yourself.”

I picked up the phone and gave the operator a long distance number at the state capital. After the usual confusions between the switchboard at my end and the switchboard at the other, I finally made connection with Jerry Sprague, a former cop-colleague of mine who now held down the city desk on the Sun-Telegraph. He was happy to hear from me. After dispensing with amenities I said, “I’m trying to pin something down, Jerry. Can you give me a fast tracer on the movements of Stanley Raiford and Frank Colclough over the past thirty-six hours? I understand they’re up in your bailiwick.”

I heard his chuckle. “Minute-by-minute, you mean? How come you always want the hard ones?”

“Do I?”

“I don’t know if we’ve had legmen on them straight through. You may be asking for the impossible.”

“With parsley,” I agreed. “But it’s important. Mainly what I want to know is if either one of them had an opportunity to leave the city last night sometime around midnight, by plane, and return before dawn.”

There was an underlayer of excitement in his voice when he shot back: “You’re sitting on something, Simon, I can smell it.”

“When it’s available for publication I’ll let you have it first. If it gets there. It’s probably nothing—I’m just trying to rule things out.”

“The time period you’re asking for—that would be the time Salvatore Aiello was murdered. For Christ’s sake, you don’t think—”

“I don’t think anything, Jerry, and your guesses are your own. I didn’t mention Aiello’s name, you did. How about it?”

“I’ll see what I can dig up. It may take time—most of the legmen are home by now, we’re wrapping up the early edition now.”

“Okay. I’m not sure where I’ll be so I’d better call you back. When can I catch you in the office?”

“I’ll be here till midnight. After that—here, I’ll give you my home number.”

I took down the number on a motel notepad, tore it off and pocketed it. He asked a few more questions and I put him off without specifically denying anything; as long as I left the bait dangling and let him jump to conclusions he’d be excited enough to dig for the answers I needed. We traded a few wisecracks and I hung up and smiled at Joanne.

I had been watching her face during the conversation with Jerry. She had reacted when I’d mentioned the names. I said to her, “What about it?”

“About what?”

“Colclough and Raiford. When you heard the names, you jumped.”

“Did I?”

I shook my head. “Do I have to pry everything out of you with a can opener? Look, you and Mike and I are all in the same boat with no bait and no hooks. Forty-one hours and ten minutes to go. How much of it do I have to waste arguing with you?”

She was apologetic. “Keeping secrets gets to be such a habit I’ve learned automatically to pretend I don’t know anything. I’m sorry, Simon. You want to know about those two greasy politicians. Certainly. I’ve seen both of them, at different times, at Aiello’s house. Naturally Aiello impressed on me that I was to forget I’d ever seen them there. You know what the penalty was to be if I ever mentioned it.”

I nodded. “Good. Okay. Now let’s go back to the safe for a minute, the things in it. Do you want to change your story? You told me this morning you’d never seen the inside of that safe, but I don’t believe that.”

“You’re right, of course. But what makes you so sure I didn’t tell the truth about that?”

“One or two things I’ve picked up about Aiello’s character. He loved to show things off.”

She made a face; obviously she was thinking about the TV-bugged bedroom. I hadn’t been thinking about that; I’d been thinking about what Mike had said about the way Aiello had shown him the contents of the safe and bragged about it. If Aiello would be that expansive with Mike, it wasn’t reasonable to suppose he hadn’t displayed the wealth for Joanne.

She said, “I’ve seen the safe, when he had it open, quite a few times. Most recently two days ago. DeAngelo was there putting some money in, for Madonna, I suppose. Aiello never missed a chance to point to the little black steel box with the roll of film in it. He didn’t have to say anything because I knew what was in the box and he knew I knew. He just pointed and grinned.”

“This may disappoint you,” I stated, “but I’m not particularly interested in that. What I want to know is what else you saw in the safe.”

“Money, mostly, and half a dozen metal boxes.” Her answers were coming easier, more smoothly, all the time. There was no hesitation. She went on: “The boxes were different shapes and sizes but they were all the same kind. Black-painted steel with locks. Like safe-deposit boxes. Each one had a little cardboard label in a brass slot, like the labels on office file drawers.”

“And there was a name on each label,” I said.

She nodded. “I suppose you want to know whose names they were. I wish I could remember, Simon. You’ve got to understand, every time he opened that safe and dragged me up to look inside, there was only one thing that drew my eye. It was that little square box with my name on it. He always kept it right out front, on a shelf at eye level, so I couldn’t possibly miss it. The rest of the boxes were farther back inside, on different shelves, and you had to walk inside to see what was written on them, all but one or two, and one of them just said ‘S. Aiello.’ I suppose it was his personal property, and the other one had Frank Colclough’s name on it, but you already know about him.”

“How about bundles of money with people’s names on them?”

She nodded. “There were four or five of those. I don’t remember seeing that doctor’s name anywhere, what was it, Brawley? I’ve never seen him before, I’m sure. Of course I’ve heard of him. He’s very high class in the trade, the kind of surgeon all the rich, fashionable people go to. He’s on the boards of both hospitals and he’s active in charities. I suppose if you don’t read the society page you might not have heard of him, but believe me, he’s well known by all the Somebodies.”

“But you never had reason to suspect any connection between him and the mob before.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“Can you remember any of the names that were on the bundles of cash?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. There’s a reason, of course. You just said Aiello liked to show things off. But obviously there were certain things he wouldn’t want to give away, and those would include the names of people who had money in his safe, wouldn’t they? Usually the bundles were turned so that the names didn’t show. Once or twice he got careless and flipped one over by mistake, but I don’t recall—no, wait. Yes I do. The other day, when DeAngelo brought the briefcase full of cash, Aiello had to make room for it, and he moved several of the bundles. He stacked them up on a front shelf down at the bottom, and three of them had the names showing. Now let me think. One was Colclough, I remember that, and another one—yes, I’m sure it was Raiford.”

“What about the third one?”

She shook her head, concentrating. I said, “Brawley?”

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.” She looked up at me and shook her head again. “I just can’t remember. Maybe if we leave it alone it will come back to me.”

“Okay. Let’s try something else. When you went to the house this morning the safe was empty. Did you mean that literally? Everything gone?”

She nodded. “Of course the shelves were still there and I didn’t get down on my hands and knees to make sure they hadn’t left something on the floor at the back, but it looked to me as if everything was gone. The works.”

“All the money and all the black lockboxes.”