Free Hit and The Marksman by Brian Garfield

walls of the house, wings which enclosed the pool area in a U, the flagstones and gravel, and the barbed wire-topped brick wall that sealed off the far end of the patio. The place was an oven.
    Vincent Madonna, the sun worshiper; lay fully clothed on a chaise lounge, shaded by a huge beach umbrella-table. As I approached he had the poolside telephone propped against his ear. The phone was doing most of the talking; Madonna listened. He gave me one glance with eyes hard as glass, nodded, waved a hand and turned his profile to me, listening to the phone.
    Madonna was stout, his features fleshy, his chin dark with heavy stubble halfheartedly covered with talc. He was beginning to look jowly and fold-cheeked. His hair, black and thick and glossy, was combed carefully back over the small ears. The backs of his hands were hairy. He wore a suit with no tie; his wardrobe, rumpled and creased, represented an obvious outlay of about $800. He looked as if his life’s ambition—to be pictured in a full-color, full-page magazine advertisement for whisky—had been frustrated by the desert heat.
    Madonna had closed his eyes in distaste; now and then he interrupted the telephone’s monologue with a baritone grunt. Agony and patience chased each other across his face. The phone complained lugubriously. Finally Madonna’s face assumed an expression of total tormented revulsion; he spoke briefly, and returned the receiver to the cradle before opening his eyes.
    He looked up and beamed at me.
    DeAngelo said, “He’s clean.”
    â€œI’m immaculate,” I said.
    â€œWe’ll see,” said Madonna. He glanced past me—a skinny dark-complexioned sycophant scuttled out of the house with a document in one hand and a fountain pen in another. Madonna said, “Can’t that wait?”
    â€œNo, sir,” said the sycophant. He put the document down on the beach-umbrella table and held his hand on it while Madonna took the pen and signed at the tip of the sycophant’s finger. Madonna glanced at it and lay back on the chaise; the sycophant put the pen together, picked up the document, blew on the signature, folded it in thirds and went.
    Not until that one was gone did any of us speak. Then it was Madonna, fingering a Frank Paradise billiard cue, who directed his affable avuncular voice at me: “How clean are you, Crane?”
    â€œThat’s what I came to see you about.”
    Pete DeAngelo husked, “Now tell us something we didn’t already know.”
    Madonna lifted a hairy hand to still him; he said to me, “Mentioning no names, let’s just say at the moment you and your little friend are alive on a rain check. I state that as a fact, not a threat.”
    â€œI understand,” I said. “Look, this is all off the record. I’m not carrying a tape recorder around. I’m not interested in meddling in things that are none of my business. I’m sure Tony Senna reported on the visit he paid me this morning—he looked around and he didn’t find whatever he was looking for. All I want to do is put this to you: if Joanne Farrell and I had taken anything important out of Aiello’s safe, we wouldn’t be stupid enough to wait around afterwards—and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to come up here and argue about it. She had nothing to do with it, I had nothing to do with it, and I’d like the chance to prove that to your satisfaction.”
    Madonna fixed me with his intent hard eyes; Pete DeAngelo moved forward, heels clacking, and said in his raspy whisper, “If that’s your best artillery, Crane, forget it, it’s a dud. You couldn’t sell that story to a hayseed who’s in the market for the Brooklyn Bridge. Listen—you’re in trouble with us, and you don’t slide out of it just by coming up here and bleeding on Mr. Madonna’s patio.”
    Madonna shushed him again with a hand. “Let me have him for