Free Hit and The Marksman by Brian Garfield Page B

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.”
    â€œTo get out of the country with the stuff?”
    â€œYou know better than that. We—”
    â€œNuts. 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.”
    â€œIt 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?”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œWhy 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?”
    â€œIt’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?”
    â€œI don’t know.” I lifted both hands. “One week—at least give us that.”
    â€œLike you said, the cops might turn something up if I let