Blood Money Read online

  “That’s something I’ve wondered about since you turned up,” said Jane. “What’s your interest in her?”

  Bernie looked down at the carpet. “I guess it’s another crummy thing that happens when you get old. When your body gets soft and weak, your mind does the same thing. You get sentimental about whatever it is that makes people alive. Some skinny little kid who moves quick and doesn’t seem to be affected by gravity is a kind of miracle. She has so much of it that she kind of throws it off around her like heat and light. It kind of kept me going.” He gazed at Jane as though he had not seen her before. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you know anything about her?”

  Jane gave her head a little shake. “She told me some of her story. I knew I didn’t have time for more of it if I was going to get her out of there.”

  Bernie said, “She’s not as delicate as she looks. Just the opposite—sort of like a little animal. A raccoon, maybe. Ever try to keep one out of your garden?”

  “I’m a big-city girl,” Jane lied. “I buy my vegetables frozen.”

  “I had a bodyguard years ago, right after they built my place. He was right from Sicily, and they thought he’d be good because he didn’t know anything. He planted a bunch of grape vines, I guess because he was homesick. But the place was right where a raccoon used to live. The new house doesn’t faze her. She wants those grapes. You put in a fence, she climbs it. You put up a bit of wire on top, she shimmies through. You electrify it, she climbs a big tree nearby and drops into the middle of the vineyard, then digs under to get out. If you put in a moat, she swims it. You stay up all night watching for her, then the second you doze off she’s back. There’s a maddening persistence there, but it’s not stupidity. She just puts up with what she has to, because she’s going to survive, no matter what. She’s going to keep coming at you until you get tired and go away, or you put a bullet into her. Seeing her die would be a shameful thing. Besides, she’s the best friend I’ve had since Sal Augustino.”

  It took Jane a second to identify the moment when the raccoon had transformed back into Rita. “Friend?”

  “I know,” said Bernie. “It sounds pathetic in a man my age. Living like I did is lonely. She used to take the time to talk to me. Nobody else did. Once in a while when things were slow, I’d get her to play a game of cards. I could tell she wasn’t much interested in cards: too much sitting still for a person like her, I guess, and too much thinking about something that’s pointless. I guess she was lonely too. We’d kind of look out for each other when there were other people around. And she got to go out—you know, shopping for groceries and so on. So I’d use her for my eyes and ears. She’d come back and describe everything she saw and heard out there. Seeing her was like getting a visitor in jail. Until you’ve been there, you don’t know what that is.”

  “I understand,” said Jane.

  “So what do we do with her? Before we do anything that’s probably going to bring the roof down on our heads, we’ve got to—”

  The door beside Bernie’s opened suddenly, and Rita glared at them. “Where have you two been?”

  Jane stepped inside and pulled Rita with her. When Bernie had entered, he closed the door behind him. “What are you doing up at this hour?” he asked.

  “Looking for you,” said Rita.

  “We went for a little walk,” Jane said. “Don’t worry. If we were going to abandon you or something, we wouldn’t be here. Bernie wouldn’t have followed you all the way from Florida, and I wouldn’t have driven half the night to get you here.”

  Rita gave her a sullen look. “I fell asleep and everything changed, didn’t it? Now it’s you and Bernie. What are you going to do with me?”

  Jane said, “What I had planned to do all along. I’m going to get you some very good identification that says you’re somebody else. Then I’m going to find you a safe, pleasant place to live and try to teach you to be that other person. When I’m satisfied that you’ve learned enough to stay alive, I’m going to leave.”

  Rita looked at the floor, then back up at her. “I … I’m sorry. I’d rather go with Bernie.”

  “What?”

  She looked at Jane apologetically. “I’m sorry. I came to you and begged you to help me. And I know there’s a way you do these things, because Celia told me. I have to do everything you say, as soon as you say it and not even ask any questions. Now you’ve gone to a lot of trouble and taken me all the way here. But I don’t want to go off by myself and hide somewhere. I’d rather go wherever Bernie’s going.”

  Bernie looked amazed, and even a little frightened. “Wait, kid. Who invited you? I just didn’t want you on your own without any money. But you won’t be on your own. Jane will help you.”

  The girl’s eyes were beginning to well up. “Please, Bernie. I worked for you for a year. You know I won’t be any trouble. I can help you a lot.”

  Jane looked at Bernie, waiting. He said, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ve always tried to seem like this nice old man, but that’s not what I am. The reason I lived in that house is that I worked for the Mafia. I was hiding money for them. They don’t get money from some nice clean enterprise. It came from things like lending somebody’s father a few bucks so they can make him pay ten times that in interest, or they’ll break his legs. Or from taking girls younger than you and forcing them to have sex with twenty strangers a day. You told me your mother was locked up for drugs. There’s a good chance the money from bringing it in came to me.”

  “You sound like I’m five years old,” said Rita. “You didn’t do any of those things, any more than I did. You couldn’t have left if you tried.”

  Bernie looked at Jane in desperation, so Jane said, “You saw what happened when they heard Bernie was killed. They seem to be tearing the country apart looking for anybody who might know anything. Right now, the only one I know about is you.”

  “They’re not looking for Bernie, because he’s dead. And he’s smarter than they are. It said in the paper he was. If he doesn’t get caught, neither do I.” She said to Bernie in a pleading voice, “This isn’t her problem. It’s our problem. She’s this nice woman, and we’re just going to get her killed.”

  Jane said, “I’m afraid you don’t know everything … ”

  “I know enough.”

  Bernie said, “Danny isn’t going to meet me somewhere. They caught him in your hotel and killed him.”

  She closed her eyes to hold the tears back. “Then you’re the only friends I have left. I want to go with you. I can help with what you’re doing.”

  “What is he doing?” asked Jane.

  “Not him. Both of you. You’re going to take all the money he hid for the Mafia.”

  “Why would you think that?” asked Bernie.

  “Because you hate them. That’s why you pretended to die. I watched you sometimes when those men came to the house. And I watched you looking out the window at them when they left. You hate them.”

  Bernie looked at Jane, his eyebrows raised.

  Jane took in a deep breath and sighed. “I guess when you know enough to get yourself killed, it won’t make things any worse if you have the story straight. Yes. We’ve decided to try to retrieve all the money he was holding in his head for the families. What we want to do is steal it and donate it to charities.”

  Rita’s body straightened and her head bobbed backward as though something had jumped up at her. “Get real.” She waited for Jane or Bernie to say something, then cocked her head. “All of it?”

  “Every penny, if we can.”

  Rita glared at her, then let her eyes move to Bernie, then back to Jane, as though she was still waiting for one of them to reveal that it was a joke. Very slowly, her eyes widened, and her lips curled up at the corners. “It’s kind of funny.” After a pause, she said softly, “Okay.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Okay’?”

  “I’m in. I’ll hel
p. Maybe it’ll pay them back just a little bit for Danny.”

  “You don’t seem to understand what this means.”

  Rita’s smile lingered on her lips, but her eyes were still wet from the tears. “I understand enough.”

  “I’m not sure you do,” said Bernie. “I’m holding money that belongs to twelve families. Not little ones, either. Right now they think I’m dead, and they hate me for dying. They can’t wait to die too, so they can go track me through hell to kill me again. If they ever get one whiff of a suspicion that I’m alive and gave away their money, they’ll go crazy. There will be hundreds of guys out looking for me every day. They’ll still be looking when nobody’s seen me for forty years and I’d have to be a hundred and fifteen years old. Then they’ll quit. You know what will happen then?”

  “What?” said Rita.

  “They’ll start looking harder for you.”

  “I’ll be fifty-eight,” said Rita. “And I’ll know that I at least did something to them before they got me.”

  Jane stood closer and looked into Rita’s eyes. “We’ve told you what we’re going to do. What you’re going to do hasn’t changed. You’re going to a place far away where you can pass as a different person.”

  “What am I supposed to do there? What’s the use of it?”

  “Who knows?” said Jane. “Maybe so that when we’re dead, there will be somebody alive who knows what we were trying to do.”

  7

  Frank Delfina opened the big steamer trunk and gazed down into it at Danny Spoleto’s body. It had been jammed into the trunk with the knees nearly to the chest and the arms folded. The neck had needed to be twisted a bit so the head would fit into one corner. The face was aimed upward at the light hanging from the ceiling of the garage. The door to the florist’s work room was open, and the thick, sweet smells of jasmine and gardenia clashed and competed with the oil and gasoline of the fleet of delivery vans.

  Delfina craned his neck so his head was aligned with the face of Danny Spoleto. He stared into the dead eyes for a minute, then walked to the other side of the trunk. “This is one dumb son of a bitch,” he muttered. He gave the trunk lid a kick so it snapped shut. Then he turned his attention to the two men who had delivered the trunk. “Is the hotel room completely cleaned up? No blood or anything?”

  “Yes sir,” said Strozza. “We got him into the bathtub before there was much blood, and we gave the floor a quick job ourselves before we left. John and Irene got there about two minutes later. After they got him in the trunk they went over everything with cleanser and disinfectant.”

  “And you’re sure there was nothing in the room and nothing in the luggage?”

  “He had two small suitcases. Nothing in there but clothes he had just bought—shirts in those plastic packages, and pants with the tags still on them. Irene even sliced open all the linings in the suitcases. He didn’t seem to own any paper.”

  Delfina glanced down at the body. “You searched him too?”

  Strozza nodded. “All he had was his wallet and car keys.”

  Delfina said, “I guess there’s no reason to hold on to the body, then. Go bury it.”

  Strozza and his partner squatted to tip the trunk up onto the dolly, then wheeled the trunk up the ramp of their truck and secured it to the back wall. “We’ll take it out to the seed farm. There’s a field they’re getting ready to plant with begonias in a couple of days.”

  “Don’t be lazy: make it deep.”

  When the two men had closed the tailgate and climbed into their truck, Caporetto pressed the thumb button beside the garage door and opened it so they could drive out, then closed it. Delfina was in a sour mood, but he gained some comfort from seeing his men moving, doing things efficiently, paying attention. He said to Caporetto, “As soon as those guys come back, put them on a plane to L.A. Call Billy and tell him to find them something to do.”

  “Sure, Frank.”

  As an afterthought, Delfina added, “Make sure it’s nothing important.”

  Delfina caught a look of mild surprise on Caporetto’s face. He shrugged. “I know Spoleto wasn’t what they expected to find, but they should have done better than this. You notice they didn’t even find a gun on him. They saw him and panicked. It would have been nice to have that guy in a small room someplace where I could have a long talk with him.”

  Caporetto nodded, but his face revealed a slight discomfort. “I still don’t understand what he was doing there.”

  “I don’t know yet where he fits exactly,” said Delfina. “But I plan to.”

  Caporetto said, “You think he just stole her credit card from Bernie’s house and charged everything to her so we wouldn’t know he was traveling?”

  Delfina looked at him in disappointment. “That’s what Strozza thinks. But you heard him. They found his wallet. If he’d had her credit card, you would have heard about it. So where did it go?”

  Caporetto shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “He never had it. The girl made the charges herself.”

  “Then it was both of them? He was the one who got the girl the job as Bernie’s housekeeper, right? Maybe he used her to find out where Bernie put the money—had her pull receipts or something from the trash for a year or so. Then he somehow lured Bernie to Detroit, popped him, and took off to collect the money. That would explain why they came all the way up to New York. That’s where the big banks and brokers and all that are.”

  Delfina said, “New York City, not Niagara Falls. But it’s something like that.”

  Caporetto’s excitement slowly grew. “Yeah,” he said. “Got to be. Danny Spoleto was supposed to be this ladies’ man, right? He didn’t look like any great shakes stuffed in a box, but I heard he had to fight them off. So he gets this green kid—she’s what, eighteen?—and charms her like a snake. All she has to do is hang around Bernie’s house, sweep the floor once a day, and keep her eyes open when she empties the trash can. When she’s found enough, Spoleto pops Bernie, meets the girl, and cashes in all the accounts she’s located for him.”

  Delfina smiled indulgently, but his customary look of stony intensity returned. He shook his head.

  “Why not?” asked Caporetto.

  “It’s a good story. I like it. But let me tell you about Danny Spoleto. He started out ten years ago in New York. He had a cousin who was made, and the cousin asked the Langustos if they could find something for him. Since the old days, the Langusto family was supposed to take care of Bernie. Maybe it meant something fifty years ago, but since then, it’s been kind of nominal, like the Swiss guards at the Vatican. They still supplied bodyguards, on a regular rotation. So they sent him down to Florida to take some other guy’s place. He didn’t get on Bernie’s nerves, so they left him there for a few years. Then they made him one of their bagmen. He would deliver money to Florida for them—most of it not even in cash—and Bernie would make it disappear. Bernie may have sent him on a few errands, too, but that was it. This was not a guy in training to enter the world of high finance. It was a guy who had to wait six or seven years before anybody would promote him to delivery boy.”

  “What about the girl? Maybe she was smarter than she looked. Maybe she was the one who came on to Spoleto, knowing that he could get her into that house.”

  “I thought of that, but she didn’t know in advance what was going to happen to Bernie.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “When our guys got to the house that night, it was about four hours after Bernie got shot. She wasn’t gone. She was still in bed.”

  “Then what do you want her for?”

  Delfina brought his lower lip over the upper one, then down again in a little shrug. “I think she can’t help but know something. She saw people come and go. Maybe they wouldn’t mean anything to her, but they would to me. But what she knows for sure is what happened before Bernie left for Detroit. It wasn’t normal. For years, Bernie barely went outside. I think somebody called him, or sent him a ticket or something,
and I’d like to know who.”

  “Why not Danny Spoleto? If he was a bagman, he must have brought briefcases full of money and stuff into the house—all for Bernie’s eyes only.”

  “Maybe,” said Delfina. “But we just caught him when he didn’t expect us. The guys searched him, searched the bags, searched the room. They didn’t find anything that showed he had access to serious money. Bernie the Elephant might have carried a hundred account numbers in his head, but you can’t tell me this bodyguard did. So even if he had something to do with setting Bernie up, he didn’t end up with any way of getting at the money.”

  “The girl? Nobody searched her. She might be carrying it for him.”

  “That’s as good a reason as any to look for her.”

  “She’s all we’ve got,” Caporetto agreed.

  “Except that we don’t have her anymore,” Delfina reminded him. “We’ve got her picture, right?”

  “Yeah. When they hired her, they told her it was for a work permit. She didn’t know any better.”

  “Okay,” said Delfina. “Here’s what we do. First thing is, nobody in this family knows anything about Danny Spoleto. As far as the other families know, we didn’t find him, and we didn’t kill him, and it never occurred to us to look for a girl. Second, I want a full-court press on finding her fast. As of right now, nobody has anything to do but find her. Get the picture copied, and make it look like one of those mailers they send out: ‘Girl missing from her home since June twenty-third,’ and give a phone number that’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “Okay,” said Caporetto.

  “And what else do we know about her? Where’s she from? What family has she got?”

  “She grew up in northern Florida. The only relative she’s got is her mother. Her name is Ann Shelford, and she’s doing five in Florida State Penitentiary at Starke.”

  “For what?”

  “Peddling meth,” he said. “Turns out it was ours, actually. Just a coincidence. Some of that stuff from the lab in California.”

  Delfina nodded. “Find a couple of people inside that we can use. I want her watched. I want somebody reading her mail, listening to her phone calls. I want somebody at her elbow all the time.”