Authors: Thomas Perry
“What was it?”
“They saw some guys in the airport. I guess it was DiBiaggio who knew one of them, really. It was a made guy he remembered from the old Castiglione days. They got to talking, and when they got around to the subject of Spoleto, these two guys don’t have anything to say, just look at each other and kind of chuckle.”
“How?”
“Like they knew where he was. No, like they had him already. Like the game was over, and they already won. The two of them say, ‘Well, so long. Got to go.’ Lomarco keeps an eye on them, to see where they’re going. Maybe they’re changing flights to go someplace else, and he wonders where. But they just go to a restaurant in another part of the airport. Pretty soon a couple of other guys arrive on a different flight, and they all wait.”
“This doesn’t sound like a big deal,” said Castananza. “I would have been curious too, but what’s the big deal?”
“Over the next hour or so, they keep arriving. It goes on until there are like twelve of them. Then they leave.”
“Is that when Lomarco and DiBiaggio called you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it didn’t seem like a big thing. I told them guys from a dozen families are all over the place, looking for these people, so you could run into anybody anywhere. We didn’t hear from them again, so I let it go. But then we didn’t hear from them for a couple more days, so I started to wonder. A couple of hours ago we started making some calls.”
“So what did you find out?”
“That’s why I thought I had to ruin your dinner, Al. It seems the New Mexico state police found their bodies. They were way the hell out in someplace called Cibola National Forest.”
“They weren’t supposed to make noise or cause trouble,” said Castananza.
“I’m pretty sure they didn’t, Al,” said Saachi. “When you told me to send guys, I didn’t think you wanted walking meat. I sent good, strong hands. Both of these guys were young, but not kids. I was there the night Lomarco made his bones. He went in alone, did this guy with a knife, and walked slow around the corner to the car with a smile on his face. He had a set of stones on him.”
“Do their families know?”
“Not yet,” said Saachi. “I just found out.”
“We’d better make a swing over to their houses tonight, so I can talk to them myself,” Castananza said. “You got enough money on you?”
Saachi’s look of anxiety returned. “This is just an opinion, Al, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“It doesn’t take long, and it’s what people expect. If I don’t do it, people are going to wonder why. In a little while, their wives are going to be wondering what’s going to happen to them and the kids.”
“I can go give them some money by myself,” offered Saachi. “We don’t know how bad this is yet.”
Castananza turned his eyes to watch Saachi. He was glancing in the rearview mirror to be sure the two boys were still back there. “You have a theory?”
“I don’t know, Al,” said Saachi. “Two perfectly capable guys are sitting in an airport, and a few days later, they’re dead, a hundred miles away. It makes you think.”
“So what does it make you think?”
“Well, what’s going on?” asked Saachi. “Nobody killed them in an airport. Maybe they followed those twelve guys into an ambush. Or maybe somebody talked them into leaving the airport. If DiBiaggio remembered one of them from the Castiglione crew, who can they belong to but DeLuca?”
“Could have been Delfina. He got some of those guys when the family split.”
“Oh yeah. That’s right,” said Saachi. “DeLuca got most of them, so I sometimes forget. But Delfina or DeLuca or anybody else, why would they kill our guys?”
“You think our guys found something—like Bernie’s money?”
“Or their guys did, and wanted to be sure nobody else knew about it.”
“Or maybe it’s all been some kind of setup from the beginning,” said Castananza.
“You think so?” asked Saachi.
Castananza shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been afraid of. One minute we hear Bernie the Elephant is dead, and we lost a lot of money. Then we hear that we’re supposed to send people all over the country. Why? To look for Bernie’s bodyguard, who is suddenly missing. Maybe ‘missing’ means he killed Bernie. But maybe it means somebody else killed both of them.”
“It beats me how the hell anybody was going to get the money out of Bernie after he was dead anyway,” said Saachi.
Castananza shrugged. “Vincent Ogliaro is in jail, but he was supposed to be smart. And that family has always been tight. Tasso was saying Ogliaro’s old man was a tough son of a bitch, and it made me remember him.”
“Well, his family ain’t tight anymore. It’s like somebody lopped off their head, and they’re just lying there. I think somebody is going to wait a decent interval and then take over.”
“DeLuca?”
Saachi squeezed his face into a doubtful look and cocked his head. “He did put the bomb in Di Titulo’s car. And I’ve been hearing that there are a lot of guys from Chicago hanging around Detroit.”
“And everywhere else, too,” said Castananza. “There seem to be a few in every airport our guys have been covering.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked Saachi.
“I told you. Take me to DiBiaggio’s house, and Lomarco’s.”
“Are you sure?” Saachi turned the car toward DiBiaggio’s house.
“We’ve got no choice, now. When everybody else hears they’re dead, they also better hear I already gave their wives a
pile of money to tide them over. People have got to feel like this is a tight family if we’re going into a war.”
“War?” asked Saachi. “With who? DeLuca?”
“Not DeLuca,” said Castananza. “It’s too big for DeLuca.”
“Who, then?”
“Maybe him and somebody else,” said Castananza in growing frustration. “DeLuca, at least two of the New York families, and Chi-chi Tasso in New Orleans. I don’t know who else, but they’re a good bet.”
“Chi-chi Tasso?” Saachi’s voice revealed his confusion.
“Yeah. He was the one who said this was all a fantasy. He said Bernie took the money himself and gave it to charities. It was a real conversation stopper. He took up half the ride with this nonsensical thing about how Bernie lost his mind and heard voices that told him to do it.”
“What do you think they’re up to?”
“Just what I said. They got Bernie. They got the rest of us to spread our guys out looking for Bernie’s money. Now they’ll cut off a few heads and take over. And we can’t fight them on that plan. Any one of them is bigger than we are. The best we can do is get our feet out of their trap before they get it all cocked and ready.”
“How do we do that?”
“Get everybody home. I mean everybody. I don’t want to hear later how one or two guys didn’t get the word and suddenly found themselves out there alone. But first take me to DiBiaggio’s house, and Lomarco’s.”
J
ane kept Bernie and Rita out of sight as she drove west. She bought food at grocery stores, and they ate while they were on the road. They took turns driving, so one person could sleep in the back of the Explorer while the second rested and dozed in the passenger seat.
As they moved across the country, Jane used small ways of bolstering the new identities she had chosen for Bernie and Rita. She bought key chains and wallets and had them mono-grammed. When she crossed into Illinois, where the Dailys had come from, she bought souvenirs: T-shirts, caps, jackets with the logos of the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bears, the Bulls, the University of Illinois, and even a couple of sweatshirts that said
CHICAGO
. She knew that salespeople, banks, and landlords were always watching for people using fake identities to steal money. The ones who did that were not in a long-term business. They simply stole a wallet and used the cards they found in it until it got to be too risky. That took a day or two. They didn’t have time to bother with things like monograms, and they didn’t wear anything that could advertise where they lived or where they had been.
At Chicago, Jane turned south. Late on the second evening, she stopped the Explorer at a fast-food restaurant outside Urbana. While she waited for the waitress to pack the food she had ordered, she went to the pay telephone in the corner by the ladies’ room. She put in coins and dialed the number that Henry Ziegler had given her. She held her breath as the telephone rang. It was long after business hours in Boston, but she
knew that it would make no difference to Henry. The phone rang again, and she heard his voice. “Yes?”
Jane said, “I thought you probably wouldn’t be home sleeping. I just wanted to know that you made it.”
He said, “I’ve been wanting to call you, too, but nobody answered in New Mexico.”
“The last ones went into the mail two days ago,” she said. “They’ll probably arrive tomorrow.”
“We did it?” said Henry.
“We did it,” she said. “Now stay safe. And thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “If you ever need me again, you know where I am.”
Jane laughed. “I should have that kind of money. Got to go.” She hung up, paid the waitress for the take-out dinners, and walked to the Explorer. She kept heading south, then turned east.
Jane turned the Explorer off the highway just across the Indiana state line in Terre Haute, and began to search the town. Bernie woke up after a few minutes and rubbed his eyes. “What are we doing?”
“Looking for the right kind of hotel,” she said.
“What’s the right kind?”
“I’ll know it if I see it. There are some hotels that are near airports and big interstate highways. They have the feel of places where people in a big hurry would stop. What I want is the sort of place you would stop if you were on vacation, or maybe the kind where local people go to have dinner.”
Jane found the hotel near the Wabash River. It was called the Davis House, and it had the feel of a country inn or a bed-and-breakfast house, but it wasn’t small enough to require compromises in privacy or anonymity. She rented three rooms on the second floor, and brought the others in after she had examined the grounds and walked the hallways.
Once they were settled, Jane gathered them in her room. When they came in, she was busy laying out clothes on her bed. “Are you leaving us again?” Rita asked.
“Not exactly,” said Jane. “I’m going on an errand in the
morning, but I should be back by nightfall. If everything goes well, we’ll stay here tomorrow night too.”
“That would be great,” said Rita. “The last couple of times I fell asleep, I had dreams about getting a shower and sleeping in a real bed.”
Bernie said, “What if it doesn’t go so well?”
“I’m sure that the Explorer still hasn’t been seen. I’ll leave that here for you and take a rental car. If I’m not back tomorrow night, don’t get worried. If I’m not back by the next night, start making plans that don’t include me.”
“You don’t have to do this,” said Bernie. “You said it yourself in Santa Fe. We’ve already done the best thing with our lives that we could have done if we’d had the sense to plan it that way. We won.”
“It’s not enough,” said Jane. “We made an agreement. When we’ve lived up to it, then it will be over.”
Jane went out to rent a car and buy a few last items, then made the telephone call to the prison in the name of Elizabeth Moody. Before dawn the next morning she got into the rental car and drove across the state line into Illinois. She took Interstate 70 to Effingham, then 57 south all the way to Marion. She approached the federal prison at Marion in the afternoon.
The high walls and the guard towers were relics of another era, when prisons looked medieval instead of industrial. She reminded herself that what she was about to do was participate in a ritual. The procedures, the movements, were already established.
She walked to the gate at ten minutes before nine and waited with the other visitors. At nine, a guard with a clipboard came to the gate to let the visitors in one at a time. There were a lot of wives, mostly young women with faces they tried to keep expressionless, a few of them with little children who seemed to have no awe or alarm at the horrible place. There were two men in suits carrying briefcases like Jane’s, and she listened carefully to what they said. When it was her turn she spoke to the guard in a clear but bored voice. “Attorney here to see a client. The name is Elizabeth Moody.”
The guard did a leisurely perusal of the sheet on his clipboard, looking a bit like a maître d’ checking restaurant reservations. He made a notation beside one of the lines, and opened the door. Jane went inside to a reception desk, where she was supposed to fill out a form and sign it, then endured more waiting, watched a guard make a cursory search of her briefcase, and passed through a metal detector to another waiting area.
Another guard came in and called for Elizabeth Moody, and ushered her down a long hallway past a couple of barred gates that the guard opened in front of her, then closed behind her as soon as she was past. He put her into a little room with no windows except for a small Plexiglas square on the door with chicken-wire reinforcement between the panes.
She sat in one of the two battered metal chairs at a bare table and waited some more. When the guard returned, he had his hand on the arm of another man, but for a second Jane thought there must have been some mistake. He was much thinner and healthier looking than she had remembered from the newspapers. He was wearing prison jeans and a work shirt, and the general impression he conveyed was odd, until she identified it: he looked too clean. That was the only way of saying it. Priests who wore street clothes sometimes looked like that. His features had not really changed. He appeared to be in his mid-forties—although she knew he was older—with thick, dark, wavy hair that seemed to start a quarter inch too low on his forehead. He was looking at her with eyes that showed little interest.
Jane concentrated on the guard. “Thank you,” she said to him. When he stood still, she gazed at him expectantly for a few seconds. He seemed to recollect himself, then turned and went outside.
As soon as the door closed, Jane held out her hand without smiling. “Good afternoon, Mr. Ogliaro. I’m Elizabeth Moody.”