Authors: Thomas Perry
Ogliaro leaned forward, grasped her hand and shook it once, then released it unenthusiastically. “Didn’t Zabel come with you?”
Jane had studied the Detroit newspapers’ articles about the
trial on the Internet while she was in Santa Fe. In the early stages, there was always a partner in the firm Zabel, Dunstreet and Bibberly giving the reporter a denial of each of the charges. Later, Zabel had given the summation. When Jane had made her appointment at the prison, she had said she was an associate in the firm.
“Not today,” said Jane. “This isn’t about your appeals. I’m not a criminal litigator, I’m a specialist in the firm’s financial division. I’m just here to take care of some business.”
Ogliaro sat down at the table. He said, “What is it?”
Jane sat across from him and began taking papers out of her briefcase. “A few papers to look over.” She handed him the first one.
He glared at it. “Interglobal insurance company? What do they want—to sell me a policy?”
Jane said, “It’s something that came to us because our office is listed as your address for business purposes right now. Your mother was Francesca Giannini Ogliaro. Is that correct?”
“Right.”
“And she passed away recently?”
He nodded, looking at her warily. “What’s this about?”
“In 1948, she apparently purchased a single premium variable lifetime annuity for you from Interglobal Life and Casualty.”
“She did?” His eyes seemed to move past Jane and settle on the wall for a moment.
“That’s what it says. The premium was a little under three hundred thousand dollars, which was quite a bit at the time, and it’s grown.” She looked at another sheet, which seemed to be a continuation of the first. “If you were collecting it right now, it would be about forty thousand a month.”
“She never said anything.”
Jane appeared to feel no interest in whether she had or not. “The annuity is in the form of a trust, and it has some conditions attached.”
“What are they?” asked Ogliaro.
“They’re a little peculiar,” she said. “As an attorney, I can tell you that nobody can make you accept any bequest. All
you have to do is sign off on this other sheet. It says I made you aware of the conditions and you refused, and I take care of the rest.”
He was impatient. “So tell me what the conditions are.”
Jane looked down at the list she had made on the computer in Santa Fe. “From the moment that you accept the annuity, you have to meet the following conditions: One. You can never be convicted of a felony committed after this date.”
“How can I guarantee that? I don’t have any control over what some D.A. charges me with.”
“It says ‘convicted.’ Presumably, if you don’t commit any new felonies, you might still be charged, but not convicted.”
He rolled his eyes in frustration, then took a deep breath to control his temper. “What else?”
“Two. You relinquish any control, ownership, management, or profit participation in any business enterprise.”
His eyes slowly widened.
“Three. You will not reside within two hundred and fifty miles of Detroit, Michigan. Nor will you own, rent, lease, borrow, or otherwise possess real estate within that area.”
“But—”
Jane pushed on. “Four. You will no longer use the name Vincent Ogliaro. You will change your name legally and officially to Michael James Weinstein. All payments from the trust will be made payable to Michael James Weinstein, with none due to Vincent Ogliaro.”
Jane paused and looked up at him, then down at the paper again. He was not reacting the way she had expected anymore. He was still frowning, but he was nodding as though he had lost his capacity for surprise or outrage. She said, “We can handle the name change for you. All you have to do is sign this petition, we file it in a court somewhere far away—say, California—where it won’t attract much attention, and it’s done. All it certifies is that you’re not doing it to avoid debts or responsibilities, which you wouldn’t be.”
He waited in silence, so Jane looked down her list, breezily alluding to provisions she wasn’t reading in their entirety. “Payments to be deposited directly to the account you open in
the name Weinstein, et cetera, to be terminated upon your death, and so on. The rest is pretty standard stuff for trust funds.”
“The first part isn’t standard stuff.”
She shrugged. “No, it isn’t. Basically, if you stop being Vincent Ogliaro, stay away from Detroit, and stay out of trouble, you’ll be supported for the rest of your life. Of course, the insurance company can’t commence payment while you’re in here. I didn’t check your file before I left the office. When do you get out?”
“The tenth of August, year after next. Thirteen months and twenty-one days.”
“And there’s no time off for good behavior in federal sentences, but you don’t have parole to worry about either, so that date is firm.” She looked at the page with the figures again. “I can’t predict exactly, because interest rates will fluctuate a bit, but if you start then, you’ll get about … half a million dollars a year, round numbers.”
Ogliaro’s eyes were focused intently on Jane now. “Why do you suppose she would do this?”
Jane shrugged, not merely to show that she didn’t know but that she didn’t care. She looked around the bare, dismal conference room. “I’d say mothers want their sons living in houses that have windows. Just a guess, though. I don’t have maternal instincts, I’m a lawyer.”
“It’s enough money so that I would never have to do anything at all, and the condition is that I never would do anything. I would just live a nice, safe, comfortable life. It’s not enough to give me any power, but it’s not enough to attract attention that would kill me, either.”
“That’s the idea, I guess,” said Jane. “We did verify that the trust exists, and that the annuity is real and irrevocable.”
Ogliaro sat with his arms folded. “She didn’t do this.” He waited, but Jane didn’t appear inclined to argue with him. “But she’s not the only one who just died, is she? Bernie died too.”
“Bernie? Who’s Bernie?”
Ogliaro’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She told me. Bernie
doesn’t know that, so you didn’t know it either. She came to visit me before she went out to shoot him. She told me how she had set it up, who was handling what part of it. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because if something went wrong, she wanted me to know who I should hunt down and kill for her.”
“And what did you say to her
“I tried to talk her out of it.”
Jane was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “Okay. So you know. The single premium wasn’t paid in 1948. It was ten million paid a couple of weeks ago.”
“He never met me. Why would he do something like this now?”
Jane said, “It’s his last chance.” She thought for a moment. “Yours too, probably.”
He stared at her for a moment, then held out his hand. “Do you have a pen?”
She handed him a pen from inside her briefcase. She watched him sign the papers in some spots, where she had put plastic clips, and initial others. “So you’re going to do it?”
He handed the papers back to her and stood up. “Either I signed the papers because I want to be a new person and get a second chance at having a life, or I signed them because I’m Vincent Ogliaro, and I think I can find a way to get the half a million a year without doing anything different. You won’t know for a while, will you?”
“No,” said Jane.
He turned, walked to the door, and prepared to knock, then held back for a moment. “Tell Bernie thanks for staying away for all those years. If he’d done anything different, I’d be dead.” He reached for the door again, then said, “My mother loved him.”
“I know,” said Jane.
“Tell him.” Ogliaro pounded on the door, and the guard opened it. “We’re done,” he said.
A
s Jane drove back toward Terre Haute, she tried to sort out what had happened. She had spent her life concentrating on the simple goal of not losing. If the other side won, her runner would die. If Jane won, all that happened was that her runner got to keep breathing for one more day, one more week. But this time, she had actually participated in something that felt like victory.
Today, while she had been inside the prison with Vincent Ogliaro, mail carriers all over the country had probably delivered the last of the letters to the offices of charities. Henry Ziegler was home in Boston. Rita and Bernie were sitting comfortably in a nice hotel in Terre Haute, and Jane was driving along a fast, open highway in a clean, untraceable rental car. She had checked her rearview mirror a dozen times in the past five miles, and the road behind her was clear.
Everything had happened as she had hoped it would, and now she had to decide how to accomplish what she needed to make happen next. She was back to doing what she had done so many times for so many people: making them vanish and reappear somewhere else where they would be safe.
Jane was beginning to feel hungry, and as soon as she recognized it, she remembered that she had not eaten today. She looked at her watch. She had hoped to make it back to the hotel in Terre Haute in time to eat with the others, but it was already dinner time. She decided to pull off the highway at Effingham. She would eat dinner and change into comfortable clothes.
* * *
Mary Ellen Tolliver sat uncomfortably in her chair at the Davis House dining room in Terre Haute, and studied her menu for the tenth time. She sat here with the stiffly starched white napkin on her lap, carefully lifted the silver cream pitcher and sugar bowl to see the silversmith’s mark on the bottoms, stared out the window at a bird on the crab-apple tree in the garden, and waited for John.
She liked the restaurant. It reminded her of the nice places her parents used to take her when she was a child, with the butter in pats on a little bowl of ice, and silverware that was too big for her hands, and everything heavy—the glasses lead crystal, the tablecloths real linen. She kept wanting to say something about it to John, but he was still out on the telephone.
He came back looking red-faced and excited, and it made Mary Ellen shift her eyes toward the girl. No, she didn’t seem to have noticed. She was just sitting there picking at her dinner, the way girls her age always did.
John glanced at her too. “See the other one yet?” he asked.
Mary Ellen shook her head, and her expression was sharp. John had never picked up the knack of whispering. Maybe it was because when he was still working at the car assembly plant, something had happened to his hearing. But he wasn’t very good at anything that required subtlety.
He seemed to notice the restaurant only as he put the big napkin on his lap. He said, “I like this place. It reminds me of the way restaurants used to be.”
Mary Ellen issued a blanket pardon that forgave him for everything, and settled into the adventure again. Since they had retired, there had been a lot of these trips. That was the way she always said it—since we retired—even though it sometimes made people ask the irritating question of what she had retired from. Both of their lives had been one way, and now both of their lives were another way, and that was that. She and John had started doing things differently.
The enemy in retirement was that nothing you did seemed to cause you to look forward to anything. Weekends were the same as weekdays, and payday was just a notice from your bank that the check had arrived as usual. It was Mary Ellen
who had slowly begun to introduce the element of chance. Three years ago for Father’s Day, she had bought John a metal detector. They had begun by taking it on a vacation to Florida, and while Mary Ellen had sat on the beach getting sunburned, John had found fourteen dollars in change and a pretty good wristwatch. They had taken it to parks, and even walked along the Mississippi with it now and then. They had never found anything quite as good after that, but Paducah wasn’t Miami, either.
Over the past couple of years, a lot of their little adventures had to do with found money. They were adequately provided for, with John’s pension from the plant and Social Security. The money itself wasn’t the attraction. One time, when the Illinois Lottery had been up to forty million, they had driven over into Illinois and bought tickets. They hadn’t won, but they had started driving over for tickets about once a month after that.
That was how they happened to see the flyers saying “Find This Girl” and “Woman Missing.” They had driven up from Paducah one day, and when they had stopped for lottery tickets, John had picked up the flyers off the counter. They had decided to keep driving deeper into Illinois, looking hard at the faces of all the women they had seen. They had driven up to Marion, where the prison was. Then they had decided that if the women were somewhere around the prison, the only major routes they had not covered on the way up from Paducah lay to the north. They had ended up here in Terre Haute, Indiana. It had been like a dream. They had come into this hotel to eat dinner, and there was “Find This Girl” sitting at a table overlooking the garden all by herself.
“Did you get through to them?” she asked quietly.
He nodded happily. “I did. They said they’d check it out right away.”
“And they took your name and address and everything?”
“You bet,” he whispered. “All they’ve got to do is come and see for themselves that it’s the same one, and we’re going to get the money.”
“If it’s the right one,” she reminded him.
“Of course it is,” he said. “Look for yourself.”
Mary Ellen tried to keep the excitement at a low level, the sort of feeling she could manage without getting a fluttery heart or something. She ventured another glance, and she felt her heart quicken a little. There was absolutely no question it was “Find This Girl.” Now she let herself hope that “Woman Missing” showed up before the investigators did. That would be twice the money.
As Mary Ellen ate her dinner, she felt a little bit guilty about her good fortune. The flyers had implied that “Find This Girl” was some sort of runaway child. Sometimes what that meant was that there was some terrible story involving abuse. Either that was the reason why they left home, or what everybody feared had happened to them since. It would be a shame to get rich and then find out that her windfall and John’s had been based on something like that. She tried to reassure herself with thoughts about “Woman Missing.” She looked quite a bit older, and what was said about her implied that she was a criminal, not a victim. Maybe Mary Ellen would be the one who saved the girl and put the criminal in jail.