Authors: Thomas Perry
Jane kept her eyes on Danny. “If you care about her, why didn’t you do something for her?”
Bernie shrugged. “What could I do? My death was untimely. I wasn’t prepared. Once I had heard about it, there was no way I could stop it. It was too late. Things were in motion, and people would really have gotten killed.”
Danny looked disapproving, as though Bernie was making a damaging admission. He went to the window and looked out. Jane studied the old man. He looked tired and sad. “What do they want Rita for?” she asked. “What do I have to worry about?”
He held up a hand and shook his head. “I know those guys. I know how they think. Nothing is ever over. If somebody killed me, then they must have figured out in advance how to get the money I was holding. If the killers weren’t that smart, then I must have left something around that would help the families get their money. If I didn’t, then I must have told somebody where it was. If I didn’t do that, then I must have slipped up once, or said something, or done something that somebody saw that will lead them to it.
Eventually, they’ll want to talk to everybody—even the little girl who cleaned my house.”
“So you decided to take a risk to find her?” Jane asked.
Bernie shrugged. “What else was I going to do?” His mouth pursed in a look of distaste. “Would you want to see this kid go have a long talk with Phil Langusto or Victor Catania? How about Salvatore Molinari?” His eyes widened. “How about Frank Delfina? She doesn’t know any answers.” He looked down and shook his head.
Danny spoke from the window. “Uh-oh. Bernie?”
“What is it?” asked Bernie. He stood and walked to the window, then followed Danny’s gaze downward. “I knew I shouldn’t have said the bastard’s name out loud.”
Jane took a step closer. “Who do you see?” Jane could see a white panel truck with the words “Trafalgar Square Flowers” painted in filigree script on the side. A door in the back opened and two delivery men emerged carrying big displays of flowers in baskets.
“It’s one of Delfina’s companies. I’ll bet one of those flower baskets has got her name on it.” He tugged Danny’s arm and picked up his coat. “Watching them isn’t going to be a good use of our time. Let’s get going.”
Bernie turned to Jane. “Maybe you’d better come out the back way with us. The reason they stopped there is so they can pull ahead to block the exit to the parking lot.”
Jane shook her head. “No, thanks.”
He pulled an envelope out of his coat pocket and handed it to Rita. “Then here’s your severance pay, honey. It’s enough to keep you out of sight for a while.” He frowned at Jane. “Keep her alive.”
Jane stepped to the door and opened it, but Rita lingered, and suddenly threw her arms around Bernie. “Thanks, Bernie.”
The old man was so surprised he nearly toppled over. She released him, and said, “You too, Danny.”
Danny said, “Good luck, kid. Stay out of trouble.”
The four hurried out of the room and Jane headed toward
the stairwell, but Rita said to the men, “Our car isn’t in the lot. Come with us.” Jane winced.
Rita stopped walking and said to Jane, “Please. Can’t we give them a ride?”
Jane said, “It’s not a good idea.”
“They offered to let us go with them,” she reminded Jane. “And they came all the way here just to help me.”
Jane said, “They got you into this mess in the first place.”
“It’s just a ride. Just far enough so they’re away from here.”
Jane saw the “L” above the elevator light up, then the “2.” She sighed. “All right. Just hurry.” As she slipped into the stairwell and started down, she was astounded at her own decision. Her only excuse was that she had witnessed the unthinkable several times in a few minutes.
She’d only had two minutes to get used to the idea that Bernie “the Elephant” Lupus had been murdered. Since then he had suddenly popped up from the grave to try to save his young cleaning lady from dying, handed her a pile of money that must have represented about twenty years’ pay for cleaning a house, and offered to—of all things—help Jane Whitefield disappear. She wasn’t sure that these new impressions were any more reliable than the news of Lupus’s death, but she couldn’t afford the time to sort them out while men who worked for Frank Delfina were coming up in the elevator.
Her ears were tuned to the sounds below her. She had seen two men carrying flowers. One was on his way up in the elevator, but it wasn’t out of the question that the other might come up one of the stairwells. She had to hope it wasn’t this stairwell. She heard no door opening below, so she kept moving, trying to keep the echoes of their own footsteps separate in her mind. Abruptly, it occurred to her that the footsteps on the stairs above her were wrong. She stopped and looked back. “Where’s Danny?”
She saw Bernie’s look of surprise, then sudden understanding. He turned and began to climb back up, but Jane passed him, taking three steps at a time. “Keep going.”
She reached the fifth-floor landing, quietly pushed the door open a couple of inches, and looked out. She saw Danny hurrying down the hallway toward her, carrying the two suitcases she had seen in the men’s room. He had gone back for the luggage. She felt a horrible frustration with him. Nobody was here looking for him or for Bernie. There was nothing in their suitcases that could have made any difference: everything was still in its package.
It was only a second later that she saw the delivery man. He stepped out of Rita’s room carrying the basket of flowers with his back toward her. She pushed the door open and took a step toward him, but there was no time. He reached inside the basket and produced a pistol with a silencer on the end. There was a soft, spitting noise as he shot Danny in the chest. He fired three more times as Danny fell. Jane heard the sound of one of the other stairwell doors opening down the hallway, and pulled her door closed.
She held her ear to the door until she heard the second man go past her, then pushed it open a crack. She heard their voices. “Danny Spoleto?” That one sounded surprised.
“What was I going to do—wrestle with him? Help me get him in the room, quick. He probably stole her credit card and used it to get here.” She heard them dragging Danny’s body, then one of them said, “Call and tell them to bring up the trunk they were going to use for the girl.”
The door to Rita’s room closed, and Jane could hear no more words. She closed the door to the stairwell and hurried downward. She found Rita and Bernie standing at the first-floor landing.
“Where is he?” asked Rita.
Jane met Bernie’s eyes. “He had to go out another way.” She could see that Bernie understood.
Bernie held the girl in the corner of his eye and said, “We had a plan for this kind of thing. He knows where to go.” Then he looked at Jane, sadly.
Jane said, “Let’s go.” This time, when she went out into the first-floor hallway, she held the door open until the others had passed her. Then she led the way down the residential
wing to a side entrance. She walked along the outer wall toward the back of the building, down the service driveway and across the street, then around the block to the car.
She unlocked the doors, then looked up and down the street while Bernie got into the back seat and Rita sat in front. Jane started the car and drove a block, then said, “I want to get on the Thruway, and the entrance is on the other side of the hotel. Lie down, both of you. Don’t raise your heads until I tell you.”
She drove past the hotel, and she could see that the florist’s truck had already left. In the loading zone in front of the lobby, a big black Lincoln Town Car had stopped. A blond woman in a smooth beige suit was standing beside it, watching a man pull a large trunk from the back of the car. Jane had time to see the man tip it up on its wheels and push it toward the lobby. The woman pivoted on her high heels to follow, and Jane was past.
J
ane drove along Lake Erie into the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, then on across the Ohio line. It was dark now, and she had watched the mirrors for three hours. There had been no car that had stayed in their wake more than a few minutes, no indication that they could have been followed. Rita had slouched in the front seat reading the newspaper Jane had given her at the hotel for a time, then fallen asleep. Every time Jane had glanced up at the mirror, she could see Bernie’s sharp, pale eyes staring ahead at the road. She said, “Bernie?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“Do you know where you want me to drop you off?” Jane saw Rita stir and sit up. The voices had awakened her.
He said, “Someplace sort of on the small side. Not Cleveland or Cincinnati. How about Mansfield?”
“How do I get there?”
“How is he supposed to know?” said Rita. “The paper said he hasn’t been out of the house in, like, twenty years.”
“He knows,” said Jane.
Bernie said, “Stay on 90 until just before Cleveland, and then take 271 south. Stay on it, and it’ll change to 71. Keep going until you’re right outside Mansfield, then switch to 30. It’ll take us right into town.”
Jane looked at Rita. “I found road maps in their trash at the hotel. That was what made me sure who it was.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I know how people running from trouble behave. A road map isn’t big, it isn’t heavy, and it isn’t incriminating. So who would throw one away?”
Rita was silent, so Jane answered her own question. “A person who can look at it once and still have it later, in his memory. Bernie Lupus.”
Rita sucked in a breath and turned to Bernie. “But you left them in the room. What if—”
The old man said, “Don’t worry, kid. If the guys who are chasing you were as good as she is, we’d be riding in their car, not hers. Even if they played way over their heads and found the maps, what would they do with them? They’d spend two weeks looking for fingerprints on them that aren’t there.”
Rita seemed skeptical, but she was silent. Jane drove the dark highway, thinking. She couldn’t get the sight of Danny’s face out of her mind. He had been moving along the hallway in a quick, stiff-legged gait, his face only slightly touched by worry, like a man in an airport hurrying to catch a plane. When he had seen the man step out of the doorway, there had been no question he had recognized him. He had made no attempt to avert his eyes and walk past, just stopped and died.
She glanced at the old man in the back seat again. That
was what he was thinking about too. He stared into space, probably remembering some good qualities in the man that Jane would never know.
She thought backward from that moment and remembered the bath. She had been running the water for her bath, heard the doorbell, turned off the water. It seemed to her now that at that moment, the floor beneath her feet had simply given way and dropped her here. She thought about Carey. What must Carey be thinking? He would be sick with worry. She had to find a way to call him. “Bernie?”
“Yeah?”
“Is there a good place to make a stop up ahead?”
He considered for a moment. “There are some little towns. And there’s a rest stop on 271 just after the exit for Richfield, if you can hold out that long.”
Jane glanced at her watch and drove on in silence, keeping the car moving. At this hour, the rest of the traffic was moving fast, the pace set by the long-distance truckers who planned to drive all night, pushing the speed limit a little while they could.
When she reached the rest stop, she drifted past the small buildings that housed the rest rooms and the telephones before she began to search for a parking space. Near the entrance, everyone who pulled in would be glancing at all the spaces, and they would see her car. She wanted them to go past her car after the building, when they would be staring ahead at the ramp onto the highway, matching their acceleration to the speed of the traffic, and not noticing cars in the lot.
Jane glanced at Rita. The girl had fallen asleep again, and now she sat up and looked around her, dry-mouthed and blinking. “We’re at a rest stop,” said Jane. “The bathrooms are in that building, if you need one.”
The girl got out without speaking and walked toward the building. Jane looked at Bernie. He said, “I suppose that’s not such a bad idea.”
Jane waited until both of them had started out, then locked the car and followed. She stopped at a telephone beside the
first building, dug a handful of change out of her purse, and dialed the number of the house in Amherst.
His voice was tight and worried. “Hello?”
“Hi,” said Jane. “It’s me. I love you.” It wasn’t the first time that she had noticed that “I love you” was what you said when the rest of what you were going to say was bad.
“I love you too,” said Carey. “What happened?”
Jane said, “It’s hard to describe. I was getting ready for dinner, and this young girl came by. She had come from … a long distance to find me.”
“So you dropped everything and took off without telling me.” His voice wasn’t angry. It was disappointed, as though a grim expectation about her had merely been confirmed. He had simply left off the word “again.”
“I’m sorry. She had left some things in a hotel room, and I could tell that she hadn’t made a serious attempt to keep people from finding out she was there—didn’t know it was necessary, didn’t even know how. I was trying to pick up her belongings and get out before anybody else showed up. I couldn’t hang around waiting for you, or even send people around the hospital to hunt you down.” She hesitated for a moment, then realized that she owed him the next admission. “I didn’t even know what to say to you if I did.”
“That brings us to my next question,” he said. “Where is ‘out’? Where are you?”
She thought for a moment. If anyone was listening to this conversation, they would already know where it had come from. “I’m in Ohio right now, but I’m just at a rest stop, and I’ll be on the road again in a minute. I know this makes you angry and it hurts your feelings. I know I promised never to do this again. I swear I’m not doing this because I missed the old days, or that it’s fun. I don’t, and it isn’t. I felt that I couldn’t say no.”
“I figured that out,” he interrupted. “This call isn’t exactly a surprise, you know. I’ve had a couple of hours to think about where you must have gone, and about what I should feel about it, what I should say. What it comes down to is this. When I said ‘I love you’ it wasn’t just automatic, like ‘How
are you?’ ‘Fine, and how are you?’ It’s the truth. The decision is made. It’s too late to talk you out of it, so all I can do now is figure out how to make this easier for you. I would like you back in one piece, and very soon.”