by Thomas Perry
Jane took the bridge over the Niagara and drove across a flat island so big that Rita needed to remind herself that an island was what it was, then another bridge, and Rita began to recognize the outskirts of Niagara Falls.
Jane drove to the hotel, but Rita didn’t feel the seat belt pulling against her to signal that the car was slowing down. “That’s it,” she said. “You’re going past it.”
“I know,” said Jane quietly. “I like to get a look at a parking lot before I drive into it, and I don’t like that one. There’s only one way out, and I don’t want to get stuck if we have a problem. We’ll park on the street.” Jane turned the next corner onto a smaller street that had a few souvenir shops and a liquor store, and stopped the car.
She turned to Rita. “Now we’ll walk in. If you see anyone inside that you remember from Florida, don’t look into his eyes, and don’t nudge me. Just tell me in a normal voice and keep walking at the same speed. We’ll go right through to another exit and make a run for the car.”
“Okay. What if I don’t see anybody?”
“We’ll go to your room, get what you left, and go down to check out. The way we do that is—”
“I used to work in a hotel,” she interrupted. “I know how to check out.” Jane could hear a slightly offended tone. “Anyway, it seems like standing around at the front desk will just give people more chance to notice me.”
“I know,” said Jane. “But I’m hoping nobody learns you’re here in time to see you. When you checked in, you used your credit card. Usually they take an impression of it and file it. They don’t actually notify the credit card company of the charge until you check out. So we’ll transfer the bill to one of my cards.”
“Why?” Now she was sure she should be offended. “I told you I have money. I work.”
“It’s not about money,” said Jane. “You don’t seem to know why Frank Delfina wants you. But I know that the easiest way he has to find you is to request a credit check on you every hour or so and look for new charges. Yours is in your own name, mine isn’t.”
“Oh,” said Rita. Her mouth was a little o.
Jane walked with her to the hotel entrance, chatting cheerfully about nothing, but kept her eyes moving, glancing ahead to detect someone waiting for Rita, then watching Rita’s face for the expression to change from tension to alarm.
As they entered the lobby, Jane’s eyes scanned the loitering places—the armchairs along the side walls, the entrance to the bar, and the gift shop. She turned suddenly toward the gift shop. “Just a second,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Rita whispered.
“Nothing,” said Jane. She went into the shop and pretended to study the souvenirs and supplies for a moment while Rita stood beside her, but she was using the time to watch the lobby through the glass. Finally she went to the counter, picked up a newspaper from the pile, and bought it. As they returned to the lobby Jane said, “If somebody I didn’t see had been watching from outside, he would have followed us in. This looks like a good time. We’ll check you out and then go up. Here. Hold this.” She handed Rita the newspaper and went to the counter.
Jane gave the clerk her Kathleen Hobbs credit card, asked her to charge the bill to it, and checked Rita out while Rita stood beside her, staring at the newspaper.
They walked toward the elevator, and Jane could tell Rita wanted to say something, but she whispered, “Wait.”
When the elevator bell rang, they stepped inside, Jane pushed the close door button, and they were alone. “What floor?”
“Fifth,” said Rita. She was staring at the newspaper, her eyes wide. She held it up anxiously. “This is it!” she said. “That’s the house!”
“What?”
Rita pushed the newspaper in front of Jane. “It’s a picture of the house where I lived.”
It was a photograph of a sprawling one-story house with a tile roof and stucco sides above the beach in Florida. There was an extremely high wall, and inside it a few tall coconut palms. But the words printed above it were bold: LIFE AND DEATH OF A LEGEND. The caption beneath said, “The secluded Florida compound Bernie ‘the Elephant’ Lupus called home for decades.”
Jane muttered, “Great. Just great,” as she took the newspaper. Her eyes fought through the unnecessary verbiage and plucked out phrases. “Murdered in Detroit … shot down outside the airport.” Aloud she said, “Is that the old man you worked for? Bernie Lupus?”
“Bernie,” Rita said. “I never knew his last name. They all called him Bernie. Why is the house in the paper? Do they think I did something wrong?”
“It’s not about you. It’s about him. He … died.”
“Oh, no,” Rita said sadly. “He was such a sweet old man … ” Then she looked distracted, puzzled. “Why is it in the papers here?”
“He was famous.”
Jane stood in silence as the elevator rose. Everything was clear, but it didn’t help, because each bit of information led to a dozen questions that each led to a dozen more, and none of the answers seemed to matter. If Bernie “the Elephant” Lupus had been shot, when had it happened? The girl had been on the road for a day and a half, and spent most of today trying to get close to Jane. That meant the shooting had taken place two days ago. Why hadn’t Jane heard of it instantly? She answered the question herself. She had not turned on the television news last night, because she and Carey had gone out to dinner after his hospital rounds, and had come home late. And now, because she had spent two years trying to distance herself from people who cared about this kind of news, there was no longer anyone who might call and tell her.
Bernie Lupus was the private banking system of the bent-nosed and bull-necked. He had supposedly been hiding Mafia money for fifty years. Jane had no clear idea what he even looked like. She glanced at the article inside the paper and saw there was no photograph of him. She had seen mug shots from the 1940s in a magazine once—a young man in profile and full-face with his hair slicked straight back from a large forehead, with sharp, alert eyes that glowed with the light from the flashbulb like a dog’s. After that, it seemed that the only photographs of him had been taken from enormous distances with telephoto lenses, dark and grainy images of a sport coat and baggy pants hanging from a short, bony body below a bald head and a face half covered by sunglasses.
There had been rumors that had grown into accepted parts of the story. He was protected. He was never glimpsed without a couple of bodyguards, but Jane had always thought their job must have been easy. He had no need or, apparently, desire to step outside the ten-foot walls around the yard of his house in Florida. It was said that the reason he couldn’t be taken out by a sniper from a building near his house was that every building on the streets surrounding his had been quietly bought by one of the families he served, and was kept occupied by people who could be trusted to watch his back.
It was also said that the secret of his success was that he never wrote anything down. Jane knew it was true that there had been federal raids on his house—always referred to in the newspapers as a “compound”—at intervals since the late 1970s, but no incriminating paper had been found. The myth was that he had developed a system of codes and mnemonic devices during a prison sentence to remember the accounts where he had hidden vast sums of money. That was always given as the explanation for the name Bernie the Elephant.
Jane had to assume that some of what was said was intentionally fabricated, and some was just the normal accretion of nonsense to anyone who is known to exist but seldom seen. Until now, the stories seemed to have served Bernie well. They had protected him from all of the people who were most active in the killing business—his clients. If one of the families killed him, they would not only lose whatever money of theirs was hidden in his famous memory, but they would bring down on themselves the simultaneous vengeance of all the other families.
She glanced at the girl. She still could not have stated precisely what kind of trouble the girl was in now, but she had the distinct impr
ession that in the last sixty seconds it had grown.
The elevator stopped on the fifth floor and Jane stepped in front of Rita to look into the hallway before she moved forward to let her out where she could be seen. The door closed behind them and Jane said, “Give me your room key.” She took the key and handed Rita the keys to her car. She pointed at a door below an exit sign. “Go into that stairwell and wait for me. If it’s safe, I’ll come and get you. If you hear a commotion, run. Go down the stairs and use a side door to the parking lot. Head for the street. At that point the car will be yours. Consider this my will.”
The girl looked pale, but she obeyed.
Jane took the key and made two turns along the hallway to find the room. She approached the door carefully and quietly, then put her ear to the door and listened. If someone was waiting inside for the girl to return, there should be some sound—footsteps, a creak of a bed—but she heard nothing. Maybe the girl’s luck was better than it seemed. Jane pushed the key into the lock quietly, waited for a few seconds, then swung the door open.
There were two men sitting at the table by the window. Jane called, “Maid service, excuse me,” and pulled the door shut. Jane slipped to the side of the door, put her back to the wall, and waited. If they didn’t make a rush for her in the next ten seconds, she would be okay. If they did, she would try to land a kick and a jab and then dash for the staircase.
As she waited, she studied the image her mind had retained of the two men at the table. One had been big, dark-haired, and thirtyish. He’d had his coat off and his tie loosened. The other had been much smaller, wearing suspenders over his white shirt. What had they been doing? Of course. Cards. There had been a deck of cards on the table, and each had been holding a hand with a lot of cards in it—too many to be anything but rummy. What else had been on the table? Nothing. There had been no guns where she could see them, no money, no pad for keeping score.
Jane’s sense of pace told her that enough time had elapsed, and she began to walk away from the door. There were several ways through this, and she just had to choose the right one. Waiting for them to leave seemed to be a bad idea. She could tell a bellman she was having trouble with her key and bring him back to open the door, then profess shock that someone was in her—Anita’s—room. But she couldn’t be sure this time that the men would feign embarrassment, put on their coats, and hurry to get out of sight. Now that she knew this had something to do with the death of Bernie Lupus, the stakes were much, much higher. They might very well kill her and the bellman, pile the bodies in the closet, and sit down again to wait for the girl.
Jane knew that the sensible course of action was to go downstairs, hand in the key, and explain to Rita that nothing she could have left was worth dying for. She did not dismiss the possibility of lying—telling the girl she had retrieved her things and taken them to the car before she had come back for her. Jane had never hesitated to lie to runners when their lives depended on their being kept docile and obedient. All she would have to do is let a bit more time elapse to make the story credible, then get the girl into the car and onto the Thruway. Jane could get her two hundred miles from here before she had to tell her that her belongings weren’t in the trunk.
As Jane walked toward the stairwell, she felt a slight twinge. She wasn’t sure she should leave the two men behind without finding out anything about them. Since the ones who had searched Bernie Lupus’s house three nights ago had worked for Frank Delfina, this pair probably did too. Jane had no way to be sure of even that, and she wasn’t certain whether it mattered. What did matter was finding out what they knew, so she could go about making their information obsolete.
Men who planned to hang around a hotel waiting for a girl to show up couldn’t have arrived expecting to camp out in her room. They couldn’t know in advance whether they could get in. They would have needed to rent a room for themselves on the same hallway, so they would know when she arrived. Without a room, they would have no plausible reason for being on this hallway at all.
As she walked, she found herself eliminating rooms that she passed. Three had PLEASE MAKE UP room signs hanging from their doorknobs. She sensed that men here to kidnap somebody would want privacy, not maid service. As she went on she heard voices behind one door and a television set behind another. There was one door that was open, and when Jane passed she could see that the bedclothes were rumpled, so she guessed someone must have just left to check out. There was one door on the hall that had the PRIVACY PLEASE side of the sign on the knob. Jane knocked on the door quietly, listened, then knocked again. After a moment she decided to take the chance.
She took her pocketknife out of her purse, opened it, and slipped it between the jamb and the door to feel for the bolt. She could tell the shape was going to make it difficult, but if those two men had gotten into Rita’s room, she might be able to get into theirs. The bolt was thick, rounded, and flat on the end, so she wouldn’t be able to slide a credit card behind it and ease it out of the receptacle.
Jane searched her purse until she found the necklace. It consisted of small beads strung on a silver wire. She would have to try it. She cut the wire at the clasp and dumped the beads into her purse. She took the twelve-inch length of wire and bent the end into a hook, then inserted it into the crack over the bolt between the door and the jamb until the end came back below the bolt. She used the knife blade to guide the end of the loop into the receptacle that held the bolt. She kept pushing the wire until she had gotten it in as far as possible, removed the knife, then slowly pushed the two loose ends of the wire back and forth, trying to work the loop to the end of the bolt. When it felt as though it had reached the butt of the bolt, she twisted both loose ends around her forefingers and tugged hard. The bolt gave a click and snapped back into the lock.
Jane was inside. She closed the door behind her and looked around. There were two suitcases, one at the end of each bed, both unlatched. The girl had said she’d stuffed everything important into a jacket. Jane guessed that if the men had found it in her room, they would have taken it back here. There was no sign of the jacket, so Jane turned her attention to the suitcases. She had hoped there would be tags on them from an airline that would tell her where they had been, but there were none.
She opened the first one. It was filled with clothes that had to belong to the smaller, older man, but something struck her. They were all new, still in packages, with tags and pins stuck to them. Even the socks and underwear were new. There was nothing that could possibly belong to Rita. She moved to the second suitcase, and found another trove of clothes that had not been touched since they had come from the store. She looked at the collar of a shirt: neck 17, sleeve 36. That was definitely the bigger man.
There was nothing in this suitcase that could belong to Rita either. Jane moved to the wastebasket. It seemed to be full. She quickly picked out the first few pieces of trash she saw: road maps. There were maps of New York State, pennsylvania, Ohio. That made sense, she supposed. The men had found their way here, and the way home was never as hard to plot. But then she looked deeper. There were other maps: the District of Columbia, northern Arizona, Colorado. Below them was a layer of travel brochures. She looked at the covers of the little folders and booklets. The first one that caught her eye was for Disneyland. There were brochures about Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite, Dinosaur National Monument. There was one about New Orleans, and others about Williamsburg, Virginia, and San Antonio.
Jane stood and moved toward the door. It was time to get the girl out of the stairwell and into the car. This was too much. She opened the door a crack, peered out into the hallway, and saw Rita.
The girl had already knocked on the door of her room, and the door was already opening. Jane pushed off with her back foot and broke into a run. The distance seemed to be just a bit too great. The girl stepped inside, and the door began to close behind her. Jane got her hand on the door just in time to keep it from clicking shut, and pushed it open.
Sh
e stepped in, closed it behind her, and stood still. The two men were standing now, the light still behind them so that they looked like silhouettes. The bigger man’s stance—arms out from his sides and his feet planted at shoulder width—made him seem shocked and disturbed, but he made no attempt to reach for a weapon. The smaller man’s face was difficult to read in the shadows. Now that he was standing, Jane could see that he was much older than he had seemed when he was seated. There was a stoop-shouldered, bent look to him.
Rita turned to look at Jane. “Jane. I thought you were in here, and I hadn’t heard any noise, and—”
“I know,” said Jane. “You thought it must be safe.”
Rita waved her arm toward the two men. “Jane, this is—”
This time the old man interrupted. “Hello, there. I’m Rita’s grandfather, Ben Shelford.”
“No, you’re not,” said Jane evenly.
The old man seemed not to have heard her. “And this is my son, David.” He nodded. “Rita’s uncle.”
“He’s Danny,” said Jane. The younger man’s head swiveled to look at the older man in alarm.
The older man went on, unperturbed. “We sometimes call him that, but his real name is David.”
Jane slowly shook her head. “You’re Bernie Lupus.”
The old man stepped closer, and Jane could see his small, pale eyes. He didn’t seem angry. He looked intrigued. “How did you come to that?”
Jane said, “I happened to notice a few minutes ago that you were playing a card game that goes to five hundred without either paying for each hand or writing down the score. Then I went in your room, and looked at your clothes and your trash.”
The old man said, “Ah,” appreciatively. He nodded his head. “What did they tell you?” He sounded, not like a teacher exactly, but like an examiner, maybe a diagnostician.
