by Thomas Perry
Delfina knew that Flaherty had been born in a trailer park somewhere in a dry lake bed east of San Bernardino, but he had, as he put it, “bettered himself.” That meant that the bribes and inside deals he had were beginning to add up. Delfina didn’t resent his own investments in Flaherty, because Flaherty was sure to be around for a long time. He had shown a virtuosity in the weird language of local politics in this part of the country, which involved a wide vocabulary of coded statements about immigration of Mexicans and school prayer and a strong defense, all issues that local governments had nothing to do with. What Delfina did resent was that the inferiority complex about money that made him receptive also made him insist on talking business at places like golf courses and horse shows. Flaherty took a swing with what looked to Delfina like a six- or seven-iron and landed on the green.
Delfina hated trudging around on a perfectly good day, sweating in the merciless southern California sunshine and even carrying his own golf bag, because neither he nor Flaherty could risk having a caddy overhear their conversation. He was glad that Flaherty was finally on the green, because it meant the ordeal was nearly over.
Delfina watched Mike Cirro, the young man he had brought with him on this trip. Cirro reached into his bag without appearing to consider one club superior to another, gripped it like a baseball bat, took a quick, choppy swing, and slapped the ball onto the hard, dry center of the fairway far in front of the green. But because he had hit it too hard with the wrong club, it bounced twice, rolled the last forty yards onto the green, and came to rest just above the cup.
Delfina shrugged and smiled at Flaherty, who seemed to be pondering questions of chance and the supernatural. Then they all waited for Pucci. He was the manager of the Parliament Park chain of grocery stores that Delfina owned, and Delfina was feeling good about him today. He had made Flaherty into a receptive listener by the second hole. At that point Flaherty could think of no reason why a supermarket couldn’t be built in Old Town, offhand, but he would need to check with a lot of interests before he could propose a zoning variance. The checking stage had only lasted until the tenth hole, when Cirro had handed Flaherty the envelope full of hundreds. Pucci feigned indecision and called to Flaherty to ask what club he should use. Delfina couldn’t hear the answer across the fairway, but whatever it was, Pucci nodded and hit the ball to the lower edge of the green.
Delfina had to be careful to keep Flaherty in a good mood until the game was over, or all of this butt-kissing would be wasted. He took his nine-iron and made a practice cut, then stared at the green. Next he gauged the distance to the sand trap in front of it, and expertly lofted his ball right into the center of it.
He good-naturedly shrugged his shoulders at Flaherty and walked toward the trap. When he reached it, he studied the positions of his opponents’ balls on the green. Flaherty had left himself a ten-foot putt. Flaherty was certainly good enough to make it, but Delfina decided not to bet anything important on it. He took a bad cut at his ball and made it thump into the dirt at the edge of the trap to roll back and stop at his feet. Then he took a second shot onto the green and watched the others. Flaherty sunk his ball, and so did Cirro, but Pucci wisely took two putts to hole out. Delfina read the green carefully, swung his putter, and put himself out of his misery.
Flaherty was standing above him on the green, preparing to gloat. “Very nicely done,” he said.
“You’re still the winner,” said Delfina.
“Well, sure,” said Flaherty. “I warned you guys you weren’t going to stand a chance against Jimmy Flaherty on his home turf.”
“You were right,” said Delfina. His eyes leveled on the others, and they nodded and mumbled congratulations. He could tell that Pucci would have been more effusive, but he was as miserable and sweaty as Delfina. Cirro was young, and golf was an old man’s game. He seemed to be somewhere outside of the proceedings, waiting for something to actually happen.
As Flaherty and Delfina walked off the green, Delfina said quietly, “Do you know when we can count on having the zoning variance? We’d like to break ground in the fall.”
Flaherty winked. “I should have it for you in a week or two.” It seemed to occur to him that somewhere, either far away or nearby, there might be a microphone. He said loftily, “It’s always been my belief that a big part of my job was attracting business to the city—making it a friendly place to invest, and a good place to live and work.”
But his oratory was wasted, because his audience was distracted. Delfina’s glance around the nearby clubhouse grounds had shown him that two men were waiting for him. “There,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know it? I just get to the green, and there’s a couple of accountants waiting for me.” He caught Pucci’s eye. “Why don’t you take Jim to the clubhouse for a drink? I’m the loser, so I’ll buy.” He shook Flaherty’s hand. “Jim, it’s been a pleasure.”
He left Pucci and Flaherty standing on the frog hair at the top of the green and headed for the parking lot. Before his cleats touched pavement, the two men he had spotted were hurrying across the terrace to meet him. One was Al Mino, an old Castiglione soldier he had placed in Oakland to oversee northern California.
Mino said, “We can wait if you want to stop in the clubhouse, Frank.”
Delfina said, “Who’s this?” as though he were deferring his answer until he knew who he was talking to.
Mino said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Frank. This is our friend Sam Zinni. I thought you two knew each other. He came to me in Oakland a year ago. Before that he was in … ”
“Illinois,” said Zinni. “I worked for DelaCroce.”
Delfina nodded. “I’m sorry, Sam. I thought you looked familiar, but I guess the damned sun is affecting me. Of course I remember you. The Maurice Black thing.”
Zinni smiled. “That’s right, Mr. Delfina.”
“Frank,” Delfina corrected him. “You’ve been around long enough to call me Frank, even if I don’t know it. What’s this about?”
Mino leaned closer. “That picture of the girl.”
“You got a car?”
“Right over here.”
Delfina turned to Cirro. “Mike, go put the clubs in your car and get me my shoes.”
He opened the back door of Mino’s car and sat with his feet out the open door until Cirro returned with his shoes, then put them on and tossed the golf shoes on the floor. “Okay, Al. Drive.”
When the car had pulled out of the clubhouse lot he said, “What about the picture? Has somebody seen Rita Shelford?”
Mino said, “I didn’t mean that girl. The other one. With the long black hair.”
“What about her?”
“I recognized her,” said Zinni. “It was from the Maurice Black thing. You remember, Black came into the Sporting Life. It was set up so Stolnick, the off-duty cop, was going to take him out to a car. He wouldn’t go, so Stolnick stuck him in the hallway by the telephones. This waitress, Nancy Carmody, saw it and took off.”
“You mean the picture looks like Nancy Carmody the waitress?”
Zinni shook his head. “No. It’s this other woman that came along later.”
“Another one?”
“Yeah,” said Zinni. “We caught up with Nancy Carmody at a camp. It was a bunch of fancy cabins just over the Wisconsin border in Lake Geneva. There were three of us: Jimmy McCormick, who’s supposed to be this all-star hit man from New Jersey, a buddy of his, and me to be sure the family is a satisfied customer. I tell the buddy to park down the road away from the place, send Jimmy through the woods to watch the cabin and make sure he likes everything, while I go make a phone call to DelaCroce and give him the news.”
Delfina was getting impatient. “What happened?”
“I get back like ten minutes later. I get the word, which is what I expected. Kill her there, bury her in the woods, and come home. I find McCormick and his buddy in the woods by the cabin. They’ve never seen her before, so they want me to look. It’s her. We can actually see her through the win
dow. She’s wearing a red blouse and jeans and bright white sneakers, like she must have bought them that day because all she had when she ran was city clothes.”
Delfina knew he had to let Zinni tell it his own way, but he had just spent three hours walking across a reclaimed desert. “So?”
“So just when we’re ready to go in, she comes out. It seems she’s going for a walk in the woods. Okay, that’s fine. McCormick goes after her. The buddy and I follow at a slower pace, so we don’t sound like an army and scare her. We get a couple hundred feet down the path, and we hear a car starting. If she’s gone for a walk, who’s starting the car? We run back, and there’s a woman wearing a red shirt behind the wheel as it heads down the gravel driveway. We run for McCormick. He says we made a mistake, because she’s still up ahead. He decides to do her right away, and runs. We do too. And there she is, about a hundred yards ahead: red shirt, white sneakers.
“She comes out of the woods onto a road. We try to catch up with her and get it over with before somebody drives up and sees her. Sure enough, a car zooms past us, pulls up to her, and stops. It’s Nancy Carmody’s car, with Nancy Carmody behind the wheel, still wearing her red shirt. We sprint to get close. This other woman opens the door of the car and just stands there, like she’s trying to get a good look at our faces. This doesn’t bother us, because she’s going to be dead too. But it also gives me a good look at her face. She gets in, slams the door, and takes off.
“We dash back to our car, and McCormick drives after them. We get maybe three miles before black smoke starts streaming out from under the hood, so you can barely see. McCormick jumps out and pops the hood. I get out too, but not because I want to put out a fire with my shirt. It’s because I see big orange flames. When I get to the front I can see them coming from the engine block and melting the wire bundle that runs along the side. There’s this white goop all over everything, and it burns high and hot.”
Delfina’s eyes were sharp as he stared at Zinni. “And you think the picture is the same woman—the one who slipped Nancy Carmody out?”
“I know it is,” Zinni asserted. “It’s her.”
Delfina was silent for a few seconds. For six years he had kept Nancy Carmody in the back of his mind, and other, newer problems had piled in on top. It was clear to him that he had not heard the whole story at the time. When the waitress had not turned up, he’d had Stolnick executed, so the immediate danger she represented had passed. “You know anything about this woman?”
“She’s got to be some kind of pro,” said Mino.
Delfina sighed. To these guys, the process of thought was like carrying big rocks to a river to use as stepping-stones. They would drop one in, then have to turn around and go all the way back to find the next one, carry it out, and drop it. “We’ll have to move fast.”
“On what?”
“Al, call Oakland. Get your guys to call all our people in cities across the country. Have them make a lot of copies of that picture—say, a couple of thousand each. We’ve got to get them to all the families as fast as we can. Tell them Rita Shelford has been spotted, and this woman was with her. Nothing else. Got it?”
“Sure, but what does it mean?”
“It means that we have to find a phone booth.”
Mino stopped the car at a gas station and got out to use one of the pay telephones along the fence where cars were parked waiting for service. After a second, Delfina’s impatience goaded him out of the car to the telephone beside Mino’s. He called his underbosses in Niagara Falls, Omaha, Los Angeles, and Boston and repeated his orders.
When he was back in Mino’s car, he sat with his eyes on the roof above his head, trying to assess his position. He had given up some of the information he had that the other bosses didn’t. That was bad. But they would finally be convinced that he was joining in the general hunt for Bernie’s money, and that was, on the whole, good. Now he had to decide exactly what his position was going to be after they found this woman for him.
21
Jane awoke slowly, listening for the clacking of the keys on Ziegler’s keyboard, then opened her eyes to look for the light under the door. When she found it, the crack of light wasn’t where it was supposed to be. She sat up in bed and remembered. The light under the door was the hotel hallway. This was the Olympic Hotel, and it was in Seattle.
The five-hundred-mile trip up the Pacific coast from San Diego to San Francisco had taken her a full day. The only stops she had made had been near mailboxes and post offices, sometimes to drop a single envelope in a slot. She had stayed one night in San Francisco, then spent most of the next day flying to Portland and Seattle, mailing more letters.
So far, everything had gone exactly as she had planned. California was a tenth of the population of the country, so there had been many stops. Portland and Seattle were smaller, so on her last flight she had been able to fold one empty duffel bag and put it inside the other with the rest of the mail. She had used the name Wendy Stein to rent the car, then been Katherine Webster in San Francisco, and Diane Finley on the flight to Seattle. When she had arrived at the hotel, the boxes of new letters had been waiting for her.
She had taken two hours emptying the boxes and packing the letters in her two duffel bags in the proper order, so the first bundles would be at the top. Then she had flattened the cardboard boxes, torn the mailing stickers off them, and carried them to the Dumpster in the little enclosure behind the building. After that, she had tried to go to sleep, but couldn’t. From the moment when she had dropped the first envelopes in Albuquerque, she had been aware that she had started the clock. It would take only a day or two before the first checks arrived at the offices of charities. She had tried to make those two days count, but now she was stopped. She had to wait until morning for her flight to Minneapolis to begin her run through the Midwest. It was only when the clock by the bed said two A.M. that she was able to assuage the feeling of nervous eagerness. The bags were ready, the tickets were in her purse on the table, and the reservations were confirmed for the rest of the trip. It was now five o’clock in the East, and she knew that while she slept, Henry Ziegler would already be in the car she had reserved for him, driving up the coast dropping envelopes in places like Orlando, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston. Even if the least likely of the possible disasters had already happened, and someone had connected the sudden dispersal of big money with Bernie Lupus, it was almost impossible that anyone would connect the event with Henry Ziegler. Probably no wiseguy had ever heard of him. And Henry would be traveling in the safest, most anonymous way, staying out of airports.
Jane slept for four hours, then woke up to discover that she had regained her strength and alertness. She called the desk downstairs to have a bellman pick up her two large bags and summon a taxi for Sea-Tac airport. She showered and dressed quickly and hurried down to settle her bill. In a few days it would be over.
At the airport, Jane dragged her two bags a few feet to the end of the line of passengers waiting to check their luggage at the curb. When the skycaps had taken them, she entered the terminal, walked through the row of metal detectors, and began to assess the crowds of people in the waiting areas. She was trying to pick out the two or three men who would be watching for Rita Shelford, but she saw immediately that things had changed. There seemed to be more of them than there had been in San Diego. The man near the end of the first aisle studying something in his briefcase was a strong candidate. He kept dipping his eyes to stare down at the open case, then looking up at people walking past him on the concourse. At first she thought it was possible that he was a police officer of some kind, but she dismissed the thought. His shoes were too nice. Cops never forgot that they were likely to spend a lot of time on their feet before the end of the shift, and might even have to chase someone down who was younger and faster, then wrestle with him. They didn’t like leather soles and pointed toes.
She knew the man couldn’t be looking for her, but she was glad to get past him. A few minutes l
ater her eyes settled on a man walking along ahead of her. He turned his head to the right, and Jane followed his eyes. He had looked directly at a man sitting in the waiting area. The man stood up and began to walk too.
Jane kept going at the same pace, stepped closer to the middle of the concourse, where people at the sides wouldn’t get as good a look at her, and watched the two men work. She tried to figure out whether they had spotted someone who looked like Rita, but it was difficult to tell. Ahead of her there were lots of people of all sizes and shapes.
The first man stepped into the stream of people ahead, stopped abruptly in front of the one he suspected, and stared up at the sign hanging from the ceiling above his head that had an arrow and the words GATES 10–22. The second man stopped behind, hemming the victim in. He had his hand in his pocket, and in it, Jane knew, would be something he wasn’t supposed to have in an airport—maybe a blade made of sharpened plastic. But when the man who had caused the jam pivoted awkwardly and took a close look into the face of the victim, he muttered an apology and stepped quickly aside.
The victim stepped off again, pulling her rolling suitcase by its extended handle. Jane hurried to catch up with the woman before the two men had time to circle back to their positions, where Jane would have to pass them.
Jane could see now that what the woman was carrying in her free hand was not an airline’s envelope with tickets in it. She had a little packet of business-size envelopes with stamps on them. The woman veered to the side of the concourse and Jane adjusted her course a few degrees to watch her more closely. The woman stopped at a steel panel with several horizontal slots in it and the eagle logo of the U.S. Postal Service. She dropped the letters in a slot and turned to go back to some gate she had already passed. Jane studied the woman’s face. First the woman’s eyes were unfocused, merely aimed ahead so she could see where she was going. Then she noticed Jane, and her eyes shot to Jane’s face: her hair, her eyes, then down at the floor. A slight smile played on her lips for a fraction of a second. She had seen the resemblance too.
