Thomas Perry - Blood Money

“You?” Jane was distracted. He had said “the boy.” She was almost sure she knew who the boy was.

“Years were going by. I was handling money for the New York families, and it was training my memory. They started bringing in more families, as a favor.”

“Detroit, too?”

“Never Detroit. Ogliaro couldn’t stand it. He knew he couldn’t do anything about what had already happened, but he wasn’t going to leave any of his money with me. But by the mid-fifties there were the New York families, Pittsburgh, Boston, two New Jersey families, one of the Chicago families, New Orleans. The ones in Los Angeles were connected to families in the East, so they were part of the package. The only person who knew where any of it was invested was me. You can see the problem.”

“They wouldn’t let you out of their sight,” said Jane.

“In the fifties there were a couple of wars. They were afraid somebody would clip me just to cause trouble. Then it was the big uproar caused by the wars. Citizens had found bodies lying around, so the government had to start making noise about the Mafia—holding hearings, doing raids. People started to worry about me getting picked up. They moved me out of New York and set me up in a house in Florida.”

“So you couldn’t go to New York anymore.”

“She couldn’t either. It was the sixties by then, and women weren’t doing that anymore. A department store in Detroit had the same clothes as one in New York. Then a bad period started. From the late sixties on, you couldn’t trust your telephone or go talk to somebody outdoors without getting your picture taken. The FBI raided my house six times, and each time I got hauled in for forty-eight hours so they could ask me questions while the families were crying real tears and wringing their hands. In 1978 my house burned down.”

“Arson?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know, because I did it myself. I hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. I talked them into taking me to Chicago while it was being rebuilt so I could be closer to her. I slipped my bodyguards once and spent the night in a hotel with her. That was the last time. A new house got built, only this time it was in the Keys. While my house was going up, they built houses all around it.”

“So those stories are true? The whole neighborhood is Mafia?”

“I don’t know what you heard, but here’s what’s true. There are three streets on each side. They built the houses and put people in them. The houses aren’t all occupied all the time, but some are. There are places on the island where you can see a boat coming from miles away in any direction, and there’s only one bridge. It was all for me.”

“Didn’t her husband die right around then?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That was why I had to see her. To propose.”

“Marriage? After thirty years?”

“What do you want from me? I couldn’t make the calendar go backwards. It was the first realistic chance I had.”

“She turned you down.”

He nodded. “I figured if anybody would understand that, it would be another woman. I sure didn’t.”

“It was the boy, wasn’t it? If her husband was dead, then her son was going to be the boss. Your son.”

“That’s just about the way she said it. Vincent was practically a kid, late twenties, when Ogliaro died. She was afraid that without her at his elbow to tell him what was what, he couldn’t do it. It would be like setting the baby on the ground while the wild dogs circled him. She couldn’t bring him with her to Florida to live with me. She said that would be like castrating him.”

“What about later, after he was established?” she said carefully. “He seems to have had an aptitude for it.”

“Then it was too late. People were already watching him, worrying that he might get too strong. If his mother came to live with me, then the families who gave me their money would decide he was trying to get his hands on it. They would have killed him.” He shook his head. “That was our son. He was what she traded our lives for.”

Jane was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a sad story.”

She thought about the woman. This was her story, not Bernie’s. She tested it. “And your son—Vincent—he arranged for your death?”

He shook his head. “How could he? He’s in prison. You knew that, didn’t you?”

Jane nodded. “I remember seeing it in the papers.”

“She did it. She did all of it. All I knew about it was that if I could get that particular flight to Detroit that day, and come outside for some air, she would handle the rest. I see her, she fires a gun at me. I fall down. She gets hustled into a car and away. About six big guys all crowd around me. One takes my picture, then slips a coat on me and a wig on my head. Another lies down in my place. Another squirts blood all over the place with a plastic bottle. One takes my fingerprints. An ambulance shows up, they lift this guy into it and drive away. A couple of these guys take me into the airport with them, and push me onto a plane, where Danny is waiting for me.”

“That’s a lot of people,” said Jane.

“One of them works in the coroner’s office, a couple more are cops. Danny didn’t know anything about the others, but they were all people she had on the hook. He said she paid them all, but none of them would tell anyway, because they’d have to say they were in on it.”

“So now you’re dead.”

“I’m dead,” he agreed. “Only it didn’t work, because she’s dead too. All those years. All the waiting and wishing, and then this. She has a heart attack. When the hell did women start having heart attacks?”

There were tears streaming down his face. She could see they were coming from his tear ducts, but that meant nothing. There were no actors and few women who couldn’t cry any time they wanted to. What caught her attention were the lines on his face. As she studied them, she understood something that had distracted her since she had met him. The expressions she had seen on his face didn’t match the lines. He would say something cheerful and the voice didn’t match the words, and then he would smile, and the face would appear to wrinkle across the lines. The expression on his face at this moment made the lines and creases fit perfectly. There was only one expression his face had assumed habitually. For fifty years, he had been in anguish. He was old now. The skin on his temple was getting a thin, almost transparent look, like vellum, so she could see the veins.

She said, “She didn’t choose this time because it was good for her, or for Vincent, did she?”

“No,” he said. In his watery blue eyes was the worst agony of all. It seemed to contain within it all of the pain he had felt for fifty years. But she was sure that there was something new, too. “I was beginning to forget things.”

5

Jane looked at him a moment longer. She began to feel that her pity was what was giving him pain now, like the weight of a soothing hand on a burn. She turned away, walked to the other side of the room, and began to rearrange the magazines.

“You’re still a kid. Maybe my telling you this will help you out.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s a very strange little skill you’ve developed. Rita was telling me about it. Somebody is in trouble, you come along, and—poof!—he vanishes.” Jane turned to look at him, and the sad eyes were on her. “I had a strange little skill too.”

“It’s not a business,” Jane said. “I wasn’t trying to get rich.”

“I know, I know,” said the old man. “I wasn’t either. I did it because my friend Sal Augustino asked me to. I could save a friend from going to jail. I did it because there was no way not to. But it wasn’t over. You do a favor, it doesn’t make you paid up. It just proves you can do it.”