Thomas Perry - Blood Money

“Thanks,” said Jane.

She opened the car door, but Bernie stopped her. “One last thing. Don’t worry. Right now it looks like they all got together for the sole purpose of hunting us down. It won’t last. I know them. They get distracted. If they’re looking for a pile of hundred-dollar bills and happen to see a kid with a nickel in his hand on the street, they’ll stop to get the nickel. Then they’ll fight over the nickel.”

Jane shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”

“Of course I am,” snapped Bernie. “I’m B … Michael Daily.” He turned and walked toward the house, then stopped. “Thanks for the ride.”

Jane waved, then hugged Rita. “I’ll think about you.”

Jane drove all day and into the evening before she stopped to make a call at a pay telephone under a street lamp in Provo, Utah. She dialed the number of the house in Amherst, and heard the answering machine.

Jane said, “I’m on my way home. It will take a few days. I love you.”

She hung up, and reached into her purse to put her extra change back. In the corner of her purse she detected something unfamiliar. It felt like tissue paper. Could she have left that in since she had bought this purse? She pulled it out, but it felt heavier than it should have. She squeezed it between her fingers. There was something hard and round in it, like pebbles. As she took it out, carefully pulled apart the folds of tissue paper, and looked down, she remembered Bernie handing her the purse. The light from the street lamp glinted off the facets of the diamonds, and made them look like small, cold stars.

38

Molinari sat on the bench beside the enormous fake adobe building and stared at the scrubby cactus plants across the walkway. The sun was low, and no matter how he turned his head, the sparse, dry Arizona trees didn’t cast enough shade to keep the glare out of his eyes.

“Mitch, stand over here in front of me.” He pointed at a spot on the bricks and watched his nephew step into it, shuffle his feet sideways until his body blocked the sun, and then stand still. Molinari crouched in the cool shadow and felt the temperature of his skin begin to drop.

“You okay?” asked his other nephew, Steve.

“It’s like being on another fucking planet,” muttered Molinari.

“Why would anybody like him come here to live?” whispered Steve.

Mitch leaned forward confidentially, and an explosion of sunlight flashed in Molinari’s face. “Maybe it’s for his lungs.”

“Yeah,” said Molinari. “He wanted to make sure air only came in at the tops.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mitch. “I meant here, instead of someplace else.” Even they knew that Castiglione had been the architect of the conspiracy of 1987. The other two bosses had been executed after the attempt, but the Commission had accepted Castiglione’s offer to go quietly into exile.

“Come in,” said a woman’s voice.

Molinari walked to the shaded porch with the two nephews flanking him, as usual, but the young woman in the white dress who was waiting in the doorway lowered her eyes and shook her head. Molinari said to his nephews, “Wait here.”

He followed the woman across a tiled foyer the size of a hotel lobby. Molinari was conscious of the tapping of his leather soles on the tiles, and looked down to notice that the woman’s feet were bare. He had wondered about her since he had first seen her. He didn’t remember hearing that Castiglione had any daughters. She seemed to be some kind of employee. Maybe she had a weapon hidden under the embroidered apron.

He found Castiglione sitting at a wooden table that looked as though it had been made by splitting logs into two-inch boards with an axe, then pounding ten-penny nails into them. The old man was thinner than the last time Molinari had seen him, but his skin had a healthy brown sheen that he didn’t remember.

Molinari bent his head in a little bow of respect. “Don Paolo, I see you’re looking good. This must be a healthy place.”

Castiglione smiled at his clumsiness. “It’s not as bad as you think it is. Sit down.”

Molinari sat. The young woman padded up behind Castiglione’s shoulder with a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other. Molinari watched her set them down, pour two glasses, and disappear through the rounded doorway. Castiglione lifted one of the glasses, said, “Salut’,” then sipped.

Molinari imitated him. “Salut’.”

“What are you here for, kid?”

Molinari was taken aback. After a moment he remembered that when the old man had last seen him, he had been a kid, not much older than his two nephews outside. “It’s a long story.”

“I know most of it,” said Castiglione. “All the families that gave Bernie Lupus money are trying to get it back. Forget it. Bernie died intestate.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t mean no balls, it means no will—nothing written down about where the hell the money is. All this stuff about him telling somebody before he died is a fantasy. Out here there’s a persistent old story about some prospector. He found a vein of gold as wide as Main Street in a mountain. He died. But every few years, a new bunch of suckers still get convinced he left a map. Why the hell would he make a map? You think a guy with a mountain of gold is going to want to show other people where it is? Do you think he’s going to forget how he got there?”

“I guess not.”

“Well, Bernie the Elephant lived by his memory. What the hell would have made him write anything down? That he wanted all his very good friends to get their money back? His friends would have taken the paper and dropped him in a Dumpster, and he knew it.”

Castiglione took a drink of his wine, then set it down. “Don’t get me wrong. I liked Bernie. It was always a pleasant experience to talk to a man who knew things, and Bernie couldn’t help knowing everything he ever saw or heard. I would have gone to his funeral, but there are people who would have considered that breaking my word.”

Molinari said, “I wouldn’t have.”

Castiglione gave a quiet chuckle. His head turned to look out at the garden, but his bright eyes were still watching Molinari from the side. “You should listen to your elders. Funerals are where a lot of deals get made.”

Molinari hesitated. “You’ve been thinking about coming back?”

Castiglione waved a hand lazily to dismiss the idea. “There are still too many people alive who remember. They have to, because they know I do, and that I think about them every day.” The way he said it made Molinari feel a chill in his spine.

Molinari said, “I came to talk to you because a lot of things are happening that I can’t figure out. I need advice. After Bernie died, we all agreed to get together and watch to see if big money started moving.”

Castiglione nodded. “I can’t blame you. It’s hard to lose that much money.”

“We made a deal, and we all watched. All of a sudden, about a week ago, money starts showing up from no place. It’s like a buried pipe broke under the street, and it starts gushing up from the manholes and the cracks in the sidewalks. Only it looks like it’s all going to charities.”

“I heard that.”

Molinari kept his face from revealing that he had noticed the response. Castiglione knew things that he had no obvious means of knowing. Molinari went on. “So we all send our people out to find out what’s going on. We pull every string, pressure every banker or broker or anybody we’ve got on the hook to trace the money back from the charities to where it came from. Finding out does zero, because the givers are made up. So we decide to find the people who might have had something to do with Bernie’s death. There’s Vincent Ogliaro. Bernie was killed in Detroit, and it’s his city, even if he’s in jail. But there’s not much chance he could be doing the rest of it.”