Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"I had been drinking club soda all night to keep my head clear, but by now it has to go somewhere. I’m a little nervous about leaving the room to go to the can at this time, but I convince myself that this may be the best thing to do. If Jerry is going to cheat, he’ll pick the time when I’m gone to do it. That night the game was in an old-fashioned motel with eight little cabins. The bathroom is right behind Jerry, who always liked to face the front door, for obvious reasons.

"So I go into the bathroom and find that five or six bottles of club soda take a long time to drain out of a person. This gives me lots of time to stand there looking around. I notice that there’s a vent over the door. If I put one foot on the bathtub and hold on to the towel rack on the door, I can actually see down into the room. Better than that, I can see it from above, the way the bosses watch the dealers in Las Vegas. There’s only one thing I haven’t figured out, and that’s what I’m going to do if I catch Jerry cheating.

"Next thing I know, there’s something going on at the front door. I didn’t hear anybody knock, but I guess somebody did. This guy Milhaven, who is a very rich guy who probably never got a door in his life, says, ’Must be more drinks. Harry, get that, will you?’ He sees I don’t hop to it, so he goes to the door.

"He gets his hand on the knob and turns it, and that’s about all he gets to do. The door is kicked in, and it hits him. He’s on the ground. The two guys who kicked it in are already inside. One of them holds his gun in two hands to aim and pumps two rounds into Jerry Cappadocia’s chest, while the other bends over Milhaven and puts one into his forehead. There are four more guys in the game, and they go crazy. Nadler the lawyer charges toward the door, but the guy who shot Jerry stands his ground and drops him, then steps aside to let Nadler fall while he aims again. Somebody kicks over the table, and Villard the grocery king and Smith the broker duck behind it. I could have told them this was going to turn out to be a bad idea. They each get hit three or four times through the green felt. Hallman, who owns a bunch of sporting-goods stores, decides to go acrobatic and dive through the closed window. He gets two steps before they clip him, so what hits the window is a dead Hallman. About this time I hear another shot, and I’m ready to faint. I mean, there’s nobody left to shoot at but me.

"I’m still in the bathroom watching this, too scared to move. These two either don’t know about me or they heard somebody say I wasn’t around to get the door. They start stealing things—taking wallets and watches and stuff. Now, these particular six players represent a pretty impressive chunk of money. Each time they arrived to play, I would sell each of them ten grand in chips. It was a kind of assurance that everybody was serious. But each of them brought a lot more, so they could buy more chips if they had a setback. Gentlemen don’t ask each other to take checks for gambling debts. So right now these two shooters are doing pretty well pocket-mining. They get the money, walk out the door, and close it behind them.

"I’m still clinging to the bathroom door like a kitten that climbed up a tree that was bigger than it looked. I’m shaking. To tell you the truth, I’m glad they didn’t break in until my bladder was empty. After about a minute, I can’t think of a reason not to let myself down. I go and look at the six guys on the floor and see there’s no chance anybody is going to make a quick trip to the emergency room and make a dramatic recovery.

"I think maybe I’ll call the cops. I mean, I’m an innocent bystander, right? I actually reach for the phone, but I stop. There’s nothing I can do for these six guys, but there’s a lot I can do for me. See, what happened is strange. Maybe it’s just a robbery. They got maybe a hundred thousand and change. But what happened when they kicked in the door wasn’t that somebody said, ’Give me your money.’ The first one in found Jerry Cappadocia and put two holes in him. I went to look at Jerry’s body, and sure enough, while they were robbing the corpses, one of them had put another shot through his left temple. That was what I heard.

"It’s possible that these two robbers were good judges of character and realized in a tenth of a second that if anybody was going to give them trouble it was Jerry C., or maybe he made a move I didn’t catch and the robber panicked. I don’t know. But it looked to me like one of those situations where somebody wanted to kill one particular man and everything else was just to cover that. At this point I start thinking about how this affects my future. I can be excused for that because I’ve just established that I’m the only guy in the room who has one. The room, in fact, is my first problem. It would not take the C.I.A. to figure out who rented the room for the game. There’s also the fact that Jerry C. heard about the game a month before. If he had, just about anybody else could have too. And even if for some reason he didn’t tell his buddies about it, there was his girl."

"Lenore?" asked Jane.

"Yeah, Lenore," he said. "Her last name was Sanders."

"She would go to the police?"

"The police were my primary concern," said Harry. "But they were not my ultimate concern. One way or another the police were going to find out it was my game. They were also capable of counting the bodies and noticing that mine wasn’t one of them. Would this cause me harm? Some inconvenience, certainly. They would try to find me and hold me for questioning. But there were other considerations. I start thinking about the five original gentlemen I recruited for my game: Villard, Milhaven, Nadler, Hallman, and Smith. I realize I don’t really know much about them. If I get picked up and questioned and let go, are their families and friends going to forget it? Maybe. But in my experience, nobody in this country gets rich by accident. A lot of people who haven’t gotten caught at anything are pretty ruthless. The heirs and colleagues of men like that can be pretty ruthless too. And speaking of heirs and colleagues—"

"—Jerry Cappadocia," she said.

"Yes," said Harry. "Him I don’t have to wonder about. I know about his colleagues. A couple of them used to show up once a week in the attic of a furniture store where Handy Andy Gurlich ran his bookie operation to collect the Cappadocia family’s license fees. Any two of them together were evidence that human evolution is not a straight line. There are lots of dead ends and throwbacks.

"Then there’s the question of heirs. Jerry Cappadocia’s father has a certain renown. He had announced a couple of years back that he was retiring and Jerry would run the family businesses. This is a man who spent forty years building those businesses with his hands, and what they consist of is killing people who don’t give him money. He’s healthy, no more than sixty-some years old. I’ve heard he speaks English like a native, except there are a few words he never learned, like mercy. What is this man going to do when he learns his only child has been killed? It’s true I was a little worried about getting picked up by the police for questioning, but it was only because they’re the ones people call when they hear shots, and they drive through red lights to get there quickly. What was really on my mind was getting picked up later for questioning by Jerry Cappadocia’s father.

"And that brought to mind another problem. I really didn’t know anything. I saw two men kick in the door and murder six men and then spend five minutes kneeling on the floor to search them. I had never seen either of them before. I didn’t see their car, if they had one. They both wore white coats they stole out of the motel’s linen cart. I saw them through a vent, so most of what I saw was backs and the tops of heads covered with navy watch caps. But if these two shooters read in the papers that there was a guy who was watching them, what were they going to do? I mean, if the first order of business when they kicked in the door was shooting Jerry Cappadocia, they must have known who he was, right? They had to know what would happen to them if Mr. Cappadocia found out who it was that killed his son."