Blood Money

29

Frank Delfina liked his Albuquerque bottled-water business because it didn’t stink. Flower shops smelled, bakeries smelled. Even supermarkets smelled if you came in the back door, where the food was delivered. There was breakage, and you always found yourself stepping on a spot that made your shoe stick, and then the sole made a little smacking noise for the next few minutes. He looked across the plant at the clean, clear bottles waiting for tomorrow morning’s shift to come in and fill them.

He liked everything. He liked it that people were dumb enough to believe that spring water driven down from the mountains in a truck was better than water that came from the same reservoir in a pipe, although they couldn’t tell the difference. He knew that, because this plant topped off each bottle with about two inches of tap water.

Delfina didn’t like flying into Albuquerque and then waiting like this. He noticed Buccio walking toward him from the distant doorway, and he stared at him in frustration. He had let himself put faith in Buccio and his crew, and it had been a mistake. Buccio had the short-haired, big-shouldered look of a marine officer, always standing up straight and wearing his sleeves rolled up above his big forearms, as though he were about to do something impressive. He always looked like somebody who could pull off just about anything, and to do him credit, he was always eager to try. But that didn’t mean things would work. Delfina had almost let Buccio and his guys talk him into letting them pull an attack on a bus carrying the bosses of half the families in the country. At least Delfina had backed away from that one.

Buccio said, “Vanelli’s car just pulled up in the lot outside.”

“All right,” said Delfina. “Get the rest of your guys in here now.”

Buccio gave Delfina a puzzled glance, then turned on his heel and strode quickly into the bottling area.

Delfina twisted in his chair to look up at Mike Cirro, then held out his hand. Cirro reached into his sport coat, produced a Smith & Wesson .45 semi-automatic pistol, and placed it in Delfina’s palm. Delfina examined it, pulled the slide to cycle a round into the chamber, then slipped it into the back of his belt and adjusted his coat to cover it, and leaned back in the chair.

A few hours ago, Delfina had let Buccio pull one of his commando-raid travesties outside Santa Fe. Buccio had flown a dozen men into Albuquerque, held a rendezvous at the airport, then deployed his troops. He had explained to Delfina how he’d sent snipers in camouflage into the desert to cover the house and the road, then pulled a full-scale assault to kick in all the doors at once and rush in. As Delfina thought about it, he was positive that at some point in the operation, Buccio must have said, “Synchronize your watches.”

But Buccio had stormed an empty house. Rita Shelford had been gone. The woman who had been helping her hide had been gone. They had found computers, all set up in the dining room, and lots of different kinds of paper and envelopes. Buccio had had the sense to take the computers. As Delfina thought about it, he could almost forgive Buccio for the childish theatrics. Having the computers was going to be better than having the girl.

Delfina was glad he had listened to Buccio’s whole story without interrupting him or shouting, because he had heard about Buccio’s mistake. He watched the rest of Buccio’s crew coming in from the door to the plant and the outer doors. They were Buccio’s hand-picked protégés, all of them. They all had his close-cropped, overexercised look with thick necks and empty faces.

Delfina heard the distant door to the parking lot open and turned to watch the last four men come in. He recognized Vanelli and Giglia. They were laughing and talking with the other two men, who looked a little more subdued. When they came into the big room and saw Delfina, Vanelli stepped forward and said respectfully, “Frank. I brought some friends of ours to meet you. This is Paul Lomarco.” He indicated a tall, dark young man in a pair of jeans and a windbreaker. “This is Pete DiBiaggio.” That one was wearing a sweatshirt above his jeans that said, NEW MEXICO, LAND OF ENCHANTMENT.

Both men smiled and nodded timidly at Delfina.

Delfina smiled too, stood up, and shook their hands. “Glad to meet you.” He turned to Buccio. “Go get these guys a beer.” Buccio prepared to pass the order to one of his crew, but Delfina’s stare remained on him until he went toward the office himself. Delfina turned to the two men. “You guys are Cleveland boys, eh? Part of Al Castananza’s family?”

Both men nodded. Lomarco said, “Yeah. They sent us here to watch the airport for the two women.”

“Yeah, I got guys all over the place on that too.” Delfina smiled and shrugged. “The only good part is, I’ll bet you’ve had tougher jobs than that. Probably looked for women when you weren’t even getting paid for it. So you guys happened to run into each other at the airport?”

“That’s right,” said DiBiaggio. “I met Vanelli a couple of years ago, so I went over to talk to him. He remembered me, too.”

Delfina nodded. “Ah, here’s Buccio with the drinks.” Buccio handed each of the two a bottle of beer.

Both men looked increasingly uncomfortable. Lomarco looked around him. “Wow. This is a big place.”

Delfina nodded. “Yeah, I figured if you build something, it should be big enough so you don’t have to do it again in five years.” He looked at the twelve men along the wall to his right. “Come on, you guys. Relax. I didn’t mean to leave you out.”

The men approached, a little warily. A couple of them nodded at Lomarco and DiBiaggio, who didn’t seem to be made more comfortable by the new faces. “Come on, guys. These are friends of ours. Aren’t you going to shake their hands?”

A couple of Buccio’s men shook hands with Lomarco and DiBiaggio. Delfina stepped back to make room for others. In a moment he was behind the two guests. As Buccio and Vanelli stepped forward and grasped the two men’s hands, Delfina reached under his coat to his back, held the pistol behind Lomarco’s head, and fired. The noise seemed to make the air in the cavernous building harden and slap the eardrums. Four or five men cringed or ducked their heads, but Delfina already had the pistol at DiBiaggio’s head. He fired.

He stepped over the men lying on the floor and walked toward his chair. Buccio, Vanelli, and two others had been spattered by blood. They were looking down at their hands and shirts, and the others seemed to be in the process of awakening from paralysis. They looked at the bodies, then at one another, and then at Delfina, who was shaking his head sadly.

“They seemed to be two pretty good men,” said Delfina. “It was a shame to have to do that.” He looked up at Buccio’s crew. “That was totally unnecessary. Do I have to remind you guys what this is about?”

A few of the men before him looked down at their feet, but Buccio, Vanelli, and a few others stared straight ahead.

“It’s everything,” said Delfina. “You know what went into this? For weeks, I had people in a Florida prison watching Rita Shelford’s mother twenty-four hours a day. Finally, we get a break. The girl writes her a letter. It takes two days to figure out that the place the girl is describing is Santa Fe. It takes a few more to backtrack through old newspaper ads to find out what houses used to be for sale or rent that aren’t anymore, then check every single one of them out. When the hard part is all done, I decide ‘Okay, these guys are always telling me about their precision and efficiency and all that. I’ll give them a shot at this.’ ”

Delfina held up his hand in wonder. “Did I need to say, Keep it a secret? Don’t let guys from other families see twelve of my men fly in at once and meet in an airport that you know is being watched?”

Delfina’s glare softened. He held out the pistol and Mike Cirro stepped up, took it from his hand, and slipped it into his coat again. “I know you must have done some of this right, because you didn’t get shot or arrested. You got into the house, took what was there, and got home. Fine. But look at these two. I didn’t kill them. You did.”

He could see the men were sufficiently chastened. “Get them out of here. They depress me.”

Several of the men dragged the two bodies out of the room, and others began to swab up the blood with red mechanics’ rags from the bottling plant. Delfina returned to his chair and watched the proceedings.

After a half hour or so, he heard the door at the far end of the building open, and saw four men come in carrying big cardboard boxes. He slowly let his excitement build. This was going to be it.

He turned to Mike Cirro. “You’re pretty sure you can do this yourself? If you need experts, I can get them. We’ve got all kinds of people on the payroll in companies all over the country.”

Cirro shrugged. “It depends on how hard it is to get around their passwords. If I can’t, I won’t hurt anything, and we can get the experts.”

Delfina watched the men bringing in more boxes. He turned to Buccio. “Give them a hand.”

In a moment, Buccio and his men had brought in the boxes and set them at Delfina’s feet. Cirro stepped forward and looked into the boxes, then picked one up and walked off toward the wall, with one of Buccio’s men. He set it on a workbench, and Buccio’s man said, “I’ll go find an extension cord.”

Delfina watched another man carry a second box toward the workbench, then looked down at the others. “What’s in these?”

Buccio knelt beside one. “Here’s her suitcase. We went through it, and there’s not much in it. Just some clothes. But here’s another one, and it might be important.”

“Why?”

“It’s not for her, or for another woman. It’s men’s clothes.”

Delfina sat up straight. “Open it. Let’s take a look.” Buccio carried the suitcase out to the floor and opened it. Delfina picked up a pair of pants, a shirt. He set them on the floor and looked at them, then stood and held them in front of his body so Buccio could see. “Look at the size.”

The pants reached about halfway down Delfina’s shin. “He’s not a big guy,” said Buccio judiciously.

Delfina tossed the clothes onto the suitcase. “That’s because he’s not a guy,” he said. “He’s a disguise for a girl. You didn’t, by any chance, see a guy near the house tonight and let him go past, did you?”

“No, Frank,” Buccio said hastily. “None of my crew would do that.”

“Good,” said Delfina. He glanced across the big room toward Cirro, who was connecting cables to the backs of the computers. That was what he was interested in. If this woman who had gotten her hands on Rita Shelford had used them to transfer money, there would be a record of the transactions in those computers. Even if it was too late to reverse them, it wasn’t too late to find out exactly where the money had really gone. The rest of the families would spend the next few months trying to trace it from wherever Bernie put it, through fake people and companies and charities that disappeared when you looked at them. Delfina would already have the money.

He saw Buccio’s man come back with a long orange extension cord. He said to Buccio, “What else did you find?”

“Nothing we didn’t know about before,” he said. “There’s stationery, envelopes, boxes, labels, all blank. They had a regular office set up.”

Delfina glanced across the room at Cirro. He could see that Cirro was turning things on. The screens of the computers lit up, there were beeps and hums. He touched a key as Delfina approached. He pressed others, started clattering away. Delfina’s excitement grew. “What have you got?”

Cirro looked back at him. He was frowning. “Something’s wrong.”

“It’s not working?”

Cirro picked up the screwdriver he had been using to tighten the cable connections and opened the side of the computer. He took the big plastic cowling off and set it aside. “Shit,” he muttered. “No hard disk.”

Disappointment flowed into Delfina’s chest and slowly hardened into anger. He watched Cirro open the other computer, but he knew, as Cirro did, that the disk would be gone. He waited for Cirro to confirm it.

“They took the hard disks out before they left,” Cirro said. “There’s nothing.”

Delfina turned and walked back to his chair and stared at the other boxes. His silence and immobility drew his men around him like a magnet. They waited as he stared, growing increasingly anxious. He raised his head.

“Kill the girl’s mother,” he said. “Call Florida and tell them. If the women we have in there with her aren’t up to it, tell them to find somebody.” He seemed to sense that his listeners were uncomfortable.

“But if she wrote a letter once, don’t you think she might do it again?” asked Buccio. “If her mother’s dead … ”

“Somehow they knew we were coming. I don’t know if it was the mother that warned them, or if she could do it again. It’s possible this mystery woman got the girl to send the letter just to get us to waste a week finding a place she already left. It doesn’t matter. If the mother’s dead, I don’t have to think about what the next trick will be.”

“Okay,” said Buccio. “I’ll call them in the morning.”

“Tonight. By morning I want all this stuff gone so the bottling guys don’t see it, and all of you out of New Mexico.” He stood up and beckoned to Cirro. “Split up and drive out. I don’t want anybody else seeing you in an airport together.” Cirro arrived at Delfina’s side. Delfina said, “Let’s get to the airport, Mike.” The two walked toward the door for a few steps, and Delfina stopped. “The woman in the drawing. She’s the one that’s got to be behind all of it. Forget everything except her.”

While Cirro drove him to the airport, Delfina thought about the woman. His people were all looking for her full-time, and he was pretty sure that most of the soldiers from the other families were doing the same, but she had not been spotted since Milwaukee. It was time to make a bigger effort to get the rest of the world to help with the search. He took out a pen and a piece of paper and began to compose a new flyer. She seemed to be into disguises, so it should have her picture on it, but this time the artist would show other possibilities: long hair, short hair, blond hair, and sunglasses. Instead of just saying she was missing, it would say she was being sought for questioning. That implied the search was all legal, but didn’t actually say she had committed a crime.

Instead of just alluding to a reward, he would name one. A hundred thousand? No. It wasn’t enough. People got junk mail from magazine wholesalers every day that offered millions. Make it a half million dollars.

There was another thing, too—the place. People were already looking all over the country, but that haphazard method didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He had to be selective. The first thing the woman had done was drag the girl up from Florida. People had forgotten that. Bernie had lived in Florida, and the girl had been born there, and that was where all of this had started. In a day or so, the girl’s mother was going to be taken off the count in a Florida prison, and there would be some kind of burial service. He would put down that she was believed to be in Florida. That wasn’t a sure thing, though. Where else?

Bernie had been killed in Detroit. There was still the chance that this whole scheme had been run by the Ogliaro family. Of course, Vincent Ogliaro was in federal prison, so if she was communicating with him, she wouldn’t go to Detroit to do it. He looked up at Cirro. “Tell me again. Where’s Vincent Ogliaro serving his sentence?”

“Marion, Illinois.”

He added that to his flyer: “Believed to be either in Florida or in the vicinity of Marion, Illinois.” Then he realized it was wrong. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. He should have paid more attention to the way the magazine clearing houses did it. The flyer had to make it sound easy, as though the very next step the person took was going to make him rich. He would do several different flyers. He would send one to Florida that said she was believed to be in Florida. He would send another to the upper Midwest saying she was probably in the Detroit area. He would send one to the lower Midwest saying she was likely to be near Marion, Illinois. Then he could begin to concentrate his men in the strip of the country she was almost sure to pass through at some point, the thin slice that ran from Chicago east along the bottom of the Great Lakes to New York.