Blood Money

7

Frank Delfina opened the big steamer trunk and gazed down into it at Danny Spoleto’s body. It had been jammed into the trunk with the knees nearly to the chest and the arms folded. The neck had needed to be twisted a bit so the head would fit into one corner. The face was aimed upward at the light hanging from the ceiling of the garage. The door to the florist’s work room was open, and the thick, sweet smells of jasmine and gardenia clashed and competed with the oil and gasoline of the fleet of delivery vans.

Delfina craned his neck so his head was aligned with the face of Danny Spoleto. He stared into the dead eyes for a minute, then walked to the other side of the trunk. “This is one dumb son of a bitch,” he muttered. He gave the trunk lid a kick so it snapped shut. Then he turned his attention to the two men who had delivered the trunk. “Is the hotel room completely cleaned up? No blood or anything?”

“Yes sir,” said Strozza. “We got him into the bathtub before there was much blood, and we gave the floor a quick job ourselves before we left. John and Irene got there about two minutes later. After they got him in the trunk they went over everything with cleanser and disinfectant.”

“And you’re sure there was nothing in the room and nothing in the luggage?”

“He had two small suitcases. Nothing in there but clothes he had just bought—shirts in those plastic packages, and pants with the tags still on them. Irene even sliced open all the linings in the suitcases. He didn’t seem to own any paper.”

Delfina glanced down at the body. “You searched him too?”

Strozza nodded. “All he had was his wallet and car keys.”

Delfina said, “I guess there’s no reason to hold on to the body, then. Go bury it.”

Strozza and his partner squatted to tip the trunk up onto the dolly, then wheeled the trunk up the ramp of their truck and secured it to the back wall. “We’ll take it out to the seed farm. There’s a field they’re getting ready to plant with begonias in a couple of days.”

“Don’t be lazy: make it deep.”

When the two men had closed the tailgate and climbed into their truck, Caporetto pressed the thumb button beside the garage door and opened it so they could drive out, then closed it. Delfina was in a sour mood, but he gained some comfort from seeing his men moving, doing things efficiently, paying attention. He said to Caporetto, “As soon as those guys come back, put them on a plane to L.A. Call Billy and tell him to find them something to do.”

“Sure, Frank.”

As an afterthought, Delfina added, “Make sure it’s nothing important.”

Delfina caught a look of mild surprise on Caporetto’s face. He shrugged. “I know Spoleto wasn’t what they expected to find, but they should have done better than this. You notice they didn’t even find a gun on him. They saw him and panicked. It would have been nice to have that guy in a small room someplace where I could have a long talk with him.”

Caporetto nodded, but his face revealed a slight discomfort. “I still don’t understand what he was doing there.”

“I don’t know yet where he fits exactly,” said Delfina. “But I plan to.”

Caporetto said, “You think he just stole her credit card from Bernie’s house and charged everything to her so we wouldn’t know he was traveling?”

Delfina looked at him in disappointment. “That’s what Strozza thinks. But you heard him. They found his wallet. If he’d had her credit card, you would have heard about it. So where did it go?”

Caporetto shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“He never had it. The girl made the charges herself.”

“Then it was both of them? He was the one who got the girl the job as Bernie’s housekeeper, right? Maybe he used her to find out where Bernie put the money—had her pull receipts or something from the trash for a year or so. Then he somehow lured Bernie to Detroit, popped him, and took off to collect the money. That would explain why they came all the way up to New York. That’s where the big banks and brokers and all that are.”

Delfina said, “New York City, not Niagara Falls. But it’s something like that.”

Caporetto’s excitement slowly grew. “Yeah,” he said. “Got to be. Danny Spoleto was supposed to be this ladies’ man, right? He didn’t look like any great shakes stuffed in a box, but I heard he had to fight them off. So he gets this green kid—she’s what, eighteen?—and charms her like a snake. All she has to do is hang around Bernie’s house, sweep the floor once a day, and keep her eyes open when she empties the trash can. When she’s found enough, Spoleto pops Bernie, meets the girl, and cashes in all the accounts she’s located for him.”

Delfina smiled indulgently, but his customary look of stony intensity returned. He shook his head.

“Why not?” asked Caporetto.

“It’s a good story. I like it. But let me tell you about Danny Spoleto. He started out ten years ago in New York. He had a cousin who was made, and the cousin asked the Langustos if they could find something for him. Since the old days, the Langusto family was supposed to take care of Bernie. Maybe it meant something fifty years ago, but since then, it’s been kind of nominal, like the Swiss guards at the Vatican. They still supplied bodyguards, on a regular rotation. So they sent him down to Florida to take some other guy’s place. He didn’t get on Bernie’s nerves, so they left him there for a few years. Then they made him one of their bagmen. He would deliver money to Florida for them—most of it not even in cash—and Bernie would make it disappear. Bernie may have sent him on a few errands, too, but that was it. This was not a guy in training to enter the world of high finance. It was a guy who had to wait six or seven years before anybody would promote him to delivery boy.”

“What about the girl? Maybe she was smarter than she looked. Maybe she was the one who came on to Spoleto, knowing that he could get her into that house.”

“I thought of that, but she didn’t know in advance what was going to happen to Bernie.”

“She didn’t?”

“When our guys got to the house that night, it was about four hours after Bernie got shot. She wasn’t gone. She was still in bed.”

“Then what do you want her for?”

Delfina brought his lower lip over the upper one, then down again in a little shrug. “I think she can’t help but know something. She saw people come and go. Maybe they wouldn’t mean anything to her, but they would to me. But what she knows for sure is what happened before Bernie left for Detroit. It wasn’t normal. For years, Bernie barely went outside. I think somebody called him, or sent him a ticket or something, and I’d like to know who.”

“Why not Danny Spoleto? If he was a bagman, he must have brought briefcases full of money and stuff into the house—all for Bernie’s eyes only.”

“Maybe,” said Delfina. “But we just caught him when he didn’t expect us. The guys searched him, searched the bags, searched the room. They didn’t find anything that showed he had access to serious money. Bernie the Elephant might have carried a hundred account numbers in his head, but you can’t tell me this bodyguard did. So even if he had something to do with setting Bernie up, he didn’t end up with any way of getting at the money.”

“The girl? Nobody searched her. She might be carrying it for him.”

“That’s as good a reason as any to look for her.”

“She’s all we’ve got,” Caporetto agreed.

“Except that we don’t have her anymore,” Delfina reminded him. “We’ve got her picture, right?”

“Yeah. When they hired her, they told her it was for a work permit. She didn’t know any better.”

“Okay,” said Delfina. “Here’s what we do. First thing is, nobody in this family knows anything about Danny Spoleto. As far as the other families know, we didn’t find him, and we didn’t kill him, and it never occurred to us to look for a girl. Second, I want a full-court press on finding her fast. As of right now, nobody has anything to do but find her. Get the picture copied, and make it look like one of those mailers they send out: ‘Girl missing from her home since June twenty-third,’ and give a phone number that’s got nothing to do with us.”

“Okay,” said Caporetto.

“And what else do we know about her? Where’s she from? What family has she got?”

“She grew up in northern Florida. The only relative she’s got is her mother. Her name is Ann Shelford, and she’s doing five in Florida State Penitentiary at Starke.”

“For what?”

“Peddling meth,” he said. “Turns out it was ours, actually. Just a coincidence. Some of that stuff from the lab in California.”

Delfina nodded. “Find a couple of people inside that we can use. I want her watched. I want somebody reading her mail, listening to her phone calls. I want somebody at her elbow all the time.”

Caporetto nodded. “We’re already working on it. As soon as the girl disappeared, that was the best guess as to where she was going first.” He added, “We’re still looking for boyfriends or just girls she used to hang out with, but nothing has come up yet.” He waited for a moment for what Delfina was going to say next, but he got the familiar cold stare that always made him feel as though Delfina were a machine that had suddenly turned itself off. He hurried to the door of the garage and slipped out.

Delfina went out through the work room and shut the door. He picked up a bouquet of roses lying on the table, then moved through the shop carrying them. He paused in the darkened room and looked out the front window, up and down the street. He hated the inside of the florist business. The cutting rooms always smelled like the biggest funeral in the world was in progress. He had not been in this building in three years, and would never have come except that it was the only safe place he owned in Niagara Falls. After a moment he was satisfied that there was nobody in a car watching the door. He slipped out and locked the door behind him.

As he walked off carrying the roses, he breathed in and out rapidly and deeply, then forced a cough to clear his lungs of pollen and perfume. He looked around again to be sure he wasn’t under surveillance, dropped the flowers into a trash can, then got into the car he had rented and drove off alone toward his hotel. In the silence, he had time to think.

In the settlement after the failed coup twelve years ago, Castiglione had been forced into exile in Arizona, and his holdings had been crudely split up. Tommy DeLuca had gotten the Castiglione territory that amounted to half of Chicago, and Frank Delfina had gotten all the far-flung enterprises, the feelers that Castiglione had been extending outward for years before he made his failed attempt to gobble up his rivals. People still talked about the inequality of the partition: DeLuca had inherited an only slightly diminished empire, and Delfina had gotten an illusion—laughable assets like a flower business in Niagara Falls, a few radio stations in places like Omaha and Reno, a bakery in California. The partition had satisfied the coalition of families that had assembled against Castiglione: no single man would retain the power to harm them.

What nobody seemed to have known was that DeLuca had won the right to preside over a dying carcass. The old neighborhood-based mob that controlled city blocks and paid off the cops in the precinct and depended on enterprises like bookmaking on sports and moving stolen TV sets was dying before he and DeLuca were born. What DeLuca had inherited was the tentative loyalty of three hundred men with rap sheets who needed to be fed and kept occupied, and the attention of a variety of state and federal agencies that had been invented in the last generation for the sole purpose of harassing the publicity-cursed Chicago families.

Delfina had left Chicago within two days of the Commission’s ruling and begun to learn. He had taken a lesson from conglomerates, and begun to slowly, quietly, build the enterprises he had. He didn’t buy out his competitors. He starved them to death, then bought up their facilities and customer lists for practically nothing. He studied the suppliers and services his businesses used, induced them to borrow money so they could expand and meet his companies’ needs, then canceled the contracts. In a year he could buy them for the price of their loans.

The distance between his various businesses had made other people assume there was no way he could do anything with them. The distance had been full of advantages. He could move anything—money, people, contraband—from Niagara Falls to Reno, or Omaha to Los Angeles in trucks registered to corporations. When they got there, he could make even the trucks disappear into the fleets of other businesses. He could transfer profits from one company to another: declare income in states that had no income tax, report sales where there was no sales tax, or sell things to himself at a loss and write off the loss. He could do anything the big corporations did.

He had begun early to construct a culture that would separate his men from the old attachments to particular neighborhoods and the families that had run them for generations. What he had been given to work with was a small cadre of displaced Castiglione soldiers like Caporetto. If he had dispensed with them at the beginning, he knew, he would not have lasted a month. He had needed to find a new way to use them.

He paid them extravagantly, gave them praise and assurances, then split them up and sent them to regions as far apart as possible. He let them recruit new, younger men and assigned the trainees as overseers of his businesses. He rotated the young men regularly from one part of the country to another, the way major corporations did. They never stayed settled long enough in a single city to be tied to it. Within a year or two they knew all the cities well enough to navigate them comfortably, and by the end of the second cycle, they were experts. Each of them had spent some time working for all of Delfina’s underbosses, and their loyalty was to the only constant he permitted them: Delfina.

For Delfina, the scattered and diverse nature of his holdings provided various forms of security. He could count on the predictable, quasi-legitimate profits of his visible companies to pay his people. If one industry or region hit hard times, the others could subsidize Delfina’s stake in it until times changed.

Delfina was part of a new world, but he knew he was not invulnerable to the one he had come from, so he looked for new models of physical security. He had read in the newspapers about the habits of foreign potentates, and studied them. It seemed to him that the most ingenious self-protectors were men like Qaddafi and Hussein. They could have surrounded themselves with thousands of troops and lived in hardened bunkers, but that would have made them bigger targets. What worked for them was a combination of anonymity and mobility. Delfina imitated them. He had no permanent residence. Instead he shuttled about the country, showed up unannounced at each of his businesses in turn, stayed for an hour or a month, and moved on.

As he drove through the dark streets toward the river, the steamy night air noticeably cooled, and big drops of summer rain splashed on his windshield. He turned on his wipers and slowed down. He thought about the two men going out to bury Danny Spoleto, then shrugged them off. They deserved a little discomfort, and the rain would hide any disturbance in the soil. By this time tomorrow they would be in California. They wouldn’t see rain again until November.

He wondered what his life would be like in November. By then he would have had time to get used to having Bernie Lupus’s money, and would have begun to put it to use. All of those cities that he had conscientiously, prudently bypassed in his endless commuting—New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh—would probably already be his. People like DeLuca, John Augustino, Al Castananza, the Langusto brothers, and Molinari would just be more underbosses he would have to visit now and then. It was almost inevitable. Bernie the Elephant had spent fifty years collecting their money and salting it away and making it grow, and now it was ready for Delfina to take. When he had it, those men would lose control of their own soldiers. The guys who had been making peanuts shaking down mom-and-pop grocery stores for their local bosses would make quiet inquiries to see if there was anything they could do for Delfina. And when that happened, the bosses would come too. He would use the money to attract their allegiance, or finance their retirement, or buy their deaths.