in the shop where Feng kept it without doing that. She was reasonably sure that she could have. That he hadn’t even tried made him seem inhuman, completely devoid of emotion. But what seemed worse at the moment was that the torture had served a second purpose, and she suspected that that too had been taken into account. Even if Martin could have simply broken in, found the list on his own, deciphered it, and chosen the right Harry on it, he probably would not have done it that way. He was anticipating that it would have occurred to someone that the one who had taken the list was likely to be a person who had been to the shop before—a person who had known about the list because he was on it. Leaving Lew Feng’s body lying in the shop mutilated was a way of misleading everyone. The mind immediately fell into the assumption that the only person who would have needed to torture Feng for information was someone who had no other way to get it. The mind began conjuring up shadowy strangers to suspect—ones who had traced some fugitive to Feng’s door. Felker remained just another potential victim, like everyone else on the list.
She couldn’t hold her body still anymore. She stood up and walked to the window again to stare down at the endless stream of cars moving in both directions—white headlights on one side of the freeway, red taillights on the other. There were still a few blank spaces in the picture she had constructed. Martin had been paid in advance to kill Jerry Cappadocia. He had gotten himself arrested while he was stalking Jerry and gone to prison. He had waited over two years to hire a pair of substitutes to do it for him. Was Martin, then, an honorable murderer? Once he had accepted the contract and taken the money, did he feel he had to deliver? Maybe he did. Certainly, a professional killer who took money in advance and never fulfilled the contract would have a hard time getting work in the future from any potential customer who had heard about it.
She recognized that the important information was in the last words: who had heard about it. The person who hired Martin to kill Jerry Cappadocia was somebody who could tell other, potential customers. Then she made it more specific, and when she did, it felt even more likely. The client was somebody in the underworld, who not only could tell others but could signal his displeasure in a more vivid way than gossip. He was somebody who might get Martin killed. He had to be another gangster type, or Martin could have kept the money and forgotten about Jerry C. If the client hadn’t been somebody like that, why would he care about Jerry Cappadocia, and how would he have known that Martin was the one to hire to kill him? People like Martin didn’t advertise.
But if all of that was true, why hadn’t this underworld rival surfaced by now, five years after Jerry had been killed? He should have done what Mr. Cappadocia’s men had been expecting, what even Harry had predicted. He should have tried to take over.
She stepped back to the bed and bent over to look through the file again, page by page, until she found the list of people who had visited Martin in prison. The first visitor had come right after he had begun serving his sentence. It was Jerry Cappadocia. That must have been Jerry’s condolence visit. The second was Martin’s defense attorney, Alvin Berbin. There were three visits from him in the first few months, probably about an appeal of the conviction. Then, almost three years later, Harry Kemple came back to visit his old cellmate. She had not guessed wrong about that. He made four visits on successive weekends, just about a month before he showed up at her door. There were no more visitors in the next five years.
She straightened and tossed the file to the foot of the bed. She had been hoping for too much. The client wouldn’t be foolish enough to visit his hired killer in prison. There was nothing in the file to give her any way of finding out who had hired Martin to kill Cappadocia.
She concentrated on Martin again. Martin had served the five years that remained of his sentence, secure in the knowledge that most of his money was in the bank, Jerry was dead, his two stand-in killers were long gone, and nobody—not the police, not Mr. Cappadocia—had ever suspected him of being involved in Jerry’s murder. There was only one minor difficulty. His two shooters had carelessly left Harry Kemple alive.
She wondered if Harry had even remembered that he had told Martin in prison that the best way to start searching for him would be to visit a woman named Jane Whitefield. Of course he had remembered, but he also had remembered that it would be five years before Martin could come after him, and he had the police and Mr. Cappadocia to worry about that night. He certainly must have thought about Martin now and then during the five years in Santa Barbara. But at the end of them, he must have been confident that his troubles were behind him. Martin would have a hard time finding him, and why should he try? Harry had remained silent for five years. Harry, being Harry, must have decided that five years would be enough to convince James Martin that he would never talk.
Martin had not forgotten about Harry. He had collected the rest of his money and gone to her, and she took him to Lewis Feng, who pointed him to Harry in Santa Barbara, and that was the end of Harry. But what then? Martin wouldn’t have taken a plane out of Santa Barbara. That would have put him on a shortlist of people who had left the small town while Harry’s body was still warm. And if he left the Honda she had bought him in town, the police would begin to look for John Young.
He would drive out, and the place where he would go was a place he would know but that nobody in Chicago would. After a year in jail, that might be anywhere. After eight in jail and a fresh murder, he would go home.
She put the file into her flight bag and walked down the stairs to catch the shuttle to the airport. She didn’t mind waiting in the terminal for a flight to Syracuse. She could use the time to buy the next batch of newspapers and read.
23
Jane checked into a motel near the airport in Syracuse and read newspapers. She started each day by finding more of them. When she had read all the ones she could buy, she spent the afternoon in a branch of the public library that subscribed to even more.
The car had about 530 miles on its odometer when he had gotten it from Lewis Feng. Jane guessed he had then driven it five hundred miles to Medford, six hundred to Santa Barbara, one hundred down to the big east-west routes that started in Los Angeles, and almost three thousand to Upstate New York. Make it five thousand miles, then. Jane searched the newspapers for the dealers’ ads. There was a nearly new Honda Accord in a dealer’s lot in Watertown, but it had a standard transmission. A lot in Ogdensburg had a Honda Accord and it was even gray, but seventeen thousand was too many miles. There was nothing in Massena.
As she moved outward, the odds got worse. Syracuse, Rome, Utica, Troy, Albany all had lots of used-car dealers, and she wasn’t sure anymore whether she was seeing all of their ads. Her best hope was that it was the sort of car they could clean up in half an hour and then use as bait to draw people onto the lot. John Young would have taken their second offer, right after the ridiculous low-ball one they always tried. As soon as they could get the Oregon plates off it, they would have it in the front row, all shined up and looking seductive.
It would have to be a dealer. He couldn’t abandon it, because leaving a new car would set off a search for John Young. He couldn’t sell it himself, because that meant staying in one place, having an address and, probably, a phone number in the papers for a few days. And by now there probably wasn’t anybody alive who would buy a barely driven new car from a stranger who didn’t advertise it and couldn’t wait a day for a decision, without checking to see if it was stolen. It had to be a dealer. He would be relying on the fact that in a few days it would be in the hands of a new owner with a set of New York plates on it.
Then, after three days of staring at identical advertisements for identical cars in newspapers from all over the state and calling dealers on the telephone who wouldn’t tell her no until they had offered her everything they had, she found it. The ad was small but effective. 'Almost new! Less than five K mi.! Dave’s Honda-Subaru in Saranac Lake.' When she called, she talked to Dave himself.
Jane rented a car in Syracuse, drove to Saranac Lake, and saw the car. It was sitting in the front row, right under the line of colored pennants, gleaming in the sunlight. She found a motel and checked in, spent a few minutes dressing in a modest schoolteacher’s spring dress, then strolled back to the lot. She walked into the showroom and let Dave find her.
'Hi there!' said Dave. He was tall and blond, with eyes so blue that they seemed to be clouded somehow. There was another man with a tie in the showroom, sitting at a desk with a telephone on it, but from the look of the place, he was just there so Dave would have someone to talk to. 'What can I show you today?'
'That Honda out there,' said Jane. 'Is that the one in the paper?'
'That’s it,' said Dave gleefully. 'You don’t often see a used one that new. Want to drive it?'
