“What?”
Rita pushed the newspaper in front of Jane. “It’s a picture of the house where I lived.”
It was a photograph of a sprawling one-story house with a tile roof and stucco sides above the beach in Florida. There was an extremely high wall, and inside it a few tall coconut palms. But the words printed above it were bold: LIFE AND DEATH OF A LEGEND. The caption beneath said, “The secluded Florida compound Bernie ‘the Elephant’ Lupus called home for decades.”
Jane muttered, “Great. Just great,” as she took the newspaper. Her eyes fought through the unnecessary verbiage and plucked out phrases. “Murdered in Detroit … shot down outside the airport.” Aloud she said, “Is that the old man you worked for? Bernie Lupus?”
“Bernie,” Rita said. “I never knew his last name. They all called him Bernie. Why is the house in the paper? Do they think I did something wrong?”
“It’s not about you. It’s about him. He … died.”
“Oh, no,” Rita said sadly. “He was such a sweet old man … ” Then she looked distracted, puzzled. “Why is it in the papers here?”
“He was famous.”
Jane stood in silence as the elevator rose. Everything was clear, but it didn’t help, because each bit of information led to a dozen questions that each led to a dozen more, and none of the answers seemed to matter. If Bernie “the Elephant” Lupus had been shot, when had it happened? The girl had been on the road for a day and a half, and spent most of today trying to get close to Jane. That meant the shooting had taken place two days ago. Why hadn’t Jane heard of it instantly? She answered the question herself. She had not turned on the television news last night, because she and Carey had gone out to dinner after his hospital rounds, and had come home late. And now, because she had spent two years trying to distance herself from people who cared about this kind of news, there was no longer anyone who might call and tell her.
Bernie Lupus was the private banking system of the bent-nosed and bull-necked. He had supposedly been hiding Mafia money for fifty years. Jane had no clear idea what he even looked like. She glanced at the article inside the paper and saw there was no photograph of him. She had seen mug shots from the 1940s in a magazine once—a young man in profile and full-face with his hair slicked straight back from a large forehead, with sharp, alert eyes that glowed with the light from the flashbulb like a dog’s. After that, it seemed that the only photographs of him had been taken from enormous distances with telephoto lenses, dark and grainy images of a sport coat and baggy pants hanging from a short, bony body below a bald head and a face half covered by sunglasses.
There had been rumors that had grown into accepted parts of the story. He was protected. He was never glimpsed without a couple of bodyguards, but Jane had always thought their job must have been easy. He had no need or, apparently, desire to step outside the ten-foot walls around the yard of his house in Florida. It was said that the reason he couldn’t be taken out by a sniper from a building near his house was that every building on the streets surrounding his had been quietly bought by one of the families he served, and was kept occupied by people who could be trusted to watch his back.
It was also said that the secret of his success was that he never wrote anything down. Jane knew it was true that there had been federal raids on his house—always referred to in the newspapers as a “compound”—at intervals since the late 1970s, but no incriminating paper had been found. The myth was that he had developed a system of codes and mnemonic devices during a prison sentence to remember the accounts where he had hidden vast sums of money. That was always given as the explanation for the name Bernie the Elephant.
Jane had to assume that some of what was said was intentionally fabricated, and some was just the normal accretion of nonsense to anyone who is known to exist but seldom seen. Until now, the stories seemed to have served Bernie well. They had protected him from all of the people who were most active in the killing business—his clients. If one of the families killed him, they would not only lose whatever money of theirs was hidden in his famous memory, but they would bring down on themselves the simultaneous vengeance of all the other families.
She glanced at the girl. She still could not have stated precisely what kind of trouble the girl was in now, but she had the distinct impression that in the last sixty seconds it had grown.
The elevator stopped on the fifth floor and Jane stepped in front of Rita to look into the hallway before she moved forward to let her out where she could be seen. The door closed behind them and Jane said, “Give me your room key.” She took the key and handed Rita the keys to her car. She pointed at a door below an exit sign. “Go into that stairwell and wait for me. If it’s safe, I’ll come and get you. If you hear a commotion, run. Go down the stairs and use a side door to the parking lot. Head for the street. At that point the car will be yours. Consider this my will.”
The girl looked pale, but she obeyed.
Jane took the key and made two turns along the hallway to find the room. She approached the door carefully and quietly, then put her ear to the door and listened. If someone was waiting inside for the girl to return, there should be some sound—footsteps, a creak of a bed—but she heard nothing. Maybe the girl’s luck was better than it seemed. Jane pushed the key into the lock quietly, waited for a few seconds, then swung the door open.
There were two men sitting at the table by the window. Jane called, “Maid service, excuse me,” and pulled the door shut. Jane slipped to the side of the door, put her back to the wall, and waited. If they didn’t make a rush for her in the next ten seconds, she would be okay. If they did, she would try to land a kick and a jab and then dash for the staircase.
As she waited, she studied the image her mind had retained of the two men at the table. One had been big, dark-haired, and thirtyish. He’d had his coat off and his tie loosened. The other had been much smaller, wearing suspenders over his white shirt. What had they been doing? Of course. Cards. There had been a deck of cards on the table, and each had been holding a hand with a lot of cards in it—too many to be anything but rummy. What else had been on the table? Nothing. There had been no guns where she could see them, no money, no pad for keeping score.
Jane’s sense of pace told her that enough time had elapsed, and she began to walk away from the door. There were several ways through this, and she just had to choose the right one. Waiting for them to leave seemed to be a bad idea. She could tell a bellman she was having trouble with her key and bring him back to open the door, then profess shock that someone was in her—Anita’s—room. But she couldn’t be sure this time that the men would feign embarrassment, put on their coats, and hurry to get out of sight. Now that she knew this had something to do with the death of Bernie Lupus, the stakes were much, much higher. They might very well kill her and the bellman, pile the bodies in the closet, and sit down again to wait for the girl.
Jane knew that the sensible course of action was to go downstairs, hand in the key, and explain to Rita that nothing she could have left was worth dying for. She did not dismiss the possibility of lying—telling the girl she had retrieved her things and taken them to the car before she had come back for her. Jane had never hesitated to lie to runners when their lives depended on their being kept docile and obedient. All she would have to do is let a bit more time elapse to make the story credible, then get the girl into the car and onto the Thruway. Jane could get her two hundred miles from here before she had to tell her that her belongings weren’t in the trunk.
As Jane walked toward the stairwell, she felt a slight twinge. She wasn’t sure she should leave the two men behind without finding out anything about them. Since the ones who had searched Bernie Lupus’s house three nights ago had worked for Frank Delfina, this pair probably did too. Jane had no way to be sure of even that, and she wasn’t certain whether it mattered. What did matter was finding out what they knew, so she could go about making their information obsolete.
Men who planned to hang around a hotel waiting for a girl to show up couldn’t have arrived expecting to camp out in her room. They couldn’t know in advance whether they could get in. They would have needed to rent a room for themselves on the same hallway, so they would know when she arrived. Without a room, they would have no plausible reason for being on this hallway at all.
As she walked, she found herself eliminating rooms that she passed. Three had PLEASE MAKE UP room signs hanging from their doorknobs. She sensed that men here to kidnap somebody would want privacy, not maid service. As she went on she heard voices behind one door and a television set behind another. There was one door that was open, and when Jane passed she could see that the bedclothes were rumpled, so she guessed someone must have just left to check out. There was one door on the hall that had the PRIVACY PLEASE side of the sign on the knob. Jane knocked on the door quietly, listened, then knocked again. After a moment she decided to take the chance.
She took her pocketknife out of her purse, opened it, and slipped it between the jamb and the door to feel for
