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