Phil closed his eyes. “How?”
“If you write a big check, the bank asks questions before they cover it. So probably it would be done electronically, by a wire transfer of some kind. That way they could do all of the transfers at once by computer. They’d do it after hours, like eight o’clock in the evening, so none of the charities knows anything has happened for at least twelve hours—and maybe not then. And whenever they found out, they would only know it happened to them. They wouldn’t know it also happened to anybody else for another twenty-four, when they read the next day’s papers.”
“Then you’re looking for an account somewhere that suddenly gets fat overnight so you can jump on it, right?”
Joe glanced uneasily at Pompi. “What they would probably do is send it to a holding account in a foreign country. The minute the money arrives, they move it again, and the account vanishes.”
“So what are you doing to stop it?” asked Phil.
“We don’t even know if that’s what they’re planning,” said Joe. “This is all theoretical. If we knew how to do it, we’d be doing it ourselves.” He saw the look of despair on his brother’s face. “That’s why we’re trying to stop it before it gets that far.”
Phil looked beaten. “And you still don’t know who’s doing it.”
Tony Pompi said inanely, “We’re working on that.”
Phil gave him a cold stare. Joe saw it and stepped between them before he was deprived of his friend. “The only candidates we’ve had to choose from are Bernie’s bodyguard, his maid, and Vincent Ogliaro. You know Vincent Ogliaro. Was this him?”
Phil sighed. There it was again. Joey knew nothing about people. “If you wanted somebody to go shake down the president of some charity—grab his wife, or something—he wouldn’t be a bad choice. But this stuff? It’s not him.”
Joey said carefully, “What about this bodyguard, Danny Spoleto? Is there a chance he’s some kind of genius and we missed it, or that Bernie trained him or something?”
“Joey,” said Phil. “You met him. He worked for this family. He might have stolen some list of accounts that Bernie wrote down, but he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He could barely read. His idea of a score was stopping over in Tampa when I sent him on errands and screwing Manny Maglione’s wife. He didn’t think I knew it.”
“Then I guess you’re right,” said Joe. “We don’t know who this is. The only one who seems promising is the woman Delfina says was with Bernie’s maid.”
“She’s the only one I’m sure of. She kicked the hell out of Nick Fuletto in the Seattle airport. What I want to know is who she’s working for. The only way to find out is to catch her.”
“Can I just show you what we’ve been thinking here?”
“I already heard,” said Phil. “You’re showing me red dots on a map. I need something people can look at— people like Catania and Molinari and DeLuca—and tell their guys what to do.”
“But that’s what we’ve got,” insisted Joe. “What we think is that they’re spreading everything as thin as they can, so we won’t notice. They’re mailing stuff from every major city they can get to. Phil, look at the map. Don’t look at the red dots. That’s where they’ve already been, and they won’t be back. Look at the spaces that are empty. That’s where they still have to go.”
Phil Langusto stared down at the map for a few seconds, his eyes slowly narrowing until they were slits. Suddenly they widened again, and he hurried to the telephone. He dialed, then stepped as close to the map as his cord would allow. “Bobby? Look, I want you to get the word out as fast as you can. First thing is, we’ve got to call all the families. Tell them to get everybody off the West Coast.”
There was a brief pause while the other man said something.
“Shut up and listen. In fact, move them east of Minneapolis. That was where they saw that woman, right? Milwaukee too? Better not go that far just yet. Tell them to send their guys east, and spread them around between Minneapolis and … Buffalo. Major airports are already covered. Put them in rest stops on the big highways, car rentals, hotels. Have you got that?”
The man on the line said something, and it seemed to satisfy Phil. He said, “The second thing is, get everybody off the East Coast south of … Washington, D.C., and move them north.”
He listened. “Right. I want the area east of the Mississippi and north of Washington, D.C., so full of people that you can’t find a hotel room or a parking space. And what I want them all to look for is the woman in the drawing. She’s going to be mailing letters.”
31
Jane awoke, lying on the back seat of the Explorer. She kept her eyes closed and listened to the steady hum of the engine and the low whistle of the wind blowing in the window above her head to cool her. She heard the voices, and realized that she had been hearing them for a long time.
“I’ve seen them come and go,” Bernie said. “Singers, actresses, whatever. If you try to look like them, then when they go, you’ll go too.”
“It’s just a style. Didn’t you have style when you were young?”
“Of course we did. The important thing about styles is that they change. Tattoos don’t change.” He sighed. “Most men aren’t out searching for a woman who matches some particular picture.” He noticed she was looking at him skeptically. “Keep your eyes on the road, or you won’t have to worry about it.”
“I was looking to see if you could say that with a straight face.”
“Of course there are exceptions,” Bernie admitted. “If one of them happens to pick you out, run like hell.”
“I would,” she said. “It would have to be because he recognized me and thought I knew where the money was.”
“I mean because he’s trouble in his own right,” said Bernie. “It’s just something I’ve observed over the years, and believe me, my role in the whole issue has been mostly observation, so I got good at it. Poochie Calamato was like that. Ever hear of him? I suppose not. Every time I saw him, he’d have his arm around the waist of a different woman, only they weren’t different. It would always be the same type—big and blond, the hair sort of like Marilyn Monroe used to wear it—and each one would be dressed the same as the last one. I don’t know if he found them that way, or he got them to change. It’s possible he took them to the stores himself and picked the clothes off the rack for them.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Rita. Jane could hear a little embarrassment in her voice as she added, “It sounds like he looked at them, anyway, and he must have cared about making them feel good.”
“You wouldn’t have liked him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean if the clothes weren’t—you know—weird or something.”
“About once a year, maybe two, he would find another one that he thought was closer to the ideal picture. Then he’d dump the last one. See, when Poochie dumped you, he dumped you. They found one in the Cuyahoga River, and another one in a ditch outside Memphis.”
Jane sat up and looked around her. “Where are we now?”
Bernie said, “Still on 40. We just left Shamrock, Texas, next stop Texola, Oklahoma.”
“I must have been out a long time,” said Jane. “Rita, I’ll take over at Texola.”
They took the exit at Texola and pulled into a gas station to fill the tank and use the rest rooms. When they came back, Jane took the wheel. Rita climbed in beside her, folding a new stick of gum onto her tongue. “Don’t you want to sleep?” Jane asked.
Rita shook her head. “Bernie drove longer than I did.”
Bernie climbed into the back seat and lay down. He said, “Keep on 40 until Oklahoma City. There you’ll want exit 146, which will take you onto 44 northbound.”
“What are the exits just before it comes up?”
“MacArthur Boulevard, then Meridian Avenue. That’s 145. If you miss 146, you can pick up 44 a few miles on at exit 153.”
“Thanks, Bernie,” said Jane.
Rita rolled her eyes. “I’ll never get used to that,” she whispered.
Jane drove on into Oklahoma, always watching her rearview mirror for signs of cars that might be following.
