30

Phil Langusto sat in the study of his house on Prospect Park and willed himself to believe that things were going the way they should. His brother Joe had the head for finance, and he and Tony Pompi were on top of this. But what they said seemed to him to be impossible to see as anything but a disaster. He glanced at his watch. He had been sitting here listening to them for only five minutes, but it seemed like five hours.

He said, “Joe, can you just let me know when you’ve got a name and a place? This is like having a sigmoidoscopy, with the doctors pointing out the sights on the television screen while they crank the camera gadget farther and farther up your ass.”

Joe said, “No, listen, Phil. I think we’re getting somewhere. Tony set up this company. It’s in the business of compiling information about charities. We’re telling charities we’re putting together the ultimate mailing list of big-time donors, and we’re going to give it to them if they cooperate. We’re using a regular boiler room, fifty guys on phones. The charities think we’re helping them, so they’re answering. They’re even calling us.”

“Yeah?” said Phil. “What are they telling you?”

“Big donations are coming in, sure. That’s the bad news. They’re all coming by mail. We tried a lot of ways of charting the charities that are getting them. Dead end. So we tried tracking the places where they’re getting mailed from. We have a pattern. One day, we’ll get a whole bunch from the West Coast. That ends. The next day, everything will be from the Deep South—Florida to northern Georgia. After that, there’s no mail from there at all.”

“This is going to kill me,” said Phil. “What good is this?”

“We’re making a map.”

“A map?”

“Yeah,” said Joe. “If we can chart where these people have been, and what direction they’re going, we can just draw a line ahead of them to figure out where they’ll be tomorrow.”

Phil Langusto took his feet off his desk and sat up straight. Maybe Joe finally had something. “Have you got it with you?”

Joe nodded to Tony Pompi, who opened his big envelope, took out a large, white folded sheet, and began to unfold it. Phil Langusto’s eyes settled on his brother’s face, saw the expression of deranged cunning, and felt a tearing sensation in his chest. Joe had always been the smart one. It was Joe who had gotten the good grades in school, Joe who was supposed to go far. Joe didn’t belong in the real world. He was as intelligent as anybody needed to be, but he had been born with no instincts. It was like not getting a joke, or being tone-deaf. There was no cure for it.

The map just kept unfolding, until Joe and Pompi knelt on the big Oriental rug to tug the corners and straighten it. Phil stood and walked to the lower edge of it. The map was seven feet wide and five feet long, showing the whole country. Phil could see red dots sprinkled on the map as though they had been sprayed from a severed artery. The West Coast had been splattered. There were a few drops in Arizona and New Mexico, a big blotch on the upper Plains that ran to the Great Lakes, then a whole line of dots dripping up the East Coast from Florida to Virginia.

“See?” Joe asked expectantly. “We’re getting their act.”

Phil’s jaw tightened so hard that the muscles on the sides of his face hurt. “What the hell are you talking about? San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, Minneapolis? What am I supposed to do with that?”

“The money is being mailed from those places, and there’s an order. We think somebody is driving around mailing the checks.” He pointed at the map. “It could be two cars. It doesn’t matter, though.”

“Joey,” said Phil, because calling him that always artificially induced patience: this was still his little brother. “You’re a smart man. I love you for it. But what I need you for right now is to find out for me what is going on—the big picture, you know? Somebody is tapping the money that Bernie the Elephant had, right? That much is for sure?”

Joe shrugged. “Of course. We were waiting to see big money moving. This is really big money, and it’s bouncing all over the place. We’ve got hundreds of guys keeping track of it.”

Phil said, “But you’re not telling me what I want to know. How does the scam work? They pull the money out of wherever Bernie deposited it, or invested it, right? They then donate it to, say, the United Way. No taxes, no questions. That makes sense to me. But how does the money complete the rest of the circle?”

Joe was still staring at his map with pride. “What circle?” he asked.

Tony Pompi said, “He means, how does it then get from the United Way back to these people who stole it. That right, Mr. Langusto?”

“Right,” said Phil. “How?”

Joe shrugged again. “We don’t know yet.”

“Guess!” Phil shouted. “Either of you.”

Tony Pompi looked nervously at Joe, who nodded. Pompi said, “We’ve got people on that, but these are honest-to-God charities. The only way we’ve thought of that makes sense is that these people have found some way to tap the accounts of the charities. If you send a check to the charity, they endorse it on the back by stamping it with an account number and the words ‘For Deposit Only.’ Their bank takes it and sends it back to your bank, which sends it to you.”

“I’ve got checking accounts, for Christ’s sake,” said Phil. “I know that much. So what?”

“You then have their bank branch’s location and the number of their account.”

“Then what? You cook up a fake check of theirs and write it to yourself?”

Tony Pompi looked at Joe for help, and Joe said, “The short answer is yes. Of course it would be more complicated than that.”

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.”