She corrected herself. Even that was a wrong assumption. He had let her see money, and she was assuming that he had shown her all of it. All she could be sure of was that he would not go anywhere that she could figure out, in order to get more.
She walked to the window and stared out at the lights along the San Diego Freeway far below her. He wasn’t infallible. He had gotten caught a few times. She went back to the bed and studied the arrest summary again. Stopped for questioning by a surveillance team. Okay, you watch, then you arrest. So what? Maybe this meant something to the cops who were supposed to read it that it didn’t mean to her. But farther down the page was the reason the surveillance had been mentioned. He had been arrested in the company of Jerry Cappadocia. He hadn’t been under surveillance at all. Jerry Cappadocia had been. John ... James Michael Martin had been just a bodyguard or something. That was in the file to show what kind of connections he had. They didn’t want the judge to think he was just some ordinary jerk. He was a special jerk, with organized-crime buddies.
Jane stared across the room at the window and listened to a big plane rumbling down the runway. No, the story didn’t make sense. Cappadocia’s friends had been, even now, looking for Harry to make him talk, and to do that, they had to keep him alive as long as that kind of conversation took. But John Felker-slash-James Martin had been looking for him to kill him. And the guys in the grave, who worked for the Cappadocia family, didn’t talk about James Martin as a member of the team. He was just a guy you hired to kill people.
Then the thin surface she had been walking on, the one that assumed anything anybody said was true unless it was disproven, seemed to give way. She was suddenly on the other side of it in her mind, looking at it in reverse.
The police had assumed Martin was some kind of employee of Jerry Cappadocia. Certainly, he had known him. But there was more than one reason to be near Jerry Cappadocia with a gun.
It was like reversing a puzzle piece; suddenly, it fit. If Jerry Cappadocia had been in danger, he might hire a killer like Martin to protect him. If he did, was that all he would do? No. He would carry a gun too, or he would have some of his own people do it for him. The surveillance was on Jerry Cappadocia, so he was the one the police wanted, but they didn’t find a way to arrest him or any of his men, which meant that none of them was armed. Jerry Cappadocia hadn’t been in danger that night. Or he hadn’t thought he was. But maybe the one thing that had kept him alive was the police surveillance. Even though he must have seen Martin searched and the gun pulled out of his belt or pantleg or somewhere, Jerry still would not have suspected. To him, it must have been like watching the police discover that his dentist owned drill.
For the first time after all these years, she understood Harry. He had always claimed he had never seen anything at the poker game the night Jerry Cappadocia was murdered. But he had run anyway. He seemed to think nobody would ever believe he hadn’t seen anything, and maybe nobody would have. But that wasn’t the reason he had run. He had run because he had seen something and couldn’t tell anybody. And the only thing that made sense, that fit his sucker personality, was if what he saw convinced him that the one who had ordered the killing was his friend, the man who had kept him alive in prison.
When she thought about it that way, she even knew what Harry had seen. He had recognized the men that Martin had hired to kill Cappadocia. He had recognized them when nobody else had. They were strangers, outsiders. But Harry had seen them before. He had probably met them where Martin had met them—in prison. Martin was still inside, where nobody would suspect him. Nobody suspected him even now, after he had killed Harry.
When her eyes focused again she was looking at the bureau, where her purse lay open in front of the mirror. The money. Even that had been misinterpreted. He got out of prison and wandered around collecting money from banks, so everyone suspected some clients had deposited money in his name. Maybe that was where it had come from to begin with, but he had had it for eight years, long before he met Harry. In fact, there was probably less of it now, because he had paid his subcontractors to kill Cappadocia for him. Then, without warning, the rest of it came to her: Martin had put up the money, but he couldn’t have given it to them himself, because he was in jail.
Martin would have cooked up some convincing reason why good old Harry should go to some safe-deposit box or bank account or dig up a hole to get the money and give it to the two men. It would be compelling, and Harry would believe it, just as she would have. Then Harry saw the men one last time, kneeling over Cappadocia’s body to search the bloody clothes for poker money.
Now Jane knew the reason why Martin could kill Harry and not be afraid of the people who had paid him to do it: There were no such people. All anybody had paid him for was the death of Jerry Cappadocia. He had done it by farming out the contract. And the ones he had hired could never talk, because they had actually pulled the triggers and nothing they could say would ever keep them alive. He had nothing to fear from anyone except Harry.
So he had fooled the person who could lead him to Harry, made her take him on the same trip that Harry had taken. Maybe he had even let those four men see him in St. Louis, brought them along behind him as evidence to convince her that he was a victim. He had known they wouldn’t try to kill him until he had led them to Harry. She didn’t let herself turn away from any of the anguish of it now. She had insisted that his new name be John because she had known it would make him feel less strange and disoriented, and that would keep him from making mistakes. But he had been watching everything she did, and that had been the last bit of information he had needed from her. It told him that no matter what last name Harry had on Lew Feng’s list, he would still be called Harry. Even if all he could get from Lew Feng under torture was the list, he could still find Harry Kemple. He had cut Harry’s throat quietly, without a struggle, and let him bleed to death on that dirty shag carpet in the apartment in Santa Barbara.
Jane started to pace again. Another big plane took off on the nearest runway and she could feel a faint vibration under her feet, but she didn’t let it distract her. As she concentrated on the facts she had accumulated, she knew that they were beginning to assume their proper order at last. She tried to reconstruct the story in a logical sequence this time, to be sure she had the truth. The truth mattered. It had started with Harry. No, it had started nearly ten years ago, when she had met Alfred Strongbear on the reservation in Wyoming. That was the real beginning, because it happened first and it was what made everything else possible, even probable. Once she had saved someone like Alfred Strongbear, it was inevitable that she would meet someone like Harry. Alfred might not have had a heart attack on a cruise ship, but something someday would make him give a man like Harry her name and address.
Harry had remembered it the way he remembered the names of underrated racehorses that might one day make him some money. He had gotten caught at something a couple of years later. One of the two gravediggers had said it was fraud, but that didn’t really tell her anything, because most of the things Harry did could have been called fraud. In any case, he hadn’t run to her to avoid the arrest, so it must have come quickly and without warning. Then she realized that this might not be the reason why Harry hadn’t tried to hide. Harry was an optimist. Right up until the guards put his watch and wallet into the envelope and marched him off to get fitted for a uniform, he had been perfectly capable of believing he would get off somehow.