He was put into a maximum-security prison, not because he was dangerous, but because his accretion of minor arrests must have made him look worse than he was. His cellmate was a man named James Michael Martin. Harry was very lucky to draw a man like Martin as a cellmate in a violent place like that. The soft little gambler might as well have had VICTIM stenciled on the back of his shirt above the number, but Martin was a killer. Martin saved Harry’s life. He probably saved it daily, just by being there and letting other prisoners judge that he would rather have Harry to talk to than see his body hauled off in a bag. So Harry, who had no other way to thank Martin, had told him the story of the old man on the cruise ship and the name and address of Jane Whitefield, the woman who made people disappear. Coming from one career criminal to another, it probably had made a nice gift. She caught a glimpse of herself as she passed the mirror on the bureau, and the expression of intense anger startled her. She walked back to the bed and lay on her back to stare up at the ceiling.
After two years, Harry had gotten out of prison about as reformed as most prisoners. He had started his floating high-stakes poker game, sure that in another few years he would be a one-man portable Las Vegas. Harry had been so elated that he had gone to visit his old friend in Marion to tell him all about it. When Harry had run into trouble, with Jerry Cappadocia showing signs of moving in on the game, he had told Martin that, too.
She sensed that she was missing something important. Her muscles tensed and she sat up. What she was forgetting was Martin’s relationship with Jerry Cappadocia. Martin had been with Jerry C. the night of his arrest. They were acquaintances. He would have known that Cappadocia would be interested in Harry’s card game, so he made sure that he heard about it. She went over it again. Could even Martin have been capable of that much premeditation? Was he that good? As she questioned it, she felt a chill. Yes, he was. She had seen his work. He nurtured relationships with people and remained detached. He watched and waited and listened to them for as long as necessary, until he heard something that he could use.
Martin made sure that Jerry C. heard about the game, and then got himself into it. Now Martin had to find the proper instruments for killing him. He selected two prisoners he and Harry knew in Marion. Maybe they weren’t killers yet, but in Marion it wasn’t hard to find two men with faces that hadn’t been seen in Chicago and who were willing to learn to pull a trigger. They were about to get out. Maybe they already were out and he had recruited them earlier and told them to wait until he could arrange the right opportunity. It was impossible for her to know which it was, and she was concentrating on coaxing out tidbits she could be sure about. She was sure Martin would need to pay the two killers in advance.
Martin still had five years to go on his sentence. He couldn’t ask his two men to kill an important gangster and then wait five years until payday. He could easily have time added to his sentence, or even die before they saw a dime. They had recently gotten out of prison themselves, so they had no money. They would need some to disappear as soon as they had killed Jerry Cappadocia, and that could only mean that they would have to be paid in advance. Martin was in prison, so he needed a bag man on the outside.
It had to be someone he could trust to go and get some of the money wherever Martin had hidden it and give it to the two men. It also had to be someone who was not going to be around after Jerry Cappadocia was killed. The only possible choice was Harry. Martin probably told Harry that he was giving the two former prisoners money to invest in some criminal scheme— loan-sharking, bookmaking—some crime, anyway, or even Harry would have sensed an odd smell wafting past his nostrils. It didn’t matter what story Martin told him. It had been good enough. Harry gave the money to the two men he and Martin had met in prison.
Martin had the money for Harry to give them, because he too had been paid in advance. When the client had come to Martin two years earlier and hired him to kill Jerry Cappadocia, that had put Martin in the same position the two men were in now: He needed his whole payment in advance. The day after a man like Jerry C. was killed would not have been a good time for the killer to go to his client to get a pile of money. If the smallest detail went wrong, he would have to be running. Even if everything went perfectly, Jerry’s father still had a big organization that remained intact, and all of it would be diverted to finding out who was meeting with whom and who had any money he hadn’t had before.
So Harry got the money, gave it to the two men for his friend Martin, and went back to his floating poker game business. A week or so later, when Harry was inside the bathroom of the motel staring through the vent above the door, he recognized the two killers. If he recognized them, he would know that what they were doing was what he had paid them for, and come to the inescapable conclusion that Martin had intended them to kill him along with the others.
Harry had considered his options—telling the police or Jerry Cappadocia’s father, or even going back to Marion to tell his friend Martin that he would never talk—and decided that any of them would eventually get him killed. But he still had one more option hidden in his memory, and he used it. He ran to Deganawida, New York, and knocked on Jane Whitefield’s door.
She had hidden him for a time and then taken him across the continent to buy him a new identity from Lew Feng. Poor Lew Feng. Martin had tortured him for his list of names. Maybe Martin hadn’t been able to find the place in the shop where Feng kept it without doing that. She was reasonably sure that she could have. That he hadn’t even tried made him seem inhuman, completely devoid of emotion. But what seemed worse at the moment was that the torture had served a second purpose, and she suspected that that too had been taken into account. Even if Martin could have simply broken in, found the list on his own, deciphered it, and chosen the right Harry on it, he probably would not have done it that way. He was anticipating that it would have occurred to someone that the one who had taken the list was likely to be a person who had been to the shop before—a person who had known about the list because he was on it. Leaving Lew Feng’s body lying in the shop mutilated was a way of misleading everyone. The mind immediately fell into the assumption that the only person who would have needed to torture Feng for information was someone who had no other way to get it. The mind began conjuring up shadowy strangers to suspect—ones who had traced some fugitive to Feng’s door. Felker remained just another potential victim, like everyone else on the list.
She couldn’t hold her body still anymore. She stood up and walked to the window again to stare down at the endless stream of cars moving in both directions—white headlights on one side of the freeway, red taillights on the other. There were still a few blank spaces in the picture she had constructed. Martin had been paid in advance to kill Jerry Cappadocia. He had gotten himself arrested while he was stalking Jerry and gone to prison. He had waited over two years to hire a pair of substitutes to do it for him. Was Martin, then, an honorable murderer? Once he had accepted the contract and taken the money, did he feel he had to deliver? Maybe he did. Certainly, a professional killer who took money in advance and never fulfilled the contract would have a hard time getting work in the future from any potential customer who had heard about it.
She recognized that the important information was in the last words: who had heard about it. The person who hired Martin to kill Jerry Cappadocia was somebody who could tell other, potential customers. Then she made it more specific, and when she did, it felt even more likely. The client was somebody in the underworld, who not only could tell others but could signal his displeasure in a more vivid way than gossip. He was somebody who might get Martin killed. He had to be another gangster type, or Martin could have kept the money and forgotten about Jerry C. If the client hadn’t been somebody like that, why would he care about Jerry Cappadocia, and how would he have known that Martin was the one to hire to kill him? People like Martin didn’t advertise.