"I'm surprised you found me. I took great care to hide myself. I erased my maiden name from all my credit records. I took the name Lloyd from a billboard."

"You left a trail a mile wide."

She picked up the wine again and had some, as if she needed the wine to help her talk about these things. "I want you to know that what I've built, I've built without their help and without their money. I didn't use Peter's help and I didn't use theirs."

"All right."

"Three days after I made the first transfer, a man came to the bank and gave me an envelope containing one thousand dollars. I called Sal and told him to take the money back, but he wouldn't. He told me that friends have to take care of one another, that kind of thing. He was sweet and charming, and it was a thousand dollars, so I let myself get talked into keeping it. That first time, after I got used to the idea, it was even sort of exciting. Do you see?"

I nodded.

"But after more calls, and more money, it wasn't. I knew it was wrong and I was scared, and finally they said, okay, if you don't want to get paid, we won't pay you. But they had already paid me a total of sixty-five hundred dollars, and I had spent it." She got up and went back down the hall again and came back with a 5 7 manila envelope. She opened it and shook out a small stack of papers and handed them to me. "Over the past three years I've put forty-two hundred dollars into various charities. I didn't want to keep any of the sixty-five hundred. That's all I can do."

I looked. The receipts totaled forty-two hundred dollars. Twenty-three hundred dollars until a clean conscience. Extremes.

She said, "Does this help at all?"

"If you got caught and went to trial, or if you went to the cops, maybe. Other than that, no."

She nodded. "Oh."

"Has Charlie ever mentioned any other way he launders money?"

"No."

"How about the woman who hired you, was she in their pocket?"

"I don't think so."

"Do they own anyone else at the bank now?"

"No."

"Does anyone else at the bank know what's going on?"

"No."

"Is there a paper record that pa.s.ses between you and the DeLucas?"

"No."

Maybe the scattershot approach wasn't going to work so well. Sort of like trying to find intelligence. "How about a record of the bank transfers?"

"Not for the first few times. The first few times, I was scared and I didn't want there to be a record so I erased it from the computers. Then I got scared to not have a record and I started keeping a file."

"Okay. That's something. I'll need to see it."

She nodded. "All right. I can print out a transaction record at the bank."

I said, "Is there anything you can think of that maybe I'm missing?"

"I don't think so."

The cat came down the hall and walked across the dining room and into the kitchen. Karen Shipley Nelsen leaned toward me and clenched her hands together. "What about Peter?"

I spread my hands. "I have what we in the trade call an ethical dilemma. I've taken Peter's money to find you, and now I have. I owe him that information."

She stared at me, still clenching the hands.

"I've found people before and kept their secrets, but that won't work here. Peter wants to find his son and he has unlimited resources with which to do it. If I tell him that I couldn't find you, he will simply hire someone else and they will find you. You weren't that hard to find."

Her jaw tightened. She wasn't liking it much, but she knew that she didn't have to like it.

I said, "What does Toby know?"

"He doesn't know anything about the DeLuca family or how I'm involved with them. I don't want him to know."

"What does he know about Peter?"

"He knows that his father's name is Peter Nelsen, and he knows that his father left us because he didn't want a family and he didn't want to be married. We don't talk about it. He doesn't know that his father is the guy who makes movies and has articles written about him."

"You should think about telling him."

She stood up and went to the window and looked out at her son. The ball was sitting motionless on the drive and Toby was sitting against one of the birches. She said, "Tell me the truth. Do you see any way out of this?"

"Guys like the DeLucas, they won't do something out of the goodness of their hearts. If we want something, we'll have to give something."

"Like what?"

"They might let you go if we could put one of their people in your place. That way they don't lose anything. Would you walk away from the bank?"

"Yes. Yes, I'd walk away." Her face was pale when she said it.

I nodded. "Okay. That's a place to start. I'll ask around, find out about the DeLucas, see what's there that we can give them or what we can use as leverage. What you can do is get together all the information you have about the accounts and about what you know about Charlie and Sal. Don't leave anything out. Even if it seems small or silly or beside the point."

"Okay."

"I'll go to Charlie and give him a little push and see what happens. Charlie won't like it, but there isn't any other way. Is that all right with you?"

She nodded.

"Maybe I can get you away from the DeLucas before we bring Peter in. If they're away and you're not a part of them anymore, it might work."

She nodded again.

"If it works, Peter doesn't have to know about the DeLucas and they don't have to know about Peter."

She was looking hopeful. "That's what I want."

"But it may not work out that way. It may get messy and you have to be ready for that, too. Focus on DeLuca. DeLuca is who is important. Not Peter. Do you understand?"

"Of course."

"We'll take it a step at a time."

She nodded some more, then we stood up and went to the door. When we got there, she said, "How much?"

I looked at her.

"How much do you want for this?"

"Fifty billion dollars."

She stared at me and then she nodded and made a little smile. "Thank you, Mr. Cole."

"Don't mention it. We're a full-service agency."

Fifteen.

I called Joe Pike at seven-thirty that night, L.A. time. "It's me. I'm in New York on this thing, and it's heating up. Looks like the mafia is involved."

"Rollie George."

"You got his number?"

Pike gave me a phone number. "Where are you staying?"

I told him.

"Wait ten, then call Rollie. Try to survive until I get there."

He hung up. That Pike. Some partner, huh?

Fifteen minutes later I called the number and a deep male voice said, "I've got an apartment on Barrow Street in the Village, just east of Seventh. You need a place to stay, it's yours." Roland George.

"How ya doin, Rollie?"

"Can't complain. My friend Joe Pike says you want to know some things about your cla.s.sic, all-American-style mafia." He dragged out mafia mafia into three long syllables. Street black. into three long syllables. Street black.

"The DeLuca family."

"Figured it might be the Gambinos, you being the guy who burned Rudy when he was out on the coast." n.o.body in the rest of the world refers to Los Angeles as "the coast." Only New Yorkers.

"A woman named Ellen Lang did him. I was just along for the ride."

"They after you?"

"No. This is something else."

"Whatever you want, it's yours, you know that."

"Sure."

"Whatever I've got, whatever I can get for you or for Joe, it's yours."

"I'm coming in tomorrow morning. From Chelam, Connecticut."

"Come in after the traffic, say about ten. Take you an hour. I'll meet you downstairs in front of the building at eleven-thirty."

"All right."

He gave me the address and we hung up.

The next morning I retraced the route I had driven before, this time turning off the West Side Highway on Twelfth and picking up Bleecker at Abingdon Square and following it down through the Village to Barrow.

Two black men and a very old Boston terrier were standing in front of a redbrick building at the east end of Barrow by Fourth Street. One of the men was younger and tall and muscular in a plain navy suit with a white b.u.t.ton-collared shirt. The other was in his early sixties in a dark brown leather trench coat and had maybe looked like the younger guy a couple of lifetimes ago, before twenty-two years with the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau and two 9mm high-velocity parabellums in the liver had taken it away from him. Roland George. The little black and white Boston terrier sat at his feet, rear legs stuck out at odd angles, its pushed-in, once-black face white with gray, staring at nothing through eyes heavy with cataracts. Its tongue was purple and didn't fit in its mouth. It drooled. Roland's dog, Maxie.

Eleven years ago, Roland George and his wife, Liana, had been driving up the Rahway Turnpike from a weekend at the Jersey sh.o.r.e when a dark brown Mercury had pulled up alongside them and two Puerto Rican hitters had cut loose with a couple of Sig automatics, payback from a Colombian dope dealer whom Roland had busted. Roland survived the bullets and the subsequent crash, but Liana did not. Maxie had been left in the care of a neighbor. They had had no children. Roland George took a forced medical retirement, drank heavily for a year, then sobered up to write thick, violent novels about New York cops tracking down psychopathic killers. The first two didn't sell, but the last three had ridden the New York Times New York Times bestseller list to a couple of penthouse apartments, a twenty-eight-room home on a lake in Vermont, and substantial contributions to political candidates favoring the death penalty. Fourteen weeks after Liana George died, the two Puerto Rican hitters held up a Taco Bell in Culver City, California, and were shot to death by a uniformed police officer named Joe Pike. That's how Joe and I knew Roland George. Roland still wore the wedding ring. bestseller list to a couple of penthouse apartments, a twenty-eight-room home on a lake in Vermont, and substantial contributions to political candidates favoring the death penalty. Fourteen weeks after Liana George died, the two Puerto Rican hitters held up a Taco Bell in Culver City, California, and were shot to death by a uniformed police officer named Joe Pike. That's how Joe and I knew Roland George. Roland still wore the wedding ring.

I pulled to the curb, got out, and Roland shook my hand. His grip was hard and firm, but bony. "You hungry?"

"I could eat."

"Let Thomas here put your car in the parking garage across the street. There's an Italian place we can walk to not far from here."

"Sure." I gave the younger man my keys, then leaned down and patted Maxie on his little square head. It was like petting a fire hydrant. "How ya doing, old boy?"

Maxie broke wind.

Roland shook his head and looked concerned. "He's not doing so well."

"No?"

"He's gone deaf. He's got the arthritis, he's blind as a bat, and now he can't hear. I think he sees things."

"Growing old is h.e.l.l."

"I bear witness to that."

Thomas said, "Shall I pick you up at the restaurant, Mr. George?"

"That's all right, Thomas, I think we'll walk back. Be good for old Max."