Blood Money by Thomas Perry

bent coat hanger snaked inside, hooked onto the last link of the chain, slid it to the end of its track, and removed it. The door opened a few more inches, and Jane saw him through the crack at the hinges.
    “Hello, Bernie,” she said quietly.
    “Oh, there you are,” said Bernie. “Can I come in?”
    “It’s a little late to ask for an invitation.”
    The old man stepped inside and closed the door, then flipped the light on, and quickly averted his eyes. “Sorry,” he said.
    Jane remembered, picked up the jeans and white blouse she had left at the foot of the bed, and slipped them on. “How did you learn to open a hotel door?”
    He shrugged. “Oh, it’s just an old trick from when I was young. I was so broke I couldn’t afford hotels in those days, so once in a while I needed to use one without paying.”
    She shook her head. “Bernie, when they’re unoccupied, the chain isn’t fastened.”
    “That’s a different trick. I thought you meant the lock. Motels like this don’t give a shit about what happens to their customers. The doors are hollow and easy to kick down, so they put cheap locks on them to save the expense of replacing them.”
    Jane decided that she didn’t really care why the old man had once broken into occupied hotel rooms: armed robbery, probably, but that had been long ago. “What do you want, Bernie?”
    “Just friendly concern. I went out for a walk, and I happened to notice the light in the window. I thought I’d see why you were up.”
    “If there was a light, it wasn’t in my window,” she said. “Let’s get beyond the preliminary lies and get to the big ones. You want me to take you to some safe haven.”
    “That would be nice,” he agreed. “But I guess I’ll have to figure out how to close out my own life.”
    “That’s how you’re seeing this?”
    “How can it be anything else?” he asked. Then he said thoughtfully, “Did you hear how I got killed?”
    Jane nodded. “I watched the television news before I went to bed. They said that a seventy-year-old woman died when you did. How did that happen?”
    “She was the one who shot me.” He looked sad. “I guess the excitement was too much for her heart. She died on the way to the hospital.”
    “You were supposed to be killed by an old woman?”
    Bernie sighed. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me.” He lookedat her, and the pain in his eyes seemed genuine. “I loved her. Francesca Giannini.” The eyes looked colder now, as though they were judging Jane. “People saw her near the end, and they probably saw this old lady with hard, sharp black eyes like a hawk, and wrinkled skin. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine what she was like in the old days.”
    Jane could tell that Bernie was testing her: whether she was smart enough to know that she would be old too. She sat at the foot of the bed beside him.
    Bernie said, “I met her at the Fontainebleau in Miami. She was twenty, I was twenty-two. In those days, mob sit-downs were different. They used to meet in places like that. It’s hard to believe now, but they’d bring their wives, kids, dogs. Her father was Dominic Giannini. He brought her along, like it was a vacation. Looking back on it now, I think he probably did it because he was afraid to leave her home alone. Not that she was in danger or something—he had Detroit sewed up tight. He just knew that if he left her home, what he told her not to do was only talk.”
    Jane nodded. “I guess things like that don’t change much.”
    “You have to understand what the problem was,” said Bernie. “She was beautiful.” Jane could see his eyes glaze over, and then he gave a little shake, as though coming back to the present was painful.
    Jane was astonished. “You’re not just remembering, are you? You’re seeing it.”
    Bernie touched Jane’s arm gently, as though he were a parent soothing and reassuring her. “That’s part of it, too, you know. You don’t just get to bring back what will