47

The second fake note, spelled out in newsprint, read:

PARKING LOT BRENTWOOD STATE HOSPITAL.

INSTRUCTIONS UNDER REAR FENDER HONDA

ACCORD LICENSE PLATE GFL 8367 AT

TEN MINUTES AFTER NINE SATURDAY NIGHT.

BRING ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS IN

HUNDRED DOLLAR BILLS TO SHOW GOOD FAITH.

BE ALONE.

It was delivered in the mail to Sixty-fourth Street on Saturday just after noon. The note was handed to Charley by Horace Gavin. “My orders are to allow you and Mrs. Barton to go unaccompanied to Brentwood.”

“At last something is happening,” Charley said hoarsely. “Will you arrange permission for the chopper to land on the hospital grounds?”

“I’ve done that. There’s just one thing, Mr. Barton.”

“What’s that?”

“That seems to be an unusually small demand.”

Charley dummied up. “Unusual?”

“You are known to be a wealthy man.”

“We can only do what the note says, Mr. Gavin. Now, if you will excuse me, I must make arrangements to get the money.”

“We have the money ready.”

“Funny money, Mr. Gavin?”

“Standard procedure, Mr. Barton.”

Charley raced up the stairs to get Mary Barton. They were downstairs again in seven minutes. The suitcase containing the cash was in the car. Danvers drove them to the heliport. Gavin wasn’t in sight. The chopper took them to Brentwood, fifty-one miles away. They touched down twelve minutes after takeoff.

Charley and Mary Barton half ran, half walked to the parking lot, which held several hundred cars. They began to look for the Honda Accord with the specified plates. They searched in every row of the parking lot, but there was no Honda Accord. After twenty minutes of searching, Gavin appeared, coming up the walk from the hospital. “It was a hoax,” he said. “There is no such car. In fact there is no such license plate.”

Mary Barton, probably because of the tension of playacting until she could get back to Sixty-fourth Street, broke into tears. Charley comforted her.

Eduardo drove up in the new gray Dodge van and parked it well in-between the stanchions under the Twelfth Street ramp at ten minutes to seven on Saturday evening. The place was deserted. At five minutes to seven Rocco drove up in a Ford Escort. He watched his uncle get out of the truck and walk slowly toward him. He just has it, Rocco thought. Every move he makes is classy. From the depths of his pariah complex, Rocco decided that Eduardo had to be the most respectable Prizzi who ever lived. Eduardo reached the car and peered into the backseat. On the floor between the seats were the twins, each one in his own basket, clean and pink, fast asleep or drugged or something, Eduardo thought, but at least they were quiet.

“Good work,” he said, standing beside Rocco at the open window. He took a revolver out of his jacket pocket and shot his nephew through the head. He opened the car door, leaned over, and shot him once again for good measure. He shut the front door, opened the back door, lifted the first basket out by its handle and carried it to the back of the van. He opened the back door of the van, put the first basket inside, then carried the second basket from the car to the van, closing and locking the van door when the loading was done.

He got into the van and backed it out of the recess, then headed uptown. He drove through the Midtown Tunnel to Long Island to his summer hideaway at Sands Point, a house that he had not had opened that year because of the preoccupation with the campaign. He unlocked the tall iron gates and rolled into the tree-lined avenue to the main house, locking the gate behind him. He opened the garage door and drove the van inside.

It was necessary to remove the baskets from the back of the van to get the boxes containing the bonds out, and, unfortunately, perhaps in his haste to get the bonds out, but certainly not out of carelessness, he dropped one of the baskets containing a baby. The basket just sort of tilted as if it had a malevolence of its own, and Conrad Price Barton fell a distance of three feet nine inches, landing on the left side of his head on the concrete floor of the garage. Eduardo got the baby back into the basket, packed it into the backseat of a Ford Escort, which was standing by, then transferred the baby in the other basket. The dropped baby was too damned quiet, he thought as he transferred the bonds from the van to the walk-in vault in the cellar of the house. He finished the transfer of the bonds in twenty minutes. He backed the sedan out of the garage, then closed and locked the garage with the Dodge van inside it. He drove with the babies in the back to the Macy-Barton house on Sixty-fourth Street, arriving at ten minutes to nine. He gave the babies over to their happy nannies, then sat in the study, sipping a malt whiskey until Charles and Mary Barton returned from the Brentwood insane asylum.