Death Benefits (10 page)

“Okay,” said Walker. “He’s rich, he looks rich, he’s exhausted and distraught, so he’s the one who gets robbed. But how did they know about his father’s life insurance policy? They didn’t get that by picking his pocket in an airport.”

Stillman shook his head. “No help there. If you steal the wallet of a guy like Alan Werfel, you run a credit check to see what else he’s got that you can steal. If you try it on Alan Werfel, you’ll see that his lists trust funds with his father as trustee. The address on his entry is his father’s house in Santa Fe.”

“But it certainly doesn’t list his father’s life insurance.”

“It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows rich people have insurance, and if you want to know the specifics, they’re easy to find out. Andrew Werfel was an old, rich guy. Every time he filled out a loan application, a disclosure form to be on the board of directors of some company, or got sued in the last twenty years, that cash-value insurance got included. It found its way into the databases of a lot of companies that sell lists of desirable customers. He also got a divorce from Alan’s mother a few years ago. The insurance policy was listed in the material the lawyers filed for division of assets. That means anybody who has an Internet account can call up the case and read it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Stillman. “There are other reasons to avoid getting a divorce too, in case you were considering one. I’ll go into that another time if I think you need it.”

“I can wait,” said Walker.

“What I’m saying is, it took me about fifteen minutes to get from the social security card in Werfel’s wallet to the life insurance policy,” said Stillman. “But keep thinking that way. You may hit something.”

“What does all this leave to investigate?”

“Ellen Snyder.”

“I’ve told you everything I know about her.”

“No you haven’t.”

Walker stared at him with narrowed eyes, his arms and shoulders tensed. Then he let out a deep breath. “No,” he said. “I haven’t. She was more important to me than I said. There was a bit more to it.”

Stillman shrugged. “I know.”

“How?”

“I heard it too many times from too many people around your office, in too many versions, to ignore it.”

Walker’s brow furrowed. “What did they say?”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Stillman. “What’s the truth?”

Walker sat down on the bed. “I came to San Francisco just before the training class started. I was in a new city, in a part of the country where I’d never been before. I remember when I started college, everybody was alone in the same way, and people were desperate. There was a kind of hysteria in the first week to meet everybody you could. People walked the campus sending out smiles in all directions like SOS signals. By the end of the second week, they had met people, combined into cliques, and the emergency was over. I don’t know what I expected when I came to San Francisco: I knew I could handle it, whatever it was. But cities aren’t like campuses, and being a grown-up isn’t the same as being a student. I arrived, and everybody was already settled, had jobs, families, friends, houses. I thought, ‘Sure. Of course.’ I rented a cheap apartment, showed up at McClaren’s, and got put in the training class.”

“And you met Ellen Snyder.”

“Yeah,” said Walker. “She attracted my attention for no particular reason except that she was pretty. You saw her picture. But when I talked to her I kind of felt at home, and that was better than pretty. When she smiled, it looked as though she was glad to see me, and I think she was. I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but she wasn’t just an instant friend, a person you meet that you find you can talk to. She was like a relative who already knows all about you, and was just waiting for you to drop by. We talked for hours, the way people do, but there was never any need to start at zero and explain what it was like where I came from, or any of that. She knew. Maybe it was because she came from a place that wasn’t very different. When she talked to you, it wasn’t like talking to a strange girl. She was like somebody’s sister: she knew you well enough not to be especially impressed, but she understood what she knew well enough to realize you weren’t so bad, either. After I’d talked to her a couple of times, somebody or other mentioned that she wasn’t attached to anybody, so I asked her out.”

“You told me that.”

“I told you she shot me down after the first time. She didn’t. It went on for a while. When you start training they give you all these loose-leaf notebooks full of manuals about business procedures, company policies, computer systems, sample forms, and so on. There are tests. We spent evenings together studying, went out a few times, went to lunch a lot, things like that. You asked before if we had sex. We did. It went on for almost two months. Then she stopped seeing me.”

“How does this change what you said before?”

Walker squinted in frustration. “I didn’t just start thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about it for over a year, and it’s hard to slice out the parts you want. While it was going on, I noticed that it was different from anything I’d felt before. I don’t mean I was happy to be with her. I couldn’t get her out of my mind when I wasn’t with her. I was up nights, then I’d be ready to go to the class at five-thirty just on the off chance that she’d be there early too. If I thought of something funny, I would save it, not tell anybody so she could be the one I told. I wasn’t ready for all this—it came so soon after I arrived, so easily. I let what I knew make me stop trusting what I felt.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was like a textbook case. You’re in a strange city, alone and lost, doing a job you’re not that happy about. You meet this girl who is in the same position, and you seem to hit it off and miraculously become closer than you’ve ever been with anyone. Miraculously—that’s the problem. It’s exactly what people warn you about: people in situations like that are vulnerable, lonely, eager to connect with anybody. They jump into big decisions, and then later regret them. Maybe they hurt somebody in a way they can’t fix.” He could see Stillman wasn’t especially respectful of his thinking, but he at least understood. “It wasn’t until she stopped seeing me that I admitted to myself that I was in love.”

Stillman sighed. “Back up. The breakup is what I’ve got to know about. How did it happen?”

“She just stopped. There wasn’t one of those talks where she said we weren’t right for each other, or that nonsense they always give you about being friends. There was no argument about anything. I’ve gone over and over what I said and did, and what she said and did, and there was nothing. She just stopped. No real explanation. I would ask her out, and she was happy to talk to me, but she wouldn’t go. I would go to where we used to eat lunch alone together, and she would still show up to eat with me, but bring five or six other people with her to the table. She would treat us all the same.”

“Are you sure you didn’t miss something?”

“I’m sure. I tried ignoring her and staying out of her way, and she would come and talk to me. But it was as though she had amnesia, and forgot everything that had gone on between us. It was the way it had been before we got together. She was this nice, friendly girl who was in my training class.”

“Another guy?”

Walker shook his head. “There was still a month or two of classes left. I saw her every day, couldn’t keep my eyes off her. There was never any guy around her. And she was always available at night for dinners or parties the whole group went to, even if somebody thought of it at the last minute. She always arrived alone and went home alone.”

Stillman mused, “I suppose you’ve got to be right. A few of those people would have been falling all over each other to be the first to tell you, if there had been somebody. Didn’t you press her to find out what was bothering her?”

Walker looked down, uncomfortable. “Sure. It’s funny. At the time, what she said struck me as a lie—not exactly untrue, but as beside the point, an evasion. She said that she had come to San Francisco to take the training class, and do as well as she could so she could go off to her job at a field office and be successful at it. She said she had loved the time we spent alone together—her words—and would always remember it, but she was leaving for Pasadena soon, and had to concentrate on the future.”

“I don’t think it was a lie either,” said Stillman. “I think she said what she meant.” He glanced at Walker. “I’ll bet it killed you.”

Walker nodded, then focused on Stillman. “But that was a while ago, and I’m over it.”

“Why did you tell me now?”

“It’s why I decided to come with you,” said Walker. “I know her. I thought it might be easier to convince you she was innocent if you didn’t know that I was once in love with her. I also believe in privacy. I think that telling any stranger who asks that you had sex with somebody is a betrayal.”

“You thought I might be down here trying to frame her,” said Stillman.

“It had crossed my mind,” said Walker. “It’s the only way that a person like Ellen could get in trouble. I decided tonight that what you’ve been trying to do was figure out what really happened. So I’m telling you everything. I didn’t just meet Ellen in class and take her out to dinner once. I got to be very close to her, spent a couple of months watching her and listening to everything she said and turning it over and over in my mind. Then I spent a year afterward double-checking to figure out what went wrong. You’re investigating her? Well, I already did: she’s not somebody who commits insurance fraud.”

Stillman sighed. “Maybe. Do you at least agree with me that the next thing we ought to do is find her?”

“Yes,” said Walker. “But I don’t know how to do that.”

“I’ve got somebody working on it. After it gets dark, we’ll go to see him.”

9

Stillman stopped the car on a dark street in the flat outer reaches of the Santa Clarita Valley, just under the wall of jagged mountains that rose up implausibly to the north. To the left, across the street, was a high school athletic field with wooden bleachers behind an eight-foot chain-link fence, and beyond it a blacktop parking lot the size of a staging area for an armored division. Walker squinted into the darkness and made out that it had a metal post with a basketball backboard every hundred feet. Along the right side of the street was a row of nearly identical one-story houses that were darkened as though they had been hastily evacuated in advance of some natural disaster. “Nobody seems to be home,” said Walker.

“They’re in there all right,” said Stillman. “They just go to bed early.”

“The whole neighborhood?”

“Most of them have to drive all the way back into town in the morning to work. The rest have to get out of here by seven, before the kids arrive. The road gets clogged with buses and car pools and jaywalking teenagers.” Stillman got out of the car and waited for Walker, who lingered at the door and stared around him.

“What are you looking at?”

“Just trying to be sure you’re not cleverly trying to attract the attention of somebody who wants to break my skull, the way you did last night.”

“I explained about that,” said Stillman. “I just wanted to verify a theory I had. What point would there be in doing it again? Come on.”

Walker started up the sidewalk to the nearest house, but Stillman tapped his shoulder. “Not in there.”

“Then which one is it?”

“You can’t see it from here. It’s down the end of the street and across the basketball courts.”

“Why park so far away?”

“It’s a nice night. Southern California is a lot better at night than San Francisco, don’t you think? The air drifts in and stays put. It’s around all day getting heated up and lived in, so you’re kind of attached to it by nightfall. It’s a friendly arrangement.”

“Why do you always park in some screwy place and then walk?”

“I told you, it’s a nice night,” Stillman answered. Then he muttered, “Besides, it’s a habit.”

“Why does that not seem to be an adequate answer?” asked Walker.

“I didn’t say there wasn’t a reason for the habit,” Stillman admitted. “I told you we’re going to see a guy who works for me.”

“That was what you said.”

“Well,” said Stillman, “he doesn’t always work for me. That means that at other times he has to work for other people, right?”

“What other people?”

“Well, now, that is the sticky part, isn’t it?” Stillman said. “If he went around telling me things like that, he would probably tell other people who I was and what he did for me.”

Walker looked at Stillman uneasily, then turned his head to survey the deserted neighborhood. “You park far away from his house because his other customers are criminals. Is that it?”

“Not necessarily,” Stillman said. “I’m just respecting the great void in information I have. It’s always a good idea. Constantine Gochay is the guy we’re going to see. I use him for skip-tracing and similar dull, sedentary occupations that clash with my temperament. I save myself aggravation by hiring the best.”

“He’s the best?”

“Right. If I hire Gochay, I save money on the plane tickets I would have bought to places where somebody was six weeks ago. The problem with hiring the best is that everybody wants the best. A word like ‘everybody’ takes in a lot of people with a wide range of behavior patterns. It could, as you no doubt astutely surmise, include corporate headhunters trying to get background information on some job candidate, or the regular kind of headhunters. It could also include some of the strange, tropical flowerings of certain federal agencies that have been known to retain employees with names like ‘Black Luigi’ or ‘The Poison Dwarf.’ Do we want to meet them? No. Do we want them to see our car? No.”

They were across the dark blacktop forest of basketball hoops, walking up a road that seemed to have no sidewalks or street lamps. The houses on this road were new, most of them set back on sloping lawns and obscured by high fences and thick hedges. Stillman grasped Walker’s arm and pulled him through a gate set into a vine-covered wall. Walker’s feet detected a stone walkway up the front lawn. The house looked as dark as the others, but Stillman walked to the front door and rang the bell.

A moment later, a young woman with close-cropped red hair and very white skin appeared. She wore blue jeans and a gray sweater that hung to the middle of her thighs. Her glasses reflected the yellow bug light above the porch, so she seemed to Walker to be staring at him with the wide, disinterested eyes of a cat. “Go on in,” she ordered. “He’s expecting you.” Her accent sounded foreign to Walker, but it was so faint that he could not identify it beyond the conjecture that the continent must be Europe, and her appearance argued for the north.

She held the door, so they had to sidestep in to get around her, and Walker was too hesitant to do anything but mistime it. There was a second when she leaned forward to check the street while he was still moving in and they came together, Walker’s chest fleetingly brushed by her breasts. The woman’s sharp green eyes flashed dangerously up at him in deep annoyance and then clouded not in exoneration but mere dismissal. He mumbled, “Excuse me,” and followed Stillman’s back as it disappeared into an open doorway at the other end of the big room.

He passed a huge projection television screen that held an image of a woman’s face a foot and a half wide with enormous lips and teeth, smiling about something the stereo speakers said was “scandalizing Hollywood.” He heard the young woman behind him, flopping down on a couch.

He stepped to the doorway to find Stillman and another man already staring expectantly at him. The other man was taller and thinner than Stillman, with black curly hair in ringlets that made him look like the bust of a Roman emperor. He nodded at Walker, then turned away, his eyes focusing on Stillman for a half-second before they moved to his work table.

The room was like a disordered and confused repair shop, the floor tangled with bundles of power cords and surge suppressors, the tables around the walls crowded with computers and screens, most of them with no keyboards. Printed papers were on the floor and laid in overlapping stacks, with some tossed in the empty boxes the paper had come in.

“Ellen Snyder . . . Ellen Snyder,” Gochay muttered as he looked at various pieces of paper, then put them back. He turned and squinted, then stepped to a table, tossed several sheets off the top of a pile, and snatched up a few more that had been on the bottom. Then he led Stillman and Walker through another open doorway into a narrow, dim hall that seemed to encircle the work room. He opened a door on the other side of the hall and led them inside.

The room appeared to have been transported here from somewhere in the Middle East. There were two big couches on either side of a large, low, copper-clad table that sat on an Oriental rug. Strewn around the room on the floor were oversized pillows upholstered with materials that seemed too complex—snippets of tapestries, Oriental weavings in patterns that weren’t the same as the rug, and one that was iridescent like bird feathers. There were no windows in the room, and nothing hung on the walls. Walker looked more closely at the walls and saw that what had looked like panels of plasterboard covered with high-gloss paint was sheet metal: the room was insulated—against sound? Electronic signals leaking out? He noticed a bank of computer components that seemed to be connected in some tandem arrangement humming quietly, with red and green lights no bigger than beads glowing steadily, and decided that must be what was being protected.

Stillman said, “What have we got?”

Constantine Gochay scanned the sheets. “I should have had Serena add this up for you before. I don’t know what the hell this is going to cost.” He reached the bottom of the last page. “Ah. I see. It’s thirty-five hundred.”

Stillman’s brows knitted. It was the first time Walker had seen him react to any expense.

Gochay nodded in sympathy. “I know. It’s not high enough, is it? She isn’t that hard to trace.”

“No,” said Stillman. “Is she even using fake names?”

“That much she’s doing,” said Gochay. “But it’s not complicated. She switches to a new one in each town, but then she’ll buy something with a card in the old name while she’s there. Or she’ll use it to buy a plane ticket to the next place.” He put the sheets in Stillman’s hands, then stood over his shoulder and pointed at the entries in order. “See?” He paused, and looked at Stillman again. “Maybe you should be careful, eh?”

“I haven’t thought of a reason yet why this one would want us to find her,” said Stillman. “I have to hope she’s just not too good at this.”

Gochay shrugged. “Then you’ll get what you get.”

“Hard to argue with that.” Stillman reached into his coat pocket, but Gochay stopped him.

“No, no. Please pay the lady on your way out.”

Walker followed Stillman into the hallway, through the work room, into the long space that Walker now realized was a false living room, placed between the outer walls and the rooms where everything illegal went on, to fool eavesdropping devices. The girl was lying on the couch staring disgustedly at a commercial with a red pickup truck bouncing unpleasantly up a steep dirt road in some mountains.

She looked up at Walker. “Did you and Constantine bring each other to a mutually satisfying completion?” Her accent was gone.

Walker answered, “Actually, you’re more my type.” He silently cursed himself. Why had he said that? This wasn’t somebody joking with him at the office. These people were criminals. She could even be Gochay’s wife. He could feel the hairs on his arms standing up.

But she smiled back, her eyes half-lidded in a way that made her look even more like a cat. “I don’t think so. I like girls.”

Walker said uncomfortably, “We have something in common.”

She brought her knees up and bobbed to her feet. “Good. We’ll go out some night and cruise the bars for pussy. Money, please.”

Stillman held out a handful of hundred-dollar bills. She snatched the money, folded the bills without counting them, then lifted her long sweater so she could stuff them into the pocket of her jeans. “Oh, Max. You shouldn’t have.”

“Good night, Serena,” said Stillman. “Always nice to see you.”

She opened the door. “Likewise, Max. Never darken my door again.” Stillman stepped out into the night. Walker tried to follow, but the girl moved in front of him, stood on tiptoes, and kissed his cheek. Then she pushed him toward the door. “Now go out and play with Max. Shoo!”

Walker found himself on the darkened porch. He couldn’t see Stillman, but he heard the voice. “She likes you.”

“Serena?” He stepped uneasily off the porch, relieved when his foot touched a surface that felt like a stepping-stone.

“Yep, God help you.” Stillman walked toward the street. “And whatever her name is, it’s not Serena. That’s just a six-letter computer password.”