Death Benefits (15 page)

15

“We’ve got ourselves a female Caucasian here.”

Walker heard the words over and over in his memory. Ormond had held him in the corner of her eye as she had said it, and Walker could still see her making her way through the weeds, pretending to look down at her feet but contemplating him, even after they had stopped walking and it was time for him to look into the hole.

One of the other cops had gone to some trouble to wipe the dirt off the face, but there were still a few grains, like sand, at the corners of the eyes, and the hair was stringy and stuck to the head so it looked wet. The Ellen Snyder he had expected was gone—but only just gone, as though he had missed her by a few minutes, a few seconds, even. Her lips were pale and her face was cold and composed, the muscles smoothed and drawn back by something—death itself, or the circumstances of it, or maybe just lying on her back under the ground. He had no idea. She had made the odd transformation. It had amazed him since he was a child, when he had gone to funerals of relatives who lay in coffins somewhere between deep sleep and not being the same person at all. They seemed to be some not-quite-accurate statue made by an artist who had never met them and only reconstructed a likeness from a photograph. The part of her body he could see was naked, still covered with a thin film of dirt, but his reaction to that fact was indifference.

He had felt no impulse, for modesty’s sake, to cover this girl that he’d cared about so deeply, and no competing urge to look, out of retroactive curiosity about her. In death, the body had lost its particularity and become a type, an example of a class of human bodies. The words that had always seemed to him to be stupid in their simplicity—female Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five, five feet six inches, blond hair—were actually wise and accurate. There was nothing specific, because whatever made people different from all of the others of their size, age, and sex went away with life.

“That’s Ellen Snyder,” he had said. They had driven him and Stillman back to the station and put them in different rooms.

After that, the questions got to be more insistent and less polite. The tall cop came in and brought Walker to still another room, where he took his fingerprints, then asked him to stand in front of a ruler painted on a bare wall, put his name on a black felt rectangle with white letters, and took his picture.

At noon, the police chief arrived. He was a big, wide man named Daniels who had a belly that hung over his belt when he sat. He cultivated one of Walker’s least favorite poses, which was that he was a simple country boy who had trouble remembering things. He began with, “Ever find a stiff before?”

He needed to have the whole story from the beginning, with every nuance explained to him. Walker went through the long and delicate process: how Ellen had authorized payment to the wrong beneficiary and disappeared, how Stillman had brought him down to Pasadena to help with the investigation because he had known her, and how he had met with Alan Werfel. He explained how the canceled checks to clear the accounts had given the company a trail to follow: each had been written to a different person, and each new person had given the company another of Ellen’s aliases and a location. He summarized the next part to leave out the felonies. He simply said, “By computer search, we picked up the last time she had used her most recent identity, and found she was still registered at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago. When we got there, she had left.” He repeated at each stage his belief that she was a victim. She had done nothing except under duress.

The chief interrupted every couple of sentences with questions timed to be devastating. Whenever Walker thought he was nearly to the end of the story, Daniels would ask something that would bring him back to the start. “If she was gone to begin with, how did you know that she was really the one who ordered the check to the wrong guy?” When Walker began again at that point and went all the way to the finish again, Daniels asked, “What made you think Ellen Snyder was the one to look for?”

Walker saw that the interrogation was a duel against an opponent who never got tired, could never make a mistake, and gave no quarter. Daniels would nod sagely while Walker breezed past some particularly dangerous part of the story, then jump back to make him repeat it twenty minutes later. “How did you know this Mrs. Bourgosian was gone if she hadn’t checked out?” Walker made up a version that left out the felonies: “We called repeatedly, waited, knocked on her door.” Then, when Walker actually got as far as the moment when he and Stillman had identified the body, the chief said, “How did you know the place to look was the old Buckland property?”

Walker had thought about this since the beginning, knowing it was going to be asked many times. He said, “We drove out of Chicago toward the north along a route Stillman thought someone like her might take—away from the major highways. When the road led to a place he thought was a good hiding spot, he stopped the car to take a look.”

The truth was much more disturbing to Walker, and he couldn’t say it, because this man was not his friend. When he had watched Stillman working, driving slowly through the night, staring out the side windows, he had detected a strange, unfamiliar expression on his face. It had been narrow-eyed, cold, and intense, but it had not been merely concentration. There was something more, almost a change of personality. Stillman had become somebody else. It was not until later, after the car had stopped, that Walker had understood who that must have been. This was what Stillman had meant by “looking at the things I see from a different point of view.” Stillman had suspected from the moment he had seen the watch that Ellen was dead.

Daniels’s eyebrows rose into an arc. “And you just went along with it, no questions asked?”

“I sit in the main office of an insurance company all day, writing reports,” said Walker. “He’s the security specialist the company hired to look into this case. What would you do?”

Daniels seemed satisfied with that, but a few minutes later, he jumped back. “What made you decide that Waterman Road was the way out of Chicago?”

The answer was the same. “You’ll have to ask Stillman.”

The interrogation seemed about to end at seven in the evening. Daniels stood up and said in a conspiratorial tone, “That Stillman, he’s something, isn’t he? Quite a reputation.”

Walker said, “Really?”

Daniels looked down at Walker speculatively. “Maybe it’s just in certain circles.” His voice dropped and he leaned closer. “I’d get as far away as I could.” Then he left.

It was nearly an hour later when the tall, thin cop came into the room and said to Walker, “You’re free to go.”

When Walker reached the street outside, it was dark. He walked down the sidewalk to the parked car, but he didn’t see Stillman anywhere. It occurred to him that his own interrogation had probably been little more than a preparation for what they wanted to ask Stillman. Walker turned and entered the station again, picked up a pen and a form that was on the counter, and wrote on the back, “Went to look for a drink.” Then he stuck it under the car’s windshield wiper and walked down the quiet street.

He came to the front entrance of a hotel that seemed to have a lot of activity. He heard music drifting from the open doorway of the lobby, and lights spilled out onto the sidewalk at his feet. He stepped in past an elderly desk clerk who seemed surprised to see him, and followed the music to a large, dim room where there was a long mahogany bar. Behind it there were six rows of bottles full of colorful liquid that seemed to glow with the light from the wall-length mirror.

Three of the tables across the room were occupied by men drinking beer and ostensibly watching a football game on a television set on a shelf high above them. Walker claimed a stool at the bar and said to the bartender, “Scotch and water, please. Any kind.”

The bartender was a bald man with a bushy mustache that looked as though he had grown it as a badge of his profession. He poured Walker a double shot, as though it were a relief to the bartender to serve something besides beer. Walker reached into his wallet and set a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, then sat staring at the mirror, watching the soundless football game in reverse.

He was on his second drink when Stillman came in and sat beside him. Stillman raised a hand to the bartender and pointed at Walker’s drink, and the bartender brought another. Stillman tasted his and nodded at the bartender, then turned to Walker. “Don’t worry, I won’t drink too much. I’ll still be able to drive you down to O’Hare airport tonight.”

“Not unless we’re going there anyway,” said Walker.

“You wanted to stay with it until we found her, and we have. I thought you’d be anxious to leave,” Stillman said. “Why aren’t you?”

Walker considered for a moment. “Because they killed her, I guess.”

Stillman looked at him thoughtfully. “I’m sorry I got you into this. When this started, I had the impression it was over—that you had both gone on to other things.”

Walker nodded. “We had.”

“But you were still in love with her, weren’t you?”

Walker shook his head. “No. For a long time, I was: so long that I got attached to the idea, comfortable with it. I was always going to be this guy whose best shot at having a life was already over. I was so sure of it that I got out of the habit of checking to see if it was still true until you came along and forced me to think about every second that I had ever spent with her. Over the past few days, I did it. I slowly realized that I didn’t feel the same about our time together anymore. When I remembered it, I still thought the same things about her. I just didn’t feel them anymore. She was everything I ever imagined she was—smart, funny, brave, good—but now it had nothing to do with me.” He frowned. “Do you understand?”

“I do,” said Stillman. “You knew she was a decent person, and she was worth your effort to try to save her. So what’s keeping you from quitting now?”

Walker took another sip of his drink. “I was just on the edge of figuring that out when you came in,” said Walker, and looked at the glass. “The problem with this stuff is that just at the moment when it’s managed to dissolve enough of the fog, whatever’s left in your stomach hits your bloodstream and you get stupid. But I think it has something to do with what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years, and what she has.”

“McClaren’s?” Stillman looked suspicious. “You’re suddenly interested in whether the company shows a profit on this year’s annual report?”

“That’s the funny part,” said Walker. “I’m not interested at all. It hasn’t crossed my mind since we were in Pasadena.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“I meant how I was spending my life before that. I was trying to be the perfect employee. I had convinced myself that if I was going to be a solid, serious person, that was the way to do it. If I worked really hard to fit into the cubicle, then in time I would be the kind of man my family would be proud of. Steady, reliable. That meant something.” He smiled. “I tried pretty hard. I went to work, came straight home—sometimes walked home to keep in shape, ate a frozen dinner, watched the news on TV, and went to bed so I could do it all over again.”

“How does she come in?”

Walker answered, “She was making the same choice, only she was better at it. We were delayed-gratification pleasure seekers. The longer you put it off, the better it will be.” He cocked his head and stared at Stillman for a second, then returned to his drink. He took a gulp, waited for the little explosion in his stomach to reverberate upward and warm his brain. “It didn’t quite sink in until I saw her there with strangers brushing the dirt off her face.”

“What was it that sank in?”

“That she and I might have read the instructions wrong.”

“Her, anyway,” Stillman agreed.

“Me too,” said Walker. “There she was. And I asked myself what she could have done that would have avoided heading for that hole. And you know what?”

“What?”

“The answer wasn’t spending more hours and more energy selling insurance.”

Stillman sipped his drink. “What happened to her is not a bad argument for life insurance.”

“True,” said Walker. “But it’s not such a good argument for trading anything important to get ahead.” He frowned. “What was it you said? ‘For twenty-four-year-olds who can’t wait to be sixty so they can move into the corner office.’ ”

“What else did you figure out?” asked Stillman.

“Nothing. I unfigured. I found out that some things I’d already figured out needed some work.”

“How about an example?”

“Murder. There’s something about seeing the way it looks—turning a person into a secret, dropping her into a hole after dark and hiding even the hole. Her face looked calm, composed. Maybe she died gently. But I know that somehow, even if it was for a tenth of a second, even if she never got to say it, some remnant of her brain was thinking, ‘Please. Not yet. Let me have another day, another few minutes.’ They didn’t.” He took the last quarter inch of his drink. “I always thought people like that ought to be hunted down. It never occurred to me that the one who ought to do it might be me.”

16

Walker awoke, showered, and dressed, then went to the next room to knock on Stillman’s door. He found Stillman on the bed with file folders from the Pasadena office spread around him and the telephone in his hand. Walker went to the only chair in the room and sat down.

Stillman was saying, “Yeah, so get it to me. Hard is just another way of saying expensive, and I already threw myself on your mercy. Call me here at the hotel before you send anything.”

He hung up, then dialed another number. “You might as well get some breakfast. This is going to take a while.”

Walker found that the dining room was closed until dinner, so he wandered down the street past the police station until he got to a diner. When he returned to Stillman’s room, Stillman was talking in the same tone. “What is it with everybody today? Here’s how it works: you do what I ask, you send me the bill, and then
I
complain. You don’t get to bill me and complain too. You think you’re mentioned in my will and I’m depleting the estate? Good guess. I’ll be waiting.” He hung up.

“You finished?” asked Walker.

“Unless I can think of somebody who can do something else for us. I like to get people working on my problems early in the morning, when they’re fresh.”

“What are they doing for you?”

“That one’s running hourly credit checks on these two guys—Albert Mayer and Richard Stone. They’re the ones who kept turning up at the same hotels as Ellen Snyder.”

“Won’t they stop using those names now?”

“You never know,” said Stillman. “They have no reason to assume that anyone was following them, just Ellen Snyder. If they’re smart, they won’t take the chance—or any other chance. I’m just trying to get something that will move us to the next set of names they use. I’ve got somebody else spreading the word that I’m paying for a man who looks like Alan Werfel.”

“I don’t think there is a man like that,” said Walker.

Stillman looked intrigued. “You don’t?”

“No. It came to me when I woke up. If they had one, then I don’t think they would have done things this way.”

“Why not?” asked Stillman.

“I accept what you said: that the first thing they did was steal Werfel’s ID in the airport. I believe that they knew about the insurance policy in some other way—maybe just by learning what they could about him before they started using the credit cards. But I don’t think they brought in a ringer and fooled Ellen Snyder into thinking he was Alan Werfel. It’s never felt right to me. It’s too hard to do quickly, and when you send him into the office, too many things could go wrong.”

“That’s right,” said Stillman. He spoke gently. “That’s the unpleasant part of this. It works best if somebody on the inside is handling everything, making sure nothing does go wrong.”

“Ellen didn’t do it,” Walker insisted. “This could have been done a lot of other ways.”

Stillman sighed. “You can’t catch a thief by figuring out all the things he could have done. You have to think of things from his point of view. What did he want to have happen, and what did he think he needed to do to make it happen? The point is, the thief can’t know what all the obstacles are going to be when he starts this. Only an insider knows. As soon as I heard a rough description of this, I started looking for somebody like her.”

“But you didn’t know her, and that’s why this never made sense to me. Ellen Snyder wasn’t in on it. She didn’t want a quick million, she wanted a career. And if they really had found a guy who could convince a stranger he was Alan Werfel, they wouldn’t have needed to pay Ellen. And if they could pay her, they wouldn’t have needed to kill her.”

“You think her only purpose was to take the blame.”

“That’s right.”

“Because she’s dead?”

“Not just dead, but dead that way, out here in the middle of nowhere, so it looked as though she got away with the money and disappeared. They couldn’t just fax in a copy of Werfel’s stolen driver’s license and expect to get a check for twelve million in the mail. They needed the paperwork to come to the main office filled out by a real McClaren’s agent who seemed to have seen the guy in person and gotten him to sign the affidavit and release forms.”

“You think she didn’t fill out the papers?” asked Stillman.

“I don’t know if she did or not. I just know she didn’t intend to participate in any fraud. If the fake Alan Werfel called her in advance and said, ‘I’m coming in on Tuesday to sign the papers,’ then she would probably have filled them out on Monday. She would never let a man like that sit in the office waiting while she was at a typewriter putting stuff into blanks on a form. Don’t you see? He fits the profile of the kind of customer she was after. She described him to me the night I took her out to dinner.”

“I thought she was after women?”

“She was after heirs, and he was an heir: a person who suddenly had a lot of money he didn’t have before, and had to come to her office. She would have seen that as a giant chance to sell him something—maybe get him to let the company manage his money, maybe buy an annuity. Twelve million bucks at six percent is a slam-dunk, no-risk seven hundred and twenty thousand a year, tax-deferred until he starts drawing it. If nothing else, she would think he was a good prospect for insurance. He’s just had the biggest reminder of mortality you can get, so she’d try whole life, or health. He’s just inherited a couple of mansions, so she’d try home owner’s.” Walker threw up his hands. “You’ve got her file open. Look at her sales figures. That’s what she did for a living. Ellen would have done everything she could to make him feel as though she was a comforting ally in his time of need. She was in sales, for Christ’s sake.”

Stillman said, “So she would fill out the papers ahead of time. I can buy that. Then what happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Walker. “Maybe they told her to meet Alan Werfel someplace outside the office with the papers. People do business at lunch all the time. She would have jumped at that. She would have wanted him alone and in a spot where the other people in her office, like Winters, couldn’t snatch him away or screw up her pitch. A restaurant would give her a psychological advantage: no office furniture to remind him that she was just some stranger in a business. It would be special treatment to show him he was important, and so on. What he’s dealing with is an insurance company, but what he’s looking at is this pretty, soothing young woman going out of her way for him. And lunch takes time—maybe two hours—which gives her a hell of a long period to wear him down.”

“Okay,” said Stillman. “Let’s grant that this is one possibility. Then why did somebody break into her apartment?”

“I didn’t say I knew what happened, exactly. Maybe they set it up so she would have to take the papers home with her. They could have set it up as a breakfast meeting, so no sane person would go to the office first. That way they could break in the night before and grab her and the papers, send the forms to San Francisco overnight, and leave nobody in Pasadena who knew anything. Maybe they broke in later, after they’d kidnapped her, because they were afraid she had something written on her calendar that would prove she hadn’t planned to leave.” He shrugged. “That’s why they jumped us on the way out of her apartment, right? Because we were flashing papers.”

“Kidnapped her?” Stillman repeated.

“You think she took off her clothes and buried herself in a field in Illinois?”

“Of course I don’t,” said Stillman. “But she seems to have done things after she handed over the check. She seems to have boarded airplanes, rented hotel rooms.”

“Then maybe that wasn’t Ellen Snyder. Maybe they broke into her apartment just to kill her and take her keys.”

“What keys?”

“To the office,” said Walker. “She definitely had keys. You met Winters. Do you think he was the one who showed up every morning at seven to open up, when he had a twenty-four-year-old assistant manager to do it? They could have killed Ellen, used her keys to get into the office, filled out the forms, faxed them to the home office, then got what they needed from the files about the office’s women clients.”

“Then what?”

“Then they have another woman travel around using false names that came from Ellen’s office files. Somebody made it look as though Ellen was on a plane to Zurich. That’s not Ellen Snyder trying to make Ellen Snyder look innocent. It’s them trying to make it look as though she and the money disappeared together. Then they buried her in a place where they thought she’d never be found.”

Stillman’s eyes were focused on the wall. “Not found,” he said absently. “Identified.”

“What?”

Stillman waved a hand. “Bodies almost always get found at some point. The trick is to make sure you leave one in the right place. Out here, the family farm doesn’t look like it’s making a comeback anytime soon. So you leave the body here, buried on an abandoned farm. You put plants over it so it won’t look any different after a couple of weeks. It might be ten years before some developer buys up all this land and starts scraping it with bulldozers. They didn’t take her clothes because they were perverts. They did it so when the body was found, there wouldn’t be any chance of tracing it through the clothes. They were hoping there would be nothing left but bones by that time, but they knew they couldn’t count on that. Rains and frosts sometimes bring a body to the surface. Hunting season’s only a couple of months away, and there will probably be men and dogs tromping through that field—the dogs being the ones they’d have to worry about.”

“What they wanted was a Jane Doe?”

“Right. That’s why they didn’t go even farther out, why they picked this place. If you want a Jane Doe to fade into a notation on a very long list, your best choices are in the vicinity of a big city.”

Walker stared at Stillman for a few seconds. He was different today. Or maybe it was Walker who was different. “What do you think happened?”

Stillman shrugged. “If I were to guess, I’d go with your theory.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“Because I don’t have to guess just yet.”