Death Benefits (17 page)

He stood very close to her and listened while she spoke to him just above a whisper. McClaren answered just as quietly, and she turned and disappeared. McClaren returned with a weary expression and sat down again. “Something else to think about. The National Weather Service has just upgraded Tropical Storm Theresa to a hurricane. It’s just passed Guadeloupe. They don’t know yet if it will make Florida, of course.”

Walker said, “They usually don’t.”

McClaren stared down at the coffee table, then seemed to remember something. “That’s right. Yours was one of the names on the vulnerability assessment for Florida last year. There’s a copy on my desk right now.”

“I didn’t do much on it,” said Walker. “Just checked the statistics and made sure the arithmetic supported the recommendations.”

“But you know the problems,” said McClaren. “We live on the business of wealthy individuals. If you won’t insure their houses, they won’t let you insure their lives, cars, jewelry, and art collections and sell them annuities. A bigger company will put together a package and sell it cheaper. You can lay off some of the biggest bets with reinsurers, raise deductibles. But disasters are a matter of time. Sooner or later, you have to pay off.”

McClaren gazed at the table again for a moment, then straightened. “Well, let’s do what we can about the problem we already have. I want you to hand off the routine stuff and stay on this Ellen Snyder business. Joyce knows you’re occupied. Go back through dead files and records. See if there have been any other instances when we might have paid these people. I’ve got to know if this is the first time or the twenty-first.”

“All right,” said Walker.

“The second thing—and this could be harder—is that you’ve got to keep this project to yourself.” He caught Walker’s expression. “Stillman again.”

“I recognized him.”

“Stillman is . . . what he is. If you want his services, you have to make some attempt to do what he says. You can’t get a modified version of Stillman.” He paused. “His ways of thinking sometimes have a special utility in a place like this, where everybody is smart and everybody knows how to keep up a good appearance.”

“I have no objection to keeping what I’m doing secret. If Joyce knows I’m occupied, it shouldn’t be hard. We all generally work alone anyway.”

McClaren stood and began to drift toward the outer office, so Walker knew he was about to be dismissed. “While this is going on, if you want to tell me anything, come directly up here. Now that Sarah knows you, there won’t be any problem.” They shook hands in the doorway, and Walker turned and heard the door close behind him.

As Walker made his way to the elevator, he passed the big desk in the reception area. He glanced at the woman, and tried to fit the name Sarah to her. She was now facing away and typing something at an incredible speed on a computer terminal while she spoke to someone on the speaker of her telephone. He knew she must be aware of him passing, but she took no notice of his departure.

When he got out of the elevator on the seventh floor, he heard the elevator beside it open, and people arriving for work spilled out toward the bay. He felt a small hand tighten on his biceps, and turned to see that it was Cardarelli, looking up at him happily.

“Walker,” she said. “You’re much cuter than I remembered you.” She looked more closely, released him, and shrugged. “No, I guess you’re not. My mistake. The light must have been in my eyes for a second.”

“Hi, Cardarelli,” he answered. “Thanks for not putting tacks on my chair while I was gone this time.”

“The janitor must have seen them and put them in your desk. Where were you, by the way?”

“I was on my honeymoon.”

She stopped and stared at him suspiciously, not quite positive that he wasn’t telling the truth. She said, “You got married?”

“No. I just try to get to the good parts first, in case there’s an earthquake or an act of war.”

She nodded. “Reading actuarial tables can salvage even the most dismal life. It’s a surprise to see you, though. Some of us thought Stillman had dragged you off to jail.”

“Who?”

“Stillman. The security guy. One day you were gone, and so was he.”

“Oh, him,” said Walker. He took another step to the entrance of his cubicle. “That’s a relief.”

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Well, welcome home. I’ve got to go warn the typists to wear longer skirts again,” and stepped off down the aisle toward the corridor.

Walker began his new assignment as soon as the others were all safely occupied in their own cubicles and offices. He found a surprising array of fraudulent claims over the past ten years. There were faked injuries, fires that the investigators found were arson, people who caused car accidents intentionally and then got quack doctors to certify spinal damage. There were even a couple of clients who had been murdered by the beneficiaries of their life insurance policies. What surprised Walker most was that in about half of the cases, he found the tracks of Max Stillman. The signs were never obtrusive. Usually he didn’t appear until the page summarizing the accounting for the case. There, among the legal fees, copying costs, and longdistance telephone bills, would be a notation that said simply, “Stillman and Associates.”

He studied the cases, but found nothing about them that reminded him of Ellen Snyder. In even the most elaborate schemes, the culprits were stationary. They would submit a false claim and stay put, waiting for payment and hoping that nobody would learn what they had done or, in any event, would never find enough evidence to prove it.

Ellen Snyder’s murder was not like that. The killers had known in advance that the fraud would be discovered, the checks traced, the trails followed. Their solution had exploited the weakness in the system, which was that these things took time. They were prepared to move faster. When the check came, they had it deposited within an hour in an account where it was sure to clear early, so it could be paid into the next set of accounts. And they had provided a prime suspect by making the McClaren’s employee who had approved payment disappear.

That night, he went home and stared at the telephone for five minutes, then walked to a restaurant a mile away to eat a solitary dinner. When he came home, he found himself staring at the phone again. He took the card out of his wallet, turned it over, and dialed the number.

Serena’s voice said, “Yeah?”

Walker paused for a moment at the sound. Now that he had heard it, this was real. “Hello,” he said. “Serena?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s me,” he said.

It became Mary Catherine Casey’s voice, tight with suppressed laughter. “Which me is it? Am I supposed to guess?”

“John Walker.”

“Oh, that me,” she said. “Are you calling to tell me that you’ve been dreaming of me every night, or that you want your money back on the flowers?”

“I’m glad you got them,” he said. “At least that went right. You like flowers? I never asked.”

She said, “I liked that Constantine was stricken with fear and dismay when they came here. He’s afraid I’ll run off with you. Don’t get excited: if I felt like running, I’d run. Flowers wouldn’t have much to do with it.”

“But I have been dreaming about you.”

“How romantic. Did I have clothes on?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable question,” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t, did I?”

“Well . . . not really.”

“That’s comforting,” she said. “I was beginning to be afraid you were more complicated than that.” She went silent for a moment. “I see you’re calling from home. You must have found the girl.”

“She’s dead,” said Walker. “They killed her in Illinois. I guess I thought Stillman told you, but . . . ”

“I wondered why I hadn’t picked her up again,” she said. “Are you okay?”

Walker took a breath as he considered. “I’m not sad for me. I guess that’s what you meant. I’m sad for her. She was just this girl, a nice person who did her job and didn’t harm anybody.”

She assumed her business voice, as though he had been talking to Mary Casey and had not heard the click when his call had been transferred to Serena. “If we can help, call us.”

“Not ‘us.’ The one I was calling was you. I wondered if I could fly down on the weekend and see you.”

“Uh-uh.”

“If this weekend isn’t a good time, I could—”

“Not interested,” she interrupted.

“Oh,” he said quietly.

“You haven’t finished with her.”

“She’s dead.”

“That’s worse. She’s not going to turn out to be a thief, or make any mistakes you can’t forgive. I can’t compete with her.”

“Who asked you to? She’s gone.”

“I can hear her in your voice. Look, if she was this nice person, then thinking about her for a while is no more than she deserved from you. So do it. When you’ve let go of her, you can call me.” The line went dead.

Walker spent the next two hours searching his mind for arguments that she had not given him a chance to use. He was over Ellen Snyder, and if he had not been, she was gone. He still thought about her sometimes, but the way he thought had changed. She was an assignment, a case that his boss had asked him to study and solve.

As he formulated the argument, he realized that it sounded false even to him. He was not in love with Ellen Snyder, but Ellen Snyder was not a case. She was a person who had been subjected to fear and probably pain, and worse, a nightmare feeling that nobody knew what was happening to her, and no help would come. And no help had come. It made him sick. The fact that he had once loved her had made her so familiar that he could see it happening in his imagination, know what she had been thinking. He did not love her anymore, but Serena was not wrong.

The whole next day, Walker worked on the fraud project. He moved forward in time to cases that were currently under investigation, but it was impossible to find anything that was suspicious in the same way as Ellen Snyder’s case. It was nearly quitting time when he noticed a commotion in the bay. There were heavy footsteps, male voices, the sounds of furniture being moved.

He saw Joyce Hazelton pass by his doorway, so he stepped out. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, I hope,” she said. “We’re just getting the bay ready. If Hurricane Theresa keeps moving toward Florida overnight, we’ll need to have a phone bank to handle the calls. Everybody sits in here and grabs whatever phone rings. After the L.A. quake in ’94 we were at it for nearly two weeks.”

“What should I be doing?” he said.

“Going home,” she said. “Get lots of sleep. If you’re smart, you’ll pack an overnight bag and keep it ready, so if it happens you’ll be able to brush your teeth and wear clean clothes. They’ve clocked winds up to a hundred and twenty and growing. If it doesn’t lose steam, the phones will be ringing when you get here tomorrow.”

The call came even earlier. It was three
A.M.
when Walker’s telephone rang, and he was awake instantly. Joyce Hazelton’s voice was quiet and clam. “John, it’s what we talked about this afternoon. I just got the call myself. We’ve all got to get into the office right away. It’s already morning in Florida.” She hung up before he could ask any questions. As he dressed, he decided she had probably been wise. The questions that he could have asked were things he would find out when he got there.

Walker drove through the nearly empty streets, making good time. He listened to the radio, tapping the button from station to station, hearing the drone of voices on call-in talk shows, snatches of sports reports, blares of music. When he finally heard the word “hurricane,” it was on some sort of listing that had to do with travel, and the next words were “and in Minneapolis, partly cloudy turning to fair.”

He parked in the garage at three-forty, started toward his trunk to bring his suitcase with him, then thought better of it. The parking spaces around him were filling up quickly. If he arrived with a suitcase, some of those people would be amused. If there turned out to be a need for it later, they would be much less so. He entered the lobby and saw that night security was still in effect, so there was a short delay while he signed in at the desk, and then another delay while a security guard used his key to operate the elevators to the upper floors.

When Walker reached the seventh floor, he saw that the transformation was already complete. Twenty of the forty desks in the open bay were occupied. There were typists and receptionists beside actuaries and underwriters. There were even a few of the investment people in the spaces at the corner nearest their corridor. But his most vivid sensation was the sound of telephones ringing all over the room.

People were snatching up receivers, uttering a few acknowledgments as they took notes on message pads. Then they would tap in policy numbers on their computer terminals and stare at the screens while they tried to answer questions. Walker could see already that many of them were out of their depth. A few would look puzzled, then raise their hands in the air like schoolchildren.

Joyce Hazelton would stride up the aisle to answer the question or take over the call, but it was a Joyce Hazelton he had never seen. She had always been made up and combed like a minor official of the State Department, always wearing a ring, a pin, and small ear studs of some semiprecious stone that matched her suit. Today she was wearing faded blue jeans, a pair of bright white running shoes, and a gray sweatshirt that said
PRINCETON 70
in blue letters. He moved closer to her as she took a telephone out of the hand of a man he recognized as a vice president who issued performance bonds on construction projects.

“Yes, sir,” she said into the phone. “I’m a supervisor. My name is Joyce Hazelton.” She was leaning down to read the computer screen. “Your premium was received on the twenty-third, which is plenty of time.” She pointed to a line on the screen so the vice president could see where it was. “Your coverage is in full force.” She listened. “What I would do in your place is make a videotape of the house. Just walk through every room with your belongings still in place, and then the outside too. That part I would do while I was getting into the car to drive away from the beach area.” She paused and listened again. “No, sir. If there really are hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds, we’d rather pay off on your home owner’s policy than your life insurance.”