Death Benefits (7 page)

6

Walker sensed that he was in a large, empty space. His ears told him that the sounds were coming from a distance, but it was some debased offshoot of human reason that told him he could not be alone. Spaces this size were public. Bits of memory rose into his consciousness. Had he passed out in the restaurant? He sat up quickly. It was a hotel room. He was still dressed, lying on top of a bed. He remembered walking in here and lying down, but he also remembered telling himself he was just going to test the bed for a moment to see if it was comfortable. He had planned to get up.

Stillman was sitting in a wing chair across the room, and the rustling noises had been the newspaper he was reading. He looked over the top of his paper at Walker, then turned a page.

“What time is it?” asked Walker. His voice didn’t sound as though it belonged to him. He cleared his throat.

“About nine. Don’t hurt yourself trying to roll the stone away from the tomb, though. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Walker crawled off the bed and walked into the bathroom. He found a paper bag on the sink. Inside were a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, mouthwash, comb, and a receipt that said Hilton Gift Shop. There were bars of soap in packages in the soap trays, so he decided he was adequately equipped for the moment.

Walker brushed his teeth and stood under the hot shower for a few minutes before he was ready to face considerations that had to do with the future. He began with the immediate future, because that didn’t challenge his mind too much. He had come to Los Angeles with only the clothes on his back, so he didn’t have to decide what to wear. As his mind began to forage beyond the moment, it collided with Stillman, and he felt the urge to stay right where he was, letting the water pound his scalp and run warm down his body to his toes until Stillman went away. He had heard him say, “We’ve got plenty of time.” It was innocuous and undemanding, but it implied that there was something coming. He reminded himself that last night Stillman had said they were going to search for Ellen.

Moments later, Walker came out of the bathroom and put on his clothes. Stillman stood, refolded his newspaper, dropped it into the wastebasket, then stepped to the door. “Come on.” It was only then that Walker noticed Stillman was wearing a freshly pressed gray suit that made him look like a senator.

Walker quickly surveyed the room, then realized he had been checking to make sure he had not left anything behind. He had nothing except his wallet and keys, and he could feel them in his pants pockets. He followed Stillman along the hall without having the slightest memory of the velvet-flocked blue-and-white wallpaper, then rode down with him in an elevator. The elevator stopped every second or third floor to pick up groups of middle-aged women who seemed to know one another, some of them pulling suitcases on wheels, so that by the time it had descended ten floors, Walker was occupying himself by estimating the weight of each passenger and her burdens, adding them up and comparing the total to the elevator’s capacity printed on the little card beside the door.

When they got out in the lobby, Stillman turned to him. “How close did we come?”

“One more stop might have done it. We had about four hundred more pounds.”

“It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” asked Stillman. “Not dying by yourself, but with all those women hugging you and screaming all the way down, so our bodies would be all smeared together like a big, runny omelette.” He stopped. “Hungry?”

Walker was defiant. “Sure. Do we have time?”

“Let me worry about that.”

They ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and Walker felt pleased with his decision. The food seemed to give his body energy, and the coffee cleared his mind. He watched Stillman paying the bill, then followed him out the front door.

Stillman turned his head to stare at Walker critically, then waved off the valet parking attendant. “We’ll have to stop and get you some clothes and stuff.” He turned and walked west on Wilshire Boulevard.

Stillman stopped to look into the Neiman Marcus window, and Walker pointedly kept moving. Stillman called, “Hold it,” and Walker came back. “I know you can’t afford this, but don’t worry about it. We’re on an expense account.”

“You may be,” said Walker. “But I doubt that it includes me, and I’m sure it doesn’t include clothes.”

Stillman glanced at his watch and said affably, “It includes anything I say it includes. I don’t itemize.”

Walker cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.

“My clients know I’m not wasting their time on that sort of thing. If they want my services, they pay what I cost and don’t get on my nerves. I don’t bid, I don’t give estimates, and I don’t account for things.”

“They go for that?” asked Walker. “McClaren’s goes for that?”

“If they didn’t want to, they wouldn’t have to. They have a telephone book. Now, we’re about to go meet some people. I want them to look at you once and make some unfounded assumptions. What that’s going to require is that you go in there and buy yourself a good shirt, a suit off the rack that fits you, and a tie in a tasteful color and subdued pattern that does not include any stripes.”

“So it’s a disguise for a meeting?”

“Jesus, I hope it’s not a disguise. I’ve been giving you the benefit of the doubt. We’re going to see some people who need to assume that you’re very high up on the food chain. We may see them more than once in the next few days. So while you’re at it, start at the skin and work outward. Buy three or four suits, some jackets and pairs of pants, shirts, shoes and so on. I’ll go buy you a suitcase to hold them in, then be back in time to sign the slip.”

Walker frowned.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I’m wondering . . . . why no stripes?”

“Because that’s what British regimental ties have, and if you ended up with the colors of the Queen’s Own Thirty-sixth Welsh Bushwhackers or the Eton All-Castrato Choir you wouldn’t know it.”

“I guess that’s true,” said Walker. “But would whoever we’re going to see?”

“One of them might,” said Stillman. “Just go.”

Walker stepped inside the glass doors, but he watched for a moment. Stillman looked up the street, then trotted across and disappeared into another store. As Walker looked at suits, he tried to decide what was bothering him. It was the rapidity of the things that had happened, and were still happening. Time seemed to speed up around Stillman. It seemed to Walker that one moment he had been in the office, and the next he was rattling along on rails at eighty miles an hour. He might very well be heading in the right direction, but maybe moving at high speed was sufficient reason to drag his feet.

When the clerk had managed to work his way down the hay bale of clothes he had laid on the counter for Walker, add up the numbers on the price tags, and pack them all into four huge shopping bags, Stillman arrived, toting a suitcase. He handed the clerk a card, signed the slip, and helped Walker carry his bags to the street. Walker recognized the car Stillman had rented at the airport. Stillman opened the door and tossed his purchases into the back seat.

Walker said carefully, “Thank you for the clothes.”

Stillman nodded. “Get in the back with them.”

As they drove off, Stillman said over his shoulder, “You can get your clothes changed while we’re on the way.”

“In the car?”

“If you don’t change your shorts at a red light, you should be okay. Just have your tie knotted and your coat on before we get to Pasadena.”

Walker opened boxes until he had a complete outfit laid out on the seat beside him and the tags removed, then waited for Stillman to reach the freeway before he began to change. When he had finished, Stillman took the Colorado Boulevard exit and drove another fifteen minutes along tree-lined side streets before he stopped the car at the curb. “This is it,” he said.

Walker looked at the two-story stone building and recognized a brass plaque that appeared to be a replica of the one on the mainoffice building in San Francisco. It said, in bold letters,
MCCLAREN
and, in smaller ones below,
LIFE AND CASUALTY
. He got out and stood on the sidewalk. When Stillman came around the car he studied Walker. “Good. You look about right.”

Stillman pretended to be searching for something in his coat pockets. “Keep your eyes open. This isn’t a cordial visit to a field office, it’s an investigation. Watch everybody you can see all the time. People are going to smile and shake your hand, but they’re no friends of yours.”

He stepped off, opened the door to let Walker go in ahead of him, then lingered for a moment. There was a young woman at the front desk who wore a thin wire telephone microphone that came from a spot above her right ear across her cheek to a place just to the right of her lips. She was looking at them while she spoke, but Walker couldn’t tell at first whether she was speaking to them. Then she repeated, “May I help you?” more pointedly.

“This is Mr. Walker, and I’m Stillman,” said Stillman. Walker noticed that Stillman’s manner seemed to have changed subtly. He was putting Walker ahead of him.

The girl’s eyes focused ahead as she pressed a button and said, “The gentlemen are here for your meeting.” Then she pressed the button again, took off her headset, and stood up. “I’ll show you the way,” she said, and left the telephone buttons to blink soundlessly.

Walker waited for Stillman to lead, but a steady pressure of Stillman’s hand on his back made him move ahead. He had not been imagining it: Stillman was keeping everyone’s attention on Walker. He stepped off smartly, looking around him at the office with frank curiosity. There were three people at desks that would have been like his if they had been in cubicles—a man in his thirties, a woman in her sixties, and a girl who looked like she was barely out of high school. He could tell from the forms on their desks and in their trays that they must be a sales support staff, processing new policies.

Then there was a hallway with doors on the right side. The first room they passed held a couple of fax machines, a copying machine, and the cache where the policy forms had come from. The second was a tiny office. At the corner of the building was a conference room.

As he entered, Walker could see there were three people already sitting around the long rectangular table. He sensed that he was supposed to take their minds off Stillman, so he became uncharacteristically aggressive. He smiled and said, “Hello. I’m John Walker, from the San Francisco office.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “And this is Mr. Stillman.”

A tall, beefy man about Stillman’s age in a dark gray suit and a white shirt that was too tight around his neck returned his smile and wrapped his sausagelike fingers around Walker’s hand to give it an enthusiastic shake. “Dale Winters,” he said. “I manage the Pasadena office. This is Daphne Pool, my assistant.”

A thin woman about forty-five years old with sharp gray eyes and silver glasses chained around her neck over a slate-gray suit moved a silver pen to her left hand, gave Walker’s hand a quick squeeze, and released it.

The third man was in his early thirties, three inches shorter than Winters, with blond hair that was just a bit too long and too expensively sculpted to belong to someone who worked in the insurance business. He jumped up with an abrupt energy and leaned across the table to shake Walker’s hand, his coat open and his tie a little loose, but he didn’t smile. He sat down again with exactly the same energy. Walker heard Winters saying, “And this is Mr. Werfel.”

Walker’s eyes shot to Stillman, whose face had assumed the remote, peaceful calm of a statue of Buddha presiding silently in the dim recesses of an empty temple. Walker forced his face into an achingly false smile and said, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Werfel.”

He took a seat across the table from Werfel and watched Daphne Pool’s thin hand slide a red binder onto the table under his chest. He nodded to her and opened the cover. There was a photocopy of an insurance policy. He saw the name Andrew Werfel and turned past it to the next divider. There was the death certificate of Andrew Werfel, then a series of copies: a birth certificate that said Alan Weems Werfel, and a driver’s license that said the same and had a picture of the man across from him looking with half-lidded eyes and disarranged hair at the camera. Then there was a copy of the first page of a passport with a much better picture of Alan Werfel. The final section contained copies of the standard forms for settling an insurance claim, all signed
Alan Werfel
and
Ellen Snyder.

He closed the notebook and glanced at Stillman, who was now leaning back beside him with his fingers knitted across his solar plexus and his eyes opaque. Walker tried to imagine what an important person from the home office would say, but he wasn’t even certain that he knew what such a person would be doing here. He turned to Winters. “Dale, can you bring me up to speed? Where do we stand now?”

Winters looked uncomfortable. His eyes flicked up nervously toward Werfel, then he said, “That little binder tells you just about everything. There was a policy. Mr. Werfel senior passed away. A gentleman purporting to be Mr. Werfel junior called the office to find out how to submit a claim. He was referred to our assistant manager, Ellen Snyder, who explained the procedures and set up an appointment. Meanwhile she researched the policy, got the necessary information, requested a settlement check, and so on. When she met with him, he had the proper identification . . . ” He glanced at Werfel again, this time in a way that seemed to be apologetic but wasn’t quite. “Or what seemed to be proper. Miss Snyder certified the claim, and disbursed the death benefit.”

Walker wished Winters had just said “money.” “Is Miss Snyder going to be joining us?”

This made Winters so embarrassed that Walker regretted the question. “She’s not in today,” Winters said numbly.

Walker pretended that had been an answer. He smiled again. “And, Mr. Werfel, I assume you showed up the same way later, to submit your claim?”

Werfel nodded sullenly.

Walker wondered what Werfel was doing here. It occurred to him that maybe he had been waiting for Walker. The thought made a chill start in the back of his neck and move down his spine. Stillman had given these people the idea that Walker was a high-level executive, brought him in here dressed like one, and duped him into acting like one. There seemed to be no way out except forward. “I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you, Mr. Werfel.”