Vanishing Act (20 page)

"I’ll save a shell for the radiator," he whispered. "Nobody’s going to kill me and ride away from it in comfort." He eased himself to the ground and lay prone with the shotgun aimed at the car. Jane began to crawl on her belly, closer and closer to the dark shape. She had gone twenty feet when she touched something hard and cold. It felt like a piece of metal, set into the ground. A drain? She ran her fingertips across it and felt raised letters. I...N...M...E...M...O... a cemetery. It was a grave marker.

She heard a snick-chuff sound, coming from the other side of the car. Somebody was digging. She could hear the clods of earth landing on the pile, some granules rolling back down, and then snick-chuff again. So that was why the other two had left. They were working in shifts. It was a lot of work to dig a grave, but not much room.

She crawled closer until she was beside the car. The trunk was open, but there was no light inside the lid. She knew she had to look inside, and that when she did, the sight she was going to see was John. They were in a town they didn’t know any better than she did, and they had decided to use the old, reliable way of disposing of the body: finding a fresh grave, digging it up, and burying the new one with the legitimate resident.

She forced her breaths to come more deeply. The air seemed to seep into her lungs and lie there, and then she would have to think to force it out and let in more. She tasted her dry tongue and made her way to the back of the car. She put her hand on the rear bumper and experienced a sensation like the one she had felt when standing on a high diving board as a little girl, those few seconds when it still seemed possible to turn and go back down.

She found herself counting silently: one ... two ... three, and then popped her head up and saw ... nothing. The trunk was empty except for a flashlight. The way it was lying there on the center of the flat, empty surface was almost like an instruction from somewhere to pick it up.

She grasped it and took a few breaths to calm herself. She could hear the shovel noise again, and now she could tell it wasn’t one shovel. They were both digging. She began to crawl toward the sound. She couldn’t see a silhouette or a shadow, but then she reached the place and she knew. They were already too deep in the hole, over their heads with piles of dirt on both sides. She moved to the nearest pile of dirt, feeling her way for John’s body.

She grasped the slide of the shotgun and stood up just as the flash came. She saw all of it at once. The two men were standing over the casket and they had the top half of it open, and the one from the apartment was taking another flash picture. Down in the coffin was Harry Kemple. The darkness closed on all of them instantly, there was the familiar whirr, then the man aimed again and the flash came with a click, and then darkness.

Jane shone the flashlight into the open grave and shouted, "Police officers. Freeze." She hoped Jake could hear her and not just see the light and shoot it.

The two men in the pit below her stood still, straddling the casket. They seemed unsure of what to do, but certain that they weren’t going to be able to find adequate footing in the narrow hole to turn around and face her, let alone draw a gun and shoot her. They raised their hands.

"Turn around," she said.

They slowly, carefully tried to free their feet from one side of the casket, turn about to step across it, and face in the other direction, but neither was able to do it with his hands in the air. Each had to lean across the casket and hold the opposite wall to do it. Then they raised their hands again and tried to stare past the beam of the flashlight to see her.

"It’s not what it looks like," said one of them. She recognized his thick arms and broad shoulders. He was the one who had climbed in Harry’s window, and he looked down so she could see the camera at his feet. "It’s just a camera, see?"

The other, a taller, thin man with a permanent look of distaste holding the muscles around his lips rigid, said, "She don’t think we killed him, for Chrissake." To Jane he said, "I know this looks strange. Weird, even."

"Save it," she said gruffly. "First I want to see you slowly take your guns out and toss them up over the pile of dirt, one at a time. And give a lot of thought to how you look while you’re doing it. If I get startled, you’re dead. First you, the tall one."

The tall man hesitated for a second, and she added, "We know you’re armed. Just having a gun on you means I can shoot now and never have to answer any questions." Looking at them, she decided that they had certainly been arrested more times than she had, and they were beginning to sense that this wasn’t normal. She pumped the shotgun. There was already a shell in the chamber, and she ejected it onto the ground, but the sound had its desired effect. The tall man bent over, took a gun out of an ankle holster, and threw it over the mound of dirt to the grass. The second man took a gun out of the waistband of his pants at the small of his back and did the same.

"Now turn and put your hands on the side of the pit."

This seemed to comfort the two men, who executed the movement with an assurance that could only have come from practice. They had their legs apart and their arms out from their bodies, and leaned across the casket to look down at the poker-faced Harry.

"Now, tell me your names."

The tall one said, "Samuel Michko."

The wide one said, "Ronald Silla."

She said, "All right, Sam and Ron. Tell me what you’re doing here."

Sam and Ron strained to look under their outstretched arms at each other. "She’s not a cop," said Sam. He turned toward the light. "You’re not a cop."

"No," she said. "Bad luck for you. I’m the woman you’ve been chasing all over the continent."

"Uh," said Ron, as though he had been kicked. Sam was silent.

"Why did you dig up Harry?" she asked.

"To take his picture," said Ron, pointing at the camera again with his foot.

"What do you want his picture for?"

"You don’t know how Mr. Cappadocia’s mind works," said Sam. "He’s from the old school. You tell him there’s a duck, you better be able to show him some feathers."

Jane’s mind silently exclaimed: Cappadocia? They work for Jerry Cappadocia’s father? They should have wanted to talk to Harry, not kill him. She needed to think. She said, "It’s a lot of work."

Sam turned a little to squint up at the light. "Jerry was important. Usually, somebody important gets popped, and sooner or later there’s no big mystery. Somebody else ends up with whatever he had. But Jerry Cappadocia dies, and that’s it. Nothing happens. So Harry gets to be important"

"You mean Mr. Cappadocia wouldn’t believe Harry was dead?"

"He figured it was just possible that Harry got cornered and went to the cops to make a deal."

"What kind of deal?"

"The only kind that’s worth anything. They’d stage his death, and he’d tell them whatever he saw that night. You think they wouldn’t do that?"

"I’ve heard of it."

"Harry was the perfect candidate. He’s been gone for five, six years, and nobody has stopped looking. And all the cops wanted him for was questioning. He didn’t do anything except see Jerry die."

"Why didn’t you take pictures right away?"

"What do you mean, right away?" asked Ron. "How the hell were we supposed to do that?"

"When you killed him."

"Killed him?" snapped Sam. "What are you talking about killed him? Martin killed him. Mr. C. read it in the papers and sent us out to make sure."

She sensed that if she didn’t say exactly the right thing now, she was going to reveal her real ignorance and they would know she couldn’t catch them in a lie. They had said Martin. She had to find out who Martin was.

"That’s all we’re doing," said Ron eagerly. "We’re not bothering anybody. It’s over. We’re just taking pictures."

"Tell me what you know about Martin."

"Nothing a lot of other people don’t know," snapped Sam. "When Mr. C. heard Martin was out, he called everybody in and told us to make sure he didn’t drop out of sight. So some guys watched him. That’s all."

"That isn’t all, is it?" She tried to make it sound ominous.

"It was the money," said Ron.

"Martin don’t need lessons from you," said Sam. He looked up at Jane again. "Obviously."

Jake suddenly appeared at Jane’s elbow. She was startled and shone the flashlight on him, then remembered and turned it back to the pit. Both men had moved fast, but they had only gotten to the piles of dirt at the edge of the pit. They slowly slid back, taking little showers of loose dirt with them, and assumed the position again.

"Don’t make me kill you," she said.

"No argument there," said Ron.

"Where was I?" said Sam, resigned. "Next thing we hear, he’s got a lot of money. This does not look good in a man like Martin after eight years."

Without knowing when it had happened, Jane realized who they were talking about. Eight years. Of course. An ex-policeman who suddenly had a lot of cash and was ready to run. They thought he knew where Harry was, and he was going to hide in the same place. But why did they call him Martin? Had he used a false name to get to Buffalo? She had to be sure. "Eight years? As a cop?"

"Cop? What cop? Martin did eight of a five-to-ten for a concealed weapon. Harry did, like, two of a three-to-five for fraud or something, years ago. Martin being what he was, which was what got him the hard time for a small bust, they—"

"What he was? What was he?" Her head was pounding now, building up a pressure behind her eyes.

"Jesus," said Ron. "She doesn’t know."

"Know what?" said Sam, annoyed.

"Anything. Anything about him."

Sam squinted up into the beam of the flashlight. "He’s right, isn’t he?"

She tried to think of an answer, but all she kept running into was the truth. "Yes," she said.

Sam rolled his eyes and shook his head in frustration. "Martin is a guy you hire when you want somebody to be dead. He was kind of on the edge of being famous at one time, which was probably why the cops felt it was worth searching him one night. They found a gun—"

"They probably planted it on him," said Ron.

Sam said icily, "You want to tell this?"

"No," said Ron. "I was just saying he wasn’t dumb enough to let them find a ..." He shrugged and let it trail off.

"Anyway," said Sam. "He got ten years, because they couldn’t prove he had done anybody with it, but they knew damned well that was what paid the rent. So he did eight of the ten, which is a world record for recent times unless you kill somebody while you’re in the joint—"

"Which he did," said Ron. "That’s what I heard. They just couldn’t prove it was him." He looked up at Jane. "So many suspects, you know? In a maximum security prison it seems like half the population is there for dusting somebody."

"Shut up, will you?" hissed Sam.

"Why, you in a hurry to finish the story so she can drop the hammer on you?"

"I’m trying to save your ass. I sense that there’s a misunderstanding here. If she didn’t know he was a killer, maybe we got something to talk about. Now I lost where I was."

"Jail," said Jane. Her voice was hollow.

"Jail. Right. Martin was Harry’s cellmate in Marion. A guy like Harry, he just can’t defend himself. His only hope is if there’s somebody around like Martin, who likes him but not too much, if you know what I mean. That’s the way it was. So Mr. C. figures it’s just possible that when Martin gets out, he’s going to look up his old cellmate, Harry. Who else has he got after eight years?"

"And then somebody found out he had money?" asked Jane.

"The money," said Ron eagerly. "He gets out after eight years of unemployment, and he’s got a lot of money. He is walking up to every bank in Chicago, and the tellers are coming up with, like, wads of it. Sometimes the manager has to come and match his signature and stuff."

Sam said, "So where’s this money coming from? Who is going to give this guy who has only one skill all this money? And who’s the mark that’s worth that much? The guy that nobody else has been able to find for five years."

"So you followed him from St. Louis?"

"Hell, no," said Sam. "We followed him all the way from Chicago. We were all set to hang around St. Louis. We figured if he was there, that was where Harry must be. We got a room, changed cars so Martin wouldn’t notice there’s this car with Illinois plates. With four guys to switch off, we figured we could probably keep going long enough to see where Harry was, and keep Martin from killing him."

"Then he gets on a bus," said Ron, outraged at the memory of it. "What the hell is a guy with a suitcase full of money doing getting on a bus? We didn’t have any choice but to drop everything, pile into one car, and follow the bus."

"All the way to Buffalo," said Sam. "We lost him after he hooked up with you." He gave a sour little nod. "As you know."

"And he got to Harry," said Ron.

For the first time Jake spoke. "Where is he now?"

"That is the question, isn’t it?" sneered Sam.

Jane said, "Did he kill Jerry Cappadocia?"

"No," said Ron. "I told you he was in jail. He just got out."

She stared at them for a moment. "What is his full name?"

"James Michael Martin."

Jake was touching Jane’s elbow. After a moment she glanced at him. He whispered, "What do you want to do with them?"

She could see that the two men in the pit knew exactly what she and Jake were whispering about. They exchanged anxious looks, as though each one was trying to get the other to agree on what desperate effort they should try. She said to them, "Before you leave, cover up poor Harry."

She turned and walked across the open lawn. Jake hurried after her. "Shouldn’t we call the police or something? They’ll come after us."

"No, they won’t," she said. "They know I don’t know anything. Never did." She walked on. Now and then her foot would light on a flat metal marker, but she paid no attention. If the dead could feel anything, it wouldn’t be anger at a foolish girl far from home, stumbling in the darkness.

22

Later that night, Jane didn’t agree to Jake’s proposal to move out of Harry’s apartment building. She just didn’t resist. She didn’t seem to care where her body was, just so there was no distraction while she stared at the opaque surfaces of walls and at the reflections in darkened windows. He picked out a small, cheap motel on Cabrillo Boulevard across the street from the ocean that he had discovered earlier that day. He parked the car and went inside while she sat motionless in the passenger seat. She walked into the room he rented, lay down on the bed, and closed her eyes. The next afternoon when Jake went out alone, she might have noticed that he had taken both of the shotguns with him, locked in the trunk of the car, but she didn’t show any interest in what he did or where he went.

When he came back and knocked on the door after the sun had set, she let him in. She didn’t ask where he had been. When she saw that he had brought dinner from a take-out fish restaurant, she sat down at the little table across from him and ate. When they were finished eating, as Jake stood up to take their two plates out to the trash bin in the parking lot, she looked up at him with a curious alertness.

"How good a friend is Dave Dormont?"

Jake was surprised to hear her voice after so many hours, and relieved to have a chance to talk to her, to be able to look at her and see her eyes. "A good friend," he said. "I’ve known him for close to sixty years."

"I want you to call him."

Jake felt a little uneasy, an intuition that her voice didn’t sound right. She didn’t sound like a young woman who knew she had gotten in too deep and was ready to turn the whole thing over to the police. Her eyes glittered as though there were something hot behind them. "I think that’s a good idea."

"It is," she said. "Call him at home. Tonight."

Jake smiled. "There are times when you have to step back and turn things over to the people who get paid for doing it." He waited for her to agree.

She didn’t appear to be listening. "Those men said he had been in jail. If he was, there would be a file. I want you to get it."

"A file? What kind of file?"

"Police have a system for sharing information about criminals. The federal government gives them money for a network called the N.C.I.C. Some of it is computerized, but that’s not what I want. I want a copy of his file from the prison at Marion, Illinois." She glanced over at the telephone expectantly.

Jake sat down at the table and studied her. "If Dave Dormont could get something like that, it would be privileged information. Why would he give it to me?"

"Because you pulled him out of Ellicott Creek fifty years ago," said Jane. She wasn’t smiling. "And you’ve spent the next fifty telling everybody in Deganawida what a great guy he is, and paid your tickets instead of asking him to fix them."

"What do you want to do with it?" said Jake.

She looked at him, and her eyes had not changed. They were still sharp and clear and unblinking. "I want to know who he really was—who did this to Harry and to a man you don’t know in Vancouver and to me. I have a right to know."

"I can’t argue with that," said Jake, warily. He looked up at her again. "It just doesn’t feel right." Then he added, "So I can’t ask Dave to do it."

"Okay," she said. She picked up the paper plates and plastic spoons, pushed them back into the bag, and headed for the door.

Jake could see the wall coming down between them. "I managed to get a full refund on those two shotguns," he said, watching her face.

She didn’t flinch. "I should think so," she said. "They’ve never been fired."

"And wait until you see the deal I got on the plane tickets back to Buffalo."

She seemed completely normal now. "How much?"

"Three twenty-two."

"Great," she said. She set down the plates, picked up her purse, sat down and wrote rapidly, then tore the check out of her wallet and handed it to him. "Thanks, Jake. Thanks for everything."

"You didn’t have to pay me back now," he said, staring at the check.

"It’s the best way to do things," she said as she stuffed the wallet back into her purse. "If I forgot, you’d get all uncomfortable about reminding me, wouldn’t you?"

"I don’t know," he admitted.

She walked to the door with the plates and garbage. "And don’t feel bad about the file. I’m not mad about it."

She stepped out the door and closed it behind her. Jake sat at the table and thought about it. He tried to tell himself it was right. Hell, he knew it was right. You didn’t leave a loaded shotgun lying around in the same room with a woman who had just learned that the man she thought she loved was using her so he could kill somebody. The file was the same thing as the shotguns.

Whatever she had planned to do with that fellow’s file, it wasn’t something that was good for her. He was lost in thought for a long time, and then it occurred to him that there was no rational reason for a woman not to have put down her purse before she took the plates out to the trash bin. He stood up and hurried to the door, but before he opened it he knew that she was gone.

Jane walked without hurrying. There were a lot of pedestrians out at this time of night in Santa Barbara, coming and going from the restaurants and movie theaters. She bought a copy of The Santa Barbara News-Press from a vending machine on State Street near the art museum and sat on the steps to read it in the light of the streetlamps. She could see after only a few minutes that there wasn’t much action in a town this size, but there were enough cases on the calendar to work.

She walked along State Street and turned right on Anapamu. The big white building on the right with its gigantic green lawns and patches of brilliant flowers had been a place that she had liked when she was here before, until she had learned that it was a courthouse. She climbed one of the outer staircases that ran along the wall and stepped into the second-floor hallway. The scuffed, uneven Mexican tiles and antique furniture along the walls outside the courtrooms made it all seem benevolent and pretty. She walked along the hall past the closed doors of the courtrooms and turned down the next hall. She read the names on the doors. Judge Joseph Gonzales, Judge David Rittenour, Judge Karen Susskind. She found a pay telephone at the end of the hall near the restrooms and looked up the number in the telephone book beneath it.

"Police department," said a male voice.

"This is Judge Karen Susskind," she said. "I’d like to speak to the watch commander, please."

"Yes, ma’am."

In a moment there was another voice. "Yes, Judge."

"I need some assistance right away."

"What can we do for you?"

She glanced at the newspaper. "I’m supposed to pass sentence on a gentleman named Richard Winton tomorrow morning at nine."

"Yes," he said. "I remember the case."

"Well, I’ve received some information that I need to have checked out as soon as possible. Nothing in this building is open, and I can’t reach the district attorney. All he could do is ask you, so I thought I’d ask you directly."

"You’re still at the courthouse?"

"Yes," she said in mild frustration. "I’m still studying the case."

"What sort of information do you need?"

"I just received an anonymous phone call here in my chambers. The person said that Mr. Winton isn’t who he claims to be. The person said his real name is James Michael Martin, and he’s not a first offender. This James Michael Martin was supposedly just released from the prison in Marion, Illinois, and he has a long record."

"Well, that’s something we can check," said the watch commander. "We can run Winton’s prints through the F.B.I., but it’ll take some time ..."

"I would appreciate it if you would make the request right away. But we can’t wait for the outcome. Find out if there is a file on this James Michael Martin in the prison, and get it faxed to you tonight. If it’s the same man, I’ll know it in a second, and I’ll have the information I need for the sentence."

"I’ll get on it right away," he said. "Do you want it delivered to your home?"

"Home?" she laughed. "I don’t expect to be home for hours. How long will it take?"

"Give us one hour," he said.

"All right. If I’m away from my desk for a minute, my assistant will be there. And if there are any delays, call me. I’ll give you the number of the private line in my chambers." She read him the number off the pay telephone, then hung up.

It took forty-two minutes before she heard the sound of a large man with heavy shoes and a lot of jangling metal on his belt come up the tiled staircase, taking the steps two at a time. She stood with her back to the big wooden door of the judge’s office so that the thick old-fashioned door frame would hide her, until she was sure he would see. She stepped forward into the hallway and saw the policeman coming. He was a motorcycle cop with high boots and a helmet under one arm. In his other hand he carried a thick manila envelope with a string tie to keep it shut.

She stepped back to the door and put her hand on the handle, then leaned forward as though she were opening the door a crack. "It’s here, Judge," she called, then trotted ahead to meet the policeman.

She pointed at the envelope. "Is that the Martin file?"

The cop said, "Yes, it is."

She snatched it out from under his arm. "Oh, thank you so much. Maybe I’ll get to go home tonight after all."

He grinned at her. "Glad to help." He turned and started to walk off as she hurried back toward the door of the judge’s office. While she walked, she listened for the click of the man’s boots to recede down the hallway. She made sure she didn’t reach the door until she heard them on the staircase.

A minute later, she heard the motorcycle start and then the whine of the engine as it sped down the block toward the station. There was only one more thing that had to happen. She considered not waiting for it, but she decided that a little patience was worth it. The pay telephone on the wall rang once and she snatched it up. "Judge Susskind."

It was the watch commander’s voice. "This is Lieutenant Garner at the Police Department, Judge. I was—"

"It’s not the same man," said Jane.

"So you don’t want Winton picked up and held for the fingerprint check?"

"Definitely not," she said. "It must have been some kind of practical joke. Whether it was on me or Mr. Winton, I couldn’t guess, but someone wanted me to delay sentencing." She added, "Thanks to you, we won’t have to do that. Goodbye."

She used the pay telephone one more time to call for a taxi, then walked down the outer staircase into the dark garden, past the beds of flowers that had closed their petals for the night and up the empty sidewalk toward the art museum to wait for it.

A few hours later, Jane sat in her room in the big hotel beside the Los Angeles airport and stared at the photographs in the file. There was John Felker staring into her eyes, only this time there was a black placard under his chin that had numbers on it. Then there was the one of his profile, the one she had lain next to in bed and studied in the light of the moon, thinking it looked like the head on a Roman coin, or the way Roman coins should have looked. Here it was, labeled with the same number on the same placard.

For a whole night in Santa Barbara she had considered all the ways it could be another mistake. The two men standing in the grave would have said anything to get out of it. Maybe the story made sense because they had anticipated that they would need to have a story to tell. As soon as she had formulated this idea, she had known it couldn’t be true, because the story they had told wouldn’t have done them any good at all with anyone in the world except Jane Whitefield.

The file had ended that. He was not John Felker. He was James Michael Martin, age thirty-eight, 7757213. He killed people for a living. The file was thick. There were all sorts of documents, from his arrest and trial record through his eight years in Marion. There was a note stating that he had a mechanical aptitude, but the prison counselor felt that vocational training was not an avenue worth exploring with this prisoner. He had gotten two fillings from the prison dentist, marked with a pencil on a diagram of numbered teeth. He had taken a class in bookkeeping and one in computer programming. He had been to the prison infirmary once—no, twice—for upper respiratory congestion, and received non-narcotic cold medicines. His general health was, each time, assessed as "excellent."

She set these sheets aside on the bed and pushed back farther in the file to the older entries. There was a summary of his record, provided at his entrance so that the prison officials would know whom they were dealing with. Five arrests, beginning at age eighteen, which could mean there had been more while he was a minor. Aggravated assault in Chicago; charges dropped twice. Manslaughter in Chicago; charges dropped. Suspicion of murder in St. Louis; released for lack of evidence.

Her eye caught something that made her stop because she wondered if she had imagined it. She went back and looked at it: arresting officer, John Felker. That was how he had known what to call himself. Martin had probably thought a lot about the man who had arrested him that time. He had known when the real Felker had retired from the police force, even learned his real Social Security number. This must have been the arrest that had made Martin seem important enough to watch, because the next arrest was the final one, for an illegal concealed weapon, something a cop wouldn’t know about unless he searched him. As Ron the gravedigger had said, it was something he probably would have gotten six months for unless the judge knew a lot about him and knew he had to swing hard because this was the last chance before somebody else died.

The Social Security number worried her. Martin probably hadn’t obtained it just to fool her. He might have gotten it because, of all the codes and serial numbers that a person collected in his life, it was the best one to have if you wanted to find him. It never changed, and it got attached to other things: credit cards, bank accounts, licenses. She wondered whether she should try to call the real John Felker to warn him. She looked at the telephone on the nightstand beside the bed, but she didn’t reach for it. She decided to wait. Martin might have learned what he could about Felker in order to harm him, but he wouldn’t be able to devote himself to that right now.