Vanishing Act (4 page)

5

Jane Whitefield aimed the gun at the doorway and quietly stepped to the other end of the kitchen. She held the big pistol in both hands to ride out the recoil without allowing it to kick upward and deprive her of the second round. She aimed ten inches to the left of the doorjamb and three feet above the ground. If he was honest, he would walk in slowly and upright. The gun would look to him as though it weren’t being poked into his face. If he was dishonest, he would charge in low and the muzzle would be at the level of his chest. She would spend the evening cleaning the floor and spackling the hole in the wall.

He walked into the kitchen with his hands held out wide and the fingers spread, as though he were offering to hug somebody. His voice had sounded as though it was coming from above her, so she wasn’t surprised that he was tall. He was slim but muscular, and that wasn’t a good sign. He had short, dark-brown hair and brown eyes, so he was probably the one Jake had seen. His face looked as though he was in his late thirties or early forties, too old to be a sneak-thief. He had about three days’ worth of dark beard on his face, and he looked tired. That part was good.

"My name is John Felker, and—"

"How did you get in here?" she asked.

"You weren’t home, and I couldn’t find a safe place. The motels ..." He seemed to see that he wasn’t answering the question. "You mean the alarm system?"

"You know I do," she said evenly. "How?"

He gave a small, apologetic shrug. "They always wire the windows and doors and things. You can’t get past them. But on the attic of every house there’s a vent at the peak, just under the roof. If you take off the grille, a man can sometimes fit."

"If he happens to be up there."

"Your neighbor is painting his house. He has an extension ladder."

Jane resolved to have the alarm company come back if she survived this. "Then what?"

"Once you’re in the attic, there’s a trapdoor to come down. I cut off the alarm."

She worked her jaw and lifted the pistol a few degrees to aim at his belly. "The alarm has a battery for backup in case the power is shut off."

His eyes settled on the gun. "The terminal box for your system is in your bedroom closet. I couldn’t find the battery, so I connected the battery circuit to your hair dryer until the battery was drained before I shut off the main circuit breaker for the house. They were smart enough to wire your phone-junction box, so I had to be sure it wasn’t hot before I disconnected the phone wires."

"You shouldn’t have done it," she said.

"I’m sorry," he said, "but I had to. Once the phone was off, I turned the power on again so the alarm would still sound inside the house if somebody broke in. I just couldn’t have the alarm going off at the police station. The battery is charged up again. No harm done."

"If you get shot, I won’t be able to call an ambulance."

"If you shoot me from there, I won’t need one." He looked a little hopeful, his eyes now fixing on hers. "If you don’t, I can hook up the phone wires again as soon as you turn off the alarm."

’’That was a lot of work. What did you do it for?"

"I need to disappear."

"And you’re afraid of the police."

"Yes."

"Then you’re a criminal."

"So are you."

She caught herself liking him a little for that. He was straightforward and quick, not watching her for a reaction and then changing his story. But nobody knew that much about how alarm systems worked unless he had some very good reason... or some very bad reason. "Tell me what happened."

He looked down at his feet, then at her. "Like this?"

"You can sit. If you like, you can lie down."

"Where?"

"Right there," she said, almost smiling at his befuddlement. "On the floor."

He sat down on the floor and she watched him as she moved across the room, until she was eight feet away and could be sure nothing he did would neutralize the advantage of the gun. He sat absolutely still on the bare, shiny floor with his knees pulled up, held by his arms. He was lean and athletic and wore a clean pair of blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of good sneakers. The signs were ambiguous. Since he was clean, he probably wasn’t crazy. But men his age tended to let their bellies go a little bit unless what they did for a living involved fighting or they had some kind of sexual problem or they had spent a lot of time in prison, and there was a lot of overlap among those three. She decided he did look a little bit like a prisoner as he sat there on the floor, not at ease but motionless—maybe a captured soldier.

"Who told you to come here?" she asked.

"Harry Kemple."

Hearing the name was like feeling an injection of tranquilizer stab into her arm. The effect should have been calming, but the first impression was of the sharp, silvery needle sliding directly into the vein. Her impulse was to fight it. "Where did you meet Harry Kemple?"

"I used to be a cop."

She felt the ground under her begin to crumble. That was one of the few good explanations for the way he looked. Maybe it would even explain why he knew so much about breaking into a house and why he had a gun. But Harry Kemple would not have told a cop anything about her. So this one must be lying, and Harry Kemple had probably never made it home free.

Thinking of that term caught her by surprise. It was from the game that she and the Reinerts and the other neighborhood kids had played most summer evenings. When grown-ups noticed, they would ask, "Are you playing hide-and-seek?" but its only name here was chase. That reflected its seriousness and scope. It was played with competitiveness and cunning, and there were no boundaries at all. Combatants could and did climb trees to the roofs of houses or run a quarter mile to the river to crouch among the rotted pilings and mossy rocks from the old ferry landing.

Each person who was caught would become one of the chasers, until at last, one person, the best, would be pursued relentlessly by all of the others, sometimes in a roving pack and sometimes spread out to sweep the neighborhood like tiger hunters. It wasn’t enough to be the last one left. To win, you still had to make it back alone to touch the big tree where everyone had started. Hot and dry-tongued and panting, you would make the final dash from the last bit of cover, across the open space, arm out to slap the tree, and yell, "Home free!"

She felt sad. Harry had lasted long enough to be the last one out, but still out. "Did you take him in? Arrest him?"

"No," said Felker. "He got in touch with me to tell me."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because I helped him once. It was maybe five, six years ago. You know about Harry?"

"Something. Tell me how you helped him."

"I was a sergeant in St. Louis. Harry got picked up in one of those group arrests that sometimes happen. You’ve got three or four guys on a dark street and they’ve all got blood on them, and their clothes are all messed up and each one says he was minding his own business when somebody hit him."

"So you arrest all of them?"

Felker’s eyebrows went up and he gave a sad chuckle. "See, when you get there, you’re alone. You call for another car and get out on the pavement and what you think about is that there is no way in the world one man can control four except to shoot them. Usually, they know that as well as you do. You try to talk, you try to scare them with the lights and the baton and all that to get them to separate. When you do, they’re all yelling at once about who did what. If you get one aside to give you a clue, the others either run or attack him. It’s ugly. So what you do is survive on bluster until more cars get there, then sit them down and sort it out."

"And Harry was the victim?"

"I don’t think Harry was ever exactly a victim. He was just the worst fighter. You know Harry."

"I knew Harry."

"What do you mean?"

"I haven’t seen him in a long time."

Felker looked at her for a moment without speaking, then said, "Anyway, when they brought him in he was acting strange. If there waS a fine he wanted to pay it, if there were charges he could file against anybody he wanted to forgive and forget. This is from a guy with a split lip, a black eye, and a nose that was probably broken. At first I figured, Okay. This guy is wanted. But when I checked ... nothing. So I sat him down and talked to him."

"What did he tell you?"

"He had been running a floating poker game in Chicago for over a year. It seemed like it was a great idea. Harry wasn’t betting anything, and he got to take a rake off every pot. He would recruit the players and bring them in and introduce them to each other. He had a couple of very rich guys who liked the danger of it: sort of an anonymous, low-life way to gamble for big stakes. The higher the pots, the bigger the rake, and Harry was also getting a chair fee and catering it like a party."

"What did Harry say went wrong?" She was listening for anything that would tell her that this was a lie.

"Like everything else that’s supposed to be the most exclusive thing in town, this game started to get famous. So the inevitable happened. A man came to him and demanded to get in. The problem with that is there’s no way out. You say yes or the next guy in the door might be wearing a badge or he might not, but either way he’s going to have a gun, and the nice little business is history. The man who wanted a seat at the table was used to getting in where he wasn’t wanted. I forget his name ..."

"Jerry Cappadocia."

"That’s it. If you know the story, why are you making me repeat it?"

"So I can decide whether to shoot you."

"Oh." He stared at the floor for a moment. "What if Harry told it two different ways?"

"You can take it up with him in the afterlife," she said. "So what happened?"

"He let Cappadocia into the game. Harry never knew if what he had in mind was to take over the game or cheat the rich suckers or if he just wanted to play poker with people who had the kind of money he had but didn’t know enough about him to let him win. About the third week, two guys kick in the door and shoot Cappadocia. Whether they were just trying to do a holdup and recognized him, or he resisted, or if they were after him to begin with, nobody knows. But the minute the door hits the floor, the guy who organized the game is in trouble. The rich guys know he put a mobster in their game. The friends of Jerry Cappadocia think he sold their buddy. The police want to talk to him. The people who shot Cappadocia also have to be interested, because the others are, and even if he didn’t see anything, if the inducements were right, he might make a plausible guess. Jerry Cappadocia’s father is semi-retired, but the people who know him say he could make Harry want very much to come up with a name. So suddenly Harry has enemies."

"What did you do for Harry?"

"I asked some more questions. He didn’t think the three men arrested with him were trying to kill him for the Cappadocia thing, because they weren’t armed. He admitted he had also given them fresh personal reasons to hit him. He had been picking up traveling money by doing card tricks without saying ’Abracadabra.’ I thought about it for a while. It seemed to me that what he had been doing wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t a capital offense, so I held the others overnight, put down a name for Harry that he was too scared to make up for himself, and let him go."

"Where did he go then?"

"I don’t know. Maybe here. I didn’t hear from him again until a few days ago."

If this one was a liar, he was good at it. He had the facts, or some of them, right, and they were the ones he could be expected to know. But he was also telling her something she wanted to hear. She wanted to believe that Harry was still all right, that someone had seen him alive a few days ago. "Where did you run into him after all that time?"

"I didn’t. He called me."

"Why?"

"He knew I was in trouble. He told me that if I needed to disappear, there was a door out of the world. He told me that this was where it was."

"And you believed him?"

Felker looked at her, his eyes unblinking but showing puzzlement. "He had no reason to lie to me."

"You didn’t know him very well, and what you knew wasn’t very good. Why trust him?"

Felker seemed to look back on it with the kind of incredulity that people feel when they try to figure out the reasons for the decisions they have made. "Maybe it was the story. It was so ... odd. He said that years ago he had met an old guy on a cruise ship. Gambling is legal on the sea. They have pools on things and slot machines, and on some of them even a couple of tables. Cruises are expensive, so the long ones have mostly people with money."

So he knows that too, she thought. Was there any way to know that besides having Harry tell him? She listened for a mistake.

"So Harry bought a ticket and posed as an amateur who was bored with slot machines and went to find more amateurs. Only there’s an old guy in the game that Harry just can’t beat. No matter how long he waited, all his practice never swung the odds over to his side. The old guy is a South American industrialist. From Venezuela or someplace. One night they’re playing in the old man’s suite and it comes down to where everybody else goes back to his own cabin broke except Harry. They’re playing one-on-one now, and Harry is still losing. Finally, Harry is in for the price of his return ticket, and they show their cards. Harry loses."

He was watching her now too, probably thinking he must be doing all right because she hadn’t shot him yet.

"The old man stands up to rake in the money, and he gets a funny look on his face. His eyes bulge out and he freezes like a statue and starts to topple over. Harry makes a grab for him and gets one hand on his arm, but the other one kind of brushes his face. The guy’s mustache comes off."

She listened, and she began to hear what, she had been listening for—not mistakes, but evidence. He was beginning to sound more and more like Harry as he told the story. The voice, the cadence of his speech were the same. He wasn’t exactly mimicking Harry, because it wasn’t conscious. But he had heard Harry tell this story.

"This is not enough to think about, but the man is having a heart attack. Now Harry’s got a decision to make. When the old guy fell across the table, what he landed on was, among other things, all of Harry’s money and a whole lot more. And he knows that unless they do things a lot differently in South America, a man with a false mustache is not called an industrialist. But Harry did the right thing. He got on the phone, called the doctor, and then bagged all the money and locked it in the little safe in the cabin. The man recovered. Before they took him off in a helicopter, he gave Harry two things—the forty thousand in cash that was in the safe and your address. You see, he knew what Harry would need most... had known from the beginning, because he was no more an amateur than Harry was."