Death Benefits_ A Novel Part 14

"So far?" Stillman raised an eyebrow.

"They haven't given us all the results of the autopsy. The smear was negative for s.e.m.e.n, and there was no obvious abrasion of the v.a.g.i.n.al area. But she's been missing for two weeks. We can't say the test shows what happened to her during about the first twelve of those days."

Walker looked at the chief, who was staring down at the blotter on his desk, as though he had noticed something there that demanded his full attention.

Stillman stood up with the file in his hand. "Chief, Officer Ormond, you've done us a big favor, and we appreciate it."

Walker caught his cue, stood up, and muttered, "Thank you."

Ormond said nothing, but the chief stood too, and said, "I sure wish we could have gotten somebody to take to trial on this one, but we're not really set up to go very far beyond what we can investigate locally."

"n.o.body could have done any better," said Stillman. "This was just the place they happened to hide the body."

"Well, Officer Ormond will send on copies of whatever we get from Springfield." He waited, his eyes on Ormond.

Ormond was looking at him, angry and unblinking. "Yes, sir." Walker wondered what the conversation had been like that had brought her to that point.

He followed Stillman out of the police station. They walked along the quiet, sunny street toward their hotel. It was not until they were inside Walker's room that he spoke. "That's it?" he asked. "They collect all this information and put it in a file and send it to the state capital?"

Stillman's stare seemed to be an evaluation of Walker. His eyes were not without sympathy, but Walker could tell he was not in a pleasant mood. "They're not doing it for now," he said. "They handled the scene professionally, made records of everything, preserved the evidence, searched for witnesses while anything they saw would have been fresh in their minds and not picked up in a newspaper."

"What do you mean, 'not doing it for now'?"

Stillman sighed. "Frauds, embezzlements, things that we've been worrying about up until now, are pa.s.sing events. If they don't get settled pretty quickly, not much is going to be accomplished later. Murder is different. The cops investigating a murder that doesn't seem likely to be solved work for the future. They hope that somebody, sometime will get an inspiration or an informant, or invent a new gadget that will make sense of the evidence they preserved."

Walker shook his head. "It's not good enough."

"It's not good at all," said Stillman. "It's just what there is." He stared at Walker for a moment. "Pack your suitcase. It's time for us both to go home."

18.

Walker and Stillman emerged from the baggage claim at the San Francisco airport as the sun was going down. Walker could feel a steady breeze, and somewhere beneath the mixture of half-combusted fuel and grit that was the smell of big cities, he could pick up a cold fresh smell from the ocean. He had been far inland for several days, and he realized that what he was smelling now had become the smell of home.

He turned and found that Stillman was already on his way to the white curb. Stillman said, "You probably didn't have much cash on you when we left. Have you got enough for a cab?"

Walker nodded. "I guess so. I hardly spent anything."

"Fine," said Stillman. He raised his hand and a cab pulled out of the line and glided to the curb. "You take the first one."

Walker was suddenly fl.u.s.tered. He hadn't expected that the trip would end at the airport. He hadn't expected anything. "Max, I ..."

"Yeah, I know. We did what we could, but now it's time to do something else. If I find anything out, I'll tell you. So get in."

Walker got into the cab with his single suitcase, and Stillman slammed the door. As the cab pulled away, Walker looked out the back window. Stillman was already on the curb, raising his hand to summon the next cab, betraying no inclination to watch Walker go.

When Walker climbed the steps, went into his apartment, and closed the door, he found himself back in the morning four days ago. The air from that morning had been locked in the four small rooms all this time, and it still had a stale aroma of cooking, dust, and maybe old laundry. The dishes from his breakfast were soaking in a three-inch bath of cold water. The coffeemaker had a parchment-brittle coffee-stained paper filter with dry grounds in it. He looked into the refrigerator, and noted with relief that there was very little food that had to be thrown away.

As he stood in the middle of his small, spa.r.s.ely furnished living room, he tried not to think about Ellen Snyder. Right now, her family would be together, immersed in misery of a sort that he had never felt. Where had she said she had come from? Oregon. Salem, Oregon. He went to the telephone and dialed long-distance information.

There were five Snyders, but he determined not to let that be his excuse for giving up. He picked the wrong number the first time, then chose wrong again, but the third time the man who answered said, "I'm her uncle."

Walker said, "I'm sorry to bother you. I was ..." then realized that he was claiming more than he had a right to: that had been over a long time ago. "I knew Ellen. I was in her training cla.s.s at McClaren's in San Francisco. I was just calling to say how sorry I am."

The man's voice was soft and tired. "Well, we all are. It's been a shock to everyone who knew her. You're the third one in the last hour. McClaren himself called, and a fellow named Spillman, or something like that. Nice of you to call." The uncle seemed to be restraining himself, trying to respond to Walker's gesture, but not feeling much like it. He wanted this to end.

"I'm sorry to ask," said Walker, "but would you happen to have her parents' number handy? I-"

"Parents?" Mr. Snyder repeated. "Her father's in Illinois. He went as soon as she was found. Her mother ... we haven't heard from her in fifteen years. Don't even know how to get in touch to tell her, or if she's heard already."

"Oh, yeah," said Walker. "Of course. I ...Well, I just wanted to say I'm sorry. I won't keep you on the phone."

"You didn't tell me your name."

"Oh. John Walker," he said. "Please give Ellen's father my regrets."

"I'll do that."

Walker stood by the phone for a moment, trying to get over the discomfort so he could remember. For now, the image of the dinner at Scarlitti's was before his eyes in absolute clarity-the red leather upholstery in the booth, the velvety texture of the dress Ellen had worn, the exact look in her eyes. He had listened to every word she had said, hearing more than the words because he had been trying to interpret the tone of her voice, weigh the emphases, and even search the pauses for messages. He remembered the heady feeling that they were revealing things as they spoke. It was not the dangerous revelations that had impressed him, the ones that had to do with ambition or tiptoed too near to s.e.x. He remembered the others, that were dangerous in another way, because they were confessions that there was nothing remarkable or exotic about either of them.

Ellen had not exactly lied to him, but she had deftly kept his attention away from that particular door. She had covered the topic of mothers by saying that she looked like hers. Her mother had been gone at least since she was eight or nine. That must have been one of the central facts of her life, but she had never alluded to it. The uncle's tone had given Walker the impression that there was something shameful about the circ.u.mstances, and that knowledge would have been worse for Ellen. After that night, the topic had never come up-or been allowed to come up-again.

Walker had no doubt that he had discovered something that was of enormous importance to understanding Ellen Snyder, a fact that might reveal who she was and why she chose to do certain things and not others-maybe why she worked so hard, maybe why she had become so independent so early, maybe why she had developed a manner that was calculated to draw people to her, but not too close to her. He also knew that none of it mattered. His using it to a.n.a.lyze her character and behavior would be wasted effort. It wasn't part of reality anymore. It was as though she had never been born.

Somebody had studied the Pasadena office, learned which two people could approve a check, and decided that the one who would be easier to overpower and drag around the country would not be the six-foot-seven, overweight Dale Winters but the small, approachable a.s.sistant manager, Ellen Snyder.

Walker looked around the small apartment, searching for something to keep his mind occupied until he was tired enough to sleep. First he unpacked, hanging the beautiful suits and jackets in the closet at the end of the pole, separated from the rest of his clothes, and putting the folded s.h.i.+rts, as they were, in a drawer of their own. He drifted into the kitchen and opened the cupboard under the sink. He found rags and sponges and cleanser, and began to clean. When he next looked up at the clock on the wall, his laundry was washed and dried, his kitchen and bathroom scrubbed, his living room and bedroom dusted and vacuumed. He had stripped the bed to wash the sheets, but now as he looked at the freshly folded ones he felt no inclination to put them on. He flopped down on the bare mattress and fell asleep.

In the morning, he chose a sport coat, s.h.i.+rt, and shoes that he had owned before he had met Stillman. He rode a cab to work, had it leave him down the street from the McClaren building, and walked to the garage entrance to verify that his car was still there. He started it, drove around the block listening to the engine, then parked it again and walked to the lobby to take the elevator to the seventh floor.

He went to his cubicle as usual, turned on his computer terminal, and called up the report about quarterly sea loss in the maritime insurance division, then looked up from his screen to see Joyce Hazelton in the doorway, gazing down at him. She stepped inside and glanced at his screen.

"I already printed that out and sent it on," she said. "It was solid." That was Joyce's highest compliment, which meant that the data were complete and the conclusions perceptive and defensible.

"Oh," he said. "I had intended to hand it in that day, but then I was gone."

"I'm very sorry about Ellen Snyder," she said quietly.

"Thanks." Walker felt discomfort at her sympathy, and it remained an irritant until he had told the truth. "But I don't rate any condolences. We were close once, but we'd lost touch a long time ago."

Joyce accepted it, and said, "They want you upstairs at seven forty-five. Go up in the elevator. When you come out, turn right. There's a receptionist to let you in."

"McClaren's office?"

"Oh, that's right. I forgot you know the way." There was nothing in her eyes that Walker could interpret. She looked at her watch. "Better get going." She waited while he put on his coat, then watched him step into the open bay as though to be sure he was actually heading in the right direction.

The elevator rose to the twelfth floor without stopping. The morning rush into the building was still ahead, and the usual traffic from office to office would not begin until after that. The doors opened and he stepped out to find that the woman he had seen up here before was standing a few feet away with her hands clasped behind her, as though she had been waiting for him. This time the honey-colored hair was tied in a different, equally complex way, and she was wearing a beige suit that seemed to have come from a shop that no ordinary person was allowed to know about, which made clothes that could never wrinkle or stretch at a seam.

"Good morning, Mr. Walker." The way she said it gave him the impression that she had been here for hours, long before anybody else was awake.

"Good morning," he said. He had been right: she had been waiting for him. He was not used to having his arrival be something that was awaited, or even noted.

"Mr. McClaren is ready for you." She turned and led the way. She opened the big oak door and Walker waited for her to precede him, but she stood aside and nodded to show him she wasn't going in. He stepped inside and the door closed quietly behind him. The office was enormous, a suite rather than a room. The section where he stood had a big antique partners' desk with chairs on both sides. He sensed that it probably belonged in a museum, but the broad, s.h.i.+ning surface was littered with papers, bound reports, telephone message slips, and yellow legal pads covered with notes in small, tight black script. There was a computer terminal on the far side, and it was the same model as Walker's.

The voice came from somewhere to his right, the deep, quiet accented sound that Walker remembered. "Come on in here."

Walker followed it under an arched opening into a larger s.p.a.ce dominated by tall bookshelves lined with leather-bound volumes that had come in matched sets, so tightly and uniformly arranged that Walker could not conceive of them ever having been moved. McClaren was in a blue suit today, but it was cut in exactly the style of the gray one he had worn the last time. He leaned forward to shake Walker's hand. "Thanks for coming."

"No problem," Walker muttered.

McClaren sat down on the nearest couch, and Walker sat across a low coffee table from him. McClaren leaned forward. "It seems to me that I ought to apologize to you."

Walker's brow knitted. "What for?"

"When I told Stillman he could take you with him, I didn't know that it was going to be that sort of trip." He seemed to hear a false note in what he had just said, so he amended it. "I should have. In my own defense, I was sure that Ellen Snyder couldn't possibly be involved in anything dishonest. I was sure that you felt the same way."

"How?"

McClaren just raised an eyebrow, but Walker saw what he meant, and rephrased it. "How did you know about her, or about what I thought?"

McClaren looked more uncomfortable. "It's a fair question. I don't want you to think that we're spying on people in the company. We're not. But small bits of legitimate information come to us as a matter of course. Supervisors evaluate you periodically. And we've always held to the old-fas.h.i.+oned policy here that when you produce a piece of paper, you sign your name to it. Not every company does that. Over time, we get to know one another. What we learn sometimes borders on the personal-also for legitimate reasons. In the training program, the instructors don't just evaluate your memory and your mental capacity. They observe how well new people adjust to the work environment-whether they get along, make friends, and so on. You and Ellen Snyder became ... close friends. People liked her, people liked you. When she got her transfer to Pasadena, those people were concerned that it might have an effect. It didn't, so the matter was set aside." He paused. "That doesn't mean it was forgotten. When we learned Ellen was the agent on the spot during a crime, and that she had disappeared, we remembered that you knew her well." He hesitated again, then went on. "I was a big fan of Ellen Snyder's, although I had never spoken to her face-to-face. So you were acting as my surrogate, the one who held my point of view. Again, I'm very sorry," he said. "It must have been very painful."

"Don't be sorry," said Walker. "In some ways it's better for me that I was there."

McClaren looked at him for a moment, as though he had not really seen him before and realized he had missed something. Then he seemed to incorporate it into his mind, and start on a new basis. "There's another reason why we needed to talk. I don't have to tell you we've got troubles. I need to find out ... more: I wanted to say 'how bad they are,' but that's wrong, because having a kid like Ellen Snyder murdered is about as bad as things get. But I want to know if that's it-if we've lost a promising young person and now it's over-or if we've got to worry about other people."

Walker nodded.

"Don't just nod at me," McClaren said. "Give me your guess." He sounded exactly like a professor.

Walker said, "They got away with it. We didn't figure it out in time. I don't know much about criminals, but I don't know anything that would keep them from trying it again."

"Stillman thinks that the biggest danger is the possibility that we've got a traitor, an inside person. What do you think?"

Walker shrugged. "I think Stillman's the expert."

"Too easy," said McClaren. "You have an opinion."

"I don't disagree with him," said Walker. "That would be the worst case, and it's possible. It would be difficult to go into an insurance company and collect a death benefit that wasn't yours unless you knew the procedures in advance. But it must be even more difficult for a criminal to approach somebody inside a company and ask him to do something like this. Are there other ways for a thief to find out enough to be able to do it? Sure. I think-"

He saw that McClaren was distracted. The a.s.sistant had come in the door silently, and now she stood like a statue in front of the big desk. McClaren patted Walker's arm apologetically, muttered, "Sorry, excuse me," and got up to join her by the desk.

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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sessment 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing, 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 a.s.signment 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 a.s.sociates."