Death Benefits Read online

  She slipped the big sweater over her head, then stared around her again. She focused her eyes on the floor. “Oh, here they are.” She picked up her glasses and put them on. She threw her coat over her shoulder and walked to the door. “Bye.”

  She was out the door and gone.

  12

  While Walker was in the shower, letting the hot water wake him up and soothe his sore muscles, he thought about Mary Catherine Casey. He directed his mind to the question of what was in her mind. He knew that the term “charming eccentric” was an oxymoron. Whenever he had met girls who had said and done things for effect, he had instinctively known that they were trouble. Some lobe of their brains had been pinched by forceps during birth, or had been atrophied by a chemical put in women’s food as a substitute for fat or sugar. He had imagined that one night he would wake up in bed and hear the sound of one of these women firing up a power drill to run it into his forehead and let the demons out. Mary Catherine Casey had not made him uneasy: she just seemed to have decided that she liked him and wanted to play with him. Serena made him very uneasy.

  He turned off the shower, dried himself off, and walked to the bedroom. There was a man standing there, looking down at his bed. The man turned: Stillman. “I knocked, but apparently you didn’t hear me, so I let myself in. You alone in there?”

  “Of course I’m alone in here.”

  Stillman glanced at the wildly disarranged bed again, then back at Walker. “Better get a move on if you’re going to make it back to San Francisco before they start storing golf clubs in your cubicle.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” said Walker. “I’m not going back.”

  “If you’re going with me, you’d still better get a move on. We just have a different flight to catch.”

  Walker dressed quickly in a suit like Stillman’s and began to collect his belongings. He noticed the condom wrappers on the floor, hastily torn apart and flung there. As he picked them up, he looked at Stillman, who was staring intently out the window at the parking lot. Finally, Walker latched his suitcase. “Let’s get out of here.”

  When he was sitting in the car beside Stillman, he squinted out the window at the glaring world. Los Angeles had always struck his Ohio eyes as shades of tan and light gray, with a few sickly pastels, but this morning it was patches of deep green grass and towering eucalyptus and palms, with scarlet roses and tangles of bougainvillea vines with impossible magenta flowers, and jacaranda trees that snowed purple petals on the ground. The sky was a blue so clear that it had never occurred to him that it was a condition that ever happened: it was a theoretical sky, without the hint of a cloud. “I see the fog lifted,” he said.

  “Yep,” said Stillman. “I guess you didn’t have a chance to watch the weather on TV, but they said the clouds were ‘low night and early morning.’ When that high pressure kicks in around here, it’ll dry your eyeballs.”

  “Okay, so you know about her.”

  “It wasn’t my toughest case,” Stillman admitted. “I’ve never seen her find anybody tolerable before.”

  “What about Gochay?”

  “They live on different planets,” said Stillman. “No, the field is a wasteland. She leaves nothing alive within pistol range . . . until now, anyway.” He looked at Walker contemplatively. “I’d be willing to pass on some wisdom if you’re in the mood to listen.”

  “Why not?”

  “You might think twice before you get too involved with a woman with her technical skills. She can hunt you down like a mad dog without leaving her computer. It would take her a minute or two to destroy your credit, delete your driver’s license, and transfer somebody else’s arrest warrant to your name.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d planned to piss her off.”

  Stillman smiled wistfully. “We never plan to piss them off. It just happens. In my short and uneventful life, I’ve had a woman go after me with a claw hammer, attempt to dust me with a twenty-two target pistol, and aim parts of her china collection at my cranium from a fourth-story window.”

  “The same woman?”

  “Of course not. She’d have to be an idiot.”

  “So would you.”

  “I suppose so, but I have a forgiving nature. Women don’t. At some point you might want to give her a call just to see if you ought to rest easy or make a run for the border. I wouldn’t trifle with Serena’s affections, as they say.”

  “Her name’s not Serena.”

  “Did she tell you to call her something else?”

  “Yes.”

  “First and last name?”

  “Middle, too.”

  “Flowers, then,” said Stillman. “Definitely flowers. Big red roses. They like to be ambiguous, but they don’t like you to be.”

  “I’m supposed to take advice from a man that women chase with a claw hammer?”

  “One way or another, I get under their skin,” said Stillman. “It doesn’t matter. I trust you’ll know what’s appropriate.”

  “Thank you,” said Walker.

  “And she’s intriguing. If I weren’t old enough to be her father, I’d have been interested myself.”

  “I would never have suspected that Max Stillman would let mere propriety enter into that kind of decision.”

  Stillman turned to look at him in surprise, then returned to his driving. “Age isn’t a matter of propriety. It’s a whole series of inexorable changes that have already happened before you notice them. The ones you can’t see are bigger than the ones you can. One day you just discover that you can’t watch this movie or read this book or have this conversation anymore. Sometimes you’ve had it too many times already, but at others, it’s not even that. It’s just that nothing in it is anything that you’re interested in anymore.”

  “You mean you know too much.”

  “Not exactly. There’s nothing wrong with the conversation, and maybe it’s a set of thoughts everybody ought to have pass through his brain at a certain time of his life. Everybody has a right to be young. It’s a crime to be the one who’s there when a young woman is having some kind of exciting revelation and not be in it with her: to be just kind of watching from a distance and knowing everything she’s going to figure out in the next five steps. Because you’re there, she can’t be with somebody who will be surprised with her. It denigrates and devalues the experience she’s having, makes her suspect that she’s naive and foolish, and destroys it for her. She sees there’s no uniqueness in it, and she knows it’s not even her thought or experience, because plenty of people have had it first.” He frowned at Walker. “You can kill somebody that way.”

  Stillman brightened. “If they’re at least thirty-five or forty, and there’s anything they still haven’t found out, been taught, felt, or experienced, then it’s high time and Max Stillman’s their man.”

  Stillman swung onto the divided drive into the airport. “If you’d like to go to San Francisco, you’ve got a ticket waiting. That’s your terminal coming up. I’ll pop the trunk, you can get your suitcase out, and be on your way. Last chance.”

  Walker said, “I told you before, I’m not going to San Francisco. I’m not going to bail out until we find her.”

  “Good. Then you can make yourself useful,” said Stillman, with no surprise or hesitation. He swerved suddenly to the white curb. “Go in there while I return this car. Go to the American Airlines desk. They have your name.”

  Walker stopped at the counter and the airline woman produced two tickets, one in Stillman’s name and the other in Walker’s. They were for Chicago. He looked at the date of purchase. It was yesterday. Again he tried to retrace Stillman’s movements, and again Stillman had left tracks in all directions. Had he really made a reservation for Walker to fly to San Francisco on United this morning? If he didn’t want Walker to go to Chicago with him, he would not have reserved a ticket to Chicago for him. He had said “Good” when Walker had told him he was not going home. So he had wanted Walker to go to Chicago with him. Maybe at
the last minute, Stillman had been planning to offer him some inducement that had not been necessary. And maybe he had sent Serena to provide the inducement.

  When Stillman came into the terminal with his little suitcase, Walker fell into step with him. Walker said, “How did she know we were staying at that hotel?”

  “That’s what she does for a living. She traces people.”

  “Did you call her and ask her to come?”

  Stillman raised an eyebrow. “Did you get the impression that if I had, she would have done it?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Then what made you think I called her?”

  “She told me if I wanted to see her again I had to go with you and find Ellen first.”

  Stillman stared ahead as he walked on. “Interesting.”

  They waited to get through the metal detectors, then walked to their gate and waited some more. When they were in the plane at last, Walker leaned back and closed his eyes. The noise and vibration of the plane’s engines relaxed his muscles and put him into a dreamless sleep.

  He did not wake until the plane jolted his spine and rattled down the runway to a stop. As the plane turned ponderously, and then bumped along toward the terminal, he slowly came to full awareness and looked out at a huge field striped with runways. O’Hare Airport, he reminded himself: Chicago.

  “You okay?” asked Stillman.

  Walker said, “I guess so.” He came to himself. “What are we doing here?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  Walker was getting used to Stillman’s routine now. He stayed at Stillman’s shoulder while they shuffled down the long, narrow aisle, then walked with him along the concourse to the escalators and down to the rental counters. He knew that the process would take fifteen minutes, and when the time had elapsed, they were on the road again.

  Walker said, “Are we in a hurry?”

  “Not really,” Stillman answered.

  “Can we stop at this plaza up here?”

  Stillman swung the car into the parking lot and stopped in front of a florist’s shop. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and produced a business card. “Here,” he said. “You’ll need the address.”

  Walker accepted the card. He walked into the shop and ordered a dozen long-stemmed roses to be sent to Mary Catherine Casey. When the girl at the counter handed him the form to fill in the address, he looked at the business card. It was Stillman’s, not Gochay’s. He flipped it over and saw that Stillman had used the back as a scratch pad. Walker copied the handwritten address onto the form, then put the card back in his pocket and handed the girl his credit card.

  When he was back in the car he said, “Thanks,” and held the business card out.

  “Keep it. It’s worth the printing cost to know I’ve salvaged your disordered personal life.”

  Walker looked at the card again. “Who are the associates?”

  “What associates?”

  “It says, ‘Max Stillman and Associates, Security.’ ”

  Stillman started the car and backed out of the parking space. “That’s just so new clients don’t get the erroneous impression that when they hire me, all they get is a middle-aged, balding man with rubber-soled shoes.”

  “So it’s a lie.”

  Stillman shook his head. “No. Stillman and Company would be a lie. Stillman, Fozzengraf, Pinckney and Wong would be a lie. Stillman and Associates is the truth.”

  “Except that the associates are imaginary.”

  Stillman turned out of the lot and accelerated onto a freeway ramp. “No, you’re not.”

  13

  Walker stared at the facade of the big hotel as Stillman drove past it. There were doormen wearing green comic-opera general’s uniforms with gold braid and shiny-brimmed hats. Cars were pulling up and letting off passengers, then being driven away by other men wearing different, short-coated green uniforms that seemed to be patterned after some kind of cavalry. Stillman turned onto a side street and into a parking ramp. “If you’re sure this person is in there, and you know the name she used to register, why not just call the police?” He hoped Stillman had noticed he had not conceded it was Ellen Snyder.

  “I have,” said Stillman. “In their infinite wisdom, they have determined that we don’t have enough evidence to give them the right to raid a hotel room and roust the guests.”

  “Just using a false credit card would seem to me to be enough,” said Walker. “What’s the problem?”

  Stillman shook his head. “It’s how we know it’s a false credit card. They’ve sniffed our story, and smelled the fine hand of someone like Constantine Gochay. This makes them nervous. They can’t be told exactly who he is, because that would force them to pursue the issue of what felonies he’s committed to find out what he knows.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You can’t blame them. All this has zip to do with the public safety of the citizens of Chicago. Ellen Snyder—guilty or innocent—is the problem of an insurance company in San Francisco, and the abuse of computer security systems is the problem of a well-known but distant government in Washington.”

  Stillman found a parking space with the car’s nose against the wall in the first level of the garage, and turned off the engine. They got out of the car, but Stillman said, “So now we investigate. Get in the driver’s seat.”

  Walker moved around the back of the car to the driver’s side and got in.

  “Adjust the mirrors so you can see the doors of the elevator.”

  “Okay,” said Walker. “Now what?”

  “Now I go upstairs to the lobby. I call the room of Mrs. Daniel Bourgosian. If I get her on the phone, I tell her I’m waiting for her downstairs, ready to help her. If she’s innocent, she’ll come see me. If she’s a thief, she’ll come out that elevator on this level and head for her car, or come out on a lower level and drive right past you to get to the exit.”

  “What if she’s being held against her will?”

  Stillman shrugged. “Then she won’t be the one to answer the phone. They’ll still have to come down that elevator to get out. They won’t want to have to bullshit their way through the lobby, because I’ve just told them that’s where I’ll be.”

  “What if they come? What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “See if it’s Ellen Snyder and try not to get shot.” Walker waited for something more specific, but his eye caught the rearview mirror and he could already see Stillman heading for the elevator. Walker reached for the door handle, then stopped.

  He didn’t believe that Ellen Snyder would come down in that elevator. In the first place, she was innocent. In the second, nobody could hold a grown woman—a smart grown woman, at that—in a fancy, crowded hotel without her screaming loud enough to pop their eardrums and shatter the wine glasses in the dining room. That left—what? It left nothing. The reason Stillman had posted him here was not so he’d accomplish anything. It was just to keep Walker out of the lobby, where Ellen might see him and recognize him. Stillman was preserving the remote possibility that he would corner her by surprise, then scare her into confessing. Walker sat back and relaxed, then readjusted the mirrors so he didn’t have to crane his neck to keep an eye on the elevator.

  It opened ten minutes later. Stillman emerged and returned to the car. “Come on,” he said. “I guess we’ll just have to lower ourselves and do this the easy way.”

  They emerged from the elevator in the lobby and Walker waited until Stillman was at the pay telephone beside the gift shop. Then he moved to the front desk. There was a clerk helping a couple check out at the far end of the counter, and a young woman shuffling some papers at the near end. She would be the one. The telephone just behind the counter rang. She picked it up and said, “Front desk.” She listened, then said, “I’ll ring for you.”

  Walker watched her consult her computer screen, then punch 3621 and hang up. She came toward him with her professional smile. He said, “I was wondering if there was a
good Chinese restaurant within walking distance.”

  She whisked a small map from under the counter and held her pen like a magic wand to point to an intersection. “Right here is Won Dim Sum, which is my favorite.” The pen seemed to rise higher into her hand by itself, and she made a quick circle at the spot, then quickly drew a line from the restaurant that extended into a circle around the hotel and handed him the map. Her mouth tightened into a closed-lipped smile to signal that the conversation was over.

  “Thanks,” he said, and walked across the lobby and followed Stillman around a corner to another hallway that led to a second set of elevators.

  Stillman stepped inside with him. Walker said, “Thirty-six twenty-one,” and Stillman pushed the 3 button.

  When the elevator stopped, Stillman walked smartly up the hall. “This kind of thing is best done quickly,” he said. “There’s not a lot that’s likely to happen as time passes that will make things better.”

  Walker turned to look behind him to see if there was anyone to hear. “How about silently? Isn’t that best?”

  “There are only so many precautions I’m willing to take,” said Stillman. “Stand here.” He pushed Walker into a position by the door with his back to the elevators, so he blocked the view. Then he leaned down to examine the lock. After a moment he produced a pick and a tension wrench from his wallet, fiddled with the lock, and pushed the door open.

  Walker took a final look up and down the hallway, then stepped inside after him and closed the door quietly.

  Stillman was standing in the middle of the room, turning and turning slowly. He stopped, facing Walker. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Walker. “When I’m with you, I never touch anything. What’s wrong?”