Death Benefits Read online

  As he walked, he began to believe that what he was doing was spending the night tromping around in an empty field, getting burrs and seeds stuck to a pair of pants that had cost about two days’ pay, and scuffing a pair of shoes that cost more. Stillman had paid for them, he thought. He can decide how they get wrecked. Walker glanced to his right to watch Stillman’s light sweeping back and forth ahead of him as he trudged on.

  There was a quiet rhythm to the night sounds. Walker could hear unseen crickets chirping, the distant call of some invisible night bird, the swish of dry plants against his legs. He set his pace by the sound of his own footsteps, methodically marching the distance out and marching back.

  He heard a sharp, shrill whistle, and turned his head. Stillman’s light had stopped moving. It shone straight down into the weeds. Walker heard the whistle again. “No,” he whispered. He began to walk through the weeds toward the light. “Let it be the money,” he thought. “Let it be nothing at all.”

  He came near Stillman and looked down cautiously, letting his light slowly move toward Stillman’s feet. He could see nothing. “What is it?”

  Stillman moved his foot and a clump of weeds fell over. “That,” he said. “Somebody did some digging here, and then replaced some of the plants. In a few days, they probably would have taken hold again.”

  Walker was silent, waiting.

  Stillman sighed. “We’re not going to do any digging, so you can forget about that. We’re going to have to concoct a very convincing bullshit story and then locate the nearest cop so we can tell it to him.”

  It took a few minutes to reach the next town. As soon as they passed the sign that said WALLERTON, POP. 953, time seemed to stop. There were lights on in the tiny police station, but when they went inside they discovered that the man on duty at the desk was not the watch commander. He was just there to answer the telephone and then walk across the station to the radio desk and ask the woman who served as night dispatcher to put aside the book she was reading and summarize the call to the three patrol cars that were out on the major highways waiting for speeders.

  It took Stillman only a couple of minutes to convince the desk officer to make the walk across the room, but it took nearly fifteen minutes for the patrol car to pull up outside.

  The two patrol officers climbed the steps into the station, arranging their nightsticks and hitching their belts. The shorter one opened the glass door and went straight to Stillman and Walker. It took Walker a second to see that she was a woman. She had short, dark hair tied back tightly, and the body armor under her shirt gave her torso a square, plump look. The other cop was a tall, rangy man in his forties who had a weathered, sunburned face and crow’s-foot wrinkles beside his eyes, as though he spent his days on a tractor. Walker read their name tags.

  The female, whose tag said ORMOND, asked, “Are you the gentlemen who found something in a field?”

  “That’s right,” said Stillman.

  Walker waited for the next round of questions, but it didn’t come. She said, “Why don’t you show us where it is?” then turned and walked toward the door.

  Walker didn’t like getting into the back seat of the patrol car. There were no door handles, and there was a metal cage that separated the back from the front. But Stillman slid in and Walker joined him.

  Stillman said, “It’s the field on the corner of Locksley and Waterman Road.”

  “The old Buckland place,” muttered the male policeman.

  Walker closed his eyes. Things were dreamlike—not quick or startling enough to be a nightmare, just a dream with a slow, growing sense of familiarity as things got worse and worse. It would have to be called something like “the old Buckland place.”

  “How did you happen to be out there this time of night?” asked the woman.

  “We’re insurance investigators from McClaren Life and Casualty in San Francisco. We’ve been following a suspect in a fraud investigation,” said Stillman. “We had a lead that she was in the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, but when we got there she had just left. We looked at the routes she might have taken to get out, and this one seemed most promising.”

  “It did?” The surprise in her voice was what Walker felt. “Why is that?”

  “A lot of reasons,” Stillman said. “For one thing, in a couple of miles you’re in Wisconsin. It’s a new state, where she hasn’t been seen before, with lots of rural roads all the way north to Duluth, Minnesota.”

  “You think she’s going to Duluth?”

  “No, I think she may be planning to keep going all the way to Canada,” said Stillman. “Now, you and I know that going to Canada is one of the worst ways to stay hidden. Americans don’t look any different from the locals, but the locals know the difference, and anybody looking for you has about a tenth of the faces to look at. But this is an inexperienced, first-offense white-collar suspect. If this turns out to be nothing, we’ll probably take a plane and wait for her at International Falls.”

  The policewoman didn’t assent or deny it. She just said, “What kind of vehicle description?”

  “Blue Pontiac Grand Am was the last one she rented, but that was in Denver, and just because it hasn’t been returned yet doesn’t mean she’s still got it. We thought maybe what she’s been doing is avoiding the interstates and taking back roads.”

  “This used to be a main road,” said the male cop. Walker thought he detected a little resentment. It was all part of the dream, and this place stood for all of the small towns that had been bypassed by the interstate highways and had slowly withered, leaving ruined barns and a few embittered loyalists.

  Stillman seemed to Walker to have said too much already. He seemed to be giving them a thousand chances to catch him in a lie. Walker held his breath, hoping the policeman would fill in the time, tell Stillman all about the way the town once was, and the betrayal that the federal government and the politicians in Springfield and the Chicago business interests had pulled forty years ago.

  The cop said no more. The car stopped, and Walker saw the sagging skeleton of the barn to his right. The female cop suddenly backed up and swerved to the side in reverse, then turned off the engine. The male cop took the microphone off the dash and said, “Unit One-two-eight. Show us Code Six at the junction of Locksley and Waterman, out.”

  Then Stillman was leading them back into the field with his flashlight, following the trampled weeds.

  Suddenly Ormond’s flashlight came on. It was a four-battery model that he had earlier mistaken for a club, and its beam was incredibly wide and bright. It flashed ahead for a moment, then swept across the field toward the area Walker had searched, and lingered there. “What were you doing over there?”

  “That was me,” said Walker.

  She turned to study him as though she had not seen him before. “What were you doing?”

  “We split the field up and started on both ends.”

  “What did you expect to find?”

  Walker shrugged nervously. “Best case—maybe she buried the money out here. Worst case—” He realized he had probably made a mistake, so he changed his sentence. “I guess I don’t know what that is.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “You don’t, huh?” Her eyes bored into him long enough to determine that he had no answer, then she turned away and followed Stillman.

  “I see it,” called the male cop. “Somebody’s been digging, all right.”

  Walker followed the others at a distance. He stayed on the periphery of the bright area cast by their flashlights. The beam of Officer Ormond’s flashlight suddenly transfixed his chest. He knew its purpose was to illuminate his face without making him squint and turn away. She asked, “How much money was it?”

  Walker answered, “Twelve million dollars, roughly. We think she was carrying about a million of it.”

  The light didn’t move. “I’m still not clear on why you think she would pick the old Buckland place to bury it on.”

  Stillman intervened. “It was my hunch. We dr
ove out of Chicago, and this was the first place we saw where you could be fairly sure of getting it done and not get noticed.”

  “You agree with that?” she asked Walker.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What made you think she’d bury it at all?”

  Walker hesitated. “We . . . I think she knew we were close behind her. She wouldn’t want to have it on her.”

  The two police officers looked at each other for a moment. It was the male who spoke. “It’ll be first light in an hour or so.”

  Ormond squatted and touched the ground, then fiddled with the stem of a plant that wasn’t rooted. “We’ll have to get some people out here.”

  They drove back to the station in silence. Walker and Stillman sat on a long wooden bench, drank stale, acidic coffee, and watched the police officers make six or seven telephone calls from the desks on the far side of the counter. The sky outside the glass doors of the station achieved a pale, gray glow, and others began to arrive. There were two men in a pickup truck who wore blue jeans and baseball caps, then a couple of other cops, who went behind the counter to talk to Ormond and her partner with their backs to Stillman and Walker, then left again.

  After Walker had finished his third cup of coffee, Ormond came around the counter and said, “They’re already getting started out there. I imagine you’d like to be there.” Walker could barely imagine anything he would like less, but she had set off for her car again, so he and Stillman followed and climbed into the back seat.

  When they arrived, there was another police car pulled up at the side of the road. There was yellow POLICE LINE tape strung on fresh wooden stakes in a ring around the spot Stillman had found. A cop was taking Polaroid photographs of the ground while the two men in baseball caps leaned on shovels outside the ring. When he finished, they stepped over the tape and began to dig. Stillman, Walker, and the two police officers stood along the road and watched.

  The policeman with the camera came out of the field and leaned on the door of Ormond’s patrol car. Walker decided he must be at the beginning of his shift, because his uniform looked newly pressed, with the creases all sharp and clear. The cop said philosophically, “You never know on these things. Last year we got called out because a lady tipped us her neighbor had dug a big hole in his back yard. We went over, and sure enough—fresh dirt. We were in a real grim mood digging it up until somebody’s shovel hit an antler.”

  He slapped his thigh and laughed. “He’d hit a buck on the highway, and figured the meat shouldn’t go to waste. But then he got scared and figured, it being out of season and all, he better do something.”

  A half hour later, the sun was above the horizon beyond the field, and the low angle seemed to make it impossible for Walker to keep it out of his eyes. Ormond walked out of the field, opened her car door, and sat behind the wheel. She picked up the microphone and closed the door. As she spoke into the microphone, Walker could not see her lips, but her eyes never moved from his. After a minute she stepped out of the car.

  “Have you got a picture of the suspect with you?”

  “It’s back in town in our car,” said Stillman.

  “Then one of you will have to come take a look.”

  15

  “We’ve got ourselves a female Caucasian here.”

  Walker heard the words over and over in his memory. Ormond had held him in the corner of her eye as she had said it, and Walker could still see her making her way through the weeds, pretending to look down at her feet but contemplating him, even after they had stopped walking and it was time for him to look into the hole.

  One of the other cops had gone to some trouble to wipe the dirt off the face, but there were still a few grains, like sand, at the corners of the eyes, and the hair was stringy and stuck to the head so it looked wet. The Ellen Snyder he had expected was gone—but only just gone, as though he had missed her by a few minutes, a few seconds, even. Her lips were pale and her face was cold and composed, the muscles smoothed and drawn back by something—death itself, or the circumstances of it, or maybe just lying on her back under the ground. He had no idea. She had made the odd transformation. It had amazed him since he was a child, when he had gone to funerals of relatives who lay in coffins somewhere between deep sleep and not being the same person at all. They seemed to be some not-quite-accurate statue made by an artist who had never met them and only reconstructed a likeness from a photograph. The part of her body he could see was naked, still covered with a thin film of dirt, but his reaction to that fact was indifference.

  He had felt no impulse, for modesty’s sake, to cover this girl that he’d cared about so deeply, and no competing urge to look, out of retroactive curiosity about her. In death, the body had lost its particularity and become a type, an example of a class of human bodies. The words that had always seemed to him to be stupid in their simplicity—female Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five, five feet six inches, blond hair—were actually wise and accurate. There was nothing specific, because whatever made people different from all of the others of their size, age, and sex went away with life.

  “That’s Ellen Snyder,” he had said. They had driven him and Stillman back to the station and put them in different rooms.

  After that, the questions got to be more insistent and less polite. The tall cop came in and brought Walker to still another room, where he took his fingerprints, then asked him to stand in front of a ruler painted on a bare wall, put his name on a black felt rectangle with white letters, and took his picture.

  At noon, the police chief arrived. He was a big, wide man named Daniels who had a belly that hung over his belt when he sat. He cultivated one of Walker’s least favorite poses, which was that he was a simple country boy who had trouble remembering things. He began with, “Ever find a stiff before?”

  He needed to have the whole story from the beginning, with every nuance explained to him. Walker went through the long and delicate process: how Ellen had authorized payment to the wrong beneficiary and disappeared, how Stillman had brought him down to Pasadena to help with the investigation because he had known her, and how he had met with Alan Werfel. He explained how the canceled checks to clear the accounts had given the company a trail to follow: each had been written to a different person, and each new person had given the company another of Ellen’s aliases and a location. He summarized the next part to leave out the felonies. He simply said, “By computer search, we picked up the last time she had used her most recent identity, and found she was still registered at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago. When we got there, she had left.” He repeated at each stage his belief that she was a victim. She had done nothing except under duress.

  The chief interrupted every couple of sentences with questions timed to be devastating. Whenever Walker thought he was nearly to the end of the story, Daniels would ask something that would bring him back to the start. “If she was gone to begin with, how did you know that she was really the one who ordered the check to the wrong guy?” When Walker began again at that point and went all the way to the finish again, Daniels asked, “What made you think Ellen Snyder was the one to look for?”

  Walker saw that the interrogation was a duel against an opponent who never got tired, could never make a mistake, and gave no quarter. Daniels would nod sagely while Walker breezed past some particularly dangerous part of the story, then jump back to make him repeat it twenty minutes later. “How did you know this Mrs. Bourgosian was gone if she hadn’t checked out?” Walker made up a version that left out the felonies: “We called repeatedly, waited, knocked on her door.” Then, when Walker actually got as far as the moment when he and Stillman had identified the body, the chief said, “How did you know the place to look was the old Buckland property?”

  Walker had thought about this since the beginning, knowing it was going to be asked many times. He said, “We drove out of Chicago toward the north along a route Stillman thought someone like her might take—away from the major highways. When the road led to a place h
e thought was a good hiding spot, he stopped the car to take a look.”

  The truth was much more disturbing to Walker, and he couldn’t say it, because this man was not his friend. When he had watched Stillman working, driving slowly through the night, staring out the side windows, he had detected a strange, unfamiliar expression on his face. It had been narrow-eyed, cold, and intense, but it had not been merely concentration. There was something more, almost a change of personality. Stillman had become somebody else. It was not until later, after the car had stopped, that Walker had understood who that must have been. This was what Stillman had meant by “looking at the things I see from a different point of view.” Stillman had suspected from the moment he had seen the watch that Ellen was dead.

  Daniels’s eyebrows rose into an arc. “And you just went along with it, no questions asked?”

  “I sit in the main office of an insurance company all day, writing reports,” said Walker. “He’s the security specialist the company hired to look into this case. What would you do?”

  Daniels seemed satisfied with that, but a few minutes later, he jumped back. “What made you decide that Waterman Road was the way out of Chicago?”

  The answer was the same. “You’ll have to ask Stillman.”

  The interrogation seemed about to end at seven in the evening. Daniels stood up and said in a conspiratorial tone, “That Stillman, he’s something, isn’t he? Quite a reputation.”

  Walker said, “Really?”

  Daniels looked down at Walker speculatively. “Maybe it’s just in certain circles.” His voice dropped and he leaned closer. “I’d get as far away as I could.” Then he left.

  It was nearly an hour later when the tall, thin cop came into the room and said to Walker, “You’re free to go.”

  When Walker reached the street outside, it was dark. He walked down the sidewalk to the parked car, but he didn’t see Stillman anywhere. It occurred to him that his own interrogation had probably been little more than a preparation for what they wanted to ask Stillman. Walker turned and entered the station again, picked up a pen and a form that was on the counter, and wrote on the back, “Went to look for a drink.” Then he stuck it under the car’s windshield wiper and walked down the quiet street.