Vanishing Act Page 18

  What made John special enough to be worth some gigantic paranoid’s nightmare of a conspiracy? She had been stupid. John could be excused for assuming that his enemies were his own, because no human being could be expected to imagine that when his life was destroyed, that wasn’t the main event. Jane couldn’t be excused. She stated it to herself: Jane is presented with an ordinary guy who tells her that one day, without warning, enormous resources have been brought into play by extremely cunning enemies he can’t even identify, all designed to destroy his ordinary life, and the one who warns him is one of the most wanted fugitives in the world. Who are these people really after? Just the mention of Harry’s name should have been enough to make it obvious to her.

  She had even said it that night. Why would they spread the word all over the prison system so just about everybody in the whole country who wasn’t eligible for jury duty would know? That was no way to kill an ex-cop. It was a way to be sure he heard he was in a kind of danger he couldn’t hope to fight off. They had wanted to get him running.

  Then the four men had followed John’s bus all the way from St. Louis to Buffalo. If they had wanted to kill him, surely they could have found some way before he got to Deganawida. They hadn’t wanted to kill him. They just wanted to see where he went.

  Later that night, when they had come upon the abandoned car on Ridge Road, they had pulled their guns. What were they trying to do—kill him? No. If they had wanted to do that, they could have stood around the car and fired through the doors. They were trying to capture him. When she had seen that they weren’t going to shoot, for an instant she had thought they might even be cops.

  John had made one mistake, but it hadn’t been the one he thought. It was that one night, years ago, he had decided that the three men arrested with Harry had not been after him because of Cappadocia. That had to be the mistake, because nobody but those three men would have known that he had ever met Harry. Why had he assumed that a man who was running from one problem had gotten attacked for something unrelated? Because that was what Harry had told him. If only he had known Harry better, things would be different now.

  Poor little Harry. After five quiet years in Santa Barbara, he would have heard a knock on the door and answered it without having that preliminary twinge of fear. He would never have forgotten the sickening sight of the men in his card game, all of them shot four or five times in the head and chest, but by now he would have convinced himself that he was safe, not because of the elaborate precautions but because he was Harry, and Harry had raised optimism to the level of the mystical.

  Most of the people who were called gamblers weren’t that at all, because they never bet on anything. Harry had been a player. Even his only attempt to move up in the world and be the one who owned the table and took the rake had been manic optimism: He had actually expected he would be the first man in history to run a high-stakes poker game in a place like Chicago without meeting somebody like Jerry Cappadocia.

  People who read in the newspapers that Harry was a gambler probably would assume that he had become one because he was good at it. Gambling wasn’t the name of a profession; it was the name of a delusion. When he had come to her in the night, he had been in possession of ten thousand dollars, all in hundreds, and one suit with shiny spots on the pants where he sat down. Now he was dead. Whether it was Cappadocia’s friends who got him because they thought he had set up the murders or it was the murderers making sure he never talked didn’t matter to anybody except Jane.

  If it was Cappadocia’s friends, they would have tried to make him talk before they killed him. If he had told them what they needed to know, then maybe they’d let John ... She stopped herself, sick and ashamed. She also knew better. Whoever had forced John to run to her, and followed them both to Lew Feng, then killed him to get Harry’s address, had constructed a big, wide trap to do it. They would close it now. John Felker dead would be slightly less troubling to them than John Felker alive, and killing him would be so easy.

  It wasn’t until the plane had landed in Chicago and she had changed airplanes for the flight to Portland that she found herself sitting next to Jake. He sat in silence, not even looking at her, until she said, "You can talk, you know. I didn’t say you had to turn into a stone."

  "Didn’t want to be a bother," said Jake.

  "The flying part is safe, Jake. You don’t have to be afraid yet."

  "That doesn’t mean I have to sit here like a moron and be impressed by it. It’s always been my belief that the greatest human achievement is swimming. A few clever monkeylike fellows have figured out how to make a machine that will lift people into the air at some speed, but this isn’t flying. It’s riding. Swimming isn’t a cheat like that. It’s a fundamental extension of human powers."

  She looked at him with suspicion. "Do you think a lot about dying?"

  "That’s a hell of a thing to ask a man my age," he said. "I don’t actively think about it. Besides, I seem to have exhausted my sources of information—for the moment, anyway."

  "Go on. You’ve been thinking about it since we left home."

  "I wasn’t thinking about falling out of the sky," he said. "I was thinking about the dead, the people who were around when I was doing most of my living— Margaret, your parents, my sister Ellen ... there’s a long list."

  "Does that make you afraid?"

  "When I was young it did. I remember when I was thirty or thirty-five I used to still hate to go to sleep at night because I didn’t want to miss anything—like a child. That was how I thought about death, too; I dreaded having my curiosity frustrated. But I guess you can only flinch so many times before the punch gets familiar. You’ve already felt it hit so many times in your imagination that it loses interest."

  "Do you think other people get that way—soldiers, people who have to think about it a lot, cops?"

  "I don’t know," he said. "Do you?"

  "People always find some way to do what they have to do, don’t they? Pretend the plane that crashes isn’t going to be theirs."

  "Yes," he said. He looked at her closely, his sharp old eyes studying her.

  She opened her purse and took out the article she had torn from the Los Angeles newspaper. She had read it three times on the way to Chicago, but she read it again, keeping her eyes down where Jake couldn’t see them.

  After they landed in Portland, she walked to the airport shop and bought a Vancouver newspaper. She had no trouble finding an article about the murder of Lewis Feng. There was a photograph of the policemen standing in front of the stationery shop while two of the coroner’s men wheeled a body bag to the curb. When she got to the part of the article that described what had happened to Feng, she put it down. He had been tortured. Of course, they would have had to do that. He would never have given them his client list unless they had first brought him to the point where the future didn’t matter as much as getting through the present. He would have to be willing to trade anything to make the pain stop. He had suffered for her mistake. She had done that to him.

  The flight down to Medford was short, but she was aware of each second as she breathed in and out in an agonizing mechanical count. As they drew nearer, she concentrated on preparing herself for the most likely possibility. John had driven the five hundred miles down from Vancouver, gone to the apartment, opened the door, and found the four men waiting for him.

  The article had said Harry was taken without a struggle in his apartment, his throat cut silently. He could have let somebody in and turned his back for a moment. But John wasn’t Harry Kemple. John was big and strong and alert. For him it would have to be something different, and more horrible—maybe three of them to hold him down and his eyes would bulge when he saw the knife come out and he’d push off with his feet to keep his neck away from the blade. She caught herself actually shaking her head to get the image out of her mind.

  She glanced at Jake. She knew he had seen it, but he pretended he hadn’t. He stared straight ahead, stiff and erect. There
was a kind of integrity to him, a separate-ness from the airplane, a refusal to slump in the seat and give up his will to the machine.

  This time when the plane touched and bounced and then rattled along the runway to taxi to the terminal, Jane was one of the people who were incapable of waiting. She was unbuckled and ready. They had not checked their bags on the final leg of the trip because she had known that she would go mad waiting for them to come rumbling down into the baggage area. They walked into the terminal, put their suitcases into storage lockers, and stepped outside.

  When the cab pulled up on the 4300 block of Islington, Jane picked the place out at once. It was the sort of building the Fengs would have chosen. It was a sprawling new apartment complex of the sort where people didn’t pay much attention to their neighbors because there were so many of them, and each wing would have a few moving out at the end of each month and new people coming in to replace them. But it was also the sort of place where you could murder a tenant without anyone noticing unless you did it with a bomb.

  She walked along the sidewalk in front of the complex and saw that it was divided into sections that had their own numbers: 4380, 4310, 4360. When she reached 4350, she looked for the parking space in the carport at the side of the building. She found B, but the Honda wasn’t in it.

  "Not home," said Jake, and she remembered his presence.

  "Time for you to go for your evening walk," she said.

  "Right." Jake started off on his stroll. He walked along the long row of parking spaces looked for all of the signs that Jane had told him about: a car with a man sitting in it, maybe pretending to wait for somebody while he read a newspaper. He scanned the windows for faces and then searched the surrounding block for a gray Honda Accord; a man who thought he might have unwelcome visitors might not park his car in a space with his apartment number on it.

  Inside the hallway, Jane read the letters on the doors. They started with F. She worked backward until she found B. She heard someone across the hall in Apartment A walk close to the door, probably to look at her through the glass peephole. She tensed her legs and prepared to move quickly. After a moment there was a creak and she could hear the person moving off.

  She turned to Apartment B and rang the bell. She could hear it jangling beyond the door. She knocked, then rang again, but there was no sound that she hadn’t made. She turned and knocked on the door of Apartment A.

  A woman about her age, wearing a sweatshirt that had a stain on it Jane identified as baby formula, opened the door and stared at her with a resigned look. "What can I do for you?"

  "I’m sorry to bother you," said Jane, and she could tell the woman was thinking, Not as sorry as I am, "but I’ve been trying to reach my friend, who just moved into Apartment B. His phone isn’t working, and—"

  "Oh," said the woman. She brushed a long strand of corkscrew-curled hair out of her left eye, and it bounced back perversely. "They haven’t moved in yet."

  Jane felt the tension beginning to grip her. "Are you sure?"

  "Believe me, in this place I’d know it. People carrying furniture around sounds like an earthquake."

  "Is there a manager?"

  "Yeah. In the next building. Apartment A." Jane heard the first faint sounds of a baby waking up, amplified by an electric monitor. "Oh," said the woman vaguely, and the harried look returned to her face.

  "Thanks," Jane said, and turned away so the woman could close the door. It didn’t prove anything. John Young didn’t have any furniture yet.

  She went outside the building and walked around the corner to the window of Apartment B. The window looked into the living room. It was just four bare walls enclosing a shiny imitation-parquet floor. The bedroom door was open, and there was nothing in there, either. Even the closet doors were open, something that the people who gave apartments their gang-cleaning between tenants did to air them out.

  The next thing Jane saw made her turn away. It was a small piece of white paper on the floor that had been slipped in under the door. She was starting to walk when she saw Jake coming around the building toward her. She pointed to the window, and he looked inside.

  "That’s my note on the floor," she said. "He never made it."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I’m going to check with the manager, but it looks that way."

  "I’ll do that," said Jake.

  In a few minutes Jake returned. "No. He would have had to check in to get his power and water turned on. He hasn’t been here."

  They walked out of the apartment complex, down Islington Street, with no destination. She hadn’t thought of this—not that he wouldn’t be in his apartment now, but that he had never been here at all. Even if the four men had found Harry’s and John’s addresses on the same list, how could they have stopped John so quickly? He would have had a good head start. They could have made it to the apartment before he did, but how could they catch him on the road?

  Jake cleared his throat, and she knew she had to ask, so she said, "What is it?"

  "Well," he said. "Is there any chance that he didn’t entirely trust you?"

  She was stung. "No chance," she said. Was there? Could he possibly think that she had some ulterior motive for everything she had done? "No."

  "I see," said Jake. "So he knew you really well."

  "Yes, we had an affair," she said, "since that’s the bush you’re beating around. But I’m being logical. He ran into trouble, but he knows the reason he got out was because I risked my life for him. He was carrying a lot of money, and some people would get suspicious of anybody who knew it. But I didn’t even let him spend any of it. I put up all the expenses. And he came to me; I didn’t look for him."

  "What do you want to do?"

  "How can I know?"

  Jake walked along, looking around him instead of at her. "There are only a couple of really strong possibilities. One is, they found him and killed him before he got here." She caught him watching her for a reaction. "In that case, there wouldn’t be much to do, would there? They’d be long gone."

  "I hope your other possibility beats that one."

  "You said he used to be a policeman?"

  "Yes," she said. "Eight years."

  "Is it possible that he hasn’t quite gotten over it? Bear with me now. Suppose he stopped and picked up a paper and read about this fellow getting killed, just like you did. This Harry was some kind of friend, right? Or at least somebody who had done him a favor ..."

  "Jake!" she gasped. She stopped and gave him a quick hug. "You did it. That’s right. It’s true. I talked to him for hours, endlessly. I was trying to tell him that he couldn’t afford to act like a cop anymore, figuring things out and then going off to do something about it. Even while I was saying it, I could see there was something in the back of his eyes, some door back there that closed. He was protecting something. And now I know. He didn’t have any other way to see things."

  "So he just might have gone on south to Santa Barbara."

  "Might have? I’m telling you, I’m sure that’s exactly what he would do. He’s thinking like a cop. He never stopped thinking that way, because he didn’t know how. He read, or heard on the radio, that Harry was murdered in Santa Barbara. He owed his life to Harry, and the people who killed Harry are also after him. He’s down at the scene of the crime trying to figure out who they are."

  "Unless something happened on the way here."

  "But that’s what’s been bothering me all along. The four men killed Lewis Feng and deciphered his list. Then what did they do? They went right away to Santa Barbara and killed Harry. That’s not a guess. We know they did because Harry’s dead. Meanwhile, John was driving from Vancouver to Medford. How could they find him unless they were actually following him? They couldn’t and they weren’t following him."

  "How do we know that?"

  "Because John left right after I did. First they had to break in at Lew Feng’s, kill him, and find his list. Harry was obviously the priority because they got him. Even if
they found both names and addresses right away and split up, two to get Harry and two to get John, he would have at the very least an hour’s head start—fifty miles. He would be in one of thousands of little cars driving the five hundred miles down the coast, so they couldn’t have gotten him on the road."

  "Some other way? It must be a nine- or ten-hour drive. A motel?"

  "It’s the same problem. They would have to stop at every hotel or motel for five hundred miles and look for a car they’d never seen before. They never could have found him. They could have murdered Harry in Santa Barbara and still have flown here in time to surprise John, but they didn’t. John hasn’t been here, but neither has anyone else."

  "How do you know that?"

  "The lady across the hall has a baby, so she’s here during working hours and would have heard them. She heard me walking up the hall—one woman, not four two-hundred-pound men. Everybody else in the complex is here at night. When those men tried to sneak into my house, they had to break a window to do it, didn’t they?"

  "Yeah," he said. "I guess they did."

  "Well, they didn’t break any windows here or jimmy a door or anything else."

  "No, they didn’t." He waited and watched her.

  She avoided his eyes and craned her neck to look up and down the street. "Did you happen to see a pay phone on your rambles? This doesn’t look like a street where cabs cruise for passengers."

  20

  As the plane turned to come in over the Santa Barbara airport, Jane looked down and tried to imagine Harry living here. She had been here once before, when she had left a client in Los Angeles and wanted to spend a few days out of sight. It was a beautiful, quiet place, but there was something about it that had never seemed quite right to her—like a graveyard with flowers that grew in too lush and luxuriant not to be a sign of a haunting.