Vanishing Act Read online

  He tried to smile, but it hurt. His top front teeth felt loose, and his upper lip was swollen to a tight, hard lump that didn’t seem to belong to him. Then there were footsteps, and they got louder, and he could see one pair of cops’ black shoes and black pants, and he knew it would be all right. Then big, hard hands rolled him over onto his back, and the pain surprised him so much that he didn’t see anything anymore.

  When Killigan awoke he was in a hospital room. He had no idea how long he had been there, but he knew he had not been wrong about the damage he had sustained. His whole head had a tender, fragile feeling, as though moving it would cause something to come loose and bleed. He heard a rustling noise, and then the cop was standing in front of him.

  "Mr. Killigan?" He was the kind of cop that Killigan liked the least. He was trim and neat, with a short, carefully combed haircut that made him look like an army lieutenant. He pulled a little notebook out of the inner pocket of a gray tweed coat, letting Killigan see the strap of the shoulder holster.

  "Yeah," he rasped. He wasn’t sure why his voice sounded like that, and then he tasted that he was swallowing blood.

  "I’m Detective Sergeant Coleman, L.A. Police Department. I need to ask you some questions about what happened. Your I.D. says you’re a private investigator."

  "Right."

  "Were you working?"

  "Yeah."

  "What were you doing at the airport?"

  "Picking up a woman named Rhonda Eckerly. Citizen’s arrest. There’s a complaint. She’s wanted in Indiana."

  "What charge?"

  "Grand larceny."

  "So you’re a bounty hunter?"

  Killigan heard something he didn’t like in the sound. It was a careful modulation of tone, as though the cop were trying to keep contempt out of his voice. Well, Killigan would make enough on this job to pay his salary for a year. Maybe he would find a way to mention the number and let this guy chew on it for the next few days. "The victim retained me to locate the suspect and bring her back."

  The cop squinted and tilted his head a little. "Who’s the victim?"

  "Mr. Robert Eckerly."

  "I see," said Sergeant Coleman. He stared at Killigan for a long time without letting his face reveal anything. Finally, he said, "I’d like to bring in the woman who was arrested when the officers found you. Are you up to that?"

  "Yeah. I want her held. I’ll press charges."

  The detective’s tongue made a quick search of his teeth as he headed for the door, but then he turned around again. "How did she come to assault you?"

  So that was it. The little bastard was so sure Killigan was weak—that it couldn’t happen to him. "I was escorting her to the van, and she surprised me. She must have taken one of those courses."

  "Were the handcuffs yours?"

  "Yes."

  The detective pulled a chair close to the bed and sat on the edge of it. "Mr. Killigan," he said. "You’re in a dangerous business. You must have some idea of how to pull this kind of thing off without getting yourself in trouble. I think you made a mistake."

  "It would seem so," said Killigan. "Now, where the fuck is Rhonda Eckerly?"

  The detective stood up, walked to the door, and opened it. A uniformed cop came in with his hand on the arm of a woman. She was about thirty. She was tall and slender and olive-skinned, with large eyes and black hair. Then Killigan realized that she was wearing Rhonda Eckerly’s clothes. "No," he said. "No. That’s not the one."

  "This isn’t Rhonda Eckerly?"

  "No!" he shouted. A pain gripped him from his hairline to his jaw. It was as though his whole face had been peeled and a cold wind blew on it. "You got the wrong one!"

  "No," said Detective Coleman evenly. "You did."

  The sanctimonious little cop hadn’t needed to say that because, even distracted by pain and half paralyzed by the dope they’d shot into him to make him lie here, Killigan had been able to figure out that much. She was a ringer. The clothes, the amateurish way Rhonda Eckerly had tried to do things—it had all been planned so they could change in the bathroom.

  The woman said, "Can I talk to him?"

  "I guess so," said the cop.

  "Alone?"

  "No," said the detective. "Not a chance."

  She didn’t look surprised. She walked a little closer to the foot of the bed, and the uniformed officer stayed at her elbow. "Do you know anything about Rhonda Eckerly?"

  "Enough," said Killigan. "She’s a fugitive. Fair game."

  The woman turned to the cop. "Thank you." She took a step toward the door.

  "That’s it?" Killigan asked. "Aren’t you going to laugh at me and tell me how easy it was?"

  ’No."

  "Why not?"

  "I understand you now. Telling you anything would be a waste of time. You’re the walking dead."

  "You both heard it," Killigan said with glee. "She threatened to kill me."

  The detective stared at him again, his head tilted to the side a little. "We’ll discuss that later." He took the woman by the arm and ushered her out the door.

  When the door closed behind them, Coleman walked Jane Whitefield down the hall, past the emergency room desk and the waiting area, across the black rubber mat. The doors huffed open and outside, in the hot night air, he led her past a couple of ambulances to his plain blue car.

  "You got into this intentionally?" he asked.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Why?"

  Jane Whitefield took a deep breath and let it out, then said, "Robert Eckerly married a girl. She was about twenty, he was about fifty. He’s a rich man in a small town. He’s charming. He’s also a sexual sadist."

  "Whose diagnosis?"

  "She ran away once before, and he managed to have her caught, like this. I don’t know if he thought of the theft charge by himself or if he called somebody like Killigan and that person told him that was how it was done. She was released into his custody. He didn’t just beat her up. He chained her by the neck in a room and invited a few like-minded friends to come and help." She looked at Detective Coleman.

  He nodded. "Go on."

  "Nothing shocks a cop? This would have. When they got too drunk and tired to just keep raping her in some ordinary way, they started trying to think up ways to make her beg them to stop hurting her, because that turned them on." She looked up at him. "What are you thinking? That you don’t want to hear the rest?"

  "Will it do her any good?"

  "No."

  "Where is she now?"

  "If I told you I don’t know, you wouldn’t believe me."

  "No."

  "Then I’ll just say she’s far away."

  Coleman leaned on the hood of his car, folded his arms, and stared at her for a moment. "So what are you going to do?"

  "I’ve done it. She’s gone."

  "About Mr. Killigan. He went up to a strange woman in an airport and attempted to handcuff her and stuff her into a van. You could file a pretty impressive array of charges. Are you going to?"

  "There’s no point."

  "Are you afraid?"

  "No. Rhonda Eckerly isn’t coming back to testify to anything. And Killigan wasn’t attacking an innocent woman minding her own business. I stalked him and trapped him."

  He stared at her thoughtfully. "Then there’s still the issue of what to do with you."

  "Nothing. I’m going home."

  "I didn’t say you could. You just told me you trapped him and beat him up on purpose."

  "You can delay me for two or three hours. If you write up a charge, the D.A. won’t file it. I told you I cooked this up myself, so there aren’t any loopholes. He attacked. I resisted. In this state I could have killed him if I wanted."

  "You’re pretty sure of that, are you?"

  "I have an attorney waiting for me at the station. He can explain it to you if you want. When that’s over, you can drive me back to the airport and put me on my plane."

  "What are you, anyway—a detective? A la
wyer?"

  "A guide."

  "Guide? That’s a new one on me."

  "Sometimes people need help. I sometimes give it to them."

  "Me too."

  "I know, and I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I admire you. I would like to shake your hand and go catch an airplane." She grabbed his right hand and gave it a shake, then started to walk out of the parking lot.

  Coleman stared at her, but he made no move to stop her. As he watched her walking away, he tried to explain why he was doing it, but there were too many reasons to pick just one. If he wrote down her name, Killigan was the sort of man who would try to find her. And she was right about the legal outcome. No judge in California would let this one come to trial. Finally, he called out to her, "Is this a woman thing?"

  She stopped and looked at him. "No. Sometimes the victim is a man. Sometimes the guide is too." She smiled at him. "Or an animal, or just a figment of somebody’s imagination."

  2

  Jane Whitefield stepped off the airplane in Rochester, New York, wearing a pair of jeans and a dark blue silk blouse with a Japanese-print pattern of trees and flowers on it. She carried the suitcase that Rhonda Eckerly had checked on to her flight in Indianapolis, but there was no longer any resemblance between them.

  She carried the suitcase to the car-rental lot and picked up the keys to the car she had reserved during her layover in New York City. Then she drove up South Plymouth Avenue into the city, inside the nest of freeways the local planners had named the Inner Loop, and onto West Main. She turned into the underground parking lot of the Presidential Hotel and let the valet take the car out of sight.

  Upstairs in the enormous old lobby, decorated in green-veined marble and dark hardwood, she walked past the reservations desk and the portals that led to bars and restaurants and entered the small shop beside the newsstand. There were four women in chairs already, getting their hair done in a respectful silence. People in hotels were all strangers, and they seemed to talk only to the hairdressers and to watch the mirrors carefully to be sure nothing unauthorized was being done to them. When the slim, dark woman entered, two of the women used the mirrors to glance at her without seeming to, but the manicurist, a plump woman in her fifties, stood up and said, "Mrs. Foley, so nice to see you again."

  Jane said, "Hi, Dorothy. Slow day?"

  "Too early to tell," she answered. Dorothy was already moving her to her cluttered worktable. She sat down across from her and examined her fingers. "These two are really something," said Dorothy as she carefully pared the nails.

  "I broke a couple playing tennis," said Jane.

  "And those scratches on your knuckles," said Dorothy. "You should stand farther away from each other when you play."

  Jane shrugged to signal that the conversation was over, and Dorothy worked in silence. When she had finished her cutting and filing and buffing and soaking and enameling, Jane followed her to the cash register and handed her a folded bill. The manicurist handed her a small plastic bag.

  When Jane Whitefield had walked out of the shop, one of the customers leaned forward in her chair and said to the manicurist, "Was that what I think it was?"

  Dorothy turned her business smile on the woman. It was attentive, cheerful, and utterly impenetrable. "Would you like a manicure?"

  Jane Whitefield walked out of the lobby and down Main Street for two blocks to the tobacco shop. When she entered, the studious-looking young man with the pipe looked up from the book he was reading and went to turn the knob on the sound system to make Mozart’s Third Horn Concerto recede to a safe distance. "What can I do for you today?" said the young man.

  "I’d like a bag of the best grade of pipe tobacco," she said. She held up her hands in a bowl shape. "About this much."

  He put his pipe under her nose and waved it back and forth. "What do you think of this?" he said. "I make it for myself. A little Latakia, some prime Virginia, and a little secret I happen to know about."

  She dodged the blue-gray smoke and wrinkled her nose. "You cut it with sumac to take the bite out of it?"

  The young man looked genuinely injured. "Are you in the business?"

  "Just a guess," she said. "I heard you were the best tobacconist in town." This seemed to make up for her knowing.

  He led her beyond the glass door into the humidified room, reached to the top shelf, and took down a cannister. He weighed some of his precious mixture and put it into a plastic bag for her. "I hate to part with this stuff," he said. "But for you—" he flipped his wrist to pour another stream of shreds into the bag—"anything. I assume you don’t smoke it yourself, so I guess this isn’t the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

  She paid him in cash and put the bag into her purse. "No, I don’t smoke," she said, "but if it’s good I’ll be back."

  Jane Whitefield parked her rented car by the curb on Maplewood Avenue and walked up the sidewalk. It was a quiet street full of three-story nineteenth-century houses shaped like plump boxes, built close together near the curb. This part of Rochester had a lot of placid old neighborhoods like this, left from a time when people who had money wanted to live on streets that seemed urban, where a carriage could pull up to the front door and lawns weren’t of much interest because people were only a mile and a generation from the farm. Most of the houses had been partitioned into apartments now, but there were probably fewer people living in them than in the old days, when a family included eight children and two servants. She came to the end of the street and crossed over into the little park.

  The grass here was the bright, luminous green that seemed to come in early April and last only until the new blades grew tall in the warm weather. When she stopped to pluck a blade, it was swollen and crisp, and when she split it, her hand was wet with chlorophyll. The trees were old, much older than the houses. They had long ago grown to their full height, and now some of the trunks were four feet in diameter. She could see the buds on the lower branches already, waiting for this part of the earth to tilt a little closer to the sun before they were ready to unfurl into leaves.

  Jane Whitefield passed to the left of the big Romanesque structure of the Christian Science church. It looked old and white and heavy, like a mausoleum now that the central part of the city had changed. Then she walked on to the edge of the grass, leaned over the thick iron railing, and looked down into the gorge.

  Fifty feet below her, the dark ribbon of the Genesee River moved along sedately to the north, far from its source in Pennsylvania and still a day’s walk from Lake Ontario. Genesee meant "pleasant banks."

  Down in the gorge, the river was maybe forty feet across at its widest point, and beside it, up a pebbly bank, was about a hundred feet of flat, weedy ground. As she stared at the flat place below her, it wasn’t spring anymore. The leaves were thick and dry on the trees, and the air was hot. It was late in the summer.

  The village of Gaskosago had been on that spot along the water, the elm-bark longhouses all oriented east to west, the smoke that rose from the chimney hole in the center of each roof going up in a straight line, only to be dispersed by the steady breeze from this side when it rose to the top of the chasm. On a quiet afternoon, the small children would play down there in the cool, clear water. Mothers never did much watching of children after they could walk, because the people believed it would stifle the self-reliance they would need later.

  The women were up here on the level ground, working with hoes and digging sticks to chop the weeds and turn the soil around the roots of the cornstalks. The plants were almost ready for harvest, so the women gossiped and laughed as they worked, invisible to each other through the tall stalks. In the early spring they had planted the corn, and then after it had sprouted, they had planted the beans and the squash so the vines could grow up the cornstalks to keep the vegetables off the ground. They called the plants the three sisters. Only the women were up here, because crops not tended by women would not grow. The men were out hunting or fighting.

  Then, down in
the village below, a couple of the dogs that had been splashing in the water with the children started barking and growling. Jane watched as a young woman stopped and listened to it. When it didn’t stop, she looked up from her work and walked to the edge of the field. She could see that women were running out of the cornfield to the low limbs of the trees where they had hung their babies in cradleboards.

  One of the older women hurried to the edge of the gorge and shouted "Go-weh! Go-weh!" at the children below. She waved her arms up and down frantically and screamed at them to run. Suddenly, the older woman’s body gave a spasmodic jerk, and a big red blotch exploded out of her back as she fell backward. There was the loud report of the rifle, echoing back and forth among the rocky cliffs above the village for a second. Jane watched the young woman turn her head to try to see where it had come from.

  What she saw were the first of the four thousand soldiers streaming out of the woods from the east. They were already on the flats, setting fire to the cornfields and the orchards. The young woman threw down her digging stick and began to run. There were more rifle shots now, first a loud, long barrage of many guns fired at once and then a ragged, uneven patter as single soldiers leveled their sights on someone running. The young woman sprinted, dashing among the tall cornstalks, making sharp turns and zigzags until she was in the woods. She ran to the north and west. Before long there were more women, a few slipping between the trees with cradleboards on their backs, others with bigger children they had scooped up in their arms, all of them trying to fade into the deep forest and away from that awful place.

  Jane closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths to erase the feeling of panic, and when she opened them, she stared up and away, at the quiet Victorian houses across the street from the park. All of that had happened long ago. The man who had ordered the attacks was named George Washington. From that day in 1779 until now, the only way of referring to any American president in the Seneca language was Destroyer of Villages.