Death Benefits: A Novel Read online

  She pushed three twenty-dollar bills through the open window onto the passenger seat. “I’m taking another cab.”

  He yelled, “You can’t do that!”

  She said, “I’m not cheating you, I’m just leaving,” turned, and stepped toward the other cab. She walked with her head up, feeling pleased with herself for speaking quietly and not relinquishing her dignity. She could see the pudgy cab driver chewing and watching her, so she made sure her performance was good. When she was near enough, she said, “Would you be able to take me to the airport?” It was only after she had said it that it occurred to her he might say no.

  He nodded and swallowed. “Sure.”

  There was a loud blare of a horn, and Ellen looked back to see the cab she had just left still in the intersection. The driver twisted in his seat to look out the rear window. The light had changed, and there was a truck behind him. Reluctantly, he glared in Ellen’s direction, then accelerated ahead to get out of the way and disappeared behind the building on the corner.

  The new driver said, “Have a problem with the other cab?”

  “Sort of.”

  “If you have his number, you can report him.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “I need to get to the airport, and he was taking me out of the way to pick up another person. I didn’t get his number anyway.”

  He got in and started the engine. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you there.” He carefully set his coffee into the drink holder beside him, and stuffed the rest of his doughnut into his mouth.

  Ellen slipped into the back seat, and they were on the 105 freeway in a few minutes. Her heart began to beat hard. It was the same sensation she had felt the only time she had been in a car accident. Her heart had begun thumping like this, not during, but after the accident, when the danger was already past, and she had time to think about how suddenly and unexpectedly it had come. She consciously relaxed her body, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply until she felt better. When she opened them again, the driver had brought them onto the San Diego Freeway, and she recognized the stretch ahead.

  When the driver came off the freeway on the long, straight ramp at Century Boulevard, he said, “What airline?”

  “Just drop me at the Hilton Hotel,” she said. “It’s up ahead. On the right.”

  The driver was mildly surprised, and a bit confused, but it was not the sort of confusion that required him to ask the young woman any questions. He knew where it was. He knew all the major hotels. He pulled up into the circular drive, got out to open her door and accept his payment and tip. He got in again, recorded the fare in his log, then picked up his radio mike to call in, and let his eyes follow the young woman through the glass doors of the lobby. He watched her until she disappeared. Then he drove out onto Century Boulevard and maneuvered into the Arrivals lane of the airport entrance. At this hour, he was probably going to spend a lot of time in the taxi staging area, waiting for his turn to drive up and take on a fare. After he got there, he was still wondering.

  She had been angry, and maybe just a little bit afraid of the other cab driver. He knew she was not the sort of person to argue about the cost, because she had given him an unusually generous tip, so she had probably told him the truth about the driver trying to double up on her and make her late.

  On the other hand, everything else had been a lie. She had said the airport, but really wanted to go to a hotel. When he had heard where she was really going, he’d decided she had to be some kind of businesswoman on the way to a breakfast meeting, with that briefcase and all. Everything about her implied that she was meeting some big executive who had flown in from somewhere, and she was here to sell him something before he flew out again. That impression had only lasted a minute. When she had gone into the lobby, she had not gone to the front desk. She hadn’t gone to the concierge’s table to pick up the phone and tell somebody she was here. She hadn’t gone to the dining room. She had walked straight to the elevators to head upstairs.

  Nobody wore a suit like that to go to a hotel for an affair, and he had never seen anybody arrive for that purpose at five-thirty A.M., either. That convinced him. This young woman had done everything possible to make this look like business, so it wasn’t business. After all, what else was upstairs but people’s hotel rooms? And changing cabs on impulse was a pretty good way to be sure you had not been followed by some private detective trying to prove you were fooling around.

  He thought the incident through one more time, to be sure he had not misinterpreted any of the evidence, and was satisfied, but not glad. He had instinctively liked that young woman from the moment when he had seen her jump out of the other cab and walk up to him, trying to look sure of herself. He hoped she had not gotten herself into something that she would regret when she was a little older, but he supposed she probably had. Everybody seemed to make a few mistakes after they looked grown up, and then really grew up while they were trying to make up for them. He pronounced a silent benediction on her and turned his attention to the airport dispatcher, who was already waving him forward. After that he was busy, and the young woman left his thoughts and then his memory. It was as though she had stepped into that elevator, and it had carried her out of the world.

  2

  “He’s asking people questions,” Maureen Cardarelli announced. She sat still, her eyes wide and expectant, waiting for Walker’s reaction.

  “Like what—‘Can Cardarelli be trusted?’ ”

  Her eyes took on a half-closed, suspicious look that still managed to be oddly seductive, her face lowered so a curtain of coal-black hair would fall to place it in half-shadow. “He hasn’t talked to you?”

  “No,” said Walker. “Maybe he can tell I’m busy.” He let his eyes move significantly in the direction of the pile of papers on his desk, then back to meet hers.

  She said with slow malice, “Odd that he hasn’t said anything to you, of all people.”

  “Why me?” Walker pretended that her uncharacteristic lack of subtlety had not made his mind stall for an instant while he searched his memory for guilty secrets.

  She shrugged and stood up, then said, “It’s a big building. Lots of departments, lots of places to camp out, but he seems to like it near you.” She smiled indulgently to imply that it had been a playful slap and he was still one of her closest confidants. “Well, I’d better let you go back to sleep.”

  Walker watched her walk to the opening of his cubicle and spin around the corner to take her first few steps in that special way she had. It was at once too graceful to be conscious and too efficient and purposeful to be anything else. As she walked toward the elevators, everything from the set of her shoulders to the pock-pock-pock of her high heels on the terrazzo floor insisted that she was on a mission of importance.

  Walker tried to force himself to return to his work. He looked down at the stack of handwritten papers on his desk, then surveyed the figures on his computer screen, but he could not keep his eyes from moving warily over the top of the monitor. There was Max Stillman again, just to the left of the opening in Walker’s cubicle, sitting at a desk in the open office everyone called “the bay,” surrounded by young typists and phone reps. Several times Walker had noticed, always with surprise, that Stillman was not an exceptionally large man. What he had was the curious quality of conveying mass and solidity, as though he were something very large that had been compressed into a dense, volatile object.

  Stillman appeared to be about fifty, with more gray at his temples than brown, and a hint of gleaming cranium under thin wisps of hair on top. He hunched over the desk with his thick forearms resting on either side of an open file, his eyes fixed on it with cold concentration. He would sometimes glare at a page for five seconds, then set it aside and move to another one, and at other times he would sit, unmoving, for fifteen minutes. When he reached the end of a file, he would always close the folder, place it neatly on the stack at the right corner of the desk, and replace it with a file from the pile on the
left.

  Stillman had materialized nearly a week ago like something that had been conjured, already standing halfway down the center aisle of the bay just at noon, when the first shift of specialists and clerks and receptionists was streaming past him toward lunch. He seemed not to watch for anyone or even to pay much attention to them. He looked, Walker had thought, like a man standing in a room by himself, preoccupied with trying to remember something.

  Walker still considered himself the first person to have noticed Stillman, although he knew that was nearly impossible. It would be very difficult for a stranger to make his way past the guards in the lobby, all the way to the seventh floor of the San Francisco office of McClaren Life and Casualty, without being asked some questions. This was headquarters, the spot where the firm had originated nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, and not a field agency: nobody sold insurance here. Walker had stepped out of his cubicle, smiled reassuringly, and said, “Can I help you, or give you directions, or something?”

  Stillman’s eyes had darted to Walker’s face with an abrupt movement that had the alertness of a bird of prey, but his body had not stirred. An expression that was not quite friendly, but that Walker had interpreted as unthreatening, had come over his face. “Name’s Stillman. Did McClaren tell you to expect me?”

  Walker had grinned. “McClaren?” He had to remind himself that it was not a ridiculous idea. He sometimes forgot that there actually was a Mr. McClaren, and rumor had it that he spent most days in an office five floors above them.

  Stillman nodded. “Right.”

  Walker had said, “He may have had someone call my supervisor. I’ll take you there.”

  Stillman had followed Walker to the corner office. Joyce Hazelton had been standing at her window, staring out at the array of tall buildings across Van Ness Avenue, when Walker knocked. She had spun around, a distracted expression in her eyes.

  Walker had not seen that she was on the telephone, because the receiver had been hidden by her dark hair, and the cord had been in front of her. “Sorry,” he’d said from the doorway, but he’d heard her say, “I think he’s here now . . . Mr. Stillman?”

  Stillman had nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She had said, “Mr. McClaren wondered if you had a minute to talk to him.” She had handed Stillman the phone, then put her arm around Walker’s shoulder to propel him out of the office with her, and closed the door behind them. She’d stood outside her own office for a few seconds, and the novelty of it had made Walker consider asking her who Max Stillman was, but the impulse had lasted only a moment, because her manicured hand had made a little sweeping motion to shoo him toward his desk.

  He had turned and gone back. The day’s figures for payouts in the casualty end of the business made a difference, but the unannounced arrival of some old rich buddy of the current McClaren was like a cloud passing a mile above him. There had been a shadow for a few seconds while it was overhead, but it had moved on.

  When Walker had returned from lunch, Stillman had been planted at the unoccupied desk in the open bay that was usually reserved for temporary workers, and Joyce Hazelton had been scurrying around gathering piles of reports and policy files. Walker had taken a couple of steps closer to offer help, but she had acknowledged him with a perfunctory smile and given her head a little shake.

  Late that afternoon, Bill Kennedy had slipped into Walker’s cubicle to deliver the morning’s figures from the field. “He’s still out there, I see.”

  Walker had brought himself back from the structured, silent, logical world of statistics. “Who?”

  Kennedy’s voice had gone lower. “ ‘What bear?’ huh? Good strategy, John. That’s why possums rule the earth.”

  Walker had glanced over his computer monitor into the vast, open office. Stillman was glaring down at another file. “He’s just some friend of Mr. McClaren’s.”

  “He’s a spy.”

  “On what?”

  “On whom. On us. It’s got to be. Accounting just cut a check for him. It’s a hundred thousand, listed on the system as ‘Security Expense.’ ”

  Walker had shrugged. “Maybe he’s going to overhaul the computer system so your twelve-year-old nephew can’t break in and peruse the physical exams of actresses anymore.”

  Kennedy had shaken his head in pity. “Take a look. Is that a computer geek? No. That’s what repressive governments send out if the general’s daughter doesn’t come home from the prom.”

  Walker had looked at Kennedy wearily. “And why do you suppose this stranger showed up in our peaceful village? Could it be that they hired him to find out who the village idiot is, and watch him rushing from hut to hut raving and talking wild?”

  “Good point.” Kennedy had smiled as he stepped off, then called back, “Sorry, got to get these figures delivered.”

  During the next few days, Walker had found that he was receiving more frequent visits from acquaintances in other departments. The men tended to step into his cubicle and move uncomfortably close to Walker’s shoulder, where they could pretend to look down at something he was showing them on his desk or computer screen, then raise their eyes slightly to stare at Stillman without being caught. The women were more subtle. They would sit in the only visitor’s chair, in the corner where Stillman couldn’t see them, and simply watch Walker’s eyes to see if Stillman did anything unusual while they fished for information.

  Walker didn’t have any. “If he’s a security consultant, I assume he’s here to make us more secure, right? So feel secure.”

  Marcy Wang stood and stared into his eyes as she drifted toward the door of his cubicle. “He’s here to make whoever paid him feel secure. I didn’t pay him, and neither did you.”

  This time, as Walker’s eyes returned to his work, they passed across Stillman. He was alarmed to see that this time Stillman was not in profile, bent over the desk he had commandeered. He was half-turned in his swivel chair, staring frankly at Walker. Their eyes met for a heartbeat before Walker was able to nod nonchalantly and force his gaze down to the safety of his papers.

  Each morning for the next three days, when Walker sat in the tiny kitchen of his apartment waiting for the coffee to drip through the machine, he remembered Stillman and felt uneasy. He thought about him as he dressed and drove to work, hoping he would be gone. Then he took the elevator to the seventh floor, discovered that Stillman was there again, hung his coat on the single hanger on the wall of his cubicle, and tried to obliterate him by concentrating on his work until nightfall.

  Walker had worked for McClaren’s for only two years, beginning the summer after he had graduated from college. When he was a junior, he had entertained a vague notion of working a year and then going to law school, but as his senior year went on, the idea of more school had receded in his mind, and the prospect of going to work had taken all his attention. When a man from McClaren’s had come to the University of Pennsylvania campus near the end of Walker’s senior year, he had signed up for an interview. The corporate mystique had intrigued him.

  McClaren’s was the company that had insured clipper ships making tea runs to China, and had covered gold shipments coming down from the mountains to San Francisco banks. The original headquarters had been replaced by this modern steel-and-glass building, but the furniture in it was Victorian, made of heavy, close-grained wood that appeared to be relics of agents who had written policies on shiploads of elephant tusks brought here to make billiard balls and piano keys. There was a lingering hint of huge risks and huge opportunities. Even now McClaren’s kept a reputation for promotion from within that was rivaled only by the Jesuits.

  When graduation had approached, he had still not received any offers that piqued his interest as much as the offer to work for McClaren’s. He had always imagined he would work in Ohio within a few hours of home, but on the day before commencement, he had talked to his father and discovered that his parents had never given the idea much consideration. He had quietly set the plan aside and signed a con
tract with McClaren’s. He had completed the training period of six months and been assigned to this cubicle on the seventh floor of the home office.

  He had been placed under the distant but sane supervision of Joyce Hazelton. She had explained to him what an analyst did: “They give us raw data. We cook and serve.” Information about all company operations was brought in, and he would screen the numbers for meaning and write reports that revealed trends and anomalies. She had said, “If we suddenly have seven percent of our clients dying on a full moon, I want that in block letters. If it’s fifteen percent, I want it underlined too.” Since then she had left him alone except to smile cordially at him once a day and meet with him every six months to show him that his performance ratings were all excellent.

  He had found an unexpected pleasure in his work. The analysts all made jokes about the job, but it was intoxicating. Examining the figures was like being a cabalist searching for messages about the future encoded in the Talmud. Some of the messages were reassuring. At certain ages people had children and bought term life. By consulting actuarial tables, he knew how many of the policies sold this year would come back for payoff at what future dates, and how many premiums the company would receive in the meantime. He could consult the company’s tables on historical profit on invested premiums to produce an estimate of total return. Because of the large number of policies and the long stretch of time, the individual deviations from the norm disappeared to produce reliable predictions.

  The work of the analysts was solitary because it demanded uninterrupted concentration, so they tended to savor encounters with their colleagues, and they greeted each other with manic friendliness. That made his time in the office pleasant enough, but he had not detected much improvement in the part of his life that took place between seven P.M. and seven A.M., and that had worried and depressed him. He thought about it most often on the trips to and from work, when he passed groups of people about his age who were walking together, because they seemed to have found some solution that he had missed.