Death Benefits: A Novel Page 5

  Stillman sat behind the wheel and drove out onto Century Boulevard. Twice Walker caught Stillman staring at him. Finally, Stillman said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  Walker said, “Nothing. Nothing new, anyway. What are we doing?”

  “I told you. Investigating.”

  Walker reviewed his question and admitted to himself that asking questions was a bad strategy. No matter what the answer had been, it would not have changed what he was doing, which was sitting in the passenger seat letting Stillman drag him wherever he pleased until he was sure Ellen was not in trouble.

  Stillman’s voice struck him as a distraction. “I’ll tell you what I know so far, so you recognize names. A guy named Andrew Werfel bought a life insurance policy from McClaren’s in 1959. It was one of those policies that rich guys buy to pay the inheritance tax so the government doesn’t take everything when they die. The payoff was twelve million. Okay so far?”

  “Sure,” said Walker. “It’s pretty common.”

  “He died a month ago. The beneficiary was his only begotten son, Alan Werfel. Everything cut-and-dried. A couple of weeks later, Alan Werfel showed up at the Pasadena office with a certified copy of the death certificate. After a few preliminary faxes and calls to the home office, he was given the usual forms to sign off on, and then a check for the twelve million. Still okay?”

  “This doesn’t sound like anything but a dull day at the Pasadena office. I assume there was something wrong with Alan Werfel?”

  “That’s the way it looks. The agent who handled the Werfel thing was the assistant manager of the Pasadena office, a young lady named Ellen Snyder. She’s the one who verified the death certificate, checked Alan Werfel’s ID, requested the payout, and handed over the check.” Walker could feel Stillman’s eyes on him.

  “Is this where I come in?” asked Walker. “Do I think Ellen Snyder did something dishonest? No. Can I prove it? No. I just have no reason to think she would, and quite a few to think she wouldn’t.”

  “I got that far on my own,” said Stillman. “She has a good record, and when she was hired, nothing got into her personnel file that was faked . . . . unlike a few other people.”

  “You’re saying there’s something wrong in my file?”

  “I’m not investigating you. I didn’t check everything in your file.”

  “You want to give me a lie detector test?”

  Stillman rolled his eyes and then blew out a breath in displeasure. “You are not the problem. You are helping me analyze the problem. And by the way, don’t ever volunteer to take a lie detector test.”

  “Why not—because people will just think I beat the machine?”

  “You hear about that more than it happens. Most of the people who can do it are nuts, and you don’t need a machine to know that you met one. What you don’t hear about is—HAH!” His shout was sudden and deafening. “How’s your pulse, kid?”

  It took Walker a second to settle back into his seat. His shirt collar suddenly felt tight. The arteries in his neck were pounding, and a faint film of moisture had materialized on his forehead. He fought down the anger. “That wasn’t funny.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be funny,” said Stillman. “It was instructive. Your heartbeat, blood pressure, and breathing just took a big jump all at the same time. You’re lying.”

  “You’re saying the lie detector people are going to scream in my ear?”

  “They don’t have to. Any six-year-old on a playground knows how to piss off the kid beside him enough to get a reading.”

  “Then I’ll stay away from playgrounds, too.”

  “Good. Now, back to Ellen. You fucked her, right?”

  Walker sucked in a deep breath. “Are you still trying to be irritating?”

  “No, it’s a natural by-product of the search for knowledge,” said Stillman. “Didn’t you?”

  “No. I didn’t.” He tried to detect whether the tone of his voice had betrayed him, and judged that the genuine anger in it had masked the lie. He tested a suspicion. “Did somebody tell you I did?”

  “I don’t remember who told me. Cardarelli, maybe. Or it could have been Marcy Wang.”

  Walker smoldered. The idea that they would express outrage to him that Stillman was spying on employees, and then tell Stillman all the personal information he wanted on other people, was incredible. How had they even known? The revelation that any of them had known enough about what had passed between him and Ellen to make any conjecture was a shock. It had begun and ended in training, when they had all been almost strangers. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered.

  “Then don’t. Maybe I made it up and forgot. I heard you took her out during training. You didn’t?”

  Walker was tense and angry. What right did this guy have to ask these prying questions? This had nothing to do with his job or Ellen’s. He said with feigned patience, “I asked her out to dinner once. Then I asked her to go someplace with me another time, and she said no. A concert. That was it. She wasn’t interested, so I dropped it.”

  “What do you mean she wasn’t interested?”

  Walker sighed to convey his weariness of the topic. “She went out with me once. It was a nice place. We were both pleasant and smiled a lot. I liked her, and I wanted her to like me. A couple of days later, I got tickets to a concert, because she’d said she played the piano when she was a kid and still loved music. But when I asked, she gave me one of those excuses they have that tells you to forget it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they have to wash their hair. It was better than that, but it was still—I remember—she had to study for an exam we were having the day after the concert.” He glared. “Satisfied?”

  “You were twenty-two, and so was she, and neither of you was married,” said Stillman. “Jesus, I don’t know about people in your generation. You look the same as people used to, except for the hair, but you’re not.”

  Walker said, “What’s the complaint?”

  “It would seem to me,” Stillman said, “that the natural thing would be to make friends, have foolish sexual relationships, blow your paycheck, feel remorse. But you don’t. All of you are so serious, so interested in making the leap from third assistant manager to second assistant manager. What is it? Are you all crazy for money?”

  Walker stared out the window, pretending not to listen.

  “Tell me this. Are men and women still attracted to each other?”

  “I was attracted, she wasn’t.”

  “That reassures me about you, anyway. A twenty-four-year-old who can’t wait to be sixty and move into the corner office has got a problem.”

  Stillman stopped the car in front of a convenience store, but he didn’t go in. Instead, he walked down the sidewalk and turned the corner onto a residential street. Walker got out and caught up, but Stillman still seemed to be marveling over the degeneration of civilization.

  “Mind if I ask where we’re going?” asked Walker.

  Stillman seemed pleased. “Not at all. In that house up there to the right is Ellen Snyder’s apartment. Bottom floor, rear entry.”

  “Wouldn’t she be at work? It’s barely three o’clock.”

  “She would be, if she were doing that sort of thing these days, but she isn’t.”

  “They fired her for paying off a policy?”

  Stillman shook his head. “They didn’t fire her, and she didn’t quit, either. She just seems to have gotten scarce.” Stillman was up the driveway now, and he approached the door.

  An uneasiness came over Walker. “Then why are we here?”

  Stillman reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of thin leather gloves.

  “You aren’t . . . .” said Walker.

  Stillman knocked on the door, then put his ear to the door and listened. He knocked again. He shrugged at Walker. “See? What can I do?” He took out a pocketknife, wiggled the blade around between the door and the jamb for a couple of seconds, held it there, and pu
shed the door open. Walker backed a few paces away, but Stillman muttered, “Sitting in the car doesn’t make you less guilty than I am, it just makes you easier to find.”

  Walker stopped backing away. He was almost relieved that Stillman had misinterpreted his reluctance. He was horrified at this man making this kind of intrusion on Ellen, but the mention of guilt made him realize that it was better this way. If Stillman was honest, he would see that there was nothing but evidence of Ellen’s innocence, and leave her alone. If he was trying to frame her, then he had just made a mistake.

  Stillman stepped in and held the door. “Come on in.”

  Walker had just crossed the threshold into a small, dark kitchen when Stillman edged past him and held his arm. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Walker followed Stillman’s eyes. He was looking at a window on the far side of the kitchen above the sink. The curtain swayed a little, then blew inward slightly as Stillman stepped toward it. He pulled the curtain aside to reveal electrical tape in an X shape from corner to corner of the upper pane, and a network of cracks. A couple of large triangles were missing.

  “I guess she isn’t very good at fixing broken windows,” said Walker. “If I’d known, I might have tried telling her I was handy around the house.”

  “It’s gotten lesser men where they wanted to go,” said Stillman. “But that’s not a repair job, it’s a B and E. If you whack a window it goes crash, tinkle. If you tape it, it just goes thump. You reach in and unlock it.”

  Walker quickly moved through the doorway to the living room, his eyes scanning.

  Stillman was instantly at his side. “What are you doing?”

  “What if she was here when they broke in? She could be lying somewhere bleeding to death.”

  Stillman held his arm again. “Not for four days. If she’s here, believe me, she can wait.” He stepped ahead of Walker. “I don’t think she is, of course.”

  “At least let me look.” He jerked his arm away.

  “I’ll do it,” said Stillman.

  “Why you?”

  Stillman sighed. “Because in your fit of chivalry you’ll tromp all over everything that might tell me what happened here. Besides, I’m beginning to like you. A four-day stiff starts to get ripe. That means if she’s here, somebody chopped her up and put her in a Coleman ice chest. You would find that looking at her would spoil the word ‘picnic’ for you forever.”

  Stillman moved rapidly across the living room, stepping in a straight path along the wall with his eyes on the floor. He opened a closet, then entered a doorway to the left that Walker judged must be the bedroom. In a moment he emerged, moved into another room, then returned to the kitchen. He stepped past Walker to the refrigerator, knocked on the front, opened it, then opened the freezer door. “Nobody’s home in there,” he announced. “Sit down and relax for a while, and I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Walker hesitated for a moment. Why wasn’t she here? He reluctantly admitted to himself that maybe if he left Stillman alone, he would find out. He sat at the kitchen table and watched Stillman through the doorway. He walked in a spiral motion around the living room, staring at the floor until he reached the center. He stepped to the bookshelf and moved books around. He examined the back of the television set, did something to the radio, studied the pictures on the wall, the empty mantel above the fireplace. He looked at the windowsills and latches, the light fixtures.

  As Stillman completed each operation, Walker had to resist asking, “What’s that? What are you looking at? What does it mean?” At six o’clock, he heard a car in the driveway, and then there were footsteps above the ceiling. They were light and quick—a woman, probably. In the silence he heard water running, faint music that he recognized as the theme of a commercial for dog food. Stillman kept at it.

  Finally, when the sun was down and the kitchen was almost completely black, Stillman came in and took off his gloves. Walker said, “Did you come to tell me something?”

  “Yeah. I’m hungry.” Stillman walked to the door, opened it, and left. He was walking down the driveway when Walker came out. Walker hesitated, then pushed in the lock button with his fist, grasped the knob with his coat, and closed the door. He caught up with Stillman on the sidewalk.

  After they had walked a short distance, Stillman reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers. “I’d like you to look at this.”

  Walker took the papers. “What is it?”

  “It’s six sheets of paper. Look them over.”

  Walker scanned the sheets as he walked, but that didn’t diminish his confusion. “It’s a lot of addresses and phone numbers. Restaurants, hotels, car-rental agencies . . . hospitals. Why do you suppose she had them?”

  Stillman took the sheets back. “She didn’t. Whenever I go anywhere, I take a few addresses with me.” He folded the sheets and returned them to his pocket.

  “Hospitals?”

  “You want to start looking for them after you need one?”

  “Oh,” said Walker. “Why did you want me to look at it?”

  “Because I didn’t find anything in the apartment,” he said. “If somebody is watching the place, we want them to think we did.”

  “We do?”

  “Yep,” said Stillman. “If they broke in to look for something, they’ll think we found it. If they broke in to clean up, they’ll think they forgot something.”

  “What if they broke in because they’re burglars who do that for a living?”

  Stillman turned up a long, narrow alley that ran along the backs of the stores on the street where they had parked. “It’s tough to get anywhere as a burglar if you leave all the stuff you can sell. The TV set is there. The radios are there. You can’t get by stealing women’s clothes and personal papers . . . and for Christ’s sake, stop looking over your shoulder.”

  “Sorry, I—”

  A weight collided with Walker and spun him around. His back and head hit a brick wall hard, and he felt a wave of nausea. When his eyes tried to focus again they couldn’t seem to find a reference point, because there was a face too close to his in the dark, and a forearm across his chest, a big man leaning against him so that he could barely breathe. The face was full of anger and hatred. The emotion was so unwarranted that the face was a monstrosity more frightening than the pain in his chest.

  “Don’t move, you son of a bitch. LAPD.”

  The instinctive notion that his survival might depend on his doing something melted away. His survival depended on not doing anything. He was going to jail for burglary. He tried to turn his eyes to see what was happening to Stillman, but the man gave his chest a push that felt as though it was cracking his sternum. “Don’t move!” snarled the face. Reports of people being killed struggling with the police floated on the edge of Walker’s consciousness.

  Then his ears were assaulted by a terrible sound. It was a loud, angry shout from Stillman, but the shout was almost instantly augmented by another voice, this one in pain. Both Walker and his captor turned in alarm.

  Stillman’s leg was on its way down from delivering a kick to the other policeman’s groin, and he seemed to have punched him at least twice. The injured man bent over and appeared ready to topple.

  Walker’s eyes shot back to his captor’s face in time to see that the fist was already on its way. Walker was unable to stifle the reflex to flinch. His right forearm jerked up to sweep the cop’s arm away from his chest, while his body turned and his head moved to the side to avoid the punch. The cop’s hand clutched Walker’s coat, so Walker’s sudden dodge kept the cop with him. The blow glanced off the back of Walker’s head, and Walker saw bright red and green blotches explode into his field of vision and then float to the periphery.

  Walker scrambled a few feet on the ground, then turned. Stillman had left his own opponent, and now he was advancing on Walker’s. Walker was at once terrified and amazed. He expected the cop to do what cops did, which was to pull out his gun and kill Stillman.


  Each instant that he didn’t made Walker more frightened, because it meant it was certain to happen in the next. But the cop on the ground stirred, pushing himself to his feet. Maybe he would be the one.

  Walker panicked. He had to stop him from firing. He picked up a fist-sized rock from the ground beside him and hurled it at the cop, then reached for another, sprang to his feet, and threw it at the one who had tried to arrest him.

  Nothing seemed to have the effect he had expected. The two cops ran in different directions, then disappeared into the black spaces between buildings.

  Stillman took Walker’s arm and pulled him down the alley. “No time to hang around here,” he muttered.

  Walker stumbled along with him, slowly regaining his breath and letting his heartbeat slow. He felt a swelling of anger at Stillman. “Why would you do that?” He walked a few paces, faster, then turned. “We’re going to jail.” Then he added, “We’re lucky we’re not dead.”

  “Were you under the impression that those were police officers?” Stillman asked calmly.

  Walker took in a breath to shout “Yes!” but he stopped. There was absolutely nothing about what they had done that any police officer he’d ever heard of would do. He changed his next words to “They scared the hell out of me.”

  Stillman nodded. “You knew you were guilty, so you figured, ‘Sure. Of course they’re cops. I deserve it, so they must be.’ That’s why they pulled that on us.” He looked ahead up the alley. “Now you can compare.”

  “What?”

  The squad car seemed to fill the alley like a train in a tunnel, leaving little space on either side. Its lights shot up into the sky as it bumped over the incline at the end of the alley, then settled firmly and steadily, growing brighter as the vehicle accelerated toward Stillman and Walker. The car stopped a few feet from them, then eased forward slowly until the window was beside them. The cop in the passenger seat was a young black man. He said, “Good evening, sirs.”