Death Benefits

16

Walker awoke, showered, and dressed, then went to the next room to knock on Stillman’s door. He found Stillman on the bed with file folders from the Pasadena office spread around him and the telephone in his hand. Walker went to the only chair in the room and sat down.

Stillman was saying, “Yeah, so get it to me. Hard is just another way of saying expensive, and I already threw myself on your mercy. Call me here at the hotel before you send anything.”

He hung up, then dialed another number. “You might as well get some breakfast. This is going to take a while.”

Walker found that the dining room was closed until dinner, so he wandered down the street past the police station until he got to a diner. When he returned to Stillman’s room, Stillman was talking in the same tone. “What is it with everybody today? Here’s how it works: you do what I ask, you send me the bill, and then I complain. You don’t get to bill me and complain too. You think you’re mentioned in my will and I’m depleting the estate? Good guess. I’ll be waiting.” He hung up.

“You finished?” asked Walker.

“Unless I can think of somebody who can do something else for us. I like to get people working on my problems early in the morning, when they’re fresh.”

“What are they doing for you?”

“That one’s running hourly credit checks on these two guys—Albert Mayer and Richard Stone. They’re the ones who kept turning up at the same hotels as Ellen Snyder.”

“Won’t they stop using those names now?”

“You never know,” said Stillman. “They have no reason to assume that anyone was following them, just Ellen Snyder. If they’re smart, they won’t take the chance—or any other chance. I’m just trying to get something that will move us to the next set of names they use. I’ve got somebody else spreading the word that I’m paying for a man who looks like Alan Werfel.”

“I don’t think there is a man like that,” said Walker.

Stillman looked intrigued. “You don’t?”

“No. It came to me when I woke up. If they had one, then I don’t think they would have done things this way.”

“Why not?” asked Stillman.

“I accept what you said: that the first thing they did was steal Werfel’s ID in the airport. I believe that they knew about the insurance policy in some other way—maybe just by learning what they could about him before they started using the credit cards. But I don’t think they brought in a ringer and fooled Ellen Snyder into thinking he was Alan Werfel. It’s never felt right to me. It’s too hard to do quickly, and when you send him into the office, too many things could go wrong.”

“That’s right,” said Stillman. He spoke gently. “That’s the unpleasant part of this. It works best if somebody on the inside is handling everything, making sure nothing does go wrong.”

“Ellen didn’t do it,” Walker insisted. “This could have been done a lot of other ways.”

Stillman sighed. “You can’t catch a thief by figuring out all the things he could have done. You have to think of things from his point of view. What did he want to have happen, and what did he think he needed to do to make it happen? The point is, the thief can’t know what all the obstacles are going to be when he starts this. Only an insider knows. As soon as I heard a rough description of this, I started looking for somebody like her.”

“But you didn’t know her, and that’s why this never made sense to me. Ellen Snyder wasn’t in on it. She didn’t want a quick million, she wanted a career. And if they really had found a guy who could convince a stranger he was Alan Werfel, they wouldn’t have needed to pay Ellen. And if they could pay her, they wouldn’t have needed to kill her.”

“You think her only purpose was to take the blame.”

“That’s right.”

“Because she’s dead?”

“Not just dead, but dead that way, out here in the middle of nowhere, so it looked as though she got away with the money and disappeared. They couldn’t just fax in a copy of Werfel’s stolen driver’s license and expect to get a check for twelve million in the mail. They needed the paperwork to come to the main office filled out by a real McClaren’s agent who seemed to have seen the guy in person and gotten him to sign the affidavit and release forms.”

“You think she didn’t fill out the papers?” asked Stillman.

“I don’t know if she did or not. I just know she didn’t intend to participate in any fraud. If the fake Alan Werfel called her in advance and said, ‘I’m coming in on Tuesday to sign the papers,’ then she would probably have filled them out on Monday. She would never let a man like that sit in the office waiting while she was at a typewriter putting stuff into blanks on a form. Don’t you see? He fits the profile of the kind of customer she was after. She described him to me the night I took her out to dinner.”

“I thought she was after women?”

“She was after heirs, and he was an heir: a person who suddenly had a lot of money he didn’t have before, and had to come to her office. She would have seen that as a giant chance to sell him something—maybe get him to let the company manage his money, maybe buy an annuity. Twelve million bucks at six percent is a slam-dunk, no-risk seven hundred and twenty thousand a year, tax-deferred until he starts drawing it. If nothing else, she would think he was a good prospect for insurance. He’s just had the biggest reminder of mortality you can get, so she’d try whole life, or health. He’s just inherited a couple of mansions, so she’d try home owner’s.” Walker threw up his hands. “You’ve got her file open. Look at her sales figures. That’s what she did for a living. Ellen would have done everything she could to make him feel as though she was a comforting ally in his time of need. She was in sales, for Christ’s sake.”

Stillman said, “So she would fill out the papers ahead of time. I can buy that. Then what happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Walker. “Maybe they told her to meet Alan Werfel someplace outside the office with the papers. People do business at lunch all the time. She would have jumped at that. She would have wanted him alone and in a spot where the other people in her office, like Winters, couldn’t snatch him away or screw up her pitch. A restaurant would give her a psychological advantage: no office furniture to remind him that she was just some stranger in a business. It would be special treatment to show him he was important, and so on. What he’s dealing with is an insurance company, but what he’s looking at is this pretty, soothing young woman going out of her way for him. And lunch takes time—maybe two hours—which gives her a hell of a long period to wear him down.”

“Okay,” said Stillman. “Let’s grant that this is one possibility. Then why did somebody break into her apartment?”

“I didn’t say I knew what happened, exactly. Maybe they set it up so she would have to take the papers home with her. They could have set it up as a breakfast meeting, so no sane person would go to the office first. That way they could break in the night before and grab her and the papers, send the forms to San Francisco overnight, and leave nobody in Pasadena who knew anything. Maybe they broke in later, after they’d kidnapped her, because they were afraid she had something written on her calendar that would prove she hadn’t planned to leave.” He shrugged. “That’s why they jumped us on the way out of her apartment, right? Because we were flashing papers.”

“Kidnapped her?” Stillman repeated.

“You think she took off her clothes and buried herself in a field in Illinois?”

“Of course I don’t,” said Stillman. “But she seems to have done things after she handed over the check. She seems to have boarded airplanes, rented hotel rooms.”

“Then maybe that wasn’t Ellen Snyder. Maybe they broke into her apartment just to kill her and take her keys.”

“What keys?”

“To the office,” said Walker. “She definitely had keys. You met Winters. Do you think he was the one who showed up every morning at seven to open up, when he had a twenty-four-year-old assistant manager to do it? They could have killed Ellen, used her keys to get into the office, filled out the forms, faxed them to the home office, then got what they needed from the files about the office’s women clients.”

“Then what?”

“Then they have another woman travel around using false names that came from Ellen’s office files. Somebody made it look as though Ellen was on a plane to Zurich. That’s not Ellen Snyder trying to make Ellen Snyder look innocent. It’s them trying to make it look as though she and the money disappeared together. Then they buried her in a place where they thought she’d never be found.”

Stillman’s eyes were focused on the wall. “Not found,” he said absently. “Identified.”

“What?”

Stillman waved a hand. “Bodies almost always get found at some point. The trick is to make sure you leave one in the right place. Out here, the family farm doesn’t look like it’s making a comeback anytime soon. So you leave the body here, buried on an abandoned farm. You put plants over it so it won’t look any different after a couple of weeks. It might be ten years before some developer buys up all this land and starts scraping it with bulldozers. They didn’t take her clothes because they were perverts. They did it so when the body was found, there wouldn’t be any chance of tracing it through the clothes. They were hoping there would be nothing left but bones by that time, but they knew they couldn’t count on that. Rains and frosts sometimes bring a body to the surface. Hunting season’s only a couple of months away, and there will probably be men and dogs tromping through that field—the dogs being the ones they’d have to worry about.”

“What they wanted was a Jane Doe?”

“Right. That’s why they didn’t go even farther out, why they picked this place. If you want a Jane Doe to fade into a notation on a very long list, your best choices are in the vicinity of a big city.”

Walker stared at Stillman for a few seconds. He was different today. Or maybe it was Walker who was different. “What do you think happened?”

Stillman shrugged. “If I were to guess, I’d go with your theory.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“Because I don’t have to guess just yet.”