Death Benefits

4

There were no assigned seats on the plane, and when the passengers boarded, Walker realized his pass was in a different “zone” from Stillman’s. Stillman sat near the front, and Walker found the only empty seat, beside a young curly-haired woman who seemed to view his arrival with disappointment. She had placed her purse, a shopping bag, and a couple of magazines on his seat, and now she sighed and slowly gathered them onto her lap.

“Sorry,” he said.

She said nothing, just occupied herself with stuffing the magazines into the seat pocket in front of her, then tried to jam the shopping bag and the purse under the seat in front with her backpack, all the time eyeing Walker’s feet resentfully.

Walker could not see Stillman from where he sat, but he was aware of him up ahead, and he felt an impatience that he could not find out what he was thinking. Why would he need somebody who knew Ellen Snyder?

The question shifted Walker’s attention from Stillman and held it on Ellen. As always, she returned in short, meaningless fragments of memory, never still, but in motion: a few strands of blond hair straying across her left eye while she was talking, and then her hand would flit up to push them away. He wasn’t always sure that he had seen precisely what he was remembering, that it had been chemically fixed in his brain on some occasion, because sometimes the memory couldn’t be identified with a specific time and place. Other times, the memory was clear and certain. He could see her on Market Street. It was after class in the late afternoon. She had seen the cable car coming. “There it is. We can catch it!” She had kept her eyes on it, tapped his chest with her small hand, and he could feel it again, fluttering insistently against him six times in a second before her first steps had taken it away, and she had broken into a run toward the stop. He had followed more slowly, because he had wanted to watch her. He remembered that exactly—the blue sweater she had been wearing, the tight skirt and flat shoes—because that had been the day after the first time they had kissed. He had watched her all day, expecting her to be different somehow: maybe softer and more affectionate, or in a nightmare version, strange and distant because she had regretted it afterward. He had not detected any change at all. She had been exactly the same, exuding happy energy, intense interest in what she saw around her, but neither uncomfortable with him nor detectably more interested.

Walker banished the memory and tried to discern what Stillman was doing. What if Stillman suspected her of something, some kind of malfeasance? He had mentioned her, and said they were going to L.A. to collect evidence about fraud. The idea that Walker would participate in an expedition to harm Ellen was insane. The simplest thing to do would be to get off the plane, tell Stillman that he’d once had a personal relationship with Ellen and was not the right choice for this assignment, then get on the next flight home.

Instantly he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to do that. Stillman was an unknown. If Walker simply left, then Ellen would find herself alone in the middle of his surprise investigation, with no advocate, and probably no witnesses. And what were Stillman’s limits, his rules? He wasn’t a cop or something. He was just some kind of private security expert. The company could hardly be relied on to keep him under control: Stillman seemed to have a lifelong social connection with the president’s family.

The flight to Los Angeles was short, so Walker sat still and waited it out, fighting images that intruded themselves on his consciousness. He imagined himself walking into Ellen’s office with Stillman, and looking into her eyes. The friendly, happy manner she’d had when he’d last seen her would vanish. She would detest him. He was going to come into her office looking like some kind of informer. She might even think that after she had dropped him, he had developed some weird scheme to get revenge by destroying her career.

Once again he considered simply getting himself out of this before she knew he had been involved. Seeing him with Stillman would destroy any respect that she had for him. Then he reminded himself of the facts. She had dumped him over a year and a half ago, well before the training period had ended. She had not changed her mind before she had left for her first post. She had not called him after that, or sent him a note. It was over.

Going along to make sure she was safe was a neutral, disinterested act that had nothing to do with any present or future relationship. It was simply necessary because in the course of their past relationship he had come to understand her well enough to know she was not dishonest. She wasn’t a lover, and she never would be again. It didn’t matter what she thought of him now. If it turned out that she needed an advocate, he would be there. Just as he was succumbing to a fantasy in which he cleared her name, she learned of it afterward, and appeared unexpectedly in San Francisco with gratitude that knew no bounds, his ears popped.

The plane was descending threateningly, moving in toward the runway. In a moment it bounced once and rattled to a stop. Walker overcame his impulse to hurry to keep up with Stillman.

Stillman was waiting for him near the end of the boarding tunnel, but while they walked, he did not speak. Walker noticed that at the car-rental counter downstairs, Stillman merely claimed a car that he had somehow reserved. He had been behaving as though he had received a telephone call at McClaren’s and run for the airport. Maybe he had, and he had called ahead from the plane. But Walker determined to remember these small discrepancies until he could perceive a pattern that was unambiguous.

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 pushed 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.”

The construction struck Walker as odd, mildly sarcastic. He said, “Good evening.”

“We got a call that there was a disturbance in this alley,” said the cop. “Know anything about that?”

Stillman said, “We did happen to run into two men a few minutes ago. They seemed to be interested in robbing us, but we managed to frighten them off, I guess.”

The policeman opened his door and got out, sliding his billy club into a rung on his belt. Walker noticed that his hand lingered there, between the club and the gun. He stood close to them. “Someone said there was a fight. Shouting and so on.”

“That’s kind of an exaggeration,” said Stillman. “It was just two guys about six feet tall, about thirty years old. They were getting ready to jump us, but when we got close, I think we were bigger than they expected, so they ran.”

“May I ask what you’re doing in the alley?”

He was staring at Walker, but Stillman spoke. “We’re visitors in town, and we parked over there on the street”—he turned to point in roughly the right direction—“and we figured this was a good shortcut.”

The cop kept his eyes on Walker. “And two men just came along at the same time?”

Walker knew he had to be the one to answer. “They seemed to be waiting here for whoever showed up.”

The policeman nodded. “Would you mind showing me some identification?”

Stillman pulled out his wallet and handed the cop his driver’s license, so Walker did the same. The cop handed the two licenses to his partner in the car, and the partner punched some numbers into the computer terminal mounted beside him. The cop returned his attention to Walker and Stillman. “What brings you to Pasadena?”

Stillman was supremely calm and friendly. “We work for McClaren’s, the insurance company. There’s a girl—a lady my friend here knew from his training school days, and he asked me if we could stop by and see her. No luck. We missed her at the office, and now she’s not at home, either.”

“I see.” His partner muttered something and the cop leaned into the window to confer with him. He came back with the licenses. “Here you go.” He looked up and down the alley, then said, “We’ll make a report of this, but I’m not sure what good it’s going to do you. They’re long gone by now.”

Stillman nodded. “I understand. They didn’t get any money from us, so I guess there’s not much harm done.”

The policeman sat in the car seat again, but before he pulled his leg in, he said, “Even in San Francisco, walking down dark alleys probably isn’t the best idea.”

“I’ve had better,” Stillman said.

“Take care,” said the cop. He shut the door and the car drifted down the alley. Now and then the bright beam of the spotlight shot out to the side and played about a row of garbage cans, a narrow space between buildings. Then the police car turned and disappeared.

Stillman stepped into the nearest passage toward the street. “Well, now that was a rotten piece of timing,” he said. “I had hoped to get a couple of names out of their wallets, not give mine to a cop.” He stopped and let Walker catch up. “What we need is dinner.”

“It is?”

“Otherwise we’ll have to drink on an empty stomach.”