Shadow Woman jw-3

by Thomas Perry

  He could tell she was getting used to him now. She just smiled, showing perfect teeth and spilling a prodigal supply of the precious spice into the room, but it was all for him. “Now I know it’s a joke.”

  “Some do it to save up for their malpractice insurance, some just hate golf. I think some of them do it just to get away from these.” He showed her his beeper. “Ever have one of these?”

  “I’m not the kind of person anybody needs urgently.”

  “Good. Don’t ever start.” He put his beeper away. “Well, I should introduce you to more people. Or you should introduce me. Just because I haven’t met you at one of these things doesn’t mean I know more people than you do.”

  “This is my first time,” she said.

  Marian Fleming drifted up with Harry Rotherberg. “There,” she said. “I knew you two would have something to talk about. But I need to take Carey back for a minute. This is Dr. Rotherberg. He’s the head of pediatrics, so he can answer any questions you have about the new wing.”

  Carey flashed a valedictory smile at the young woman and stepped away with Marian. “How am I doing?”

  “You’re my paladin,” she said. “Right now I’m going to jump you over a few pawns and get you to work this bunch over here.”

  “The captain of industry with the plaid cummerbund?”

  “Yep. Know him?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen his cummerbund at these things before, but his name doesn’t leap to mind.”

  “He’s Charlie Fraser. That’s his tartan. He comes off as a dope, but he’s not. He’s given about a hundred thousand so far this year. Be nice to him.”

  “What a devious plan.”

  “Oh, and Carey?”

  “What?”

  “Since Jane isn’t here, I’ve seated you with Susan Haynes. I’m counting on you to romance her a little for me.”

  “Why?”

  “She doesn’t know anybody,” said Marian. “Harry’s a great pediatrician, but ten minutes with him is an evening in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood. She’s got money and she wants to do good with it.”

  “I’ll get it for you if I have to turn her upside down and shake her.”

  “I have no doubt. Your reputation precedes you.” There was no trace of a smile as she expertly moved him into the space before Charlie Fraser. “Charlie, this is Dr. McKinnon,” she said.

  Carey shook Fraser’s hand and smiled while Marian Fleming said, “And this is Honoria Fraser, his wife.”

  “I’m glad you could come,” said Carey. “I had heard you had given us quite a bit of help in the past, and I wanted to thank you.”

  Fraser looked shocked. “Who are you, anyway? What do you do?”

  “I’m a surgeon.”

  Fraser leaned over and kissed his wife on the cheek. She laughed, then put her fingers over her mouth as though it were a breach of decorum. Her husband said, “That’s another one for you, Honey.”

  Carey said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I made a bet with Honey two years ago. Every year I get a printed thank-you note with my name written on it so the I.R.S. will be satisfied. But to this day, no actual human being connected with the hospital ever walked straight up like a regular person and said thanks. I said nobody ever would, or if they did, it would be an administrator from fund-raising. You just won her the bet.”

  Carey looked worried. “Uh-oh.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “If nobody ever did it before, maybe I wasn’t supposed to. I guess this means you’ll stop giving money now?”

  “Do I look like an idiot?” asked Fraser. He looked down at his tuxedo. “Well, I suppose I do. But I’m not. I do lose most of my bets with Honey, but so would you.”

  Carey looked at Honoria Fraser and smiled. “I can believe it.”

  “Let me tell you something about fund-raising, since you seem to be sensible,” said Fraser. “These dinner-dance things are a mistake. When I want to lure investors into my business, I take them to the plant. I let them meet the good people I’ve got working for me. They show them the machinery and computers and trucks. They let them see how we make our products, from the quality of the raw materials to the packing and shipping. They show people what Charlie Fraser’s going to do with their money. Now, if I was an idiot”—he turned his head to survey the room—“I would put on something like this party.”

  “Charlie!” said Honoria sharply.

  “The doc doesn’t care,” Fraser assured her. “He can tell I mean well.” He turned to Carey. “There’s nothing that makes a person who gives money cringe more than a fancy party. It costs money, and if he’s reasonably intelligent he knows it’s his money. He didn’t give it so he could go to a party. He gave it so some poor kid gets his turn on a kidney machine. He’d like to see that. If it comes down to parties, he knows he could do a pretty good party himself for a few thousand, invite whomever he pleased, and serve better food.”

  Honoria said to Carey, “Charlie’s quite the blowhard, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Carey agreed. “You are, Charlie. But you’re absolutely right. I can’t talk Marian out of throwing these parties, but I can do the rest for you.” He wrote a telephone number on his ticket and handed it to Fraser. “This is my office. Call any day, and I’ll have somebody arrange a tour for you, and for anybody you want to bring. If you see where the money goes, and what it does for this city, I think you’ll be proud.”

  “I am proud,” said Charlie. “I’m just telling you how to get more.” He glanced at the number on the ticket. “I will do this, you know.”

  “I expect you to,” said Carey. “Bring some friends.”

  There was a chime, and people began to move beyond the screens dividing the cafeteria in half. “That’s dinner,” said Charlie. One of the waiters pushed the button to make the opening widen, and Carey could see white linen and gleaming silverware for the only time this year. “If you don’t have anybody to sit with, you can come with us.”

  “Marian’s got other plans for me,” said Carey.

  He drifted across the paths of a few familiar couples moving toward the tables and scanned for Susan Haynes. He found her standing with one arm across her chest and the other holding a glass of champagne, listening to Harry Rotherberg talking about the ultrasound machines the hospital was about to buy. Katie Rotherberg moved in ahead of Carey and separated them.

  Carey said, “Dinner time. Don’t worry if the meat tastes funny. You’re already in the hospital.”

  “ ‘Please be seated and the maître d’ will call you when your stomach pump is ready’?”

  “I can see you’ve been to benefits before. Why this one?”

  She shrugged. “I’m new in town, and I saw it in the paper. Hospitals tend to be everybody’s charity. I thought it was a good opportunity to get a look at the local gentry and make it clear I’m one of the good guys.”

  He looked at her in mock suspicion. “You’re some kind of businesswoman, aren’t you?”

  “Good grief, no.” She giggled. “Nobody in my family has ‘been’ anything in ages. My father used to sit on boards of directors. That way he got mail and was allowed to own a briefcase. But he didn’t actually know anything or do anything, or they wouldn’t have wanted him around. His epitaph should have been ‘He Voted Yes.’ ”

  “Your mother?”

  “She voted no. When I was about three. She turned up a few years ago, but we didn’t have much to talk about. To complete the whole sordid family tree, I have an older brother. Come to think of it, he’s something—a fisherman.”

  “A commercial fisherman?”

  “No, silly. Trout. He spends his summers at his house in Jackson Hole and his winters in rehab places. They don’t seem to have any therapeutic value, but it’s a quiet place to tie flies, once his hands stop shaking.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She touched his arm, and it felt as though it had been brushed by a bird’s wing. “Don’t sound so solemn.
None of this just happened, you know. It’s all old history.”

  As they reached the newly unscreened section of the cafeteria, Marian Fleming caught Carey’s eye and nodded toward the front of the room near the head table. He gave his head a tiny shake, and she picked up two place cards from the front table, ushered Leo Bortoni and his wife from the back to Carey’s place, and watched Carey take Susan Haynes’s arm and walk her to the rear table. He could see that Lily Bortoni was delighted, having interpreted the move as a sign that her husband was appreciated. He liked them both, and he congratulated himself for having accidentally made them feel good. He pretended he had been looking past them for someone else, gave a little shrug, and continued toward the back of the room.

  Carey and Susan Haynes sat at a table for four, but they were alone. He looked at her. “I guess this is where we’re supposed to talk about Cornell.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “Briefly. Uris Library.”

  “Cruel to put it at the top of a hill,” she said. “Thought I’d die.” One of the photographs in the alumni magazine had shown the view from the library, so its altitude was all she knew about it.

  “Goldwin Smith Hall.”

  “Big, old, and cold.” She said it with an air of profound boredom. She hoped that was the long, low one across the quadrangle with the statue in front, but whatever it was, the description seemed to satisfy him.

  “Had enough?”

  “More than enough.” She leaned closer. “So what about your life story?” she asked.

  “I was born in this hospital, and sort of never got out,” he said. “My education was just a leave of absence. I’m a surgeon.”

  “Married?” He wasn’t sure if she said it so quickly and adroitly because she didn’t care, or because she did care.

  “Just. Three months ago. She’s out of town right now.”

  “Oh, yes. Marian said something about that. I forgot. What kind of surgeon are you—plastic surgery?”

  “If you need anything cosmetic done, Buffalo isn’t really the best place. There are hospitals in Los Angeles and Boston that do more of those in a week than we do in a year. What I do is mostly basic medicine. If you have no further use for your gall bladder or your appendix, I’m your man.”

  Her eyebrow raised in a perfect arch. “Do I look sick?”

  “Hardly. But you could be a hypochondriac. The rich ones sometimes give money so they’ll have a nice place to stay during their next anxiety attack. I promised Marian I’d explore every avenue.”

  “You’re doing just great,” she said. “I feel as though I’d been strip-searched. All my avenues have been thoroughly probed.”

  “Are you going to cough up the loot?”

  She nodded. “Some. I told you before that if I’m going to live here, I have to establish myself up front as one of the good guys. That makes me eligible for unearned invitations and so on.”

  “What made you pick Buffalo?”

  She turned the big green eyes on him and looked at him shrewdly. “I like it. Or maybe it’s better to say that I don’t dislike it, which is not true of certain other places. And real estate is cheap, so I can sell my house that’s teetering on a precipice in San Francisco and buy something nicer here. As you may have guessed, my heart and Mr. Haynes’s no longer beat as one. Before that, we spent some time being no longer a fun couple. I used to come through Buffalo when I was in college, and I decided it was the sort of place where I could be happy.”

  “Because it’s not on the circuit you’re used to.”

  “If you’re tired of humanity, maybe it’s time to meet new specimens. That’s the theory, anyway.” She brightened. “Did I pass my examination?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You’re healthy as a young Hereford cow and as sane as Monsignor Schumacher.” He glanced at the tables around him and nodded. “Evening, Monsignor.” He turned back to her. “I think you’ll like it here, at least for a time. It’s smaller than you’d think, and people are clannish. But you’re the sort of person who makes a good impression, and anybody who comes here voluntarily has passed the first test.”

  “And you’ve passed yours,” she said. The caterers arrived and dealt out plates of food from a cart, leaning down to mutter into each person’s ear, “Careful, the plate is very hot.”

  She tasted the salmon on her plate and said, “You can go unplug the equipment. It’s very good.”

  “That’s Marian’s fault. She’s always destroying cherished traditions. Usually after these things we used to spend half the night admitting people, giving upper GIs and so on. I have no idea what we’ll do with ourselves.”

  She looked at him, her chin resting on her hands. “That brings me to something I’m a bit concerned about myself.”

  “Oh?” he said.

  “Well, it’s kind of embarrassing. I leased this big black Mercedes when I got to town, because I figured it would be good on snow and ice. But I’m not very good with it. I managed to steer it to the hospital okay, but about half an hour ago I went out to get my makeup bag from the front seat …”

  Carey’s lips slowly, involuntarily curved upward.

  “This is nothing to smile about. I backed into an empty parking space and hurried to get inside, so I wouldn’t be late and get stared at by a lot of people who knew each other. There’s a color code and a sign, but I guess I didn’t see it because I backed in. Anyway, I guess it was for some kind of emergency vehicle, and the police towed my car away. Why are you smiling?”

  Carey’s smile grew, and he began to chuckle.

  “Are you some kind of sadist?”

  “No,” said Carey. “I’m very sorry. I saw your car when I got here, and I wondered whether I should say something. That’s all.”

  “Then why on earth didn’t you?” she asked. “I would have moved it in a second.”

  He looked down at his hands, then forced his eyes to meet her stare. “I didn’t want to seem like a jerk. It was my parking space.”

  It took two breaths for her face to register confusion, then shock, then understanding. Her eyes sparkled, and her laugh was clear and musical. It seemed to linger on her lips. “You know where I can get a ride to the impound lot after this thing ends?”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  20

  Ultimately, it seemed to Seaver, all investigations came down to staring through a pane of glass at some doorway late at night. Sometimes it was sitting in a car that smelled like old cigarettes, and sometimes it was renting a rat’s nest of an office like this one, barring the door, and trying to drink enough coffee out of styrofoam cups to stay awake until something happened.

  This time the doorway was on a little storefront with a big sign that said OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, so the surveillance was worse than it had usually been in the old days. And Manhattan presented special problems. You couldn’t sit on a street in a parked car for twelve hours without collecting a stack of tickets, and even if you did, there wasn’t much chance you could use the car to follow anybody. Suspects in Manhattan scuttled underground to slip into subway trains, or stepped into yellow cabs that barely came to a complete stop before they were off again on a long street that looked like a river of identical yellow cabs, each of them blowing its horn and weaving erratically to keep going ten miles an hour faster than the speed limit. Or the suspect veered into a doorway a hundred feet away and vanished into a building that had fourteen elevators and sixty floors. Cars weren’t much use. The quarry had to be stalked on foot and not taken down until he was indoors, away from the hundreds of faces that were always visible on the street.

  Seaver had mailed a small package addressed to Valued Cardholder, Box 345, 7902 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10003. The outer wrapping was bright orange with iridescent yellow stripes on it, so he would have no trouble spotting it when the mail was picked up. He couldn’t sit here waiting for the dark-haired woman to show up in the flesh. There was a better than even chance that the mail would be picked up by
some intermediary, and Seaver would have to follow the package.

  If the woman had been hiding fugitives for anything like the eight or nine years since Miranda’s reincarnation, then the woman must have built some high walls between her and people like Stillman. She couldn’t let people like him find her easily. She would know what Seaver had known—that even though some part of a career criminal’s stunted brain believed that some day she might be his last chance of surviving, the reason he would need her at all had a lot to do with his inability to choose a future benefit over an extra pack of cigarettes right now.

  Seaver was prepared for the intermediary. Inside the package was an expensive sports watch packed with a photocopy of a typed message explaining to Valued Cardholder that it was a reward from Visa for using a credit card. Inside the watch, and running off its battery, was a small radio transmitter with a range of a thousand yards.

  If Seaver got lucky, the dark-haired woman might strap the watch to her wrist. Even if she didn’t like it that much, she would at least see it was too good to throw away, so she would shove it into a drawer in her apartment. It didn’t matter. As soon as she had it, he would have her. When he had her, he would have Hatcher.

  Seaver reached over to the desk and pulled the plastic top off the next styrofoam cup of coffee. It was not much warmer than the air around it now, the white powdery substance that symbolized milk already beginning to coagulate in little gooey lumps that floated just under the oily surface. He covered it again and walked to the sink, ran the water until it was steaming hot, stopped the drain, filled the sink a few inches, held the cup in the water, and looked around for something heavy enough to keep the cup from floating up and tipping over.

  He could find nothing in the little bathroom to hold it down, so he took the extra ammunition clip out of his pocket and carefully placed it on the lid. Since he had nothing else to do, he used the opportunity to urinate. That was another problem with doing surveillance at this stage of his career. He had not sat around like this drinking quarts of stale coffee in at least ten years, and his kidneys were treating it as a new and unpleasant experience.