The Scared Stiff

by Donald E. Westlake

  “How are you?” she said, and her voice was a rich contralto.

  “Much better now, Señora de Paula,” I told her, and shook her firm hand. “Thanks to you and Arturo here.”

  “Oh, Arturo,” she said, with an indulgent laugh, as though we were talking about some scamp of a boy. I saw then that maternalism was her strategy for dealing with the entire world, which of course made her perfect to run this hotel.

  “I’m Gary Brine, by the way,” I said. “I don’t know if Arturo told you.”

  “Mr. Brine,” she acknowledged. “But not while you’re here.”

  “No, I understand I’m Keith Emory for a while.”

  “Until your problems are solved,” she said.

  I laughed. “Oh, Señora,” I said, “if it were only that easy!”

  Arturo now came around from behind me, a kind of sheepish grin on his face. “Dulce,” he said, exactly like that scamp of a boy bringing an apple to teacher. Or a mango here, I suppose.

  “How are you, Artie?” she said, making it clear she enjoyed him and saw no reason to take him seriously.

  “Feelin’ fine,” he said, and took her hand, and kissed it.

  Arturo’s usual greeting for a woman was a bear hug, but I could see where Dulce de Paula wouldn’t get much of that sort of treatment. Still with the same indulgent smile, she said, “How’s Ifigenia?”

  “Not yet gone to her reward,” Arturo said.

  She laughed, delighted with her scamp. “Artie, that’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “Ifigenia is a terrible thing to say,” he told her. “Why’d you ever let me go, Dulce? If I’d stuck with you, I’d be a doctor today and Fernando would drive my cab.”

  “You’d both probably like that,” she commented, and turned back to me. “And I think you’d probably like to get settled.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Would you like someone to show you to the room? I see you don’t have much luggage.”

  “I’ve been moving fast and light,” I explained. “Is it complicated to get to the room? If not, I’ll just go there.” Because, of course, I had no cash for a tip.

  “It’s very easy,” she promised me. “Come look.”

  Arturo said, “I’ll go see are there any customers out front. See you later, Mr. Brine.”

  “Thanks for everything, Arturo,” I told him, with just the proper distance between the rich North American and the poor Hispanic cabby.

  “De nada,” he told me. “Adios, Dulce.”

  “So long, Artie.”

  Arturo left, and I heard the women in the outer office giggle again as I bent over the hotel map Dulce de Paula opened onto her desk. This was a very snazzy four-color map, the various floors projected at angles that made the whole thing simple. Everything was color-coded, with an index of the hotel’s features.

  “We are here,” she said, and pointed first to the map, then to a second door on the left side of her office. “When you go out there, you’ll be in this hallway. You see?”

  “Sure.”

  “You go straight down here, and turn left, and that’s the elevator bank. You’re on the third floor, Room Three-twenty-three.”

  “Okay.”

  She handed me a folder. “Your key and the minibar key.”

  Minibar key. Have there ever been more beautiful words in the English language? “Thank you,” I said, and took the folder.

  “You’re already checked in as Keith Emory,” she assured me, “so you won’t have to go through any of the formalities.”

  “That’s wonderful. I really appreciate this.”

  She extended her hand. “Do enjoy your stay with us, Mr. Emory,” she said.

  “I know I will,” I told her, and now I kissed her hand.

  She liked that. “Oh, go on,” she said.

  I had become her latest scamp.

  32

  The bathroom! Never mind the minibar, look at this bathroom! The lights, the plumbing, the gleaming tile! The mirrors! The thick towels! You could jump off the roof of this building, and if you landed on these towels you’d be safe.

  The room itself was not very large, a typical Holiday Inn sort of room, which has become the hotel industry standard. The king-size bed was not too soft, not too firm, but just right. The television set got CNN, HBO, Showtime, and pay-per-view. The minibar had one of everything and two Bud Lights. Above it the snack bar contained, among its many familiar wonders, macadamia nuts.

  The view out the window was of part of the golf course. Men in madras pants and women in madras skirts made their slow way past, giving obeisance to the little white ball.

  I showered for a long long time. Then I lay on the bed and watched a Steve Martin movie on HBO. I laughed whether it was funny or not.

  Safe. Safe at last. Manfredo and Luis and the other Luis with the bad arm and José and Pedro and poco Pedro with the machete can’t get me here; they can’t get across that river, not on those ferries. The insurance investigator and Rafael Rafez can snoop around all they want; they’ll never find Barry Lee alive and never find proof he isn’t dead.

  If only Lola could be here with me. I tried to dream up some way to make it possible for her to fly down, check in as a single. We could pretend we didn’t know one another by day, sleep together by night.

  And how long would it be before the insurance investigator arrived, sniffing around, checking out the guest list? There was no way, dammit, no way. Lola couldn’t use a false name because she’d have to show her passport. And I couldn’t dare get the terrific Señora de Paula to slip in a second person incognito because it would screw up the original story. So I just had to be patient.

  •

  When the phone rang in the room Wednesday afternoon, I assumed it was a wrong number. This was my third day here, and I’d been keeping strictly to myself, eating alone, swimming alone in the hotel pool, and (of course) sleeping alone.

  But it wasn’t a wrong number, it was Señora de Paula, saying, “Mr. Emory, I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Not at all,” I said, amused at her using the cover name in a phone call. “I haven’t been this relaxed in years.”

  “Away from the cares of Hollywood,” she suggested.

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “When the phone rang just now, I hardly knew what that noise was.”

  She laughed. “It is an invitation, actually. An old friend of my husband’s from his college days is in the country on business, and he’s coming to the hotel for dinner this evening. He says he has a very interesting story to tell about why he’s here, and I thought as a film producer you might find him intriguing.”

  “Ah-hah,” I said.

  “Would you like to join us? I don’t mean to intrude, if you’d prefer to—”

  “No, no,” I said. “That sounds fine. Thank you for asking me.”

  “I’ll keep your secret, of course,” she said. “You’ll be Mr. Keith Emory.”

  “Thank you.” She enjoyed being a conspirator, Señora de Paula, I could see that. She was a bit of a scamp herself.

  “It will just be the four of us,” she assured me. “In the dining room. At eight o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  •

  The insurance investigator.

  Why hadn’t that occurred to me? An old friend is in the country on business for a reason that has an interesting story attached to it. Why had I assumed the old friend would be South American? Señora de Paula’s husband was a doctor; why wouldn’t he have had his schooling in the United States?

  I was here now. There was no turning back. I’d timed my arrival in the dining room for three minutes after eight, to give the others time to get here and settle themselves, and the smoothly smiling hostess said, “Of course. This way,” when I said, “De Paula.” I followed her, and she said, “The others are here.”

  “Good,” I said, and looked out past her at the large corner table where Señora de Paula sat facing me, smiling, in conversati
on with a large robust mustachioed man to her left — the doctor husband, of course, Fernando — and, to her right, a man I recognized immediately. The last time I’d seen him had been in sunlight, in the street in front of Mamá and Papá’s house in Sabanon, talking with Rafael Rafez.

  He’ll have seen Barry Lee’s picture, won’t he? Candid photos taken over the years, on vacation and here and there. Maybe my driver’s license, from the wreck. I’m eight pounds lighter now, I have this thick mustache, I’m more tanned than ever before; will that be enough?

  Well, sooner or later I would have had to test this theory anyway, that whoever I am now can look like Barry Lee without being Barry Lee, so here comes the experiment, ready or not. Smiling a greeting, happy to be here, I approached the table.

  “And here he is,” said Señora de Paula, and the two men turned their faces my way.

  “Don’t get up,” I said, as they both got up.

  “Mr. Keith Emory,” Señora de Paula said, “please meet my husband, Fernando, and an old friend of his from Boston, Mr. Leon Kaplan.”

  “How do you do.”

  “How do you do.”

  “How do you do.”

  We all took our places, and a waiter appeared out of nowhere to help me slide my chair in. “A cocktail, sir?”

  Absolutely. Leon Kaplan was looking at me quizzically, his sharp nose and sharp eyes all pointed at me. On the other hand, I’d better keep my wits about me, so I canceled my order for a vodka martini on the rocks with a twist just at the second I was about to voice it, and instead said, “Just a glass of white wine. That Kendall Jackson chardonnay, that’s nice.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Off he went, expeditiously. It’s a different experience, when you’re in a restaurant, to eat at the boss’s table.

  Leon Kaplan said, “Have we met, Mr. Emory?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m based in Santa Monica now, would it be from there?”

  His small smile was also dry. “No, I’m strictly eastern,” he said. “Boston area.”

  “Don’t know Boston,” I said. “I grew up in New Jersey.”

  Fernando de Paula said, “Leon and I went to college together in Boston.”

  “Fernando was premed,” Kaplan explained, “and so was I for the first year.”

  Fernando, who had a robust man’s robust voice, now gave a robust laugh. “Then he got smart,” he said, “and switched to business.”

  “Ah,” I said. “And are you in business now, Mr. Kaplan?”

  “Leon, please,” he said.

  “And I’m Keith,” I lied.

  Fernando said, “Leon’s an investigator.”

  I raised an interested eyebrow. “Investigator? With the police, you mean?”

  “Insurance,” my new friend Leon said, and my chardonnay arrived.

  “Like Double Indemnity,” I said, and lifted my glass with a hand that didn’t shake even the tiniest bit. “Cheers,” I said to the table.

  We all toasted one another, I tasted the chardonnay, and Leon said, “Not that glamorous. Usually, it’s pretty boring.”

  “But not this time,” Fernando said.

  Leon smiled his small dry smile, pleased with himself. “No, not this time.”

  “The truth is,” Señora de Paula said, “Leon is just wonderful at catching the bad boys. And the reason he’s wonderful is, he’s a bad boy himself.” And she shook a mock-chiding finger at Kaplan as he smirked.

  Fernando said, “Oh, now, Dulce, that isn’t fair. Leon was just a little wild in the old days, that’s all.” To me, smiling, trying to come across like a man with secrets, he said, “I confess I was a little wild myself, at one time.”

  “But Leon, and he knows this is true,” Señora de Paula said, “had a real talent for deviltry. I’m sometimes surprised he switched sides.”

  Kaplan, grinning, said, “Maybe I was just never given a good enough offer on the other side.”

  “That’s probably true,” she agreed, now mock-solemn, and said to me, “That’s why he’s so good at catching the crooks, because he can think like them.”

  I couldn’t help saying, “Is that true, Leon? Can you think like a crook?”

  “I’ve had my successes,” Kaplan admitted modestly.

  “And he’s about to have another one,” Fernando said, “right here in Guerrera.”

  Señora de Paula said, “Tell him about it, Leon, I know he’ll be interested. He’s in the film business in Los Angeles.”

  Leon raised his eyebrows, intrigued. “Are you?”

  “On the production side,” I said. “Also not that glamorous. But Dulce told me you had some sort of interesting reason for being in Guerrera.”

  “It wasn’t even supposed to be my file,” Leon said. “But then I saw it was Guerrera, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I have an old friend down there; this is a chance to visit.’ So I got the folder, and here I am.”

  “That’s terrific,” I said. “What is this folder?”

  “It’s an accidental death, a life insurance claim,” he told me. “I’m with Hartford National, and we’ve had a number of these the last few years. You mentioned Double Indemnity. They really killed the husband in that one, but what we’ve been getting is the people who fake their deaths.”

  I said, “They can do that?”

  “They can try,” he said. “If they feel they need the money bad enough, they’ll go for it. Not all of them are smart, or they wouldn’t be in so much trouble in the first place.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said.

  “A lot of them forget,” he explained, “that they have to go on being somebody after it’s all over. It isn’t enough to fake a death and get a death certificate and all that. They have to find a brand new ID somewhere.”

  “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do that,” I said.

  “Some know,” he told me. “And I think we’ve got one now.”

  “And that’s why you’re here.”

  “We’ve had a claim on a person — I can’t mention names, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “It looked straightforward,” he said. “Accidental death, so it is double indemnity, and quite a lot of money.”

  “But it’s a fake?”

  “To tell you the truth, I can’t be sure, not yet.” Leon shook his head. “If it weren’t for the letter, we wouldn’t have had any question at all.”

  Politely curious, I said, “Letter?”

  “Let me explain. These days, the majority of the life insurance fraud cases we get come from offshore. A country like this, or a country in Africa, say, or other parts of the world, the recordkeeping isn’t that exact. It’s maybe a little easier to get a death certificate.”

  “Not in my hospital,” Fernando said.

  “I know, Fernando,” Leon assured him, “but not everybody is as scrupulous as you people.”

  “You mentioned a letter,” I said.

  “Well, before that,” he said, “we’d already done the usual check. Any time there’s an offshore death and a large-figure payout, we look to see if there’s anything that doesn’t seem right, and we did it in this instance, and it seemed as though fraud wasn’t even remotely a possibility. The circumstances were open and unimpeachable.”

  “And yet,” I said, “here you are.”

  “One week after the claim was put in,” he told me, “in fact, just at the moment the payout was being approved, a letter arrived at the national police station in San Cristobal. Now, if Fernando will forgive me, the post office in this country isn’t the greatest.”

  “Believe me, I know,” Fernando said, and his wife said, “We beg people, Fax us the dates of your stay. Don’t write.”

  “I’ve heard it said,” Leon told me with his dry smile, “that the post office here is nothing to write home about.”

  “I’ve heard that about the mail here,” I agreed. But I was thinking, Get on with it, man. What the hell is this letter?

 
; “So the letter,” Leon said, “had been mailed more than a month earlier. It got screwed up in the postal system, but then finally it did get to the police.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “It said our client was planning to stage a fake death, in order to defraud our company. It said the letter writer’s husband was involved in the plot, even though the letter writer had begged him to have nothing to do with it. It asked the police to warn our client that his plans were known, in order to force him to give up the whole idea.” He spread his hands. “You see? The letter was written a month before our client’s alleged death, but it wasn’t found until after the death — if it really was a death — had already occurred.”

  I said, “Do you know who the letter writer is?”

  “No. Some disgruntled wife. She doesn’t matter, and her husband doesn’t matter. In fact, the client doesn’t matter, if he’s still alive someplace.”

  “He doesn’t?” I was distracted, because I did know who the goddamn letter writer was. The angry Ifigenia, the bitch. What had I ever done to her?

  Leon was saying, “The widow — or the wife — has put in a claim. If I can establish fraud while I’m here, that lady is going to jail.”

  “Won’t that be easy to do?”

  “You’d think so,” he said. “Once we’re on the trail. But the circumstances are just so solid. It was an automobile accident, seen by a restaurant full of people, none of whom knew our client. It was a local mortician, who also did not know our client. There’s even a videotape of the funeral, believe it or not, with grieving family members. I’ve been to the cemetery, and the grave is there. I’ve talked to the mortician who wrote the death certificate, and he described the body, and it would seem to be the right man. I’ve visited the stonemason, and the headstone is being carved right now.”

  “If it was an automobile accident,” I suggested, “maybe it’s one of God’s little ironies. The man came down here to fake a death and was killed in a freak accident before he could do it.”

  “I know,” Leon said, as the waiter distributed menus. “I’ve thought of that.” After the waiter left, Leon added, “I almost believe that could be the truth, but I just have a feeling about this one.”