Dance for the Dead jw-2

by Thomas Perry

  In her dream she found herself kneeling on a bare earth floor in a dark enclosure. Her ears told her that the space was about fifteen feet square. As her eyes slowly became more used to the dark she could see the texture of the inner side of the elm bark that had been shingled together to make the walls and roof of the ganosote. It was a large one built in the old style, about a hundred and twenty feet long with compartments like this one on either side. She counted ten cooking fires at intervals down the center aisle. She could see dark shapes of men, women, and children huddled at the fires or walking past them.

  One of the children pushed aside the bearskin that was hanging at the east end of the longhouse to cover the door, and she had to look down to avoid the glare. She knew from the bright sunlight that it must be morning. When the child scampered out and the bearskin swung shut again she didn't raise her head because she was thinking about what the light had shown her. She was wearing a leather skirt and moccasins, and she could feel that the reason the bare ground didn't bother her knees was that they were protected by a pair of leggings. She reflected in a detached way that all of her clothes were soft deerskin, and this confirmed her impression that the day that was beginning was in the Old Time.

  She could see that around her neck was a necklace woven from fragrant marsh grass, and she reached up to touch it. Every few inches there was a little disk of marsh grass covered with shell beads. She could smell the fresh, grassy scent, and she knew that the perfume made the smoke, cooking meat, and the twenty or thirty bodies in the ganosote easier on her nostrils.

  She heard a noise and turned to see that behind her there was the big shape of a man on the lower platform along the wall of the compartment, and that he was stirring, about to wake up. She didn't know who he was, but stored on the platform five feet above him were her things - the extra moccasins she would use to replace the ones on her feet now, the elm bark gaowo tray she used to prepare corn bread, her collection of ahdoquasa with the bowl ends polished smooth for eating soup and the handles carved in the shapes of men and women embracing. She knew he must be her husband, but he stayed asleep in the shadows with his face to the wall because it was not time for her to see him yet.

  She heard someone calling her name outside, and in the logic of dreams, she knew that the voice was the reason she was here. She stood up and walked past the fires to the bearskin flap. A strong hand gripped her arm, and she turned. A man whose face she did not quite see in the dim light said in Seneca, "If you don't want to dream about the dead, you don't have to. If the women sing the Ohgiwe, they'll leave." She knew this voice.

  "I know, Jake," said Jane. She lifted the corner of the bearskin and ducked out into the light.

  "Jane!" said a voice. It was harsh and high, not quite human, like the screech of a parrot. "Jane!"

  She looked around her, and her eye caught a flash of deep blue above her on a maple tree, and then another flitted across the open air from an old sycamore. It flew in spurts, a dip and a wing-flap to bring the bird up, then a dip and a wing-flap and claws clutching the branch of the tree beside the first one. Jane could tell they were the two scrub jays she had captured in California.

  The two birds dropped to the lowest branch of the maple just above her. The male tilted his head to the side and glared at her with one shiny black eye. "Jane!"

  "What?" she asked.

  The female jay hopped to reverse her position on the branch, her head where her tail had been, and leaned down. "We did what you asked," she said. "We took Dennis and Mona to Hawenneyugeh."

  "Thank you," said Jane. "But you have to go home now. You can't survive in this climate, and winter is coming."

  The male shifted back and forth on the branch nervously, and she could hear its claws scratching the bark. "We came for you."

  The jays eyed her without moving. Jane felt a small, growing fear. "Am I going to die too? So many people, all dying for nothing."

  The female dropped to the grass at her feet and jerked her head from side to side to bring first one eye and then the other to bear on Jane. "It's not supposed to be for anything," she said. "It's what we are."

  "What we are?"

  "Hawenneyu, the Right-Handed Twin, creates people, birds, trees. Hanegoategeh, the Left-Handed Twin, makes cancer, number-six birdshot, Dutch Elm disease. For every measure, a countermeasure: Hawenneyu creates the air, Hanegoategeh churns it into the cold wind; Hawenneyu makes fire and houses, Hanegoategeh makes the fire burn the houses."

  "Are you here to tell me it's my turn to be used up?" asked Jane.

  "To warn you. If you want to be alive and breathe the air and drink the water, then look and listen. Nothing has changed since the beginning of the world. You're still walking through wild country. No sight or sound is irrelevant. Learn about your enemy."

  She studied the two birds. "Who is my enemy?"

  "Think about how he works," said the female jay.

  "He's been killing people," Jane said. "There's nothing special about it at all. It's just brutal: cutting up the Deckers - "

  "Without leaving any sign in the house that a little boy had ever lived there," the male reminded her.

  "How about Mona and Dennis?" she asked. "He hired some men to beat Dennis to death and throw Mona down a stairwell."

  "He waited until you had made your preparations for one building, and got the case moved to another. You had to go to a new place where a dozen men were waiting for you and court was already in session."

  "And what about Alan Turner?" asked the female jay.

  "What about him?" Jane asked.

  "We know how you got into Turner's house past the alarm system and out again. How did he do it?"

  "I don't know," said Jane. "I suppose he rang the doorbell. Alan Turner let him in. They must have known each other."

  "You're not listening," said the female jay. "Anybody could get in by ringing the doorbell. How did he get out without tripping the alarm after Turner was dead?"

  "How?" she asked.

  Jane awoke and listened to the sounds of the cars on the freeway a few blocks away. Rush hour must have begun, but then she remembered that the term had no meaning around Los Angeles. There were cars clogging the roads every hour of every day. She sat up and looked around her, then stood and walked into the shower.

  She had only needed some sleep. She still didn't know the man's name, but while she slept she had figured out something else about him. He might have gotten into the house in Monterey without setting off the alarm because Turner had let him in. But the only way he could have gotten out and left the alarm on after he had killed Turner was to know the alarm code.

  16

  Ellery Robinson opened the apartment door and looked out past her with wary eyes. "Come in," she said quietly. "This isn't a neighborhood for standing in a lighted doorway."

  Jane stepped inside and watched the thin, hard arms move to close the steel door and then turn the dead bolt.

  "I been waiting for you," said Ellery Robinson. "I knew you saw me in jail because I saw you. How did you find me? I'm not in the phone book."

  "I went to your old apartment and asked around until I found somebody who still knew you.... You're in trouble again."

  "No big thing. My parole officer thinks I have an attitude, so he forgot to write down when I came to see him."

  "You don't have an attitude?"

  Ellery Robinson shrugged her thin shoulders. "When a black woman gets past the age where they stop thinking about her big ass, they remember they didn't like her very much to begin with."

  "Can you do anything about it?"

  "He turned out to be unreliable, so his reports aren't enough to send anybody to jail anymore."

  "He must have been really unreliable."

  "Yeah. While I was in jail I heard they caught him in his office with a Mexican girl going down on him. He's been getting what he wanted regular like that for years. All he had to do to get them deported was check a box on a form, so they did a lot of favo
rs."

  "Does he know who set him up?"

  For the first time Ellery Robinson smiled a little, and Jane could see a resemblance to the young woman she had met years ago. "Could be anybody. Everybody knew."

  Jane sat in silence and stared at her. She had aged in the past eleven years, but it seemed to have refined and polished her. Ellery Robinson tolerated the gaze for a time, then said, "How about you? Have you been well?"

  "I can't complain."

  "You mean you can't complain to me, don't you?" said Ellery Robinson. "You're thinking I should have gone with you."

  "I don't know. Nobody can say what would have happened."

  "Don't feel sorry for me. I had a life, you know. My sister Clarice and I had one life. When I was in prison I would sit in the sun in the yard and close my eyes and follow her and the baby around all day with my mind. The women in jail thought I'd gone crazy, that I sat there all day in a coma, but I wasn't there at all. I was living inside my head."

  "You don't regret it?"

  "I regret that I'm a murderer. I don't regret that he got killed. He needed it."

  Jane nodded. "You doing okay now?"

  "I'm contented. I know what's on your mind. It's that woman in county jail, isn't it?"

  "Mary Perkins?" said Jane. "No. She's far away now."

  "What, then?"

  "I know people hear things - in jail, the parole office, places like that."

  "Sometimes."

  "What have you heard about Intercontinental Security?"

  Ellery Robinson's clear, untroubled face wrinkled with distaste. "If you're hiring, hire somebody else. If they're looking for you, don't let them find you."

  "They seem to have a lot of business."

  "Oh, yeah, it's a big company. And it's old, like Pinkerton's or Brinks or one of them. I think they used to guard trains and banks and things. For all I know they still do; I'm not a stockholder."

  "Have you heard anything about burglaries in places they're supposed to protect - as though they might be fooling their own alarm systems or something?"

  "No. What I hear most about them now is they hunt for people."

  "What sort of people?"

  "The usual. Skip-trace, open warrants, wanted for questioning, runaways. Somebody jumps bail, the bail bondsman is on the hook. Some clerk takes a little money out of the till and runs. The police don't look very hard, so the company hires Intercontinental."

  "What's different?"

  "The ones they bring in seem to fall down a lot. Maybe a broken arm, maybe a leg. Maybe their face doesn't look too good."

  "It's an old company. Did they always have that reputation?"

  Ellery Robinson shrugged. "I didn't always know people who got chased. Then I was away for a few years. It's since I got back that I've been hearing things."

  "Who have you been hearing them from? Can you help me get to one of them?"

  The little woman leaned back on her worn couch and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She seemed to be searching for names and addresses up there, but Jane could tell that she was rejecting some of them for reasons that she would not reveal.

  The young man stood beside a car in the darkness. He was tall and heavy, with a jacket that was too thick for this weather and baggy blue pants. Jane could see that there was a streetlight directly above him, but the lamp was a jagged rim of broken glass.

  Ellery Robinson followed the angle of Jane's eyes. "The street dealers shoot them out at night, and the city replaces them in the day. Everybody gets paid." She stopped walking and held Jane's arm. The young man looked up the block for three or four seconds, then down the block. When he was satisfied, he came away from the car and walked across the sidewalk onto the lawn.

  Ellery Robinson looked up and said to him, "This is the woman." Then she turned to Jane. "He won't hurt you." Then she turned and walked away across the packed dirt of the big gray project toward her room.

  Jane turned to the young man. "Thank you for coming."

  The young man started walking, and she stepped off with him. "Got to keep moving or everybody starts to notice you're not going about your business."

  "All right."

  "She said you want to know about Intercontinental."

  "Yes," said Jane. She waited for the logical question, but it did not come. He didn't consider it his business why she wanted to know, just as Ellery Robinson had not taken it on herself to tell either of them the other's name.

  He said, "I worked for them."

  "How long?"

  "About two weeks." He anticipated the next question. "In October. They put out ads in this part of town. They wanted store security for two big malls in time for Christmas. You know, they didn't want a couple of white kids in uniforms in front of a store on Crenshaw. They'd just get hurt."

  "What happened?"

  "They made me a trainee. That means they don't have to pay regular wages. They put me through a lie detector test, a couple of days in a classroom, and turned me out. I worked the malls for a week and a half."

  "Why did they fire you?"

  The young man's eyes shot to hers and then ahead again. "Security check turned up my priors. Couldn't get bonded."

  "What did you find out before you left?"

  "Now you're not going to believe me, right?" he asked. "I got priors, and I'm a 'disgruntled former employee.'"

  Jane looked up at the sky, then sighted along the wall of the complex. "It's a cold, clammy night for L.A. It'll probably rain soon, from the way it feels. And you may not believe it, but I hardly ever find myself in this part of town after midnight in any weather."

  "I can believe that," he said.

  "If I thought you were going to lie to me, I'd be pretty stupid to be here, wouldn't I?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then tell me what it was like."

  "They're looking for young men with strong motivation and they'll give them the skills to succeed. Like the army. They got this guy who comes in and tells you how to be a thief in a big store so that you know what to look for."

  "Did he get it right?"

  "There were plenty of people in that room who could tell you for sure, but I wasn't one of them. I think it was pretty close, though, because they were all listening. Probably got some new ideas for the off-season."

  "The skills to succeed. Can you tell me anything about this guy? Who was he?"

  "His name was Farrell. Sort of an old guy with gray hair that's all bristly like a brush and spit-shined shoes. They called him the training officer. After he told us how to spot thieves, he told us what to do about them."

  "Take them to the back of the store and call your supervisor?"

  "Yeah," he said. "He says the system doesn't do any good. They get a court date and in a day they're back for more. So the supervisor would take them someplace and scare them."

  "How scared?"

  "Farrell says that comes under initiative. The company judges supervisors on the results."

  "What are the results?"

  "He says there are three kinds: the ones who don't need it and are doing it for some kind of kick, the ones in a crew that sells it, and junkies. There's no way to make any of them stop, but you can make them go to another store next time."'

  "Did you get to see any of this?"

  "Once. A woman got caught with a bag that had a big box in it with a trapdoor cut in it, and she was shoveling stuff into it. The supervisor took her in the back for a while, then shoved her out the loading dock door. She ran."

  "I've heard this before. Stores do it themselves. What else did you see?"

  "The next week my background check comes in, so I'm out. I turn in my blues and go home. Two days later I get a phone call. It's Farrell. He says he's sorry to hear what happened, but maybe he can do something for me. I got initiative and motivation and I'm not afraid to do what needs to be done. He says sometimes there are jobs for people who cant make it through a background check. I'd still be working for Intercontinental, but t
hey'd pay me in cash. Kind of an undercover job, and it paid a lot more."

  "Did he say what you would be doing?"

  "I'm twenty-two. Never had a job before because I'm dragging a five-page rap sheet. Got two convictions. Aggravated assault - did three for that in youth camp. Assault with a deadly weapon - did three more for that in Soledad. I figure he was looking for a brain surgeon."

  "You said there were a lot of people in the training class who had the same problem. Did anybody else get the same offer?"

  "I don't know."

  "What did you tell him?"

  They reached the sidewalk on the other side of the complex. He moved to the outside and looked carefully up and down the street before he ventured out of the shelter of the big buildings. "I told you I couldn't get another job."

  "So you signed on."

  "He had me come to another office. Not the big place where they hire and train people. This one was out in Van Nuys. There were eight or ten men hanging around - white guys, black guys, a couple of Mexicans. Everybody dressed good, but not really doing much. The sign on the door said 'Enterprise Development.'"

  Jane remembered the men at the courthouse. They had all been wearing suits or sportcoats, and none of them had been carrying anything that could connect them with Intercontinental Security. "Where in Van Nuys?"

  "The address is 5122 Van Nuys Boulevard. Big building, small office."

  "What did you do there?"

  "Farrell came and talked to me for a while."

  "What did he tell you?"

  "Pretty much what anybody tells you when you're doing something you get paid in cash for. If something goes wrong they'll slip you bail money, but if you tell anybody anything, there are a bunch of them and only one of you."

  "And he still didn't tell you what he wanted you for?"

  "Yeah, he did," said the young man. "Hunting."

  "What?"

  "That's what he said. The way it works is, the company has a list of people they want. The company does whatever is legal to find them. That's all in the open. It's a big company with offices in fifty places and a lot of people on the payroll. But then there's some cases that are off the books. Like maybe a guy disappears at the same time as a computer chip or a famous painting or something. The company knows it, they know he's got it, or he's got the money from it. Somehow he got away with it."