by Thomas Perry
“How can you?”
“That’s not going to be an issue between us. It’s like what the insurance companies call a pre-existing condition. My problem.”
“So you’re going to keep it here, empty?”
“If we sell it, then maybe—no, probably—one night the new owners are going to be sitting downstairs watching television, and somebody is going to arrive and tell them things I don’t want them to hear. Or even worse, one of the chasers will have followed him here. This isn’t theoretical. It happened once.”
“It’s going to be a hard place to unload. I suppose you don’t want the phone company reassigning your number either.”
“I can afford to keep paying the bills. In a few years there will be fewer people who remember the address. The ones who do will know that it’s not the solution to anybody’s problem anymore. Then we’ll cancel the phone, sell the house, and use the money for a trip around the world or something.”
He laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to use up your money. We should have had that conversation before, too. I will support my wife. Keep whatever money you have safe, in case of an emergency.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “This is the emergency, tonight. Things are happening fast that will get set in cement, so we have to do all of them right. We take each other on, unconditionally. What I used to do has put you in jeopardy: not much jeopardy, but some enterprising F.B.I. agent could still stumble on somebody I helped, and you could wake up one morning to the smell of tear gas and the sight of men in bulletproof vests and baseball caps knocking down the door with a battering ram. There are also some very slimy people out there who still want to find some victim they didn’t get to torment enough, and would be very happy to step over your body for the privilege of asking me questions.” She paused to let the two unpleasant possibilities settle in his imagination. Then she smiled. “However. I did make a lot of money at it. You’d better share the rewards, because you’ve already taken on the risks.”
He shrugged. “We can use it to buy a lot of life insurance.”
She laughed and kissed him. “I’m serious. About once a month or so, you’ll see a lot of mail from my two business managers. One is Stewart Hoffstedder. He’s fictitious, basically just a mail drop in New York I use to pay bills for imaginary people, so you don’t want to know about any of that. The other one is named Michael Mesnick, and he’s real. He’s a former I.R.S. agent. If you ever fall into the morass of my finances, call him or his assistant, Kim Henmi, and they’ll straighten it out. Do not say anything about how ill-gotten my gains are. They think I’m a career consultant who spends too much money on travel and not enough on pensions.”
He gave her a hug and stood up. “I’ll try to remember.” But she was still sitting on the bed. “That’s it, right?”
She sat quietly for a moment. “Here is the rest of it. I don’t think I want to have to say this twice, because it’s a little … embarrassing. What I intend to do with the rest of my life is be your wife. I’m not reserving anything, holding anything back. This is the only life I expect to have, so I’m not willing to let it go wrong by little increments because I wasn’t paying attention. I will always be available to you, at any hour of the day or night. If you want to talk, I’ll talk. If you don’t want to talk, that probably means you should try even harder to talk. I’ll be listening.”
Carey sat on the bed hard, as though his legs had given way. “The sweet old-fashioned girl? Jane Whitefield?”
“Jane McKinnon. Older than old-fashioned,” she said. “Primal, actually.” He hugged her again, but as he smiled at her, he saw she wasn’t smiling. “The only thing I won’t do for you is play dumb.”
The supple, gentle touch of his arm around her seemed to stiffen, and after a second the arm dropped away. “I hope this is because you’re getting everything out of the way at once—housecleaning day.”
“It is.”
“Then I guess I don’t have any grounds to feel insulted. So I’ll just say that I love you. I married you. If I had any reason to imagine I couldn’t live up to the agreement, I would have to be insane. I don’t expect to ever give you any reason to feel … insecure. Okay?”
She gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks. I’m sorry to bring that up again. Maybe we just know too much about each other. You’re a very attractive man, Carey. And you’re getting better instead of worse. You like women, and we all sense it, and so we all nuzzle up to you. And you’re also a very successful doctor in a provincial town. Everybody likes to be around men like you. None of that is going to change just because you’re married. What I’m saying isn’t ‘Watch your step because I’m onto you.’ I’m saying, I know you like women a whole lot. And I like you a whole lot. You’re used to variety and excitement and … whatever. I understand it. So here I am. I’m not everybody in the world, but I’m going to try to be everything to you. Just ask. No, you don’t even have to ask, because I’m saying yes now, for all time.”
“The strawberries,” said Carey.
She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him hard, rocking him back and forth. “I’m so glad. You don’t know how relieved I am.”
“About what?”
“You’re nowhere near as dumb as you look. It’s just the cheap haircut, after all.”
7
Earl Bliss had once taken a locksmith course during the dead time while he was waiting for his next job to find him. Everybody in his graduating class had been a deep-bottom loser, with no serious hope of finding work fixing locks, but every one of them had learned to handle a pick and a tension wrench. Earl had gotten a great deal of use out of his set, and tonight he held them in his teeth until he and Linda reached the row of mailboxes in the lobby of Pete Hatcher’s apartment building. He quickly slipped behind Linda while she watched the hallway, then set the tension wrench in the lock, pulled the pick out of his teeth, and opened the little door that said #6 HATCHER.
He handed the mail to Linda and walked on toward Hatcher’s apartment door. Linda had always loved Las Vegas hotels, but the idea that the people who dealt cards and waited on her actually lived in Las Vegas had always depressed her. It reminded her of the summer when she was seven and her mother had gotten two days of work in a bikini movie. Linda had been allowed to believe that she was being permitted a rare glimpse at glamour. She knew now that her mother just had not had a place to leave her while school was out.
Linda had been dragged along and had watched a whole group of them waiting in line for a turn to climb into a dusty trailer on the hot, black road above the beach and wriggle into swimsuits handed out off a rack, all of them women like her mother—pretty, but at twenty-five already looking worn and a little bovine.
They were just supposed to play volleyball behind two men who got into a fistfight, but they knew even less about volleyball than the two men did about fighting, so as the sun rose higher and began to sear eyeballs and heat the sand enough to burn their feet, they got breathless and fell and bumped into one another, a couple of them crying. And then—she never was told how her mother had managed it—they had gone to live with Dwayne.
She recognized him as one of the men who had been up at the trailer that day. He was in charge of something or other—could it possibly have been lighting, on a beach? She remembered the long, dull, hot days of the summer living in that apartment on Winnetka Avenue, the doors of the apartments all open on the blindingly bright, lying promise of the empty pool, trying to catch a breeze that could never come because the building itself blocked it from entering the courtyard. Her mother had thrown Dwayne out in a rage one day and had to be reminded the apartment was in his name.
Linda followed Earl and watched him open the door lock with as little effort as he had needed with the mailbox. When she joined him he was already blocking off the bathroom window with towels and duct tape to keep the light from shining through it.
When Earl had finished, she closed the bathroom door, turned on the
light, and took out the mail. They sat on the rim of the bathtub together and opened it. Before she even got to the bills, she could see they had something. It was a thick monthly bank statement with a stack of canceled checks inside. She curbed her eagerness and handed it to Earl, then opened the bills, one by one. There was the power bill, which was worth nothing. There was the phone bill, which was worth a lot because it would have the numbers he had called and the cities. There was a bill for rent on this apartment. When she saw the envelope with the Visa logo on it she felt hopeful, but then she saw it wasn’t a bill at all but an offer for a new card. Earl stuffed the mail into Linda’s purse and stood up.
They put on the latex medical gloves and began to search the apartment. She could tell that Hatcher had not been given much time to prepare before he left. There were objects here that were worth money and could have been sold or pawned—gold cufflinks and rings, even a good watch with a couple of small diamonds on the dial. But the same objects told her that somebody had given him a lesson or two about disappearing. Distinctive jewelry was as good as a scar or bright red hair. There were a couple of empty frames on the mantel, but not one photograph was left anywhere.
Earl came and shone his Maglite into the fireplace and carefully examined a pile of ashes. Whatever had been burned in there, it wasn’t done for heat in Las Vegas in June. Linda could see that Earl wasn’t going to be able to tell what it had been, so she left the room.
She found Hatcher’s bedroom and systematically worked her way through it. From his pillow and the sheets under it, she gathered a dozen hairs and put them in a plastic bag. In the bathroom she made a list of all of the brand names she could find—toothpaste, shaving cream, razors, soap, shampoo, hairbrushes. She took the razors in case there was blood from a nick and gathered more hair from the brushes. They were more likely than the others to have been pulled out with the follicles. She searched hard for prescription bottles, so she could find the names of the doctors and pharmacies, but found none, so she moved to the kitchen.
She studied his eating habits. He didn’t own anything even mildly interesting—a crêpe pan or a wok or a can of jalapeños or a jar of saffron. She dutifully noted the brand names in the cupboards and refrigerator, but they were all just the ones advertised on national television, and he had kept little food in the house. He probably had worked late at night and eaten in the hotel restaurants. She lingered at the refrigerator, opening bottles and unwrapping packages of food in the freezer because amateurs sometimes left valuables there, and he had left in a hurry.
Linda returned to the living room and found Earl busy unzipping each cushion from the couch to check inside the cover. The couch itself had been tipped over so Earl could look up among the springs. He had also tipped over the coffee table, chairs, and lamps. Earl heard her enter and said, “You get started on the bookcase.”
Pete Hatcher had not been much of a reader. Linda wrote down the title, the author, and a description of each book, removed it from the shelf, looked behind it, held it up, and flipped through the pages with her thumb to see if anything fell out or had been taped inside, but found nothing.
At three in the morning Earl began to tip the furniture back onto the depressions in the rug where they had stood before, so Linda went from room to room making sure she had left no signs of her presence.
It was after five when they reached their motel. As soon as they were in the room Linda lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, but Earl was restless. After ten minutes, the sound of him shifting in the squeaky chair by the table and scribbling things on paper made her open her eyes. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Nope,” said Earl. “I’ll sleep later.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get a picture of how to do this.” He frowned and let his eyebrows bounce up once for emphasis. Linda hated that.
“How’s it going?”
“According to Seaver, he had lots of friends. He was one of those guys who had everything. Everybody loved Pete Hatcher. Especially women.” The contempt and envy in Earl’s voice made Linda feel almost sorry for him. “He may have changed his name, but that isn’t going to change. He’s not the sort that’s going to be lying low for long. He’ll need company. He’ll be out shaking hands and telling lies about himself.” He looked at Linda and she seemed to remind him of something. “He’ll be looking for women. According to Seaver, he’s a regular old snatch-hound.”
“That doesn’t exactly limit his movements,” said Linda. “Sex he can find anyplace. It would be better if there was one woman he couldn’t live without. Her we could find.”
“No sense thinking about what we don’t have. What we do have has got to be enough to get us there.” He consulted his notes. “He used a pro to get out of here. She had him drive out in a car instead of getting on a plane in Las Vegas. It wasn’t a rented car, because then he’d turn it in wherever he ends up. So she bought it for him. If she’s any good at all, she wouldn’t let him stay in Nevada, right? It’s too small.”
“Right.”
“So he’s out of state, with the car. He’s got to do something with it. If he sells it, keeps it, or abandons it, then it gets new plates and the old plates get returned to the Nevada D.M.V. There are only a million, two hundred thousand people in the whole state. How many cars? About half that many. How many of them are going to have their plates turned in this month?”
“I have no idea, do you?”
“No, but not many.”
“What if it’s in her name?”
“If it was, it won’t be. He has to insure it in the new state, be able to get pulled over and ticketed without getting hauled in.”
“He’ll need a license to do any of that.”
“If she didn’t get him anything else, she got him a new license and birth certificate and Social Security card. Those I can’t start with. But the new car registration I can probably get at the end of the month.”
“Suppose he just drove it to an airport outside of Las Vegas? That’s what I’d do.”
“Yeah,” said Earl. “We’ll have to cover that possibility too. It’s not going to be simple. This woman is a problem. She didn’t let him make a lot of mistakes. There’s nothing easy left: no personal letters, no pictures, not even any old credit card bills. Oh, that reminds me. Where’s the bank statement we got? He just might have written a check to his new name.”
“In my purse.”
He snatched her purse off the doorknob where she had hung it, pulled out the statement, and opened it. He quickly shuffled through the checks, then sighed. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, then slapped the checks down on the table.
“What’s wrong?”
“He had a balance of sixty-two thousand bucks. He wrote a check for sixty to ‘Cash.’ You want to know who took it and gave him the sixty in cash?”
“No bank I ever heard of would.… Oh, don’t tell me.”
“Yep. Pleasure Island Casino. The stupid bastards had him under surveillance, and they let him walk up to a cashier and write a check for his fuck-you money.”
“That’s got to be his idea,” said Linda. “I’m sure he’s seen them do it for gamblers. But he wrote it for less than his balance, so he doesn’t have the bank and the police looking for him too. That’s her.”
Earl shrugged. “Her again. Yeah.” He stared into space for a few seconds. Slowly, his jaw began to work, the knotted muscles grinding his teeth together. “Let’s think about her. She sees, probably before he does, that his time is coming. They’ve watched him enough so if they were just going to fire him, he’d be gone already. She knows they’re not going to take their eyes off him while he’s alive unless she makes them. She tells him how to do a quick housecleaning. She gets him a car, and some papers. She arranges to meet him in the one place in Las Vegas where there aren’t a million lights. She gets him out.” Earl’s face assumed a look of puzzlement. “But then she doesn’t go too, she hangs in to buy him time.”
&nb
sp; Linda sighed. “This isn’t getting me anywhere. So she bought him time.”
Earl’s irritated look froze her. “You’re not thinking. You know any pros who are going to hang around to get in a fight in an elevator if the client’s already driving out with a big head start?”
“No women, anyway.”
“No men either. The pay doesn’t go up any for bruises. She must have thought he needed the extra minutes, and that means he wasn’t safe until a particular time.”
“It can’t be anything but an airport,” said Linda. “He wasn’t going to be invisible until the plane was in the air.”
“How much time did she need to buy him?” Earl leafed through the piles of tourist literature the maids had left on the coffee table. He found a number and dialed. “Yes. I’m interested in the midnight show, but I want to see another show, too. Is it one of those things where you have a bunch of warm-up acts? What time does the Miraculous Miranda actually get on stage?” He wrote something down. “Then when does the show end?” His pencil scribbled another note. “That’s too bad. I may have to catch her act on another trip. Thanks.” He hung up and studied his notes. “Okay. Miranda comes on right at twelve, first thing. She’s on the stage for two hours.”
“So what?”
Earl scowled. “So this woman figures Hatcher is going to have two hours to drive before the lights come on again and somebody sees he’s not sitting next to her. He’s driving to an airport, and she’s planned on two hours. His plane has to leave pretty soon after he gets there, because she doesn’t want him sitting in an airport when Seaver’s people start looking for him. She wants him to arrive about the time the plane is boarding, so he can walk right in and disappear.”
