Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  "Yes."

  "It’s a long story."

  "What else have we got to do?" It sounded wrong, even to her. It was almost flirtatious. She tried to be businesslike. "I’ve got time."

  "It came to me that the job just wasn’t what I pretended it was."

  "What was it?"

  "You take a long, close look at all the people you’ve arrested, sometimes the easy way, sometimes the hard, with broken bones and blood and abrasions. They’re mostly the kind of person who, when you talk to him, just hasn’t got a clue."

  "A clue about what?"

  "It isn’t just that they don’t know there’s a law about resisting arrest. They’re not too clear on laws like cause-and-effect and gravity. The world goes on around them and steps on them all their lives, but they don’t have any idea why, and it drives them half crazy. They don’t know why the guy next door has a new television set and they don’t. Later on in prison they get tested and they can barely read, and they’re addicted to everything, and their future is nothing."

  "You felt sorry for them?"

  "Not sorry enough to stop arresting them. What happened to me was that I could see that my own future was the same as theirs. I was going to have to spend twelve more years with these people—dragging them in, because they don’t even know that much, that when they’re driving at a hundred and ten, the helicopter over their heads isn’t going to lose sight of them if they go a hundred and twenty, or that fifteen cops at their door aren’t going to give up and leave them alone, no matter how hard they fight. If you spend all your time with them, you’re just living the other half of their lives."

  "Twelve more years—that was until retirement?"

  "Yeah."

  "So you quit?"

  "I quit. I drew my credit-union balance and went to school. I got a C.P.A. license and went to work as an accountant at Smithson-Brownlow."

  "What’s that?"

  "It’s the twelfth biggest accounting company in the country. The St. Louis office is one of seventeen."

  "Sorry, I count my own money. What happened?"

  "I lasted almost five years. Then one day I was at work and I ran across a problem. I think it was an accident, but I can’t even be sure of that. Somebody may have been setting me up to see it."

  "See what?"

  "One day a guy I didn’t even know, on a different floor of the building, comes in, turns on his computer, and a message on the screen says, ’Bang. You’re dead.’ Then everything that was in his hard disk rolls across the screen and disappears forever. It’s a computer virus. You know how they work, right?"

  "Sure," she said. "You lost everything."

  "No," he said. "They lost everything on his machine and five or six others and the mainframe. But one of the bosses was in early, kept his head and stopped the rest of us from turning ours on. The computer company sent over a program doctor, like a detective. He managed to find out how the virus worked, and delete it from the program. It took him about two weeks. He also searched every floppy in the office and found out the virus came from a disk somebody had brought in with a computer game on it. Every disk he used that went into another computer got that computer too, and so on. Of course nobody admitted to the computer game, and they couldn’t tell whose machine was first. But mine was clean."

  "Why did yours miss out?"

  "I was handling a lot of single-client personal accounts. I would enter what I was doing and pass the disk on to the woman who oversaw the mainframe, and she would feed it to the machine for the company records. She kept the disk for backup and I got a new one." He looked tired now, his brow wrinkling a little as he remembered. "So I took a chance. I spent the first two days of the quarantine printing out everything in my files. Every word came out. For the next day or two I looked it over for signs of the virus."

  "What did you find?"

  "A lot of transactions I didn’t know about."

  "Stealing?"

  "Yes. There was a pattern. There were lots of accounts where somebody had money in a portfolio— retirement funds, mostly. There would be dividends that were supposed to go for reinvestment, but instead they went to money-market accounts inside the portfolio. Then there would be a withdrawal from that account marked as an internal transfer to another account. The problem was, that one wasn’t part of the portfolio. It didn’t belong to the customer. I checked the number and it wasn’t even an account that was under the company’s control."

  "It doesn’t sound complicated enough to be the perfect crime."

  "It wasn’t. But the customer wouldn’t notice right away. His balance wouldn’t go down, it just wouldn’t go up as much as it was supposed to. If he saw a report of the transfers, he would see that dividends received were being moved from one of his own accounts to his holding account and then to another account. He would assume that was his, too. Finally, I called the money-market fund’s customer service number to get the name of the owner."

  "Wait. They’ll tell you that over the phone?"

  "I was just trying to find out if it was legitimate. If it was one of our accounts, they’d tell me what I wanted to know. If they wouldn’t, I’d know it was trouble. I said, ’I’m John Felker, from Smithson-Brownlow. Can you fax me a copy of the last statement for account number 12345678?’ "

  "And they did it?"

  "Yes. Only not for the reason I thought. They did it because it was mine. There was almost half a million dollars in the account."

  "It was in your name?"

  "Yeah. At first I was furious. It took me maybe an hour to get scared."

  "What did you have to be afraid of?"

  "I started thinking. The computer virus had nothing to do with the company. It’s a random act, like a drunk throwing a beer bottle into a crowd at a ball game. This was different. Somebody who had studied the operation—my part of it, specifically—had gone through and carefully moved things around. Whoever did it had access, knew the names of clients, that kind of thing. They were doing it to me."

  "Did you go to your boss?"

  "I was going to, but you have to imagine what the atmosphere was around there. They were losing money, probably clients. We were all suspects for bringing the virus in, so they were looking at us like the enemy anyway."

  "So what? They already knew about the virus. This might have been part of it—some angry ex-employee or something."

  "Right. But what if I had been stealing money? All of a sudden the virus hits and everybody in the firm starts scrutinizing all of the old records. All I could do was go to the boss and tell him the transfers on the computer were part of the joke. Only they weren’t in the computer, like the virus. The money had really been moved and deposited in my name. I decided that before I brought this up, I had better keep looking until I found out enough to prove I wasn’t a thief."

  "Why would anybody do this, anyway? If they put it in your name, it wasn’t for the money."

  "That was what my boss would have said. Then it occurred to me that the half million could have been only part of it, or it could have all been done to set me up."

  "Did it occur to you to transfer it all back where it belonged?"

  "I told you what I found. I can’t tell what I didn’t find. For one thing, I didn’t find anything like a half million in transfers. They could have been from accounts I never saw, didn’t know about. And if these people could put money in, maybe they could get it out, too. There could be another half million already gone."

  "You were an ex-cop. Why didn’t you go to the police?"

  "Believe me, I thought about it. But being an ex-cop made me more worried. I thought about what had happened in cases like this when I was a cop. You get a guy—a banker or accountant or lawyer—we got lots of lawyers. Some company blows the whistle. There’s an account in his name with half a million in it. What does the D.A. do? He puts him in custody, quick. The judge doesn’t grant bail, because if he’s got one account with that much in it, he might have five more, and finding them tak
es months. He’s a sure thing for jumping bail. While I was sitting in jail, anything could be happening with those records, and none of it was going to help me."

  "So what did you do?"

  "Here’s where Harry comes in. After all this time he called me."

  "Where?"

  "I don’t know where he was. I was at home."

  "What did he say?"

  "Two things. One was to stay out of jail. He had heard that some guys had been shopping a contract on me inside the prison system."

  "Shopping?"

  "Yeah. It was open. Anybody who got me was going to collect."

  "Is that normal?"

  "It hardly ever happens. It’s too risky. There are so many people who would hear about it who need something to tell the police more than they need money."

  "How did Harry hear about it?"

  "He wouldn’t say. Not in prison, and not in St. Louis. He was calling long-distance from a pay phone, and he kept pumping money into it and I kept hearing cars go by."

  "What did you do?"

  "I thought it through eighty different ways. No matter what I did, I couldn’t imagine a way things could work out that didn’t include my spending a lot of time in a prison waiting for an investigation. Harry said the contract was for a hundred thousand. That meant somebody must have stolen a lot. He might have taken ten million, left a half million lying around to get me arrested, and gotten me killed before my trial."

  "Would that put an end to it?"

  "Sure. He keeps the nine million or so, and everybody figures I took anything that’s missing in the whole company."

  "So it was somebody in the company."

  "It might have been, even somebody in one of the other branches, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been somebody I arrested when I was a cop. For a long time now, they’ve been giving inmates computer lessons as part of the job-training program. It beats lathes and drill presses for getting a job afterward, and they can’t use them to make a knife. You can learn a lot about computers in a five-to-ten sentence. Or it could be something bigger. If you can steal money by phone, then anybody anywhere could be doing it, and I just happened to be the victim."

  "What did you do?"

  "Any way you looked at it, the minute the computer man got the company’s machines up and running and they took a close look at what was in there, I was going to jail. Within two or three days after that I would have to sleep, and then I would be dead."

  She looked at him closely. "You stole it, didn’t you?"

  "What else could I do?" he asked. "I was an honest man. I didn’t have the kind of money it takes to go on the run."

  She seemed to be staring through his eyes into the back of his head. "Did it occur to you that this might have been what they wanted you to do?"

  "Of course it did," he said. "If they were capable of thinking up the rest of it, they could think of that, too. But if I did nothing, each day the prisons were going to graduate maybe a hundred guys whose only offer of employment on the outside was killing me. If I brought it to the police, I was going inside, where the rest of them were. Even if I didn’t, the company was going to find the pattern soon, just as I had."

  "So you took the money."

  "Some of it. So now I’m not just being set up. I really did what they’re going to kill me for. I’m guilty."

  "If you get to be safe and secure, will you give it back?"

  He stared into the distance, toward the window behind her, for four or five breaths. "I’d like to. I doubt it."

  "Why not?"

  "We were all bonded. When they find out, the customers will get their money back. The insurance company will raise its premium, and life will go on. I’d like to be honest again, but embezzlers always say that, and I don’t have any reason to believe I’m any better than the rest of them. I don’t know if I’m ever in my life going to be in a position where I can bring myself to give it back. I’m going to be scared."

  She kept the gun in her right hand while she picked up the telephone and cradled it under her chin. "What was the phone number of your station when you were a cop?"

  "555-9292." He said it quickly, as though it had worn a groove into his brain and would never go away. "314 area code. But police stations won’t tell you anything about an officer."

  "I know," she said, and then somebody answered. She said, "Hello. This is Rachel Stanley from Deterrent Health Plans." She listened for a moment, then cut in and talked fast. "I’m calling because I’d like to set up a seminar for any police officers who might be interested in an exciting new plan for supplementing the coverage of law enforcement professionals." She stopped, as though she had run into a wall. "Oh?" she said. "What sort of plan do you have now?" She listened again. "Well, it’s very good, but if anyone there is—I understand. Goodbye."

  She dialed another long-distance number on the telephone and said, "I’d like the number of Missouri Casualty," listened for a moment, then dialed again, her eyes on him all the time. He could tell she was listening to a recording, and when she heard the right choice, she punched a number. After a pause, she said in a voice that was something between a purr and a threat, "Yes. This is Monica Briggs in admitting at U.C.L.A. Hospital in Los Angeles. We have a patient here named John Felker who is a retired St. Louis policeman."

  She listened for a sentence or two, then sounded preoccupied as she repeated, "Social Security number ... let’s see..."

  Felker handed her his wallet with the card showing and she read it off. Then she punched the speaker button so Felker could hear it too, and put down the receiver to hold the gun in both hands, aimed at his chest. The woman’s voice on the other end echoed through the living room. "Oh, that’s too bad. At the time when Mr. Felker left the police force, he had only been employed for seven years, nine months. His benefits weren’t vested. I’m afraid he has no coverage with us."

  Jane lowered the pistol and said into the speaker, "Oh, he has primary coverage. This would have been secondary. He’ll be fine." She punched the button and put down the gun. "I’ll help you."

  7

  Jake Reinert cleaned his brushes on his father’s old workbench in the cellar. In a way he felt unworthy using it. His father had been a real craftsman. His own father, Jake’s grandfather, had been a cavalryman in the royal hussars of the Austro-Hungarian empire and he hadn’t wanted his son to be a soldier. He had sent the boy to school, but when he was about to be beaten for some infraction or other, the boy had either punched or pushed the teacher, depending on how much of his wine he had swallowed when he later told the story, jumped out the school window, and run. Then the soldier had sent his son to be apprenticed to a cabinet-maker, but he had gotten kicked out of there, too. The cavalryman foresaw that like him, the boy was left with nothing but the military to keep bread in his mouth. So he did what tens of thousands of fathers all over Europe had been doing with boys like that since 1492, and got him on a ship to America.

  Now that Jake had grown up, he suspected there had probably been a bit of self-interest in the decision, since there were advantages to being able to ship a juvenile delinquent to the other side of the world. But Jake knew there was sincerity, too. It was just about at the point in history when men riding full-speed on horseback waving swords were pretty sure to run into artillery and machine guns, even in that part of the world. No man would want his son in on that.

  Jake’s father must have learned a lot in his apprenticeship. He had come over at sixteen and never had much trouble finding work. He had made fine furniture, done the interior woodwork of the fancy cabin cruisers they built down at the boatworks even carved some of the beautiful, fanciful animals they mounted on the merry-go-rounds at the Mitchell-Bauer carousel plant.

  Jake was at the stage of life where he had come down here enough times to find his brushes hardened into paddles, so he soaked them for an hour or two in fresh turpentine after the visual evidence said they were clean. He also could look out the cellar window from here and se
e the light in the side window of Jane Whitefield’s house. The lights would come on shortly, and then he would be able to see shadows on the ceiling and, sometimes, silhouettes in the window.

  The world was old now. Most of the unexplored territory left was in the space between people’s ears. Jane Whitefield’s mother had comported herself with dignity and modesty during her marriage to Henry Whitefield. But Jake’s wife, Margaret, had once regretfully implied that she had quite a past. Jake had asked a few questions, to see if he had glimpsed a side of Margaret that he hadn’t suspected—jealousy or some need to put any strange woman who showed up in her bailiwick under suspicion—but he hadn’t.

  Her hint had been based on certain knowledge, some woman-to-woman confidence, and it was what it had sounded like. Jane’s mother had been left without resources in New York City at the age of twenty. There was a myth that said that there was a time in our society when a twenty-year-old girl could not be left without resources, even in a big city. Somebody would pick her up and let her belong, just as a lost fingerling swims into a school of fish and disappears. Jake was always willing to admit the possibility that such a thing might once have been real, but even in those days it wasn’t true to the experience of anyone then living. He supposed that was what small towns were for. Jane’s mother hadn’t been in a small town. Instead, she found herself a succession of boyfriends who periodically vacationed in places like Elmira and Attica.

  Margaret had never been one to be critical of anyone for having had a lot of sex. That would have been completely alien to her nature. The way she always said it was "People have a right to try to be happy. It’s in the Declaration of Independence." But she implied that Jane’s mother had tried harder than most before she was finally able to bring it off. Margaret had a genuine sympathy for that, because sympathy was the thing that came easiest to her.

  On the whole, Jake was a nurture-over-nature man, but he could not rule out any possibility that science hadn’t ruled out first. When Jane was younger, he had sometimes watched her behavior for the sort of sweet tooth that her mother had. Whatever else had been true of Jane’s mother, she had never turned it into a business.