Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  A minute later, she heard the motorcycle start and then the whine of the engine as it sped down the block toward the station. There was only one more thing that had to happen. She considered not waiting for it, but she decided that a little patience was worth it. The pay telephone on the wall rang once and she snatched it up. "Judge Susskind."

  It was the watch commander’s voice. "This is Lieutenant Garner at the Police Department, Judge. I was—"

  "It’s not the same man," said Jane.

  "So you don’t want Winton picked up and held for the fingerprint check?"

  "Definitely not," she said. "It must have been some kind of practical joke. Whether it was on me or Mr. Winton, I couldn’t guess, but someone wanted me to delay sentencing." She added, "Thanks to you, we won’t have to do that. Goodbye."

  She used the pay telephone one more time to call for a taxi, then walked down the outer staircase into the dark garden, past the beds of flowers that had closed their petals for the night and up the empty sidewalk toward the art museum to wait for it.

  A few hours later, Jane sat in her room in the big hotel beside the Los Angeles airport and stared at the photographs in the file. There was John Felker staring into her eyes, only this time there was a black placard under his chin that had numbers on it. Then there was the one of his profile, the one she had lain next to in bed and studied in the light of the moon, thinking it looked like the head on a Roman coin, or the way Roman coins should have looked. Here it was, labeled with the same number on the same placard.

  For a whole night in Santa Barbara she had considered all the ways it could be another mistake. The two men standing in the grave would have said anything to get out of it. Maybe the story made sense because they had anticipated that they would need to have a story to tell. As soon as she had formulated this idea, she had known it couldn’t be true, because the story they had told wouldn’t have done them any good at all with anyone in the world except Jane Whitefield.

  The file had ended that. He was not John Felker. He was James Michael Martin, age thirty-eight, 7757213. He killed people for a living. The file was thick. There were all sorts of documents, from his arrest and trial record through his eight years in Marion. There was a note stating that he had a mechanical aptitude, but the prison counselor felt that vocational training was not an avenue worth exploring with this prisoner. He had gotten two fillings from the prison dentist, marked with a pencil on a diagram of numbered teeth. He had taken a class in bookkeeping and one in computer programming. He had been to the prison infirmary once—no, twice—for upper respiratory congestion, and received non-narcotic cold medicines. His general health was, each time, assessed as "excellent."

  She set these sheets aside on the bed and pushed back farther in the file to the older entries. There was a summary of his record, provided at his entrance so that the prison officials would know whom they were dealing with. Five arrests, beginning at age eighteen, which could mean there had been more while he was a minor. Aggravated assault in Chicago; charges dropped twice. Manslaughter in Chicago; charges dropped. Suspicion of murder in St. Louis; released for lack of evidence.

  Her eye caught something that made her stop because she wondered if she had imagined it. She went back and looked at it: arresting officer, John Felker. That was how he had known what to call himself. Martin had probably thought a lot about the man who had arrested him that time. He had known when the real Felker had retired from the police force, even learned his real Social Security number. This must have been the arrest that had made Martin seem important enough to watch, because the next arrest was the final one, for an illegal concealed weapon, something a cop wouldn’t know about unless he searched him. As Ron the gravedigger had said, it was something he probably would have gotten six months for unless the judge knew a lot about him and knew he had to swing hard because this was the last chance before somebody else died.

  The Social Security number worried her. Martin probably hadn’t obtained it just to fool her. He might have gotten it because, of all the codes and serial numbers that a person collected in his life, it was the best one to have if you wanted to find him. It never changed, and it got attached to other things: credit cards, bank accounts, licenses. She wondered whether she should try to call the real John Felker to warn him. She looked at the telephone on the nightstand beside the bed, but she didn’t reach for it. She decided to wait. Martin might have learned what he could about Felker in order to harm him, but he wouldn’t be able to devote himself to that right now.

  She moved to the back of the file. Born April 23. It gave her a special kind of twinge that she knew she wasn’t supposed to be feeling. They had been together on the Grand River reservation on his birthday. Somehow that made it more horrible, increasing the distance he had placed between them. She was ashamed of feeling that way, still. It was one thing to be surprised if somebody hit you in the dark; it was another to keep feeling surprised, over and over, as the blows kept coming.

  Then she noticed his place of birth. Why had she assumed it would be St. Louis? She recognized that the trouble came from her clinging unconsciously to a wish that at least something he had said to her be true. She wanted to detect some point where he had wavered, maybe forgotten himself and actually talked to her without calculation. She wanted to believe that they had been, if only for one minute, nothing but a man and a woman lying in the dark, telling each other things. Everything he knew about St. Louis he had probably learned while earning that suspicion-of-murder arrest. The place of birth was, somehow, even worse than the birthday. He was from Lake Placid, New York.

  She stood up and walked all the way to the door and then back to the wall, over and over as she explored the stinging sensation. Not only was everything he had said a lie, but he must have been listening to what she said and secretly thinking she was stupid, making her tell him where they were now and where they were going, and listening always without wanting to hear what she was saying but, instead, to be sure that she was still fooled. He had asked questions, made her talk about what she felt and about her family and her people, not because he was even morbidly curious, but because everyone knew that the best way to lie to someone was to make her do the talking.

  She pushed aside the memories of Felker and forced herself to think about Martin. He had killed Harry over a week ago. He had just gotten out of prison after eight years, so any friends he might have had would not have been the sort he could trust. If he had gone to any of them, Cappadocia’s men would have seen it because they were following him. He could not have prepared an escape to the Caribbean or somewhere while he was sitting in a cell. It took papers even he couldn’t have collected in there without having somebody find out. What had he done? He had gotten out of jail and collected the money. Was that the whole payment in advance or just earnest money? It didn’t matter, because he was too cunning to expect that he could kill Harry and then go back to Chicago for the rest. Nobody could be certain if Harry ever knew who had killed Jerry C., but if John had gotten a pile of money from them, then he knew. He would be smart enough to see that once he killed Harry, he would be taking Harry’s place. Not Chicago, then. The partial payment was all he could expect to make on the deal.

  She corrected herself. Even that was a wrong assumption. He had let her see money, and she was assuming that he had shown her all of it. All she could be sure of was that he would not go anywhere that she could figure out, in order to get more.

  She walked to the window and stared out at the lights along the San Diego Freeway far below her. He wasn’t infallible. He had gotten caught a few times. She went back to the bed and studied the arrest summary again. Stopped for questioning by a surveillance team. Okay, you watch, then you arrest. So what? Maybe this meant something to the cops who were supposed to read it that it didn’t mean to her. But farther down the page was the reason the surveillance had been mentioned. He had been arrested in the company of Jerry Cappadocia. He hadn’t been under surveillance at all. Jerry Cappa
docia had been. John ... James Michael Martin had been just a bodyguard or something. That was in the file to show what kind of connections he had. They didn’t want the judge to think he was just some ordinary jerk. He was a special jerk, with organized-crime buddies.

  Jane stared across the room at the window and listened to a big plane rumbling down the runway. No, the story didn’t make sense. Cappadocia’s friends had been, even now, looking for Harry to make him talk, and to do that, they had to keep him alive as long as that kind of conversation took. But John Felker-slash-James Martin had been looking for him to kill him. And the guys in the grave, who worked for the Cappadocia family, didn’t talk about James Martin as a member of the team. He was just a guy you hired to kill people.

  Then the thin surface she had been walking on, the one that assumed anything anybody said was true unless it was disproven, seemed to give way. She was suddenly on the other side of it in her mind, looking at it in reverse.

  The police had assumed Martin was some kind of employee of Jerry Cappadocia. Certainly, he had known him. But there was more than one reason to be near Jerry Cappadocia with a gun.

  It was like reversing a puzzle piece; suddenly, it fit. If Jerry Cappadocia had been in danger, he might hire a killer like Martin to protect him. If he did, was that all he would do? No. He would carry a gun too, or he would have some of his own people do it for him. The surveillance was on Jerry Cappadocia, so he was the one the police wanted, but they didn’t find a way to arrest him or any of his men, which meant that none of them was armed. Jerry Cappadocia hadn’t been in danger that night. Or he hadn’t thought he was. But maybe the one thing that had kept him alive was the police surveillance. Even though he must have seen Martin searched and the gun pulled out of his belt or pantleg or somewhere, Jerry still would not have suspected. To him, it must have been like watching the police discover that his dentist owned drill.

  For the first time after all these years, she understood Harry. He had always claimed he had never seen anything at the poker game the night Jerry Cappadocia was murdered. But he had run anyway. He seemed to think nobody would ever believe he hadn’t seen anything, and maybe nobody would have. But that wasn’t the reason he had run. He had run because he had seen something and couldn’t tell anybody. And the only thing that made sense, that fit his sucker personality, was if what he saw convinced him that the one who had ordered the killing was his friend, the man who had kept him alive in prison.

  When she thought about it that way, she even knew what Harry had seen. He had recognized the men that Martin had hired to kill Cappadocia. He had recognized them when nobody else had. They were strangers, outsiders. But Harry had seen them before. He had probably met them where Martin had met them—in prison. Martin was still inside, where nobody would suspect him. Nobody suspected him even now, after he had killed Harry.

  When her eyes focused again she was looking at the bureau, where her purse lay open in front of the mirror. The money. Even that had been misinterpreted. He got out of prison and wandered around collecting money from banks, so everyone suspected some clients had deposited money in his name. Maybe that was where it had come from to begin with, but he had had it for eight years, long before he met Harry. In fact, there was probably less of it now, because he had paid his subcontractors to kill Cappadocia for him. Then, without warning, the rest of it came to her: Martin had put up the money, but he couldn’t have given it to them himself, because he was in jail.

  Martin would have cooked up some convincing reason why good old Harry should go to some safe-deposit box or bank account or dig up a hole to get the money and give it to the two men. It would be compelling, and Harry would believe it, just as she would have. Then Harry saw the men one last time, kneeling over Cappadocia’s body to search the bloody clothes for poker money.

  Now Jane knew the reason why Martin could kill Harry and not be afraid of the people who had paid him to do it: There were no such people. All anybody had paid him for was the death of Jerry Cappadocia. He had done it by farming out the contract. And the ones he had hired could never talk, because they had actually pulled the triggers and nothing they could say would ever keep them alive. He had nothing to fear from anyone except Harry.

  So he had fooled the person who could lead him to Harry, made her take him on the same trip that Harry had taken. Maybe he had even let those four men see him in St. Louis, brought them along behind him as evidence to convince her that he was a victim. He had known they wouldn’t try to kill him until he had led them to Harry. She didn’t let herself turn away from any of the anguish of it now. She had insisted that his new name be John because she had known it would make him feel less strange and disoriented, and that would keep him from making mistakes. But he had been watching everything she did, and that had been the last bit of information he had needed from her. It told him that no matter what last name Harry had on Lew Feng’s list, he would still be called Harry. Even if all he could get from Lew Feng under torture was the list, he could still find Harry Kemple. He had cut Harry’s throat quietly, without a struggle, and let him bleed to death on that dirty shag carpet in the apartment in Santa Barbara.

  Jane started to pace again. Another big plane took off on the nearest runway and she could feel a faint vibration under her feet, but she didn’t let it distract her. As she concentrated on the facts she had accumulated, she knew that they were beginning to assume their proper order at last. She tried to reconstruct the story in a logical sequence this time, to be sure she had the truth. The truth mattered. It had started with Harry. No, it had started nearly ten years ago, when she had met Alfred Strongbear on the reservation in Wyoming. That was the real beginning, because it happened first and it was what made everything else possible, even probable. Once she had saved someone like Alfred Strongbear, it was inevitable that she would meet someone like Harry. Alfred might not have had a heart attack on a cruise ship, but something someday would make him give a man like Harry her name and address.

  Harry had remembered it the way he remembered the names of underrated racehorses that might one day make him some money. He had gotten caught at something a couple of years later. One of the two gravediggers had said it was fraud, but that didn’t really tell her anything, because most of the things Harry did could have been called fraud. In any case, he hadn’t run to her to avoid the arrest, so it must have come quickly and without warning. Then she realized that this might not be the reason why Harry hadn’t tried to hide. Harry was an optimist. Right up until the guards put his watch and wallet into the envelope and marched him off to get fitted for a uniform, he had been perfectly capable of believing he would get off somehow.

  He was put into a maximum-security prison, not because he was dangerous, but because his accretion of minor arrests must have made him look worse than he was. His cellmate was a man named James Michael Martin. Harry was very lucky to draw a man like Martin as a cellmate in a violent place like that. The soft little gambler might as well have had VICTIM stenciled on the back of his shirt above the number, but Martin was a killer. Martin saved Harry’s life. He probably saved it daily, just by being there and letting other prisoners judge that he would rather have Harry to talk to than see his body hauled off in a bag. So Harry, who had no other way to thank Martin, had told him the story of the old man on the cruise ship and the name and address of Jane Whitefield, the woman who made people disappear. Coming from one career criminal to another, it probably had made a nice gift. She caught a glimpse of herself as she passed the mirror on the bureau, and the expression of intense anger startled her. She walked back to the bed and lay on her back to stare up at the ceiling.

  After two years, Harry had gotten out of prison about as reformed as most prisoners. He had started his floating high-stakes poker game, sure that in another few years he would be a one-man portable Las Vegas. Harry had been so elated that he had gone to visit his old friend in Marion to tell him all about it. When Harry had run into trouble, with Jerry Cappadocia showing si
gns of moving in on the game, he had told Martin that, too.

  She sensed that she was missing something important. Her muscles tensed and she sat up. What she was forgetting was Martin’s relationship with Jerry Cappadocia. Martin had been with Jerry C. the night of his arrest. They were acquaintances. He would have known that Cappadocia would be interested in Harry’s card game, so he made sure that he heard about it. She went over it again. Could even Martin have been capable of that much premeditation? Was he that good? As she questioned it, she felt a chill. Yes, he was. She had seen his work. He nurtured relationships with people and remained detached. He watched and waited and listened to them for as long as necessary, until he heard something that he could use.

  Martin made sure that Jerry C. heard about the game, and then got himself into it. Now Martin had to find the proper instruments for killing him. He selected two prisoners he and Harry knew in Marion. Maybe they weren’t killers yet, but in Marion it wasn’t hard to find two men with faces that hadn’t been seen in Chicago and who were willing to learn to pull a trigger. They were about to get out. Maybe they already were out and he had recruited them earlier and told them to wait until he could arrange the right opportunity. It was impossible for her to know which it was, and she was concentrating on coaxing out tidbits she could be sure about. She was sure Martin would need to pay the two killers in advance.

  Martin still had five years to go on his sentence. He couldn’t ask his two men to kill an important gangster and then wait five years until payday. He could easily have time added to his sentence, or even die before they saw a dime. They had recently gotten out of prison themselves, so they had no money. They would need some to disappear as soon as they had killed Jerry Cappadocia, and that could only mean that they would have to be paid in advance. Martin was in prison, so he needed a bag man on the outside.

  It had to be someone he could trust to go and get some of the money wherever Martin had hidden it and give it to the two men. It also had to be someone who was not going to be around after Jerry Cappadocia was killed. The only possible choice was Harry. Martin probably told Harry that he was giving the two former prisoners money to invest in some criminal scheme— loan-sharking, bookmaking—some crime, anyway, or even Harry would have sensed an odd smell wafting past his nostrils. It didn’t matter what story Martin told him. It had been good enough. Harry gave the money to the two men he and Martin had met in prison.