Vanishing Act

by Thomas Perry

  Martin had the money for Harry to give them, because he too had been paid in advance. When the client had come to Martin two years earlier and hired him to kill Jerry Cappadocia, that had put Martin in the same position the two men were in now: He needed his whole payment in advance. The day after a man like Jerry C. was killed would not have been a good time for the killer to go to his client to get a pile of money. If the smallest detail went wrong, he would have to be running. Even if everything went perfectly, Jerry’s father still had a big organization that remained intact, and all of it would be diverted to finding out who was meeting with whom and who had any money he hadn’t had before.

  So Harry got the money, gave it to the two men for his friend Martin, and went back to his floating poker game business. A week or so later, when Harry was inside the bathroom of the motel staring through the vent above the door, he recognized the two killers. If he recognized them, he would know that what they were doing was what he had paid them for, and come to the inescapable conclusion that Martin had intended them to kill him along with the others.

  Harry had considered his options—telling the police or Jerry Cappadocia’s father, or even going back to Marion to tell his friend Martin that he would never talk—and decided that any of them would eventually get him killed. But he still had one more option hidden in his memory, and he used it. He ran to Deganawida, New York, and knocked on Jane Whitefield’s door.

  She had hidden him for a time and then taken him across the continent to buy him a new identity from Lew Feng. Poor Lew Feng. Martin had tortured him for his list of names. Maybe Martin hadn’t been able to find the place in the shop where Feng kept it without doing that. She was reasonably sure that she could have. That he hadn’t even tried made him seem inhuman, completely devoid of emotion. But what seemed worse at the moment was that the torture had served a second purpose, and she suspected that that too had been taken into account. Even if Martin could have simply broken in, found the list on his own, deciphered it, and chosen the right Harry on it, he probably would not have done it that way. He was anticipating that it would have occurred to someone that the one who had taken the list was likely to be a person who had been to the shop before—a person who had known about the list because he was on it. Leaving Lew Feng’s body lying in the shop mutilated was a way of misleading everyone. The mind immediately fell into the assumption that the only person who would have needed to torture Feng for information was someone who had no other way to get it. The mind began conjuring up shadowy strangers to suspect—ones who had traced some fugitive to Feng’s door. Felker remained just another potential victim, like everyone else on the list.

  She couldn’t hold her body still anymore. She stood up and walked to the window again to stare down at the endless stream of cars moving in both directions—white headlights on one side of the freeway, red taillights on the other. There were still a few blank spaces in the picture she had constructed. Martin had been paid in advance to kill Jerry Cappadocia. He had gotten himself arrested while he was stalking Jerry and gone to prison. He had waited over two years to hire a pair of substitutes to do it for him. Was Martin, then, an honorable murderer? Once he had accepted the contract and taken the money, did he feel he had to deliver? Maybe he did. Certainly, a professional killer who took money in advance and never fulfilled the contract would have a hard time getting work in the future from any potential customer who had heard about it.

  She recognized that the important information was in the last words: who had heard about it. The person who hired Martin to kill Jerry Cappadocia was somebody who could tell other, potential customers. Then she made it more specific, and when she did, it felt even more likely. The client was somebody in the underworld, who not only could tell others but could signal his displeasure in a more vivid way than gossip. He was somebody who might get Martin killed. He had to be another gangster type, or Martin could have kept the money and forgotten about Jerry C. If the client hadn’t been somebody like that, why would he care about Jerry Cappadocia, and how would he have known that Martin was the one to hire to kill him? People like Martin didn’t advertise.

  But if all of that was true, why hadn’t this underworld rival surfaced by now, five years after Jerry had been killed? He should have done what Mr. Cappadocia’s men had been expecting, what even Harry had predicted. He should have tried to take over.

  She stepped back to the bed and bent over to look through the file again, page by page, until she found the list of people who had visited Martin in prison. The first visitor had come right after he had begun serving his sentence. It was Jerry Cappadocia. That must have been Jerry’s condolence visit. The second was Martin’s defense attorney, Alvin Berbin. There were three visits from him in the first few months, probably about an appeal of the conviction. Then, almost three years later, Harry Kemple came back to visit his old cellmate. She had not guessed wrong about that. He made four visits on successive weekends, just about a month before he showed up at her door. There were no more visitors in the next five years.

  She straightened and tossed the file to the foot of the bed. She had been hoping for too much. The client wouldn’t be foolish enough to visit his hired killer in prison. There was nothing in the file to give her any way of finding out who had hired Martin to kill Cappadocia.

  She concentrated on Martin again. Martin had served the five years that remained of his sentence, secure in the knowledge that most of his money was in the bank, Jerry was dead, his two stand-in killers were long gone, and nobody—not the police, not Mr. Cappadocia—had ever suspected him of being involved in Jerry’s murder. There was only one minor difficulty. His two shooters had carelessly left Harry Kemple alive.

  She wondered if Harry had even remembered that he had told Martin in prison that the best way to start searching for him would be to visit a woman named Jane Whitefield. Of course he had remembered, but he also had remembered that it would be five years before Martin could come after him, and he had the police and Mr. Cappadocia to worry about that night. He certainly must have thought about Martin now and then during the five years in Santa Barbara. But at the end of them, he must have been confident that his troubles were behind him. Martin would have a hard time finding him, and why should he try? Harry had remained silent for five years. Harry, being Harry, must have decided that five years would be enough to convince James Martin that he would never talk.

  Martin had not forgotten about Harry. He had collected the rest of his money and gone to her, and she took him to Lewis Feng, who pointed him to Harry in Santa Barbara, and that was the end of Harry. But what then? Martin wouldn’t have taken a plane out of Santa Barbara. That would have put him on a shortlist of people who had left the small town while Harry’s body was still warm. And if he left the Honda she had bought him in town, the police would begin to look for John Young.

  He would drive out, and the place where he would go was a place he would know but that nobody in Chicago would. After a year in jail, that might be anywhere. After eight in jail and a fresh murder, he would go home.

  She put the file into her flight bag and walked down the stairs to catch the shuttle to the airport. She didn’t mind waiting in the terminal for a flight to Syracuse. She could use the time to buy the next batch of newspapers and read.

  23

  Jane checked into a motel near the airport in Syracuse and read newspapers. She started each day by finding more of them. When she had read all the ones she could buy, she spent the afternoon in a branch of the public library that subscribed to even more.

  The car had about 530 miles on its odometer when he had gotten it from Lewis Feng. Jane guessed he had then driven it five hundred miles to Medford, six hundred to Santa Barbara, one hundred down to the big east-west routes that started in Los Angeles, and almost three thousand to Upstate New York. Make it five thousand miles, then. Jane searched the newspapers for the dealers’ ads. There was a nearly new Honda Accord in a dealer’s lot in Watertown, but it had a standard tra
nsmission. A lot in Ogdensburg had a Honda Accord and it was even gray, but seventeen thousand was too many miles. There was nothing in Massena.

  As she moved outward, the odds got worse. Syracuse, Rome, Utica, Troy, Albany all had lots of used-car dealers, and she wasn’t sure anymore whether she was seeing all of their ads. Her best hope was that it was the sort of car they could clean up in half an hour and then use as bait to draw people onto the lot. John Young would have taken their second offer, right after the ridiculous low-ball one they always tried. As soon as they could get the Oregon plates off it, they would have it in the front row, all shined up and looking seductive.

  It would have to be a dealer. He couldn’t abandon it, because leaving a new car would set off a search for John Young. He couldn’t sell it himself, because that meant staying in one place, having an address and, probably, a phone number in the papers for a few days. And by now there probably wasn’t anybody alive who would buy a barely driven new car from a stranger who didn’t advertise it and couldn’t wait a day for a decision, without checking to see if it was stolen. It had to be a dealer. He would be relying on the fact that in a few days it would be in the hands of a new owner with a set of New York plates on it.

  Then, after three days of staring at identical advertisements for identical cars in newspapers from all over the state and calling dealers on the telephone who wouldn’t tell her no until they had offered her everything they had, she found it. The ad was small but effective. "Almost new! Less than five K mi.! Dave’s Honda-Subaru in Saranac Lake." When she called, she talked to Dave himself.

  Jane rented a car in Syracuse, drove to Saranac Lake, and saw the car. It was sitting in the front row, right under the line of colored pennants, gleaming in the sunlight. She found a motel and checked in, spent a few minutes dressing in a modest schoolteacher’s spring dress, then strolled back to the lot. She walked into the showroom and let Dave find her.

  "Hi there!" said Dave. He was tall and blond, with eyes so blue that they seemed to be clouded somehow. There was another man with a tie in the showroom, sitting at a desk with a telephone on it, but from the look of the place, he was just there so Dave would have someone to talk to. "What can I show you today?"

  "That Honda out there," said Jane. "Is that the one in the paper?"

  "That’s it," said Dave gleefully. "You don’t often see a used one that new. Want to drive it?"

  Jane thought for a moment, then glanced at her watch. "I guess so." They hated that. The whole game was taking as much time as possible, talking to you, making friends, and getting you to accept what they thought about cars and money. If they were really good at it, at the end they could get you to feel ashamed of using up so much time and then quibbling over a few hundred dollars.

  She followed Dave out to the lot and stood by the door while he dropped the key chain into her hand. Then he said diffidently, "Mind if I come along? I can answer any questions you might have."

  "If you want to," said Jane. "But I don’t want to take up too much of your time."

  He slipped into the passenger seat and buckled his seat belt. "No problem," he said. "I got Bob in there to mind the store, and to tell you the truth, it’s a real treat to get out." He looked like a dog going with the family on a picnic, gazing around him happily and pushing his muzzle toward the half-open window. "You from around here?"

  "No," she said. "I just came up on vacation and I saw your ad."

  "That’s pretty much what happened to me. That was twelve years ago. Somehow I had the idea it would be fishing in the spring and summer, hunting in the fall, skiing in the winter. But I seem to spend just as much time on this lot as I did in Jersey."

  She drove south on Route 3 toward Tupper Lake. It was a good road, and in the spring it was cold and clear at this altitude. The green pine forests on the sides of the mountains looked sparse, turning thick and wet where they merged into the leafy trees halfway down, and below them the lake started so abruptly that it looked like the mountains went down into it.

  "See that?" asked Dave.

  "See what?"

  "The miles. Less than five thousand."

  "Are you sure the one who sold it to you didn’t turn it back?"

  Dave laughed. "You’re just like my wife. Suspicious. No. The cable’s untouched, and I checked the labels on the doors. It only cleared customs from Japan two months ago. The guy drove it here from Oregon. Those are all good miles."

  "Good miles?"

  "Yeah. He broke it in right. He didn’t beat it to death in city traffic, just drove the long, easy straightaways across the country."

  "It’s a nice car," she conceded. "What made him get rid of it?"

  "If you’d seen him, you wouldn’t have to ask. He was a big, tall fellow. I’ll bet he was six-foot-six. This is a fine piece of machinery, but for a man that size driving it four thousand miles—well, it was pretty hard on him. The Japanese don’t design a car for a man that size. It would be stupid: They don’t have any."

  "You’d think he would know how tall he was when he bought it."

  Dave was stumped for a moment. "You would, wouldn’t you?" He recovered quickly. "He fit in okay, but I guess a long trip like that makes little problems seem like big problems."

  Jane pulled the car onto the shoulder, then hooked into the far lane to drive back to Saranac Lake. Dave didn’t like the look of that. "This is a real steal. I don’t know if you read the papers, but the dollar has gone way down against the yen since this baby was built. You try to buy one of these right off the boat, it’s going to cost you an extra three thousand dollars."

  "Is that right?" She had read so many newspapers in the past three days that she could have quoted the figures. The small papers always printed the car ads at the end of the business section. She turned into the lot and drove the car into its space with its nose to the sidewalk.

  As they got out, Dave said eagerly, "Well, what do you think?"

  "I just don’t know," she answered, her eyes fixed wistfully on the car. "I like it, but ..."

  "But what?" he asked.

  "I just keep wondering why the last owner got rid of a new car."

  "I told you why."

  "What did he buy when he traded it in?"

  "Nothing. He said he made one mistake by being too hasty and that he wanted to look around some more first."

  Jane was beginning to feel a hope. It was too early to let it grow. Of course he wouldn’t buy another car from the same lot; it would be too easy to trace. But if he had no car at all, maybe he was still in the area. "I wonder ... I know this is kind of unusual, but I can’t afford to buy a car and go buy another one next month like he did. Do you think I could talk to him?"

  Dave’s face was beginning to show the strain. "I don’t know. Talking to him isn’t going to do you much good. The car is what it is, no matter what he says. Take the car to your own mechanic. Have him look it over."

  "I just drove in today. I don’t have a mechanic."

  "I can recommend a couple."

  She just looked at him sadly, and he saw the problem. The town was just too small, and anybody she picked could be a friend of his. "I’ll go look at the papers and see if we can get him on the phone."

  She followed Dave inside and watched him finger through the drawers in his single filing cabinet. At last he pulled out a manila envelope and shook it out over the desk in front of Bob. Whatever Bob’s function was, it didn’t include moving or even looking down. He never took his eyes off Jane.

  There were an owner’s manual, a couple of slips of white paper with seals and computer printing on them, a pink slip, and a yellow bill of sale. He snatched it up and stared at it for a moment. "There," he said. "Annabel Cabins in Lake Placid. Let’s give them a call." He was pursuing this with stoical determination now. She had made him decide he was going to prove there was nothing hidden by his sheer persistence in uncovering it. He dialed the number he read off the paper.

  "Hello," he said. "This is Dave Rabel
down at Dave’s Cars in Saranac Lake. How are you this afternoon?" He listened for a second, then said, "No, I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just wanted to get in touch with a fellow who’s staying there. His name is John Young. He still with you?" There was a long pause while wrinkles appeared on Dave’s forehead. "You sure? Well, thanks for your time." He hung up, shrugged, and looked at her.

  "He’s not there?"

  He shook his head. "I’m sorry. Well, we tried."

  She decided she could take the risk of not letting go. "He checked out, or he’s never been there?"

  Dave looked indecisive, but he sensed that he wasn’t going to be able to get past it. "I remember he said that was where he was going, but I guess they didn’t have a vacancy or something." She could tell he was wondering why John Young had been able to give him the phone number but hadn’t used it to call for reservations.

  "What if it’s stolen?"

  Dave smiled. "No, there are built-in safeguards. His name was on the pink slip, and I saw his license and it had the same name. Besides, when you register a sale, they run the I.D. number of the car on the computer."

  Jane backed away from the desk. "Well, I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble."

  "You mean you’re giving up?"

  "I just wouldn’t be able to feel comfortable unless I knew more about the car’s history."

  Dave was fighting his frustration now. "It doesn’t have any history. It’s brand-new. Anybody can see that."