Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead

by Perry, Thomas

  She looked under the stalls and found she was alone. She was glad, because she wouldn’t have to pretend that what she was doing was easy. She leaned close to the mirror and dabbed on the foundation painfully. The resuit looked tolerable, but it stung for a few seconds. She stopped until the pain subsided a little, and had just begun to work on her eyes when she heard the door open and a pair of high heels cross the floor behind her. She had a pretty vivid black eye from the big guy with the yellow tie who had piled in at the end. It was hard to cover it and make both eyes look the same with a hand that hurt.

  “Can I help you with that?”

  Jane didn’t turn around, just moved her head a little to verify what she guessed about the woman behind her in the mirror. She wasn’t surprised that the woman was attractive. Makeup was a personal issue – not quite a secret, but almost – and you had to be pretty spectacular to have the nerve to tell somebody you could do her makeup better than she could. This one was tall – almost as tall as Jane – and almost as thin, but her face had that blushing china-figurine skin that women like her somehow kept into their forties. They were always blond, or became blond, like this one. Every last one of them had switched to tennis after their cheerleading coaches had put them out to pasture, but they must have played it at night, because their skin looked as though it had never seen sunlight.

  Jane said. “No, thanks. I can handle the painting. It’s the repairs that are hard.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” There was tension in the voice.

  “No,” said Jane. “If I should, then you must be good at this. Maybe I should let you do my makeup after all.”

  The woman whispered, “I was in the county jail when you were.”

  Jane turned to look at the woman more closely, this time with a sense that she ought to be watching her hands, not her face. “Well, congratulations on getting out.”

  Jane waited for her to leave, but the woman just smiled nervously and waited too. “Thanks.”

  Jane decided that she could do the finishing touches in another ladies’ room or even on the plane. “Well, I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “No, you don’t. It doesn’t leave for an hour. Four-nineteen to New York. I’m on it too. My name is Mary Perkins.”

  “Are you following me?”

  “I was hoping to do better than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s not much to talk about when you’re in jail. There was a girl who had been in court when you were arrested. There was a rumor you had hidden somebody. That sounded interesting, so I asked around to find somebody who could introduce us, but sure enough, all of a sudden they were letting you go under another name. How you managed that I don’t want to know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I want you to do it for me.”

  “Why?”

  “When I got arrested there were some men following me. That was thirty days ago. I just saw two of them here.”

  “Why do they want you?”

  The woman gave her a look that was at once pleading and frustrated. “Please, I don’t have time to tell you my life story and you don’t have time to listen to it right now. I have to get out of Los Angeles now – today – only they’re already here, and it can’t be a coincidence. They’re looking for me.”

  “But who are you?”

  “The short answer is that I’m a woman who needs to disappear and has the money to pay whatever it is you usually get for your services.”

  Jane felt exhausted and defeated. Her head, face, hands, and wrists were throbbing and weak. She looked at the woman who called herself Mary Perkins, and the sight of her face made Jane tired. She had said almost nothing, but Jane was already picking up signs in her eyes and mouth that she had lied about something. She was genuinely afraid, so she probably wasn’t just some sort of bait placed in the airport by the people Jane had fought outside the courtroom. But if men were following her at all, they were undoubtedly policemen. Jane thought, No. Not now. I’m not up to this. Aloud, she said, “Sorry.”

  “Please,” said the woman. “How much do you want?”

  “Nothing. You have the wrong person. Mistaken identity.”

  Mary Perkins looked into Jane’s eyes, and Jane could see that she was remembering that Jane was injured. “Oh,” the woman said softly. “I understand.” She turned and walked toward the door.

  As she opened the door, Jane said, “Good luck.” Mary Perkins didn’t seem to hear her.

  Jane looked at her face in the mirror. The bruises were covered, but the thick makeup felt like a mask. When she put the glasses on, they reminded her that the side of her nose had been scraped by the buttons on the big guy’s sleeve when he missed with the first swing.

  She walked out to the concourse and strolled along it with the crowds until she was near Gate 72. She saw the woman sitting there pretending to read a magazine. If she was being hunted, it was a stupid thing to do. Jane walked closer to the television set where they posted flight information. Mary Perkins’s eyes focused on Jane, and then flicked to her left. Jane appreciated not being stared at, but then the eyes came back to her, widened emphatically, and flicked again to the left. Jane stopped for a moment, opened her purse, turned her head a little as though she were looking for something and studied the two men to Mary Perkins’s left. If they were hunters they were doing a fairly good job of keeping Mary Perkins penned in and panicky. The short one was sitting quietly reading a newspaper about fifty feet from Mary Perkins, and the big one was pretending to look out the big window at the activity on the dark runway. She could see he was watching the reflection instead, but that wasn’t unusual. Her eyes moved down to the briefcase at his feet. It was familiar, the kind they sold in the gift shop where she had bought the makeup.

  The smaller man had no carry-on luggage. He sat quietly with his newspaper, not looking directly at Mary Perkins. He had to be the cut-off man, the one she wasn’t supposed to notice at all until the other man came for her and she bolted. They couldn’t be cops, or they would already have her. She had already bought her ticket, and a plane ticket was proof of intent to flee.

  Jane felt spent and hopeless. She admitted to herself that if she got home safely she would find herself tomorrow going to a newsstand and picking up a Los Angeles Times and the New York papers to look for a story about a woman’s body being found in a field. These two were going to follow Mary Perkins until, inevitably, she found herself alone.

  Jane walked back down the concourse, raising her eyes to look at the television monitors where the departing flights were posted, never raising her head and never slowing down. By the time she had passed the third monitor she had made her selection. There was a Southwestern Airlines flight leaving for Las Vegas five minutes after the flight to New York. She went down the escalator, walked to the ticket counter and paid cash for two tickets to Las Vegas for Monica Weissman and Betty Weissman. Then she returned to the gate where Mary Perkins was waiting. She sat down a few seats from her, counted to five hundred, then stood up again.

  She walked close to Mary Perkins on the way to the ladies’ room. As she did, she waggled her hand behind her back, away from the two watchers.

  She waited inside the ladies’ room in front of the mirror until Mary Perkins came in. “Did you check any luggage onto the plane for New York?”

  “I don’t have any,” said Mary Perkins. “As soon as I got out I came here.”

  “Good,” said Jane. “When we get out of here, stay close but don’t look at me. You never saw me before. One of those guys will be standing between you and the exits. The other one will have moved to a place where he can see his buddy signal him.” She handed Mary Perkins the ticket for Las Vegas.

  She looked down at the ticket. “Las Vegas? How does this change anything?”

  “Just listen. When it’s time to board, one of them will go to a telephone to tell somebody at the other end that you’re on the plane. It’s a five-hour flight with a
stop in Chicago, and that gives them time to do everything but dig your grave before we get there. The other will sit tight until the last minute.”

  “But what are we going to do? What’s the plan?”

  Jane looked at her wearily. “The plan is to go to Las Vegas and make them think you’ve gone to New York. Now give me about the time it takes to sing the national anthem before you come out. Then go sit where you sat before.”

  Jane swung the door open. Instead of looking toward the waiting area, she glanced behind her for the one watching the exit. The man with the paper was loitering a few yards away at the water fountain. She turned and saw that the other one had taken a seat where he could watch his friend. There was a certain comfort in seeing that they were predictable.

  Jane sat a few yards behind the man with the briefcase and studied him. He couldn’t be armed with anything worse than a pocketknife. Three inches or less, if she remembered the regulation correctly. They weren’t going to do anything in an airport anyway. People you didn’t know wouldn’t commit suicide to kill you. These were hired help for somebody.

  The woman at the boarding desk was joined by a second woman, who said something to her. Then the one who had given Jane her boarding pass picked up a microphone and cooed into it, “Flight 419 for New York is now ready for boarding.” People all over the waiting area stood up. “Will those passengers with small children, or who need help boarding, please come to the gate now….”

  That invitation seemed to apply to no one, so as the woman went on – “Passengers in rows one through ten may board now” – the taller man walked to the row of telephones beside the men’s room.

  Mary Perkins stirred, but Jane gave her head a little shake and picked up a newspaper someone had left on a seat near her. The woman went on calling out rows of seats, then said, “Passengers in the remaining seats may board now.” Still Jane sat and stared at the newspaper. There were four minutes left. When there were three minutes, she closed the newspaper and began to walk toward the gate.

  In her peripheral vision she saw Mary Perkins stand up and follow, then saw the taller man hurriedly punch some numbers into the telephone. Jane stopped to glance up at the clock on the wall, and saw the smaller man walking along behind Mary Perkins. The man at the telephone had hung up, and he walked straight to the gate, handed the woman his ticket, and entered the tunnel. Jane walked a few feet past the last set of seats in the waiting area slowly, letting Mary Perkins catch up with her. At the last second, she turned to her.

  “Why, Mary,” she said. “It is you.”

  Mary Perkins stopped and stared at her in genuine shock. “Well… yes.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  The man who had been following Mary Perkins stopped too, standing almost behind them. Jane seemed to notice him for the first time. “Oh, don’t mind us. Go ahead.” She pulled Mary Perkins aside. “It’s me, Margaret Cerillo. I thought I recognized you before, but I wasn’t sure…”

  The man hesitated. He obviously had orders to follow Mary Perkins onto the airplane, but he also had been instructed to be sure he wasn’t caught doing it. He could think of no reason to stand and wait for these two women while they talked, so he stepped forward, handed his ticket to the woman at the door, and stepped past her into the boarding tunnel.

  Jane moved Mary Perkins away from the gate casually. “Slowly, now, and keep talking,” Jane whispered. “You seem to be worth a lot of expense.”

  “I guess they think I am,” said Mary Perkins.

  “If you have something they want, you’ll never have a better time to come up with it. We can go right into the plane and make a deal. The lights are on and everybody’s been through metal detectors. There’s no chance of other people we can’t see.”

  “If I had anything to buy them off with, what would I need you for?”

  Jane stopped and looked at her. “I’ll still help you shake them afterward in case there are hard feelings.”

  “Thanks, but I can’t get rid of them that way.”

  “What did you do?”

  Mary Perkins turned to look at Jane, leaning away from her as though she had just noticed her there and found it displeasing. “Why do you assume I did something?”

  “I know you did. If you didn’t, what would you need me for?”

  Jane began to walk again. Any woman whose claim to trust was that she had picked up some gossip in the L.A. county jail didn’t inspire much confidence, and this one struck her as a person who had done some lying professionally. But Jane could see no indication of what she was lying about. She was being followed by two men who had not taken the sorts of steps that anybody would take if they wanted to stop her from jumping bail or catch her doing something illegal. They had seen her waiting for a flight to a distant state, and they had gotten aboard. The local cops couldn’t do that, the F.B.I, wouldn’t be prepared to do it on impulse, and if none of them had stopped her from leaving the county jail, then they didn’t know of any reason to keep her there.

  Jane had to admit to herself that the only possibility that accounted for the way these men were behaving was that they wanted to keep her in sight until there weren’t any witnesses. “A little faster now,” she said. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  They started across the waiting area and Jane caught a peculiar movement in the edge of her vision. A man sitting at the far end of the waiting area stood up, and two men who had been conferring quietly at a table in the coffee shop did the same. It wasn’t that any of them would have seemed ominous alone. It was the fact that their movements coincided with Jane’s and Mary’s starting to walk fast. “Did you hear them announce a flight just now?”

  Mary winced. “Please don’t tell me you hear voices.”

  “I don’t. There were two men on that flight. Do you have some reason to believe there wouldn’t be others?”

  “Well… no.”

  Jane’s jaw tightened. “Let me give you some advice. Whatever it is you’ve been doing that makes people mad at you, cut it out. You’re not very good at getting out of town afterward.”

  Mary Perkins let Jane hurry her along the concourse in silence until they reached Gate 36. They slipped into the tunnel with the last of the passengers, just as the man at the gate was preparing to close the door. Jane heard running footsteps behind her, so she stopped at the curve and listened.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the airline man’s voice. “You’ll need a ticket. We aren’t permitted to accept cash.”

  “Can’t I buy one?”

  “Yes, sir, but you’ll have to go to the ticket counter. I have no way to issue a ticket.”

  “But that’s way the hell on the other end of the airport. Can you hold the plane?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but passengers have to catch connecting flights, and we have a schedule. There are five flights a day from LAX to McCarran. You could – ”

  Jane walked the rest of the way up the tunnel and through the open hatch, and she and the woman took their seats. Mary Perkins said, “What do you call that?”

  “Airport tag,” said Jane. “I haven’t played it in years.” She sat back, fastened her seat belt, and closed her eyes. “I hope I never do again.”

  4

  “What are you thinking?” asked Mary Perkins.

  “I'm not thinking. I’m resting,” said Jane.

  “Does resting mean you’ve already thought, and you have a plan? Because if it does, I’d sure like to know what it is.”

  “No, it means I want you to be quiet.”

  Jane closed her eyes again. The plane was flying over the Southwest now, toward the places where the desert people lived: Mohave, Yavapai, Zuni, Hopi, Apache, Navajo. Some of them believed that events didn’t come into being one after another but existed all at once. They were simply revealed like the cards a dealer turned over in a blackjack game: they came off the deck one at a time, but they were all there together at the beginning of the game.

  What Jane needed
to do now was to find a way to reveal the cards in the wrong order: go away, then arrive. She reviewed all of the rituals that were followed when an airplane landed. The fact that they were known and predictable and unchanging meant that they already existed, even though the plane was still in the air. The flight was a short one, and she felt the plane begin to descend almost as soon as it had reached apogee. It was just a hop over the mountains, really, and then a long low glide onto the plateau beyond.

  Jane reached into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her and examined the monthly magazine the airline published. She leafed past the advertisements for hotels and resorts and the articles on money, cars, children, and pets. At the back she found the section she was looking for. There were little maps of all of the airports where the airline landed, so people could find their connecting gates. She studied the one for McCarran, then tore the back cover off, reached into the seat pocket in front of Mary, and tore that back cover off too.

  “What are you doing?” asked Mary.

  Jane pulled her pen out of her purse and began printing in bold capital letters. “Here’s what you have to do. When the plane lands, everybody is going to get off except you. You take as much time as you can. You’re sick, or your contact lens fell out. I don’t care what it is.”

  “How long?”

  “Try to stretch it out long enough to get at least one flight attendant to leave the plane first. It may not work, but I’ve seen it happen, and when it does, people watching for a passenger get confused.”

  “Okay,” said Mary. “Then what?”

  “Then you come off the plane. Walk out fast, don’t look to either side. Head for the car-rental desk. Rent a car. Make it a big one, not a compact. Something fat and luxurious and overpowered. They’ll probably have lots of them in Las Vegas. Drive it around to the edge of the building where you can see the Southwest baggage area. When I come out the door, zoom up fast and get me.”

  “What if something goes wrong?”