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

by Perry, Thomas

  In fifteen minutes the girl’s dryers stopped and she folded her clothes, kicked the doorstop up, and closed the door slowly and quietly. It was almost three in the morning and she didn’t need a couple of hundred neighbors waking up angry.

  Jane waited a few minutes longer before she opened the door, pulled the adhesive tape out of the doorjamb, dug the dimes out of the hole, and pulled Mary inside. She shut the door, and they made their way up the back stairs to the second floor, away from the public areas to the long corridors lined with students’ rooms. Jane walked quietly through the halls of the dormitory, looking at the doors of all of the rooms. At each corner she stopped and listened for other footsteps, but she heard none. Finally she stopped at a door where there was a folded note taped at eye level. She pulled it off carefully and read it.

  Cindy – Your mother called like eight times!!! I told her you were in the library. Call her as soon as you get back from Columbus.

  Lauren

  Jane slipped the Catherine Snowdon credit card between the doorknob and the jamb until she found the plunger, then bowed it a little to push the plunger aside and open the door. Before she closed it behind Mary she put the note back. Cindy was going to need time to prepare a comforting story for her mother.

  Jane felt for the single bed by the wall, pulled the thick blanket off it and draped it over the rod behind the curtains so that no light would escape, then turned the switch on. She went to the closet and studied the clothes for a moment, then started taking things out. “She’s about your height, but she wears her tops big.” She tossed a sweater on the bed. “Put it on.” She took off her own blouse and slipped another sweater over her head. Then she glanced at Marys rubber boots. “Those aren’t going to help us either. Try some of hers.”

  Within a few minutes they were both dressed in Cindy’s clothes. There was one short fall coat and one University of Michigan jacket. It was reversible, so Jane pulled it inside out and put it on. There were places where she could still pass as a college girl, but a college was not one of them. She counted a thousand dollars out of her purse and set it on the desk. “Sorry, Cindy,” she wrote on Cindy’s pad. “I needed clothes.” She turned to Mary. “You look good, considering. Let’s go.”

  Jane led Mary out through the laundry room, then found the Student Union by walking toward the center of the campus. The Ride Board was something she remembered from her college days, and she found it in a big hallway off the entrance. There were index cards posted in long lines on a cork bulletin board. She ignored the “Ride Wanted” cards and looked closely at the “Going to…” cards. Most of them offered rides for Thursday night or Friday, so they were obsolete already. She selected one that said, “Going to Ohio State. Leaving for Columbus Saturday 5:00 a.m. Return after game. Share driving and gas. Doug,” and gave a phone number. She glanced at her watch. It was four a.m. now. If Doug wasn’t an idiot he was at least awake. She walked to the pay phone across the hall and dialed the number.

  At five o’clock the car pulled up in front of the Student Union. Doug was big and smiled easily. He was the sort of boy who would shortly flesh out and play a lot of golf. His two passengers were a surprise to him. While he was driving from his room to the campus he had planned to say he was glad that they had turned up at the last minute because he loved company. He also liked making a road trip without having to pay all of the expenses himself, but better than either, he liked women. He liked looking at them and hearing their voices and smelling the scents that hung in the air around them. When he saw the two women walking down the steps of the Student Union he thought that this was turning out to be a very fortunate day. But when they got into the car and the light came on he realized that they were old. They weren’t old like somebody’s mother, but they were still too old to be any more interested in Doug than his female professors were.

  Near the ramp for the 23 Expressway at Geddes Avenue, Doug started to signal for a turn into the all-night gas station, but the dark one said, “Can we stop for gas later? There’s nobody on the road now and we can make good time. Later on we’ll be dying to stop.”

  Doug could live with that. The gauge said they had half a tank, so it didn’t really matter. But for a second it seemed to him that she had some other reason for not wanting to stop until she was out of Ann Arbor. It was as though her husband was cruising around looking for her or something. They didn’t stop until Toledo, and then the dark one insisted on paying for the gas and driving the next hundred miles.

  It turned out that the one in the back was a graduate student in the business school. She had worked for ten years and then decided to go back. She was asleep most of the time. The dark one was a lot more talkative. She was a friend of the graduate student, and had talked her into going down for the game. Maybe she wasn’t really that talkative, because afterward he couldn’t remember learning anything else about her in the four-hour drive. Maybe she had just prompted Doug to talk and smiled a lot.

  When they were on the outskirts of Columbus, the dark one announced that they still had to go scrounge tickets to the game, because she had talked Alene into coming at the last minute on a whim. She had him drop them off on the Ohio State campus so they could check the bulletin boards for offers of unused tickets.

  Doug hated to relinquish the fantasy he had been developing for four hours, revising and refining it at each turn in the long road. He had envisioned himself ending up in a hotel in Columbus with the two older women, celebrating Michigan’s victory on a king-sized bed. But he had not been able to invent any plausible set of circumstances that might lead to the fulfillment of this fantasy, nor could he imagine how one went about proposing such a thing. He left them with a regret that hung about him until later in the day, when he met a girl named Michele who called herself Micki with an i. She had seen him on the Ohio State campus with the two older women and convinced herself that there was a melancholy sophistication about him. He did not think about the two older women again until Sunday night, when he was driving back to Michigan with Micki. It had occurred to him that they might not have been able to get tickets to the game, but he would not have guessed that instead they had bought airline tickets from Columbus to Boston under assumed names and disappeared during the stopover in Cleveland.

  21

  Mary lay on her bed in the motel room and listened to the airplanes passing overhead. She had already unconsciously perceived their rhythm. They would growl along for four minutes somewhere far beyond the eastern end of the building, then roar overhead and into nothingness. There would be a pause of forty-five seconds before she heard the next one growling and muttering at the starting line.

  Mary was tired of waiting for the question. She turned her head to look at Jane. “It was the medical records,” she said.

  Jane was sitting at the round table under the hideous hanging lamp sorting small items she had taken from her purse. There was a lot of cash, and cards that seemed to have been taped to the lining in rows. “What medical records?” She didn’t look up.

  “You were the one who made me think of it. I wanted to do it the way you would. I went to a doctor in Ann Arbor. I asked for the form people send to their old doctors to get their records forwarded. I signed it and changed the doctor’s address so they would send it to me.”

  “Why did you do that?” asked Jane. “Do you have some condition that needs to be watched?”

  Mary Perkins shook her head. “It just seemed like the right thing to do – to have them. Now, before something happened. I was going to change my name on them and bring them to the new doctor on the first visit. I couldn't think of a reason why a woman my age wouldn’t have records somewhere, and I knew I could never make some up. And they’re confidential; they’re supposed to be protected.”

  Jane sighed. “They are. The address where they’re sent isn’t.”

  “Oh. But how did Barraclough’s people get it?”

  “There are a lot of ways. You pose as Mary Perkins’s probation officer an
d ask. Or you get a person hired to work in the office so she can watch for the right piece of paper to come in the mail. They might have wanted a copy of your records anyway to see if you had a condition that meant you had to keep seeing one of fifteen specialists in the country, or needed a particular kind of surgery or something. They could even do the same thing you did: send a note from a real doctor requesting the records. The old doctor’s secretary would say they’d already been sent to such and such an address. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter very much. Did you get them?”

  “Get what?”

  “The medical records.”

  “Oh. Sure.” She looked uncomfortable. “They got burned up.”

  “Good.” Jane went back to her sorting. “It’s one more avenue Barraclough had that he doesn’t have anymore.”

  Mary’s voice began in a quiet tone that was low-pitched and tense, as though she were flexing her throat muscles to keep her vocal cords from tightening. “They started the fire while I was asleep in the house, you know. They didn’t do it so nobody would know they had been there. They made me come out to them because they were dressed like firemen who were there to save me. I couldn’t see their faces, just the masks and helmets and raincoats.”

  “I know,” said Jane.

  “I’m not trying to tell you what happened,” said Mary Perkins. “I’m trying to tell you what happened to me.” She said more softly, “To me.” She stared at Jane’s face for a reaction, and what she saw told her Jane was waiting. “I’m new at this,” she said again. “For you it’s like herding cattle around. It’s not just taking care of them; it’s making sure they don’t stampede off a cliff or eat poison or drink so much water that their stomachs rupture.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” said Jane. “They had you. It wasn’t something you imagined.”

  “They do that too. They talk softly to the cattle and say, ‘Come on, girl. It’s okay.’ But it’s not exactly true and it’s not exactly for the cow’s benefit.” Mary took a deep breath. “I’m not used to being the only one who doesn’t know things, and I’m not used to this way of looking at the world. I guess I should have had enough imagination to figure out what it was like. I once knew some people slightly who were supposed to be very tough, but I never saw any of them actually do anything. I keep looking back and wondering how I ever got from being eighteen and smart and pretty all the way to being twice that and having men I never saw before burning me out of a house.”

  Jane shrugged. “You told me how it happened.”

  “No,” said Mary Perkins. “No, I didn’t. I told you what happened to some savings and loan companies. Not what happened to me.”

  Jane stopped sorting and began to string together credit cards and licenses with strips of adhesive tape. She did not dare look at Mary for fear there would be something in her eyes that gave Mary permission to stop talking.

  “In the summer of 1981 I was twenty-two. I had just graduated from Florida State. I was good at interviews – I could tell that they liked me – but I couldn’t seem to get a job. I remember coming home and closing the door to my bedroom upstairs. I would take off my outfit and hang it up carefully so my makeup wouldn’t ruin it when I flopped down on the bed to cry. Then I would get newspapers from other places and write letters to answer the ads. Finally in October I got a job. Winton-Waugh Savings in Waco, Texas, wanted a management trainee. I went to work in the loan department at just about the time when things started heating up. I remember I was making two hundred and seventy-two dollars a week. Pretty soon I started noticing that a lot more money was coming into the bank, and a lot more going out as loans. That was the start.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to a party.” Her face had an ironic smile, as though she had thought about it so many times that she expected Jane to understand. “The bank had a giant bash for its big customers, and I got introduced to some of them. There were men there who had tens of millions of dollars. And I was with them, talking futures and options with them as if I was one of them. There was one in particular who was really nice. His name was Dan Campbell. Not Daniel. When he signed papers he wrote ‘Dan.’ He had everything: a big house in Houston, a cattle ranch in Oklahoma, and a plane for flying back and forth. I knew all about them because the loan papers were in a filing cabinet right behind the desk where I sat every day.”

  “There was this big candlelight dinner on tables set up in the bank lobby, and dancing. I’d never seen so much liquor, all the bottles lined up on this portable bar with the lights behind them so they looked pretty, like perfume bottles or something. When the formal party was over and most of the people went home, the night wasn’t over. There was a small private party just for maybe twenty people like Dan Campbell in the executive suites down the hall. We all started in Mr. Waugh’s office, but people wandered out into the garden outside the sliding door and into some of the other offices, carrying their drinks. Somehow Dan Campbell and I ended up in my office. After a few minutes he switched off the light and locked the door. A person would have had to be retarded not to have it occur to her that if we didn’t make any noise people would never know we were in there.”

  “You don’t have to tell me this.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Mary. Her face was set and insistent. “So then Dan Campbell is saying, ‘Come on, Lily. Just touch it. I promise it won’t bite.’ I was not an innocent young thing. I don’t want to give you that impression or imply that I was drunk or something. I wasn’t left breathless and swept off my feet by a charming older man. If I was dazzled by anything, it was by being near all that money. Also, I liked him and was impressed with him, so I did it.”

  “The next day I was back at my desk as usual, feeling a little bit amazed when my eyes would happen to fall on some particular piece of furniture, and then a little depressed and foolish, and in comes a delivery guy with twenty-four long-stemmed red roses in a beautiful crystal vase and puts them on my desk. I see them, and for a second I think maybe I wasn’t just this stupid girl who got talked into something. Maybe this was just what I had convinced myself it was for a few minutes last night when I forgot it was the bank that took me to dinner. Then I opened the card, and it was signed by Mr. Waugh, my boss. There was a check for a thousand dollars from the bank that said ‘Employee Incentive Bonus.’”

  “Did you quit?”

  “No,” said Mary. “I didn’t. I started to, I thought about it, but I didn’t do it. You hear a lot about people doing that, but you don’t see it much. People say they walked out, threw their jobs away or something, but at least they have their principles. But it’s almost never like that. It almost never happens right away, just like you never think of the clever thing to say to somebody when it would have mattered. And I couldn’t think of a way to tell Mr. Waugh I resented getting a check for it without coming out and announcing exactly what it was that he and I both knew I had done. I decided I wasn’t about to face that conversation, and there was nothing else I could do to change things. All I could do was cash the check and go on with my life.”

  “The bank was growing then, and pretty soon I’m not working in the loan department, I’m a loan officer. Mr. Waugh tells me we’ve got to go on a business trip to Houston. I remember the flowers and get all upset, but there just isn’t a way to get out of it. By now I understand why the bank needs to move money in and out, and my job is to keep the money going out, and that means meeting with customers. And there were two other women going: Mr. Waugh’s assistant and another loan officer.

  The pay was getting better and better, and I was learning a lot, so I didn’t try to get out of it.”

  Jane could tell that Mary was not lying now. She was trying to push away the excuses. This was a confession.

  “We meet with a group of twelve investors who have formed a limited partnership for a real estate development. You know, right now I can’t even remember what they were calling it, but it was the usual thing, something like Sunnydale Vistas
or Meadowgrove Heights. Anyway, the first session is in an office they’ve set up near River Oaks. Not in River Oaks, of course, but close enough so people would smell money on their business cards. Things were really tantalizing in that first session. We’ve got the chance to lend them sixty million, maybe more later. They’re willing to keep it deposited until they need it, with the interest in escrow offsetting our costs – which are nil – and release times tied to what gets built. Then we were supposed to go out and see the land. It was near La Porte, right by Galveston Bay. The plans called for canals, with boat slips for each house, malls, and all that.”

  “We don’t drive, though. We go out to get the best view on this big boat that’s leased to the company’s sales department for impressing the customers. We see it through binoculars and talk business until dark, but still no papers get signed. We have a catered dinner, and still no agreement comes out of Mr. Waugh’s briefcase. It just degenerates into a cocktail party on the upper deck. Everybody’s talking about money and their favorite things that it buys and how great they’re all doing. They’re getting tipsy and optimistic. Pretty soon I start to hear music coming from somewhere down below, and laughing and loud talk. One by one, people start to disappear. It goes on awhile until it’s just me and Waugh and maybe three of these investors. It’s getting cold up on deck. I say to Waugh, ‘Maybe I’ll go down below.’ He says, ‘If you like.’ So I make my way down those steps in the dark in high heels carrying a martini.”

  “The others didn’t go down?”

  “One did. I had to help him, because he was getting drunk. So I go down and open the door to this big room they called the saloon, and the music is deafening. What I see at that moment makes me drop my drink. It’s Waugh’s assistant. Her name was Maria. She’s dancing, doing a strip for these four investors, and I do not mean a tease. When I came in she was already down to her panties, and she’s got her thumbs in the waistband, as though they were about to move south. I start to back out, but the drunk behind me pushes me in, and Maria sees me. She kind of wriggles over to me without losing a beat, puts her arm around me with a big smile, yells into my ear, ‘Come on. Get with the party,’ and starts pulling me into the saloon with her. I pushed her arm off me and said, ‘Stop it. I’m not some hooker.’”