Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  The construction struck Walker as odd, mildly sarcastic. He said, “Good evening.”

  “We got a call that there was a disturbance in this alley,” said the cop. “Know anything about that?”

  Stillman said, “We did happen to run into two men a few minutes ago. They seemed to be interested in robbing us, but we managed to frighten them off, I guess.”

  The policeman opened his door and got out, sliding his billy club into a rung on his belt. Walker noticed that his hand lingered there, between the club and the gun. He stood close to them. “Someone said there was a fight. Shouting and so on.”

  “That’s kind of an exaggeration,” said Stillman. “It was just two guys about six feet tall, about thirty years old. They were getting ready to jump us, but when we got close, I think we were bigger than they expected, so they ran.”

  “May I ask what you’re doing in the alley?”

  He was staring at Walker, but Stillman spoke. “We’re visitors in town, and we parked over there on the street”—he turned to point in roughly the right direction—“and we figured this was a good shortcut.”

  The cop kept his eyes on Walker. “And two men just came along at the same time?”

  Walker knew he had to be the one to answer. “They seemed to be waiting here for whoever showed up.”

  The policeman nodded. “Would you mind showing me some identification?”

  Stillman pulled out his wallet and handed the cop his driver’s license, so Walker did the same. The cop handed the two licenses to his partner in the car, and the partner punched some numbers into the computer terminal mounted beside him. The cop returned his attention to Walker and Stillman. “What brings you to Pasadena?”

  Stillman was supremely calm and friendly. “We work for McClaren’s, the insurance company. There’s a girl—a lady my friend here knew from his training school days, and he asked me if we could stop by and see her. No luck. We missed her at the office, and now she’s not at home, either.”

  “I see.” His partner muttered something and the cop leaned into the window to confer with him. He came back with the licenses. “Here you go.” He looked up and down the alley, then said, “We’ll make a report of this, but I’m not sure what good it’s going to do you. They’re long gone by now.”

  Stillman nodded. “I understand. They didn’t get any money from us, so I guess there’s not much harm done.”

  The policeman sat in the car seat again, but before he pulled his leg in, he said, “Even in San Francisco, walking down dark alleys probably isn’t the best idea.”

  “I’ve had better,” Stillman said.

  “Take care,” said the cop. He shut the door and the car drifted down the alley. Now and then the bright beam of the spotlight shot out to the side and played about a row of garbage cans, a narrow space between buildings. Then the police car turned and disappeared.

  Stillman stepped into the nearest passage toward the street. “Well, now that was a rotten piece of timing,” he said. “I had hoped to get a couple of names out of their wallets, not give mine to a cop.” He stopped and let Walker catch up. “What we need is dinner.”

  “It is?”

  “Otherwise we’ll have to drink on an empty stomach.”

  5

  The Coast of Borneo was a relic of a period that Walker had missed, and he calculated that even Stillman had to be too young to have seen anything but strange little outposts cut off and isolated by flanking movements of change. The big bare-beamed dining room had outrigger canoes hanging from the ceiling, and drinks served in ceramic mugs that were effigies of somebody’s gods. As he followed Stillman deeper into the place, he gazed at a man in a chef’s hat behind glass prodding a huge slab of sizzling meat over flames that threatened to flare up and engulf them both, then waited while an Oriental waiter in a tuxedo tucked two gigantic menus under his arm and conducted them across an unused dance floor and up onto the tiered gallery of tables.

  Stillman sat down and squinted up at the waiter for a few seconds as though the two of them were in a poker game and the waiter had just raised. The waiter held a tiny pad in the palm of his hand with a pen poised over it. Stillman said, “Can your bartender make a real mai tai?”

  “Old-fashioned kind?” asked the waiter, now assessing Stillman with veiled interest.

  “That’s right,” said Stillman. “The old-fashioned kind.”

  “Two mai tai old-fashioned kind,” the waiter announced, and put a strike mark on his pad that could not have been a Chinese character, then spun on his heel and went off. It seemed to Walker that the pad must be for appraising the customers, and Stillman had scored high.

  “What’s changed about mai tais?”

  Stillman shrugged. “Beats me. It’s pretty clear they’ve gone to hell like everything else.”

  The waiter returned with two large glasses filled with liquid the color of liver. Stillman sipped his, then said, “Perfect.”

  Walker tasted his, and guessed that “old-fashioned kind” must mean that the quantity of rum was up to the standard in force when driving drunk was still legal in Los Angeles. He tasted it again, and decided those days would be missed.

  A few minutes later the waiter reappeared, his tiny pad in his hand and his eyebrow raised expectantly. Stillman nodded to Walker.

  Walker replied, “Should we have what Mr. Fo ordered in 1949?”

  Stillman shook his head. “Fo wasn’t in this time zone then. We’ll have to settle for prime rib, medium rare. And bring us more of these.” When the waiter was gone, he said, “That’s what everybody had before words like ‘cholesterol’ crept into the language. They’re all going to be surprised after a lifetime of deprivation when they die of nothing.”

  Walker said, “They should spend time with you, and they wouldn’t have that to worry about.”

  “So buy yourself some insurance. I need to hear about Ellen.”

  Walker had intended to sip his drink, but he noticed that the ice at the bottom already clinked against his front teeth. The drink was like a black hole that sucked everything around it into the glass and disappeared with it. He said warily, “I don’t know a lot. You’ve seen pictures of her, right?”

  “One in her file, and one copy of her company ID card. An escapee from cheerleader detention camp.”

  “She looks that way,” Walker agreed. “Mildly athletic-looking, but not tiresome about it. I don’t even know if she did anything to stay that way. She was alert and serious about the training classes. I remember she had a few interests that didn’t have anything to do with work. I told you about the music.”

  “By the way, that was a reasonable try, kid.” Stillman raised his glass in a mock toast. “They like evidence that you’re listening when they move their lips. I wonder why it didn’t fly. Is there a boyfriend?”

  “The word I got was no.” He stared into space for a moment. “Cardarelli. That’s who told me. Now that I know Cardarelli better, I guess that didn’t mean it was true. But Ellen didn’t say anything about a boyfriend when she went out with me, and that would have been the time.”

  “No, before that would have been the time. What did she talk about?”

  Walker was thinking about her again, searching for a sign that he had missed. No, there was nothing, even at the end, that showed she was thinking about another man. Stillman was staring at him, waiting.

  “The one time you took her out,” prompted Stillman. “What did she tell you?”

  He needed an answer, and he was stuck with the lie that he had only taken her out once. He settled on the first time, at the Italian restaurant. He would answer questions about that. “As I remember, I guess she talked mostly about the future.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” said Stillman. “We seem to be in it, so I’d like to know what the hell it is.”

  Walker tried to bring it back. “She had a kind of overall strategy. She was convinced that a woman in a big company like McClaren’s had to make things happen, or they
wouldn’t.”

  “Are we talking about endearing ourselves to upper management? Dirty old men my age?”

  “If we were, I didn’t get it. What she said was that she had to be patient. Getting herself into the San Francisco office would put her into competition she couldn’t beat.”

  “Like who?”

  Walker shrugged. “Men, I guess. I think she mentioned Kennedy as an example. People who went to better colleges, and were just as bright and worked just as hard as she did.”

  “Who else?”

  “Well . . . me,” he said uncomfortably. “But it was just because if she hadn’t said that, she probably thought I would have been uncomfortable. She wanted to be in one of the branch offices, but a particular kind. She said she didn’t want to insure ship’s cargoes or satellite launches or something, because the customers are the sort of men who wouldn’t take her seriously. She said cute and perky weren’t qualities they looked for.”

  “It sounds like something that might be true. But what about the tone? When she said it, what was her voice like? Bitter? Angry?”

  “Not really. She figured that things were improving for women, but the time wasn’t right yet. She said if there were layoffs at McClaren’s, she’d be safer in an office with four people than in one with four hundred. She would concentrate on family stuff: life insurance gets bought by men, but the survivors are widows, and the minute there’s a payoff, they’re women with more money than their husbands had the day they died. There’s no tax on it, either. But the tax kicks in hard for the next generation, so she would sell them life insurance to pay that for the kids, and probably long-term-care insurance because they were alone now, and if the money was big enough, she’d convince them to let the company manage it.” He shrugged. “She figured that who she was and the way she looked would give her an edge.”

  “What did you think?”

  “The numbers add up the way she thought they did—actuarial tables on male-female longevity, and so on. I don’t know if the rest of it does. There are too many intangibles. It seemed smart at the time—she is cute and perky, and maybe that’s the audience for it. Almost any plan seems smart to you if you don’t have a plan.”

  “So she ended up in Pasadena. Did she plan that too?”

  “She said that was one of her choices. There was Pasadena, some place in Orange County, Scottsdale in Arizona, Palm Beach in Florida, a couple of others. The idea was to be in a place where the demographics work out—income level, age of population, and so on.” He let his drink swirl around, listening to the ice on the glass.

  Stillman looked at him speculatively. “She must have sold a lot of insurance to make assistant manager in a year and a half. That’s a rank above the rest of you, right?”

  Walker nodded. “She said that would happen—that promotions come more quickly on the front lines. And she must have made something on commissions. If she made a dollar, it’s more than an analyst gets.”

  “But what was the point of it—the end?”

  Walker smiled. “I got the impression that in twenty years, when the rest of us have become permanent drudges in our cubicles, and some have killed each other off in main-office politics, she expects to come back. If present trends play out, in those twenty years the status of women can only be better. At that time she could be well up the ranks, maybe vice president and regional manager of a big chunk of the country. Then, if there’s a certain combination of circumstances, she could end up running the company. She didn’t say what the circumstances were.”

  “It would help if she changed her name to McClaren.”

  Walker shrugged. “You’ll have to suggest it to her.”

  Stillman studied Walker as he said, “Actually, I think I know what she has in mind. Dynasties have a life span. She probably thinks that at some point, either there won’t be enough McClarens, or there won’t be the right McClaren. There could even be too many, so the stock is spread too thin among people who don’t know each other. A competitor could start buying up those shares. It doesn’t matter what it is. Each year brings the end closer.”

  “Really?” said Walker. “No more McClarens at McClaren’s? Then what?”

  “Hard times,” said Stillman. His eyes drifted around the room as he spoke. “The company loses money. This happens to insurance companies on a fairly regular schedule. Then you’ve got a bunch of people in the San Francisco office who are associated with the discredited practices or decisions that failed. And you have a woman—she’s only forty-four at this point—who has twenty-two years with the company and runs operations in some big, successful region. Because she’s been out of sight, nobody knows anything negative about her. She gets a phone call from the board of directors.” He suddenly returned his eyes to Walker. “How would you feel about that?”

  “Me?” Walker looked surprised. “You mean would I be jealous or something? I don’t think so. And I could think of worse people to work for.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “It’s just an expression,” said Walker. “I meant she was good, not that anybody else was bad.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Stillman. “Now I understand why she wasn’t interested in you. You’re a nagging boil that appeared on her ass after she bought a nonrefundable plane ticket.”

  “It’s nice to make an impression on people.”

  Stillman held up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure you’re a young woman’s fantasy. A delightful, spiritual companion on life’s highway who’s hung like a horse. But that’s all beside the point, isn’t it?”

  “It wouldn’t be to me.”

  “She’s whoring after strange gods.”

  “She’s what?”

  “It’s just a line from a book nobody reads anymore. What it means this time is that it wasn’t you she turned down. It’s men. And women: she can’t be a lesbian because that would be even harder to fit into the vision. If you’ve got a plan that’s sure to fail unless absolutely everything happens in a certain way, then you have to make it all happen that way. A boyfriend in the San Francisco office would be a deviation.”

  “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel better about this or worse.”

  Stillman raised his eyebrows, took a long draft of his mai tai, and stared contemplatively at the hull of the outrigger canoe hanging above the table. “I’d say that our humanity requires us to feel . . . bad. Which we will tomorrow while these drinks claw their way out of our systems.” He looked at Walker again. “You’re in the clear, ego-wise. You could have been the aforementioned paragon of virtues, and she would have skipped the concert.”

  “Then what are we sad about, precisely?”

  “Her. No matter how misguided the goal, we can’t help rooting for the determined little human animal who wants it. That’s why we watch people doing things like climbing Mount Everest—which, on the well-known one-to-ten Stanford-Binet stupidity scale weighs in at about a thirty—and actually, with shame and horror, admit to ourselves that we hope the little boogers make it.”

  “We don’t know that she won’t.”

  “The broken window tells us somebody broke into her apartment. The two guys show us that somebody was watching her apartment—somebody from out of town, or they would have known enough to impersonate Pasadena cops instead of L.A. cops. They may have been interested in getting their hands on her, or keeping our hands off her. But I’d say the idea that she’s irrelevant to the little problem at McClaren’s is about shot.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “We find her.” Stillman’s eyes met the waiter’s across the room, and he pointed at his empty mai tai glass. The waiter scurried off.

  Walker stared at his glass while the waiter snatched it up and replaced it with a full one. It was beginning to take on a strange brightness, but then he realized that it was all right. It just looked bright because the breadth of his vision was now so narrow that the periphery was gone, and the glass was about all that was left. He felt a sudden
regret so deep that he gave in to the need to draw in a quick breath. Maybe he was being stupid. What was he defending—her reputation? Her life could be in danger. He should tell Stillman the part he had not said. But as he contemplated it, he could not think of a single disparity between the truth and the lie that made any difference to anyone but John Walker.

  6

  Walker sensed that he was in a large, empty space. His ears told him that the sounds were coming from a distance, but it was some debased offshoot of human reason that told him he could not be alone. Spaces this size were public. Bits of memory rose into his consciousness. Had he passed out in the restaurant? He sat up quickly. It was a hotel room. He was still dressed, lying on top of a bed. He remembered walking in here and lying down, but he also remembered telling himself he was just going to test the bed for a moment to see if it was comfortable. He had planned to get up.

  Stillman was sitting in a wing chair across the room, and the rustling noises had been the newspaper he was reading. He looked over the top of his paper at Walker, then turned a page.

  “What time is it?” asked Walker. His voice didn’t sound as though it belonged to him. He cleared his throat.

  “About nine. Don’t hurt yourself trying to roll the stone away from the tomb, though. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Walker crawled off the bed and walked into the bathroom. He found a paper bag on the sink. Inside were a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, mouthwash, comb, and a receipt that said Hilton Gift Shop. There were bars of soap in packages in the soap trays, so he decided he was adequately equipped for the moment.

  Walker brushed his teeth and stood under the hot shower for a few minutes before he was ready to face considerations that had to do with the future. He began with the immediate future, because that didn’t challenge his mind too much. He had come to Los Angeles with only the clothes on his back, so he didn’t have to decide what to wear. As his mind began to forage beyond the moment, it collided with Stillman, and he felt the urge to stay right where he was, letting the water pound his scalp and run warm down his body to his toes until Stillman went away. He had heard him say, “We’ve got plenty of time.” It was innocuous and undemanding, but it implied that there was something coming. He reminded himself that last night Stillman had said they were going to search for Ellen.