Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  Walker took a final look up and down the hallway, then stepped inside after him and closed the door quietly.

  Stillman was standing in the middle of the room, turning and turning slowly. He stopped, facing Walker. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Walker. “When I’m with you, I never touch anything. What’s wrong?”

  “The bed’s messed up, the bathroom light is on, there are towels on the floor.”

  “I guess she’s messy.”

  “No suitcase.” He used a handkerchief to open the closet door. “No clothes. She hasn’t checked out or they wouldn’t have rung the room, but she’s gone.”

  “Okay,” said Walker. He stepped toward the door.

  “Hold it.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Look carefully at everything in this room.”

  Walker stared at the bed, the bathroom, the coffee table, the armoire that held a television set above and a bar below. “What am I looking for?”

  Stillman said, “Any sign that Madeline Bourgosian is Ellen Snyder. Anything at all.” He opened the upper section of the armoire to reveal the television set, then tested the bar cabinet to see if it had been opened. He moved toward the bathroom.

  The bar had been the place that Walker had considered most promising, so he looked for something else. The bed. He stared closely at each of the pillows, trying to spot a blond hair, but found nothing. Maybe women didn’t lose the occasional hair while they slept, the way men did. Probably if there were any, Stillman would find them in the bathroom sink in front of the mirror, where she had brushed her hair.

  He pulled back the covers of the bed. If he were to leave something accidentally in a hotel room, that was where it would have been. He sometimes sat on the bed while he was dressing, and usually laid things out there when he was packing. The awful, complicated patterns on hotel bedspreads often made small objects hard to see in dim light. He saw nothing, so he ran his hand over it to be sure.

  He moved to the telephone on the nightstand and looked from the side at the little notepad the hotel had left, but he could see no imprint from a sheet that had been torn off. He peered into the wastebasket beneath the little desk. He began to walk the room in a spiral pattern, scanning the floor.

  “What are you doing?”

  He saw that Stillman was staring at him. “I saw you doing this in Ellen’s apartment.”

  “There’s not enough room in here. You’ll screw yourself into the floor. Just look.” He returned to the bathroom.

  Walker went to his knees and looked under the bed, opened all the drawers he could find, then returned to the telephone. He read all of the possibilities on the card for numbers to dial, but “redial” was not one of them. There must be some way of knowing what calls had been made; certainly the hotel knew.

  He was turning toward Stillman to ask when his eye caught a glint from the darkness behind the nightstand. He bent closer. “Max. I found something.”

  “Don’t touch it.” Stillman appeared at his side, then knelt down and looked. He raised his head and stared along the top of the nightstand. “Hmmm.” He took a pen from his pocket, carefully reached behind the nightstand, snagged the object, and pulled it out to the open floor. It was a gold woman’s watch. “Is it hers?”

  “I don’t know,” said Walker. “She had one sort of like that—an oval center with a round face in it, about that size, I think.”

  Stillman prodded the watch to turn it over. “Take a look on the back of the case.”

  Walker could see engraving. “E.S.S. 10/2/95.” He felt his heart begin to thump, but it was as though it was pumping energy out of him. “That doesn’t mean it’s hers, or that she left it here.”

  Stillman hooked the band with his pen and dropped the watch behind the nightstand again. “It sure ain’t Madeline Bourgosian’s.” Then he went to the coffee table, where there were two magazines the hotel had left. One said, Chicago—That Wonderful Town, and the other said, Guide to Amenities. He began to leaf through them quickly.

  “Why did you put it back? It’s our evidence.”

  Stillman didn’t look up. “If the cops find it, it’s evidence. If we break in and find it, I’d say it’s demoted to something less . . . a clue, maybe.”

  Stillman moved to the chest of drawers Walker had already opened. “What we want now is another one.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “Something that tells us where she went from here.”

  “What’s the likelihood of that?”

  Stillman scowled as he stared around the room, then seemed to notice the second telephone on the desk. “Oh, I’d say the odds are nearing ten to one for.” He opened a desk drawer and took out the telephone directory. He turned to the yellow pages and began leafing through them.

  Walker stared over his shoulder in disbelief. “You’re not even through the A’s. Are you going to look at every page?”

  “Nope.” He stopped. “There it is. Airlines. Lo and behold. She’s circled American Airlines, and written her flight reservation right on the page. No doubt she copied it over afterward. Flight 302, from New York to Zurich. Thursday the twelfth. That’s tonight. Easy, isn’t it?”

  He used his pen to write it down on a business card, then closed the book and put it back. He stood up again and walked to the connecting door to the next room that people opened to turn the rooms into a suite. Then he walked across the floor to the door connecting with the room on the opposite side. “This one,” he said.

  “What?” said Walker.

  “Don’t you remember? We’ve been operating on the theory that she’s traveling with two men. Maybe she got involved in this because she fell in love. That’s what love is—cajoling a woman into actively participating in something she wouldn’t have thought of doing by herself, right?”

  “Ever the romantic,” Walker muttered.

  “Well?” Stillman said. “I’ve heard of women falling in love with two men at once, but I never heard of one who actually ran off with both of them. Even if she did, they would take two rooms. They’re not traveling on a budget, you know. Even if their favorite means of expressing this affection were the time-honored Mongolian cluster fuck—”

  “Is this necessary?” Walker interrupted.

  “Sorry. I let it slip my mind that she was once the object of your infatuation. Even if she were insatiable and they had to go at it in shifts, person number three would need a bed to sleep on and regain his strength while the party of the first part and the party of the second part partied. He was in this room over here.”

  Walker’s frustration and annoyance were growing. “How do you know it wasn’t the room on this side?”

  “That one hasn’t been opened since the last time the woodwork was painted. There’s a little bit of white enamel between the door and the jamb. It’s not exactly painted shut, but the bellman might need to use one of these.” He produced his pocketknife and opened a blade. He turned a little wing knob to open the door, then put his ear to the door behind it and listened. “Nobody’s home.”

  “I thought we knew that already.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Stillman. “See, whoever was in that room will have checked out when he left, to keep the world from seeing the connection. I’m hoping the hotel hasn’t rented the room again.” He used the knife to remove the screw holding the latch on the other side of the door, then poked the latch forward through the screwhole, and opened the door.

  Walker could see the bed had been professionally made, and everything was in place. He said, “I guess we’re out of luck. They already cleaned it.” He turned to go, but Stillman held him.

  “Look around anyway,” he said. “Each chance you get only comes once.” He went to work on the room, searching everywhere, then replacing things exactly. When he reached for the two magazines, Walker was fascinated. How could they be anything but identical to the ones in the first room?

  “Now he
re’s something the maid missed,” Stillman said. “Page ninety-two is ripped out. Bring me hers.”

  Walker went back to the first room and returned with Chicago—That Wonderful Town. Stillman took it and found the page. “I thought so. The missing page is a map of the Chicago area for visitors—northwest quadrant.”

  He held up the page behind the missing one. It was a map with a larger scale that showed only downtown Chicago. He set the page on top of Ellen’s map and held a spot with his finger. “There’s a line,” he said. “It would take you right out here onto this road west of Waukegan.”

  He put the magazine back on top of the other one, and handed Ellen’s to Walker. “Let’s get out of here. You leave through this room, and I’ll leave through hers so we can latch both sides of these connecting doors. I’ll meet you in the car.”

  Walker waited until Stillman had screwed the latch back in and closed the door. Walker latched his side, went to the door, and listened. He heard no sound, so he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. The elevator opened and a middle-aged couple stepped out. He turned away from them and walked ahead in the same direction they were going. He made a turn, then another, and another, until he reached a dead end where the hallway stopped. He took the emergency stairway down to the next floor and found his way to the elevator.

  He arrived at the basement level and stepped out to find Stillman sitting in the car. When he was inside, Stillman started the engine and drove toward the exit. “Look for a phone,” he said.

  As soon as they were out on the street, Walker saw a pay telephone beside a restaurant. “There.” Stillman pulled to the curb, got out, and made a call. After a few minutes, he came back and drove off.

  “I just called American Airlines,” he said. “I checked on her flight from New York to Zurich to see if it fit what she wrote down.”

  “Does it?”

  “Of course it does,” said Stillman. “While I had them on the line, I thought I’d ask whether there was a direct flight to Zurich from here tonight. There is. One a day, in fact. And there are still seats available. Odd, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” said Walker.

  “The only reason I can think of to fly to Zurich is if you want to get to Zurich,” Stillman said. “Am I getting through to you?”

  “Yeah. We lost them,” said Walker. “Can you call somebody in Zurich to meet their plane or something?”

  “I would if I were a cop,” said Stillman. “If I were a cop, I’d do a lot of things like that, because I could afford to stumble all over myself until the truth came out. In the morning, the hotel maids will open the room to clean, see she’s gone, and the manager will call the cops. They’ll find what we found. They’ll see the watch and say, ‘Aha! This isn’t Mrs. Bourgosian.’ They’ll figure out E.S.S. is Ellen Sue Snyder. They’ll find that somebody used the telephone book as a scratch pad, and they’ll call Zurich. In a day or so, they’ll admit they lost her. She slipped out of their cunning clutches. They’ll assure the nearest reporter that they’re turning Europe upside down to extradite her and bring her to justice.”

  “You mean they’ll be lying?”

  Stillman shrugged. “They may try to do it. If people start thinking they can escape a crime just by going to Europe, it’ll be impossible to get a seat on a trans-Atlantic flight. They’ll all be booked until doomsday by fleeing felons.”

  “I take it what you’re saying is that Ellen didn’t go to Zurich.”

  “Somebody using her name made a reservation from a hotel room in Chicago to take a flight out of New York. But I didn’t see any note about a reservation on a flight to New York. Did you?”

  “Maybe she didn’t write it down. Besides, there must be a flight from O’Hare to Kennedy about twice an hour. She could show up and get one.”

  “True. Is that the way you would do it?”

  “Probably not,” admitted Walker. “Maybe she drove to New York.”

  “She would have to drive about a hundred and twenty to get there in time.” He sighed. “Here’s the way it looks to me. You have this young woman who pulls a very odd little crime that requires lots of elaborate moves: washing her cut of the money, using fake names and IDs and so on. Then she’s in a hotel in Chicago. She’s alert enough to know that we haven’t lost her. She leaves without checking out of the hotel so anybody following her will think she’s still there. This is not hard for a woman to do, because the clerks and cashiers always assume she’s with some man who just paid, or will be along in a minute. Fine so far?”

  “Fine,” said Walker.

  “She leaves in such a hurry that she forgets her watch, which is exactly what a person in a hurry would miss first. When you’re trying to catch a plane, you look at your watch every minute or two. As it happens, this watch is not ordinary. It has her initials and a date engraved on it. The date is October second, which is Ellen Snyder’s birthday.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “I haven’t had time to check, but it will be.”

  “It is,” Walker admitted. “But it could have been the anniversary of something: maybe the day she got her braces taken off, or the day her grandmother swam the Hellespont.”

  Stillman nodded. “Maybe. But look at it backwards. Suppose you wanted not only to be sure somebody knew you were in a particular place at a particular time, but to be sure that they didn’t make a mistake and think you were somebody else. How would you do it?”

  “I’d leave a signed note.”

  “How about renting a hotel room, which narrows the time down to twenty-four hours? Then leave something there that’s yours. A watch with initials and a birthday isn’t a bad choice. The only thing missing is her social security number. That watch is better than a birth certificate. A gold watch is too valuable to look like you left it on purpose, and this one looks like it has sentimental value. And, unlike a birth certificate, it doesn’t even have to be genuine to fool an expert. You could go into a jewelry store and buy a watch and have anything you want engraved on it.”

  Walker said, “So you think it’s another trick. Ellen is trying to throw us all off and make us think she’s in Europe.”

  “I think somebody is,” said Stillman. “The watch was left on purpose, and nobody who’s running uses a phone book as a scratch pad to write down her next flight.” He paused. “She wouldn’t have had to do any of that herself.”

  He drove along the lake, then turned west, staring ahead at the dark road, then at the map he held on the steering wheel. Then he turned north onto a smaller road and set the map aside. From time to time he would slow markedly and look out the window at landmarks in the dim landscape: a construction site, a stand of trees that had at first looked like a woods but turned out to be only the narrow green windbreak beside a large condominium complex. He seemed to be evaluating places and rejecting them.

  “What are you doing?” asked Walker.

  “This is the road that was marked on the map they took with them.”

  “I thought you said everything we found was faked.”

  “I don’t think leaving an impression on the page beneath the map was something they did to mislead us,” said Stillman. “If it was, they would have left it in her room. Nobody was supposed to know the people in the next room had anything to do with Ellen Snyder. And it wouldn’t be contradictory. You don’t leave false trails leading in two different directions. You pick one and leave signs to it. I think they picked Zurich. So I’m trying to drive this route and look at the things I see from a different point of view.” He sighed. “Now I’ve got to ask you to be quiet for a while and let me think.”

  Walker sat in silence while Stillman continued northward. Now and then he would slow the car down, look at a particular configuration of buildings or fields, then seem to reject it and speed up again.

  After another fifteen minutes, he pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road beside a large field that had once been a farm but had no
buildings left except a single bare-board barn with a caved-in roof. Through the empty front doorway, Walker could see stripes where the moonlight streamed in through gaps in the back wall.

  Stillman flipped on his bright headlights and Walker could see the green reflective surface of a road sign at the edge of a narrow perpendicular line of pavement. It said LOCKSLEY RD. Stillman turned the lights off and cut the engine. Walker realized with growing uneasiness that this was the first place they had come to that was completely quiet and deserted, the first place where he could see no electric lights in any direction.

  When Walker turned his head to look at Stillman, he could see the sober expression and the sad, watchful eyes. “I’m not asking you to do it,” Stillman said. “If you want to wait here, you can.”

  Walker shook his head, not so much to deny the thought as to dispel the cold, prickly sensation that had settled on the back of his neck. “It doesn’t have to be. It could be nothing. Somebody else could have marked that map and ripped it out of the magazine two weeks ago.”

  Stillman turned and stared out the window into the dark field. “It’ll go faster with the two of us.”

  14

  Stillman opened his suitcase and took out a small Maglite, then handed an identical one to Walker. “Save your batteries until we get out there.” They closed the trunk of the car and stepped to the edge of the field. Stillman said, “We’ve got maybe six hours before farmers and commuters start coming up that road in force. You start down on that end, and I’ll start up here. Walk the field in rows, as if you were plowing it.”

  Walker asked, “What will it look like?”

  “I think if they were here at all, it was probably sometime today. The weeds will have been trampled down, and they won’t have had time to stand back up.”