Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  “What would we do?”

  “Same thing they did. We’d get in our car and drive off. But this isn’t just a question of fraudulent insurance claims, it’s murder with special circumstances. Death penalty. If that were you, would you leave evidence here?”

  “I don’t suppose I would,” said Walker. “But if they saw us here, wouldn’t they think that we must have come to search Scully’s house and his cousin’s too?”

  “Sure,” said Stillman.

  “And we were here first, so wouldn’t they think it’s too late?”

  “Just the opposite. If they had what they came for, they wouldn’t be hanging around the coffee shop. If we had what we came for, we wouldn’t be loitering around on Main Street either. We’d be gone. If they saw us, then what they saw was proof that it’s not too late, but that they’ve got to make a move very soon. Tonight, after dark.”

  Walker was skeptical. “Tonight? Not tomorrow night?”

  “If they saw us, they know how close we are to getting there first. After dark tonight is the first time we could pull a break-in. They’ll try to beat us to it.”

  “With all those police around?”

  “They don’t know about the police.”

  “How the hell can you know that?”

  Stillman spoke quietly and patiently. “Think about what happened. We were walking up Main Street when we saw them getting out of their car. Then what?”

  “We went straight up Constitution Avenue to the police station.”

  “Right. It took about five or six minutes to walk up there, and another twenty-five for the chief to tell his men to move in. When they did, they didn’t see our two guys. They had their descriptions, the make, year, and license number of the car. Besides that, there can’t be more than twenty-five people in this town today that the cops haven’t seen twice a week since they were born. But the cops didn’t see our two guys. I’d say that means our guys were gone before the police got there, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess so,” Walker admitted. “What do you suppose they’re doing now?”

  Stillman walked on, staring into the distance. “They’re changing clothes, getting a different car, and waiting for dark.”

  Walker dreaded the answer to the next question. “And what are we going to do?”

  “Pretty much the same thing: wait for dark.”

  Walker put his hands in his pockets and kept going in silence. Stillman looked at him and a small smile came to his lips. “Don’t worry,” he said. “If we’re right about this, there are two addresses they’ll have to hit in order to win. If they decide to go to Scully’s first, the cops will move in and snap them up.”

  “That’s not what you’re hoping for, is it?” said Walker.

  Stillman shook his head. “No.”

  “You’re hoping they’ll pick the other place,” Walker said. “What you want to do is spot them somehow, and let them lead us to the other dead man’s house.”

  Stillman beamed and patted Walker on the shoulder. “It’s not something to be glum about. If they actually get into the house and start searching, all we have to do is call the cops. Even if every single thing went wrong, and we couldn’t get the cops, we could sit and wait. As soon as they finish that house, they’ll still have to go to Scully’s. The cops will put them in a bag.”

  For the next few minutes, Walker’s mind kept producing questions, then answering them for itself. What if the chief was wrong, and the two men had not recognized him and Stillman? Then they would break into the houses as planned, and probably be less cautious about it. What if they had come to Coulter for some other purpose that he and Stillman had not thought of? Then they would proceed with it—whatever it was—and Walker and Stillman might catch them at it. What if the two men had seen not only Stillman and Walker but also the police? Then they would either risk an attempt to hit the houses anyway, or they would stay away. No matter which choice they made, nothing would be lost if Walker and Stillman waited.

  At Oak Street, Walker turned toward Main, but Stillman said, “Keep going this way.”

  “The car is up the other way.”

  “Yeah,” said Stillman. “I don’t want to move the car just yet. It’s been there long enough so people will be used to it, and moving it attracts attention.”

  “Attention?” Walker’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Stillman. “Are you trying to keep those two guys from seeing us—or the police?”

  “By now the chief might have noticed that we’re gone,” said Stillman. “He might say, ‘Good riddance,’ or he might want to keep us where he can reach us so we can identify those two guys. But if he has us sitting in the station, then the opposition gets what it wants: we’re on the sidelines until it’s all over. You know what we need?”

  “A lawyer?”

  “No,” said Stillman. “A place where we can be out of sight for a while, and still be able to see what’s going on.”

  “Too bad it’s not Sunday,” said Walker.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The church would be open. There used to be a couple of them that looked like that where I grew up. They usually have a way up into the steeple.”

  Stillman said nothing, but Walker saw that his eyes rose and he craned his neck to see the church steeple through the treetops, and when he reached the next corner, he turned his steps toward Main Street. He kept going until he was at the rear of the church. There was a small door up a pair of stone slabs that served as steps, but when he tried to turn the handle, it didn’t budge. He muttered, “That’s not what I was hoping for. I thought the damned things were always unlocked.”

  “I don’t think anybody rushes in to ask for sanctuary anymore,” said Walker. “I’ll go around and check the front.”

  He stepped to the corner of the building, looked up and down for police cars, then ventured the few steps to the front door. He tested the big brass handle and found it unlocked. As he turned to go back for Stillman, he saw that Stillman was already at the corner of the building. Stillman stepped across the lawn, and they were in.

  Walker quietly closed the door. They stood motionless in the small foyer and listened. There was a hollowness in the old wooden building that was audible, as though the air in the big empty spaces had a sound of its own. Walker could hear muffled noises from outside—cars passing on Main Street once a minute—but he heard no sound from within.

  He took a step and heard the wooden floor creak, then waited without moving for a response, but none came. He took three more steps and was under the wide portal into the sanctuary. The style of the place seemed to him to proclaim its age. The plain, dark, close-grained wood of the pews seemed to have been made of boards two feet wide. There was a pulpit raised slightly on a wooden platform, and beside it on the wall of the plain, shallow nave were two huge high-backed chairs, but there was little adornment. He turned and looked up. There was a balcony at the rear of the sanctuary, probably for a choir. He looked for stained-glass pictures on the windows, but the panes were simply divided into lozenge-shaped patterns of stained glass on the lower half, with thick, clear glass at the tops to let in light.

  He returned to the entry to find Stillman looking at him inquiringly. “Nobody’s here,” Walker whispered, then wondered why he needed to.

  Stillman spoke only a bit more loudly. “I found the way up. It’s in the cloak room.” He led Walker into a tiny room at the side with only one small window. Above the coat racks rose a series of varnished wooden slats attached to the wall. Walker’s eyes followed them to the ceiling, where there was a recessed square that had to be an access hatch.

  Walker stared at it skeptically. “This was my idea, wasn’t it?” He sighed. “Maybe you’d better stay down here and try to break my fall if it gives way.”

  “Deal,” said Stillman.

  Walker climbed the first few feet easily, but as he rose higher, the reasons why this was not a practical idea began to enter his mind insistently. Climbing the bell tower of s
omebody else’s church seemed to him to go beyond the level of merely presumptuous tourist behavior. It had the feeling of blasphemous intrusion. But climbing the first few rungs of a ladder in front of Stillman had a quality of irreversibility. Without some compelling reason, it was difficult to simply stop and begin feeling for lower rungs with his toes. He kept his eyes on the ceiling and climbed.

  When he came to the top, he pushed up on the wooden hatch cover, half-hoping the compelling reason would come in the form of a cover nailed in place. But the cover rose smoothly. He lifted it aside and stuck his head through the opening. The atmosphere smelled of years of dust. It was dim, but not completely dark, so he could make out some shapes. The floor on this level was the same plain hardwood as the floor below, but it had been left rough-cut, not sanded or varnished. The walls were bare wood with studs and crosspieces showing. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that there was another set of rungs nailed between two studs, leading upward. He pulled himself up onto the floor, looked down, and beckoned to Stillman.

  He waited until he saw Stillman’s face and shoulders ascending toward him, then stepped out of the way. Stillman had to shrug to squeeze his shoulders through the opening, then raised his arms and lifted himself the rest of the way. Walker set the hatch cover back over the opening.

  Stillman looked around until he saw the ladder, then said, “Going up?”

  Walker repeated his climb to the next level. There was no hatch covering the opening above him, and he could see that the hatchway and a small hole near it were the source of the light. The walls above seemed to be golden with glowing horizontal stripes. When his head rose through the opening, he understood. The top level was the belfry. In the center was a heavy, tarnished brass bell suspended from a steel rod. The small speck of light he had seen from below was the hole for the bellpull. He could not recall seeing a hole in the ceiling in the foyer of the church, but he supposed there must have once been one.

  The four walls of the belfry had panels of louvers, probably to keep the bell’s peal from being muffled. Most of the light was coming from the louvered opening on the western side, where the late-afternoon sun was moving lower. The louvers were an arrangement he liked instantly: the level he had just left had been oppressively hot, but up here he could feel a cool, steady breeze. He moved close to the south wall to peer down through the louvers, and found that the church roof blocked the foreground but he could see the streets beyond.

  “This is perfect.” It was Stillman’s voice behind him. Stillman pulled himself up and stood on the east side of the belfry, raising and lowering his head to look between different slats of the louver. “You can see most of the town from here.” He turned to look at Walker. “Whatever you do, don’t bump into that bell.”

  Walker bent and looked upward under the rim of the bell. “The clapper’s gone. They must have taken it out when they stopped using it.”

  Stillman sidestepped from one panel to the next, moving around the belfry, peering out at the sights below. When he stopped, he said urgently, “There!”

  Walker stepped away from the bell and moved his face to the opening. He could see the flat squares that were roofs of the old buildings along Main Street, the tops of big trees just below the belfry. Beyond were the pitched roofs of houses in neat rows on either side of each gray strip of concrete. To the west he could see the winding course of the tan riverbed, with the black ribbon of water in the middle. “What is it I’m looking at?”

  “They’re on this side now,” said Stillman.

  Walker moved to the next panel, where Stillman was. He could see the tops of black-and-white police cars. There were four of them, slowly scuttling along the grooves below the treetops that were the streets west of the police station. When a car reached the end of a residential street at New Hampshire, it would turn west for a block and go up the next one until it reached Coulter, then turn west and go down another block. “At least they’re not giving up,” said Walker.

  Stillman was already shading his eyes with both hands and staring into the distance to the west. “Damn. You can’t see the old covered bridge from here, because the woods are in the way. Probably too far anyway. If they had only gone down there and blocked it off when I told them to, this would already be over.”

  “Why do you suppose they didn’t?” asked Walker.

  “Inconvenience. That’s what it always is.”

  “It doesn’t look that hard.”

  “Not to do it,” Stillman said. “To take the heat for having done it. People who want to drive to the next town to rent a movie have to wait an extra minute while a cop stares into their back seat.”

  Walker watched him for a moment as he stepped from that panel to the next, always looking down. “Is that what made you quit the police force—local politics?”

  “What makes anybody not quit?” said Stillman. “The job stinks. Low pay, long hours, and now and then you get to have a wrestling match with a mean drunk.”

  “Did something happen?”

  Stillman glanced at him. “Yeah, a lot happened. What did you have in mind?”

  “The captain in Miami seemed to think maybe there was something you did that didn’t get made public.”

  Stillman shook his head. “No, there wasn’t anything like that. It was wrong for my temperament, so I made a career change.”

  “Not much of one.”

  Stillman shrugged. “I was thirty years old. What I had learned was how to fire a sidearm, come out of a street fight better off than the other guy, and drive a car fast. What was I going to be—secretary of state? I had a little practical experience in tickling the law-enforcement establishment to get them to do what I wanted, and had made a few acquaintances who had other useful skills.”

  “What’s the difference? Is it just money?”

  Stillman shook his head. “No. The difference is, if the phone rings and somebody wants me to do something, I can say no and hang up.” He stared at Walker for a moment. “And if somebody asks a question I don’t want to answer, I don’t.” He turned away again and looked out between the slats.

  Walker moved away from him to the northwest corner. He shaded his eyes and squinted to the west along Main Street, past the river and across the open fields to the woods that hid the covered bridge, and to the row of hills beyond. The sun was low now and had a blinding glare, like a fire that burned brightest yellow just as it was consuming the last of its fuel. That was the direction where the two men had almost certainly gone, and was probably the direction from which they would return. But after a time, the low angle of the sun made it too painful to look to the west, and he turned to the north.

  He stared down at the quiet residential streets on the other side of Main. He picked out Birch Street, where James Scully had lived, then the block, and, finally, from his memory of the morning when he had searched for it, the very house. The old trees threw long shadows and made the green of the lawns deep and soothing to his eyes, so he devoted himself to Birch Street, staring closely into each of the yards, trying to detect the policemen who had been assigned to watch Scully’s house. He moved on, but kept returning to that block during the next hours. He did not see any uniformed men crouching there, or any movement or change that would have signaled their presence. He looked at the plain rectangular box of New Mill Systems, and tried to pick out each car in the lot on the unlikely chance that the two men had parked their rental car among the herd and gone to wait in the woods.

  Stillman had lapsed into a long silence, still moving from panel to panel according to an unpredictable schedule. He would spend fifteen minutes at one, then just a minute at another. When he spoke, his voice was calm and quiet. “What do you see?”

  “Not a whole lot,” Walker answered. “There doesn’t seem to be much going on anymore. How about you?”

  “They did a pretty good sweep for an hour or so after we got up here. Since then, it’s been a lot more subtle. They’ve got three patrol cars on the road instead of the usual two,
but there seem to be a few cops walking around in plain clothes trying to look inconspicuous.” He pointed at the louvered panel in front of him. “See? There’s one.”

  Walker moved to the panel and looked down, standing tall to achieve the proper angle. There was a man in a sport coat walking along Main. He turned into the drugstore. “He’s a cop?”

  Stillman said, “Either he’s checking in with a radio or he’s making calls on a cell phone every five minutes that last three seconds each.”

  They kept watching as the sun sank below the three hills and the steady breeze began to turn cool. The foot traffic on Main Street thinned, and Walker saw some of the shop proprietors come out, close their doors and lock them, then walk up Main and turn onto the residential streets on both sides.

  At eight the street lamps flickered once or twice, then came on steadily. By then, the windows of the businesses that sold food or drinks were the only ones that had not gone dark. The belfry was high above any source of artificial light, and it had fallen into deeper darkness than the rest of the town. After some time, Stillman held his wrist close to his face, leaned toward the louvered panel, and stared at his watch. “Time to go. Watch your step on the way down. It’s hard to see.”

  They climbed down the ladder to the second level, where there was no opening and the darkness seemed nearly total. Walker had to feel around the floor to find the hatch cover. When he had, he lifted it up carefully and listened for a few seconds before he whispered to Stillman, “You first.”

  Walker heard rustling sounds while Stillman was going down through the opening, then the soft shuffle of his feet on the rungs. When Walker heard Stillman’s shoes creaking the floorboards of the cloak room, he started down after him. The moment his head had cleared the opening he began to feel a bit better. The air was cooler, and there was a dim glow through the open doorway of the cloak room, the faint filtered light from the sanctuary windows reflected off the white walls. He carefully replaced the hatch cover and descended to Stillman’s side.