Part 13 (1/2)
”But you were still in love with her, weren't you?”
Walker shook his head. ”No. For a long time, I was: so long that I got attached to the idea, comfortable with it. I was always going to be this guy whose best shot at having a life was already over. I was so sure of it that I got out of the habit of checking to see if it was still true until you came along and forced me to think about every second that I had ever spent with her. Over the past few days, I did it. I slowly realized that I didn't feel the same about our time together anymore. When I remembered it, I still thought the same things about her. I just didn't feel them anymore. She was everything I ever imagined she was-smart, funny, brave, good-but now it had nothing to do with me.” He frowned. ”Do you understand?”
”I do,” said Stillman. ”You knew she was a decent person, and she was worth your effort to try to save her. So what's keeping you from quitting now?”
Walker took another sip of his drink. ”I was just on the edge of figuring that out when you came in,” said Walker, and looked at the gla.s.s. ”The problem with this stuff is that just at the moment when it's managed to dissolve enough of the fog, whatever's left in your stomach hits your bloodstream and you get stupid. But I think it has something to do with what I've been doing for the last couple of years, and what she has.”
”McClaren's?” Stillman looked suspicious. ”You're suddenly interested in whether the company shows a profit on this year's annual report?”
”That's the funny part,” said Walker. ”I'm not interested at all. It hasn't crossed my mind since we were in Pasadena.”
”Then what do you mean?”
”I meant how I was spending my life before that. I was trying to be the perfect employee. I had convinced myself that if I was going to be a solid, serious person, that was the way to do it. If I worked really hard to fit into the cubicle, then in time I would be the kind of man my family would be proud of. Steady, reliable. That meant something.” He smiled. ”I tried pretty hard. I went to work, came straight home-sometimes walked home to keep in shape, ate a frozen dinner, watched the news on TV, and went to bed so I could do it all over again.”
”How does she come in?”
Walker answered, ”She was making the same choice, only she was better at it. We were delayed-gratification pleasure seekers. The longer you put it off, the better it will be.” He c.o.c.ked his head and stared at Stillman for a second, then returned to his drink. He took a gulp, waited for the little explosion in his stomach to reverberate upward and warm his brain. ”It didn't quite sink in until I saw her there with strangers brus.h.i.+ng the dirt off her face.”
”What was it that sank in?”
”That she and I might have read the instructions wrong.”
”Her, anyway,” Stillman agreed.
”Me too,” said Walker. ”There she was. And I asked myself what she could have done that would have avoided heading for that hole. And you know what?”
”What?”
”The answer wasn't spending more hours and more energy selling insurance.”
Stillman sipped his drink. ”What happened to her is not a bad argument for life insurance.”
”True,” said Walker. ”But it's not such a good argument for trading anything important to get ahead.” He frowned. ”What was it you said? 'For twenty-four-year-olds who can't wait to be sixty so they can move into the corner office.'”
”What else did you figure out?” asked Stillman.
”Nothing. I unfigured. I found out that some things I'd already figured out needed some work.”
”How about an example?”
”Murder. There's something about seeing the way it looks-turning a person into a secret, dropping her into a hole after dark and hiding even the hole. Her face looked calm, composed. Maybe she died gently. But I know that somehow, even if it was for a tenth of a second, even if she never got to say it, some remnant of her brain was thinking, 'Please. Not yet. Let me have another day, another few minutes.' They didn't.” He took the last quarter inch of his drink. ”I always thought people like that ought to be hunted down. It never occurred to me that the one who ought to do it might be me.”
16.
Walker awoke, showered, and dressed, then went to the next room to knock on Stillman's door. He found Stillman on the bed with file folders from the Pasadena office spread around him and the telephone in his hand. Walker went to the only chair in the room and sat down.
Stillman was saying, ”Yeah, so get it to me. Hard is just another way of saying expensive, and I already threw myself on your mercy. Call me here at the hotel before you send anything.”
He hung up, then dialed another number. ”You might as well get some breakfast. This is going to take a while.”
Walker found that the dining room was closed until dinner, so he wandered down the street past the police station until he got to a diner. When he returned to Stillman's room, Stillman was talking in the same tone. ”What is it with everybody today? Here's how it works: you do what I ask, you send me the bill, and then I I complain. You don't get to bill me and complain too. You think you're mentioned in my will and I'm depleting the estate? Good guess. I'll be waiting.” He hung up. complain. You don't get to bill me and complain too. You think you're mentioned in my will and I'm depleting the estate? Good guess. I'll be waiting.” He hung up.
”You finished?” asked Walker.
”Unless I can think of somebody who can do something else for us. I like to get people working on my problems early in the morning, when they're fresh.”
”What are they doing for you?”
”That one's running hourly credit checks on these two guys-Albert Mayer and Richard Stone. They're the ones who kept turning up at the same hotels as Ellen Snyder.”
”Won't they stop using those names now?”
”You never know,” said Stillman. ”They have no reason to a.s.sume that anyone was following them, just Ellen Snyder. If they're smart, they won't take the chance-or any other chance. I'm just trying to get something that will move us to the next set of names they use. I've got somebody else spreading the word that I'm paying for a man who looks like Alan Werfel.”
”I don't think there is a man like that,” said Walker.
Stillman looked intrigued. ”You don't?”
”No. It came to me when I woke up. If they had one, then I don't think they would have done things this way.”
”Why not?” asked Stillman.
”I accept what you said: that the first thing they did was steal Werfel's ID in the airport. I believe that they knew about the insurance policy in some other way-maybe just by learning what they could about him before they started using the credit cards. But I don't think they brought in a ringer and fooled Ellen Snyder into thinking he was Alan Werfel. It's never felt right to me. It's too hard to do quickly, and when you send him into the office, too many things could go wrong.”
”That's right,” said Stillman. He spoke gently. ”That's the unpleasant part of this. It works best if somebody on the inside is handling everything, making sure nothing does go wrong.”
”Ellen didn't do it,” Walker insisted. ”This could have been done a lot of other ways.”
Stillman sighed. ”You can't catch a thief by figuring out all the things he could have done. You have to think of things from his point of view. What did he want to have happen, and what did he think he needed to do to make it happen? The point is, the thief can't know what all the obstacles are going to be when he starts this. Only an insider knows. As soon as I heard a rough description of this, I started looking for somebody like her.”
”But you didn't know her, and that's why this never made sense to me. Ellen Snyder wasn't in on it. She didn't want a quick million, she wanted a career. And if they really had found a guy who could convince a stranger he was Alan Werfel, they wouldn't have needed to pay Ellen. And if they could pay her, they wouldn't have needed to kill her.”
”You think her only purpose was to take the blame.”
”That's right.”
”Because she's dead?”
”Not just dead, but dead that way, out here in the middle of nowhere, so it looked as though she got away with the money and disappeared. They couldn't just fax in a copy of Werfel's stolen driver's license and expect to get a check for twelve million in the mail. They needed the paperwork to come to the main office filled out by a real McClaren's agent who seemed to have seen the guy in person and gotten him to sign the affidavit and release forms.”
”You think she didn't fill out the papers?” asked Stillman.
”I don't know if she did or not. I just know she didn't intend to partic.i.p.ate in any fraud. If the fake Alan Werfel called her in advance and said, 'I'm coming in on Tuesday to sign the papers,' then she would probably have filled them out on Monday. She would never let a man like that sit in the office waiting while she was at a typewriter putting stuff into blanks on a form. Don't you see? He fits the profile of the kind of customer she was after. She described him to me the night I took her out to dinner.”