Dance for the Dead (18 page)

She checked in with a credit
card in the name of Katherine Webster. She had gotten the card in the
same way she had obtained the five others she had brought with her:
she had grown them. Now and then she would take a trip to a different
part of the country just to grow new credit cards. She would start
with a forged birth certificate, use it to admit her to the test for
a genuine driver’s license, and then would go to a bank and
start a checking account in a new name. If the amount she deposited
was large enough, sometimes the bank would offer her a credit card
that day. If it did not, she would use the checks to pay for mail
orders. Within a few months, the new woman would begin receiving
unsolicited mail. Among the catalogs and requests for contributions
would inevitably be offers for credit cards. She used the credit
cards carefully, a new one in each town, so that when Katherine
Webster disappeared, she didn’t reappear in the next city.
Instead, a woman named Denise Hollinger took her place.

The banks that issued their own
credit cards were happy to pay themselves automatically each month
from her checking account, so all she had to do was to keep the
balance high. For the others, she simply filled in the
change-of-address section on the third bill and had future ones sent
to a fictitious business manager named Stewart Hoffstedder, C.P.A.
One of Mr. Hoffstedder’s services was paying clients’
bills. He had a post office box in New York City to receive the
bills, and he issued neatly typed checks from a large New York bank
to pay them. The imaginary Mr. Hoffstedder was so reliable that each
year most of his clients would have their credit limits increased.

Sometimes Jane would grow a
different kind of credit card. It would begin with her opening a
joint checking account for herself and her husband, who was so busy
that she had to bring the signature card home and have him sign it
and return it by mail. Months passed while the husband paid for his
mail-order goods with the checks and got his credit card. Then Jane
would close the joint checking account and make sure the imaginary
Mr. Hoffstedder got her imaginary husband’s bills. She could
use the man’s card to pay expenses if she made reservations
over the telephone, and when traveling let people guess whether she
was wife, lover, or colleague without having to give herself any name
at all.

After Katherine Webster checked
into the hotel, she bought the San Diego newspapers, went directly to
her room, ordered dinner from room service, and made the preparations
she had planned during her long trip across the country. First she
ordered a rental car by telephone, the keys to be delivered to her
room for Mr. William Dunlavey, and the car left in the hotel parking
lot. She spent a few minutes reading the society page of the
San
Diego Union,
then set her alarm for six a.m. and went to bed.

When the alarm woke her, she
checked the name she had found on the society page again: Marcy
Hungerford of Del Mar, co-chair of the Women of St. James
Fund-raising Committee and honorary chair of this year’s ball,
was headed for the family’s eastern digs in Palm Beach. That
was the best name in the columns. Honorary chairs were either famous
or had money, and Marcy Hunger-ford wasn’t famous. She was
doing fund-raising and was active in that world, so she might have
one telephone number that people could find. Jane checked the
telephone book and found it listed, with the address beside it.

Jane took the stairs to the
swimming pool, went out the garden gate, and skirted the building to
the parking lot. She had no difficulty finding the rented car. She
had told the woman on the telephone that Mr. Dunlavey liked big black
cars, and this one had a small sticker on the left rear bumper that
had the right rental company’s name on it. She walked farther
along the line of cars until she found one with an Auto Club sticker,
peeled it off with a nail file, and stuck it over the one on her
car’s bumper.

She drove out to the Golden
State Freeway, headed north to the first Del Mar exit, went over a
high mesa and came down onto the road along the ocean. The houses on
the west side of the street were big and far apart, and she could see
vast stretches of flat beach on the other side of them. When she
found Marcy Hungerford’s house she was satisfied. It was two
stories with a long, sloped roof and stilts on the beach side, a
four-car garage under it on the street side, and about eight thousand
square feet in the middle. She drove past it at thirty miles an hour
and studied the exterior. The establishment was too complicated for
Marcy Hungerford to have given all of the servants the week off or
taken them with her, but they would cause no trouble. By the time
they realized something was wrong, it wouldn’t be wrong
anymore.

At nine a.m. Jane found a little
shop in San Diego that rented post office boxes, and she took a key
and paid for a month in the name of Marcy Hungerford. Then she drove
back to Del Mar and found the post office. She filled out a
change-of-address form and had all of Marcy Hungerford’s mail
sent to her new post office box beginning the next day.

At ten a.m. Jane went to a pay
telephone in a quiet corner of Balboa Park and dialed a Los Angeles
number. As she put the coins into the slot, she checked her watch
again.

“Hoffen-Bayne,” said
the receptionist.

“I’d like to speak
to a representative for new customers, please,” said Jane.

“Your name?”

“Marcy Hungerford.”

“Please hold and I’ll
transfer you to Mr. Hanlon.” There were a few clicks and a man
said “Ronald Hanlon” in a quiet, calm voice. “What
can I do for you, Ms. Hungerford?”

Jane said, “It’s
Mrs. I’m considering new financial management and I’m
shopping around. I’d like to know more about Hoffen-Bayne.”

Mr. Hanlon said, “Well,
we’ve been in business in Los Angeles since 1948 and handle a
full range of financial affairs for a great many people. We offer
investment specialists, tax specialists, accountants,
property-management teams, and so on. If you could give me a rough
idea of your needs, I think I could give you a more focused picture.”

That was the money question.
“Well,” said Jane, “my husband’s affairs are
managed by Chase Manhattan.” This established that she wasn’t
somebody who had just dialed the wrong number; banks seldom managed
anything less than a few million. “But I have some assets I
like to hold separately.” She kept her voice cheerful and
opaque. Maybe there were problems with the marriage, and maybe not.
If there were, California was a community-property state, and this
meant she might be talking about some money the husband didn’t
know about and half of what he had at Chase Manhattan. She was giving
Mr. Hanlon a small taste. “I’m interested in having
somebody I trust manage my money conservatively so that it pays a
reliable income each year.”

“Conservative” meant
she didn’t need to gamble to make more, and the income was
another hint of divorce.

Hanlon rose to the bait slowly
and smoothly. “Yes, that sounds wise,” he said. “That
would mean setting you up with our accountants and tax people, and a
financial planner.”

“And property management,”
she added. “Do you have arrangements to handle foreign real
estate? France and Italy?”

That did it. He wasn’t
talking to a lady with a couple hundred thousand in passbooks. “I
think the best thing to do would be to make an appointment and we can
talk it all over in detail with advisers from some of our
departments. When are you free?”

“That’s a problem,”
said Jane. “I live in San Diego and I’m leaving for Palm
Beach today.” She checked her watch again to see how long she
had been talking.

“When will you be back?”

“I’m not sure. It
could be a month. I’m asking for information from several
companies. I’m going to look it over while I’m away, and
when I’m back I’ll have the choices narrowed down.”
The element of competition would help. “I’d like to have
you send me whatever material you’ve got that will help me know
whether your company is the right one for me.” She decided
Marcy Hungerford had no reason to be vague, and making her naive
wouldn’t help. “I’d like to know the backgrounds
and qualifications of your investment people, financial planners, and
so on.”

Mr. Hanlon seemed a little
surprised. Maybe she had gone too far. “I think we have some
things we can send you. What’s your address?”

“It’s 99.233 The
Shores, Del Mar, California 91.182.” She glanced at her watch
again. She had only twenty seconds left before the operator came on
and asked for more quarters.

“Phone?”

Jane gave him Marcy Hungerford’s
telephone number. The answering machine or the maids would tell him
she was out of town.

“Got it,” he said.
“I’ll get that right out to you.”

Ten seconds left. “Fine.
I'll watch for it. And thanks.” She hung up and walked across
the lush green grass of the park in the direction of the zoo. She
felt satisfied. Hanlon would make a serious attempt to impress her
with Hoffen-Bayne’s operation. The main issue would be whether
he had caught the hint about backgrounds. Whoever had gone after
Timmy Phillips had been in the company seven years ago and was still
there.

The next morning when Jane went
for her run on the beach, she considered the ways of taking the
company apart so that she could see what was inside. If Hoffen-Bayne
had been around since 1948, then they had almost certainly been sued.
She could drive up to U.C.L.A. and hire a student to research the
county records for the cases. The least that would give her were the
names of the people at Hoffen-Bayne who had been served with
subpoenas, and almost any lawsuit would provide a lot more.

But that would mean dreaming up
another story to tell the law student that would make him feel
comfortable about doing it but not comfortable enough to talk about
it freely. It would also place the student in a public building where
someone might notice that he had an unusual curiosity about one
particular company. He might be helping somebody build a case. That
sort of information might easily get back to Hoffen-Bayne. Certainly
when Dennis Morgan had been doing his research, somebody at
Hoffen-Bayne had learned about it. She decided not to bring anybody
else into this mess.

At four o’clock Jane drove
back along the Golden State Freeway to Del Mar and stopped at the
little store where her post office box was. She saw through the
little window that Marcy Hungerford had lots of mail. She sorted
through the letters and bills and catalogs until she found the packet
from Hoffen-Bayne, then drove to the post office and filled out
another change-of-address form so that Marcy Hungerford’s mail
would start being delivered to her house again.

She considered scrawling
“misdelivered” on today’s mail and slipping it into
the nearest mailbox, but she decided that the safest way was to
ensure that there was no interruption in service. She waited until
eight p.m. when it was dark along the beach, walked past Marcy
Hunger-ford’s house, left the mail in her box, returned to her
car, and drove on.

At the hotel Jane opened the
packet from Hoffen-Bayne and began to study it. She could see
immediately that Mr. Hanlon had not missed any of her hints and that
he had been convinced that her account was worth having. There was a
printed brochure that included little descriptions of the various
arms of the company and a cover with a touched-up photograph of their
building on Wilshire Boulevard. Inside were graphs and tables
purporting to be proof of high returns for their clients, mixed with
a text that promised personal service. Mr. Hanlon had also dictated a
cover letter to Mrs. Hunger-ford, and stapled to it was a little
stack of computer-printed resumes.

The next morning Jane checked
out of the hotel and drove up the freeway toward Los Angeles. The
coast of California had always made her uneasy. The air was lukewarm,
calm and quiet, as though it were not outdoors. On the left side of
the road the blue-gray ocean rose and fell in long, lazy swells,
looking almost gelatinous where the beds of brown kelp spread like a
net on the surface. The low, dry, gentle yellow hills to the east
always made her sleepy because they were difficult for the eye to
define, not clear enough to tell whether they were small and near or
large and far. Behind them she could see the abrupt rising of the
dark, jagged mountains like a painted wall.

The land along this road always
looked deserted. She had to remind herself that it had been the most
densely populated part of the continent when the Spanish missionaries
and their soldiers arrived. The Indians here had not been at war for
centuries the way the Iroquois had, so they weren’t fighters.
The first Europeans they saw herded them into concentration camps
where they forced them to build stone missions and work the fields,
and then locked them up at night in barracks, the men in one and the
women in another. They were chained, whipped, starved, tortured, and
executed for infractions against the priests’ authority, and
they died from diseases that flourished in their cramped quarters
until they were virtually exterminated.

California was a sad place, a
piece of property that had begun as a slaughterhouse and could never
be made completely clean. It was perpetually being remodeled by new
tenants who could not explain why they were doing it. They bulldozed
the gentle hills into flat tables where they built hideous, crowded
developments that encrusted the high places like beehives. They
gouged and scraped away at the surface and covered it with cement so
that every town looked like every other town, and the rebuilding was
so constant that every block of buildings in the state seemed to be
between ten and twenty years old and just beginning to show signs
that it needed to be bulldozed and rebuilt again.