Dance for the Dead (25 page)

Mary climbed back up her stairs
slowly and deliberately because she wanted to let her heart stop
pounding. The way Jane had said it was an invitation to join a
conspiracy. People who were startled jumped half an inch and said,
“Oh.” They didn’t vault down twenty-foot staircases
and dash into the snow in wet socks. That was what people did who
were terrified, running for their lives. We’ll let your
cowardice pass without comment, and we’ll call it something
else. That was what Jane was saying. No, it was even worse than that.
She knew it wasn’t merely cowardice. It was the only sane
response for a woman who was guilty of so much that any surprise
visitor was probably there because he wanted to put her in a bag.
That was what Jane was passing without comment.

Mary reached the top of the
stairs and stepped into her living room. She looked around for Jane
but couldn’t see or hear her, which made her remember the
strangeness about the woman that had always irritated her. It was
that erect quietness that made other people feel as though they
talked too much without getting anything in return, like they were
emptying the contents of their brains into a deep, dark hole, where
it wasn’t deemed enough to amount to much. She drifted around
like she was the queen of the swans, and it was okay with her if
anybody with her suspected she thought they were dumb, short, and
pasty-faced and their voices were too loud.

Mary heard the sound of the
teakettle steaming in the kitchen; then it stopped, so that was where
Jane must be. She felt tension stiffen the back of her neck and
shoulders.

This was her place, and there
was some primal insult in having another woman walk in and go through
her cupboards. She hated owing this woman so much that she had to
endure it.

Mary moved toward her little
kitchen just as Jane came out with the tea tray, already talking.
“I’m really sorry I had to come in like this. It would
make me angry if anyone did it to me, but it seemed best. In the
first place, I didn’t know you well enough to be able to
predict whether you were likely to have gotten your hands on a gun.
You’ve had plenty of time to do it.”

Mary felt the words dissolve
what remained of her confidence like a sugar cube in a rainstorm. She
had been here a month, and it had never occurred to her to obtain the
most obvious way of protecting herself. The decision she would have
made was by no means certain, but that didn’t help; it made her
even more frightened, because she had not given it even enough
thought to reject it.

But Jane was going on. and Mary
hadn’t been listening. “… didn’t want to get
my head blown off, and I figured if your landlord heard a woman
coming up the steps he would assume it was you. I’ve been very
careful not to cause trouble by coming here. Nobody followed me and
nobody had a chance to see me outside waiting. I saw you coming up
the sidewalk, so I made tea.” She held out a cup so Mary could
take it.

Mary sniffed it and said, “It’s
different.”

“I picked it up in L.A.”
said Jane. “It’s mixed with blackberry leaves. I’ve
got a weakness for nonsense like that.”

Mary sipped. At least this woman
had not come in and put her hands into the cupboards looking for
things. The teakettle and the water were in plain sight. She resisted
the feeling. Whatever this woman wanted, she was not going to get it
by dropping a teabag into a cup of water. She smiled. “Me too.”

Mary’s smile was like a
cat purring while it rubbed its fur against a person’s leg.
Jane could see that the smile had not just been practiced in front of
a mirror. It had about it the cat’s ease and grace that could
only have come from bringing it out and using it to get what the cat
needed. She looked around. “I like your apartment,” she
said.

Mary longed for her to say
something insincere about the furniture.

“You got everything
right,” said Jane. “It would be pretty hard for somebody
to get all the way up that stairway if you really wanted to stop him.
The building looks like a single-family house from the outside, so
nobody would look for a stranger here. That’s the important
thing. Not what you’ll do if they find you, but being where
they won’t look.”

“How did you find me? Or
were you here all the time watching me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe
to see what I did.” Mary realized that she had not said
anything. She resolved not to make this mistake again. “To see
if I was good enough at it to have a chance.”

Jane said, “No, I don’t
play games.”

“Then you changed your
mind about me.” Without any reason at all, Mary thought.

“No again,” said
Jane. “I expected you to be good at it.”

Mary was tired. She had spent
the day trying to get personnel managers to give her a competitive
test of business skills when all they wanted was references, then to
give her the benefit of the doubt based on her ability to speak
knowledgeably, and the promise that references could be obtained, and
finally just to give her a break because she was pleasant,
well-groomed, and eager. Now she was sitting in a pair of pants with
a wet seat. “Let me try to be more direct,” she said.
“You helped me, and I thank you for that. Then you walked out
on me. Rather mysteriously, I might add. Now you’re back. You
tell me I played a good game of hide-and-seek, but here you are. You
seem to have had no trouble finding me, or opening the lock to my
door to get in and make yourself a cup of tea. I’ve never had
any difficulty believing you’re better at this than I am, but
now I’m not just awed, I’m scared to death. So what do
you want?”

Jane put down her tea. “You
shouldn’t be scared to death. I found you because I knew where
to look. If you had been stupid, you would have left Ann Arbor, put
yourself in the airports and hotel lobbies again, and inevitably
found your way to one of the places where they’re looking. I
knew you weren’t stupid, so I was pretty sure you must still be
in this town. So what would you be doing? If you had wanted to give
up on life you would have stayed put and done nothing. A person can
sit in the right locked room forever without getting found if she has
enough to pay the rent. I figured you would be too lively to go that
way, so I tried the job route.”

“What’s the job
route?” Mary asked.

“I knew you had the sense
to figure out that the more you do with a fake identity, the better
it gets because after a while it’s not exactly fake anymore.
You’re not the only woman in town with records that only go
back a few years. Pretty soon it will take a lot of digging to detect
whether you’re entirely rebuilt or just went through the usual
changes – a couple of marriages that brought new names, a
couple of moves from one state to another, a career change or two.
Having eliminated the possibility that you had left or gone into a
coma, I knew you would be applying for jobs. It’s the best way
to start a new life.”

“That was enough?”
asked Mary.

“The biggest and safest
employer in Ann Arbor is the university. I called the personnel
office and said I was a member of a faculty committee trying to hire
someone to do the accounting and clerical work for a big research
grant in the medical school.”

“Why that? Why not
something else?”

“Faculty members aren’t
hired by the university personnel office. They’re hired by the
faculty, so there was very little chance she would look for a
personnel file on me and not find it. Medical schools are
semi-autonomous, so I could play an insider without knowing anything
about her operation. I asked her to send me copies of applications
with a bookkeeping background, since I figured that would be your
strength. I asked how long it would take to bring them to my office.
She said a day or two, so I offered to come over and pick them out
myself. That way I didn’t need an office.”

“You got this address off
my application. God, it’s easy.”

“Not that easy,”
said Jane. “Nobody knows what I knew – your new name, the
city, and where you’d have to apply for work if you wanted
any.” She stared at Mary Perkins over the rim of her teacup.
“Not even Barraclough.”

Mary felt her spine stiffen. She
considered her options. She could pretend the name had made no
impression on her, and later find a chance to slip away quietly. She
could create some kind of disturbance – throw the cup at Jane
and run. But even if she got out the door, the only way of taking the
next step was to fall back on the name and the credit that Jane had
given her. She wasn’t ready. She should have been ready. “How
do you know that name? I never told you.”

“Why didn’t you?”
asked Jane. “You told me you didn’t know who was looking
for you.”

Mary Perkins’s mind
stumbled, held back from the conclusion it was about to reach. That
was right. She had come to Jane Whitefield, and Jane Whitefield kept
nagging her about who it was. She hadn’t known. She couldn’t
have been working for Barraclough. At least a month ago she couldn’t.
“I wanted you to help me,” said Mary. “I only
provide the arguments for what I want. You have to supply your own
arguments against.”

“All right,” said
Jane. “Then let’s take the whole issue off the table. I
have decided to help you.”

“In spite of Barraclough?”

“Because of Barraclough.”

“Do you know him?”

“I’ve seen his
work.” She looked at Mary closely. “Has he ever seen
you?”

The question didn’t make
any sense unless the way Jane Whitefield wanted to make money was to
sell someone else to Barraclough and say she was Mary Perkins. “I
suppose he has lots of pictures of me.”

“Not pictures,” Jane
said. “Has he actually looked at you face-to-face?”

“Is that important?”

“Yes. Tell me.”

“We never met,” said
Mary Perkins. “When I got out of the federal prison eight
months ago, he somehow heard about it. He knew where I was living.
How he got that I don’t know. They said it was going to be a
secret to help in my rehab – you know, help me fit into the
community, keep my old cronies away, and all that.”

“He used to be a cop. He
knows how to use the system. He didn’t come for you himself?”

“He sent two men,”
said Mary Perkins. “They explained to me about Barraclough.”

“What did they tell you?”

“He’s the director
of the Los Angeles office of Intercontinental Security. He’s
got a huge organization and a lot of power, and connections with
every police department. You can’t get away from him and you
can’t fight him. He had read about me.”

“Read what?”

“Everything. Newspaper
reports, the transcript of my trial, the investigation reports. I
don’t know how he got those either. He had decided that I had a
whole lot of savings and loan money hidden someplace. He wanted it. I
couldn’t call the police and say he was taking it because I
wasn’t supposed to have it.”

“You told me the pitch.
You just didn’t tell me where you heard it. Since you’re
still running and they’re still chasing, you must have gotten
away. How?”

“They didn’t put a
gun to my head and say ‘Pay or die.’ I told them I didn’t
have it. But they said Barraclough knew I did because he had followed
my case.” She chuckled sadly. “You know how prosecutors
are. They rave around in front of the jury, flinging enormous,
impossible numbers around. This is how much is missing from savings
and loans in this great, tormented state of Texas. This is the woman
caught with ten dollars of it. All that nonsense doesn’t simply
go into the jury’s subconscious; it goes into the transcript.
Even if your lawyer proves it’s silly, once it’s been
said it exists. It had convinced Barraclough I had some insane amount
of money – like fifty million.”

“So Barraclough sent them
to pick you up and take you with them, right?”

“What else? If I had that
kind of money I couldn’t haul it around in a suitcase. It would
take a couple of freight cars. It would have to be in a numbered
account in Switzerland or someplace. They said they’d have to
hold on to me until I had led them to the accounts.”

“What was the up side?”

“Does this sound like it
has an up side?”

Jane said, “When it was
all over, what did they promise to leave you? Would you have any
money left, or just your life?”

“They said Barraclough had
done this quite a few times before. He just took half from each one
he caught and let him go.”

“Did you believe them?”

Mary Perkins smirked. “Do
I look younger than I am, or what? It was like having a man ask you
to take off half your clothes.”

“What happened then?”

“They each took one of my
arms and led me outside to their car. It was a two-door, so you had
to kind of squinch in behind the front seat. They had the passenger
seat already tipped forward when they opened the door. They had
turned off the dome light so it wouldn’t go on when the door
opened. I remember looking in and thinking, I’m going to die. I
had just read one of those articles they have in magazines about
serial killers and rapists, and it said whatever you do, don’t
get in the car. Once you’re in, nothing is up to you anymore;
it’s up to them. They pushed me in and I started crying.”

“Because you thought you
were going to die?”

“Knew it. I knew I would
die if I didn’t do something. The crying was all I could think
of. It made them nervous and nasty. One of them said if I didn’t
stop he’d hurt me, so I stopped. I could see that made them get
overconfident. It was a long drive, and they had been waiting outside
my apartment for hours. They had to make a pee stop. They were
talking about going to a gas station, but they had a full tank, so
they didn’t want to stop and have the gas guy stare at them and
maybe remember they had a woman with them. So they waited until they
were on the Interstate and pulled into a truck stop. One of them was
going to go in, and then the other while the first one stayed with
me. I kept looking for a chance to get in there, so I could scream my
head off, even make one of them hit me, but they didn’t give me
any chance. I tried saying I had to pee too. I tried saying I had to
change a tampon. I begged, I promised.”