by Thomas Perry
Jane’s eyes rested on the elaborate carrying case for the fancy sniper rifle. She put on her gloves, knelt on the floor beside it, opened it, and began to take out the rifle parts that she had hidden in her pack and place them, one by one, in the precisely shaped indentations of the travel case. Magazine here, suppressor here, foregrip here, bolt here, buttstock here. There was a peculiar satisfaction to the task. It was like feeling the pieces of a puzzle slip perfectly into the spaces where they belonged.
When she had finished, she loaded all of the items she had found in the room into the Toyota. Then she carefully walked down the snowy pavement, stepping in the man’s footprints to Room 3165. She used a credit card to open the door and looked around her: a single suitcase, a suit hanging in the closet. She searched the suitcase, but there was nothing in it but men’s clothing with brand names that could be bought anywhere. She went to the closet and looked at the label sewn inside the coat of the suit: Callicott Haberdashery, Las Vegas. It could hardly be a coincidence that a man who bought his clothes in Las Vegas had knocked on the door of the two shooters she had met in the Montana mountains. He must be one of the team.
She went into the bathroom and looked at the items he had left on the counter: razor, toothpaste, comb, hairbrush, deodorant—just the usual stuff. She stepped back into the other room and noticed the wastebasket. She reached inside, unfolded the single piece of crumpled paper, and read it: “Come see me in Room 3165. Seaver.”
She had heard that name. Seaver was one of the names that Pete had mentioned when he was talking about the casino. Seaver was the one who had been told somebody was a problem just before Pete had read an obituary. But he hadn’t been some hit man. He was the chief of security for the whole company.
Jane put the crumpled paper back into the wastebasket. Seaver was the customer, the one who had hired the killers. He was the one who had been sitting in Las Vegas all this time, comfortable and immune, while they had gone out to hunt Pete Hatcher for him. They had murdered a young policeman in Denver and some unsuspecting tourist in Swan Lake, but nothing they had done could ever reflect on Seaver. He had kept his distance until now. What was he doing up here? Was he checking up on his employees? No. What could he say that would have made them try harder, and what sanctions could he apply if they failed? Probably he had considered it safer to hand them their final payment as soon as they came out of the mountains so they wouldn’t knock on his door in Las Vegas. It didn’t matter. He was here.
Jane hurried out to the Toyota, took one piece of luggage out of the cargo bay, went back into Seaver’s room, and knelt to slide it under the bed.
Jane drove to a supermarket in Whitefish, unloaded the rest of the men’s belongings into the big Dumpster behind the building, then drove back to Kalispell. It was the middle of the night when she parked the Toyota outside the gate of the rental agency. She threw the key over the fence so it hit the door of the office and dropped to the top step, where they couldn’t help finding it. Then she walked to the small airport at the edge of town and paid in hundred-dollar bills for a seat on the first flight to Los Angeles.
It was not until she was sure the weather had cleared enough and her flight was boarding that she went to a pay telephone and made her call to the police. She said quickly, “There’s a man in Room 3165 at the Rocky Mountain Lodge. He told me last night he killed that guy over in Swan Lake.” The woman on the other end was talking over her insistently, saying, “Your name, please. Give me your name.” But Jane said, “He showed me the gun,” and hung up. Probably the woman had not picked up everything she was saying, but it didn’t matter. They recorded all the calls, and in a minute she would be playing it back for some superior.
33
Seaver was in a daze. None of this felt real to him. The cell was like something out of the movies: old, with things written on the walls that had come from a succession of madmen stretching back at least a generation, thoughts that no functioning brain could contain scrawled in letters like shrieks, with every fifth word misspelled, and anatomical pictures that made him queasy.
Seaver couldn’t be here, not in his waking life. When the door had burst inward onto the floor he had been lying in bed, so maybe he had been asleep and what he saw now just proved that his subconscious was getting better at constructing nightmares. The guns had all been pointed at him as the intruders sidestepped to spread out around the bed. Some of the men had looked at him with cold contempt, but the faces of others were empty, just concentrating on lining up the sights with his chest, his head, his belly, waiting to fire.
He had known enough to lie motionless on his back, both arms stretched out from his sides as though he were being crucified. He had known that speaking was a bad strategy, not only because he might say something that would come back to haunt him but also because it was in his best interest to keep the ones with the empty faces calm. They would do the job they had been sent to do, and then they would realize they had the wrong man and leave.
Then one of them had dropped to his belly, slithered under the bed, and dragged out a long, narrow case, opened it, and nodded to the leader before he closed it. “He’s got it,” he said. Rough hands had rolled Seaver onto his belly, applied the handcuffs, dragged him to a car, and driven him to the local police station.
While he had been fingerprinted and photographed and searched and pushed into the cell, he had been thinking frantically, trying to catch up with time. They had to be after Earl. Somehow Earl had done this to him—read the note, slipped the gun under the bed, and left. Then Linda had called the police on the way out of town. He wanted to shout, “But why?” loudly enough so they could hear it. Was it just because he had violated the unspoken terms of their agreement and come to Montana? Or could Earl have thought that Seaver had grown so impatient that he had come here to get his advance money back?
Seaver kept reminding himself that it didn’t matter. He was in trouble, and he had to concentrate on what was going on now. The police had found his false driver’s license and credit cards. They had performed a trace metal detection test on his hands by swabbing them with hydroxyquinoline and holding them under ultraviolet light. He was fairly sure he was in the clear on that one, because the glowing purplish specks that indicated steel and brass were small enough to be ambiguous.
But they had also done an atomic-absorption test on his clothes. That was bad. He knew they must have found antimony, barium, and lead. The only defense he could think of was that he had worn the same clothes for legal target practice at home in Las Vegas and not gotten them cleaned. He could hardly say he hadn’t fired a gun in them. He had, but it had not been a rifle. It had been the pistol he had fired into the two men in New York City. The shorter barrel, close range, and downward angle probably accounted for why so much powder residue had stuck to his clothes.
Seaver might be able to account for most of the evidence in a trial if he got the right lawyer, but the rifle was like a mathematical problem that he couldn’t figure out how to approach. When the ballistics tests were completed, he knew they would show a match between a test-fired bullet and the bullet that had killed the man in Swan Lake. Otherwise there would have been no reason for Earl to plant it in his room. As Seaver reflected on it, the whole issue of the rifle was perhaps his biggest problem. The lieutenant who had first interrogated him had mentioned, almost casually, that it had come with a silencer. If it had a factory-made suppressor on it, then it had to be a military or police-only model. The prosecutor would drag out Seaver’s record and reduce his years of honorable service as a policeman into a set of connections that would make it possible for him to get his hands on a rifle like that—something not a lot of people could do.
He reviewed his own record from the point of view of a prosecutor. They could drag out his expert marksman ratings. Those would be far from enough to prove he could put a round through some guy’s temple at five hundred yards, but there wouldn’t be any other suspect around who could have done it on the best d
ay of his life. The prosecutors would be sure to dig up his four shootings in the line of duty. The fact that four boards of inquiry had cleared him would mean nothing. Juries looked at internal investigations as what they were: routine, obligatory checks just to be sure there was nothing so obviously wrong with a shooting that the public was sure to recognize it instantly. The shootings would establish that Seaver had dropped the hammer on other men at least four times and not been turned into a shaking wreck by the experience.
The longer Seaver thought about his prospects, the worse they seemed. He had enlisted in the service, done fifteen years as a police officer, then eleven years in a responsible, respectable executive position in an American company with a recognized name. But to the twelve Fundamentalist farmers, old women in pearl necklaces, and fish-bait salesmen who would make up a jury around here, being vice president for security at a Las Vegas casino would sound like he was a gangster.
And what the hell was Seaver doing up here in the first place? The only thing strangers did up here was nothing—go on vacation. What was there to choose from? Hunting, fishing, skiing, horses. Could he salvage the whole rifle issue by saying he’d lied about it at first because he had planned to use an illegal weapon on a hunting trip? No. If rounds from the gun matched the bullet in a murdered man’s head, it wouldn’t matter why he said he had brought it. He had to stick to the story that the gun wasn’t his. He had no fishing tackle or skis, no clothes he could wear to ride a horse even if he had known which end of one to climb onto. He had to say he had been here on business. But what sort of business didn’t involve meeting with anyone?
He pondered what he knew about the way Pleasure, Inc., was run, but his mind kept getting mired in the depressing details of the one-of-a-kind project in upstate New York that had gotten him into this mess. Then it occurred to him that this wasn’t such a bad project to think about. He could be here in Montana scouting for a place that Pleasure, Inc., could develop as a resort. Companies like Pleasure, Inc., really did keep that kind of scouting a secret. If word leaked out too early, the price of land would triple overnight, competitors would start nosing around, and the local lunatics who always turned up when anybody built anything would begin to organize. A scouting trip accounted for all of his aimless driving, and for his not being dressed or equipped to do any goofing off. A scouting trip would account for his using a false name: it kept competitors and speculators from suspecting anything.
Suddenly, the angle Seaver had been sifting for appeared to him. The sleazy reputation that clung to Las Vegas casinos could be used not to hang him but to make him a victim. It was not Seaver but unscrupulous competitors who had used the rifle to whack that guy in Swan Lake. They had done it so they could plant the rifle in Seaver’s room and discredit Pleasure, Inc., seriously enough so the company could never build in Montana.
Seaver knew he would have to retrace all of his movements since he had arrived in Montana to find anything that supported his story and lose anything that didn’t. He had arrived in Montana when? Two days before they had arrested him. He had gone right to his hotel in Billings. Could he verify that? Yes. He had flown under a false name, but the police had found identification in the name he had used. If necessary, his lawyers could find somebody in the airline or even on the flight who remembered his face, so that proved it wasn’t a lie. The hotel would have his check-in time. Then what had he done? He had gone to his room and watched the television … and seen the report of the killing! It was already on TV. The guy had gotten himself killed before Seaver got here! How could Seaver have forgotten the most basic step in proving a murder charge? He had an alibi!
Seaver was free. He was as good as out the door. He rehearsed his story again and again, adding tiny bits to it that he could be sure came from his memory and could be crosschecked by the police later. As he did, he discovered that the rifle had been magically transformed from a damning piece of evidence to a complete exoneration. If Seaver had not been here, he could not have fired the rifle. But the ballistics would show that somebody had fired it through that guy’s head in Swan Lake. If the person who had fired it decided the best thing he could do with it was put it under Seaver’s bed, then Seaver certainly was no friend of his. Presto! No murder charge, no conspiracy to commit murder, no accessory to murder, not even a felony charge for possessing a silencer.
It wasn’t until many hours later, after Seaver had told the police the whole story and walked out of the police station, that his euphoria began to wane. He had only gotten himself out of one small scrape. He had been sent out by the three partners to handle a problem, and he had not handled it yet. He had gotten himself arrested instead. While he had been in jail, it was possible that things might even have gotten worse. There had been photographers on the jailhouse lawn, and men with video cameras that had the call letters of television stations on them.
If Earl Bliss had seen those reports, he would also see the reports that Seaver was free. He might decide that failing to frame Seaver meant he had to kill him. If Pete Hatcher was alive, even he could figure out that the reason Seaver was in Montana was to find him. It might be enough to drive him into the arms of the F.B.I. And if the Italians in New York had seen the reports, they might start asking questions too. He might have to think of a whole new story just for them. He was going to have to check with Foley, Buckley, and Salateri as soon as possible to find out where he stood.
As soon as he was out of Kalispell and down the road to Missoula, he checked into another hotel and walked down the street to a convenience store where there was a pay telephone. He called the private number of the partners’ offices in the Pleasure Island casino, but nobody answered. He tried calling their houses but got nothing except the voices of servants who told him politely they were writing down his name. Then he tried the operator at the hotel.
“This is Calvin Seaver,” he said. “I need to have you reach Mr. Foley, Mr. Salateri, or Mr. Buckley for me. Any one of them.”
“I’m sorry, sir. The resort owners can only be reached through their assistants during normal business hours.”
“I know better than that. They can be reached any time of any day of the year. If you don’t know me, call up the emergency notification list. I’m at the top.”
“Your name, sir?”
“I just told you. Calvin Seaver.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’ve been instructed to inform any callers that there is no Calvin Seaver connected with the hotel. All inquiries regarding a Calvin Seaver are to be immediately referred to Mr. Bennis in hotel security.”
“So refer me. Get him on the line.”
There was a silence, and Seaver could tell from the duration that the operator was talking to Bennis’s office. No, damn it, that was Seaver’s office. Bennis was a flunky, a man Seaver had picked out of the ranks because of his canine loyalty and his ability to keep his mouth shut.
“Bennis,” said the voice.
“This is Seaver. I’m at a pay phone, so there’s no tap at this end. You might want to check your bug detector.”
“I already did,” said Bennis. “It’s clear.”
“I’m in Missoula, Montana. The police got convinced they had the wrong man and let me out. I wanted the big guys to know. I’m coming home.”
“Cal—” There was an unpleasant sound to Bennis’s voice that Seaver had not noticed before, almost a whine.
“What?”
“You’ve been good to me, so I’m paying off the favor. Don’t come here.”
Seaver felt as though he’d had the wind knocked out of him. “What does that mean?”
“They hired some people.”
“They were going to kill me in jail? Without even hearing what happened or giving me a chance to fix it?”
“Look, I don’t know any more.”
Seaver’s field of vision had a red aura at the edges, and his heart beat so hard he could feel it. “They didn’t hire them. They don’t know who to hire, and they wouldn’t let themselve
s get within a mile of anybody like that. You hired them. They called you into the office and told you I was a problem, a serious liability. Did you even tell them I wasn’t? That I would never talk?”
Bennis’s voice was calm. He sounded as though he were on the other side of a huge chasm, watching a disaster that had nothing to do with him. “You know them, Cal. They make a decision, and that’s their decision. You don’t talk them out of something like that.”
“You’re right,” said Seaver. “I’m glad you told me. And you know what else? I’m glad you’re the one they picked to replace me. You deserve it.”
Seaver hung up and took two steps back toward his hotel. He was tired, and had to sleep. No, there was no way he could go back up there and sit around all night. He had told Bennis he was in Missoula. He had to get on a plane.
He looked at his watch. It was three in the morning. What was the date? September 16—no, 17. It was a date that he would always remember. As he walked toward the hotel, he shook his head, and was surprised that the violent movement traveled to his shoulders and spine. He probably looked like an old dog shaking water off his back.
Seaver gave a quiet snort of a laugh at the thought. That was about right. For eleven years, since the day he had gone to work for Pleasure, Inc., he had been moving a third of his salary into accounts in the Caribbean under the name Luther Olmstead. How could men as smart as Buckley, Salateri, and Foley not have guessed that? When they had met him, he had just finished fifteen years as a cop, where there had been no opportunity to put away a dime. Then he had landed a job that paid over two hundred thousand a year with virtually no expenses. The taxes alone would have been more than his old salary.
He would stop in Los Angeles just long enough to pick up traveling money and his passport. That was the main thing—getting out. After that, he would consider what else he wanted to do. The three big guys probably thought that, given his history, his impulse would be to call the police. They would be busy in a few hours getting rid of evidence. But his experience as a policeman had not given him an interest in calling the police. And that was not his only option. He might not know the names of the old men in New York that the three partners were afraid of, but he did know the names of some similar men in Los Angeles, and he just might decide to give them a call. They would appreciate the opportunity to give their friends in New York a timely warning. He had always heard that the Mafia worked on reciprocity and favors, and this was a time of his life when it would not hurt to have them think of him with gratitude.