Dance for the Dead jw-2

by Thomas Perry

  "In the summer of 1981 I was twenty-two. I had just graduated from Florida State. I was good at interviews - I could tell that they liked me - but I couldn't seem to get a job. I remember coming home and closing the door to my bedroom upstairs. I would take off my outfit and hang it up carefully so my makeup wouldn't ruin it when I flopped down on the bed to cry. Then I would get newspapers from other places and write letters to answer the ads. Finally in October I got a job. Winton-Waugh Savings in Waco, Texas, wanted a management trainee. I went to work in the loan department at just about the time when things started heating up. I remember I was making two hundred and seventy-two dollars a week. Pretty soon I started noticing that a lot more money was coming into the bank, and a lot more going out as loans. That was the start."

  "What did you do?"

  "I went to a party." Her face had an ironic smile, as though she had thought about it so many times that she expected Jane to understand. "The bank had a giant bash for its big customers, and I got introduced to some of them. There were men there who had tens of millions of dollars. And I was with them, talking futures and options with them as if I was one of them. There was one in particular who was really nice. His name was Dan Campbell. Not Daniel. When he signed papers he wrote 'Dan.' He had everything: a big house in Houston, a cattle ranch in Oklahoma, and a plane for flying back and forth. I knew all about them because the loan papers were in a filing cabinet right behind the desk where I sat every day."

  "There was this big candlelight dinner on tables set up in the bank lobby, and dancing. I'd never seen so much liquor, all the bottles lined up on this portable bar with the lights behind them so they looked pretty, like perfume bottles or something. When the formal party was over and most of the people went home, the night wasn't over. There was a small private party just for maybe twenty people like Dan Campbell in the executive suites down the hall. We all started in Mr. Waugh's office, but people wandered out into the garden outside the sliding door and into some of the other offices, carrying their drinks. Somehow Dan Campbell and I ended up in my office. After a few minutes he switched off the light and locked the door. A person would have had to be retarded not to have it occur to her that if we didn't make any noise people would never know we were in there."

  "You don't have to tell me this."

  "Yes, I do," said Mary. Her face was set and insistent. "So then Dan Campbell is saying, 'Come on, Lily. Just touch it. I promise it won't bite.' I was not an innocent young thing. I don't want to give you that impression or imply that I was drunk or something. I wasn't left breathless and swept off my feet by a charming older man. If I was dazzled by anything, it was by being near all that money. Also, I liked him and was impressed with him, so I did it."

  "The next day I was back at my desk as usual, feeling a little bit amazed when my eyes would happen to fall on some particular piece of furniture, and then a little depressed and foolish, and in comes a delivery guy with twenty-four long-stemmed red roses in a beautiful crystal vase and puts them on my desk. I see them, and for a second I think maybe I wasn't just this stupid girl who got talked into something. Maybe this was just what I had convinced myself it was for a few minutes last night when I forgot it was the bank that took me to dinner. Then I opened the card, and it was signed by Mr. Waugh, my boss. There was a check for a thousand dollars from the bank that said 'Employee Incentive Bonus.'"

  "Did you quit?"

  "No," said Mary. "I didn't. I started to, I thought about it, but I didn't do it. You hear a lot about people doing that, but you don't see it much. People say they walked out, threw their jobs away or something, but at least they have their principles. But it's almost never like that. It almost never happens right away, just like you never think of the clever thing to say to somebody when it would have mattered. And I couldn't think of a way to tell Mr. Waugh I resented getting a check for it without coming out and announcing exactly what it was that he and I both knew I had done. I decided I wasn't about to face that conversation, and there was nothing else I could do to change things. All I could do was cash the check and go on with my life."

  "The bank was growing then, and pretty soon I'm not working in the loan department, I'm a loan officer. Mr. Waugh tells me we've got to go on a business trip to Houston. I remember the flowers and get all upset, but there just isn't a way to get out of it. By now I understand why the bank needs to move money in and out, and my job is to keep the money going out, and that means meeting with customers. And there were two other women going: Mr. Waugh's assistant and another loan officer.

  The pay was getting better and better, and I was learning a lot, so I didn't try to get out of it."

  Jane could tell that Mary was not lying now. She was trying to push away the excuses. This was a confession.

  "We meet with a group of twelve investors who have formed a limited partnership for a real estate development. You know, right now I can't even remember what they were calling it, but it was the usual thing, something like Sunnydale Vistas or Meadowgrove Heights. Anyway, the first session is in an office they've set up near River Oaks. Not in River Oaks, of course, but close enough so people would smell money on their business cards. Things were really tantalizing in that first session. We've got the chance to lend them sixty million, maybe more later. They're willing to keep it deposited until they need it, with the interest in escrow offsetting our costs - which are nil - and release times tied to what gets built. Then we were supposed to go out and see the land. It was near La Porte, right by Galveston Bay. The plans called for canals, with boat slips for each house, malls, and all that."

  "We don't drive, though. We go out to get the best view on this big boat that's leased to the company's sales department for impressing the customers. We see it through binoculars and talk business until dark, but still no papers get signed. We have a catered dinner, and still no agreement comes out of Mr. Waugh's briefcase. It just degenerates into a cocktail party on the upper deck. Everybody's talking about money and their favorite things that it buys and how great they're all doing. They're getting tipsy and optimistic. Pretty soon I start to hear music coming from somewhere down below, and laughing and loud talk. One by one, people start to disappear. It goes on awhile until it's just me and Waugh and maybe three of these investors. It's getting cold up on deck. I say to Waugh, 'Maybe I'll go down below.' He says, 'If you like.' So I make my way down those steps in the dark in high heels carrying a martini."

  "The others didn't go down?"

  "One did. I had to help him, because he was getting drunk. So I go down and open the door to this big room they called the saloon, and the music is deafening. What I see at that moment makes me drop my drink. It's Waugh's assistant. Her name was Maria. She's dancing, doing a strip for these four investors, and I do not mean a tease. When I came in she was already down to her panties, and she's got her thumbs in the waistband, as though they were about to move south. I start to back out, but the drunk behind me pushes me in, and Maria sees me. She kind of wriggles over to me without losing a beat, puts her arm around me with a big smile, yells into my ear, 'Come on. Get with the party,' and starts pulling me into the saloon with her. I pushed her arm off me and said, 'Stop it. I'm not some hooker.'"

  "What happened?"

  "She got really angry - shot me a look that would knock a pigeon off a telephone wire - and said, 'Don't kid me, honey. Who do you think made out your last bonus check?' But then there's one of these investors behind her, and he's impatient for the show to go on, and he pulls the panties down to her feet. She grins, steps out of them, kind of sticks out her rear end, gives it a little wriggle, and starts to dance with him. I turn and walk out of the saloon. I don't know where to go. I open the door to one of the staterooms, and there's the other loan officer. She's doing one of the investors on the bed while a couple of others watch. I shut the door, go back up the hallway toward the steps, and there's Mr. Waugh. He opens the door of the saloon so he can glance in, and I can see that Maria has gone way beyond the stri
p. It's an orgy. He opens the door a little wider, holding it for me to go in first. Then he sees the expression on my face, kind of shrugs, and goes inside. I spend the next four hours alone up on that freezing deck."

  "Did he fire you?"

  "No. I took a plane back by myself and came in Monday morning to find the loan papers, all signed, on my desk. All of a sudden the account was mine and I had to make the deal work - get it through the loan committee and the lawyers, and set up the schedules, and all that. And I had to make out the bonus checks: ten grand each. Nobody said a word about it. Maria was invisible for weeks. The other loan officer - her name was Kathy - was no friend of mine. She never spoke to me again. I started looking for jobs. The bank was growing out of control by then, so we were all busy enough not to have to look right at each other."

  "Nothing else happened?"

  "About a month later, I come into work and there are these strange women in the office. Both of them are young - twenty or twenty-one - and gorgeous. Maria comes in with them, and her face is absolutely empty. She says to me, 'We're really running short of space around here. Mr. Waugh wants you to move back out to your old desk to make room for the new loan officers.' Out front was the pool of low-level clerical people and beginners. I cleaned out my office - pictures, plants, and paper clips - carried everything out, and put it all on my old desk, and something happened. I knew they wanted me to quit, and I wanted to quit, but up until then I had also wanted to outlast them, take whatever they had to offer for as long as it took and then end up with a better job somewhere else. I had been operating on the theory that I made them more uncomfortable than they made me. But it was too much. I closed the desk drawer and walked into Mr. Waugh's office. He was on the phone and he said into it, 'Excuse me. I have something I have to take care of. I'll call you right back,' all the time with his eyes on me. He hung up. I said, 'You didn't have to hang up. I just wanted to say goodbye.' I reached over the desk and shook his hand and said, 'Thank you for hiring me.' He was surprised. I thought at first that he was just relieved because it wasn't a horrible scene, but before I was across the lobby I realized that all along he had been expecting me to come around."

  "You didn't have another job. Where did you go?"

  Mary Perkins gave a sad little laugh. "I went nowhere. I couldn't find another job in town. I couldn't find one anywhere, so I moved to California. Just getting there took about the last of the money I had saved. I was out of work for six months. I was twenty-four, looking better than I ever have in my life because I didn't have enough money to eat regularly. I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me. The fantasy I had wasn't about getting a nicer place to live and having enough food. It was getting rich - really rich. I had been on the party boats, done the big real estate deals, and flown in the private planes, and I wanted them again. So I thought of how to get them, and I got started."

  "How did you get started?"

  "I used to spend a lot of time at the unemployment office, and I got used to seeing the regulars. One was a guy who had tried to talk to me. You have to picture this. There's a guy about forty, in there to collect his unemployment check, and he sees a woman who turns him on, so he goes up to her and tells her not to worry. He's a successful contractor, and as soon as spring comes he's going to be doing more big projects and he'll hire her. But he was good-looking and cheerful and, oddly enough, he wasn't stupid, so I decided to get to know him. I went into the unemployment office and smiled at him. When he hit on me, I said, 'Why don't you take me out for coffee?' We walked out to the lot, and he's driving a three-year-old BMW with a brand-new lock on the trunk. I'd had enough experience making loans to know that locks don't wear out in three years. They get drilled out because the original owner didn't hand over the keys. It turns out that even though he's a liar, he really does have a contractor's license, but no capital, no crew, and nothing going for him. He was perfect."

  "Perfect for what?"

  "I had decided to use what I knew about savings and loans. I promoted him from contractor to developer. I was his wife. We called ourselves the Comstocks or the Staffords or the Stoddards. We would go to a new city where nobody knew us. Sometimes we'd rent a house in a quiet, upscale part of town and do nothing but get to know our neighbors. Eventually there would be somebody who would invite us to his club, or to a summer home, or just to a party. Once we were accepted, the bankers would find us. Sometimes all it took was to let our new friends know we were happy there and wanted to buy a fancy house. By 'eighty-three a lot of savings executives were dying to lend a couple of million to just about anybody who wanted it for something as normal as a house, and they listened for leads."

  "What then?"

  "It varied. Sometimes we'd get somebody to sell us a hundred-thousand-dollar house for a million, kick back five hundred thousand, and leave town on the same day. The best was when we got to know the savings and loan executive and his wife - saw them socially. I would find a way to get the man alone - happen to go alone to the place where he always ate lunch, or drop in to see his wife on a Saturday afternoon when I knew she would be gone. I would convince him that he was so irresistible that I didn't plan to try. If that worked I would turn it into a full-blown affair and concentrate on making sure he didn't want it to end just yet. Eventually the subject of my husband's real estate development would come up. I would say he was considering moving to another state and doing the project there because the local money people didn't see the potential. Bobby would get his loan. When Bobby didn't make payments, the bank would issue a new loan to cover the interest, or buy into the project. I learned all the tricks that a banker could think of just by watching these guys trying to keep Bobby busy and stupid."

  "It always worked?"

  Mary Perkins shook her head. "Nothing always works. But I designed it so that if the banker wasn't interested, the worst he could do to me was to tell my husband. But if he once sunk it into me, that option was gone, and he was in for the ride of his life." She stopped and stared at Jane. "You're thinking that I invented a scheme to turn myself into a whore, don't you? To do what I wouldn't do for Mr. Waugh."

  Jane shrugged. "I'm not in the habit of making that kind of judgment."

  "Well, that's exactly what I did. At one point I was doing both the husband and wife at once, and the three of us were conspiring to keep Bobby too busy to notice by pumping money into his business. Of course I had to keep Bobby happy too. We were living as a married couple, and I couldn't have him going off tomcatting around the country club. This went on for about three years."

  "What ended it?"

  "I got enough money and enough inside information to do the stunts I told you about. It was essentially the same, except that Bobby had enough to retire, so I let him. I would get the loan myself, and would default on it myself, but first I made sure that Cyrus Curbstone had seen enough of me so that he didn't want my loan brought to the police."

  "How did you get caught?"

  "I bought a savings and loan," Mary said. "Big mistake. I thought I knew more than I did. I didn't know when to set fire to the place and get on a plane."

  "Why are you telling me all this now?"

  "I want you to know," Mary said.

  "Know what?"

  "Why I held on to the money when I was caught and the feds wanted it back. Why I told you I didn't have it when I needed your help and any sane person would have given it up to stay alive. It wasn't because I needed to have a lot of money hidden someplace where I'll probably never see it again; it's because of what I had to do to get it."

  "But why now?"

  "Because now that I know enough to want to give it up, I can't give it up. He wouldn't take it and let me go, would he?"

  "No."

  "He would take it and insist there was more, and when I couldn't give him any more, all he could do was kill me."

  "Yes."

  "And he'll never give up, will he?"

  "No," said Jane. "He won't."

  "And if I go t
o the police and tell them he's been chasing me, what I'm telling them is that he might be trying to steal fifty million dollars. That's no crime, but I'm admitting that I still have it. I'm the only one who will go to jail, and he'll still be free to kill me."

  "Fifty million dollars." Jane returned to taping her cards into the lining of her purse. "You'll make good bait."

  "Yes," Mary said, "I will."

  22

  When Jane and Mary left Cleveland they were carrying suitcases that were much larger than they needed to hold the few outfits they had bought, because they had more shopping to do in Chicago. The first item they selected at the electronics store was a small video camera with automatic focus and a zoom lens. The second was a directional microphone. The brochure that went with the microphone described the wonderful capability it offered for recording bird songs without coming close enough to disturb the little creatures. The copy obviously had been composed in order to protect the company from becoming a co-defendant in some criminal proceeding. Jane tested a number of voice-activated tape recorders, and when she had settled on the best, she told the salesman to write up a bill for two.

  While he was busy doing this, Mary whispered, "Why two?"

  Jane answered, "Because I don't think having a conversation with Barraclough is something I'll want to try twice if the first recorder doesn't catch every word."

  Jane bought a used Toyota in Chicago under the name Catherine Snowdon. It was five years old, had one previous owner who had kept it greased, oiled, and maintained, but it had a sporty red exterior. She drove it off the lot to a one-day spray shop and had it painted gray for five hundred dollars. Then she picked up Mary at the motel and turned west onto Route 80. It was winter now, and if they were going to travel by road, it had to be a big one.

  For six days they drove the interstate through Davenport, Des Moines, Omaha, Grand Island, North Platte, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City. Just before Reno they turned south down 395 along the east side of the Sierras to the desert. Jane checked them into a motel in San Bernardino near the entrance to I-10, rested for a day, and studied the maps of Los Angeles County. The next day she drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles, reported the sale of Catherine Snowdon's car to Katherine Webster, a resident of Los Angeles, and picked up a set of California plates.