Death Benefits

by Thomas Perry

  Suddenly the big oak door opened, and Walker realized that the flash of gray beyond it was his first glimpse of the man who ran the company where he had worked for two years. Rex McClaren was as tall as Walker, dressed in a gray suit. Walker could see wrinkles around the pale blue-gray eyes as he looked at Stillman and smiled. His hair looked as though it had turned gray early, because his face was not old enough to go with it. His voice was a deep, quiet one with a slight accent that Walker associated with prep schools in New England. “Max,” he said. “Sorry to hold you up. I hope I didn’t break your stride.”

  “It’s okay,” said Stillman. He looked at Walker and began to raise his hand toward him, as though to begin an introduction.

  McClaren was too quick. “Ah,” he interrupted. “John Walker.” He stepped forward and gave Walker’s hand a firm, hard shake. Walker saw that the smile made the wrinkles around the eyes return.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Walker mumbled.

  McClaren looked puzzled, and in his confusion he reminded Walker of one of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania, mildly embarrassed at his mistake but comfortable in his admission: his position proved that any mistake of his was caused by the press of great matters, not by mere stupidity. “Oh, I guess that’s right. We haven’t met. I’ve seen you around, but I don’t ever seem to get down to analysis lately.” The word “lately” clearly meant during Walker’s short career. “Joyce likes to run the place without any intrusion from on high. Good to meet you.”

  Walker nodded, but said nothing because his mind was stumbling over new impressions. He had never seen McClaren before, and he wondered how McClaren had seen him. He obviously had a long-standing relationship with Joyce Hazelton, but Walker couldn’t remember anything she’d said to him that would have revealed that she had met McClaren. But even more mystifying was the oddly familiar tone between McClaren and Stillman.

  McClaren looked at Stillman, his eyebrows rising as though they had something to do with listening. Stillman was up. “We just stopped by to get your blessing, Rex. We won’t hold you up.”

  McClaren half-grinned, but there was a question behind it. “You’ve got it,” he said. “But don’t worry about holding me up. I thought you guys had a plane to catch.”

  Stillman glanced at his watch. “Oh, thanks. Yeah, we’d better do it.” He raised his eyes to Walker. “You have any questions while we’re here?”

  Walker shook his head. “Thanks for taking the time to see us,” he said to McClaren. He retreated, with as much dignity as he could manufacture, toward the elevators.

  The car was out of the garage, a mile away, and accelerating onto the 101 before Walker said, “What’s going on?”

  “I’m afraid our hope of lunch is fading. We’ll concentrate on making the plane.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “My investigation just turned something up,” said Stillman. “Somebody from McClaren Life and Casualty has to go with me to check it out. That’s you.”

  “Why me?”

  Stillman slipped into the left lane and flashed past a line of cars, then veered to the right and shot through an opening into a clear space ahead. “I need someone who really works for the company, who knows a little about what goes on in all parts of it, and who can disappear from his cubicle for a while without having the company fall apart. I also need somebody who knows Snyder.”

  “Ellen Snyder?” said Walker. “This is about her?” He was shocked, pained.

  “There. You do know her.”

  “She was in my training class,” said Walker. “There were sixty of us, and I don’t know her any better than the others do.” He heard himself say it, and was surprised that his first, almost automatic response was a lie.

  “I interviewed a few candidates, and I had to settle for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not a psychological mess.”

  “Who is?”

  Stillman looked at him in irritation. “The rest of them. They’re hiding behind layers and layers of bullshit. I ask them where they were born, and they say, ‘I’ll check and get back to you.’ I ask them if they filled out some stupid form in a file, and they tell me who they told to do it for them. They’re so ambitious for the next promotion that they can hardly think about what they’re doing for the next ten minutes.”

  Walker began to compose a defense for them, but he realized that all he would be able to come up with was “Being ambitious doesn’t make somebody a psychological mess.” This was not exactly true, or not always true, so he was silent.

  Stillman said, “I’m afraid for people like that. And if they’re on my side, I’ve got to be afraid for me, too. I’m going to have to teach my partner a few things as we go, and I don’t have time to go back to the beginning.”

  “Partner?” Walker protested.

  “Did I say ‘partner’? It’s a figure of speech,” Stillman said.

  Walker assembled his arguments and began to touch them off, one by one. “I am a data analyst. I was hired to work in the insurance business, not in security, or whatever you call it.”

  “Then maybe you ought to know more about insurance,” said Stillman. “The problem with insuring against theft is that you can’t always cover yourself against loss by raising premiums. Once in a great while, you have to leave your cubicle and go convince some actual thieves that you won’t put up with it.”

  “You’re joking.” Having detected no change in Stillman’s expression, Walker began to worry that he wasn’t. He found himself remembering woolly tidbits of propaganda from his training class: the agent on the Malaysian ship who had held a sawed-off shotgun to the captain’s head to keep him from surrendering to the pirates. What Stillman was saying made a certain surreal sense. “What, exactly, would you want me to do?”

  “Most likely, not a thing,” said Stillman. “I think it’s a case of fraud. We verify that I’m right, collect some leads, and turn everything over to the police. It’s a terrific deal for you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “McClaren’s is an old-fashioned company,” said Stillman. “You’ve been around for a couple of years, so you must have noticed that much.”

  Walker said, “It’s the only insurance company I’ve ever worked for.”

  “The company is what Wall Street calls ‘closely held.’ That means that the forty percent of the stock that isn’t owned outright by people named McClaren is in blocks held by spindly-looking horse-faced daughters with different married names, their heirs, and their descendants.”

  “That much I know,” said Walker.

  “Well, every twenty years or so, they all get together for a picnic in the back yard of the old house on Nob Hill and decide who in the next generation ought to be president. They thank the last one and send him off to spend the rest of his life shooting clay pigeons, sailing boats, or raising grapes on a vineyard in Napa.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Rex, the one you just met, is the third generation of the family that’s hired me to do odd jobs, and he’s probably the last I’ll see, because he’s younger than I am. It doesn’t matter. He’s so much like his grandfather and his uncle that I know what he’ll say before he does. The point is, the company doesn’t change, and they do pretty much what they want.”

  “I’m not clear on what this has to do with me.”

  “You like your job. The pay is decent. If you’re at a cocktail party and some girl asks you what you do, you can say ‘I work at McClaren’s’ and she will have heard of it and think you must be pretty respectable. And while I was in the building, I noticed your bosses don’t pay much attention to you, so you probably are. If you want to, the McClarens will probably let you stay in that cubicle until you’re seventy, and pay you a little more each year. You’ll get promoted to Joyce Hazelton’s job when she retires.”

  “Is that the terrific deal you’re talking about? That I don’t get fired from my job if I go with you?”
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br />   “Well, it’s not so bad, is it?” said Stillman. “But there’s a fast track, and while you were stumbling around, you blindly stepped on the low end of it. A company like McClaren’s will always need a lot of workers, but they’re always looking for a small, steady supply of players.”

  “Players?”

  “Gamblers,” said Stillman. “Insurance is just gambling, with the bets in writing. They’re the guys the rest of us see when we think of McClaren’s, the steely-eyed bastards in the dark suits you talk to if you want to insure your fireworks display or your oil-drilling rig. McClaren’s doesn’t recruit them from outside. They just hire a bunch of young people to do jobs like yours, and wait to see which ones grow into the suit.”

  “And going with you is going to prove I’m a steely-eyed bastard and get me promoted?”

  “Hell no,” said Stillman. “You get to spend a couple of days out of your box telling me what the little numbers on an insurance policy mean, and you get credit with McClaren’s for showing promise.”

  Walker nodded sagely. “What I get is points with McClaren for being a risk taker without taking any risks.” He paused. “Of course, if I don’t go, then I’m already marked: I’m not promising.”

  Stillman shrugged. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t pick the business you’re in.”

  Walker glared at him. “But you did pick me, and told the president of the company that you had picked me, without asking me if I even wanted this golden opportunity.”

  Stillman grinned and slapped Walker’s shoulder, making the car take a dangerous wobble on the freeway. “There we go. That’s what got you into this. You cut right through the smoke and figured out who did what, and you’re not afraid to shove it up my nose. I don’t know if you’re a promising insurance executive or not, and I certainly don’t care. You’re good enough for this.”

  Walker’s jaw muscles worked compulsively as he stared at the entrance to the airport parking area. “I know. I remind you of yourself at this age,” he muttered.

  Stillman’s head swiveled so he could stare at Walker in surprise. “Not even remotely. Whatever mistakes your parents made, that much they did right.”

  He pulled into a space too quickly, stopped the car with a jolt so it rocked forward, then went around to the trunk. He snatched a small suitcase, slammed the lid, and set off toward the terminal.

  Walker got out of the passenger seat, closed the door, put his hands in his pockets, and stared at the pavement for a moment. The choices seemed to have narrowed in a very short time: either he could walk to the terminal, take a cab back to town, and start looking for a job, or he could start running to catch up with Stillman.

  Walker began to saunter slowly across the broad parking lot. He thought about Stillman, and he savored his suspicion and resentment, but he recognized that he was only thinking about Stillman so he would not think of Ellen. For the past eighteen months, when he was tired or off-guard, anything might remind him: a woman’s laugh he heard coming from a half-closed door in a corridor of the McClaren building, the sight of a couple about his age who were in love but were still nervous with each other because they didn’t seem quite to trust the feeling yet. He could bring back the sight of Ellen without closing his eyes. Stillman had said this involved her. What could Stillman possibly be investigating that involved Ellen?

  After a few paces, he noticed that something was wrong with his feet. They were moving faster than he had intended, and after a few more paces he had to take his hands out of his pockets to keep his balance, and then he was jogging, pumping his arms to bring up his speed.

  4

  There were no assigned seats on the plane, and when the passengers boarded, Walker realized his pass was in a different “zone” from Stillman’s. Stillman sat near the front, and Walker found the only empty seat, beside a young curly-haired woman who seemed to view his arrival with disappointment. She had placed her purse, a shopping bag, and a couple of magazines on his seat, and now she sighed and slowly gathered them onto her lap.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She said nothing, just occupied herself with stuffing the magazines into the seat pocket in front of her, then tried to jam the shopping bag and the purse under the seat in front with her backpack, all the time eyeing Walker’s feet resentfully.

  Walker could not see Stillman from where he sat, but he was aware of him up ahead, and he felt an impatience that he could not find out what he was thinking. Why would he need somebody who knew Ellen Snyder?

  The question shifted Walker’s attention from Stillman and held it on Ellen. As always, she returned in short, meaningless fragments of memory, never still, but in motion: a few strands of blond hair straying across her left eye while she was talking, and then her hand would flit up to push them away. He wasn’t always sure that he had seen precisely what he was remembering, that it had been chemically fixed in his brain on some occasion, because sometimes the memory couldn’t be identified with a specific time and place. Other times, the memory was clear and certain. He could see her on Market Street. It was after class in the late afternoon. She had seen the cable car coming. “There it is. We can catch it!” She had kept her eyes on it, tapped his chest with her small hand, and he could feel it again, fluttering insistently against him six times in a second before her first steps had taken it away, and she had broken into a run toward the stop. He had followed more slowly, because he had wanted to watch her. He remembered that exactly—the blue sweater she had been wearing, the tight skirt and flat shoes—because that had been the day after the first time they had kissed. He had watched her all day, expecting her to be different somehow: maybe softer and more affectionate, or in a nightmare version, strange and distant because she had regretted it afterward. He had not detected any change at all. She had been exactly the same, exuding happy energy, intense interest in what she saw around her, but neither uncomfortable with him nor detectably more interested.

  Walker banished the memory and tried to discern what Stillman was doing. What if Stillman suspected her of something, some kind of malfeasance? He had mentioned her, and said they were going to L.A. to collect evidence about fraud. The idea that Walker would participate in an expedition to harm Ellen was insane. The simplest thing to do would be to get off the plane, tell Stillman that he’d once had a personal relationship with Ellen and was not the right choice for this assignment, then get on the next flight home.

  Instantly he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to do that. Stillman was an unknown. If Walker simply left, then Ellen would find herself alone in the middle of his surprise investigation, with no advocate, and probably no witnesses. And what were Stillman’s limits, his rules? He wasn’t a cop or something. He was just some kind of private security expert. The company could hardly be relied on to keep him under control: Stillman seemed to have a lifelong social connection with the president’s family.

  The flight to Los Angeles was short, so Walker sat still and waited it out, fighting images that intruded themselves on his consciousness. He imagined himself walking into Ellen’s office with Stillman, and looking into her eyes. The friendly, happy manner she’d had when he’d last seen her would vanish. She would detest him. He was going to come into her office looking like some kind of informer. She might even think that after she had dropped him, he had developed some weird scheme to get revenge by destroying her career.

  Once again he considered simply getting himself out of this before she knew he had been involved. Seeing him with Stillman would destroy any respect that she had for him. Then he reminded himself of the facts. She had dumped him over a year and a half ago, well before the training period had ended. She had not changed her mind before she had left for her first post. She had not called him after that, or sent him a note. It was over.

  Going along to make sure she was safe was a neutral, disinterested act that had nothing to do with any present or future relationship. It was simply necessary because in the course of their past relationship he
had come to understand her well enough to know she was not dishonest. She wasn’t a lover, and she never would be again. It didn’t matter what she thought of him now. If it turned out that she needed an advocate, he would be there. Just as he was succumbing to a fantasy in which he cleared her name, she learned of it afterward, and appeared unexpectedly in San Francisco with gratitude that knew no bounds, his ears popped.

  The plane was descending threateningly, moving in toward the runway. In a moment it bounced once and rattled to a stop. Walker overcame his impulse to hurry to keep up with Stillman.

  Stillman was waiting for him near the end of the boarding tunnel, but while they walked, he did not speak. Walker noticed that at the car-rental counter downstairs, Stillman merely claimed a car that he had somehow reserved. He had been behaving as though he had received a telephone call at McClaren’s and run for the airport. Maybe he had, and he had called ahead from the plane. But Walker determined to remember these small discrepancies until he could perceive a pattern that was unambiguous.

  Stillman sat behind the wheel and drove out onto Century Boulevard. Twice Walker caught Stillman staring at him. Finally, Stillman said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  Walker said, “Nothing. Nothing new, anyway. What are we doing?”

  “I told you. Investigating.”

  Walker reviewed his question and admitted to himself that asking questions was a bad strategy. No matter what the answer had been, it would not have changed what he was doing, which was sitting in the passenger seat letting Stillman drag him wherever he pleased until he was sure Ellen was not in trouble.