by Thomas Perry
“So you think that they were set up with whatever they needed ahead of time, before they got the insurance money, but Lydia King wasn’t.”
“Right.” Stillman added, “What she looks like is a person who did some service, then got a ten percent payoff and a good-bye.”
“When did McClaren’s hire you?”
“Right about at that point,” said Stillman. “They got nervous when the second Alan Werfel showed up. They looked at their canceled check, saw it had been deposited at B. of A. They called and found out the account was drained. They tried to get in touch with Ellen Snyder, learned she was gone, and went from nervous to agitated.”
“And you did all this tracing?”
“Me?” asked Stillman in surprise. “Not personally. I just kind of diverted some of the people at McClaren’s, and when they got in over their heads, I hired some subcontractors. I hate chasing paper around.”
“What else have you got?”
“I’d say that it comes down to the disappearance of Ellen Snyder.”
“You think she got her ten percent and ran off with a suitcase full of wigs.”
“Do you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why—instinct?”
Walker began to pace. “More than that.”
Stillman spoke patiently. “You said you liked her. Haven’t you ever noticed that on the TV news, every time a con artist gets arrested, they interview five or six old ladies who say, ‘She was such a nice, sweet girl. I would never have believed it.’ That’s why they call them that. They get your confidence.”
Walker said, “I know. I’ve been trying to pretend I don’t know her. I just say, ‘Okay, these people exist, and you have to use another way to figure out whether you’ve met one.’ She spent two years with the company, six months of it with me in training. What did she make?”
Stillman searched through his pile of folders until he found one that had a stamp that said PERSONNEL—CONFIDENTIAL on it. He scanned a few pages, then looked up. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Walker waved the question away impatiently. “I won’t be jealous. I haven’t missed any meals.”
“The first six months after training, she had a salary of thirty-seven thousand, so she actually got eighteen-five. She also got commissions adding up to sixty-two thousand.”
“In six months?”
Stillman said, “She probably sold a dozen policies to relatives.”
Walker smiled and nodded. “How about the next full year, after she ran out of relatives?”
“She got promoted to assistant manager at fifty thousand, and made a hundred and forty-four thousand in commissions.”
Walker sat down on the bed, took the folder, and looked at the figures for himself. “Jesus,” he muttered. Then he slapped the folder shut and collected himself, stood, and returned to pacing. “That makes it even clearer. She was young, single, and had hardly any expenses. Her apartment is even smaller and crummier than mine. She was following a plan, and it’s hard to imagine how it could be going any better. Onto those figures you have to add the value of the company health insurance, the retirement plan, the—”
“What’s your point?”
“The money isn’t enough.”
“A million, two hundred thousand?” asked Stillman. “At age twenty-four?”
“Right,” said Walker. “She made nearly two hundred last year, plus, say, twenty-five percent in benefits. That’s two-fifty. The money she would have gotten for stealing, if she invested it at eight percent, would bring her ninety-six thousand a year. She’d be living on less than half her former income. She would also have to give up everything she already had—her savings, past retirement contributions, free health insurance, whatever possessions she couldn’t carry. If you forget everything except that she’s bright enough to do these calculations in her head, then it’s a deal she would never consider.” He stopped pacing, turned to Stillman, and held out both hands, as though waiting for applause.
“Does the term ‘immediate gratification’ mean anything to you?” asked Stillman.
“To me, yes. If it meant anything to her, I might have had more luck with her. She’s a person with a plan that’s going to pay off over a twenty-year period, remember?”
“Suppose she had an immediate need,” said Stillman. “She could have a gambling problem, a drug problem, some vulnerability to blackmail. Hell, they could have walked in with those papers and said, ‘Sign off on this or your kitty-cat dies.’ ”
“You’ve been investigating—or duping other people into investigating. Do you believe any of that?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” said Stillman. “It doesn’t feel like blackmail: nobody who blackmails you wants to get paid off in women’s clothes and wigs.” He frowned. “But Ellen Snyder has no history of knowing the sort of people who do this kind of crime, so it’s hard to just fall into it. There’s also the fact that she had visitors in her apartment before we got there. Friends don’t usually come in through your locked kitchen window. But it’s possible she could have been young and naive enough to make the mistake of becoming an unprotected, unarmed woman with over a million in her suitcase.” He lay back on Walker’s bed and stared at the ceiling. “She’s the one part of this that bothers me.”
“The rest of it doesn’t? Werfel conveniently losing his license and passport and everything just after his father died and not reporting it?”
Stillman shook his head. “I told you I looked into the old man’s death. Then I thought of Werfel the Younger. It could work: Alan Werfel files his claim with Ellen Snyder, and cashes his check. Then he kidnaps or otherwise gets rid of Ellen Snyder. He comes back to the office and says to Winters, ‘Here I am. I’d like my check, please.’ Then nobody fools around with false identities, forges any signatures, and so on. Very neat.”
“That didn’t happen?”
“No. Werfel senior was in Santa Fe, but Werfel junior was in Italy. He got a call, used a credit card to buy a plane ticket and the passport to get off the plane in New York. He then used the credit card again to buy a ticket from New York to Santa Fe. He got off the plane in Santa Fe, got whisked away to the father’s house by relatives, then cared for by servants for the next five days while he’s moping around the place. Then there’s the funeral, and a lot more grieving friends and relatives, some of whom stayed on for four days. That puts him in Santa Fe when the other Alan Werfel was in Pasadena. He stays there, in fact, until the family attorney shows up to go over his father’s papers with him. The lawyer tells him the various things he’s got to get done—among them, filing an insurance claim. The call to Winters was from Santa Fe. It’s on the phone bill.”
“And all that time, he didn’t miss his ID?”
“You don’t need a passport to visit New Mexico, and you don’t need a wallet if you don’t leave the house. He seems to have figured the servants who unpacked his bags left his stuff in some drawer. He had them searching the house for it for a day before he called the credit card companies and the DMV and the police. These calls didn’t exactly result in a manhunt. There hadn’t been any charges on his cards since the plane ticket to New Mexico, so everybody figured it was a simple loss, not a theft.”
“But how in the world did it happen? Where did it happen?”
“My guess is Kennedy Airport. He’s at the ticket counter. He just got off an eight-hour flight, and he’s waiting to buy a ticket for a five-hour flight. He’s slow and dull and tired. He’s also distracted, because his father just kicked. You saw how he dresses. He’s probably got a six-hundred-dollar flight bag on the floor by his feet. He pulls out a soft leather wallet containing the passport, credit cards, and money. He hands the airline clerk his plutonium card, gets it back, and now he’s got tickets, the wallet, and so on in his hands while he’s trying to move away from the counter. He screws up. Maybe he slips the wallet into his bag and turns his back, or puts it in a pocket that a thief can reach—which is any
pocket—and the thief sees which one it is. Or maybe later he sets the bag on a conveyor belt at the metal detectors and loses sight of it while some guy has to go through over and over again. It doesn’t matter. You can’t be in a major airport without being watched by pros, and he would have been Victim Number One in just about any crowd of ten thousand. It could have happened anywhere, but my guess is Kennedy.”
“Okay,” said Walker. “He’s rich, he looks rich, he’s exhausted and distraught, so he’s the one who gets robbed. But how did they know about his father’s life insurance policy? They didn’t get that by picking his pocket in an airport.”
Stillman shook his head. “No help there. If you steal the wallet of a guy like Alan Werfel, you run a credit check to see what else he’s got that you can steal. If you try it on Alan Werfel, you’ll see that his lists trust funds with his father as trustee. The address on his entry is his father’s house in Santa Fe.”
“But it certainly doesn’t list his father’s life insurance.”
“It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows rich people have insurance, and if you want to know the specifics, they’re easy to find out. Andrew Werfel was an old, rich guy. Every time he filled out a loan application, a disclosure form to be on the board of directors of some company, or got sued in the last twenty years, that cash-value insurance got included. It found its way into the databases of a lot of companies that sell lists of desirable customers. He also got a divorce from Alan’s mother a few years ago. The insurance policy was listed in the material the lawyers filed for division of assets. That means anybody who has an Internet account can call up the case and read it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” said Stillman. “There are other reasons to avoid getting a divorce too, in case you were considering one. I’ll go into that another time if I think you need it.”
“I can wait,” said Walker.
“What I’m saying is, it took me about fifteen minutes to get from the social security card in Werfel’s wallet to the life insurance policy,” said Stillman. “But keep thinking that way. You may hit something.”
“What does all this leave to investigate?”
“Ellen Snyder.”
“I’ve told you everything I know about her.”
“No you haven’t.”
Walker stared at him with narrowed eyes, his arms and shoulders tensed. Then he let out a deep breath. “No,” he said. “I haven’t. She was more important to me than I said. There was a bit more to it.”
Stillman shrugged. “I know.”
“How?”
“I heard it too many times from too many people around your office, in too many versions, to ignore it.”
Walker’s brow furrowed. “What did they say?”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Stillman. “What’s the truth?”
Walker sat down on the bed. “I came to San Francisco just before the training class started. I was in a new city, in a part of the country where I’d never been before. I remember when I started college, everybody was alone in the same way, and people were desperate. There was a kind of hysteria in the first week to meet everybody you could. People walked the campus sending out smiles in all directions like SOS signals. By the end of the second week, they had met people, combined into cliques, and the emergency was over. I don’t know what I expected when I came to San Francisco: I knew I could handle it, whatever it was. But cities aren’t like campuses, and being a grown-up isn’t the same as being a student. I arrived, and everybody was already settled, had jobs, families, friends, houses. I thought, ‘Sure. Of course.’ I rented a cheap apartment, showed up at McClaren’s, and got put in the training class.”
“And you met Ellen Snyder.”
“Yeah,” said Walker. “She attracted my attention for no particular reason except that she was pretty. You saw her picture. But when I talked to her I kind of felt at home, and that was better than pretty. When she smiled, it looked as though she was glad to see me, and I think she was. I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but she wasn’t just an instant friend, a person you meet that you find you can talk to. She was like a relative who already knows all about you, and was just waiting for you to drop by. We talked for hours, the way people do, but there was never any need to start at zero and explain what it was like where I came from, or any of that. She knew. Maybe it was because she came from a place that wasn’t very different. When she talked to you, it wasn’t like talking to a strange girl. She was like somebody’s sister: she knew you well enough not to be especially impressed, but she understood what she knew well enough to realize you weren’t so bad, either. After I’d talked to her a couple of times, somebody or other mentioned that she wasn’t attached to anybody, so I asked her out.”
“You told me that.”
“I told you she shot me down after the first time. She didn’t. It went on for a while. When you start training they give you all these loose-leaf notebooks full of manuals about business procedures, company policies, computer systems, sample forms, and so on. There are tests. We spent evenings together studying, went out a few times, went to lunch a lot, things like that. You asked before if we had sex. We did. It went on for almost two months. Then she stopped seeing me.”
“How does this change what you said before?”
Walker squinted in frustration. “I didn’t just start thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about it for over a year, and it’s hard to slice out the parts you want. While it was going on, I noticed that it was different from anything I’d felt before. I don’t mean I was happy to be with her. I couldn’t get her out of my mind when I wasn’t with her. I was up nights, then I’d be ready to go to the class at five-thirty just on the off chance that she’d be there early too. If I thought of something funny, I would save it, not tell anybody so she could be the one I told. I wasn’t ready for all this—it came so soon after I arrived, so easily. I let what I knew make me stop trusting what I felt.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was like a textbook case. You’re in a strange city, alone and lost, doing a job you’re not that happy about. You meet this girl who is in the same position, and you seem to hit it off and miraculously become closer than you’ve ever been with anyone. Miraculously—that’s the problem. It’s exactly what people warn you about: people in situations like that are vulnerable, lonely, eager to connect with anybody. They jump into big decisions, and then later regret them. Maybe they hurt somebody in a way they can’t fix.” He could see Stillman wasn’t especially respectful of his thinking, but he at least understood. “It wasn’t until she stopped seeing me that I admitted to myself that I was in love.”
Stillman sighed. “Back up. The breakup is what I’ve got to know about. How did it happen?”
“She just stopped. There wasn’t one of those talks where she said we weren’t right for each other, or that nonsense they always give you about being friends. There was no argument about anything. I’ve gone over and over what I said and did, and what she said and did, and there was nothing. She just stopped. No real explanation. I would ask her out, and she was happy to talk to me, but she wouldn’t go. I would go to where we used to eat lunch alone together, and she would still show up to eat with me, but bring five or six other people with her to the table. She would treat us all the same.”
“Are you sure you didn’t miss something?”
“I’m sure. I tried ignoring her and staying out of her way, and she would come and talk to me. But it was as though she had amnesia, and forgot everything that had gone on between us. It was the way it had been before we got together. She was this nice, friendly girl who was in my training class.”
“Another guy?”
Walker shook his head. “There was still a month or two of classes left. I saw her every day, couldn’t keep my eyes off her. There was never any guy around her. And she was always available at night for dinners or parties the whole group went to, even if somebody thought of it at the last minute. S
he always arrived alone and went home alone.”
Stillman mused, “I suppose you’ve got to be right. A few of those people would have been falling all over each other to be the first to tell you, if there had been somebody. Didn’t you press her to find out what was bothering her?”
Walker looked down, uncomfortable. “Sure. It’s funny. At the time, what she said struck me as a lie—not exactly untrue, but as beside the point, an evasion. She said that she had come to San Francisco to take the training class, and do as well as she could so she could go off to her job at a field office and be successful at it. She said she had loved the time we spent alone together—her words—and would always remember it, but she was leaving for Pasadena soon, and had to concentrate on the future.”
“I don’t think it was a lie either,” said Stillman. “I think she said what she meant.” He glanced at Walker. “I’ll bet it killed you.”
Walker nodded, then focused on Stillman. “But that was a while ago, and I’m over it.”
“Why did you tell me now?”
“It’s why I decided to come with you,” said Walker. “I know her. I thought it might be easier to convince you she was innocent if you didn’t know that I was once in love with her. I also believe in privacy. I think that telling any stranger who asks that you had sex with somebody is a betrayal.”
“You thought I might be down here trying to frame her,” said Stillman.
“It had crossed my mind,” said Walker. “It’s the only way that a person like Ellen could get in trouble. I decided tonight that what you’ve been trying to do was figure out what really happened. So I’m telling you everything. I didn’t just meet Ellen in class and take her out to dinner once. I got to be very close to her, spent a couple of months watching her and listening to everything she said and turning it over and over in my mind. Then I spent a year afterward double-checking to figure out what went wrong. You’re investigating her? Well, I already did: she’s not somebody who commits insurance fraud.”
Stillman sighed. “Maybe. Do you at least agree with me that the next thing we ought to do is find her?”