Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead

by Perry, Thomas

  “How did that work out?”

  “Not so great. In order to convict, they had to take the judge and jury through all these loan papers, land-flips, asset appraisals, and files. The average person can barely follow his own taxes. All this paper was written up to fool qualified accountants. The paper made most of these guys look like victims. For all I know plenty of them were. About a third got off. and of the others only about half got convicted of anything that carried jail time. The average sentence was three years.”

  “You said they were picked so there could be civil suits. Didn’t they still have to face that?”

  “Sure, but they all said they were broke. Even if they had a hundred million dollars in a box under their bed, they also had papers to show they owed somebody two hundred million.”

  “I know the government confiscated land and buildings and things. They’ve been selling them off for years.”

  “If you read that much, you don’t have to ask me how that’s going. The savings and loans the government took over were the worst, because that was all they had enough money for. The worst were ones where somebody had pulled land-flips to jack up an acre in the middle of a toxic waste dump from a thousand dollars to a million, and had a shady contractor put a substandard building on it so they could jack up the price of the land all around it.”

  “It’s an interesting story,” said Jane, “but it’s history. It’s been over for years.”

  “Oh?” said Mary Perkins. “Then let me ask you something. Where is it?”

  “What?”

  “The money.”

  “It wasn’t real to begin with, was it? If you take something that’s worth a thousand dollars and say it’s worth a million, and then it goes back to a thousand, nothing happened.”

  “Something happened. Somebody walked out the door clutching a check for a million dollars he didn’t have before, so he got a profit of nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand. The collateral wasn’t real, but the money he got from the bank was. He didn’t even have to pay taxes on it. A loan isn’t income. It’s a deduction.”

  “I forgot about that for a second.”

  “Sure you did. You’re supposed to. Everybody gets used to the idea that money is gooey, flexible stuff. They talk about it inflating and deflating and flowing and being liquid. No reason why it can’t evaporate.”

  “Somebody got it, but if nobody can put his hand on it, then it did evaporate. So that part of it is over.”

  “It’s not over,” said Mary Perkins. “We’re just moving into the second round now.”

  “What’s the second round? The ten thousand who got away are still doing it?”

  “No. Let’s say a lull has settled over the borrowing industry. There’s no such thing as a savings and loan anymore. The ones that are left are just banks that haven’t changed their names yet. That goose has been killed.

  Scams always work best in boom times, when everybody’s too busy to do much checking, almost any business you say you’re in might make a profit, and the value of any kind of collateral is going up. But there’s still unfinished business.”

  “Then what’s unfinished?”

  “I’ll give you another typical case: a guy who got into the borrowing business right after the law changed. He didn’t amount to much before that. The government shuts him down in ‘eighty-nine or ‘ninety when they take over the S and L he was borrowing from. He weasels around during the four years it takes to prepare a noose for him. His lawyer and the prosecutor work out a plea bargain. He’ll cooperate in the investigation, do six months for one count of making a false statement on a loan form, and settle for twenty million in damages.”

  “The government bought that?”

  “Would you?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did they. If he’s offering twenty, he’s got forty. The only way he could have gotten it is by stealing it. They take him to court. He’s convicted. He gets his standard three-year sentence and is ordered to repay fifty million dollars. He says he’s broke. They say, ‘No way is this man broke.’ They lock him up and look for hidden accounts, fake names, the rest of it. They find nothing. He serves his three years. Some time during those three years the statute of limitations runs out on everything he did at the bank.”

  “You mean he’s free? Nobody can do anything?”

  “He can never be charged again by the government for the crimes he committed in getting the money. Of course he still can’t show that he’s got twenty or forty or a hundred million. He’s still got the judgment against him for that much, and swearing he didn’t have it was a new crime. But generally speaking, his legal problems are over. Now he’s got illegal problems.”

  “What are those?”

  “Well, let’s study this guy. He got only a three-year sentence for the following reasons.” She ticked them off on her long, thin fingers, the nails looking like knife points. “He has never committed any offense before. He is clearly not armed or violent or dangerous. He has no known connection with organized crime or the drug trade. Everybody who ever heard his name thinks he’s got a fortune, but federal investigators who sniff out money for a living didn’t find it. What does all that mean to you?”

  “It means he’s got the money pretty well hidden.”

  “Good for you. You win a trip to the Caribbean.” Jane looked closely at Mary Perkins. “I think I know what his illegal problems are.”

  “Yes,” said Mary Perkins. “He’s not violent enough to scare anybody off and he’s got no connections that are worth anything. If you steal his umpteen million he can’t even call the police because he’d have to tell them he had that kind of money, and this time his sentence wouldn’t be three years; it’d be more like thirty. He’s the perfect victim.” After a long pause Mary Perkins added, “He’s a lot like me.”

  6

  Jane drove along the dark highway skillfully, sometimes lingering in the wake of a big eighteen-wheel truck for many minutes if the driver was pushing to make time, and sometimes moving out into the other lanes to slither between drifting cars where the truck wasn’t nimble enough to navigate. Always she stayed within a few miles an hour of the rest of the traffic to keep from tempting the state police, but almost always she was the one who was passing. It was difficult to study and recognize the headlights coming up from behind, so she kept them back there. Now and then she would see one of the exceptions coming up fast in the rearview mirror, and she would evacuate the lane he seemed to prefer and find a space in the center, where she could move to either side if he swerved toward her, and waited there until he had gone on his way.

  “Why aren’t you saying anything?” asked Mary Perkins.

  “I’m waiting to hear your story.”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me a lot of stuff about how you used to steal money. You didn’t tell me anything about yourself. I thought you were just warming up to it.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mary Perkins,” she answered, the annoyance making her voice strain. “I told you that in the ladies’ room in Los Angeles.”

  “Okay,” said Jane quietly. She drove in silence for a long time.

  “Oh,” said Mary Perkins brightly. “You mean the one I was born with. I haven’t used it in years, so it sounds strange when I say it: Lily Smith.”

  “What made you pick Mary Perkins?”

  “Well, I was in a business where it didn’t seem to be a good idea to use the name on my birth certificate. Smith is okay, but it sounds like an alias. Perkins is the kind of name that makes the mark think good thoughts. Mary Perkins is Mary Poppins, with ‘perk,’ which is peppy and cheerful instead of ‘pop,’ which is unpredictable. And ‘kins’ is sweet and innocent, like babykins and lambkins. Also, all names that end with ‘kins’ are Anglo-Saxon in a homespun straight-from-the-farm sort of way, not in the my-ancestors-were-on-the-Mayflower way.”

  “And Mary is just from Mary
Poppins?”

  She smiled. “It’s kind of hard to find anything that sounds more innocent.”

  “The word immaculate comes to mind,” said Jane.

  “Well, there’s that side of it, of course,” said Mary Perkins. “But there are other things that aren’t quite as obvious. First, Mary says ‘mother.’ In fact, it says ‘mother of somebody important.’ And it’s common and feminine. See, if you’re going to rob banks – ” She stopped, as though she realized it was going to be hard to make herself understood, then started over. “Did you ever take a look at the way your bank is set up?”

  “I think I have,” said Jane.

  “You’ve got the open floor, which is just there to make you think the bank is big and solid. Then you see the people. At the tellers’ counter there are twenty women and a couple of men too young to shave. Then there are a few desks behind that, where everybody is always on the phone. Those are usually women in their fifties. They look like chaperones, there to supervise the twenty women and two boys up front, and to smooth over mistakes.”

  “I take it those aren’t the people you were trying to impress.”

  “Not if what you came for is money. When you get behind those desks, there are offices. Sometimes they’re not even on the same floor. But somewhere down a long, quiet, carpeted hallway there will be a huge wooden desk with nothing on it except a couple of those old-fashioned black pens that stick up out of a marble slab, and a lamp with a green shade. Behind that desk will be a middle-aged man. See, banks are in layers. You can meet fifty-two senior executive vice presidents, and all of them are women. You’ve got to resist the temptation to tell them enough so that they can say no, and hold out until you see this man.”

  “And Mary was for him?”

  “Yes. It’s straightforward, short, and unpretentious. It’s not a nickname. It’s not a boy’s name that was supposed to be cute on a girl. A lot of women in businesses use initials: M. H. Perkins, or M. Hall Perkins. They think it makes them serious. They’re wrong. It does not endear them to that man in the back office, and that is the only game being played.”

  “It is?”

  “You must impress the man who has the power to say yes. He doesn’t want to be fooled, or to be in business with any person of either sex who is insecure enough to hide things. The only thing worse is a hyphenated name – the woman is married, which is a fact that has very big pluses and minuses that have to be managed carefully. But the hyphenation implies some kind of nonconformist convictions about men and women that she wants to advertise. The man in the back office is not interested in thinking about that. He’s interested in getting more money. He wants to deal with somebody who is going to get lots of money and pay him some of it.”

  “Okay, so Mary Perkins makes it in the door, and M. H. Perkins doesn’t.”

  “Right. She’s at the door now. She’s energetic and cheerful and well scrubbed, and she has hair that’s a bit on the long side and high heels and subtle makeup, but not so subtle that he can’t tell she bothered. She wears good jewelry, but very little of it, and it’s small. If Mary is married for this meeting, it’s a solitaire diamond that’s just a little bigger than an honest banker can afford, and that’s all. If she’s not, maybe a lapel pin. Why? Because that’s the way the women who end up with the most money look. The most common way to get it is still to marry it, so Mary is feminine.”

  “It doesn’t sound as though he’s thinking about Mary Perkins as a business partner.”

  “I’m not talking about the deal. I’m talking about the first impression – unconscious, probably – the five seconds from the door to the chair. Finance is a tough business. The guy is smart, and above all he’s patient. He’s seen a lot on the way to the corner office. In order to automatically get back ten percent of his loan each year, he has to lend the money to somebody who will win – who will use his money to make fifteen percent. What I’m describing for you is the sort of woman he can be made to believe will win.”

  “How did Mary Perkins get to the point where people are hunting for her?”

  Mary Perkins shook her head as though she were marveling at it. “There was a lot of wild stuff in the papers when I went to trial. My lawyer told me that if I went for the plea bargain, it didn’t matter how much I agreed to admit I took, because I was already broke. The prosecutor could use a ridiculous number to help her look good, and I would declare bankruptcy and never have to pay a dime. It didn’t work that way. Now people think I was one of the ones who ended up with the big money. They want it. I don’t have it.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “That’s part of the problem. It could be anybody.”

  Jane looked at her for a moment. Mary was slouching in the passenger seat, looking out the window at the darkness. When she turned to meet Jane’s gaze her eyes were wide with wonder and a touch of injury. What she was saying coincided with the truth in one spot: there was no way of limiting the number of people who might be interested in robbing a woman who had stolen millions of dollars. But this did not alter the fact that Mary Perkins knew who was after her tonight, and that she insisted she didn’t. Jane said, “Why were you in county jail?”

  Mary Perkins shrugged. “Parole violation. I saw those men and tried to leave town.”

  Jane stifled the annoyed response that rose to her tongue. Mary obviously was experienced enough to know that the best lies were short and simple. Where did the lie begin? She might have noticed that men were following her, but she had not tried to leave town because of that.

  Something else must have happened first – something that told her what they wanted. All of the hours Jane had spent hustling this woman around the country settled on her chest like a weight. “Where do you think you could go where there would be the smallest chance you’d be recognized?”

  “Smallest chance?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Let’s see. We just left California, so that’s out. Texas is also out.”

  Jane concentrated on the mechanical details for the next few minutes. At Ann Arbor she took the Huron Street exit. She said, “When was the last time you slept?”

  “I slept maybe four hours last night. Jails never seem to quiet down until you start to smell breakfast.”

  “We’ll sleep now.”

  There was a motel just after the exit. Jane pulled into the lot and walked into the office by herself to rent a room. She opened the door with the key, locked the door, checked each of the windows, tossed the key on the table by the door, undressed, and lay down on the nearest bed without speaking. Mary Perkins had no choice but to imitate her. When she awoke, the sun was glaring through a crack between the curtains and Jane was sitting on the other bed reading a newspaper. Mary sat up and said, “What time is it?”

  “Ten. Checkout is twelve. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Mary Perkins rubbed her eyes. “I guess we’ll make it.” She smiled. “It’s not as though we had to pack, is it?”

  “No.”

  Mary Perkins swung her feet to the floor and stood up. She had been surprised to see that Jane was dressed, but the newspaper suddenly caught her attention. “You’ve been out.”

  “Yes,” said Jane, not looking up. Mary Perkins could see that she had circled some little boxes in the want ads. Jane also had set a medium-sized grocery bag on the table beside the key.

  “I never heard you,” said Mary on the way to the bathroom. “You must be the quietest person I ever met in my life.”

  “I figured you needed to sleep.”

  Mary examined the shower and found that the knobs were hot and the tub was wet. She thought about the woman in the other room. A lot of people could tiptoe around pretty well, just like little cats. But how did this one get everything else to be quiet – appliances and fixtures and things?

  Mary Perkins got the water to run warm and stepped under the spray. She felt good, she had to admit. Here she was in a clean room with a clear head a couple of thousand mil
es away from danger, and taking a shower. Once again whatever it was that had always kept the luck coming had not failed.

  But now that she was alert and not particularly frightened, she had time to think about that woman out there on the bed. What she sensed about Jane Whitefield was not comforting. No, the animal wasn’t a cat. Just because it looked like it had soft fur and the eyes were big and liquid and it didn’t make any noise at all didn’t mean it was cuddly and gentle. Mary was not the sort of person who lost fingers at zoos. Whatever this one was, it had that look because it happened to be the female of its species, not because it was something you wanted around the house.

  The person who had recognized Jane Whitefield in jail was a short black woman named Ellery Robinson. The word on Ellery Robinson was that she had been pulled in on a parole violation. That didn’t make her seem interesting until Mary learned that the conviction was for having killed a man in bed with an old-fashioned straight razor. She had served six or seven years of a life sentence in the California Institution for Women at Frontera, one of those places in the endless desert east of Los Angeles. She was in her fifties now, small and compact with a short, athletic body like a leathery teenager. She never spoke to anyone, having long ago lost interest in whatever other people gained from listening, and having gotten used to whatever it was they expelled by talking. But sometimes she still answered questions if they weren’t personal.

  Mary was in the mess hall one morning when another woman pointed out Jane Whitefield and asked Ellery Robinson if she knew anything about her. Ellery Robinson had actually turned her whole body around in the chow line to stare at her before she said, “She makes people disappear.” Then the conversation was over. Ellery Robinson turned back to eye the food on the warming tables. When a young woman down the line on her first day inside saw the same food and started crying, she looked at her too for a second, not revealing either sympathy or contempt, but as though she just wanted to see where the noise was coming from.