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

by Perry, Thomas

  Jane listened carefully. While she had been investigating them, they had been investigating Marcy Hungerford. The name had rung some bell or other. She had chosen well, but from here on she had to be cautious. They knew more about Marcy Hungerford than she did. She decided to stop flirting. It would do her no good to convince people Marcy Hungerford was an idiot. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll be happy to drive up there and meet him as soon as I’m back in California. Can you connect me with whoever keeps his calendar?”

  “Let me see if he’s free to talk to you himself right now. I know he’d like to if he can.”

  “Even better.”

  She heard a cascade of annoying music pour out of the speaker, and watched the man in the corner window. She saw him pick up the receiver. He talked to Hanlon for a few seconds, reached across his desk, picked up a file, opened it, and then pushed a button on his telephone.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hungerford,” he said. “My name is Alan Turner.”

  “Hello,” she said. She started the car and pulled away from the curb.

  “I understand you’re considering us to manage your assets.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. She drove up the street away from the building, turned right at the corner, and kept going west. “I’m considering several companies. I’d like to find someone who will take responsibility for handling things.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re in business to offer,” said Turner. “We have experts on the staff in every aspect of financial management, and – ”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “Mr. Hanlon said the same thing. But let me explain. I want to know who would be the one person coordinating everything. I don’t want to have to call thirty people every time I have a question.”

  “I understand perfectly. With your approval, I would manage your account myself. I don’t do much of that anymore, but I still have a few.”

  “That’s very kind.”

  “Here’s what I propose. I’ll sit down with you when you return from Palm Beach. We’ll take an inventory of your current assets. I’ll examine what you have and come back with a hypothetical portfolio that’s sufficiently diversified to ensure you a good income. We can arrange to have it continue in perpetuity for your heirs, if you wish.”

  Jane had to be sure. “That sounds like a trust fund.”

  “That’s what it is,” Turner said. “In my experience, people who are busy – as I know you are, with your charity work and so on – don’t want to waste their lives micromanaging their wealth. Over the years I’ve helped quite a few of our clients establish trusts, and so far we’ve done very well for them.”

  Now she was sure that they’d had Marcy Hungerford investigated. She had never mentioned charities. “What do you charge for all this?”

  “Our commission is five percent of income,” he said. “Of course there would be incidental fees from time to time for brokers, front-end loads on certain purchases, and so on, but you’re familiar with those and they don’t go to Hoffen-Bayne. They might be quite high in the first year while we’re developing a group of haphazard assets into a coordinated portfolio, and there will be legal fees if you choose to establish a trust, but the costs taper off as the years go by.”

  “That all sounds good,” said Jane. “What you’ve said in the last few minutes has done a lot to convince me that you’re the one I’m looking for. I’ll call you as soon as I’m back home.”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “I look forward to meeting you.”

  “Goodbye,” she said, and tapped the button to disconnect, then drove the Mercedes back to the dealer’s lot. She looked at a few more models, then let the salesman know that she hadn’t found anything she was really comfortable in. She got back into her rented Honda Acura and drove over the pass to the Hilton on the hill above Universal City and took another room. It was a comfortable hotel, and she didn’t mind staying there a few days while she did the paperwork. After she was settled and had dinner she left instructions with the concierge to have both the morning and evening editions of the LA. Times delivered to her room each day, and went for a walk.

  She strolled around the complex of buildings at the top of the hill and across the parking lots to a row of pay telephones outside the gate of the Universal Studios tour. She reviewed what she was about to do. There was no way anyone could trace to Jane Whitefield a call made from a public telephone at a place that had millions of visitors a year. It was safe. With the three-hour time difference, she would catch him just after he had come home. She felt a little uncomfortable. She had told herself that she was doing it now because she was afraid of waking him up early in the morning, and there was no point in calling while he was out. But she also knew that if he had decided to do something other than come home from work, this would be the time a person might call and find out. She had no choice but to behave the way she would if she were trying to check up on him, and she hated that. She pushed a quarter into the slot and dialed Carey McKinnon’s number. The operator came on to tell her how many more quarters were needed, and she dropped them in.

  “Hello?” he said. His voice seemed a little thin, as though he were winded.

  “Hi, Carey.” she said. “It’s me.”

  “Well, hello,” he said. He sounded delighted, and she felt glad. “Are you back from your trip?” When she noticed he had not yet said “Jane,” it occurred to her that there might be a reason.

  “No, I won’t be able to get through this job right away. I just felt like hearing your voice.”

  She wanted him to say “And I felt like hearing yours,” maybe because if he said it she would know there wasn’t another woman in the room with him. The thought made her feel contempt for herself. He said, “My sentiments exactly. I must have just missed you the other day. When I came in there was your message on my machine. When will you be back in town?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She heard the beep-beep-beep of his pager in the background. “Oh, shit,” he said. “That’s my pager.”

  “I heard it.”

  “Look, give me the number where you’re staying, and I’ll call you when I’m back from the hospital.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m out and I don’t have it with me. I’m never there anyway. I’ll have to try you again in a day or so, when things cool down.”

  “Do that.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “For now,” he said.

  As Jane stepped away from the bank of telephones she had to dodge a group of Asian teenagers who swept past laughing and talking. She wished that she didn’t have the kind of mind that always suspected deception. She reminded herself that it was ridiculous even to think of Carey that way – as though she had a right to expect that he would never see another woman. He had offered, and she had not agreed, had only said “We’ll talk about it.” There was no proof that a woman was in the room with him, anyway. She was just inventing a way to make herself miserable. As she walked back to her hotel, she wished that she hadn’t known that when a pager was clicked off and then on again, it beeped to signal that it was working.

  She spent the late evening trying to think about Alan Turner, but found her attention slipping back to Carey McKinnon. She was angry at herself for being suspicious, and angry at him for being the sort of person who made her suspicious. He was probably innocent, and if she cared about him enough to be this uncomfortable, what was she doing thousands of miles away from him, forming agonizingly clear pictures of what he might be doing with some other woman? She should be there. She was surprised by the strength of her urge to be with him. She wondered why it was stronger now than it had been yesterday. Was it because his voice had triggered some unconscious longing for him – maybe love, but maybe just some crude sexual reflex, the equivalent of Pavlov’s dogs’ hearing a bell and salivating – or because it had set off an even cruder instinct to gallop back and defend her mate from the competition? Twice she was tempted to call the hospital to see if he was on duty but fought down
the impulse.

  When the hour was late enough so that she could not imagine a good excuse to call any of Carey’s numbers, Jane managed to remind herself of what she was doing in Los Angeles. She had decided it was necessary to find out who had been trying to kill Timmy Phillips. If that was true a week ago, then it was still true. Turner was the prime suspect, and anything she could figure out about him might save a little boy’s life. Thinking about anything else was a waste of time. When she had reached this conclusion, she promptly fell asleep.

  As the morning sun came up over the next ridge in a blinding glare, Jane laid all of her information about Alan Turner on the table of her room and studied it. She had Turner’s name, the license number of the car he drove, the address of his office, and the address of his house on Hill-crest in Beverly Hills where she had followed him two nights ago. The resume that Hanlon had sent to Marcy Hungerford said that Turner was a 1969 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and that he had an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.

  She forged a letter from Turner to the U.S.C. registrar’s office requesting that a transcript of his graduate work be sent to the personnel manager of Furnace Financial, Ltd. in Chicago. The Furnace corporation was a business she had founded some years before. It had a genuine legal existence, but the ownership was cloudy and the physical plant consisted of a post office box that she had rented in a small Chicago mini-mall, with the arrangement that everything that arrived was to be sent unopened to another post office box in Buffalo. Then she called the owner of the little shop where the box was and asked him to call the Hilton when anything with a U.S.C. return address arrived.

  As soon as she hung up she dialed Carey’s number. When his machine clicked on, she tried to think of the right kind of message. She knew he wasn’t working now, or she thought he wasn’t. It occurred to her that if there had been a woman with him last night, she would still be there. She simply said, “It’s Jane Whitefield.” She paused to let him change his mind or go to an extension where the woman wouldn’t hear. “I guess I missed you again.” As she hung up, she closed her eyes and felt a headache building. All right, she thought. I said I would call him, and I’ve called him. Enough. I have work to do.

  She drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Glendale and filled out a form. On a line near the top, she provided the license number of the BMW Turner drove, and in the big space at the bottom she said he had scraped her car in a parking lot. The DMV answered with the name and address of the owner, which was only the leasing company Green Import Auto, but it also listed the lessee, Alan Turner, and included his driver’s license number.

  After only two days, the U.S.C. transcript arrived in Chicago. Jane asked the owner of the shop to open it and read it to her. From this she got Turner’s Social Security number. With the driver’s license number and Social Security number, she was able to have Furnace Financial request a credit report on Alan Turner.

  The credit report told her he was paying a mortgage of one million, eight hundred thousand dollars to Southland Mortgage. This must be the house on Hillcrest. He had several credit cards and paid the balances each month to avoid interest charges. He had checked the box on his mortgage papers that said “Divorced,” which made things simpler: he didn’t have a wife with a second income. But there was also a surprise. Turner was repaying another loan of six hundred thousand dollars to the Bank of Northern California. It was a mortgage on a second home.

  She looked in the telephone book for the Bank of Northern California and found listings for several branches, as well as a Bank of Northern California Mortgage Services in San Bernardino. She called the mortgage office and asked for the credit department. Anybody who loaned money must have a credit department. In a second a woman answered.

  “This is Monica Butler at the San Francisco office,” Jane said. “I’ve got a loan application here from a customer who lists a mortgage from us already for six hundred thousand. I’d like to know what the property is.”

  The young woman said, “The name?”

  “Alan R. Turner. Need his Social Security number?”

  “No,” the woman said. She was typing the name into a computer. If the person on the other end of the line thought you were from the same company, none of the privacy rules applied. She was merely transferring information from one internal file drawer to another.

  “The property is at 1522 Morales Prospect, in Monterey.”

  “Do you have a zip?”

  “Sure. It’s 93.940.”

  “Thanks.” Jane hung up and wrote down the address. The picture she was forming of Turner was coherent and consistent: he made a lot of money and he was cautious and premeditated. He saved some by driving a leased company car. He used his high income and stability to take out big deductible mortgages on two of the most desirable addresses in the Western Hemisphere, so he probably didn’t pay much in taxes. But those were relatively modest prices for their neighborhoods, so he wasn’t taking big risks. He wasn’t in love with debt, because his credit cards had never carried a balance to the next month. He didn’t look like an embezzler. If he had been quietly robbing the Phillips trust fund for years, he must have had the foresight to know that some day a stranger might take a look at his assets. Either he was extremely sophisticated or she had chosen the wrong man at Hoffen-Bayne.

  The following morning Jane rose before dawn, walked to the door of her room, picked up her copy of the Los Angeles Times, and unfolded it to reveal the second page, where the summary of major articles was printed. On the lower left side was a box that said, “Judge Seizes Hoffen-Bayne Records (See E-l, Business).” She had run out of time.

  13

  Jane had checked out of the Hilton and had her car on Laurel Canyon Boulevard by five a.m. She hadn’t dared stop to read the whole article, but she had scanned it on the walk down the hallway to the desk, and took a longer look while she was waiting for the valet to bring her car to the entrance. The judge had been devious. He had issued requests for specific documents, which Hoffen-Bayne had dutifully provided a week ago. Probably he had done this to give them the impression that he was just going to take a cursory glance at a couple of carefully cooked annual reports. If he hadn’t asked for something, they would have suspected trouble. Then, last night after business hours, he had issued a warrant and sent cops with a truck down to Wilshire Boulevard. She moved her eyes down the column of print, but could see no names.

  She decided to avoid Wilshire Boulevard. The office would already have reporters and cops and, as soon as the clients got up and read their papers, enough panicky investors to keep them all busy. She needed to go to Beverly Hills.

  She reached Sunset and turned right. Even at five in the morning the street was busy, but the cars were moving quickly. She made her way in the intervals between cars, the skyline in front of her dominated by enormous lighted billboards with pictures of pairs of giant actors looking stern and fearless, and actresses with moist lips the size of watermelon slices.

  The judge had done his work. Timmy was, at least for the moment, as safe as anyone could make him. He had already told the authorities everything he knew. The judge had taken away the incentive for anybody at Hoffen-Bayne to kill him. It would be like killing a witness who already had testified. There was only Turner to occupy her mind now. She had calculated that she would have a few more days to study him, and her feeling of frustration surprised her. It wasn’t that she had any real hope that she could do any more than the authorities could to get Timmy’s money back. She wasn’t even sure how she felt about the money. She had to fight the conviction she had been raised with that accumulating wealth was a contemptible activity.

  This wasn’t something that her parents had invented. It was an old attitude that had never gone away. In the old days no family ever built up disproportionate surpluses of food. Whatever they had was shared with scrupulous equality. Each longhouse was owned by the women of the clan, and each woman had a right to live there and raise
her children and sleep with her husband when he was around. A man was a warrior and hunter, out in the forest for most of the year, and he seldom owned anything he couldn’t carry. If he wanted respect, he would bring back lots of meat and plunder for the village. A person’s status was a measure of how good he was at obtaining things to share, not how much he was able to take and hoard. After the white people arrived they advised each other that the way to find the leaders of the Iroquois was to look for the men in rags.

  Whatever would happen to Timmy’s money would happen whether she was here or in Deganawida. It was Turner she was interested in. She had to know if his careful accounting and his conservative, respectable manner of living had all been part of a scheme to disguise a greed strong enough to make him kill people.

  She turned down Hillcrest and cruised slowly past Turner’s house. She had to be alert and careful this morning. The richest parts of Los Angeles were guarded with a strange, subtle vigilance. There were small, tasteful signs with the trademarks of security patrols on every lawn, small, unobtrusive surveillance cameras on the eaves of the big houses, and lots of invisible servants watching. The sound of a helicopter overhead probably meant a cop was looking down with night-vision binoculars. An unfamiliar car parked in the wrong place, a stranger walking down the street, and particularly anybody doing anything before sunrise, were ominous signs to be remembered and reported.

  She drove across Sunset onto the slope on the north side, parked her car on a side street next to a medical building in a space that was shielded from the intersection by a big tree and a Land Rover, and ducked down in the seat while she changed into her sweat suit and sneakers. She pulled her hair behind her head, slipped a rubber band around it to make a ponytail, and began to jog slowly down onto the flats.

  The sidewalks here were wide and even, and the street was lined by two long rows of coconut palms. The air was warm for early morning, and she could hear traffic above and below her but saw no cars driving down Hillcrest yet. She ran slowly and easily, less to keep from pulling a muscle than to keep anyone who saw her from looking twice. A woman trotting painfully along a residential street at dawn was just another local girl in the dull business of keeping her waist and thighs attractive; a woman loping along like a track star was something else.