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

by Perry, Thomas

  “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 strip. 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,” M
ary 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 to 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.

  She spent two days driving the freeways until she found the spot she wanted, right on the western edge of a confusing knot of interlocking entrances, exits, and overpasses on the Ventura Freeway. If a person drove east, he would immediately come to the fork where half the lanes swung off onto the San Diego Freeway, then divided again to go north toward Sacramento or south toward San Diego. After another mile or two, there was another junction where some lanes went north on the Hollywood Freeway but most swung southeast toward the city. Another mile and there was another fork, with some lanes continuing southeast and the others bearing due east toward Glendale and Pasadena. With a small head start, a car heading eastward could be very hard to follow.

  Every mile on the Ventura Freeway there was a little yellow pole with an emergency telephone on it. The small blue marker above the pole Jane chose announced that it was number 177.

  That night in the motel Jane tested the equipment. At two a.m. she drove back into the San Fernando Valley. She parked the car on a quiet side street in Sherman Oaks just north of Riverside Drive and walked the rest of the way to the little hill that elevated the Ventura Freeway above the surrounding neighborhoods. She had to lower the equipment over a fence and then climb over after it.

  She was hidden from the street by thick bushes, and from the freeway by a low metal barrier along the shoulder. The barrier was supposed to keep a runaway car on the eastbound side of the Ventura Freeway from careening down the hill into the front of somebody’s house, and judging by the depth of some of the dents and scrapes, it probably had. She trained the directional microphone carefully across the freeway on a spot twenty feet from call box number 177, then adjusted the breadth of its field until it picked up very little street noise. She threw a stone at the spot and watched the reels of the two tape recorders turn when it hit, then stop again. She set the video camera on automatic focus and aimed it at the same spot. She switched everything off, carefully covered all of the equipment with leaves and branches, then went down the hill, over the fence, and back to her car.

  Jane and Mary stayed at the motel for two more days. They rehearsed, memorized, and analyzed until it began to seem as though everything Jane was planning had already happened and they were weeks past it already, trying to recall the details.

  “How long do you stay?” asked Jane.

  “Ten seconds. Fifteen at the most. Just long enough to pop out the tapes.”

  “What happens if he pulls out a gun?” Jane asked.

  “I leave.”

  “What if he puts it to my head?”

  “I ignore it. There’s nothing I can do to stop him, so I leave.”

  Early each morning they drove along the Ventura Freeway past call box 177, studying the flow of the traffic for ten miles in both directions. They memorized the fastest lanes, practiced making an exit just beyond the junction with another freeway and then coming up a side street to emerge on the new freeway going in another direction.

  “Can’t you just call him up and record what he says on the phone?” asked Mary.

  “No,” said Jane. “He’s the regional head of a big security company. His phone will have sweepers and bug detectors that even the police can’t buy yet. Besides, he won’t say anything that will put him away unless he sees you.”

  On the third day at four in the afternoon Jane White-field went to a pay telephone in Barstow and made the call. “I want to speak with Mr. Barraclough,” she said. “Tell him it’s Colleen Mahoney from the courthouse. I have something he wants to talk about.”

  “Can you hold?” said the secretary.

  “No,” said Jane. “I’ll call back in two minutes. Tell him if he’s not the one who answers, he’s lost it.” She waited four minutes, then dialed the number again.

  This time a man’s voice answered. It was deep, as though it came from a big body, but it was smooth, clear, and untroubled. “Yes?” he said.

  “Is this Mr. Barraclough?”

  “Yes, it is.” He held the last word so it was almost singsong.

  “This is – ”

  “I know who it is, Jane,” he said. “I heard that’s what you like to be called. What can I do for you?”

  Her mind stumbled, then raced to catch up. He was far ahead of the place where she had thought he would be. “I have Mary Perkins,” she said.

  “Who’s Mary Perkins?”

  “I’m not recording this,” she said. “Your phone isn’t tapped.”

  “I know it isn’t.”

  “Then do you want her?”

  “If you have her, why do you need me? You like me all of
a sudden?”

  “If you weren’t tracing this call, why would you ask so many stupid questions?” Jane asked. “I’ll call this number at five a.m. tomorrow. If you meet me alone and unarmed, you’ll get a peek.” She hung up, picked up Mary, and drove to Los Angeles, where they rented two identical white cars, then left the gray Toyota at the Burbank Airport. They spent the night in a motel in Woodland Hills.

  At four a.m. Jane parked her rented car on the street she had chosen below the freeway, climbed the fence to turn on her camera, microphone, and recorders. Then she drove west to the big coffee shop in Agoura and at exactly five a.m. used the pay telephone outside the door.

  “Yes?” said Barraclough.

  “It’s me,” she said. “In twenty minutes I’ll be at the lot on the corner of Woodley Avenue and Burbank Boulevard in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. If you’re not there I’ll keep going.”

  “Wait,” he said. “I didn’t get those streets.”

  “Then rewind the tape and play it back,” she said, and hung up.

  Twenty minutes was an enormous stretch of time for a man like Barraclough. Jane thought about all of the preparations he would have made already. He would have all of the trainees on the special payroll of Enterprise Development already awake and standing by. He would have some pretext for using Intercontinental Security’s facilities and equipment too. Now he would be frantically ordering all of them into positions around the Sepulveda Recreation Area. No, not frantically: coldly, methodically.

  She had selected the meeting place carefully. It was the sort of spot a person might choose who had some fear of ambush but no understanding of how such things happened. It was free of people in the hours before dawn, a flat open lawn that had been built as a flood basin with a vast empty sod farm on one side, a golf course on the other, and nothing much but picnic tables and a baseball diamond in between. The place gave the illusion of safety because she could see a second car coming from half a mile off. So could he, but all he had to do was block two spots on Burbank Boulevard and one end of Woodley and she was trapped.