by Thomas Perry
She checked in with a credit card in the name of Katherine Webster. She had gotten the card in the same way she had obtained the five others she had brought with her: she had grown them. Now and then she would take a trip to a different part of the country just to grow new credit cards. She would start with a forged birth certificate, use it to admit her to the test for a genuine driver’s license, and then would go to a bank and start a checking account in a new name. If the amount she deposited was large enough, sometimes the bank would offer her a credit card that day. If it did not, she would use the checks to pay for mail orders. Within a few months, the new woman would begin receiving unsolicited mail. Among the catalogs and requests for contributions would inevitably be offers for credit cards. She used the credit cards carefully, a new one in each town, so that when Katherine Webster disappeared, she didn’t reappear in the next city. Instead, a woman named Denise Hollinger took her place.
The banks that issued their own credit cards were happy to pay themselves automatically each month from her checking account, so all she had to do was to keep the balance high. For the others, she simply filled in the change-of-address section on the third bill and had future ones sent to a fictitious business manager named Stewart Hoffstedder, C.P.A. One of Mr. Hoffstedder’s services was paying clients’ bills. He had a post office box in New York City to receive the bills, and he issued neatly typed checks from a large New York bank to pay them. The imaginary Mr. Hoffstedder was so reliable that each year most of his clients would have their credit limits increased.
Sometimes Jane would grow a different kind of credit card. It would begin with her opening a joint checking account for herself and her husband, who was so busy that she had to bring the signature card home and have him sign it and return it by mail. Months passed while the husband paid for his mail-order goods with the checks and got his credit card. Then Jane would close the joint checking account and make sure the imaginary Mr. Hoffstedder got her imaginary husband’s bills. She could use the man’s card to pay expenses if she made reservations over the telephone, and when traveling let people guess whether she was wife, lover, or colleague without having to give herself any name at all.
After Katherine Webster checked into the hotel, she bought the San Diego newspapers, went directly to her room, ordered dinner from room service, and made the preparations she had planned during her long trip across the country. First she ordered a rental car by telephone, the keys to be delivered to her room for Mr. William Dunlavey, and the car left in the hotel parking lot. She spent a few minutes reading the society page of the San Diego Union, then set her alarm for six A.M. and went to bed.
When the alarm woke her, she checked the name she had found on the society page again: Marcy Hungerford of Del Mar, co-chair of the Women of St. James Fund-raising Committee and honorary chair of this year’s ball, was headed for the family’s eastern digs in Palm Beach. That was the best name in the columns. Honorary chairs were either famous or had money, and Marcy Hungerford wasn’t famous. She was doing fund-raising and was active in that world, so she might have one telephone number that people could find. Jane checked the telephone book and found it listed, with the address beside it.
Jane took the stairs to the swimming pool, went out the garden gate, and skirted the building to the parking lot. She had no difficulty finding the rented car. She had told the woman on the telephone that Mr. Dunlavey liked big black cars, and this one had a small sticker on the left rear bumper that had the right rental company’s name on it. She walked farther along the line of cars until she found one with an Auto Club sticker, peeled it off with a nail file, and stuck it over the one on her car’s bumper.
She drove out to the Golden State Freeway, headed north to the first Del Mar exit, went over a high mesa and came down onto the road along the ocean. The houses on the west side of the street were big and far apart, and she could see vast stretches of flat beach on the other side of them. When she found Marcy Hungerford’s house she was satisfied. It was two stories with a long, sloped roof and stilts on the beach side, a four-car garage under it on the street side, and about eight thousand square feet in the middle. She drove past it at thirty miles an hour and studied the exterior. The establishment was too complicated for Marcy Hungerford to have given all of the servants the week off or taken them with her, but they would cause no trouble. By the time they realized something was wrong, it wouldn’t be wrong anymore.
At nine A.M. Jane found a little shop in San Diego that rented post office boxes, and she took a key and paid for a month in the name of Marcy Hungerford. Then she drove back to Del Mar and found the post office. She filled out a change-of-address form and had all of Marcy Hungerford’s mail sent to her new post office box beginning the next day.
At ten A.M. Jane went to a pay telephone in a quiet corner of Balboa Park and dialed a Los Angeles number. As she put the coins into the slot, she checked her watch again.
“Hoffen-Bayne,” said the receptionist.
“I’d like to speak to a representative for new customers, please,” said Jane.
“Your name?”
“Marcy Hungerford.”
“Please hold and I’ll transfer you to Mr. Hanlon.” There were a few clicks and a man said “Ronald Hanlon” in a quiet, calm voice. “What can I do for you, Ms. Hungerford?”
Jane said, “It’s Mrs. I’m considering new financial management and I’m shopping around. I’d like to know more about Hoffen-Bayne.”
Mr. Hanlon said, “Well, we’ve been in business in Los Angeles since 1948 and handle a full range of financial affairs for a great many people. We offer investment specialists, tax specialists, accountants, property-management teams, and so on. If you could give me a rough idea of your needs, I think I could give you a more focused picture.”
That was the money question. “Well,” said Jane, “my husband’s affairs are managed by Chase Manhattan.” This established that she wasn’t somebody who had just dialed the wrong number; banks seldom managed anything less than a few million. “But I have some assets I like to hold separately.” She kept her voice cheerful and opaque. Maybe there were problems with the marriage, and maybe not. If there were, California was a community-property state, and this meant she might be talking about some money the husband didn’t know about and half of what he had at Chase Manhattan. She was giving Mr. Hanlon a small taste. “I’m interested in having somebody I trust manage my money conservatively so that it pays a reliable income each year.” “Conservative” meant she didn’t need to gamble to make more, and the income was another hint of divorce.
Hanlon rose to the bait slowly and smoothly. “Yes, that sounds wise,” he said. “That would mean setting you up with our accountants and tax people, and a financial planner.”
“And property management,” she added. “Do you have arrangements to handle foreign real estate? France and Italy?”
That did it. He wasn’t talking to a lady with a couple hundred thousand in passbooks. “I think the best thing to do would be to make an appointment and we can talk it all over in detail with advisers from some of our departments. When are you free?”
“That’s a problem,” said Jane. “I live in San Diego and I’m leaving for Palm Beach today.” She checked her watch again to see how long she had been talking.
“When will you be back?”
“I’m not sure. It could be a month. I’m asking for information from several companies. I’m going to look it over while I’m away, and when I’m back I’ll have the choices narrowed down.” The element of competition would help. “I’d like to have you send me whatever material you’ve got that will help me know whether your company is the right one for me.” She decided Marcy Hungerford had no reason to be vague, and making her naive wouldn’t help. “I’d like to know the backgrounds and qualifications of your investment people, financial planners, and so on.”
Mr. Hanlon seemed a little surprised. Maybe she had gone too far. “I think we have some things we can sen
d you. What’s your address?”
“It’s 99233 The Shores, Del Mar, California 91182.” She glanced at her watch again. She had only twenty seconds left before the operator came on and asked for more quarters.
“Phone?”
Jane gave him Marcy Hungerford’s telephone number. The answering machine or the maids would tell him she was out of town.
“Got it,” he said. “I’ll get that right out to you.”
Ten seconds left. “Fine. I’ll watch for it. And thanks.” She hung up and walked across the lush green grass of the park in the direction of the zoo. She felt satisfied. Hanlon would make a serious attempt to impress her with Hoffen-Bayne’s operation. The main issue would be whether he had caught the hint about backgrounds. Whoever had gone after Timmy Phillips had been in the company seven years ago and was still there.
The next morning when Jane went for her run on the beach, she considered the ways of taking the company apart so that she could see what was inside. If Hoffen-Bayne had been around since 1948, then they had almost certainly been sued. She could drive up to U.C.L.A. and hire a student to research the county records for the cases. The least that would give her were the names of the people at Hoffen-Bayne who had been served with subpoenas, and almost any lawsuit would provide a lot more.
But that would mean dreaming up another story to tell the law student that would make him feel comfortable about doing it but not comfortable enough to talk about it freely. It would also place the student in a public building where someone might notice that he had an unusual curiosity about one particular company. He might be helping somebody build a case. That sort of information might easily get back to Hoffen-Bayne. Certainly when Dennis Morgan had been doing his research, somebody at Hoffen-Bayne had learned about it. She decided not to bring anybody else into this mess.
At four o’clock Jane drove back along the Golden State Freeway to Del Mar and stopped at the little store where her post office box was. She saw through the little window that Marcy Hungerford had lots of mail. She sorted through the letters and bills and catalogs until she found the packet from Hoffen-Bayne, then drove to the post office and filled out another change-of-address form so that Marcy Hungerford’s mail would start being delivered to her house again.
She considered scrawling “misdelivered” on today’s mail and slipping it into the nearest mailbox, but she decided that the safest way was to ensure that there was no interruption in service. She waited until eight P.M., when it was dark along the beach, walked past Marcy Hungerford’s house, left the mail in her box, returned to her car, and drove on.
At the hotel Jane opened the packet from Hoffen-Bayne and began to study it. She could see immediately that Mr. Hanlon had not missed any of her hints and that he had been convinced that her account was worth having. There was a printed brochure that included little descriptions of the various arms of the company and a cover with a touched-up photograph of their building on Wilshire Boulevard. Inside were graphs and tables purporting to be proof of high returns for their clients, mixed with a text that promised personal service. Mr. Hanlon had also dictated a cover letter to Mrs. Hungerford, and stapled to it was a little stack of computer-printed résumés.
The next morning Jane checked out of the hotel and drove up the freeway toward Los Angeles. The coast of California had always made her uneasy. The air was lukewarm, calm and quiet, as though it were not outdoors. On the left side of the road the blue-gray ocean rose and fell in long, lazy swells, looking almost gelatinous where the beds of brown kelp spread like a net on the surface. The low, dry, gentle yellow hills to the east always made her sleepy because they were difficult for the eye to define, not clear enough to tell whether they were small and near or large and far. Behind them she could see the abrupt rising of the dark, jagged mountains like a painted wall.
The land along this road always looked deserted. She had to remind herself that it had been the most densely populated part of the continent when the Spanish missionaries and their soldiers arrived. The Indians here had not been at war for centuries the way the Iroquois had, so they weren’t fighters. The first Europeans they saw herded them into concentration camps where they forced them to build stone missions and work the fields, and then locked them up at night in barracks, the men in one and the women in another. They were chained, whipped, starved, tortured, and executed for infractions against the priests’ authority, and they died from diseases that flourished in their cramped quarters until they were virtually exterminated.
California was a sad place, a piece of property that had begun as a slaughterhouse and could never be made completely clean. It was perpetually being remodeled by new tenants who could not explain why they were doing it. They bulldozed the gentle hills into flat tables where they built hideous, crowded developments that encrusted the high places like beehives. They gouged and scraped away at the surface and covered it with cement so that every town looked like every other town, and the rebuilding was so constant that every block of buildings in the state seemed to be between ten and twenty years old and just beginning to show signs that it needed to be bulldozed and rebuilt again.
Jane drove along the Golden State Freeway for three hours until she came to the Hollywood Freeway, took the exit at Vermont, then swung south again for the few blocks to Wilshire Boulevard, where the tall buildings that sheltered corporations instead of people rose abruptly out of the pavement.
The things that had been happening had a very impersonal quality to them: a respected corporation had managed an account, and it had decided it was time to file a petition to declare a client deceased. But somewhere behind the opaque and anonymous veneer there was a person. Money was stolen by human beings. Sometimes thieves worked together and sometimes separately, but most successful embezzlers worked alone. It was time to find the man.
In the late afternoon, Jane began to watch the Hoffen-Bayne building from the window of a restaurant across Wilshire Boulevard. It was small for this part of Los Angeles, only five floors. The bottom floor was rented out to a travel agency and a coffee shop, and the second floor was a reception area for Hoffen-Bayne. After an hour she moved to the upper tier of the parking ramp for the tall insurance building beside Hoffen-Bayne and studied the upper windows to determine which ones were small, functional offices for accountants, brokers, and consultants, and which ones were big pools for bookkeepers and secretaries. She paid special attention to the desirable corner offices.
At six P.M., when she saw people inside taking purses out of desk drawers and turning off computers for the day, she strolled along the quiet side street near the driveway and studied the men and women who came out and got into cars in the reserved-for-employees spaces in the parking lot. She wrote down the license numbers and makes and models, and matched the cars to the people she had seen in the windows.
Tall-Thin-and-Bald wanted to be noticed. He drove a gray Mercedes 320 two-door convertible that retailed for about eighty-five thousand and was too sporty for him. Woman-with-Eye-Trouble, who had the habit of putting on her sunglasses while she was still inside the office, drove a racing-green Jaguar XJ6, which was only about fifty thousand, but she was still a possibility, as was Old Weight-Lifter, who drove a Lexus LS 400, which sold for even less. Eye-Trouble might have chosen her car because it was pretty, and Weight-Lifter might be the sort of person who bought whatever the car magazines told him to.
Jane made four grids on a sheet of paper to represent the windows of the upper floors, labeled them “N,” “S,” “E,” and “W,” and made notes on each window about who had appeared in it and what went on when he did. A supervisor might pop in on a subordinate, might even deliver sheets of paper to the subordinate’s desk, but when several people met in an office, it was usually the office of the ranking person.
An hour later, after the upper windows were dim but there were still people in the coffee shop and travel agency, she went into the lobby, took the elevator to the second floor, and stood outside the locked glass
doors to the Hoffen-Bayne reception area. She was looking for a directory of offices posted on the wall, but there was none. The reception area was all smooth veneer and expensive furniture that made it look like a doctor’s waiting room. There was no easy way into the complex, and there was a small sticker on the glass door that said “Protected By Intercontinental Security,” and under that, “Armed Response.” She didn’t particularly want to bet that she could fool the sort of security system a company that handled money for a lot of rich people might consider a good investment, so she turned and went back to the elevator and took it to the basement of the building, on the level with the parking lot, and found a door with a NO ADMITTANCE sign. The door had a knob with a keyhole to lock it and it wasn’t wired, so she had little trouble slipping her William Dunlavey MasterCard between the knob and the jamb and pushing the catch in. Inside the room were circuit breaker boxes and a telephone junction box. She opened it and studied the chart pasted inside the door. It gave the extensions of the various offices in the building, so she copied them and returned to her car.
She checked into a hotel two miles down Wilshire Boulevard and compared her office chart with the telephone extensions. Some of the offices must be the big ones she had seen through the third-floor windows, where people sat at computers and worked telephones in a pool. Nobody important had a single number with fifteen extensions. The offices she wanted were on the fourth and fifth floors, so she concentrated on them. She dialed each number and listened to a computerized voice-mail system telling her what part of the company it belonged to—investment, property management, billing, accounting—but not the name of the person. She used the information to eliminate more of the offices. The person who had been robbing the trust fund would have to be in a position to exert power over where the money was placed and how the company kept track of it. He didn’t share an office, or send out bills for services, or manage real estate, or answer other people’s phones. She consulted the résumés that Mr. Hanlon had sent her, and filled out more of the chart before she went to sleep.