Dance for the Dead
Page 17
There had to be some kind of safety button to kill the furnace when the door was off so that it didn’t start up and burn the house down. As she searched, the blower motor went on and the fire grew hotter. She couldn’t let it run for long, or all the metal around it would get hot too. She kept her head low, slipped her fingers under the bottom of the panel, and pushed upward again. The panel lip was freed, and the furnace went off. Carefully she pushed the panel higher until it came off, then leaned it on its side to keep from making noise, and lay down again.
A few minutes later she judged the air was cool enough to let her reach up through the space where the panel had been and feel around. There was a wooden door in front of the panel: the furnace must be in a space disguised as a closet. She ran her fingers up the side of it until she felt a hinge.
She sat on the ground and waited until she could touch the burners with her fingers before she made her attempt. She squatted cautiously, rose to a crouch, straightened to raise the upper part of her body into the furnace, reached out the front to find the doorknob, and opened the door a crack. She pulled herself up, slithered under the burners and out the front of the furnace, crawled out of the closet, and closed the door behind her.
She was in a dim hallway with a bleached oak floor and a long row of small framed drawings of sailing ships on the white walls. As she looked down the hall she could see the foyer. There was an alarm keypad on the wall near the front door. A small red light was glowing to indicate that the system was armed. At the other end of the hall was a staircase. If she herself had installed the security system, this was where she would have put an interior trap. Whatever a burglar stole down here, you didn’t want him getting up those stairs where the bedrooms were. She stepped slowly to the side of the staircase, grasped the railing, and sidestepped between the posts up along the outside of it. She was ten feet up, just below the center of the staircase, before she found the electric eye mechanism. It was a foot above a step, so a crawling intruder couldn’t slide under it, and even one who took three steps in a stride would break the beam. There were probably pressure pads under the carpet on some of the steps in case an intruder saw it in time.
She kept outside the railing beyond the top of the stairs and then climbed over the railing into the hallway. There might be other traps on the second floor, but if Turner was up here, this alarm zone was probably turned off.
There were lighted rooms on both ends of the second-floor hallway. The house was absolutely quiet. She could hear no movement or snoring or the shifting of a person in a chair. She wondered for a moment if she had been lucky and entered while he was out, but then she remembered the car in the garage.
She looked at the glowing doorway of each room and chose the one to her left. It was slightly closer to the stairway, and if she had to run she didn’t want to have Turner three steps closer to the only way out. Slowly she edged along the hallway with her shoulder almost touching the wall. When hardwood floorboards creaked, it was usually the ones in the center.
At the doorway she leaned out just far enough to use the dark windows in the room as mirrors to search for Turner. When she found him she jerked backward. She had been looking for a human form, and when she found it lower and closer to her than she had expected, her reflex was to duck back quickly to evade the blow or the shot. But even as her body was protecting itself, the feeling had already turned into something else.
His blond hair was wet with blood, and under the body, the thick beige rug had soaked up the first of it and saturated, then let a pool of it form and spread. She could see that the outer edge of the pool was already drying into a dark maroon ring, the carpet tufts hardening into twisted bristles. She craned her neck to look for the gun, and found it where it was supposed to be, beside the right hand. She knew enough about the way policemen treated the scenes of suicides to know it was a bad idea to enter the room. If she lost a strand of hair or a fiber from her clothes, she would be somebody they wanted to talk to.
She leaned inward far enough to verify that there was a discoloration that looked like a powder burn on Turner’s right temple around the entry hole. The other temple was pressed to the carpet, and she decided it was just as well. The exit hole would be bigger and harder to look at.
It hadn’t occurred to her that he would kill himself. If he hadn’t doctored the records well enough he was about to be revealed as a thief, but a lot of people in his business had suffered that kind of publicity, and a fair percentage of them had never gone to jail. If he had been likely to be charged with the murders it would have made more sense, but the authorities had made no progress on the first ones in over two years, and they hadn’t even been able to hold the men who had broken Dennis’s neck and thrown Mona down the stairwell. Nobody was offering those men a deal in exchange for his name.
The raid on Turner’s office must have made him panic. She looked down at him and felt something like sympathy for his fear and his forlorn death, but then she decided that she was only feeling the immediacy of it. The sweat and blood were still fresh, and the smell of his fear was probably still trapped in the air of the room and had set off some basic physical reaction in her brain that was stronger than the disgust he had aroused when he was alive.
She took off her shoes and stepped back along the same path that she had taken to reach the door, shuffling her feet a little to obscure any invisible marks her sneakers had made. At the stairway she hesitated and looked at the second room on the far end of the hallway. Why was the light on in there too? She reminded herself that he was beyond caring about electric bills, but then why had he turned off all the lights downstairs?
As soon as she was at the door, she could see the two sheets of paper on the desk. They were placed on the surface in the pool of light from the desk lamp like an exhibit. She stepped into the room.
They had been typed on the computer in the corner of the room and printed on the printer beside it. She looked at the second sheet, the one with the signature. All it said was “I take full responsibility for my actions. Alan Turner.”
Then she looked at the first page. It began, “This is my last message to the rest of the world. When you read it I’ll be gone, out of your reach.” She had never seen a suicide note before, but somehow she had assumed they were addressed to family members or friends, like personal letters.
“The reason I have decided to end my life is that I have not been able to resist the temptation to steal from one of my accounts. I believed Timothy Phillips would never be found alive, so I was harming no one. Later it became apparent that Timothy Phillips was not dead. The people who had been posing as his parents were sending letters, and I knew that if I allowed them to go on, I would be caught. I went to Washington, D.C., where the letters were coming from, and agreed to a meeting. I hired two men to follow the couple from the meeting and find out where they were living with the boy. I am not certain, to this day, what I would have done if they had followed my instructions, but they did not. They formed some plan of their own, probably to take the boy and use him to take control of his money. Whatever it was, it failed. The next thing I knew, the supposed parents were dead and the boy had disappeared. I regret having proceeded in this fashion. Because I hired those men, I was, and am, technically guilty of arranging two murders. I should mention that none of my associates or colleagues benefitted in any way from my actions, and none of them had any knowledge of my theft or any of the things I did to cover it up. I do not know the names of the two men I hired to find the boy in Washington. I met them in a bar and made the deal in the parking lot outside. There is nothing more to say.”
Jane studied the sheet without touching it. The printing went right to the bottom of the page. Then there was the second page with “I take full responsibility for my actions” and the signature. The handwriting experts would certainly find that the signature was genuine. It was only the first page that she suspected was a forgery.
She had sensed that it was odd to write a suicide note on
a computer, but now she could see the purpose of it. Once Turner was dead, they had simply gone into the file, deleted whatever had been on the first page, typed a new one, and printed it out. Computer printers placed an extra step between the typist and the paper. There were no keys to hit unevenly, no distinctive characteristics to reveal that one page had been typed by Turner and the other by someone else. Maybe he had signed a blank sheet before they shot him, and they had simply run that through the printer too. It didn’t matter. He had been shot in the right way and fallen in the right way. Everything was in the right place. The security system was on, so the police would assume there was no way anyone could have come in, killed him, and left. Unless they found something that wasn’t perfect—a wrong chemical residue on his right hand, or a different set of prints on the brass casings of the bullets—he was a suicide.
She stood still for a moment. She could feel that the man who had done this was the one who had fooled her at the courthouse. Turner probably had earned his death, but he wasn’t the one she should have been thinking about all this time. The one to worry about wasn’t the inside man who took a share and didn’t ask enough questions about what was going to happen if the plan didn’t work. The one to look for would be the one who would still be left standing if everything went wrong. He had been in this room. If she had been smelling fear, she now knew it had been fear of him. His cunning had arranged everything around her to disguise his presence, but the perfect positions of the objects in the room only made his presence more pervasive.
Jane did not stop to form a clear, logical plan about what she was going to do. She simply knew that whatever arrangements the enemy had made must be to his benefit. She snatched up the forged suicide note, walked to the room where the body was lying, picked up the pistol, put it into her belt, and slid down the banister to the ground floor. Then she made her way back through the furnace to the crawl space, closed the closet door above her, replaced the metal panel, and crawled back out from under the house.
Within ten minutes she was back at the gas station taking the plastic tarp off her rented car. She dropped her room key in the mail slot at the motel office and drove south. She didn’t know the enemy’s name and she didn’t know where he lived, but now she knew something about him. He wasn’t some accountant who had hired a few head-bangers to block a courtroom so his embezzling wouldn’t get noticed by the authorities. He was a pro.
Jane drove for the rest of the night. As soon as she was over the last big hill into Los Angeles County at Thousand Oaks, she ate breakfast at an enormous coffee shop surrounded by brown gumdrop-shaped hills. Just as she was taking her first sip of coffee the clock reached seven and men with heavy machinery began assaulting the mounds, shaving the tops to make level building lots.
She waited in a shopping mall until noon and then checked into a brick hotel in Burbank with a glass elevator that ran up the outside of the building to give future guests a view of whatever was going to be built in the empty, weed-tufted lot under it. She was glad that whatever was in the master plan for the lot had not yet been started, because she needed to sleep. She closed the curtains, undressed, and turned off the lamp. She knew that the dreams would probably come, but she was too tired now to fight them. She lay in the bed staring up at the single red light of the smoke detector on the ceiling, then relinquished her will and slept.
In her dream she found herself kneeling on a bare earth floor in a dark enclosure. Her ears told her that the space was about fifteen feet square. As her eyes slowly became more used to the dark she could see the texture of the inner side of the elm bark that had been shingled together to make the walls and roof of the ganosote. It was a large one built in the old style, about a hundred and twenty feet long with compartments like this one on either side. She counted ten cooking fires at intervals down the center aisle. She could see dark shapes of men, women, and children huddled at the fires or walking past them.
One of the children pushed aside the bearskin that was hanging at the east end of the longhouse to cover the door, and she had to look down to avoid the glare. She knew from the bright sunlight that it must be morning. When the child scampered out and the bearskin swung shut again she didn’t raise her head because she was thinking about what the light had shown her. She was wearing a leather skirt and moccasins, and she could feel that the reason the bare ground didn’t bother her knees was that they were protected by a pair of leggings. She reflected in a detached way that all of her clothes were soft deerskin, and this confirmed her impression that the day that was beginning was in the Old Time.
She could see that around her neck was a necklace woven from fragrant marsh grass, and she reached up to touch it. Every few inches there was a little disk of marsh grass covered with shell beads. She could smell the fresh, grassy scent, and she knew that the perfume made the smoke, cooking meat, and the twenty or thirty bodies in the ganosote easier on her nostrils.
She heard a noise and turned to see that behind her there was the big shape of a man on the lower platform along the wall of the compartment, and that he was stirring, about to wake up. She didn’t know who he was, but stored on the platform five feet above him were her things—the extra moccasins she would use to replace the ones on her feet now, the elm bark gaowo tray she used to prepare corn bread, her collection of ahdoquasa with the bowl ends polished smooth for eating soup and the handles carved in the shapes of men and women embracing. She knew he must be her husband, but he stayed asleep in the shadows with his face to the wall because it was not time for her to see him yet.
She heard someone calling her name outside, and in the logic of dreams, she knew that the voice was the reason she was here. She stood up and walked past the fires to the bearskin flap. A strong hand gripped her arm, and she turned. A man whose face she did not quite see in the dim light said in Seneca, “If you don’t want to dream about the dead, you don’t have to. If the women sing the Ohgiwe, they’ll leave.” She knew this voice.
“I know, Jake,” said Jane. She lifted the corner of the bearskin and ducked out into the light.
“Jane!” said a voice. It was harsh and high, not quite human, like the screech of a parrot. “Jane!”
She looked around her, and her eye caught a flash of deep blue above her on a maple tree, and then another flitted across the open air from an old sycamore. It flew in spurts, a dip and a wing-flap to bring the bird up, then a dip and a wing-flap and claws clutching the branch of the tree beside the first one. Jane could tell they were the two scrub jays she had captured in California.
The two birds dropped to the lowest branch of the maple just above her. The male tilted his head to the side and glared at her with one shiny black eye. “Jane!”
“What?” she asked.
The female jay hopped to reverse her position on the branch, her head where her tail had been, and leaned down. “We did what you asked,” she said. “We took Dennis and Mona to Hawenneyugeh.”
“Thank you,” said Jane. “But you have to go home now. You can’t survive in this climate, and winter is coming.”
The male shifted back and forth on the branch nervously, and she could hear its claws scratching the bark. “We came for you.”
The jays eyed her without moving. Jane felt a small, growing fear. “Am I going to die too? So many people, all dying for nothing.”
The female dropped to the grass at her feet and jerked her head from side to side to bring first one eye and then the other to bear on Jane. “It’s not supposed to be for anything,” she said. “It’s what we are.”
“What we are?”
“Hawenneyu, the Right-Handed Twin, creates people, birds, trees. Hanegoategeh, the Left-Handed Twin, makes cancer, number-six birdshot, Dutch Elm disease. For every measure, a countermeasure: Hawenneyu creates the air, Hanegoategeh churns it into the cold wind; Hawenneyu makes fire and houses, Hanegoategeh makes the fire burn the houses.”
“Are you here to tell me it’s my turn to be used up?” asked Jane.
She studied the two birds. “Who is my enemy?”
“Think about how he works,” said the female jay.
“He’s been killing people,” Jane said. “There’s nothing special about it at all. It’s just brutal: cutting up the Deckers—”
“Without leaving any sign in the house that a little boy had ever lived there,” the male reminded her.
“How about Mona and Dennis?” she asked. “He hired some men to beat Dennis to death and throw Mona down a stairwell.”
“He waited until you had made your preparations for one building, and got the case moved to another. You had to go to a new place where a dozen men were waiting for you and court was already in session.”
“And what about Alan Turner?” asked the female jay.
“What about him?” Jane asked.
“We know how you got into Turner’s house past the alarm system and out again. How did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I suppose he rang the doorbell. Alan Turner let him in. They must have known each other.”
“You’re not listening,” said the female jay. “Anybody could get in by ringing the doorbell. How did he get out without tripping the alarm after Turner was dead?”
“How?” she asked.
Jane awoke and listened to the sounds of the cars on the freeway a few blocks away. Rush hour must have begun, but then she remembered that the term had no meaning around Los Angeles. There were cars clogging the roads every hour of every day. She sat up and looked around her, then stood and walked into the shower.