by Thomas Perry
Varney looked back on that experience with a warm, pleasurable feeling. He had tried to repeat it a few times, but only twice with similar success. Sex was one of the things that this life of adventure made difficult for him.
Coleman had warned him that it would be that way. Part of staying alive in this business was staying out of situations where some woman felt she had the right to ask as many questions as she could think of until her jaw got tired. Most of them thought that having sex gave them the right. Coleman’s solution had been to employ prostitutes.
Varney had never known exactly how Coleman had managed it, but in every city, he’d seemed to know an address or a telephone number, even the cities he claimed never to have visited before. One night near the end of his time with Coleman Simms, Varney had been in a room in Indianapolis with a girl named Terry. She had looked young, maybe nineteen, and she had said she had not been in the trade very long. He hadn’t believed her at the time, but in retrospect, he decided that maybe she had been telling the truth. She had begun to ask him questions about where a young guy like him got his money, what company he worked for, what city, and so on. Varney was drunk. He stood as much as he could, and in a moment of annoyance, decided to end the questions.
“You know that guy over in Fort Wayne who got his throat cut last night?”
“Yes,” she said. It had been on the television news all day.
“Well, that’s what I do,” Varney said. “I make a lot of money because I’m really good at it.”
The next morning when Varney woke up, Terry was gone. He wasn’t entirely sorry, because he had a headache and wasn’t interested in hearing her voice again. He showered and dressed, then found that Coleman wasn’t in his room. Varney waited for a couple of hours, and when Coleman showed up, he was in a jumpy mood. As they walked to the car in the hotel lot, Coleman’s jaw was set, and he threw his suitcase into the trunk and slammed the lid so hard that the car rocked on its springs. When he took the wheel and Varney was sitting beside him, he said, “Don’t ever do that again.”
“Do what?”
Coleman said, “Don’t tell hookers your life story. They’re not in it to meet interesting people. If you want them to respect you, stay away from them. If you want them to like you, give them some money.”
Varney felt a growing sense of dread. “What happened?”
“About four o’clock I saw her sneaking off down the hall like something was chasing her. I decided to see if something was. When I caught up with her, she told me you hadn’t said anything about Fort Wayne, and if you had, she would never tell anyone.”
“I didn’t tell her anything to prove I really did it,” he said uneasily. “I just couldn’t stand the stupid questions. I decided to shut her up.”
Coleman glared at him. “It’s a business. Get that into your head. If they ask you questions, it’s just like when a waiter asks you questions. None of them gives a shit what the answer is. They’re just trying to make you feel important so you’ll give them a decent tip and they can go on to the next customer.”
“Did you have to give her more money to keep her quiet?”
Coleman took his eyes off the road to turn an irate stare on Varney. “It was a little late for that, kid. I had to break her neck.”
After that, Varney had to sit in silence staring at cornfields and now and then a ramshackle house with dusty old cars in the front yard. The midmorning sun heated the endless, straight road until distant pools of imaginary water appeared on the pavement, then dissolved as the car drew nearer. He thought about the girl Terry, the thin white neck, the little wisps of blond hair that grew at the nape, and felt a confusing retroactive arousal that lasted for a few seconds, until memory moved forward and reminded him that it had all turned ugly, and the girl’s body was cold and already dumped someplace. Each time he forgot that he didn’t want to think about her, the girl’s image returned, and he would find himself falling into the cycle again. She should have kept her mouth shut.
After about an hour, Coleman spoke again. “That’s the only free one you’ll ever get out of me. If I ever have to do it again, I’ll deduct my fee from your pay.”
At that moment, Varney forgot the girl and began to concentrate on Coleman. He was treating Varney as though he were some weak, inferior creature that he had the right to criticize or punish any time Varney displeased him. Varney began to see the events of the night differently. Coleman had not had to kill the girl just because Varney had made a small mistake. He had done it to exert control and stifle him. Coleman had sensed that Varney had taken pleasure in her, and Coleman had decided for that reason alone to find an excuse to take her away. Coleman was like a father who punished a child by strangling the kid’s puppy in front of him.
As the car traversed the hot, flat country, Varney watched the telephone poles go past the window. Coleman was not the wise, generous professional who had taken Varney on as an apprentice. It had seemed that way at first, but from the beginning, the one who had done all the hard, dangerous work had been Varney. Coleman made a phone call or two, acted as Varney’s driver and companion, then kept most of the money. Varney sat there quietly for the rest of the morning, staring out the window at the flat country. There was no reason to argue with Coleman about the girl, no reason to say anything at all. It was settled.
Varney came out of his reminiscence and pulled his car up onto the blacktop margin along the side of a gas station in south Buffalo. He got out, stood at the pay telephone, and opened the book to the yellow pages. There were dozens of hotels listed, but he could safely ignore most of them. He wrote down the addresses and phone numbers of the ten biggest and most expensive in town.
It was thinking about Coleman that had given him the idea. Whenever Coleman had come into a town, he had looked in the yellow pages to find the biggest and the best. Prescott was a lot like Coleman—tall and swaggering, with that cowboy accent and that way of insinuating that he knew everything. They were so much alike that sometimes, when Varney was remembering Coleman, he had caught himself letting Prescott’s features merge with Coleman’s to form a single face.
18
Prescott stepped into the hotel room and saw the little red light on the telephone dial flashing. He turned off the switch by the door to make the room go dark before he went to the telephone. He stood with his back to the wall where he could not be seen through the window, and lifted the receiver. If the man he was searching for had found the right hotel and used some trick to get the right room number, he could leave a message, train his rifle through the window on the phone, and win the easy way.
The computer voice said, “You have . . . one! . . . message.” Prescott covered his free ear so he would not miss any vibration of the vocal cords, could judge the tightness of the throat, maybe even hear a background noise. A man who always made calls from pay telephones couldn’t always control what went on around him.
The voice said, “Prescott, this is Millikan. I’ll be in the bar downstairs at ten o’clock. Come see me.” Prescott hung up, looked at his watch, left the room, and took the elevator down to the lobby. It was nearly eleven, but he didn’t hurry to step into the bar. He went into the gift shop and bought a copy of the Buffalo News, studied the people passing in and out of the bar, studied the street outside the lobby. He scrutinized the faces of the young men who opened car doors for people at the curb or carried their luggage. Then he stepped across the lobby to the bar.
It was an old-fashioned, dark room with polished wood along the walls, booths with red leather upholstery, and a few potted plants in unlikely and inconvenient places. He saw Millikan from a distance and had time to look at him as he walked in his direction. Millikan had aged in ten years. The disappointed, liquid blue eyes looked as though they were the same, but the desiccation that happened in middle age had begun, and the skin looked loose and dry. Millikan’s thick, wiry hair had not receded. It still began too low on the forehead and covered his head like a bristly cap, but now it was
mostly gray, and thin on top. He had a big, thick manila envelope on the table under his forearm.
Prescott walked to the table and sat. Neither man smiled or offered to shake hands. People at other tables in the dim, windowless room would have assumed that they had last seen each other ten minutes ago. Millikan said, “The police knew where you were staying.”
Prescott nodded. “This wasn’t a good time to come. He’s out there looking for me now.”
Millikan rubbed his forehead in a gesture of frustration that Prescott recognized as a habit that had only gotten stronger over the years. “What are you doing?”
“You know,” said Prescott. “You have news?”
Millikan rubbed his forehead again, then left his elbow on the table and leaned his cheekbone against his fist. “The police in Louisville have been looking more closely at the victims. The first theory seems to have been wrong.”
Prescott kept his eyes on Millikan without showing much eagerness or interest. “Which one?”
“The intended victim. I mean the first one to be shot—Robert Cushner Junior. It wasn’t what everybody thought. He did have a new computer-hardware breakthrough, and one of the big companies that might have felt threatened by it did know about it. The Louisville police started at the top, with the intention of pressing executives to scare them into cooperating. But all they had to do was ask, and the first one produced a signed, witnessed, and notarized agreement. They had bought his company. He was due to get a wire transfer of twenty million dollars in cash and fourteen in stock. The transaction went through without a hitch even though he was dead.”
Prescott shrugged. “So the company’s out. What else are they looking at?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“They’ve done investigations on everybody who was there that night. They looked for anything odd at all: old gigs as witnesses or jurors, drug problems, gambling problems, debts, boundary disputes. They worked on the restaurant owner, rival establishments, distributors of liquor, food, and linen. Nothing.”
Prescott said, “I still think Cushner’s the victim.”
“Oh, he’s the victim,” Millikan agreed. “Got to be.”
Prescott stirred in his seat. “I appreciate your coming to tell me that the cops have eliminated a few things. Anything helps.”
Millikan said, “You could wait for them. They’ll find out who hired this guy. They may not be able to prove it, but they’ll figure it out.”
“Probably,” said Prescott. “Someday.”
“I’m doing my best to help them. The minute we get it, I’ll tell you.” Millikan looked as though he were trying to make himself understood in a foreign language. “You don’t have to do it this way.”
Prescott said, “If you do find out, I’ll have a choice, won’t I?”
The waitress stopped at their table, picked up Millikan’s glass, and set a napkin in front of Prescott. “Another?” she asked, and Millikan nodded. “And what can I get you, sir?”
“Nothing, thanks,” said Prescott. He was staring at Millikan. “I’ve got to do some driving tonight.”
As she disappeared, Prescott leaned forward. “Do me a favor. Go home. This isn’t what you do.”
Millikan pushed the envelope across the table. “I brought you this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s why I came. The lieutenant sent me everything: copies of every report you don’t already have, copies of all thirteen autopsies, every word the cops wrote down. It’s all in there. I didn’t want to mail it to some hotel and find out you’d already checked out.”
Prescott pulled it across the table onto his lap, but he didn’t open it. He looked into Millikan’s tired, rheumy eyes.
“Thank you.” He opened his folded newspaper and pushed a single stiff sheet of paper to Millikan.
Millikan turned it over and looked at the glossy surface of the photograph. In the dim light of the bar, he couldn’t see the picture as clearly as he wanted to; his eyes hungrily traced the outlines. He could see this was a young man with dark hair, small, regular features, a thin nose and lips. The features that were unusual were the eyes. They made him want to hurry to the lobby and hold the picture under the light. They were cold, but they were not the dead, distant eyes of certain killers he had met in his work over the years. They were bright with an inner life that absolutely contradicted the expression of the lips, the unlined, untroubled forehead. It was a frightening picture. Millikan raised his eyes to meet Prescott’s.
“That’s all I have to give you in return just now,” said Prescott. “If you see anybody that looks even a little bit like that, run like hell.”
“Have you given this to the police?”
“No, but they’ve got nothing to worry about. He hasn’t seen them on television. He has seen you.”
Millikan watched Prescott step away from the table and disappear into the lobby.
It was two A.M. Prescott had read the police reports from the night of the shooting, the notes from the interviews and inquiries they had made about each of the victims. Then he had scanned the autopsy reports to see if there was anything about any of the bodies that would change his impression of what had happened in Louisville. There were surprises. They all concerned the young couple who had been killed together near the front of the restaurant.
The man’s corpse had been lying on top of the woman’s, the man obviously attempting to shield her from the shooting with his own body. The first story had been that the killer had stood over them and fired two times into the man’s back, so that the bullets passed through him into her. But the autopsy on the man said he had one shot through the back, one through the back of the head. The woman had been shot three times—the two rounds that had passed through the man first, and once through her right side, just under the arm.
The police had interviewed members of both victims’ families, a few friends, and the people who had worked with them. Nobody had been aware that this man and this woman had ever met each other. They had been in a small, intimate restaurant together for a late dinner, and when trouble had started, the woman had not cowered in a corner somewhere, and the man had neither fought nor run. He had thrown himself over her to keep her from being . . . Prescott stopped. Maybe she had already been hit.
He worked his way back through the police interviews. The man, Gary Finch, was unmarried, age twenty-eight. He worked as an auto mechanic for the Ford dealership down the street from the restaurant. He had showered, dressed in a coat and tie, and gone there for a late supper after work about twice a week.
Prescott looked at the papers on the woman to verify his first impression. She was Donna Halsey, age thirty-four. She was a stockbroker in the Louisville office of Dennison-Armistead. Prescott had a suspicion that began to grow as he scanned the interviews with people who knew her. It wasn’t what they said that interested him—none of them seemed to know anything—but who they were. Her boss was a vice president. Her brother was a senior partner in a law firm that the local cops seemed to think was a big deal. Her friends, male and female, were all professional people of some kind—a pediatrician, an officer in a bank. She didn’t seem to know anybody who wasn’t about as well connected as you could be in a place like Louisville without owning a whole lot of land with horses on it.
Prescott went back to the interviews about the car mechanic. His friends all seemed to be guys who watched games with him, went fishing, went bowling. The cops had even gone to his high school and talked to a teacher and a guidance counselor.
Everybody used the word “nice.” They talked about his sense of fun or his good nature. There were a couple of people who used the word “decent,” as though to set him apart from somebody who was indecent. Everybody said he worked hard, but nobody said he was especially bright. He had no rap sheet with the local cops. Prescott turned to the autopsy again. He looked at the angles of the two shots, at the pictures of the entry and exit wounds. The coroner had agreed with Millikan
and Prescott: he had been lying on the woman, and gotten shot at close range from above.
The exit wound in the face was so bad that a picture that had been taken while he was alive had been added to the file, so that the coroner could tell what he had looked like before. Prescott studied it for a moment, and his suspicion hardened. Prescott had been holding on to the possibility that the upper-class, educated, wealthy professional woman had taken her car in to the dealership to be fixed, seen this nice, manly young guy with a strong jaw, piercing eyes, and whatever else she liked. She would have said to herself, “Aw, what the hell,” and gotten together with him, if only for a one-nighter. That would have explained why none of her friends had been aware of him. But Gary Finch was a nice guy, a steady guy, a funny guy, and at least once in his life, a brave guy. He was not a good-looking guy. He had a small, weak jaw that accentuated his double chin, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and small, close-set eyes.
Prescott looked at Donna Halsey’s photograph. She looked better in her autopsy photograph than most of the women he had seen alive on the streets in Louisville. She was slim, very blond, with hair tied back in a tight, shining ponytail. The suit she had been wearing would have looked good in Manhattan. He glanced at the coroner’s shots of the corpse: unusually good body.
Prescott quickly set out all the photographs of the crime scene, and his suspicion was confirmed. The table of the first victim, Robert Cushner, had one plate of food on it, almost eaten; one set of silverware; two place mats. He looked closely at the other pictures, trying to determine what was on the tables near the bodies. The pair of men had just about finished eating. Their table was still full of plates and silverware. The table above Donna and Gary’s bodies was a small one with two settings: one for a person sitting on the bench along the wall, and one for a person in a chair facing him. The others all seemed to match Prescott’s expectations. It had been late. A whole section of the restaurant had already been unofficially closed down, with the tablecloths and settings taken up for the night. That was probably what the waiter killed in the kitchen had been doing. There was only one waiter still on duty serving customers, and the late people had been seated in a small area so he could reach them easily.