Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  When they reached the motel, Stillman opened the door of his room and said, “Come on in.” He opened his leather case. “I set this up so the camera shoots out this end of the bag.” He carefully extracted it, ejected the videocassette, and inserted it in a recorder that was on top of the television set.

  Walker hadn’t seen the recorder before. “Did you buy that in Nashua too?”

  “Got a good deal on it.” He turned on the television set, then pressed the recorder’s PLAY button.

  Walker could see the inside of the store, but it seemed reversed. Stillman had set the recorder on the counter, aimed at the mirror. Walker saw Mr. Foley walk into the back room. Then Walker saw the picture jerk from side to side, until Stillman achieved the angle he wanted. The camera was looking into the mirror behind the counter at the image of the mirror on the back wall behind the computer screen. Then the camera zoomed in so that the computer was all that was visible, and stayed there.

  Walker heard the recorded voice of Mr. Foley, and then his own voice, sounding less deep and less pleasant than he had remembered it.

  Stillman leaned over the cassette recorder. He pressed the FAST FORWARD button and rushed the tape until a pair of hands appeared, then let it slow. The optician pressed the space bar and the screen said password: he typed RFOLEY. Then he typed SALES. The screen display changed to show a series of words with lines beside them: NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE, DESCRIPTION.

  Walker watched him type in the information for David Holler. “Okay,” Walker said. “You got his password and the customer file name for only two hundred and fifty bucks. Now what? Do we go copy his files on a disk? I assume you bought a computer too.”

  “No,” said Stillman. “I didn’t know he had one. I was picturing something more like a card file. But we’ll adjust.”

  26

  At eight, Stillman and Walker left the motel and strolled to Main Street, watching people enjoying the warm summer evening. There were older couples just coming out of the restaurants on both sides of the street after early dinners, and a stream of sunburned families who had probably stopped for the night in preparation for climbing Mount Monadnock, or heading north to the White Mountains or the lake country.

  Walker said, “Have you picked out a restaurant yet?”

  “I’m afraid we won’t be having dinner for an hour or so. If we see a good one, we’ll stop on the way back.”

  Walker said warily, “I thought we were killing time until later. You want to break into a store on Main Street at eight o’clock? The streets are full of people.”

  Stillman answered, “It’s the best time. Right now there are still plenty of businesses open, still lots of strangers out on foot. If we wait until after midnight, it will just be us. A light showing through a store window will bring everybody on the public payroll but the governor.”

  “But there’s an alarm. There were electric eyes on the floor inside the door. Don’t you remember the bing-bing noise when we went in today?”

  Stillman sighed. “Not all alarm systems are the same. Businesses like banks have systems you don’t want to think about, because what they deal in is money. What Foley’s got to sell is eyeglasses. They’re expensive enough so he doesn’t handle much cash, and certainly doesn’t leave it overnight. Stealing frames and lenses isn’t practical, because there’s no resale. Nobody who needs glasses is going to get them ground and fitted by a thief. Foley’s got expensive tools and instruments, but they’re no use to anybody but an optician.”

  “How do you know Foley sees it the way you do?”

  “He’s a sensible sort of man. He bought himself an Impler 2000, which cost him five hundred and ninety-five. It’s got three settings: chime, so he knows when a customer comes in the door, off, and alarm. What happens when it’s on alarm is the door opens and breaks that beam you saw. Then Mr. Foley has forty seconds to punch his code on the keypad and turn it off before a god-awful noise begins.”

  “Do you know his code?”

  “I don’t need to. There’s a shutoff switch, located inside a locked metal box somewhere on the premises. A thief can’t go in, find the box, open it, find the switch, and flip it in forty seconds.”

  “I take it you can.”

  “Fortunately I’m not a thief. If you get the right angle you can see the box in one of his mirrors. It’s mounted on the wall in the little workshop in back.”

  “Are you sure you can get into it in forty seconds?”

  Stillman looked at him for a moment. “You’ve got to learn to live with a little more risk, if you’re going to get anywhere.”

  When they reached 1219 Main Street, Stillman took out his pick and tension wrench, leaned over the door lock, fiddled with it for a moment, then turned to Walker. “Check your watch and time this. Let me know when to go.”

  Walker waited as the second hand ticked. “Four, three, two, one, go.”

  Stillman opened the door and hurried to the back of the store while Walker stepped in and closed it. He heard Stillman mutter, “Damn.”

  Walker’s eyes shot to Stillman. The door to the work room was closed. Stillman knelt beside the knob with his pick and tension wrench. “Sing out the time.”

  “Thirty-four seconds.”

  Stillman muttered, “Not working.”

  “What?”

  “It’s going to take too long. The lock is too good.”

  “Can’t we break it down?”

  “We can’t break the man’s door and expect him not to notice. We’ll have to get out.”

  “Wait,” said Walker. “There were keys. He had a big ring with keys on it when he opened the display case.”

  Walker swung his legs over the low counter where he had sat to be fitted, then dropped to all fours. He could see nothing, but he groped in the pitch-black enclosed space under the surface of the counter. His hand hit a heavy metal object, and he heard a jingle. He grasped it, scraping his finger on the head of the nail where it hung, then pulled it out and tossed it at Stillman. “Heads up.”

  He heard the heavy ring hit Stillman’s chest, then fall to the carpet at his feet. He heard Stillman grab it. Walker lifted his wrist to his eyes so he could see the watch and called, “Fifteen seconds, fourteen . . . .”

  He heard Stillman jab a key into the lock, rattle it, then try another. The doorknob turned, and Walker could see a deepening of the darkness as the door swung inward.

  He called, “Ten, nine . . . ” and heard a metallic scraping as Stillman tried to insert a key into the metal box and the others dangled. “Eight . . . seven . . . ” He heard another scrape, then jangling. “Six . . . five . . . ” The door suddenly closed and a horizontal stripe of light appeared at the floor. He knew that Stillman had closed himself in and turned on the light in the windowless work room. Walker crouched and prepared himself for the sound of the alarm. “Three . . . two . . . ” He stood and took a backward step toward the front of the store, his eyes still on the little strip of light.

  The light went off and the door opened. “It’s off,” said Stillman. “In the future, if you know where the keys are, you might mention it to me before I go through the exercise of picking three locks in forty seconds.”

  “It didn’t come to me until we were in here,” said Walker. “I remembered thinking the key ring was too big and heavy to carry around in his pocket.”

  Stillman moved behind the counter to the computer. “Now, let’s print out a copy of that file on paper and go get a drink.”

  Walker moved in beside him, switched on the computer and the screen, then looked around him. “No printer. Did you see a printer in the back room?”

  “Let me look.” He stepped off in the dark, closed the door again and turned on the light, then turned it off. “Nothing.” He sighed. “This is getting harder than it has any right to be. Bring up the file.”

  Walker tapped the space bar as Foley had done, typed in RFOLEY and SALES, and the first entry appeared: Asheransky, Linda. Stillman took his video camera from
his bag, propped it on the shelf behind the computer screen, and turned it on. “Now,” he said, “give it about three seconds on each entry, then scroll down to the next. Get every one of them on tape.” He stepped away. “And remember not to get in front of the camera.”

  Walker counted the seconds as he centered each entry on the screen. He wondered how long this was going to take. He would need a minute to get twenty names, an hour to get twelve hundred. But Foley had spent about twenty minutes with them today, and nobody else had come in. Maybe he didn’t have twelve hundred customers. Walker tried to give himself hope as he scrolled from entry to entry. It was a small town, and people who needed glasses would need new ones now and then. That would be enough business for a shop this size. He looked up for Stillman, but he didn’t see him at first glance, and he needed to return his eyes to the screen. When he tried again, Stillman was by the doorway, looking out at the street to keep watch.

  The minutes passed slowly, but at last he reached Mona Ziegler and gave her the three seconds. He scrolled down, and saw the entry for David Holler. That was him. Foley had not ordered the computer to fit it into the alphabetical list yet. He held his breath and scrolled down again. The cursor stopped. “That’s it,” he whispered. “I’ve got them all.”

  “Good,” said Stillman quietly. “I was just getting ready to tell you to turn it off.”

  Walker closed the file and switched off the monitor, then the computer. The room was in deep darkness again. His eyes were no longer used to the dark, so he couldn’t read his watch.

  Stillman’s voice reached him from the vicinity of the front door. “There’s a cop coming up the street rattling doorknobs.”

  Walker sat on the floor behind the counter, then remembered the video camera. He reached up and pulled it down into his lap. He heard Stillman moving beyond the counter along the side wall. Stillman’s voice whispered, “Remember the mirrors.”

  A bright beam of light pierced the darkness above Walker’s head. It flitted quickly across the room, and when it hit the mirror it seemed to split and come from everywhere. Walker froze, hoping his immobility would keep the police officer from recognizing the shape of his shadow on the carpet as human. The flashlight beam caromed here and there, flashed a couple of times, and disappeared. Stillman’s whisper came through the dark again. “Don’t move yet.”

  The light came on once more and moved slowly around the shop, then went out. Walker waited, but there was no more sound. After five minutes, Stillman said, “Let’s bid a fond adieu to Foley Optical.”

  Stillman took the video camera out of Walker’s hands, and put it into his bag.

  “How do we get out of here without setting off the alarm?” asked Walker.

  “Just the reverse of before. I’ll go into the back, flip the switch, lock the box, come out, lock the work-room door. Then I’ll hand off the keys to you. Put them where you got them, and head for the front door.”

  Walker waited behind the counter where he had found the keys. When Stillman hurried past, he snatched the keys, hung them on the nail under the counter, and hurried to the door. He was barely out when Stillman swung it shut behind him. He took a step, but he noticed Stillman wasn’t coming. “What are you doing?”

  Stillman took his pick out of the lock and stepped off. “Locking the door for Mr. Foley.” He began to move more quickly. “It’s a simple pin-tumbler model, so you just have to poke one of them out of line. Let’s go get something to eat before everything closes down.”

  They walked up the street toward the center of town, and Walker saw that Stillman had been right. The first few restaurants they passed were dark. But then they found a small Italian restaurant, and stepped inside. It was dim and cool, with checkered tablecloths and shelves of old Chianti bottles that had basketwork around their lower halves. The side walls were made of bare red bricks decorated with long twining vines of artificial ivy.

  They ordered eagerly and waited. Walker had the urge to talk, but the room was too quiet to risk it. After taking a breath for the fourth time to say something, he analyzed what he would have said. It was merely a nervous recitation of what they had done. He would have recounted each move to get over the tension. When he recognized that, he lost the need to speak. He sipped his wine and ate his food, then paid the bill magnanimously with the David Holler credit card.

  It was not until they had walked back to Key Road and were on the last stretch outside the motel that he said, “When we set the alarm off, were you afraid?”

  “Afraid?” said Stillman. “By the time you got the keys I had pretty much concluded that I had made a mistake. I figured we were going to have a tedious and unpleasant evening, one way or another. But sometimes things work out.”

  “But were you afraid?”

  “It’s a complicated question,” said Stillman. “My heart starts beating fast, I sweat a little, get a dry mouth. But after that’s happened enough times for enough unrelated reasons, you begin to get used to it. Fear isn’t some kind of disease, you know. It’s a survival mechanism. The purpose of that shot of adrenaline is to get your body ready to put out its maximum effort—greatest speed, greatest strength, greatest intake of oxygen. It makes your mind work better too, if you let it. You just have to keep it off the subject of how scared you are, and get it involved in what you’re going to do about it—like when you remembered the keys. It’s still fear, I guess. But it’s not the same feeling that you used to have.”

  “I don’t know,” said Walker. “It still feels about the same to me.”

  “You’re most of the way there already,” said Stillman. “All that’s left is to get to the point where you give yourself credit for it.” He smiled. “Of course, when things get ugly, all I really care about is how you act. I don’t give a shit how you feel.”

  They walked into his room and he popped the videotape out of the camera and put it into the VCR. While the television set buzzed and crackled on an empty channel, he handed Walker the pad and pen from the desk. “Make notes while we eliminate people.” Then he started the videotape.

  Walker watched the tape of Linda Asheransky’s entry, then the next, and the next. Whenever they reached a male name, Stillman froze the tape and they examined it closely. More than half were women. Only about a third of the male customers had ever made an order that included tinted lenses, and only half were green-tinted. The rest were blue, brown, gray, or photosensitive.

  When they reached David Holler, Walker counted the names he had written down. “I’ve still got fifty-six names.”

  Stillman began to rewind the tape. “What do you want to look at this time?”

  “How about frames?”

  “All right. Cross off everybody but the ones with gold frames.”

  The second time through, they eliminated all but thirty-two men. As Stillman rewound the tape again, he said, “We’ve got thirty-two males who bought gold frames and green-tinted lenses that aren’t photosensitive. What else is there about them?”

  Walker stared at the first entry again. “What’s a diopter?”

  “A unit of refraction. The more of them, the stronger the lens. Our guy didn’t think he needed glasses to shoot us, so we have to assume he could see pretty well. But I don’t know how many diopters that is. Let’s stick to the easy stuff.”

  “The lenses are plastic, not glass.”

  This time they eliminated only five men. Stillman said, “Twenty-seven is still a lot of guys.” He stared at the screen for a moment. “Let’s take another look at the glasses.” Walker went into his room and came back with them. Stillman held them up to the light and stared through the lenses.

  “Okay,” said Stillman. “The guy was just a bit nearsighted. He didn’t need bifocals. This time, check the prescriptions. There will be two entries, one marked R and the other L. If there are two for each eye, it’s bifocals.”

  When they had gone through the tape again, Stillman looked at Walker’s list, then stood up and began to pace. “We’re d
own to twenty-one. All of them have male names, green-tinted nonphotosensitive lenses in gold frames without bifocal prescriptions.”

  Walker stared at the entries as they began to go past again. He froze the tape and pointed. “What’s this number: fifty-three by twenty, forty-six by twenty?”

  “I don’t know. My knowledge of optometry is starting to get used up.” He stared at it for a few seconds. “It’s by the frame order, so it must be a size.”

  “Then what’s this—one hundred and fifteen?”

  “That I understand. It’s millimeters: the length of the arms that go from the lens to your ears. Probably the other is the size of the circular part that holds the lens.”

  Walker snatched up the dead man’s sunglasses and studied the frames. “Fifty-nine by twenty. One forty-five.” He went back up the list in reverse, writing down the numbers beside each name.

  When they had gone back to Linda Asheransky, Stillman picked up the notepad and the pen, and began to cross off names. When he had finished, he said, “Our man could be Donald Ross, James Scully, Paul Stratton, or Michael Tyler.” He began to speed through the tape again, stopped at Michael Tyler, and began to write.

  “What did you find?” asked Walker.

  “Phone numbers.”

  “You’re just going to call them up?”

  “It’s probable I’m going to bother three harmless guys with a nuisance call in the middle of the night. The fourth is the only one I’d worry about making suspicious, but I don’t have much chance of reaching him. He’s dead.”

  27

  “Listen to this.” Stillman handed the telephone receiver to Walker.

  “This is Jim. If you want to leave a message, wait until you hear the beep.” Walker hung up, then looked up at Stillman. “That’s him?”

  Stillman shrugged. “He’s the only one who wasn’t home when I called.”

  His name was James Scully, and he lived in a town called Coulter, New Hampshire. Walker had not heard the voice before, because when he had shot the man, he had heard nothing but the sound of the gun. He had just finished listening to a ghost. Walker looked at his watch. “It’s three-thirty A.M. We’ve got his name and his address. What do you think? Do we call the police or the FBI?”