Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  They passed a two-story brick building, set back on a lawn, that proclaimed itself Coulter Library and looked like one of the thousands built in the era of Andrew Carnegie. Beyond it was a white clapboard church with a tall steeple that looked like all of the others he had seen in the past two days. Ahead he saw a lighted blue sign that said simply POLICE, so he turned off Main onto Grant and went up the parallel street to his left.

  When he passed Sycamore, then Oak, he knew it was coming. There was Maple, then Birch. He paused at the corner, looking at house numbers. There were no lights in any of the windows on this block, but he could see that the dim purple luminescence in the east had begun to make colors distinguishable. He turned up the street. The houses were old, most of them Georgian or early Victorian, but there were modern touches—sidewalks and driveways poured within the past few years, porch lights and fixtures that were shiny and recent. When he braked as he approached 117, Stillman said, “Keep going and park around the corner.”

  Walker stopped in front of a low fence that separated the street from the beginning of a pasture. He got out and waited while Stillman went to the back of the Explorer and opened his leather bag. Walker could see him putting things into his jacket pockets, and then he appeared at Walker’s side. “We’ll have to do it efficiently,” he said. “We’ve only got twenty minutes before the sun comes up.”

  “Maybe we should come back at night.”

  “No,” said Stillman. “This is fine. It’s not prime time for burglars, so if somebody sees us, we’re not automatically in trouble.”

  He walked briskly up the block, turned in at 117, then kept going around to the back door, looking up at the eaves of the house, stopping to study windows. When they reached the back door of the house, Walker stood by and waited, but Stillman kept going. There was a sloped wooden cover for a basement entrance a few feet away with a door on it and a padlock.

  Stillman knelt on it, put a thin metal object into the padlock, and opened it as though he’d had a key. He lifted the door and went down the narrow concrete steps. Walker came down after him, then pulled the door shut.

  As he watched Stillman pull out his pick and tension wrench and insert them into the lower door to the basement, Walker said, “How did you open the padlock?”

  “A shim pick. I’ll get you enrolled in a class on locks sometime, and buy you a set of picks for graduation.”

  Walker didn’t respond. He watched Stillman swing the door open and step inside.

  Stillman said, “Or, if we get caught one of these times, we can spend a couple of years on it.”

  The basement was the sort of place he remembered from his grandparents’ house in Ohio. In the summer it had been cool and damp, and had a faint musty smell. Stillman switched on a small flashlight and moved it slowly around the walls.

  The walls were bare and the concrete was coarse and old. It seemed to have crumbled in places and been patched and painted over with whitewash. There was a hot-water heater in one corner, a work bench with a vise and tools in another, and in the middle an oil furnace with a big storage tank. There were a new washer and dryer along one wall beside a big metal sink.

  Stillman switched off the light and quietly climbed the wooden stairs to the landing above. When Walker joined him, Stillman whispered in his ear, “Give me five minutes.” He opened a door and disappeared into the first floor of the house.

  Walker listened, looking out the back door at the lawn. The sun was beginning to rise, and he felt each second passing, taking away a little of the darkness. When Stillman opened the door again, he jerked in nervous surprise.

  Stillman said in a normal voice, “He lived alone,” then turned and walked across the kitchen. Walker could see a gleaming stove and marble counters, a big side-by-side refrigerator.

  “Are you sure?” he whispered. “Look at this kitchen.”

  “I have. Look in the fridge and you’ll see this is just where he came to open his next beer. Anyway, there’s no women’s stuff anywhere, and no toys or clothes for kids. He slept up there.” Stillman pointed up the stairs to the second floor. “He had a sort of den down here. I’m going through that. You go up and do the bedroom.” As Walker climbed the stairs, he added, “Remember, we’re looking for things that will give us the names and locations of his buddies—address book, phone bill, photo album, birthday card.”

  Walker found the bedroom and did a quick survey, but found no photographs or papers in the open, so he looked for storage places. He had watched Stillman do this enough times that he could dispense with wasted motion. He searched the drawers of the dresser, pulled them out to see if anything was behind them, and looked under the bed and in the closet. He found nothing, so he looked for hiding places. He went into the small bathroom, lifted the tank cover of the toilet, searched the area under the sink, tested the baseboards and tiles to be sure none of them were loose. He moved quickly back to the bedroom, checked the mattress for slits in the fabric on the top and bottom, squeezed the pillows. He moved close to each light fixture to be sure nothing was in it. He tested the carpets to be sure no section had been lifted. Just as he was running out of places to look, he found the gun.

  He had noticed that the headboard of the bed seemed thicker than most, so he tapped it in a few places to see if it was hollow. When he tapped the center just above the mattress, a small door opened outward. There was a squat, square-cornered SIG pistol sitting where James Scully could reach it in the night. He closed the little door and kept searching.

  The walk-in closet was another proof of James Scully’s neatness, but the clothes surprised him. Walker counted twenty-two suits and sport coats hanging neatly side by side, all facing to the left. His shirts were all, likewise, hanging with their fronts to the left on another pole. His shoes were in a cupboard, four pairs to a row with the toes outward.

  Walker stood on a chair to look at the top shelf. There were hats—mostly baseball caps with the bills facing forward and the logos of heavy-machinery companies on their crowns, and a short-barreled shotgun with a box of deer slugs beside it. Walker patted each pocket of the coats and pants, looked inside the shoes, then knelt and was checking whether anything was taped to the bottom of each shelf when Stillman appeared in the doorway.

  “Find anything?”

  “A shotgun up on that shelf, and a pistol in a compartment in the headboard of the bed.”

  “No paper, huh?” said Stillman. “We’d better go.”

  Walker got to his feet and walked to the stairs with him. “What about you?”

  “Not a lot of surprises. He had quite a bit of money. You can see that from the furniture, the way his house has been remodeled. Damned if I know where a dime of it is, though. He didn’t leave anything that we could use to find it. His little den has a desk in it, but he seems to have used the place mostly to read magazines, watch TV, and talk on the phone.”

  “You mean there’s no paper around at all?”

  “Sure there is. Birth certificate, deed to the house, pink slip for his car, bills—water, power, heating-oil company, credit cards. That was a disappointment, because he hasn’t been using them on his travels. He’s got another set somewhere besides the one he had on him in Florida. The phone bills don’t have any long-distance calls on them. I don’t think I missed much. I even found his spare set of keys.”

  They were at the cellar stairs. Stillman started down, but Walker said, “We can’t give up like this.”

  “We’re not. I plugged bugs into the phone jacks upstairs and down. And, of course, I took the keys,” said Stillman. “I’m looking forward to the luxury of opening a lock with the actual key.”

  “But we can’t come back. Pretty soon the cops in Miami or the FBI will identify him and announce it. His buddies will come and clean this place out.”

  “Then we’ll pick it up on the bugs. That’s another luxury I’m looking forward to,” Stillman said. “The minute they get started I pick up the phone and call the cops to come get them. An
d you know what? Whoever comes in to look for incriminating evidence about themselves will experience a moment of intense pleasure just before they hear the sirens. Because this guy didn’t have any.”

  29

  Walker could already see his shadow on the pavement, a fantastic elongation of his silhouette that stretched across the road, stepping into the shadow of the Explorer that was nearly a square. He started the engine as soon as he could get inside.

  Stillman said, “Very slowly, just the way we came.”

  Walker eased the transmission into gear and rolled off the shoulder to get the Explorer moving, then very gradually accelerated in the direction it had been aimed when he had parked. He concentrated on keeping the engine running just above idle and the speed low enough so he could coast to a stop at each corner.

  Stillman said, “Go down this street, turn onto Main just before the river, then head for the highway. I think we’ll have breakfast in that last town we went through on the way.”

  “South Haverley? Why South Haverley?”

  “It looked a little bigger and livelier than Coulter, even an hour ago. I’d rather not hang around here doing nothing while we wait for something to open up.”

  Walker turned onto Main and headed out of town. This time, when he came to an intersection, he stopped only long enough to be sure he wouldn’t be accused of running the stop sign. Now there were lights on in a few of the houses, and twice he saw police cars. One was cruising along a parallel street in the same direction he was going, and the other had stationed itself on a quiet block just off Main, in the time-honored way of traffic cops waiting for speeders.

  When he had crossed the bridge across the river and was driving between the open fields again, he kept staring into his rearview mirror.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Stillman. “Cops?”

  Walker glanced at him. “It’s not entirely out of the question, is it? We did just pull off one of our many unsuccessful burglaries.”

  “Relax,” said Stillman. “I saw two patrol cars on the way out, and if anybody had reported anything, they would have collared us then. And it wasn’t entirely unsuccessful.”

  “No?”

  “No. We know James Scully was one of them, and we know he wasn’t the one who’s been moving all those insurance claims from your company.”

  “You could tell that?”

  “I told you he wasn’t in the habit of making long-distance phone calls—none at all last month, when there might have been a lot of conversation with people who were getting started on scams in Pasadena, Miami, and God knows where else. After seeing his place, we know he had plenty of spending money, but it was the sort of money that a guy who does high-risk work might get as pay. And he didn’t have the kinds of things that the money guy will have.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Office supplies. Pens, calculators, computers, airline timetables, maps. His friends might have gotten in and out already and removed incriminating paper. They would have no reason to get rid of paper clips. The magazines I found all had subscriber’s address labels, so they were his—all guns and naked women.” Stillman paused. “I’d say that Scully was pretty much what he seemed to be the night we met him: the sort of guy you tell, ‘Go get Walker and Stillman,’ and he goes out to get Walker and Stillman.”

  “So now we’re stuck again.”

  “Temporarily becalmed,” said Stillman. “If the other guy in Florida was a sort of relative, it’s possible he lived nearby—maybe in Coulter, or in one of these other little towns around here.” He let his eyes rest on Walker for only a half-second before he said, “Let’s find some breakfast.”

  Walker began to breathe more evenly as soon as he was back on the Old Concord Road. There were other cars on the highway now, and the bright summer sunlight seemed to lend not exactly benevolence, but at least reality to the world. What he could see now included long views of trees and fields and hills, not just a section of pavement lit by the funnel-shaped beams of his headlights surrounded by vague shapes and shadows. There were flowers growing in patches here and there, and being able to see the detail and complexity of their forms made him less uneasy. Approaching traffic now resolved itself into sequences of cars, and not just the glare of headlights brightening and then disappearing. It even made him feel better that two of the first six cars had out-of-state license plates. This was tourist season, and the uncomfortable feeling he’d had that he and Stillman were the only strangers disappeared.

  They found a restaurant just outside South Haverley that had been built to look like an enlarged farmhouse. A few of the dozen cars in the parking lot had plates from Massachusetts, New York, or Vermont. When he pulled into a space and got out of the Explorer, he noticed that the muscles of his shoulders and neck were stiff from the tension of the night and morning, then remembered that he had been awake for twenty-four hours.

  They sat beside a window that looked out on the highway, ordered steak and eggs for breakfast, and then watched the traffic continue to build while they ate. When Stillman was signing the charge slip, Walker let himself return to thoughts of the immediate future. They got back into the Explorer and Walker started the engine, moved to the edge of the highway, and signaled for a left turn while he waited for an opening in the traffic.

  “You know where we’re going?” Stillman asked.

  “What choice do we have?” said Walker. “The case is in Coulter.”

  They drove back to the sign that said COULTER and made the turn. There were two cars ahead of them on the road that sliced between the hills and onto the flat plain beyond, and as each turned to the right, Walker stared at the occupants. The first car held a couple in late middle age and the second a younger couple with children in the back seat.

  Walker drove more confidently over the covered bridge this time, and across the fields to the town. Coulter looked different in full daylight. There were people on the street, cars parked in front of the old-fashioned commercial buildings. The public library was not open yet, but there were lights on inside, and two little girls were on the front steps with stacks of books beside them, watching two slightly older boys playing catch with a baseball on the lawn.

  They went on past the old church, and Walker could see the blue sign ahead that said POLICE.

  Stillman seemed to read his mind. “Keep going. I want to see it.”

  It was a wide, single-story modern building made of tan bricks that didn’t match the reddish color of the older buildings in the area. Walker’s second glance made it look even better. The town was about half the size of Wallerton, the little place in Illinois where Ellen Snyder had been murdered. There, the police station had been about half as big, and much older.

  “Pull around the corner, and we’ll park on the side street,” said Stillman. When they got out and walked back toward Main, Stillman nudged Walker. “Look at the parking lot.”

  Walker looked at the row of police cars. “Looks like sixteen,” he said.

  “I guess we didn’t have to worry about car thieves,” said Stillman. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Walker’s impression of the place began to grow more specific now that his slower pace let him see details. The town had been laid out in the eighteenth century, when there had been a hope that cities designed on a rational plan would stay that way, and this one had. The streets were on a regular grid. Main Street ran down the middle of town from the bridge, with two parallel streets on each side of it: Federal and New Hampshire on the left, and Constitution and Coulter on the right. The cross streets began with Washington, set right above the river on the first high ground. Then came Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Grant. Walker suspected that Grant Street had been changed from something else, because all the houses on the street seemed to be older than the Civil War. It had probably been a tree, because this was where the names of trees began: Sycamore, Oak, Maple, Birch, Hemlock, and Cherry. The streets all ended in fences that separated the town from old pastures. />
  The houses were nearly all of the older varieties—wooden ones that seemed to belong in the late eighteenth century, and brick ones with Victorian-style porches and elaborate wooden trim. A few were nearly new, but they were built to the scale of older times, when a family might include eight children and a couple of maiden aunts. As they walked up another street, and another, Walker’s impression was confirmed. “It’s a pretty prosperous place.”

  “Yeah,” said Stillman. “I suppose the houses don’t tell the whole story. Most of them are a few generations old, when the money could have come from something we can’t see anymore because they sold it—lumber, or granite, maybe. Real estate has got to be cheap around here.”

  “They take care of the place, though,” said Walker. “About a third of these houses look as though they’ve just been painted.” They walked back the way they had come.

  A few minutes later, at the next intersection, Walker noticed something at the end of Grant Street that looked different. It was a long, one-story building that appeared to be the work of the same architect who had built the police station. It was plain, tan brick with only tiny windows at the top, just below the roof. The parking lot beside it seemed to be full.

  Stillman noticed it too. “I wonder what that is.”

  They walked down the street toward the building, until Walker could make out the stainless-steel letters attached to the brick facade. “ ‘New Mill Systems,’ ” he read.

  “Just some kind of business,” said Stillman. “Let’s go back.”

  They returned to Main Street. The town didn’t look any different from the other small, old places in the area. The single church had a stone set at the corner of it with the date 1787. The library had opened now, and Walker could see through the glass doors that the girls had already made their way past the librarian’s desk to an alcove full of tall, brightly colored books that had to be the children’s section. The boys had disappeared. As he passed, a pretty young woman with serious-looking glasses came from behind a counter and knelt on the floor beside one of the girls.