Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  As he walked to the corner of Keys Street, he wished he had gone with her. He still had not been able to figure out exactly what their relationship was, or what it should be, and she was no help. If he had asked her she would have come back with “Who said this was a relationship?” The one thing he had decided on his own was that every time she left, he hated to see her go. As he passed the familiar shops and restaurants, he consoled himself. It was likely that whatever Stillman would decide to do next would be dangerous, and it would almost certainly be unpleasant and illegal. He would feel better if she was away for a few days in some big public building surrounded by musty old papers.

  Spending the morning in a glass room surrounded by thick, gnarled old rosebushes with cabbage-sized roses had not made him forget. The people he and Stillman had been searching for were killers. When the sidewalk brought him past the last high building, he could see Stillman’s rented Explorer in the parking lot beside the hotel.

  He stepped in through the side entrance, came up the hallway, and knocked on Stillman’s door. Stillman opened it with the telephone receiver at his ear, and Walker stepped inside. Stillman was standing at the desk with an open telephone book in front of him. He nodded at Walker and said, “Mr. Fisher? How are you today. My name is Eric Campbell, and I’m calling to let you know that Golden Future Funds has some information that could be of great interest to you. Are you of retirement age, sir?” He listened for a moment, making a note on a sheet of paper in front of him. “Is anyone in the household under sixty-five? No? Then I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time. Thank you for your patience.”

  He hung up and dialed another number. “Hello, is this Mrs. Gilman?” He listened. “Miss Gilman. I’m sorry. This is Calvin Arnott calling from Kirby Travel in Manchester. We’re trying to give away a vacation for two in Antigua, and I said give away. It’s a promotion from Delta Airlines.” He listened for a moment. “Well, sure. Can you give me your boyfriend’s name?” Stillman wrote furiously. “His age? Good. The drawing is on the first of the month, and we’ll call you that day if you win. Good luck.”

  He hung up the telephone and glanced at Walker, then looked down at his list and put his finger on the next line. “Welcome home. Get anything?”

  “Misplaced hopes,” said Walker. “I was hoping she would know people in Coulter. I’d sip my tea and she would say, ‘Scully? Sure, I know the family. All nice people except Jimmy and his cousin Billy. They hung out with those awful Johnson brothers.’ ”

  “I take it she didn’t have much for us.”

  “I know more than I want to about the town, but it doesn’t put us any closer to finding out who the second guy was.”

  Stillman looked at him impassively. “What about the town?”

  “Why all the houses were fancy. The place was founded by what she calls ‘tinkers.’ They arrived when the Industrial Revolution hit New England and traveled around selling tools and machinery, mostly to farmers in the fringe settlements as the frontier moved west. They had a reputation for cheating and swindling their customers.”

  “A fine old American tradition,” said Stillman. “Everybody who got rich did it by cheating somebody.” His voice trailed off as he returned to his papers. “Well, nice try, anyway. Where’s Serena?”

  “She’s on her way to Concord to check the birth and death records.” Walker sighed. “Another waste of time.”

  Stillman didn’t contradict him. He dialed another number. “Hello. My name is Mike Metzger, and I’m calling for Mr. Philips. Yes. The Internal Revenue Service. You’re Mrs. Philips? Oh, then maybe you can help me. No, you’re not being audited, we’re doing a projection. If you could give me the names of the dependents you’ll be declaring on your Form 1040 next year, and their ages.” He wrote as he listened. “I see. Very good. Thank you for your time.” His finger moved down his list.

  Walker turned and stepped toward the door, but Stillman said, “I’ve just got a couple more calls, and then I thought maybe we could get lunch. Why don’t you go change into tourist clothes?”

  “Good idea,” said Walker. “Where do you want to go?”

  “The Old Mill in Coulter.” He didn’t wait for Walker’s response, but dialed the next number. “Hello. My name is Art Miller. I’m calling from MCI-WorldCom. What I’d like to offer is six hours of free long-distance calling for each member of your household just for trying our service. How many people would that be? Can you give me their names and ages?”

  Walker muttered, “I’ll be right back,” and went to his room to change.

  When he returned, Stillman was saying, “We’re not sure yet when the estate-planning seminar will be held. In small-town areas we like to be sure which date people prefer, so we’ll have the best attendance. Which date during the first week of September would be best for you? Good. Now that I’ve got your personal profile, we’ll be able to tailor our advice to your needs. We’ll call. Thanks.” He hung up, then stood and stared at his sheaf of papers.

  Walker said, “What was that all about?”

  “I’m making a list of men between twenty and fifty, with special attention to men who can’t be reached by telephone—meaning they could be the one who departed for the great area code in the sky with James Scully.”

  “Why all the different impersonations?”

  Stillman said, “You design it for the person you’re talking to. You hear an old codger’s voice, you want a list of his heirs. You hear a young woman, you want the men in her life. Simple.”

  To Walker it wasn’t simple. It meant that each time Stillman heard a voice, he had to be ready to become the right caller, with the right lie. “How’s it going?”

  “About as well as can be expected. I’ve called all the listed numbers, and picked the names that are possibles and those that aren’t home. That’s a lot better than we started with, but it’s not a small enough number to do anything with.”

  “Have any idea how the FBI is doing?”

  “Yeah. McClaren says they’re doing lousy. No names yet. Let’s go to Coulter.”

  This time, when they drove into Coulter, Walker tried looking at the town through Ivy Thwaite’s eyes. Now the proportions made sense to him. The big buildings on Main Street had been built to accommodate people who had brought ready money in from elsewhere. The ground floors of the ornate buildings had probably always been occupied by rows of small shops, just as they were now. They had sold clothes and personal accoutrements to men whose livelihood as swindlers depended on good costuming, and to their women, whose major compensation for being isolated in a remote village would have been a high standard of living.

  Now, through one of those meaningless coincidences that history always seemed to produce, the town had been reborn in the same form. A cadre of young engineers or computer geeks or science nerds with an idea to sell had eschewed the high prices and congestion of Boston and built their own version of Coulter.

  Stillman parked on Main near Grant Street. As they strolled down Main Street, Walker noticed that today, too, the town had attracted a few tourists. When he and Stillman crossed the bridge over the river to the Old Mill, they had to wait inside the door while the waiter conducted a family to a table, and Walker picked up a strong southern accent in the children’s chatter. There were several cars in the nearby lot that had out-of-state license plates.

  Other waiters had appeared at the far end of the big dining room, and they were setting tables in an area cordoned off by a white rope strung between brass stanchions. Walker counted ten tables.

  When they had been seated and the waiter was taking their order, Stillman acknowledged Walker’s distraction. “What’s going on over there?” he asked the waiter.

  The waiter half-turned, as though he had not noticed it before. “The tables? I guess they’re getting ready for a private party. I just came on.”

  While they ate, Walker noticed Stillman occasionally watching the preparations without letting himself appear to. He spoke little, and Walker knew it w
as because he was listening to conversations around him, probably trying to distinguish the natives from the tourists, and the old-time residents from the newcomers who had migrated here to work at New Mill Systems.

  Walker occupied himself by looking at the wall above him, where another part of the restaurant’s collection of old photographs was hung.

  When they were outside, Stillman said, “Interesting, wasn’t it? Waiters don’t usually come on at one-thirty. Either they work lunch or they work dinner. On a big day, they work both.”

  “Maybe they brought him in to help get ready for the party.”

  “Mysterious that he didn’t know what it was.”

  “I think Ivy Thwaite was right about this place.”

  “Oh?” said Stillman. “You mean the waiter is secretive because it’s a congenital condition he inherited?”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking about him. I was looking at the pictures on the wall. I noticed some new things. The place had electricity. It was all wired up before the turn of the century. Most towns like this still had gas lamps for years. Everybody on the street was all dressed up and riding around in a fancy buggy.”

  “You have to remember they were getting their picture taken,” said Stillman absently. “That was probably a big deal at one time—an occasion—so they didn’t get their pictures taken in old boots covered with cow shit.”

  “There was nobody on the whole street like that.”

  “Then probably it was Sunday.”

  Walker sighed in frustration and looked back at the Old Mill. “I could see that building in the picture. You know what? It didn’t have a sign.”

  “A sign of what?”

  “A sign. A sign that said what it was. Did you ever see a business—I mean one that has customers who are strangers and isn’t illegal—that didn’t have a sign on it?”

  Stillman walked beside him for a few steps. “You’ve got me. I don’t mean you’re right. I just don’t know. If I did see one, it didn’t have a sign on it, and I didn’t know it was a business.”

  Walker took in a breath, preparing to explain, but then he let it out. “You’re right.”

  “Then can we talk about the present?”

  “Sure.”

  “Between last night and this afternoon, I managed to make a list of the grown men in this town. It came to a hundred and forty-three, pretty close to your guess.”

  “Damned close,” said Walker.

  “All right,” Stillman conceded. “Damned close. Of course, if I missed a few, then it would just be pretty close.” He turned onto Main Street. “On the phone, I managed to eliminate all but thirty-eight of them.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “By talking to them, mostly,” said Stillman. “Our boy is dead, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Some of them had wives who said their husbands were at work and could I call back at five-thirty or something. A lot of them gave me phone numbers I could call to reach the old man right away. Those I eliminated too. A few I didn’t talk to turned out to be too old for our purposes. Anyway, we’ve got thirty-eight left that weren’t answering last night or today, or whose relatives said they were out of town.”

  “That was pretty good,” said Walker.

  “But not good enough.”

  “What if we limit it to the phones that nobody at all answers?” asked Walker. “He’s dead, after all.”

  “You mean we can assume that if a woman answered and she wasn’t crying, then the man in her life isn’t lying on a slab in Florida? You’re forgetting that the FBI hasn’t identified either man yet. This guy’s next of kin hasn’t been notified yet, so we can’t be sure they know he’s dead. And if you were a man who committed felonies professionally, it would be pretty hard to keep the little woman in the dark about it. If she knows what you do for a living, she knows how to cover. Even if you were good enough to deceive her, you would still have to feed her a bullshit story, so she could tell people why you weren’t out front mowing the lawn this week. And these guys seem to travel a lot. Most likely their relatives are used to them not showing up on time.”

  “I suppose so,” said Walker. “Forget that idea. What about making a list of people who have no visible means of support?”

  “You mean like the idea I had about checking their health insurance in the drugstore?”

  “It’s not as elegant, but we only need to eliminate thirty-seven now. We go in every door on Main. Write down the men who work as waiters or store clerks or cops: anybody who has a name tag, or anybody whose name is on an office directory. That should eliminate a few of the ones you couldn’t reach by telephone. They were out working when you called.” He squinted. “A big step would be to somehow get a list of employees at New Mill Systems.”

  “I tried New Mill this morning. I called and asked for the personnel manager. Some guy came on, so I said I was from the New Hampshire Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I asked for a list of employees broken down by age, sex, and race.”

  “Race?” said Walker. “I haven’t seen a pair of brown eyes since I got here, let alone brown skin.”

  “What do you want from me? I asked the guy what he expected to hear. No dice. He said the company employs fewer than a hundred people, and has been certified exempt from reporting requirements.”

  “Is that true?” asked Walker. “Are companies like that exempt from discrimination laws?”

  “How the hell do I know what the law is in New Hampshire? It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to take him to court. The list I wanted would have been of people who didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Walker’s eyes settled on the sidewalk as he contemplated the problem. “Thirty-eight men . . . .”

  “We’ve been in New Hampshire for three days, and none of the devious ways has worked. What I think we’ve got to do is start taking some chances.”

  “Start?”

  “Yeah. Risk drawing attention to ourselves. Ask direct questions of anybody who will talk to us. ‘Do you know James Scully? Who does he hang out with?’ ”

  “I think you’re right,” said Walker. “It would probably go faster if we split up and talked to as many—”

  “Maybe not,” said Stillman.

  Walker looked up and stared at him. His eyes were squinting ahead. “But you just said—”

  “Look,” said Stillman.

  Walker turned his eyes to follow Stillman’s gaze. Far up the street, two men were getting out of a car parked along Main Street across from the coffee shop. Walker studied them, not quite daring to make a decision yet, straining his eyes and waiting for them to turn their heads so he could see their faces.

  Stillman tugged his arm lightly to divert him into an alcove that shaded the entrance to a clothing store, and the movement of Walker’s body made him come to his senses. Waiting in plain sight for them to turn around would be insane. What they appeared to be were the two men who had pretended to be cops in the alley in Pasadena, but he wasn’t sure. He was positive he knew their faces, their postures, and their walks. In his shock and alarm he had studied them, imprinted them on his memory that night.

  “Your eyes are better than mine,” Stillman said. “Stand here.” Stillman nudged him near the corner of the display window where he could look up the street through both panes of glass. “You won’t stand out between those mannequins. Steady. Don’t move, just look.”

  Walker obeyed. He stood absolutely still, staring, holding his breath. One of the men had moved out of sight along the side of the car, toward the front. The other was at the trunk. He leaned over, opened the trunk, and bent down to get something out. Then he stood erect again, slammed the lid, and turned. Walker could see the movement of the shoulders, then the dark hair. The man looked up the street to check for traffic before he stepped away from the car. Then he looked down toward Walker, and Walker saw the bushy mustache. The two men trotted across the street. Walker stepped back.

  “It’s them,” said Walke
r. “They’re here.”

  34

  Stillman’s eyes were gleaming. “Well, now that is a real gift from above,” he murmured.

  “Should we follow them?” asked Walker.

  “I think we’d better concentrate on making sure we don’t bump into them. We have to assume their memory for faces is as good as ours.”

  Stillman stepped to the edge of the alcove where Walker had stood, then slowly moved his body to the right to see more and more of the sidewalk along the row of old buildings. When he had one eye beyond the corner of the display window, he said, “They went into the coffee shop,” and stepped out.

  They turned away from the place where they had seen the two men and strode briskly toward the end of the row of buildings. Stillman said, “Let’s get across the street down there by the bridge, then head along the river to the next street.”

  Walker led the way to Washington Street, where Main narrowed to funnel traffic onto the bridge, then glanced back toward the coffee shop before he ventured across. He and Stillman reached the other side quickly, and it took them only a few more steps to reach the curb, cross the sidewalk, and slip out of sight behind the bulk of the big building on the corner. He waited for Stillman to catch up. “What are we doing—getting the car?”

  “It’s parked on Main, remember? We can’t get to it without putting ourselves in sight of the coffee shop,” Stillman said. “But I guess I’m finally going to get to say something that you’ll be happy to hear. Those two, thanks to us, are already wanted for questioning in connection with a homicide investigation. Also for assault. We’re going to the police station to get their asses thrown in jail.”

  Walker noticed that his heart must have been beating hard since he had seen the two men. It was beating hard now, and it didn’t slow, but it wasn’t preparing him to contend for his life. “I can hardly believe it,” he said.