Dance for the Dead (11 page)

“And Mary was for him?”

“Yes. It’s
straightforward, short, and unpretentious. It’s not a nickname.
It’s not a boy’s name that was supposed to be cute on a
girl. A lot of women in businesses use initials: M. H. Perkins, or M.
Hall Perkins. They think it makes them serious. They’re wrong.
It does not endear them to that man in the back office, and that is
the only game being played.”

“It is?”

“You must impress the man
who has the power to say yes. He doesn’t want to be fooled, or
to be in business with any person of either sex who is insecure
enough to hide things. The only thing worse is a hyphenated name –
the woman is married, which is a fact that has very big pluses and
minuses that have to be managed carefully. But the hyphenation
implies some kind of nonconformist convictions about men and women
that she wants to advertise. The man in the back office is not
interested in thinking about that. He’s interested in getting
more money. He wants to deal with somebody who is going to get lots
of money and pay him some of it.”

“Okay, so Mary Perkins
makes it in the door, and M. H. Perkins doesn’t.”

“Right. She’s at the
door now. She’s energetic and cheerful and well scrubbed, and
she has hair that’s a bit on the long side and high heels and
subtle makeup, but not so subtle that he can’t tell she
bothered. She wears good jewelry, but very little of it, and it’s
small. If Mary is married for this meeting, it’s a solitaire
diamond that’s just a little bigger than an honest banker can
afford, and that’s all. If she’s not, maybe a lapel pin.
Why? Because that’s the way the women who end up with the most
money look. The most common way to get it is still to marry it, so
Mary is feminine.”

“It doesn’t sound as
though he’s thinking about Mary Perkins as a business partner.”

“I’m not talking
about the deal. I’m talking about the first impression –
unconscious, probably – the five seconds from the door to the
chair. Finance is a tough business. The guy is smart, and above all
he’s patient. He’s seen a lot on the way to the corner
office. In order to automatically get back ten percent of his loan
each year, he has to lend the money to somebody who will win –
who will use his money to make fifteen percent. What I’m
describing for you is the sort of woman he can be made to believe
will win.”

“How did Mary Perkins get
to the point where people are hunting for her?”

Mary Perkins shook her head as
though she were marveling at it. “There was a lot of wild stuff
in the papers when I went to trial. My lawyer told me that if I went
for the plea bargain, it didn’t matter how much I agreed to
admit I took, because I was already broke. The prosecutor could use a
ridiculous number to help her look good, and I would declare
bankruptcy and never have to pay a dime. It didn’t work that
way. Now people think I was one of the ones who ended up with the big
money. They want it. I don’t have it.”

“Who are these people?”

“That’s part of the
problem. It could be anybody.”

Jane looked at her for a moment.
Mary was slouching in the passenger seat, looking out the window at
the darkness. When she turned to meet Jane’s gaze her eyes were
wide with wonder and a touch of injury. What she was saying coincided
with the truth in one spot: there was no way of limiting the number
of people who might be interested in robbing a woman who had stolen
millions of dollars. But this did not alter the fact that Mary
Perkins knew who was after her tonight, and that she insisted she
didn’t. Jane said, “Why were you in county jail?”

Mary Perkins shrugged. “Parole
violation. I saw those men and tried to leave town.”

Jane stifled the annoyed
response that rose to her tongue. Mary obviously was experienced
enough to know that the best lies were short and simple. Where did
the lie begin? She might have noticed that men were following her,
but she had not tried to leave town because of that.

Something else must have
happened first – something that told her what they wanted. All
of the hours Jane had spent hustling this woman around the country
settled on her chest like a weight. “Where do you think you
could go where there would be the smallest chance you’d be
recognized?”

“Smallest chance?”

“That’s what I
said.”

“Let’s see. We just
left California, so that’s out. Texas is also out.”

Jane concentrated on the
mechanical details for the next few minutes. At Ann Arbor she took
the Huron Street exit. She said, “When was the last time you
slept?”

“I slept maybe four hours
last night. Jails never seem to quiet down until you start to smell
breakfast.”

“We’ll sleep now.”

There was a motel just after the
exit. Jane pulled into the lot and walked into the office by herself
to rent a room. She opened the door with the key, locked the door,
checked each of the windows, tossed the key on the table by the door,
undressed, and lay down on the nearest bed without speaking. Mary
Perkins had no choice but to imitate her. When she awoke, the sun was
glaring through a crack between the curtains and Jane was sitting on
the other bed reading a newspaper. Mary sat up and said, “What
time is it?”

“Ten. Checkout is twelve.
We’ve got a lot to do.”

Mary Perkins rubbed her eyes. “I
guess we’ll make it.” She smiled. “It’s not
as though we had to pack, is it?”

“No.”

Mary Perkins swung her feet to
the floor and stood up. She had been surprised to see that Jane was
dressed, but the newspaper suddenly caught her attention. “You’ve
been out.”

“Yes,” said Jane,
not looking up. Mary Perkins could see that she had circled some
little boxes in the want ads. Jane also had set a medium-sized
grocery bag on the table beside the key.

“I never heard you,”
said Mary on the way to the bathroom. “You must be the quietest
person I ever met in my life.”

“I figured you needed to
sleep.”

Mary examined the shower and
found that the knobs were hot and the tub was wet. She thought about
the woman in the other room. A lot of people could tiptoe around
pretty well, just like little cats. But how did this one get
everything else to be quiet – appliances and fixtures and
things?

Mary Perkins got the water to
run warm and stepped under the spray. She felt good, she had to
admit. Here she was in a clean room with a clear head a couple of
thousand miles away from danger, and taking a shower. Once again
whatever it was that had always kept the luck coming had not failed.

But now that she was alert and
not particularly frightened, she had time to think about that woman
out there on the bed. What she sensed about Jane Whitefield was not
comforting. No, the animal wasn’t a cat. Just because it looked
like it had soft fur and the eyes were big and liquid and it didn’t
make any noise at all didn’t mean it was cuddly and gentle.
Mary was not the sort of person who lost fingers at zoos. Whatever
this one was, it had that look because it happened to be the female
of its species, not because it was something you wanted around the
house.

The person who had recognized
Jane Whitefield in jail was a short black woman named Ellery
Robinson. The word on Ellery Robinson was that she had been pulled in
on a parole violation. That didn’t make her seem interesting
until Mary learned that the conviction was for having killed a man in
bed with an old-fashioned straight razor. She had served six or seven
years of a life sentence in the California Institution for Women at
Frontera, one of those places in the endless desert east of Los
Angeles. She was in her fifties now, small and compact with a short,
athletic body like a leathery teenager. She never spoke to anyone,
having long ago lost interest in whatever other people gained from
listening, and having gotten used to whatever it was they expelled by
talking. But sometimes she still answered questions if they weren’t
personal.

Mary was in the mess hall one
morning when another woman pointed out Jane Whitefield and asked
Ellery Robinson if she knew anything about her. Ellery Robinson had
actually turned her whole body around in the chow line to stare at
her before she said, “She makes people disappear.” Then
the conversation was over. Ellery Robinson turned back to eye the
food on the warming tables. When a young woman down the line on her
first day inside saw the same food and started crying, she looked at
her too for a second, not revealing either sympathy or contempt, but
as though she just wanted to see where the noise was coming from.

Mary Perkins had come upon
Ellery Robinson sitting in the sunshine in the yard, a headband
around her forehead and the sleeves of her prison shirt rolled up to
make it fit her child-sized frame. Mary Perkins smiled, but Ellery
Robinson said only, “What do you want?”

“I heard you know who that
woman is that came in yesterday. Tall, black hair, thin?”

“Yes.”

“Is it true that she hides
people?”

Ellery Robinson closed one eye
and tilted her head up to look at Mary Perkins. “Why aren’t
you talking to her?”

“I thought I’d
better rind out what I could first.”

Ellery Robinson abruptly lost
interest in Mary Perkins. She seemed determined to end the
conversation, so everything came out quickly in a monotone. “I
heard that if a person is in trouble – not the kind of trouble
where the cops take them to court, but the kind where the cops find
their head in a Dumpster – the person could do worse than see
her.”

Mary Perkins stared at Ellery
Robinson, but her face revealed nothing. “You sure nobody made
her up?”

Ellery Robinson nodded in the
direction of the cell-block. “There she is.”

“If you know her, why
haven’t you talked to her?”

For the first time Ellery
Robinson’s facial muscles moved a little, but it wasn’t a
smile. “I don’t have that kind of trouble. If you do, go
meet her yourself.”

Mary Perkins looked
uncomfortable. “This is all new to me. It’s the first
time I’ve been arrested.”

“No, it isn’t.”
It wasn’t an accusation. There was no trace of reproof or
irony. There was nothing behind it at all. Then she seemed to
acknowledge that her words were what had made Mary Perkins take a
step backward. “Lots of bad girls in here. You aren’t the
worst.” She closed her eyes and moved to the side a little so
she would be in the full sun again and Mary’s shadow would be
gone.

Now Mary stood in the shower in
Michigan, feeling safe. She had begun to relax when she sensed
something had changed again. She tensed and swung around to see the
shape outside the shower curtain.

“Dry off,” said
Jane, “but leave your hair wet.”

Mary turned off the water,
snatched a towel off the rack, pulled it inside the curtain with her,
and turned away to dry herself. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why leave my hair wet?”

Jane reached into the paper bag
and pulled out a box with a picture of a fashion model on it. “We’ll
dry it after it’s dyed.”

“Dyed? What if I don’t
want it dyed?”

“Then don’t dye it,”
said Jane. “You’ve got easy ways to stay lost, and hard
ways. Changing the color of your hair is one of the easy ways.”

Mary glared at the model on the
box. Whatever color her hair had been when the picture was taken, an
artist had painted it over a hedgehog brown. “That color?”

Jane set the box on the sink
just under the mirror. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I’ve just always
been blond.”

Jane’s eyes lifted to
glance at her in the mirror, and then Mary saw them move to the
picture on the box. She said nothing, but Mary saw what she was
comparing the color on the box to. She angrily snatched another towel
off the rack, wrapped it around her and tucked it under her arm like
a sarong. “I meant I’ve always
felt
blond. I’ve
been blond for a long time.”

Jane didn’t turn to face
her. “We’ve got less than two hours before checkout time.
If you want to look different, the time to do it is before you rent
an apartment, not later, after everybody has seen you already. I’ll
be out there. Think it over.”

Mary sat on the edge of the tub
and stared at the mirror. It was just high enough so that all she
could see of herself was the glowing blond hair at the crown of her
head. It was bright, shiny, almost metallic when it was wet like
this. She walked to the door and called, “Okay, let’s get
it over with.”

Jane came back in, slipped on
rubber gloves, pulled a chair up next to the sink, and went to work
on Mary’s hair. The acrid smells and the mess on the counter
were all familiar to Mary, but it had been years since she had
endured them outside of a hairdresser’s shop.

Jane worked in silence and with
extreme care, glancing at her watch every few minutes. Then it was
over, and she was brushing Mary’s hair out.

Mary said, “You’ve
done this quite a bit, haven’t you?”

“Sure,” Jane said.
“If you do all of the easy things, the hard ones work better.
Dyeing your hair, buying new clothes, using glasses to change the way
your eyes look – those are easy. You can do all of them in a
day, and none of them has any risk. If you think about what you’re
trying to accomplish, you can do it as well as I can.”

“What am I trying to
accomplish?”

Jane looked at her in the mirror
impatiently. “You put in a lot of time trying to be Mary
Perkins. You had it all worked out. Just do it in reverse. For the
time being, you have nothing in common with Mary Perkins. She liked
Las Vegas. You hate it; the lights give you a headache and everybody
on the street looks like a zombie to you. Mary Perkins made
businessmen think about her and remember her. Lose everything you did
to accomplish that. Be the one who doesn’t catch their eye.
That’s easy to do, and if you don’t do at least that
much, you’re finished. Anybody who wants to find you can knock
on doors and show your picture.”