Dance for the Dead (20 page)

“Hello?” he said.
His voice seemed a little thin, as though he were winded.

“Hi, Carey.” she
said. “It’s me.”

“Well, hello,” he
said. He sounded delighted, and she felt glad. “Are you back
from your trip?” When she noticed he had not yet said “Jane,”
it occurred to her that there might be a reason.

“No, I won’t be able
to get through this job right away. I just felt like hearing your
voice.”

She wanted him to say “And
I felt like hearing yours,” maybe because if he said it she
would know there wasn’t another woman in the room with him. The
thought made her feel contempt for herself. He said, “My
sentiments exactly. I must have just missed you the other day. When I
came in there was your message on my machine. When will you be back
in town?”

“I’m not sure.”

She heard the
beep-beep-beep
of his pager in the background. “Oh, shit,” he said.
“That’s my pager.”

“I heard it.”

“Look, give me the number
where you’re staying, and I’ll call you when I’m
back from the hospital.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,”
she said. “I’m out and I don’t have it with me. I’m
never there anyway. I’ll have to try you again in a day or so,
when things cool down.”

“Do that.”

“Goodbye.”

“For now,” he said.

As Jane stepped away from the
bank of telephones she had to dodge a group of Asian teenagers who
swept past laughing and talking. She wished that she didn’t
have the kind of mind that always suspected deception. She reminded
herself that it was ridiculous even to think of Carey that way –
as though she had a right to expect that he would never see another
woman. He had offered, and she had not agreed, had only said “We’ll
talk about it.” There was no proof that a woman was in the room
with him, anyway. She was just inventing a way to make herself
miserable. As she walked back to her hotel, she wished that she
hadn’t known that when a pager was clicked off and then on
again, it beeped to signal that it was working.

She spent the late evening
trying to think about Alan Turner, but found her attention slipping
back to Carey McKinnon. She was angry at herself for being
suspicious, and angry at him for being the sort of person who made
her suspicious. He was probably innocent, and if she cared about him
enough to be this uncomfortable, what was she doing thousands of
miles away from him, forming agonizingly clear pictures of what he
might be doing with some other woman? She should be there. She was
surprised by the strength of her urge to be with him. She wondered
why it was stronger now than it had been yesterday. Was it because
his voice had triggered some unconscious longing for him –
maybe love, but maybe just some crude sexual reflex, the equivalent
of Pavlov’s dogs’ hearing a bell and salivating –
or because it had set off an even cruder instinct to gallop back and
defend her mate from the competition? Twice she was tempted to call
the hospital to see if he was on duty but fought down the impulse.

When the hour was late enough so
that she could not imagine a good excuse to call any of Carey’s
numbers, Jane managed to remind herself of what she was doing in Los
Angeles. She had decided it was necessary to find out who had been
trying to kill Timmy Phillips. If that was true a week ago, then it
was still true. Turner was the prime suspect, and anything she could
figure out about him might save a little boy’s life. Thinking
about anything else was a waste of time. When she had reached this
conclusion, she promptly fell asleep.

As the morning sun came up over
the next ridge in a blinding glare, Jane laid all of her information
about Alan Turner on the table of her room and studied it. She had
Turner’s name, the license number of the car he drove, the
address of his office, and the address of his house on Hill-crest in
Beverly Hills where she had followed him two nights ago. The resume
that Hanlon had sent to Marcy Hungerford said that Turner was a 1969
graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and that he had an M.B.A.
from the University of Southern California.

She forged a letter from Turner
to the U.S.C. registrar’s office requesting that a transcript
of his graduate work be sent to the personnel manager of Furnace
Financial, Ltd. in Chicago. The Furnace corporation was a business
she had founded some years before. It had a genuine legal existence,
but the ownership was cloudy and the physical plant consisted of a
post office box that she had rented in a small Chicago mini-mall,
with the arrangement that everything that arrived was to be sent
unopened to another post office box in Buffalo. Then she called the
owner of the little shop where the box was and asked him to call the
Hilton when anything with a U.S.C. return address arrived.

As soon as she hung up she
dialed Carey’s number. When his machine clicked on, she tried
to think of the right kind of message. She knew he wasn’t
working now, or she thought he wasn’t. It occurred to her that
if there had been a woman with him last night, she would still be
there. She simply said, “It’s Jane Whitefield.” She
paused to let him change his mind or go to an extension where the
woman wouldn’t hear. “I guess I missed you again.”
As she hung up, she closed her eyes and felt a headache building. All
right, she thought. I said I would call him, and I’ve called
him. Enough. I have work to do.

She drove to the Department of
Motor Vehicles office in Glendale and filled out a form. On a line
near the top, she provided the license number of the BMW Turner
drove, and in the big space at the bottom she said he had scraped her
car in a parking lot. The DMV answered with the name and address of
the owner, which was only the leasing company Green Import Auto, but
it also listed the lessee, Alan Turner, and included his driver’s
license number.

After only two days, the U.S.C.
transcript arrived in Chicago. Jane asked the owner of the shop to
open it and read it to her. From this she got Turner’s Social
Security number. With the driver’s license number and Social
Security number, she was able to have Furnace Financial request a
credit report on Alan Turner.

The credit report told her he
was paying a mortgage of one million, eight hundred thousand dollars
to Southland Mortgage. This must be the house on Hillcrest. He had
several credit cards and paid the balances each month to avoid
interest charges. He had checked the box on his mortgage papers that
said “Divorced,” which made things simpler: he didn’t
have a wife with a second income. But there was also a surprise.
Turner was repaying another loan of six hundred thousand dollars to
the Bank of Northern California. It was a mortgage on a second home.

She looked in the telephone book
for the Bank of Northern California and found listings for several
branches, as well as a Bank of Northern California Mortgage Services
in San Bernardino. She called the mortgage office and asked for the
credit department. Anybody who loaned money must have a credit
department. In a second a woman answered.

“This is Monica Butler at
the San Francisco office,” Jane said. “I’ve got a
loan application here from a customer who lists a mortgage from us
already for six hundred thousand. I’d like to know what the
property is.”

The young woman said, “The
name?”

“Alan R. Turner. Need his
Social Security number?”

“No,” the woman
said. She was typing the name into a computer. If the person on the
other end of the line thought you were from the same company, none of
the privacy rules applied. She was merely transferring information
from one internal file drawer to another.

“The property is at 1522
Morales Prospect, in Monterey.”

“Do you have a zip?”

“Sure. It’s 93.940.”

“Thanks.” Jane hung
up and wrote down the address. The picture she was forming of Turner
was coherent and consistent: he made a lot of money and he was
cautious and premeditated. He saved some by driving a leased company
car. He used his high income and stability to take out big deductible
mortgages on two of the most desirable addresses in the Western
Hemisphere, so he probably didn’t pay much in taxes. But those
were relatively modest prices for their neighborhoods, so he wasn’t
taking big risks. He wasn’t in love with debt, because his
credit cards had never carried a balance to the next month. He didn’t
look like an embezzler. If he had been quietly robbing the Phillips
trust fund for years, he must have had the foresight to know that
some day a stranger might take a look at his assets. Either he was
extremely sophisticated or she had chosen the wrong man at
Hoffen-Bayne.

The following morning Jane rose
before dawn, walked to the door of her room, picked up her copy of
the
Los Angeles Times,
and unfolded it to reveal the second
page, where the summary of major articles was printed. On the lower
left side was a box that said, “Judge Seizes Hoffen-Bayne
Records (See E-l, Business).” She had run out of time.

Jane
had checked out of the Hilton and had her car on Laurel Canyon
Boulevard by five a.m. She hadn’t dared stop to read the whole
article, but she had scanned it on the walk down the hallway to the
desk, and took a longer look while she was waiting for the valet to
bring her car to the entrance. The judge had been devious. He had
issued requests for specific documents, which Hoffen-Bayne had
dutifully provided a week ago. Probably he had done this to give them
the impression that he was just going to take a cursory glance at a
couple of carefully cooked annual reports. If he hadn’t asked
for something, they would have suspected trouble. Then, last night
after business hours, he had issued a warrant and sent cops with a
truck down to Wilshire Boulevard. She moved her eyes down the column
of print, but could see no names.

She decided to avoid Wilshire
Boulevard. The office would already have reporters and cops and, as
soon as the clients got up and read their papers, enough panicky
investors to keep them all busy. She needed to go to Beverly Hills.

She reached Sunset and turned
right. Even at five in the morning the street was busy, but the cars
were moving quickly. She made her way in the intervals between cars,
the skyline in front of her dominated by enormous lighted billboards
with pictures of pairs of giant actors looking stern and fearless,
and actresses with moist lips the size of watermelon slices.

The judge had done his work.
Timmy was, at least for the moment, as safe as anyone could make him.
He had already told the authorities everything he knew. The judge had
taken away the incentive for anybody at Hoffen-Bayne to kill him. It
would be like killing a witness who already had testified. There was
only Turner to occupy her mind now. She had calculated that she would
have a few more days to study him, and her feeling of frustration
surprised her. It wasn’t that she had any real hope that she
could do any more than the authorities could to get Timmy’s
money back. She wasn’t even sure how she felt about the money.
She had to fight the conviction she had been raised with that
accumulating wealth was a contemptible activity.

This wasn’t something that
her parents had invented. It was an old attitude that had never gone
away. In the old days no family ever built up disproportionate
surpluses of food. Whatever they had was shared with scrupulous
equality. Each longhouse was owned by the women of the clan, and each
woman had a right to live there and raise her children and sleep with
her husband when he was around. A man was a warrior and hunter, out
in the forest for most of the year, and he seldom owned anything he
couldn’t carry. If he wanted respect, he would bring back lots
of meat and plunder for the village. A person’s status was a
measure of how good he was at obtaining things to share, not how much
he was able to take and hoard. After the white people arrived they
advised each other that the way to find the leaders of the Iroquois
was to look for the men in rags.

Whatever would happen to Timmy’s
money would happen whether she was here or in Deganawida. It was
Turner she was interested in. She had to know if his careful
accounting and his conservative, respectable manner of living had all
been part of a scheme to disguise a greed strong enough to make him
kill people.

She turned down Hillcrest and
cruised slowly past Turner’s house. She had to be alert and
careful this morning. The richest parts of Los Angeles were guarded
with a strange, subtle vigilance. There were small, tasteful signs
with the trademarks of security patrols on every lawn, small,
unobtrusive surveillance cameras on the eaves of the big houses, and
lots of invisible servants watching. The sound of a helicopter
overhead probably meant a cop was looking down with night-vision
binoculars. An unfamiliar car parked in the wrong place, a stranger
walking down the street, and particularly anybody doing anything
before sunrise, were ominous signs to be remembered and reported.

She drove across Sunset onto the
slope on the north side, parked her car on a side street next to a
medical building in a space that was shielded from the intersection
by a big tree and a Land Rover, and ducked down in the seat while she
changed into her sweat suit and sneakers. She pulled her hair behind
her head, slipped a rubber band around it to make a ponytail, and
began to jog slowly down onto the flats.

The sidewalks here were wide and
even, and the street was lined by two long rows of coconut palms. The
air was warm for early morning, and she could hear traffic above and
below her but saw no cars driving down Hillcrest yet. She ran slowly
and easily, less to keep from pulling a muscle than to keep anyone
who saw her from looking twice. A woman trotting painfully along a
residential street at dawn was just another local girl in the dull
business of keeping her waist and thighs attractive; a woman loping
along like a track star was something else.