Dance for the Dead (4 page)

“The court would –
will – appoint a guardian, and probably in this case, a
conservator, if you’re right about the size of the
inheritance.”

“That wouldn’t be
Hoffen-Bayne?”

“We don’t appoint
business-management companies to raise children, or to audit
themselves.”

“Then the power and money
would be in jeopardy.”

“Certainly they would have
to at least share the control.”

“And they did try to have
him declared dead.”

“That’s a legal
convenience. It relieves them of responsibility to search for him,
and also protects them if someone were to ask later why they’re
administering a trust for a client who hasn’t been seen for
seven years.”

“Then it would have been
even more convenient if he were really dead. They wouldn’t have
had to go to court at all.”

“Filing a motion is a
little different from hiring assassins to hunt down a six-year-old
and kill him.”

“Maybe. I think filing the
motion was a trap. I think Dennis Morgan was poking around, and
somebody noticed it. It’s not all that hard to find out what
you want about people: the trick is to keep them from knowing you’re
doing it. Dennis was a respected lawyer, but investigating wasn’t
his field; lawyers hire people to do that. I think they sensed that
if a Washington attorney was interested, then Timmy was going to turn
up sometime soon.”

“And you – all of
you – got caught in the trap?”

“Yes.” She stood up.
“You asked me what I think, so you would know where to begin.
I’ve told you. Dennis couldn’t find anybody but
Hoffen-Bayne who would benefit from Timmy’s death – no
competing claims to the money or angry relatives, for instance.
Nobody tried to break the will during all the years while Timmy was
missing. But I don’t know what Dennis got right and what he got
wrong, and I can’t prove any of it. I only saw the police
putting handcuffs on four of the men in the courthouse, and there
won’t be anything on paper that connects them with Hoffen-Bayne
or anybody else. I know I never saw them before, so I can’t
have been the one they recognized. They saw Timmy.” She took a
step toward the door. “Keep him safe.”

The judge said, “Then
there’s you.” He watched her stop and face him. “Who
are you?”

“Jane Whitefield.”

“I mean what’s your
interest in this?”

“Dennis Morgan asked me to
keep Timmy alive. I did that. We all did that.”

“What are you? A private
detective, a bodyguard?”

“I’m a guide.”

“What kind of guide?”

“I show people how to go
from places where someone is trying to kill them to other places
where nobody is.”

“What sort of pay do you
get for this?”

“Sometimes they give me
presents. I declare the presents on my income taxes. There’s a
line for that.”

“Did somebody give you a
present for this job?”

“If you fail, there’s
nobody around to be grateful. My clients are dead.” After a
second she added, “I don’t take money from kids, even
rich kids.”

“Have you served in your
capacity as ‘guide’ for Dennis Morgan before?”

“Never met him until he
called. He was a friend of a friend.”

“You – all three of
you – went into this knowing that whoever was near this little
boy might be murdered.”

She looked at him as though she
were trying to decide whether he was intelligent or not. Finally, she
said, “An innocent little boy is going to die. You’re
either somebody who will help him or somebody who won’t. For
the rest of your life you’ll be somebody who did help him or
somebody who didn’t.”

The judge stared down at his
desk for a few seconds, his face obscured by the deep shadows. When
he looked up, his jaw was tight. “You are a criminal. The
system hates people like you. It has special teeth designed to grind
you up.”

As she watched him, she could
see his face begin to set like a death mask. He pressed his intercom
button. “Tell the officers to come in.” He began to
write, filling in lines on a form on his desk.

The two police officers swung
the door open quickly and walked inside. The man had his right hand
resting comfortably on the handle of the club in his belt.

The judge said, “I’ve
finally straightened this out. Her real name is Mahoney. Colleen Anne
Mahoney. She was attacked by those suspects on the way into the
courthouse. Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity, because
she had no connection with the Phillips case. I’m giving you a
release order now, and I want all records – prints,
photographs, and so on – sealed… no, destroyed. Call me
when it’s been done.” He handed the female officer the
paper. “I want to avoid any possibility of reprisals.”

“Will do, Judge,”
said the policewoman. Kramer’s instinct about her was
confirmed. She had a cute little smile.

The policeman opened the door
for Jane Whitefield, but this time nobody touched her. She didn’t
move. “You should have those teeth checked.”

He shrugged. “The system
was never meant to rule on every human action. Some things slip
through.”

She stared at him for a second,
then said simply and without irony, “Thank you, Your Honor,”
turned, and walked out of his office.

Jane
Whitefield drove her rental car down Fairfax past the high school,
the old delicatessens and small grocery stores and the shops that
sold single items like luggage or lamps, beyond the big white CBS
buildings and then into the hot asphalt parking lot at Farmers’
Market, where she found refuge from the Southern California sun in
the cool shadow between two tour buses. The market was crowded on
Saturdays, and it took her a few minutes of threading her way among
the hundreds of preoccupied people to find the pet store. There were
two glass enclosures out front where puppies lay sleeping with their
smooth little potbellies in the air.

She
bought two cubical birdcages that had one side that could be opened
for cleaning, and a two-pound bag of bird feed that was peppered with
sunflower seeds. She walked across the market to a craft store where
people bought kits for making bead jewelry. She drove out of the
market and headed northward toward the hills, but then stopped only a
few blocks up when she saw a secondhand store that looked as though
it might have the right kind of teddy bear. Then she drove the
winding road over Laurel Canyon to the San Fernando Valley, and on
across the flats to the campus of the California State University at
Northridge. She had been past the school once years ago, and carried
a picture of it in her mind. It was the right kind of habitat.

Jane had not done this in years,
but she was very good at it. She drove around the nearly empty campus
until she found a long drive with a row of tall eucalyptus trees
beside it and a few acres of model orchard beyond them. She parked
her car in the small faculty parking lot behind some kind of science
building and carried her cages to the eucalyptus trees. Nearly
everyone on campus seemed to be in a library or dormitory, so she had
the luxury of silence while she worked.

She propped open the sides of
the cages with sticks that had fallen from the trees, took the food
cups from their slots on the bars and filled them with bird feed,
then ran thin jewelry wire from the cups to the sticks. She balanced
a stone on the open wall of each cage so it would come down fast and
stay shut. She sprinkled a handful of bird feed over the carpet of
fallen eucalyptus leaves in front of the cages, and went for a walk.
She used her sense of the geography of university campuses to find
the Student Union, and sat at a table in the shade of a big umbrella
at the edge of a terrace to drink a cup of lemonade.

Even
at this time of year, Southern California seemed to her to be parched
and inhospitable. The broad lawns in public places like this were
still a little yellow and sparse from the eight-month-long summer,
with its hundred-degree stretches. Back home people would be telling
each other stories about years they remembered when the snow didn’t
stop until May, and wondering if this would be another one. When her
lemonade was finished she walked back across the campus to the row of
eucalyptus trees. Before she turned the corner of the science
building she heard a squawk, and then some fluttering, and she
thought about the difference between birds and human beings. No
matter how many times it had been done, each new generation of birds
flew into the trap as though it had never before happened on earth.
Maybe they weren’t so different.

She
approached the traps, but they didn’t look the way she had
expected. One of them was just as she had left it, and the other one
had two big blue scrub jays in it together. When she moved closer she
could see that one was a male and the other female, slightly smaller
with more brown on top and less blue. As she stepped to the cage, the
questions began.
“Jree?”
asked the male.
“Jree?”
The female scolded,
“Check check check!”

They weren’t like the
birds at home, but they were quick and greedy for survival, so
territorial and aggressive that they had probably crowded in together
without hesitation. It was too late in the year for them to be
feeding hatchlings, and having one of each seemed right. They were
already mated.

She poured in some more seed to
give them something to think about, lifted the cage, put it in the
back seat of the car, and covered it with a silk blouse from her
suitcase.

Jane
drove to the county office building and wiped her face clean of the
thick makeup she had been using to hide the bruises, then walked to
the Department of Children’s Services. The people in the office
were busy in a way that showed they had given up hope of ever doing
all they were supposed to do but were keeping on in the belief that
if they worked hard enough they would accomplish some part of it.
There were two empty desks for each one that had a person behind it,
so they moved from one to another picking up telephones and slipping
files in and out of the piles like workers tending machines in a
factory. She waited for a minute, then saw a woman hang up her
telephone and pause to make a note in a file.

Jane stepped forward. “Excuse
me,” she said. “I need to leave something for Nina
Coffey.”

The woman’s eyes rolled up
over the rim of her glasses and settled on Jane; her head, which was
still bent over the papers on the desk, never moved. Jane could tell
that her bruises had identified her as an abused mother. “How
can I help you?”

“It’s this teddy
bear,” said Jane. “Timmy Phillips left it in my car.”

The woman showed no recognition
of the name. She snatched a gummed sticker out of the top drawer and
put her pen to it. “Spell it,” she said.

“P-H-I-L-L-I-P-S.
I’d appreciate it if you got it to
her, because it’s important to Timmy.” Jane handed the
woman the small, worn brown teddy bear.

The woman turned her sharp gaze
through the glasses at the bear. “I can see that,” she
said. “Don’t worry. I’ll give it to her.”

“Thanks,” said Jane
warmly.

The telephone rang and the woman
held up one finger to signal that Jane was to wait while she answered
it, but Jane turned away. She heard the woman call, “Mrs.
Phillips?” but she was out the door.

Jane waited down the street from
the parking garage. She had seen the row where the employees’
parking spaces were, and now she parked at the curb where she could
watch them.

It
was not long before she saw the woman she had been waiting for. Nina
Coffey was in her forties and very slight with red hair that was
fading into a gray that muted it. Jane saw that she had the habit of
holding her keys in one fist when she came out of the elevator, so
she suspected that this was a woman whose profession had given her a
clear-eyed view of the planet she was living on. In her other hand
she held a hard-sided briefcase and a teddy bear.

Jane waited for her to start her
car, drive to the exit, and move off down the street before she
pulled her own car out from among the others along the block. She
followed Nina Coffey at a distance, and strung two other cars between
them so she wouldn’t get too accustomed to the sight of Jane’s.
Coffey turned expertly a couple of times, popped around a corner and
then up onto a freeway ramp, and Jane was glad she had put the other
cars between them so that she had time to follow in the unfamiliar
city.

She pushed into the traffic and
over to the same lane that Coffey chose and stayed there, letting a
couple of other cars slip in between them again. Coffey turned off
the freeway in a hilly area that the signs said was in Pasadena, and
Jane had to move closer. There seemed to be stoplights at every
intersection, and Nina Coffey was an aggressive driver who had a
knack for timing them. After the third one, Jane had to stop while
Coffey diminished into the distance. She turned right, then left,
then sped up five blocks of residential streets that had no lights,
turned left, then right again to come out three blocks behind her.

Finally Nina Coffey came to a
street where she had to wait to make a left turn, and Jane caught up
with her again. When Coffey stopped in front of a modest two-story
house with a brick facade, Jane kept going. As she passed, she
studied the car that blocked the driveway and knew it was the right
house. The car was a full-sized Chevrolet painted a blue as
monotonous as a police uniform.

The authorities had done exactly
as Jane had hoped they would. They were protecting Timmy from
everybody, without distinction – the people who wanted him
declared dead, the reporters, people who were sure to search the
family tree to suddenly discover they were relatives – and
without comment. They had put Timmy in the home of a cop while the
mess around him was sorted out.