Dance for the Dead (6 page)

One of the ghosts was a man she
had never met. She kept remembering the newspaper picture of John
Doe. The police artists had needed to touch it up so much that it was
more a reconstruction than a photograph. A cop had found him three
years ago sprawled among the rocks below River Road. He had five
thousand dollars in cash sewn into his suit, a pair of eyeglasses
with clear glass lenses, a brand-new hairpiece that didn’t
match his own hair, and three bullet holes in his head. Jane had
watched the newspapers for months, but the police had never learned
who he had been or why he was running. Maybe he had not been trying
to reach her; perhaps he was just heading for the Canadian border.
But his death within a few miles of her house still haunted her.

On the third day in jail, one of
the ghosts came to life. The guards had let Jane out into the
exercise yard with the other prisoners and she had seen Ellery
Robinson. Years ago Jane had taken Ellery Robinson’s sister
Clarice out of the world to escape a boyfriend who was working his
way up to killing her. Jane could remember Ellery’s eyes when
she had tried to talk her into disappearing with her sister. Ellery
had said, “No, thank you. He’s got nothing to do with
me.” For the next few years Jane had often thought about those
clear, innocent eyes. Ellery had waited a couple of days while Jane
got Clarice far away, then killed the boyfriend. Later Jane had made
quiet inquiries for Clarice and learned that Ellery’s life
sentence meant she would serve four to six years.

After the six years, Jane had
kept the memory quiet by imagining Ellery Robinson out of the state
prison and living a tolerable life. But here she was, back in county
jail. In that moment ten or twelve years ago when Jane had not
thought of the right argument, not said the right words, not read the
look in those eyes, Ellery Robinson’s life had slipped away.
Jane looked at her once across the vast, hot blacktop yard, but if
Ellery Robinson recognized her, no hint of it reached her face. After
that, Jane had not gone out to the yard again. Instead she had sat on
her bunk and thought about Timothy Phillips.

As she stepped into the airport
terminal she had a sudden, hollow feeling in her stomach. She still
had not freed herself of the urge to take Timmy with her. She had
recognized the madness of the idea as soon as she had formulated it.
The whole purpose of this trip had been to bring Timmy under the
protection of the authorities. They weren’t going to let him
disappear again easily. Even if she succeeded in getting him away, it
might be exactly the wrong thing to do. It might make her feel as
though she had not abandoned him, but Timmy would lose all that
money, and with it, the protection. Maybe in ten years he would hate
her for it – if he lived ten years. Jane had not even been good
enough to keep Mona and Dennis alive. No, Timmy was better off where
he was, with the cops and judges and social workers. She was tired,
beaten. It was time to go home, stop interfering, and give the world
a vacation from Jane Whitefield.

She walked to the counter and
bought a ticket for New York City because it was the right direction
and there were so many flights that she didn’t expect to have
to wait long to get moving again. She used a credit card that said
Margaret Cerillo. As the man at the counter finished clicking the
keys of the computer and waited for the machine to print out the
ticket, she noticed his eyes come up, rest on Jane’s face for
an instant, and then move away too fast. Jane explained, “I had
a little car accident yesterday. Some idiot took a wide left turn on
La Cienega and plowed right into me.” The last time she had
looked, the makeup had covered her injuries well enough, but with the
heat and the hurry, the scrapes and bruises must be showing through.

“It must have been…
painful,” said the man.

“Pretty bad,” said
Jane. She took the ticket and credit card and walked up the escalator
and through the row of metal detectors. She kept going along the
concourse until she found an airport shop that had a big display of
cosmetics. She selected an opaque foundation that matched her skin
tone and some powder and eye shadow. When she caught a glimpse of
herself in the mirror at the top of a revolving display, she reached
below it and picked out a pair of sunglasses with brown-tinted
lenses. Then she took her purchases with her into the ladies’
room. Her face was still hot and tender from the punches she had
taken, and her right hand was aching from the hard blows she had
given the men in the hallway, but a little discomfort was better than
being noticed.

She looked under the stalls and
found she was alone. She was glad, because she wouldn’t have to
pretend that what she was doing was easy. She leaned close to the
mirror and dabbed on the foundation painfully. The resuit looked
tolerable, but it stung for a few seconds. She stopped until the pain
subsided a little, and had just begun to work on her eyes when she
heard the door open and a pair of high heels cross the floor behind
her. She had a pretty vivid black eye from the big guy with the
yellow tie who had piled in at the end. It was hard to cover it and
make both eyes look the same with a hand that hurt.

“Can I help you with
that?”

Jane didn’t turn around,
just moved her head a little to verify what she guessed about the
woman behind her in the mirror. She wasn’t surprised that the
woman was attractive. Makeup was a personal issue – not quite a
secret, but almost – and you had to be pretty spectacular to
have the nerve to tell somebody you could do her makeup better than
she could. This one was tall – almost as tall as Jane –
and almost as thin, but her face had that blushing china-figurine
skin that women like her somehow kept into their forties. They were
always blond, or became blond, like this one. Every last one of them
had switched to tennis after their cheerleading coaches had put them
out to pasture, but they must have played it at night, because their
skin looked as though it had never seen sunlight.

Jane said. “No, thanks. I
can handle the painting. It’s the repairs that are hard.”

“You don’t remember
me, do you?” There was tension in the voice.

“No,” said Jane. “If
I should, then you must be good at this. Maybe I should let you do my
makeup after all.”

The woman whispered, “I
was in the county jail when you were.”

Jane turned to look at the woman
more closely, this time with a sense that she ought to be watching
her hands, not her face. “Well, congratulations on getting
out.”

Jane waited for her to leave,
but the woman just smiled nervously and waited too. “Thanks.”

Jane decided that she could do
the finishing touches in another ladies’ room or even on the
plane. “Well, I’ve got a plane to catch.”

“No, you don’t. It
doesn’t leave for an hour. Four-nineteen to New York. I’m
on it too. My name is Mary Perkins.”

“Are you following me?”

“I was hoping to do better
than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s not much to
talk about when you’re in jail. There was a girl who had been
in court when you were arrested. There was a rumor you had hidden
somebody. That sounded interesting, so I asked around to find
somebody who could introduce us, but sure enough, all of a sudden
they were letting you go under another name. How you managed that I
don’t want to know.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I want you to do it
for me.”

“Why?”

“When I got arrested there
were some men following me. That was thirty days ago. I just saw two
of them here.”

“Why do they want you?”

The woman gave her a look that
was at once pleading and frustrated. “Please, I don’t
have time to tell you my life story and you don’t have time to
listen to it right now. I have to get out of Los Angeles now –
today – only they’re already here, and it can’t be
a coincidence. They’re looking for me.”

“But who are you?”

“The short answer is that
I’m a woman who needs to disappear and has the money to pay
whatever it is you usually get for your services.”

Jane felt exhausted and
defeated. Her head, face, hands, and wrists were throbbing and weak.
She looked at the woman who called herself Mary Perkins, and the
sight of her face made Jane tired. She had said almost nothing, but
Jane was already picking up signs in her eyes and mouth that she had
lied about something. She was genuinely afraid, so she probably
wasn’t just some sort of bait placed in the airport by the
people Jane had fought outside the courtroom. But if men were
following her at all, they were undoubtedly policemen. Jane thought,
No. Not now. I’m not up to this. Aloud, she said, “Sorry.”

“Please,” said the
woman. “How much do you want?”

“Nothing. You have the
wrong person. Mistaken identity.”

Mary Perkins looked into Jane’s
eyes, and Jane could see that she was remembering that Jane was
injured. “Oh,” the woman said softly. “I
understand.” She turned and walked toward the door.

As she opened the door, Jane
said, “Good luck.” Mary Perkins didn’t seem to hear
her.

Jane looked at her face in the
mirror. The bruises were covered, but the thick makeup felt like a
mask. When she put the glasses on, they reminded her that the side of
her nose had been scraped by the buttons on the big guy’s
sleeve when he missed with the first swing.

She walked out to the concourse
and strolled along it with the crowds until she was near Gate 72. She
saw the woman sitting there pretending to read a magazine. If she was
being hunted, it was a stupid thing to do. Jane walked closer to the
television set where they posted flight information. Mary Perkins’s
eyes focused on Jane, and then flicked to her left. Jane appreciated
not being stared at, but then the eyes came back to her, widened
emphatically, and flicked again to the left. Jane stopped for a
moment, opened her purse, turned her head a little as though she were
looking for something and studied the two men to Mary Perkins’s
left. If they were hunters they were doing a fairly good job of
keeping Mary Perkins penned in and panicky. The short one was sitting
quietly reading a newspaper about fifty feet from Mary Perkins, and
the big one was pretending to look out the big window at the activity
on the dark runway. She could see he was watching the reflection
instead, but that wasn’t unusual. Her eyes moved down to the
briefcase at his feet. It was familiar, the kind they sold in the
gift shop where she had bought the makeup.

The smaller man had no carry-on
luggage. He sat quietly with his newspaper, not looking directly at
Mary Perkins. He had to be the cut-off man, the one she wasn’t
supposed to notice at all until the other man came for her and she
bolted. They couldn’t be cops, or they would already have her.
She had already bought her ticket, and a plane ticket was proof of
intent to flee.

Jane felt spent and hopeless.
She admitted to herself that if she got home safely she would find
herself tomorrow going to a newsstand and picking up a
Los Angeles
Times
and the New York papers to look for a story about a woman’s
body being found in a field. These two were going to follow Mary
Perkins until, inevitably, she found herself alone.

Jane walked back down the
concourse, raising her eyes to look at the television monitors where
the departing flights were posted, never raising her head and never
slowing down. By the time she had passed the third monitor she had
made her selection. There was a Southwestern Airlines flight leaving
for Las Vegas five minutes after the flight to New York. She went
down the escalator, walked to the ticket counter and paid cash for
two tickets to Las Vegas for Monica Weissman and Betty Weissman. Then
she returned to the gate where Mary Perkins was waiting. She sat down
a few seats from her, counted to five hundred, then stood up again.

She walked close to Mary Perkins
on the way to the ladies’ room. As she did, she waggled her
hand behind her back, away from the two watchers.

She waited inside the ladies’
room in front of the mirror until Mary Perkins came in. “Did
you check any luggage onto the plane for New York?”

“I don’t have any,”
said Mary Perkins. “As soon as I got out I came here.”

“Good,” said Jane.
“When we get out of here, stay close but don’t look at
me. You never saw me before. One of those guys will be standing
between you and the exits. The other one will have moved to a place
where he can see his buddy signal him.” She handed Mary Perkins
the ticket for Las Vegas.

She looked down at the ticket.
“Las Vegas? How does this change anything?”

“Just listen. When it’s
time to board, one of them will go to a telephone to tell somebody at
the other end that you’re on the plane. It’s a five-hour
flight with a stop in Chicago, and that gives them time to do
everything but dig your grave before we get there. The other will sit
tight until the last minute.”

“But what are we going to
do? What’s the plan?”

Jane looked at her wearily. “The
plan is to go to Las Vegas and make them think you’ve gone to
New York. Now give me about the time it takes to sing the national
anthem before you come out. Then go sit where you sat before.”

Jane swung the door open.
Instead of looking toward the waiting area, she glanced behind her
for the one watching the exit. The man with the paper was loitering a
few yards away at the water fountain. She turned and saw that the
other one had taken a seat where he could watch his friend. There was
a certain comfort in seeing that they were predictable.

Jane sat a few yards behind the
man with the briefcase and studied him. He couldn’t be armed
with anything worse than a pocketknife. Three inches or less, if she
remembered the regulation correctly. They weren’t going to do
anything in an airport anyway. People you didn’t know wouldn’t
commit suicide to kill you. These were hired help for somebody.