Vanishing Act (6 page)

"It’s possible that these two robbers were good judges of character and realized in a tenth of a second that if anybody was going to give them trouble it was Jerry C., or maybe he made a move I didn’t catch and the robber panicked. I don’t know. But it looked to me like one of those situations where somebody wanted to kill one particular man and everything else was just to cover that. At this point I start thinking about how this affects my future. I can be excused for that because I’ve just established that I’m the only guy in the room who has one. The room, in fact, is my first problem. It would not take the C.I.A. to figure out who rented the room for the game. There’s also the fact that Jerry C. heard about the game a month before. If he had, just about anybody else could have too. And even if for some reason he didn’t tell his buddies about it, there was his girl."

"Lenore?" asked Jane.

"Yeah, Lenore," he said. "Her last name was Sanders."

"She would go to the police?"

"The police were my primary concern," said Harry. "But they were not my ultimate concern. One way or another the police were going to find out it was my game. They were also capable of counting the bodies and noticing that mine wasn’t one of them. Would this cause me harm? Some inconvenience, certainly. They would try to find me and hold me for questioning. But there were other considerations. I start thinking about the five original gentlemen I recruited for my game: Villard, Milhaven, Nadler, Hallman, and Smith. I realize I don’t really know much about them. If I get picked up and questioned and let go, are their families and friends going to forget it? Maybe. But in my experience, nobody in this country gets rich by accident. A lot of people who haven’t gotten caught at anything are pretty ruthless. The heirs and colleagues of men like that can be pretty ruthless too. And speaking of heirs and colleagues—"

"—Jerry Cappadocia," she said.

"Yes," said Harry. "Him I don’t have to wonder about. I know about his colleagues. A couple of them used to show up once a week in the attic of a furniture store where Handy Andy Gurlich ran his bookie operation to collect the Cappadocia family’s license fees. Any two of them together were evidence that human evolution is not a straight line. There are lots of dead ends and throwbacks.

"Then there’s the question of heirs. Jerry Cappadocia’s father has a certain renown. He had announced a couple of years back that he was retiring and Jerry would run the family businesses. This is a man who spent forty years building those businesses with his hands, and what they consist of is killing people who don’t give him money. He’s healthy, no more than sixty-some years old. I’ve heard he speaks English like a native, except there are a few words he never learned, like mercy. What is this man going to do when he learns his only child has been killed? It’s true I was a little worried about getting picked up by the police for questioning, but it was only because they’re the ones people call when they hear shots, and they drive through red lights to get there quickly. What was really on my mind was getting picked up later for questioning by Jerry Cappadocia’s father.

"And that brought to mind another problem. I really didn’t know anything. I saw two men kick in the door and murder six men and then spend five minutes kneeling on the floor to search them. I had never seen either of them before. I didn’t see their car, if they had one. They both wore white coats they stole out of the motel’s linen cart. I saw them through a vent, so most of what I saw was backs and the tops of heads covered with navy watch caps. But if these two shooters read in the papers that there was a guy who was watching them, what were they going to do? I mean, if the first order of business when they kicked in the door was shooting Jerry Cappadocia, they must have known who he was, right? They had to know what would happen to them if Mr. Cappadocia found out who it was that killed his son."

"Are you sure they’d know about Jerry’s father?" she asked.

"I know you’re not from Chicago, but trust me," Harry said. "Not knowing about Mr. Cappadocia is like saying, ’You mean Nancy Sinatra has a father?’ "

"So they’re probably looking for you too."

"As soon as they reload."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want to disappear for a little while," he said. "I don’t know who these two guys are, so I can’t get the police off my back by telling them, and I certainly can’t get Mr. C. off my back. And if I’m right, these two guys were not working on their own. Somebody hired them to kill Jerry C. In fact, this is the only bright spot."

"This is a bright spot?" she asked.

"For me it is. These days my standards are lower than other people’s. I figure the reason to hit Jerry is somebody wants to take over the Cappadocia operations. If that somebody now makes a move on Jerry’s father or goes around trying to slide Cappadocia businesses onto their own inventory, the somebody gets a name. Then I got nothing to tell anybody that they don’t know already. There’s no reason to put my feet in a meat grinder to ask me questions, and no reason to cut my head off to keep me from answering them."

As Jane brought it all back, this was the part that came back to her most vividly. Harry was only going to have to disappear for a little while. She could see him saying it, his face haggard and hopeful, like the face of a flood victim saying the rain had to stop soon. It was Harry at his most basic.

Harry had shown up at her door with nothing to offer except the story about Alfred Strongbear. The two robbers had left no money for him, not even the table stakes for the final poker game. He had tried to make up for it with expert advice. He once asked if she liked horses, and she had answered, "Yes," before she realized that he had said "the horses." "Never bet on anything less than a twenty-to-one shot," he advised. "It’s not worth your time. You can’t make anything. The secret is, the numbers fool people into thinking that handicapping is an exact science. No expert can figure it that close. When a horse opens at twenty-to-one, all they’re saying is that it’s a long shot. Fact is, it’s probably ten-to -one, or even eight-to-one unless it’s got three legs. One race in ten or fifteen, the others all go out and trip over their shoelaces." Harry had spent his life convincing himself that the long shots were going to come in. After she had studied him for a time, she understood that this was because he identified with them. If people had been assigned odds the way racehorses were, Harry would have been a twenty-to-one shot. She had an intuition that Harry was going to have to stay under longer than a little while, so she had given him a cover that would hold up. That had been five years ago.

Felker had gotten the essential parts of the story right, the ones Harry would have told a cop to get him to help. There was an account of the murder vague enough to reassure the cop that Harry didn’t know the kinds of details that would make it worth the cop’s while to put him in a cell, but vivid enough to convince him of what would happen to Harry if he did.

She was feeling a very strong impulse to believe Felker. It was just like Harry to have said Alfred Strongbear had given him forty thousand dollars instead of five thousand, and where would any of the story have come from if Harry hadn’t told him? And then there was the way he told it. He had listened to Harry’s voice, and she could tell that he liked Harry, thought he was funny. Maybe Harry was safe. Maybe this one was another like Harry, a man nobody was willing to take in and protect because he wasn’t exactly an innocent but who wasn’t a monster, either. The missing parts, the ones Felker didn’t know or didn’t remember, made it seem more likely. Harry had asked Alfred Strongbear, "If you want a mustache, why don’t you just grow one?" The old man had told him, "It comes in too thin. People would know I’m an Indian."

Jane said, "All right. You can get up now." She relaxed her arm to let the gun muzzle point down at the floor and walked into the living room.

"You’ll help me?" he asked.

"I didn’t say that," she said. "I’m just not afraid enough of you to shoot you. Go connect my phone."

6

She waited in the living room and watched John Felker come in and sit in the chair across the room. She picked up her telephone, listened to the dial tone, then put it back in the cradle. "You were a policeman." The light was behind her, so it shone over her shoulder to illuminate him and remind her that there wasn’t much time left before dark.

"Eight years. You want to know why I’m not now."

"Yes."

"It’s a long story."

"What else have we got to do?" It sounded wrong, even to her. It was almost flirtatious. She tried to be businesslike. "I’ve got time."

"It came to me that the job just wasn’t what I pretended it was."

"What was it?"

"You take a long, close look at all the people you’ve arrested, sometimes the easy way, sometimes the hard, with broken bones and blood and abrasions. They’re mostly the kind of person who, when you talk to him, just hasn’t got a clue."

"A clue about what?"

"It isn’t just that they don’t know there’s a law about resisting arrest. They’re not too clear on laws like cause-and-effect and gravity. The world goes on around them and steps on them all their lives, but they don’t have any idea why, and it drives them half crazy. They don’t know why the guy next door has a new television set and they don’t. Later on in prison they get tested and they can barely read, and they’re addicted to everything, and their future is nothing."

"You felt sorry for them?"

"Not sorry enough to stop arresting them. What happened to me was that I could see that my own future was the same as theirs. I was going to have to spend twelve more years with these people—dragging them in, because they don’t even know that much, that when they’re driving at a hundred and ten, the helicopter over their heads isn’t going to lose sight of them if they go a hundred and twenty, or that fifteen cops at their door aren’t going to give up and leave them alone, no matter how hard they fight. If you spend all your time with them, you’re just living the other half of their lives."

"Twelve more years—that was until retirement?"

"Yeah."

"So you quit?"

"I quit. I drew my credit-union balance and went to school. I got a C.P.A. license and went to work as an accountant at Smithson-Brownlow."

"What’s that?"

"It’s the twelfth biggest accounting company in the country. The St. Louis office is one of seventeen."

"Sorry, I count my own money. What happened?"

"I lasted almost five years. Then one day I was at work and I ran across a problem. I think it was an accident, but I can’t even be sure of that. Somebody may have been setting me up to see it."

"See what?"

"One day a guy I didn’t even know, on a different floor of the building, comes in, turns on his computer, and a message on the screen says, ’Bang. You’re dead.’ Then everything that was in his hard disk rolls across the screen and disappears forever. It’s a computer virus. You know how they work, right?"

"Sure," she said. "You lost everything."

"No," he said. "They lost everything on his machine and five or six others and the mainframe. But one of the bosses was in early, kept his head and stopped the rest of us from turning ours on. The computer company sent over a program doctor, like a detective. He managed to find out how the virus worked, and delete it from the program. It took him about two weeks. He also searched every floppy in the office and found out the virus came from a disk somebody had brought in with a computer game on it. Every disk he used that went into another computer got that computer too, and so on. Of course nobody admitted to the computer game, and they couldn’t tell whose machine was first. But mine was clean."

"Why did yours miss out?"

"I was handling a lot of single-client personal accounts. I would enter what I was doing and pass the disk on to the woman who oversaw the mainframe, and she would feed it to the machine for the company records. She kept the disk for backup and I got a new one." He looked tired now, his brow wrinkling a little as he remembered. "So I took a chance. I spent the first two days of the quarantine printing out everything in my files. Every word came out. For the next day or two I looked it over for signs of the virus."

"What did you find?"

"A lot of transactions I didn’t know about."

"Stealing?"

"Yes. There was a pattern. There were lots of accounts where somebody had money in a portfolio— retirement funds, mostly. There would be dividends that were supposed to go for reinvestment, but instead they went to money-market accounts inside the portfolio. Then there would be a withdrawal from that account marked as an internal transfer to another account. The problem was, that one wasn’t part of the portfolio. It didn’t belong to the customer. I checked the number and it wasn’t even an account that was under the company’s control."

"It doesn’t sound complicated enough to be the perfect crime."

"It wasn’t. But the customer wouldn’t notice right away. His balance wouldn’t go down, it just wouldn’t go up as much as it was supposed to. If he saw a report of the transfers, he would see that dividends received were being moved from one of his own accounts to his holding account and then to another account. He would assume that was his, too. Finally, I called the money-market fund’s customer service number to get the name of the owner."

"Wait. They’ll tell you that over the phone?"

"I was just trying to find out if it was legitimate. If it was one of our accounts, they’d tell me what I wanted to know. If they wouldn’t, I’d know it was trouble. I said, ’I’m John Felker, from Smithson-Brownlow. Can you fax me a copy of the last statement for account number 12345678?’ "

"And they did it?"

"Yes. Only not for the reason I thought. They did it because it was mine. There was almost half a million dollars in the account."

"It was in your name?"

"Yeah. At first I was furious. It took me maybe an hour to get scared."

"What did you have to be afraid of?"

"I started thinking. The computer virus had nothing to do with the company. It’s a random act, like a drunk throwing a beer bottle into a crowd at a ball game. This was different. Somebody who had studied the operation—my part of it, specifically—had gone through and carefully moved things around. Whoever did it had access, knew the names of clients, that kind of thing. They were doing it to me."

"Did you go to your boss?"

"I was going to, but you have to imagine what the atmosphere was around there. They were losing money, probably clients. We were all suspects for bringing the virus in, so they were looking at us like the enemy anyway."

"So what? They already knew about the virus. This might have been part of it—some angry ex-employee or something."

"Right. But what if I had been stealing money? All of a sudden the virus hits and everybody in the firm starts scrutinizing all of the old records. All I could do was go to the boss and tell him the transfers on the computer were part of the joke. Only they weren’t in the computer, like the virus. The money had really been moved and deposited in my name. I decided that before I brought this up, I had better keep looking until I found out enough to prove I wasn’t a thief."

"Why would anybody do this, anyway? If they put it in your name, it wasn’t for the money."

"That was what my boss would have said. Then it occurred to me that the half million could have been only part of it, or it could have all been done to set me up."

"Did it occur to you to transfer it all back where it belonged?"

"I told you what I found. I can’t tell what I didn’t find. For one thing, I didn’t find anything like a half million in transfers. They could have been from accounts I never saw, didn’t know about. And if these people could put money in, maybe they could get it out, too. There could be another half million already gone."

"You were an ex-cop. Why didn’t you go to the police?"

"Believe me, I thought about it. But being an ex-cop made me more worried. I thought about what had happened in cases like this when I was a cop. You get a guy—a banker or accountant or lawyer—we got lots of lawyers. Some company blows the whistle. There’s an account in his name with half a million in it. What does the D.A. do? He puts him in custody, quick. The judge doesn’t grant bail, because if he’s got one account with that much in it, he might have five more, and finding them takes months. He’s a sure thing for jumping bail. While I was sitting in jail, anything could be happening with those records, and none of it was going to help me."

"So what did you do?"

"Here’s where Harry comes in. After all this time he called me."

"Where?"

"I don’t know where he was. I was at home."

"What did he say?"

"Two things. One was to stay out of jail. He had heard that some guys had been shopping a contract on me inside the prison system."

"Shopping?"

"Yeah. It was open. Anybody who got me was going to collect."

"Is that normal?"

"It hardly ever happens. It’s too risky. There are so many people who would hear about it who need something to tell the police more than they need money."

"How did Harry hear about it?"

"He wouldn’t say. Not in prison, and not in St. Louis. He was calling long-distance from a pay phone, and he kept pumping money into it and I kept hearing cars go by."

"What did you do?"

"I thought it through eighty different ways. No matter what I did, I couldn’t imagine a way things could work out that didn’t include my spending a lot of time in a prison waiting for an investigation. Harry said the contract was for a hundred thousand. That meant somebody must have stolen a lot. He might have taken ten million, left a half million lying around to get me arrested, and gotten me killed before my trial."

"Would that put an end to it?"

"Sure. He keeps the nine million or so, and everybody figures I took anything that’s missing in the whole company."

"So it was somebody in the company."

"It might have been, even somebody in one of the other branches, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been somebody I arrested when I was a cop. For a long time now, they’ve been giving inmates computer lessons as part of the job-training program. It beats lathes and drill presses for getting a job afterward, and they can’t use them to make a knife. You can learn a lot about computers in a five-to-ten sentence. Or it could be something bigger. If you can steal money by phone, then anybody anywhere could be doing it, and I just happened to be the victim."

"What did you do?"

"Any way you looked at it, the minute the computer man got the company’s machines up and running and they took a close look at what was in there, I was going to jail. Within two or three days after that I would have to sleep, and then I would be dead."

She looked at him closely. "You stole it, didn’t you?"

"What else could I do?" he asked. "I was an honest man. I didn’t have the kind of money it takes to go on the run."

She seemed to be staring through his eyes into the back of his head. "Did it occur to you that this might have been what they wanted you to do?"

"Of course it did," he said. "If they were capable of thinking up the rest of it, they could think of that, too. But if I did nothing, each day the prisons were going to graduate maybe a hundred guys whose only offer of employment on the outside was killing me. If I brought it to the police, I was going inside, where the rest of them were. Even if I didn’t, the company was going to find the pattern soon, just as I had."

"So you took the money."

"Some of it. So now I’m not just being set up. I really did what they’re going to kill me for. I’m guilty."

"If you get to be safe and secure, will you give it back?"

He stared into the distance, toward the window behind her, for four or five breaths. "I’d like to. I doubt it."

"Why not?"

"We were all bonded. When they find out, the customers will get their money back. The insurance company will raise its premium, and life will go on. I’d like to be honest again, but embezzlers always say that, and I don’t have any reason to believe I’m any better than the rest of them. I don’t know if I’m ever in my life going to be in a position where I can bring myself to give it back. I’m going to be scared."

She kept the gun in her right hand while she picked up the telephone and cradled it under her chin. "What was the phone number of your station when you were a cop?"

"555-9292." He said it quickly, as though it had worn a groove into his brain and would never go away. "314 area code. But police stations won’t tell you anything about an officer."

"I know," she said, and then somebody answered. She said, "Hello. This is Rachel Stanley from Deterrent Health Plans." She listened for a moment, then cut in and talked fast. "I’m calling because I’d like to set up a seminar for any police officers who might be interested in an exciting new plan for supplementing the coverage of law enforcement professionals." She stopped, as though she had run into a wall. "Oh?" she said. "What sort of plan do you have now?" She listened again. "Well, it’s very good, but if anyone there is—I understand. Goodbye."

She dialed another long-distance number on the telephone and said, "I’d like the number of Missouri Casualty," listened for a moment, then dialed again, her eyes on him all the time. He could tell she was listening to a recording, and when she heard the right choice, she punched a number. After a pause, she said in a voice that was something between a purr and a threat, "Yes. This is Monica Briggs in admitting at U.C.L.A. Hospital in Los Angeles. We have a patient here named John Felker who is a retired St. Louis policeman."

She listened for a sentence or two, then sounded preoccupied as she repeated, "Social Security number ... let’s see..."

Felker handed her his wallet with the card showing and she read it off. Then she punched the speaker button so Felker could hear it too, and put down the receiver to hold the gun in both hands, aimed at his chest. The woman’s voice on the other end echoed through the living room. "Oh, that’s too bad. At the time when Mr. Felker left the police force, he had only been employed for seven years, nine months. His benefits weren’t vested. I’m afraid he has no coverage with us."