Brian Garfield - Necessity

It is the sixth day after the theft. She pulls off the Interstate in Tucson, a city she has never seen before. According to the atlas it is a county seat and the second largest city in Arizona-population half a million people.

It seems as good a place as any for a beginning.

The coppery taste on her tongue is a symptom of fear: a familiar companion but unwelcome all the same.

While a fat man with a bandit’s mustache fills the tank she puts a quarter into a newspaper vending machine and leafs through the Arizona Daily Star until she finds the address of its editorial offices.

She pays cash for the gasoline and asks directions and tries to ignore the lechery that leers from the fat man’s eyes when he thinks she’s not watching.

He has been neither articulate nor accurate; she has to stop twice to ask directions. These guide her along wide boulevards debased by plastic and neon, then into scrub desert beaten raw by the sun. Mountains loom all around in a moderate brown smog. The six-lane traffic is incongruously heavy: it seems out of kilter, out of time on this primitive ground.

She has turned the air conditioner all the way up but still the steering wheel is nearly too hot to hold. The car is four years old, 67,000 miles on the clock, not in the best of working order-she bought it for cash in a dying town near Scranton from an unemployed miner who’d taken an ad in one of the supermarket throwaways. In terms of probabilities she doubtless is lucky it’s still running at all.

The miner hated to part with the car but he needed the $1,500-he has mouths to feed-and she doubts he’ll get around to recording the transfer of title until he receives next year’s reregistration bill from the motor vehicle people. Long before then she’ll be rid of the car and in the meantime it is as anonymous a pale blue midsize as can be found and there’s a good chance no one will ever trace it to her.

The wig makes her scalp itch. She feels clammy, uncomfortable with sweat: partly fear, partly the end-of-June heat. Even behind the reflecting lenses of her sunglasses she has to keep her eyes squeezed into a painful squint.

This climate can make one listless-or careless. It won’t do to drop one’s guard; it won’t do to disregard even for a moment the fact that they’re after her.

Pennants hang listlessly above a lot that offers enormous mobile homes for sale. Little stucco houses have weeds, cactus, old cars and broken-down pickup trucks for yard ornaments. And there’s not a pedestrian in sight. Not even a dog.

Arizona Daily Star. The modern structure is as wide and low as a trucking warehouse. She finds a space in the parking lot and walks inside and the cool is as sudden and free as what you feel when you emerge from a sauna.

“I wonder if I could see the obituaries for the first three months of 1953.”

She is steeled to answer questions with inventions but the girl behind the Information counter is incurious. “That’s in the microfilm section.” The girl directs her back into the maze.

She carries the bulky shoulder bag tight against her side as she explores the corridors. Really it’s too big for a handbag but she hasn’t let it out of reach in the three days since she bought it.

Half the money is inside it; the other half, with the diamonds, is in the suitcase locked in the trunk of the car.

An old man with sad bassett eyes brings out his film containers and shows her how to use the viewing machine. “Pretty soon they’ll have all this stuff in the computers and it’ll be real easy to find. But the computer don’t go back that far just yet, thank God, so they still need me.”

She thanks him and sits before the screen of the microfilm reader, turning the crank, searching each day’s issue for the obituary page.

She finds a possibility-January 13,1953: she rereads it several times but decides against it, partly because the date unnerves her (ludicrous superstition!) and partly because she doesn’t like the name of the deceased, Agnes Leonora Dapp. Surely there’ll be something more mellifluous than that …

The town was much smaller thirty-one years ago. A tenth of its present population. An overgrown cowtown, really; she rolls past February headline stories about rodeo parades and an El Conquistador Horse Show. Not many babies were born, let alone died, that season. She prowls on.

March 27, 1953. She leans toward the screen.

DIED: Hartman, Jennifer Corfu, aged 17 days, of cardiac deficiency. Infant daughter of Samuel P. G. Hartman and Jennifer Corfu Williams Hartman, 2675 No. Eastbourne Dr., Tucson. Private services will be conducted March 29th at Gower Funeral Home. Parents request that donations in lieu of flowers be sent to the Tucson chapter of the Nat’l Heart Ass’n.

She writes it all down and, on her way out, consults a current local telephone directory. No Samuel or Jennifer Hartman.

That’s good: they’ve moved away or died.

She stops again at the Information counter. A pulse lurches at the back of her throat; she endeavors to smile. “How do I get to the county courthouse?”

“Jennifer Corfu Hartman.” She prints the words clearly, then fills out the rest of the form. Date of birth March 10, 1953. In the block under Purpose of Request she writes, “Lost the original. Am applying for passport.”

Her hand trembles when she turns it in but the grey-haired Chicano clerk has a friendly smile. “Likely take a couple hours. You might want to get lunch.”

“Thank you.”

She puts the certified copy of Jennifer’s birth certificate in her bag in the same compartment with the birth certificate she obtained two days ago in Albuquerque for Dorothy (NMI) Holder, who died in 1955 at the age of 22 months. The traffic accident killed the little girl’s parents as well. The Albuquerque newspaper gave up a grisly photo of the wreck and the information that the father was studying agricultural science on the GI Bill: poor bastard survived two years in the Korean war only to be wiped out by an oil-slippery road surface.

She parks in a shopping mall, zips up the compartment in her handbag and goes from one big department store to another, buying clothes off the rack. Jeans, blouses, two skirts, shoes, toiletries and cosmetics-even underwear: she wants nothing on her person that can be traced back more than five days.

In a cheap cluttered surplus store she buys an inexpensive suitcase. She carries it out in her left hand, the shoulder bag snug in her right.

She won’t be remembered. She’s paid cash for everything and she stays hidden behind the big sunglasses and the dark wig she bought three days ago in Denver.

The plan seemed to take shape overnight and the details have dropped into place with a speed that still bewilders her because she wasn’t aware she was capable of such cunning.

Now an instinct for thoroughness keeps nagging her to remember every item of the scheme.

In a dusty hot alley behind a restaurant she finds a garbage bin higher than her eye-line. She transfers the cash and the diamonds to the new bag and then searches through her old suitcase, trying to force herself to be dispassionate but when she comes to the photograph of Ellen it is not possible to disregard the lump that fixes itself high in her chest. It won’t go up and it won’t go down.

With dread reluctance she puts the snapshot back where she found it, closes the suitcase and boosts it onto the lip of the garbage bin until it tips over and drops out of sight inside. She hears it dislodge glass bottles as it falls.

Probably it will be crushed in the mechanism of a garbage truck-buried under half a ton of waste in a county dump where nobody will ever find it.