Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

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.

13

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.

Jane took her time and looked closely at the houses. Few of them showed any interior lights at this hour. The garages were all hidden far back behind the houses at the ends of long driveways, and nobody left his car parked on the street. When she approached Turner's block she slowed to a walk, as though she were catching her breath.