Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

"I don't know," said Jane. "I suppose he rang the doorbell. Alan Turner let him in. They must have known each other."

"You're not listening," said the female jay. "Anybody could get in by ringing the doorbell. How did he get out without tripping the alarm after Turner was dead?"

"How?" she asked.

Jane awoke and listened to the sounds of the cars on the freeway a few blocks away. Rush hour must have begun, but then she remembered that the term had no meaning around Los Angeles. There were cars clogging the roads every hour of every day. She sat up and looked around her, then stood and walked into the shower.

She had only needed some sleep. She still didn't know the man's name, but while she slept she had figured out something else about him. He might have gotten into the house in Monterey without setting off the alarm because Turner had let him in. But the only way he could have gotten out and left the alarm on after he had killed Turner was to know the alarm code.

16

Ellery Robinson opened the apartment door and looked out past her with wary eyes. "Come in," she said quietly. "This isn't a neighborhood for standing in a lighted doorway."

Jane stepped inside and watched the thin, hard arms move to close the steel door and then turn the dead bolt.

"I been waiting for you," said Ellery Robinson. "I knew you saw me in jail because I saw you. How did you find me? I'm not in the phone book."

"I went to your old apartment and asked around until I found somebody who still knew you.... You're in trouble again."

"No big thing. My parole officer thinks I have an attitude, so he forgot to write down when I came to see him."

"You don't have an attitude?"

Ellery Robinson shrugged her thin shoulders. "When a black woman gets past the age where they stop thinking about her big ass, they remember they didn't like her very much to begin with."

"Can you do anything about it?"

"He turned out to be unreliable, so his reports aren't enough to send anybody to jail anymore."

"He must have been really unreliable."

"Yeah. While I was in jail I heard they caught him in his office with a Mexican girl going down on him. He's been getting what he wanted regular like that for years. All he had to do to get them deported was check a box on a form, so they did a lot of favors."

"Does he know who set him up?"

For the first time Ellery Robinson smiled a little, and Jane could see a resemblance to the young woman she had met years ago. "Could be anybody. Everybody knew."

Jane sat in silence and stared at her. She had aged in the past eleven years, but it seemed to have refined and polished her. Ellery Robinson tolerated the gaze for a time, then said, "How about you? Have you been well?"

"I can't complain."

"You mean you can't complain to me, don't you?" said Ellery Robinson. "You're thinking I should have gone with you."

"I don't know. Nobody can say what would have happened."

"Don't feel sorry for me. I had a life, you know. My sister Clarice and I had one life. When I was in prison I would sit in the sun in the yard and close my eyes and follow her and the baby around all day with my mind. The women in jail thought I'd gone crazy, that I sat there all day in a coma, but I wasn't there at all. I was living inside my head."

"You don't regret it?"

"I regret that I'm a murderer. I don't regret that he got killed. He needed it."

Jane nodded. "You doing okay now?"

"I'm contented. I know what's on your mind. It's that woman in county jail, isn't it?"

"Mary Perkins?" said Jane. "No. She's far away now."

"What, then?"

"I know people hear things - in jail, the parole office, places like that."

"Sometimes."

"What have you heard about Intercontinental Security?"

Ellery Robinson's clear, untroubled face wrinkled with distaste. "If you're hiring, hire somebody else. If they're looking for you, don't let them find you."

"They seem to have a lot of business."

"Oh, yeah, it's a big company. And it's old, like Pinkerton's or Brinks or one of them. I think they used to guard trains and banks and things. For all I know they still do; I'm not a stockholder."

"Have you heard anything about burglaries in places they're supposed to protect - as though they might be fooling their own alarm systems or something?"

"No. What I hear most about them now is they hunt for people."

"What sort of people?"

"The usual. Skip-trace, open warrants, wanted for questioning, runaways. Somebody jumps bail, the bail bondsman is on the hook. Some clerk takes a little money out of the till and runs. The police don't look very hard, so the company hires Intercontinental."

"What's different?"

"The ones they bring in seem to fall down a lot. Maybe a broken arm, maybe a leg. Maybe their face doesn't look too good."

"It's an old company. Did they always have that reputation?"

Ellery Robinson shrugged. "I didn't always know people who got chased. Then I was away for a few years. It's since I got back that I've been hearing things."

"Who have you been hearing them from? Can you help me get to one of them?"

The little woman leaned back on her worn couch and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She seemed to be searching for names and addresses up there, but Jane could tell that she was rejecting some of them for reasons that she would not reveal.

The young man stood beside a car in the darkness. He was tall and heavy, with a jacket that was too thick for this weather and baggy blue pants. Jane could see that there was a streetlight directly above him, but the lamp was a jagged rim of broken glass.

Ellery Robinson followed the angle of Jane's eyes. "The street dealers shoot them out at night, and the city replaces them in the day. Everybody gets paid." She stopped walking and held Jane's arm. The young man looked up the block for three or four seconds, then down the block. When he was satisfied, he came away from the car and walked across the sidewalk onto the lawn.

Ellery Robinson looked up and said to him, "This is the woman." Then she turned to Jane. "He won't hurt you." Then she turned and walked away across the packed dirt of the big gray project toward her room.

Jane turned to the young man. "Thank you for coming."

The young man started walking, and she stepped off with him. "Got to keep moving or everybody starts to notice you're not going about your business."

"All right."

"She said you want to know about Intercontinental."

"Yes," said Jane. She waited for the logical question, but it did not come. He didn't consider it his business why she wanted to know, just as Ellery Robinson had not taken it on herself to tell either of them the other's name.

He said, "I worked for them."

"How long?"

"About two weeks." He anticipated the next question. "In October. They put out ads in this part of town. They wanted store security for two big malls in time for Christmas. You know, they didn't want a couple of white kids in uniforms in front of a store on Crenshaw. They'd just get hurt."

"What happened?"

"They made me a trainee. That means they don't have to pay regular wages. They put me through a lie detector test, a couple of days in a classroom, and turned me out. I worked the malls for a week and a half."

"Why did they fire you?"

The young man's eyes shot to hers and then ahead again. "Security check turned up my priors. Couldn't get bonded."

"What did you find out before you left?"

"Now you're not going to believe me, right?" he asked. "I got priors, and I'm a 'disgruntled former employee.'"

Jane looked up at the sky, then sighted along the wall of the complex. "It's a cold, clammy night for L.A. It'll probably rain soon, from the way it feels. And you may not believe it, but I hardly ever find myself in this part of town after midnight in any weather."