Thomas Perry - Dance for the Dead

"The bank was growing then, and pretty soon I'm not working in the loan department, I'm a loan officer. Mr. Waugh tells me we've got to go on a business trip to Houston. I remember the flowers and get all upset, but there just isn't a way to get out of it. By now I understand why the bank needs to move money in and out, and my job is to keep the money going out, and that means meeting with customers. And there were two other women going: Mr. Waugh's assistant and another loan officer.

The pay was getting better and better, and I was learning a lot, so I didn't try to get out of it."

Jane could tell that Mary was not lying now. She was trying to push away the excuses. This was a confession.

"We meet with a group of twelve investors who have formed a limited partnership for a real estate development. You know, right now I can't even remember what they were calling it, but it was the usual thing, something like Sunnydale Vistas or Meadowgrove Heights. Anyway, the first session is in an office they've set up near River Oaks. Not in River Oaks, of course, but close enough so people would smell money on their business cards. Things were really tantalizing in that first session. We've got the chance to lend them sixty million, maybe more later. They're willing to keep it deposited until they need it, with the interest in escrow offsetting our costs - which are nil - and release times tied to what gets built. Then we were supposed to go out and see the land. It was near La Porte, right by Galveston Bay. The plans called for canals, with boat slips for each house, malls, and all that."

"We don't drive, though. We go out to get the best view on this big boat that's leased to the company's sales department for impressing the customers. We see it through binoculars and talk business until dark, but still no papers get signed. We have a catered dinner, and still no agreement comes out of Mr. Waugh's briefcase. It just degenerates into a cocktail party on the upper deck. Everybody's talking about money and their favorite things that it buys and how great they're all doing. They're getting tipsy and optimistic. Pretty soon I start to hear music coming from somewhere down below, and laughing and loud talk. One by one, people start to disappear. It goes on awhile until it's just me and Waugh and maybe three of these investors. It's getting cold up on deck. I say to Waugh, 'Maybe I'll go down below.' He says, 'If you like.' So I make my way down those steps in the dark in high heels carrying a martini."

"The others didn't go down?"

"One did. I had to help him, because he was getting drunk. So I go down and open the door to this big room they called the saloon, and the music is deafening. What I see at that moment makes me drop my drink. It's Waugh's assistant. Her name was Maria. She's dancing, doing a strip for these four investors, and I do not mean a tease. When I came in she was already down to her panties, and she's got her thumbs in the waistband, as though they were about to move south. I start to back out, but the drunk behind me pushes me in, and Maria sees me. She kind of wriggles over to me without losing a beat, puts her arm around me with a big smile, yells into my ear, 'Come on. Get with the party,' and starts pulling me into the saloon with her. I pushed her arm off me and said, 'Stop it. I'm not some hooker.'"

"What happened?"

"She got really angry - shot me a look that would knock a pigeon off a telephone wire - and said, 'Don't kid me, honey. Who do you think made out your last bonus check?' But then there's one of these investors behind her, and he's impatient for the show to go on, and he pulls the panties down to her feet. She grins, steps out of them, kind of sticks out her rear end, gives it a little wriggle, and starts to dance with him. I turn and walk out of the saloon. I don't know where to go. I open the door to one of the staterooms, and there's the other loan officer. She's doing one of the investors on the bed while a couple of others watch. I shut the door, go back up the hallway toward the steps, and there's Mr. Waugh. He opens the door of the saloon so he can glance in, and I can see that Maria has gone way beyond the strip. It's an orgy. He opens the door a little wider, holding it for me to go in first. Then he sees the expression on my face, kind of shrugs, and goes inside. I spend the next four hours alone up on that freezing deck."

"Did he fire you?"

"No. I took a plane back by myself and came in Monday morning to find the loan papers, all signed, on my desk. All of a sudden the account was mine and I had to make the deal work - get it through the loan committee and the lawyers, and set up the schedules, and all that. And I had to make out the bonus checks: ten grand each. Nobody said a word about it. Maria was invisible for weeks. The other loan officer - her name was Kathy - was no friend of mine. She never spoke to me again. I started looking for jobs. The bank was growing out of control by then, so we were all busy enough not to have to look right at each other."

"Nothing else happened?"

"About a month later, I come into work and there are these strange women in the office. Both of them are young - twenty or twenty-one - and gorgeous. Maria comes in with them, and her face is absolutely empty. She says to me, 'We're really running short of space around here. Mr. Waugh wants you to move back out to your old desk to make room for the new loan officers.' Out front was the pool of low-level clerical people and beginners. I cleaned out my office - pictures, plants, and paper clips - carried everything out, and put it all on my old desk, and something happened. I knew they wanted me to quit, and I wanted to quit, but up until then I had also wanted to outlast them, take whatever they had to offer for as long as it took and then end up with a better job somewhere else. I had been operating on the theory that I made them more uncomfortable than they made me. But it was too much. I closed the desk drawer and walked into Mr. Waugh's office. He was on the phone and he said into it, 'Excuse me. I have something I have to take care of. I'll call you right back,' all the time with his eyes on me. He hung up. I said, 'You didn't have to hang up. I just wanted to say goodbye.' I reached over the desk and shook his hand and said, 'Thank you for hiring me.' He was surprised. I thought at first that he was just relieved because it wasn't a horrible scene, but before I was across the lobby I realized that all along he had been expecting me to come around."

"You didn't have another job. Where did you go?"

Mary Perkins gave a sad little laugh. "I went nowhere. I couldn't find another job in town. I couldn't find one anywhere, so I moved to California. Just getting there took about the last of the money I had saved. I was out of work for six months. I was twenty-four, looking better than I ever have in my life because I didn't have enough money to eat regularly. I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me. The fantasy I had wasn't about getting a nicer place to live and having enough food. It was getting rich - really rich. I had been on the party boats, done the big real estate deals, and flown in the private planes, and I wanted them again. So I thought of how to get them, and I got started."

"How did you get started?"

"I used to spend a lot of time at the unemployment office, and I got used to seeing the regulars. One was a guy who had tried to talk to me. You have to picture this. There's a guy about forty, in there to collect his unemployment check, and he sees a woman who turns him on, so he goes up to her and tells her not to worry. He's a successful contractor, and as soon as spring comes he's going to be doing more big projects and he'll hire her. But he was good-looking and cheerful and, oddly enough, he wasn't stupid, so I decided to get to know him. I went into the unemployment office and smiled at him. When he hit on me, I said, 'Why don't you take me out for coffee?' We walked out to the lot, and he's driving a three-year-old BMW with a brand-new lock on the trunk. I'd had enough experience making loans to know that locks don't wear out in three years. They get drilled out because the original owner didn't hand over the keys. It turns out that even though he's a liar, he really does have a contractor's license, but no capital, no crew, and nothing going for him. He was perfect."