Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"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."

Jane lowered the pistol and said into the speaker, "Oh, he has primary coverage. This would have been secondary. He’ll be fine." She punched the button and put down the gun. "I’ll help you."

7

Jake Reinert cleaned his brushes on his father’s old workbench in the cellar. In a way he felt unworthy using it. His father had been a real craftsman. His own father, Jake’s grandfather, had been a cavalryman in the royal hussars of the Austro-Hungarian empire and he hadn’t wanted his son to be a soldier. He had sent the boy to school, but when he was about to be beaten for some infraction or other, the boy had either punched or pushed the teacher, depending on how much of his wine he had swallowed when he later told the story, jumped out the school window, and run. Then the soldier had sent his son to be apprenticed to a cabinet-maker, but he had gotten kicked out of there, too. The cavalryman foresaw that like him, the boy was left with nothing but the military to keep bread in his mouth. So he did what tens of thousands of fathers all over Europe had been doing with boys like that since 1492, and got him on a ship to America.

Now that Jake had grown up, he suspected there had probably been a bit of self-interest in the decision, since there were advantages to being able to ship a juvenile delinquent to the other side of the world. But Jake knew there was sincerity, too. It was just about at the point in history when men riding full-speed on horseback waving swords were pretty sure to run into artillery and machine guns, even in that part of the world. No man would want his son in on that.

Jake’s father must have learned a lot in his apprenticeship. He had come over at sixteen and never had much trouble finding work. He had made fine furniture, done the interior woodwork of the fancy cabin cruisers they built down at the boatworks even carved some of the beautiful, fanciful animals they mounted on the merry-go-rounds at the Mitchell-Bauer carousel plant.

Jake was at the stage of life where he had come down here enough times to find his brushes hardened into paddles, so he soaked them for an hour or two in fresh turpentine after the visual evidence said they were clean. He also could look out the cellar window from here and see the light in the side window of Jane Whitefield’s house. The lights would come on shortly, and then he would be able to see shadows on the ceiling and, sometimes, silhouettes in the window.

The world was old now. Most of the unexplored territory left was in the space between people’s ears. Jane Whitefield’s mother had comported herself with dignity and modesty during her marriage to Henry Whitefield. But Jake’s wife, Margaret, had once regretfully implied that she had quite a past. Jake had asked a few questions, to see if he had glimpsed a side of Margaret that he hadn’t suspected—jealousy or some need to put any strange woman who showed up in her bailiwick under suspicion—but he hadn’t.

Her hint had been based on certain knowledge, some woman-to-woman confidence, and it was what it had sounded like. Jane’s mother had been left without resources in New York City at the age of twenty. There was a myth that said that there was a time in our society when a twenty-year-old girl could not be left without resources, even in a big city. Somebody would pick her up and let her belong, just as a lost fingerling swims into a school of fish and disappears. Jake was always willing to admit the possibility that such a thing might once have been real, but even in those days it wasn’t true to the experience of anyone then living. He supposed that was what small towns were for. Jane’s mother hadn’t been in a small town. Instead, she found herself a succession of boyfriends who periodically vacationed in places like Elmira and Attica.

Margaret had never been one to be critical of anyone for having had a lot of sex. That would have been completely alien to her nature. The way she always said it was "People have a right to try to be happy. It’s in the Declaration of Independence." But she implied that Jane’s mother had tried harder than most before she was finally able to bring it off. Margaret had a genuine sympathy for that, because sympathy was the thing that came easiest to her.

On the whole, Jake was a nurture-over-nature man, but he could not rule out any possibility that science hadn’t ruled out first. When Jane was younger, he had sometimes watched her behavior for the sort of sweet tooth that her mother had. Whatever else had been true of Jane’s mother, she had never turned it into a business.

Young women, even young women of considerable intelligence and self-reliance, had been known to get themselves into trouble with this sort of activity. They had even been known to be found dead. Because no matter what sort of caution a young woman had, once she was in a private place, out of earshot of trusted friends and in any of the positions necessary for what the polite called consummation, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the course of events. It was best to accomplish whatever checking of credentials needed to be done well before that stage.