Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Two days later Elizabeth gave up on the stationery. The paper was made by one of the largest manufacturers in the country, and the engraving, the manager of one of the stores told her, could have been done by anybody in the business, on the premises, in about an hour. The leather folder was impressive to his professional eye, but since it was stamped with a famous French trademark, it could hardly be traced without a great deal of difficulty. Elizabeth felt guilty using the folder, but since she had gone to so much trouble, she decided she had earned it.

On that same day she learned that she had a new neighbor. There was something annoying about having Maria be the one to tell her because a few months earlier she had told Elizabeth that the Bakers were having loud arguments. “They’re going to get the divorce,” she had pronounced with the air of a gypsy fortune-teller. Elizabeth had said she didn’t think so. Then, when the divorce was still in the stage where the opposing lawyers were bluffing each other about assets, Maria had said, “She’s going to take the house.” Elizabeth was more wary this time, and merely asked, “How do you know?” and Maria had answered, “The house is important to a woman,” as though her employer had just arrived from Jupiter. Sure enough, a few weeks later Brad Baker’s car was gone and Ellen was planting tulips in the front yard. Then, only a few days ago, Maria had announced that Ellen Baker would move out soon. “She was a fool and took the house,” she said. “The money was what she needed. Money doesn’t make you weep when you see it.”

Elizabeth never saw the rental sign go up, and never saw it go down. All she saw was the man. He wasn’t anybody she would have noticed except that he was living across the street from her, and therefore couldn’t be ignored. He was of average height and build, about five feet ten or eleven, in his late thirties or early forties, and he had light brown hair that she decided had probably been blond when he was a child. When she looked at him across the distance provided by the width of the street and their two little front lawns, she had to admit that he seemed unremarkable enough to share the general characteristics of a whole physical subgroup of men she’d known, including—there was no way to keep this thought from emerging—her own dead husband, Jim. He wore sport coats that seemed to fit him and ties with subdued patterns, didn’t carry his keys on his belt, have a wallet with a chain attached to it or wear shoes with noticeable heels, so he was probably all right. She was secretly pleased that he left for work every morning when she did because it meant that she didn’t have to rely on Maria for a description. She waited a few days for Maria to tell her he was taking drugs or bringing prostitutes into Ellen Baker’s house during his lunch hour, but he hadn’t stimulated Maria’s interest, and Elizabeth forgot about him.

* * *

Alexandria wasn’t a bad place to be while he waited for things to sort themselves out. It was important to stay away from the parts of the Washington area that were likely to be full of people who worked for Jerry Vico. Unless things had changed in ten years, they would be out in force looking for just about anybody who was alone, just in case they could take something from him or sell him something. But Alexandria didn’t seem to be that kind of place. He slept in a quiet residential neighborhood, then put on respectable clothes and left each morning at the time when the people who lived there left for work. He timed his departure to coincide with E. V. Waring’s. It was a risk, but he decided that it was more of a risk to be invisible and therefore inexplicable.

Eddie had taught him this method when he was a kid. He had called it turkey hunting. “Everybody thinks turkeys are stupid, because all they ever see is the fat-ass domesticated Butterball kind. But the wild ones are scrawny, tough and smart. They live in the woods and only come out into clearings they know to peck around, and then they go back into the woods. If they see anything that’s different, they don’t come out at all. So what you do is this. Wait until maybe midsummer. Then you take a broomstick and saw it off to about forty-eight inches. You paint it black and go out in the woods to a good clearing. You prop it against a log at a thirty- or forty-degree angle and then go away for a couple of months. The first day of the season you get up in the middle of the night, go out to the clearing and lay your shotgun right where the broom handle was. When the sun comes up, the turkeys peek into the clearing, see your gun, think it’s the broom handle and walk right in front of it. It’s the only way to get them.”

Eddie had bagged Otto Corrigan that way. He had closed the butcher shop for a month and moved into a house in Cincinnati right next door to Corrigan’s with the boy. The month that followed stuck in Wolfs memory as one endless sunny afternoon with the smell of grass and trees and the buzz of seventeen-year locusts. Eddie had him working on the lawn, and trimming the shrubs and planting flowers, tomatoes and radishes all day long while he himself performed less strenuous chores that Wolf could no longer remember in detail. It didn’t matter what either of them did as long as they were visible in the yard. Corrigan was supposed to be a lawyer, but he had only one client, and instead of a secretary or a clerk, he had four big guys in his house who looked like defensive linemen. He almost never went out, and the four guys made sure no one ever came close. By the end of the month, Corrigan and his four bodyguards were so accustomed to the sight of their next-door neighbors that on the last afternoon, when Eddie and the boy came for them, they appeared not to notice.

But Wolf had not needed to rent the house across the street from E. V. Waring to kill her. There was nobody protecting her, and unless she was carrying a firearm in her briefcase, she didn’t appear to be capable of protecting herself. He had taken the risk because he wasn’t sure that what he wanted was to kill E. V. Waring. Now that he had found her, he wanted to stay close enough to watch her. Once he had gotten past the first moments, when his instinct for self-preservation had prompted him to get rid of her as simply and quickly as possible, he had begun to let his imagination work on her. The only thing he wanted now was to get past whatever barriers she had erected to keep him from disappearing, and killing her probably wouldn’t help. But it was just conceivable that there was some way of finding out what those barriers were: who was looking where, and what they were looking for. The solution to his problem might be as simple as reading some papers in her briefcase, but probably it wasn’t.

There were a couple of things about E. V. Waring that gave Wolf something to think about. She had kids. One was a little boy who got picked up in a van that had the name of a private school written on it. The other was a baby who was walked around the block every day in a stroller by a baby-sitter who went home at night. He never saw a husband, although he spent all of one day and night watching for him to show himself. A couple of days later the mailman arrived just after the maid and the baby went out, so he went across the street and pretended to knock on the door, but used the gesture to cover his other hand’s movement into the mailbox to pluck out the letters. He scanned the envelopes, and saw that about a third were addressed to Elizabeth Waring, and that the others were for Mrs. E. Hart, Elizabeth Hart or Occupant. Since a couple of them were utility bills, he decided that there was no husband to worry about.

He began to wonder if the easiness of it was making him complacent. The more he studied her and thought about her, the less impatient he was to do anything about her. He could take her off anytime he wanted to, but as long as he didn’t need to make a move, there was nothing for E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, to interpret. She couldn’t do him any harm unless he made some ripples on the surface. The time for her to die was the day he was ready to leave.