Bad Men (2003) (21 page)

Marianne never understood why Moloch had kept the licenses, the purses, the little personal items from the women. She suspected that they were souvenirs, or a means of recalling the women from whom they had come, a kind of aide-mémoire. Or perhaps it was simply vanity.

Moloch had never told her what he did for a living, exactly. He was, when she asked in those first days, a “businessman,” an “independent consultant,” a “salesman,” a “facilitator.” Marianne believed that the women, and what had happened to them, were only part of what he was. Now, when she read of raids on stores or banks, and saw her husband’s cash reserve increase; when she heard of a businessman being killed in his car for his briefcase, the contents later revealed to be $150,000 in under-the-counter earnings, and an amount just under that was briefly added to the bag in the shed; when a young woman disappeared in Altoona, the daughter of a moderately wealthy businessman, and her body was found in a ditch after the ransom was paid, she thought of Moloch. She thought of Moloch as she fingered the money; she thought of Moloch as she smelled the burnt powder in the gun among the nails; and she thought of Moloch as she spied the hardened dirt in the treads of his boots, carefully picking it away and placing it in a Ziploc bag that she bound tightly and squeezed into a tampon inserter.

In those last days, she became aware of an increase in the pitch of his activities. There were more calls to the home phone, the phone that she was not allowed to answer. There were more frequent, and longer, absences. The mileage on his car climbed steadily in increments of two hundred miles. He grew yet more distracted, now barely glancing at the receipts from the market and failing even to check the total spent against her allowance for the week.

There were three things that Marianne had learned about Moloch’s final operation, through careful listening and the maps and notes that he had locked away in the attic. The first was that it would take place in Cumberland, far to the north of the state and close to the borders of both Maryland and Pennsylvania. The second was that it would involve a bank.

The third was that it would take place on the last Thursday of the month.

She made her plans carefully. She called Karen from a pay phone and told her the exact time at which she would arrive to pick up the material. She contacted her sister, who lived only a few miles away, yet from whom she had become virtually estranged because of Moloch’s paranoia, and told her of her plan, and of the possibility that she and her sorry-ass husband might have to leave the state at some point in the future, but with money in their pockets. Surprisingly, Patricia seemed unconcerned by the prospect of uprooting herself. Bill had recently been let go from a plant job and she saw it as a chance for them both to start over again.

Marianne prepared three changes of clothing for Danny and herself, using what little cash she had left to buy them each a new set of clothes cheaply at Marshalls: no-name jeans, plain T-shirts, cotton sweaters from beneath the yellow, black, and red
REDUCED
sign. These she placed at the bottom of their respective piles of clothing, although she need not have worried, Moloch becoming ever more withdrawn as the day of the operation approached. This was to be his big score, she sensed.

What she could not have known was that Moloch’s recent actions were merely one of a number of scams and crimes that he had put into operation over the years, and that there were other men involved, committing insurance frauds, drug rip-offs, minor bank raids in small dusty towns.

Murders.

And these were only the enterprises that produced a profit, for Moloch had his hobbies too. He had more in common with the would-be rapist Otis Barger than might once have seemed possible, except he picked his targets more carefully, from the ranks of whores and addicts and lost souls, and there was never a risk of them talking, because when he was finished with them, he disposed of their remains in forests and mountain bogs. Moloch’s peculiarity—one, if the truth be known, of many—was his disinclination to have vaginal sex with his victims.

After all, he did not wish to be unfaithful to his wife.

Yet even if she had known all of this at the time, had recognized the unsuspected depths of her husband’s degeneracy, Marianne would still have acted as she did, independently and without making a formal approach to the authorities. She would still have contacted Karen. She would still have set in motion her escape.

She would still have told the police of the details of the bank job.

She called them shortly after she had retrieved the cash from the hollow beneath the shed floor and placed it in the trunk of her car, alongside the two small bags that represented all of the possessions she was prepared to take with her. She planned to drive to the rendezvous point, meet Karen, then head on to the bus station and abandon her car there. From there, she would pay cash for two tickets to three different destinations, each bought at a separate window. She would travel on to only one of them, New York, and there she would buy three more tickets to three different cities, and again head to only one of them. It seemed like a good plan.

She strapped her son into the baby seat, then drove to the mall and parked by the pay phone. She lifted the boy out and carried him, still sleeping, to the phone. From there she dialed the dispatcher at the Cumberland PD and asked to be put through to Detective Cesar Aponte. She had read his name in a newspaper one week earlier, when he was quoted during an investigation into a domestic assault case that had left a woman fighting for her life. If he was not on duty, she had three other names, all taken from the newspapers.

There was a pause, then a man’s voice came on the line. “Detective Aponte speaking.”

She took a breath, and began:

“There will be a bank robbery today at four
P.M.
at a First United in Cumberland. The man leading the robbery is named Edward Moloch. He lives at…”

Using RACAL, the call was traced back to the pay phone at the mall. By the time the local cruiser arrived, Marianne was gone, and nobody could recall what the woman who had made the call looked like. The only thing that the old woman behind the counter at the Beanie Baby Boutique could remember was that she had an infant boy asleep on her shoulder. Stuck behind the pay phone was an envelope, just as Marianne had told them there would be. It contained Moloch’s various false IDs and some, but not all, of the material from the attic relating to what she believed were his past crimes. Most of it remained in the house.

By then, Marianne had arrived at the meeting place, a disused gas station half a mile outside town. She was five minutes late. There was no sign of Karen’s car, and for a moment she panicked, fearing that she had been abandoned. Then Karen appeared from the back of the lot, waving her around. She drove and parked beside a beat-up Oldsmobile.

She got out of the car and saw that Karen had a manila envelope in her hand.

“You’ve got it? You’ve got it all?”

“You’ve got my money?”

Marianne popped the trunk. The black knapsack she had taken was zippered closed. When she opened it, dead presidents blinked in the bright sunlight. Ten of the sealed bundles had been opened, then rebound. Marianne handed them to Karen.

“Fifty thousand. I counted it this morning.”

“I trust you.”

She handed over the envelope. Marianne slit it with her thumbnail.

“Don’t
you
trust
me
?”

“If I didn’t trust you, do you think I’d be opening the trunk in front of you?”

“I guess not.”

She examined the passport, the driver’s license, the card bearing her social security number. She was now Marianne Elliot instead of Marian Moloch. Her son’s name, according to his new birth certificate, was Daniel. Where his father’s name should have been, the word “Unknown” had been written.

“You’ve left me with my own first name, almost.”

“You’ve never done this before. The first thing that will give you away is your failure to answer to your new name. It will arouse suspicion and attract attention to you. Marianne is close enough to your given name for you to avoid that problem.”

“And Danny’s father?” She had asked Karen to give her son the name Daniel. It was the name that she had always wanted for him, but Moloch had given him his own name, Edward. Now he was Daniel. In her mind, he had always been Daniel.

“You get asked, his name was Lee Server, and he’s dead. In there is an obituary for Server. It will tell you all you need to know about him.”

Marianne nodded. She found a set of documents and IDs for both Patricia and Bill, the photos a little old because they were the only ones she had at hand when Karen had agreed to help her. Once again, they had been left with their own first names.

“I should ask you for more money,” said Karen. “I had to pay off some people. The paper trail goes right back, even down to death certificates for your father and mother. There’s a typewritten sheet of paper in that envelope. Memorize the details on it, then burn it. It’s your new family, except you’ll never get to know them now. You’re an only child. Your parents are dead. It’s all very sad.”

Marianne stuffed the material back into the envelope.

“Thank you.”

“How the hell did you ever get involved with this guy?” asked Karen suddenly.

“A man tried to rape me,” she replied. “He saved me.”

There was a pause.

“Did he?” Karen asked sadly.

“I trusted him. He was…strong.” She started back toward her car.

“I gave him those names, the ones on the papers that you found in the attic,” said Karen.

Marianne stopped.

“What do you mean?”

“I created them, all but one. He came to me and I did it.”

“Who is he? Who is he really?”

“I don’t know. The only name that I didn’t give him is the one he used with you. Moloch was how I knew him, right from the beginning. I guess he likes that name a lot.”

She tossed a set of car keys to Marianne.

“This is your car now. Registration is in the glove compartment. It’s clean.”

“I’ll give you more money.”

“Didn’t cost me much. I’d kept it hidden away in case I ever had to run. I guess your need’s greater than mine right now.”

Karen helped her move the bags into the trunk of the new car, then shifted the baby seat to the Oldsmobile while Marianne carried Danny. He was awake now, and had begun to cry.

“You’d better get going,” said Karen.

Marianne strapped the still-howling child in, then stood at the driver’s door.

“I—”

“I know.”

Then, without even knowing why, Marianne walked quickly up to the older woman and kissed her tenderly on the mouth, then hugged her. After a moment, Karen responded, hugging her tightly in return.

“Good luck,” she whispered.

“And to you.”

Then Marianne got in the car and drove away.

There were three First Uniteds in Cumberland, and each was monitored after Marianne’s warning. It was not her fault that the information she had given was wrong. Cumberland was merely the base: the bank itself was in Fort Ashby, ten miles south. It was taken just as the doors were being locked for the day. Nobody was killed, although the security guard was pistol-whipped and would never fully recover from his injuries. The silent alarm was not set off until the robbers—five of them—had left the bank. By the time the police could react, the thieves were gone.

Moloch got back to his house shortly before daybreak. The street was quiet. He made one full circuit of the block, then parked at the end of the driveway and entered the house. He walked straight to the back door, passed through the garden in darkness, and unlocked the shed door.

He saw the space where the board should have been, and the empty hollow where his money once lay, and then there were flashlight beams, and shouted orders, and dogs barking.

And as he emerged blinking into the phalanx of armed men, he thought:

Bitch. I’ll kill you for this.

Widow’d wife and wedded maid,
Betrothed, betrayer, and betray’d!
—Sir Walter Scott, “The Betrothed”

It was close to dawn when they neared their destination. Already there was a faint glow visible in the east, as of a fire distantly glimpsed. They had agreed on a rotation for sleeping and driving, as Moloch was reluctant to pause for any reason. He had the scent of her now, of that he was certain. It had proved easier than expected, for elements outside his control had fallen into place for him: foolish Verso, who had hoped to trade Moloch’s life for his own; his idiot brother-in-law, risking his anonymity in order to gamble on meaningless outcomes; and Dexter’s casual remark that his wife would not be using her own name, causing tumblers to fall in Moloch’s mind.

For most of the journey, he remained silent and awake, watching the red lights of the cars on the road streaming toward the void, fading into the distance until they were swallowed up by the blackness. Moloch had been incarcerated for so long that he found himself fascinated by the small details of the lives being lived around him, although there was a remoteness, perhaps even a coldness, to his interest: it was the curiosity of a small boy marveling at the industry of termites or ants in the moment before he annihilates their mound or torches their nest. He watched the cars go by, their occupants only occasionally visible in the brief flare of a match or the comforting illumination of the dashboard lights, and wondered how so many could be on the roads and highways at this time, for what mission could be so urgent, what destination so compelling, that it caused them to give themselves up to a journey through the night, forsaking sleep? Moloch suspected that, for some, there was no destination. There was no home waiting, no husband drowsing, no wife sleeping or children dreaming. There was only the illusion of progress and momentum offered by the cocoon of the automobile in the surrounding night. These people were not traveling; they were fleeing, taunted by a false belief that if they ran fast and hard enough they might somehow escape their past or their present, that they might even somehow escape themselves. Moloch recalled those who had crossed his path and faded from the view of the world as a consequence. For some, he thought, it might almost have been a relief. He closed his eyes and waited for the coming of the dream.