Dance for the Dead (32 page)

“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.”

“Perfect for what?”

“I had decided to use what
I knew about savings and loans. I promoted him from contractor to
developer. I was his wife. We called ourselves the Comstocks or the
Staffords or the Stoddards. We would go to a new city where nobody
knew us. Sometimes we’d rent a house in a quiet, upscale part
of town and do nothing but get to know our neighbors. Eventually
there would be somebody who would invite us to his club, or to a
summer home, or just to a party. Once we were accepted, the bankers
would find us. Sometimes all it took was to let our new friends know
we were happy there and wanted to buy a fancy house. By ‘eighty-three
a lot of savings executives were dying to lend a couple of million to
just about anybody who wanted it for something as normal as a house,
and they listened for leads.”

“What then?”

“It varied. Sometimes we’d
get somebody to sell us a hundred-thousand-dollar house for a
million, kick back five hundred thousand, and leave town on the same
day. The best was when we got to know the savings and loan executive
and his wife – saw them socially. I would find a way to get the
man alone – happen to go alone to the place where he always ate
lunch, or drop in to see his wife on a Saturday afternoon when I knew
she would be gone. I would convince him that he was so irresistible
that I didn’t plan to try. If that worked I would turn it into
a full-blown affair and concentrate on making sure he didn’t
want it to end just yet. Eventually the subject of my husband’s
real estate development would come up. I would say he was considering
moving to another state and doing the project there because the local
money people didn’t see the potential. Bobby would get his
loan. When Bobby didn’t make payments, the bank would issue a
new loan to cover the interest, or buy into the project. I learned
all the tricks that a banker could think of just by watching these
guys trying to keep Bobby busy and stupid.”

“It always worked?”

Mary Perkins shook her head.
“Nothing
always
works. But I designed it so that if the
banker wasn’t interested, the worst he could do to me was to
tell my husband. But if he once sunk it into me, that option was
gone, and he was in for the ride of his life.” She stopped and
stared at Jane. “You’re thinking that I invented a scheme
to turn myself into a whore, don’t you? To do what I wouldn’t
do for Mr. Waugh.”

Jane shrugged. “I’m
not in the habit of making that kind of judgment.”

“Well, that’s
exactly what I did. At one point I was doing both the husband and
wife at once, and the three of us were conspiring to keep Bobby too
busy to notice by pumping money into his business. Of course I had to
keep Bobby happy too. We were living as a married couple, and I
couldn’t have him going off tomcatting around the country club.
This went on for about three years.”

“What ended it?”

“I got enough money and
enough inside information to do the stunts I told you about. It was
essentially the same, except that Bobby had enough to retire, so I
let him. I would get the loan myself, and would default on it myself,
but first I made sure that Cyrus Curbstone had seen enough of me so
that he didn’t want my loan brought to the police.”

“How did you get caught?”

“I bought a savings and
loan,” Mary said. “Big mistake. I thought I knew more
than I did. I didn’t know when to set fire to the place and get
on a plane.”

“Why are you telling me
all this now?”

“I want you to know,”
Mary said.

“Know what?”

“Why I held on to the
money when I was caught and the feds wanted it back. Why I told you I
didn’t have it when I needed your help and any sane person
would have given it up to stay alive. It wasn’t because I
needed to have a lot of money hidden someplace where I’ll
probably never see it again; it’s because of what I had to do
to get it.”

“But why now?”

“Because now that I know
enough to want to give it up, I can’t give it up. He wouldn’t
take it and let me go, would he?”

“No.”

“He would take it and
insist there was more, and when I couldn’t give him any more,
all he could do was kill me.”

“Yes.”

“And he’ll never
give up, will he?”

“No,” said Jane. “He
won’t.”

“And if I go to the police
and tell them he’s been chasing me, what I’m telling them
is that he might be trying to steal fifty million dollars. That’s
no crime, but I’m admitting that I still have it. I’m the
only one who will go to jail, and he’ll still be free to kill
me.”

“Fifty million dollars.”
Jane returned to taping her cards into the lining of her purse.
“You’ll make good bait.”

“Yes,” Mary said, “I
will.”

When
Jane and Mary left Cleveland they were carrying suitcases that were
much larger than they needed to hold the few outfits they had bought,
because they had more shopping to do in Chicago. The first item they
selected at the electronics store was a small video camera with
automatic focus and a zoom lens. The second was a directional
microphone. The brochure that went with the microphone described the
wonderful capability it offered for recording bird songs without
coming close enough to disturb the little creatures. The copy
obviously had been composed in order to protect the company from
becoming a co-defendant in some criminal proceeding. Jane tested a
number of voice-activated tape recorders, and when she had settled on
the best, she told the salesman to write up a bill for two.

While he was busy doing this,
Mary whispered, “Why two?”

Jane answered, “Because I
don’t think having a conversation with Barraclough is something
I’ll want to try twice if the first recorder doesn’t
catch every word.”

Jane bought a used Toyota in
Chicago under the name Catherine Snowdon. It was five years old, had
one previous owner who had kept it greased, oiled, and maintained,
but it had a sporty red exterior. She drove it off the lot to a
one-day spray shop and had it painted gray for five hundred dollars.
Then she picked up Mary at the motel and turned west onto Route 80.
It was winter now, and if they were going to travel by road, it had
to be a big one.

For six days they drove the
interstate through Davenport, Des Moines, Omaha, Grand Island, North
Platte, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City. Just before Reno they turned south
down 395 along the east side of the Sierras to the desert. Jane
checked them into a motel in San Bernardino near the entrance to
I-10, rested for a day, and studied the maps of Los Angeles County.
The next day she drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles, reported
the sale of Catherine Snowdon’s car to Katherine Webster, a
resident of Los Angeles, and picked up a set of California plates.

She spent two days driving the
freeways until she found the spot she wanted, right on the western
edge of a confusing knot of interlocking entrances, exits, and
overpasses on the Ventura Freeway. If a person drove east, he would
immediately come to the fork where half the lanes swung off onto the
San Diego Freeway, then divided again to go north toward Sacramento
or south toward San Diego. After another mile or two, there was
another junction where some lanes went north on the Hollywood Freeway
but most swung southeast toward the city. Another mile and there was
another fork, with some lanes continuing southeast and the others
bearing due east toward Glendale and Pasadena. With a small head
start, a car heading eastward could be very hard to follow.

Every mile on the Ventura
Freeway there was a little yellow pole with an emergency telephone on
it. The small blue marker above the pole Jane chose announced that it
was number 177.

That night in the motel Jane
tested the equipment. At two a.m. she drove back into the San
Fernando Valley. She parked the car on a quiet side street in Sherman
Oaks just north of Riverside Drive and walked the rest of the way to
the little hill that elevated the Ventura Freeway above the
surrounding neighborhoods. She had to lower the equipment over a
fence and then climb over after it.

She was hidden from the street
by thick bushes, and from the freeway by a low metal barrier along
the shoulder. The barrier was supposed to keep a runaway car on the
eastbound side of the Ventura Freeway from careening down the hill
into the front of somebody’s house, and judging by the depth of
some of the dents and scrapes, it probably had. She trained the
directional microphone carefully across the freeway on a spot twenty
feet from call box number 177, then adjusted the breadth of its field
until it picked up very little street noise. She threw a stone at the
spot and watched the reels of the two tape recorders turn when it
hit, then stop again. She set the video camera on automatic focus and
aimed it at the same spot. She switched everything off, carefully
covered all of the equipment with leaves and branches, then went down
the hill, over the fence, and back to her car.

Jane and Mary stayed at the
motel for two more days. They rehearsed, memorized, and analyzed
until it began to seem as though everything Jane was planning had
already happened and they were weeks past it already, trying to
recall the details.

“How long do you stay?”
asked Jane.

“Ten seconds. Fifteen at
the most. Just long enough to pop out the tapes.”

“What happens if he pulls
out a gun?” Jane asked.

“I leave.”

“What if he puts it to my
head?”

“I ignore it. There’s
nothing I can do to stop him, so I leave.”

Early each morning they drove
along the Ventura Freeway past call box 177, studying the flow of the
traffic for ten miles in both directions. They memorized the fastest
lanes, practiced making an exit just beyond the junction with another
freeway and then coming up a side street to emerge on the new freeway
going in another direction.

“Can’t you just call
him up and record what he says on the phone?” asked Mary.

“No,” said Jane.
“He’s the regional head of a big security company. His
phone will have sweepers and bug detectors that even the police can’t
buy yet. Besides, he won’t say anything that will put him away
unless he sees you.”

On the third day at four in the
afternoon Jane White-field went to a pay telephone in Barstow and
made the call. “I want to speak with Mr. Barraclough,”
she said. “Tell him it’s Colleen Mahoney from the
courthouse. I have something he wants to talk about.”

“Can you hold?” said
the secretary.

“No,” said Jane.
“I’ll call back in two minutes. Tell him if he’s
not the one who answers, he’s lost it.” She waited four
minutes, then dialed the number again.

This time a man’s voice
answered. It was deep, as though it came from a big body, but it was
smooth, clear, and untroubled. “Yes?” he said.

“Is this Mr. Barraclough?”

“Yes, it is.” He
held the last word so it was almost singsong.

“This is – ”

“I know who it is, Jane,”
he said. “I heard that’s what you like to be called. What
can I do for you?”

Her mind stumbled, then raced to
catch up. He was far ahead of the place where she had thought he
would be. “I have Mary Perkins,” she said.

“Who’s Mary
Perkins?”

“I’m not recording
this,” she said. “Your phone isn’t tapped.”

“I know it isn’t.”

“Then do you want her?”

“If you have her, why do
you need me? You like me all of a sudden?”

“If you weren’t
tracing this call, why would you ask so many stupid questions?”
Jane asked. “I’ll call this number at five a.m. tomorrow.
If you meet me alone and unarmed, you’ll get a peek.” She
hung up, picked up Mary, and drove to Los Angeles, where they rented
two identical white cars, then left the gray Toyota at the Burbank
Airport. They spent the night in a motel in Woodland Hills.

At four a.m. Jane parked her
rented car on the street she had chosen below the freeway, climbed
the fence to turn on her camera, microphone, and recorders. Then she
drove west to the big coffee shop in Agoura and at exactly five a.m.
used the pay telephone outside the door.

“Yes?” said
Barraclough.

“It’s me,” she
said. “In twenty minutes I’ll be at the lot on the corner
of Woodley Avenue and Burbank Boulevard in the Sepulveda Dam
Recreation Area. If you’re not there I’ll keep going.”

“Wait,” he said. “I
didn’t get those streets.”

“Then rewind the tape and
play it back,” she said, and hung up.

Twenty minutes was an enormous
stretch of time for a man like Barraclough. Jane thought about all of
the preparations he would have made already. He would have all of the
trainees on the special payroll of Enterprise Development already
awake and standing by. He would have some pretext for using
Intercontinental Security’s facilities and equipment too. Now
he would be frantically ordering all of them into positions around
the Sepulveda Recreation Area. No, not frantically: coldly,
methodically.