Death Benefits (4 page)

Walker said, “Where do you want to eat today?”

Stillman looked up at the strip of black above the door, where the floor numbers were lighting up, one by one. “If the traffic’s moving, we might have time to pick something up at the airport.”

3

Walker’s head spun to look at Stillman. “Why would you want to go to the airport for lunch?”

Stillman said, “I said we’ll try to get lunch. We may not have time. Our plane leaves in a little over an hour.”

“Wait. Hold it,” said Walker. “Our plane? I can’t get on a plane.” His thoughts unexpectedly clarified. “I don’t even want to. What’s this about?”

“If you need somebody to feed your goldfish or something, I can make a call.” He added, “And don’t worry about not leaving your key. The people I’ll call are used to that kind of thing. They’ve evolved beyond the need for keys.”

“I don’t have a goldfish. I do have a job. I have—”

“You do,” said Stillman. “And this is it.” He glared at Walker for a moment, then sighed. “All right. I guess we’ll have to make time for this.” The elevator door opened, but Stillman pressed the button for the twelfth floor. The door closed, and the elevator began to ascend.

Walker gaped at him for a moment. He remembered Joyce Hazelton handing Stillman the phone and asking him obsequiously whether he had time to talk to Mr. McClaren. Walker had never even seen McClaren. He tried to determine whether Stillman was bluffing. They were already passing the tenth floor. If it was some kind of joke, he would have to stop the elevator in a second or two.

The doors opened and Stillman stepped out. Walker hesitated, followed him, then stopped just outside the doors. When they hummed shut he felt as though his retreat had been cut off. There was a woman in her thirties with perfectly arranged honey-colored hair and a cashmere dress walking toward the elevator as though she were a hostess going to answer the door. Walker had never seen her before. She met his eyes, a look of puzzlement appearing on her face. It stayed there just long enough to make Walker’s heart stop beating: if she asked what he was doing here, he wouldn’t know the answer. She gracefully turned on her high heels, opened a big oak door at the end of the room, and disappeared.

Walker looked toward Stillman, but he wasn’t where Walker had expected him to be. He had moved off across the floor, and he was settling into a big wing chair under a painting of a clipper ship. Walker was distracted by the room. It was different from the rest of the building. It was like a men’s club in an old movie about London. The chairs and tables were antique, and even the walls up here had somehow been contrived to have the solidity of things made by hand a long time ago.

The door opened silently, and seemed to open only a crack, but the woman miraculously slipped out and quietly closed it again. “He’s just wrapping something up,” she said. “He asked if you could give him a minute.” Stillman nodded.

She turned and glided past Walker, and he had a chance to look at her without getting caught. He was comparing her to a fashion model in a magazine, then changed his mind. Her movements were designed to convey efficiency and polish rather than allure, as though her job was to warn people that everything up here was different, more professional, better.

A phone rang quietly as she was passing a desk in an alcove that looked like the set for the television news. She paused without diverting her course and snagged it from the front of the desk. “Mr. McClaren’s office.” Even her voice was beautiful, but it was perfection rather than warmth, like a voice broadcast from a great height. “I’m very sorry, sir, but he’s just going into a very important meeting. We’ll get back to you in about fifteen minutes.” She replaced the receiver, and her eyes passed across Walker without a hint of a smile.

Suddenly the big oak door opened, and Walker realized that the flash of gray beyond it was his first glimpse of the man who ran the company where he had worked for two years. Rex McClaren was as tall as Walker, dressed in a gray suit. Walker could see wrinkles around the pale blue-gray eyes as he looked at Stillman and smiled. His hair looked as though it had turned gray early, because his face was not old enough to go with it. His voice was a deep, quiet one with a slight accent that Walker associated with prep schools in New England. “Max,” he said. “Sorry to hold you up. I hope I didn’t break your stride.”

“It’s okay,” said Stillman. He looked at Walker and began to raise his hand toward him, as though to begin an introduction.

McClaren was too quick. “Ah,” he interrupted. “John Walker.” He stepped forward and gave Walker’s hand a firm, hard shake. Walker saw that the smile made the wrinkles around the eyes return.

“Pleased to meet you,” Walker mumbled.

McClaren looked puzzled, and in his confusion he reminded Walker of one of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania, mildly embarrassed at his mistake but comfortable in his admission: his position proved that any mistake of his was caused by the press of great matters, not by mere stupidity. “Oh, I guess that’s right. We haven’t met. I’ve seen you around, but I don’t ever seem to get down to analysis lately.” The word “lately” clearly meant during Walker’s short career. “Joyce likes to run the place without any intrusion from on high. Good to meet you.”

Walker nodded, but said nothing because his mind was stumbling over new impressions. He had never seen McClaren before, and he wondered how McClaren had seen him. He obviously had a long-standing relationship with Joyce Hazelton, but Walker couldn’t remember anything she’d said to him that would have revealed that she had met McClaren. But even more mystifying was the oddly familiar tone between McClaren and Stillman.

McClaren looked at Stillman, his eyebrows rising as though they had something to do with listening. Stillman was up. “We just stopped by to get your blessing, Rex. We won’t hold you up.”

McClaren half-grinned, but there was a question behind it. “You’ve got it,” he said. “But don’t worry about holding me up. I thought you guys had a plane to catch.”

Stillman glanced at his watch. “Oh, thanks. Yeah, we’d better do it.” He raised his eyes to Walker. “You have any questions while we’re here?”

Walker shook his head. “Thanks for taking the time to see us,” he said to McClaren. He retreated, with as much dignity as he could manufacture, toward the elevators.

The car was out of the garage, a mile away, and accelerating onto the 101 before Walker said, “What’s going on?”

“I’m afraid our hope of lunch is fading. We’ll concentrate on making the plane.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“My investigation just turned something up,” said Stillman. “Somebody from McClaren Life and Casualty has to go with me to check it out. That’s you.”

“Why me?”

Stillman slipped into the left lane and flashed past a line of cars, then veered to the right and shot through an opening into a clear space ahead. “I need someone who really works for the company, who knows a little about what goes on in all parts of it, and who can disappear from his cubicle for a while without having the company fall apart. I also need somebody who knows Snyder.”

“Ellen Snyder?” said Walker. “This is about her?” He was shocked, pained.

“There. You do know her.”

“She was in my training class,” said Walker. “There were sixty of us, and I don’t know her any better than the others do.” He heard himself say it, and was surprised that his first, almost automatic response was a lie.

“I interviewed a few candidates, and I had to settle for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not a psychological mess.”

“Who is?”

Stillman looked at him in irritation. “The rest of them. They’re hiding behind layers and layers of bullshit. I ask them where they were born, and they say, ‘I’ll check and get back to you.’ I ask them if they filled out some stupid form in a file, and they tell me who they told to do it for them. They’re so ambitious for the next promotion that they can hardly think about what they’re doing for the next ten minutes.”

Walker began to compose a defense for them, but he realized that all he would be able to come up with was “Being ambitious doesn’t make somebody a psychological mess.” This was not exactly true, or not always true, so he was silent.

Stillman said, “I’m afraid for people like that. And if they’re on my side, I’ve got to be afraid for me, too. I’m going to have to teach my partner a few things as we go, and I don’t have time to go back to the beginning.”

“Partner?” Walker protested.

“Did I say ‘partner’? It’s a figure of speech,” Stillman said.

Walker assembled his arguments and began to touch them off, one by one. “I am a data analyst. I was hired to work in the insurance business, not in security, or whatever you call it.”

“Then maybe you ought to know more about insurance,” said Stillman. “The problem with insuring against theft is that you can’t always cover yourself against loss by raising premiums. Once in a great while, you have to leave your cubicle and go convince some actual thieves that you won’t put up with it.”

“You’re joking.” Having detected no change in Stillman’s expression, Walker began to worry that he wasn’t. He found himself remembering woolly tidbits of propaganda from his training class: the agent on the Malaysian ship who had held a sawed-off shotgun to the captain’s head to keep him from surrendering to the pirates. What Stillman was saying made a certain surreal sense. “What, exactly, would you want me to do?”

“Most likely, not a thing,” said Stillman. “I think it’s a case of fraud. We verify that I’m right, collect some leads, and turn everything over to the police. It’s a terrific deal for you.”

“Why is that?”

“McClaren’s is an old-fashioned company,” said Stillman. “You’ve been around for a couple of years, so you must have noticed that much.”

Walker said, “It’s the only insurance company I’ve ever worked for.”

“The company is what Wall Street calls ‘closely held.’ That means that the forty percent of the stock that isn’t owned outright by people named McClaren is in blocks held by spindly-looking horse-faced daughters with different married names, their heirs, and their descendants.”

“That much I know,” said Walker.

“Well, every twenty years or so, they all get together for a picnic in the back yard of the old house on Nob Hill and decide who in the next generation ought to be president. They thank the last one and send him off to spend the rest of his life shooting clay pigeons, sailing boats, or raising grapes on a vineyard in Napa.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Rex, the one you just met, is the third generation of the family that’s hired me to do odd jobs, and he’s probably the last I’ll see, because he’s younger than I am. It doesn’t matter. He’s so much like his grandfather and his uncle that I know what he’ll say before he does. The point is, the company doesn’t change, and they do pretty much what they want.”

“I’m not clear on what this has to do with me.”

“You like your job. The pay is decent. If you’re at a cocktail party and some girl asks you what you do, you can say ‘I work at McClaren’s’ and she will have heard of it and think you must be pretty respectable. And while I was in the building, I noticed your bosses don’t pay much attention to you, so you probably are. If you want to, the McClarens will probably let you stay in that cubicle until you’re seventy, and pay you a little more each year. You’ll get promoted to Joyce Hazelton’s job when she retires.”

“Is that the terrific deal you’re talking about? That I don’t get fired from my job if I go with you?”

“Well, it’s not so bad, is it?” said Stillman. “But there’s a fast track, and while you were stumbling around, you blindly stepped on the low end of it. A company like McClaren’s will always need a lot of workers, but they’re always looking for a small, steady supply of players.”

“Players?”

“Gamblers,” said Stillman. “Insurance is just gambling, with the bets in writing. They’re the guys the rest of us see when we think of McClaren’s, the steely-eyed bastards in the dark suits you talk to if you want to insure your fireworks display or your oil-drilling rig. McClaren’s doesn’t recruit them from outside. They just hire a bunch of young people to do jobs like yours, and wait to see which ones grow into the suit.”

“And going with you is going to prove I’m a steely-eyed bastard and get me promoted?”

“Hell no,” said Stillman. “You get to spend a couple of days out of your box telling me what the little numbers on an insurance policy mean, and you get credit with McClaren’s for showing promise.”

Walker nodded sagely. “What I get is points with McClaren for being a risk taker without taking any risks.” He paused. “Of course, if I don’t go, then I’m already marked: I’m not promising.”

Stillman shrugged. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t pick the business you’re in.”

Walker glared at him. “But you did pick me, and told the president of the company that you had picked me, without asking me if I even wanted this golden opportunity.”

Stillman grinned and slapped Walker’s shoulder, making the car take a dangerous wobble on the freeway. “There we go. That’s what got you into this. You cut right through the smoke and figured out who did what, and you’re not afraid to shove it up my nose. I don’t know if you’re a promising insurance executive or not, and I certainly don’t care. You’re good enough for this.”

Walker’s jaw muscles worked compulsively as he stared at the entrance to the airport parking area. “I know. I remind you of yourself at this age,” he muttered.

Stillman’s head swiveled so he could stare at Walker in surprise. “Not even remotely. Whatever mistakes your parents made, that much they did right.”

He pulled into a space too quickly, stopped the car with a jolt so it rocked forward, then went around to the trunk. He snatched a small suitcase, slammed the lid, and set off toward the terminal.

Walker got out of the passenger seat, closed the door, put his hands in his pockets, and stared at the pavement for a moment. The choices seemed to have narrowed in a very short time: either he could walk to the terminal, take a cab back to town, and start looking for a job, or he could start running to catch up with Stillman.

Walker began to saunter slowly across the broad parking lot. He thought about Stillman, and he savored his suspicion and resentment, but he recognized that he was only thinking about Stillman so he would not think of Ellen. For the past eighteen months, when he was tired or off-guard, anything might remind him: a woman’s laugh he heard coming from a half-closed door in a corridor of the McClaren building, the sight of a couple about his age who were in love but were still nervous with each other because they didn’t seem quite to trust the feeling yet. He could bring back the sight of Ellen without closing his eyes. Stillman had said this involved her. What could Stillman possibly be investigating that involved Ellen?