Shadow Woman (14 page)

“Same principle, different
consequences,” said Jane. “There’s a big difference
between having the cops investigate a crime every ten years and
having dozens of them move in with you to protect the financial
interests of the legislature and its cronies.”

“What cronies?”

“Building hotels and
casinos can’t be done without money from outside. That means
some big corporation with investors and boards of directors is going
to have more to say about what goes on here than we are. It may have
occurred to you that Senecas haven’t had a lot of luck trusting
either the state of New York or corporations in the past. This state
has a perfect record. It has never, even in the most minimal way,
lived up to any agreement that it has ever made. It has never even
felt itself constrained by federal laws.”

Jane could feel that she had
talked herself into an agitated heat. She paused, let the passion
cool for a moment, and said, “I guess I’m working up to
what I wanted to say. I read in the paper that there are already
offers from gambling companies on the table. One of them is an outfit
called Pleasure, Inc.”

“That’s right.”

“If the decision is that
we’re not in the gambling business, forget I ever told you
this. If there is gambling, make sure no agreement includes Pleasure,
Inc.”

“Why not?”

“I met a man who used to
work for them. They’re criminals in the usual ways: skimming
money from the casino, feeding illegitimate cash into the games and
redeeming the chips with checks and credits to launder it, investing
secret profits in illegal enterprises. They’re capable of
killing people when it suits them.”

“How in the world did you
meet anybody who knew that?”

“It’s just one of
those crazy things that happens if you travel a lot. You meet people
you wouldn’t otherwise.”

“You should have paid the
airline for an upgrade,” said Sadagoyase. “Why would he
tell you and not the police?”

“He was afraid of them,
and he wasn’t afraid of me. I just have that kind of face.”

“But – ” he
began.

“No more questions. I
won’t answer them, and that will spoil this beautiful day. Use
the information as you think best. If you think it will help in
council, you can use my name. I can’t tell you his.” Jane
stood up to leave.

“What will you do if
gambling comes in?”

Jane gave a little shrug. “I’ll
give myself an extra fifteen minutes to drive out here in the
traffic, and another fifteen to find a place to park.”

“All Senecas would be
entitled to a share of the profits. Would you take it?”

She shook her head. “No.
That I couldn’t do.”

He watched as she bent down to
kiss Violet, her long straight black hair swinging to touch his
wife’s; she came to him and did the same. Then she turned and
walked to her car. As she passed under the big hemlock and the
sunlight fell in bright dapples on her head and shoulders, he felt
himself losing perspective. He could not help feeling he had just
received an official visit from his grandmother’s grandmother.

It
was nearly noon. The three men at the far end of the enormous
conference table had begun to look bored. Calvin Seaver watched
Stella Olson’s eyes sweep down the page of her report to the
summary. This was one of the reasons why Seaver was in awe of Stella.
Some of the people in this room would have decided to hold the big
guys’ attention by tickling them with cheerful patter, or just
droned on, insisting that if these three persisted in owning a
casino, they would have to hear all about how it was run. Stella just
said in her clipped, soothing voice, “Thirty-two hires, two
terminations, eight on medical leave, four resignations, for a net
gain of eighteen, which will cover all existing positions until the
end of September.” She sat down, closed her folder, and watched
the three men attentively. Seaver saw Max Foley’s eyes slip to
one side, then the other, and come to some understanding with his
partners. “Are the salary figures in the report?”

Seaver couldn’t tell
whether the three partners had decided to humiliate her because she
had been the one to hire Pete Hatcher or to ask a polite question
because Stella had earned the right to their attention, but he knew
that probably Stella could tell which it was. She was a poker player,
and she seemed to have a gift for reading faces. She came back at
them without looking down at her papers.

“Salary and benefits on
the eighteen new hires adds up to an additional $52,500 a month.
Lower starting salaries on the fourteen replacements offsets $5,833
of it. So the extra cost is $46,667 for this month only. On September
first we lost eight regulars who went back to college for additional
work, and eight shifted from full to part time. We have three
scheduled retirements. We’ll make up the $46,667 on October
fourteenth.”

Peter Buckley smiled. “That’s
marvelous work, Stella.” Even Salateri seemed to make an
exception to his habit of never praising and gave her a reluctant
nod. Seaver decided they must have given Stella a slow one over the
plate. That way when she walloped it out of the park, the others
would see how it was done.

Max Foley looked around
expectantly. “Anybody have anything to talk about that’s
more urgent than lunch?” The men and women around the table
looked like statues. “No? Then you know where we are.”

All of the twenty managers stood
up and began to glance at watches, gather papers, and file out. A few
of them chatted affably, but Seaver knew it was all harmless banter.
He knew because he had periodically tape-recorded the whispers and
murmurs, amplified them, and listened to them to be sure nobody said
anything once the soundproof door opened that constituted a violation
of security.

As Seaver stood to join the
queue, Buckley caught his eye and lazily gestured at a chair near the
end of the table. Seaver set his papers on the table and pretended to
put them in order until the others had gone, then walked over and sat
down.

This was one of the times when
the three partners looked like one entity, some Hindu deity with six
arms and three faces. They all turned to watch Seaver, but Salateri
was the face who spoke. “Cal,” he said. “We’re
wondering what stage we’ve reached on the Pete Hatcher thing.”

It was Seaver’s impulse to
say, “It’s taken care of,” but he knew that was not
what the triumvirate had held him apart to hear. He pursed his lips
thoughtfully, then said, “I made the arrangement I mentioned. I
gave them one hundred for expenses. We agreed on an eventual price of
three hundred, plus any overhead they incur beyond the hundred.”

“And?” prompted
Buckley.

“They haven’t asked
for the rest yet.”

Foley frowned. “What does
that mean?”

Seaver said, “They haven’t
finished yet.”

Salateri shook his head in
disgust but said nothing. To Seaver’s surprise, it was Buckley
who pursued it. “Doesn’t that make you… a little
uncomfortable?”

Seaver resisted the glib, easy
answer. “It’s not as quick as I had hoped,” he
conceded. “But I’m not concerned. I picked these people
because I was confident that they would be able to find him and take
care of it quietly, without the sorts of problems these matters can
sometimes cause.” He held his palms up. “I still think
so. The delay just means that the professional who helped Hatcher
disappear also helped him stay hidden for a while.”

Foley snorted. “I think
it’s time to ask a few specific questions. Just who are these
people?”

“Their names are Earl
Bliss and Linda Thompson. They have a detective agency in Los
Angeles.”

“Why did you pick them?”

“They’ve done a few
things for me and for acquaintances of mine, and they’ve always
delivered. The choice of specialists isn’t very good. They’re
the best of a bad lot.”

Foley’s brows knitted. “A
bad lot?”

“As a rule, paragons of
mental health don’t do wet jobs. Usually the people available
for that kind of work have felony records. They look like they’ve
spent a lot of time lifting weights in some exercise yard and have
lots of memorable tattoos. They’ve all learned that you can get
out of just about any sentence if you’ve got something juicy to
tell the authorities about somebody else, and they’re all
certain to be in trouble again. So they can be a problem that doesn’t
go away.”

“What’s different
about the ones you hired?” asked Foley. “Are they
paragons of mental health?”

“I can only guess, and I
would guess not. But they don’t seem to have problems that get
in the way. And these people fit the Pete Hatcher problem.”

“How?”

“They’ve done a lot
of skip-tracing and bail-jump cases, so they’re set up to find
people quietly and without fuss. If they get noticed while they’re
looking, they can say they’re on that kind of case, and show
licenses to make it believable. There are two of them, and this kind
of work is best done in pairs, which is why police officers work that
way. If you have to, you can watch a building twenty-four hours a
day, and it’s very hard to slip behind someone who can look in
two directions at once. And one of them is a woman. Two men together
are probably a team of some kind, but two people of different sexes
are just ‘a couple.’”

Salateri seemed to be bursting,
but he confined himself to a measured tone. “If they’re
so good, why is it taking them so long to find one guy? It’s
been almost four months.”

Seaver sighed. “The
Justice Department has seventy thousand people, and sometimes it
takes them twenty years.” He saw that this did not please the
three men, and he regretted having let it slip out. “I don’t
mean to be flippant. But the problem isn’t going out and
finding the Pete Hatcher we knew. He has professional help. She’s
probably been doing everything for him. At some point he’ll
stop paying her, and he’ll be on his own again. He’ll
float to the surface.”

Max Foley blinked his eyes, took
off his glasses, and set them on the table, then produced a white
handkerchief and meticulously cleaned the tinted lenses. “How
do I put this?” he asked himself. “The world is a
complicated place, full of pieces that somehow fit together, and each
one affects the others. Most people just don’t know how.”

Seaver could sense that what was
coming was terribly important, and that he would need to catch every
word and remember it. Then it seemed to him that they might be about
to fire him. He waited anxiously.

Foley put on his glasses and his
eyes widened to look at Seaver. “That’s what we do –
the three of us here. Together we know how the pieces fit. It can’t
be written down. It’s too much for one person to keep in his
head, so we each know one part completely, and some of the rest.”

Buckley said, “We think we
haven’t explained our problem well enough to you.”

Seaver began to wonder. There
were worse things than being fired. Maybe he was about to hear a
description of one of them. “Explained what – Pete
Hatcher?”

Buckley nodded. His arm came up
in one of his vague, limp gestures. “And so on.”

Seaver could feel the danger.
“All my life I’ve operated on orders,” he said. “If
I got the orders wrong, I apologize. Repeat them, and I’ll do
my best. But I don’t need to know any more than I do.”

“Who said you had a
choice?” snapped Salateri.

Peter Buckley gave a deprecating
smile and said, “You think we’re going to tell you
something that will make you a liability. That’s perceptive,
but I’m afraid there’s nothing we could tell you that
would make you more vulnerable than you already are.” A moment
went by. “Now you’re thinking that we’re going to
tell you something intended to give you a better appreciation for the
importance of Pete Hatcher: what we win if we win, what we lose if we
lose. If that happened we wouldn’t be sorry, but that’s
not why you’re here. We’re hoping that if we tell you
more, you’ll think of new ways to help us.”

“I’ll try,”
said Seaver.

“You know we gave Pete
Hatcher quite an education,” said Foley. “We started him
in personnel with Stella. Then we had him work customer service on
the hotel side for a while. First the tennis shop, then he was a
starter at the golf course. Then we shifted him to the casino side.
He worked the floor as a runner for the pit bosses.” He turned
to his partners. “Help me here.”

“Finance,” said
Buckley. “First purchasing, then accounts. Then I think it was
entertainment.”

“Right,” said
Salateri. “Ticket sales, then booking.” He glared at
Seaver. “I think that was when we sent him to you.”

Seaver nodded.

“Then we started promoting
him. He seemed to have potential,” said Buckley. “He was
young, not a genius, but not stupid. He didn’t care how hard he
had to work, he seemed to get by just fine. He had one rare and
special gift. That was the way he got along with people. Everybody
liked Pete Hatcher: grandmas, little kids, people from foreign
countries who might interpret some normal gesture as an insult.”

Salateri looked as though he
were sucking on something sour. “We gave him a taste of
everything. We trusted him with little things, then tried bigger
things. He never let us down.”

Buckley sighed wistfully. “We
began to rely on him. That was where we got into trouble. Las Vegas
is a special place. There’s never been anything like it in the
world. When the country goes into a recession, we do better. People
flock here in the summer, when you can burn your hand on the roof of
a car. Sometimes it seems as though the laws of economics don’t
apply here. But they do.”

“This is a business like
any other,” said Foley. “If this company is going to
survive, it has to diversify, expand, form alliances. Staying put
means dying. We’ve presented Pleasure Island as a family
attraction. We may have done ourselves incalculable good for the
future, but in the meantime, it has cut the number of dollars we take
in per customer. Kids don’t spend much. All they use is the
beds and the food, which we practically give away to attract
business.”