Vanishing Act (17 page)

"Excuse me?" said Jane.

"Valentine Girls."

Jane’s head was pounding. "Can I order a message delivered and pay over the phone with a credit card?"

"Sure. Tell me what day you’d like it delivered."

"Today. As soon as I hang up."

"Tonight? That could be tough. We have to arrange for the right person, and ..."

"No you don’t," said Jane. "I don’t care who it is, just so it’s right away. It’s not a fun thing. It’s urgent."

"All right. Give me your credit card number."

Jane pulled out her Visa and read off the number.

"What’s the address for the message?"

"It’s for John Young, 4350 Islington, Apartment B as in boy."

"That in Medford?"

"Yes."

"Message?"

Jane hesitated. She hadn’t had time to think it through. "Say, ’Harry died. Come home. Mom.’ Make that, ’Love, Mom.’ " She listened while the woman repeated it in a monotone.

"That’s right."

"Okay, now we come to the tricky part."

"What’s that?"

"If you want this delivered tonight, the only person I have is a male stripper. He’s getting ready for a bachelorette party in an hour. I’m afraid he gets a hundred dollars. It’s not his fault that—"

"That’s okay," said Jane. "It’s important."

"Just so you understand."

"And, please, write it down. Make sure the stripper knows that if Mr. Young is not home he should slip it under the door. Not in the mailbox or something— under the door."

"We’ll do it."

Jane thought for a second. What else was there? "And if you don’t mind, could it be on a plain piece of paper? Not your regular stationery or something?"

"Don’t worry," the woman said. "I’ve already got it that way. Nobody wants this kind of message on a valentine."

"Great," said Jane. She leaned against the supermarket wall again. "Wonderful."

"And I’m sorry about Harry," said the woman.

"Thanks." She hung up and took three deep breaths. What now? Could she wait until she got home to call the airlines? Yes. She had to go home anyway, and it would be quicker because she could pack while she was talking. She hurried to her car, started it, and drove. The ripe cantaloupe in the back seat smelled like garbage, so strong it made her feel queasy. She rolled down her window and drove faster.

She pulled into her driveway too fast and heard a bag fall over and some cans rolling around on the floor. She ran into the house, took the steps three at a time to the second floor, and looked at the answering machine. The message light wasn’t blinking, and the counter still said zero.

Quickly, she looked up the airlines section of the Yellow Pages and started at the top, with American Airlines. "When is the first flight out of Buffalo that will get me to Medford, Oregon?" There was a flight to Chicago, then Portland, with a hop down to Medford/ Jackson County airport that would take until 7:00 A.M. Pacific time.

As she accepted her reservation, she heard the door-bell ringing downstairs. She nearly screamed in frustration, but clenched her teeth, read off her credit card number, and waited until she had heard the woman distinctly say, "You’re confirmed," before she relinquished the telephone.

She ran down the stairs and flung the door open. It was Jake. "Sorry, Jake, but I’ve got to leave in a minute."

"That’s why I’m here," he said. He stepped in, and she had to fight an impulse to give him a hard push in the chest and slam the door.

Instead, she pivoted and hurried up the stairs. "I’ve got to pack." She was already thinking about what to take. There was no good way to bring a firearm aboard an airplane. It would have to be the matching manicure kit and jewelry box and makeup kit. There was a thick, heavy gold chain in the jewelry box that clasped to two screw-on handles of the hairbrushes, and those screwed into two lead-filled lipstick tubes. When the parts were assembled that way she had two long, weighted handles connected by a chain, and that made a very ugly set of nunchaku. There was also a big nail file with an ivory handle and a blade that was stainless steel and sharpened like a razor.

She was vaguely aware that Jake was following her upstairs. "I saw you roar in, so I figured you planned to leave right away. He’s not safe after all, is he?"

"Right," she snapped, and wondered instantly why she had let that out. The frustration was driving her to madness.

"Have you warned him?"

"I tried, but I don’t know if he got the message or—" Saying it out loud was not what she wanted to do, so she didn’t. "I’ve got to go there."

"I’ll go with you," he said. "I’ll be ready before you are."

"No."

"I saw those men. Did you?"

"Yes." Then she admitted, "Not close."

"I did. I’d know them anywhere. And if they followed you to where he is, they must have seen you. They didn’t see me."

"Look," she said. "This is crazy. Why am I arguing with you? It’s none of your business. I’m going, you’re not."

He said, "I know you’re wishing I’d fall in a hole. But I can see them coming and you can’t. I can even report them to the police and you can’t, or you would have already. They don’t know me, but they know you, and no matter how good you are or how smart or how young, you can’t be in two places at the same time and watch your own back. If you’re going because you think you have to save that fellow’s life, then you ought to think in practical terms and take the help that’s available. You think about that, and I’ll be waiting for you."

He walked off down the stairs and Jane kept packing. It was awful. Why she had ever admitted it, told this old man her secret, she couldn’t imagine now. But as she worked, she knew she was denying things she had no right to dismiss. There was no getting around the fact that Jake was the only one who could recognize the four men.

She closed the suitcase and ran downstairs. She started to activate the alarm system, then changed her mind and turned it off. If John came here, he would try to break in again.

She hurried to the car, and there was Jake sitting in the passenger seat with a sportcoat on and his suitcase lying on the back seat. She got in beside him. "Please listen," she said. "This isn’t the Rowland boys throwing Dave Dormont into Ellicott Creek. John and I both knew a nice, gentle man named Harry. He and John helped each other at different times. I took them both to another nice man named Lewis Feng, who helped them to hide. Today Lew Feng is dead. Harry is dead. John may be dead. If those men think you’re a problem, you’ll be dead."

"I’m old," he said, "but I’m not feebleminded. I know what I’m doing. I’m just waiting to see if you do."

She started the engine and backed out of the driveway. "Just don’t talk," she said quietly. "I’ve got to think."

19

Jane Whitefield sat in the airplane seat and stared out the double pane of glass into the darkness. She had killed Harry. She just had not made the right connections. When she forced herself to look at John Felker objectively, he was a nobody, just an ex-policeman, no different from thousands of others, content doing some dull job because he’d had enough excitement to last the rest of his life.

He had assumed that somebody had chosen him because he had once been a cop. Every cop has a lot of enemies who are criminals, and they don’t retire just because he does. And being an ex-cop who went to night school instead of getting a Harvard M.B.A. made him the sort of outsider who could easily be made to take a fall in a big accounting firm. Either explanation had sounded plausible, and she had accepted his assumption without really examining it.

What made John special enough to be worth some gigantic paranoid’s nightmare of a conspiracy? She had been stupid. John could be excused for assuming that his enemies were his own, because no human being could be expected to imagine that when his life was destroyed, that wasn’t the main event. Jane couldn’t be excused. She stated it to herself: Jane is presented with an ordinary guy who tells her that one day, without warning, enormous resources have been brought into play by extremely cunning enemies he can’t even identify, all designed to destroy his ordinary life, and the one who warns him is one of the most wanted fugitives in the world. Who are these people really after? Just the mention of Harry’s name should have been enough to make it obvious to her.

She had even said it that night. Why would they spread the word all over the prison system so just about everybody in the whole country who wasn’t eligible for jury duty would know? That was no way to kill an ex-cop. It was a way to be sure he heard he was in a kind of danger he couldn’t hope to fight off. They had wanted to get him running.

Then the four men had followed John’s bus all the way from St. Louis to Buffalo. If they had wanted to kill him, surely they could have found some way before he got to Deganawida. They hadn’t wanted to kill him. They just wanted to see where he went.

Later that night, when they had come upon the abandoned car on Ridge Road, they had pulled their guns. What were they trying to do—kill him? No. If they had wanted to do that, they could have stood around the car and fired through the doors. They were trying to capture him. When she had seen that they weren’t going to shoot, for an instant she had thought they might even be cops.

John had made one mistake, but it hadn’t been the one he thought. It was that one night, years ago, he had decided that the three men arrested with Harry had not been after him because of Cappadocia. That had to be the mistake, because nobody but those three men would have known that he had ever met Harry. Why had he assumed that a man who was running from one problem had gotten attacked for something unrelated? Because that was what Harry had told him. If only he had known Harry better, things would be different now.

Poor little Harry. After five quiet years in Santa Barbara, he would have heard a knock on the door and answered it without having that preliminary twinge of fear. He would never have forgotten the sickening sight of the men in his card game, all of them shot four or five times in the head and chest, but by now he would have convinced himself that he was safe, not because of the elaborate precautions but because he was Harry, and Harry had raised optimism to the level of the mystical.

Most of the people who were called gamblers weren’t that at all, because they never bet on anything. Harry had been a player. Even his only attempt to move up in the world and be the one who owned the table and took the rake had been manic optimism: He had actually expected he would be the first man in history to run a high-stakes poker game in a place like Chicago without meeting somebody like Jerry Cappadocia.

People who read in the newspapers that Harry was a gambler probably would assume that he had become one because he was good at it. Gambling wasn’t the name of a profession; it was the name of a delusion. When he had come to her in the night, he had been in possession of ten thousand dollars, all in hundreds, and one suit with shiny spots on the pants where he sat down. Now he was dead. Whether it was Cappadocia’s friends who got him because they thought he had set up the murders or it was the murderers making sure he never talked didn’t matter to anybody except Jane.

If it was Cappadocia’s friends, they would have tried to make him talk before they killed him. If he had told them what they needed to know, then maybe they’d let John ... She stopped herself, sick and ashamed. She also knew better. Whoever had forced John to run to her, and followed them both to Lew Feng, then killed him to get Harry’s address, had constructed a big, wide trap to do it. They would close it now. John Felker dead would be slightly less troubling to them than John Felker alive, and killing him would be so easy.

It wasn’t until the plane had landed in Chicago and she had changed airplanes for the flight to Portland that she found herself sitting next to Jake. He sat in silence, not even looking at her, until she said, "You can talk, you know. I didn’t say you had to turn into a stone."

"Didn’t want to be a bother," said Jake.

"The flying part is safe, Jake. You don’t have to be afraid yet."

"That doesn’t mean I have to sit here like a moron and be impressed by it. It’s always been my belief that the greatest human achievement is swimming. A few clever monkeylike fellows have figured out how to make a machine that will lift people into the air at some speed, but this isn’t flying. It’s riding. Swimming isn’t a cheat like that. It’s a fundamental extension of human powers."

She looked at him with suspicion. "Do you think a lot about dying?"

"That’s a hell of a thing to ask a man my age," he said. "I don’t actively think about it. Besides, I seem to have exhausted my sources of information—for the moment, anyway."

"Go on. You’ve been thinking about it since we left home."

"I wasn’t thinking about falling out of the sky," he said. "I was thinking about the dead, the people who were around when I was doing most of my living— Margaret, your parents, my sister Ellen ... there’s a long list."

"Does that make you afraid?"

"When I was young it did. I remember when I was thirty or thirty-five I used to still hate to go to sleep at night because I didn’t want to miss anything—like a child. That was how I thought about death, too; I dreaded having my curiosity frustrated. But I guess you can only flinch so many times before the punch gets familiar. You’ve already felt it hit so many times in your imagination that it loses interest."

"Do you think other people get that way—soldiers, people who have to think about it a lot, cops?"

"I don’t know," he said. "Do you?"

"People always find some way to do what they have to do, don’t they? Pretend the plane that crashes isn’t going to be theirs."

"Yes," he said. He looked at her closely, his sharp old eyes studying her.

She opened her purse and took out the article she had torn from the Los Angeles newspaper. She had read it three times on the way to Chicago, but she read it again, keeping her eyes down where Jake couldn’t see them.

After they landed in Portland, she walked to the airport shop and bought a Vancouver newspaper. She had no trouble finding an article about the murder of Lewis Feng. There was a photograph of the policemen standing in front of the stationery shop while two of the coroner’s men wheeled a body bag to the curb. When she got to the part of the article that described what had happened to Feng, she put it down. He had been tortured. Of course, they would have had to do that. He would never have given them his client list unless they had first brought him to the point where the future didn’t matter as much as getting through the present. He would have to be willing to trade anything to make the pain stop. He had suffered for her mistake. She had done that to him.

The flight down to Medford was short, but she was aware of each second as she breathed in and out in an agonizing mechanical count. As they drew nearer, she concentrated on preparing herself for the most likely possibility. John had driven the five hundred miles down from Vancouver, gone to the apartment, opened the door, and found the four men waiting for him.

The article had said Harry was taken without a struggle in his apartment, his throat cut silently. He could have let somebody in and turned his back for a moment. But John wasn’t Harry Kemple. John was big and strong and alert. For him it would have to be something different, and more horrible—maybe three of them to hold him down and his eyes would bulge when he saw the knife come out and he’d push off with his feet to keep his neck away from the blade. She caught herself actually shaking her head to get the image out of her mind.

She glanced at Jake. She knew he had seen it, but he pretended he hadn’t. He stared straight ahead, stiff and erect. There was a kind of integrity to him, a separate-ness from the airplane, a refusal to slump in the seat and give up his will to the machine.

This time when the plane touched and bounced and then rattled along the runway to taxi to the terminal, Jane was one of the people who were incapable of waiting. She was unbuckled and ready. They had not checked their bags on the final leg of the trip because she had known that she would go mad waiting for them to come rumbling down into the baggage area. They walked into the terminal, put their suitcases into storage lockers, and stepped outside.

When the cab pulled up on the 4300 block of Islington, Jane picked the place out at once. It was the sort of building the Fengs would have chosen. It was a sprawling new apartment complex of the sort where people didn’t pay much attention to their neighbors because there were so many of them, and each wing would have a few moving out at the end of each month and new people coming in to replace them. But it was also the sort of place where you could murder a tenant without anyone noticing unless you did it with a bomb.

She walked along the sidewalk in front of the complex and saw that it was divided into sections that had their own numbers: 4380, 4310, 4360. When she reached 4350, she looked for the parking space in the carport at the side of the building. She found B, but the Honda wasn’t in it.

"Not home," said Jake, and she remembered his presence.

"Time for you to go for your evening walk," she said.

"Right." Jake started off on his stroll. He walked along the long row of parking spaces looked for all of the signs that Jane had told him about: a car with a man sitting in it, maybe pretending to wait for somebody while he read a newspaper. He scanned the windows for faces and then searched the surrounding block for a gray Honda Accord; a man who thought he might have unwelcome visitors might not park his car in a space with his apartment number on it.

Inside the hallway, Jane read the letters on the doors. They started with F. She worked backward until she found B. She heard someone across the hall in Apartment A walk close to the door, probably to look at her through the glass peephole. She tensed her legs and prepared to move quickly. After a moment there was a creak and she could hear the person moving off.

She turned to Apartment B and rang the bell. She could hear it jangling beyond the door. She knocked, then rang again, but there was no sound that she hadn’t made. She turned and knocked on the door of Apartment A.

A woman about her age, wearing a sweatshirt that had a stain on it Jane identified as baby formula, opened the door and stared at her with a resigned look. "What can I do for you?"

"I’m sorry to bother you," said Jane, and she could tell the woman was thinking, Not as sorry as I am, "but I’ve been trying to reach my friend, who just moved into Apartment B. His phone isn’t working, and—"

"Oh," said the woman. She brushed a long strand of corkscrew-curled hair out of her left eye, and it bounced back perversely. "They haven’t moved in yet."

Jane felt the tension beginning to grip her. "Are you sure?"

"Believe me, in this place I’d know it. People carrying furniture around sounds like an earthquake."

"Is there a manager?"

"Yeah. In the next building. Apartment A." Jane heard the first faint sounds of a baby waking up, amplified by an electric monitor. "Oh," said the woman vaguely, and the harried look returned to her face.

"Thanks," Jane said, and turned away so the woman could close the door. It didn’t prove anything. John Young didn’t have any furniture yet.

She went outside the building and walked around the corner to the window of Apartment B. The window looked into the living room. It was just four bare walls enclosing a shiny imitation-parquet floor. The bedroom door was open, and there was nothing in there, either. Even the closet doors were open, something that the people who gave apartments their gang-cleaning between tenants did to air them out.

The next thing Jane saw made her turn away. It was a small piece of white paper on the floor that had been slipped in under the door. She was starting to walk when she saw Jake coming around the building toward her. She pointed to the window, and he looked inside.

"That’s my note on the floor," she said. "He never made it."

"Are you sure?"

"I’m going to check with the manager, but it looks that way."

"I’ll do that," said Jake.

In a few minutes Jake returned. "No. He would have had to check in to get his power and water turned on. He hasn’t been here."

They walked out of the apartment complex, down Islington Street, with no destination. She hadn’t thought of this—not that he wouldn’t be in his apartment now, but that he had never been here at all. Even if the four men had found Harry’s and John’s addresses on the same list, how could they have stopped John so quickly? He would have had a good head start. They could have made it to the apartment before he did, but how could they catch him on the road?

Jake cleared his throat, and she knew she had to ask, so she said, "What is it?"

"Well," he said. "Is there any chance that he didn’t entirely trust you?"