Death Benefits_ A Novel Part 16

Walker stepped outside and felt a stirring in the air, not a gradual increase in the breeze, but a solid ma.s.s of air that hit him as it pa.s.sed across the blacktop, then was gone. It startled him, a sudden slap from the hurricane, and not a playful pawing. It felt like a test, a first pa.s.s from something that wanted to eat him. He stepped to the car, and as he opened the door the wind arrived, this time like an invisible wall. His hair blew and fluttered, and the colored pennants strung on a wire overhead began to flap and make snapping noises, straining until the wire was as taut as a bowstring. There was a steady hissing sound that he knew was just air whistling across the openings of his ears.

He got in and slammed the door, and there was silence. He brushed the hair out of his eyes, then started the engine and drifted out onto the road. He followed the directions the man had given him, searching for each street sign with extreme care, straining to reach beyond the distance he could see in order to make out as early as possible that one sign had too many letters, the next too few. When he saw Northwest Seventh Street and managed to complete the right turn onto it, he felt his chest swell in grat.i.tude. The man who had gotten him here had said there was only a mile to go, and now it was a straight line, with no possibility of a mistake.

The wind blew harder, the sudden onrush of air making the car rock slightly, and he overcompensated by gripping the steering wheel in surprise, then slowly, tentatively, loosened his grip. He could hear invisible specks of dust ticking against the window beside him as he searched for Tenth Avenue.

He saw it. The low brick building could have been anything-a store, a restaurant. But beside the door he could see a small bra.s.s plate like the one on the agency in Pasadena. He turned into the driveway and continued around the building to a parking lot that looked as though it would hold about twenty cars. There were only two in the lot.

He looked up at the sky, and decided he didn't have time to ponder why there weren't more cars. He could see the underbelly of the storm now, like a dark gray ceiling closing overhead. He opened the car door with surprising difficulty as the wind pushed against it, pounded down the b.u.t.ton, let it shut, and leaned back against the wind to control his speed as he trotted to the door of the building.

He swung it open and slipped inside, then experienced the blessed quiet again. He straightened his collar and pushed back his hair as he looked around. The room had the same aged quality of all the McClaren's offices, as though a single decorator had gone around the country buying up the antique furniture in each city and placing it in the same patterns. His eye caught movement, and he turned to see a short, bald man in his early sixties standing at the window. He had half-turned to place a steady, appraising gaze on Walker. He wore a three-piece suit that must have been tailored for his slim, narrow-shouldered frame, so he looked like a wizened boy. "I see the wind is up." The accent was a soft, genteel southern elongation of vowels that Walker a.s.sociated with Charleston.

"It certainly is," said Walker. He stepped closer. "My name is John Walker. I'm from the San Francisco office."

The small man stepped forward in a leisurely way and shook Walker's hand, then stood with his hands clasped behind him and rocked twice on his heels. "Ah, our reinforcements. I'd been led to believe that there was a bit more to you, numerically speaking. I'm Charles Evans, regional manager."

"The others flew into Atlanta," said Walker. "They should be on their way."

"I sincerely hope not," said Evans. "The storm would catch them out. Have you ever been in a hurricane?"

Walker glanced toward the window. He thought he heard the wind picking up. "Not yet."

Evans said, "Well, this one won't be as bad as it could be."

Walker brightened. "No?"

"That's the whole premise of our business, isn't it? It's never as bad as it could be. If it ever were ..." He left Walker to complete his sentence. "You came at a calm moment. When the front rolled into sight, people stopped calling insurance companies and turned to conveying their concerns to the Almighty. I sent home everybody who lives close enough to get there. Miss Turley and I are the only ones left, so you may as well ride it out with us."

Walker said, "I'd be happy to have something to keep me occupied. Is there any paperwork I can get started on?"

Evans looked at him through the corner of his eye, amused. "McClaren's has had a presence here since the turn of the century. As soon as hurricane season begins, we prepare all the paperwork."

"You go to all that trouble just in case?"

"I can see you really haven't been in a hurricane. The first thing that happens is that the power goes off. You're returned to a more primitive era, without computers or copiers."

"Of course," said Walker. "I'm sorry. They called me in the middle of the night, and I guess it took most of my brainpower to get here."

"Well, you're here now, so all we've got to do is wait it out." The sound of the wind began to mount noticeably. Evans turned and stared out his window. "Here it comes."

Walker stepped closer and looked. He could see a line of rain like a curtain sweeping toward them across the parking lot, turning the pavement dark and s.h.i.+ny with a hissing sound, throwing a thousand little splashes on the hood and roof of his rental car, then exploding against the office window like the spray of a hose.

Evans reached to the side of the window and pressed a b.u.t.ton, and a metal shutter slowly lowered to cover the gla.s.s. Then Evans went to the other windows on that side of the building and repeated the process. "That should do it for the present," he said. "The winds move clockwise, so it's possible that later on they'll hit the building from the other side."

The lights gave a small, sick flutter, and then went out. "Ahead of schedule," said Evans.

Walker went to the other side of the room, where there was a small unshuttered window, and stood looking out at what had replaced the late afternoon. The sky was an opaque dark gray, and below it a sourceless twilight, as though light had simply been trapped there when the sky closed up. Puddles seemed to Walker to rise up from the ground, with the wind sending wrinkly wavelets across it, then lifting spray off the surfaces to add it to the rain.

Somewhere, lost in the steady beat of rain and wind, Walker thought he heard a voice. It grew louder and louder. "... has reached the mainland with strong winds and extremely heavy rain. The possibility of flooding-" A middle-aged woman with silver hair appeared from the hallway, holding a flashlight and a portable radio. She turned off the radio. "The phones are dead too."

Evans said, "Miss Turley, this is John Walker from the San Francisco office, come to save us from the ravages of nature."

"Here. Have a flashlight," she said. "We've got plenty. If you run out of batteries, they're in the cabinet over there. If you would like some coffee, get it now or it will be cold."

Walker took the flashlight. "Thanks," he said.

"Well, I'm going to see if I can sleep with all this racket," she said. "All h.e.l.l has to break loose and knock out the phones before a person can get some rest." She was still talking when she pa.s.sed too far down the corridor to be heard.

Evans said to Walker, "I think I'll try to get a nap myself. As soon as the weather lets up, we're all going to be very busy." As he stepped away, he said over his shoulder, "There are couches in the offices."

Walker stayed at his window, watching as more of the hurricane came in. The wind was screaming along the eaves of the building now, and in the street Walker could see it lofting leaves and wet papers and bits of unidentifiable debris high into the air. He could still see an occasional car pa.s.s by on the street, crawling along with headlights on and winds.h.i.+eld wipers flicking back and forth frantically, the tires already making rooster-tail wakes in the puddles. He watched each one as long as he could see it, hoping the person inside was very close to where he was going. After twenty minutes had pa.s.sed, he saw no others. The people had given their city up to the hurricane.

An hour later, the volume of the wind seemed to increase again, and Walker's uneasiness increased with it. He found himself thinking, This is it. This is as high as it goes. Then it would seem to increase again. He began to see objects in motion that he had never expected to see. There was a blue sheet-metal rectangle that gave prices for Regular, Self-Serve, and Full-Serve. It flew through the air for fifty feet, then cartwheeled along the center of the street, fell flat, and lay there, but the next time he looked, it was gone. It was two hours later that he noticed the smaller pieces of debris, dark, flat rectangles fluttering in the air to scatter like leaves. It took more time before a group of them landed near enough for him to see them clearly. They were s.h.i.+ngles. The storm had begun to tear off roofs.

Night did not fall. The darkness simply acquired depth until Walker conceded that he could not see anymore. He turned away from the window and realized the room was as dark as a closet. He felt for the flashlight Miss Turley had given him, then went down the hall until he found an office door that was open. He went to the couch and lay down on it with his jacket as a blanket. He listened to the roar of the wind, and the splas.h.i.+ng of the water rus.h.i.+ng out of the gutters to the ground outside. He tried to feel whether the force of the wind was having any effect on the structure of the building, but he could detect no movement. The storm had reached such an intensity that the sounds had lost their variation. They were just an unchanging roar with no startling rises or falls, and the sameness slowly put him to sleep.

At some point in the night, he awoke to the sound of small objects being hurled against the building in a sudden patter. He sat up for a moment and tried to gauge the strength of the wind, but he could not detect a change. He lay back and thought about the sudden noise that had disturbed him. He wondered if it had been more s.h.i.+ngles. Leaves and trash and even signs blowing around meant nothing. s.h.i.+ngles were different. s.h.i.+ngles meant that somewhere not far from here, somebody's house was filling up with water.

20.

Morning was just the sound of Miss Turley walking past his door in high heels. Walker got up and went to his window. There was a diffuse gray light that let him see. The street outside was a running stream from curb to curb carrying unidentifiable debris, mud, and leaves. Farther up the block he could see three tall palm trees that had fallen, and the water formed unmoving waves where it washed past them.

He heard the sound of a radio, so he followed it to find Evans's office. "The eye pa.s.sed over south Florida at around four A.M. A.M. The governor has issued a statement that some search-and-rescue teams have been out during the night, and that disaster-relief personnel and equipment from all over the nation are already being a.s.sembled in command centers outside the hurricane's path, ready to move in as soon as conditions warrant." The governor has issued a statement that some search-and-rescue teams have been out during the night, and that disaster-relief personnel and equipment from all over the nation are already being a.s.sembled in command centers outside the hurricane's path, ready to move in as soon as conditions warrant."

Evans looked at Walker. "It's over. They're not ready to say that, but it is."

"What do we do?"

"These people have been paying us fat premiums for years in the fear that this was going to happen. Now we convince them it was worth it."

"How?"

"What we need is a policyholder who saw an agent from McClaren's show up like an angel without waiting to be called. And if they need it, we'll take care of them."

"Take care of them?" said Walker.

Evans nodded. "If the damage is small, we'll help board up a broken window or two, fill out a claim form, take some pictures, and move on to the next client. But judging from the radio, some of the houses are going to be uninhabitable. Clients will need food, clothes, lodging. We'll be there to cover it. Each policy file already has an envelope with five hundred dollars in cash and a blank, signed check. See what I'm getting at?"

Walker nodded. "You want friends for life."

"For generations. A little sympathy, a small advance on a payment we'll have to make later anyway, will make all the difference."

"When do we start?"

"Now. You'll take some policies and I'll take some. Pretty soon our own people will start making it in one by one, and Miss Turley will send them out." He pointed to a pile of folders with a camera on top. "Take that pile. They're all in one zip code."

Walker glanced at the first address, then at his road map. He checked two more, and he couldn't help noticing the sizes of the policies. "You've got some pretty expensive real estate on the books."

"We're starting with the big ones because they're easier to reach, and they're more likely than most to still be standing. You know the old insurance adage: the Lord hates a trailer park. As the cleanup gets going, we'll be able to reach the rest."

Walker took his pile of policies and forms and joined Evans at the door. Walker looked out at the gray sky and said, "You're sure that's it? Do they stop and start again?"

"This one's over," Evans said. He opened the door, then stopped Walker. "One last word. The reason these people deal with us is that for a hundred and fifty years, the company was run by gentlemen, and now by ladies and gentlemen. What we're doing is reminding them that ladies and gentlemen are better than their word. Conglomerates are not."

Walker looked carefully at his car and saw that there was mud up to the hubcaps, but nothing else seemed to be wrong. He tried the key, and the engine started and ran strong, so he opened his road map, drove out of the lot, and headed toward the ocean.

The next day and night merged into a continuous, exhausting blur. The first houses were huge and elaborate, some of them built in eccentric, grand rococo styles, some in art deco revival. A few looked like clubs, built above private quays with jetties extending outward, a couple of them only to serve as artificial shoals, where the caved-in carca.s.ses of ruined yachts lolled absurdly.

Walker would arrive, show his identification, look at the damage, offer emergency help, fill out the form, and take photographs with the Polaroid camera Miss Turley had given him with the files, then move on to the next house.

Walker made it back to the office after dark. When he opened the door he was startled at the change. There were people at all of the desks, and wet, tired-looking men and women coming in, as he was, to drop off claim forms, get more film for their cameras, and pick up the next set of files for the next zip code. He saw Kennedy, Cardarelli, and a few other San Francisco people processing forms at desks, but there were many others he had never seen before.

There were genuine local appraisers, who had been reinforced by appraisers from other states. They were easy to spot, because they had come prepared with appropriate outdoor clothes, their own cameras, and things that novices like Walker didn't have, like tape measures clipped to their belts. A few of them even wore hard hats.

Walker went out again, this time to a new neighborhood. This one was situated above a lake that must once have been small, but it had grown to include quite a few lawns and gardens, and even the ground floor of one house. Walker worked in a kind of fog, taking on everything that presented itself. He drove a woman to a hospital, taped plastic over broken windows, started a wet electrical generator that ran a pump, opened a power garage door by disconnecting it from the screw mechanism, and helped to wrap up a painting that looked to him as though it might be a genuine Vermeer.

Walker slept on the floor of the office for a few hours, then went out again at dawn. This day was the same, a succession of houses with windows blown in, roofs denuded of some of their s.h.i.+ngles. There was a note on one house that said the occupants had gone to an evacuation shelter, so he drove there in search of them, and found several other clients too. He filled out the forms with generalities: "Customer believes house is a total loss," or "Customer states that the flooding damaged the first floor but did not reach the second." When he returned from the last trip of the day, he handed his claim forms to Cardarelli.

She looked up from her desk. "Ah, Walker. Tell me, is it day or night out there?"

"Night."

"Good. I thought I was going blind." Her expression suddenly changed, and she was all business again. "Thank you," she said, and returned to her work.

Walker turned, and Evans was beside him. He led Walker aside. "Have you met Fred Teller?"

He correctly interpreted Walker's blank look. "Appraiser from New Orleans?" Evans prompted. "Tall, thin fellow with blond hair-wears a canvas jacket."

Walker looked at him in tentative agreement. "I think I've seen him, but I haven't talked to him. I've been out a lot." He detected something in Evans's expression. "Is there a problem?"

"n.o.body remembers seeing him since last night."

"Do you know where he was working?"

"The last batch of policies he was checking were in Palm Beach."

"He could have car trouble or something. With the phones out, he'd be stuck. If you've got another copy of his list, I'll go out and take a look."

Walker drove out of the lot and looked at his watch. He had been working for sixteen hours straight, but he felt a quiet contentment. The weight of his depression over the search for Ellen Snyder had not disappeared, but it had been forgotten for a time. For the past two days, he had been able to forget about Ellen Snyder, and about himself, and concentrate on the simple, direct business of making claims. He reminded himself that now he should be thinking about Fred Teller.

He picked a house on the list of clients that Teller had been given, and drove to it. The owner had seen no appraiser, so Walker took the time to fill out a claim form, then checked his map and picked a second house that looked like the closest.

It was a big, rambling place on a slight rise in the land that looked artificial, with a tile roof that seemed to be intact and a two-car garage. He walked to the front door and knocked, but n.o.body came to answer, so he walked around the house to the back to see if they had not heard. There was a tennis court that looked s.h.i.+ny in the darkness. The net had provided the wind with a place to deposit broken branches and leaves and the ubiquitous bits of trash paper, so the pile in center court had grown into a barricade.

He knocked on the back door, but there was still no answer, so he walked toward the street, where he had left his car. He was preparing to go to the next house on the list when something caught his eye. There was a single set of muddy tire tracks on the driveway, leading from the garage door to the street.

He stared at it for a moment. If the car had been in the garage during the hurricane, and someone had driven it out, why would the tracks be muddy? If they had taken the car out after the hurricane and then driven it into the garage, there might be a single set of muddy tire tracks. But that would mean the car was still here, and the owners home.

He walked to the side of the garage and looked in the window. There was a boat on a trailer on one side of the garage. On the other was a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a toolbox showing under a tarp, and what looked like a briefcase. Walker went back to his car and got his flashlight, then shone it in the garage window. The reflection off the gla.s.s made it hard to see, so he manipulated the flashlight a bit, and the light pa.s.sed across the license plate: Louisiana.

Walker went to the side of the house and shone the flashlight in the window. It was a dining room. Everything was in place, and he could see no broken windows. He tried to imagine what had happened to the appraiser. If he'd had engine trouble, and the client was gone, would he have put his car in the client's garage?

Walker looked up, but he was too close to the house to see into any of the upper windows. He went back to the tennis court to see if he could detect any sign that someone was awake upstairs and had not heard the door. He stood near the net and looked up, but he could see no glow of flashlights or candles. He tried using his own flashlight, s.h.i.+ning it in the upper windows to cast a light on the ceiling, but he detected no shadow of a person looking out to see what he was doing.

As he lowered his light, it shone on the gra.s.s. He brought it back, then moved it from side to side. There was a long depression where the gra.s.s had been crushed. He moved his light a few feet to the right and picked up a second depression-tire tracks. He tried to fathom the sight. Someone had driven a car back here? Maybe the home owner had asked the appraiser to use the utility vehicle he drove to move or carry something for him. But then Walker remembered that here, too, there was only one set of tracks. Whatever had come this way had not come back.

He picked up the parallel tracks again on the far side of the tennis court, and followed them. They led down a broad gravel path through a garden, then to another rectangular expanse of pavement. He moved closer and directed his light over it. It wasn't pavement. It was the cover of a swimming pool.

He let his light move along the edge of the pool cover. It was the kind with an electric motor that turned a reel to pull it back into a wooden housing at the end of the pool, and wheeled guides on a track at the edges. But what caught his attention was that the cover was clean. He looked around. The pool was in a protected spot below the hill, but the cover should have been plastered with wet leaves and trash and mud like everything else. It must have been rolled up in its housing during the storm and rolled out afterward. There had been no electricity, so someone had pulled it out by hand. He stared at the pool cover for a moment.

He stepped to the end of the pool, dreading what he was going to find but not sure what it was. He knelt to grasp the bar that held the cover and managed to push it a couple of feet away from the deck. He picked up his flashlight and trained it down into the water.

The light played along the hood of a black Mercedes sedan. He went down on his elbows, aimed the light again, and sucked in a breath. There were two bodies. The man in the back seat had floated upward, and all Walker could see of him from this angle was a leg that had drifted out of the open window, the pant leg halfway up the calf, so his shoe and sock and a length of white skin were visible. The woman was held in the front pa.s.senger seat by her seat belt, sitting there with her dead eyes staring ahead.

Walker quickly stood and yanked the cover back. He turned to look around him, not because he expected to see something else but because he hoped he would not. He didn't know whether to keep the light on or turn it off, so he flicked it off and felt worse, then pushed the switch on again. He walked up the path quickly, his head swiveling from side to side in an attempt to see all around him at once. When he made it to the tennis court, he broke into a run.

He reached the street, got into the car, and drove a mile or more, searching for a police car, a fire truck, any vehicle that looked as though it belonged to someone in authority, but he saw nothing. This area had not been hit hard, and he knew the emergency vehicles must be in other neighborhoods. He drove on, feeling more and more desperate, but then to his left, down a long, straight avenue, he saw a faint glow on the pavement: electric lights. He turned and drove toward the glow.

It was a large building with a few lighted windows. As he came nearer, he saw that there was a big set of letters along the top of the building that were not illuminated. He picked out the word hospital. Of course that was what it would be. They all had emergency generators. He turned up the driveway and into a lot, then ran toward a lighted doorway.

The automatic doors didn't work, but he pushed one open and stepped into chaos. There were people on gurneys in the hallway with IV stands set up beside them, nurses and orderlies rus.h.i.+ng back and forth, people who wore dirty clothes and fresh white bandages, children crying, old people sitting on floors because there were no chairs. Down the hall in the lobby, he saw what he had been looking for, the dark blue uniform of a policeman. Walker hurried toward him with such speed and determination that the cop's body went tense.

Walker said, "I just found two murder victims."

The cop looked into Walker's eyes for about two seconds, then picked his radio off his belt and began to talk.

It was four hours later when a police car finally dropped Walker off back at the hospital. He had taken one set of policemen to the pool and shown them what he had found, then waited while they broke into the house and told him that they had not found Fred Teller inside. After that it had been a long night of waiting in the back seat of a police car, then waiting in the station, then waiting for another police car to take him back.

While he was driving his rental car back to the McClaren agency, the lights began to come on. At first the streets were dark, and then there was a sudden flickering around him, and the street lamps came on, not all at once, but with a brightening that shot along the straight stretch of road ahead like a row of dominoes falling. A few seconds later, other circuits came on in random groups. Lights that had been on when the power died all came back-upper windows, neon signs and fluorescents in closed stores, alarm systems that now clanged and hooted along the empty streets. Traffic signals that had been dead for two days suddenly began to blink on and off.

He turned into the driveway at the McClaren's office, s.n.a.t.c.hed Fred Teller's list off the seat, and ran into the building. People who looked as though they had been asleep were standing up and moving toward desks, a few of them looking around and picking up papers off the floor as though they had not noticed them before. Walker saw Evans come out of the hallway that led to his office, putting on his suit coat and looking pleased.

Walker hurried up and grasped his arm. "Are the phones working?"

Evans turned and led him back down the hall. "I'm not sure yet. Did you find him?"

Walker's mind had gone so far beyond the surprise of it that for a second the question struck him as insane. "I'm afraid I didn't. The police are looking now. I've got to try to make a call."

Evans stopped and looked back at Walker, but Walker dodged by him and hurried ahead. Walker stepped into Evans's office and reached for the telephone, but as he did, he heard a ringing in the main office, and then a half-ironic cheer from the people gathered there. He dialed the number of the McClaren's office in San Francisco. It rang twice, and then a pleasant female voice said, "You have reached the office of McClaren Life and Casualty. We're sorry, but all-" He hung up.

He sat at Evans's computer terminal, typed in Joyce Hazelton's e-mail address, and began to type.

"URGENT, URGENT, URGENT for anyone in the McClaren's office, from John Walker in Miami."