Death Benefits_ A Novel Part 4

Stillman shrugged. "Beats me. It's pretty clear they've gone to h.e.l.l like everything else."

The waiter returned with two large gla.s.ses filled with liquid the color of liver. Stillman sipped his, then said, "Perfect."

Walker tasted his, and guessed that "old-fas.h.i.+oned kind" must mean that the quant.i.ty of rum was up to the standard in force when driving drunk was still legal in Los Angeles. He tasted it again, and decided those days would be missed.

A few minutes later the waiter reappeared, his tiny pad in his hand and his eyebrow raised expectantly. Stillman nodded to Walker.

Walker replied, "Should we have what Mr. Fo ordered in 1949?"

Stillman shook his head. "Fo wasn't in this time zone then. We'll have to settle for prime rib, medium rare. And bring us more of these." When the waiter was gone, he said, "That's what everybody had before words like 'cholesterol' crept into the language. They're all going to be surprised after a lifetime of deprivation when they die of nothing."

Walker said, "They should spend time with you, and they wouldn't have that to worry about."

"So buy yourself some insurance. I need to hear about Ellen."

Walker had intended to sip his drink, but he noticed that the ice at the bottom already clinked against his front teeth. The drink was like a black hole that sucked everything around it into the gla.s.s and disappeared with it. He said warily, "I don't know a lot. You've seen pictures of her, right?"

"One in her file, and one copy of her company ID card. An escapee from cheerleader detention camp."

"She looks that way," Walker agreed. "Mildly athletic-looking, but not tiresome about it. I don't even know if she did anything to stay that way. She was alert and serious about the training cla.s.ses. I remember she had a few interests that didn't have anything to do with work. I told you about the music."

"By the way, that was a reasonable try, kid." Stillman raised his gla.s.s in a mock toast. "They like evidence that you're listening when they move their lips. I wonder why it didn't fly. Is there a boyfriend?"

"The word I got was no." He stared into s.p.a.ce for a moment. "Cardarelli. That's who told me. Now that I know Cardarelli better, I guess that didn't mean it was true. But Ellen didn't say anything about a boyfriend when she went out with me, and that would have been the time."

"No, before that would have been the time. What did she talk about?"

Walker was thinking about her again, searching for a sign that he had missed. No, there was nothing, even at the end, that showed she was thinking about another man. Stillman was staring at him, waiting.

"The one time you took her out," prompted Stillman. "What did she tell you?"

He needed an answer, and he was stuck with the lie that he had only taken her out once. He settled on the first time, at the Italian restaurant. He would answer questions about that. "As I remember, I guess she talked mostly about the future."

"That's what I wanted to hear," said Stillman. "We seem to be in it, so I'd like to know what the h.e.l.l it is."

Walker tried to bring it back. "She had a kind of overall strategy. She was convinced that a woman in a big company like McClaren's had to make things happen, or they wouldn't."

"Are we talking about endearing ourselves to upper management? Dirty old men my age?"

"If we were, I didn't get it. What she said was that she had to be patient. Getting herself into the San Francisco office would put her into compet.i.tion she couldn't beat."

"Like who?"

Walker shrugged. "Men, I guess. I think she mentioned Kennedy as an example. People who went to better colleges, and were just as bright and worked just as hard as she did."

"Who else?"

"Well ...me," he said uncomfortably. "But it was just because if she hadn't said that, she probably thought I would have been uncomfortable. She wanted to be in one of the branch offices, but a particular kind. She said she didn't want to insure s.h.i.+p's cargoes or satellite launches or something, because the customers are the sort of men who wouldn't take her seriously. She said cute and perky weren't qualities they looked for."

"It sounds like something that might be true. But what about the tone? When she said it, what was her voice like? Bitter? Angry?"

"Not really. She figured that things were improving for women, but the time wasn't right yet. She said if there were layoffs at McClaren's, she'd be safer in an office with four people than in one with four hundred. She would concentrate on family stuff: life insurance gets bought by men, but the survivors are widows, and the minute there's a payoff, they're women with more money than their husbands had the day they died. There's no tax on it, either. But the tax kicks in hard for the next generation, so she would sell them life insurance to pay that for the kids, and probably long-term-care insurance because they were alone now, and if the money was big enough, she'd convince them to let the company manage it." He shrugged. "She figured that who she was and the way she looked would give her an edge."

"What did you think?"

"The numbers add up the way she thought they did-actuarial tables on male-female longevity, and so on. I don't know if the rest of it does. There are too many intangibles. It seemed smart at the time-she is is cute and perky, and maybe that's the audience for it. Almost any plan seems smart to you if you don't have a plan." cute and perky, and maybe that's the audience for it. Almost any plan seems smart to you if you don't have a plan."

"So she ended up in Pasadena. Did she plan that too?"

"She said that was one of her choices. There was Pasadena, some place in Orange County, Scottsdale in Arizona, Palm Beach in Florida, a couple of others. The idea was to be in a place where the demographics work out-income level, age of population, and so on." He let his drink swirl around, listening to the ice on the gla.s.s.

Stillman looked at him speculatively. "She must have sold a lot of insurance to make a.s.sistant manager in a year and a half. That's a rank above the rest of you, right?"

Walker nodded. "She said that would happen-that promotions come more quickly on the front lines. And she must have made something on commissions. If she made a dollar, it's more than an a.n.a.lyst gets."

"But what was the point of it-the end?"

Walker smiled. "I got the impression that in twenty years, when the rest of us have become permanent drudges in our cubicles, and some have killed each other off in main-office politics, she expects to come back. If present trends play out, in those twenty years the status of women can only be better. At that time she could be well up the ranks, maybe vice president and regional manager of a big chunk of the country. Then, if there's a certain combination of circ.u.mstances, she could end up running the company. She didn't say what the circ.u.mstances were."

"It would help if she changed her name to McClaren."

Walker shrugged. "You'll have to suggest it to her."

Stillman studied Walker as he said, "Actually, I think I know what she has in mind. Dynasties have a life span. She probably thinks that at some point, either there won't be enough McClarens, or there won't be the right McClaren. There could even be too many, so the stock is spread too thin among people who don't know each other. A compet.i.tor could start buying up those shares. It doesn't matter what it is. Each year brings the end closer."

"Really?" said Walker. "No more McClarens at McClaren's? Then what?"

"Hard times," said Stillman. His eyes drifted around the room as he spoke. "The company loses money. This happens to insurance companies on a fairly regular schedule. Then you've got a bunch of people in the San Francisco office who are a.s.sociated with the discredited practices or decisions that failed. And you have a woman-she's only forty-four at this point-who has twenty-two years with the company and runs operations in some big, successful region. Because she's been out of sight, n.o.body knows anything negative about her. She gets a phone call from the board of directors." He suddenly returned his eyes to Walker. "How would you feel about that?"

"Me?" Walker looked surprised. "You mean would I be jealous or something? I don't think so. And I could think of worse people to work for."

"Really? Who?"

"It's just an expression," said Walker. "I meant she was good, not that anybody else was bad."

"It doesn't matter," said Stillman. "Now I understand why she wasn't interested in you. You're a nagging boil that appeared on her a.s.s after she bought a nonrefundable plane ticket."

"It's nice to make an impression on people."

Stillman held up his hands. "Don't get me wrong. I'm sure you're a young woman's fantasy. A delightful, spiritual companion on life's highway who's hung like a horse. But that's all beside the point, isn't it?"

"It wouldn't be to me."

"She's whoring after strange G.o.ds."

"She's what?"

"It's just a line from a book n.o.body reads anymore. What it means this time is that it wasn't you she turned down. It's men. And women: she can't be a lesbian because that would be even harder to fit into the vision. If you've got a plan that's sure to fail unless absolutely everything happens in a certain way, then you have to make it all happen that way. A boyfriend in the San Francisco office would be a deviation."

"I'm not sure if I'm supposed to feel better about this or worse."

Stillman raised his eyebrows, took a long draft of his mai tai, and stared contemplatively at the hull of the outrigger canoe hanging above the table. "I'd say that our humanity requires us to feel... bad. Which we will tomorrow while these drinks claw their way out of our systems." He looked at Walker again. "You're in the clear, ego-wise. You could have been the aforementioned paragon of virtues, and she would have skipped the concert."

"Then what are we sad about, precisely?"

"Her. No matter how misguided the goal, we can't help rooting for the determined little human animal who wants it. That's why we watch people doing things like climbing Mount Everest-which, on the well-known one-to-ten Stanford-Binet stupidity scale weighs in at about a thirty-and actually, with shame and horror, admit to ourselves that we hope the little boogers make it."

"We don't know that she won't."

"The broken window tells us somebody broke into her apartment. The two guys show us that somebody was watching her apartment-somebody from out of town, or they would have known enough to impersonate Pasadena cops instead of L.A. cops. They may have been interested in getting their hands on her, or keeping our hands off her. But I'd say the idea that she's irrelevant to the little problem at McClaren's is about shot."

"So what can we do?"

"We find her." Stillman's eyes met the waiter's across the room, and he pointed at his empty mai tai gla.s.s. The waiter scurried off.

Walker stared at his gla.s.s while the waiter s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and replaced it with a full one. It was beginning to take on a strange brightness, but then he realized that it was all right. It just looked bright because the breadth of his vision was now so narrow that the periphery was gone, and the gla.s.s was about all that was left. He felt a sudden regret so deep that he gave in to the need to draw in a quick breath. Maybe he was being stupid. What was he defending-her reputation? Her life could be in danger. He should tell Stillman the part he had not said. But as he contemplated it, he could not think of a single disparity between the truth and the lie that made any difference to anyone but John Walker.

6.

Walker sensed that he was in a large, empty s.p.a.ce. His ears told him that the sounds were coming from a distance, but it was some debased offshoot of human reason that told him he could not be alone. s.p.a.ces this size were public. Bits of memory rose into his consciousness. Had he pa.s.sed out in the restaurant? He sat up quickly. It was a hotel room. He was still dressed, lying on top of a bed. He remembered walking in here and lying down, but he also remembered telling himself he was just going to test the bed for a moment to see if it was comfortable. He had planned to get up.

Stillman was sitting in a wing chair across the room, and the rustling noises had been the newspaper he was reading. He looked over the top of his paper at Walker, then turned a page.

"What time is it?" asked Walker. His voice didn't sound as though it belonged to him. He cleared his throat.

"About nine. Don't hurt yourself trying to roll the stone away from the tomb, though. We've got plenty of time."

Walker crawled off the bed and walked into the bathroom. He found a paper bag on the sink. Inside were a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, mouthwash, comb, and a receipt that said Hilton Gift Shop. There were bars of soap in packages in the soap trays, so he decided he was adequately equipped for the moment.

Walker brushed his teeth and stood under the hot shower for a few minutes before he was ready to face considerations that had to do with the future. He began with the immediate future, because that didn't challenge his mind too much. He had come to Los Angeles with only the clothes on his back, so he didn't have to decide what to wear. As his mind began to forage beyond the moment, it collided with Stillman, and he felt the urge to stay right where he was, letting the water pound his scalp and run warm down his body to his toes until Stillman went away. He had heard him say, "We've got plenty of time." It was innocuous and undemanding, but it implied that there was something coming. He reminded himself that last night Stillman had said they were going to search for Ellen.

Moments later, Walker came out of the bathroom and put on his clothes. Stillman stood, refolded his newspaper, dropped it into the wastebasket, then stepped to the door. "Come on." It was only then that Walker noticed Stillman was wearing a freshly pressed gray suit that made him look like a senator.

Walker quickly surveyed the room, then realized he had been checking to make sure he had not left anything behind. He had nothing except his wallet and keys, and he could feel them in his pants pockets. He followed Stillman along the hall without having the slightest memory of the velvet-flocked blue-and-white wallpaper, then rode down with him in an elevator. The elevator stopped every second or third floor to pick up groups of middle-aged women who seemed to know one another, some of them pulling suitcases on wheels, so that by the time it had descended ten floors, Walker was occupying himself by estimating the weight of each pa.s.senger and her burdens, adding them up and comparing the total to the elevator's capacity printed on the little card beside the door.

When they got out in the lobby, Stillman turned to him. "How close did we come?"

"One more stop might have done it. We had about four hundred more pounds."

"It's kind of nice, isn't it?" asked Stillman. "Not dying by yourself, but with all those women hugging you and screaming all the way down, so our bodies would be all smeared together like a big, runny omelette." He stopped. "Hungry?"

Walker was defiant. "Sure. Do we have time?"

"Let me worry about that."

They ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and Walker felt pleased with his decision. The food seemed to give his body energy, and the coffee cleared his mind. He watched Stillman paying the bill, then followed him out the front door.

Stillman turned his head to stare at Walker critically, then waved off the valet parking attendant. "We'll have to stop and get you some clothes and stuff." He turned and walked west on Wils.h.i.+re Boulevard.

Stillman stopped to look into the Neiman Marcus window, and Walker pointedly kept moving. Stillman called, "Hold it," and Walker came back. "I know you can't afford this, but don't worry about it. We're on an expense account."

"You may be," said Walker. "But I doubt that it includes me, and I'm sure it doesn't include clothes."

Stillman glanced at his watch and said affably, "It includes anything I say it includes. I don't itemize."

Walker c.o.c.ked his head and raised an eyebrow.

"My clients know I'm not wasting their time on that sort of thing. If they want my services, they pay what I cost and don't get on my nerves. I don't bid, I don't give estimates, and I don't account for things."

"They go for that?" asked Walker. "McClaren's goes for that?"

"If they didn't want to, they wouldn't have to. They have a telephone book. Now, we're about to go meet some people. I want them to look at you once and make some unfounded a.s.sumptions. What that's going to require is that you go in there and buy yourself a good s.h.i.+rt, a suit off the rack that fits you, and a tie in a tasteful color and subdued pattern that does not include any stripes."

"So it's a disguise for a meeting?"

"Jesus, I hope it's not a disguise. I've been giving you the benefit of the doubt. We're going to see some people who need to a.s.sume that you're very high up on the food chain. We may see them more than once in the next few days. So while you're at it, start at the skin and work outward. Buy three or four suits, some jackets and pairs of pants, s.h.i.+rts, shoes and so on. I'll go buy you a suitcase to hold them in, then be back in time to sign the slip."

Walker frowned.

"What are you waiting for?"

"I'm wondering .... why no stripes?"

"Because that's what British regimental ties have, and if you ended up with the colors of the Queen's Own Thirty-sixth Welsh Bushwhackers or the Eton All-Castrato Choir you wouldn't know it."

"I guess that's true," said Walker. "But would whoever we're going to see?"

"One of them might," said Stillman. "Just go."

Walker stepped inside the gla.s.s doors, but he watched for a moment. Stillman looked up the street, then trotted across and disappeared into another store. As Walker looked at suits, he tried to decide what was bothering him. It was the rapidity of the things that had happened, and were still happening. Time seemed to speed up around Stillman. It seemed to Walker that one moment he had been in the office, and the next he was rattling along on rails at eighty miles an hour. He might very well be heading in the right direction, but maybe moving at high speed was sufficient reason to drag his feet.

When the clerk had managed to work his way down the hay bale of clothes he had laid on the counter for Walker, add up the numbers on the price tags, and pack them all into four huge shopping bags, Stillman arrived, toting a suitcase. He handed the clerk a card, signed the slip, and helped Walker carry his bags to the street. Walker recognized the car Stillman had rented at the airport. Stillman opened the door and tossed his purchases into the back seat.

Walker said carefully, "Thank you for the clothes."

Stillman nodded. "Get in the back with them."

As they drove off, Stillman said over his shoulder, "You can get your clothes changed while we're on the way."

"In the car?"

"If you don't change your shorts at a red light, you should be okay. Just have your tie knotted and your coat on before we get to Pasadena."