Fidelity (3 page)

“Marilyn Tynan,” said Hall. The three men looked at each other and said nothing. Bill Przwalski began to empty the wastebaskets into a cardboard box.

“What?” she asked.

“That’s not a new one. It’s a divorce case we did three years ago. Phil just has April send a bill to her and a few others every month with all the current ones. She’ll never pay. Did he even sign that?”

She turned it around and held it so Ray Hall could see it. “Yes.”

Hall shrugged. “Sometimes he doesn’t bother.”

Bill Przwalski’s cardboard box was full of trash. He lifted it.

“Put that down, Billy,” she said. He lowered it to his desk. “Now, one of you tell me what you think is going on.”

The others looked at Ray Hall. He took a breath, then let it out. “I don’t feel happy about telling you this, Emily. On a hunch, when I went into Phil’s office, I got the company bank-account numbers, and called them. The bank’s computer says Kramer Investigations has a hundred and fifty in one account, and two hundred in the other.”

“Dollars?” said Emily. “You’re talking about a hundred and fifty dollars?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes moved across the faces of the three men, who now stared back at her openly. She reached into her purse, took out her checkbook, stepped to the front of April’s desk, picked up the telephone, and dialed the number on her checks. The cheerful machine voice told her to give the account number and then the last four digits of her Social Security number. When she had punched in the numbers, the machine began to recite a list of choices. She pressed four for a balance. “Your account balance is … seventy-three dollars and … seventeen cents. To return to the main menu, press eight. To speak with a representative, press zero.”

Emily muttered, “Oh, my God,” then pressed the zero and waited. The voice said, “Please hold. All our representatives are busy right now, but your call is important to us.”

She kept the telephone to her ear. “The money’s gone from our account, too.” The men didn’t look surprised.

She heard the elevator doors open and close. She held the telephone and watched the office door with the others. When it swung open, she noticed that their eyes had all been focused at the level of Phil Kramer’s face, but he was not the one who stepped in. Their eyes dropped about a foot to the face of April Dougherty. As she stepped inside, Emily and the three men stood still, watching her, but nobody greeted her. She glanced at the men without surprise, then faced Emily. “Good morning.”

“Hi, April.” Emily kept the phone to her ear.

“I’ll just be a minute,” April said. “I want to collect a few personal belongings, and then I’ll be out of your way. Have the police been here yet?”

“Not yet.”

April moved to her desk, and began opening the drawers and setting things on the white blotter. They were spare and pitiful: a coffee cup with a flower on it, a little male bee hovering over it and a little female bee hiding behind the stem. Beside it were a plastic dispenser for no-calorie chemical sweeteners, a little box with an emery board and six bottles of nail polish, and a couple of hairbrushes. The final item was a cheap makeup case.

“The cops aren’t going to impound your hairbrush,” Ray said. “If it embarrasses you to leave tampons lying around, then take them. But you don’t want your desk so empty that the cops think you’re hiding something.”

“I’m not!” she snapped.

“Then act like it. Put your stuff back in your desk, sit in your chair, and see what you can bring yourself to do to help us find Phil.”

April gaped at him, then sat down and pulled a file out of the deep lower right-hand drawer of her desk. “This is the log sheet. It’s what everyone has been doing this week.”

Emily’s eyes widened. She spun it around on the desk to read it.

“Christ, you didn’t include him.”

“Of course not. He’s the boss,” April said.

Emily knew that a part of her was grateful to April for not referring to Phil in the past tense. “Have you kept logs of incoming phone calls and appointments?”

“Sure.” April showed Emily a notebook full of lined paper with two columns of names and numbers. Then she produced a bound calendar with a page for each day.

Emily could see that there were lots of calls, lots of people coming into the office. There were also whole days when Phil had been out of the office, and April had put a diagonal line through his square and written No Appointments on it in her neat, unhurried handwriting. Emily pointed to the most recent one. “What’s this? Did he say in advance that he didn’t want you to make any appointments, or just call from somewhere and say `I’m not coming in today’?”

“Both,” April said. “A lot of the time somebody will be here and then leave, so I have to cancel whatever else is up. Sometimes one of the men calls to say he’s in Pomona or Irvine or someplace, and can’t get back.”

Emily held the three men in the corner of her eye while April spoke. She noted that none of them showed surprise at anything April said. Emily said, “You all know what I’m looking for. We need to know what Phil’s working on, and where. He could be stuck somewhere and in trouble.”

The recorded voice on the telephone said again, “Please hold. All our representatives are busy now, but your call is important to us.” Emily hung up, then reached into her purse, found the slip of paper where she had written the number the police officer had given her when she had called before, and dialed it again.

She heard a voice say, “Officer Morris.”

“Officer Morris, this is Emily Kramer. I spoke with you a little while ago about my husband. Well, now I’ve just learned that money has disappeared from his business accounts and our personal bank accounts. I’m afraid someone may have his identification or be holding him or-“

“Mrs. Kramer, wait. I’ve been trying to reach you. I just called your house, and I was about to try the office. I’m afraid we’ve found Mr. Kramer. I’m very sorry to say he’s dead.”

Emily felt thankful that he had not prolonged the revelation and made her listen for a long time, praying that he wasn’t going to say what she had known he would say. “Thank you,” she said.

Then she began to cry.

Jerry Hobart and Tim Whitley were stuck on the road to Las Vegas. Interstate 15 was always just the first part of the pleasure, the incredibly clear sky and the bright yellow morning sun striking the pavement ahead of the car and making the tiny diamond particles pressed into the asphalt glitter. It didn’t matter that the diamonds were really bits of broken glass pressed into the hot asphalt by the weight of the cars passing at eighty or ninety. They were like the sequins on the little outfits of the waitresses and the girls in the shows. They weren’t diamonds either, and the glitter in their makeup wasn’t gold dust, and Tim Whitley didn’t care. All that would have done was add to the price. The thought of the women made him eager to get there.

When they had started this morning, the cars on the road to Las Vegas had seemed to skim the pavement, barely touching it. The air was hot and dry and clean. Whitley had sat in the passenger seat and stared out at the high desert, looking at the rocky hills sprouting yuccas and small, paddle-shaped prickly pears, and the vast flatlands with Joshua trees spread out like straggling migrations of men, the speed of the car making them appear to move.

But now it was after four o’clock, and they had been inching along at a walk, then stopping dead for a few minutes, then creeping forward a few feet for nearly seven hours. “Jesus,” he said. “This is the worst.”

Jerry Hobart’s head turned slowly toward him like a tank turret. His eyes were slits. “The day isn’t over yet.”

“If it would just either speed up, or stop,” Whitley complained. “Hell, if it would just stop. Then we could turn off the engine and save the gas for later, and take a decent piss by the side of the road.”

Hobart said nothing. The jaw muscles on the side of his face kept tightening and going slack.

“We’ve been climbing for the past hour or two. Maybe I can find a station with news on it now.” Whitley leaned close to the dashboard in spite of the fact that the speakers were in the door panels, and used a delicate touch to move the vertical line in minute increments from one band to the next. Once he managed to find the faint singing of Spanish voices that reminded him of a party inside a house far away. Once there was bandy music, and he heard an announcer say something about narcotnafccantes. “The whole fucking world is turning into Mexico.”

Hobart said nothing, and the silence bothered Tim. Hobart was older and more experienced, and he was one of those men who had a solitary self-sufficiency, a strength that Tim knew he lacked. Each time Tim talked, he regretted it afterward. He knew that it was unseemly to complain, and there was no use whining to the man who had been at least moving the car forward when the cars ahead of it moved.

But Tim was frustrated. Four days ago they had rented a suite in the Venetian, and then yesterday they had driven to Los Angeles to do some work. They had done their job last night, collected their pay, packed up, and headed back toward Las Vegas in the morning. Hobart’s establishment of an alibi was thoughtful: Check into a good hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, go out every day and every night, and then one night simply go out and drive to Los Angeles for the killing and drive back. Their suite was officially occupied while they were gone, and nobody was keeping track of anything else. Hobart had called the hotel a couple of times. Once he had complained that the water pressure in the shower wasn’t strong enough and asked them to fix it while he was out gambling. Hobart had left their cell phones in the room and made calls to them so there would be a record that they had received calls from a signal repeater that was in Las Vegas within a few minutes of the killing.

But Tim Whitley was feeling increasingly agitated now. They had expected to be back in the hotel by ten or eleven. Now it was after four, and they had not gone a mile in the past hour. Who expected a traffic jam in the middle of the desert? It was the worst jam Whitley had ever seen, and they weren’t even in a city. They were fifty miles from a real town, practically on the edge of Death Valley. The gas gauge looked from here as though the tank was barely above empty. He hoped it was just the angle making the gauge look that way. He wasn’t facing it head-on like Hobart was in the driver’s seat.

Of course, somebody would come along and help if they ran out of gas-there wasn’t much solitude on Route 15 today-but that would make their beautiful alibi problematical: There would be somebody who had seen the two of them stalled on the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas at the wrong time. If they stopped, they were vulnerable. And there was two hundred thousand dollars in cash in the trunk. It wasn’t that people didn’t drive into Las Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash every day, it was that a pair of shitheels in a six-year-old Hyundai didn’t. If anything happened to separate them from the endless, anonymous current of traffic-if they had to get out to push the car to the shoulder and sit there with it while everybody stared at them in pity-then they would probably find themselves talking to a tow-truck driver or a cop. It wasn’t fair. This should have been simple.

At first everything had been quick and easy. He and Hobart had been working together for about a year, and they were sure of each other. There was no indecision when they saw Philip Kramer come out of the house after the meeting. Hobart said, “We’ll take him in his car so we don’t have a body lying on the ground that we have to drag out of sight. Go find a place with a clear shot at the left side of his car.”

That was not as easy as it sounded. A parked car has to be stopped with its right side to the curb and its left to the street. That didn’t suggest a lot of hiding places. But Tim knew that Hobart never spoke idly, and not doing what he said was the same to Hobart as refusing to do it.

Tim Whitley ran down the street toward the place where Phil Kramer had left his Toyota sedan, and searched. The only hiding place he could find to the left of Kramer’s car was inside the van parked across the street. Tim was a car thief, and he had his slim-jim with him. By the time Kramer came up the dark street, Tim Whitley was crouched down in the back of the van right behind the driver’s seat. When Kramer’s door opened, Tim heard it. He went to the window of the van and fired.

Tim felt good about it. It wasn’t Hobart this time, with Tim only there to steal a car to use in the job and drive away afterward. This time Tim was the shooter. Hobart’s only part in the job had been to walk up the street behind Kramer to keep him preoccupied and under the impression that he knew what to be afraid of.

Tim Whitley sensed a change in Hobart, who was shifting in his seat, trying to see around the car ahead. “What do you see?”

“Cars are getting off up there.”

“That’s probably good, isn’t it?” Whitley said. “We’ve finally come to what’s holding up the traffic. It’s got to be an accident. Once we get past that, we’ll be home-free.” He kept watching Hobart for a reaction.

“I don’t see an accident. They’re just getting off. Like a detour.”

Tim could see it now, too. There was an exit ramp far ahead, and cars were moving to the right to take it-not a huge stream of cars, but maybe one in ten. They climbed to a narrow road above, turned left to cross an overpass, and drove off somewhere to the left and away into the rocky hills.

He knew that Hobart was going to take that road, just from looking at his face. Nine out of ten drivers were staying on the interstate, but the one-tenth that were willing to veer off onto a road that was only two lanes at its widest would surely include Hobart. He had the peculiar, rare quality of absolute confidence in himself and depthless contempt for everybody else.

Hobart took the exit ramp and accelerated up the incline to the other road. He stopped only for an instant, not because he had to look to the right-nobody was coming from that direction, nor had there been since Whitley had first seen the exit-but just to look at the desert from up here.

“Jerry?”

“What?”

“Do you happen to know where this goes?”