Runner (21 page)

He offered to keep Tracy on the payroll long after she had the baby and stopped working, so the company would be paying for her support. But since he had turned down her proposals, she wanted a lump-sum payment, and told him she intended to have their brief affair declared a common-law marriage. It was absurd, illegal, and unfair. But she was showing herself to be very stubborn and surprisingly efficient.

As the weeks passed and he knew that the time was coming for her condition to become visible, Richard became desperate. What Tracy didn't know was that Richard Beale would do anything to keep his parents from finding out he had made her pregnant.
Richard was an only child who had been born to a difficult mother and an impossible father. He knew that their reaction to the news would be unpleasant. They had already been ordering him to marry soon and give them grandchildren. If they knew Tracy was pregnant they were likely to take her side and give her what she had wanted in the first place—Richard as a husband. He would be tied for life to a woman who was essentially an enemy. The plan he had been pursuing of embezzling a few dollars at a time until he had enough to be independent would be effectively blocked. But leaving things as they were wouldn't prevent trouble either. If his father learned that he had proposed paying Tracy off by making her a phantom employee of the company, he would fire him and throw him out on the street. The business belonged to his parents. There was no way Richard could let the pregnancy proceed long enough so his parents could see it for themselves.

Richard called Steve Demming and asked him to have lunch at a restaurant in Del Mar. He had met Demming through Jerry McGern, a lawyer he had worked with on a development five years ago. Richard had told McGern about the trouble he was having with a roofing company. They were holding the whole project for ransom by delaying and asking for extra money. McGern had said, "Let me send a guy I know to see you." The guy had turned out to be Steve Demming. The roofing company had abruptly changed its position, and the roofs began going on the houses two days later.

He had hired Demming and his crew a number of times after that, but it was always on company matters. The real estate business in coastal California was tough and competitive, and the Beale family's interests were complicated. There were employees, suppliers, and subcontractors who needed to be watched without their knowing it. There were competing developers and speculators who needed to be persuaded not to bid on certain projects. There were buyers and
tenants who signed agreements they didn't think they needed to keep, and had to be taught to keep their word. There were payoffs to be delivered to inspectors, commissioners, and politicians. It was important that the people who performed these services not be employees of the Beale Company. Whenever Demming's crew did any work for Richard, he would pay them by placing one of them in the separate budgeted account of a current building project.

Richard and Demming sat on the patio of the restaurant in Del Mar looking out at the horizon, where the blue-gray sea met the blue-gray overcast sky. Richard explained his problem with Tracy and asked for Demming's help. Steve's understanding and discretion had surprised him. Steve told him that one of the women on his crew, Sybil Landreau, had too much to drink now and then, and had managed to get pregnant a couple of times. She had a cordial relationship with a doctor just over the border in Tijuana who was a favorite with the local hookers. Steve and Sybil and Pete Tilton would simply drive Tracy to the doctor and return her to the United States in a day or two. When Richard said, "Tracy won't go to Mexico with you," Demming said, "This doctor won't mind if a patient arrives anesthetized."

Richard knew that the problem had been solved, because he never heard from Tracy again. It gave him a warm feeling about Demming and his people—not just gratitude, but a kind of camaraderie. Like Richard, they were reliable. And they weren't the sort of people to look down on him for being human. They were people who sometimes had done foolish things themselves, and knew they probably would again.

The crew had solved Richard's trouble with Tracy, but that had not cured him of his receptionist problem. There was another occasion a couple of years later. The receptionist's name was Heather,
and Richard had to ask Demming to handle the problem again. Heather had seemed to welcome his attentions until they had sex, but then she had begun to make snide remarks. They had sounded like jokes at first—that she was just teasing him about the fact that the way they had gotten together was, technically, sexual harassment. But the jokes came more and more often, and then she asked him for a raise. She wanted her salary doubled, and she wanted to move into one of the new condominiums the company had built and live there for free. A couple of days after Heather vanished from San Diego, Richard's cell phone rang.

"Richard? It's me—Heather."

His breath caught in his throat, but he recovered. "What's up?"

"You know damned well what's up."

"I don't."

"Your friends, your scum, drugged me and kidnapped me. I woke up in Mexico."

"Aw. That's too bad."

"Too bad?
Too bad,
Richard?"

"Yeah. It sure sounds that way."

"When I woke up I was in some crummy hotel with a couple of your friends. The woman said if I ever told anybody anything about you or them, they'd sell me to a Mexican whorehouse where the pimps would kill me if I tried to run away."

"Jesus, Heather. If that's true, maybe you shouldn't have told me."

"You knew, you bastard."

"No way."

"You paid them to do this to me. All I'm asking is that you admit it. Tell the truth once."

"I don't know anything about this."

"I don't believe you."

"What do you want from me? Do you want to come in and talk?"

"I can't come in and talk. I'm in Ciudad Juarez, where your friends dumped me. I don't have any money to get home. I don't want to go talk to you. I hate you. You'll never see me again, you pig." She hung up.

Richard stared at his cell phone.
What could be better?
he asked himself. It was perfection. They had made sure all she had was a crazy story that she would be too scared to tell, and she had just given him a guarantee that she would leave him alone forever. This was science. It was art. Richard began to cherish Demming and his crew. They never seemed to be surprised at what he asked of them, and they were never at a loss about how to accomplish it.

Of course, having Demming solve a problem was expensive, and as this Christine Monahan problem dragged on, it was becoming more so. Keeping four people traveling around searching for somebody was like keeping four people on a perpetual vacation, running up bills at hotels, restaurants, airlines, car rentals. And having Ronnie Sebrot dealing with hospitals and doctors for his knee was worse. Richard wasn't sure what it was going to cost him for Carl McGinnis's death. He was hoping that Carl was a bachelor, without a widow to pay off. He remembered hearing some remark that Carl had something going with Claudia Marshall, but that proved nothing. The crew had spent a lot of time together—lots of it nights away from San Diego—for years, and he supposed that they must have routinely taken care of each other in that way.

The phone on Richard's desk rang, and he waited while Marlene, the new receptionist, answered it. In a few seconds, his phone buzzed, and he snatched up the receiver. "Yes?"

"It's a Mr. Demming for you, Richard." The voice was musical
and efficient and cheerful. He knew that what he had been thinking should have made him immune to any thoughts about the new receptionist, but it hadn't. He modulated his voice carefully so it was businesslike, yet friendly.

"Thanks, Marlene." He hit the button that was blinking. "Hi, Steve."

"Richard, I wanted to give you an update on what we're doing."

"I was hoping you were calling to say you had her."

"Not yet."

Richard hated
Not yet,
but he was sure Demming must remember that he hated that answer, and be saying it anyway. He couldn't afford to alienate Demming now, so he ignored his irritation. "Okay. So what's happening?"

"We've been circulating the pictures of Christine online to people around the country we think will look for her if there's money in it. We've set the payoff at a hundred thousand."

Richard swallowed, but his throat was so dry he swallowed air. "I guess that's okay. I don't actually have to pay anybody, right?"

"Actually, Richard, if they find her for us, you do. If somebody can find her, he can find you. Some of these people aren't anybody you want to fuck around with."

"Look, Steve. I'm not sure if I made this entirely clear. She's not in the same situation as the other girls I asked you to help me with. I really need Christine back here healthy and in a receptive mood."

"A receptive mood?"

"If possible, I'd like her to be happy to see me."

"It's kind of late to worry about her mood. But I'll think about it, and see what we can do."

"Thanks," said Richard. "And I appreciate your keeping me up on everything. I really need to have this work out."

"Good-bye, Richard."

Richard sat there, staring at the phone for a moment. Maybe this extra aggravation was the price for letting Demming and his crew handle personal problems for him. There was a kind of unwelcome familiarity to the way Demming had been talking to him for the past couple of weeks. He seemed at times to think he was indulging Richard's whims. Maybe that was Richard's imagination, but Demming didn't sound like an employee talking to his boss.

Richard decided that he needed to get out of the office. Maybe he would take an early lunch. Maybe he would ask Marlene the new receptionist to go with him.

"There you are." The voice was his father's.

Richard looked up. "Of course I'm here. This is my office, where I work."

"That's why I'm surprised." He came in and sat on the couch. He always sat in the center of a couch and rested both arms on the back, taking up as much space as one human being could. If anybody else wanted to sit, they would have to endure a terrible proximity to him, and only after they actually sat would he move slightly. He looked at the door as though he hadn't seen it before. "Close that door, will you, Richard?"

Richard kept himself from expressing what he felt. He got up from his desk, walked around it to the door and closed it. "What's the occasion?"

"Maybe I'm here to take a close look at what you're doing to my business. Maybe I brought fifteen CPA's and four computer experts to snoop around and see if there's anything being hidden from me. Would that bother you?"

Richard fixed a smile on his face, but he knew it was the sort of smile a man put on when he didn't want to fight an opponent
he knew would crush him. "Not unless they wasted a lot of time doing it."

Andy Beale smiled, too, but his smile was more convincing, and to Richard it was chilling. Why would he say that if he didn't think Richard had something to hide? "Well, I'm just here to talk to you about Christine. Have you talked to her since the day we were out on the boat?"

"No."

"Have you even tried?"

"Of course. She left her apartment a month ago and hasn't been back. No one has heard from her."

"That's it? You knocked on her door and talked to her friends?"

Richard took a moment to decide. There were a hundred reasons not to tell him any more than he had to, but there was no way to get rid of him without meeting each of his insinuations with an answer. "I've done a lot more than that. I hired some professionals to develop their own leads and find her for me."

Andy Beale cocked his head as though he had heard a sound in the distance that he couldn't quite identify. "Well, that's interesting. Who?"

"They've done some work for us before, and they've done it well, so I trust them. They're security specialists."

"I didn't ask what they were. I said, 'Who?'"

"The head man is named Steve Demming. He has a crew of three other men and two women."

"Women? That sounds sensible. It ought to reassure her if they find her."

"That's what I think. And they will find her."

"But they don't have her."

"Not yet."

Andy Beale looked at his son with new interest. "So how are they going about it?"

"I just got off the phone with Steve. He's offering a reward and distributing photographs of her. He's also using the Internet to get people to e-mail him if they see her. He has his own sources." He saw the unchanged look of curiosity on Andy Beale's face, and knew what his father was going to say before he said it.

"That's pretty convenient for you, having somebody else do it all?"

"I've been running credit checks on her every day to see if she uses a credit card or anything. So far, she hasn't. There's a skip-tracing company that I've occasionally used to find tenants who skip owing rent. I've got them searching the big commercial databases for any sign of her."

"She's been gone for over a month. How much cash could a girl like that have—a week's worth? After that she couldn't buy a meal or fill up at a gas station without the credit bureaus noticing. She's got to be with somebody."

The conversation had moved from the uncomfortable to the excruciating for Richard, but he could not think of a way to change the subject. He tried retreating behind a haze of vagueness. "Well, we'll see."

"Yeah. You damned well ought to see. Somebody's helping that girl, probably putting her up and paying her bills and signing for things so she doesn't leave a trail. Everything you're doing only works if she's alone, and she isn't. You must have some idea of who the guys are she might know well enough. You were fucking her for six months or so. Who else was?"

Richard felt his cheeks heating up. "Nobody. She was a virgin when she came to work here. And after that I was with her all the time."

"A secretary, about half your age, who had never been with anybody else. She wasn't exactly a difficult girl to impress, was she? Wasn't that a little too easy even for you?"