rest of his life shooting clay pigeons, sailing boats, or raising grapes on a vineyard in Napa.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Rex, the one you just met, is the third generation of the family that’s hired me to do odd jobs, and he’s probably the last I’ll see, because he’s younger than I am. It doesn’t matter. He’s so much like his grandfather and his uncle that I know what he’ll say before he does. The point is, the company doesn’t change, and they do pretty much what they want.”
“I’m not clear on what this has to do with me.”
“You like your job. The pay is decent. If you’re at a cocktail party and some girl asks you what you do, you can say ‘I work at McClaren’s’ and she will have heard of it and think you must be pretty respectable. And while I was in the building, I noticed your bosses don’t pay much attention to you, so you probably are. If you want to, the McClarens will probably let you stay in that cubicle until you’re seventy, and pay you a little more each year. You’ll get promoted to Joyce Hazelton’s job when she retires.”
“Is that the terrific deal you’re talking about? That I don’t get fired from my job if I go with you?”
“Well, it’s not so bad, is it?” said Stillman. “But there’s a fast track, and while you were stumbling around, you blindly stepped on the low end of it. A company like McClaren’s will always need a lot of workers, but they’re always looking for a small, steady supply of players.”
“Players?”
“Gamblers,” said Stillman. “Insurance is just gambling, with the bets in writing. They’re the guys the rest of us see when we think of McClaren’s, the steely-eyed bastards in the dark suits you talk to if you want to insure your fireworks display or your oil-drilling rig. McClaren’s doesn’t recruit them from outside. They just hire a bunch of young people to do jobs like yours, and wait to see which ones grow into the suit.”
“And going with you is going to prove I’m a steely-eyed bastard and get me promoted?”
“Hell no,” said Stillman. “You get to spend a couple of days out of your box telling me what the little numbers on an insurance policy mean, and you get credit with McClaren’s for showing promise.”
Walker nodded sagely. “What I get is points with McClaren for being a risk taker without taking any risks.” He paused. “Of course, if I don’t go, then I’m already marked: I’m not promising.”
Stillman shrugged. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t pick the business you’re in.”
Walker glared at him. “But you did pick me, and told the president of the company that you had picked me, without asking me if I even wanted this golden opportunity.”
Stillman grinned and slapped Walker’s shoulder, making the car take a dangerous wobble on the freeway. “There we go. That’s what got you into this. You cut right through the smoke and figured out who did what, and you’re not afraid to shove it up my nose. I don’t know if you’re a promising insurance executive or not, and I certainly don’t care. You’re good enough for this.”
Walker’s jaw muscles worked compulsively as he stared at the entrance to the airport parking area. “I know. I remind you of yourself at this age,” he muttered.
Stillman’s head swiveled so he could stare at Walker in surprise. “Not even remotely. Whatever mistakes your parents made, that much they did right.”
He pulled into a space too quickly, stopped the car with a jolt so it rocked forward, then went around to the trunk. He snatched a small suitcase, slammed the lid, and set off toward the terminal.
Walker got out of the passenger seat, closed the door, put his hands in his pockets, and stared at the pavement for a moment. The choices seemed to have narrowed in a very short time: either he could walk to the terminal, take a cab back to town, and start looking for a job, or he could start running to catch up with Stillman.
Walker began to saunter slowly across the broad parking lot. He thought about Stillman, and he savored his suspicion and resentment, but he recognized that he was only thinking about Stillman so he would not think of Ellen. For the past eighteen months, when he was tired or off-guard, anything might remind him: a woman’s laugh he heard coming from a half-closed door in a corridor of the McClaren building, the sight of a couple about his age who were in love but were still nervous with each other because they didn’t seem quite to trust the feeling yet. He could bring back the sight of Ellen without closing his eyes. Stillman had said this involved her. What could Stillman possibly be investigating that involved Ellen?
After a few paces, he noticed that something was wrong with his feet. They were moving faster than he had intended, and after a few more paces he had to take his hands out of his pockets to keep his balance, and then he was jogging, pumping his arms to bring up his speed.
4
There were no assigned seats on the plane, and when the passengers boarded, Walker realized his pass was in a different “zone” from Stillman’s. Stillman sat near the front, and Walker found the only empty seat, beside a young curly-haired woman who seemed to view his arrival with disappointment. She had placed her purse, a shopping bag, and a couple of magazines on his seat, and now she sighed and slowly gathered them onto her lap.
“Sorry,” he said.
She said nothing, just occupied herself with stuffing the magazines into the seat pocket in front of her, then tried to jam the shopping bag and the purse under the seat in front with her backpack, all the time eyeing Walker’s feet resentfully.
Walker could not see Stillman from where he sat, but he was aware of him up ahead, and he felt an impatience that he could not find out what he was thinking. Why would he need somebody who knew Ellen Snyder?
The question shifted Walker’s attention from Stillman and held it on Ellen. As always, she returned in short, meaningless fragments of memory, never still, but in motion: a few strands of blond hair straying across her left eye while she was talking, and then her hand would flit up to push them away. He wasn’t always sure that he had seen precisely what he was remembering, that it had been chemically fixed in his brain on some occasion, because sometimes the memory couldn’t be identified with a specific time and place. Other times, the memory was clear and certain. He could see her on Market Street. It was after class in the late afternoon. She had seen the cable car coming. “There it is. We can catch it!” She had kept her eyes on it, tapped his chest with her small hand, and he could feel it again, fluttering insistently against him six times in a second before her first steps had taken it away, and she had broken into a run toward the stop. He had followed more slowly, because he had wanted to watch her. He remembered that exactly—the blue sweater she had been wearing, the tight skirt and flat shoes—because that had been the day after the first time they had kissed. He had watched her all day, expecting her to be different somehow: maybe softer and more affectionate, or in a nightmare version, strange and distant because she had regretted it afterward. He had not detected any change at all. She had been exactly the same, exuding happy energy, intense interest in what she saw around her, but neither uncomfortable with him nor detectably more interested.
Walker banished the memory and tried to discern what Stillman was doing. What if Stillman suspected her of something, some kind of malfeasance? He had mentioned her, and said they were going to L.A. to collect evidence about fraud. The idea that Walker would participate in an expedition to harm Ellen was insane. The simplest thing to do would be to get off the plane, tell Stillman that he’d once had a personal relationship with Ellen and was not the right choice for this assignment, then get on the next flight home.
Instantly he knew that he couldn’t bring himself to do that. Stillman was an unknown. If Walker simply left, then Ellen would find herself alone in the middle of his surprise investigation, with no advocate, and probably no witnesses. And what were Stillman’s limits, his rules? He wasn’t a cop or something. He was just some kind of private security expert. The company could hardly be relied on to keep him under control: Stillman seemed to have a lifelong social connection with the president’s family.
The flight to Los Angeles was short, so Walker sat still and waited it out, fighting images that intruded themselves on his consciousness. He imagined himself walking into Ellen’s office with Stillman, and looking into her eyes. The friendly, happy manner she’d had when he’d last seen her would vanish. She would detest him. He was going to come into her office looking like some kind of informer. She might even think that after she had dropped him, he had developed some weird scheme to get revenge by destroying her career.
