drained. They tried to get in touch with Ellen Snyder, learned she was gone, and went from nervous to agitated.”
“And you did all this tracing?”
“Me?” asked Stillman in surprise. “Not personally. I just kind of diverted some of the people at McClaren’s, and when they got in over their heads, I hired some subcontractors. I hate chasing paper around.”
“What else have you got?”
“I’d say that it comes down to the disappearance of Ellen Snyder.”
“You think she got her ten percent and ran off with a suitcase full of wigs.”
“Do you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why—instinct?”
Walker began to pace. “More than that.”
Stillman spoke patiently. “You said you liked her. Haven’t you ever noticed that on the TV news, every time a con artist gets arrested, they interview five or six old ladies who say, ‘She was such a nice, sweet girl. I would never have believed it.’ That’s why they call them that. They get your confidence.”
Walker said, “I know. I’ve been trying to pretend I don’t know her. I just say, ‘Okay, these people exist, and you have to use another way to figure out whether you’ve met one.’ She spent two years with the company, six months of it with me in training. What did she make?”
Stillman searched through his pile of folders until he found one that had a stamp that said PERSONNEL—CONFIDENTIAL on it. He scanned a few pages, then looked up. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Walker waved the question away impatiently. “I won’t be jealous. I haven’t missed any meals.”
“The first six months after training, she had a salary of thirty-seven thousand, so she actually got eighteen- five. She also got commissions adding up to sixty-two thousand.”
“In six months?”
Stillman said, “She probably sold a dozen policies to relatives.”
Walker smiled and nodded. “How about the next full year, after she ran out of relatives?”
“She got promoted to assistant manager at fifty thousand, and made a hundred and forty-four thousand in commissions.”
Walker sat down on the bed, took the folder, and looked at the figures for himself. “Jesus,” he muttered. Then he slapped the folder shut and collected himself, stood, and returned to pacing. “That makes it even clearer. She was young, single, and had hardly any expenses. Her apartment is even smaller and crummier than mine. She was following a plan, and it’s hard to imagine how it could be going any better. Onto those figures you have to add the value of the company health insurance, the retirement plan, the—”
“What’s your point?”
“The money isn’t enough.”
“A million, two hundred thousand?” asked Stillman. “At age twenty-four?”
“Right,” said Walker. “She made nearly two hundred last year, plus, say, twenty-five percent in benefits. That’s two-fifty. The money she would have gotten for stealing, if she invested it at eight percent, would bring her ninety-six thousand a year. She’d be living on less than half her former income. She would also have to give up everything she already had—her savings, past retirement contributions, free health insurance, whatever possessions she couldn’t carry. If you forget everything except that she’s bright enough to do these calculations in her head, then it’s a deal she would never consider.” He stopped pacing, turned to Stillman, and held out both hands, as though waiting for applause.
“Does the term ‘immediate gratification’ mean anything to you?” asked Stillman.
“To me, yes. If it meant anything to her, I might have had more luck with her. She’s a person with a plan that’s going to pay off over a twenty-year period, remember?”
“Suppose she had an immediate need,” said Stillman. “She could have a gambling problem, a drug problem, some vulnerability to blackmail. Hell, they could have walked in with those papers and said, ‘Sign off on this or your kitty-cat dies.’ ”
“You’ve been investigating—or duping other people into investigating. Do you believe any of that?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” said Stillman. “It doesn’t feel like blackmail: nobody who blackmails you wants to get paid off in women’s clothes and wigs.” He frowned. “But Ellen Snyder has no history of knowing the sort of people who do this kind of crime, so it’s hard to just fall into it. There’s also the fact that she had visitors in her apartment before we got there. Friends don’t usually come in through your locked kitchen window. But it’s possible she could have been young and naive enough to make the mistake of becoming an unprotected, unarmed woman with over a million in her suitcase.” He lay back on Walker’s bed and stared at the ceiling. “She’s the one part of this that bothers me.”
“The rest of it doesn’t? Werfel conveniently losing his license and passport and everything just after his father died and not reporting it?”
Stillman shook his head. “I told you I looked into the old man’s death. Then I thought of Werfel the Younger. It could work: Alan Werfel files his claim with Ellen Snyder, and cashes his check. Then he kidnaps or otherwise gets rid of Ellen Snyder. He comes back to the office and says to Winters, ‘Here I am. I’d like my check, please.’ Then nobody fools around with false identities, forges any signatures, and so on. Very neat.”
“That didn’t happen?”
“No. Werfel senior was in Santa Fe, but Werfel junior was in Italy. He got a call, used a credit card to buy a plane ticket and the passport to get off the plane in New York. He then used the credit card again to buy a ticket from New York to Santa Fe. He got off the plane in Santa Fe, got whisked away to the father’s house by relatives, then cared for by servants for the next five days while he’s moping around the place. Then there’s the funeral, and a lot more grieving friends and relatives, some of whom stayed on for four days. That puts him in Santa Fe when the other Alan Werfel was in Pasadena. He stays there, in fact, until the family attorney shows up to go over his father’s papers with him. The lawyer tells him the various things he’s got to get done—among them, filing an insurance claim. The call to Winters was from Santa Fe. It’s on the phone bill.”
“And all that time, he didn’t miss his ID?”
“You don’t need a passport to visit New Mexico, and you don’t need a wallet if you don’t leave the house. He seems to have figured the servants who unpacked his bags left his stuff in some drawer. He had them searching the house for it for a day before he called the credit card companies and the DMV and the police. These calls didn’t exactly result in a manhunt. There hadn’t been any charges on his cards since the plane ticket to New Mexico, so everybody figured it was a simple loss, not a theft.”
“But how in the world did it happen? Where did it happen?”
“My guess is Kennedy Airport. He’s at the ticket counter. He just got off an eight-hour flight, and he’s waiting to buy a ticket for a five-hour flight. He’s slow and dull and tired. He’s also distracted, because his father just kicked. You saw how he dresses. He’s probably got a six-hundred-dollar flight bag on the floor by his feet. He pulls out a soft leather wallet containing the passport, credit cards, and money. He hands the airline clerk his plutonium card, gets it back, and now he’s got tickets, the wallet, and so on in his hands while he’s trying to move away from the counter. He screws up. Maybe he slips the wallet into his bag and turns his back, or puts it in a pocket that a thief can reach—which is any pocket—and the thief sees which one it is. Or maybe later he sets the bag on a conveyor belt at the metal detectors and loses sight of it while some guy has to go through over and over again. It doesn’t matter. You can’t be in a major airport without being watched by pros, and he would have been Victim Number One in just about any crowd of ten thousand. It could have happened anywhere, but my guess is Kennedy.”
“Okay,” said Walker. “He’s rich, he looks rich, he’s exhausted and distraught, so he’s the one who gets robbed. But how did they know about his father’s life insurance policy? They didn’t get that by picking his pocket in an airport.”
Stillman shook his head. “No help there. If you steal the wallet of a guy like Alan Werfel, you run a credit check to see what else he’s got that you can steal. If you try it on Alan Werfel, you’ll see that his lists trust funds with his father as trustee. The address on his entry is his father’s house in Santa Fe.”
“But it certainly doesn’t list his father’s life insurance.”
“It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows rich people have insurance, and if you want to know the specifics,
