they’re easy to find out. Andrew Werfel was an old, rich guy. Every time he filled out a loan application, a disclosure form to be on the board of directors of some company, or got sued in the last twenty years, that cash-value insurance got included. It found its way into the databases of a lot of companies that sell lists of desirable customers. He also got a divorce from Alan’s mother a few years ago. The insurance policy was listed in the material the lawyers filed for division of assets. That means anybody who has an Internet account can call up the case and read it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” said Stillman. “There are other reasons to avoid getting a divorce too, in case you were considering one. I’ll go into that another time if I think you need it.”
“I can wait,” said Walker.
“What I’m saying is, it took me about fifteen minutes to get from the social security card in Werfel’s wallet to the life insurance policy,” said Stillman. “But keep thinking that way. You may hit something.”
“What does all this leave to investigate?”
“Ellen Snyder.”
“I’ve told you everything I know about her.”
“No you haven’t.”
Walker stared at him with narrowed eyes, his arms and shoulders tensed. Then he let out a deep breath. “No,” he said. “I haven’t. She was more important to me than I said. There was a bit more to it.”
Stillman shrugged. “I know.”
“How?”
“I heard it too many times from too many people around your office, in too many versions, to ignore it.”
Walker’s brow furrowed. “What did they say?”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Stillman. “What’s the truth?”
Walker sat down on the bed. “I came to San Francisco just before the training class started. I was in a new city, in a part of the country where I’d never been before. I remember when I started college, everybody was alone in the same way, and people were desperate. There was a kind of hysteria in the first week to meet everybody you could. People walked the campus sending out smiles in all directions like SOS signals. By the end of the second week, they had met people, combined into cliques, and the emergency was over. I don’t know what I expected when I came to San Francisco: I knew I could handle it, whatever it was. But cities aren’t like campuses, and being a grown-up isn’t the same as being a student. I arrived, and everybody was already settled, had jobs, families, friends, houses. I thought, ‘Sure. Of course.’ I rented a cheap apartment, showed up at McClaren’s, and got put in the training class.”
“And you met Ellen Snyder.”
“Yeah,” said Walker. “She attracted my attention for no particular reason except that she was pretty. You saw her picture. But when I talked to her I kind of felt at home, and that was better than pretty. When she smiled, it looked as though she was glad to see me, and I think she was. I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but she wasn’t just an instant friend, a person you meet that you find you can talk to. She was like a relative who already knows all about you, and was just waiting for you to drop by. We talked for hours, the way people do, but there was never any need to start at zero and explain what it was like where I came from, or any of that. She knew. Maybe it was because she came from a place that wasn’t very different. When she talked to you, it wasn’t like talking to a strange girl. She was like somebody’s sister: she knew you well enough not to be especially impressed, but she understood what she knew well enough to realize you weren’t so bad, either. After I’d talked to her a couple of times, somebody or other mentioned that she wasn’t attached to anybody, so I asked her out.”
“You told me that.”
“I told you she shot me down after the first time. She didn’t. It went on for a while. When you start training they give you all these loose-leaf notebooks full of manuals about business procedures, company policies, computer systems, sample forms, and so on. There are tests. We spent evenings together studying, went out a few times, went to lunch a lot, things like that. You asked before if we had sex. We did. It went on for almost two months. Then she stopped seeing me.”
“How does this change what you said before?”
Walker squinted in frustration. “I didn’t just start thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about it for over a year, and it’s hard to slice out the parts you want. While it was going on, I noticed that it was different from anything I’d felt before. I don’t mean I was happy to be with her. I couldn’t get her out of my mind when I wasn’t with her. I was up nights, then I’d be ready to go to the class at five-thirty just on the off chance that she’d be there early too. If I thought of something funny, I would save it, not tell anybody so she could be the one I told. I wasn’t ready for all this—it came so soon after I arrived, so easily. I let what I knew make me stop trusting what I felt.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was like a textbook case. You’re in a strange city, alone and lost, doing a job you’re not that happy about. You meet this girl who is in the same position, and you seem to hit it off and miraculously become closer than you’ve ever been with anyone. Miraculously—that’s the problem. It’s exactly what people warn you about: people in situations like that are vulnerable, lonely, eager to connect with anybody. They jump into big decisions, and then later regret them. Maybe they hurt somebody in a way they can’t fix.” He could see Stillman wasn’t especially respectful of his thinking, but he at least understood. “It wasn’t until she stopped seeing me that I admitted to myself that I was in love.”
Stillman sighed. “Back up. The breakup is what I’ve got to know about. How did it happen?”
“She just stopped. There wasn’t one of those talks where she said we weren’t right for each other, or that nonsense they always give you about being friends. There was no argument about anything. I’ve gone over and over what I said and did, and what she said and did, and there was nothing. She just stopped. No real explanation. I would ask her out, and she was happy to talk to me, but she wouldn’t go. I would go to where we used to eat lunch alone together, and she would still show up to eat with me, but bring five or six other people with her to the table. She would treat us all the same.”
“Are you sure you didn’t miss something?”
“I’m sure. I tried ignoring her and staying out of her way, and she would come and talk to me. But it was as though she had amnesia, and forgot everything that had gone on between us. It was the way it had been before we got together. She was this nice, friendly girl who was in my training class.”
“Another guy?”
Walker shook his head. “There was still a month or two of classes left. I saw her every day, couldn’t keep my eyes off her. There was never any guy around her. And she was always available at night for dinners or parties the whole group went to, even if somebody thought of it at the last minute. She always arrived alone and went home alone.”
Stillman mused, “I suppose you’ve got to be right. A few of those people would have been falling all over each other to be the first to tell you, if there had been somebody. Didn’t you press her to find out what was bothering her?”
Walker looked down, uncomfortable. “Sure. It’s funny. At the time, what she said struck me as a lie—not exactly untrue, but as beside the point, an evasion. She said that she had come to San Francisco to take the training class, and do as well as she could so she could go off to her job at a field office and be successful at it. She said she had loved the time we spent alone together—her words—and would always remember it, but she was leaving for Pasadena soon, and had to concentrate on the future.”
“I don’t think it was a lie either,” said Stillman. “I think she said what she meant.” He glanced at Walker. “I’ll bet it killed you.”
Walker nodded, then focused on Stillman. “But that was a while ago, and I’m over it.”
“Why did you tell me now?”
“It’s why I decided to come with you,” said Walker. “I know her. I thought it might be easier to convince you she was innocent if you didn’t know that I was once in love with her. I also believe in privacy. I think that telling any stranger who asks that you had sex with somebody is a betrayal.”
“You thought I might be down here trying to frame her,” said Stillman.
“It had crossed my mind,” said Walker. “It’s the only way that a person like Ellen could get in trouble. I decided tonight that what you’ve been trying to do was figure out what really happened. So I’m telling you
