went behind the counter to talk to Ormond and her partner with their backs to Stillman and Walker, then left again.
After Walker had finished his third cup of coffee, Ormond came around the counter and said, “They’re already getting started out there. I imagine you’d like to be there.” Walker could barely imagine anything he would like less, but she had set off for her car again, so he and Stillman followed and climbed into the back seat.
When they arrived, there was another police car pulled up at the side of the road. There was yellow POLICE LINE tape strung on fresh wooden stakes in a ring around the spot Stillman had found. A cop was taking Polaroid photographs of the ground while the two men in baseball caps leaned on shovels outside the ring. When he finished, they stepped over the tape and began to dig. Stillman, Walker, and the two police officers stood along the road and watched.
The policeman with the camera came out of the field and leaned on the door of Ormond’s patrol car. Walker decided he must be at the beginning of his shift, because his uniform looked newly pressed, with the creases all sharp and clear. The cop said philosophically, “You never know on these things. Last year we got called out because a lady tipped us her neighbor had dug a big hole in his back yard. We went over, and sure enough—fresh dirt. We were in a real grim mood digging it up until somebody’s shovel hit an antler.”
He slapped his thigh and laughed. “He’d hit a buck on the highway, and figured the meat shouldn’t go to waste. But then he got scared and figured, it being out of season and all, he better do something.”
A half hour later, the sun was above the horizon beyond the field, and the low angle seemed to make it impossible for Walker to keep it out of his eyes. Ormond walked out of the field, opened her car door, and sat behind the wheel. She picked up the microphone and closed the door. As she spoke into the microphone, Walker could not see her lips, but her eyes never moved from his. After a minute she stepped out of the car.
“Have you got a picture of the suspect with you?”
“It’s back in town in our car,” said Stillman.
“Then one of you will have to come take a look.”
15
“We’ve got ourselves a female Caucasian here.”
Walker heard the words over and over in his memory. Ormond had held him in the corner of her eye as she had said it, and Walker could still see her making her way through the weeds, pretending to look down at her feet but contemplating him, even after they had stopped walking and it was time for him to look into the hole.
One of the other cops had gone to some trouble to wipe the dirt off the face, but there were still a few grains, like sand, at the corners of the eyes, and the hair was stringy and stuck to the head so it looked wet. The Ellen Snyder he had expected was gone—but only just gone, as though he had missed her by a few minutes, a few seconds, even. Her lips were pale and her face was cold and composed, the muscles smoothed and drawn back by something—death itself, or the circumstances of it, or maybe just lying on her back under the ground. He had no idea. She had made the odd transformation. It had amazed him since he was a child, when he had gone to funerals of relatives who lay in coffins somewhere between deep sleep and not being the same person at all. They seemed to be some not-quite-accurate statue made by an artist who had never met them and only reconstructed a likeness from a photograph. The part of her body he could see was naked, still covered with a thin film of dirt, but his reaction to that fact was indifference.
He had felt no impulse, for modesty’s sake, to cover this girl that he’d cared about so deeply, and no competing urge to look, out of retroactive curiosity about her. In death, the body had lost its particularity and become a type, an example of a class of human bodies. The words that had always seemed to him to be stupid in their simplicity—female Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five, five feet six inches, blond hair—were actually wise and accurate. There was nothing specific, because whatever made people different from all of the others of their size, age, and sex went away with life.
“That’s Ellen Snyder,” he had said. They had driven him and Stillman back to the station and put them in different rooms.
After that, the questions got to be more insistent and less polite. The tall cop came in and brought Walker to still another room, where he took his fingerprints, then asked him to stand in front of a ruler painted on a bare wall, put his name on a black felt rectangle with white letters, and took his picture.
At noon, the police chief arrived. He was a big, wide man named Daniels who had a belly that hung over his belt when he sat. He cultivated one of Walker’s least favorite poses, which was that he was a simple country boy who had trouble remembering things. He began with, “Ever find a stiff before?”
He needed to have the whole story from the beginning, with every nuance explained to him. Walker went through the long and delicate process: how Ellen had authorized payment to the wrong beneficiary and disappeared, how Stillman had brought him down to Pasadena to help with the investigation because he had known her, and how he had met with Alan Werfel. He explained how the canceled checks to clear the accounts had given the company a trail to follow: each had been written to a different person, and each new person had given the company another of Ellen’s aliases and a location. He summarized the next part to leave out the felonies. He simply said, “By computer search, we picked up the last time she had used her most recent identity, and found she was still registered at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago. When we got there, she had left.” He repeated at each stage his belief that she was a victim. She had done nothing except under duress.
The chief interrupted every couple of sentences with questions timed to be devastating. Whenever Walker thought he was nearly to the end of the story, Daniels would ask something that would bring him back to the start. “If she was gone to begin with, how did you know that she was really the one who ordered the check to the wrong guy?” When Walker began again at that point and went all the way to the finish again, Daniels asked, “What made you think Ellen Snyder was the one to look for?”
Walker saw that the interrogation was a duel against an opponent who never got tired, could never make a mistake, and gave no quarter. Daniels would nod sagely while Walker breezed past some particularly dangerous part of the story, then jump back to make him repeat it twenty minutes later. “How did you know this Mrs. Bourgosian was gone if she hadn’t checked out?” Walker made up a version that left out the felonies: “We called repeatedly, waited, knocked on her door.” Then, when Walker actually got as far as the moment when he and Stillman had identified the body, the chief said, “How did you know the place to look was the old Buckland property?”
Walker had thought about this since the beginning, knowing it was going to be asked many times. He said, “We drove out of Chicago toward the north along a route Stillman thought someone like her might take—away from the major highways. When the road led to a place he thought was a good hiding spot, he stopped the car to take a look.”
The truth was much more disturbing to Walker, and he couldn’t say it, because this man was not his friend. When he had watched Stillman working, driving slowly through the night, staring out the side windows, he had detected a strange, unfamiliar expression on his face. It had been narrow-eyed, cold, and intense, but it had not been merely concentration. There was something more, almost a change of personality. Stillman had become somebody else. It was not until later, after the car had stopped, that Walker had understood who that must have been. This was what Stillman had meant by “looking at the things I see from a different point of view.” Stillman had suspected from the moment he had seen the watch that Ellen was dead.
Daniels’s eyebrows rose into an arc. “And you just went along with it, no questions asked?”
“I sit in the main office of an insurance company all day, writing reports,” said Walker. “He’s the security specialist the company hired to look into this case. What would you do?”
Daniels seemed satisfied with that, but a few minutes later, he jumped back. “What made you decide that Waterman Road was the way out of Chicago?”
The answer was the same. “You’ll have to ask Stillman.”
The interrogation seemed about to end at seven in the evening. Daniels stood up and said in a conspiratorial tone, “That Stillman, he’s something, isn’t he? Quite a reputation.”
Walker said, “Really?”
Daniels looked down at Walker speculatively. “Maybe it’s just in certain circles.” His voice dropped and he leaned closer. “I’d get as far away as I could.” Then he left.
