It was nearly an hour later when the tall, thin cop came into the room and said to Walker, “You’re free to go.”
When Walker reached the street outside, it was dark. He walked down the sidewalk to the parked car, but he didn’t see Stillman anywhere. It occurred to him that his own interrogation had probably been little more than a preparation for what they wanted to ask Stillman. Walker turned and entered the station again, picked up a pen and a form that was on the counter, and wrote on the back, “Went to look for a drink.” Then he stuck it under the car’s windshield wiper and walked down the quiet street.
He came to the front entrance of a hotel that seemed to have a lot of activity. He heard music drifting from the open doorway of the lobby, and lights spilled out onto the sidewalk at his feet. He stepped in past an elderly desk clerk who seemed surprised to see him, and followed the music to a large, dim room where there was a long mahogany bar. Behind it there were six rows of bottles full of colorful liquid that seemed to glow with the light from the wall-length mirror.
Three of the tables across the room were occupied by men drinking beer and ostensibly watching a football game on a television set on a shelf high above them. Walker claimed a stool at the bar and said to the bartender, “Scotch and water, please. Any kind.”
The bartender was a bald man with a bushy mustache that looked as though he had grown it as a badge of his profession. He poured Walker a double shot, as though it were a relief to the bartender to serve something besides beer. Walker reached into his wallet and set a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, then sat staring at the mirror, watching the soundless football game in reverse.
He was on his second drink when Stillman came in and sat beside him. Stillman raised a hand to the bartender and pointed at Walker’s drink, and the bartender brought another. Stillman tasted his and nodded at the bartender, then turned to Walker. “Don’t worry, I won’t drink too much. I’ll still be able to drive you down to O’Hare airport tonight.”
“Not unless we’re going there anyway,” said Walker.
“You wanted to stay with it until we found her, and we have. I thought you’d be anxious to leave,” Stillman said. “Why aren’t you?”
Walker considered for a moment. “Because they killed her, I guess.”
Stillman looked at him thoughtfully. “I’m sorry I got you into this. When this started, I had the impression it was over—that you had both gone on to other things.”
Walker nodded. “We had.”
“But you were still in love with her, weren’t you?”
Walker shook his head. “No. For a long time, I was: so long that I got attached to the idea, comfortable with it. I was always going to be this guy whose best shot at having a life was already over. I was so sure of it that I got out of the habit of checking to see if it was still true until you came along and forced me to think about every second that I had ever spent with her. Over the past few days, I did it. I slowly realized that I didn’t feel the same about our time together anymore. When I remembered it, I still thought the same things about her. I just didn’t feel them anymore. She was everything I ever imagined she was—smart, funny, brave, good—but now it had nothing to do with me.” He frowned. “Do you understand?”
“I do,” said Stillman. “You knew she was a decent person, and she was worth your effort to try to save her. So what’s keeping you from quitting now?”
Walker took another sip of his drink. “I was just on the edge of figuring that out when you came in,” said Walker, and looked at the glass. “The problem with this stuff is that just at the moment when it’s managed to dissolve enough of the fog, whatever’s left in your stomach hits your bloodstream and you get stupid. But I think it has something to do with what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years, and what she has.”
“McClaren’s?” Stillman looked suspicious. “You’re suddenly interested in whether the company shows a profit on this year’s annual report?”
“That’s the funny part,” said Walker. “I’m not interested at all. It hasn’t crossed my mind since we were in Pasadena.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“I meant how I was spending my life before that. I was trying to be the perfect employee. I had convinced myself that if I was going to be a solid, serious person, that was the way to do it. If I worked really hard to fit into the cubicle, then in time I would be the kind of man my family would be proud of. Steady, reliable. That meant something.” He smiled. “I tried pretty hard. I went to work, came straight home—sometimes walked home to keep in shape, ate a frozen dinner, watched the news on TV, and went to bed so I could do it all over again.”
“How does she come in?”
Walker answered, “She was making the same choice, only she was better at it. We were delayed-gratification pleasure seekers. The longer you put it off, the better it will be.” He cocked his head and stared at Stillman for a second, then returned to his drink. He took a gulp, waited for the little explosion in his stomach to reverberate upward and warm his brain. “It didn’t quite sink in until I saw her there with strangers brushing the dirt off her face.”
“What was it that sank in?”
“That she and I might have read the instructions wrong.”
“Her, anyway,” Stillman agreed.
“Me too,” said Walker. “There she was. And I asked myself what she could have done that would have avoided heading for that hole. And you know what?”
“What?”
“The answer wasn’t spending more hours and more energy selling insurance.”
Stillman sipped his drink. “What happened to her is not a bad argument for life insurance.”
“True,” said Walker. “But it’s not such a good argument for trading anything important to get ahead.” He frowned. “What was it you said? ‘For twenty-four-year-olds who can’t wait to be sixty so they can move into the corner office.’ ”
“What else did you figure out?” asked Stillman.
“Nothing. I unfigured. I found out that some things I’d already figured out needed some work.”
“How about an example?”
“Murder. There’s something about seeing the way it looks—turning a person into a secret, dropping her into a hole after dark and hiding even the hole. Her face looked calm, composed. Maybe she died gently. But I know that somehow, even if it was for a tenth of a second, even if she never got to say it, some remnant of her brain was thinking, ‘Please. Not yet. Let me have another day, another few minutes.’ They didn’t.” He took the last quarter inch of his drink. “I always thought people like that ought to be hunted down. It never occurred to me that the one who ought to do it might be me.”
16
Walker awoke, showered, and dressed, then went to the next room to knock on Stillman’s door. He found Stillman on the bed with file folders from the Pasadena office spread around him and the telephone in his hand. Walker went to the only chair in the room and sat down.
Stillman was saying, “Yeah, so get it to me. Hard is just another way of saying expensive, and I already threw myself on your mercy. Call me here at the hotel before you send anything.”
He hung up, then dialed another number. “You might as well get some breakfast. This is going to take a while.”
Walker found that the dining room was closed until dinner, so he wandered down the street past the police station until he got to a diner. When he returned to Stillman’s room, Stillman was talking in the same tone. “What is it with everybody today? Here’s how it works: you do what I ask, you send me the bill, and then
“You finished?” asked Walker.
“Unless I can think of somebody who can do something else for us. I like to get people working on my problems early in the morning, when they’re fresh.”
