“How?”
“What we need is a policyholder who saw an agent from McClaren’s show up like an angel without waiting to be called. And if they need it, we’ll take care of them.”
“Take care of them?” said Walker.
Evans nodded. “If the damage is small, we’ll help board up a broken window or two, fill out a claim form, take some pictures, and move on to the next client. But judging from the radio, some of the houses are going to be uninhabitable. Clients will need food, clothes, lodging. We’ll be there to cover it. Each policy file already has an envelope with five hundred dollars in cash and a blank, signed check. See what I’m getting at?”
Walker nodded. “You want friends for life.”
“For generations. A little sympathy, a small advance on a payment we’ll have to make later anyway, will make all the difference.”
“When do we start?”
“Now. You’ll take some policies and I’ll take some. Pretty soon our own people will start making it in one by one, and Miss Turley will send them out.” He pointed to a pile of folders with a camera on top. “Take that pile. They’re all in one zip code.”
Walker glanced at the first address, then at his road map. He checked two more, and he couldn’t help noticing the sizes of the policies. “You’ve got some pretty expensive real estate on the books.”
“We’re starting with the big ones because they’re easier to reach, and they’re more likely than most to still be standing. You know the old insurance adage: the Lord hates a trailer park. As the cleanup gets going, we’ll be able to reach the rest.”
Walker took his pile of policies and forms and joined Evans at the door. Walker looked out at the gray sky and said, “You’re sure that’s it? Do they stop and start again?”
“This one’s over,” Evans said. He opened the door, then stopped Walker. “One last word. The reason these people deal with us is that for a hundred and fifty years, the company was run by gentlemen, and now by ladies and gentlemen. What we’re doing is reminding them that ladies and gentlemen are better than their word. Conglomerates are not.”
Walker looked carefully at his car and saw that there was mud up to the hubcaps, but nothing else seemed to be wrong. He tried the key, and the engine started and ran strong, so he opened his road map, drove out of the lot, and headed toward the ocean.
The next day and night merged into a continuous, exhausting blur. The first houses were huge and elaborate, some of them built in eccentric, grand rococo styles, some in art deco revival. A few looked like clubs, built above private quays with jetties extending outward, a couple of them only to serve as artificial shoals, where the caved-in carcasses of ruined yachts lolled absurdly.
Walker would arrive, show his identification, look at the damage, offer emergency help, fill out the form, and take photographs with the Polaroid camera Miss Turley had given him with the files, then move on to the next house.
Walker made it back to the office after dark. When he opened the door he was startled at the change. There were people at all of the desks, and wet, tired-looking men and women coming in, as he was, to drop off claim forms, get more film for their cameras, and pick up the next set of files for the next zip code. He saw Kennedy, Cardarelli, and a few other San Francisco people processing forms at desks, but there were many others he had never seen before.
There were genuine local appraisers, who had been reinforced by appraisers from other states. They were easy to spot, because they had come prepared with appropriate outdoor clothes, their own cameras, and things that novices like Walker didn’t have, like tape measures clipped to their belts. A few of them even wore hard hats.
Walker went out again, this time to a new neighborhood. This one was situated above a lake that must once have been small, but it had grown to include quite a few lawns and gardens, and even the ground floor of one house. Walker worked in a kind of fog, taking on everything that presented itself. He drove a woman to a hospital, taped plastic over broken windows, started a wet electrical generator that ran a pump, opened a power garage door by disconnecting it from the screw mechanism, and helped to wrap up a painting that looked to him as though it might be a genuine Vermeer.
Walker slept on the floor of the office for a few hours, then went out again at dawn. This day was the same, a succession of houses with windows blown in, roofs denuded of some of their shingles. There was a note on one house that said the occupants had gone to an evacuation shelter, so he drove there in search of them, and found several other clients too. He filled out the forms with generalities: “Customer believes house is a total loss,” or “Customer states that the flooding damaged the first floor but did not reach the second.” When he returned from the last trip of the day, he handed his claim forms to Cardarelli.
She looked up from her desk. “Ah, Walker. Tell me, is it day or night out there?”
“Night.”
“Good. I thought I was going blind.” Her expression suddenly changed, and she was all business again. “Thank you,” she said, and returned to her work.
Walker turned, and Evans was beside him. He led Walker aside. “Have you met Fred Teller?”
He correctly interpreted Walker’s blank look. “Appraiser from New Orleans?” Evans prompted. “Tall, thin fellow with blond hair—wears a canvas jacket.”
Walker looked at him in tentative agreement. “I think I’ve seen him, but I haven’t talked to him. I’ve been out a lot.” He detected something in Evans’s expression. “Is there a problem?”
“Nobody remembers seeing him since last night.”
“Do you know where he was working?”
“The last batch of policies he was checking were in Palm Beach.”
“He could have car trouble or something. With the phones out, he’d be stuck. If you’ve got another copy of his list, I’ll go out and take a look.”
Walker drove out of the lot and looked at his watch. He had been working for sixteen hours straight, but he felt a quiet contentment. The weight of his depression over the search for Ellen Snyder had not disappeared, but it had been forgotten for a time. For the past two days, he had been able to forget about Ellen Snyder, and about himself, and concentrate on the simple, direct business of making claims. He reminded himself that now he should be thinking about Fred Teller.
He picked a house on the list of clients that Teller had been given, and drove to it. The owner had seen no appraiser, so Walker took the time to fill out a claim form, then checked his map and picked a second house that looked like the closest.
It was a big, rambling place on a slight rise in the land that looked artificial, with a tile roof that seemed to be intact and a two-car garage. He walked to the front door and knocked, but nobody came to answer, so he walked around the house to the back to see if they had not heard. There was a tennis court that looked shiny in the darkness. The net had provided the wind with a place to deposit broken branches and leaves and the ubiquitous bits of trash paper, so the pile in center court had grown into a barricade.
He knocked on the back door, but there was still no answer, so he walked toward the street, where he had left his car. He was preparing to go to the next house on the list when something caught his eye. There was a single set of muddy tire tracks on the driveway, leading from the garage door to the street.
He stared at it for a moment. If the car had been in the garage during the hurricane, and someone had driven it out, why would the tracks be muddy? If they had taken the car out after the hurricane and then driven it into the garage, there might be a single set of muddy tire tracks. But that would mean the car was still here, and the owners home.
He walked to the side of the garage and looked in the window. There was a boat on a trailer on one side of the garage. On the other was a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a toolbox showing under a tarp, and what looked like a briefcase. Walker went back to his car and got his flashlight, then shone it in the garage window. The reflection off the glass made it hard to see, so he manipulated the flashlight a bit, and the light passed across the license plate: Louisiana.
Walker went to the side of the house and shone the flashlight in the window. It was a dining room. Everything was in place, and he could see no broken windows. He tried to imagine what had happened to the appraiser. If he’d had engine trouble, and the client was gone, would he have put his car in the client’s garage?
