there.”
“Sure it’s over a hundred. It’s the fucking desert!” Hobart set the hand brake, wiggled the gearshift to be sure it had clicked into Park, and wrenched the steering wheel to lock it. He took the keys, got out and slammed the door.
The idea of waiting here alone in the car tried to form in Tim’s mind, but he couldn’t grasp and hold it. Being here was unthinkable. It wasn’t that something terrible would happen if he were alone, being alone was terrible. He opened the door and got out. The air was so hot it hit the nerves of his skin like something sharp. He stood looking down at the black pavement with swirls of sand on it.
The road was only a layer of asphalt that some crew had dumped from a truck and rolled flat one day. It wasn’t safety. It was only a sign that some men had been here once a few years ago.
Tim began to walk away from the pavement toward Hobart. After a few steps into the dirt, his tie to the road wasn’t as strong, and he began to trot. When he caught up with Hobart, he was already sweating. They kept walking to the northeast between hills that were just piles of rocks. Tim knew that he needed to be smart and use the few advantages he had. There was the sun, and it was getting lower, so he could identify the west with his eyes closed. He knew that time was important.
He concentrated on keeping up with Hobart. It shouldn’t have been difficult because he had longer legs and he was younger. But Hobart sometimes seemed to be something that wasn’t quite human anymore. It wasn’t that he hadn’t started as human, but that he just wasn’t as weak as a man anymore. He had burned the softness out of himself a while ago. Hobart kept going straight as though he were walking a surveyor’s line. Tim supposed that was a kind of good news. If they went straighter, they’d go farther and meet the curve of the road sooner.
After walking until his shoes had gotten full of sand, Tim noticed that his face was dry. The air was so hot and parched that his sweat dried before it could form drops. He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for fortyfive minutes. At this pace I make that three miles, give or take.”
“That ought to be far enough,” said Hobart. He took a gun out of his shirt and shot Tim through the chest, and then stood over him and shot him through the forehead.
He put the gun back into his belt under his shirt, grasped Tim’s ankles, and dragged his body to the side of one of the innumerable piles of rocks. He dug down a few inches with his hands to make a depression, and rolled Tim into it. He covered the body with rocks and then walked the three miles back to the road.
When Hobart reached the car, he opened the trunk, took out the gas can, and poured the three gallons into the gas tank. He started the engine, turned on the air conditioning, and opened the windows to blow the hot air out of the car while he accelerated toward the gas station in Amargosa Valley. With a full tank, he could be back in Las Vegas in a couple of hours.
4
Emily spent three hours with Detective Gruenthal, the police officer who was placed in charge of Phil’s murder. He was a big man with a red face and thinning filaments of hair that were in the process of changing from blond to white. She told him about Phil’s habits, and about the sudden departures: the missing money, not telling her where he was late at night. Gruenthal dutifully took notes, a constant illegible scribbling into a notebook that seemed smaller than his thick hand, then told her that the first avenue to pursue was the money.
Because one signatory was dead, Emily was not permitted to open the safe-deposit box that she and Phil rented. She had to meet Detective Gruenthal and a woman named Zia Mondani who represented the state of California at the bank, where the manager was waiting. Emily and the bank manager entered the vault to retrieve the box. Emily carried the box, and they went into a little room instead of the cubicle that Emily and Phil had always used before.
They all sat down at an empty table and she opened the long, narrow gray metal box. As she took things out she set them on the table in front of Detective Gruenthal. There was the deed to the house. There were Phil’s, Emily’s, and Pete’s birth certificates and Social Security cards.
Gruenthal immediately picked up Pete’s papers. “What’s this?”
“They’re our son Pete’s. He died five years ago in a car crash. Neither of us ever thought to take them out, I guess.” She noticed a copy of Pete’s death certificate and set that in front of Gruenthal, too.
There was their marriage license, and she had to fight to keep from crying in front of these strangers at the sight of it. To distract herself, she quickly picked out the insurance policy for the house and the policy for the two cars, then the pink slips for the cars. There was Phil’s Honorable Discharge from the Marine Corps, a few photographs of the house for insurance purposes, a copy of Phil’s private-investigator’s license in case something happened to the original that hung in the office. She came to the end.
Gruenthal said, “Is that it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Anything missing?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
Ms. Mondani, the woman from the state, stood up, said, “Thank you, Mrs. Kramer,” and left the room.
Emily began to put the papers back in the box. She tried to remember the things that should have been here, but weren’t. Phil had taken his mother’s diamond pin, the necklace of real pearls that Emily’s grandmother had given her, and the savings bonds. She wasn’t even certain how much any of the items had been worth. The jewelry had never been appraised because Phil had said there was no point in insuring anything that was sitting in a bank. The bonds had been a gift from Phil’s parents when Pete was born, the beginning of a fund for Pete’s college tuition.
As she and the manager returned the box to its slot in the vault, she berated herself. She should have told Detective Gruenthal that things were missing, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had no idea why Phil had taken them. Was there some need that he had been hiding from her? He always hated to worry her. Maybe he had made some investment that she would have considered risky. She couldn’t tell Detective Gruenthal something so private before she even knew the explanation. How could this stranger understand what she was telling him when she didn’t yet understand it herself?
When the box had been locked away, she could see Gruenthal was feeling impatient. His time had been wasted. “Mrs. Kramer, I’d better be getting back to the station. If there’s anything you remember later, or anything I can do, please call.”
“Thank you,” she said and watched him leave.
The bank manager saw his chance, too. “Anything else I can do?”
When she said, “Yes,” he looked mildly surprised. “I’d like a printout of all the checks that were written against our account in the past year.”
“Certainly. Why don’t you come to my office where you can be comfortable while I get that information for you?”
When she had the copies in a neat file inside a big envelope, she took them home to study. The checking account was linked to the savings account, and both accounts had been gutted in a quiet, orderly way. Money had been deposited in the checking account from time to time, but the withdrawals were all bigger than the deposits, and the excess came out of the savings account. Phil had written one or two big checks a month for the whole year. All of them were made out to “Cash.” As she looked at them, tears of frustration welled in her eyes so she had to keep wiping them away to see. She whispered over and over, “Jesus, Phil. What were you doing? What the hell were you thinking?”
She went to the computer and ordered credit checks from the three credit bureaus. What she was really trying to do was establish the extent of the financial disaster. Were there credit cards she had not seen, or had Phil borrowed money she didn’t know about? The credit reports were transmitted, and she read them with a chill in her spine, but there seemed to be nothing in them that she had not already discovered. Nothing told her anything about Phil’s state of mind, or what he had been doing the night he was killed.
Emily became more frantic. She began to search the house. She hunted through the office for credit-card slips or receipts, then through stacks of bills that had been paid and filed. She read the last two tax returns, which she had signed when Phil had asked her to, but never bothered to examine. The figures looked normal, but there was no way for her to tell whether they were accurate. At three A.M. she fell asleep on the couch in the den.
