She turned to the Senator’s file. It was already five or six hundred pages of field reports, chemical analyses, interviews, and transcripts from consulting agencies. It wasn’t really different from Veasy’s file. It would just take longer before they could give up. But already the additions were beginning to take on that peculiar archival quality. Here and there she could see notations that said
When Elizabeth looked up, Brayer was back. She returned to her work without speaking to him. Since Connors had left, the sight of John Brayer had been an irritant. She had placed him in a vulnerable position by her mistake, and he had accepted it and supported her. Now he was an irresistible temptation, the only possible source of approval that could assuage the guilt and humiliation of the last twenty-four hours, and she couldn’t ask for it or even take it if it were offered. It wouldn’t be offered because then he wouldn’t be John Brayer, who approved what was efficient and productive, and disapproved of everything else.
The file had been kept up. After she’d left Denver the FBI had even followed up on Elizabeth’s theory that the killer would have multiple sets of reservations. If he had, he’d been clever. He’d used more than one name, and possibly even used other blinds nobody had thought of. He was home free, she thought. He could run for senator himself, now that there was a vacancy.
“Elizabeth,” said Brayer. His voice sounded normal—happy, almost. She closed the file.
It couldn’t be, she thought. They hadn’t caught Tollar and Hoskins.
“We’ve got some action. I just got a call from the Flamingo. They’ve asked for a bellhop in Toscanzio’s suite. It looks like he’s headed for home.”
HE WOKE UP and looked at Maureen. She was still moving the car down the highway, her eyes peering through a pair of saucer-shaped sunglasses at the traffic. She’ll do, he thought. Even if all she knows is driving a car and staying awake when I can’t. I’m a respectable businessman on a trip with his wife.
The first stop would be the one that would tell him how to handle the rest. He’d worked in Detroit. There were people who knew him by sight. It had to be first, it had to be the test. He looked out at the bleak, rolling hills, a few trees between patches of old gray snow. Even like this it was familiar—especially like this. It reminded him of the man standing alone on the hillside, a man so alone he could have been lost on the surface of Jupiter or drifting in the darkness and silence at the bottom of the ocean. And as soon as the man had seen his face he’d known. The man had been a numbers runner, or was it a bookie? But the man had come up short. He’d been given chances, but he hadn’t used them. But as soon as they’d gotten close enough for their eyes to meet, the man had known that this wasn’t a warning. That was when the rest of the world had dissolved and he’d become the man alone on a hillside, a dark, motionless vertical object standing on the gray, empty snow. He hadn’t bothered to say, “Wait, I can pay.” He hadn’t bothered to say anything, because when he saw who they’d sent to meet him he’d known that restitution and repentance and even money were things that pertained to people on a world a million miles away from him, a world that he was no longer a part of. He had stood there and then the bullet had smacked into him and toppled him over. The man lay there against the empty hillside, already dead with his blood leaking out into the snow, and he’d stood over the body and pumped the trigger until the clip of the big .45 automatic was empty. Later he’d dropped the gun in the river, a heavy military-model .45, inaccurate beyond a few feet, all square edges and with a kick that jerked his forearm when he fired it.
In Detroit he had let them use his face. He’d been young in those days and hadn’t known any better. It hadn’t occurred to him that this day might come and there might still be people around who had thought about that face during the long winter nights, wondering if it would be the last thing they ever saw.
They were nearing the city. He said, “I’ll drive now. Find a place to pull over.”
Maureen nodded and turned off at the next exit. It was a rest stop that consisted of a parking lot and gas station and a Howard Johnson’s with a tiny souvenir shop attached to it. They got out and separated to the rest rooms, then bought gasoline before he swung back onto the highway.
He drove for another half hour, the traffic heavier now, as more and more cars poured onto the highway from the roads that converged on the city. At the Woodward Avenue exit he slipped from the current and guided the car down the ramp to the stoplight.
“What do you want me to do here?” said Maureen.
“Nothing,” he said. “We make one stop and move on. In and out as fast as possible. I’m going inside and you stay with the car so we don’t get a ticket,”
He inched the car down the familiar street from stoplight to stoplight, past large department stores and office buildings and banks. It hadn’t changed much. He searched for a place to leave the car. Anyplace would do now. He passed the Midwestern Bank and turned right.
Maureen said, “What about there? You just passed a parking lot. There’s another one coming up.”
“No,” he said. “Some of the parking lots downtown are owned by people I don’t want to see. I can’t take a chance.”
Just past the next corner a delivery truck was waiting to pull out. He stopped and waved the driver on, then pulled into the empty space. “Stay here,” he said, and got out. He walked back up the sidewalk to Woodward Avenue and looked for a likely store. It took only a block before he found the side entrance to Hudson’s Department Store. He had no trouble finding the right kind of briefcase. It was the kind that the men in this district carried—hard sides and a combination lock.
In ten minutes he was crossing the street in front of the Midwestern Bank. “There is a magic elixir to make you disappear,” Eddie had said. “It’s money. If you have enough of it you can go anywhere and do anything and nobody will ask you where you got it. But that’s only if you’ve got enough of it so you don’t ever have to do anything to get more.”
At the teller’s cage he said, “I’d like to get into my safe deposit box, please.” He made sure she saw the briefcase. A man with a briefcase might be bringing something to put in the box, or might be making an exchange. You never knew. But he was probably taking a minute off from work, and might be pressed for time.
The teller said, “Your name, please.”
“David R. Fortner.”
She made a move with her left hand and a man appeared beside her. He said, “Please come with me.” The man conducted him to a tiny cubicle with one chair and a table in it, then took his key and reappeared with the box. He asked the man to wait outside; he’d only be a second.
When he was alone again he opened the box. Inside were the bills, exactly as he’d last seen them five years ago. There was no point in counting them; it took time to count a hundred thousand in hundreds. They fit neatly into the briefcase. He watched the man lock the box into its place in a wall of identical boxes, then took the key.
As he walked back to the car he looked at his watch. One thirty-five. It had been less than a half hour, and now he could move on, leaving Detroit behind.
Maureen sat in silence as he drove back toward the freeway. Every third block she glanced behind them at the traffic, but after they were on the highway she settled back and lit a cigarette.
He had planned to drive for an hour and then stop, but when the hour was up he kept driving, putting the monotonous miles between him and Detroit. It had gone beautifully, he knew. It had been in and out with little chance anyone could have seen him. But he still didn’t feel what he wanted to feel, so he drove on, checking the mirror every few seconds to see if there could be a car that had been behind them for too many miles. It was just his nervous energy, he knew, and not the sure and reliable sense of caution he’d acquired over the years. But he drove on into the afternoon sun, building up the count of miles between him and the days he’d spent accumulating the stack of money in that box.
He drove past South Bend and Gary and was on the broad eight-lane expressway that poured the westbound cars into Chicago when Maureen said, “I think we’d better find a place to stop for the night.”
He said, “Not for a while yet. We can move faster at night.”
Maureen said, “I’m tired and I’m hungry, and I think we should. A vacationing real-estate man from Syracuse doesn’t drive all night, and his wife doesn’t have to look as though she slept in her clothes. Why don’t we stop at a motel in the right price range and eat supper in the right kind of restaurant? We mustn’t look as though we’re
