He went back to the body and searched the pockets. There were no keys. He thought about it. Fieldston must have taken a cab from somewhere or walked. Probably the airport. And he hadn’t planned to go home, ever again, because he no longer even had a key to his own house. And he hadn’t checked into a hotel, he had no hotel key. Fieldston had been frightened enough to make sure nobody at all knew he was in Las Vegas.
There was a lot of work to do, so he had to move quickly. No mistakes, nothing he’d forgotten about that he had to come back later to correct. It all had to happen between now and dawn. He looked at his watch. Three thirty. Two good, safe hours and then another one before the people who worked the day shift started to get up. He went outside and drove his car into Orloff’s driveway with the lights off.
He went back into the house and looked around for something to help. Orloff’s desk chair was about right and it had wheels. He got down on his knees, put his hands under Fieldston’s shoulders, and hoisted him into the chair. Then he went to the bathroom and took two more large bath towels from the linen cupboard. Whatever else they’d done, he was sure they wouldn’t have counted towels. He wrapped one of the towels around the upper part of the body and threw the other in Fieldston’s lap. Then he pulled the office chair through the house to the door. He took the right arm and the body slumped forward onto his shoulders. He staggered with it to the car and shrugged it into the trunk. He arranged the towels as well as he could to keep the blood from escaping.
Then he returned to the house. He moved the desk chair back to Orloff’s office, shuffling his feet on the carpet to remove the imprint of the wheels. He took a final look to see that everything appeared undisturbed, then put the wallet in the briefcase and went out. At the car he remembered. How had Fieldston gotten in? Fieldston hadn’t had a key. He returned to the house and looked at each of the windows. It was the window to the guest bedroom, but Fieldston had been careful. There were no scuff marks on the sill, and the lock wasn’t damaged, just scratched minutely. He took a last look around before he left the house. He pressed down on the trunk of his car just enough so the latch caught and drove off down the street. He took a labyrinthine route to reach the freeway without going down the Strip. As he felt the car accelerate onto the freeway, he had an impulse to laugh. By the time the sun came up he’d be in Kingman, Arizona, and maybe Flagstaff by the time the stores opened up. No telling how far a man might go after he’d been shot in the head.
THE BOOKS HE SELECTED were paperbacks. In the supermarket he bought three, all of which said bestseller on their covers. In the bookstore he picked classics—books he remembered being forced to read in school. In the drugstore he found two that claimed to be something called novelizations of movies. When he had enough, he sat in the parking lot to do the packing: one bill per page. It struck him as funny that the first of the paperbacks was worth over two hundred thousand dollars. It took more than an hour, but he couldn’t afford to rush it. He was good at making packages, at tying and taping and arranging, and this was one package he wanted to make perfect.
By the time the post office opened he was there to watch the man unlock the doors. He sent the package fourth class, special book rate. It was a strange sensation to see the postman at the counter toss the package into the bin with a dozen others, all practically indistinguishable from one another. At that moment he knew there was no reason to think about it anymore. It was gone from his possession forever, and there was no way he could ever get it back. It was more money than he ever hoped to have, more than some towns were worth, probably. And now it was gone. He didn’t linger at the counter to think about it. It had all been decided hours ago, while he drove through the cold air of the dark desert. It was the only way.
The sun was rising in the sky and he had to make every hour into miles. If he waited too long the bags of ice he’d bought would start to melt, and the seals on at least some of the bags would be defective. He couldn’t afford to have water dripping from the trunk as he drove. If he kept at it he might make five hundred miles before he needed to change the ice, because the air rushing by would cool the surface of the car just as it cooled the engine. It was going to be a long time before he slept again, he thought. But there’d be plenty of time to sleep later on— twenty hours a day for the rest of his life, if he felt like it. All he had to do now was deliver Edgar. He said aloud, “Keep cool, Edgar. It won’t be long now.”
It was shortly after noon when he began to hear the sloshing sounds. Whenever he slowed down or accelerated there was a faint noise of water moving about in the trunk. By one o’clock he began to see drips of water hitting the pavement in his rearview mirror whenever the car gained speed too abruptly. When he stopped in Flagstaff to fill the gas tank he put his hand on the trunk and knew that his theory of air cooling had been wrong. The surface of the trunk was as hot as the metal fixtures on the gas pump. As he drove off he said, “Edgar, we’ve got problems. You’re getting parboiled in there. Afraid we’ve got to make another arrangement.”
It was in the Sears store that he bought the hacksaw and the shovel and the ice chest. He had to search another fifteen minutes before he found the ranchers’ supply store. When he found it he shopped carefully for the lime, reading the labels on the big fifty-pound bags: calcium oxide—95 percent; magnesia—2 percent; total silica, alumina, iron—2 percent. Water content no more than 1 percent guaranteed.
He moved the bags to the car in a cart, and was back on the road again. The bags of Blue Ice he bought at a liquor store in Winslow, because it was the first place he passed through that looked as though they might sell it already frozen.
It was mid-afternoon now and so hot that the endless, straight highway danced and quivered. Off in the distance dust devils swirled crazily and dissolved, the only signs of movement. He took Route 77 through Snowflake and Show Low, and then swung east again through Springerville and into New Mexico on Route 60. It was already night before he found the place he was looking for between Quemado and Magdalena, about fifty miles past the Continental Divide. It was a back road not shown on the map, but he could see it went somewhere. It had been over an hour since he’d seen another car, and the local ranchers would be shutting themselves in for the night. He turned off on a dirt road that wound through rocky hillocks and barrows, and kept going until he found a spot that suited him. He parked the car on the side of the road and got out.
Looking around and studying the place, he saw nothing but the gigantic, bright expanse of the sky, the stars incredibly clear and close above his head. He took the shovel and set off up the side of the hill. It was pretty country, he decided, even at night—bigger and emptier and cleaner than the land the main routes passed through. And if he worked steadily he could probably still make Amarillo by the time the sun came up.
The first half of the day Elizabeth had spent dreading the return of John Brayer. It was the fact that he must have been in Washington when he found out about Palermo that bothered her. In the first place, he would probably already have set up the appointment with the Attorney General’s office before he found out. That meant he’d have to explain to them why he no longer needed to see them. But more than that she hated the idea that he would be there when the anger and disgust settled on him. He’d be right there in the office where they handled personnel cases, where Elizabeth’s file was kept.
Sometime during the afternoon her feelings began to change. The FBI agents were coldly polite, but she could feel the weight of their resentment and contempt. And they were right. If only Brayer had let her take Palermo here, he’d still be alive. He might not be happy at first, but it really would have made no difference in the long run. The trip to Carson City had served no legitimate purpose. Something could have been arranged to keep Palermo under wraps here in Las Vegas. But now Brayer was comfortably out of sight in Washington or somewhere, and Elizabeth was still here in the Bureau office, taking the force of their resentment alone. And of course they all knew about it. Her report had included the rationale for making a dash to Carson City. The ones who hadn’t read it had been told. She could see it in their faces. At four o’clock Elizabeth decided she had been a fool. If Brayer filed a request for dismissal, or even so much as a negative performance evaluation, she’d demand a hearing and fight it. He’d been the one who ordered her to handle Palermo that way, after all—a lone woman with an analyst’s rating transporting a self-confessed criminal through an unpopulated area in the dark. She could have been killed too. If he filed any kind of reprimand, she thought, she’d make him regret it. By the time the hearing was over she’d have a special commendation.
At dinner Elizabeth began to wonder if she hadn’t been too defensive. Nothing had come through from Washington all day that referred to Palermo’s murder. Maybe Brayer was taking the blame himself, leaving her out of it for the moment. She’d seen him do that before, file a report in which somebody was just named as “the agent in place” or “the field agent.” That would explain why he’d been out of touch.
When she went to bed she was already feeling worried about him. He was in Washington taking the blame
