part of it, or it could have all been done to set me up.'
'Did it occur to you to transfer it all back where it belonged?'
'I told you what I found. I can’t tell what I didn’t find. For one thing, I didn’t find anything like a half million in transfers. They could have been from accounts I never saw, didn’t know about. And if these people could put money in, maybe they could get it out, too. There could be another half million already gone.'
'You were an ex-cop. Why didn’t you go to the police?'
'Believe me, I thought about it. But being an ex-cop made me more worried. I thought about what had happened in cases like this when I was a cop. You get a guy—a banker or accountant or lawyer—we got lots of lawyers. Some company blows the whistle. There’s an account in his name with half a million in it. What does the D.A. do? He puts him in custody, quick. The judge doesn’t grant bail, because if he’s got one account with that much in it, he might have five more, and finding them takes months. He’s a sure thing for jumping bail. While I was sitting in jail, anything could be happening with those records, and none of it was going to help me.'
'So what did you do?'
'Here’s where Harry comes in. After all this time he called me.'
'Where?'
'I don’t know where he was. I was at home.'
'What did he say?'
'Two things. One was to stay out of jail. He had heard that some guys had been shopping a contract on me inside the prison system.'
'Shopping?'
'Yeah. It was open. Anybody who got me was going to collect.'
'Is that normal?'
'It hardly ever happens. It’s too risky. There are so many people who would hear about it who need something to tell the police more than they need money.'
'How did Harry hear about it?'
'He wouldn’t say. Not in prison, and not in St. Louis. He was calling long-distance from a pay phone, and he kept pumping money into it and I kept hearing cars go by.'
'What did you do?'
'I thought it through eighty different ways. No matter what I did, I couldn’t imagine a way things could work out that didn’t include my spending a lot of time in a prison waiting for an investigation. Harry said the contract was for a hundred thousand. That meant somebody must have stolen a lot. He might have taken ten million, left a half million lying around to get me arrested, and gotten me killed before my trial.'
'Would that put an end to it?'
'Sure. He keeps the nine million or so, and everybody figures I took anything that’s missing in the whole company.'
'So it was somebody in the company.'
'It might have been, even somebody in one of the other branches, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been somebody I arrested when I was a cop. For a long time now, they’ve been giving inmates computer lessons as part of the job-training program. It beats lathes and drill presses for getting a job afterward, and they can’t use them to make a knife. You can learn a lot about computers in a five-to-ten sentence. Or it could be something bigger. If you can steal money by phone, then anybody anywhere could be doing it, and I just happened to be the victim.'
'What did you do?'
'Any way you looked at it, the minute the computer man got the company’s machines up and running and they took a close look at what was in there, I was going to jail. Within two or three days after that I would have to sleep, and then I would be dead.'
She looked at him closely. 'You stole it, didn’t you?'
'What else could I do?' he asked. 'I was an honest man. I didn’t have the kind of money it takes to go on the run.'
She seemed to be staring through his eyes into the back of his head. 'Did it occur to you that this might have been what they wanted you to do?'
'Of course it did,' he said. 'If they were capable of thinking up the rest of it, they could think of that, too. But if I did nothing, each day the prisons were going to graduate maybe a hundred guys whose only offer of employment on the outside was killing me. If I brought it to the police, I was going inside, where the rest of them were. Even if I didn’t, the company was going to find the pattern soon, just as I had.'
'So you took the money.'
'Some of it. So now I’m not just being set up. I really did what they’re going to kill me for. I’m guilty.'
'If you get to be safe and secure, will you give it back?'
He stared into the distance, toward the window behind her, for four or five breaths. 'I’d like to. I doubt it.'
'Why not?'
'We were all bonded. When they find out, the customers will get their money back. The insurance company will raise its premium, and life will go on. I’d like to be honest again, but embezzlers always say that, and I don’t have any reason to believe I’m any better than the rest of them. I don’t know if I’m ever in my life going to be in a position where I can bring myself to give it back. I’m going to be scared.'
She kept the gun in her right hand while she picked up the telephone and cradled it under her chin. 'What was the phone number of your station when you were a cop?'
'555-9292.' He said it quickly, as though it had worn a groove into his brain and would never go away. '314 area code. But police stations won’t tell you anything about an officer.'
'I know,' she said, and then somebody answered. She said, 'Hello. This is Rachel Stanley from Deterrent Health Plans.' She listened for a moment, then cut in and talked fast. 'I’m calling because I’d like to set up a seminar for any police officers who might be interested in an exciting new plan for supplementing the coverage of law enforcement professionals.' She stopped, as though she had run into a wall. 'Oh?' she said. 'What sort of plan do you have now?' She listened again. 'Well, it’s very good, but if anyone there is—I understand. Goodbye.'
She dialed another long-distance number on the telephone and said, 'I’d like the number of Missouri Casualty,' listened for a moment, then dialed again, her eyes on him all the time. He could tell she was listening to a recording, and when she heard the right choice, she punched a number. After a pause, she said in a voice that was something between a purr and a threat, 'Yes. This is Monica Briggs in admitting at U.C.L.A. Hospital in Los Angeles. We have a patient here named John Felker who is a retired St. Louis policeman.'
She listened for a sentence or two, then sounded preoccupied as she repeated, 'Social Security number ... let’s see...'
Felker handed her his wallet with the card showing and she read it off. Then she punched the speaker button so Felker could hear it too, and put down the receiver to hold the gun in both hands, aimed at his chest. The woman’s voice on the other end echoed through the living room. 'Oh, that’s too bad. At the time when Mr. Felker left the police force, he had only been employed for seven years, nine months. His benefits weren’t vested. I’m afraid he has no coverage with us.'
Jane lowered the pistol and said into the speaker, 'Oh, he has primary coverage. This would have been secondary. He’ll be fine.' She punched the button and put down the gun. 'I’ll help you.'
7
Jake Reinert cleaned his brushes on his father’s old workbench in the cellar. In a way he felt unworthy using it. His father had been a real craftsman. His own father, Jake’s grandfather, had been a cavalryman in the royal hussars of the Austro-Hungarian empire and he hadn’t wanted his son to be a soldier. He had sent the boy to school, but when he was about to be beaten for some infraction or other, the boy had either punched or pushed the teacher, depending on how much of his wine he had swallowed when he later told the story, jumped out the school window, and run. Then the soldier had sent his son to be apprenticed to a cabinet-maker, but he had gotten kicked out of there, too. The cavalryman foresaw that like him, the boy was left with nothing but the military to keep bread
