Dance for the Dead

'Would you?'

'No.'

'Neither did they. If he's offering twenty, he's got forty. The only way he could have gotten it is by stealing it. They take him to court. He's convicted. He gets his standard three-year sentence and is ordered to repay fifty million dollars. He says he's broke. They say, 'No way is this man broke.' They lock him up and look for hidden accounts, fake names, the rest of it. They find nothing. He serves his three years. Some time during those three years the statute of limitations runs out on everything he did at the bank.'

'You mean he's free? Nobody can do anything?'

'He can never be charged again by the government for the crimes he committed in getting the money. Of course he still can't show that he's got twenty or forty or a hundred million. He's still got the judgment against him for that much, and swearing he didn't have it was a new crime. But generally speaking, his legal problems are over. Now he's got illegal problems.'

'What are those?'

'Well, let's study this guy. He got only a three-year sentence for the following reasons.' She ticked them off on her long, thin fingers, the nails looking like knife points. 'He has never committed any offense before. He is clearly not armed or violent or dangerous. He has no known connection with organized crime or the drug trade. Everybody who ever heard his name thinks he's got a fortune, but federal investigators who sniff out money for a living didn't find it. What does all that mean to you?'

'It means he's got the money pretty well hidden.'

'Good for you. You win a trip to the Caribbean.' Jane looked closely at Mary Perkins. 'I think I know what his illegal problems are.'

'Yes,' said Mary Perkins. 'He's not violent enough to scare anybody off and he's got no connections that are worth anything. If you steal his umpteen million he can't even call the police because he'd have to tell them he had that kind of money, and this time his sentence wouldn't be three years; it'd be more like thirty. He's the perfect victim.' After a long pause Mary Perkins added, 'He's a lot like me.'

6

Jane drove along the dark highway skillfully, sometimes lingering in the wake of a big eighteen-wheel truck for many minutes if the driver was pushing to make time, and sometimes moving out into the other lanes to slither between drifting cars where the truck wasn't nimble enough to navigate. Always she stayed within a few miles an hour of the rest of the traffic to keep from tempting the state police, but almost always she was the one who was passing. It was difficult to study and recognize the headlights coming up from behind, so she kept them back there. Now and then she would see one of the exceptions coming up fast in the rearview mirror, and she would evacuate the lane he seemed to prefer and find a space in the center, where she could move to either side if he swerved toward her, and waited there until he had gone on his way.

'Why aren't you saying anything?' asked Mary Perkins.

'I'm waiting to hear your story.'

'I told you.'

'You told me a lot of stuff about how you used to steal money. You didn't tell me anything about yourself. I thought you were just warming up to it.'

'What do you want to know?'

'What's your name?'

'Mary Perkins,' she answered, the annoyance making her voice strain. 'I told you that in the ladies' room in Los Angeles.'

'Okay,' said Jane quietly. She drove in silence for a long time.

'Oh,' said Mary Perkins brightly. 'You mean the one I was born with. I haven't used it in years, so it sounds strange when I say it: Lily Smith.'

'What made you pick Mary Perkins?'

'Well, I was in a business where it didn't seem to be a good idea to use the name on my birth certificate. Smith is okay, but it sounds like an alias. Perkins is the kind of name that makes the mark think good thoughts. Mary Perkins is Mary Poppins, with 'perk,' which is peppy and cheerful instead of 'pop,' which is unpredictable. And 'kins' is sweet and innocent, like babykins and lambkins. Also, all names that end with 'kins' are Anglo-Saxon in a homespun straight-from-the-farm sort of way, not in the my-ancestors-were-on-the-Mayflower way.'

'And Mary is just from Mary Poppins?'

She smiled. 'It's kind of hard to find anything that sounds more innocent.'

'The word immaculate comes to mind,' said Jane.

'Well, there's that side of it, of course,' said Mary Perkins. 'But there are other things that aren't quite as obvious. First, Mary says 'mother.' In fact, it says 'mother of somebody important.' And it's common and feminine. See, if you're going to rob banks - ' She stopped, as though she realized it was going to be hard to make herself understood, then started over. 'Did you ever take a look at the way your bank is set up?'

'I think I have,' said Jane.

'You've got the open floor, which is just there to make you think the bank is big and solid. Then you see the people. At the tellers' counter there are twenty women and a couple of men too young to shave. Then there are a few desks behind that, where everybody is always on the phone. Those are usually women in their fifties. They look like chaperones, there to supervise the twenty women and two boys up front, and to smooth over mistakes.'

'I take it those aren't the people you were trying to impress.'

'Not if what you came for is money. When you get behind those desks, there are offices. Sometimes they're not even on the same floor. But somewhere down a long, quiet, carpeted hallway there will be a huge wooden desk with nothing on it except a couple of those old-fashioned black pens that stick up out of a marble slab, and a lamp with a green shade. Behind that desk will be a middle-aged man. See, banks are in layers. You can meet fifty-two senior executive vice presidents, and all of them are women. You've got to resist the temptation to tell them enough so that they can say no, and hold out until you see this man.'

'And Mary was for him?'

'Yes. It's straightforward, short, and unpretentious. It's not a nickname. It's not a boy's name that was supposed to be cute on a girl. A lot of women in businesses use initials: M. H. Perkins, or M. Hall Perkins. They think it makes them serious. They're wrong. It does not endear them to that man in the back office, and that is the only game being played.'

'It is?'

'You must impress the man who has the power to say yes. He doesn't want to be fooled, or to be in business with any person of either sex who is insecure enough to hide things. The only thing worse is a hyphenated name - the woman is married, which is a fact that has very big pluses and minuses that have to be managed carefully. But the hyphenation implies some kind of nonconformist convictions about men and women that she wants to advertise. The man in the back office is not interested in thinking about that. He's interested in getting more money. He wants to deal with somebody who is going to get lots of money and pay him some of it.'

'Okay, so Mary Perkins makes it in the door, and M. H. Perkins doesn't.'

'Right. She's at the door now. She's energetic and cheerful and well scrubbed, and she has hair that's a bit on the long side and high heels and subtle makeup, but not so subtle that he can't tell she bothered. She wears good jewelry, but very little of it, and it's small. If Mary is married for this meeting, it's a solitaire diamond that's just a little bigger than an honest banker can afford, and that's all. If she's not, maybe a lapel pin. Why? Because that's the way the women who end up with the most money look. The most common way to get it is still to marry it, so Mary is feminine.'

'It doesn't sound as though he's thinking about Mary Perkins as a business partner.'

'I'm not talking about the deal. I'm talking about the first impression - unconscious, probably - the five seconds from the door to the chair. Finance is a tough business. The guy is smart, and above all he's patient. He's seen a lot on the way to the corner office. In order to automatically get back ten percent of his loan each year, he has to lend the money to somebody who will win - who will use his money to make fifteen percent. What I'm describing for you is the sort of woman he can be made to believe will win.'

'How did Mary Perkins get to the point where people are hunting for her?'

Mary Perkins shook her head as though she were marveling at it. 'There was a lot of wild stuff in the papers when I went to trial. My lawyer told me that if I went for the plea bargain, it didn't matter how much I agreed to