Dance for the Dead

stupid.'

'It always worked?'

Mary Perkins shook her head. 'Nothing always works. But I designed it so that if the banker wasn't interested, the worst he could do to me was to tell my husband. But if he once sunk it into me, that option was gone, and he was in for the ride of his life.' She stopped and stared at Jane. 'You're thinking that I invented a scheme to turn myself into a whore, don't you? To do what I wouldn't do for Mr. Waugh.'

Jane shrugged. 'I'm not in the habit of making that kind of judgment.'

'Well, that's exactly what I did. At one point I was doing both the husband and wife at once, and the three of us were conspiring to keep Bobby too busy to notice by pumping money into his business. Of course I had to keep Bobby happy too. We were living as a married couple, and I couldn't have him going off tomcatting around the country club. This went on for about three years.'

'What ended it?'

'I got enough money and enough inside information to do the stunts I told you about. It was essentially the same, except that Bobby had enough to retire, so I let him. I would get the loan myself, and would default on it myself, but first I made sure that Cyrus Curbstone had seen enough of me so that he didn't want my loan brought to the police.'

'How did you get caught?'

'I bought a savings and loan,' Mary said. 'Big mistake. I thought I knew more than I did. I didn't know when to set fire to the place and get on a plane.'

'Why are you telling me all this now?'

'I want you to know,' Mary said.

'Know what?'

'Why I held on to the money when I was caught and the feds wanted it back. Why I told you I didn't have it when I needed your help and any sane person would have given it up to stay alive. It wasn't because I needed to have a lot of money hidden someplace where I'll probably never see it again; it's because of what I had to do to get it.'

'But why now?'

'Because now that I know enough to want to give it up, I can't give it up. He wouldn't take it and let me go, would he?'

'No.'

'He would take it and insist there was more, and when I couldn't give him any more, all he could do was kill me.'

'Yes.'

'And he'll never give up, will he?'

'No,' said Jane. 'He won't.'

'And if I go to the police and tell them he's been chasing me, what I'm telling them is that he might be trying to steal fifty million dollars. That's no crime, but I'm admitting that I still have it. I'm the only one who will go to jail, and he'll still be free to kill me.'

'Fifty million dollars.' Jane returned to taping her cards into the lining of her purse. 'You'll make good bait.'

'Yes,' Mary said, 'I will.'

22

When Jane and Mary left Cleveland they were carrying suitcases that were much larger than they needed to hold the few outfits they had bought, because they had more shopping to do in Chicago. The first item they selected at the electronics store was a small video camera with automatic focus and a zoom lens. The second was a directional microphone. The brochure that went with the microphone described the wonderful capability it offered for recording bird songs without coming close enough to disturb the little creatures. The copy obviously had been composed in order to protect the company from becoming a co-defendant in some criminal proceeding. Jane tested a number of voice-activated tape recorders, and when she had settled on the best, she told the salesman to write up a bill for two.

While he was busy doing this, Mary whispered, 'Why two?'

Jane answered, 'Because I don't think having a conversation with Barraclough is something I'll want to try twice if the first recorder doesn't catch every word.'

Jane bought a used Toyota in Chicago under the name Catherine Snowdon. It was five years old, had one previous owner who had kept it greased, oiled, and maintained, but it had a sporty red exterior. She drove it off the lot to a one-day spray shop and had it painted gray for five hundred dollars. Then she picked up Mary at the motel and turned west onto Route 80. It was winter now, and if they were going to travel by road, it had to be a big one.

For six days they drove the interstate through Davenport, Des Moines, Omaha, Grand Island, North Platte, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City. Just before Reno they turned south down 395 along the east side of the Sierras to the desert. Jane checked them into a motel in San Bernardino near the entrance to I-10, rested for a day, and studied the maps of Los Angeles County. The next day she drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles, reported the sale of Catherine Snowdon's car to Katherine Webster, a resident of Los Angeles, and picked up a set of California plates.

She spent two days driving the freeways until she found the spot she wanted, right on the western edge of a confusing knot of interlocking entrances, exits, and overpasses on the Ventura Freeway. If a person drove east, he would immediately come to the fork where half the lanes swung off onto the San Diego Freeway, then divided again to go north toward Sacramento or south toward San Diego. After another mile or two, there was another junction where some lanes went north on the Hollywood Freeway but most swung southeast toward the city. Another mile and there was another fork, with some lanes continuing southeast and the others bearing due east toward Glendale and Pasadena. With a small head start, a car heading eastward could be very hard to follow.

Every mile on the Ventura Freeway there was a little yellow pole with an emergency telephone on it. The small blue marker above the pole Jane chose announced that it was number 177.

That night in the motel Jane tested the equipment. At two a.m. she drove back into the San Fernando Valley. She parked the car on a quiet side street in Sherman Oaks just north of Riverside Drive and walked the rest of the way to the little hill that elevated the Ventura Freeway above the surrounding neighborhoods. She had to lower the equipment over a fence and then climb over after it.

She was hidden from the street by thick bushes, and from the freeway by a low metal barrier along the shoulder. The barrier was supposed to keep a runaway car on the eastbound side of the Ventura Freeway from careening down the hill into the front of somebody's house, and judging by the depth of some of the dents and scrapes, it probably had. She trained the directional microphone carefully across the freeway on a spot twenty feet from call box number 177, then adjusted the breadth of its field until it picked up very little street noise. She threw a stone at the spot and watched the reels of the two tape recorders turn when it hit, then stop again. She set the video camera on automatic focus and aimed it at the same spot. She switched everything off, carefully covered all of the equipment with leaves and branches, then went down the hill, over the fence, and back to her car.

Jane and Mary stayed at the motel for two more days. They rehearsed, memorized, and analyzed until it began to seem as though everything Jane was planning had already happened and they were weeks past it already, trying to recall the details.

'How long do you stay?' asked Jane.

'Ten seconds. Fifteen at the most. Just long enough to pop out the tapes.'

'What happens if he pulls out a gun?' Jane asked.

'I leave.'

'What if he puts it to my head?'

'I ignore it. There's nothing I can do to stop him, so I leave.'

Early each morning they drove along the Ventura Freeway past call box 177, studying the flow of the traffic for ten miles in both directions. They memorized the fastest lanes, practiced making an exit just beyond the junction with another freeway and then coming up a side street to emerge on the new freeway going in another direction.

'Can't you just call him up and record what he says on the phone?' asked Mary.