He watched as she bent down to kiss Violet, her long straight black hair swinging to touch his wife’s; she came to him and did the same. Then she turned and walked to her car. As she passed under the big hemlock and the sunlight fell in bright dapples on her head and shoulders, he felt himself losing perspective. He could not help feeling he had just received an official visit from his grandmother’s grandmother.
10
It was nearly noon. The three men at the far end of the enormous conference table had begun to look bored. Calvin Seaver watched Stella Olson’s eyes sweep down the page of her report to the summary. This was one of the reasons why Seaver was in awe of Stella. Some of the people in this room would have decided to hold the big guys’ attention by tickling them with cheerful patter, or just droned on, insisting that if these three persisted in owning a casino, they would have to hear all about how it was run. Stella just said in her clipped, soothing voice, “Thirty-two hires, two terminations, eight on medical leave, four resignations, for a net gain of eighteen, which will cover all existing positions until the end of September.” She sat down, closed her folder, and watched the three men attentively. Seaver saw Max Foley’s eyes slip to one side, then the other, and come to some understanding with his partners. “Are the salary figures in the report?”
Seaver couldn’t tell whether the three partners had decided to humiliate her because she had been the one to hire Pete Hatcher or to ask a polite question because Stella had earned the right to their attention, but he knew that probably Stella could tell which it was. She was a poker player, and she seemed to have a gift for reading faces. She came back at them without looking down at her papers.
“Salary and benefits on the eighteen new hires adds up to an additional $52,500 a month. Lower starting salaries on the fourteen replacements offsets $5,833 of it. So the extra cost is $46,667 for this month only. On September first we lost eight regulars who went back to college for additional work, and eight shifted from full to part time. We have three scheduled retirements. We’ll make up the $46,667 on October fourteenth.”
Peter Buckley smiled. “That’s marvelous work, Stella.” Even Salateri seemed to make an exception to his habit of never praising and gave her a reluctant nod. Seaver decided they must have given Stella a slow one over the plate. That way when she walloped it out of the park, the others would see how it was done.
Max Foley looked around expectantly. “Anybody have anything to talk about that’s more urgent than lunch?” The men and women around the table looked like statues. “No? Then you know where we are.”
All of the twenty managers stood up and began to glance at watches, gather papers, and file out. A few of them chatted affably, but Seaver knew it was all harmless banter. He knew because he had periodically tape- recorded the whispers and murmurs, amplified them, and listened to them to be sure nobody said anything once the soundproof door opened that constituted a violation of security.
As Seaver stood to join the queue, Buckley caught his eye and lazily gestured at a chair near the end of the table. Seaver set his papers on the table and pretended to put them in order until the others had gone, then walked over and sat down.
This was one of the times when the three partners looked like one entity, some Hindu deity with six arms and three faces. They all turned to watch Seaver, but Salateri was the face who spoke. “Cal,” he said. “We’re wondering what stage we’ve reached on the Pete Hatcher thing.”
It was Seaver’s impulse to say, “It’s taken care of,” but he knew that was not what the triumvirate had held him apart to hear. He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then said, “I made the arrangement I mentioned. I gave them one hundred for expenses. We agreed on an eventual price of three hundred, plus any overhead they incur beyond the hundred.”
“And?” prompted Buckley.
“They haven’t asked for the rest yet.”
Foley frowned. “What does that mean?”
Seaver said, “They haven’t finished yet.”
Salateri shook his head in disgust but said nothing. To Seaver’s surprise, it was Buckley who pursued it. “Doesn’t that make you … a little uncomfortable?”
Seaver resisted the glib, easy answer. “It’s not as quick as I had hoped,” he conceded. “But I’m not concerned. I picked these people because I was confident that they would be able to find him and take care of it quietly, without the sorts of problems these matters can sometimes cause.” He held his palms up. “I still think so. The delay just means that the professional who helped Hatcher disappear also helped him stay hidden for a while.”
Foley snorted. “I think it’s time to ask a few specific questions. Just who are these people?”
“Their names are Earl Bliss and Linda Thompson. They have a detective agency in Los Angeles.”
“Why did you pick them?”
“They’ve done a few things for me and for acquaintances of mine, and they’ve always delivered. The choice of specialists isn’t very good. They’re the best of a bad lot.”
Foley’s brows knitted. “A bad lot?”
“As a rule, paragons of mental health don’t do wet jobs. Usually the people available for that kind of work have felony records. They look like they’ve spent a lot of time lifting weights in some exercise yard and have lots of memorable tattoos. They’ve all learned that you can get out of just about any sentence if you’ve got something juicy to tell the authorities about somebody else, and they’re all certain to be in trouble again. So they can be a problem that doesn’t go away.”
“What’s different about the ones you hired?” asked Foley. “Are they paragons of mental health?”
“I can only guess, and I would guess not. But they don’t seem to have problems that get in the way. And these people fit the Pete Hatcher problem.”
“How?”
“They’ve done a lot of skip-tracing and bail-jump cases, so they’re set up to find people quietly and without fuss. If they get noticed while they’re looking, they can say they’re on that kind of case, and show licenses to make it believable. There are two of them, and this kind of work is best done in pairs, which is why police officers work that way. If you have to, you can watch a building twenty-four hours a day, and it’s very hard to slip behind someone who can look in two directions at once. And one of them is a woman. Two men together are probably a team of some kind, but two people of different sexes are just ‘a couple.’ ”
Salateri seemed to be bursting, but he confined himself to a measured tone. “If they’re so good, why is it taking them so long to find one guy? It’s been almost four months.”
Seaver sighed. “The Justice Department has seventy thousand people, and sometimes it takes them twenty years.” He saw that this did not please the three men, and he regretted having let it slip out. “I don’t mean to be flippant. But the problem isn’t going out and finding the Pete Hatcher we knew. He has professional help. She’s probably been doing everything for him. At some point he’ll stop paying her, and he’ll be on his own again. He’ll float to the surface.”
Max Foley blinked his eyes, took off his glasses, and set them on the table, then produced a white handkerchief and meticulously cleaned the tinted lenses. “How do I put this?” he asked himself. “The world is a complicated place, full of pieces that somehow fit together, and each one affects the others. Most people just don’t know how.”
Seaver could sense that what was coming was terribly important, and that he would need to catch every word and remember it. Then it seemed to him that they might be about to fire him. He waited anxiously.
Foley put on his glasses and his eyes widened to look at Seaver. “That’s what we do—the three of us here. Together we know how the pieces fit. It can’t be written down. It’s too much for one person to keep in his head, so we each know one part completely, and some of the rest.”
Buckley said, “We think we haven’t explained our problem well enough to you.”
Seaver began to wonder. There were worse things than being fired. Maybe he was about to hear a description of one of them. “Explained what—Pete Hatcher?”
Buckley nodded. His arm came up in one of his vague, limp gestures. “And so on.”
Seaver could feel the danger. “All my life I’ve operated on orders,” he said. “If I got the orders wrong, I
