concentrate on what she had to accomplish. The idea had been to mail each check from the place where it supposedly had been written, and to have all the checks arrive at their destinations within a few days of one another. The bosses would hear of the sudden boom in charitable giving when everyone else did, and probably not suspect what it meant. Even if they figured out that the money was theirs, by then it would be too late for them to do anything. The letters would already be at their destinations, the checks cashed, and the money safely deposited in the accounts of thousands of organizations all over the country.
Now things had changed. She had seen the intensity of the search building since she had flown to the Caribbean. Each time she had been in an airport there had seemed to be more big, tough-looking men standing around watching passengers arrive and depart. Jane had not anticipated that they would be doing anything but scrutinizing people for a resemblance to Rita.
In Sea-Tac airport they had not been looking only for Rita. The first two had been stalking a woman who fit Jane’s general description, and who had been carrying a stack of business letters. The third man had ignored a thousand people and gone after Jane. The Mafia—or some part of it, anyway—knew that the money was being moved by mail, and that the way to stop it was by capturing a dark-haired woman.
Jane tried to imagine how they knew about her, but the possibilities were unlimited, and each one that occurred to her had something about it that didn’t fit. If they had found the house in Santa Fe, and Bernie or Rita had talked, then they would know that the way to end the flow of money would be by using the records in the computers to stop payment on the checks. If they had noticed Henry somehow, then they would have made him block the transactions. They wouldn’t need to find Jane.
She gave it up and tried to think about where she was now, and what she should do. Today was the third day. Jane had finished the mailings on the West Coast, picked up her second load of letters, and gotten out. Henry would be nearly up to Washington, D.C., by now, and then he would have his second set of letters in his bags and start dropping them off, hour by hour, as he moved north along the East Coast.
In most parts of the country, today’s mail had already been delivered, so another burst of donations would hit the banks this afternoon. Whoever was watching transactions for the Mafia would have a lot to think about.
As Jane made her plans, certain decisions were inevitable. From now on, she would have to try very hard to stay away from airports. She would have to make a second, more thorough attempt to change her appearance.
She turned onto Interstate 90, and after seventy miles drove over the Mississippi into La Crosse, Wisconsin. All night she drove through the Wisconsin countryside, stopping only to mail letters—first only a mile from the bridge, then 143 miles farther east at Madison, then 54 miles on at Beloit. Then she drove the last 74 miles to Milwaukee.
Jane stopped at a hotel on West Highland Avenue that she judged to be equidistant from the Convention Center, Marquette University, and the Pabst Brewing Company. She brought her bags into her room, then went downstairs, moved her rental car to the other side of the lot, where she could see it from her window, and went to sleep.
In the morning, Jane bought the local newspapers from the gift shop in the hotel lobby and went back to her room to read them. There were no articles that indicated the sudden growth of generosity in the country had come to the attention of the
“Public Auto Auction, Rain or Shine,” ran the banner above the huge advertisement. “You Inspect the Vehicles Before the Auction!” As though to prove it, the smaller letters said, “Inspection, 10:00, Auction, Noon.” Jane looked at the long list of car models, years, and prices, then realized that they were simply examples of past bargains: it was an auction, after all. Along the bottom, the ad said, “If you don’t have cash we accept all major credit cards for purchase or as a down payment! EZ financing available. Serving Milwaukee since 1993.”
Jane took a taxi to the address at the bottom of the page. She found herself on the edge of a big lot, where a few dozen customers, nearly all of them men, walked up and down staring at rows of cars of all makes and sizes. A few of the men had pads or pieces of paper on which they made notes. Jane concluded that they were involved in some aspect of the used-car business, because anybody who just wanted a cheap car probably wouldn’t need to write anything down to remember the one he liked.
Jane picked one man out and watched him stalk the rows. His hands were clean, but they had a few stubborn black stains on them that he had not been able to scrub off, and the knuckles of the right hand had an angry red look she decided had come from rapping them on something while turning a wrench in a confined space. She made a point of being nearby each time he looked up from his pad. Finally, he said, “You looking for a car?”
“What else have they got?” said Jane with a smile.
“For yourself?”
“Uh-huh.”
He pointed at a black rectangle that rose higher than the line of cars in the next row. “If you like SUVs, there’s a ‘97 Ford Explorer over there with about eight thousand miles on it. She’s a couple of years old, and the finish has a few scratches, so she won’t go for what she’s worth.” He turned and pointed in the other direction at two gray shapes that Jane could barely see. “If you want to go fancy, they have a couple of Mercedes down there. One of them has a dent that you could fix for two hundred, and it’ll knock a thousand or more off the price.”
“I just need to get from point A to point B. Where do the cars come from?”
He shrugged. “Some get confiscated, some are regular repos.”
Jane said, “I don’t know if I want to end up with a car that belonged to a drug dealer or an axe murderer or something. What if he wants it back?”
The man smiled. “They’re not usually that exciting. Usually it’s just the plain old IRS.”
“Thanks,” she said, and walked off to look at the cars he had pointed out.
When the auction began, Jane joined the gaggle of people who followed the auctioneer along the rows. She watched the bidding while the first few cars were sold. There was a tall, thin man who stood a bit to the side of the auctioneer and watched the bidders. If the auctioneer was getting nowhere, he would turn toward the tall, thin man. He would give a bid, the auctioneer would say, “Sold,” and walk on. Jane decided the man must be the loss stopper, who made sure that nothing went too low.
When the auctioneer reached the Ford Explorer, Jane waited to see the other bidders. There were a few ridiculously low bids, and then her new friend appeared at her shoulder and whispered, “Offer eight.” Jane said, “Eight thousand.” There were bids of eighty-one and eighty-two hundred. Jane waited until the auctioneer turned to the stop-loss man, then yelled, “Nine thousand.” The auctioneer looked at the other bidders, then declared the car sold and walked on.
Before Jane’s friend followed, he whispered, “Good deal.”
Jane grinned, then went off to pay for her car. She gave the man in the little building her Diane Fierstein credit card, received her bill of sale, and drove her car off the lot to register it in the name Diane Fierstein.
The hair was much more complicated than buying a mere car. It took time to find the right salon, then to call for an appointment on short notice. She had to improvise a story about how she was flying to Houston for her sister’s wedding tomorrow, and her regular hairdresser had solemnly promised an appointment, and then gotten into an accident and hurt her hand, and could you please, please.… After her performance, Jane went to a bookstore to leaf through magazines to find the right picture. At four-thirty, Jane was in a shop near the university handing the magazine to the stylist.
Jane knew that the way she felt in the stylist’s chair was idiotic, and found that knowing didn’t help at all. She had always liked her long black hair. It was a peculiar, personal link with who she really was. She liked it because when she looked at it, she could remember her father’s voice telling her it was beautiful, and her mother brushing it, then holding her own auburn hair beside it and smiling. “To think I would ever have a little girl with this thick, gorgeous black hair,” she would say. Jane had kept it long and made the effort to care for it, even in times of her life when she could make no argument for its practicality. Since she and Carey had been together, it had seemed to her to be mingled in some complicated way into their relationship. He had talked about it and run his fingers through it in a way that stood for all of the differences between men and women that made each mysterious and fascinating to the other.
The first long tresses fell on the sheet the stylist had pinned around her neck, and she had to fight the
