Varney drove back to Cincinnati, stuffed the bag into the bottom of a dumpster, then parked the car on the street five miles from his apartment. He searched it for any paper that might tell the police anything, but found none. He wiped the prints off the door handles, steering wheel, and trunk, walked the first two miles, then jogged the rest of the way home. He was back at one, but he could see that Mae had not returned from the mall. He took his clothes off, put them into the washing machine and started the load, then got into the shower.
When he got out, he heard Mae laboring up the stairs. When she was outside the door, he heard a rustle, then a heavy clank as she set the weights on the floor and put her key into the door. It swung open, and he saw her raise her hand to push a strand of black hair out of her eyes. She looked beautiful to him, and he discovered he was not angry at her anymore.
It was five days later that he had to go into the office and pay Tracy for the next two weeks. He walked into the building, climbed the steps to the second floor, and stepped into the big wholesale office.
Tracy was busy staring at a column of figures on a piece of paper. He had to wait until the sharp pencil point had put a dot beside each line and come to the bottom. Then the sharp fingernails released the pencil and let it fall on the desk.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. She was not smiling.
“I brought you some money,” said Varney.
She raised the pencil again, holding it before her, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “You’re not going to say anything?”
“Like what?”
“ ‘I’m sorry, Tracy,’ or ‘Forgive me, Tracy, I didn’t mean it.’ ”
He stared at her, and he could see she knew. “I’m sorry.” Then he said, “Why am I sorry?”
“Because you have risked my life, my sons’ lives, the very people who took you in when you needed it. You showed no regard for our safety, or even your own. You killed a man who worked for me. Do you have no feelings?”
“What are you talking about?”
She raised her voice almost to a shriek. “They warned me. Everybody warned me. You can’t keep a killer around and expect he’s not going to do something. That’s why I never did it before. You fooled me, with your baby face and your ‘Yes, Tracy, no, Tracy.’ I should have cut out my tongue before I said yes to you.”
“He called the apartment. You should have kept him away from Mae,” said Varney. “I was paying you for that.”
“He never asked me, or I would have.”
“His mistake.”
“No, yours.”
“How’s that?”
“You think I’m the only one who knows? He had a family. They know you did it. He called you from home!”
“Give me their address, and I’ll take care of it.”
The suggestion seemed to further enrage her. “He was a hillbilly. You can’t kill them all. There are brothers, sisters, cousins all over Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. They want money. They wanted a hundred thousand to keep quiet, but I beat them down to seventy. If you don’t think that’s a good deal, here’s the phone book. Kill everybody in it named Perkins. Then you can start on the sisters under married names, and the cousins and aunts and uncles.”
“You got them to agree to one payment to shut up and forget he’s dead?”
“I told you, they’re trash. They know it’s either seventy grand, or they get to talk and have the pleasure of seeing you go to jail, which is worth nothing.”
“Have you paid them?”
“No, I haven’t paid them,” she shouted. “I didn’t kill him. And where am I going to get seventy thousand dollars? But if I were you, I’d get it, and bring it here today. They’re not real good at waiting.”
He nodded, numbly.
“And while you’re at it, don’t forget the thirty-five hundred you owe Mae, and the seventy-five hundred you owe me.”
He walked to the door, then stopped and turned to look at Tracy. “Does Mae know?”
Tracy sighed and shook her head. “No, she doesn’t. If she did, it would scare the poor girl to death. You pay, and she never has to know.” Tracy’s voice lowered a bit. “This can be just between you and me.” Her heavily made-up eyes were reproving, but he detected a hint of the tentative, conditional forgiveness that his mother had sometimes teased him with. “Just don’t ever do that again.”
29
The northern end of the San Fernando Valley was only a few miles inland from where Millikan lived, but on nights like tonight, the air seemed to have drifted in from the desert and then remained still all day, heating up on the treeless boulevards and vast, blacktopped parking lots. The sweat had already begun to form droplets on his forehead. “She ran this place all alone—did the cooking and handled the cash register?”
“That’s right,” said Carrera. “The register’s got over two hundred in it, and nothing else seems to be missing either.”
Millikan went behind the counter into the little kitchen and stared down at her body. She was Hispanic, not much over five feet tall. She looked about sixty years old, but he knew she could have been much younger. Life in this tiny, sweltering space, standing over a griddle, squinting to protect her eyes from smoke and getting peppered with grease spatters, wasn’t much of a beauty treatment. He supposed it wasn’t always this hot, but after she had been shot, the killer had not bothered to turn off the oven or the deep fryer.
Lieutenant Carrera stood on the other side of the counter, leaned over it, and pointed. “See, she got just the two shots: one through the chest, and the other in the back of the head after she was down.”
Millikan had to step through the narrow door to go outside and then come back in through the front entrance to reach the small porch that had been enclosed and converted into a dining room. There was a big blue B grade from the Los Angeles County Health Department posted on the window. There were only four tables, and from the look of the place, all four had probably been filled at once only during lunch hours. This was not a night spot.
Millikan took a few steps, then stopped and stared down at the third man on the floor. Like the other two, he was Anglo, not Hispanic, and moving into middle age. He estimated that they were all in their late thirties to early forties. The man wore blue jeans that showed some wear, but not the wear that came from physical work. They were slightly faded because somebody had washed them a couple of times to make them soft and maybe to shrink them to give a custom fit.
Millikan would not have needed to look at the jeans to know that these men had not been laborers. Their hands were soft, not callused. Millikan knew that if he wanted to figure out how much a man made, the place to look was where the money showed. Car keys all came from the factories now, because they had computer chips and remote door-lock controls. They had the make of the car stamped all over them. And Millikan had become very good at identifying men’s shoes and watches.
The three men were arranged roughly in a line across the room. There was a hole in the forehead of the man on the right, a hole in the back of the man in the center, near the front door. The third man had ducked down behind a table, and gotten shot through it at least four times: Millikan could see several holes in the tabletop, and entry wounds in the man’s thigh, stomach, chest, and head.