Seaver stared at it, and saw the color of the paint. It was yellow, and the little marquee on the roof was visible now. It was the same cab. Seaver waved his arm frantically, and the cab pulled to the curb. The driver stepped out, slammed the door, and looked at him over the roof.
“He’s hurt worse than I thought,” said Seaver. “We need to get him to a hospital after all.”
The driver trotted around the rear of the car and opened the back-seat door. Seaver knelt and began to lift the torso of the body. “Give me a hand.”
The driver squatted to lift the feet. He backed into the cab and set the legs on the back seat, but that gave him a look at the chest. “This guy’s bleeding all over. He’s been stabbed or something.”
Seaver’s hand was already in motion. The gun swung out, he fired into the driver’s belly, then raised the barrel higher and fired into the driver’s chest, then into his head.
Seaver returned the gun to his coat pocket and walked around the car to get into the driver’s seat. He turned on the meter, then drove the cab to the rear of the building he had rented and parked it. He went up the stairs, through his little office, and into the bathroom. He washed his hands and face thoroughly, then examined his suit, shoes, and shirt for blood spatters. He saw none, but wiped his shoes with toilet paper anyway and flushed it down the toilet. He took a big wad of dampened toilet paper and wiped off the gun and wrapped it in toilet paper, then went about the little suite wiping off all of the surfaces he had ever touched. He collected all of his old coffee cups and lids, boxes, and wrappers, and locked the door behind him before he left. He dropped the trash in the Dumpster at the rear of the building.
Seaver started the cab and drove at least twelve blocks south before he found a dark alley between two stores that met a second, longer alley, so he could turn and leave it beside a loading dock. Then he walked a mile, stuffed the still-wrapped gun into the fishy-smelling center of a trash bag inside a garbage can, and replaced the lid. He walked another mile before he came to a theater. People were streaming out onto the street, walking toward parking lots and climbing into taxicabs. He attached himself to the crowd, climbed into a cab, and had it take him to an intersection not far from his hotel.
When he was inside his room, he pulled the mailer out of the back of his belt. He opened it and poured the mail out on the bed. The envelopes were all addressed to Stewart Hoffstedder, C.P.A. That was something that gave him hope, at first, because Stillman had said something about a man’s name. But the mail was almost all bills, as though they were for a real C.P.A. The bills were all for credit cards in different names—female, male, even corporate names. Were they all for this woman?
A horrible thought came to him. Stillman’s brain was probably not a perfectly developed organ to begin with. Since the age of ten it had probably been shorted out by drugs and jarred by blows. Maybe he had gotten the number wrong. Maybe this was some real C.P.A., a business manager who paid bills for a number of clients. The mail in the pouch seemed to have nothing to do with the dark-haired woman. It was possible that Seaver had scared Stillman so badly that he had cooked up a box number on the spot.
Seaver laid all of the bills out on the bed in a row and began to study them, looking desperately for similarities. On August 8, Wendy Wasserman had rented a car in Missoula, Montana. On August 10, Michael Phelan had rented a hotel room in Potomac, Montana. Katherine Webster had paid for lunch in Condon, Montana, the next morning. Seaver rocked back on his heels and smiled at the ceiling in relief. He had not wasted all this time and energy.
He glanced at the forwarding address on the label stuck to the mailer. It was just another post office box, this one in Chicago. If he needed to, he could go there and watch that one too. But right now, he had something infinitely better. He knew where the dark-haired woman was. She was on the move, driving around Montana with Pete Hatcher.
21
Carey drove up to the gate of the impound lot and parked. Susan stepped to the gate and rang the bell. Carey could hear the old-fashioned jangling noise a hundred feet away in the little shack in the center of the lot, and that meant trouble. There were no lights on in the windows. He stepped to the gate and stood beside her feeling useless.
Then he walked along the fence and around the corner. There was a small sign that said, LOT HOURS 6:00 A.M. TO 10:00 P.M. He walked back to Susan and frowned apologetically. “It’s closed until six in the morning.”
“No.” She seemed to see herself from outside. She was standing in a dark, desolate part of the city in the middle of the night, wearing three-inch heels and a strapless evening gown. Slowly, the beautiful smile reappeared. She let her arms come out from her sides in a “look at me” gesture.
He said, “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
They got into his car and he backed out of the drive. “You can’t really do that,” she said. “It’s all the way out in Orchard Park. If you could just drop me off at a hotel near here, you can go home and get some sleep.”
“Why would you stay in a hotel?” asked Carey. “It’s ridiculous.” Why was it that people who didn’t want to be any trouble always ended up being plenty?
“It’s now after midnight. If you drive me all the way to my apartment, it’ll be two before I’m asleep, and probably three before you are. So I’d get three hours’ sleep, call a cab, and for eighty dollars or so, he’d drive me to the other end of the county to get my car. That’s if I could even get a cab in Orchard Park at five in the morning. But if I stay here, I can be on the spot when the lot opens and drive myself home.”
“Here’s the problem with that. Look around you—factories, warehouses, and an impound lot. It isn’t very scenic in the daytime, so there’s a shortage of good hotels around here. By ‘good’ I don’t mean famous, I mean safe.”
“Oh,” she said.
“On the other hand, I happen to have a perfectly good house about twenty minutes away, with six spare bedrooms, five bathrooms, and clean towels.” He held his breath, hoping she would have a better idea.
“I hate to put you to that kind of trouble.”
That meant “yes.” He had no choice but to push the offer as graciously as he could manage at this hour, and make it sound easy. “I have to be at the hospital by seven, and I can take you to get your car on the way.” He glanced at her. “I might even be able to scare up some clothes for you that won’t look strange at dawn—like the bedraggled party-goer at the end of an Italian movie. Jane’s about your size.”
She looked at him with what seemed to be curiosity. “You would do that?”
“Sure.” What choice did he have?
“Won’t your—won’t Jane feel … uncomfortable?”
“What for?” he said too quickly. He had been concentrating on his own discomfort, so he had not yet thought about what Jane would feel. He cautiously considered the subject. He had a sudden vision of Jane’s eyes resting on Susan, taking an inventory—the long, golden hair, the little wisps on the nape of the long, delicate neck where they had escaped from the place where they had been tied, the impossibly smooth ivory skin—then focusing on Carey. But Jane’s look would be completely unjustified.