Fidelity (4 page)

“No. But you can get anywhere from anywhere else, if you’re moving. Those people back there aren’t.”

Tim knew it wasn’t a good idea to ask anything else for the moment. He knew that it wasn’t manly to keep expressing uncertainty, to keep demanding information that he had not earned by waiting and seeing. He did not want to squander the precious respect he had gained by taking Phil Kramer with one shot from the van. Doing that had shown he was calm and unafraid.

Still, Tim wanted to voice the concern he had that this might be a road that didn’t go where Hobart imagined. He recalled hearing there was one road off Interstate 15 that people took to drive up and around to come out on the north side of the Grand Canyon, the side where there were practically no people. And he knew there was another exit that took you north into Death Valley.

Tim went back to fiddling idly with the radio tuner. It was a fake activity now, and he was just doing it to change the number on the digital indicator, to keep Hobart thinking he was doing a job, like the sonar man in a submarine movie where everybody stood around sweating while he listened for enemy ships. The radio should be picking up something intelligible, but it wasn’t working right.

Hobart kept driving up the road between the dry, rocky hills. As the minutes passed and personalities reasserted themselves, the distances between the cars that had left the traffic jam lengthened. There were some drivers who just stomped on the gas pedal and tore through the desert as though the jam were chasing them. Others seemed to wonder if they had made the wrong decision to leave the only major highway in the desert and drive off hoping that the new road would magically take them to Vegas, where they wanted to be. They went slowly, looking back at the interstate as long as they could, hoping to see some improvement so they could go back.

Hobart flashed past a dozen of these cars and kept going for a half hour before Tim Whitley began to feel that he was going to have to speak. He considered various things he could say, but rejected each of them. Any reference to the time that had passed, the distance, or the traffic might sound like whining, and Hobart didn’t respect whining. He had already foreclosed any talk about their destination. Hobart had said he didn’t know where the road led, but seemed to think he could take it to Las Vegas even if it didn’t go there.

Whitley let the miles slip past. As he looked out at the rock shapes and colors and the brightness, he conceded that the desert was beautiful. But it was beautiful in the same way the ocean was, in a hostile, treacherous way. If the boat were to spring a leak or the car to break down, the scenery would not be just a sight anymore, but a vast harshness. One was deadly cold and the other was deadly hot, and they were both too enormous for a person to slight in this thoughtless way. It was almost bad luck not to give the desert the fear it deserved.

He felt the car’s engine stop racing. In the new silence, Hobart whispered, “Shit.” Whitley could see his arm muscles straining as the car coasted. The power steering had cut off, and each adjustment Hobart made to the front wheels meant fighting the dead mechanism. He aimed the car at the shoulder of the road, brought it onto the gravel, and stopped. A second later, the cloud of dust they had kicked up drifted over the car and away.

Tim knew they were out of gas, but he had to say it anyway. “Out of gas?”

“Uh-huh.” Hobart turned to look into Whitley’s eyes.

“What are we going to do?”

“Walk to get some gas.”

Tim Whitley turned and looked back at the long, empty road behind them, a thinning black surface that dissolved into shining pools of mirage water in the relentless sunshine. He tried to calculate. They had been driving for about a half hour. No, more. It was at least fortyfive minutes. He didn’t know how fast Hobart had been driving, but it had to be at least sixty miles an hour. That was a mile a minute. “We can’t walk back that far. It’s more than forty miles.”

Hobart said, “No, we can’t. We go in the other direction. There’s a town up ahead.”

“How do you know?”

“I happened to see it on a map. I think it was on the place mat in that diner in Baker. I know the road goes north this far. To the left is Death Valley, and the road swings off to the right to where the town is. We’ll buy a three-gallon can of gas and pay somebody to drive us back here with it.”

“Do you happen to know how far it is?”

“Well, if you walk on the road, it could be ten miles, but the road hooks to the right, so we can take a shortcut across country and meet it. I’d guess it would be four miles that way, maybe even two.”

“Jesus, Jerry,” said Tim. “Walk across the open desert like that?” The car’s air conditioning had cut off with the engine, so the windows were heating the enclosed space like a greenhouse. “It must be over a hundred out there.”

“Sure it’s over a hundred. It’s the fucking desert!” Hobart set the hand brake, wiggled the gearshift to be sure it had clicked into Park, and wrenched the steering wheel to lock it. He took the keys, got out and slammed the door.

The idea of waiting here alone in the car tried to form in Tim’s mind, but he couldn’t grasp and hold it. Being here was unthinkable. It wasn’t that something terrible would happen if he were alone, being alone was terrible. He opened the door and got out. The air was so hot it hit the nerves of his skin like something sharp. He stood looking down at the black pavement with swirls of sand on it.

The road was only a layer of asphalt that some crew had dumped from a truck and rolled flat one day. It wasn’t safety. It was only a sign that some men had been here once a few years ago.

Tim began to walk away from the pavement toward Hobart. After a few steps into the dirt, his tie to the road wasn’t as strong, and he began to trot. When he caught up with Hobart, he was already sweating. They kept walking to the northeast between hills that were just piles of rocks. Tim knew that he needed to be smart and use the few advantages he had. There was the sun, and it was getting lower, so he could identify the west with his eyes closed. He knew that time was important.

He concentrated on keeping up with Hobart. It shouldn’t have been difficult because he had longer legs and he was younger. But Hobart sometimes seemed to be something that wasn’t quite human anymore. It wasn’t that he hadn’t started as human, but that he just wasn’t as weak as a man anymore. He had burned the softness out of himself a while ago. Hobart kept going straight as though he were walking a surveyor’s line. Tim supposed that was a kind of good news. If they went straighter, they’d go farther and meet the curve of the road sooner.

After walking until his shoes had gotten full of sand, Tim noticed that his face was dry. The air was so hot and parched that his sweat dried before it could form drops. He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for fortyfive minutes. At this pace I make that three miles, give or take.”

“That ought to be far enough,” said Hobart. He took a gun out of his shirt and shot Tim through the chest, and then stood over him and shot him through the forehead.

He put the gun back into his belt under his shirt, grasped Tim’s ankles, and dragged his body to the side of one of the innumerable piles of rocks. He dug down a few inches with his hands to make a depression, and rolled Tim into it. He covered the body with rocks and then walked the three miles back to the road.

When Hobart reached the car, he opened the trunk, took out the gas can, and poured the three gallons into the gas tank. He started the engine, turned on the air conditioning, and opened the windows to blow the hot air out of the car while he accelerated toward the gas station in Amargosa Valley. With a full tank, he could be back in Las Vegas in a couple of hours.

Emily spent three hours with Detective Gruenthal, the police officer who was placed in charge of Phil’s murder. He was a big man with a red face and thinning filaments of hair that were in the process of changing from blond to white. She told him about Phil’s habits, and about the sudden departures: the missing money, not telling her where he was late at night. Gruenthal dutifully took notes, a constant illegible scribbling into a notebook that seemed smaller than his thick hand, then told her that the first avenue to pursue was the money.

Because one signatory was dead, Emily was not permitted to open the safe-deposit box that she and Phil rented. She had to meet Detective Gruenthal and a woman named Zia Mondani who represented the state of California at the bank, where the manager was waiting. Emily and the bank manager entered the vault to retrieve the box. Emily carried the box, and they went into a little room instead of the cubicle that Emily and Phil had always used before.

They all sat down at an empty table and she opened the long, narrow gray metal box. As she took things out she set them on the table in front of Detective Gruenthal. There was the deed to the house. There were Phil’s, Emily’s, and Pete’s birth certificates and Social Security cards.

Gruenthal immediately picked up Pete’s papers. “What’s this?”

“They’re our son Pete’s. He died five years ago in a car crash. Neither of us ever thought to take them out, I guess.” She noticed a copy of Pete’s death certificate and set that in front of Gruenthal, too.

There was their marriage license, and she had to fight to keep from crying in front of these strangers at the sight of it. To distract herself, she quickly picked out the insurance policy for the house and the policy for the two cars, then the pink slips for the cars. There was Phil’s Honorable Discharge from the Marine Corps, a few photographs of the house for insurance purposes, a copy of Phil’s private-investigator’s license in case something happened to the original that hung in the office. She came to the end.

Gruenthal said, “Is that it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Anything missing?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

Ms. Mondani, the woman from the state, stood up, said, “Thank you, Mrs. Kramer,” and left the room.

Emily began to put the papers back in the box. She tried to remember the things that should have been here, but weren’t. Phil had taken his mother’s diamond pin, the necklace of real pearls that Emily’s grandmother had given her, and the savings bonds. She wasn’t even certain how much any of the items had been worth. The jewelry had never been appraised because Phil had said there was no point in insuring anything that was sitting in a bank. The bonds had been a gift from Phil’s parents when Pete was born, the beginning of a fund for Pete’s college tuition.

As she and the manager returned the box to its slot in the vault, she berated herself. She should have told Detective Gruenthal that things were missing, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had no idea why Phil had taken them. Was there some need that he had been hiding from her? He always hated to worry her. Maybe he had made some investment that she would have considered risky. She couldn’t tell Detective Gruenthal something so private before she even knew the explanation. How could this stranger understand what she was telling him when she didn’t yet understand it herself?

When the box had been locked away, she could see Gruenthal was feeling impatient. His time had been wasted. “Mrs. Kramer, I’d better be getting back to the station. If there’s anything you remember later, or anything I can do, please call.”

“Thank you,” she said and watched him leave.

The bank manager saw his chance, too. “Anything else I can do?”

When she said, “Yes,” he looked mildly surprised. “I’d like a printout of all the checks that were written against our account in the past year.”

“Certainly. Why don’t you come to my office where you can be comfortable while I get that information for you?”

When she had the copies in a neat file inside a big envelope, she took them home to study. The checking account was linked to the savings account, and both accounts had been gutted in a quiet, orderly way. Money had been deposited in the checking account from time to time, but the withdrawals were all bigger than the deposits, and the excess came out of the savings account. Phil had written one or two big checks a month for the whole year. All of them were made out to “Cash.” As she looked at them, tears of frustration welled in her eyes so she had to keep wiping them away to see. She whispered over and over, “Jesus, Phil. What were you doing? What the hell were you thinking?”

She went to the computer and ordered credit checks from the three credit bureaus. What she was really trying to do was establish the extent of the financial disaster. Were there credit cards she had not seen, or had Phil borrowed money she didn’t know about? The credit reports were transmitted, and she read them with a chill in her spine, but there seemed to be nothing in them that she had not already discovered. Nothing told her anything about Phil’s state of mind, or what he had been doing the night he was killed.

Emily became more frantic. She began to search the house. She hunted through the office for credit-card slips or receipts, then through stacks of bills that had been paid and filed. She read the last two tax returns, which she had signed when Phil had asked her to, but never bothered to examine. The figures looked normal, but there was no way for her to tell whether they were accurate. At three A.M. she fell asleep on the couch in the den.

The garbage trucks grumbling up the street and lifting cans with their hydraulic claws woke her at six thirty. She put the papers away and assessed the damage. Phil had taken all of their money and either spent it or put it somewhere out of her reach. He didn’t seem to have pushed them farther into debt than they already had been with the mortgage on the house and the payments on Phil’s car. But why would he deplete their savings? Phil had never been a gambler.

It occurred to her that he might have been sick and not told her. That might explain his mysterious absences from work. He could have been seeing doctors. She called Dr. Kalamian, the family internist, told him what had happened, and asked if Phil had been sick.

Dr. Kalamian said, “I don’t think so,” then got his records. “I saw him April 27 for his physical. He was fine. His numbers were all normal, actually quite good for a man his age. There’s very little chance anything was wrong, or it would have shown up in his tests. And if he’d had anything serious, he would have asked me to refer him to a specialist, and he didn’t. Look, Emily, this is probably the most stressful time of your life. Would you like me to prescribe something to help you sleep? Maybe an antidepressant?”