The Butcher's Boy (35 page)

She turned on the light. There was no point in trying to go back to sleep.

She had used up the eight hours of unconsciousness she'd purchased with the exhaustion, the disorientation, and the shame of the morning. Now she had to face whatever was left of the night. It was six a.m. in Washington .

Elizabeth dressed. If she was doomed to spend the next few hours 170

thinking about it, then thank God it was Las Vegas .

Downstairs there would be something to eat, and crowds of people still gambling and drinking and living some life that didn't have to include an awareness of what sharpened metal did to flesh and arteries.

She took the elevator to the ground floor and walked through the casino.

There were only a few tables open now, and people were playing blackjack and craps with a slow and leisurely alcoholic intensity in pools of light that swirled with blue-gray wisps of cigarette smoke. Elizabeth couldn't decide whether these were the serious gamblers who stayed on like permanent features of the landscape while the ephemeral hordes of tourists came and went around them, or just a straggle of losers who stayed on because there was nothing better to do than play away their last few chips, no place that offered more. It didn't matter. They were all here together at three o'clock in the morning— Elizabeth too.

She walked past the restaurants. They had closed hours ago. Nobody who was up at this hour wanted beef Wellington or sole bonne femme. The coffee shop was still ablaze with lights, but far off in the corner behind a stockade of upturned chairs a black man was following a vacuum cleaner in its jerky foragings beneath the tables. She picked a table away from the vacuum cleaner.

She was only two tables away from a pair of beefy middle-aged men in gray suits, but at this hour it seemed best. It was inhabited ground, at least, and it made her feel less alone.

The waitress, she decided, had been pretty once. Maybe she was pretty still, but she looked tired and worn. The hairnet didn't help much either. She looked like a man wearing a beret. The waitress walked by on her way to the kitchen and slapped a menu on Elizabeth's table. In a few minutes she was back, standing over Elizabeth's table with her pad in her hand.

Elizabeth said, "I haven't decided yet. What's in a Donna Summer sandwich?"

"Pastrami. Chopped liver. Cole slaw."

It sounded about right, Elizabeth thought. She hadn't eaten in—how long?

A whole day, at least. "I'll take that. And coffee."

The waitress nodded as she wrote. Her face retained its stony efficiency.

In a very low voice she said, "By the way, do yourself a favor."

Elizabeth looked up, and saw that the waitress's eyes were sliding in the direction of the two men at the next table. Elizabeth said, "Favor?" in the same low voice.

The waitress said, "Don't try to sell it in here, honey." She tipped her head so slightly in the direction of the two men that even Elizabeth wasn't sure at first that it meant anything. Then she said, "Vice squad."

Elizabeth's mind sprinted to catch up. Of course. The only women she'd seen in the casino had been a group of four motherly ladies in pantsuits at a blackjack table together, all giggling and silly like the teenagers they'd probably been the last time they'd been out late in a pack like this. She said to the 171

waitress, "Thanks," and the waitress disappeared.

Elizabeth looked at her watch. Almost three thirty. On some other night it might have struck her differently. But now it felt as though she'd been slapped.

Was it her clothes? She wanted to tell someone something that would prove they were all wrong. Had they all been thinking that? But the words that rose to the surface of her mind were, "No, you're wrong. I got good grades, and worked hard!"

It was so peculiar it distracted her from the embarrassment. What had she stumbled on? Grades. Hard work and doing what they told you to do. Good girl. Ever so good. College. Scholarships. Business school. A government job. No mistakes, no flagging of attention, no momentary lapses, and you stayed at the top, the surface. Because just below the top it was dark and there was no way to see what lurked there. Something terrible. Everything terrible. And each step of the way was cumulative, like climbing up a ladder to avoid a flood. It got you farther and farther away from whatever was down there. Humiliation.

The waitress returned with the sandwich and Elizabeth started to eat. It was so thick it strained her jaw to get her mouth around it, but she decided she didn't care. And she didn't care about the calories either. Bad girl. She smiled. So what? Today I'm a failure. A fat failure. Who looks like a prostitute.

She began to feel better almost immediately. In another hour or two Brayer would turn up, and it would be a new day. And Palermo had told her quite a bit, after all. When she finished eating she'd go upstairs and write it all down, so it was ready when Brayer returned. And there was still Edgar Fieldston.

He couldn't stay out of sight forever.

She was aware of a voice beside her. She turned to see that it was one of the men at the next table, leaning his pink face toward her and smiling, the angle of his head making his tight collar cut into his shaven jowl. He said,

"Would you like to join us for dessert?"

Elizabeth kept chewing and shook her head.

The man's smile only widened, his tiny white teeth like a string of pearls.

"Oh, come on. I'll buy."

Elizabeth swallowed, then said, "Shut up and go away. I'm thinking."

He knelt over Fieldston's body and placed the towels underneath the head. It wasn't bleeding much, considering. In a little while it would stop, when the body cooled. Meanwhile, there was plenty to do.

The briefcase was exactly as Fieldston had said. He'd never seen so much money, he thought. Hardly anybody had. What had he said? Four million. Must be all thousand dollar bills. So maybe he hadn't been running. He could hardly have expected to spend those bills without being noticed, and without Balacontano's organization to launder them. So what the hell was he doing? All right, take him at his word. He was planning to pay Balacontano and then disappear, with Orloff's checkbook as the threat that would convince Bala to leave him alone. Which meant the bookkeeping at FGE was perfect unless there 172

was a key. But that was practically impossible. How could it be that good? The fool. Balacontano would have helped him disappear all right.

He made a quick search of the house. Fieldston apparently hadn't touched anything in the other rooms. He must have known Orloff well. Certainly Fieldston wasn't smart enough to have found the room without knowing, not if he'd been stupid enough to think he could blackmail Carl Bala.

He went back to the body and searched the pockets. There were no keys.

He thought about it. Fieldston must have taken a cab from somewhere or walked. Probably the airport. And he hadn't planned to go home, ever again, because he no longer even had a key to his own house. And he hadn't checked into a hotel, he had no hotel key. Fieldston had been frightened enough to make sure nobody at all knew he was in Las Vegas .

There was a lot of work to do, so he had to move quickly. No mistakes, nothing he'd forgotten about that he had to come back later to correct. It all had to happen between now and dawn. He looked at his watch. Three thirty. Two good, safe hours and then another one before the people who worked the day shift started to get up. He went outside and drove his car into Orloff's driveway with the lights off.

He went back into the house and looked around for something to help.

Orloff's desk chair was about right and it had wheels. He got down on his knees, put his hands under Fieldston's shoulders, and hoisted him into the chair. Then he went to the bathroom and took two more large bath towels from the linen cupboard. Whatever else they'd done, he was sure they wouldn't have counted towels. He wrapped one of the towels around the upper part of the body and threw the other in Fieldston's lap. Then he pulled the office chair through the house to the door. He took the right arm and the body slumped forward onto his shoulders. He staggered with it to the car and shrugged it into the trunk. He arranged the towels as well as he could to keep the blood from escaping.

Then he returned to the house. He moved the desk chair back to Orloff's office, shuffling his feet on the carpet to remove the imprint of the wheels. He took a final look to see that everything appeared undisturbed, then put the wallet in the briefcase and went out. At the car he remembered. How had Fieldston gotten in? Fieldston hadn't had a key. He returned to the house and looked at each of the windows. It was the window to the guest bedroom, but Fieldston had been careful. There were no scuff marks on the sill, and the lock wasn't damaged, just scratched minutely. He took a last look around before he left the house. He pressed down on the trunk of his car just enough so the latch caught and drove off down the street. He took a labyrinthine route to reach the freeway without going down the Strip. As he felt the car accelerate onto the freeway, he had an impulse to laugh. By the time the sun came up he'd be in Kingman, Arizona, and maybe Flagstaff by the time the stores opened up. No telling how far a man might go after he'd been shot in the head.

The books he selected were paperbacks. In the supermarket he bought 173

three, all of which said bestseller on their covers. In the bookstore he picked classics—books he remembered being forced to read in school. In the drugstore he found two that claimed to be something called novelizations of movies. When he had enough, he sat in the parking lot to do the packing: one bill per page. It struck him as funny that the first of the paperbacks was worth over two hundred thousand dollars. It took more than an hour, but he couldn't afford to rush it. He was good at making packages, at tying and taping and arranging, and this was one package he wanted to make perfect.

By the time the post office opened he was there to watch the man unlock the doors. He sent the package fourth class, special book rate. It was a strange sensation to see the postman at the counter toss the package into the bin with a dozen others, all practically indistinguishable from one another. At that moment he knew there was no reason to think about it anymore. It was gone from his possession forever, and there was no way he could ever get it back. It was more money than he ever hoped to have, more than some towns were worth, probably. And now it was gone. He didn't linger at the counter to think about it.

It had all been decided hours ago, while he drove through the cold air of the dark desert. It was the only way.

The sun was rising in the sky and he had to make every hour into miles. If he waited too long the bags of ice he'd bought would start to melt, and the seals on at least some of the bags would be defective. He couldn't afford to have water dripping from the trunk as he drove. If he kept at it he might make five hundred miles before he needed to change the ice, because the air rushing by would cool the surface of the car just as it cooled the engine. It was going to be a long time before he slept again, he thought. But there'd be plenty of time to sleep later on—twenty hours a day for the rest of his life, if he felt like it. All he had to do now was deliver Edgar. He said aloud, "Keep cool, Edgar. It won't be long now."

It was shortly after noon when he began to hear the sloshing sounds.

Whenever he slowed down or accelerated there was a faint noise of water moving about in the trunk. By one o'clock he began to see drips of water hitting the pavement in his rearview mirror whenever the car gained speed too abruptly.

When he stopped in Flagstaff to fill the gas tank he put his hand on the trunk and knew that his theory of air cooling had been wrong. The surface of the trunk was as hot as the metal fixtures on the gas pump. As he drove off he said,

"Edgar, we've got problems. You're getting parboiled in there. Afraid we've got to make another arrangement."

It was in the Sears store that he bought the hacksaw and the shovel and the ice chest. He had to search another fifteen minutes before he found the ranchers' supply store. When he found it he shopped carefully for the lime, reading the labels on the big fifty-pound bags: calcium oxide—95 percent; magnesia—2 percent; total silica, alumina, iron—2 percent. Water content no more than 1 percent guaranteed.

He moved the bags to the car in a cart, and was back on the road again.

The bags of Blue Ice he bought at a liquor store in Winslow, because it was the first place he passed through that looked as though they might sell it already frozen.

It was mid-afternoon now and so hot that the endless, straight highway danced and quivered. Off in the distance dust devils swirled crazily and dissolved, the only signs of movement. He took Route 77 through Snowflake and Show Low, and then swung east again through Springerville and into New Mexico on Route 60. It was already night before he found the place he was looking for between Quemado and Magdalena, about fifty miles past the Continental Divide. It was a back road not shown on the map, but he could see it went somewhere. It had been over an hour since he'd seen another car, and the local ranchers would be shutting themselves in for the night. He turned off on a dirt road that wound through rocky hillocks and barrows, and kept going until he found a spot that suited him. He parked the car on the side of the road and got out.

Looking around and studying the place, he saw nothing but the gigantic, bright expanse of the sky, the stars incredibly clear and close above his head. He took the shovel and set off up the side of the hill. It was pretty country, he decided, even at night—bigger and emptier and cleaner than the land the main routes passed through. And if he worked steadily he could probably still make Amarillo by the time the sun came up.

The first half of the day Elizabeth had spent dreading the return of John Brayer.

It was the fact that he must have been in Washington when he found out about Palermo that bothered her. In the first place, he would probably already have set up the appointment with the Attorney General's office before he found out. That meant he'd have to explain to them why he no longer needed to see them. But more than that she hated the idea that he would be there when the anger and disgust settled on him. He'd be right there in the office where they handled personnel cases, where Elizabeth ’s file was kept.