He sat heavily behind the desk and shook his head. “Never had that happen to me before. Never.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So don’t be sorry. How could you know? When was this taken?” He was studying the picture carefully.
“Last April.”
“Where is he now?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“I think why I threw up, we were always a close family, me and my two sisters. This man isn’t any Evan Lawrence. His name is Jerry Tobin. Everybody working here at the time liked him. That was five years ago. And I have thought about the whole thing ten thousand times. Doris, she was my kid sister, she fell head over heels. What can you do? I didn’t want her marrying any con artist like Jerry Tobin. He was very slick. He could really close a sale. Hell, Dorrie hadn’t turned twenty-one even. But she got her money when she was eighteen. We all did. That was the way Poppa’s will worked. I told her that she was going to have to wait a year and see if she still loved Jerry enough to marry him. She was furious. She didn’t want to wait. She was pretty. And she wasn’t thinking straight because good old Jerry Tobin had gotten into her pants, and she couldn’t get enough of it. They called from the bank and said they had tried to keep her from cleaning out her accounts, but they had no legal way to stop her. She didn’t come back home; not ever again. She was dead by evening of the next day. Down near Kerrville, just past a little town named Ingram, on a back road. It was her car, her white Buick. She was driving. They missed a turn and went off the road and hit a live oak a kind of glancing blow. It threw him clear when the car rolled. They think she was knocked out. They couldn’t tell because the car burned. It burned her all to hell. They had to identify her from dental work to be sure. People saw the fire and stopped. Jerry Tobin was face down on a stony bank, all scuffed up. He didn’t come to until he was in the ambulance. He came to the funeral service here in Dallas. He cried like a baby. He still had some small bandages on. But she was dead. Where was the money? It had burned up with her and her luggage and clothes and car, and his luggage and clothes. Too bad. All gone.”
“Much?”
“Depends on who is counting. Two hundred and twenty something thousand. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy the story. I drove way down there and looked at where it happened. I looked at what was left of the car. There was a police investigation. They cleared him. Dorrie’d had a couple of minor accidents and a whole bundle of moving vehicle violations. She always drove too fast. He knew that. Everything fitted together. I hired private investigators. I wanted them to find him loaded with money. I wanted to get the whole thing opened up. But all of a sudden he just took off. He left a note on my desk. There are too many sad memories around here, Marty. I can’t take it any longer. Good-by and good luck.”
He tried to smile.
“I thought I was past being really hurt about it and then I saw that face, that goddamn smirk of his, and it got to me. Why do you want to find him?”
“Maybe the same kind of thing. A little bigger stake. And more risk.”
“How much bigger?”
“Half again.”
He whistled without making a sound. “Maybe there’s some law about using a false name.”
“And maybe he had it legally changed. If I can’t locate him, what difference does it make?”
“She was so alive! Look, if he did it twice, then he killed them both.”
“Just an assumption, Marty.”
“You sound like some kind of lawyer. You know what I did? When they weren’t finding out anything about him-those investigators I was paying-I asked one of them if he knew of a good safe way to find somebody who’d be willing to kill Tobin. It made the investigator very nervous. He didn’t seem to want to ask around. I was going to try some other way of finding somebody when all of a sudden Tobin took off. I am not a violent-type guy, as you can probably guess, McGee. But she was my kid sister, and that son of a bitch came into her life and ended it. Maybe it happened just like he said. So what? He was still to blame, wasn’t he? I’m not hurting for money. I could hire the best there is.” He tried to force a laugh, but his eyes filled with tears and he hopped up and stared out his window. “We were always such a close family,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Did you try to trace him?”
“For a while. It’s a big country. Even back then all the rules were beginning to break down. You know, about new identities. People drifting all over, calling themselves anything at all, buying new names with driving licenses and passports and the whole thing. They say you can trace people through social security numbers. If a person stayed put, maybe you could. But a drifter can invent a new number for every job he has. I traced down the number Jerry gave when we hired him. It took months for the report to come back through the local office. It was a number issued to a woman with an Italian name.”
“Was he a good salesman?”
“I don’t know how he’d have done in the market we got now, but five-six years ago he was a killer. He could close a deal while the next guy would just be getting around to showing the bathrooms. I would say he cleared somewhere in the low six figures in the time he was here.”
“Would you know about him getting ripped off by somebody with a tax-shelter scam?”
“Jerry? Ripped off? Not likely.”
“Buying a bunch of Bibles to donate them later to schools and churches for four times what he paid?”
“No way at all. He had a good business head. Very very sharp. I’ve got some pretty good moves myself. But I think he could have come up with better ones. I kept telling him I should open a branch of Eagle in Fort Worth and he could run it, but he didn’t want any part of it. He said he was lazy. I don’t think so. I think it was something about the exposure, about attracting too much attention to himself.”
“Did he get into any kind of trouble while he worked for you?”
“Not money trouble. And not really what you’d call trouble. We were peddling a development called Crestwinds, and we put together a model house with the contractor and some decorators. During open house the salesmen had to take turns manning the place. So they had keys. One of our saleswomen went back after hours one night looking for a gold earring she could have lost there, and she found Jerry in the sack with the wife of the contractor. It was a second wife, a young one. That was before he took aim at my sister Doris. The woman that found them raised hell, and I told Jerry to find a better place for his fun and games. It didn’t happen again, at least that I know of.”
Finally there was no more information to be gained. He was dispirited, quite unlike the mood he’d been in when I arrived.
As I was getting ready to leave he gave me his card. “Look, stay in touch, Trav. You get a line on him and need any kind of help at all, phone me. Okay? A promise?”
“Sure.”
“What is inside the head of a man like that? I mean, assuming he killed Doris or any other girl, what’s the point?”
“I read somewhere that the average bank robbery nets eighteen hundred dollars. That could have something to do with it.”
“But he couldn’t have been hurting for money. He made good money. He didn’t have a lot of expensive habits.”
His last question was, “Where do you go from here?”
“When did the accident happen?”
It took him a moment to count it out. “In May. A Saturday, the twenty-first. Five years and two months ago.”
“Did the press cover it?”
“Yes. On Monday morning. It didn’t make the Sunday papers.”
“So from here I go and look up the report.”
“I came across the clippings a year or so ago and wondered why I was saving them. I tossed them out.”
Eleven
WEDNESDAY THE twenty-first of July in Naples was one of those rare mousse-mist days of summer, a heavy overcast, no wind, and an invasion of almost invisible bugs from the swamps and inlets, driving the tourists off the beach in front of the Eden Beach Hotel and its bungalows, sending them into the lounges for listless sessions of Scrabble or backgammon or into their rooms for the dubious diversion of daytime television.