“Hi, April.” Emily kept the phone to her ear.
“I’ll just be a minute,” April said. “I want to collect a few personal belongings, and then I’ll be out of your way. Have the police been here yet?”
“Not yet.”
April moved to her desk, and began opening the drawers and setting things on the white blotter. They were spare and pitifuclass="underline" a coffee cup with a flower on it, a little male bee hovering over it and a little female bee hiding behind the stem. Beside it were a plastic dispenser for no-calorie chemical sweeteners, a little box with an emery board and six bottles of nail polish, and a couple of hairbrushes. The final item was a cheap makeup case.
“The cops aren’t going to impound your hairbrush,” Ray said. “If it embarrasses you to leave tampons lying around, then take them. But you don’t want your desk so empty that the cops think you’re hiding something.”
“I’m not!” she snapped.
“Then act like it. Put your stuff back in your desk, sit in your chair, and see what you can bring yourself to do to help us find Phil.”
April gaped at him, then sat down and pulled a file out of the deep lower right-hand drawer of her desk. “This is the log sheet. It’s what everyone has been doing this week.”
Emily’s eyes widened. She spun it around on the desk to read it.
“Christ, you didn’t include him.”
“Of course not. He’s the boss,” April said.
Emily knew that a part of her was grateful to April for not referring to Phil in the past tense. “Have you kept logs of incoming phone calls and appointments?”
“Sure.” April showed Emily a notebook full of lined paper with two columns of names and numbers. Then she produced a bound calendar with a page for each day.
Emily could see that there were lots of calls, lots of people coming into the office. There were also whole days when Phil had been out of the office, and April had put a diagonal line through his square and written No Appointments on it in her neat, unhurried handwriting. Emily pointed to the most recent one. “What’s this? Did he say in advance that he didn’t want you to make any appointments, or just call from somewhere and say `I’m not coming in today’?”
“Both,” April said. “A lot of the time somebody will be here and then leave, so I have to cancel whatever else is up. Sometimes one of the men calls to say he’s in Pomona or Irvine or someplace, and can’t get back.”
Emily held the three men in the corner of her eye while April spoke. She noted that none of them showed surprise at anything April said. Emily said, “You all know what I’m looking for. We need to know what Phil’s working on, and where. He could be stuck somewhere and in trouble.”
The recorded voice on the telephone said again, “Please hold. All our representatives are busy now, but your call is important to us.” Emily hung up, then reached into her purse, found the slip of paper where she had written the number the police officer had given her when she had called before, and dialed it again.
She heard a voice say, “Officer Morris.”
“Officer Morris, this is Emily Kramer. I spoke with you a little while ago about my husband. Well, now I’ve just learned that money has disappeared from his business accounts and our personal bank accounts. I’m afraid someone may have his identification or be holding him or-“
“Mrs. Kramer, wait. I’ve been trying to reach you. I just called your house, and I was about to try the office. I’m afraid we’ve found Mr. Kramer. I’m very sorry to say he’s dead.”
Emily felt thankful that he had not prolonged the revelation and made her listen for a long time, praying that he wasn’t going to say what she had known he would say. “Thank you,” she said.
Then she began to cry.
3
Jerry Hobart and Tim Whitley were stuck on the road to Las Vegas. Interstate 15 was always just the first part of the pleasure, the incredibly clear sky and the bright yellow morning sun striking the pavement ahead of the car and making the tiny diamond particles pressed into the asphalt glitter. It didn’t matter that the diamonds were really bits of broken glass pressed into the hot asphalt by the weight of the cars passing at eighty or ninety. They were like the sequins on the little outfits of the waitresses and the girls in the shows. They weren’t diamonds either, and the glitter in their makeup wasn’t gold dust, and Tim Whitley didn’t care. All that would have done was add to the price. The thought of the women made him eager to get there.
When they had started this morning, the cars on the road to Las Vegas had seemed to skim the pavement, barely touching it. The air was hot and dry and clean. Whitley had sat in the passenger seat and stared out at the high desert, looking at the rocky hills sprouting yuccas and small, paddle-shaped prickly pears, and the vast flatlands with Joshua trees spread out like straggling migrations of men, the speed of the car making them appear to move.
But now it was after four o’clock, and they had been inching along at a walk, then stopping dead for a few minutes, then creeping forward a few feet for nearly seven hours. “Jesus,” he said. “This is the worst.”
Jerry Hobart’s head turned slowly toward him like a tank turret. His eyes were slits. “The day isn’t over yet.”
“If it would just either speed up, or stop,” Whitley complained. “Hell, if it would just stop. Then we could turn off the engine and save the gas for later, and take a decent piss by the side of the road.”
Hobart said nothing. The jaw muscles on the side of his face kept tightening and going slack.
“We’ve been climbing for the past hour or two. Maybe I can find a station with news on it now.” Whitley leaned close to the dashboard in spite of the fact that the speakers were in the door panels, and used a delicate touch to move the vertical line in minute increments from one band to the next. Once he managed to find the faint singing of Spanish voices that reminded him of a party inside a house far away. Once there was bandy music, and he heard an announcer say something about narcotnafccantes. “The whole fucking world is turning into Mexico.”
Hobart said nothing, and the silence bothered Tim. Hobart was older and more experienced, and he was one of those men who had a solitary self-sufficiency, a strength that Tim knew he lacked. Each time Tim talked, he regretted it afterward. He knew that it was unseemly to complain, and there was no use whining to the man who had been at least moving the car forward when the cars ahead of it moved.
But Tim was frustrated. Four days ago they had rented a suite in the Venetian, and then yesterday they had driven to Los Angeles to do some work. They had done their job last night, collected their pay, packed up, and headed back toward Las Vegas in the morning. Hobart’s establishment of an alibi was thoughtfuclass="underline" Check into a good hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, go out every day and every night, and then one night simply go out and drive to Los Angeles for the killing and drive back. Their suite was officially occupied while they were gone, and nobody was keeping track of anything else. Hobart had called the hotel a couple of times. Once he had complained that the water pressure in the shower wasn’t strong enough and asked them to fix it while he was out gambling. Hobart had left their cell phones in the room and made calls to them so there would be a record that they had received calls from a signal repeater that was in Las Vegas within a few minutes of the killing.
But Tim Whitley was feeling increasingly agitated now. They had expected to be back in the hotel by ten or eleven. Now it was after four, and they had not gone a mile in the past hour. Who expected a traffic jam in the middle of the desert? It was the worst jam Whitley had ever seen, and they weren’t even in a city. They were fifty miles from a real town, practically on the edge of Death Valley. The gas gauge looked from here as though the tank was barely above empty. He hoped it was just the angle making the gauge look that way. He wasn’t facing it head-on like Hobart was in the driver’s seat.