Irritated, Widdler walked toward the door, shaking her head, jabbing her finger at the closed sign. The woman held up a file folder, then pressed it to the glass and jabbed her own finger at it. Making an even deeper frown look, Widdler put her nose next to the glass and peered at the tab on the file folder. It said, in a spidery hand, “Armstrong quilts.”
The woman on the other side shouted, loud enough to be heard through the door, “I'm Lucy Coombs. I'm Marilyn Coombs's daughter. Open the door.”
Widdler thought, “Shit,” then thought, “Elegance.” What is this? She threw the lock, opened the door a crack.
“I'm closed.”
“Are you Jane Widdler?”
Widdler thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Yes.”
The words came tumbling out of the woman's mouth, a rehearsed spieclass="underline" “My mother's house has been attached by the Walker and now by the Milwaukee museum. They say the Armstrong quilts are fakes and they want their money back and that it was all a big tax fraud. I have her file. There's a letter in it and there's a note that says you and your husband were Cannon Associates and that you got most of the money. Mom's house was worth two hundred thousand dollars and I'm supposed to be the heir and now I'm not going to get anything. I'll sell you the original file for two hundred thousand dollars, or I'm going to take it to the police. The museums can get the money back from you, not from me.”
The woman sounded crazy-angry but the part about Cannon and the Armstrongs wasn't crazy.
“Wait-wait-wait,” said Widdler, opening the door another inch.
“I'm not going to talk to you here. I'm afraid of you and I'm afraid the police are tapping your telephones. They tap everything now, everything, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI. I brought this copy of the file and the letter and inside there's a telephone number where you can call me at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning.
It's at a Wal-Mart and if you don't call me, you won't be able to find me and I'll go to the police.”
The woman thrust the file through the door and Widdler took it, as much to keep it from falling to the floor, as anything, and Widdler said, “Wait-wait-wait” but the woman went running off through the parking lot, vaulted into the junkiest car that had ever been parked at the store, a battered Chevy that looked as though it had been painted yellow with a brush, with rust holes in the back fender. The woman started it, a throaty rumble, and sped away.
Jane looked at the file. “What?”
At ten o'clock the next morning, Jane Widdler got self-consciously into her Audi and drove slowly away from her house, watching everything. Looking for other cars, for the same cars, for cars that were driving too slow, for parked cars with men in them. She would be headed, eventually, for the Wal-Mart.
The night before, given the phone number by Coombs, she'd found the Wal-Mart in a cross-reference website. She'd also found Coombs's address. She'd sat and thought about it for a while, and then she'd driven slowly, carefully, watchfully out to scout the Wal-Mart, where she found a block of three pay phones on the wall inside the entrance. One showed the number given her by Coombs. She'd noted the number of all three, then had driven another circuitous route out to the interstate, and then across town to Coombs's house.
She considered the possibility of shooting the woman at her own door; but then, what about the file? Would she have time to find it? Were there other people in the house? Too much uncertainty. She'd gone home-the police had finished their search-and had drunk most of a bottle of wine.
In the morning, at ten o'clock, she started out, a feeling of climax sitting on her shoulders.
She drove six blocks, watching her back, then hooked into the jumble of narrow streets to the north, on backstreets, long narrow lanes, into dead ends, where she turned and came back out, looking at her tail. In ten minutes, she'd seen precisely nothing…
Lucas was in his car three blocks away, Flowers bringing up the rear, Jenkins and Shrake on the flanks. Overhead-way overhead- Jerrod was in a Highway Patrol helicopter, tracking Widdler with glasses. Del was with Coombs.
They tracked her for a half mile, out to the interstate, away from the Wal-Mart, into a Best Buy. She disappeared into the store.
“What do we do?” Flowers called.
“Shrake? Jenkins?” Lucas called. “Can one of you go in?”
“Got it,” Shrake said.
But Shrake had been a block away and almost got clipped by a cell-phone user when he tried to make an illegal turn. The parking lot was jammed and he didn't want to dump the car at the door; she might spot it. By the time he got parked, and got out and crossed the lot without running, and got through the front door, he was too late.
She was walking directly toward him, toward the exit. He continued toward the new-release movie rack, and when she'd gone out, he called, “She's out, she's out…”
“Got her,” Lucas said, watching from across the street. “What'd she do in there?”
“Don't know. Want me to ask around?”
Lucas thought, then said, “Ah… fuck it. Catch up with us. She's back in her car.”
“She's heading for the Wal-Mart,” Jerrold called five minutes later. “Tell Del to put Coombs in the store.”
Lucas and his group tracked her right into the Wal-Mart parking lot, past the main entrance, to the Garden Shop. “She's going in the back side, through the Garden Shop,” Lucas called to Del.
“I'm heading that way… I'm heading that way,” Del called back. Then “I got her,” and “Lucy is headed for the phones.”
Widdler watched Coombs from halfway across the store. Watched her for three or four minutes, looking for anybody who might be a cop. Coombs was wearing another muumuu, a blue one this time. She was a heavy woman, big gut, chunky around the hips, a potato-eating prole, a leftover hippie. She stood just inside the entrance, looking at the bank of three yellow pay phones.
Widdler, in Women's Clothing, watched for another minute. Nothing moving. She saw Coombs looking at her watch. If Davenport was behind this, Widdler thought, he could have tapped the phone, but they wouldn't have let Coombs come in her by herself, would they? Widdler took the cell phone out of her pocket and dialed. She watched Coombs pick up the pay phone. Coombs said, “Hello,” and Widdler said, “Hang up, and go two phones down. I'll call you on that one in two seconds.”
Coombs hung up the phone, moved down two. Stared at the phone-didn't call anyone, didn't look at anyone. Widdler punched in the number. Coombs answered and Widdler said, “I don't have two hundred thousand dollars. I could get eighty thousand now and pay you the rest later, but I want the original of the letter.”
“Why would you pay me the rest later?” Coombs asked. “If I didn't have the letter?”
“Because you could cause me a lot of trouble by talking to the police, even without the original,” Widdler said. “You'd be in trouble yourself, for destroying evidence, but I don't know how crazy you are. I'd pay you, all right, but I don't have the cash now.”
“I don't know,” Coombs said.
Widdler: “You don't have any time to think about it. Say yes or say no, or I'll hang up.”
“Ah, God. You'd pay me?”
Coombs sounded exactly like a stoned-out hippie, hoping against all expectation that something good might happen to her. “Yes. Of course. I've already started getting the money together.”
“All right,” Coombs said. “But I'll go to the cops if you don't pay me the rest…”
“Just tell me what you want to do.”
“Here's what I've worked out,” Coombs said. “I don't trust you and I want to look at the money. So I want to do it in a semipublic place where I can scream for help if you try to hurt me, but where we'll have a little privacy. I'll scream, I really will.”