23

As Jane drove, she tried to calm herself enough to watch the rearview mirrors, maneuver through traffic as quickly as possible, and still devote most of her consciousness to the time beyond the next minute or two. She had to get rid of this car. It was stolen, and that meant it had probably been intended to be used for one occasion only and then dumped. The new paint job they had given it and whatever they had done to prevent the license plates from being spotted would have bought her some time, but the rear bumper and trunk were enough of a mess to attract attention. She couldn’t park it and walk off down the street dragging her two duffel bags, and she couldn’t stay in Minneapolis long enough to rent a clean, anonymous new car. Before she did anything else, she had to get out of town. She slipped the pillows out of her clothes and tossed them on the seat beside her, and after a few minutes she began to feel a bit less panicky.

Jane noticed a mailbox on a corner and remembered the letters. She had letters that needed Minneapolis postmarks. She stifled the impulse to go on, then turned into the parking lot of a restaurant, pulled in between two pickup trucks, and opened the trunk. She unlocked the two bags, found the one she would need first, and took out the letters. She forced herself to walk at a normal pace to the mailbox, put the letters inside, then walk back to the parking lot. As she unlocked the car, she heard behind her the sound of an engine accelerating slightly louder than the rest of the traffic. She turned her head in time to see the blue car speeding up the street in the direction she had been going, both men in the front seat staring intently at the road ahead. She felt her shoulders give an involuntary shiver. She got into the driver’s seat, started the car, and drove off the other way.

She headed due south on Route 35, then left the interstate and turned east at Owatonna. When she reached Byron, she turned south on a rural road, then east again to the Rochester Municipal Airport. As she drove along the driveway to the long-term parking lot she studied the cars, the people waiting outside the terminal, and the road behind her. She saw nothing that frightened her, so she decided not to give something frightening time to arrive. She parked the car, walked to the terminal carrying one of her duffel bags and towing the other behind her, and stopped at the rental counter looking as though she had just stepped off a plane.

While she waited for the woman behind the counter to produce the forms and contracts, Jane studied the people around her. There seemed to be no watchers in this part of the airport. It was possible that any watchers here would have been sent to wait for her at the Minneapolis airport, but she had no impulse to go upstairs to the departure gates to test the theory.

Jane used the Katherine Webster credit card and driver’s license to rent the car, then accepted the keys. In ten minutes she was outside again, driving down the street in a new dark green Pontiac with one of the duffel bags on the seat beside her. As soon as she saw a mailbox she mailed the Rochester letters, then drove off again.

Jane tried to appraise her situation. All of her care and her precautions had not prevented something from going wrong. People were looking for her, and they were looking in the right places. The seven days she had allotted to getting the mailing done was no longer a real number. She would have to forget numbers and concentrate on what she had to accomplish. The idea had been to mail each check from the place where it supposedly had been written, and to have all the checks arrive at their destinations within a few days of one another. The bosses would hear of the sudden boom in charitable giving when everyone else did, and probably not suspect what it meant. Even if they figured out that the money was theirs, by then it would be too late for them to do anything. The letters would already be at their destinations, the checks cashed, and the money safely deposited in the accounts of thousands of organizations all over the country.

Now things had changed. She had seen the intensity of the search building since she had flown to the Caribbean. Each time she had been in an airport there had seemed to be more big, tough-looking men standing around watching passengers arrive and depart. Jane had not anticipated that they would be doing anything but scrutinizing people for a resemblance to Rita.

In Sea-Tac airport they had not been looking only for Rita. The first two had been stalking a woman who fit Jane’s general description, and who had been carrying a stack of business letters. The third man had ignored a thousand people and gone after Jane. The Mafia—or some part of it, anyway—knew that the money was being moved by mail, and that the way to stop it was by capturing a dark-haired woman.

Jane tried to imagine how they knew about her, but the possibilities were unlimited, and each one that occurred to her had something about it that didn’t fit. If they had found the house in Santa Fe, and Bernie or Rita had talked, then they would know that the way to end the flow of money would be by using the records in the computers to stop payment on the checks. If they had noticed Henry somehow, then they would have made him block the transactions. They wouldn’t need to find Jane.

She gave it up and tried to think about where she was now, and what she should do. Today was the third day. Jane had finished the mailings on the West Coast, picked up her second load of letters, and gotten out. Henry would be nearly up to Washington, D.C., by now, and then he would have his second set of letters in his bags and start dropping them off, hour by hour, as he moved north along the East Coast.

In most parts of the country, today’s mail had already been delivered, so another burst of donations would hit the banks this afternoon. Whoever was watching transactions for the Mafia would have a lot to think about.

As Jane made her plans, certain decisions were inevitable. From now on, she would have to try very hard to stay away from airports. She would have to make a second, more thorough attempt to change her appearance.

She turned onto Interstate 90, and after seventy miles drove over the Mississippi into La Crosse, Wisconsin. All night she drove through the Wisconsin countryside, stopping only to mail letters—first only a mile from the bridge, then 143 miles farther east at Madison, then 54 miles on at Beloit. Then she drove the last 74 miles to Milwaukee.

Jane stopped at a hotel on West Highland Avenue that she judged to be equidistant from the Convention Center, Marquette University, and the Pabst Brewing Company. She brought her bags into her room, then went downstairs, moved her rental car to the other side of the lot, where she could see it from her window, and went to sleep.

In the morning, Jane bought the local newspapers from the gift shop in the hotel lobby and went back to her room to read them. There were no articles that indicated the sudden growth of generosity in the country had come to the attention of the Sentinel or the Journal. There were no wire-service reports of murders in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or stories about the East Coast that she could interpret as harm coming to Henry Ziegler. The meteorological reports even confirmed that he was having clear weather. It was not until she turned to the want ads that she saw something of interest.

“Public Auto Auction, Rain or Shine,” ran the banner above the huge advertisement. “You Inspect the Vehicles Before the Auction!” As though to prove it, the smaller letters said, “Inspection, 10:00, Auction, Noon.” Jane looked at the long list of car models, years, and prices, then realized that they were simply examples of past bargains: it was an auction, after all. Along the bottom, the ad said, “If you don’t have cash we accept all major credit cards for purchase or as a down payment! EZ financing available. Serving Milwaukee since 1993.”

Jane took a taxi to the address at the bottom of the page. She found herself on the edge of a big lot, where a few dozen customers, nearly all of them men, walked up and down staring at rows of cars of all makes and sizes. A few of the men had pads or pieces of paper on which they made notes. Jane concluded that they were involved in some aspect of the used-car business, because anybody who just wanted a cheap car probably wouldn’t need to write anything down to remember the one he liked.

Jane picked one man out and watched him stalk the rows. His hands were clean, but they had a few stubborn black stains on them that he had not been able to scrub off, and the knuckles of the right hand had an angry red look she decided had come from rapping them on something while turning a wrench in a confined space. She made a point of being nearby each time he looked up from his pad. Finally, he said, “You looking for a car?”

“What else have they got?” said Jane with a smile.

“For yourself?”

“Uh-huh.”

He pointed at a black rectangle that rose higher than the line of cars in the next row. “If you like SUVs, there’s a ‘97 Ford Explorer over there with about eight thousand miles on it. She’s a couple of years old, and the finish has a few scratches, so she won’t go for what she’s worth.” He turned and pointed in the other direction at two gray shapes that Jane could barely see. “If you want to go fancy, they have a couple of Mercedes down there. One of them has a dent that you could fix for two hundred, and it’ll knock a thousand or more off the price.”

“I just need to get from point A to point B. Where do the cars come from?”

He shrugged. “Some get confiscated, some are regular repos.”

Jane said, “I don’t know if I want to end up with a car that belonged to a drug dealer or an axe murderer or something. What if he wants it back?”

The man smiled. “They’re not usually that exciting. Usually it’s just the plain old IRS.”

“Thanks,” she said, and walked off to look at the cars he had pointed out.

When the auction began, Jane joined the gaggle of people who followed the auctioneer along the rows. She watched the bidding while the first few cars were sold. There was a tall, thin man who stood a bit to the side of the auctioneer and watched the bidders. If the auctioneer was getting nowhere, he would turn toward the tall, thin man. He would give a bid, the auctioneer would say, “Sold,” and walk on. Jane decided the man must be the loss stopper, who made sure that nothing went too low.

When the auctioneer reached the Ford Explorer, Jane waited to see the other bidders. There were a few ridiculously low bids, and then her new friend appeared at her shoulder and whispered, “Offer eight.” Jane said, “Eight thousand.” There were bids of eighty-one and eighty-two hundred. Jane waited until the auctioneer turned to the stop-loss man, then yelled, “Nine thousand.” The auctioneer looked at the other bidders, then declared the car sold and walked on.

Before Jane’s friend followed, he whispered, “Good deal.”

Jane grinned, then went off to pay for her car. She gave the man in the little building her Diane Fierstein credit card, received her bill of sale, and drove her car off the lot to register it in the name Diane Fierstein.

The hair was much more complicated than buying a mere car. It took time to find the right salon, then to call for an appointment on short notice. She had to improvise a story about how she was flying to Houston for her sister’s wedding tomorrow, and her regular hairdresser had solemnly promised an appointment, and then gotten into an accident and hurt her hand, and could you please, please.… After her performance, Jane went to a bookstore to leaf through magazines to find the right picture. At four-thirty, Jane was in a shop near the university handing the magazine to the stylist.

Jane knew that the way she felt in the stylist’s chair was idiotic, and found that knowing didn’t help at all. She had always liked her long black hair. It was a peculiar, personal link with who she really was. She liked it because when she looked at it, she could remember her father’s voice telling her it was beautiful, and her mother brushing it, then holding her own auburn hair beside it and smiling. “To think I would ever have a little girl with this thick, gorgeous black hair,” she would say. Jane had kept it long and made the effort to care for it, even in times of her life when she could make no argument for its practicality. Since she and Carey had been together, it had seemed to her to be mingled in some complicated way into their relationship. He had talked about it and run his fingers through it in a way that stood for all of the differences between men and women that made each mysterious and fascinating to the other.

The first long tresses fell on the sheet the stylist had pinned around her neck, and she had to fight the tears—to keep her eyes from closing because that would squeeze them out. But then, after a few minutes, the cutting was over. She still had to endure the hair dye and the wave, but those things had no meaning for her now, because the long black hair was not hers anymore.

Two hours later, she was staring at a woman in the mirror, reminding herself that this woman was the one she had chosen to be. She had short brown hair with a slight curl. The stylist had treated her eyebrows to match the hair, and they made the blue eyes she had inherited from her mother look bigger, but somehow less startling than they had been this morning. She looked like a mildly attractive thirty-year-old who was probably married, probably worked in some kind of office, but lived in the suburbs.

Jane quickly turned away from the mirror. She kept her body turned toward the front of the shop to give the stylist a huge tip while she detested her for her skill, then turned with feigned cheerfulness to go out the back door without looking in the mirrors again. She drove her new Ford Explorer to a big mall, and spent the late afternoon shopping.

In a department store, Jane bought a pair of plain gray soft-sided suitcases that matched the interior of the Explorer, then a supply of makeup, beginning with a foundation that was a shade or two lighter than her skin. Next she selected clothes. When she had been seen in the airport she had been wearing a skirt and jacket she had bought in Beverly Hills and a silk blouse, so she worked to get away from that image. She bought clothes that a married suburban woman might wear while she was doing errands: lots of slacks, comfortable shoes, and oversized tops. She also bought jeans and running shoes, a baseball cap, a pair of designer sunglasses, and a couple of light summer jackets.

She ate dinner in a restaurant in the mall, then drove up the street to a big hardware chain, found her way to the automotive section, and bought big floor mats to match the carpet in the Explorer. She used them to cover her suitcases, and drove to the street behind her hotel and parked.

Before she had left the hotel this morning, she had put up the DO NOT DISTURB sign. On her way out, she had counted the number of doors from the room to the elevator, and established that hers was the fourth from the left end of the building on the third floor. She could see that the curtains were still open, and the dim lamp by the bed was still turned on. The only thing left to check was the car she had rented in Minnesota.

She walked along the street behind the hotel until she found a tall office building with a parking garage beside it. She used the stairs to climb to the fourth floor of the building, then went out the exit door to the upper level of the parking garage, stepped to the edge, and looked down.

The parking lot of the big hotel was filling up for the evening. Most of the curtains on the upper floors of the hotel were closed, but there were lights behind many of them, and some of the small, translucent windows of the bathrooms were lighted. People were beginning the ritual of getting showered and changed for dinner.

Jane studied the people she saw entering and leaving the hotel by the parking lot entrance. It was a weeknight in a city that wasn’t particularly renowned as a tourist attraction, so Jane wasn’t surprised that most of the guests looked as though they were returning from business meetings. Men and women were dressed in suits, and they carried things—briefcases, folders, squarish cases that probably contained computers or samples. A van pulled up and a mixed group of six got out. They were all wearing jeans or casual khaki trousers, but they all had little orange buttons pinned to their chests, and they didn’t divide into male-female pairs when they walked toward the entrance, so this too was business of some kind.

It took Jane another minute to identify the watchers. There were two men in a car at the end of the lot, and two more on the street beyond the parking lot, but she wasn’t sure that what they were watching was her car. She waited to see one of them move, but they waited too.

She walked back into the office building and tried to assess what she had seen. She had run from Minneapolis to Rochester in a stolen car. It would not have been difficult for the ones in Minneapolis to learn that a stolen car had been found in the lot of the Rochester airport, or even to find it themselves. She had hoped that when they did, they would assume she had gone there to board an airplane.

If they knew she had not taken a flight out of Rochester, then they would guess that probably what she had done was rent a car. If a man came to the rental counter—maybe a man pretending to be a cop, and maybe just a man who had a plausible reason and a roll of money—he might have been able to find out what kind of car a particular woman had rented a few hours before. That was simple. But Rochester, Minnesota, was a distance from Milwaukee. Could they have seen her at the airport and followed her all this way? It didn’t seem possible. Even if she had been spectacularly unobservant and not seen them, she had given them plenty of chances to grab her on lonely roads. Somebody in Milwaukee had probably been told to look for a green Pontiac with Minnesota plates, and found it here in the hotel parking lot.

The fact that they were not waiting for her in her room didn’t prove anything. If what they wanted was to capture her, they would not want her in a busy hotel. She descended to the lobby of the office building, found a telephone booth, and studied the phone book. A minute later, she was talking to the local office of Victory Car Rentals.

“I’ve got a problem. I rented a car from your agency at the Rochester, Minnesota, airport, and drove it to Milwaukee. Now it won’t start.”

“What’s it doing?” the man asked.

“What’s it doing?” she repeated. “Nothing.”

“I mean, when you turn the key, does the starter turn over, or does it just sit there?”

“It goes ‘Errr, errr, errr,’ then nothing happens.”

“It’s probably flooded. Turn everything off. Just let it sit for fifteen minutes and try again. It should be fine.”

“I tried that.”

“Oh,” said the man. “Well, then this time, push the pedal all the way down and hold it there while you turn the key.”

Jane sighed loudly. “I’ve done all of those things. I’m running late. I’ve already called a cab to take me to the airport, and I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my plane. I’ve got a client waiting to pick me up at the other end. The car is at the Columbia Hotel on Highland. I’m going to leave the keys at the desk for you.”

The man’s voice sounded forlorn. “There’s probably nothing wrong with the car, ma’am,” he said. “Maybe you’re jumping the gun.”

“Since you work in Milwaukee and the car is from Minnesota, you have no way of knowing, do you? If you want the car, it’s at the Columbia Hotel. My cab just pulled up outside, and I’ve got to go.”

Jane hung up, walked out of the building, and circled two blocks to approach the hotel front entrance from the other direction. She waited up the street until the right moment came. A cab pulled up and let a man out. Jane timed her arrival at the entrance to coincide with the cab’s departure, and fell into step with the man. “Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” she said.

The man, a tall, gangling guy with big feet, a suitcase in one hand, and a useless raincoat draped over his other arm, was startled. He turned toward her quickly, then recovered. “Sure is,” he said.

They reached the door at the same time, and while he was trying to move the suitcase to the other hand, she pulled the door open for him. They walked to the desk together. Jane used the time to search the lobby for watchers, but saw no candidates. The desk clerk looked at both of them attentively and held his hands poised over his computer.

Jane spoke before the man did. “I’m checking out. My name is Stevens. I have two bags in my room ready to go. Can you send somebody up for them?” She held out her key card.

The clerk summoned a bellman, then sent him off with the card while he computed Jane’s bill. She handed him her Lisa Stevens credit card and signed, then said, “I’d like to leave these keys with you. A man from Victory Rentals will be here to pick up my car.”

“Certainly,” said the man. He accepted the keys, slipped a piece of paper onto the ring, and wrote something on it before he put them into a drawer. “Anything else we can do for you?”

“Can you please check to see if anyone has come to the desk to leave a message for me?”

He looked through a small pile of notes. “Nobody’s been here, ma’am.”

“That changes my plan a little,” said Jane. “Can you hold my bags down here for a while? I’ll be back for them later.”

“We’d be happy to,” he said. She could tell he was beginning to dread her next request.

“Thanks,” she said, then hurried out the front door. She took a different route back to her spot on the parking structure. If there had been a watcher inside the hotel, she had not seen him. If he had found her room, he had not done it by pretending to leave a note and following someone upstairs to her door.

Jane returned to her post at the edge of the parking structure and looked down at the hotel lot. The two sets of men were still down there. As the time went by, she reviewed what she had said and done. She had tried to sound rushed, angry, and breathless to the man at the car rental, so with any luck he would stick to his theory that she had simply flooded the carburetor and gotten too flustered to know it.

It was an hour before she saw her expectation confirmed. A Pontiac that was the same year, model, and color as her rental car pulled into the parking lot and stopped near the door. A young man wearing a blue work shirt and jeans got out of the passenger seat and trotted into the hotel. Jane watched the men at the rear of the parking lot. They turned their heads to confer, but she couldn’t tell whether the coincidence meant anything to them. The man at the wheel of the new Pontiac sat with his window open and his elbow on the door, looking gloomy. He was clearly the boss—probably the man she had talked to. The younger man came out, trotted to Jane’s rental car, unlocked it, and sat in the driver’s seat without closing the door. The two watchers conferred again. This time, their heads turned back and forth in jerky movements.

The young man started Jane’s car. He half-stood, stuck his head over the roof, and waved at his boss in the identical Pontiac. The man looked even gloomier, gave a halfhearted wave back, and drove out of the lot. The young man adjusted the driver’s seat in Jane’s car, pulled his long legs in, shut the door, and drove off after him.

The two watchers were confused. They were upset. Jane held her breath and watched them for a few seconds, until they did what she had expected them to do. They started their car and drove up the row after Jane’s car. They could not ignore the possibility that what the young man was doing was bringing the car to Jane. If that wasn’t it, and she no longer needed her car, then she was gone. Maybe she had been gone for hours.

Jane waited and studied the second set of watchers. They either felt less hesitation, or had less time for it. If Jane’s car was gone, and their colleagues had gone off after it, then they were parked in the street watching nothing. They swung away from the curb and went off after their companions.

Jane pivoted and ran. She reached the door, swung it open, and dashed to the elevator. When she emerged on the street she slowed her pace to a purposeful walk, but she arrived at her Explorer quickly, pulled it to the front entrance of the hotel, opened the tailgate, and hurried into the building. The bellman had already recognized her. He had the bags out of the little storeroom beside the door, and he carried them to the Explorer. She handed him a ten-dollar bill, slammed the tailgate, and drove off.

Jane made the first right turn, then a left, and pulled over beside the curb to study her rearview mirror. After three minutes, she was sure that nobody had managed to follow her. She opened her bag, looked at her road map, and headed for the entrance to Interstate 94 south.

For the first time since morning, she began to breathe more easily. She had changed her appearance, traded cars, and later on, when she had gotten tired of driving, she would fold up the distinctive green duffel bags and keep the rest of the letters in the gray suitcases with the carpet over them. The night was just beginning, and Wisconsin wasn’t used up yet. She still had to hit Racine and Kenosha.