Chapter 15 #3
She said, “What did you actually do?”
“A rich man named Barton Stillivant hired me to be around and do a lot of the things that maybe a rich guy doesn’t have time to do, and sometimes the things he just doesn’t want to do.
I arranged his travel and went with him.
I made sure his suitcases got picked up and toted to customs and loaded into the cab and taken to his hotel suite.
I set up dinner parties for him. I maintained the list of people he gave presents to, picked out the gifts, sent or delivered them or whatever.
Sometimes I would drive a woman friend of his home from a date so he could drink as much as he wanted without getting in trouble.
After a couple years I was representing him at meetings with his brokers and accountants and so on. The job was whatever he wanted done.”
Magda listened and waited. She knew that this was a delicate conversation. She had to learn as much as she could, and the way to do that was to let this man talk about his problems, no matter how impatient she was to learn about the woman he called Miss Whitefield.
“This went on for nearly ten years. He paid me well, and after a while he didn’t want to bother with paying bills, so part of my job was paying myself.
He seemed to trust me, but there were boundaries.
Secrets. I never really knew what he was making money on, or how he got so rich.
He would just say ‘I buy bulk commodities cheap in one place and sell them in other places for more.’ ”
“You haven’t said why he wants you dead.”
“It was true that he bought and sold things in bulk, so he could pay less for a unit, and then sell them for more. But when I saw the bookkeeping, it was all order numbers, sometimes addresses and sometimes just a city, or a shipping company, but it was never a person’s name or a clear product name.
They were ‘units’ like ‘two hundred thousand units’ or just pages and pages of model numbers or serial numbers.
If he went to examine the merchandise, I never went with him or saw him do it. ”
“What changed?”
“One day I saw a television news report of a big arrest in Mexico, and I recognized three of the people they were dragging off to jail. They had been in our Chicago living room a week before. When I realized that they were caught selling military weapons in Mexico, I knew that the man they’d bought them from was my boss, Bart Stillivant.
I waited two weeks and then went to him and quit.
I told him I had a sister in Phoenix who had a degenerative disease and needed my help.
I was going to go take care of her. He acted as though he believed me. ”
“Did you actually expect him to? Who would believe a healthy man would quit a good job to go hold a relative’s hand while she waited to die?”
“I did think he would. The truth was that I already had done that, about twelve years earlier. It was my mother, but it was the same story. And I really did go to Phoenix. If he had any doubts, he could call me.”
“How did you learn that you were in danger?”
“Men came for me in the middle of the night in Phoenix. They tied my hands, pulled a bag over my head, and dragged me out to a van and drove into the desert. They went off-road some distance, and I knew they were taking me out there to kill me and bury my body. But at one point, they hit a rock. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard it and I felt it.
I could smell the leaking gasoline, and one of the men had hit his head when the van jerked to the side, and he was half-conscious and bleeding.
When they dragged him out, I could hear them talking about how bad it was.
I had been working on freeing my hands, and I knew this was my last chance, I was desperate, and finally succeeded.
I pulled off the hood, went out the back door of the van, and ran into the darkness.
I ran for a couple of miles, and then walked, looking for lights that would show me where the road was. ”
“You were lucky they didn’t just walk in and kill you in your apartment,” Magda said. “The only thing your boss could possibly think was that you were making a deal with the authorities to sell him out so you wouldn’t be blamed for any of the things he was doing.”
“Yes.”
She thought for a moment. “You can sleep in this room tonight, and we’ll talk again in the morning.”
She climbed the stairs to the second floor and stepped into the bedroom where Daniil and Mikhail were in bed. She closed the door and whispered, “Are you awake?”
“Yes.” They both started to get up.
“Don’t get up now,” she said. “Just listen. A man came to the door. Someone sent him here looking for the woman we want. He thinks I’m her.
We’re going to use him, so I don’t want one of you to stumble across him and kill him.
I’ll tell the others.” She went to the other bedroom and repeated the warning to Maxim and Dmitri.
Then she went to the linen closet in the upstairs hallway, found a pillow and a blanket, and brought them downstairs, but found Brian Finlay was already asleep, so she left them by the couch.
She went out the kitchen door, walked to the garage, and entered.
By the light of her phone, she saw that the car he had parked there was a modest-looking black Honda sedan with Illinois license plates.
He had a laundry bag and a blanket in the back seat.
She tried the driver’s side door so the interior lights would go on.
It opened. She got in and began her search with the glove compartment.
The car registration confirmed his name was Brian Finlay and showed an address in Chicago.
She kept looking in the glove compartment and found a vinyl pouch with the car manual and three smaller booklets about the car in it.
She took them out, flipped through them, and noticed a yellow sheet that had the name of a car dealer in Chicago printed on the top, and had been used as a bookmark for a page about the car’s lighting system.
She opened the other door and looked in the back seat.
She lay on her side and reached under each of the front seats.
She tugged on each section of the upholstery, feeling for any part that might move.
She felt the laundry bag he seemed to have been using as a pillow to sleep in the back seat, found the outer parts soft, then reached down into the middle and found the gun.
Magda felt more relieved than anything else.
It made her think Finlay genuinely thought he was in danger of being killed.
He had been sleeping in his car in this garage, and he’d made sure that at any moment he could put his hand on a gun.
She considered the implications. The first was that if he was thinking that way, he’d probably left the car keys somewhere close to the driver’s seat.
She sat in the front again. She turned down the two sunshades, then stuck her fingers under the mirrors attached to them.
Then she realized that she had not had to think of the key as a key.
It was probably a fob. She looked beside the steering wheel and saw that there was a starter button, not a key slot.
All that was necessary was that the fob be somewhere inside the car, and it would start.
She looked in the drink holders, then under the seat, then felt around beneath the dash for tape.
Then she sat in the back seat and reached into the pocket behind the driver’s seat, and then the one behind the passenger seat, and there it was.
It was there because it was an easy place to reach from the driver’s seat.
She took the gun and the key fob, closed the car quietly, and went back to the house.
She hid the gun in a covered pan in one of the lower kitchen cupboards and the fob in a cracker box, and then went deeper into the house.
Magda used her phone to find the telephone number and address of Bart Stillivant and copied them in her phone’s address book. Then she lay down on the couch in the den and went to sleep.