Suspended Sentences

She found the list in her handbag and studied it. She never remembered to do things unless she wrote them down. Severn kidded her about it.

She’d miss him desperately in his absence for the next few days; but in a way she was grateful for it. She’d be able to get everything done and she wouldn’t have to tell lies to Severn to explain why she was going to be out so much this week.

A few of the items had already been checked off — she’d taken care of them ten days ago during Severn’s last business trip out of town; but there was still a great deal to do.

1.   Toy gun. Must look real. Revolver type.

2.   Suitcases (2).

3.   Clothes. Ned’s suit size 44 short. Shirts 16 neck, 33 sleeve. Waist 38, inseam29. Shoes 10 1/2-C. Socks, shorts, etc. Remember Ned prefers brown, doesn’t like blue.

4.   Car. Can be old but must run well.

5.   Make airline reservation: San Diego to Mexico City for late Monday afternoon Feb. 18th, in name of Arnold Creber.

7.   Sunglasses. Reflector Type.

8.   Blond wig, man’s. Ned’s bat size is 7 1/4.

9.   Ned arrives LAX Feb 16th, 730p.m. Take suitcases, etc. Leave envelope at Delta information desk.

10.   Make reservation in Creber name at a Burbank motel, Feb. 16th & 17th.

She’d taken care of all the easy things on the list and left the difficult ones for last. Tomorrow on the lunch hour she’d take care of the toy gun. Then Thursday she’d have to take a sick day and visit the used-Car lots.

She hated all of it. It was complicity — she’d be a criminal. But it was the price Ned had exacted from her. The insurance hadn’t come anywhere near covering all the expenses of Mom’s last illness and Ned had been despicably, and typically, cold-hearted about it. “Let her die and get it over with. Pull the plug — let her go.”

“Ned!” She’d been astonished, shocked. “She’s your mother too, you know.”

“She’s a dying old woman. Making a few doctors rich won’t change that.” Then he’d given her that quick easy selfish smile. “I’ll make you a deal, sister. You want to lavish money on the old woman, fine. I’ll let you have the money. But I want a quid pro quo. You’ve got to do a few things for me. Now get out your notebook and let’s see you make one of those lists of yours. First I’m going to want a toy gun…”

That had been a year ago, at the prison in Atlanta. She’d only visited him once more after that, to tell him about the funeral and ask him when he expected to be released on parole. She’d left quickly, unable to face his indifference to Mom’s death.

Now he was getting out, just as he’d pla

Thurston found a parking space just off McDonough Boulevard and walked to the entrance gate. The long gray building had a forbidding institutional massiveness. Only a discreet plaque identified it: Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. The “Big A.”

Thurston was expected. His credentials got him in. A guard escorted him to a small outer office where he waited a few minutes with a magazine before he was admitted to the Deputy Warden’s sanctum.

The Deputy Warden was a large man with a bushy sand-colored mustache and a beer gut and the plaid-shirt look of Good Ole Boy who spent his free days hunting with coon hounds and swapping lies in roadhouse taverns.

“Well, now, Mr. Thurston, they didn’t tell me exactly what you want down here but we be happy to oblige you if we can. Now you represent the insurance company, that right?” He pronounced “right” as if it were “rat” and put heavy emphasis on the first syllable of “insurance.”

Thurston said, “I work for a private-investigation company. But we’re under contract to the insurance people, yes. Indirectly I work for the insurance company. We’re still hoping to recover the bonds that Marks stole.”

“I can see where they might be just a little bit interested in something like that. They had to pay off the claim in full, I expect?”

“In full,” Thurston agreed drily. “We didn’t recover any of it.”

“But I thought Marks confessed?”

“He did.”

The Deputy Warden glanced through a stapled sheaf of papers — possibly the file on Edward “Ned” Marks. “They were bearer bonds, I see. No registered owners, no signatures. Even if you get ’em back, how’re you fixin’ to identify them?”

“They’ve got serial numbers.”

“Well,” the Deputy Warden said, “he’s behaved himself here, kept mostly out of trouble, served easy time. Stays out of most folks’ way. I haven’t had much contact with him. No occasion to. The ones I see are mostly the troublemakers. So there’s not a whole lot I can tell you about him.”

The Deputy Warden cocked his head over on one side. “You know, that’s a pretty fair rate of pay — seven hundred thousand dollars for twenty-eight months easy time. Works out to about twenty-five thousand a month, doesn’t it. Good pay, yessirreebob. If he gets to keep it.” The eyes narrowed into a shrewd smile. “You’re fixin’ to see he doesn’t get to keep it.”

Thurston said, “Well, I’m fixing to try. He’s due for release tomorrow morning. I’d appreciate it if you’d point him out to me but not let him see me. I’ve seen his photographs But they’re a few years old and I’d rather have him identified for me in the flesh, just so there’s no possibility of a mistake.”

“And then you aim to shadow him when he leaves here, that it?”

“Every step of the way.”

Thurston sat in the car in a No Parking zone —“Violators will be towed away”— with art angle of view on the Big A. It looked rather like the Reichstag from this angle — the old one, he thought; the one Hitler had burned down in ’33. Thurston took an interest in history, particularly the kind that was told photographically. He had a growing collection of rare old plates — even a few Matthew Brady originals. It was the sort of thing you did when you lived alone, and Thurston preferred to live alone.

He wasn’t antisocial. But he’d learned there wasn’t anybody whose face he wanted to look at every night and every morning — or at least he’d thought so until recently.

There was one daughter, now thirteen, the souvenir of his youthful romantic illusion, but she was confined to a home for the severely retarded. She didn’t recognize him on his infrequent visits, so he didn’t feel he had any real ties. He read books, collected his photographic history, played poker quite often, enjoyed his own simple cooking, worked out three times a week in a health club, dated several women most of whom were divorcees; but lately he’d been seeing more of one woman than of the others.

He enjoyed most of all his work. Thurston had been a licensed investigator ever since he’d been discharged from the Military Police in 1968.

He had specialized in insurance cases for seven years now; he had a record of recoveries that no other agent in the company could match, and he took pride in it.

The Ned Marks case had been a special challenge from the begi

Marks had been neither surprised nor chagrined when they’d arrested him two days after the bearer bonds had disappeared from the vault of the Sherman Oaks bank where he’d worked for eight months as a junior mortgage officer.

Thurston had inherited a thorough dossier on Marks and he’d committed the salient references to memory. It was a personal history of dreary familiarity to Thurston, who had read a thousand such dossiers and long since lost his capacity for surprise.