Dance for the Dead by Thomas Perry

for many minutes if the driver was
pushing to make time, and sometimes moving out into the other lanes
to slither between drifting cars where the truck wasn’t nimble
enough to navigate. Always she stayed within a few miles an hour of
the rest of the traffic to keep from tempting the state police, but
almost always she was the one who was passing. It was difficult to
study and recognize the headlights coming up from behind, so she kept
them back there. Now and then she would see one of the exceptions
coming up fast in the rearview mirror, and she would evacuate the
lane he seemed to prefer and find a space in the center, where she
could move to either side if he swerved toward her, and waited there
until he had gone on his way.
    “Why aren’t you
saying anything?” asked Mary Perkins.
    “I’m waiting to hear
your story.”
    “I told you.”
    “You told me a lot of
stuff about how you used to steal money. You didn’t tell me
anything about yourself. I thought you were just warming up to it.”
    “What do you want to
know?”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Mary Perkins,” she
answered, the annoyance making her voice strain. “I told you
that in the ladies’ room in Los Angeles.”
    “Okay,” said Jane
quietly. She drove in silence for a long time.
    “Oh,” said Mary
Perkins brightly. “You mean the one I was born with. I haven’t
used it in years, so it sounds strange when I say it: Lily Smith.”
    “What made you pick Mary
Perkins?”
    “Well, I was in a business
where it didn’t seem to be a good idea to use the name on my
birth certificate. Smith is okay, but it sounds like an alias.
Perkins is the kind of name that makes the mark think good thoughts.
Mary Perkins is Mary Poppins, with ‘perk,’ which is peppy
and cheerful instead of ‘pop,’ which is unpredictable.
And ‘kins’ is sweet and innocent, like babykins and
lambkins. Also, all names that end with ‘kins’ are
Anglo-Saxon in a homespun straight-from-the-farm sort of way, not in
the my-ancestors-were-on-the-Mayflower way.”
    “And Mary is just from
Mary Poppins?”
    She smiled. “It’s
kind of hard to find anything that sounds more innocent.”
    “The word immaculate comes to mind,” said Jane.
    “Well, there’s that
side of it, of course,” said Mary Perkins. “But there are
other things that aren’t quite as obvious. First, Mary says
‘mother.’ In fact, it says ‘mother of somebody
important.’ And it’s common and feminine. See, if you’re
going to rob banks – ” She stopped, as though she
realized it was going to be hard to make herself understood, then
started over. “Did you ever take a look at the way your bank is
set up?”
    “I think I have,”
said Jane.
    “You’ve got the open
floor, which is just there to make you think the bank is big and
solid. Then you see the people. At the tellers’ counter there
are twenty women and a couple of men too young to shave. Then there
are a few desks behind that, where everybody is always on the phone.
Those are usually women in their fifties. They look like chaperones,
there to supervise the twenty women and two boys up front, and to
smooth over mistakes.”
    “I take it those aren’t
the people you were trying to impress.”
    “Not if what you came for
is money. When you get behind those desks, there are offices.
Sometimes they’re not even on the same floor. But somewhere
down a long, quiet, carpeted hallway there will be a huge wooden desk
with nothing on it except a couple of those old-fashioned black pens
that stick up out of a marble slab, and a lamp with a green shade.
Behind that desk will be a middle-aged man. See, banks are in layers.
You can meet fifty-two senior executive vice presidents, and all of
them are women. You’ve got to resist the temptation to tell
them enough so that they can say no, and hold out until you see this
man.”
    “And Mary was for him?”
    “Yes. It’s
straightforward, short, and unpretentious. It’s not a