Necessity by Brian Garfield Page B

affair you keep tabs on the boyfriend.
    â€œNow you’ll get divorced people where one of the parents doesn’t like the court’s ruling on child custody, so the parent steals his own kids or her own kids. Cases like that, where the kids are school age, we call up the school where the kids used to go. I say I’m the principal out here in Tulsa and I’m inquiring about the transcripts for these kids. And usually I’ll find out the transcripts have already been sent out to a school in Boise, Idaho. Bingo.
    â€œEven the worst cases get solved sooner or later. Most of them.
    â€œSee, the thing is, is that people tend to stay with the same social level. They’re comfortable with their own kind of people and they seek out those kind of people. Eventually, see, there’s going to be a coincidence. Eventually they’re going to run into somebody from their old life that recognizes them. Maybe right away, maybe five years down the road. But it’ll happen. It always does. There’s only one way to prevent it, and that’s when they make themselves over into a totally different person. New interests, new social class, new everything. And there just aren’t a whole lot of people capable of doing that.
    â€œAnd even then we get them sometimes. People make mistakes. And that’s what we look for, mistakes.”
    He poked the cigar in his mouth, squinted through the smoke, spread both hands out with palms up and gave her a nasty little smile. “That’s how we do it, Mrs. LaCasse. And notice at no time do my fingers leave my hands.”
    He chuckled at his little joke and she managed to smile appreciatively before she said:
    â€œIt’s utterly fascinating. I don’t—look. Let’s take it from the other end for a moment. Just hypothetically. It’s just so interesting. Do you mind? Suppose you take an ordinary housewife. Suppose one day she decides to disappear without a trace, and suppose, oh, let’s say she knows her husband is likely to hire someone like you to find her and she wants to make sure she doesn’t get found. How would a person go about disappearing so completely that even you couldn’t find him?”
    â€œOrdinary woman, ordinary husband? I guess she might get away with it if she knew how. But of course that’d be different with somebody like you, Mrs. LaCasse. Somebody with a husband like yours, I mean.”
    â€œThat goes without saying.” She smiled yet again. “But I am curious.”
    â€œI’ll tell you then. Your ordinary housewife in South Orange, you mean. There’s a lot of things she might do.
    â€œFor openers she’d have to clean out her bank accounts in cash and then throw away her checkbooks and all her credit cards.
    â€œBest way to do that’s put it all in a wallet and let somebody else lay a false trail for her.
    â€œHow she does that, there’s a dozen ways. Railroad station’s pretty good. Trailways depots are okay. Airports aren’t so good because people tend to be a little more honest about lost possessions.
    â€œAnyhow maybe she just gets on a turnpike in the direction opposite to the direction she’s really heading. She’d stop in one of those service area Howard Johnson’s and leave the wallet in the ladies’ room. Make it look like she left it behind by mistake. You know how women empty out their handbags when they’re trying to find the lipstick.
    â€œThe wallet may get turned in and returned to the husband, in which case he’s got a lead in the wrong direction, but people bein’ what they are it’s more likely somebody steals the wallet. Next thing you know they’ll be passing bad checks and running up credit card charges two hundred miles away, laying down a beautiful false trail for you. Am I boring you?”
    She gave him another smile and tried to hide its insincerity. “If I get bored I’ll yawn. Go on,