Empty Promises

pull off the ruse. Sandra had an uncanny knack for reading people, and he was afraid she would see it in his face when he lied to her. But he was going to give it a try.
    It was only a day or two before Sandra Treadway called him to ask if he’d found someone to kill her husband. This time, Sam said that he had located someone who might possibly do the job, but only if the price was right.
    “Great!” she said. “I want to meet with him tonight.”
    Sam said he would try to arrange a meeting, but warned Sandra that it might take a few days. He hung up and called Walt Stout. Stout would be walking a narrow legal ledge. He could not suggest anything to Sandra because that would be construed as entrapment; he could only follow her lead in a death-plot conversation.
    At 9:00 p.m. on August 5, Stout met Sam Bettel at his office and Sam phoned Sandra. “I’ve got him to agree to talk with you,” Sam said. “I’m with him now.”
    “I want to meet him right away,” Sandra said. “But it’s got to be in the right place—I don’t want to be seen talking to him in public.”
    “You say the place.”
    “Behind the Yorktown,” she said, mentioning a restaurant they both knew well. “Out back in the parking lot. What’s he look like?”
    Sam’s eyes raked over Walt Stout, as he tried to figure a way to describe him. “Oh, in his forties, six feet, 185 pounds, brown hair. Big old mustache. Tough-looking—you’d figure that.” Stout grinned.
    “Okay,” she said. “I’ll meet him behind the Yorktown, say, in fifteen minutes.”
    Walt Stout wore casual clothes and drove a five-year-old white Chevrolet convertible. He hoped devoutly that he didn’t look like a cop as he followed Sam’s car. He pulled into the parking lot behind the Yorktown Restaurant. A Ford station wagon was parked in a corner, away from the other patrons’ cars.
    Sam got out of his car and walked over to the station wagon. Stout could see a woman sitting behind the wheel and he saw her talking with Sam Bettel, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. At length, Sam raised his arm and pointed toward Stout’s car. Then he walked toward the detective.
    “She still wants to go through with it. She wants to talk to you. I told her your name was Doug.”
    The parking lights on the Ford wagon went off, and the woman known to Stout as Sandra Treadway slid out of the driver’s seat and headed toward him. She had thick ash-blond hair, cut in layers and swept back from her face. She would have been pretty, except for the deep lines around her mouth and the hard look on her face. She peered into Stout’s car, and then climbed in beside him.
    “This is Doug,” Sam said. “I’ll let the two of you talk.” Sam hurried to his car and drove away. He had done his part.
    Sandra told “Doug” that they couldn’t talk where they were because her husband and his lady friend often frequented the Yorktown. He suggested they drive a few blocks to a Safeway supermarket parking lot.
    “I understand you have a job you want done,” Stout began when they reached the Safeway lot. That was as much as he dared say.
    But Sandra, who was no blabbermouth, cautiously answered, “Yes.”
    “Just what is this job?”
    “I think you know.”
    “Your friend says you want someone taken care of.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well, what do you mean by ‘taken care of’?” Stout pressed, pretending to be unaware of what she really wanted of him, although the phrase “taken care of” wasn’t that difficult to decipher.
    Exasperated, Sandra blurted, “I think you know perfectly well what I mean!”
    “You mean you want someone killed?” Stout exhaled as if he was shocked at the thought, but she was nodding her head.
    “Yes … my husband.”
    For almost an hour, Sandra talked to the man she believed to be a hired killer. She wanted him to know that she wasn’t a jealous woman. She wasn’t at all upset about the other woman in her husband’s life. He could have all the women he wanted; she just didn’t feel that a divorce would be financially feasible for her. “He’s got a triple-indemnity insurance policy—if he dies accidentally, that is—and all the money goes to me, his legal wife.”
    Stout listened quietly, appearing to consider the job. He sighed and shook his head. “A job like that wouldn’t come cheap—it’s risky. That would cost you in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars.”
    Sandra didn’t flinch.
    “It would have