by Thomas Perry
“Yes,” he said. He took out his identification and held it up, but she didn’t look at it.
“I thought I recognized you. I was in the Hollywood Division when you were there in homicide. I’m Becky Salamone. I know you don’t remember me, so don’t pretend.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“What happened?”
“Since I retired, I’ve been doing PI work. I’ve been watching Mrs. Mason for about a week. She and her husband, George, reported a necklace as stolen in a burglary two years ago. Here’s the insurance company’s circular on it.” He unfolded it and handed it to her.
Officer Salamone held it. “Sapphires and diamonds. Nice.”
“Yeah,” said Till. “McLaren Life and Casualty paid them three hundred fifty thousand. She’s wearing it tonight.”
“Oh?” Salamone looked around her. “Where is she?”
Till looked toward the hotel entrance. “She must have gone back inside. I took a picture, she got upset, and her husband came after me wanting the film. First he tried to buy it, then to grab it. I couldn’t let him do that.” Till took out his camera. “It’s digital. You can see the picture.” He turned the camera on so she could see the shot of the Masons standing beside their car.
Salamone compared the image with the photograph on the sheet. “Great shot.”
“I got the car in because you can see the model and the plate,” said Till. “The car wasn’t built when the necklace disappeared. It’s brand-new.”
George Mason shouted from the front of the hotel, “Hold him! I want to press charges.”
Officer Salamone handed Till’s camera and circular back to him, then approached the group outside the hotel, took her partner aside for a few seconds, whispered to him, and then returned. “Mrs. Mason. Where is Mrs. Mason?”
Mrs. Mason came forward. “I saw all of it. This man was—”
Officer Salamone said, “Mrs. Mason, weren’t you wearing a necklace earlier?”
“I don’t understand.”
Till held up the picture from the insurance company and unfolded it. “This one.”
Mrs. Mason was beginning to look pale. “No, I wasn’t wearing that. I don’t have a necklace like that. What does this have to do with your attacking my husband? It’s ridiculous!”
Till turned to the other people who had been at the event in the hotel. “Anyone see Mrs. Mason wearing a necklace tonight?”
None of the guests seemed to understand the question. Their expressions looked as though Till had been speaking a language they had never heard before. Till turned his left side to the group and gave a barely perceptible wink to Officer Salamone with his right eye. “I guess there’s no choice. You’ll just have to search all of them and charge the one who has it.”
Salamone’s face was unreadable. She gave a slight nod.
Till called out to the group, “Don’t anyone attempt to leave. Extra units will be arriving in a moment to bring everyone down to the station so officers can take your statements under oath and perform body searches. Most of you will be free to go within a few hours.”
All of the party looked horrified, but one of the women began to tremble, and then to cry. She looked at Mrs. Mason. “I’m sorry, Brenda, but I can’t do this. Not even for you.” She opened her purse, lifted out Mrs. Mason’s necklace, and held it out to Officer Salamone as though it were a venomous snake.
THE NEXT MORNING Jack Till walked to his office. He almost always left his car parked in the space under his apartment building on the east side of Laurel Canyon, and walked to his office on Ventura Boulevard. The distance was no more than a half mile, and he liked being at street level, looking around and thinking.
He felt good this morning. The insurance company had already responded to the news that their necklace had been recovered. They would pay him enough to ensure that this year his detective agency would almost break even, and the year was only half over. And when he had come home last night, he had played back his voice mail and listened to a message from Dan Mulroney, a detective in the Hollywood Division, telling him he had referred a client who would probably come to see him today. It was only his second year as a private investigator, and he might actually make a profit.
He stopped at the open-air newsstand on the corner, bought this morning’s Los Angeles Times, put it under his left arm and made his way along the boulevard with the morning sun at his back. He stopped in Starbucks to pick up a cup of coffee, and made his way to his building. It was a two-story complex with a big antique shop and a row of three stores that sold women’s clothes, gifts, and eyeglasses on the ground floor. There was a narrow entry between the antiques and the women’s clothes, a black felt directory under glass on the wall inside the door, and a staircase leading to a single corridor of offices on the second floor.
Till’s office was the first on the right, a single room that held a telephone, a desk, two filing cabinets, and a couch, all from an office-furniture–liquidation dealer on Sherman Way. On the left side of the corridor were three offices held by three sallow young men who kept long, irregular hours and were always reincorporating themselves as different television-production companies. Till walked up the stairs carrying his newspaper and coffee, and found a young woman leaning against his door.
She was slight and blond, her hair fine and glossy as a child’s, but it took him a moment to see what she really looked like because her face was discolored by purple bruises and distorted by swelling. She looked, more than anything, like some of the female homicide victims he had seen. As soon as she saw him, she pushed herself away from his door, and then grasped the cane he had not seen before. She used it to make way for him to unlock his door.
“Good morning,” he said. “Are you here to see me—Jack Till?”
“Yes.”
“Then come on in.” He was sure he knew her story simply by looking at her. She must have been in a car accident. There was some kind of lawsuit, and she would hire him to investigate the other party. He set his coffee and paper on the desk and pointed to the couch. “Please make yourself comfortable.”
She looked at the couch skeptically. “Do you have a regular chair? That kind of thing isn’t good on my back right now.”
As Till went to the other side of the room to retrieve a straight-backed chair, she edged closer to his desk, and at first he thought she was sneaking a look at the files on the surface, but then he realized she was staring out the window that overlooked Ventura Boulevard. He could see her pupils moving in small jumps, focusing on one person, then another. She was terrified.
He realized there had been no accident. He put the chair down in front of the desk. “Who did this to you?”
She held her arms out from her sides as though she were showing him her dress, but he could see the gesture meant her battered face, her injured body. “A man. Two men, really. They want to kill me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
“What would you like me to do—protect you? Find them?”
“Help me run away.”
SIX YEARS LATER, Jack Till would still remember that moment in his office, when he had seen Wendy Harper for the first time. When he had listened to her story, he had reacted as though he were still a policeman. He had tried to get her to do all of the sensible things, to turn the problem over to the police and let them protect her. She had a rebuttal to every suggestion, a reason why the only hope she had of staying alive was to try to live elsewhere. She had already been to the police after she had been beaten, and they had suggested she see Jack Till. In the end, he had given in. He had taught her what she needed to know about the methods police departments used to track fugitives, on the theory that anyone searching for her would not be as good at it as the professionals. When he had finished teaching her and the injuries that were visible had healed, he left her in another city at the entrance to the airport.
For the first year he worried, scanning the newspapers for any news of her
, waiting to read that her body had been found. Five more years passed, and he heard nothing more of Wendy Harper.
He hoped that the silence meant she had made it.
3
ARE YOU GOING to do it?” she asked.
“You are,” he said.
Paul and Sylvie Turner made their way along Broxton Avenue with the unhurried grace of long-legged wading birds. They were both tall and slim, and their straight posture elongated them. Sylvie was pretty, with smooth skin, big eyes, and shoulder-length dark brown hair that shone in the late afternoon sun. They both wore large sunglasses, khaki slacks and dark-colored tailored jackets. As Paul and Sylvie walked past the windows of a bookstore, only Paul glanced in that direction to check their reflection in the glass. He liked being in Westwood because most of the people on the streets were UCLA students who paid little attention to a middle-aged couple. Ahead of Paul and Sylvie, dominating the intersection was a big old movie theater called the Regent.
They spoke, as couples like them often did, without looking directly at one another. “Why do you want me to do it?” she asked.
“I just do. It’s your turn, and I think you would feel better if you did it. I’m just thinking about you.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “You like to watch me.”
“Maybe I do.”
They crossed the street, and Paul bought them tickets to the movie that was scheduled to start in five minutes. A young usher took their tickets just inside the door, tore them, and returned the stubs to Paul. Without speaking, Sylvie and Paul separated in the lobby and went into the restrooms. Sylvie gathered her hair into a ponytail and slipped a band over it. When they returned to the lobby they both had removed their sunglasses and jackets. They occupied themselves by looking at posters for coming attractions.
After a few minutes, the door of one of the screening rooms opened and a crowd of about a hundred people, many of them couples around the same age and description as the Turners, straggled out and across the lobby toward the street. The Turners waited until the first few stepped out into the sunlight and stopped to push buttons on cell phones or search their pockets for parking receipts. Then Paul and Sylvie allowed themselves to be swept out with the main body of the group. They stayed in the group all the way across the street and into the parking structure, where they walked past the black BMW that Paul had driven into the lot. Instead, they got into their second car, the black BMW that Sylvie had parked here.
The receipt for the movie tickets carried the credit-card number and the time of purchase. For eighteen dollars they had just bought two hours. Paul and Sylvie had become expert at bending and molding time in small ways. Paul slipped the two ticket stubs into his wallet, and Sylvie retrieved the parking receipt for her car and handed it to him.
Paul stopped at the parking attendant’s cubicle while Sylvie looked the other way, but she knew it would not be necessary. There would be a different attendant later who had never seen her before. Paul drove out to Wilshire Boulevard and onto the San Diego Freeway. He followed it to the Santa Monica Freeway, took it to the Fifth Street exit, and parked in the structure there. Paul and Sylvie joined the pedestrians walking past the open promenade of Fifth Street toward the Santa Monica Pier, but when they reached the corner, they let the group go, turned, and walked along Ocean Avenue. Paul looked at his watch for the second time, but Sylvie touched his forearm. “That’s getting to be a nervous habit,” she said quietly.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Just watch the pretty sunset on the ocean. There’s plenty of time, and if you keep checking, then people will start watching you to see what the hurry is.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m just still not sure yet that this is the very best place and time.”
“It’s the best for him,” Sylvie said. “It’s the only time when we can be really sure he’s alone. He’ll do all the checking for us. She lives right up there. It’s the third building, fourth balcony from the end on the fourth floor. See it?”
“It’s open. Maybe he’s watching the same sunset through those white inner curtains,” Paul said. “Have you thought about that?”
She smiled patiently. “No, he’s not. That’s the bedroom. He’s there, he’s with her, and he’s not interested in the sunset.”
“He could have left already, too.”
“He never leaves until after it’s dark.”
“Just this once he might.”
“No, never,” she said. “You have to remember it’s not about him. It’s about her. She has a reputation. She has a husband.”
“I suppose you’re right. He’s a gentleman.”
“You’re a gentleman,” she said. She clutched his arm with both her hands, pulled it to her body, and looked up into his eyes. She was trying to gauge whether he had noticed that she had known he was feeling the impulse to look at his watch and she was holding his arm down.
“Thank you.” He squinted at the sun, just touching the ocean to the right of the south-facing bay. “We should probably start moving. He’ll come out the back.” The sun looked soft and distended, like the yolk of an egg on the flat horizon.
She looked at the sun, too. “You’re right. It’s getting to be time.”
“Do you have everything ready, so you could do it right now if you had to?”
“Yes.”
“Are you getting excited?”
“Yes. Always. No matter how many times.”
“Let’s go meet him.”
They strolled away from the ocean, then turned into the alley behind the row of apartment buildings west of the pier. They walked slowly, lingering now and then in dark alcoves and shadowy places where the last light of the darkening sky did not reach.
They both saw him come out a rear door of the next building in the dusk, stop on the low step for a moment, then turn to walk toward them. Sylvie felt the gentle pressure of Paul’s hand on her back, the firm touch she felt when they were dancing. She yielded and took a step forward.
And then she was alone.
JIMMY POLLARD kept his head down, looking at the uneven, cratered pavement of the alley as he walked. People insisted on keeping dogs in the city, and there was a certain group of them who didn’t want to walk their dogs out front where they had to obey the ordinance and dispose of their messes. They walked them in alleys, so a person had to watch where he set his feet.
The thought pushed Jimmy Pollard into one of the moments, once rare but now becoming disturbingly frequent, when he stepped outside himself and saw himself from somewhere above, as an objective observer might see him. His past was all stretched out behind him and leading here, to this moment.
He was sneaking out the back door of a woman’s apartment building in the twilight and making his way up an alley. It was the time when other men were coming the other way, arriving from their day’s work, opening the front door and seeing the women they were doing it for, some of them even smelling dinner cooking. But maybe that was a dream image left over from his childhood. Maybe nobody did that anymore. The women were mostly out all day, too, because nobody had any children now. The ones who did put them in some kind of day care and picked them up around now. Maybe the whole world was sneaking along some alley. “Here I am,” he said to himself. That was all.
Jimmy had a wife, three kids and a job. He and Connie had grown apart over the years, a pair of roommates who had things they held against each other. But Emma, Ben, and Melissa were on his mind every hour. Thinking about them made him feel happy and terrible and lost all at the same time. And here he was.
He heard the light sound of footsteps on the pavement, looked ahead in the dim light, and saw the shape of a woman—the hips, the narrow waist, the shoulders. He drew in a breath—Connie? Would she come here?
The woman’s strides brought her closer, and as she stepped into a strip of light that reached the alley between two buildings she was illuminated for a second. No. Even from this distance, it wasn’t Connie. Tha
nk you, Lord. He knew that confrontation was going to happen someday, but not here and not now. He still had time. Even as he thought that, he knew he would not use the time, if it were fifty years. He would never be a faithful husband again. He would never break off the affair, or use the reprieve to go to Connie and tell her. He quickly recited the reasons, an inventory that included the children, the house, the job, the money.
Unexpectedly, in the inventory was something new; a piece of unintentional clarity. One of the reasons why these afternoons with Sally were so irresistible was that they were forbidden and secret.
Jimmy kept his head down, concerned to be sure this woman in the alley didn’t get a look at his face. Women didn’t walk alone in alleys. If she was walking a dog, he hadn’t seen it. She was probably a neighbor who had come down to toss something in the Dumpster. She could be one of Sally’s friends who would remember seeing him here, and could easily be present some other time and recognize him. Still, he couldn’t resist the impulse to look.
He glanced up and then down again, and brought back an impression that was favorable. She was tall—too tall for him, but very slim and graceful, like a dancer. If she could afford a beachfront condo in Santa Monica, she was more than a dancer. She was probably a party girl who lived with some rich guy. He took another glance, and he found he didn’t want to take his eyes away. He began to think about her. She wasn’t really that tall, just straight.
He was about ten feet from her when he met her eyes, and smiled respectfully. He said, “Hello,” with just the right combination, he thought, of friendliness and perfunctory politeness to reassure a woman alone in an alley. She reached into her purse, probably to put her hand on her canister of pepper spray, but she smiled. Was that mischief?
“Hi, Jimmy,” Sylvie said.
He gaped. Who was she? She took her hand out of her purse. There was a gun. He knew he didn’t have time to turn around and go back, so he kept walking. If she was scared of him, then in a few seconds she would see he’d meant her no harm. There was a flash-bang, he felt pain, and he began to run. He ran hard, past her. He heard the gun again, but he could still move, still make his legs take step after step toward the opening to the street. There would be people. He could run to them and yell and make a scene.
