by Thomas Perry
He accepted his rental car, drove out Tropicana to Rainbow Boulevard, turned right on Charleston Boulevard to Jones Boulevard, and then north to Cheyenne Avenue, keeping watch on the cars behind him. He pulled into a grocery store parking lot, studied the cars that went by for a few minutes, then went inside the store to buy bottled water and snacks for the trip back to Los Angeles. Then he stood for a moment inside the doorway to see whether any of the cars he had seen on the road behind him had appeared in the supermarket lot or any of the other parking lots within sight, but none of them had.
Till got into his car again and drove aimlessly for a time, watching for followers and waiting for night to come. It came in a way that he had forgotten, a sky of blue and pink deepening into purple as the huge banks of moving, sparkling lights joined the billboard-sized television screens with shimmering videos of beautiful women, tables covered with food, and flutes of bubbling champagne to fight back the dark.
Jack Till drove past Cheyenne Avenue, then came back and parked. He got out and walked into a large condominium complex and then came out the other side, went around the block and returned to the car. Till was of the opinion that the way to keep from being followed was not merely to watch for followers, but to provide them with a plausible false destination and lead them there.
When he was positive that nobody could have followed him, he drove through the city to Boulder Highway, and drove south away from the tall hotels into the flat suburban landscape to the south, and then into Henderson, where Ann Delatorre lived. As he drove, he kept having the same thought over and over: Ann Delatorre might not be Wendy Harper. He had chosen her out of all of the women who had flown out of Santa Barbara on August 30 six years ago, but that didn’t mean he was right. It would not be the first time when he had made a logical guess based on the soundest evidence and been utterly wrong.
The address was a house on a clean, quiet, broad, well-ordered street, one of a long row of similar one-story houses. Each house sat on a small patch of well-tended green lawn, and had a two-car garage to one side of it. After passing a few houses, he detected that there were three styles—Mediterranean, Southwest, Colonial—alternating so that no house was beside one just like it.
He found the house, drove past it slowly and studied the pattern of lights in the windows. The suburban street seemed an unlikely habitat for the Wendy Harper he had met, and that made him uneasy in a new way. It had been six years since Wendy had seen him. She might not even recognize him. He continued along the street for a distance before he turned around. If she was still nervous, still taking a precautionary look at every car that went by, then he should try to keep from alarming her. He could have made a telephone call to warn her that he was coming, but there was no way of knowing whether someone was monitoring her line or even his cell phone. He brought his rental car to a stop at the curb near her house, walked to her front door, and rang the bell. He heard footsteps.
He stood straight on the front steps, keeping his face up so the light would catch it and she would have a chance to recognize him. The door opened an inch, then clicked. There was a deadbolt in the floor with a second receptacle for the steel bar, and she had engaged it. He stared at the two inches of open doorway, and saw that the face staring back at him was black.
“Can I help you?” The woman’s question was a challenge, a carefully polite message that she was not glad to see a stranger on the doorstep.
“Yes,” he said. “My name is Jack Till, and I came to see Ann Delatorre. Is this the right house?”
There was a second of hesitation that told him it was.
“What can I do for you?” He could see her better now, as she moved her head from side to side in front of the open slice of doorway to see whether there was anyone with him. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, with a pretty face and large brown eyes.
“I’m a private investigator who helped her once, a few years ago. I know that she’ll want to see me.”
“I do see you,” said the woman. “I’m Ann Delatorre.”
“Oh. I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you like this. I was looking for someone else.” He turned as though to leave, then stopped. “Oh, one more thing. Do you know any other Delatorres in the area? Delatorre is her married name. Her original name was Harper.”
“I’m the only one I know about. Good night.” She closed the door, and he heard the bolt click, and then a second one.
Till walked away from the door, turned at the corner of the house and made his way quickly along the side of it. When he reached the first window, he looked in. It was a dining room, but he could look through it to see the front door, where the woman stood, staring out the peephole in the door. She pulled away from it and Jack Till ducked down and bent low to sneak along the side of the house. He stopped at the next window and cautiously looked in. It was a kitchen.
She was at the counter across the room, reaching for a telephone. He knew that she might be calling the police to tell them he was lurking around, but he had to stay. She pushed eleven digits: long distance. He felt in his pocket and found the small microphone he had been hoping to plant inside the house. He looked for an opening on the outer wall of the house, and found a rounded metal awning that jutted a few inches from the wall, about six inches wide, with a metal flap. He could tell from the position high up and at the windowless portion of the kitchen that it must be the opening for the ventilation hood over the stove. He looked around for a way up, and saw three wheeled plastic garbage bins. He moved the heaviest one under the vent opening, stood on it, attached the thin power cord from the receiver to clip on the tiny microphone, and lowered it into the ventilator duct in the kitchen.
The duct seemed to amplify the sounds. He could hear the woman walking around, her footsteps sharp and heavy, as she listened to someone on the other end of the call. Then she said, “What he said was, ‘My name is Jack Till. I’m here to see Ann Delatorre. Is this the right house?’” She listened. “No, he didn’t say that right away. It was later, when he was about to leave. He asked me if I knew anyone else named Delatorre around here. He said it was your married name—that your maiden name was Harper.”
Jack Till lifted his wrist close to his face. The call had been placed at 8:07. It was July 20.
The woman said, “He’s sort of tall. Maybe six feet one or two. He’s in good shape. I don’t know. Yeah, he could be forty, I suppose. He said he helped you six years ago. Did he? I mean if he’s for real. Is he telling the truth?” Jack Till could hear frustration in the woman’s voice. As soon as she hung up, staying here was going to get very risky. He pulled the vent open and held it while he gently pulled up his microphone and pocketed it. He quietly climbed down from the garbage bin and rolled it back to the other side of the driveway, then hurried to his car and drove toward his hotel.
On the drive back into Las Vegas, Till had a few minutes to think. Watching the door of the house open and seeing the wrong woman inside had brought disappointment. Only a moment later had come the shock, the recognition that his disappointment was so painful because it was personal, not professional. He had been allowing himself to think about Wendy Harper again, to picture her and remember her voice, but he had not realized how much emotion he had invested in the prospect of seeing her again. In his mind, she had always been the woman he had met in the wrong way at the wrong time, the wasted chance.
Maybe the shock had been a corrective. He needed to see what was happening, not what he wished would happen. He went to his room and looked at the skip-tracer’s printout for Ann Delatorre and found the account number and company she used for telephone service. He called the company’s billing department and said, “I’m calling because I’d like to cancel our long-distance service. We’re going to be moving to another city. We don’t have a new address yet. We’ll be in hotels at first, so I don’t have a place to transfer the number to. But I’d like to get a final bill as soon as possible so I can take care of it before I leave. How soon do you supp
ose you could do that? Wow, that’s wonderful. Thanks.”
Till drove out to Henderson again the next morning. He spotted the letter carrier on her route, and then drove past her a couple of times to check her progress until he saw her delivering mail on the block where Ann Delatorre lived. He checked his watch: one-fifteen. He spent most of the day and evening watching the house to see if Wendy Harper had come, but there was no sign of a visitor. The next two mornings, Till drove by again, but there was still no unfamiliar car in the neighborhood.
On the third day at two-fifteen, he pulled his car into Ann Delatorre’s driveway, went to the door, and pretended to press the doorbell. With his other hand, he reached quickly into the mailbox, took out the telephone bill he had requested, and slipped it into the inner pocket of his sport coat. After a moment, he turned, walked to his car, and drove away.
He parked at the Crown Pointe Promenade, opened the telephone bill, and scanned the list of toll calls. On July 20 at 8:07 P.M., Ann Delatorre had made a call to a number in the 415 area code. That was San Francisco. He wrote the number in the notebook he carried, tore up the bill, and threw it into a trash receptacle in the mall. At eight-thirty, he returned to Ann Delatorre’s house.
He parked in the driveway again and knocked on the door. This time the door did not open a crack. It swung open abruptly, and Ann Delatorre stood in front of him, aiming a revolver at his chest. The barrel was short, and from his point of view, the muzzle looked cavernous. He said, “It’s only me again. Jack Till. If you pull the trigger on that thing, bits of my heart and lungs will be sprayed all over your entry.”
“I know that. I’m glad to hear that you know it, too.” She took three steps backward. “Come inside and close the door.”
Jack Till stared into the woman’s eyes. It was a risk to step inside with a woman aiming a gun at his chest. He wasn’t quite sure how the law worked in Nevada, but in California, if a stranger like him was shot inside a woman’s house, his murder was likely to be called self-defense.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But if I wanted to kill you, it wouldn’t matter if you were in or out. I’d leave town.”
He took a step forward, his eyes still on hers, and she took another step backward to maintain the distance between them. He looked down at the gun in her hand. He could see the dimpled gray noses of the bullets gleaming dully in the cylinder, waiting.
He closed the door and she moved the gun to the side so it was aimed at a spot to the left of his chest. “Thank you,” he said. “I hate to see you walking backward with that aimed at me.”
“I can still kill you.”
“But at least now you’ll have to want to.”
“That way, into the living room.” She pointed with her free hand. “Sit on the couch.”
He stepped in and sat down, leaned back with his arms stretched out and became still. He wanted to keep his hands in sight.
She sat in a chair ten feet from him and rested the gun on the arm so she could keep it ready without getting tired. “You said that you were a private detective. Who are you working for?”
“I’m working for myself. Finding her was something that needed to be done, so I’m doing it.”
“Are you after me?”
“No. I don’t know you. I’m searching for a woman whose name was Wendy Harper.”
“Why?”
“She came to me because somebody was after her. I helped her to get lost. Now a man who used to be her boyfriend is being charged with her murder.”
“What if she’s dead?”
“I don’t think you would let me in and talk to me like this if she were dead. I’m trying to let her know that Eric Fuller is in trouble because of what we did.”
“What do you want her to do about it?”
“I want her to come back to Los Angeles with me, just long enough to prove to the District Attorney’s office that she’s alive. They’ll drop the charges, and she can go back to wherever she is now.”
“If she’s alive. And if she’s still alive at the end of it.”
Jack Till reverted to the tactic he had used as a homicide detective, trying to become the friend who understood and forgave. “Look, I’m on her side. I’m sure if you know anything at all about what happened, you know that already. I kept her alive once. And I can see you’re on her side, too. I can tell you’re scared, but you’re trying to protect her and do what’s best for her. So am I, but protecting someone can be tough, and it can be dangerous. You’re not wrong to worry.” He shook his head slowly, as though he were thinking about specific threats that she didn’t know about yet.
“Go on.”
“That gun isn’t a bad idea. If anything, it’s not enough. If you and I could just cooperate on this, I think we’d all be safer. Now, I know you called somebody right after I left here the other night. Was it Wendy?”
“It was my mother.”
He let his disappointment in her show. After a moment he said, “I taught her how to hide. I thought that would be enough to keep her safe, but things have changed. The man she was running from before seems to have put out some serious money to get her. That means high-end killers. Why won’t you help me?”
“I owe her.”
“Then you should want what’s best for her.”
“I do. I’m not sure I know what that is, and I’m not sure you do, either.”
“How long have you known her?”
She stared at him in silence, thinking for a moment, then shrugged. “All right. There’s no reason not to tell you, so I will. I met her six years ago. It must have been about two weeks after you left her at the airport in Santa Barbara. I was walking along a hallway in my apartment building. I was crying, so I didn’t see clearly where I was going, and I came around a corner and bumped into her. We looked at each other, and I could see she was crying, too. It was so stupid that we stood there thinking about it for a second, and started to laugh.”
“Did she live there, too?”
“Yes. It was a terrible place, a whole building full of losers and people who were running away from something. It was a couple of miles north of town, and nobody talked to anybody, but after that, the two of us were friends.”
“What were you doing there?”
She narrowed her eyes for a moment, then seemed to change her mind. “Boyfriend troubles.”
“What kind?”
“He was looking for me. I left; he wanted me back.”
“Where was that?”
“Another city. It doesn’t matter to you which one unless you want to hurt me. You say you don’t, and anyway, I’m not going to tell you anything that will give you the power. I met him, and I went with him. My mother was religious. She put all my stuff on the front steps and locked the door and the gate. I stayed with Howard, and that was hard. He wanted a lot from me, and I did it. I cooked for him and his friends and did all the work around the place. He would sell crack to cars that pulled up to his corner. I held the money and the crack and his gun. See, if you got caught, they wouldn’t charge you as an adult until you were sixteen.”
“He told you that?”
“That’s right.”
“Did he tell you that you couldn’t get shot?”
“He didn’t talk about that. But you’ve got him right. That’s what he was. He was the one who got the money and I was the one who got the trouble.”
“What kind?”
“Howard got into a fight with the guy who sold him drugs. It wasn’t the kind of fight where you lay low for a while and then patch it up. It was the kind where you don’t even go back to your place to get your clothes. You leave town.”
“Is that when he turned you out?”
Her facial muscles seemed to slacken, so she had no real expression. “Yes.” She watched him for some particular reaction that she must have seen before, but she seemed not to detect it. She started again slowly. “He said it was just going to be once, and then we would be safe, and he would always be
grateful. It was a town where we had never been, and nobody would know me or anything, so once it was done it would be over.”
“Was it?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It went on for about a week, until we had enough money to move on to another city, a bigger one. But Howard couldn’t make a connection. The man who was supposed to be in that city and willing to help him get set up was gone. He had to go out and spend money to get to know people who would introduce him to the people he needed to meet.” She sighed. “And the money ran out.”
“He turned you out again.”
She nodded. “This time it was different. The first time, we were both out, and I was dressed up and made up, and we would see a man and Howard would ask me if that one was okay, and I would either say, ‘Please, not that one,’ or ‘Okay.’ If I said okay, then he would ask the man if he was interested, and they would talk prices. Then I would talk to the man and take him up to our room. Howard would follow and stand outside to make sure nothing terrible happened. This time he set it up differently. I had to go out alone on the street where the men came to find girls. I didn’t want to. I was cold. I was scared of the men and the cops, and the other girls out there who looked like they wanted to beat me up or chase me off.
