by Thomas Perry
“Did you see her again that night?”
“Only from a distance. The place was like a big cocktail party that night. Everybody had a story to tell you, or a friend to introduce, or somebody who had asked to be remembered or something. I may have looked around for her later on and seen that she was in the middle of a conversation. I went into the kitchen to see if Eric and his crew had already buttoned up and gone. The busboys and dishwashers and the floor man were still there, but Eric and the cooks had left. I took my time, chatted for a while, and then went out the back of the building to head for my car. I always parked at the far end of the lot in the daytime, before the valet attendants arrived. The place had nearly cleared out while I was dawdling, so the whole lot was nearly empty. As I was walking, a car arrived. I thought it was odd, because it was so late, but then I looked at it and I thought it must be a limo picking somebody up. It was a big black American car, like the cars you rented yesterday to bring me back. It came into the lot and then stopped, swung around to face out near the exit, and turned off its lights, but the motor was still running, and I could see the green lights on the dashboard were on. The back door opened and a man got out and just stood there.”
“What did he look like?”
“Just a man. Maybe five feet eight or nine. White. In his middle thirties.”
“Close your eyes and think about him. Pretend you’re seeing him again now. Do you feel anything about him—uneasiness, maybe fear?”
“No, irritation. I’d had enough of the whole restaurant scene, not only trying to get through that year after the engagement collapsed, but that night specifically. The way he carried himself, standing beside his chauffeured car that was half-blocking the exit, he seemed to be the epitome of what was wrong with L.A.”
“So you stared at him and felt annoyed.”
“Yes. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a jacket that I could tell even at a distance of forty feet or so in dim light was good, because of the way it fit him. He had dark brown hair, short. He was trim and had good proportions and I just knew he had a personal trainer and a nutritionist and all of that, but he wasn’t like a young man. He acted older, kind of cranky and impatient. There was just something about his posture at first, kind of slouching there, looking mad.”
“He was looking at something. Was he looking at you?”
“No. Not yet. He’d seen me but I was just part of the landscape. He was looking toward the restaurant. From where he was, he could probably see the front door, or certainly the front corner of the building where people came to pick up their cars.”
“So you could see his face. What was it like?”
“That was part of the impression I had that he was not as young as he looked. It was the way the skin lay over the bone structure of his face. There was no fat, so the skin seemed thinner the way it does in middle-aged people. He was clean-shaven, sort of artificially tanned, although I don’t know how I could tell that. I can see him now, staring in the direction of the front door, waiting.”
“Tell me everything you saw, everything you thought.”
“The front door of the restaurant opened—I heard voices, maybe the sound of the busboys clearing a table near the front, the dishes clattering in the bin, saw more light for a few seconds—and I could see his face better for a moment. There was laughter from the street. I heard a woman, then another, a couple of deeper voices. Some of the people went the other way on the sidewalk, away from the lot, so I didn’t see them. Only one came around the corner of the building to the parking lot: Kit. She walked up to the man from the black car, sauntering a little as though she were teasing him. He put his hand on her arm. It wasn’t a nice touch, you know? He gripped her arm, and the way she held it, a little away from her body, I could tell he was hurting her. But she didn’t try to pull it away from him. She just stood there, and it reminded me of the way a child stands who’s done something bad and the parent takes him by the arm. She just stood looking down and listened. He was saying something to her in a low voice, and he put his face really close to her ear. The way his mouth was opening wide while he was talking but not getting loud, I could tell he was angry.”
“Did she answer him?”
“No. She just looked down, waiting for him to finish, when he hit her. It surprised her as much as it did me because it came from nowhere. He held her arm with his left hand, and his right came up and slapped her. She dropped her purse and put her hand to her cheek, and that seemed to make him madder. I yelled, ‘Hey!’ and started toward her. She saw me and yelled, ‘It’s okay, Wendy. I’m okay.’ The man opened the back door of the limo and pushed her in, then turned for a second to look in my direction. The bodyguard, the same one I had seen the other time, got out, picked up her purse, found her car keys in it, trotted to her car, got in, and drove out the exit. The boyfriend got into the black car and followed him out.”
Till was listening to her words, to her tone, to her hesitations, trying to detect the places where she was unsure, and the places where she was leaving something out. “What did you do?”
“I went back into the restaurant and called the police. I told them who I was and what had happened, and they began to ask questions that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know the man or where he lived. I didn’t know where Kit lived. I knew her last name was Stoddard. I hadn’t gotten the license number of the car. I sent somebody to look for Olivia, but she had gone home. The police said they’d send a car, and I hung up. I called Olivia, and I told her what had happened. She sounded scared, but she didn’t know the name of the man, either. By the time the cops arrived, it was at least a half hour later, and I had to tell them the whole story over again before they told me there wasn’t much they could do. They radioed in to ask that other cops take a close look at black limos that seemed to have a man and a redhead in them. So I went home and tried to sleep.”
“Did you call them the next morning to see if anything had turned up?”
“Yes. I ended up having to tell the whole story a third time because the cop on duty seemed not to have heard of it. He said he would check and see if anyone had found out anything, and call the restaurant if there was news.”
“I take it he didn’t call.”
“No. I called Olivia again after that. It was around ten, and she came in, and we compared notes. She had called Kit a dozen times and gotten no answer. Finally she took me to Kit’s apartment, which was in an old stucco building off Franklin that had been repaired. You know, it was one of those twenties buildings that have high, narrow doors and lots of arches, but it wasn’t restored, just painted and held together. I remember the name on the mailbox wasn’t Kit’s. It was another girl’s name, and Olivia said it was because the other girl had moved out and the landlord would raise the rent if he knew. We rang the bell and knocked on the door, but she wasn’t home. Neither of us had a key, so we couldn’t get in at first, but the lock looked really cheesy, so Olivia tried slipping a credit card between the door and the jamb, and it opened. The place had about a month of dust and smelled stale. The food in the refrigerator was all old, and about half of her plants were dead from lack of water. I looked in her closet and a lot of clothes were in there, but not the outfit I had seen the night before. Olivia and I tried to remember other outfits she owned that were favorites, and all of them were missing.”
“What did you think that meant?”
“That she had moved in with the boyfriend. That was what she had implied when we had talked to her. So we waited. Nothing happened. After a few days of calling and leaving messages on her voice mail, we went over there again. We got into the apartment with Olivia’s credit card again. As soon as we opened the door, I knew something had changed. It was the smell.”
“What kind of smell?”
“Cleanser. Chlorine bleach. Then there was the ammonia smell of window cleaner, and some kind of pine-smelling floor wash. It was all mixed together in those four little rooms. Boy, was it clean. All of Kit’s stuff had been mov
ed out, and the place had been scrubbed. There wasn’t so much as a piece of paper in the whole place. I know because I looked, and because there was nothing it could have been in or under. The furniture, which Olivia was sure had come with the apartment, was gone. There was nothing left. The only objects anywhere in the apartment were a couple of cans of white paint, a roller and a brush, and a blue plastic tarp.”
“Did you see any stains or marks that they were trying to cover up with the paint?”
“Nothing. The paint made Olivia scared because she thought somebody must have left it there and gone back for the ladder. She expected to see them any second.”
“And you?”
“Well, there’s nothing as contagious as fear. It made me want to leave, but it also made me want to see if the cleaning crew had missed anything. You could see that this wasn’t a building where that kind of cleaning usually happened. The entryway had old copies of LA Weekly lying in a pile. The halls hadn’t been painted for a long time. After all, the reason we could see it at all was that the lock was too cheap to keep out the two of us for ten seconds. So I made Olivia help me search everything: kitchen drawers, cabinets, the space behind the bottom drawers where things sometimes fall. Nothing had been left. We went out to the back of the building to see if there was a conspicuous load of trash out there.”
“Why were you so thorough?”
“Because it wasn’t like Kit to do that kind of cleaning. Olivia kept saying that. Kit was the kind of person who never got back a cleaning deposit on an apartment. She just walked away from whatever she didn’t feel like taking with her. I thought maybe she had stopped paying rent and the landlord had dumped everything to get the place ready for the next tenant.”
“It sounds right. What did you find?”
“Zero. We had been in the apartment just a week or so before, and so we looked for familiar things: the clothes she had left in the closet, the pots from the dead plants, the magnetic calendar from her refrigerator. All gone. I went back into the building to talk to the manager. He wasn’t the owner. He was like a lot of them are, an actor who spent most of his days going out on open casting calls or classes. Managing the building wasn’t much effort, and it covered half his rent. He had known Kit by sight, but he had thought of her as Carolyn Styles, the name on the mailbox and the lease. She had been there when he moved in, and he didn’t know anything about a sublet agreement. He gave me the name and number of the owner. He was a businessman from Korea who was very nice. He had no forwarding address for Carolyn Styles, but he did have a previous address and a few referrals from old landlords.”
“You’re good. It’s what I’ve done a hundred times.”
“Well, I hope you had better luck at it than I did. What I ended up with, after talking to everybody I’d ever met who knew Kit, was this: Kit Stoddard was not her real name. It was a name that she’d worked out with a casting agent named Marti Cole about the day after she’d arrived in Los Angeles. She had wanted to be an actress, so she needed a name like Kit Stoddard. The agent’s office was where she met Carolyn Styles.”
“A false name, too.”
“Yep.”
“It sounds as though the agent used names from a phone book—STO, STY.”
“No, because neither of them was listed. I tracked Marti Cole down, though. She had gone out of business and was working as an assistant to a casting director at Southern Star Pictures. She said she’d closed her office because she couldn’t afford health insurance—it had brought home to her that she wasn’t making it. She hadn’t seen either Kit or Carolyn Styles in two years, and no longer had any memory of what their real names were.”
“You gave up at that point?”
“No. I just felt that I couldn’t do that until I knew she was all right. I kept talking to people every night at the restaurant. I would check the reservation book for the names of people who had known Kit. At night I would check the bar for people I’d seen drinking with her. I asked them everything I could think of. Her real name, where she was from, any other addresses or phone numbers, anything about the boyfriend. Had she ever worked a real job. What I really wanted most was just somebody who had seen her that day, or anytime since that night in the parking lot.”
“Get anything?”
“Not much. Everybody seemed to have the same relationship with Kit that Olivia had. They’d met her at a club or a restaurant or a party. She had always seemed to them to be close friends with somebody else, and then when I talked to the other person, that one didn’t know much about her, either. A few of them knew she had wanted to be an actress, but none of them could remember her being in anything. Some thought she was a model. I knew a photographer named Jimmy Shannon. I called him, and he had one of his assistants check with the agencies. None of them ever heard of her, and I had already checked with the Screen Actors Guild. After all that work, I never found anybody who knew more than Olivia had told me the first day.”
“What was Olivia doing all this time? Was she helping you?”
“At first she was. We even spent days and days driving the beach cities from Ventura to Newport, looking at beach houses, condos, and apartment buildings. We were looking for her red hair or his black car. Of course it was impossible. Then Olivia was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes. She left.”
“Why did she leave? Did she talk about it?”
“Well, Olivia was still working at Banque. She and Eric were through. David, her old boyfriend, was still interested, but not in any serious way. He just liked sleeping with her once in a while. The restaurant scene was getting to her, just as it was getting to me. And she was scared. We had started out the first night with the fear that Kit’s story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. As time went on, we were sure of it. We went to the police again, but you can imagine how far we got.”
“Sure. A pretty young woman moved to L.A. hoping to be an actress. She changed her name, dated rich men, and then moved away and left her apartment clean.”
“Well, the police didn’t exactly issue an alert. It got to Olivia.”
“How?”
“She got more and more afraid. She regretted leaving all of those messages on Kit’s voice mail. She thought the boyfriend would find us and kill us to shut us up.”
“Did she tell other people, or take precautions of any kind?”
“She was always looking over her shoulder, and she wouldn’t leave the restaurant alone anymore. Then one night when I was expecting her to work, she called the restaurant. She said she was calling from the airport. She was leaving because she was tired of being afraid.”
“Did it occur to you that she might have been forced to call you and say she was leaving?”
“Of course. By then I was as paranoid as she was. But I heard announcements being made in the background—gibberish about flights boarding, and not leaving bags unattended. She sounded calm, maybe even happy she was leaving. So I figured she was okay.”
“All right. So you were on your own.”
“Right. It was more than that. Eric was on his third girlfriend right then, and so he wasn’t around very much to talk to me. My weeks of investigating and asking about Kit kept me away from the restaurant. I began to feel that the whole Banque scene was over. It wasn’t just that Kit, who had become a friend, and Olivia, who had been with us from the beginning, were gone. It was noticing that what had been going on had not been real. Everybody was an actor or a model. What we actually spent our time doing was waiting on tables and tending bar, but we had all agreed to pretend that wasn’t true. For a while Eric and I were protected because we had our own fantasy. It still worked for Eric, because he was a real chef, but it didn’t work for me anymore. If I wasn’t with Eric, I was just a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had worked eighteen hours a day for ten years in a job that would never get any easier or give me any chance at a life.”
She was moving close to the night when she had been attacked, and Till needed to get her ther
e, but he sensed that she was skipping something that had happened. “Did you do anything about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look into the job market, or think about other cities to move to, or call friends in other parts of the country.”
“I didn’t get the chance. About a week after that, I came home from the restaurant one night, and the man was waiting for me with a baseball bat.”
“And you had never seen him before?”
She paused, looked away from him for a second. “I had seen him. I lied before about that. He was the bodyguard who had been waiting at the table in the club when we were with Kit.”
Till had to keep himself from showing either his excitement at her admission or the fact that he had known from the first description that the bodyguard might be her attacker. Finally she was beginning to tell the truth. “Did he speak?”
“I spoke. I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said nothing.”
“And then?”
“He started beating me, and then got scared off. Eric arrived, and right behind him there was another car. The fact that it was two cars was what saved me, I think. It seemed like a lot of cars, maybe a lot of people.”
“Who was in the other car?”
“That’s the best part of the joke, I guess. Just Eric’s latest girlfriend. She had arrived at the restaurant to go home with him for the night, but she needed to have her own car available in the morning. She saved my life. I had been hit a few times, and I was down. I knew I couldn’t run or fight anymore. Then all of a sudden there were all these headlights, and he ran.”
She walked ahead toward the rock, and now they were near the foot of it, but she stayed ahead a couple of paces, and Till couldn’t talk to her with all of the other tourists so close. Their conversation had not ended, only paused for an indeterminate period, and they both knew it. She had already made the first crucial admission: that she had lied when she said she knew nothing about the attacker. Now it was essential for Till to keep her confidence and find a way to make her tell him the rest.
