by Thomas Perry
Till looked at Linda Gordon. “Then I’ll take Miss Harper out of here, and someday we can all hear officially what we already know.”
“Don’t leave Los Angeles,” said Linda Gordon. “And make sure my office knows exactly where you are at every moment.”
“What?” said Wendy.
“You heard me. If you aren’t Wendy Harper, then what you’ve just done is an obstruction of justice, for starters. Mr. Till will be your codefendant. If you are Wendy Harper, then there are other things that you need to talk about with the police. We understand you have been withholding information about a possible homicide that occurred six years ago. You also may be charged with grand theft in connection with a fraudulent life-insurance claim. I’m being very casual about this because you came on your own. But don’t test me.”
“Excuse me,” Chernoff broke in. “Since this isn’t over, we might as well get a few more things on the record. Don’t anyone leave just yet.”
Till said, “All right, Jay. What is it?”
“Give me a few more minutes.” He took out his cell phone and dialed. “Okay. Pull up ahead of my car and come in. We’re expecting you.”
Linda Gordon turned to stare at Chernoff. “What are you doing? This isn’t the time for the kind of antics you pull in the courtroom. We all have other things to do.”
“Nothing as important as this,” Chernoff said.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Your client isn’t sitting in a cell surrounded by psychopaths. He’s in his very expensive house or his famous restaurant.”
“His reputation is priceless, and his arrest has been all over the press. He deserves to be exonerated as quickly as possible. And when it’s appropriate, as visibly as possible.”
There was the sound of a car’s tires scraping the curb across the street, then a car door slamming, then another. Poliakoff pushed the curtain aside a few inches to look out the front window, then stepped to the door and opened it.
The first person in the door was a pretty woman about thirty years old with long brown hair and blue eyes. “Wendy!” She rushed to throw her arms around Wendy Harper. “Where have you been?”
Wendy said, “Olivia. Did you come back just for this?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve been back for three years. I still work at Banque.”
A man in the doorway came forward. “Wendy, it’s really good to see you again.” He took his turn to hug Wendy, but there was a self-conscious, reserved quality to the embrace. “We were all afraid you were dead.”
Wendy said, “It’s nice to see you too, David. Are you still at the restaurant, too?”
“No,” he said. “Except once in a while if somebody is sick. I’ve been getting work as an actor. Olivia and I are married.”
Olivia held her left hand out to Wendy, and Wendy said, “Wow, look at that rock!”
Olivia said, “David got an airline commercial. He makes a cute pilot.”
Till watched Wendy as a third person came in the door, and her eyes began to fill with tears. “Eric!”
He stepped forward, looking tired and shaken, and said, “Do I get one of those hugs, too?”
“Try and stop me.” She threw her arms around his neck and they embraced hard. “I missed you so much.” After a few seconds, she pulled back to look at him. “You look good for a condemned man.”
“Thank God you came back,” he said. “I’ve heard what you’ve had to go through to get here. Why did you ever leave in the first place?”
“I was just so scared, and I had to get away. I never imagined you could be accused of killing me.” Her eyes drifted to Jack Till. “I came back because this whole nightmare has got to end.” She hugged Eric again and then, after a few seconds, they parted.
Linda Gordon turned to Chernoff. “Do you want to tell me the purpose of all this?”
“Depositions,” Chernoff said. “You and I and Sergeant Poliakoff and Officer Fallon can go into your kitchen and take some official statements.” He turned to the newcomers. “I assume you can all swear on pain of perjury that this woman is the same Wendy Harper you knew six years ago?”
“Of course,” Olivia said. “Let’s get it over with so we can catch up on things.”
“I don’t see any point in deposing anyone,” Linda Gordon said. “We’ll have irrefutable scientific evidence in a couple of weeks, and it will make witnesses irrelevant.”
Jack Till said, “You weren’t shy about taking an official statement from me when I went to see you the first time. It doesn’t matter if you won’t take a statement from them, though. Sergeant Poliakoff is the detective in charge of a murder investigation. He can interview anyone he pleases, tape-record their statements, or take his own notes.”
“You came to me and offered to give me your statement voluntarily, so I took it,” Linda Gordon said. “But this is no longer a matter for the opinions of witnesses. Either she is Wendy Harper, or she isn’t.”
Poliakoff had made a decision. “Tim, take a few pictures of everyone here.”
“What’s that for?” Linda Gordon asked.
“It will help me identify them later.”
She turned to stare at Chernoff, who seemed uncharacteristically silent. “You’re planning to call me in front of the judge, aren’t you? You’ll put me under oath and force me to say that all of these people recognized each other.”
“I don’t want to do anything theatrical.”
“Do you honestly not understand why I feel it’s best to wait until the positive scientific evidence is in?”
“I don’t.”
“All right, then. We’ll take depositions.”
Chernoff said, “Olivia? Would you like to go first?”
“Yes.” And she walked into the kitchen ahead of the others. The two lawyers swore her in and explained perjury to her. Then each of them asked her questions. “How long did you know Wendy Harper?”
“Ten years.”
“Don’t count the six when she was missing.”
“Four years, then.”
“How often did you see her?”
“Every day.”
Her husband David said, “I knew her for four years at the restaurant. Olivia was the first person hired to work at Banque, and then she persuaded Wendy to hire me.”
“Wendy hired you, not Eric?”
“Wendy ran the dining room and the bar. I was a bartender.”
“How well did you know her?”
“Extremely well.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She and I, um, dated once.”
Jack Till was the last one in the kitchen. Linda Gordon began, “Do you swear that the woman you brought here today is the same Wendy Harper you helped to disappear six years ago?” Then: “Did you ever reveal to anyone what you had done?”
“Not until the day I read in the paper that Eric Fuller had been charged with her murder.”
“But otherwise you didn’t reveal it to anyone?”
“No.”
“You know that there was a large life insurance policy on Miss Harper that Eric Fuller collected on?”
“I’ve heard that. You’ll have to ask him.”
“You know you’re guilty of assisting him in a life-insurance fraud?”
“No, I’m not,” Till said.
Chernoff said, “Hold it, Miss Gordon. I need to interrupt this for a moment.” He turned off the tape recorder.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yes. I see you’re searching for a pretext to try to detain either Miss Harper or Mr. Till. The reason I stopped the tape was to save you from going on the record with something that would have terrible consequences for you. I assure you that any charges will be dropped, and you’ll spend the rest of your career fighting to keep from being fired and disbarred.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Of course it’s a threat. My God, are you listening at all?”
“This meeting is over,” she said. “You can a
ll leave my house now.”
“I’m happy to do that,” Chernoff said. “I’ll be petitioning the judge to dismiss the charges against Eric Fuller before the end of the afternoon. If I were you, I’d try to get in first to drop the charges before then. But you suit yourself.”
Chernoff crossed the room in ten quick paces, opened the door and stopped only long enough to say, “Eric, I’ll call you later when the charges are dismissed.” Then he was out the door.
Eric nodded, then looked at Wendy. “Do you think we could talk?”
Wendy looked at Eric, then at Till. Jack Till hid his instinctive feeling of jealousy and his more reasoned dread of loss. He said, “I don’t think Miss Gordon wants us here, and I don’t want you standing around on a street in plain sight. Wendy, you can ride with Eric, and I can follow you to the police station. Eric, do you know how to get there?”
“Unfortunately, I do,” Eric said.
Linda Gordon came out of the kitchen, and she seemed to be propelled toward the door. She hurried past them, flung the front door open, and stepped out onto the porch. Jay Chernoff’s red Saab was just pulling away from the curb as she shouted, “Mr. Chernoff!” She waved her arm frantically. “Mr. Chernoff!”
Jack Till saw her do a quick half-turn and then fall sideways on the porch before he heard the distant report of the gun. He and Poliakoff dropped to their knees on opposite sides of Linda Gordon’s fallen body. Each of them grasped an arm to drag her inside. Till kicked the door shut, and then he and Poliakoff were up and at the windows, trying to locate the shooter.
“Rifle,” Till said.
“A sound delay,” said Poliakoff. “At least half a second.”
“Six or seven hundred feet.”
“The hill at the end of the street.”
“There’s an empty lot, and I think there’s a road up above, so it could have been one of the back yards. Call it in.”
Poliakoff took a hand radio out of his pocket. “This is Sergeant Poliakoff. I am under sniper fire at 5605 Greenbelt Street, Sherman Oaks. There’s a gunshot victim here, and I need an ambulance. I think the sniper is at the south end of Greenbelt on the hillside. It’s three blocks south of Ventura, four blocks west of Coldwater. I’ll stand by.”
Till was back on the floor with Linda Gordon. “Wendy,” he said. “Get a couple of blankets and a pillow off her bed.” To Linda Gordon, he said, “You’re going to be just fine. You got clipped in the shoulder, but it went right through. We’re going to make you comfortable, and the ambulance will be here in a minute.”
Wendy knelt beside Jack with the blankets and pillow. Till gently lifted Linda Gordon’s head and slipped the pillow under, then covered her with the blankets. As Wendy bent over her, he noticed how closely Wendy’s long blond hair matched the color of Linda Gordon’s.
37
PAUL TURNER RAN down the hill with long strides that his momentum lengthened into jumps and landings, and then he was off the hill and into the car. “Got her,” he said. “High on the left side, maybe the heart.”
Sylvie looked into the rearview mirror and pulled the car away from the curb, then continued up Valley Vista. “You’re sure it was fatal?”
“I can’t give you a firm medical prognosis through a rifle scope,” he said. “All I can do is hit her with a .308 and clear my calendar in case there’s a funeral.”
“I suppose,” she said. The road skirted the low hills in winding curves toward the west. She couldn’t drive as fast as she wanted to because this was a suburban residential area, with stop signs and streets coming in on the right every two hundred feet or so. A few of the curves were blind, and this was not a time when they could afford to risk an accident. Paul opened his window. She said, “Can you close your window?”
“Why?”
“It’s creating a vacuum or something and it’s hurting my ears.”
“I’m listening for sirens.”
“We won’t have any trouble hearing them. If you drive with your window open, people think you’re drunk or smoking pot.”
He sighed, pressed the button, and watched the window slide up. “I can’t believe how great this feels.”
“I guess I’m still a little bit behind you,” she said. “Everything about this job has been hard until two minutes ago. I need to get used to the idea that Wendy Harper is finally dead, and we can take a vacation.”
Paul was grinning. “It’s great. I knew the thing to do was follow Eric Fuller. I knew damned well that wherever she was, he would turn up.”
“You get full credit.” At the time when they had been planning, Sylvie had been about to suggest the same thing, but she had wisely decided to let his idea be the one they chose. She had seen nothing objectionable in it, and she had known that if it turned out to be a mistake, she would rather blame him than be blamed. She had also decided that it was a good strategy to accept his idea without a murmur because her acquiescence would give him confidence. Killing was mostly psychology. Paul had followed Eric Fuller to the safe house easily and bagged Wendy Harper with a single shot from two hundred yards out, so obviously Sylvie had been right. She congratulated herself silently. “You’re the best,” she said.
He said, “I knew that no matter what else she did, as soon as she hit town, they would see each other. He could hardly have her come all the way down here after six years to save his ass and not even thank her. It just wouldn’t be natural. And from our point of view, I knew he was going to be perfect. The one you want to shadow isn’t some cop who follows people for a living, and is perfectly capable of noticing you and getting you arrested. It’s the sorry bastard who spends his time in a restaurant chopping onions.”
Sylvie kept herself from speaking. At times she felt amazement at how egocentric men were. It had not yet occurred to him that he owed her a share in the congratulations. Killing Wendy Harper had not been a matter of following a lovesick chef from La Cienega to Greenbelt Street and sitting behind a bush waiting for a chance to pop an unsuspecting woman. There had been plenty of effort and frustration for Sylvie, too.
Paul seemed to notice that she wasn’t seconding everything he said anymore. “But I can’t take all the credit. You did a great job on this, too, Sylvie. Really.”
She detected in herself a perverse urge to bait him, to say, “Oh? What did I do?” She knew by now that he would say something patronizing: “What? Oh, a lot. You were with me all the way.” She forced herself to forgo the opportunity to make herself irritated and miserable. That was another skill she had picked up during a long marriage. She could see quarrels coming from a great distance, could play them out in her mind to confirm that there was nothing for her to gain, and then decline them. “You’re sweet, Paul.”
She swerved into the turn at Beverly Glen, crossed the intersection at the Cadillac dealership onto Tyrone, and kept going north toward home. She moved up the back streets until she came to Vanowen, and then followed it west nearly to their house. She was thinking ahead. In less than a day, they could be on their way to Madrid.
She drove up to the house and pulled into the driveway. It was late afternoon now, and other people in the neighborhood would be getting home soon. That felt good. She loved living a secret life while appearing to be doing exactly what other people did. She pushed the button on the opener and watched the garage door roll up. She drove in, turned off the engine, and closed the door behind them. “We finally killed the bitch, and now we’re home free. I love it, and I love you.” She leaned over and kissed Paul’s cheek.
“I love you, too,” Paul said. “Just one more thing, and we’ll be on our vacation.”
They got out and Sylvie went to unlock the kitchen door. Paul brought the rifle and ammunition in. He said, “All we really have to do is go pick up our million bucks.”
“You don’t mean now, tonight?”
“Sure I do. We did the job, and he said he’d collect the money and have it waiting. That was the arrangement.”
“But we don’t ne
ed to have a million dollars in cash tonight. It’s silly. I wouldn’t even know where to put it all. We’ve already got so much cash for the trip that I’m worried about it.”
“It’s not important where we put it,” Paul said. “We’ll shove it under the bed, or in the oven or something until we can put it into safe-deposit boxes. That isn’t the point. We go to pick it up tonight because we don’t want to give Scott Schelling a few days to dream up a way to keep us from collecting. We don’t have to be rude about it, or anything—just cool and businesslike. We show up and say, ‘We did what you asked, and here we are. Time to pay. Bye-bye.’”
Sylvie nodded. “Okay. Give me a chance to change.”
“I’ve got to get this rifle ready to dump before we go see Schelling.”
“Okay.” Sylvie went off to take another shower and dress. She knew that they were going to be out late tonight, so she selected a pair of black pants and a black pullover and black shoes. Black was always right in these ambiguous evening situations, and she looked good in black.
When she came out of the shower, Paul was in the bedroom already dressed in a pair of nicely pressed gray pants, a dark blue shirt, and a black jacket.
“You don’t need to get dressed. You look incredible.” He plucked the towel off her, then put his arms around her and held her there.
“I’m cold. Cut it out. I want to get dressed. This isn’t the time.” She held herself rigid, her back hunched over.
He kept his arms around her for two more seconds, as though she might relent, then let her go. “I suppose it’s not.” He turned and walked out of the bedroom. She felt relieved for a few seconds because he intended to leave her in peace. She knew she had hurt his feelings, and knew that she shouldn’t have been quite so insensitive to his mood. He was still feeling manic about their difficult victory, their sudden freedom from that awful job.
She should have been flirtatious and teasing, and made him go away feeling good about her. Instead she had fended him off clumsily, so she had looked unattractive, and actually stood there like a statue, like a symbol of frigidity. As she dressed, she cursed herself for being so slow to think. It was just that she had been forcing herself to face her tension about Scott Schelling, and fear was not an aphrodisiac.
