Silence

15

IT WAS NEARLY ten o’clock in the evening when Paul Turner drove the rental car to the corner of the street where Ann Delatorre lived. “He’s gone. He’s been to that house twice today,” said Paul. “I’ll bet he set this up six years ago: If he ever needed to get in touch with Wendy Harper, he would come here, and Ann Delatorre would know where she was.”

“Till’s amazing,” Sylvie said. “He never let anybody know that he had even met Wendy Harper, let alone taken her away. But he still bothered to set up a woman nobody ever heard of to act as a go-between.”

“You know, this could easily be the meeting place. But we can’t assume that.”

“What do we do?”

“It’s like watching a magic trick. You keep your eye on the hand that holds the ball, and ignore everything else.” He looked at the notebook computer on Sylvie’s lap, and watched the blue dots appearing on the map. “We follow Till’s car.”

He pulled out from the curb and drove out to the Boulder Highway toward Las Vegas. When he reached the city and turned left toward the Strip, he saw bright spotlights and construction machinery ahead. He took three quick lane changes, moving in and out of traffic. Then he made a wide turn. There were pockets of road construction everywhere in Las Vegas, constant revision and replacement. This road was being widened to accommodate the expansion of a hotel, but tonight all but one of the lanes were blocked by big yellow machines hauling asphalt or stirring up clouds of dust. Paul’s hand was always sure and steady as he swerved to achieve position.

Sylvie wasn’t worried about catching up with Till’s car. She watched Paul’s dark eyes shine as he looked ahead, and she knew he was looking ahead in time, too. He was working out details.

“We’re going to need the two .38s, and also the rifle. Make sure they’re loaded and lying where you can reach them, so we can pick one up and fire.”

“Okay.” Sylvie released her seat belt, knelt on her seat, and reached between the bucket seats to the floor behind her. She carefully pulled the SKS rifle between the seats to the front. She had to keep it low and covered with her jacket because the drivers of trucks and bulldozers they passed could see down into the car.

Sylvie was comfortable with the .38 revolvers they had picked up from Paul’s gun dealer. Revolvers were simple, and the differences between them were mostly cosmetic. But the SKS rifle had a nasty profile like a black wasp, with a folding metal stock and a pistol grip that made it short enough to swing around inside a car. The SKS was Russian, so the markings that hadn’t been drilled off meant nothing to her, and the action felt stiff and unpredictable. The spring-operated moving parts seemed likely to pinch her fingers. She held it carefully under her coat and reached behind her to the floor for the ammunition clip. “Do you want me to crank a round into the chamber of this thing?”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. Just so you know it’s there.” She clicked the magazine into the underside of the receiver, then held the rifle by its pistol grip and pulled back the charging lever. She checked the safety catch and then carefully placed the rifle between her seat and the door with the barrel upward so any accidental discharge would only blow a hole in the rented car’s roof. Then she reached into the glove compartment and took out the two .38 pistols, careful not to bump the threading on the ends of the barrels against anything. She checked the cylinder of each, put them both on her lap under the coat and waited for Paul.

The SKS would punch through the sheet metal of a car without slowing down very much. The .38 pistols didn’t have the same piercing power, but they would be lethal fired through glass at short range. Paul must be planning to take Jack Till and Wendy Harper in Till’s car and kill them both at once, without any preliminaries. He always seemed to know what he wanted and how to get it. That was one of the things that she had always loved about him.

When they had met, she had still been married to Darren McKee. After all this time, it was hard to remember what it had felt like being married to Darren. He had been short, and had come up to a spot about even with the middle of her ear. She could remember embracing him and feeling his hair tickling her earlobe. She could still recall how bristly his mustache had felt on her skin, but that wasn’t a feeling anymore, it was just information. She couldn’t bring back his smell or hear his voice or feel his shape on her hands or her body. He had no weight or volume in her mind anymore.

Darren pampered and controlled her. He allowed her to buy all the clothes she wanted, but he would look at them when she brought them home, and if he disapproved of them he made her take them back to the store. He scheduled her days, so there was a two-hour period for exercise, then an hour for hair and makeup. Darren believed it was beneficial for her to leave the house every afternoon, so from one to five she was free to shop, see friends, or go to matinees. She had a cell phone, but she almost never made a call. Darren would call her several times a day to see if she was on schedule. If she wasn’t, he would adjust the schedule to give her more time.

The money had been a big surprise to her. Darren had been managing the stripping tours of adult-film stars for about fifteen years by then. As a group, his clients required a great deal of managing—some were addicted to drugs, some were not very bright or practical, some were lazy—but they were good at attracting male audiences. Darren acted as producer. The club paid to book a show, and Darren paid the women salaries. So instead of taking ten or fifteen percent as a manager would have, he took about sixty, and let the women get rich on tips.

Before she had learned that Darren had money, he had talked her into signing a prenuptial agreement. “Honey,” he said. “It’s to protect your money and my pride. I can’t have people in the industry thinking I married a hot young star so I could live off her money. It’s emasculating. If we sign the agreement, our assets stay separate. I can say I support my wife, and haven’t touched a cent of her money.” She had signed. Shortly afterward, she realized how he had stayed rich through three marriages. But it had not bothered her.

What eventually did begin to bother her was that she was twenty-one and he was forty. She was bored. He was busy, obsessed with business, and not much fun. Then one day she was at the gym finishing the exercise class that Darren had put into her schedule, and on the way into the locker room she saw a sheet on the bulletin board. It said “DANCE CLASS: BALLROOM DANCING.” The small print said the class was to take place in the aerobics workout room later that afternoon, so she stayed to look through the glass wall into the room.

When Sylvie heard the music and saw the woman who was running the class demonstrate the dance, Sylvie began to move to the music, unconsciously imitating the steps. But the instructor—she had introduced herself as Fran a moment earlier—noticed, and beckoned to her through the glass.

Sylvie didn’t see Paul at first. She came into the room, keeping her eyes on the instructor and taking a few tentative steps of a samba, and then he was there beside her and they were dancing together. That was all. They had become partners. When the class was over, Paul stood with her for a few minutes in the big room outside where there were stationary bikes and treadmills and Nautilus machines. They exchanged names and the short versions of their histories that people constructed and carried around like calling cards. When she said, “I’ve got to go,” and he said, “I’ll look forward to seeing you on Thursday,” she walked off and noted that the capsule autobiography she had given him was a newly revised version. She had not mentioned that she had a husband.

On Thursday they simply walked in when the aerobics class ended and stood together but apart from the rest of the dance students, waiting to begin. At the class she wore her hair in the chignon she had worn all those years in ballet. Fran, the dance instructor, was a skinny middle-aged vegan who had been a physical-education teacher at one time. She moved like an anthropologist demonstrating the dances of a tribal culture. The steps were all mimicked with technical accuracy, but the passion and the grace were what she had not been able to bring back with her. She had to evoke them with words, exhort the better dancers to supply the missing qualities, and the best dancers were Sylvie and Paul. Paul was the sort of man that Madame Bazetnikova had called un danseur noble. But it wasn’t about him. It was, as in ballet, about her.

When she danced with Paul, Sylvie felt herself become beautiful and wild and somehow triumphant. After years of slouching, she held herself erect and was still not nearly as tall as he was. She had tried since she was in high school to look small, so she wouldn’t be noticed. Now she wanted to be noticed, to be admired. She felt light and graceful, as though she could float a foot above the floor.

When the music ended for the last time, and Fran put on her oversized sweater to leave, the rest of the class followed. Paul simply placed his hand on the small of Sylvie’s back and exerted the same gentle pressure that had been there since the dance had begun. They talked as they walked, mostly about the dancing, the parts they liked the most, the parts they wanted to work on and improve. But Sylvie was not thinking about the words. She was thinking about the large male hand on her back.

She thought about what he might mean by placing it there, and what it meant when she let it stay, and when she obeyed its pressure, walking where he guided her instead of turning to go into the women’s locker room to dress for her workout. He conducted her to the passenger side of his car, opened the door, and drove her to his apartment. On the way, they talked about the traffic, the summer heat, the houses on his street, and not about where they were going. She told herself it was faintly ridiculous for her to have been in those movies, but now to feel the tension of this moment, to feel the delicate ambiguity of each word or touch or glance.

She let him lead her into the apartment as he led her in the dance. She let him undress her, and she felt, for the first time, a sense of rightness. This was the way she had always wanted things to be. Later, when it was over, she lay in Paul’s bed for a few minutes, then sat up, walked into his living room, putting on her clothes as she found them on the floor. On the way back, they talked as they had before, about the songs they loved and the dance class.

The next Tuesday, the same thing happened, and Sylvie realized that it hadn’t been an isolated event, a mutual lapse that they would each silently wonder about forever. That had been the lie she had told herself. Soon she was lying to Darren about the exercise sessions she missed at the gym and about her partners in the dance class. Sometimes she would describe for him men who really were in the class, and sometimes, because there were more women than men, she would say that she had danced only with women that day.

After a few weeks, she told Paul that she was married. He said, “I saw the mark on your finger where you took off your ring.”

Two months later, Paul said, “We should be married. It’s time to get your divorce.”

She told him about the prenuptial agreement she had signed. “If I divorce him, I won’t have much money—only what I could save before I got married.”

“Does he have a lot of money?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s made a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s only left you one way to get your share of it.”

Sylvie let the moment pass. She never asked, “What do you mean?” She said nothing. For two more months, she thought about what Paul had said. She knew he had meant it at least a little, because he had said it the way some men made jokes—the kind that really weren’t jokes, but questions. She detected certain feelings in herself that she should not be having. She resented Darren for having caught her at a weak moment and holding out marriage as the alternative to a bad part of her life. She began to wish that Darren were dead.

But Paul took care of Darren by himself. He waited for Darren to go out on one of his tours with a couple of women who had used the names Ray-Lee and Kay-Lee in their last few films. All actresses in adult cinema liked to do girl-on-girl scenes because they were so much easier, less dangerous and strenuous than regular sex. These two had temporarily captured the imaginations of the segment of the audience who liked to watch that sort of thing.

Paul flew to New York, drove to Philadelphia, and waited for Darren and the women to reach town. He took a room in the hotel where they would be staying, then waited until a morning when the women left the room beside Darren’s to go to the hotel’s spa. He stood outside Darren’s door holding a grocery bag and knocked. When Darren opened the door, he pushed his way in and closed the door. Paul’s bag held a .32 revolver with a plastic one-quart water bottle taped over the barrel to suppress the sound. Paul fired once into Darren’s chest, then stood over him and fired into his head. He walked out with the gun still inside the bag, and closed the door. If anyone heard the noises, they did not interpret them as shots. The women found Darren two hours later, when Paul was already in the airport waiting for his plane home.

Sylvie was awakened abruptly that morning by a ringing doorbell, and opened the door to a pair of police officers. Since this was only four hours after Darren had been killed, the visit ended forever any suspicion that she’d had any direct role in his death: No flight from the East Coast could have brought her home that quickly.

Even so, when Paul paid his respects before the funeral, he told her that they must not call, write letters, or meet each other again for three months because police often kept family members of murder victims under surveillance. Ninety-one days later, they met, apparently by chance, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago. They returned to Los Angeles on different days, Sylvie started going to the dance class again, and Sylvie and Paul had a period of simulated courtship.

Sylvie watched Paul driving the streets of Las Vegas, and felt a light-headed tingle of excitement about him. There was nothing in the world as erotic as being with a man who had killed her husband to take her. The breathless feeling was still there after fifteen years. But as she watched, she could see his face was changing, taking on a new expression. “What is it?”

“Look.”

She looked ahead. As she did, the big red-striped shape of a Southwest Airlines jet glided over them and onto a distant runway. “Is he at the airport?”

“His car is at the airport. I think he turned it in.”

“Then how are we going to find out where he went?”

PAUL WALKED CAREFULLY along the side of Ann Delatorre’s house in the darkness, keeping his shoes from making any noise. There were no security-company signs on the lawn, no stickers, and no keypads visible through the windows, and he wasn’t surprised. People on the run didn’t want any conversations with the police officers who responded to false alarms, or even minor burglaries. They wanted everything quiet and undisturbed. He liked that. What he didn’t like was that many of them made up for it by arming themselves.

Paul peered around the corner of the house and saw Sylvie waiting outside the back door. In the darkness behind the house he could just see that her right hand was down at the side of her body, and he knew she was holding the pistol beside her thigh, where it would not be seen if a light came on. She had screwed the silencers on the threaded muzzles of the two .38 revolvers. Paul liked to use the lower-caliber, low-velocity cartridges for jobs like this. If Ann Delatorre could be intimidated by a gun, a .38 with a silencer on it would scare her as much as a .44 magnum, and if she couldn’t, then it would be big enough to kill her.

Sylvie gave Paul a silent wave, and Paul moved back toward the front of the house. He was searching for the room where Ann Delatorre slept. He had looked in at two dark bedrooms, and seen only the smooth, tight bedspreads and undented pillows on the beds. At last he found what he had been looking for. The third bedroom had its blinds closed, but he was able to put his eye to the corner and make out the shape of a sleeping person on the bed.

He stood still for a few seconds and listened. The night was quiet out here in the suburbs. He knew that Route 215 swung through Henderson, but it was too distant for him to hear the cars. He went around the house to a spare bedroom where the door was closed. Any incidental sounds he made getting in would be less likely to reach Ann Delatorre’s ears from there.

Paul used a glass cutter to etch a small half-circle in the windowpane just at the latch. He ran a strip of duct tape across the semicircle, then put on his leather gloves and pounded it once with his hand. There was only a dull thump and a click as the semicircle of glass was punched inward and held by the tape. He peeled back the tape carefully and brought the small piece of glass with it, then reached inside, unlocked the latch, and slid the window open six inches.

He put his head to the opening and listened. When he heard nothing but the hum of the air conditioner, he lifted the window all the way, and climbed inside. Then he crouched on the floor for a few seconds, letting his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness. Paul had killed several people at night while they were asleep in their beds, and he had come to enjoy it. He moved quietly to the door, stood still for a few seconds, then turned the knob and pulled the door inward.

The sudden bang made him jump in alarm, and the muzzle-flash blinded him. He had leaped to the side instinctively, so he was behind the wall again, and he squatted there. He heard footsteps dash out of the bedroom across the hall, already past him and around the corner before he was able to get his gun out of his jacket.

Paul leaned around the doorway and fired, but he knew that the shot was at least a whole second late. It was just a way to fight his paralysis and do something. He ran down the hallway, knowing that if she were waiting to shoot him, the place she would aim was at the corner. He ran past it into another doorway and aimed up the next hall. All he saw was an open door, and the night beyond.

She had made it outside. He dashed to the back door and heard Sylvie’s voice rasp, “Drop it at your feet. Now turn around and go back inside.”

The woman’s shape appeared in the doorway, and then Paul could see Sylvie’s taller silhouette. She stepped in and closed the door, and Paul turned on the light.

The woman was black. She was barefoot, wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt that said UNLV. Paul stared at her. “Who are you?”

“My name is Ann Delatorre.”

“Where is Wendy Harper?”

“Who’s Wendy Harper?”

Paul lunged forward and punched her in the ribs with his free hand. He suspected that he had broken a couple of them, because when she tried to straighten, the pain overpowered her for a moment.

Paul grasped a handful of her hair and shook her, then wrenched it to the side so her head hit the wall. “You know her. Say it.”

“I know her.”

He held her hair and jerked her head up so she had to look at him. “If you tell us where she is, I’ll give you ten thousand dollars. You can get on a plane and take a vacation, then come back and nobody will know how we found out. You’ll never see us again.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

Paul swung her head against the wall again, harder this time. It hit, then she slid and collapsed onto the floor. He waited a few seconds until she seemed to regain consciousness, then kicked her.

Sylvie began to worry. The woman on the floor was getting hurt, maybe incapacitated, but she didn’t seem to be afraid. Sylvie whispered, “Don’t kill her, or she can’t tell us.”

He said, “Miss Delatorre. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“Then think for a minute. I want something small and simple. I’ll pay you money for it. If you don’t tell me, I’ll inflict suffering. Don’t answer now, automatically. Just listen and think.” He turned to Sylvie. “Go to the kitchen and bring me back a butcher knife.”

Sylvie walked into the kitchen. She didn’t want to turn on another light, but she didn’t see any knives on the counter, so she’d have to look in some drawers. She heard a growling cry—not of pain, but anger and hatred. She pivoted and ran back to the hallway.

When she emerged from the kitchen she was horrified. It was the woman who was making the noise. Somehow she had tripped Paul and now she was on him, scratching and biting. He was using his left hand to hold her off, and his right forearm to protect his face, but he couldn’t get a grip on her, and she kept reaching for the gun, and when he pulled it away, she would go for his eyes.

Sylvie rushed forward and poked her gun against the woman’s head. “Stop it! Stop!” she shouted, but the woman whirled suddenly, her eyes alive, almost joyful as she snatched at Sylvie’s gun.

Sylvie fired into her head. The woman’s body fell where it was, straddling Paul in the narrow corridor, while he lay on his back. He pushed at her body, then rolled and kicked himself free of it. “Shit,” he said. He stood up with difficulty. “This is a fucking disaster.”

Sylvie stared at him, the horror undiminished since the instant when she had heard that growl. Paul was wet with the dead woman’s blood. Her blood had spattered the hallway, even a few drops on the ceiling, but the wound had emptied onto Paul’s chest and neck, so his clothes were soaked. He had three long red scratches on his left cheek, where the woman’s nails had raked him, and a nail mark under his right eye. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and opened it a couple of buttons, then looked at the skin beneath.

“Oh, God, she bit you!”

“Yeah. Bit, scratched, tried to get my eyes.”

“She was crazy.”

“Yeah. I just looked away from her for a second when you went toward the kitchen. She was waiting for it, I guess.” He looked down at the body. “I sure wish you hadn’t killed her.”

“What?”

“That was what she wanted, not what I wanted. Sylvie, you knew we needed her alive to answer questions.”

“What could I do? She was hurting you.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s over. No use in arguing.”

“But what did you want me to do?”

“You could have shot her anywhere, but not in the head. She would have been in pain and too weak to cause trouble. We could have kept her alive and made her talk.”

Sylvie walked into the kitchen.

“Wait. Where are you going?”

“I don’t want to think of you as an asshole. I’m going to give you a chance to stop being one.”

“Sylvie, this isn’t the time. We need to do some searching. Find some rubber gloves and get started while I get her out of the way.”

“What do you want me to look for?”

“Anything that would tell us where Wendy Harper is—a stub from a plane ticket, an address book, a letter. Use your imagination.”

Sylvie fought her sense of injustice. She had saved his life, and now he was blaming her for losing what the woman knew. She opened the cabinet below the sink, found a box of disposable rubber gloves, and put a pair on. She searched drawers and cabinets, leaving them open so she wouldn’t look in the same place twice.

She passed by the entrance to the hallway and looked at Paul without letting him see her. He was cleaning up—wrapping the body in a blanket. She kept moving. Let him do it by himself. She had tried to do something nice for him by killing her, and he had not appreciated it. Let him think about that for a while.

Sylvie moved through the house, opening drawers and cabinets, feeling her way through stacks of folded linens, moving cans and bottles aside to see if something was hidden behind them. She found a drawer where old bills were kept, but none of them seemed to contain any information that she could use. She found a sheet of names and addresses printed out beside the computer in one of the spare rooms, but then another sheet below it, and another, a whole stack of dozens of pages. They seemed to be mailing lists of customers for some kind of business.

Sylvie woke up the computer and tried to sign on, but the password had not been stored. She had started typing passwords like “Ann” and “Ann’s computer” and “Open sesame” when she saw the purse. It was a reddish brown Coach shoulder bag with a small silver clasp, and Sylvie’s first thought was that she liked it, but she pushed that thought out of her mind and picked it up.

She looked inside, and found an address book. She didn’t have much hope it would say “Wendy Harper,” but it might contain the computer password or something else she could use. She searched through every page, but found nothing that she could identify as useful. She found Ann Delatorre’s cell phone, turned it on and began to scroll through the stored phone numbers, then the recently called numbers. They were all local.

She looked inside the wallet. There were a few credit cards, a library card, a couple of business cards from companies around Las Vegas. The driver’s license looked real, but it didn’t say Ann Delatorre. It said L. Ann Delatorre. She found no passwords or out-of-town addresses, but in the back of the wallet, she found something that made her draw in her breath suddenly. It was a printed card that had come with the wallet. It said, “If found, please call” and in a woman’s handwriting it gave a telephone number and the word “Reward.”

Sylvie looked at the number on the desk telephone. That was a 702 number. She checked Ann Delatorre’s cell phone. The little screen showed a 702 number, too.

She understood Ann Delatorre, without knowing her at all. She had been a woman who had been absolutely resolved to protect Wendy Harper. She would never have written down her phone number for herself. She had memorized it a long time ago and would remember it forever. She had known that she wouldn’t lose her wallet. But she had also known that someday she might be killed. There would be police, or at least someone who found her body and would go through her purse. They would call the number. And on the other end, Wendy Harper would learn that Ann Delatorre was dead. “Paul?” she called. “I’m pretty sure I found the phone number. It’s a 415. Isn’t that San Francisco?”