Silence

16

IT WAS PROBABLY the last flight of the night—certainly the last flight to San Francisco. The long-distance number Ann Delatorre had called was in the 415 area code, so now Jack Till was in an airplane looking out the small plastic window at the lighted maintenance area beside the flight line. The ten minutes or so while he waited for the seats beside him to fill always guaranteed a low level of suspense. The seats on Southwest were not assigned, so anybody could sit anywhere, and night flights usually had a few empty seats.

Till watched attractive women walking up the aisle clutching their purses and oversized carry-ons, their big, liquid eyes narrowing in pure self-interest as they hunted for the seat they considered the best. He was sometimes amused in a cold way when he saw what they chose. They did not often choose to sit beside Jack Till.

Till was tall but thin, and didn’t have the sort of frame with elbows and shoulders that encroached on a neighbor’s space. He always wore a good sport coat and crisply pressed shirt when he was working, and travel was work. He knew he wasn’t ugly. But he supposed he looked like what he was: a retired cop whose face showed some wear.

He watched the next woman’s eyes zigzag from one side of the aisle to the other, reading faces. They passed over his quickly, not quite afraid of him, at least not in an airplane, but not comfortable near him, either. He supposed it was because after all of those years protecting people like her, he had picked up the look of the people he’d been protecting them from. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t interested in company.

His mother would have been offended on his behalf, but his mother had been a difficult woman who was offended regularly. She married his father in an act of speculation, like buying a piece of land cheap on the guess that any chunk of the planet might have something valuable on it. Ray Till had already been drafted for the war when she met him, and she might easily have been a young widow. But he returned from Europe a couple of years later a captain, with three battlefield promotions and a silver star. He was a quiet man with blue eyes that had beneath them an underlying toughness, and maybe the toughness had been what had attracted her. He became an electrician and wired whole developments in the San Fernando Valley during the building boom, when vast orange and lemon groves were cut down and incinerated in bonfires to make room for the new houses.

Till’s parents became mildly prosperous, but there were some times when Helen Till was unkindly reminded that her husband wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer. Even a minor executive in the movie business held a higher social standing than an electrical contractor, no matter how many men he sent out in trucks each day to wire people’s swimming-pool heaters and electronic-gate openers.

When Jack decided to go to the police academy, his parents did not understand, because he had never given them the reason. They never exactly accepted his decision, but they became used to it. Helen and Ray both lived long enough to see their only son make Detective Sergeant, when no likely scenario involved anybody shooting at him. But his mother had strong opinions on every aspect of his life.

When Jack brought a girl named Karen home from college to meet his parents for the first time, his mother greeted her warmly and then retired a distance, pretending to be arranging places on the table, but really to observe Karen while she talked to Ray and Jack. No, there was someone else present, too. Who was it? Aunt Nancy, his mother’s younger sister.

Jack remembered seeing them talking in the kitchen, and then he saw his mother give one of her shrugs. Helen Till was not a woman who spent much time in a state of uncertainty. When she shrugged, it never meant “I don’t know.” It always meant “I can’t imagine why everybody doesn’t know.”

Later, Jack left with Karen. He spoke with his mother the next day, when he came by to thank her for the elaborate dinner. He said, “Well? What did you think of Karen?”

She said, “As a date, or as a candidate for governor?”

That did it, saying it that way. She had directed his attention away from Karen’s beauty and the extreme care she gave to dressing and grooming herself, and onto the sparse and oddly assorted furniture of her mind.

His mother looked into his eyes, and then shrugged. “If she loves you, the nicest, smartest girl in town will do everything the biggest whore will do. And she’ll mean it.”

Years later, when he married Rose, it was without the benefit of his mother’s advice. But she liked Rose and approved of her. Rose was cheerful and eager to have fun, the sort of pretty woman who had sun-induced freckles, an athletic, lithe body and a sort of buoyant energy. She didn’t mind that Jack was a police officer. In retrospect, he supposed that she thought of police work as a sport, like hunting. The way things turned out was as surprising to Jack’s mother as it was to Jack. He still believed that if the trials that had fallen to them had been different ones—maybe bankruptcy or a chronic illness instead of Holly’s problem—she might have held up, might even have been heroic. But she did not hold up. She ran away from Jack and from Holly. She left a note that said she needed to spend some time alone and think, and that she would be in touch as soon as she was ready. The way he learned her new address was by reading the divorce papers that arrived in the mail.

After Rose, there had been a series of relationships with women, but he had never been tempted to marry again. After a few misunderstandings and disappointments, he developed a talent for recognizing women—mostly widows and divorcees—who liked male company but had no more interest in marrying anybody than he did.

Holly was the center of his life. He had never kept the women he dated from meeting her, but he had never rushed the meetings, and he had never given Holly the impression that any of the women would be around for a long time. He had needed desperately to protect Holly from loss. He thought about Holly now, and wondered what she was doing tonight. It was late, so he pictured her asleep in her bed in the room she shared with her friend Nancy in Garden House. In a few hours she would be up again, bustling around in the kitchen and getting ready for another day at the shop.

Till felt uneasy. He looked out the plane’s window along the flight line, where he could see the rounded shapes of four other planes nosed up to the terminal. He could see the lights of the hotels, and beyond them the dark of the desert. Leaving Henderson felt wrong. There were too many things he did not know, too many questions he had not asked, too many possibilities that he had left untested. He was still bothered by the telephone call that Ann Delatorre had made to Wendy Harper after his first visit. He’d heard what Ann had said, but what had Wendy said? Had she told Ann Delatorre not to let Till know where she was? Had Wendy told her to find a way to get rid of him?

Maybe Wendy had heard what was going on in Los Angeles and was already making her way there on her own. That would make a great deal of sense. If Wendy had become adept at hide-and-seek over the past six years, then she might have decided that her best use of Jack Till was to leave him wandering around trying to develop leads to places where she wasn’t. Maybe her plan was to slip into Los Angeles alone and unnoticed. If that was her plan, then he was blowing it for her right now. He was on an airplane that was about to take him straight to her.

He couldn’t fly to San Francisco without knowing whether he was helping her or hurting her. The only way to find out was to talk to Ann Delatorre one more time. He stood up, opened the overhead compartment, and took out his small suitcase.

“What are you doing?”

Till turned his head and saw that it was the flight attendant. “I’m leaving. I’m not going to be on this flight. You can give my seat to somebody else.”

“Why? Is something wrong? Are you ill?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just forgot something I have to do.”

“Sir, I don’t know if you’ll be able to get a refund.”

“That’s okay,” he said, and manufactured a reassuring smile. “By the way, this is my only bag, so nobody has to take anything else off the plane.”

She decided to believe that he wasn’t a terrorist and he wasn’t insane. She moved up the aisle past him, weaving through the passengers who were still boarding. “Excuse us, please. Excuse us.” She stayed ahead of him to secure a few feet of aisle leading toward the front of the plane, so he could step into it after her. When they reached the end of the aisle, and he stepped out the hatchway, she said, “I hope everything works out for you.”

“I’m sure it will be fine. You’ve been very helpful. Thanks.”

He moved quickly out into the concourse and then to the moving walkway, found the baggage area, then made his way through crowds of people to the car rental counters. This time he chose a different rental company to throw off anyone who might be watching him.

Till drove out of McCarrran Airport and took the 215 south to Henderson. He was cutting back to cross his own trail, but he was sure it was the right thing to do. He knew he had missed something when he was talking to Ann Delatorre. She had said she was Wendy Harper’s closest friend. What would her closest friend do if Wendy was in danger? Maybe she would join her, or maybe she would summon Wendy back to Las Vegas from wherever she was living. Maybe she had been eager to invite him in and tell him her story to get rid of him before Wendy arrived.

Till drove up Ann Delatorre’s street looking for cars parked along the curb that he had not seen before. There were none, but he kept going past the house to see if there were any other changes. There was a light on in the back of the house. He had driven past several times on different nights, but he had never seen that light on.

Till pulled over and parked a distance from the house, and then walked back, staying on the garage side, where the view from the house was limited. When he reached the house he could see that the light was coming from the hallway that led from the living room to the kitchen. He took in a deep breath and slowly blew it out through his teeth. She must have left already. She had gone to meet Wendy Harper. When he had watched the house before, she had never left lights on this late at night. Till supposed she had probably forgotten it, or plugged a light into a timer, then set it to go on and off at the wrong times because she was in a hurry to get on the road.

Till walked to the rear of the house where the light was on, and looked in through the window of the back door. He took out his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1 as he walked along the house to look in the bigger window.

A woman’s voice came on after a few seconds. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

“I just found a woman’s body at 93117 Valerio Springs in Henderson. She’s wrapped in a blanket on the kitchen floor of her house. Her name is Ann Delatorre.”

“Your name, please?”

“Jack Till.”

“You know that she’s dead?”

“I can see she’s been shot in the head.”