Silence

22

PAUL GOT OUT of the black SUV and opened Sylvie’s door so she could climb out. As he watched her long legs swing out and straighten, and then saw her slide lightly off the seat and hop to the ground, he realized that the sight made him like her better. He had been seething, his jaw clenched much of the time since Sylvie had shot Ann Delatorre, and the nasty irrational remarks Sylvie had made in the parking lot at the pier had made things much worse. She was stupid and childish and completely unable to keep her mind focused on anything except herself. But the sight of those long legs and the graceful hop to the pavement dissipated his anger.

Paul was an aesthete. Other people could have said his response was not aesthetic but sexual, but that kind of statement would have shown that these people knew nothing. They didn’t understand that the two were the same: the response of the human mind to beauty.

He glanced toward the car rental building and took Sylvie’s arm, confident that he was pursuing the right strategy. Jack Till had left the freeway several miles before the airport. Till was fond of pulling tricks around airports, sometimes turning in his car and flying out, and sometimes turning in one car and renting another. Either way, the airport car rental was the place where Jack Till would be this afternoon.

“Why are we stopping here?” Sylvie asked.

“We’ve got to trade this SUV for a different vehicle.” He removed the two small suitcases from the SUV and shut the back door.

“Why?”

“It’s a tactic. Just like chess. I think he may have spotted us behind him. If he didn’t pick this out as the vehicle to worry about yet, he certainly saw it, so now is a good time to change. We’ll also block his move.”

“What move?”

“He rented his car here. He got off the freeway a few miles back, so we’re ahead of him. But he’s on his way here to turn in his car. Either he’ll just dump it and try to get on a plane to Los Angeles—which I doubt—or he’ll rent a new car, too.”

“And?”

“He’ll still be looking for the black SUV, and we’ll know what his new car is.”

Paul walked into the car rental building. At the counter, he took out his keys and the papers he’d been given when he’d rented the SUV. “I’d like to trade in my SUV for something smaller, please,” he said to the young woman behind the desk. She reminded him of a girl named Beth he had dated about twenty years ago. She had the same red-brown hair and the same light skin and blue eyes. This girl could be a close relative of Beth’s. He wished he could say something. Sylvie was too prickly and difficult to listen to even neutral observations about women. Pointing them out made her want to kill them. The girl handed his keys to a man in blue overalls and watched him disappear out a back door.

As he watched the girl turn to her computer to tap in some information, he was tempted to say something to her; but he had dated Beth under his real name, so he couldn’t. Anyway, Sylvie was a few feet away at the magazine rack near the door watching for Jack Till’s beige Lincoln to come up the access road to the rental buildings.

Sylvie’s jealousy was ridiculous, and that seemed to be part of her reason for it. The jealousy was her way of denying that she had done what he had seen her do in about fifty movies with at least a hundred men. When he first met her, he pretended that he didn’t recognize her, and never let the topic of pornographic movies enter a conversation. He waited patiently, and when she made a big event out of gently, gradually telling him about her two-year career, he brought in a box from the garage to show her that he had already bought copies of all of her films. He said little more than the fact that he knew, and that it made no difference to him. That fantastic claim had struck Sylvie as entirely true.

The truth was that her film career had intrigued him and added to his attraction to her. What he had found to be a more difficult topic was his profession. For a time he tried telling her he was an entrepreneur who had made some money selling an Internet start-up business, then that he acted as a business consultant, and sometimes traveled to other cities to solve clients’ problems.

In those days, he received most of his referrals from Bobby Mosca, the bartender at the Palazzo di Conti restaurant on La Brea. The Palazzo was a landmark where well-known people sometimes went, partly because it served good southern Italian food, and partly because it had a reputation. Sometimes the story was that it was a remote outpost for members of the Balacontano family who came west on business. A competing story was that Bugsy Siegel had once been the silent owner, and that when he was shot in the bungalow on the other side of town, one of the unintended consequences was that the apparent owners became the real owners.

One night Paul’s telephone rang, and Sylvie answered and handed it to Paul. When the call was finished, he looked up and saw her in the doorway. She said, “I know.”

Paul sat back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach. “You know what?”

“I know who Bobby is. I know what you do for a living.”

Paul nodded, keeping his eyes on her.

“You killed Darren so you could have me. Surely you must have expected me to know that much. When the police came here, they told me it was a professional execution. And after living with you for months, how could I not know?”

“So now what?”

“Are you asking me what I’m going to do about it?”

“No, I’m asking you what you feel about it.”

She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest, then kissed him, hard. “I love you.”

He had left late that night to complete the job Bobby had called about. He came home to find her waiting up for him.

She said, “How did it go? Tell me everything that happened.”

“Why?” he said. “Why would you want to hear about that?”

“How else am I going to learn?”

As he looked away from the counter at Sylvie, he forgave her for the arguments and the idiotic defensiveness and lack of confidence. She was everything he had ever wanted. If he could just keep her convinced of that, then things would be tolerable. He heard the rental agent behind him, and turned.

He accepted the keys to the new car and looked at the tags. The car was a blue four-door Ford. That was acceptable: It wasn’t anything like the SUV. “Thank you,” he said. He turned and walked to Sylvie, picked up the two suitcases, and let Sylvie hold the door open for him. He walked to the car and put the suitcases into the trunk. Paul was pleased to see that the mechanic had already driven the black SUV around to the back of the building to clean and service it.

He and Sylvie got in. “Have you kept watching for Till’s beige rental car?”

“Of course. There’s only this one road for rental return. So far there have been fourteen cars since we got here. Two were beige or brown, but neither went to the Cheapcars lot, and neither had Till or the girl in them.”

“Good watching.” He reminded himself that he had thought of her as stupid, but Sylvie was absolutely not unintelligent. She could make all sorts of calculations and computations without engaging the major parts of her brain, and then announce them as though they were self-evident. It had been imprecise of him to let the word stupid float into his mind.

He felt his affection for her surge. He would never be able to separate what he saw from what he felt or what he thought. She was beautiful, therefore she was enticing, therefore he wanted her. The beauty itself was even more complicated because it was not perfection—Sylvie would never leave a flawless corpse—but depended upon an expression of the lips and a look about the eyes and a way of moving.

Paul understood his long attraction to her, but had never fully accounted for the moments when he reached the other extreme and felt rage. This gave his perceptions of her a tentative quality that made him uncomfortable. He watched the road, looking to the left and then the right, then pulled out of the lot.

“There it is,” she said. The beige Lincoln Town Car popped into Paul’s rearview mirror. He lifted his foot from the gas pedal and let the car slow down so it would stay on the straight section long enough for him to see the Lincoln turn into the Cheapcars lot. “Hurry up! You’ve got to make it all the way around the loop past the terminals and come by again in time to see.”

“I will,” he said. “Calm down.” He sped up again and went around the corner out of sight of the rental lots, and toward the airport. He went past the terminals, maneuvering patiently among the shuttle buses, cars, and taxi vans. He kept to the left so he could take the rental-car loop again. When he came to it he took it and went slowly along the road until he could see the Cheapcars lot, and then pulled the car over to wait. He watched as a maintenance man came out and took charge of the beige Town Car, reaching toward the steering wheel shaft to turn on the engine and check the gauges.

Suddenly there was a movement in Paul’s peripheral vision. The unexpectedness of it made him jump. He looked up and saw the front of a police car growing to fill the rearview mirror.

Paul noted that the cop had not turned on his blue-and-red flashers. The cop got out of the driver’s seat instantly, which meant that he was not calling in the stop yet. He appeared at the side of the car beside Paul’s window. He was less than thirty years old, with a chubby boyish face that didn’t seem to go with his trim body, and black hair that seemed to start too low on his forehead, like a knit cap. Paul noticed the squared-off surface of his torso that revealed the body armor under his uniform.

Paul looked ahead through the windshield. This was just the kind of thing that Paul could not permit to happen. He had done everything right, followed patiently when a less-clever person would have made some premature, impulsive attempt that would have alarmed Jack Till. Now, when Till had finally come together with Wendy Harper, this fat-faced cherub of a cop was here to ruin everything. Paul read the metal tag on his right pocket: Rodeno.

The cop leaned on the car so he could look in at them. “Afternoon, folks.”

“Afternoon,” Paul said.

In the periphery of his vision, he saw Sylvie give the cop too much of a smile, and heard her voice become false and musical. “Hello, officer.”

Paul stifled his irritation. She was trying to get control of the situation in the way that had always worked for her, and that was probably good. Even a cop would respond to a friendly smile from a pretty woman, even if she was fifteen years too old for him. Paul could see that the tension in the cop’s arms relaxed a bit as he leaned to speak to them.

“Are you having car trouble?”

“No,” Paul said. “Not exactly. I just rented this car and drove it out of the lot, but I needed to pull over, adjust the seats, and get to know the controls a little better before I get on the freeway with it.”

“That’s the kind of thing you should do in the lot before you drive out. What agency did you rent it from?”

“Miracle Rent-a-Car.” Paul looked ahead again. He could see Jack Till and Wendy Harper coming out of the rental office. Time was passing, the moment of opportunity getting wasted.

“May I see your rental papers, please?”

Paul had not yet put them away, so he was able to snatch them out of the well in the door. The name he had used to rent them was William Porter. He supposed the name was going to be worthless after this. “Sure.” He jabbed them out the window of the car, practically in Officer Rodeno’s face. “Here they are.”

Officer Rodeno had been startled by the abrupt movement. He accepted the papers and straightened. “The problem is, this isn’t a place where you can park and make adjustments. It’s a no-stopping zone. You should have gone around the loop and back into the Miracle lot, or off the loop onto a street where you could stop legally. Then you could make whatever adjustments were necessary to drive safely.”

Paul said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that I couldn’t stop here. I guess I missed the sign.” He was intensely aware of everything going on around him. He felt the car move microscopically as Sylvie’s back muscles contracted to make a slight shift in position. He knew she was looking ahead at Till and Wendy Harper, and he moved his eyes to see what had affected her.

There was an airport-shuttle bus at the Cheapcars lot with its doors open. A couple of customers who must have turned in cars climbed aboard. Paul strained to see whether Jack Till and Wendy Harper were among them. This was agony. Were they going to the terminal?

“May I see your license, please?”

Paul turned toward Officer Rodeno. “Look, I haven’t blocked any traffic or done any harm. I was just getting ready to pull out when you arrived.”

“May I see your license, Mr. Porter?” Rodeno repeated.

Paul sighed and took out his wallet. He had needed to use the Porter license to rent the car, so it was still in the pocket under the clear plastic. He slipped it out and handed it to the cop.

The license was good. He had bought a doctored Arkansas license two years ago in the name of William Porter and used it as identification to apply for a California license. As he thought about the trouble he’d gone through, his irritation grew. Officer Rodeno studied the license and then Paul’s face. After a moment he turned away from Paul and stepped toward his car. The cop was going to run a check on William Porter.

Paul felt Sylvie move again, and then felt her put her gun in his hand. He could feel that the silencer had been screwed onto the barrel. He stuck it under his arm beneath his sport coat, got out of the car, and followed Officer Rodeno to his police car. Officer Rodeno sat behind the wheel with the door open, looking down at the license. He reached for the radio microphone. Paul moved to the open door of the police car, used his body to block any observer’s view, and in a single, efficient movement, pulled out the gun and fired. There was a spitting sound, Rodeno’s head jerked to the side an inch or two, then bowed, and his body followed it to rest on the wheel. Paul leaned in the open door and toppled Rodeno’s body onto the passenger seat, got in and closed the door, then used his legs to push the body the rest of the way to the passenger side. The engine was already idling, and he threw it into gear and drove.

Paul adjusted the rearview mirror, and he saw Sylvie pull out onto the road to follow him in the rental car. He looked around for witnesses, but to his relief, he could detect nobody looking in his direction. Nobody seemed to have seen how the traffic stop had ended, or at least interpreted it as a killing. Shooting the cop and driving off had been quiet and taken no more than three or four seconds.

Instead of taking the loop to go through the airport again, Paul took the entrance to the freeway, then pulled off at the first exit and parked the police car on the lot of a big Sears store. He took a moment to retrieve his William Porter license and rental papers from the floor, and wipe off the door handles and steering wheel. By then Sylvie was pulling to a stop beside him. He got into the passenger seat and sat in silence for a few seconds while Sylvie drove off.

“What’s the matter?” Sylvie asked.

“I still can’t believe that happened. Did you see if they went to the airport?”

“They didn’t get into the shuttle bus.”

“Where are they, then?”

“They rented another car, just like we did. It’s a Lincoln Town Car, like the other one, only charcoal gray. I have the license number, and they were just getting into it when we left. We can catch them in a few minutes.”