Silence

29

JACK TILL WALKED Ann Donnelly to a small restaurant at the harbor with white wooden walls where the smell of food overpowered the smell of the sea air, and made them both even hungrier. He talked about neutral things that seemed to calm her. He praised the food and the sights at Morro Bay, and talked about the other places where tourists usually went around here—Cambria, San Simeon, Pismo Beach. All the time Till watched her face, wondering what he could do to make her tell him the parts of the story she was hiding.

When she seemed to be revived, Till said, “Let’s go for a walk.” He watched her for a time as she surveyed the windows of shops that sold beach clothes or exotic seashells. She was quiet and her eyes seemed not to focus for long on anything, so he judged it was time. When they reached the beach and the other people were too far away to overhear, he said, “What are you thinking about—being scared?”

“Yes. And no. I’m still so scared that I keep looking in window reflections to see who might be sneaking up on us. But what I’m trying to do is hold on to reality and not get hysterical.”

“You seem pretty calm to me.”

“I keep going over everything and finding lots of things I did wrong, misinterpreted, or ignored, but what I can’t find is anything I did right.”

“You did quite a few things right, or you would have been dead for six years.”

“Before that. I was thinking far back, to the start.”

“Tell me about the start. What was it?”

“It started with a girl named Olivia Kent. I hired her as the very first waitress at Banque, before we even opened. She was a great waitress. Beautiful, too. She had long brown hair and blue eyes, and the figure I wish I had. She had a quick sense of humor, probably from a lifetime of being hit on and turning guys down without hurting their feelings. She liked people and they felt it when she talked to them, but she was fast and efficient, so they didn’t notice she was manipulating them into ordering quickly and clearing her table for the next customer.”

“How old was she when she was killed?”

“She wasn’t. She’s not the one. You asked me where the trouble started, and it started with her.”

He guided her along the shoreline. “Let’s walk out to the rock. There’s a long spit of land that leads out there, and you can tell me while we walk.”

“All right.”

“So place me in time and space. You and Eric were about twenty-three when you started the restaurant.”

“Twenty-five. Olivia was twenty-one. I remember because when she applied for the job, she came in with recommendations from her last two jobs, two years and one year at restaurants in Cleveland when she was in college. Twenty-one meant she could serve alcohol, which was essential.”

“Okay. You and Eric were twenty-five, and she was twenty-one.”

“Yes. The whole staff was young. Eric had become a very good chef by then. He was precocious. Nobody gets to be a three-star chef after working in kitchens for seven years, half of it part-time. You can’t get enough hours in the kitchen, enough instruction, enough years of tasting and screwing up and redoing. But he was very good. He had worked up a menu of twelve entrées with a few variations, all of them superb, and six appetizers that relied on small dabs of expensive ingredients arranged beautifully on a plate. That way, after a helper had assisted him a few times, he could make one himself. Even I could do it after a while if we were rushed.”

“You said everybody was young. What were the rest of them like?”

“Like us. The waitstaff were all women, my age or younger. There were six of them to start, all with some experience. I picked the ones I did because I understood them, and they seemed to understand me. Until six months before we opened, I had been a waitress, and I still had the blisters, the burns, and the aching wrists to prove it. I didn’t notice at first that they were so similar. But now I realize that I was so inexperienced that I could only evaluate people who were like me.”

“You were still a waitress until six months before you opened Banque?”

“It was one of my jobs. I worked as a stockbroker during the day, starting at five A.M. before the New York markets open. I got home at three, then worked at Bernard’s in the Biltmore from five until ten. Eric had lots of jobs, too. He was head chef at Désirée, and he also wrote food articles for a few gourmet magazines, and catered.”

“Catered what?”

“People would come to Désirée and ask him to cook for private parties—mostly studio people. It helped him to build a clientele. If those people had a party, they wanted everybody there to know that they hadn’t just had it catered, they’d hired the head chef from Désirée. Getting to know people was a big part of getting started. I think almost everybody we hired was somebody we met in the restaurants where we worked, and most of the customers at first were people who knew us from jobs. The big thing was money, of course. We saved everything—my tips, Eric’s magazine checks and extra pay, even money people sent him from home as birthday presents. We spent nothing. The only time either of us was in a restaurant was for a paycheck. On Fridays I would deposit our checks at lunch, and I’d have most of the money invested by four, so we wouldn’t be tempted to touch it. Then the weekend would come and we’d work all day and late in the evening, so there would have been no time to spend it anyway.”

“All that was for the restaurant?”

“When you start up, you have to be prepared to lose money for a couple of years.” She smiled. “I figured everything out in advance. We would run out of money and credit on April 26. For a while, we were all calling the place Le Vingt-six Avril.”

“How did you get past April?”

“Dumb luck and lots of help. All of the people who worked for us took a cut in pay from their last jobs. They shared tips, and we were lucky with the waitresses. They were all young and shameless about coaxing big tips out of the customers. Whenever we had some windfall profit—we did a few wedding receptions, a few after-hours parties—the money would help us stagger through another week or two.”

“When did Banque catch on?”

“We started pretty well and grew steadily. The big factor was that Eric had a following. There were some articles and reviews, and then we had to hold on tight.”

“But you did, obviously.”

“It was hard work for everybody. You have to maintain the quality of the food when you can barely cook it fast enough, preserving friendliness and efficiency when the staff are practically sprinting in and out of the kitchen for a whole shift. Every restaurant in history started with owners asking employees to kill themselves to get it going, and then never sharing the wealth. If you’re smart, you start sharing after your first good week. We did that.”

“So you managed to keep everybody friendly.”

“That’s a laugh.” She shook her head as she walked along. “Banque was way too friendly. We had this great place where all these friends of ours were regulars, and at least a couple of times a night some celebrity would arrive. It felt glamorous, and the money started coming in. The bartenders and waitresses and all the kitchen staff were young and unattached, and worked long hours. They didn’t just get along. The restaurant started to be a scene, and it took over their personal lives. After a couple of months, there was no way to keep up with who was with whom, and there were friends of both sexes from outside who would get drawn into the mix.”

“So the employees were all very social. What about you?”

“I was the one who had her eye on the bottom line—the only one who did. It was what I studied to do in college, and managing the place was my only contribution. I tried to keep everybody paying attention.”

“What about Eric?”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a great chef at work, but it’s hard to describe. He was tuned in. He had his eyes on everything that went on behind the kitchen door, cooking with seven or eight timers going in his mind at once. If a new molecule had entered the kitchen, he would have known it. He was always sweating, moving from burner to burner to plating table to mixing bowl. We talked about all the pairing off, but the social dynamics of the restaurant were my problem, not his. He said, ‘Who’s not doing his job?’ I said, ‘Everybody is.’ He said, ‘Then what’s there to worry about?’”

“So you both felt like outsiders?”

“Eric and I were in the center of it, but not part of it. We had hired people we found pleasant, and the consequence was that we ended up with young people who found each other pleasant. The atmosphere was charged. If there had been such a thing as a pheromone detector, it would have burned up.”

“I think you made a good decision. You stay out of people’s personal lives until somebody asks for your advice.”

“Well, anyway.” She looked away for a second. “That was the place, the atmosphere. We were there seven days a week, and working hard. People came in and out when the restaurant was closed, making deliveries or fixing stuff, cleaning and restocking. It was always active, always alive. We were surrounded with people. The business was charmed. We were making so much money that I paid off our start-up loans in a year. When I renegotiated the lease to buy the building, the landlord wanted to carry the mortgage himself. In the third year, we were making enough so that Eric and I bought a house with a big down payment. Around that time, he asked me to marry him. That was the beginning of the end.”

“Because you said no?”

“I said yes. It was a surprise, but not in the way you might think. When he asked, it reminded me that we weren’t already married. It was, ‘Oh. That’s right. We’re not officially related, are we?’ That kind of detail had been my job, usually—to keep us on the right side of the laws and solvent and secure. I knew that marriage was a necessary part of that, like liability insurance and fire coverage and a business permit. It was just a chore I had neglected.”

“Girls are always planning their weddings. Why do you suppose the idea of marriage wasn’t on your mind?”

“Yes, that’s probably why. I didn’t let myself suspect it, of course. I didn’t want to delve into how I felt about my parents or what they’d shown me about marriage. But even more, I didn’t want to spend time thinking about Eric and what I felt about him—or didn’t feel. He was like a relative, my only one.”

“I remember you said your mother had died when you were young. What about your father? He was an artist, right?”

She knitted her brows and shook her head. “That’s right. When my mother left him, he didn’t notice for a week or so that she had left me there, too, because his studio was always a gathering place for women—models, artists, dealers, buyers—and one of them took care of me. Her name was Margaret, and she was a rich woman who had come to learn to paint like Moss Harper. It took her a couple of years to realize that she never could, and she left, too.”

“Moss Harper? I didn’t realize that’s who your father was.”

“The great Moss Harper. When Margaret left, she took me with her. We went to her house in Poughkeepsie, and she was the one who raised me.”

“Just like that? Nobody signed any papers?”

“That only happens when there’s a possibility of a disagreement. He seemed to feel that taking care of children was the responsibility of the nearest woman, so when she left, he thought it was only natural that she took me with her.”

“Were you in touch with him?”

“I saw him once, for two days, when I was in college. I went to New York to his studio. It was like going to visit a person who had donated an organ to you. The excuse for going was to thank the person, but the real motive was curiosity, and that part was more egotism than interest in him. I was seeing one of the factors that had contributed to the making of the glorious twenty-year-old me. There was no connection, really. He didn’t care about me, and even my curiosity wasn’t reciprocated. He had seen a million twenty-year-old girls, and I didn’t strike him as one of the most interesting.” She walked along the dirt path on the spit that led them toward the looming rock. “No, my father wasn’t close to me. After Margaret died, only Eric was.”

“That’s why you agreed to marry Eric?”

“Of course. We told ourselves and each other that not marrying before was a small, amusing oversight. We didn’t make a big deal out of the engagement, or even mention it at the restaurant. I noticed something I hadn’t known before. Not being married was okay because some people assumed we were, and others thought we would be, but had some political objection to official marriage. Telling anyone we were going to get married would have weakened my position because Eric was the one who was indispensable, not me. As long as we seemed unbreakably tied together, I had authority. If I was just the boss’s girlfriend with wedding plans, it would be different. There would be a period of time when he was still up for grabs.”

Jack Till wondered why these were the details she was choosing to tell him, but he could see that she was choosing, so he waited.

“It became a problem. I knew that beneath all of the automatic stuff that was happening—like saying ‘I love you’ at all the right times, but hearing it sound like ‘God bless you’ or ‘You’re welcome,’ instead of ‘I think about you all the time and you make my knees weak,’ there was something missing. We both felt that way, I think, but we didn’t want to admit it even to ourselves.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing. What could I say?”

“And Eric?”

“Now we’re getting close to the sad part. It makes me sad to remember it, anyway. Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself because my life is a mess.”

“I can make your life better if you can just give me some hard information about the men who are after you or the girl who was killed. Anything might help. Even her name could do it.”

“I’m getting to it. Today I’m finding that I can talk about it only by talking around it first. And only after I’ve stamped down all the weeds around it can I go to the center. The next thing that happened was Olivia.”

“Oh, yes. Olivia.”

“Yes. Olivia Kent was where I started, so I’ve completed the circle, walked all around the truth.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Eric cheated on me with Olivia.”

“I’m sorry. It must have hurt.” He had to be careful to keep the response simple and sympathetic. If she detected a false tone, it might make her see him as a manipulator and shut down.

“It was pretty much what I said earlier. He was in an atmosphere that was like a slow-motion orgy, where people changed partners over a period of months, making the rounds of the place in a couple of years. But there was always looking and flirting, always an undercurrent. Olivia Kent was the only one, at first, who knew that Eric and I had just decided to get married, and understood that the period leading up to it was an opportunity for her.”

Till decided to follow the story she wanted to tell him, and hope that it led to what he wanted to know. “An opportunity to have a fling with Eric, or take your place permanently?”

“It’s hard for me to say what she was thinking. She had been with us for a long time, and she liked Eric. Maybe all that time she had been developing a hopeless crush on him, and unexpectedly learned that the crush wasn’t hopeless—was only getting hopeless, and that she had to make a move right then. It could have been more than a crush. But there are also women who get a thrill out of seducing men just before their weddings, and she may have been one of them. I had been her boss for almost four years, and maybe she had been building up resentment. I suppose it could have been all of those feelings in some proportion, because people are too complicated to do things for one reason.”

“So she used her opportunity.”

“Right. Eric proposed, I said yes, and we set the date for six months later. We said it was so we could do it during our least busy season, after New Year’s. That gave Olivia plenty of time to work, but she started the affair right away. She made a move and Eric didn’t hesitate.”

“How did you find out he was seeing Olivia?”

“I figured out that something was going on. A lot of women say that a woman always knows, but it’s not true. We don’t. Eric was just about the same. Olivia wasn’t.”

“How was she different?”

“She started being sort of cold and snippy to me. I recognized the attitude. Sometimes when somebody is doing something to hurt you, she has to convince herself that you already deserved it. That was the way it was with Olivia and me, and pretty soon I began to suspect what the reason might be. One night when I left work, I just drove to Olivia’s apartment, parked, and waited. It wasn’t more than a few minutes before they showed up in Eric’s car. They both went in, and an hour or so later, Eric came out. The prosecution rests.”

“Did you tell him you knew?”

“I turned my car around so I wouldn’t have to drive past him in the street, and then drove as fast as I dared to beat him home. I needed to think about the whole thing. At first I was horribly hurt and angry. Then I noticed that my own impulse wasn’t to break up with him. I didn’t hate him. In an odd sort of way, I understood him and felt sympathy for him.”

“So you did nothing at all?”

“Olivia had a sort of on-again, off-again boyfriend. His name was David.”

“Oh. Revenge sex.”

“Well, not quite. I got him alone one night and kissed him, and I thought I was prepared to go through with it. But when he kissed me back, I wasn’t, so I didn’t. I said, ‘I’m sorry, David, but I just realized why I was doing this, and it’s not a good reason, or a good idea.’ He was very nice and understanding about it. But then, he didn’t keep his mouth shut. That was part of the claustrophobic atmosphere around there, too: Everybody was always telling each other secrets, leaving out no intimate details. He had a confessional relationship with Olivia’s best friend, Kit, so he told her.”

“Kit as in Katherine?”

“Maybe. Or Kathleen, or Katerina, or a hundred other names. She was just called Kit.”

“Was she one of the other waitresses?”

“She waited sometimes. Primarily she was Olivia’s friend. When Olivia had been with us for a few months, Kit just showed up. She was very striking, with bright red hair that was helped along only a little bit by the stylist’s dye, to tone it darker and make it shinier, and big green eyes. She had freckles, but she was really good with makeup, so her skin looked clear and white, except for a blush under the cheekbones. She would come in and sit at the bar, sometimes with another girl or two, just drinking and waiting for Olivia. When she was with a man, she might have dinner. At some point, she started acting as Olivia’s substitute. Olivia came to me and asked if I could arrange it when she had to go home to Ohio for some family thing. I was a little skeptical the first time, but after that I wasn’t. She clearly had worked in a formal restaurant before, and learned to be professional. She was fast and hardworking and knowledgeable. She knew the Banque menu by heart and could discuss it with customers. Then Olivia would come back from wherever she had been this time, and Kit would go back to being a bar ornament. When she wasn’t filling in for Olivia, she acted like a rich girl who could barely bring herself to work hard enough to get drunk. And maybe she was. The arrangement was that we would pay Olivia for the time. I don’t know what arrangement they made about Kit’s tips, but at Banque those were bigger than salaries.” Wendy glanced at Jack Till, and he could tell she was trying to see whether he knew.

He said, “She’s the one?”

“She’s the one.”

“You’re sure she never made it onto your payroll?”

“Positive.”

“Too bad. A Social Security number would have given us a leg up. Even a full name.” He needed to coax her, but he didn’t want to distract her from her recollections. He had to keep her talking. “So Kit told her best friend Olivia that you had flirted with David.”

“More than that. I was emotional about the whole situation right then. When I was with David, I was crying and saying far too much. I told him that Eric was fooling around with Olivia, and that it was making me crazy, and that was why I had made a fool of myself with him.”

“And he told Kit, and Kit told Olivia.”

“Kit told Olivia that I knew she was sleeping with my fiancé, that I was going mad with jealousy, and that I had slept with her boyfriend David.”

“Really?”

“Yes. She had decided to give me a little revenge that I hadn’t actually earned.”

“Did it make you angry?”

“Not exactly. It was funny, really, because only David and I knew for sure what had gone on. I was denying everything, which people assumed I would do no matter what. He was denying it, too, but of course, Olivia would never believe him.” She looked happy, wistful, but only for a second. “Kit and I became friends after that.” She seemed to remember something and corrected herself. “Sort of. She was still primarily Olivia’s friend, and so was I, but we had a secret that Olivia didn’t know.”

“Wait. You were still friends with Olivia?”

“Not right away. I still hated her then. The first thing was that Olivia told Eric that I knew all about it. I left the restaurant as usual one night and found Eric had followed me home. I had seen him getting ready to leave, but I had assumed he was going to Olivia’s. Instead he pulled into the driveway right after I did. We sat in the living room of our new house that we had bought and furnished together, and talked about why we shouldn’t marry each other, and what we should do about our predicament.”

“Was it a fight, or were you both too sad for that?” He couldn’t help remembering the breakup with his wife, Rose, when he had simply come home and found the note telling him that she was going away for a while, and which friend had agreed to watch Holly until he got home from work.

“We talked for a long time, and we both cried and held each other, then opened a bottle of really good cognac that we were saving for some big occasion, and got drunk and cried and hugged some more. I don’t think we made any decisions except to announce to each other that we weren’t in love. We still had Banque. Either of us could have walked away from the restaurant if it had been a failure, but it was a roaring, screaming success. We had named it Banque because it was in an old bank building, but after four years, it might as well have been a real bank. The place had become so valuable that neither of us could have bought the other out, and everything was leveraged. We had bought the building, so it had a mortgage. We had bought our new house, and that had a mortgage. There wasn’t a way that Eric could leave, because he was the big attraction. We had never separated our interests in any legal way, just agreed that everything was ours together. So everything had changed, but nothing looked different.”

“You mean because you stayed in the house and the restaurant.” She was getting close to the part she had kept secret, so Till only prompted her.

“Yes. Eric moved into the second big bedroom. And half the time he didn’t come home anyway, or came home when it was just about morning and I was ready to get up. We still worked at the restaurant, of course, but not together. A lot of the work I did was daytime stuff—taking deliveries, balancing the books, doing bills, payroll and taxes, and supervising the daytime crew. When Eric came in, he went straight to the kitchen. Sometimes he even entered through the delivery door in back near the pantry. It’s possible we were even better workers than we had been—I was, certainly, because I had nothing else anymore. Then the drama kind of seeped away. It’s amazing what you can get used to if you’re busy enough to keep your mind turned outward all the time. The restaurant kept thriving, the money came in, and the days went by. Before long, Eric and I grew close again. We were still business partners and best friends.”

“Eric had Olivia to occupy him. What was your social life like?”

“I went out after work with Kit, and after Olivia and Eric broke up, we took Olivia back, too. We went to late-night clubs, danced, drank, had fun. I had a few dates with men I shouldn’t have, but most of the time I went out with the girls. I told you what the two of them looked like. It was great to be out with them. We walked into a club, and men just began to move toward them, as though they couldn’t help it. Every night was New Year’s Eve for about five months. And I was the one who didn’t want to go home, the one who would slip the DJ a couple hundred bucks to keep the music going a little longer. Then Kit met a man and stopped hanging out with us.”

“Did that stop you?”

“No. I went out, sometimes with Olivia, and sometimes with other women we knew. I went to parties. The whole period is kind of a blur, partly because I was drinking a lot for the first time in my life, and partly because I was moving fast, trying to jump back a few years and live the time that I had wasted on Eric. I wanted to be where the loud music was.”

“Did you have some kind of plan for the future? What were you thinking at that time?”

“From the time when Eric and I had gotten together, I had begun to make plans, killing myself to reach certain goals and set our lives up in the best, most solid and predictable ways. When I was twenty-one, I could have told you what I was going to be doing at forty-one or sixty-one. I realized that I had been insane, so I was trying to develop a new strategy. I remember the day when I had planned to marry Eric, I was out with Olivia, and we ran into Kit.”

“Where?”

“It was Darkest Peru, off Sunset. It was Olivia and me, and there might have been one of the other girls from Banque. We hadn’t seen Kit for at least a month. We walked into the ladies’ room and there she was, in front of the mirror fixing her makeup. As soon as I walked in, I spotted her. Who else could it be with that hair? She seemed really happy to see us. She said she was with her boyfriend. They were just getting ready to leave, and he was waiting for her, but she wanted us to meet him. We went out of the ladies’ room and she took us to a table. There were five chairs, but just one young guy sitting there with a glass of cola. He was big, wearing a dark sport coat that looked tight because it was thin summer-weight cloth, and you could see arm muscles. He saw us coming, and stood up. I thought he was good looking, except for his thick neck. And I wasn’t wild about the knit shirt with the coat. I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back, and she didn’t introduce us. She just said to him, ‘Where is he?’ She said it kind of angrily, because she seemed to be embarrassed in front of us. I realized the guy was a bodyguard. He said, ‘He went out to the car. He needed to make some calls. Come on.’ If that wasn’t exactly what he said, it was close. I could tell the bodyguard had been assigned to wait for Kit and bring her along when she came out of the ladies’ room. Kit hesitated, kind of putting one hand on her hip and frowning. Then she decided, for whatever reason, that she wasn’t going to push it. She said to us, ‘Well, I guess he’s in a big hurry now. I’ll have to arrange a get-together when he’s not feeling so fucking important.’ She went with the bodyguard, though.”

Till knew she was on the edge of telling him the things he wanted to know. “What did you make of the bodyguard? Were you afraid of him?”

“No. We had a lot of show-business customers at Banque, so I was used to them. Bodyguards had been the accessory for Hollywood types since silent films. And people were even more likely to bring bodyguards to the late-night clubs. There was a kind of badboy ambience to those places, and it fit.”

“What happened after that night?”

“I kind of forgot about it. After all, it was a nonevent, a meeting that never happened. I got distracted, and didn’t think about it for a while.”

“Distracted by what?”

“A big mistake. I got into a relationship with one of the owners of an art gallery. It was the gallery that hung paintings on the walls in Banque. His name was Matthew. At the moment I was looking for something to turn everything upside down, so the excitement seemed to be just what I needed. It wasn’t.”

“How did the relationship end?” Till was sensing that there was something about this period that she considered the cause of her problems. There was the language of excuses: heavy drinking, distraction, bad relationships.

“I know it’s not exactly a surprise to anyone to say it, but there’s just a hint of fraudulence about everything having to do with art.”

Till studied her. “What exactly was the fraudulence in Matthew? Was it something to do with your being Moss Harper’s daughter?”

“Wow. Did somebody tell you that, or did you figure it out?”

“Just a guess.”

“I went to an opening at his gallery. Matthew was working the crowd, trying to make some sales. The crowd included a few artists who were there because Matthew was powerful and could help them, but mostly they were a bunch of rich people who had figured out that buying art was a chance to be part of a scene without having talent or personality or being attractive. I found myself standing there beside a very tall, chubby guy who was drinking and eating while he talked, and he looked like the spoiled son of a Roman emperor. He kept staring down at me as though he knew some guilty secret about me. Finally, he leaned uncomfortably close and said, practically in my ear, “Matthew tells me you’re Moss Harper’s daughter. Are you?” It was one of those moments when a dozen things that had all seemed just slightly off clicked into place at once. I had never told Matthew who my father was. It had never come up. Matthew had been using me for status. I was a curiosity.”

“What did you do?”

“I dropped him and worked harder. For me, the restaurant had soured the night I caught Eric fooling around, but I didn’t have anything else to do. Restaurants were the only business I knew. Eric was the only one I could really talk to. Everything I had was tied up in Banque. So I stayed. The only big changes were the ones I had made when Eric and I broke the engagement. I had split the long-term bank accounts into thirds—his, mine, and the restaurant’s—and stopped putting any new money into the restaurant. I paid us each one-half of the net profits at the end of each week. So by this time, I had a growing backlog of money, most of which was still in cash in the safe in the basement of our house. It wasn’t happiness, but it was a way to live. Then one night at the beginning of August, I saw him for the first time, and everything started to change.”

“Do you mean Kit’s boyfriend?”

She nodded.

Till waited, but she didn’t go on. He said, “You’re right to be scared. But the only way to end this is to remember and tell everything, and keep searching for things you didn’t recall until now.”

She was silent for a few steps as they walked together along the gravel path. The gulls from the rock were circling above them. “The restaurant had been packed all evening. Eric liked to close the kitchen at ten-thirty or eleven, but that night he didn’t stop cooking until one. I went by the bar a while later, and there was Kit, in her favorite seat, talking to all the men, as she always did. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I might have seen her once after the night in Darkest Peru, but if so we didn’t actually speak—just hugged and hurried off in different directions. But this time I joined her and we chatted for a minute or two. I remember she said that she hadn’t been out much because her boyfriend had taken a summer place at the beach, so coming in to Banque had seemed like too much work. I might have said, ‘You should make him bring you here more often.’ But then she told me that she had come by herself while he was out, and she had called him after she had arrived, so he might come by later. That was it. I got called away because somebody else wanted to talk to me, so I moved on.”

“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 moved 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 there, 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.

He continued with their walk, and then spent the afternoon walking through the shops with her. He watched her closely all day, waiting for her to resume their conversation, but she did not do it. Once, as they were walking on the street far from other pedestrians, he said, “Ann?”

“I’m not Ann anymore.”

“Who are you?”

“I have no choice right now. I have to be Wendy.”

While she pretended to shop to keep him from interrogating her, Till used the time to think about the other part of the problem. He had to keep her alive. When they came back to their rooms in the hotel, he waited until she was in the other room and then used his cell phone. He dialed a number he knew very well, then said, “Sergeant Poliakoff, please.”