Silence

45

JACK TILL SAT in the back seat of the unmarked car beside Wendy as Max Poliakoff drove them along the quiet street toward Scott Schelling’s house. Till said, “That house is 2908. Schelling’s is 3206. It’s going to be the third block up, on the right.”

“I’m nervous,” Wendy said.

Poliakoff half-turned in the driver’s seat to look at her. “Don’t be. We’ll knock and ask to speak with him. We won’t say who you are. If he’s the one, all you have to do is nod, and we’ll arrest him. If he’s not the right Scott, then you shake your head, and I’ll tell him some comforting nonsense about Neighborhood Watch.”

“I guess it’s just that I’ve spent so much time thinking about him. First Olivia and I kept searching the city for him so we could be sure Kit was all right. Then, after I got beat up, the last people in the world I wanted to see were him and the one with the bat.”

“We’ll get the one who hit you, anyway. He’s as good as in the bag. Once we pick him up, we’ll do a lineup and have you identify him formally. And then he’s going away.”

“You don’t sound as though you’re so sure about Scott,” she said.

Till said, “That might take a bit longer, that’s all. Nobody saw him do anything to Kit Stoddard. But there will be some connection between him and the others. We’ll find it.”

“We could even get something going this morning,” Poliakoff said. “I’ve got Horton waiting at the DA’s office. If this is the right Scott, I’ll make a call, and he’ll walk a search warrant through for us. I mean, how can it not be the right Scott? The blue Maserati in the picture is registered to him.”

They were quiet as they moved up the final block. Till could see that Schelling’s house was different from most of the others in this stretch. His was a long, two-story house with white siding and tall windows set far back from the street. It was a style that seemed almost antique now because most of the others had been bulldozed recently and replaced with oversized Tuscan villas closer to the street but built on raised ground, so visitors had to climb wide ornamental steps to reach the entrances.

The unmarked car pulled through the open gate, up the driveway, and stopped at the front of the house. Till and Poliakoff got out, and Till leaned back into the car. “Wendy, if you feel frightened, you can stay in the car. You’ll be able to see him through the window.”

“No, I want him to see me.” She got out and stood beside the car.

Till said, “Max.”

“What?”

“The garage. The lights.”

The garage door was open and there were two cars inside. The overhead lights in the garage were on, even though the morning sun was shining in through the open door. “Yeah,” he said. “Odd.”

Till stepped closer. “That’s the Maserati in the picture we found.” He turned around to see that the other two police cars had arrived. One had parked at the entrance to the driveway just inside the gate, and the other was now pulling up beside Poliakoff’s car in front of the house. Two officers got out and followed Poliakoff to the front door.

Poliakoff rang the doorbell and waited, then rang it again. Next he grasped the heavy door knocker and rapped on the door loudly. There was no response. The police officers looked at each other. Poliakoff took a small radio out of his coat pocket and said, “Dave, this is Max. Can you go to the gate and press the intercom button to let them know we’re here?” There was a hollow “Roger” from the little box. From the door they could hear a telephone ringing inside the house, but there was no sign that anyone was going to answer the call from the gate.

Till walked to the nearest window along the front of the building. “Max?”

“Yeah?”

“I see somebody lying on the floor in the foyer. Take a look.”

Poliakoff stepped up beside Till, held both hands beside his face to shade his eyes. “You’re right.” He turned to call to the other officers, “We’ve got to go in.”

One of the uniformed officers went to his car and opened the trunk while the others moved toward the front of the house. Poliakoff stepped back onto the porch. As an afterthought, he tried the doorknob. “Hold it,” he called. “No need to knock it down, it’s unlocked.” He turned the knob gingerly, then pushed the door open with his foot.

Till went inside with Poliakoff. After a moment Poliakoff came out to confer with the others, then went back inside. They seemed to be gone a long time, and then Till and Poliakoff emerged together. Poliakoff held two California driver’s licenses. He set them both on the roof of his car, so Wendy could see them clearly.

Till said, “Do you recognize either of these men?”

She began to blink back tears. “It’s them.”

Till put his arms around her and said quietly, “Then as soon as you tell me the rest, it will be over.”

She looked at him, then at Poliakoff, as though afraid he had heard.

Poliakoff said to Till, “If you want privacy, all I’ve got is my car.”

“Thanks,” Till said. He joined her in the back seat of the unmarked police car, and they sat still for a moment. Finally Till said, “How did you know him?”

“What do you mean? I didn’t know him. I saw him once, and I told you all about that.”

“You just saw a pair of driver’s licenses six years later, and you said, ‘It’s them.’ You got her into it, didn’t you?”

Her eyes were wide with disbelief and anger. “What are you talking about?”

“That was why you felt responsible for Kit when she disappeared. You felt as though it was your fault.”

Her eyes were filling with tears. “I didn’t know Scott Schelling at all. The one I had met was Carl. He was one of those good-looking guys who hang around clubs late at night. You see them a few times, and even though you don’t really know them, you feel as though you do. One night he asked me about a couple of girls I knew, and Kit was one of them.”

“How did he know you were in that business?”

“Oh, God,” she said. Her body slumped into the seat, as though her muscles had gone limp. “That wasn’t the way it was. It wasn’t a business, it was just social. The first time, it was at Banque, and a man named Jerry asked me about Olivia. The man was a good customer, a lawyer, and we were joking around. He said he would give me a thousand dollars just to introduce him to Olivia. I thought he was nice, so I laughed and held out my hand, and he gave me the money—just like that. I stopped Olivia in the little space between the dining room and the kitchen, and I showed her the money and pointed him out. We laughed because it was a big compliment, and she went along with the joke. She went to his table and they talked, and she made a date with him.” She shrugged. “The same thing happened later with Kit. Carl asked for an introduction, and then handed me some money. That was all.”

“That wasn’t all. This is me you’re talking to.”

“Yes. All right. There were others. A few times.”

“And you took money from the men.”

“Maybe once or twice. It sounds so sleazy, and it wasn’t like that.”

“Besides Jerry and Carl, who was there?”

“There was a businessman named Bryce, who was just a familiar face at first. He entertained clients from out of town and he asked me to scare up a few attractive friends to fill out a party.”

“Just once?”

“Well, no. A few times. It wasn’t a formal thing. He just didn’t know anybody, and he needed a favor. I knew girls—some who worked for me, some I had met in other ways—who loved the chance to go out to a nice party and meet some new men. I went once myself. What I did for him was what any hostess does. I invited people I knew would be fun. What any of them chose to do afterward was her business.”

“And the word got around.”

“No. It wasn’t like that, ever. There were only a few people, and it didn’t go on for that long. Nobody knew, really.”

“But Carl heard, and he paid you for an introduction to Kit.”

She was crying, her eyes on his in a pleading look, but she didn’t speak. He waited, and finally she said, “Yes.”

“And that’s why you lied to the police, and to me.”

“It wasn’t lying. Don’t you see? If anyone heard that I had taken money, then they would get a completely wrong idea. All I did was keep them from thinking something that wasn’t true.”

“You were afraid of being embarrassed?”

“It’s more than embarrassment, Jack. It would give the whole city the wrong idea about Banque, after we had worked so hard to make it the best kind of restaurant and attracted the very best patrons. Important men can’t afford to be seen in a place where people pay for sex. And no woman wants to be suspected of selling herself. The money would have dried up. The critics would have dropped us. Then some reporter would have found out who my father was, and I would be the story. I had a right to avoid that.”

“How much did Eric know?”

“None of it. This happened after our engagement was broken, and we didn’t talk much about our social lives.”

“What about Kit Stoddard? Who was she?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I think I do now, but I didn’t at first. I thought Kit Stoddard was a real name. But I found some letters in her apartment when Olivia and I broke in. The envelopes said Katherine McGinnis, and the return addresses were in Canada. Hamilton, Ontario.”

Till’s anger was visible now, but his voice was calm, even. “Didn’t you think it would help to tell the police that? Or to tell me that?”

“I wanted to. I would have, if it would have saved her. But at that point, I already knew she must be dead. Telling everything I knew after that would have made it all a hundred times worse. People would say she was a hooker, when she couldn’t even defend herself, and that I had sent her to a psycho who killed her.”

“So you were afraid of being prosecuted?”

“I don’t know. I knew that some of the things I had done would sound much worse than they were.”

“That was why Olivia ran away, too, wasn’t it? She had taken money. She had been one of the women you set up with men.”

“Yes. Neither of us ever knew what had happened to Kit, or why. Olivia was afraid to be alone, afraid to go to work. So she left. Then Carl came after me.”

Till put his hand on the door handle. “Well, it’s over now. You’re safe.”

She reached and grasped his wrist. “I did what I could.”

“I’m not going to pretend that I’m buying your view of things. If you were afraid to tell the police, you still could have told me.”

“I wish I had. I wanted to, and I’ll always be ashamed that I didn’t. But what I did was weak and stupid. It wasn’t evil.”

“That’s what makes this such a waste. You knew that I had been a cop long enough to have seen everything. You should have known that what you had done wouldn’t have struck me as anything but a mistake. But not telling was important. You lied to me.”

She let go of his arm and held herself away. “What about you? Were you telling me the truth? For the past few days, what you were doing was interrogating me. You said and did anything that might make me care about you, just so I would tell you what you wanted. Well, congratulations, Jack. You didn’t let me keep anything to myself. You’re a hero.”

“I was trying to help you do what you had to. The better I got to know you—the closer I got to you—the more certain I was that you had a secret.”

“It was my secret, and I was the only one who was suffering for it. When I heard that it wasn’t just me anymore, I did what I could.” She sobbed. “And I was brave, damn it. I took risks. I wasn’t doing what was right for me, just what was right.”

“You were brave. I’ll give you that.”

Now she was angry. “Thank you very much. And you’re a saint. You’ve made it clear that you’d rather cut off your arm than do anything unethical, but haven’t you ever had a moment when you just didn’t know what to do and guessed wrong? In all those years as a cop, haven’t you had one conversation you wished you hadn’t, or maybe wondered if you’d hit somebody too hard?”

Till stiffened, barely breathing. He sat in silence for a few seconds, looking ahead through the windshield. He could see Steven Winslow again—not the face contorted into a snarl as he swung the hammer at Till, but what he became after Till had hit him: a boy stretched out on the deserted street, dying alone in the dark. It had been more than twenty years, but Till was still able to see him. Till couldn’t tell Wendy why forcing her to give up her secret had been so important to him, couldn’t describe the self-hatred and shame he was trying to save her from. He became aware of her physical presence, the sound of her breathing, the smell of her soap, the closeness. He felt the seconds passing and made a decision. He swung the door open and got out.

She leaned toward the open door. “I think we’ve both known for a while that I’m not the perfect human being. I’m just the one who loves you. If I’m not worth salvaging, then I guess you should go.”

He looked startled. “I wasn’t walking away from you,” he said. “You’re right. I’ve been unfair, and I’m sorry. I was just going to tell Poliakoff we’re leaving.”

“Together?”

“Unless you don’t want to anymore.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. But I think we should let it.”

“So do I. Come on.”

She slid out of the police cruiser and stood beside him. She slipped her hand into his, and he let it stay there. They climbed the steps to the doorway, where Poliakoff was sketching the crime scene while two uniformed officers took measurements.

Till said, “Max, I left my car at the station. Can you spare the cop by the gate to drop us there?”

“Sure. I left him down there to keep these guys from running off,” Poliakoff said. “Not much chance of that. Thank you both for your help. I’ll call you.”

As they walked down the cobbled driveway toward the patrol car idling near the gate, Till turned to Wendy. “There’s somebody I have to see right away, and I’d like you to come, too. Her name is Holly.”