Silence

5

CHEF CHARGED IN PARTNER’S MURDER

Jack Till sat in his office and stared at the newspaper article for a long time, his mind brushing the sentences aside to find the detail that had caused a homicide detective to arrest Eric Fuller, and a DA to charge him. The article just repeated that Eric Fuller was a well-known chef, that Wendy Harper had been his partner, and that when she disappeared six years ago, he got richer.

Till put the newspaper on his desk, locked his filing cabinets, and put his gun in the safe. He went down the stairs to Ventura Boulevard, walked to his apartment on Laurel Canyon to get his car, then drove downtown on the Hollywood Freeway.

He parked in the underground structure on Spring Street and walked to the District Attorney’s office at 210 West Temple. It was only as he was passing the courts complex that he realized that he should have called ahead, found out which of the 938 Assistant DAs had been assigned to prosecute Eric Fuller, called him, and arranged an appointment. But an appointment had not occurred to him, any more than it would have if he’d been driving a heart-attack victim to a hospital. This was the sort of visit that obliterated the slow, careful broaching of topics.

He entered the main reception area of the District Attorney’s office impatiently, waited his turn in the line of visitors, then showed his wallet to the middle-aged woman behind the counter. On one side it held the unofficial ID that showed he was a retired police officer, and on the other his private investigator’s license. “My name is Jack Till,” he said. “I need to know which Assistant DA is prosecuting the homicide case against Eric Fuller. Would you be able to help me?”

“People v. Eric Fuller. Not listed here,” she said. “You said homicide? What’s the victim’s name?”

“Harper, Wendy A.”

The woman looked down at a directory, then dialed four numbers on the phone in front of her. “This is Nell,” she said softly. “Can you direct me to the prosecutor who’s in charge of the homicide of a Wendy Harper? Thanks.” She hung up. She took a sheet from a message pad and a pen, leafed through a notebook, and then wrote a name and office number on the sheet and handed it to him. “You must know your way around this building, right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Twenty years on the force. Thank you very much.” He went through the metal detector, then waited his turn for the elevator while he deciphered the note. The prosecutor’s name was Gordon something. No. Gordon was the last name. Linda Gordon. He rode upstairs, then walked along the hall past the offices of other Assistant DAs working on other cases. He knew some of them, but fewer and fewer each year as they retired or accepted offers at private law firms. When he found the office, the door was closed, but he saw beneath the door that a light was on, and heard a woman’s voice, so he knocked.

A moment later a young woman with long blond hair that looked as though it had begun as brown opened the door. She looked startled when she saw him. “Yes?”

“Are you Linda Gordon?”

“Yes.” She looked impatient. He could see that she had left her telephone off the hook and the receiver was on her desk. Till recognized the expression. She was waiting for him to deliver a subpoena. Half the lawsuits in existence were convicts suing prosecutors and cops.

“My name is Jack Till. I need to speak with you for a few minutes. I can see you’re on the phone. I can wait out here until you’re finished.”

She looked suspicious. “What’s this about? Who are you?”

“I’m a private investigator, and I have some important information about the case you’re prosecuting against Eric Fuller.”

“Just hold it a minute.” She stepped quickly to the phone and lifted it. “Carl? I’ve got to call you back. Two, three minutes. Honest.” She set the telephone in its cradle. “Come in.”

Till entered the small, cluttered space and looked for a place to sit. There was one chair, but it appeared to be the permanent place for a stack of files. She saw the direction of his eyes and started toward the chair, but he held up his hand. “Don’t bother. I’ll only be here for a few minutes. I saw the newspaper a little while ago. I came to let you know that there’s been a mistake. You can’t prosecute Eric Fuller, or anybody else, for the murder of Wendy Harper.”

She bristled. “I can’t?”

“No. Wendy Harper is alive.”

Linda Gordon leaned against the wall behind her desk with her arms folded. “Go on.”

Jack Till recognized the gesture. She was protecting herself unconsciously—from him? She was blocking what he was saying. All he could do was keep trying. “The reason you don’t have a body is that she’s still using it.”

“Have you talked to the police?”

“Not yet. I came straight here.”

“Well, that’s the normal way to do things when you have information. The detective in charge is Sergeant Max Poliakoff at Homicide Special in the Parker Center. If you’ll just—”

“I know him. I was the one who trained him when he was in Hollywood Homicide.”

“Trained him? You’re a police officer?”

“Retired.”

“And you want to give me this evidence?”

“Yes. I can go over and talk to Max Poliakoff first, if you’d prefer it.”

She stared at him for a second, and he could see that she was thinking far ahead. “All right. At this point I’d better stop you. I want to record what you’re saying on my tape recorder. Is that all right with you?”

“Okay.”

She took a small pocket recorder from her purse, slipped a new tape cassette into it, and clicked a button. “This is Linda Gordon, Assistant District Attorney, and I’m interviewing a gentleman who has come to my office on Wednesday, May 13. It’s now eight-fifty-three A.M. And your name is?” She held out the recorder as though she were challenging him to run.

“John Robert Till.”

“Spell it?”

“T-I-L-L.”

“Now, you have not been placed under oath. But you have told me that you’re a retired police officer, so you know that it is a crime to lie to a law-enforcement official about a homicide case. You are, of course, aware of that?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Then say what you wish to say.”

“I’m here to advise you not to pursue a case against Eric Fuller for the murder of Wendy Harper because I know that she’s not dead.”

“How do you know that? Have you seen her?”

“Not recently. I saw her six years ago, after the last time she was seen in Los Angeles.”

“So you were the last one to see her alive?”

“Not at all. But I was the last one to see her here. I’m a private investigator. She hired me. She had been attacked by a man one night when she was coming home from her restaurant. He beat her up in a way that sounded to me as though he intended to disable her and then kill her.”

“How can you know what he intended to do?”

“He used a baseball bat. He started with her legs and arms, then hit her a glancing blow on the head, but he was interrupted by a couple of cars before he could keep her still long enough for his big swing.”

Till could see the description had elicited an expression of pure revulsion in Linda Gordon, and that she had not intended him to see it. She set her recorder down on the desk and resumed the pose with her arms folded and the desk between them. “What was the purpose of this attack?”

“I believe it was to murder her and make it look like a predatory, opportunistic killing rather than a practical sort of homicide. Somebody was after her, and she knew it.”

“Who was after her?”

“She said that a friend—a woman who sometimes worked at her restaurant—had a boyfriend she thought might be dangerous.”

“Dangerous in what way?”

“The woman had told her some things about him, some things he had done to her.”

“Why would he be after Wendy?”

“One night Wendy was outside the restaurant after closing. She saw the guy when he came to pick up the friend, and he saw her. A few days later, the friend was gone. She stopped coming to work. Her apartment was empty. Wendy believed she was dead.”

“What was the boyfriend’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was the waitress’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know? Didn’t you ask?”

“Sure. She wouldn’t tell me the woman’s name, and claimed not to know the man’s name.”

“That’s it? That’s all? You gave up?”

“I was no longer a police officer, and had no way of compelling her to tell me anything. A responding officer had interviewed her the night of the attack and a detective talked to her afterward, in the hospital. If I’d had a month or so, I might have persuaded her that telling me more would make her safer, but at the time, she was too terrified to listen. She wanted to leave Los Angeles immediately. She was convinced that if she stayed in Los Angeles long enough for this boyfriend to find her again, she was going to die.”

“Was she right?”

“I honestly don’t know. I don’t know who her friend’s boyfriend was, or who the man he’d hired to beat her was. I offered to protect her, to act as contractor to get her some bodyguards, or to put her house and her restaurant under surveillance. But if this man wanted her badly enough—”

“So what did you do?”

“I gave her the help she wanted, the help she was willing to take.”

“Which was?”

“I drove her to a hotel in Solvang. I hid her there for a few days. We stayed in her room most of the time, and I told her how I would go about finding a person who didn’t want to be found.”

“Explain.”

“I told her the methods professionals might use to find her. And then I taught her ways to avoid those methods.”

“And then what?”

“Then she left.”

“Just like that. She left. You never saw her again, or heard from her.”

“No. That was one of the things I warned her about. If you have contact with people you used to know, you’ll get caught. She had not told anyone she was going to hire me, but if someone had already been watching her, then he might know. We were definitely not followed to Solvang. But later on, a potential killer might monitor my mail or my phone and wait for her to write or call.”

Linda Gordon was finding his clear, unemotional delivery maddening. “Let me ask you something. What evidence can you give me that any of this ever happened, or that you ever met her?”

“I tried to be sure there wasn’t any. Keeping evidence could have endangered her. I wouldn’t be telling you any of this now if you hadn’t charged someone with killing her.”

“Did Eric Fuller know she simply went away voluntarily?”

“No. She wanted him to believe she was dead, and go on with his life. She felt there was nothing to be gained by telling him anything. She believed that if he knew, he would try to find her and possibly get them both killed.”

“I thought she was in love with him. That’s the story we’ve been told. I’m sure that’s going to figure in his defense. You expect me to believe she would leave him like that?”

Jack Till looked at her, beginning to lose his optimism. She wasn’t really listening to what he said. She was formulating arguments against it. “They were a couple when they came to Los Angeles. They had gone to college together and had been close friends. At different times, that friendship took a lot of different forms. They were roommates, and they were engaged to be married, and they started a business together. When the romantic relationship went away, nothing else changed. They were still closer to each other than they were to anyone else, and they trusted each other. They stayed partners and the restaurant did well.”

“Well enough so he killed her to get her half of it?”

“What I came to tell you is that he didn’t kill her, and neither did anyone else. I sent her away.”

“Maybe you did. That was one day, one moment in time. You admit you have no way of knowing what happened to her after that day six years ago. Isn’t that right?”

“It’s right. I haven’t seen her. I haven’t tried to see her. I taught her how to keep from being seen, and then sent her off to do it.”

“And you think a week of lessons from you was that effective? That she just heard your advice, and then she could stay hidden forever?”

“It’s not as simple as that. Nobody was looking for her until she had been gone for at least a month. She told Fuller she was going on a trip to recuperate from the beating, and nobody else cared where she was. When she didn’t come back, he tried to find her by calling mutual friends, who hadn’t heard from her. By the time the cops were involved, there was no place for them to start looking.”

“And you planned that, too?”

“Yes. I did. I taught her what I knew, and that was enough to get her started. But now she’s been at it for six years, and probably knows more than I do. She’s a very bright woman.”

Linda Gordon pushed off from the wall and stepped closer to her desk. Till could see her eyes lower for a second, and he knew she was looking to check that enough tape was left in her recorder without reminding him that it was running. She leaned on the desk. “You know, you’ll be in serious trouble for telling me all this.”

“I know.”

“You’ve admitted that you’re a party to insurance fraud, that you helped a person get false identification, and I don’t know what else. You used to be a cop. You know there will be quite a list.”

“I had a choice. I could go to bed every night for the next thirty years knowing that Eric Fuller was going to spend another night in prison, or I could go to bed knowing I was the one who prevented that.”

“You could go to jail.”

“The choices aren’t always good.”

“Very stoical. Let me show you something.” She walked around her desk to the chair with the stack of files, moved a few to the desk, found the one she wanted, and opened it. There were ten-by-twelve-inch color photographs. She selected one and handed it to Jack Till.

There was a white cloth torn like a rag and covered with dark stains. It was stretched out on a lab table. He could see the ruler on the table in the corner of the shot to give it scale. “What is it?”

“It’s her blouse, with her blood on it.” She handed Till another photograph.

“And what’s this one?” he asked.

“It’s a bat like the one you were talking about, also with her blood on it.” She glared at him. “Interesting, don’t you think?”

“Where did you get this stuff?”

“It was found at Eric Fuller’s house.”

“Where—the front porch?”

“No,” she said. “Buried in the back yard in a rusty metal box. There was a gas pipe leaking, and the gas company dug it up while they were looking for the leak.”

“Just as good.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s planted. That rag may have been a blouse once, and it may even have been the blouse Wendy Harper was wearing when she was attacked. I assume you have a lab report that the blood is a match for hers.”

“She had herself genetically tested for a breast-cancer gene a couple of years before she was murdered. There isn’t any doubt that this sample belongs to her, and that means she’s dead. I’ve got a significant amount of her blood on a piece of her clothing, and murder weapons.”

“Weapons? Plural?”

“There was also a knife that once belonged to a set in Eric Fuller’s kitchen. We have proof that Eric Fuller bought the set eight years ago. I’m sure by the time we go to trial, we’ll get something similar on the bat.”

“The evidence is faked.”

Linda Gordon said, “I don’t know if you’re telling the truth about what you did or not. If you’re telling the truth and you tried to help her save herself, I’m truly sorry for you. But it certainly looks to me as though sometime around the period when she disappeared, Eric Fuller caught up with her. She hasn’t been seen for six years. How can I look at that blouse and that bat with her blood on them, and do nothing?”