Silence

2

JACK TILL STRAIGHTENED his necktie as he watched the paparazzi across the street. They had been calm and still for a time, glancing now and then at the hotel, but now they were up out of their cars and pacing, their eyes on the front entrance. He noticed that they devoted half of their attention to each other. They were competitors, and a photograph wasn’t worth much if the others got it, too. Till was lucky that Marina Fallows was in the hotel tonight for the charity banquet. She had stood out in small parts in a couple of big movies, and fresh faces were always the favorite prey of the tabloids. He wondered what this week’s issues would say she had been doing here.

The photographers stood still for an instant, as though they’d heard something. Then they all moved at once, a shift toward the front doors, where the doorman and parking attendants had suddenly been reinforced by a couple of dark-suited security men. In a moment a pair of dark limousines floated in from the parking lot around the corner, and veered close to the curb.

The show inside the reception room where Marina Fallows had been must be over, and now the show outside was beginning. The doors opened and the beautiful young woman appeared, dressed in a long strapless black evening gown and open-toed shoes that glinted in the light. She was accompanied by a man about her age in a dark suit who looked as though he had been chosen to look good by her side. The flashes began and Till was surprised once again by how small some actresses were in person, almost like children. The flashes became continuous like strobe lights, the photographers elbowing each other aside to get closer, shooting at the rate of three frames a second. Two of them stood in front of the lead limousine to block its path while their partners ran along beside the couple, pushing their flashing cameras into their faces until the two were inside and the door slammed.

Till kept his attention on the doorway. He saw two couples come out, then a third, all dressed in evening clothes. Till reached into his pocket, extracted a letter-sized printed sheet, studied the color picture on it for a moment, then began to walk as he put it away and then reached into the side pocket of his coat.

Till was six feet one inch tall, forty-two years old, with broad shoulders and an energetic stride. He was dressed in a dark suit that made him look as though he had attended one of the events in the hotel’s reception rooms. As he approached the front of the building, the paparazzi and the security people seemed to sense that it was in their best interest to assume that he had nothing to do with their struggles, and pretend not to see him.

Till reached the curb while the third couple waited for the parking attendant to bring their car to them. They were in their forties, the wife very thin and blond, with freckles that melted together like a tan on her bare shoulders and collarbones. The husband was tall and fit, with an open, boyish face and eyebrows that looked almost white in the reflected light of the street lamps. As the couple’s Mercedes pulled up to the curb, Till’s eyes returned to the wife’s neck.

Till took a small digital camera out of his coat pocket and snapped a picture.

The man laughed and held up his hand. “Hey! We’re not famous!”

Till said, “Sorry, my mistake,” and kept walking.

As he came abreast of the couple, he saw the woman turn away from him and whisper urgently to her husband, her hand clutching her throat. Till picked up his pace.

The husband ran after Till and tapped him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, friend, but I’m going to have to ask you for that film.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Till said. “You can’t have it.”

“All right, I’ll pay you for it. My wife really doesn’t want to have her picture taken, and you can’t sell it, anyway. We’re not actors.” He produced a very small, soft wallet, and extracted a bill. “Will a hundred cover it?”

“No,” said Till. “You’re welcome to tell her I exposed the film or something, but I can’t take your money. I’ve got things in the camera that I want, so I can’t help you.”

“You have to.” The man lunged for Till’s hand to snatch the camera.

Till’s left hand came up so quickly, it seemed to have been in the air waiting for the man’s hand to arrive. He caught the hand and twisted it around so the man had to bend to the side.

“Let me go. Let go of my hand!”

“Okay.” Till pocketed his camera and then released him.

The man straightened and backed away. When he was a few feet off, he turned and hurried back into the hotel entrance with his wife. He already had his cell phone out, and he was talking into it with animation. Till could see through the glass doors that several other men and women in evening dress were flocking around the couple. Three of the men came out and took a few steps in Till’s direction, but they didn’t seem to be able to decide what to do. Their friend didn’t need to be saved, and Till wasn’t running away. They withdrew to the front door of the hotel to look in the glass door at their friend and then back at Till.

The police car arrived in about four minutes, veered to the curb behind the couple’s Mercedes, and rocked once on its worn shock absorbers. Two young police officers got out, one male and one female. The woman was short, with dark hair tied back in a bun, and she looked stocky in her bulletproof vest, but the man was tall and thin, like a basketball player. “Sir,” the male officer said, “are you Mr. Mason?”

“No, my name is Jack Till. George Mason is inside the door over there. The tall, blond one with the tan.”

“Officer! Officer!” George Mason rushed out of the hotel through the glass doors, followed by his wife and the rest of his party. “This man assaulted me. He took our picture, and then he twisted my wrist.”

“Hold it, everyone,” said the policewoman. “Everybody will get a chance.” She said to her partner, “You take Mr. Mason’s statement. I’ll talk to this gentleman.”

She led him a few paces up the street and stopped. “Are you the Jack Till who used to be a cop?”

“Yes,” he said. He took out his identification and held it up, but she didn’t look at it.

“I thought I recognized you. I was in the Hollywood Division when you were there in homicide. I’m Becky Salamone. I know you don’t remember me, so don’t pretend.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“What happened?”

“Since I retired, I’ve been doing PI work. I’ve been watching Mrs. Mason for about a week. She and her husband, George, reported a necklace as stolen in a burglary two years ago. Here’s the insurance company’s circular on it.” He unfolded it and handed it to her.

Officer Salamone held it. “Sapphires and diamonds. Nice.”

“Yeah,” said Till. “McLaren Life and Casualty paid them three hundred fifty thousand. She’s wearing it tonight.”

“Oh?” Salamone looked around her. “Where is she?”

Till looked toward the hotel entrance. “She must have gone back inside. I took a picture, she got upset, and her husband came after me wanting the film. First he tried to buy it, then to grab it. I couldn’t let him do that.” Till took out his camera. “It’s digital. You can see the picture.” He turned the camera on so she could see the shot of the Masons standing beside their car.

Salamone compared the image with the photograph on the sheet. “Great shot.”

“I got the car in because you can see the model and the plate,” said Till. “The car wasn’t built when the necklace disappeared. It’s brand-new.”

George Mason shouted from the front of the hotel, “Hold him! I want to press charges.”

Officer Salamone handed Till’s camera and circular back to him, then approached the group outside the hotel, took her partner aside for a few seconds, whispered to him, and then returned. “Mrs. Mason. Where is Mrs. Mason?”

Mrs. Mason came forward. “I saw all of it. This man was—”

Officer Salamone said, “Mrs. Mason, weren’t you wearing a necklace earlier?”

“I don’t understand.”

Till held up the picture from the insurance company and unfolded it. “This one.”

Mrs. Mason was beginning to look pale. “No, I wasn’t wearing that. I don’t have a necklace like that. What does this have to do with your attacking my husband? It’s ridiculous!”

Till turned to the other people who had been at the event in the hotel. “Anyone see Mrs. Mason wearing a necklace tonight?”

None of the guests seemed to understand the question. Their expressions looked as though Till had been speaking a language they had never heard before. Till turned his left side to the group and gave a barely perceptible wink to Officer Salamone with his right eye. “I guess there’s no choice. You’ll just have to search all of them and charge the one who has it.”

Salamone’s face was unreadable. She gave a slight nod.

Till called out to the group, “Don’t anyone attempt to leave. Extra units will be arriving in a moment to bring everyone down to the station so officers can take your statements under oath and perform body searches. Most of you will be free to go within a few hours.”

All of the party looked horrified, but one of the women began to tremble, and then to cry. She looked at Mrs. Mason. “I’m sorry, Brenda, but I can’t do this. Not even for you.” She opened her purse, lifted out Mrs. Mason’s necklace, and held it out to Officer Salamone as though it were a venomous snake.

THE NEXT MORNING Jack Till walked to his office. He almost always left his car parked in the space under his apartment building on the east side of Laurel Canyon, and walked to his office on Ventura Boulevard. The distance was no more than a half mile, and he liked being at street level, looking around and thinking.

He felt good this morning. The insurance company had already responded to the news that their necklace had been recovered. They would pay him enough to ensure that this year his detective agency would almost break even, and the year was only half over. And when he had come home last night, he had played back his voice mail and listened to a message from Dan Mulroney, a detective in the Hollywood Division, telling him he had referred a client who would probably come to see him today. It was only his second year as a private investigator, and he might actually make a profit.

He stopped at the open-air newsstand on the corner, bought this morning’s Los Angeles Times, put it under his left arm and made his way along the boulevard with the morning sun at his back. He stopped in Starbucks to pick up a cup of coffee, and made his way to his building. It was a two-story complex with a big antique shop and a row of three stores that sold women’s clothes, gifts, and eyeglasses on the ground floor. There was a narrow entry between the antiques and the women’s clothes, a black felt directory under glass on the wall inside the door, and a staircase leading to a single corridor of offices on the second floor.

Till’s office was the first on the right, a single room that held a telephone, a desk, two filing cabinets, and a couch, all from an office-furniture–liquidation dealer on Sherman Way. On the left side of the corridor were three offices held by three sallow young men who kept long, irregular hours and were always reincorporating themselves as different television-production companies. Till walked up the stairs carrying his newspaper and coffee, and found a young woman leaning against his door.

She was slight and blond, her hair fine and glossy as a child’s, but it took him a moment to see what she really looked like because her face was discolored by purple bruises and distorted by swelling. She looked, more than anything, like some of the female homicide victims he had seen. As soon as she saw him, she pushed herself away from his door, and then grasped the cane he had not seen before. She used it to make way for him to unlock his door.

“Good morning,” he said. “Are you here to see me—Jack Till?”

“Yes.”

“Then come on in.” He was sure he knew her story simply by looking at her. She must have been in a car accident. There was some kind of lawsuit, and she would hire him to investigate the other party. He set his coffee and paper on the desk and pointed to the couch. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

She looked at the couch skeptically. “Do you have a regular chair? That kind of thing isn’t good on my back right now.”

As Till went to the other side of the room to retrieve a straight-backed chair, she edged closer to his desk, and at first he thought she was sneaking a look at the files on the surface, but then he realized she was staring out the window that overlooked Ventura Boulevard. He could see her pupils moving in small jumps, focusing on one person, then another. She was terrified.

He realized there had been no accident. He put the chair down in front of the desk. “Who did this to you?”

She held her arms out from her sides as though she were showing him her dress, but he could see the gesture meant her battered face, her injured body. “A man. Two men, really. They want to kill me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who they are.”

“What would you like me to do—protect you? Find them?”

“Help me run away.”

SIX YEARS LATER, Jack Till would still remember that moment in his office, when he had seen Wendy Harper for the first time. When he had listened to her story, he had reacted as though he were still a policeman. He had tried to get her to do all of the sensible things, to turn the problem over to the police and let them protect her. She had a rebuttal to every suggestion, a reason why the only hope she had of staying alive was to try to live elsewhere. She had already been to the police after she had been beaten, and they had suggested she see Jack Till. In the end, he had given in. He had taught her what she needed to know about the methods police departments used to track fugitives, on the theory that anyone searching for her would not be as good at it as the professionals. When he had finished teaching her and the injuries that were visible had healed, he left her in another city at the entrance to the airport.

For the first year he worried, scanning the newspapers for any news of her, waiting to read that her body had been found. Five more years passed, and he heard nothing more of Wendy Harper.

He hoped that the silence meant she had made it.