by Thomas Perry
“I see it,” said Paul. He drove up the next aisle so he could pull out and follow if Till and Wendy Harper came back and got into the car. “You get out and check the dock and the shops.”
Sylvie got out of the car and walked toward the docks. A few stores along the wharf sold bright-colored kayaks, wet suits, or expensive clothes for people who hung around beach resorts. Sylvie checked each of the stores. There was nobody in any of them who remotely resembled Jack Till, even from a distance. She walked out onto the dock and stopped at the jetty where the commercial fishing boats unloaded. There were big turnbuckles where they tied off, and an electric winch on an armature for lifting the heavy wooden boxes that were piled on the back of the fish packers’ trucks parked nearby.
She saw a bored-looking blond boy with a tan so deep that the whites of his eyes glowed as though he were looking out of holes cut in leather. He sat on the back of one of the trucks listening to a radio and waiting for a boat to come in. Sylvie considered the chance that the boat would contain Wendy Harper, then dismissed the idea. She walked farther out along the dock and studied the row of fishing boats, each with its net rolled up on a big drum near the stern. Some of the boats looked deserted, worn and dirty, as though they hadn’t been out of port in years, but she supposed that was probably the sign that they were out often. It was possible that Till was retrieving Wendy Harper from one of the hundred or so yachts that were anchored in the harbor, or moored along the next set of docks, but if so, there was no sign of a dory going to or from any of them.
She went back the way she had come, and got back into the car beside Paul. “I couldn’t find him. He could be meeting her in a boat. I’ve been everywhere else. They could be on the beach, but I figured it was best to come back here so he didn’t slip by me or something.”
“That was smart,” Paul said. “We’ll just wait and then follow when he leaves.”
Once again, for the ten thousandth time, Sylvie wondered: When Till finally showed himself and got into his car, would he look up, see her, and recognize her face from one of the movies she’d made? It had happened twice in supermarkets and once at the bank just two years ago, and it had humiliated her terribly. If it ever happened when she was working, it could get them caught. She looked at Paul, wanting to tell him what she was thinking, but knowing that she had better not. She took the 9mm Beretta out of her purse, released the magazine to be sure it was fully loaded, pushed the magazine back in until it clicked and held, and made sure the safety was on. She arranged the things in her purse so the flimsy scarf just covered the gun.
“Shit,” Paul said. “Oh, shit!”
“What?” She looked out the windshield and saw a potbellied man in his late thirties wearing a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. He was opening the doors of Till’s rental car. She could see the white plastic rental-company key tag dangling from the keys in his hand. “Oh, no.” Then, from around the side of the building where the restrooms were, she could see Mom coming along with two kids about five and eight. The kids got into the car, and Mom knelt while she put more sunscreen on their little faces. Sylvie whispered, “How could we have the wrong car? How could we?”
“We didn’t. Till must have turned it in, and these people rented it.”
“But how?”
“Please don’t keep asking me how. Probably when it stopped last night near the airport, he was turning it in. They must have cleaned it, filled the tank, and rented it to these people.”
Sylvie and Paul watched as the parents got in and the father carefully backed out of the parking space. He drove out and turned right onto Cabrillo Boulevard. The mother was half-turned in her seat. She seemed to be coaxing the kids to look out at the blue expanse of the Pacific, but the little girl reached out and punched her brother, then pretended he had hit her and began to cry.
12
JACK TILL SAT BACK in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac and watched the miles of road roll under it. There was a hard wind in the high desert today, and it had blown any suspicion of cloud away. The sky was an unchanging deep blue, and the sun glinted off any piece of metal like a camera flash. Since Till had come down out of the pass into Nevada, he had been able to look out over the emptiness now and then to see dust devils swirling in the distance.
As he drove, he revisited the days before he had taken Wendy Harper away. He had tried not to learn too much about her. He had barely listened even to her volunteered confidences because he had not wanted to figure out where she would be and carry that information in his mind for the next twenty years.
But there had been one question he had asked her repeatedly: “Who is the guy you saw with the waitress? I used to be a homicide detective. I still know nearly everybody in Homicide Special, and a lot of people in Hollywood Homicide. If he killed her, we can get him. They’ll lock him up.”
“I didn’t say she was a waitress. And I only saw him with her once, at night. He didn’t do anything to me. I think he hired the one who did, but that one didn’t say he did. He didn’t say anything.”
Till said, “You know the identity of a person who is missing and maybe dead, at least a description of the murder suspect, and had a good long look at an assailant who is probably working for him. We could do a lot with that, probably connect the two and put them both away.”
“I thought about it all the time in the hospital. I don’t know enough to identify him, much less get him arrested, but he thinks it’s worth paying people to kill me. I’ll run out of blood before he runs out of money. So I’ll go away.”
“I think you know more about him than you’re saying. His name is enough. I can get it to the homicide people without having you hauled in.”
“Here’s the joke. I don’t know his name. She never told me that.”
“Then how do you know he’s behind any of this?”
“When I saw him with her in the parking lot, he was trying to hide his face. He carried himself funny, to stay in the dark part where the shadow of the building hid him. While I watched him, he went to his car to check something inside, but he didn’t open the door because it would turn on the dome light. Don’t you see? It’s a hundred small observations in two or three minutes, and I’ve forgotten sixty of them by now. It’s degenerated into an intuition, and an intuition isn’t good enough. All I can do is get away.”
“Getting out is a huge thing to do,” Till said. “It means giving up your career, and all of the people who care about you.”
Then she had said the most surprising thing to him. “In a way, it’s probably a good thing. My life here has reached a kind of paralysis.”
“So running will solve your personal problems?”
She smiled. “I didn’t ask for this. I had two ribs broken with one swing of that bat. I’m just saying that when something like that happens, it changes your life—everything in your life.”
“Are you one of those women who gets sick and thinks it’s good because she loses weight?”
“No. I didn’t say the change was for the better, and if it were, it wouldn’t be worth it. I know I’m trading old problems for new ones. What I’m really telling you is that I would never have had the guts to walk away from this life unless something big and ugly was chasing me. I’ve got a half-interest in a successful restaurant, with investors begging us to open more locations. It’s worth millions, but I can’t sell it. I also own a half-interest in a million-dollar house with Eric, but I can’t sell that, either. I don’t even have a real career. My career is handling Eric Fuller, keeping him productive, solvent, and supplied with fresh produce and linens.”
“You’re willing to leave him forever?”
“Leaving Eric is the part I hate, but it’s the thing I should have done, anyway. Eric doesn’t need me anymore. He’s a great chef, and he’s got the loyalty of a whole staff of good people we found and trained. He’s got a national reputation now. He’s made. But if I don’t leave, his chance for a real personal life is going to pass. If I’m with him, my c
hance will pass, too.”
Jack Till fought through the fog of years and brought back details. She had said her mother was dead. Her father had apparently been out of the picture since she was a child. Was he dead, too? She and Eric had grown up in upstate New York. Poughkeepsie. They had gone to college—where? Wisconsin.
Just from the way she had handled her new name, he believed she was too smart to return to the place where she was raised, or the place where she and Eric had gone to college. She would know that there were people who had known her well—teachers, neighbors, friends and the parents of friends, doctors. Even if she could have been sure nobody like that was left, there would be others who knew her by sight or reputation. She would try to stay away from any of the cities where she had lived before.
As he drove through the desert, he kept picturing her, listening to her voice in his memory. It was an uncomfortable feeling, because at the time he had caught himself feeling a strong attraction to her. He had told himself at the time that he had to hide the affection he felt for her: She was running for her life, and he couldn’t go with her. After it was over, he had thought of her often, always reluctantly, and with a sense of loss. But thinking about her now made him feel almost certain. Wendy Harper had changed her name to Ann Delatorre and flown to Las Vegas on August 30 six years ago.
Las Vegas was garish and vulgar and extravagant. It was an endless river of people who thought the rules of the universe were about to change, so this time they would end up with the money and the casino owners would end up with a hangover. Wendy Harper wasn’t a gambler. She had saved most of her money and worked seven days and six nights a week for years. The ambience of Las Vegas didn’t fit with anything Wendy Harper had ever liked. But she had come to Jack Till to learn how to stop being Wendy Harper. She was Ann Delatorre now. Who knew what Ann Delatorre liked?
When Till took the exit from Route 15 at the Mandalay Bay complex, he was once again amazed at the traffic. Ten or fifteen years ago, he and Jimmy DeKuyper had driven here a number of times to pick up fugitives being extradited on L.A. homicides. He had always taken this exit so he could drive up the Strip, and couldn’t remember ever being delayed on the way uptown. Now, going a couple of blocks on the Strip was a project. He decided to check in at a hotel and let a cabdriver do it for him.
He pulled his rental car into the circle at the MGM Grand and saw the valet arrive to drive it away. He got out, and it was as though the door to a blast furnace had opened. The hot, dry wind seemed to take the moisture from his skin and dry his eyes. He walked inside, found his way to the front desk, and stood in line. There were about twenty-five women in gray uniforms along the desk at stations where they were checking people in as quickly as they could, but the lines were still growing behind him. He had been consciously keeping his moves random, always deciding at the last minute according to whim, and now he wondered whether he had made a mistake. But when he reached the front of the line, the woman asked for his reservation but showed no reaction when he said he didn’t have one, and gave him a folder with a set of key cards in it.
He put his suitcase in his room and then went to work. The telephone company had told him Ann Delatorre’s number was unlisted, so he would have to find it another way. He called the offices of unions, and the personnel offices of all the large companies he found in the phone book. When he found nothing, he went back to the telephone book and looked at the ads for local private detectives.
He found plenty of agencies that looked honest and reliable: “All our investigators are former police officers, fully licensed and bonded,” or “Offices in New York, Dallas, and Chicago.” He didn’t want anybody like that, so he kept searching the pages. He found one that had a suite on the second floor of a building with an address that sounded like a strip mall. The small, cheap ad said: FRAUD DETECTION, MARITAL, DEBT COLLECTION.
He took a cab to the address. The building was in a part of the city that Till thought of as Daylight Las Vegas. Tall hotel buildings poked up like fingers in the distance, but in the foreground there were only one- and two-story box structures with stucco on the front sides and tinted windows that the eye could not penetrate. The address was on a strip with a low-end store that sold discount clothes, a tattoo parlor, a chiropractor, and a small storefront offering tae-kwon-do lessons. Up on the second level there was a door with a sign that said Lamar Collection Services.
He opened the door, heard an electronic bell ring, and waited at the counter at the back of the small reception area. He looked around and saw three plastic lawn chairs and a laminated table that held year-old car magazines. In a moment he heard some shuffling sounds from a back room, and a woman in her forties with bright red hair came through the door. She placed her hands on the counter, and Till could see a set of long blue fingernails painted with tiny white flowers. “How can I help you?” she said without enthusiasm.
Till took out his identification. “My name is Jack Till. I’m a private investigator from Los Angeles. I’m searching for a former client of mine. I’d like to find out if she’s living in Nevada.”
She shrugged. “We’re skip-tracers. We can do that.”
“Her name is Ann Delatorre.”
“You haven’t said you represent a company she owes money, or that you’re trying to deliver money they owe her, or anything. There are laws.”
“Oh. Did I forget to mention that? She hired me and didn’t pay. What do you charge?”
“Depends. Just to see if we’ve got her under our noses is forty bucks. That includes a search of the two biggest databases. If you want us to collect for you, then you’re talking about quite a bit more.”
“I think I’d like to start with the easy stuff. For now I’d just like an address and, if possible, a phone number.”
“Okay.” She pushed a pad of paper to him with a pen. “Write down the name. You pay in advance, then come back in an hour.”
He took out two twenty-dollar bills, wrote down the name. “I can wait here.”
“Suit yourself.”
She went away for no more than ten minutes, and returned with a skip-trace sheet she had printed out. She set it on the counter and turned to walk toward the back of her store. She said over her shoulder, “There you go.”
Till got up from his plastic chair and took the paper. It had the name Ann Delatorre, a home address, and a Social Security number. Under occupation it said “Sales,” and the employer was a company called “Karen’s” on Paradise Road. It occurred to Till that it was possible Wendy Harper had found a way to have another extra identity. She could be Ann the salesclerk and also Karen, the absent owner who hired her, paid her salary and verified her ID papers. Till said, “Thank you,” but the woman with the blue nails was gone.
As he walked to the street and took out the card with the cab company’s phone number on it, he glanced at his watch. It was still early. Karen’s would probably still be open. He called a cab, rode to Paradise Road, and found that the address was a mailing center that rented mailboxes. He reminded himself that Wendy Harper had stayed invisible for six years. He had expected her to be good at it.
13
SYLVIE SLIPPED OUT of the airplane’s aisle into the window seat, then lifted the armrest up to open the space between her and Paul as he sat down and fastened his seat belt. Then she wiggled her hips once to establish contact with him. He looked down at her and smiled.
It was interesting to Sylvie to see Paul moving back and forth so easily between the extremes of his personality. Just an hour ago, he had been speaking with the boy in the car-rental office and smiling almost as warmly as he was now. He had said, “I really would appreciate your help in this situation. Jack is my oldest friend, and my wife’s brother. We’ve got to locate him just as soon as we can.”
The boy had not returned Paul’s beautiful smile. He had simply played at being a heartless bureaucrat. “I’m sorry, sir. But company rules prohibit us from using the locator on a car just because somebody asks.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“What’s a day’s pay for you? I’ll give you that just for a little help.”
“I don’t know, sir. I’m paid once a month.”
“All right. A week’s pay, in cash. Divide your paycheck by four.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Company rules.” The boy held his hands up in a shrug.
Paul’s long arm shot out, and before the boy could step backward, Paul had gripped his right wrist, spun him around, and had the arm twisted behind his back. Paul was as quick and graceful at jujitsu as he was at dancing. He held the boy’s arm with no apparent effort. The boy was bent over, his face almost to the counter, his eyes watering, then almost closed in pain. His body tilted to the side while Paul was steering him around the counter and into the open.
Paul said to Sylvie, “Would you please give him three hundred dollars?”
“Sure.” Sylvie opened her purse, took out the three bills, held them up like a magician’s assistant, folded them once, and placed them in the boy’s breast pocket.
Paul applied some more pressure, and the boy went to one knee. “I’ll do it. All right. Stop. Stop it.”
Paul released him and said, “Thank you.” He watched while the boy pushed on his knee with his good hand to raise himself. The hand that Paul had held was pressed to the boy’s stomach, as though held by an invisible sling. The boy went around the counter and Paul went with him. He used his uninjured hand to tap on the computer’s keys while Paul looked over his shoulder. Paul took a pen off the counter and wrote on a map the code number for the locator on Till’s car and the license number.