by Thomas Perry
“It looks very authentic there,” he said. He was relieved that he didn’t have to pick it out of a whole row of nearly identical maps.
Jill Klein turned to the maid. “Consuelo, make sure we’re not disturbed.”
Consuelo scuttled out of the room. He heard the sound of a lock clicking, then, a few seconds later, another.
She said, “When I’m thanking someone, I think the old ways are best, don’t you?” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips.
Schelling was shocked, alarmed. He had no response ready. “I don’t think this is smart,” he said. “Your husband is—”
“Downstairs at the party with his mistress.” She took his hands and put them around her waist. “Just be quick, so nobody gets embarrassed.”
The telephone in Scott’s coat began to vibrate again. In the silence it gave an audible buzz, and he jumped as though they had been caught.
“Turn that thing off.”
He dug the phone out and flipped it open. “Yes?”
It was Tiffany’s voice. “Scotty, I’m sorry to call again, but I’m in my car, and the news is saying that the two men you were asking about have been shot to death.”
“Are you sure?”
“The description is the same. And it’s the parking lot behind Harlan’s, where I told them to meet Paul.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go home. Do nothing. Say nothing. I’ll see you Monday morning.” He disconnected.
Jill Klein had turned away from him, and now she was walking toward the door. He said, “Jill. Please wait.”
She stopped and looked over her shoulder as she reached for the doorknob. “Jill? To you I’m Mrs. Klein. I’ll always be Mrs. Klein.” She opened the door. He could see that in the office Consuelo had been sitting on the couch in near-darkness, probably so nobody would see light under the door. She stood up quickly, turned on the light, and unbolted the door so Jill Klein did not have to break her stride on the way out.
Schelling walked through the sitting room past Consuelo, but she did not meet his gaze. As far as he could tell, her eyes had never moved to his face. She was obviously paid never to see or hear.
As Schelling walked to the back stairwell, he saw Jill Klein far ahead of him near the front of the building, turning to go down a different staircase. She looked in his direction, but it was only for a second, and her face was utterly blank. She was timing her descent to coincide with his so it was not possible for anyone downstairs to see them both.
Schelling went downstairs, skirted the group in the living room, went outside to the garden again, and dialed his phone. He heard the voice of Dale, his personal trainer. “Dale here.”
“Hi. It’s Scotty. Are you alone? Can you talk?”
“Sure. I’m at home doing my own workout. What’s wrong, Scotty?”
“I’m in Santa Fe, and I’ve only got a minute or two to talk. You really were a marine, right?”
“Yes.”
“You were trained to kill people?”
“Well, yeah, I guess so. I mean, that’s what it boils down to. That’s what war is. It’s for your country, for the rest of the people, but they train you to fight.”
“Have you ever killed anybody?”
“Me? No. When I was in Desert Storm, they kept me in Kuwait, making newly arrived National Guardsmen do push-ups and squat-thrusts while they got used to the heat. I was sent to Haiti and Liberia, and I didn’t get even that close. Most of that time I was on a ship outside the harbor.”
“But you knew how. And you were ready, right?”
“Sure, but I don’t get why you’re asking.”
“I need a huge favor.”
“Wait a minute.”
“I’ll make it worthwhile.”
“Scotty—”
“Look, I’m in terrible trouble. I’m in Santa Fe tonight on business, but tomorrow I have to get on a plane and go back home. These people have already killed some people who work for me. I’m in danger. It’s a self-defense situation. It’s self-defense.”
“Have you talked to the police about this?”
“Dale, this is way beyond that stage, and I don’t have time to explain it all.”
He heard a deep sigh. “Scotty, I can’t help you on something like this.”
“Please.”
“What?”
“I said please. If you can’t do it, then give me a name. I can take it from there. If you don’t want to have me use your name, I won’t.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t do that kind of work, and I don’t know people who do.”
Scott laughed. He decided the sound was no more false than any other laugh he had given. There was silence on the other end, so he said, “Got you! It was just a joke, Dale. I was just yanking your chain. You fell for it, though. Admit it.”
“Scotty, if you’re in some kind of trouble, I think you’ve got to go to the authorities. If you’re not, and this really is a joke, then your sense of humor is really sick.”
“I’m sorry, buddy. I was just calling to tell you I won’t be back in time for our workout session tomorrow, and the idea came to me, so I went with it. If it wasn’t funny, I apologize. It seemed funny at the time.”
“Are you sure you’re telling me the truth now?”
“Of course I am. Look, I’m in a hurry right now, but I’ll give you a call when I’m free to slip a workout into my schedule. Take care, Dale.”
“All right. Call me.”
Scott Schelling stood motionless for a moment with the dead phone in his hand, every muscle rigid with fear and regret and humiliation. What if he hadn’t convinced Dale that he’d been joking? No, he decided. He had to stop that train of thought now. He couldn’t spend any time worrying about Dale. What was he going to do—hire somebody else to kill Dale? He had to keep from getting crazy.
As he let his brain concentrate on the problem of the Turners, he fought his fear and anxiety and forced himself to think about what he was going to do. He had hired the Turners, promised them a million dollars in cash to kill Wendy Harper. When they had succeeded, he had tried to have them killed, but the Turners had survived. The only person he had left that he could trust was Carl, and Carl couldn’t fix this alone. But Scott still had one other asset—the million dollars. It was in a suitcase in the trunk of his car in Los Angeles.
He heard music, and looked back through the French doors into the hallway and the living room. There was a group of mariachis at the edge of the cocktail party, strumming instruments and singing. There were no signs the guests were going in to dinner yet. He punched Carl’s number into his cell phone.
“Hello?”
“Carl. It’s me. The two jerks who met with the Turners got killed.”
“Holy shit! When?”
“A little while ago, but Tiffany says it’s already on the radio. I want you to talk to the Turners. Tell them I want to pay them what I owe them, but I’m out of town until tomorrow. Tell them those two were trying to turn on me, kill the Turners, and keep the money for themselves. Got it?”
“Yes. I’ll try to reach them.”
“Carl, this isn’t a time when you give it a try and see what you can do. You have to succeed. I’m trusting you with my life here.”
“Okay, Scotty, okay. I didn’t mean it like that. You know I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Thanks, Carl. I’ve got to go now.” He hung up and looked inside again. He was ashamed that he had panicked and tried to hire Dale to kill the Turners. Carl would use money to succeed with the Turners. Nobody wanted a half-second of revenge more than they wanted a million dollars. Once Carl paid them off, then he would be safer than he had been at any time in the last six years.
But there was one more problem that was nagging at him: the terrible mistake he’d made upstairs. He couldn’t have Jill Klein as an enemy. She was his boss’s wife, even if his boss slept with somebody else now and then. She cou
ld sour Scott’s reputation with the board of directors of Aggregate, who were virtually all presidents of other big companies. She could squash somebody like Scott Schelling in a week.
He slipped indoors and began to search for her. He moved through the crowd, looking in every direction until he spotted her. She was at the far end of the big living room, standing with another lady and laughing at something the woman had said, her head back and her too-perfect teeth on display. Her eyes were always rolling to see how people around her were looking at her, but when she saw Scott Schelling, her laugh lost its energy and died.
He stood patiently a few feet off until she had to notice him or risk causing a scene. She nodded and stepped away, and he moved to intercept her. “Hello, Mrs. Klein.” He held out his hand to her. “I don’t know if you remember, but I’m Scott Schelling, Crosswinds Records. We met at the party a few months ago when Aggregate bought us up.”
She stared at him with narrowed eyes. “Schelling? Yes, I believe I do remember. Nice to see you.” She took a step to his right, to move past him.
“I sent you a small present, and I wondered if you had opened it.”
Her eyes moved from side to side to be sure nobody was listening. She whispered, “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to start over. I want to apologize for answering my telephone. It’s a line I use only for emergencies. My mother has been hospitalized for over a week with a stroke, and the hospital wouldn’t connect me with her room earlier. My secretary was calling to tell me she got through and my mother’s doing better.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m very sorry she’s been ill.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Klein.”
“Jill. Please call me Jill.”
“Jill, then. I wondered if you would be willing to show me where you’ve hung the map.”
She looked around with the alertness of a deer. “There’s not enough time now. I told the caterers to call everyone in to dinner in five minutes. Where are you staying?”
“The Eldorado. Room 362.”
“Expect me at one.” She turned and disappeared into the crowd, then reemerged on the other side of the room near her husband and Martha Rodall.
Schelling used up a few minutes trying to have conversations with the wives of two executives in the Legal Division. They were well trained in talking to men, but they seemed to be under the impression that all men wanted to talk about golf.
When dinner was announced, he filed into the dining room with the others and took his seat near the foot of the table among the executives from other minor subsidiaries of the parent company. It was like being one of the youngest children in a big, complicated family.
But tonight he didn’t mind. He had just saved himself from destruction. Maybe he had even found the secret back stairway to the next level of success.
39
AFTER DARK, Jack Till walked along the sidewalk away from the hill and headed back toward Linda Gordon’s house. He had watched the men and women beyond the yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, searching for the brass casing from the rifle or any impression left on the dirt by the shooter’s shoes, but Till had been forced to keep his distance. The police would stay at the scene for a while trying to get everything that there was, but he had known for hours that there was nothing left to find.
He walked back to the house. There were two cops still working the front yard, looking for the bullet that had passed through Linda Gordon’s shoulder. They had a faint hope that it had gone into a tree trunk or a fence or the next house. He could see that others were finishing their door-to-door interviews in the neighborhood with the usual hopeless questions: “Did you happen to see?” “Did you happen to hear?” “Will you please call us right away if you hear of someone else who did?”
He went in the door and saw that Max Poliakoff was back inside, using the small kitchen table as his headquarters while the other cops searched. Till said, “Max, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Have you found out anything about Kit Stoddard yet?”
“Hell, Jack. One crisis at a time. You gave me the name yesterday, and I’ve got a man on it. There was such a person, but the name probably was an alias, as you thought. She’s not on any list that he’s checked yet. Nobody he’s talked to knows where she went.”
“What about Scott?”
“Well, yeah, that’s the important one, isn’t it? He’s even harder to find because we don’t know where to begin. Apparently nobody knew anything about him even at the time when he was dating Kit Stoddard, including his last name—if Scott was his first name. He could have been from out of town—out of the country, even. He was seeing Kit, but none of her friends met him.”
“I have a feeling,” said Till.
“What’s your feeling?”
“Ever since I went to talk to Linda Gordon a couple of months ago, I’ve thought there was something odd about her. She seemed to have an abnormal interest in how this case came out. She didn’t want to hear that the victim was alive, she wanted Eric Fuller to go to trial. Did she strike you the same way?”
Poliakoff looked down at the table for a moment. “Yeah, actually, she did. I asked around, talked to some people in the department, and then a couple of contacts I have in the DA’s office. The word is that she’s always a competitor. But she really likes these cases where some guy victimizes a woman. It seems to inspire her, to make her feel like she’s fighting for something. It makes her tough to beat in front of a jury. So the head deputy DA assigns a lot of them to her.”
“You’re telling me that what we saw here today was normal?”
Poliakoff shrugged. “What’s normal?”
“If you hadn’t thought she was behaving strangely, then you wouldn’t have asked around about her.”
“All right. That’s true. But I can believe she just got carried away. Everybody here must have seemed like they were on the other side, trying to push her into rushing her decision. Maybe she felt cornered.”
“There were four witnesses who had known Wendy Harper six years ago, and a police forensics technician who as good as told her that the picture he took of Wendy today matched her old driver’s license. But she wanted to try to keep Wendy in town and vulnerable. You heard her trying to dream up charges to file to keep her here.”
Poliakoff held up his hands. “What do you want from me, Jack? She’s the prosecutor in the case.”
“She just got shot.”
“She got shot because all that blond hair made her look from a distance like Wendy Harper, and no other reason.”
“She’s an attempted murder victim, and it happened right here. This house is a crime scene. It’s got her blood splattered on the front of it.”
“You’re telling me to search her house? What’s the probable cause?”
“You don’t need a warrant. You were already inside when the crime was committed, and the scene belongs to the detective in charge until he releases it.”
“What the hell would I even be looking for?”
“What I’d be looking for is something that proves she knows a man named Scott.”
“Scott? That’s a stretch. There’s no evidence that she’s anything but overeager and suspicious.”
“So look for some, and you might find it,” Till said.
Poliakoff looked at him for a moment. “Wendy is waiting for you. Do you want to drive her to the station, or do you want us to do it?”
“I will. Is she alone?”
“She’s out back talking to Eric Fuller.”
Till walked to the front door, stepped carefully past the dried pool of Linda Gordon’s blood, and then out onto the porch. He took a deep breath of the night air, then walked up the driveway to the corner of the house and stopped to compose himself. As he came around the corner, he saw Eric and Wendy sitting on a porch swing together. Were they holding hands? He couldn’t tell from here.
Till stopped walking and said, “Hello. I’m sorry
to interrupt.”
Wendy turned toward Till and he advanced. He could see that she had been crying. She didn’t rise, nor did Eric. Instead, she turned away from Till toward Eric and said, “I don’t ever want to lose touch with you again.”
Eric stood up and shook Till’s hand. “I suppose you have to take her somewhere, right?”
Till nodded. “They want her at the station.”
Eric said, “All right, then. It’s the middle of dinner, and my sous-chefs and cooks have been making my new lobster risotto without me. I’d better show up and give them a hand.” Eric’s eyes were moving, staying away from anyone else’s eyes. He turned, walked around the house, and up the driveway.
Till saw that Wendy was still crying. He tried to think of something to say.
She caught him looking at her. “I told him what I had been doing since we last saw each other.”
“Oh,” Till said. “Sometimes I think honesty is overrated.”
“I think I knew that once, but forgot. Well, where are we going to go now? To the police station?”
“That’s the second stop. First, St. Joseph’s Hospital.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where the ambulance took Linda Gordon.”
They got into Till’s rental car. He drove up the street a few yards, turned around, and headed out toward Ventura Boulevard, then turned east toward Burbank. They were quiet for a time, and then Wendy said, “We saved Eric. We accomplished what we had to do. Has it occurred to you yet that maybe what we ought to do next is get the hell out of here?”
“This isn’t six years ago. Last time there didn’t seem to be much choice, but this time, you aren’t the only one who thinks that this Scott guy is a killer. If the cops keep at it, they’ll get him, and this will be over forever.”
“Then why don’t we leave town and let them have at it?”