The Boyfriend (2 page)

In her profession, she had heard a lot of excuses like those. There were very few girls who hadn’t gotten started because whoever was supposed to be supporting them had stopped.

She went outside with Megan and Caitlyn and exchanged the usual hugs and near-miss kisses that they had traded since freshman year. She was acutely aware of the way the three of them looked on the sunlit sidewalk in front of Ivy at the Shore. As they were at this moment, three young women who were sophisticated, graceful, and just reaching the late peak of their beauty, they would have made a wonderful painting—one head light blond, one strawberry red, one coal black.

As the valet parking attendant brought the little runt of a Mercedes and the other two got in, Catherine waved. As she watched them drive off along Ocean Boulevard she thought how nobody in LA called the place where the land met the ocean “the shore.” And then, without consciously turning her thoughts in their direction, she found herself deciding she would never see those two women again. Everything she had ever wanted to know about them she had known before graduation. Now, four years later, they were the same, as they would be forever.

There was no reason to see them again. She handed the valet her parking receipt, and he ran off to get her car. He came back with the sleek black Mercedes S600. She had felt glad she had arrived first so they hadn’t seen the car. Because they were Megan and Caitlyn they would always assume she’d arrived on time because she drove an old Nissan or something, and not a car that cost five times what Caitlyn’s had. She heard a set of police sirens just as the car stopped and the valet got out and opened the door. She listened, and decided they were moving away.

She drove along Ocean Boulevard toward the end of Montana so she could get back into west LA. It had been a long lunch. It would be after three by the time she got home, and four by the time she was ready to work. She took out her phone and listened to her messages on the speaker.

The first one was an “I can’t help thinking about you all the time” call. She recognized the voice. Billy? Bobby? It was that kind of name. He was sweet, and kind of handsome. She would return his call when she got home. There was an “I saw your pictures on Backpage.com, and I thought I’d call and see if we could work out a deal.” No, she thought. If you saw the ad, you saw the prices. Nothing to work out. “Hi. It’s me, George. I’ll call later to make an appointment.” George was in his sixties, older than her father. But he was exactly the kind of regular that made girls rich. He was a widower who missed his wife and loved women. The old ones were gentle and patient, much easier on the body, and George gave her big tips.

She drove into the short driveway and waited while the heavy iron gate rose to admit her, then drove in, pressed the button to close it, and swung into her parking space. Catherine stepped to the inner door and went up into the first-floor lobby. There was a thick carpet, so her high heels made no noise. She stepped into the elevator, and went up to her apartment.

When she walked in, she could sense he was in the bedroom, even though he was very quiet. It sounded as though when he’d heard the door open he had stopped to listen to be sure it was Catherine. “Hi,” she said, and stepped into the bedroom.

He smiled. “Hi.” He had a great smile—boyish and unguarded, and yet there was a sly, knowing look in the big, beautiful eyes that revealed he was a really bad boy. It made her want to jump on him. She stepped toward him and saw he had a gym bag half open on the other side of the bed, and he had folded clothes inside.

“Are you leaving?”

“I think I’ve taken enough advantage of your hospitality. Thanks, Catherine. Thanks so much for putting up with me.”

“And for putting out with you?” She shrugged.

His smile renewed itself. “That too. No, that especially.”

She stepped closer. “I forgot to tell you the meter was running. You owe me seventy thousand roses. Just kidding.”

“If I had that much, I’d be happy to give it to you,” he said. He sat on the bed and put something else into the gym bag.

“Did you find an apartment?”

“I’d never move out for that,” he said. “I finally agreed to take that job in Phoenix. I’ll be back from time to time on weekends, and the job will end in the late spring.”

“Okay,” she said. “Sounds fine.”

“It gets a little hot for construction around then, and the jobs taper off.” He reached down, picked up a nearly empty two-quart plastic bottle of Pepsi, took a drink, and offered it to her.

As she looked at him it was unbearable to imagine the Phoenix sun shining down on a construction site, ruining his unlined, beautiful complexion. She accepted the bottle, took a drink, and handed it back. “Ugh. That’s real. I thought it was diet.”

He took another deep draft, emptying it; set it down; then went back to packing his gym bag.

She walked into the bathroom and took off her new skirt, then the expensive silk blouse. “Will you send me your phone number and address?”

“Of course. But you’ve already got my cell number and e-mail. Those will always be good.”

While Catherine was in the bathroom he took a roll of duct tape out of his bag and tore off a long strip. He reached in again and pulled out a Beretta M92 pistol. He pushed the muzzle of the pistol into the neck of the big plastic bottle and taped it there. He said, loudly enough for her to hear, “I also plan to see you whenever I can get back for a visit.”

“Make sure you call a couple of days ahead. I’d hate to have you come and be too busy to see you.” She regretted having said that. It had just been a way to sting him for leaving her.

“I will.”

She came out of the bathroom barefoot, dressed in a bra and a thong, passed by him, and stepped to her closet to hang up her lunch clothes.

He stepped close behind her, raised the pistol and the plastic bottle, and pulled the trigger. There was a smothered
pop
sound, not much louder than their voices. The second shot was slightly louder because of the hole in the bottle, but still not enough to worry him. He watched her collapse onto the carpet, then touched her carotid artery. Dead.

He went back to searching the apartment. In-call escorts didn’t have time to rush off to the bank every time they accumulated a lot of cash, and they couldn’t deposit big sums anyway. At least Catherine couldn’t. She had no way to explain to the IRS where she was getting more than two thousand dollars a day. He had found about thirty-five thousand in the apartment while she had been out with her friends today. Predictably, she had hidden it in her bedroom. He wished he could search the rest of the apartment thoroughly, but the moment he had pulled the trigger, he had given up that option. It was already late afternoon, and as he took her purse from the bed and pulled out the cash in her wallet, he could hear her cell phone buzzing.

While he’d searched the apartment he had been cleaning it too. Now he stopped searching and turned to cleaning in earnest. Lately, he had become extremely careful about the way he left a woman. He made certain that there were no fingerprints, hairs, or fibers. There were people in this world who were too dumb to think of all the devices that were able to prove that a person had been somewhere. He always cleaned out the drains—even opening the traps where there were hairs in the pipes. He vacuumed the floors and the furniture, emptied the canister into a trash bag, and took the bag with him. He laundered the sheets, pillowcases, and blankets. None of the women he left had ever given her apartment a more thorough cleaning than he had.

He knelt behind Catherine’s body; unclasped the gold chain around her delicate white neck, carefully freeing a couple of strawberry blond hairs from the clasp; then went to her right ankle and unclasped the matching anklet. He put them into his pocket.

He picked up his gym bag, set it on the bed, unwrapped the duct tape from the gun, and removed the bottle. Then he put them into the bag, zipped it shut, and went to the bedroom door. He looked back once. It was a shame. She was so much more beautiful than she knew, and so kind. He picked up his trash bag, went out to the hall door, stopped there and listened, then opened it a crack and looked out to be sure the hall was clear. He locked the door and walked out the front entrance toward his car.

Once he was on the road, he felt confident. He knew that if the cops found a man’s hair, prints, or clothing fiber in Catherine Hamilton’s room, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. There were probably forty guys a week leaving physical traces of themselves in that apartment, and none of them had any lasting relationship with her.

She had been very pretty, with bright catlike eyes and that strawberry blond hair. She’d had her hair done in a salon that was full of movie actresses who were still perfect specimens and hadn’t gotten famous enough to have the hairdressers go to their houses yet. She had fitted in. She was one of those girls who had started taking money for sex because it was so easy that one night the temptation had just pulled her in. She never took drugs or even drank, so that wasn’t even a small part of her decision. She had gone to college, and she was smart.

She had been seduced by arithmetic. If she had been a lawyer, she could have charged clients about four hundred an hour, and given back two hundred and fifty on office rent, taxes, secretaries, and student loans. Instead she charged three hundred an hour, and about once a month she’d buy some new thongs and thigh-high stockings. She’d told him once she liked men well enough close-up, so the job hadn’t been a huge chore.

Selling sex was a profession that put girls in a position to control men—promising, teasing, coaxing. It made some girls jump to conclusions. Because they could manipulate men so easily, they imagined they must be smarter or stronger. A lot of them died of that. Catherine had been wiser. She had lived within the bounds of reality, not getting overconfident or foolhardy, and not taking anything for granted.

Her only problem was that she had run into him. She had liked him and let him sleep in her apartment for a few weeks while he was in Los Angeles doing a job. He had told her that when the job was done he would move on. He hadn’t told her that the nature of his job made it necessary that when he moved on he would have to kill her.

As he got on the eastbound freeway he accelerated rapidly and changed lanes to place his car behind one truck and in front of the next. In a minute, by gauging the speeds of the other cars on the freeway and inserting his between two of them to his left, he found the perfect speed in the perfect lane and relaxed. He did not think of Catherine again. She was gone.

Jack Till knew the essential skill was to exert total control over his hands. He held the pistol steady and breathed evenly while he kept the sights lined up and even across the top. At the end of an exhalation he pulled the trigger. The Glock had a long trigger pull, and he knew there was going to be a bang and the gun would jump a little, but he had to pretend he didn’t know that—make his mind think past the jump while he completed the squeeze. There was a
Bang!
And then there was the ring of the brass casing that was ejected onto the concrete floor to the right.

It was hard to see a nine-millimeter hole in the paper at this distance. If what you were shooting at was a man, you knew right away. When the bullet hit his body anywhere, it was really bad news for him—about the worst news the body ever got—and it showed. The man went down and became immobile, and there was still a shooter with some more rounds just like the first one in his magazine, and his hands were settling the front sight between the two rear ones right within the outline of the body again.
Bang!
Till got the round off into the center of the target again, but there was definitely barrel drift to the right.

There was no need to adjust his aim. It was his trigger pull tugging the gun to the right. He had to concentrate on bringing the trigger all the way back without letting the sights move.
Bang!
Then the jangle of brass.

As Till went through the next six rounds he knew he had solved the problem, because the pattern of holes in the ten circle in the center was dense enough to show daylight.
Bang!
That was the last round, so he released the empty magazine and set it and the pistol on the counter in front of him. He took off the ear protectors, then reached up and pressed the button, and the target skittered toward him on the wire and stopped. He had carved the center out pretty well, with only the one hit a half inch to the right of the bull’s-eye. Gunfights were hardly ever at twenty-five yards. They tended to be close-in and sloppy. Nonetheless, bad habits had to be strangled the day they appeared.

Till supposed he needed some time on a combat range, walking through an unfamiliar course to keep his skills sharp. Most people didn’t identify visual cues quickly enough or open fire early enough, so it didn’t matter what they might have hit if they had fired. He would try to get around to a combat range soon. Right now he had an appointment.

He packed the Glock, the earphones, and the spare magazines into his aluminum case; locked it; opened the door; and left the range. He put the case into his trunk and drove.

The thing about gunfights was that they were all motion. Nobody just stood there like a dueler. A shooter’s eyes and ears were distracted by bangs, shouts, and muzzle flashes. There seemed to be no time, no place to hide, no incentive to stick his head up into all that flying metal long enough to aim and fire. The mind had to insist that he had to do it if he wanted to be the one who went home.

Jack Till parked his car in the municipal lot behind his office and took the aluminum case with him. He didn’t want to face even the minuscule chance that somebody would pick today to pop his trunk when it was full of guns and ammunition. He walked around the block to the doorway at the front of the building between the jewelry store and the dentist’s office and climbed the stairs to the second-floor hallway. His office was the one just at the top of the stairs, and on the door was a sign, TILL INVESTIGATIONS. He put away his gun case, sat at his desk, and looked at his watch.