The Boyfriend (4 page)

“The rules. It’s funny” he said. “We used to say that when you were little. You remember that?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “You told me the rules a hundred times. Don’t open the door just because somebody rings the bell. Don’t go out without Maria. Don’t tell anybody on the phone that my father isn’t home. When you were a cop I would be afraid that things were happening every day like they did on TV. Now it’s usually better.” She studied him. “So what’s up this time?”

“It’s the sort of thing I used to do in those days. It’s a murder. A young woman about your age got shot in her apartment by a man. The police see it as a robbery. Her parents want to know more.”

“That sounds okay for you, but poor them.”

“I think it’s safe. But I have a feeling this might take me out of town. Will you be okay with that if it happens?”

“Sure. I’m not alone. There are ten of us. And when you’re not busy you can call me.”

“That’s right.”

They went to the restaurant and got a booth in the bar. They talked about her job and his, the friends she lived with in the house, what a good thing an occasional helping of french fries was. She had the most lively, engaging blue eyes.

He thought about Holly’s mother, Linda. The Tills had been twenty-one and twenty-two when Holly was born. The doctors hadn’t seen any reason for Linda to have amnio. That was recommended for women in their late thirties. When she’d learned that her child had Down syndrome, she had fallen apart. She had simply been unable to cope with it, to accept the amendment to her vision of what her life should be. She had not accepted it. She had filed for divorce, granted him full custody of Holly, and never come back. In the first years there had been a hundred thousand times when he had blamed her, resented her, or felt contempt for her for bailing out. But in recent years he’d felt a little sorry for her. As he’d gotten older he had realized that she’d probably felt horrible for a brief part of every day. And she’d never gotten to know the person Holly had become.

He took her home, walked into the communal living room, and saw that dinner had just ended. “Come on, Jason,” one of the girls said. “It’s your turn.”

“We can do the dishes later,” Jason said. “I just want to see this.”

There was a Dodgers game in its eighth inning, and Jason looked as though he were taking a lead off first base. He was sideways, halfway between the television set and the kitchen, his eyes still on the game.

“I’ll do it this time if you do it tomorrow,” Holly said. “You don’t mind, do you, Dad?”

“No,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s a nice thing to do. Talk to you soon.”

“Thanks, Holly,” said Jason.

Jack Till went out the front door to the porch. He pretended to stop and look at his cell phone’s screen, but used the moment of immobility to study the block, searching for men in cars that were parked or moving slowly, any sign of someone watching from a window, or anything that seemed to have changed since last week. There was nothing, so he went down the steps and walked briskly around the corner to his car.

Jack Till sat in his apartment, opened his laptop, went online, and looked at the ads for escorts. He studied the ads until he had some familiarity with the services offered and a sense of the prices and the vocabulary. He’d found that his sense of how the business worked dated back to his time as a police officer, so it seemed a generation out of date. When he had last worked on a homicide that had to do with prostitution it had been a world of pimps and madams.

He was ready to look at the material Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton had given him. He opened the thick manila envelope. There were family photographs of Catherine as an athlete—taking a credible starting dive at a swim meet, jumping high in a soccer game to head the ball toward the net. He could tell it was Catherine because of the slightly curly strawberry blond hair. She reminded him of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. And there was her graduation picture from UCLA.

The parents had not been able—never were able—to cull the information they gave Till to keep it relevant. They had probably wanted to include her grades, but had resisted the impulse. They wanted to demonstrate to him that their daughter’s life had been valuable.

In a folder inside the envelope, isolated from the material that reflected her real life, was the information that probably mattered—about the life of Tamara Saunders. Tamara was the name Catherine had used. She was five feet eight and weighed 119 pounds. Her skin was very white and, on her shoulders and forearms, freckled. There had to be freckles like Catherine’s on Tamara’s nose and forehead, but nobody would have known, because Tamara always wore makeup that made her skin look as clear and unmarked as porcelain. Her eyes were hazel, and big. She seemed to appear miraculously each day at four p.m., and continued to exist until around three a.m., when she turned off her telephone and pushed the last client out the door.

His reading of the ads persuaded him that she’d had at least some notion of the danger her work put her in. She said she was available for in-calls only until she got to know a client, and that she did subject clients to “moderate screening.” That was unexpected good news. If she had kept some record of the ones she had cleared and agreed to see, the rest of his search would be simpler. He hadn’t heard or read anything that appeared to be her notes, but maybe the police had kept them. The more the police knew, the more they kept to themselves. Making a great case in the newspapers would only persuade the killer to run farther and hide deeper.

He looked at more of the material but found no other reference to screening. He stared at the ads again, and then he noticed the necklace. It was a thin gold chain with a gold oval disk at the end; the disk had a row of small diamonds along the rim, and a bigger diamond off-center near the middle. There was a matching ankle bracelet around her left ankle. The smaller diamonds appeared to be about a quarter carat each, so the set would have cost at least a couple of thousand dollars, and possibly much more.

He looked at a list that the Hamiltons had received—the items the police were holding. No jewelry. The necklace and anklet must have been stolen. He looked at the list again. No cash was found in her apartment. He thought about the life of an escort. How likely was it that the killer had just come in pretending to be a customer, looked around, and found all of her jewelry and cash? It didn’t seem likely at all. Jack Till put on a black sport coat, slipped a .380 pistol into the pocket, and went outside to his car.

Patrolman Gene Trinicum drove up to the front of his one-story ranch-style house in Simi Valley at four-thirty a.m. He was tired and felt a little bit sick to his stomach from the stale coffee he’d had to keep drinking for hours to stay awake. He’d also had to wrestle with a drunk to get him into the car at two-thirty, and he still felt bone-tired from having all that adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream and the muscle strain from lifting the guy and overpowering his arms while his partner handcuffed him.

He opened his garage door with the remote and drove in, then closed it behind him and got out of the car. He hadn’t seen the man standing beside the door, and even as he jumped backward in surprise, he wondered how this could be happening.

“Hold it,” said Till. “Don’t move.”

“You’ve made a big mistake. I’m a police officer.”

Till said, “Stay calm. I haven’t done anything to you yet, Gene. I came here so I could talk to you alone without getting you fired.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Jack Till. I was a homicide detective three when you were in elementary school.”

Trinicum looked at him, and for the first time made out in the dim light that Till had a gun in his hand.

Till said, “All I want from you is an honest answer to a couple of questions, and then I’ll go away.”

“Ask.”

“Do you remember a homicide from a month ago where a young working girl got shot in an apartment in Encino? Her name was Catherine Hamilton.”

“Yes.”

“You and your partner were the first to respond to the scene. Right?”

“Right.”

“Any paramedics or anybody get there first?”

“No. Some friend of hers got worried, and called nine-one-one. It was a girl’s voice on the recording, but she wouldn’t identify herself. Probably another hooker. So we went, the manager let us into her apartment, and there she was.”

“Here’s where we get to the tricky part. I’m asking because I need to know about the guy who killed her—how he does things, what he’s got. If you tell me the truth in confidence, it will never get reported. How much money was in her apartment when you got there?”

“It’s in the report from the detectives who did the search. I think they said three or four hundred. It’s not my case, so I don’t have the exact number.”

Till said quietly, “I really want to go away now and leave you alone. So tell me what I need and let me.”

“What?”

“You know and I know. The detectives on the case might suspect, but they’ll leave you alone unless…”

“Unless?”

“To make it clear, I was a really good homicide detective, and people remember me. There are guys with stars on their collars who owe me their lives. If I ask them to, they’ll toss your house, freeze your bank accounts, examine every deposit and expenditure you’ve made, and dig up your yard until they find it. And then I’ll count it myself. Or you can give me an honest number right now. When you got there, how much cash was in that apartment?”

“How do I know you’re not wearing a wire?”

Till moved so quickly that Trinicum was on his back with Tills forearm across his throat before he could tell that anything was coming.

Till said, “You know I’m not wearing a wire because if I am I just made a recording of myself dropping you on a concrete floor and getting ready to crush your trachea. Good enough?” He let up a bit on the pressure on Trinicum’s throat.

Trinicum nodded, and Till rose and let him sit up. “There was just under thirteen thousand. My partner and I split it.”

“Where was it hidden?”

“In the freezer, in a fake frozen food package. Some civilians might miss it, but we see the latest-model hiding containers every time we bust a house for drugs. We were working on a clock because there was a nine-one-one call, then the call from dispatch, and maybe two minutes after the landlord left, to search. After that I had to call in the body, and the homicide guys would come.”

“Good enough. Did it look as though the killer had found any money?”

“Yeah. There were some other little stashes in the bedroom, and they were all empty—a couple of hollowed-out books, a couple of empty boxes in the backs of dresser drawers. She probably had another forty or so.”

“Here’s the last question. Was there any jewelry?”

“We didn’t have time to check, and we wouldn’t have kept it anyway.”

“There wasn’t any on the list of belongings the parents got.”

“I really don’t know. We weren’t going to take anything we had to bring to a pawnshop.”

“Drugs?”

“None.”

“You’re sure? It’s happened before—cops, EMTs, firemen,” Till said.

“I’ve heard of that too. The reason I heard is they got caught.”

Till said, “I’m done. I’ll keep everything you told me to myself. If you suddenly remember something I might want to know, give me a call.” He put a card in Trinicum’s breast pocket.

“Why would I do that?”

“I figure you’ll look at the card and ask around about me. People will tell you that you can trust me.”

Till dialed the phone in his office and looked out on Ventura Boulevard while he waited. Sometimes this part of LA reminded him of a children’s book he used to read with Holly, about “Busytown.” There were always a million things happening on each page—cars, trucks, airplanes, bikes, heavy machinery. The phone line came alive. “Vice, Sergeant McCann.”

“Hi, Ted. This is Jack Till.”

“Hey, Jack. It’s good to hear your voice. How are things going?”

“My daughter says, ‘How are things in the gumshoe business?’ She’s a believer in plain talk.”

“How is she, anyway?”

“Just great. I’ll tell you why I’m calling. I just took on the case of a young woman who was an escort. She was killed in an apartment in Encino.”

“Catherine Hamilton. I suppose her parents are getting desperate.” He paused. “No offense. You know what I mean.”

“It’s pretty accurate. Nobody pays for a private investigator until they’re desperate. I’m starting to look at the paperwork, and something occurred to me. Is this part of an epidemic or something? Have there been other girls in that line of work who have been shot and robbed lately?”

“No,” said McCann. “Not here.”

“Somewhere else?”

“Well, yeah. There have been a few over the past year or two in other cities that seem a lot like what happened to her. It’s been in the NCIC. I think the way you do. When there’s a crime like this, I try to figure out how to get a handle on it. I look to see if there’s some kind of a pattern. We’re not Homicide, of course.”

“I get the hint,” said Till. “I just don’t know anything about the two Homicide guys who are handling this case—Anthony and Sellers. I don’t want to step on any toes or bruise any egos. The parents seem to think they’ve done everything they can, but it wasn’t much, and I knew you’d know what was going on.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll e-mail you what I’ve got on those murders. There are five of them, all young and pretty, all killed in their residences in different cities.”

“Not streetwalkers?”

“No. All independent, mostly in-call.”

“Thanks, Ted. I’ll be watching for it. I’m still walking in a circle around this. Catherine’s parents were here yesterday. Anything that I can learn about the landscape is likely to help.”

“Just let me know if there’s anything useful.”

“I will.”

“Like if you find Jack the Ripper is now living in the Valley, I’ll be the first one you call.”

“You will.”

Till sat in front of his laptop in his office on the second floor of the building on Ventura. He had once thought he would have a partner in this business, and he’d seen a used desk that was cheap and matched the first one, so he’d bought it. There never was a partner, but the second desk was a good one for the computer because there was no window behind it.