“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.