“From the time when Eric and I had gotten together, I had begun to make plans, killing myself to reach certain goals and set our lives up in the best, most solid and predictable ways. When I was twenty-one, I could have told you what I was going to be doing at forty-one or sixty-one. I realized that I had been insane, so I was trying to develop a new strategy. I remember the day when I had planned to marry Eric, I was out with Olivia, and we ran into Kit.”
“Where?”
“It was Darkest Peru, off Sunset. It was Olivia and me, and there might have been one of the other girls from Banque. We hadn’t seen Kit for at least a month. We walked into the ladies’ room and there she was, in front of the mirror fixing her makeup. As soon as I walked in, I spotted her. Who else could it be with that hair? She seemed really happy to see us. She said she was with her boyfriend. They were just getting ready to leave, and he was waiting for her, but she wanted us to meet him. We went out of the ladies’ room and she took us to a table. There were five chairs, but just one young guy sitting there with a glass of cola. He was big, wearing a dark sport coat that looked tight because it was thin summer-weight cloth, and you could see arm muscles. He saw us coming, and stood up. I thought he was good looking, except for his thick neck. And I wasn’t wild about the knit shirt with the coat. I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back, and she didn’t introduce us. She just said to him, ‘Where is he?’ She said it kind of angrily, because she seemed to be embarrassed in front of us. I realized the guy was a bodyguard. He said, ‘He went out to the car. He needed to make some calls. Come on.’ If that wasn’t exactly what he said, it was close. I could tell the bodyguard had been assigned to wait for Kit and bring her along when she came out of the ladies’ room. Kit hesitated, kind of putting one hand on her hip and frowning. Then she decided, for whatever reason, that she wasn’t going to push it. She said to us, ‘Well, I guess he’s in a big hurry now. I’ll have to arrange a get-together when he’s not feeling so fucking important.’ She went with the bodyguard, though.”
Till knew she was on the edge of telling him the things he wanted to know. “What did you make of the bodyguard? Were you afraid of him?”
“No. We had a lot of show-business customers at Banque, so I was used to them. Bodyguards had been the accessory for Hollywood types since silent films. And people were even more likely to bring bodyguards to the late-night clubs. There was a kind of badboy ambience to those places, and it fit.”
“What happened after that night?”
“I kind of forgot about it. After all, it was a nonevent, a meeting that never happened. I got distracted, and didn’t think about it for a while.”
“Distracted by what?”
“A big mistake. I got into a relationship with one of the owners of an art gallery. It was the gallery that hung paintings on the walls in Banque. His name was Matthew. At the moment I was looking for something to turn everything upside down, so the excitement seemed to be just what I needed. It wasn’t.”
“How did the relationship end?” Till was sensing that there was something about this period that she considered the cause of her problems. There was the language of excuses: heavy drinking, distraction, bad relationships.
“I know it’s not exactly a surprise to anyone to say it, but there’s just a hint of fraudulence about everything having to do with art.”
Till studied her. “What exactly was the fraudulence in Matthew? Was it something to do with your being Moss Harper’s daughter?”
“Wow. Did somebody tell you that, or did you figure it out?”
“Just a guess.”
“I went to an opening at his gallery. Matthew was working the crowd, trying to make some sales. The crowd included a few artists who were there because Matthew was powerful and could help them, but mostly they were a bunch of rich people who had figured out that buying art was a chance to be part of a scene without having talent or personality or being attractive. I found myself standing there beside a very tall, chubby guy who was drinking and eating while he talked, and he looked like the spoiled son of a Roman emperor. He kept staring down at me as though he knew some guilty secret about me. Finally, he leaned uncomfortably close and said, practically in my ear, “Matthew tells me you’re Moss Harper’s daughter. Are you?” It was one of those moments when a dozen things that had all seemed just slightly off clicked into place at once. I had never told Matthew who my father was. It had never come up. Matthew had been using me for status. I was a curiosity.”
“What did you do?”
“I dropped him and worked harder. For me, the restaurant had soured the night I caught Eric fooling around, but I didn’t have anything else to do. Restaurants were the only business I knew. Eric was the only one I could really talk to. Everything I had was tied up in Banque. So I stayed. The only big changes were the ones I had made when Eric and I broke the engagement. I had split the long-term bank accounts into thirds—his, mine, and the restaurant’s—and stopped putting any new money into the restaurant. I paid us each one-half of the net profits at the end of each week. So by this time, I had a growing backlog of money, most of which was still in cash in the safe in the basement of our house. It wasn’t happiness, but it was a way to live. Then one night at the beginning of August, I saw him for the first time, and everything started to change.”
“Do you mean Kit’s boyfriend?”
She nodded.
Till waited, but she didn’t go on. He said, “You’re right to be scared. But the only way to end this is to remember and tell everything, and keep searching for things you didn’t recall until now.”
She was silent for a few steps as they walked together along the gravel path. The gulls from the rock were circling above them. “The restaurant had been packed all evening. Eric liked to close the kitchen at ten-thirty or eleven, but that night he didn’t stop cooking until one. I went by the bar a while later, and there was Kit, in her favorite seat, talking to all the men, as she always did. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I might have seen her once after the night in Darkest Peru, but if so we didn’t actually speak—just hugged and hurried off in different directions. But this time I joined her and we chatted for a minute or two. I remember she said that she hadn’t been out much because her boyfriend had taken a summer place at the beach, so coming in to Banque had seemed like too much work. I might have said, ‘You should make him bring you here more often.’ But then she told me that she had come by herself while he was out, and she had called him after she had arrived, so he might come by later. That was it. I got called away because somebody else wanted to talk to me, so I moved on.”
“Did you see her again that night?”
“Only from a distance. The place was like a big cocktail party that night. Everybody had a story to tell you, or a friend to introduce, or somebody who had asked to be remembered or something. I may have looked around for her later on and seen that she was in the middle of a conversation. I went into the kitchen to see if Eric and his crew had already buttoned up and gone. The busboys and dishwashers and the floor man were still there, but Eric and the cooks had left. I took my time, chatted for a while, and then went out the back of the building to head for my car. I always parked at the far end of the lot in the daytime, before the valet attendants arrived. The place had nearly cleared out while I was dawdling, so the whole lot was nearly empty. As I was walking, a car arrived. I thought it was odd, because it was so late, but then I looked at it and I thought it must be a limo picking somebody up. It was a big black American car, like the cars you rented yesterday to bring me back. It came into the lot and then stopped, swung around to face out near the exit, and turned off its lights, but the motor was still running, and I could see the green lights on the dashboard were on. The back door opened and a man got out and just stood there.”