“What did he look like?”
“Just a man. Maybe five feet eight or nine. White. In his middle thirties.”
“Close your eyes and think about him. Pretend you’re seeing him again now. Do you feel anything about him—uneasiness, maybe fear?”
“No, irritation. I’d had enough of the whole restaurant scene, not only trying to get through that year after the engagement collapsed, but that night specifically. The way he carried himself, standing beside his chauffeured car that was half-blocking the exit, he seemed to be the epitome of what was wrong with L.A.”
“So you stared at him and felt annoyed.”
“Yes. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a jacket that I could tell even at a distance of forty feet or so in dim light was good, because of the way it fit him. He had dark brown hair, short. He was trim and had good proportions and I just knew he had a personal trainer and a nutritionist and all of that, but he wasn’t like a young man. He acted older, kind of cranky and impatient. There was just something about his posture at first, kind of slouching there, looking mad.”
“He was looking at something. Was he looking at you?”
“No. Not yet. He’d seen me but I was just part of the landscape. He was looking toward the restaurant. From where he was, he could probably see the front door, or certainly the front corner of the building where people came to pick up their cars.”
“So you could see his face. What was it like?”
“That was part of the impression I had that he was not as young as he looked. It was the way the skin lay over the bone structure of his face. There was no fat, so the skin seemed thinner the way it does in middle-aged people. He was clean-shaven, sort of artificially tanned, although I don’t know how I could tell that. I can see him now, staring in the direction of the front door, waiting.”
“Tell me everything you saw, everything you thought.”
“The front door of the restaurant opened—I heard voices, maybe the sound of the busboys clearing a table near the front, the dishes clattering in the bin, saw more light for a few seconds—and I could see his face better for a moment. There was laughter from the street. I heard a woman, then another, a couple of deeper voices. Some of the people went the other way on the sidewalk, away from the lot, so I didn’t see them. Only one came around the corner of the building to the parking lot: Kit. She walked up to the man from the black car, sauntering a little as though she were teasing him. He put his hand on her arm. It wasn’t a nice touch, you know? He gripped her arm, and the way she held it, a little away from her body, I could tell he was hurting her. But she didn’t try to pull it away from him. She just stood there, and it reminded me of the way a child stands who’s done something bad and the parent takes him by the arm. She just stood looking down and listened. He was saying something to her in a low voice, and he put his face really close to her ear. The way his mouth was opening wide while he was talking but not getting loud, I could tell he was angry.”
“Did she answer him?”
“No. She just looked down, waiting for him to finish, when he hit her. It surprised her as much as it did me because it came from nowhere. He held her arm with his left hand, and his right came up and slapped her. She dropped her purse and put her hand to her cheek, and that seemed to make him madder. I yelled, ‘Hey!’ and started toward her. She saw me and yelled, ‘It’s okay, Wendy. I’m okay.’ The man opened the back door of the limo and pushed her in, then turned for a second to look in my direction. The bodyguard, the same one I had seen the other time, got out, picked up her purse, found her car keys in it, trotted to her car, got in, and drove out the exit. The boyfriend got into the black car and followed him out.”
Till was listening to her words, to her tone, to her hesitations, trying to detect the places where she was unsure, and the places where she was leaving something out. “What did you do?”
“I went back into the restaurant and called the police. I told them who I was and what had happened, and they began to ask questions that I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know the man or where he lived. I didn’t know where Kit lived. I knew her last name was Stoddard. I hadn’t gotten the license number of the car. I sent somebody to look for Olivia, but she had gone home. The police said they’d send a car, and I hung up. I called Olivia, and I told her what had happened. She sounded scared, but she didn’t know the name of the man, either. By the time the cops arrived, it was at least a half hour later, and I had to tell them the whole story over again before they told me there wasn’t much they could do. They radioed in to ask that other cops take a close look at black limos that seemed to have a man and a redhead in them. So I went home and tried to sleep.”
“Did you call them the next morning to see if anything had turned up?”
“Yes. I ended up having to tell the whole story a third time because the cop on duty seemed not to have heard of it. He said he would check and see if anyone had found out anything, and call the restaurant if there was news.”
“I take it he didn’t call.”
“No. I called Olivia again after that. It was around ten, and she came in, and we compared notes. She had called Kit a dozen times and gotten no answer. Finally she took me to Kit’s apartment, which was in an old stucco building off Franklin that had been repaired. You know, it was one of those twenties buildings that have high, narrow doors and lots of arches, but it wasn’t restored, just painted and held together. I remember the name on the mailbox wasn’t Kit’s. It was another girl’s name, and Olivia said it was because the other girl had moved out and the landlord would raise the rent if he knew. We rang the bell and knocked on the door, but she wasn’t home. Neither of us had a key, so we couldn’t get in at first, but the lock looked really cheesy, so Olivia tried slipping a credit card between the door and the jamb, and it opened. The place had about a month of dust and smelled stale. The food in the refrigerator was all old, and about half of her plants were dead from lack of water. I looked in her closet and a lot of clothes were in there, but not the outfit I had seen the night before. Olivia and I tried to remember other outfits she owned that were favorites, and all of them were missing.”
“What did you think that meant?”
“That she had moved in with the boyfriend. That was what she had implied when we had talked to her. So we waited. Nothing happened. After a few days of calling and leaving messages on her voice mail, we went over there again. We got into the apartment with Olivia’s credit card again. As soon as we opened the door, I knew something had changed. It was the smell.”
“What kind of smell?”
“Cleanser. Chlorine bleach. Then there was the ammonia smell of window cleaner, and some kind of pine-smelling floor wash. It was all mixed together in those four little rooms. Boy, was it clean. All of Kit’s stuff had been moved out, and the place had been scrubbed. There wasn’t so much as a piece of paper in the whole place. I know because I looked, and because there was nothing it could have been in or under. The furniture, which Olivia was sure had come with the apartment, was gone. There was nothing left. The only objects anywhere in the apartment were a couple of cans of white paint, a roller and a brush, and a blue plastic tarp.”
“Did you see any stains or marks that they were trying to cover up with the paint?”
“Nothing. The paint made Olivia scared because she thought somebody must have left it there and gone back for the ladder. She expected to see them any second.”