“And you?”
“Well, there’s nothing as contagious as fear. It made me want to leave, but it also made me want to see if the cleaning crew had missed anything. You could see that this wasn’t a building where that kind of cleaning usually happened. The entryway had old copies of LA Weekly lying in a pile. The halls hadn’t been painted for a long time. After all, the reason we could see it at all was that the lock was too cheap to keep out the two of us for ten seconds. So I made Olivia help me search everything: kitchen drawers, cabinets, the space behind the bottom drawers where things sometimes fall. Nothing had been left. We went out to the back of the building to see if there was a conspicuous load of trash out there.”
“Why were you so thorough?”
“Because it wasn’t like Kit to do that kind of cleaning. Olivia kept saying that. Kit was the kind of person who never got back a cleaning deposit on an apartment. She just walked away from whatever she didn’t feel like taking with her. I thought maybe she had stopped paying rent and the landlord had dumped everything to get the place ready for the next tenant.”
“It sounds right. What did you find?”
“Zero. We had been in the apartment just a week or so before, and so we looked for familiar things: the clothes she had left in the closet, the pots from the dead plants, the magnetic calendar from her refrigerator. All gone. I went back into the building to talk to the manager. He wasn’t the owner. He was like a lot of them are, an actor who spent most of his days going out on open casting calls or classes. Managing the building wasn’t much effort, and it covered half his rent. He had known Kit by sight, but he had thought of her as Carolyn Styles, the name on the mailbox and the lease. She had been there when he moved in, and he didn’t know anything about a sublet agreement. He gave me the name and number of the owner. He was a businessman from Korea who was very nice. He had no forwarding address for Carolyn Styles, but he did have a previous address and a few referrals from old landlords.”
“You’re good. It’s what I’ve done a hundred times.”
“Well, I hope you had better luck at it than I did. What I ended up with, after talking to everybody I’d ever met who knew Kit, was this: Kit Stoddard was not her real name. It was a name that she’d worked out with a casting agent named Marti Cole about the day after she’d arrived in Los Angeles. She had wanted to be an actress, so she needed a name like Kit Stoddard. The agent’s office was where she met Carolyn Styles.”
“A false name, too.”
“Yep.”
“It sounds as though the agent used names from a phone book—STO, STY.”
“No, because neither of them was listed. I tracked Marti Cole down, though. She had gone out of business and was working as an assistant to a casting director at Southern Star Pictures. She said she’d closed her office because she couldn’t afford health insurance—it had brought home to her that she wasn’t making it. She hadn’t seen either Kit or Carolyn Styles in two years, and no longer had any memory of what their real names were.”
“You gave up at that point?”
“No. I just felt that I couldn’t do that until I knew she was all right. I kept talking to people every night at the restaurant. I would check the reservation book for the names of people who had known Kit. At night I would check the bar for people I’d seen drinking with her. I asked them everything I could think of. Her real name, where she was from, any other addresses or phone numbers, anything about the boyfriend. Had she ever worked a real job. What I really wanted most was just somebody who had seen her that day, or anytime since that night in the parking lot.”
“Get anything?”
“Not much. Everybody seemed to have the same relationship with Kit that Olivia had. They’d met her at a club or a restaurant or a party. She had always seemed to them to be close friends with somebody else, and then when I talked to the other person, that one didn’t know much about her, either. A few of them knew she had wanted to be an actress, but none of them could remember her being in anything. Some thought she was a model. I knew a photographer named Jimmy Shannon. I called him, and he had one of his assistants check with the agencies. None of them ever heard of her, and I had already checked with the Screen Actors Guild. After all that work, I never found anybody who knew more than Olivia had told me the first day.”
“What was Olivia doing all this time? Was she helping you?”
“At first she was. We even spent days and days driving the beach cities from Ventura to Newport, looking at beach houses, condos, and apartment buildings. We were looking for her red hair or his black car. Of course it was impossible. Then Olivia was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes. She left.”
“Why did she leave? Did she talk about it?”
“Well, Olivia was still working at Banque. She and Eric were through. David, her old boyfriend, was still interested, but not in any serious way. He just liked sleeping with her once in a while. The restaurant scene was getting to her, just as it was getting to me. And she was scared. We had started out the first night with the fear that Kit’s story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. As time went on, we were sure of it. We went to the police again, but you can imagine how far we got.”
“Sure. A pretty young woman moved to L.A. hoping to be an actress. She changed her name, dated rich men, and then moved away and left her apartment clean.”
“Well, the police didn’t exactly issue an alert. It got to Olivia.”
“How?”
“She got more and more afraid. She regretted leaving all of those messages on Kit’s voice mail. She thought the boyfriend would find us and kill us to shut us up.”
“Did she tell other people, or take precautions of any kind?”
“She was always looking over her shoulder, and she wouldn’t leave the restaurant alone anymore. Then one night when I was expecting her to work, she called the restaurant. She said she was calling from the airport. She was leaving because she was tired of being afraid.”
“Did it occur to you that she might have been forced to call you and say she was leaving?”
“Of course. By then I was as paranoid as she was. But I heard announcements being made in the background—gibberish about flights boarding, and not leaving bags unattended. She sounded calm, maybe even happy she was leaving. So I figured she was okay.”
“All right. So you were on your own.”
“Right. It was more than that. Eric was on his third girlfriend right then, and so he wasn’t around very much to talk to me. My weeks of investigating and asking about Kit kept me away from the restaurant. I began to feel that the whole Banque scene was over. It wasn’t just that Kit, who had become a friend, and Olivia, who had been with us from the beginning, were gone. It was noticing that what had been going on had not been real. Everybody was an actor or a model. What we actually spent our time doing was waiting on tables and tending bar, but we had all agreed to pretend that wasn’t true. For a while Eric and I were protected because we had our own fantasy. It still worked for Eric, because he was a real chef, but it didn’t work for me anymore. If I wasn’t with Eric, I was just a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had worked eighteen hours a day for ten years in a job that would never get any easier or give me any chance at a life.”
She was moving close to the night when she had been attacked, and Till needed to get her there, but he sensed that she was skipping something that had happened. “Did you do anything about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look into the job market, or think about other cities to move to, or call friends in other parts of the country.”
“I didn’t get the chance. About a week after that, I came home from the restaurant one night, and the man was waiting for me with a baseball bat.”