The Boyfriend (3 page)

He still had a few minutes to kill before the potential clients arrived for their appointment. He wished he didn’t feel nervous about this. He knew that they were the parents of a girl named Catherine Hamilton who had been murdered. That meant they probably wanted him to accomplish something the whole police force couldn’t. He needed money right now, and the only way to get it was to get a case, but he had to reserve the right to refuse.

He heard them walking up the stairs, the woman’s high heels making a sharp sound on the wooden stairs while the husband’s leather soles went
shuff,
as each one slid onto the next step. He stood and opened the door. The husband was much shorter than Jack Till’s six feet three. He was in his early sixties, barrel-chested, with bristly white hair and a lined face. His wife seemed about ten years younger, with light reddish hair and white skin. They both had the look of people who had been mourning for a month or two and were beginning to sense that the pain would never decrease.

Till said, “I’m Jack Till.” He shook Hamilton’s hand, then accepted Mrs. Hamilton’s and gave it a gentle shake, then sat down behind his desk. The Hamiltons took the two empty chairs in front of it, and told him the story he had expected to hear.

Many times in his life Jack Till had sat across a table from a person who had lost someone to a crime. The experience was always a proof of the inability of speech to comfort anybody and the inadequacy of any attempt by human beings to institute a decent civilization. “I’m sorry for your terrible loss,” he said. He had said the words hundreds of times when he was a younger man with a gold badge. He had always meant it.

He was sorry. He felt all of it—the way the death of a beautiful daughter would turn a family to stone, leave all of the survivors wishing they had died too, and make them unable to develop or even change after that. He could feel all the memories cut off at the instant when they’d heard she had died, sealed off as though behind glass. And he knew much more than they did about parts of it. For the first few hundred times, he had gone to the scene and seen the body and the mess, and smelled the coppery smell of all that blood. And as though he could ever forget, he had been duly provided with a full set of color photographs of the body as it lay there, and the whole of the place where it had happened.

He had often been the one to arrest the person who had brandished the gun or surreptitiously held the unseen, often unimagined, knife. And he had heard all the excuses—and the confession and the recanting of it. He was always sorry. And then he had stopped. He had been a Detective 3 in Los Angeles for twenty-three years when he filed for retirement. He had become a private investigator, partly because he never wanted to look across a table again and see the same kind of faces shocked by the cruelty and unfairness of violent death.

“Mr. Hamilton,” he said. “I have been a police officer, but that was long ago. I’m only a private investigator now. Almost all of my work is gathering evidence for civil cases.”

“Please,” said Hamilton. “I’m not under the delusion that you’ll suddenly sign up again and fix this. I’d like some advice. Just advice.”

“I think your best bet is to try to work with the detectives on the case. Try to make lists of her contacts, her acquaintances. If there’s a Facebook page, an address book, the detectives will talk to everybody, and they’ll try to develop leads. Finding the perpetrator will do nothing for your grief. But it will make you feel you may have saved someone else from going through this.”

“We’ve already met with the detectives. They were very open about the way things were going to work. Our daughter Catherine was a professional escort, I believe that was the word they used. That means she had a variety of false names. She moved from city to city. She met and made herself vulnerable to many men, all strangers. The police have done four weeks of it. They’ve spoken with a few other girls. They’ve got the coroner’s report on how she died. They’ve examined her bank records, credit card bills, and so on. They’re done. It was a robbery. She was shot.”

“How did she get involved in that work?”

“We don’t really know. She graduated from college and got a job. She was very busy, didn’t come home much at first, and less after that. She never answered her phone so we got used to leaving messages. We had no idea she was doing this.”

“Do you think she might have been forced into it?”

Her mother spoke for the first time. “No. She was capable of calling the police. And she wasn’t the kind of kid to be vulnerable to coercion. She knew she had rights, and that there was plenty of help if she needed it.”

“What about drugs?”

The father said, “We don’t think that was it either. She didn’t take drugs in high school. She was an athlete—a gymnast—and they got tested before competitions and at random. She wasn’t with that kind of crowd in college. The coroner didn’t find any drugs in her system. And he went out of his way to say she looked healthy and well cared-for. No marks, nothing.”

“These are the wrong questions,” said Mrs. Hamilton. Till could see that she had reached the point of madness. She had listened carefully and answered thoughtfully, but had heard nothing that mattered.

Her husband put his arm around her shoulders and tightened it, as though he were trying to hold a bundle of sticks together. “I’m sorry, Mr. Till. We know those are the usual things. Judy is just… getting worn down.”

Till moved so he was facing Mrs. Hamilton. “What are the right questions?”

“There are no obvious reasons why anybody would kill her. She wasn’t working for a pimp. She was independent. She didn’t do drugs, didn’t have debts. The coroner says she wasn’t sexually assaulted, although she’d probably had sex within a few hours before she died. Look, we know this is awful. Nobody wants to think about it. Everything you learn about it is tawdry and degrading. There is no question at all that for at least the past year, Catherine was providing sex for money. But that doesn’t mean it was okay to kill her. I could see the detectives exchanging looks. I could read their minds. ‘This woman’s daughter was having sex with men who saw her Web site and called her up. What did she expect?’ It’s all true. Everybody knows it’s a risky activity. And it’s illegal. But this was a young woman. She was twenty-six years old. She never in her life hurt anybody. But now she’s dead. And the police act like she’s not human. It’s like somebody’s scrawny old cat ran away and died. They feel some kind of sympathy for us, and I see it. But the truth is, our daughter’s death wasn’t a big deal. She should have known better. We should have taught her better.” She shrugged. “They’re right. Catherine made a mistake. Our family is broken and destroyed.”

“The police officers I know don’t automatically dismiss the murder of anyone,” said Till. “The questions can be insensitive. But I know they’ll try hard to find the killer.”

“Well, unless some new leads come up, they’re finished,” said Mr. Hamilton. “So I thought we’d try to develop new leads. We have a list of private detectives who have at one time or other taken cold murder cases and brought them to a satisfactory conclusion. I wonder if you could take a look at it.” He held out a single sheet of paper.

Till took it, and looked down the list of names. He ignored his own name, which was on the top. “Yes, I know this one. And this one. And… no, not this one.”

Hamilton looked at the name he was pointing at. “You mean you don’t know him, or wouldn’t hire him?”

“Wouldn’t hire him,” Till said. “He was removed from the police department for cause. I don’t imagine he’s improved much on his own.”

“Which one of these investigators is the best?”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Till said. “No matter how good he is, this kind of case is very difficult to solve. It’s also extremely expensive to pursue, and I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say this too. Even if he succeeds, it’s not going to make you feel better.”

“We’re aware of the expense. We accept the futility of it. We’re going to do this,” said Mrs. Hamilton. “It’s a direct question, and we’re relying on your honesty. Which one is the best?”

“I am.”

“That’s what we heard,” said Mr. Hamilton. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a check. “Here’s a hundred thousand dollars. And here’s my card. When you run out of money, call for more.”

“Please,” said Mrs. Hamilton.

Till sighed. “I’ll need all the information about her you can give me—pictures, social security number, bank records, anything that will help me trace her movements over the past couple of years.”

Mrs. Hamilton opened her oversize purse and placed a thick manila envelope on the desk between them. “That’s all in here. And a few other things we thought… you know. A lot of it is personal, things she said or wrote.” She began to cry. “I’m sorry. I just can’t help it.”

“I understand,” he said. “I have a daughter of my own.”

Jack Till parked around the corner and walked to the house, as usual. He had been a homicide cop for a long time and had put some awful people away. Most of them were long gone; a few had been on death row twenty years or more, and a couple had been executed. But there had been some angry, psychotic men he had made more angry over the years, and he didn’t want to risk leading any of them to Holly’s house.

Holly was twenty-eight years old already, and she’d been living at the house since she had finished school at eighteen. The house had been the idea of a couple he had not particularly liked. They were very rich, and their money had come from one of the many permutations of the film industry. The town was full of people who supplied some commodity or technical service to the movies, and it sometimes seemed to him that they all acted like directors or stars. But this pair had proposed that the parents of all the kids in the class chip in a monthly fee to keep the house going. They had also been generous enough to buy the house and set up a foundation, then pay more of the upkeep than anybody else. They’d been determined to provide a happy home for their son, Joshua, that had a chance of lasting through his life.

It had been a brilliant scheme. The kids had all been attached to each other from the time their parents had noticed that something was different about them and found their way to the school, so they were like brothers and sisters. And the parents had known that they didn’t want to die and leave a child with Down syndrome alone and friendless in the world. He still thought of them as children, although they were adults now. In a few years they’d be middle-aged.

He walked around the block and approached the house from the opposite direction to look for changes in the neighborhood and spot things that looked worrisome. It also gave anyone who had followed him a chance to show himself. It had always been one of his nightmares that he might lead one of the monsters he’d met at work to these sweet, defenseless people, searching for Jack Till’s daughter.

He stepped up to the front porch, and heard Leah’s voice shout, “Hi, Jack!” through the screen door.

“Hijack?” he said. “Hiya, Leah.”

“Hialeah racetrack,” she said. It was an old joke between them, but she laughed again because she liked him and wanted to make him feel comfortable. She opened the screen door to let him into the living room. “I’m pretty sure I saw Holly come home from work a few minutes ago. Should I go get her?”

“That would be really nice,” Till said. “Thanks.”

Leah climbed the stairs to the second floor, and Jack sat down in the living room on the couch. He caught himself looking around the room searching for signs that something was wrong. It was much neater than his apartment, partly because the girls in this house were all tidy people, outnumbered the boys, and showed their scorn when anybody left a mess.

“Hey, Dad.”

He looked up and saw Holly coming down the stairs. She was like any other twenty-eight-year-old, walking carefully down the stairs, until a sudden attack of exuberance made her jump from the last step to the floor. She came and wrapped a tight hug around Till.

It was impossible not to feel better when he saw her affection and her happiness. “How’s the gumshoe business?” she said.

He grinned. “About the way it always is,” he said. “It keeps me from getting lazy and going broke. How’s the flower business?”

“It’s going pretty well,” she said. “Mrs. Carmody and I are happy with the way people are coming in this summer. There aren’t any big holidays for flowers after Mother’s Day, but we’ve got a lot of business.” She leaned close to him and said confidentially, “Mrs. Carmody says it looks like a lot of men are feeling guilty for cheating on their wives.” She laughed happily.

There was also that, he thought. The kids, including his daughter, were unembarrassed by sex, and sometimes seemed to him to have a more mature attitude than he did. It was still sometimes disconcerting. He was unable to hide from himself the fact that Holly and her boyfriend Bill had a sexual relationship, because it had not occurred to her to hide it. At first he’d had to say to himself, “She’s over twenty-one. Would this bother me if she was like most people?” The thought made him say, “How’s Bill?”

“He’s great,” she said. “He’ll be sorry he missed you. He has to work late tonight restocking the shelves for the Big Summer Blowout Sale.”

“Well, I guess that happens. Can’t have a Blowout Sale without something to blow out. Give him my regards.”

“‘Kindest Regards from Jack,’” she said, imitating his voice. “You and I can have dinner alone.”

“Fine with me. Want to go to Redratto’s?”

“No, I can make Italian food myself. We have it a lot. Can we go to Mo’s and get a burger?”

“Sure, if that’s what you have a taste for.”

“I do. With curly french fries. Where’s your car?”

“Around the corner and on the next block. It’s a little walk.”

“Oh-oh,” she said. “You’re going on a scary case again.”

“You know that from where I parked the car?”

“That and how you’re looking around all the time while we walk. You’re thinking about somebody watching us while we talk. You’re paying attention to the rules again.”