Silence

neck rising. As an experiment, he took a turn to the left, away from the predictable route into Hollywood. The second car followed.

Jack made more turns, trying to see what the other car looked like under lighted streetlamps at intersections. He determined that it was a year-old BMW, and there was only one person in it. It was after four o’clock in the morning, and it was clear that the car’s presence wasn’t a coincidence. In his experience, nobody who could afford a BMW needed to rob Jack Till, but he wasn’t willing to bet his life on it. He watched the driver’s behavior, and gradually limited the possibilities to one: The driver was trying to follow him home. Till made a few turns, crossed Hollywood Boulevard to the south, and kept going. He began to form a picture in his mind of the right place to stop, and then searched for it as he drove.

Finally, after fifteen minutes of driving, he turned abruptly into a dark street, then into a driveway that led into a loading dock at the back of some kind of business. The other car went past the driveway, and Till could see the driver staring after him. The driver was a white male about his age, wearing a yellow hooded windbreaker. Till quickly backed out of the driveway, but instead of turning around and going the other way, he drove after the BMW.

The BMW stopped abruptly in the middle of the street. When Till pulled forward to pass, the BMW moved in the same direction to block him. Till tried going to the right, but the BMW pulled to the right and cut him off. The door of the BMW flew open and the driver emerged, running toward Till. Till’s headlights revealed that the man had something in his right hand, but there was no time to see what it was. The man swung his arm and hit Till’s side window. It shattered, the glass flying against Till’s chest and into his lap.

The man raised his arm for a second swing, and Till pushed his door open as hard as he could into the man, his whole body behind it as he emerged from the car. He heard the man grunt and saw him stagger backward. Till could see that what the man was holding was a claw hammer, like the ones carpenters used. Till said, “What the hell are you doing? I don’t even know you.”

“Well, I know you, asshole!” The man’s face was contorted with rage, his teeth bared and his eyes squinted in hatred. “You were with Nicole.”

“What’s it got to do with you? Are you an old boyfriend or something?”

The man lunged toward him, taking a wide swing with the hammer. Till dodged it, and the man’s swing of the heavy hammer brought his arm across his body so he was momentarily off balance and defenseless. Till delivered a hard punch to the middle of his face, into his nose and upper teeth, that rocked him back and made him fall to the pavement. Till said, “Leave the hammer on the ground and we’ll talk.”

The man rose and sprang at Till again, but Till dodged and hit him as he went past. The punch connected with the added force of the man’s momentum, and Till felt it all the way to his shoulder. He relaxed for a moment because he was sure the fight was over, but this time the man’s recovery was a genuine surprise. The man should have gone down, but he pivoted and swung the hammer again, and this time he didn’t miss.

The hammer hit Till’s side, just below his rib cage. The hammer’s head had turned in the man’s hand, so the injury was more painful than damaging. Till instantly spun to face the man, and as his body reacted to protect itself, it took his mind with it. Till was wild with hurt and anger as he charged the man. He hit him just as he was trying to get a better grip on the hammer, and knocked it to the pavement. As the man reached for it, Till punched him four or five times in a combination, driving him back out of reach of the hammer. Till kept coming, knocked him down, threw himself on him, and hit him three more times. Each of his punches drove the man’s head into the pavement. He stared down at the man and waited for the next move, the next trick, his right arm drawn back to hit him again.

But this time the man didn’t move. His eyes were closed. His mouth was now bloody, his nose broken and out of line. His face had acquired a flat, loose look, as though the muscles weren’t under his control anymore. He seemed to be unconscious. Till stood up and took a step backward, waiting for the man’s next move: a kick to trip him and bring him down, another weapon, a sudden tackle. There was no movement. Till gave the man’s leg a kick. There was no reaction, no twitch of an eyelid. The man’s head was cocked to the side a little. Fine. Let the son of a bitch be knocked out, Till thought. He can wake up in a few minutes and think about what a fool he is.

Till picked up the hammer, got into his car, turned around, and drove back the way he had come. As he prepared to make the first turn to the west toward Hollywood, he looked into the rearview mirror. The man lay on the pavement just as Till had left him, his car parked in the middle of the street above him.

Till turned and drove away.

A few hours later, when Till’s alarm woke him for his job at the liquor store, he turned on the television. The reporter was saying, “Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Steven Winslow of La Canada was beaten to death in a quiet neighborhood near the center of the city. Police say the body of Winslow, who was twenty-six years old, was found at seven A.M. in the two-hundred block of Pilcher Avenue. He appears to have been killed in an attempted robbery of some kind, possibly a carjacking. The street was apparently chosen because it is in an industrial block where businesses had been closed for hours, and is partially obscured by the soundstages of a small movie studio. No one reported hearing the victim’s cries. Police are asking that anyone who has any information about the crime, or who saw Mr. Winslow at any time last evening, call the Rampart Station.”

Till remembered the moment when he had straddled Steven Winslow, his fist raised, waiting for any movement. He had, at that moment, been ready to kill him—he had thrown off all compunction. He realized now that Winslow probably had already been dead, but that hardly mattered.

He called in sick to the liquor store and watched television as long as there were reports, then went out to buy the afternoon edition of the papers. He read about the crime and waited for the police to come and knock on his door. There was no question what was going to happen then. His car window was shattered. His hands were scraped, and his right knuckle had a deep cut where he had hit Winslow’s teeth. He had snatched the hammer off the street before he had left, and it was still on the floor of his car. When the police began to ask questions, they would learn that he had picked up Winslow’s girlfriend at a club, and spent the night at her apartment. They would look at the crime scene again and realize that Winslow had died in a fight. Who else would he have been fighting with, and what else would he have been fighting about? Nicole would tell them what had happened between them and who he was.

He waited all day for the police to come. The next day he went to work, and when he came home he read in the Times that Winslow’s fiancee, Nicole Kelleher, twenty-one, had been interviewed. She said she could not imagine why such a tragedy had occurred, because Winslow was one of those people who had never had any enemies: “Everyone just loved Steve.” She and Winslow had been planning to be married in about a year, but had not yet set a date. They had dated exclusively for nearly three years, but had been engaged for only four weeks.

Even while Till was consumed with guilt and regret for what he had done, part of his mind was mulling over the evening with Nicole and remembering the sensation that something was wrong. When he looked at the photograph of the girl in the newspaper and read her statements to the reporters, he realized what it was.

She must have known that Steven was spying on her. Till wasn’t sure what had been going through her mind at the time, but he knew she had been aware he was watching and she had staged their liaison. Now that he thought about it, she had behaved as though she was trying to make sure Steven kept watching and following.

All kinds of small observations that had puzzled Till now made sense, beginning with her choice of him at the Cobra Club. Till had not been the sort of man this girl would pick. She was bait for the ex-prom-kings and the boys home from Princeton for the summer. At twenty-two, Till was tall and lean, with a face that had already taken a few punches. He made no sense as her partner in a summer one-night stand. But he was a perfect choice as an adversary for somebody like Steven.

She had definitely wanted to be seen. She had approached Till in the middle of the dance floor of the club, and stood right there under the lights talking to him for a long time, even though she kept attracting other men and turning them down. When Till and Nicole had left together, she had made a point of getting into his car with him right in front of the club, and having him drive her the short distance to where her car was parked instead of walking her there. She had kissed him before she got out of the car, and he remembered that she had opened the door so the dome light went on while she was still kissing him.

She had asked him to follow her car to her apartment. She had driven slowly and waited at traffic signals to make it easy for him to follow and, he knew now, for Steven to follow. She had parked in her space and then come back out, standing in the center of the street with him as though she wanted to be seen. He remembered her looking down the street, almost furtively. She had probably been verifying that Steven’s car had arrived, and was