that a light was on, and heard a woman’s voice, so he knocked.
A moment later a young woman with long blond hair that looked as though it had begun as brown opened the door. She looked startled when she saw him. “Yes?”
“Are you Linda Gordon?”
“Yes.” She looked impatient. He could see that she had left her telephone off the hook and the receiver was on her desk. Till recognized the expression. She was waiting for him to deliver a subpoena. Half the lawsuits in existence were convicts suing prosecutors and cops.
“My name is Jack Till. I need to speak with you for a few minutes. I can see you’re on the phone. I can wait out here until you’re finished.”
She looked suspicious. “What’s this about? Who are you?”
“I’m a private investigator, and I have some important information about the case you’re prosecuting against Eric Fuller.”
“Just hold it a minute.” She stepped quickly to the phone and lifted it. “Carl? I’ve got to call you back. Two, three minutes. Honest.” She set the telephone in its cradle. “Come in.”
Till entered the small, cluttered space and looked for a place to sit. There was one chair, but it appeared to be the permanent place for a stack of files. She saw the direction of his eyes and started toward the chair, but he held up his hand. “Don’t bother. I’ll only be here for a few minutes. I saw the newspaper a little while ago. I came to let you know that there’s been a mistake. You can’t prosecute Eric Fuller, or anybody else, for the murder of Wendy Harper.”
She bristled. “I can’t?”
“No. Wendy Harper is alive.”
Linda Gordon leaned against the wall behind her desk with her arms folded. “Go on.”
Jack Till recognized the gesture. She was protecting herself unconsciously—from him? She was blocking what he was saying. All he could do was keep trying. “The reason you don’t have a body is that she’s still using it.”
“Have you talked to the police?”
“Not yet. I came straight here.”
“Well, that’s the normal way to do things when you have information. The detective in charge is Sergeant Max Poliakoff at Homicide Special in the Parker Center. If you’ll just—”
“I know him. I was the one who trained him when he was in Hollywood Homicide.”
“Trained him? You’re a police officer?”
“Retired.”
“And you want to give me this evidence?”
“Yes. I can go over and talk to Max Poliakoff first, if you’d prefer it.”
She stared at him for a second, and he could see that she was thinking far ahead. “All right. At this point I’d better stop you. I want to record what you’re saying on my tape recorder. Is that all right with you?”
“Okay.”
She took a small pocket recorder from her purse, slipped a new tape cassette into it, and clicked a button. “This is Linda Gordon, Assistant District Attorney, and I’m interviewing a gentleman who has come to my office on Wednesday, May 13. It’s now eight-fifty-three A.M. And your name is?” She held out the recorder as though she were challenging him to run.
“John Robert Till.”
“Spell it?”
“T-I-L-L.”
“Now, you have not been placed under oath. But you have told me that you’re a retired police officer, so you know that it is a crime to lie to a law-enforcement official about a homicide case. You are, of course, aware of that?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Then say what you wish to say.”
“I’m here to advise you not to pursue a case against Eric Fuller for the murder of Wendy Harper because I know that she’s not dead.”
“How do you know that? Have you seen her?”
“Not recently. I saw her six years ago, after the last time she was seen in Los Angeles.”
“So you were the last one to see her alive?”
“Not at all. But I was the last one to see her
“How can you know what he intended to do?”
“He used a baseball bat. He started with her legs and arms, then hit her a glancing blow on the head, but he was interrupted by a couple of cars before he could keep her still long enough for his big swing.”
Till could see the description had elicited an expression of pure revulsion in Linda Gordon, and that she had not intended him to see it. She set her recorder down on the desk and resumed the pose with her arms folded and the desk between them. “What was the purpose of this attack?”
“I believe it was to murder her and make it look like a predatory, opportunistic killing rather than a practical sort of homicide. Somebody was after her, and she knew it.”
“Who was after her?”
“She said that a friend—a woman who sometimes worked at her restaurant—had a boyfriend she thought might be dangerous.”
“Dangerous in what way?”
“The woman had told her some things about him, some things he had done to her.”
“Why would he be after Wendy?”
“One night Wendy was outside the restaurant after closing. She saw the guy when he came to pick up the friend, and he saw her. A few days later, the friend was gone. She stopped coming to work. Her apartment was empty. Wendy believed she was dead.”
“What was the boyfriend’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was the waitress’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? Didn’t you ask?”
“Sure. She wouldn’t tell me the woman’s name, and claimed not to know the man’s name.”
“That’s it? That’s all? You gave up?”
“I was no longer a police officer, and had no way of compelling her to tell me anything. A responding officer had interviewed her the night of the attack and a detective talked to her afterward, in the hospital. If I’d had a month or so, I might have persuaded her that telling me more would make her safer, but at the time, she was too terrified to listen. She wanted to leave Los Angeles immediately. She was convinced that if she stayed in Los Angeles long enough for this boyfriend to find her again, she was going to die.”
“Was she right?”
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t know who her friend’s boyfriend was, or who the man he’d hired to beat her was. I offered to protect her, to act as contractor to get her some bodyguards, or to put her house and her restaurant under surveillance. But if this man wanted her badly enough—”
“So what did you do?”
“I gave her the help she wanted, the help she was willing to take.”
“Which was?”
“I drove her to a hotel in Solvang. I hid her there for a few days. We stayed in her room most of the time, and I told her how I would go about finding a person who didn’t want to be found.”
“Explain.”
“I told her the methods professionals might use to find her. And then I taught her ways to avoid those methods.”
“And then what?”
“Then she left.”
