Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  Nancy looked deeper in the drawer. There was a box of ammunition, so she took it. There was also a key that looked as though it belonged to a safe-deposit box, but she couldn’t think of a way to use it. She found a canvas tote bag in the closet that had an ugly picture of a rose on it. She put the gun and the box of bullets inside, then moved to the kitchen and took the wallet, keys, and change purse.

  She found a plastic bag in a drawer, took off the rubber gloves, put them in the bag, and dropped them into her tote. She moved close to Mary, careful to keep from stepping in the blood, and touched her bare leg. It felt cold. She had to be dead. Looking down at her now, Nancy realized that she must have been hysterical to have imagined that Mary was not dead before.

  Nancy took one moment more to take two paper towels from the roll on the counter. With one she wiped off the handle of the knife that was stuck in Mary’s chest. As she passed the table she picked up the copy of the newspaper with her picture in it. She used her other paper towel to keep her hands from leaving prints when she turned the doorknob. She locked the door and went to her own apartment.

  Nancy’s nervous energy was not an infirmity now. It was the power that might save her. She quickly packed her clothes and personal effects in her two suitcases, closed them, and took them to the door. She went to the sink and ran water over a dish towel. She began in the kitchen and wiped every surface with the towel, using the wetness to tell which surfaces she had wiped and which she had missed. She even cleaned the undersides of appliances, then put the few cups, dishes, pans, and silverware she’d bought in the dishwasher and ran it on the pots and pans setting.

  She moved into the rest of the little apartment and wiped every window, every handle, all of the smooth surfaces of every piece of furniture. It was a quicker, more efficient process now than before, because now she was used to doing it. She never hesitated, never needed to stop or decide. Her manic restlessness kept her working. When she had finished, she made one last stop. She went to the mailboxes in the lobby, opened hers, wiped it off inside and outside, then relocked it.

  She returned to her apartment, slipped her suitcases into a plastic trash bag so anyone who saw her would think she was taking out the garbage, locked the door, and hurried down the back stairs to the parking garage below the building. She had to search for a minute to find the Honda. Mary’s car was hidden by two elephantine sport-utility vehicles that couldn’t fit into their own spaces and overlapped Mary’s.

  Nancy put her bag in the trunk of the car, started it, and listened to the engine for a minute while she located the various controls and adjusted the seat and mirrors to fit her taller body. The engine sounded good, and the gas tank was full.

  Nancy backed up to get out of the space, and drove up the ramp onto the street. She turned right onto Topanga Canyon and headed for the freeway. She took the southbound entrance because heading into the city would bring her to the tangle of interchanges onto other freeways. She brought her new Honda’s speed up to merge into the moving river of cars, then glanced down at the tote bag beside her that held her new wallet, her change purse full of money, and her new gun.

  16

  Catherine Hobbes sat in the unmarked blue police car beside Detective James Spengler, watching the streets of the San Fernando Valley slide past her window. It was early morning but it was already hot, and the traffic coming eastward toward them was virtually stopped. The sun reflected off the windshields, so that she kept seeing flashes and then a lingering green glow on her retina. When she thought of the West Coast, she thought of her part of it—Portland, Washington, California as far south as San Francisco. Los Angeles was hard to get used to.

  “You seem pretty calm about this,” said Spengler.

  “It’s an act I developed to keep male cops from thinking I’m emotional.”

  “Right.”

  “I promise I’ll get excited when this woman is in custody and I know for sure she’s Tanya Starling,” she said. “You’ll think you’ve won a football game. I’ll be running around high-fiving you guys and slapping you on the butt.”

  “You spotted the picture as soon as you got off the plane. She sure looks like the same one.”

  “Your picture of a girl looks like my pictures of a girl. But we don’t know if the apartment where we’re going belongs to her. And whenever you put out a picture to the public, it strikes a lot of people as the spitting image of somebody who doesn’t look that way at all.”

  “Three calls tipping you on the same person don’t usually turn out to be nothing.”

  “That’s why I’m nervous,” she said. “I’ve been gritting my teeth for an hour hoping this is Tanya. But I’ve learned not to be too quick to assume anything about her. When we began this investigation, we all thought she was probably a kidnap victim. I’m still not sure whether some guy killed Dennis Poole because he was jealous over her and she’s still running from him, or she’s running because she killed him herself.”

  “You want a prediction?”

  “Sure.”

  “Your first version is right.”

  “Which one is that? I forgot.”

  “The killing will turn out to be about her, but she didn’t kill the guy. After you get her, you’ll find out she was a drug mule who took off with somebody’s shipment. Or she’s a hooker who had a particularly possessive pimp, who wasn’t about to let her go off with a client.”

  “One of those was my first version?”

  “I’m just going with the odds. You said before that they met at a hotel in Aspen and she came to visit, but nobody at home ever saw them together. That sounds like there was something about her that kept him from showing her off. And women don’t usually do a gunshot murder on a guy unless they’re married to him.”

  “If you want to kill somebody bigger than you are, and you’ve got a gun, you use it—no matter who you are.”

  “Maybe. But then there’s the death of Brian Corey in the Hilton. They met in a bar, had dinner in Beverly Hills, and went up to his room and had sex. Afterward, she leaves alone, and so do his wallet and his rental car. What does that sound like?”

  “It sounds like a hooker.”

  “Right. And there was no gun, so she couldn’t have done the murder. The girl I saw in the picture didn’t throw a full-grown man off a balcony. It had to be a man, or maybe two men—somebody like the pimp. In fact, it would have to be a really uneven match, somebody who could completely overpower and silence him. There were no signs of a struggle in the room, and nobody on the floor heard a fight.”

  “You can push an elephant off a balcony if he’s off balance and you give him a shove at the right time.”

  “Joe Pitt agrees with me.”

  It took an effort to hide her surprise. “Joe Pitt? When did you talk to him?”

  “He gave me a call when he saw the picture in the paper. He told me he had been working on this with you, and the girl looked like the one on your tapes. He also asked us to give you our best cooperation.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. He’s very complimentary about you. But when we were talking about the Brian Corey thing, he figured there was no way she could have done it herself.”

  “Let’s concentrate on getting her into custody,” she said. “Then we’ll find out.” Catherine looked away. She had been thinking hard about Tanya Starling, but the mention of Joe Pitt was distracting her now. She wasn’t sure what to think. She’d had a pleasant sensation when she had heard that he had complimented her, but then there was a suspicion that maybe the compliment had not been about her police work. He and Spengler were men, and they talked like men. And after all, he had told Spengler he disagreed with her theory. She was irritated at Pitt for calling Spengler and talking about her at all. What business did he have interfering with her investigation? No, that wasn’t fair either: he had recognized Tanya’s picture in the newspaper, and it was his duty to call the cops. But why hadn’t he called her?

  “Here’s the street. The
apartment is coming right up.” They glided up the street and a moment later the other two unmarked cars turned off Topanga Canyon after them. Spengler pulled the car into a parking space near the front steps, the next car drove around the back of the building, and the third pulled in beside Spengler.

  “Well, let’s see if we can scoop her up quick,” he said. “Then, while she’s telling us who killed those two men, you’ll have plenty of time to congratulate me on being right.”

  “Just don’t assume she’s not dangerous until she’s handcuffed,” said Hobbes.

  Spengler got out and conferred for a moment with the two officers in the car beside them, then joined Hobbes on the front steps.

  The two officers stationed themselves at the building exits while Spengler and Hobbes stepped into the lobby. Hobbes stopped to check the names on the mailboxes. “Mills” with no first name was on box 5. They went up two steps into the hallway on the right, and knocked on the door to apartment 5. They waited a few seconds, listening. Then Spengler knocked again, harder. After a minute, he knocked a third time. There was no answering call, no sound of movement in the apartment.

  “Let’s try across the hall,” said Hobbes. She knocked on the door across the hall, waited, then knocked again. “Nobody’s home in number four, either.”

  Spengler said, “Let’s hunt down the manager.”

  “Apartment one. I checked the mailboxes.”

  They walked back to the lobby and into the opposite hallway, and knocked on the door. There was a small sign taped to it that said R. NORRIS, MANAGER. R. Norris was an unshaven man about forty years old who seemed to have been awakened by the knock.

  Catherine Hobbes stood back and waited while Spengler said, “Mr. Norris, I’m Detective Spengler, Los Angeles Police.” He held his identification up so that Norris could compare the photograph with his face. “I’m very sorry we have to bother you this morning, but I have a warrant for one of your tenants. It’s Miss Nancy Mills, in apartment five. She doesn’t seem to be answering her door, so I’d like you to open it up for us.”

  “She goes out most days. She walks a lot.”

  Hobbes took a step closer. “You mean for fitness?”

  “In the morning she goes out and jogs. Then around ten or so, she goes out again. She doesn’t have a car.”

  Hobbes looked at Spengler. He reached into the inner pocket of his sport coat and produced some papers. “Sir, here’s a copy of the warrant. I’d appreciate it if you could open the apartment for us. It will save us all some trouble if we don’t have to break the door down.”

  Norris stared at the warrant, uncomprehending. After a moment he either found the part that permitted a search of Nancy Mills’s domicile or he simply gave up. “Hold on a minute. Let me get the key.”

  A moment later, he returned with a set of master keys. He led the way down the hall to the apartment, unlocked it, and stepped back.

  Spengler said, “Thank you, Mr. Norris.” When he swung the door open, he looked in and said, “She’s certainly neat, isn’t she?”

  “That’s not it. She’s gone,” said Hobbes. “She’s moved out.” She slipped past him into the kitchen and examined the cleaning supplies on the counter.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s a furnished apartment. There’s nothing here that’s personal.” She stepped carefully along the edge of the living room to the hallway, her eyes on the floor to keep from disturbing any evidence. She continued into the bedroom and looked into the open closet.

  She turned and saw Spengler standing behind her, his eyes on the empty hangers on the pole in the closet. He took the radio off his belt. “Don’t hold your breath, guys. She’s out of here. She must have seen her picture in the paper.”

  Hobbes heard a couple of tinny voices on the radio. “Roger.” “Got it.”

  Hobbes said, “Can you please call for a forensic team? I’d like to be sure it’s the same girl I’ve been looking for.”

  “Dave, call this in to the station,” he said into the radio. “Let them know we’ll need a forensic team. Everybody else come on in and help us canvass the rest of the tenants, and see if anybody knows where she went.”

  Catherine Hobbes had tried to stay two steps behind Jim Spengler. Even though she carried a badge and a gun, she was only a guest in Los Angeles, and this was officially the investigation of the death of Brian Corey at a Los Angeles hotel. But it became evident almost immediately that she was a less intimidating interviewer than Spengler, so she began to take the lead.

  The man in apartment 8 was not able to recall ever having seen the woman in the picture, nor could the couple in apartment 9. The others seemed to know very little about her. The person who lived across the hall from Nancy Mills was the one Catherine wanted most to talk to. She went back to knock on the door again, but the neighbor still wasn’t at home.

  After about twenty minutes, the forensic team arrived and set to work in Nancy Mills’s apartment.

  Catherine Hobbes had conducted enough interviews to persuade her that the woman who had called herself Nancy Mills had kept to herself and revealed very little. Catherine left the other detectives and returned to apartment 5, where two men and a woman were crawling on the living room carpet with rubber gloves, plastic bags, magnifiers, and tweezers, searching for physical evidence. The woman technician looked up from the carpet, and Catherine said, “Catherine Hobbes, Portland Police.”

  “Hi,” said the woman. “I’m Toni.”

  “Have you noticed the streaks yet?” asked Catherine.

  “Streaks?”

  “Yes,” said Catherine. “Look at this coffee table, and you can see what I mean. You can see it best if you look at it from the side.” Catherine knelt beside the coffee table, and Toni joined her. They sighted along the top, then along the side. It was marked with a striated pattern. “See the streaks?”

  “They’re from washing it,” said Toni. “It’s been washed with a rag that was soaking wet. If you use furniture polish or wax, it forms a coating. This was just wet.”

  “Any fingerprints on it?”

  “Not yet. And we’re finding this everyplace. It’s on all the furniture, the windows, the counters, even the walls. Every surface has streaks on it, because it’s been washed down with a rag or cloth. You can see white cotton fibers in some spots. There were a couple of places that were still wet, so this wasn’t done long ago. Maybe last night.”

  “No prints at all?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “It’s pretty hard to keep prints off everything, so we undoubtedly will find some. But she sure didn’t want us to. Right now we’re collecting hairs. So far all of them are ten to twelve inches, light brown.” Toni leaned over and picked up some hairs with a pair of tweezers. “Oh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “More hairs. But these didn’t fall out. They were pulled out.”

  “You mean violently?”

  “Yes. See, even without magnifying them, you can spot little bits of tissue. That’s the root. Judging from the length, it’s probably a woman’s hair, but it’s a different woman. This is thicker and wavier, like a perm, and it has a gray root, so the brown is almost certainly a dye job.”

  Catherine Hobbes said, “Excuse me, Toni.” She went to the doorway and looked down the hall. She could see Jim Spengler talking to the manager in the lobby. She walked up to them.

  She said, “Mr. Norris, can you tell me about the tenant who lives across the hall in apartment four?”

  “Her name is Mary Tilson. She’s almost always there this time of day. I’m surprised she isn’t now. She usually doesn’t go out until the afternoon.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Maybe sixty or so.”

  “Can you describe her hair?”

  “Her hair?”

  “Yes. Is it long and straight, short, blond or brunette?”

  “It’s brown. It’s not straight. Kind of wavy, maybe almost to her chin.”

  “Thanks. Can you excuse u
s for a second?” She took Spengler’s arm and pulled him a few feet off. “The forensic tech just found some hairs that had been pulled out of a woman’s head, like in a fight. They’re six to eight inches long, brown and wavy, with a gray root.”

  “You mean you think they belong to the woman who lives across the hall?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to take a quick look in her apartment. If she’s not there and everything looks normal, fine. But somebody got some of her hair pulled out, and Toni says they don’t belong to Nancy Mills.”

  Spengler said, “Mr. Norris, can you come with us, please?”

  They reached the door of apartment 4, and the manager unlocked it. Spengler pushed the door open a few inches, and his eyes focused on something. He said, “Thank you, Mr. Norris. We’ll take it from here.”

  He turned to Catherine as Norris was moving off. “It’s not good.” He stepped into the apartment, and Catherine followed. She could see the woman lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. Spengler was already hurrying to the woman, but Catherine had noticed that the outer edges of the big pool of blood were dark and dry, which meant she had been there a long time. Spengler touched her carotid artery. “She’s been dead a while. Her throat was cut. And a knife—looks like a regular butcher knife—is still in her.”

  “I’ll call the forensic people over from the other apartment.”

  “Yeah, thanks. We’ll get them going on this.”

  Catherine stepped across the hall and said, “Toni, we’ve got a deceased victim in apartment four.”

  “Oh, man.” Toni began to put her equipment back into the tackle box on the floor. “I had a feeling about this,” she said. “Too many hairs. Come on, guys. Let’s see if we can get anything fresh over there.”

  Jim Spengler was gathering the other detectives in the hall to tell them what had been discovered in apartment 4. Catherine approached.