Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  She said, “The manager says Nancy Mills didn’t have a car.”

  Spengler said, “That’s right. Ron, get a description of Mary Tilson’s car, check the parking spaces downstairs and see if her car is gone. If it is, run her name and get the license and description on the air. Dave, get on the radio and let them know what we’ve got here.”

  He saw the forensic team move to the doorway and peer inside before stepping in. “Toni, you want us to call for reinforcements?”

  “Thanks, Jim, but I’ll call them myself as soon as I’ve taken a look.”

  “Fine.” He turned back to the other police officers. “Al, see if anything is missing in the apartment, especially credit cards or ATM cards. If they are, get started on finding out if they’ve been used yet.”

  The detectives moved off, and Catherine went down the hall to Mr. Norris. She said, “I’d like to take a look at Nancy Mills’s rental agreement.”

  They entered Mr. Norris’s apartment, and he produced a file from a desk drawer. Inside were five-page lease agreements for all of the tenants. Catherine leafed through them carefully until she found the one that said Nancy Mills. Norris said, “You can take that one if you want. I’ve got a Xerox copy in the file, and the rental company has a duplicate original.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Do you have a spare file folder or an envelope?”

  “Sure.” He handed her a manila envelope.

  “Thanks very much,” she said. She slipped the agreement inside, and walked out of the room. She went down the hall and found Toni in the kitchen of apartment 4.

  She said, “Toni, this is the rental agreement for Nancy Mills. I’d appreciate it if you could take it to the lab and examine it for latent prints.”

  Toni took it. “Sure thing. I’ll try dipping it in ninhydrin to bring up the amino acids, and give you a call.” She put it into a cardboard carton with her growing collection of plastic evidence bags.

  Catherine turned to Spengler, who was staring down at the body of Mary Tilson. He said, “I guess this just about finishes the idea that the girl is the one doing this stuff. I can’t see her cutting a woman like that and leaving her to bleed out on the floor.”

  Catherine walked out of the room, down the hall, and outside, where she leaned against the car and took a few breaths of air. Her mind had been fully occupied since the moment she had arrived, but now it was still racing, and there was little for her to do until either the crime-scene technicians or the officers searching for the girl gave her something new to interpret.

  Her mind kept returning to Joe Pitt. She was tempted to call him and tell him what she thought of him for interfering with the relations between her and the Los Angeles police. But this was his town, where he had been the D.A.’s investigator. She had no right to tell him what to say to the L.A. police, and any homicide detective here would know him personally. He had seen the photograph in the paper and recognized Tanya, and he’d had to report it. But why had he called the L.A. homicide people, and not her? She could think of two answers, without even asking him: the newspaper had said to call Spengler, so he had. And she had essentially told him not to bother her again, and so he hadn’t.

  17

  As the girl drove along Interstate 15, the brightly lighted hotels appeared against the sky in the distance, and minutes later the town rose up around her. She was afraid to stop, but she was too tired not to. She had been up since sunrise, spent the day on her feet, and then been forced to defend herself from Mary’s ugly demands and clean up afterward. The hours of driving since then had drained the last of her nervous energy.

  She saw the exit for the Mandalay Bay hotel, and then she was on it, and then in the thick traffic on the strip. The first place where she was able to make a right turn was the entrance to the MGM Grand, so she gave her car to the parking attendant there and watched him drive it into the parking structure.

  She wanted to check into a hotel and sleep, but she didn’t dare. If the police were searching for her, one of the things they would do right away was get in touch with the Las Vegas hotels. She was hungry, so she went inside to the long promenade where the restaurants were and looked into a few. The customers had all moved into the drinking phase of the evening, so she kept going.

  She found a coffee shop farther on the promenade, bought a piece of lemon cake she saw in the glass case, and ate it. She rested her eyes and cradled her head in her arms for a moment. When she awoke, there was a tall man in a dark blue suit standing over her. As he leaned closer, she could hear low-volume radio chatter coming from his coat pocket. He said, “Miss? Are you all right?”

  “Huh? Oh my gosh,” she said. “I must have dozed off.”

  His sympathetic concern vanished. This was not a medical emergency. “You can’t sleep here.” It was as though he had already heard and penetrated the lie she had not told yet.

  She stood, took her purse, and strode off. She had the feeling that he was behind her, talking into the radio about her. She never decreased her speed until she was out of the building.

  For the next few hours she was one of the thousands of people walking from casino to casino. She had stopped in Las Vegas to rest, but there seemed to be no way for her to do it. When she was too tired to keep walking she would sit at a table in a bar and order a soft drink. She caught another catnap at six A.M. on the couch in a ladies’ room in Caesars, but the attendant politely woke her as soon as she had entered deep sleep. Later in the morning she ate brunch at the Aladdin. When big groups of people began to check out of the hotels at ten-thirty, she joined the line at the entrance to the MGM and had the valet retrieve her car.

  She drove out the Boulder Highway toward Henderson, and stopped at a shopping mall. She left her car inside the parking structure, where it would be less visible, and walked to the mall’s cinema complex. She bought a ticket to the first movie that was showing. It was an awful film about two evil children, and there were few other people in the theater to watch it, so she found a seat in the middle of a row and fell asleep. She spent the whole afternoon and evening in the complex, going from one small theater to the next, each time sleeping for an hour or two and waking when the lights came up and people shuffled out.

  When she felt that she was able to drive again, she ate dinner in a Denny’s in Henderson. It was eleven-thirty when she drove into the desert to the east. She had wasted a whole day in Las Vegas, and she was nearly as tired as she had been when she had arrived.

  Her troubles were building up. She had done a rash, unconsidered thing, but it had not really been her fault. She had not set out to kill Mary Tilson. She just had not been able to think of a way to avoid it. Mary Tilson wouldn’t shut up, and she wouldn’t leave her alone, and she couldn’t be dissuaded from calling the police.

  She was just a regular person who had always wanted what everybody else wanted—to be happy. She had been smart in school and had been accepted to the University of Illinois. She remembered that the letter had arrived in April, and she had taped it to the wall of her bedroom so she could look at it every morning when she woke up, and every night when she went to bed. The habit had lasted until June. It was a Sunday when everything had changed.

  She remembered waking up and seeing the letter that morning: “Dear Charlene Buckner: It is my pleasure to inform you . . .” She had used a single small piece of tape on the top so she could take it down in September and bring it with her in case she needed to prove that she had been accepted.

  As she always did, she lay in her bed, looked at the tone of the light, and touched the wall beside her bed to see if it was warm or cool, because that side was the outer wall of the house. She could feel that it was warm. In those few seconds she sensed that something was wrong. The house was more than quiet. It was a vacuum, because something big had moved on, and nothing had yet filled the space. She knew what it was.

  She got up and stepped to the door of her mother’s bedroom. The drawers of the dresser were still open, a little askew
and out of their tracks because her mother had been in a hurry to empty them.

  Charlene walked through the little house, moving from room to room and looking. She was not exactly searching for her mother, just looking at her world to see what it looked like without her. There was a note on the kitchen table, a glass placed on it to hold it down, as though a wind might blow through and take it. Charlene picked up the glass and smelled the strong, turpentine scent of whiskey, so she set it in the sink with the other dirty dishes.

  She picked up the note. “Dear Char, I had an unexpected opportunity, and I had to take it. If you need to reach me, write to me care of my sister Rose. I’ll check with her later. Don’t forget to ask the college for scholarship money. Bye for now. Mommy.” The o had a smiling face drawn in it. Charlene put the note in the garbage bag and began to clean up.

  She rinsed the dishes and put them in the sink with very hot water and detergent to soak a bit while she went outside to pick up the Sunday newspaper from the sidewalk. She had always done that to keep the neighbors from noticing that her mother stayed out late and slept for the first half of the day. It was a warm, sunny morning, and there were flowers blooming in the neighbors’ yards. She went back inside, closed the door, and locked it.

  She was halfway through the dishes before she really felt what had happened to her. She was as alone as a person in a raft in the middle of the ocean. She spent a few minutes thinking about how it must have happened.

  Her mother had been in one of her depressions lately, because of her most recent boyfriend, Ray. About two months ago, Ray had hit her and then left. The next day she had pretended that she had gotten tired of Ray and made him leave, then bumped into a kitchen cupboard in the dark because she’d been trying to get a glass of water in the middle of the night without waking Charlene. But Charlene had awakened and heard her sobbing, pleading with Ray not to leave: “Ray, I wasn’t even interested in him that way. It just happened. It didn’t mean anything. Please don’t leave. I’ll never do it again.” Her mother’s voice had been the shrill kind that carried, but Ray was a mutterer, with a deep voice, so Charlene couldn’t make out anything he was saying. She hadn’t needed to.

  Charlene’s mother had hated being alone. It wasn’t clear to Charlene from the contradictory stories she told when she had ever been alone, but the experience must have been terrible, because she was willing to do anything to keep from being alone again. Some of the time when a boyfriend moved out, she had heard her mother saying, “I’ll do anything,” and known that she meant it. Charlene was sure she knew what the opportunity in the note had been. Somebody had offered her a chance not to be alone.

  It struck Charlene at first that since her mother was so scared of being alone, it was odd that she would abandon Charlene. But she always had been that way. If the weather was hot, then she was hotter than other people. If there was only one piece of meat left, then she was hungrier than anyone else. Charlene should have seen this coming, from the moment when she had received her letter from the college. Her mother had read the letter on the wall too, and to her it had meant that Charlene was going away.

  Charlene didn’t like her mother very much, but she missed her in some deep, awful way. After another day, however, she realized she still had to get herself through the rest of June and graduate, then find a way to survive July and August on her own and get to college. The remark about a scholarship in her mother’s letter had been her only mention of money. That had been her way of saying that she had not left Charlene any.

  That morning, as soon as Charlene was showered and dressed, she went to the only place she could think of in Wheatfield to find work. It was the Dairy Princess on Highway 19. It looked almost exactly like a Dairy Queen place, but it actually wasn’t. It was a transparent counterfeit, relying on the notion that people would see what it was imitating and then pull over, exactly as though it were a Dairy Queen. They would realize that it wasn’t, but they would forgive the small imposture.

  The summer manager was a boy named Tim she remembered from high school; he was two years older than she was, and was already off for the summer. There was a line at the order window, so she waited until it was her turn. She said she wanted to see Tim.

  When he came to the window, he said, “Hi, Charlene. What can I get you?”

  “I need a job, thanks. Do you have one that’s open?”

  Tim looked at her for a long time. She could see him trying to calculate, and he actually looked worried, as though he couldn’t figure out the answer. “If you’re willing to work hard, there’s one left.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She started right away. At first she worked only on weekends, because that was when most people wanted ice cream and hamburgers. When graduation came and summer began, she worked six days a week, from twelve until nine. She got minimum wage, which wasn’t much, but she ate something during her break each night that served as dinner, and once in a while some man would give her a tip.

  She took her mother’s advice and wrote a letter to the admissions office at the university, informing them that she was going to need a scholarship. She told them that the reason she had not applied before was that her mother had never managed to fill out the Parents’ Confidential Statement about her finances, but that her mother’s finances no longer mattered because her mother had moved on. Two weeks into the summer she received a gently worded letter that said it was too late for this year, and included some application forms for federal loans.

  Charlene remembered sitting in her empty house at the kitchen table reading the forms and feeling absolutely bereft. The next two nights she came home tired and worked on the forms. The third night, she finished at midnight and walked to the letter box outside the post office to mail them.

  Charlene made a friend at the Dairy Princess named Alice. She was a woman of about twenty-nine who had a little boy but lived with her parents not far from where Charlene lived. At seven each night they went outside, away from the heat and the smells, and while Alice smoked, they talked. She had seen Charlene staring at Tim when he wasn’t looking.

  Charlene had not let her thoughts about Tim get beyond the speculation stage, where she felt a small tingle when he was near her in the narrow, hot kitchen and they accidentally brushed against each other as she was carrying food to the pickup window. She didn’t have any room in her life for another person. But Alice had caught her looking at him, and from that day she spoke to Charlene about her crush on Tim.

  One night when Charlene left at her usual time, Alice offered to close the store so Tim could go too. Charlene noticed him walking along the street twenty feet behind her, so she slowed and gradually they began to walk together.

  He said, “Alice told me you’re having a hard time saving the money you need to start at college.”

  She was alarmed, humiliated. She had not formed close relationships with other girls in high school, because they always seemed to turn any confidence into gossip. Alice was so much older that Charlene had assumed she wouldn’t behave that way or betray her. She fought the panic and answered, “I guess it’s true. I’ve got to pay my own living expenses, because my mother is away right now.”

  “I heard that too. It must be hard.”

  “I don’t miss the company. I’m out most of the time anyway. It’s just that I got used to having her pay for things.”

  They walked along the dark streets toward her house. They talked about the day’s customers who had looked strange, or acted superior, and about the pressure Tim felt to keep the receipts at the Princess high so the owner, Mr. Kallen, wouldn’t give him a bad recommendation when he left in the fall. He knew he wouldn’t be fired in the middle of the summer, and his parents had enough money to pay his tuition at Purdue whether he worked or not, but he was convinced that a bad recommendation in his first supervisory job would ruin his future.

  Charlene walked along beside him, most comfortable while he was talking but feeling something like stage fright whene
ver a topic had been exhausted and another hadn’t replaced it. She became ashamed of the fact that the items that occupied her mind weren’t theories or ideas, only the personal obsessions and problems that consumed her—the fact that she wasn’t paying the rent on the house or the utility bills, just trying to ignore the increasingly ominous late notices and not answering the telephone in the hope that she wouldn’t be evicted before September, the fear that people would know she was alone in the house and too young to have any rights—and she didn’t want him to know any of them.

  When they reached her house they stood for a moment in silence on the porch in the dark, and he kissed her. It was a shock for her, a soft, sweet moment in a life that had turned into an emergency. She had come to expect days full of sweat and the smell of burning grease and overflowing, fly-swarmed garbage cans. As he held her, she seemed to be floating, her eyes closed. When he released her, she stood motionless for a few seconds.

  He said, “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I watch you in the Princess.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. You’re the best-looking girl in Wheatfield.”

  “Of course, Wheatfield is so huge. There must be twelve girls. And I’m not, anyway.”

  “I’m serious. Everybody knows it. I remember when you came into high school. I was a junior. Everybody was blown away.”

  She looked down, afraid that she might be blushing and that he could see it, even though they were under the porch roof, so the moonlight didn’t reach them. She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she said, “Thank you.”

  They kissed again, and she began to feel her nervousness being replaced by a relaxed, lazy sensation that she sensed might be a sign of danger. If she didn’t stop, she was going to let him go too far. She broke off the kiss. “I’d better go in now. Thanks for walking me home.” Then she grinned. “And everything.”

  She found her key chain in her purse and turned to unlock the door. He said, “Can I come in?”