Nightlife: A Novel Page 16

  Carl was a recreational talker, a man whose own voice enchanted him so much that for him speech was like singing. As soon as he was home each evening, drinking the martini she had mixed for him, he told her anecdotes about what he had done all day and what he had thought, and shrewdly analyzed the people he had seen. They were all minor players in his personal story, which was essentially comic, because he always triumphed.

  He taught her how much to tip various people who provided services, and to remember that it was wise to tip the most when the service was still in doubt, not afterward, in gratitude for something she already had. Once, when Carl needed to leave her alone for a few days, he opened a drawer in the bedroom and showed her where the gun was.

  He picked it up, then said, “It’s loaded, see?” He moved the cylinder to the side to show her the bullets in the holes, then flipped it back. “It’s smart to consider all of them loaded, but this one always is. If somebody knows I’m gone and thinks that makes it a good time to break in, you hold it like this, arms extended in front of you, and pull the trigger. Fire three or four times. It’s a .357 magnum, so I guarantee it will stop him. It’s got a bit of a kick, so hold on.”

  “You mean it’s legal to kill someone because he’s trying to break in?”

  “It’s not murder if he breaks into your apartment and tries to harm you. If he’s still outside in the hall when you shoot him, drag the body inside before you call the cops.” Then he added, “And if he’s not dead, shoot him again, in the head. If they live, they sue.”

  For nearly nine years, she lived with Carl Nelson and learned from him. In return, she was even-tempered and companionable. She was aware that his attraction to her was sexual, so she cultivated the attraction. His manner in bed was much like his conversation. He was affable and he wanted to charm her and be the one directing the proceedings, teaching her things he thought she would like. All she really had to do to please him was to be available and submissive, willing to be impressed.

  Just before Tanya’s twenty-eighth birthday, Carl Nelson came home from his office early. He didn’t sit where he usually did, on the couch where she had been waiting for him. He sat instead in the chair across from her. He said, “I’m finished with the Zoellner case. I’m going to Europe for a while.”

  She said, “Wonderful. Should I call to make arrangements with the travel agent?”

  “No, thank you. They’ve already handled that at the office.”

  She understood then, from the way he said it. He was going. She was not. She controlled herself as well as she could. “You deserve a break. When will you be back?”

  “In about a year. I’m taking a sabbatical. I’ll be doing some work while I’m over there, handling some things for regular clients.”

  “You’re taking a secretary, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “Mia is going with me.”

  She had seen Mia at his office. Mia was nineteen years old and already a failed model. She was taller than Tanya—taller even than Carl—and she had striking green eyes. She was Tanya Starling’s replacement.

  Tanya stood up and said, “Excuse me, Carl. This is hard for me.” She went into their bedroom, crawled onto the bed, and cried. She stayed there for a long time. Then she heard noises. It was Carl in the big walk-in closet. There were sounds of hangers scraping sideways along the pole, and drawers opening and closing.

  Tanya went into the bathroom, spent a few minutes fixing her hair and makeup, then stepped into Carl’s closet. She said, “Packing? You’re leaving that soon?”

  “My flight is at ten tomorrow.”

  She could feel herself beginning to lose control. Tears were coming, and her knees felt weak. She said, “I’ll have my stuff out of the apartment as soon as I can. I think the doorman will let me leave a few things with him while I find a place.”

  “There’s no reason to do anything like that, Tanya. In fact, I’ve been counting on you to stay here while I’m gone.”

  “For the whole year?” Maybe he was going to have the secretary for a while and then come back to her. Men loved variety. That was okay. Her mind was already accommodating itself to the idea. Maybe he would even send for her.

  “Sure. It will give you the time to figure out what you would like to do with your life, and get a start on it. You’re smart, beautiful, and you should be doing something. Maybe real estate, or decorating. Take some time and think it over. And your staying here gives me somebody I know I can trust to care for the place and keep an eye on it. I’ll have the office pay the bills and send you an allowance.”

  “Sure.” The word allowance was a deliberate reminder of her dependency, but he would have had to maintain the lease anyway, and pay someone to occupy the apartment and care for his tropical fish, his paintings and antiques.

  She considered taking Carl’s pistol out of its drawer and shooting him. She considered simply slipping the loaded gun into his suitcase, so he would be arrested at Heathrow or De Gaulle or wherever he was flying to. But then she detected a contradictory impulse. She stopped being angry because she wanted him to stay. She began to be impatient for him to leave.

  She spent some minutes exploring feelings she had not acknowledged before. She was humiliated, hurt, shocked, but now she realized that her situation was not so simple. She had been exploited, certainly, for her sexual attractiveness and her docility. In return, she had been educated, entertained, and pampered for nine years. The part that she was astounded and ashamed about was that she had not anticipated this moment or prepared herself for it.

  Carl’s ability to appreciate women was limited to girls of about eighteen. He found them interesting only during this phase of their lives. His was an entirely sexual addiction, but it wasn’t because they were at their best. The exercised, massaged, and rested Tanya Starling looked much better, even younger, than the lonely, sad, frightened Charlene Buckner had, and she was more adventurous. And Tanya had seen Mia, who was going to take her place. Mia was pretty, but not prettier than Tanya. The attraction was that she was the right age: Tanya no longer was.

  Tanya couldn’t be taught which clothes to wear or which wines to serve, how to behave at a cocktail party or how to please a man in bed, because by now she knew. She couldn’t be taken to a great hotel and stare in awe at the paintings on the domed ceiling, because she had already seen others as good. She had heard Carl’s stories, and he could never tell them to her for the first time again. She was no longer a protégée, just a sycophant massaging his ego, more desperate each day to keep him fooled, so she would not lose her increasingly unpleasant job.

  He had betrayed her, certainly, but he had also set her free. He had supported her so lavishly that she would never have been able to translate her vague feelings of dissatisfaction into the irrevocable act of walking out the door. Now he was sending her away. It didn’t feel good, but it felt overdue, like a task she had been putting off.

  Tanya went to bed in the spare bedroom, but when, a couple of hours later, Carl finished his preparations for his trip and climbed into the bed with her, she didn’t object to having sex with him. He seemed to believe he had one more night due him, and she didn’t feel like fighting. It gave her a chance to observe the extent to which she had only been going through the motions, and to try to think back to the time when sex with him had still been exciting. She realized that tonight, when she had no feeling except impatience for his departure, was not much different from the last fifty nights.

  The next morning, Carl was up at five. He wrote her a big check and placed it on the antique table in the entry. “Cash this,” his note said. “It’s just in case you need anything. Call the office any time you need more.” At the door, he turned and noticed that she had stepped into the room to watch him. He set down his suitcases and embraced her. “I know you’re a little scared, but you’ll be fine. I know you’re going to be a very successful woman someday.”

  She remembered her answer: “In a year, I’ll have more money than you do.” Sh
e had looked through the window to the street far below and watched the cab moving off, the tailpipe spewing steamy white exhaust into the cold morning air.

  Tanya spent the next few months looking for work in the daytime and looking for a man in the evening. The evening hunting was better, but she didn’t find the sort of man she needed. Rich men were nearly all married, and they were all aware that the most expensive catastrophe likely to befall them was a divorce. They were willing to spend lots of money on her, but they weren’t willing to stay the night.

  She went through a period in which she stopped looking for work and applied for readmission to the university, then spent her days trying to devise a course of study that would help prepare her for a career in law. Her observation of Carl had taught her that his clients paid him lots of money for very little work, as long as he kept them afraid.

  She had begun to feel optimistic when she received a telephone call. She thought she recognized the voice on the other end as Arthur Hinman, one of the other partners in Carl Nelson’s firm. He said, “May I speak to Miss Starling, please?”

  She wasn’t absolutely positive it was Arthur, so she said, “This is Miss Starling.”

  “This is Arthur Hinman, one of Carl Nelson’s partners at Colefein, Park and Kayslander. I’m calling to let you know that Mr. Nelson has died.”

  “Oh, my God. How? Where?”

  “I believe he had a heart attack, but I’m not sure yet. He was in Spain.” He paused a full breath, which was his mourning period for Carl Nelson. Then he said, “We’re handling his estate, and the lease for his apartment is being terminated. We’ll be closing it up to inventory his effects. That means your services won’t be needed anymore.”

  “Arthur,” she said. “Don’t act as though you don’t know me. You’ve been here dozens of times. You know I’m not the maid or something.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s inconvenient. But please be out of there by noon tomorrow. You can leave the key with the doorman downstairs.”

  She hung up the phone and went to work, taking everything from the apartment that she was sure Carl would have missed but the law firm would not. The art and antiques, the huge record collection, the old books were probably all insured. The cash Carl kept in the toe of a shoe on his upper closet shelf, and his cuff links, tie clasps, and tuxedo studs were all small enough to take. His watches were probably insured too, but nobody would be able to prove he hadn’t lost one in Europe, so she took his Rolex. Then, as an afterthought, while she was tossing things into her suitcase, she opened the drawer that contained Carl’s gun, and slipped it into her purse.

  20

  Catherine Hobbes sat in the homicide office of the North Hollywood station. She had borrowed a table beneath the whiteboard where someone had drawn a crude diagram of Mary Tilson’s apartment, with a body that looked like a gingerbread man. She shut the sounds of ringing telephones and the voices of the detectives out of her mind, opened the file, and looked at each of the crime scene photographs again, and then at the list of fingerprints from the two apartments that had been identified so far. There was the copy of the print that belonged to Nancy Mills. Staring at it gave Catherine a strange feeling: this was more than something that the woman had touched. It was more intimate, the touch itself.

  Catherine had spent a career listening to the confident voices of experts who assured her that there were no mysteries, and that the physical evidence always told the story. This was a physical world, every cubic centimeter crammed with molecules. Any motion created a disturbance that left a trail, and anything the killer touched stuck to him. They were right about Tanya: she was leaving a growing collection of trace evidence behind her. But where the hell was she?

  Jim Spengler came into the room. “I brought you some coffee.” He set a white foam cup on the table, then sat in the folding chair beside her.

  “Thanks. I’ll bet when you do interrogations, you’re always the good cop.”

  “I would have brought it sooner, but I’ve been checking to see if there have been any other homicides since she got here that might have something to do with her.” He looked at the photographs in front of her. “I heard you were in the lab half the night. Anything new?”

  “No. I think Mary Tilson let her in, and they went together into the kitchen. I think Miss Tilson was turned to the left, maybe getting something out of the cupboard or refrigerator. When she turned away, I think Nancy Mills took the butcher knife out of the holder and stabbed her.”

  “You don’t think a man did that?”

  “I’m looking at the list of prints Toni’s people found. I don’t see any male prints anywhere in the apartment, identified or not. I don’t see a forced entry.”

  “So she let him in.”

  “A sixty-year-old single woman like Mary Tilson is going to be nervous about letting a man into the apartment if she’s alone.”

  “So Nancy Mills was with him. She let them both in.”

  “Even if the man is with Nancy Mills, he doesn’t go into the kitchen with Mary Tilson and wait until she turns her back.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she won’t let him, and if he comes, she won’t turn her back. If a single woman comes over to see another single woman, they both might go into the kitchen while they talk. The guest at least offers help while the hostess gets refreshments. If it’s a stranger, a man, he doesn’t go in the kitchen, he stays in the living room. If it’s a man with Nancy Mills, the one who goes into the kitchen is still Nancy, not the man.”

  “Why not both?”

  “Because. It’s just the way it is. I’ve been a single woman for long enough so I know all the moves.” She shrugged. “And there’s no evidence that there was a man.”

  “You’re also assuming that the stab in the back came first, not the throat.”

  “That’s right. If you cut the throat first, the victim is as good as dead. If you stab her first, maybe she’s still up to making some noise, even fighting. That’s when you have to cut her throat—to keep her from yelling. We know the stab in the lower chest was last, because that’s where the knife ended up.” She glared at him. “I know what you’re going to say next: No woman would do that.”

  “I was still back on the part about single-woman etiquette. You said you’ve been single for a long time, as though you weren’t always. Have you ever been married?”

  She frowned. She had been careless, because she hadn’t been thinking about herself, or about him: she had been thinking about the sequence of events at the crime scene. “Yeah,” she said. “I was.” She avoided his eyes. Could he possibly not know that bringing up a woman’s failed marriage would cause her pain?

  “When were you married?”

  “None of your business.” She still didn’t look at him.

  “Come on. What am I going to do, gossip? Nobody knows you down here, and all I asked was when. That’s a public record. I could look it up.”

  She turned to him, feigning boredom with the topic. “A long time ago. We were young, just out of college. It was a classic starter marriage. After a couple of years we both started to realize that we’d made a mistake.”

  “What was your reason?”

  All right, she thought. Evasion would just prolong the badgering. “He had a problem with the ‘forsaking all others’ part.”

  “So you got a divorce. And that’s how you got to be an expert on women living alone.”

  “Correct. Divorce is a costly way to find out how to choreograph murders of single women, but it works.”

  “Okay,” he said. “For the moment, we don’t have any sign it was a man. But my gut is telling me there is one.” He looked over the lab reports.

  From across the room Al Ramirez, one of the officers who had been at the apartment building, called out, “Detective Hobbes? There’s a call for you from your department. Captain Farber.”

  She stood. “That’s my boss. Where can I take it?”

  “That phone on the desk in th
e corner. I transferred it.”

  “Thanks.” She stepped over and picked it up. “Mike?”

  She noticed that Jim Spengler had found something to do that kept him nearby, in earshot. The captain said, “Hi, Cath. What’s up?”

  “Tanya Starling was here in Los Angeles, using the name Nancy Mills. She seems to have pushed a man off an eighth-floor balcony at the Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills the night before last.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  “She got herself on another hotel security camera.”

  “Pushing him?”

  “No. Picking him up in a bar earlier that night. The LAPD released a picture of her with him. She seems to have seen it and panicked. She packed up, cleaned her apartment, killed the woman in the apartment across the hall from hers, and went off in the victim’s car.”

  “You really think she’s doing all of this herself?”

  “You sound just like Jim Spengler, the homicide detective in charge of the case.” She looked at Spengler, who shrugged. “Who also sounds like Joe Pitt, and everybody else. I can place her in Dennis Poole’s hotel room in Aspen with a picture and witnesses, and her hair places her in his house. I have pictures that can put her in a room in the Hilton hotel with the second victim, Brian Corey, and a fingerprint that places her in the apartment where Mary Tilson was murdered. What I can’t do is find a single bit of evidence that there was an unknown man with her, or after her.”

  “I’ve seen a few pros who could come looking for her, kill witnesses, and take the evidence with them. I’m just saying, don’t rule out the man just yet. I assume the LAPD has the car’s description and plates out to every department.”

  “Yes. I think we’re about twelve hours behind her. I think she’ll get as far as she can in a day or two, and then dump it.”

  “So what do the L.A. cops need you for?”

  “I suppose they don’t. I’d like to stay at least another day in case the car is found and she’s still in it.”