Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  “All right. You’ve got a day. And I know how I want you to spend it. We still don’t know for sure that Dennis Poole’s murder wasn’t some kind of reprisal against his cousin Hugo—whether the girl did it, or someone helped her, or someone came for Dennis and she became an inconvenient witness.”

  “How can I eliminate a reprisal against Hugo Poole?”

  “Find out if Hugo Poole is fighting back.”

  Catherine Hobbes parked her rental car on Sheldrake Avenue and dialed the number of the homicide office on her cell phone.

  “Spengler.”

  “It’s me. I’m on Sheldrake and I can see the theater.”

  “I hear you.”

  “All right. Here goes.” She put the cell phone into the compartment on the side of her purse without ending the call, got out of the car, and walked toward the old movie theater. Long experience made her dislike being on foot and alone in this kind of neighborhood: there was nobody else walking, and there seemed to be no place to take a defensive position, only big brick office buildings with bars across their doorways. She considered the possibility that Hugo Poole cast such a big shadow that it kept minor predators away from his door.

  When she reached the front of the theater, a tall, muscular man about thirty-five years old was waiting on the other side of the glass with a set of keys. He unlocked the door and held it open for her, then scanned up and down the street before he closed and locked it again.

  “I’m Sergeant Hobbes, Portland Police.”

  “I know.”

  “And you are—?”

  “We’re not in Portland.”

  The man turned, and she followed him into a big, ornate old lobby with an empty glass candy counter and faded art deco murals on the walls. He climbed a carpeted staircase to the upper hallway. On both ends of the hallway were loges, but in the middle there was a wall of dark polished hardwood. It took her a moment to see that there were two doors cut into the wood. One had worn gold letters that said PROJECTION, and the other was unmarked. The man knocked on that one, and a muffled voice said, “Come in.”

  The man held the door open for Catherine Hobbes. “Thanks, Otto,” said the voice inside, and Catherine entered.

  Hugo Poole stood behind a big old desk that must have been part of the theater’s original furnishings. He came around it, smiling. “Hello, Catherine. Or is it Cathy?”

  “It’s Sergeant.”

  “Oh. Should I be asking to see a warrant?”

  “I’m just here to chat. When I called, I figured you would have Joe Pitt with you. Is he on his way?”

  “No. I paid him off, and he went back to gambling full time.” Hugo Poole looked at her suspiciously, and for a moment she wondered if he had sensed that her question had a personal interest behind it. But he said, “I don’t know if you’re wearing a wire or not. I often have Otto frisk visitors who might mean us harm. With you that policy seemed fraught with difficulties.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Fraught.”

  “So I’ll have to assume you are wired.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Are you here to tell me you’ve finally caught Tanya Starling?”

  “No, I’m here because a disturbing suggestion keeps coming up as we search for her.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She seems to be doing things that some of my colleagues believe she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do—at least alone. They think that your cousin Dennis was killed by some man who was trying to hurt you, and she was either a witness or an accomplice.”

  Hugo Poole stared at her unhappily, but said nothing.

  She said, “Two days ago, another man she had been with in a hotel fell off an eighth-floor balcony. There are pictures of her on the hotel security tapes, just as there were with your cousin Dennis. The day after that, the woman who lived across the hall from her was stabbed to death with a butcher knife. LAPD is saying that it seems as though a dangerous, angry man is looking for her, and killing anyone who tries to protect her.”

  “I’ve heard that theory.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Not much.” He stared into her eyes. “But I don’t know much about these things.”

  “No?”

  “No. You’re the cop. I’m just a small businessman. But it seems to me that all of these theories are based on the idea that women don’t kill people.”

  “True.”

  “It seems to me your colleagues aren’t willing to see anything that isn’t statistically likely, because they’re afraid of looking stupid.”

  “You could be right. But it’s hard to prove that somebody isn’t after her. And the only person anybody can think of who has a motive to hunt for her, and might have found it necessary to kill anyone near her, is you.”

  “I haven’t been out of town since I was in Portland with you.”

  “The last two were in Los Angeles. The hotel was right up there on Wilshire.”

  “I haven’t been in any hotels lately. You said there are pictures of her on the security tapes. Did you see any pictures of me?”

  “No. But I didn’t see any pictures of anyone else, either.”

  “Then she did it herself.”

  Catherine hesitated. “I’ll be honest with you, Hugo, but I need you to be honest with me too. I think she’s the only one. But if there’s anything going on down here that would have made someone kill your cousin, I need to know about it. Now.”

  Hugo Poole shook his head and held out his hands. “I don’t have any active enemies that I know about. I haven’t heard a word from anybody taking credit for Dennis and threatening me. And I didn’t kill any of these people or pay anybody to do it.”

  “I noticed that you didn’t say that you’ve never killed anyone.”

  “And I noticed that the cops haven’t been able to find one young girl in all this time, even though she’s been leaving bodies all over the place.”

  “She’ll be found. Be sure of that.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  She looked at him closely. “No. I just had to check and see if you knew anything I didn’t.”

  He walked to the door and held it open for her. “Then you’d better be going. The traffic gets bad in this part of town right about this time of the afternoon.”

  “Well, thanks for your time, Hugo. Take care.”

  She walked past him into the carpeted upper level of the theater and let Otto conduct her to the front door. When Hobbes was outside and walking toward her car, she took her cell phone out of her purse and pretended to dial it. Then she said in a voice too low to be audible beyond a few feet, “Did you get all that?”

  Jim Spengler’s voice said, “Sure. I haven’t heard the recording, of course, but it should be fine.”

  “Thanks for doing it,” she said. “Not that it got us anything.”

  “Do you think he was lying?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t see any sign that he was lying, and I’m good at spotting it. I think he was actually glad to see me at first, because he thought I’d come to tell him we had Tanya Starling.” She reached her car. “Well, I’m at my car. I’ll be there in a half hour or so.”

  “Wait,” said Spengler. “I’ve got news.”

  “What is it?”

  “Remember that I was checking other homicides that happened since she came to town? Well, after you left, the detective who was working on another case came to talk to me. He was investigating the murder of a young man a couple of weeks ago. The victim was a bank branch manager from San Francisco named William Thayer. He was here to visit his family. He was found shot in the head in a picnic area in the hills above Malibu. His car was found in the parking lot of the Topanga Plaza, about a mile from the apartment building where Nancy Mills lived. It seems the dead guy was the manager of the bank branch where Tanya Starling and Rachel Sturbridge had a joint account.”

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing
. I’ll be there soon.”

  Inside the lobby of the Empire Theater, Otto locked the front door again. He watched Detective Hobbes get into her car and drive away, then turned to see Hugo Poole standing behind him, watching too. Hugo asked, “Did she say anything to you on her way out?”

  “No. Anything I need to know?”

  Hugo Poole nodded. “Yeah. All this time has gone by, and they’re no closer to finding the woman who killed my cousin than they were two months ago.”

  “They’re not?”

  “No. She was back here to see if I did it. She’s starting over.”

  “Is there something you want done to speed this up?”

  “See if you can reach Calvin Dunn. Tell him I want him.”

  21

  It was three-thirty A.M. and Nancy Mills seemed to be getting used up. She had been driving for hours and she was on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. At night like this, the city looked like an outpost on another planet. She found a street on the southwest side of the city where there were a few run-down apartments, parked Mary Tilson’s car by the curb in front of an empty lot, and opened the trunk. She needed to cut down on what she was carrying.

  She put her money and the drabbest, plainest clothes she had into one suitcase. She put the Colt Python pistol that had been Carl’s into the zippered pocket on the outside of her suitcase, checked to be sure the smaller pistol she had taken from Mary Tilson’s bedroom was loaded, and slipped it into her purse. She closed the trunk, then drove until she came to a shopping center, and cruised along the back of a row of stores until she found a dumpster. She placed the unwanted second suitcase into it, and drove off again.

  She was lost in a way that felt hopeless, because there wasn’t any place she was looking for, or any reason to believe that anywhere she stopped was going to be safe. She knew that she had to find a way to get some sleep. When she turned onto the next street, she saw that there were cars parked all along the curb, below some apartment buildings. She let the car coast to a stop and looked around her. Maybe if her car was parked with so many others, she could sleep in the back seat and nobody would notice her until morning.

  But she couldn’t let herself be here in the morning. The sun would come up, the new day would already be under way, and she would be caught in the light in the open.

  She had to think hard, but she was so tired that getting her brain to do more than keep the car on the road was too much effort. She drove on for another mile of flat pavement, each side lined by one-story bungalows on plots of land that had ornamental stones or desert brush instead of grass.

  She realized that it was the car that was making her vulnerable. The police would be searching for it, and without it she would look just like anyone else—just an anonymous girl. That gave her an idea, and she drove on, following the signs toward the airport. She parked the car in the long-term lot, wiped off the steering wheel, door handles, and trunk lid, took her suitcase, and caught the shuttle bus to the terminal.

  She went inside the baggage area to the row of courtesy telephones for local hotels, picked the ones near the airport, and began trying to find a vacancy. When she found a room at one called the Sky Inn, the man at the desk asked for her name. She hesitated. The police were looking for Rachel Sturbridge and Tanya Starling, and probably Nancy Mills by now, so she said, “Nicole Davis.” It was one of the names she had used in college when she had gone out alone. She stepped outside and into the first taxi at the curb.

  When she arrived at the Sky Inn, she saw that the clerk who had talked to her was in his twenties but had taken on the mannerisms of middle age. He never smiled, and the only thing that seemed to give him pleasure was his own efficiency. He spoke in a monotone, as though he were reading, held the registration card so that it faced her, and used his pen to point to the room rate, the check-out time, and the place for her signature. As she signed, he said, “And I’ll need a major credit card.”

  She stared at him, and her mind was blank for a second. She had become so exhausted she hadn’t thought this through. She reached into her purse and pulled out a stack of bills. The rate was a hundred and sixty-five dollars a night, so she placed two hundred-dollar bills on the counter. “I’ll pay in cash. I don’t use credit cards.”

  He looked at her closely for the first time, but she sensed that it was only because she was a curiosity—a person who had gotten herself into trouble because she didn’t know when to stop charging things. He took her money, went to the back room, and returned with her change. He handed her a small envelope with her key in it. “Up the elevator behind you to the second floor, then turn right.” As Nicole Davis left, the young man busied himself clicking the keys of his computer terminal.

  She entered her room, locked both of the locks and set the chain, put her purse where she could reach the gun, took a hot shower, and collapsed on the bed.

  Several hours later she awoke and sat up, then reminded herself of what this room was, and that she was Nicole Davis. She stood and opened the curtain on the window just an inch, and the light blasted in to illuminate the whole room. She squinted out at the parking lot. The sun splashed off the roofs and windshields of the cars and into her eyes. She retreated.

  The idea of stopping here to sleep had seemed brilliant last night. She had been on the edge of collapse, driving a car that belonged to a dead woman. She had felt she needed to be rid of Mary Tilson’s car, and she was at least four hundred miles from Los Angeles. But now she was stranded.

  She was in a hotel in a place where she had never been before, and she had no easy way out of here. How long had she slept? She looked at the clock by the bed, then picked up the watch she had left on the nightstand. It was nearly noon, check-out time. She remembered that geek downstairs saying it in his monotone voice. She stepped to the bed and picked up the telephone, then pressed the button for the front desk. “This is Miss Davis in—what is it—room 256. I’d like to stay another day. Is that all right?”

  “Let me see.” This time it was a girl’s voice. A child’s voice. “Um . . . you paid cash in advance for one night. What credit card did you give us?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t carry credit cards, but I can come down there in a few minutes and pay for another day in cash.”

  “Well, there’s a problem. I’m afraid your room, the one you’re in right now, is rented for tonight. We might be able to move you to a new one, but check-in time isn’t until four.”

  “All right. I’ll just wait. Give me a call when the new room is ready.”

  “I’m so sorry. The thing is, we need the room you’re in, and it’s check-out time now. The staff has to clean it and change the sheets and so on before the new people arrive. They can’t wait until four to do that. See?”

  “So I have to check out now, and then check back in at four?”

  “I’m afraid that’s the only way we can accommodate you.”

  Nicole Davis had to be very, very careful. She closed her eyes to keep the frustration from turning into a red, blinding rage. “I can do that. I’ll be right down.”

  She dressed quickly, then went through her suitcase. She removed all of the cash she had been carrying there, and the jewelry that David Larson had given Rachel Sturbridge, and put it into her purse. She closed her suitcase, and then opened it again. She couldn’t leave the two-pound .357 magnum Colt Python with its four-inch barrel in the outer pocket the way it was. Somebody might brush against it or read its shape in the bulge it made. She slipped it inside the suitcase among her clothes and locked the suitcase.

  She took the elevator to the lobby. At the front desk she found the female clerk she had spoken to, and she was glad she had kept her temper. The clerk was a small blond girl who seemed to be about seventeen. She smiled and tried to be helpful, but she didn’t have enough authority to accomplish much.

  Nicole Davis made a formal reservation for the first room that became available, and managed to force the girl to take the money for it in advance. Then she said,
“Can I leave my suitcase with you and go out for a while?”

  That was something the girl knew how to do, so she came around the desk with a label, wrote “N. Davis” on it and attached it to the suitcase, then wheeled it around the desk into a back office.

  Nicole Davis found that it wasn’t as hot outside as she had feared. The sun was bright and the sky cloudless, but the altitude in Flagstaff was much higher than she was used to along the coast.

  Nicole was uneasy. The police were looking for her, and Flagstaff wasn’t big enough to hide her for long. She needed to get out of town, but how she did it made a difference. She couldn’t get on an airplane or rent a car without identification, and the police were waiting for her to use ID that said Tanya Starling or Rachel Sturbridge. When she thought about the police hunting her, she always pictured the woman cop from Portland. That Catherine Hobbes had followed her to San Francisco, and she was still thinking about her every day, waiting for her to make some tiny mistake.

  Nicole needed a car. She couldn’t buy one at a car lot, because they would ask to see a driver’s license. She needed to find a car on the street that had a For Sale sign on it. She would give the owner a few grand in cash and drive away with it. She began to examine every car parked along her way for a sign, but she couldn’t find one. Then she turned a corner and saw something better—a bus station.

  Nobody who was looking for Tanya Starling would imagine her getting on a bus. Everything they knew about her habits would lead them to look in the most expensive hotels or expect her to turn up at the luxury car lots. They knew Tanya Starling. But what they knew was a person she had invented. They didn’t know that she had ever been anything but rich and spoiled. They didn’t know that she knew how to be poor and alone.

  She walked into the bus station, stepped to the counter, and picked up a copy of the printed bus schedule. She could see that business was slow today. There were a couple of men who looked like drunks slouching in and out of sleep in the waiting area, a couple of old people she decided were Indians, and a middle-aged woman with two children who looked the right ages to belong to her daughter. The bored man behind the window seemed to have nothing to look at but her, so she left with her schedule.