Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  His face was darker and grimmer. He was feeling resentful, more and more unappreciated and ill-used, and she could see anger growing behind his eyes. She said, “Haven’t you ever seen a woman before?”

  “No. Just movies. Pictures.”

  She was desperate, miserable. She couldn’t afford to make him angry and resentful. “Look, Ty. You don’t have to feel rejected, or that I’m just too selfish to give you what you want. I like you. I really do. And I know that what you’re thinking about seems like something you really want, but this isn’t the right time. I’m not the one.”

  His eyes were fixed on the wall ahead of him. “It’s not that big a thing to you. You take off your clothes in front of doctors, people like that, people who haven’t done anything for you.”

  She said, “Please, Ty.”

  “Please yourself. Please.”

  She sighed. “All right then, I suppose.”

  “Now?”

  “If I have to.”

  25

  As soon as Catherine Hobbes had learned that Tanya had been sighted in Flagstaff, she had taken a plane to Arizona. Now, as she sat in the passenger seat of the police car, staring out the window while Officer Gutierrez drove, she wondered if she had missed her again. At night Flagstaff didn’t seem big enough to hide Tanya Starling. There didn’t seem to be enough places for strangers to sleep, enough people on the streets to keep her from being seen. There didn’t seem to be enough men.

  Gutierrez was about forty years old and the sort of officer that Hobbes would have appointed to guide a visitor if she had been the one to pick. He was proper and experienced and pulled together like a military man, in a fresh uniform with razor creases and spit-shined shoes. All the steel on him shone in the dim light of the dashboard.

  He drove past the hotel and around to the parking lot, then kept the car idling. “See the window up here with the blinds drawn and the bright lights?”

  “Second floor, third from the end?”

  “Right. That was her room.”

  Catherine Hobbes looked around to determine the lines of sight from the nearest street. “Think she saw somebody waiting for her in her room?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I know there were a few unmarked cars parked back here, so she might have seen them. Or maybe she’s just getting into the habit of calling places to see if there are cops before she shows up. Whatever it was, she picked up the signs.” He pulled into a space. “Ready to go in?”

  “Can you show me the bus station first?”

  “Sure. It’s just up on South Malpais Lane.” He pulled across the lot and back out onto South Milton, drove a couple of blocks, then turned left. “It’s up ahead, there. It’s been about eight hours since she’s been here, though.”

  “I’d like to take a look anyway,” she said. “I’m trying to get to know her, and I’d like to see what she saw.”

  Officer Gutierrez drove a few yards past the station entrance and stopped the car at the curb, then got out with Catherine Hobbes. Catherine could see the pay telephone attached to the stucco wall at the front of the building. It could have been the one Tanya had used to call the hotel, but there were probably others inside or around the back in the boarding area. It was too late to take prints from any of them now.

  She pushed through the glass doors, into the station. It was late evening, but she could see that the station had the forlorn, always-two-A.M. look that bus stations had, the fluorescent lights just bright enough to make a person who was stuck here feel defeated. She walked over to the counter and picked up one of the small folded bus schedules.

  While she was examining it, Gutierrez said, “The first ticket she bought was to Santa Fe for ten o’clock tomorrow morning. She bought the one to Phoenix just before it was due to leave at five after three. That was the next bus out.”

  Hobbes went to the front door, stepped out, and looked at the city. “The hotel is about four long blocks in that direction, right?”

  “Right,” said Gutierrez. “Maybe a half mile.”

  Catherine stepped back inside, then walked to the door on the opposite side of the waiting area, underneath the sign that said BOARDING—TO BUSES. She went outside again and stood under the overhanging roof. A bus came up South Malpais and made the wide turn, shouldering up the slight rise onto the blacktop, then emitting a hiss as it came to rest. The lights came on and the doors opened. The sign above the windshield that said FLAGSTAFF changed to HOLBROOK.

  As Catherine watched, an assortment of people slowly made their way, one by one, down the bus’s narrow steps to the pavement. They were the people Catherine had become accustomed to seeing on sweeps through the bus stations in Portland: old men and women who stared down at their feet as they walked, or very young, solitary men with faces that were pinched with watchfulness, or teenage girls in twos or threes, talking and laughing as though the rest of the world could not hear them.

  The driver and a ticket agent opened the luggage compartment on the side of the bus, hauled suitcases out, and set them in a row, where passengers came to claim them. Then Catherine saw the people she had been waiting for, the first of the riders for the next leg of the bus’s journey, forming a line. They were like the last group, people too young or too old to drive, people who had no money for a car. Catherine got into the line behind a lady carrying a large carpetbag, looked around her, then moved close to the bus.

  She said to the ticket taker, “Do city buses stop here? I don’t see a bus stop.”

  “They don’t stop at the station. The nearest stop is on the corner at South Milton.”

  “Thank you.”

  Gutierrez stepped up to Catherine, curious. She said, “I think somebody picked her up.”

  “What do you mean—like she had someone waiting for her?”

  “No. She came in here and bought the ticket to Phoenix just before the bus was going to leave. She walked to the front door, made the call to the hotel, then got into this line to board the bus.”

  “Right. That’s what the witnesses said.”

  “But when the state police stopped the bus she wasn’t on it.”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Well, something happened while she was standing here, right where I am, waiting to board. Something changed her mind, diverted her from the bus. But from this spot, you can’t see any alternatives. There aren’t any taxicabs, or rental cars, or anything else. If she had just turned and started walking, she would have been spotted. The police units arrived within a minute or two after she called the hotel, and they searched for blocks around the station, questioning everybody who might have noticed her. The only possibility is that she met somebody, and he or she gave her a ride out of the area in a private car.”

  “You think she could do that? She works that fast?”

  “You saw her picture. She looks young and sweet and vulnerable.” Catherine looked around her at the entrance to the station. “The only thing I’m wondering about is who it could be. The reason people are in a bus station is that they don’t have cars.”

  “Whoever it is, he’s going to get a big surprise.”

  As Catherine stepped away from the line with Gutierrez and they walked along the street toward his police car, Calvin Dunn took a step backward behind the idling bus to keep the headlights of a passing car from shining on his face. When he had seen the two of them behind the bus station, the woman standing in line and then going with the cop, he had experienced a moment of interest. She was about the right age, size, and shape. But apparently she was just another damned cop.

  26

  Nicole Davis lay on the bed, her eyes open wide, staring into the darkness. She tried closing, then opening her eyes, but the darkness looked the same. She wanted not to be here, not to be who she was. She turned and listened to Tyler asleep beside her, snoring a little in his dream. She knew what he was dreaming about.

  She had foreseen exactly what would happen as soon as he had gotten his wish. She had known what his n
ext wish would be, and that there would be no way for him to resist, and no way for her to stop him. Of course she had known, because for the first time in her life she was the one who had lived enough to know what he would feel before he felt it. So now she had become the knowing seducer and the unwilling victim, both at the same time. Ty had been all eagerness and joy at what was happening, while Nicole tried to be patient and instill patience, to teach.

  She felt that time had fractured and slipped, two sides meeting in the wrong place, like a break in a fault line. She should have been with him when she was sixteen too, and they would have been a match. They would have groped their way into the same experience at the same time. She would have been the way he was now—amazed. After that, she would have been so happy with a boyfriend just like Ty all those years ago, on the other side of the chasm. It would have made everything different, every moment of her life after that.

  She felt a pair of wet tears spill from her eye sockets and streak down both sides of her face to her ears. She had come a very long way from sixteen, and none of it had been the way she had imagined it.

  Events seemed to be coming faster and faster now. She was being forced to make choices without warning, without having the time to consider the consequences. Whenever she made a move, the reaction to it seemed to come instantly. If she took a step, the police sirens were wailing before she could take the second step.

  It was that woman cop she had talked to on the telephone: Detective Catherine Hobbes. She was probably still all the way back in Portland, but what was happening here in Flagstaff was her fault. In fact, everything that had happened since Dennis Poole had been because of Catherine Hobbes. She was the reason why there were all of these cops blocking the roads tonight.

  Dennis Poole’s death had been the end of a private dispute, a contest between equals. Dennis had been getting ready to accuse Tanya of taking his money. He could have gotten her sent to prison, and that would have been the end of her. She had shot him in self-defense. All that Catherine Hobbes had needed to do then was report it as a homicide, fill out her stupid police forms, hand them in, and go home. But instead she had decided to use poor Tanya Starling to transform herself into a hero. It was disgusting.

  If it had not been for Catherine Hobbes, there would have been no reason for her to protect herself from people like Bill Thayer or Mary Tilson. There would have been no reason to give in to the sexual fantasies of a sixteen-year-old boy in Arizona. She lay in the dark and closed her eyes until she fell asleep.

  At daybreak she awoke and looked at the sleeping face of Tyler Gilman on the pillow. It was untroubled, almost blank. He was in absolute repose, his mouth closed and his eyes unmoving.

  She slid off the bed and walked to the bathroom where she had left her clothes. They were still hanging from the hook behind the door, where she had hung them as she took them off. She carried her clothes to the living room before she quietly put them on, because she wasn’t ready to be with Tyler yet. As she sat alone, hugging her knees, her bare feet on the couch, she concluded that she had done the only thing she could possibly have done. If she had refused, he would not have done anything else for her. She needed for him to do much more, or she was going to be caught. It was that simple.

  Now she needed to decide what she wanted him to do for her. She wanted to get out of Flagstaff. That required waiting several days, until the police had searched everywhere in town that they could search, and then having Ty drive her to another city. It should be outside Arizona.

  Eventually she would need her own car, and she would need a suitcase full of clothes that didn’t look much like the ones she had left in the hotel. She would have to think of a way for Ty to acquire those things without drawing attention to himself. As she considered her situation, she realized that it probably wasn’t too bad. All she had to do was control Tyler Gilman.

  She heard him stirring. There was a thump as he bounced off the bed to the floor. She heard him pad up the hallway toward the living room, then felt the vibration as he walked across the room to her.

  He was standing in front of her, a blanket wrapped around him. “I woke up, and I was afraid that you were gone—that you had left while I was sleeping.”

  She slowly lifted her head to face him. “I’m not gone. It’s just that you made me do a serious, important thing last night, when I didn’t want to. That’s why your mind did that to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, I’m not sorry I did it. I’m just sorry for you, that you feel bad.”

  “I understand. I told you last night that I understood why you wanted that. It’s the way men are.” She stood and walked toward the kitchen. “I’ll make your breakfast. You like eggs, don’t you?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  She looked at him pensively. “It’s too late for that now. You did something big and risky for me, and then in return you wanted something big from me, that’s all. So now it’s another day. What kind of eggs do you like?”

  “Will you ever let me again?”

  She cocked her head. “I don’t know. After we’ve had breakfast and a shower and brushed our teeth, I might think about it. Now go sit down at the table.”

  He walked toward the kitchen. As he passed close to her, she noticed that he lowered his eyes. He would be fine.

  27

  Calvin Dunn sat in a winged armchair in the farthest corner of the Sky Inn lobby, so that his back was against the wall in the corner next to the stone fireplace. There was no fire tonight, because the temperature had been in the nineties today, and the heat lingered in the brick walls of the building. Calvin Dunn read the newspaper.

  It seemed to him that the story of the female serial killer had already begun to get overripe in Flagstaff. It was not on the front page anymore. There were enough car accidents and killings of local people by their friends and neighbors to keep the cops busy and provide the reporters with copy. Nobody seemed excited anymore by the girl’s visit to town. She was like a cloud that had passed overhead without getting anybody wet.

  He lifted his eyes over the newspaper and watched the young man at the front desk. It was after two A.M. and the last guest had come into the lobby an hour ago, but the clerk was always busy looking busy, trying to keep himself in line for a promotion to—what? Head night clerk? He was the only night clerk. This time of night he was running low on things to do, so he polished his counter with a can of Pledge and a hotel washcloth. He was aware of Calvin Dunn’s presence, and looked up at him occasionally.

  Calvin Dunn folded his newspaper under his arm, stood up, and walked to the desk.

  The clerk said, “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Do you happen to be the one who checked in that girl I’ve been reading about in the newspapers?”

  “Yes, sir. That was me.”

  Calvin Dunn looked interested. “That must have been something. What was she like?”

  It was a momentous question, one the young man had probably been asked many times at first, but that people had stopped asking since the girl had disappeared. “She was really nice looking. That was the first thing I noticed, the first thing anybody would notice. But then, when I asked her for a credit card, she said she didn’t use them. She didn’t look like the kind of person who doesn’t use them. She didn’t look poor, or political, or anything.”

  “She’s a criminal,” said Calvin Dunn. “I would have expected a criminal would be eager to use a credit card—somebody else’s, of course.”

  “I wouldn’t really know,” said the clerk. “But she had a purse full of cash. I could see it when she paid for her room. I thought for a minute that maybe she was, like, a movie star who didn’t want to be recognized.”

  “Happen to see a gun?”

  “No. I’m sure she probably had one, but she didn’t let me see it.”

  “You know, you might have been killed.”

  “I know,” said the young man. He seemed pleased that at last somebody had realized it.
/>   “The thing is, you were brave to turn her in.”

  “Not really,” he said. “I was at home, and I happened to see her picture on television. I called the police from my apartment.”

  “That’s what I mean. You were the only one who recognized her, and turned her in.” He paused. “The only one.”

  “I was?”

  “Yeah,” said Calvin Dunn. “She’s probably given a lot of thought to you during the past couple of days. Of course, there were other people later who said they remembered her going by one place or stopping in another. You and I know that it’s mostly because people hate it when anything big happens right in front of their noses and they don’t see it. So they convince themselves that they did see it. The point is, you were the only one who really did notice and got the police after her.”

  The young man seemed uncomfortable. “Are you a police officer?”

  “No,” said Calvin Dunn. “I work for the family of one of the victims.”

  “I wondered why you were sitting by the fireplace reading the newspaper so late at night, so I thought you were the police, watching me.”

  “You’re not far off.”

  The young man looked into his eyes and understood. “You’ve been waiting for her, haven’t you? You think she’s going to come back here and try to kill me.”

  Calvin Dunn said, “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “It’s just a precaution. The police are watching the bus station and the car rental places and the airport and even the highway entrance ramps. They’ve got all the rational places covered. They know what she looks like, and if she shows up where they are, they’ll probably get her.”

  “You sound as though you don’t think she will.”

  “She’s got another side besides the rational one, and that makes all the difference. She looks as though she wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but once in a while, she pulls out a big old pistol and shoots a guy through the head. That shows that she doesn’t necessarily do what other people would do.”