Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  She hesitated, then wrote the phone number at her house. They had their drink, but before either of them had finished it, she said, “I’ve got to get up early and meet with a photographer to look at his portfolio.” He put her in a taxi in front of the hotel, and she went back to her house feeling pleased with herself for timing her exit to pique his interest.

  The next day she got up early and walked to a newsstand on Market Street to buy the Portland Oregonian, then had a cup of coffee and a bagel while she searched it for new information about Dennis Poole. She found no mention of him, and she walked home feeling relieved. She turned the television to the local morning news for company while she read the San Francisco Chronicle, but didn’t bother to turn it off when the news was replaced by reruns of a situation comedy. At eleven, her telephone rang for the first time. Nobody had her number except David Larson, so she hurriedly muted the television set before she answered it, smiled to herself, and said, “Singular Aspects.”

  The second dinner with David was at the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton on Nob Hill, and it went better than the first for Rachel Sturbridge. Just after their entrées were served, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking. I would like to buy a half interest in your magazine.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “There is no magazine yet. How can I sell it?”

  “That’s why I’m offering now. I’m betting you’re going to be so successful that it will be too expensive to buy in later. I bring you capital and business knowledge, and you bring me the idea, the talent, and the effort. That’s how start-ups work.”

  “That’s very flattering,” she said. “But let’s not be in a rush.”

  “Why the delay?”

  “I’m going to ask for fifty billion dollars, and I need to give you time to raise it.”

  He laughed and touched her hand. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s why I’m willing to bet on you. I wanted to make you the offer before I left for Austin, but that doesn’t mean I need the answer by then.”

  “When are you going back?”

  He looked unhappy, as though he had been dreading the subject. “On Friday. I hate to do it, but I have a meeting that afternoon, and I’ve already postponed it once.”

  “That’s only two days.”

  “One, really. I leave early Friday morning.”

  “Is it that important?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. People are coming from New York and London.”

  She couldn’t let him go this way. She knew that he had been enjoying his time with her, and that she was rapidly making an impression on him. But he was a rich man in his fifties. He had met a great many attractive women by now, and he probably met more every month. She had not yet had time to reach the point where she would not simply fade into his memory with all of the others. She had to do something quickly. “Then you’ll have to go. But can I take you out for a farewell dinner tomorrow night?”

  He looked surprised. “Thank you. I’d love that. But it shouldn’t sound so final. You and I are going to be partners, just as soon as I raise that fifty billion.”

  The third dinner was at the Fairmont. Once they were past the lobby, with its high, vaulted ceiling and marble columns, David seemed to relax. There was a quiet, comfortable quality to their conversation. He told her stories about his childhood in Texas, his business associates, his friends. When the waiter asked whether they would like anything else, Rachel said, “No, thank you.” He asked, “Would you like to charge it to your room?” She said, “Yes.”

  David met her eyes, and she shrugged. “Another cat out of the bag.”

  He said, “You’re staying here?”

  “I reserved a suite when I made the reservation. The view from the tower rooms is one of the best in the city. I thought it might be a nice way to be sure you didn’t forget me as soon as you got back to Texas.”

  “Not likely,” he said.

  She had prepared herself in advance for a night of closing her eyes tight and enduring, but she was pleasantly surprised. He was a gentle, considerate lover with an easy, appreciative disposition that made her feel less self-conscious. When they were not making love he was a cheerful, affectionate companion.

  Late that evening after he fell asleep, she lay awake considering the best way to make use of him. She had been wise to resist the temptation to sell him a half interest in her imaginary magazine. She had been very close to yielding. He seemed accustomed to risky investments, and he would probably forgive her when she faked an attempt at a magazine and didn’t return any money. But she could afford to let her bet stay on the table. She was beginning to think that maybe the way to get her money was the way lots of other women had done it. Maybe she should marry it.

  The next morning they said good-bye in the room. He called a cab to take him to the Prescott to check out and then to the airport. Rachel took a second cab back to her house. She put his business card on her refrigerator with a magnet and waited.

  On the third day, a FedEx package arrived. Inside was a velvet box. She opened it, and found a white-gold pendant with a single large diamond. The velvet box said Van Cleef & Arpels, but that was only a box. She took off the shade of her reading lamp and held the diamond close to the bulb. She could tell it was a good stone, about three carats, and very bright. It must have cost him at least ten thousand dollars, and possibly much more.

  Looking at the light sparkling in the facets of the diamond made her feel lucky. It had probably been dangerous to get involved with another man so soon after Dennis Poole, but there had seemed to be nobody looking for her, so she had begun to look for a new man.

  Men were a difficult way to make a living. All any of them really wanted was sex. It made them easy to attract and easy to play for a little money, but not necessarily easy to control. They got jealous and watchful, and at times the sex could be troublesome, too. At least with David it wasn’t unpleasant or especially demanding. She took his card off her refrigerator, went to the telephone, and dialed the private number he had written on the back. When he answered, she said, “You certainly know how to keep a girl’s attention, don’t you?”

  A week later David was in San Francisco again. He called her from the airport, then picked her up at her house and drove to a hotel in Carmel that consisted of a group of luxurious cabins on a wooded cliff above the ocean. They had dinner in the restaurant in the central building, watching the waves crash against the rocks below, then walked along the path through the pines to their cabin, and sat on the couch before the stone fireplace, listening to the crackling of the wood fire.

  After a time, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”

  “Good,” she said. She leaned close and kissed him softly.

  “I’ve even been trying to find ways to help you get your magazine started.”

  “You’re sweet.” She kissed him again.

  “While I was doing it I found out a couple of things that made me curious.”

  “What kind of things?” She turned her body on the couch to face him. She could feel the hairs on her scalp rising. It wasn’t exactly fear, but an intense anticipation.

  “Well, you said you had never been married.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m wondering if you changed your name at some point.”

  She kept her eyes on his face. “You’ve hired somebody to investigate me?”

  He smiled. “Now, please don’t get mad at me. It’s a normal thing to do if you’re thinking of making an investment in a start-up. I have a standing account at the Averill Agency in Dallas. Whenever I’m about to make a seed-money investment, they routinely do a quick rundown on the principal players, just to be sure none of them has a tail and a pitchfork. It’s no different from asking your mechanic to take a look at a car you’re buying.”

  Rachel leaned forward, her eyes searching his. “And?”

  “As you know, they didn’t find any problems, because there are no problems. But they did have trouble finding out
much else about you. They said that either you’d had a marriage at some point that you forgot to mention, or maybe had petitioned for a name change.”

  She stared at him coldly, sensing the urge to make him suffer. “Rachel Sturbridge isn’t the name I was born with. My family was well-off and respected, but it looked good only from the outside. From the inside, it wasn’t a group you would want to belong to. There wasn’t a lot of love.” She paused, as though bravely controlling her emotions. “What there was, was a lot of cruelty. After I grew up I spent years trying to get over it, and on the advice of my therapist, I severed the connection completely. Being really free of them meant using a different name, so I do. You’re the only person I’ve ever had to explain this to.”

  He was embarrassed at his mistake. “Rachel, I’m sorry. I just cared so much about you that I couldn’t know enough.”

  She stood up.

  He looked horrified. “Please. I never imagined that talking to you about it would bring back bad memories. Stay with me.”

  “I’m tired, and I’m going to sleep now. We can talk in the morning.” David had carried both of their suitcases into one of the bedrooms when he’d unloaded the car. Now she went into that room, took hers into the other bedroom, and quietly closed the door.

  When she awoke in the morning she knew that two things were going to happen. One was that David Larson was going to buy her a big present. The other was that she was going back to San Francisco. She went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, and began to pull herself together. “I’m heartbroken,” she told the girl in the mirror. It was well said. She would use it.

  During the time while he was in Austin she had allowed herself to grow overconfident. She had formed plans that carried them both years into the future. She had pictured them spending time in Europe together—maybe in the Greek islands, which looked beautiful and warm in the magazines, or Provence, which sounded in articles as though it existed solely to serve food and wine to people like her. She was sure David had accumulated enough money already. It seemed to her that the only reason he still traveled around chasing investments was that he’d had nothing better to do until he’d met Rachel Sturbridge. She could have made those years wonderful for him. But that was before he had betrayed her.

  She watched herself in the mirror as she said, “I’m heartbroken” again. She meant it. He had told his stupid private detectives to pry into her private life looking for incriminating information, and she was just lucky they had not found anything. It had been a cold, calculating thing to do. Men always wanted you to do impulsive, risky things because you let your passion for them get too strong to resist. They wanted you to trust them completely, holding nothing at all back to protect yourself. But then, after your body and soul had gotten to be things they had, rather than things they wanted, they announced that they had reserved the right to be suspicious and cautious about you.

  When David knocked and asked if she would go to breakfast with him, she called through the closed door, “No, you go ahead.”

  Rachel spent the next hour working efficiently and methodically to make herself beautiful. She had started beautician’s school the summer she had turned sixteen, and had learned some cosmetology and hairdressing before she had missed a tuition payment. But she had learned her most valuable tricks years before that, in the long succession of beauty pageants her mother had entered her in beginning at age four. She had been born with good skin and small, symmetrical features, and she had a quick, practiced hand with a brush, eyeliner, and mascara.

  She was good at dressing herself because she had a hard, objective eye. That was something else the pageant circuit had done for her. She could look at herself the way a contest judge would, with no sentimentality and no mercy. She accentuated her figure’s best points and hid the flaws. She tried all three dresses she had brought, chose the one that would give him the most haunting memory of her body, and put on spike heels.

  Rachel packed her suitcase, stood it upright on its wheels, and extended the handle. Then she went to the living room, arranged herself on the small couch, turned on the television set, and waited. David returned about an hour after that.

  When he opened the door and saw her, she could tell her effect was what she had intended. He stopped at the door and simply stared for a moment, then took a couple of deep breaths and walked toward her. “Rachel,” he said. “I need to talk to you. I’m really very sorry. I never imagined I was going to hurt your feelings or remind you of anything that caused you pain.”

  She raised her face to him. Her eyes were cold, as though she were looking at him from a great distance.

  He said, “I brought you a little something.” He took a velvet jewelry box from his coat pocket and held it out to her. “Will you please forgive me?”

  Seeing another jewelry box nettled her, partly because it showed he thought she was childish enough to be mollified by it, and partly because she wanted whatever lay inside the box. Her expression didn’t change. “I waited here for you only because I felt that I should say something to you for the sake of clarity. If you’ll remember, I never asked you to invest in my business.”

  “I never meant to imply—”

  “Please let me finish. I won’t be long.” She glared at him, holding him in silence for a breath before she continued. “It was a purely personal relationship, from my point of view. I never offered you anything or asked you for anything. When you asked questions about my business I answered them. When you offered to invest, I repeatedly refused your money. You called in detectives anyway and had me investigated. Well, that was a deal breaker. I’m leaving now. I want you to tear up my telephone number and forget my address.”

  “But Rachel.” He tried to sit beside her, but she recoiled and stood up. He held out his hands. “Can’t we talk about this?”

  “No. We can’t. If you want to do something for me you can order your detectives to shred whatever files they have on me. Beyond that, I have no further interest in anything you do or say.” She turned, walked to the bedroom, grasped the handle on her suitcase, and pulled it to the door on its wheels.

  David Larson stood up, looking pained. “Please don’t go, Rachel. It was a terrible mistake. I’m trying to make it up to you.” As he raised his arms in supplication, he noticed the velvet box in his hand, and held it out. “This was for you. Won’t you at least take a look at it?”

  “No, I won’t. Good-bye.” She pushed the door open, dragged her suitcase out, and let the door swing shut behind her. She went down the steps and up the paved drive to the main lodge, and had the concierge call her a cab.

  On the long drive to San Francisco she contemplated what she had done, and decided that leaving David Larson had been her only possible choice. She couldn’t continue the relationship after he’d had her investigated. If she stayed, he would have the detectives resume their poking and prying. It was quite possible that they would find out that she had once been Tanya Starling, and maybe even that she had known Dennis Poole. It was also a bit late to allow him to buy into her imaginary magazine, and then make the money disappear on imaginary expenses. Now that the detectives had been called in, she couldn’t even continue to play him for gifts and support.

  Her only possible move had been to sever any connection with him. The paradox was that his having her investigated had made her want to kill him, and the only thing that was preventing her from doing it was that he’d had her investigated. Before his body could cool, his detectives would be there to give the police a whole dossier on her.

  The next afternoon at one, there was a knock on her door. She looked out the window to decide whether to answer, and saw it was the Federal Express man. She opened the door, signed for the thick envelope, and took it inside to open it.

  The envelope contained three items. The first was the typed report that David Larson had received from the Averill Detective Agency in Dallas, Texas, saying that there wasn’t much about Rachel Sturbridge to know. The second was
a file folder, stamped AVERILL AGENCY: CONFIDENTIAL. It had Sturbridge, Rachel on the tab, and contained about twenty pages of handwritten notes describing things checked unsuccessfully, credit reports on Rachel Sturbridge that had yielded virtually no information, a copy of her business license, and some photographs. There were pictures of her coming and going from her house, as well as a few close-ups of her face made from blowups of more distant shots.

  The third item in the package was a note from David Larson. It said, “You asked that I destroy the background check. These are the only copies. Please accept my apologies. David.”

  Rachel searched the kitchen drawers until she found some matches. She took the note, the file, and the report out to the tiny square of concrete below her back steps, then made a small bonfire. She looked at each piece as she added it to the flames.

  The detective had been called off, and she was watching the collection of incriminating information burn up, page by page. She was confident that David was feeling contrite and apologetic, not suspicious of her. But this wasn’t enough. She looked at the rented house, then down the hill at the city. She picked up a stick to stir the ashes and make sure there was nothing left of the paper. She would have to disappear.

  7

  The videotape was grainy and distorted, and the colors seemed faded. It had been taken through a plastic dome that covered the video camera in the hotel hallway. The shot angled down from the ceiling. A white-haired couple walked under it and up the hallway to the elevator alcove. A few seconds later, a man appeared, coming from the direction of the elevators. “That’s him. That’s my cousin Dennis,” Hugo Poole said.

  A thin blond woman caught up to Dennis while he stood at the door of his hotel room.

  “Look at the hair,” said Sergeant Hobbes.

  “It’s just about the right length,” Joe Pitt said.

  On the monitor, Dennis slid a key card out of his wallet. The woman stood facing Dennis, talking to him, waiting for him to push the card into the lock and turn the handle. Hugo Poole waited impatiently for the girl to show her face. Dennis Poole opened the door to let the girl in ahead of him. “Turn around, for Christ’s sake,” Hugo said. “Turn around!”