Nightlife_ A Novel Part 12

He said, "We've got to think this through. How pregnant are you?"

"My period was supposed to start eight days ago, and I'm never more than a day or two late. I bought a test, and I took it yesterday. I bought another today, and used it. I wanted to be sure, and now I'm sure. I called the doctor because he doesn't charge to talk on the phone, and he said the accuracy of the test is almost a hundred percent." She gave a sad little smile that she had practiced for this moment. "He told me congratulations." Then she made herself cry.

Tim held her and rocked her back and forth, but she didn't stop, so he released her and finished closing the store. They walked to her house, but when she asked him to come in, he said he needed to be alone to think.

For two days, they exchanged looks of worry in the kitchen, where Alice and the customers couldn't see them. Three days after that, when she arrived at the Dairy Princess he was waiting for her outside the back door, and they walked to the park. He was so nervous that she could see the sweat on his forehead. They sat on a park bench and he said, "I've thought about this. I have something for you." It was a plain white business envelope. Inside were some green bills. He said, "It's twelve hundred. Most of what I saved this summer."

"You're trying to buy me off?" Tears came to her eyes. "For twelve hundred dollars?"

"No," he said. "It's not to buy you off."

"Keep it." She tossed the envelope on his lap. "I can't live on it if I have the baby, and I'm not getting an abortion." She stood up. "I thought by now you would have talked to your father. You can't keep him from knowing this."

Tim was horrified. His eyes were swimming, but he wasn't crying. It looked the way a person's eyes watered when he was. .h.i.t in the nose. "You're not going to go to him. He'll kill me. He'll disown me. Really."

"We'll see." She got up and started to walk.

"Wait. You're right." When she heard him running to catch up with her, she kept going. "Please," he said. "Give me one more day."

The next morning when she was almost dressed for work there was a loud knock on the door. She could see from the shadows on the curtain that it was two men. She was afraid it might be the sheriff's deputy with an eviction order, but when she pushed the curtain aside a quarter inch, she saw it was Tim and an older man wearing a business suit, who didn't look happy. She smiled into the mirror, fixed her hair, then went to the door.

When she opened it, Tim surged forward. "Can we come in?"

The older man held Tim's arm in his hand and pulled him back, then stepped in ahead of him. "I'm Tim's father. I know who you are."

"I'm Charlene."

"Tim tells me he knocked you up."

"That's right."

"You've both been very foolish. Neither of you had the right to do that. I'm here to try to settle this right now, while we still can."

"How?"

"Tim tells me he offered you some money, and you told him it wasn't enough." He reached into the inner pocket of his suit coat, took out an envelope, and held it out. Charlene could see it had come from the same box of envelopes as Tim's had.

"How much is in it?"

"Enough to see you through the pregnancy, or to get you an abortion. Three thousand dollars. In return, you sign this paper, saying he's not responsible."

Charlene said, "I appreciate your coming here to help me. But I haven't decided what to do yet."

"What do you mean?"

"The first time it happened, Tim forced me."

Tim's father's head spun to face the boy, his eyes protruding. He looked like a bull. Tim's eyes stayed straight ahead, staring at her as though he had been punched. "Charlene . . ."

Charlene said, "He was my boss at the Dairy Princess. I was afraid to tell, and afraid to say he couldn't do it again. It was the only job I could get in town. I needed to work to pay for college, and I'm only seventeen, so I couldn't work in a regular restaurant where there's a bar. I'm thinking about talking to somebody about it-maybe a lawyer."

Tim's father's eyes blinked as though he had a pain in his stomach. She could tell he had a suspicion about her, but he did not dare voice it without knowing the truth. He had to a.s.sume that this meeting was his only chance to settle her complaint quietly. She knew he was considering letting Tim take his chances, but the risk was enormous-greater than Tim knew. If she really was seventeen and pregnant, and told that story in court, Tim could end up in prison.

He said carefully, "Charlene, I'm sorry. I didn't really understand the situation until now. I want to pay for your medical care and your first year at the university-tuition, room, and board. I make that about-" He looked up at the ceiling. "Three thousand medical. Fifteen thousand for the university is eighteen thousand."

"Is that how much it costs?"

"Yes. I'll be honest with you, that doesn't include a lot of frills. But it should cover things."

"All right, then."

He said, "Here's the paper." He handed it to her, then held out a pen.

She took the paper but ignored the pen. "By the time you get back here with the money, I'll have had a chance to read it."

Late that afternoon, she packed and stripped the house of the few items she cared about that fit in her two suitcases, and counted the money Tim's father had given her. The next morning she was on the early bus to Chicago.

Tonight, as she drove along the dark highway in Mary Tilson's car, she remembered how much she had enjoyed the day when she had left Wheatfield on the bus. Lying about the pregnancy had given her some satisfaction-planning it all summer, then springing it on Tim's father like that, right in front of Tim, when she hadn't left him a way to even deny any of it-but what she had enjoyed most was the money. She remembered sitting on the bus staring out the window at the long line of telephone poles going by, and thinking about the beautiful things all that money would buy.

18.

Catherine Hobbes sat at a stainless steel table in the crime lab and watched Toni Baldesar pouring epoxy into a small dish. Toni carefully placed the kitchen knife in the vapor chamber, then lifted the dish of epoxy onto the hot plate, closed the door, and began to heat it. She turned to Catherine. "All we can do is wait and see if the epoxy vapor makes some latent prints show up. If they match the ones I got from the rental agreement, we'll have her."

"I don't think there will be any," said Catherine. "She's not careless. She's got an obsession with cleaning things and wiping off surfaces to be sure she doesn't leave anything. I don't see her leaving prints on a murder weapon."

"I know, but you'd be surprised at how often I get lucky with things like that. They get emotional, and then everything is such a mess, and they have so many things to think about at once. Sometimes I think that a person's brain just skips over the things that it doesn't want to think about-especially things that involve getting blood on them or going back to touch the body."

"Maybe," said Catherine. She had a blown-up copy of the driver's license photograph of Tanya Starling on the table in front of her, and while she waited she was using a pencil to fill in the background to make the hair shorter. "And it's just possible that my theory about her is wrong. Some man may have come looking for her and killed Mary Tilson because she saw his face."

"I'd rule that out," said Toni.

"Based on what evidence?"

"Based on no evidence-no evidence that a man has been in that apartment since the day the plumbing was installed," said Toni. "No prints, no hairs, no shoe marks, nothing."

"That's what I've been telling people," said Catherine. "So far I've got two of us convinced."

Toni was staring through the small window in the front of the vapor box at the butcher knife. The epoxy vapor had filled the small chamber. She flipped a switch and an exhaust fan cleared the vapor. She opened the door and examined the knife with a flashlight, then turned it over. "Score one for the pessimists. She wiped the handle clean."

"What have we got left?" asked Catherine.

Toni looked up at the clock on the wall. "It's nearly eleven. What I've got is a load of laundry and a sink full of dishes waiting at home."

"I'm sorry," said Catherine. "I know I kept you here half the night."

"No," said Toni. "You didn't. When we've got one that fresh, I always try to squeeze all the information I can out of the trace evidence the first day. Sometimes you find something that helps catch the killer that day, and not just convict him two years later."

"I know. That's why I've been hanging around."

Toni carefully poured the warm epoxy back into its jar. "How long have you been a cop?"

"Seven years. Four in homicide."

"You went through the ranks fast." She began to sponge off the counters where she had been working.

Catherine shrugged. "It's a small department and I'm good at taking tests."

Toni looked at her for a moment. "I'll bet you are."

"How long for you?"

"Fifteen years this June. For me, it's a little different. I see some horrible things, but I don't have to chase anybody down and drag him off to jail. There's less stress." She took off her lab coat and hung it on a hook. "And no fear."

"Well, thanks for staying late tonight," said Catherine.

"I'm sorry we didn't get everything we wanted, but we'll keep working on it."

"Thanks to you, we know for certain Nancy Mills is Tanya Starling, and we can place her in the victim's apartment. That's plenty for one day." Catherine folded her picture of Tanya Starling as they walked toward the door.

"Do you need a ride to your hotel?"

"No, thanks," said Catherine. "I have a rental car." She stepped out in the hallway and Toni locked the door of the lab. "Good night."

She went to her car in the police lot and drove through the dark streets toward her hotel. Talking with Toni had made her think back on her first days as a police officer. She had not grown up planning to join the police bureau. She had decided to apply to the academy during the long drive home, away from the wreckage of her life in California. It had been an act of desperation, just grasping for something in her life that made sense and didn't need an excuse or an explanation. The months in the academy that followed, the grueling physical training and the Spartan discipline that bothered other recruits so much, had been her salvation. At times she thought it had saved her life.

She remembered the first day after she had graduated from the police academy. She reported for work at the police bureau more than an hour early, all dressed in her uniform with her shoes shined and her heavy gear creaking against her leather belt. She had been a.s.signed to the precinct station on the northeast side of the city.

When she walked in the front entrance and approached the desk, a big man with a military haircut and a neck that seemed to overflow from his starched collar stepped in from the side and said, "Hobbes?"

"Yes."

"I'm Lieutenant Morton. Come with me."

She followed, watching his broad back swaying from side to side with his rolling gait. He went into his office and closed the door, then glared at her with bloodshot eyes. His face seemed to have some kind of pink, irritated rash on it that she later came to believe was a reaction to contained anger. He said, "Catherine Hobbes."

"Yes, sir" was all she could think of to say.

"Your father is Lieutenant Frank Hobbes, and your grandfather was the first Frank Hobbes. Is that right?"

She smiled. "Yes." She felt a moment of pride, and maybe some relief.

"I hate dynasties." He paused, then narrowed his eyes. "A police force is a government operation, which means that n.o.body in this town owns any more of it than anybody else. It doesn't matter whose daughter or granddaughter you are. You are the greenest of green rookies, and you will be treated like all of the others in every respect. You got that?"

"Yes, sir," she said. "I never wanted any special privileges." Her stomach began to sink, and she knew her face was beginning to turn red.

"You are also a woman," he continued. "I'm very suspicious of that."

"Of what-that I'm a woman?"

"Being a woman and wanting to be a cop. In this precinct we deal with a lot of street crime. Every day a cop has to go out and drag somebody back here in handcuffs or push somebody around. You coming here and exercising your const.i.tutional right to wear that uniform has grave implications for the rest of the people I put out there. You coming here means to me that you must be a.s.suming that some male cop is going to be willing and able to do his share of the physical stuff and yours too."

She knew that her face was bright red, but there was nothing she could do about it, and she was not going to retreat. "I'm not-"

"Being Frank Hobbes's daughter, you cannot pretend that you didn't know what a cop does. You can't possibly imagine you're going to take down some crystal meth monster who's six feet six and two eighty."

"No, sir," she said. "Most of the men in my academy cla.s.s aren't up to that either. But any one of us will do our best to help subdue a person like that if the occasion comes up, and to use our brains to be sure it doesn't come up often."

He glared at her for two seconds, then smiled, and said. "You are Frank's girl. Welcome to my shop. Now get to roll call and go to work."

19.

Nancy Mills drove deeper into Arizona in the night. She had hoped to be better off than this by now. When she had seen Carl for the last time in Chicago, she had said she would have more money than he had within one year. It had been most of a year already, and what did she have so far? Forty thousand? No, less. She probably had thirty thousand left, and she was driving a dead woman's car along a highway that had signs telling her to watch out for elk. Carl would have laughed at that if he could have known.

Carl had hated nature. He had told her that golf courses were about the wildest places he ever wanted to be. He said that people who went on hikes in the wilderness or liked animals were stupid. Now that she could look back, she knew he had thought that most of the people he knew were stupid. Compared to Carl, they probably were.

She had met Carl in a restaurant in Chicago. She had just finished her final exams for the fall semester, and she had taken herself out to dinner to celebrate.

The celebration felt due, because the semester had been a difficult time for her. Charlene had come to Chicago on the bus four days early. She had slept in the bus station the first night, then rented the only lodging she could afford, a room in a dirty motel not far from the campus. She had walked past her dormitory each day to see if it was open yet, and then sneaked in on the fourth day at seven A.M., A.M., when the last of the janitorial crews were cleaning up after the painters who had given the hive of cubical cinder-block rooms a fresh coat of bile green. when the last of the janitorial crews were cleaning up after the painters who had given the hive of cubical cinder-block rooms a fresh coat of bile green.

She had dreaded the way the first day at the dormitory would be. She had seen simulations of that day in movies and television shows-the happy, eager students, the resigned, tearful mothers, the proud, worried fathers all haunting the dormitories-and had known there was no place for her in that event. For her it could only be an unmasking. Everyone would see that n.o.body cared about her, and that she was nothing.

She put her clothes into one of the two dressers in her room, left a note to claim one of the beds, and went out until evening, after the other girls were settled and their families gone. She told the girls on her floor that her parents were living in Europe, and couldn't come with her.

College began badly and became an ordeal. She had hoped college would change her life, but the girls snubbed her, the city was gray and filthy, and the work was demanding and monotonous. The world was pretty much the same everywhere, and her status in it was fixed at the lowest slot. Nothing Charlene Buckner ever did was going to make more than a minor change that would probably be temporary and might not even be an improvement.

Near the end of the semester, Charlene began to make her first visits to another life, one that existed because she chose it. She bought two good outfits at Marshall Field's. One was a black c.o.c.ktail dress that was on deep discount because there was a tiny tear in the hem that she could fix in a minute. The other was a sleek black skirt and three different tops to go with it.

She found a good pair of black shoes on sale because they had heels too high for most women to bear. Her mother had trained her from the age of four to dance in high heels for the beauty pageants, so she loved them. There was also a pair of black flats that she could wear in less formal places, and a small, elegant black purse. The coat she bought was intended as a raincoat, too light for a Chicago January, but she knew it looked right, so she tolerated the cold. She began to dress and go out alone at night.

Charlene would call for her reservations in various names that she made up while she was standing at the dormitory pay phone, like Nicole Davis or Kimberly De Jong. She would go into the bar after dinner, and when men asked her name, she would give them the latest one. During the long weeks of cla.s.ses she was Charlene, but once or twice a week, there would be a night when she became Nicole or Kimberly or Tiffany.

She discovered that she could attract men. Occasionally she would go out on a Friday night, meet a man, and then not return to the dormitory until Sat.u.r.day, or even Sunday. If anyone asked where she had been, she would say she had gone to visit an old school friend in Boston, or met her parents for dinner in New York. But the other girls had so little interest in her that they seldom asked.

She loved the nights when she was someone else. The only disappointment was the men. They excited her at first because they were a few years older than she was, but they were all so involved with their careers as stockbrokers or sales representatives or junior executives that they were unable to convey anything to her about their lives that she understood, except that they worked very long hours.

On one of those Friday evenings, at a restaurant called Luther's, she met Carl. She'd walked in from the dining room and stepped toward the bar when she became aware that someone was close behind her. There was a tap on the shoulder, and she turned to see Carl. He smiled and said, "Please join me at my table."