Nightlife_ A Novel Part 2

Catherine Hobbes had been surprised to see how fine Pitt's features were, and how alert and intelligent his eyes looked. But for her there wasn't anything endearing about his attractiveness. He talked with the kind of easy familiarity that meant he was aware that he had an advantage with women.

She was irritated at Joe Pitt already, but she was determined to be polite to him. She had orders, and she was not about to get in trouble just because he was arrogant. If she could tolerate him long enough, she could learn something. He was a well-known investigator who had, in his prime, solved a number of murders. If she had to endure his banter to learn what he knew, then she would do it. "There isn't any sign of forced entry here. The other doors are bolted from the inside."

Pitt looked around. As a concession to the rainy Portland climate there was a small foyer with a black-and-white marble floor and a long wooden seat for changing boots, a coat rack above it, and an umbrella stand. Beyond that the thick carpet began, and everything in sight was beige or white.

"Where did he get shot?"

"Upstairs in the master suite. I'll show you." She went to the long straight staircase, and they climbed to the landing.

Pitt walked into Dennis Poole's bedroom, which was big enough for four bedrooms. He surveyed the furnishings. On the wall there was a plasma television about six feet wide, and below it on a cabinet a set of videoca.s.sette recorders and DVD players. There was a big desk with more computer equipment on it than anybody needed. There were shelves with so many books and magazines on them that they reminded Pitt that he hadn't seen any evidence of a book downstairs. The bed looked like the oversized king in a good hotel suite. "Was he in debt to pay for all of this?"

"We haven't found any debt yet. Considering his income, the house isn't at all extravagant," she said. "He bought it about a year after his divorce, when he was twenty-eight. That was fourteen years ago. He lived alone, and he cleared three to four hundred thousand a year. There's no sign of expensive hobbies or collections, no trace of drugs in his blood or the house, no history of gambling."

"Anything missing?"

"He lived alone, so we haven't got anybody who really knows. There are no dust spots where things have been removed, or marks on the walls from missing paintings or anything. We took a couple of people from his office through the house, and neither of them could remember seeing anything here that's gone." She held him in the corner of her eye. "Maybe you can tell me." Instantly she wished she had not said it.

He looked around him as though he had not heard. "Where was the body?"

"In the bathtub." She led him into the bathroom. It was big too, with an enormous black tub and a room-sized gla.s.s-walled shower with showerheads on three sides and a slate seat along one wall. Most of the surfaces were covered with fingerprint dust. "One shot to the head."

He looked down at the tub, then moved his face close to examine the blood-spatter pattern on the wall above it. "And you're sure he didn't just pop himself?"

"The gun wasn't found with him. Anyway, the angle was wrong."

"How?"

"Sort of like this." She pointed her index finger at her own head. "See? The angle is too high. You can't get a gun up there and point slightly downward, and why would you?"

Joe Pitt nodded and walked farther into the bathroom, examining the shower and the sinks without touching anything. "Was he taking a bath or did they just shove him in there to keep the job from getting messy?"

"He was naked. There was soap in the tub, and a towel under his head like a pillow."

Pitt left the bathroom and stared at the bedroom again. "I a.s.sume your people didn't find anything in the rest of the house."

"It's all just like what you saw on the way up here. The rooms look like no one's ever used them. It's white couches that n.o.body ever sat in, and gla.s.s tabletops without so much as a fingerprint. The kitchen is beautiful, but there's hardly anything in the refrigerator but drinks. He ate out three meals a day."

"He seems to have lived up here."

"That's how I see it," she said. "The television gets something like two hundred and fifty channels, about fifty of them sports. He could sit up here forever watching one game after another, and never go downstairs except for more beer."

"Who dusted the white couches and washed the windows?"

"He had a contract with Mighty Maids. They have a whole crew of women come in at once, clean the h.e.l.l out of everything, and go away. That was how his body got found. His crew came twice a week during business hours, when he was usually at work. They had a key, but they also had an alibi-people who saw them cleaning houses at the time of death. They came in yesterday and there he was."

Joe Pitt stood in the center of the room and slowly turned all the way around, studying every detail. "Have you pieced together the sequence?"

She nodded. "He left work earlier than usual, but didn't have to tell anybody why, because he was the boss. He was wearing a dark gray suit that day. He was home by four, set his briefcase down in the kitchen, and came up here. He took off the suit and tie and hung them up in here." She walked to the huge walk-in closet and pushed the door open so Pitt could see the neat row of coats and trousers hanging along the pole. At least four were shades of gray. "They're in the lab, of course. Next he threw his shirt, socks, and underwear in the hamper, went into the bathroom, ran the water in the tub, and got in."

"So he was still doing everything voluntarily-no chance of force?"

"There are no abrasions or contusions on him to show a struggle, and there was no water splashed around when the maids found him. At some point, the killer probably slipped in, approached him from behind, held the gun a foot from his head, and fired once. The entry wound is behind the right ear. The neighbors on both sides and across the street were still at work, and n.o.body else in the neighborhood remembers hearing a shot."

"You figure it was intended to be a faked suicide at first?"

"I think so, but it was botched. Maybe Mr. Poole heard the guy at the last instant and flinched. Maybe the killer just got too eager and fired early."

"Was the gun Poole's? Did he have one that's missing?"

"He didn't have any firearms registered to him."

Pitt looked down at his feet. "This isn't going to be easy, is it?"

"No," said Catherine Hobbes. "He seems to have been secure and prosperous. He had no enemies anybody knows about. He just came back from vacation a couple of weeks ago, and the people at work said he seemed happy and relaxed."

"What about women?"

"What about them?"

"Did he like them? Did he like one in particular?"

"That's one of the things that's been worrying me. The trace evidence people found some long, straight blond hairs. There were two on suits of his, a few on the carpet in here, one on a bathrobe. The women on the Mighty Maids crew are all black or Hispanic."

"Any blondes at his company?"

"Two, but the hair isn't a match for either one. n.o.body seems to remember seeing him with a blond woman lately. There are no female relatives who live in town, and his mother says none have long, straight blond hair."

"This blond woman seems like the most promising thing I've heard," said Pitt. "She could have been married. That would give Poole a reason to try to keep the relationship quiet, and a good motive for the husband to kill him."

"We've been concentrating on her, and we've found nothing yet. On the other hand, we do have one odd thing that turned up unexpectedly."

"What?"

"You."

"I don't feel like an odd thing."

She shrugged. "I got an order from my captain that I'd be cooperating with an expert from Los Angeles, a former D.A.'s investigator who will help with the case. I looked you up on Google and found lots of articles about you, mostly in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, but in national magazines too. Pictures of you and everything." but in national magazines too. Pictures of you and everything."

"Anything interesting?"

"You're retired from the D.A.'s office-honorably, it said-and now you make a gazillion dollars a year doing private investigation. At that point, I was ready to invite you over for a home-cooked dinner and a shot at meeting my parents. Then I talked to my captain and found out you were working for the cousin."

"You lost interest?"

"Let's say the nature of my interest changed."

"It doesn't have to," said Pitt. "I'm not here to do anything wrong, and I really do make a gazillion dollars."

"You're working for a bad guy," said Hobbes. "Lips that have touched Hugo Poole's a.s.s will never touch mine."

"Your a.s.s?"

"My anything," she said.

Joe Pitt nodded. "So up here, when a known criminal asks you to investigate his relative's murder, you say no?"

"We don't actually consult him. When there's a murder we go after the killer, whether anybody wants us to or not." She patted his arm and said with mock sympathy, "It's not you, Joe. It's me. I just don't like people taking money from a crook to keep him out of a murder investigation."

"I wasn't hired to do that," he said. "Hugo Poole agrees with you. He thinks the killing is a reprisal for something he did down in L.A. If you want to pursue that, he'll try to help you. But it's not what happened."

"You don't know that."

"If it's a reprisal, they wouldn't try to make it look like a suicide. They'd make it as big and ugly as they could, and make d.a.m.ned sure Hugo knew why."

Joe Pitt stalked around the room, looking at things. "This place has been cleaned up. I asked you before if something was missing, and you didn't know. I know now what it is. It's the mess."

"But he wasn't messy," she said. "Downstairs each room looks like a department store window."

"Because he didn't live down there. He lived up here, in this suite. But there's nothing random, nothing out of its place up here. I know it wouldn't look like a room in a fraternity house, but this isn't the way it looked when he died, either. It's been sanitized. The only person who would have done that is the killer."

"You think the killer took the time to go through this whole suite wiping off prints and picking up fibers?"

"Yes, I do," he said. "But I think that what the shooter didn't want us to know about wasn't his prints. I think he was removing signs of the blond woman. The killer came in and shot Poole-one round, no struggle. At that point, he could have exited without much risk of leaving anything of himself. But instead he straightened the suite, put everything away, vacuumed the carpets. He missed a couple of blond hairs on the floor and stuck to Poole's clothes."

"The blond hairs on the suit don't mean somebody cleaned the place. Maybe that's all there were."

"You said the Mighty Maids were all black or Hispanic, and they cleaned the h.e.l.l out of this place twice every week. That takes hours of hard work, a lot of it on their hands and knees. So where are the fibers from their uniforms? Where are the dark hairs?"

"Oh, G.o.d," said Hobbes. He was right. d.a.m.n him. "What if she was what it was about?"

"Could be. Maybe some other man came here to take her-or take her back."

"I've got to find that girl."

6.

The girl felt some sadness, but she was satisfied. She had thoroughly experienced Dennis Poole, so she was not disappointed in herself. She was proud of herself for overcoming her shyness and fear in the hotel bar in Aspen, and being the first to speak. That alone was an accomplishment. She had found something about him appealing-his tall, slightly awkward body, the clothes he wore that seemed to be right out of the box, as though he had never worn anything all year but a business suit. She had sat in the bar at a small table near the window that looked out on the mountains, then feigned surprise to find him sitting nearby and said, "What a wonderful sky. I love the color of the sky just after sundown." How could he not reply?

After she had talked to him for a few minutes, she had found that she almost instantly knew what to say to him and how to say it. There had never been more than a few moments when she had needed to doubt herself. She had listened to him carefully, begun to acc.u.mulate a small trove of facts about who he was and what he liked, and then made herself the woman that he wanted. He owned a small, dull business and he was on vacation, so she became a perfect vacation companion. She was the lively girl who was always happy, always on the edge of laughter, ready to go to the next place just to see what was there.

She had experimented with liking him-pretended to find him more interesting than he was, better looking than he was-and found that after a couple of days she actually did like him. She looked back on it now and missed him. She remembered the cool, clear nights of early summer, when they walked out on the balcony of his suite and looked up at the stars and there seemed to be about three times as many as usual.

As she drove along the gently curving highway, she said aloud to the image of Dennis, "At least we had a good time." Her face felt so right when she said it that she held the expression, and flipped down the sun visor to look at her reflection in the makeup mirror.

Perfect. The full lips pouted, the sparkly blue eyes were wistful and wise. She revised the words slightly. "At least we had fun." The way the row of small white teeth touched the lower lip to say "fun" was worth going for.

She flipped the visor back up and returned her eyes to the road. The darker hair she had given herself made her look a bit more serious than she had looked as Tanya, too sophisticated to bleach her hair platinum blond. She liked the subtle reddish highlights.

She felt good today. There was something hopeful about driving south, away from rain and toward warmth and sunshine and flowers. She had saved enough money from the month with Dennis Poole to be happy for a while. As soon as she had met him, she had begun pointing a finger at expensive, shiny things in stores and wishing aloud. She had loved it when he had bought them for her, and had rewarded him with affection.

Sometimes she would be about to leave him for the spa or the pool and ask him to give her some money for tips or drinks. A couple of times she had taken money from his wallet while he was asleep. After he had persuaded her to visit him at his house in Portland, she had come with only one suitcase, let him talk her into staying longer, and got his permission to pay for the extra clothes she would need by borrowing one of his credit cards. Dennis had been a satisfying experience, but Dennis was over.

Who to be now? Being a brunette made her feel sedate, understated, aristocratic. Her new name should be something old-fashioned, even biblical, but Anglo-Saxon-no Catholic saints, and nothing faux French. Sarah would be good, or Rebecca. No, both were too common. Rachel. That was just about right.

She had always favored names that sounded like rich people's names, but nothing too heavy-handed. She didn't want to call herself a name that was also the name of a company: it would be hard to pa.s.s as a Ford or a Pillsbury. She thought about her new self for a few minutes, and decided that she should have roots in New England. Maybe a place-name. Stamford? No. Sturbridge. That felt right: Rachel Sturbridge-how do you do?

Rachel Sturbridge held the car to the south, and began to wonder where to stop. San Francisco was the next city she had heard about along the way, so she decided to aim for it and stop to see if it felt right. She drove half the night and reached the city at three A.M., A.M., then parked the car in a big structure near Union Square. She made her way downhill to the square, then walked around staring at the big buildings, the quiet, lighted entrances to hotels and the dark display windows of stores. She loved seeing a city late at night, after all of the superficial busyness and crowding and knotted traffic had been stripped away. She decided that she would stay. Then she returned to the parking structure and slept in the back seat of her car until people began starting the cars near hers and driving off. then parked the car in a big structure near Union Square. She made her way downhill to the square, then walked around staring at the big buildings, the quiet, lighted entrances to hotels and the dark display windows of stores. She loved seeing a city late at night, after all of the superficial busyness and crowding and knotted traffic had been stripped away. She decided that she would stay. Then she returned to the parking structure and slept in the back seat of her car until people began starting the cars near hers and driving off.

In the morning Rachel used her Tanya Starling identification to rent a small furnished house, then added the name of Tanya's roommate, Rachel Sturbridge, to the lease. That afternoon she rented a post office box in both names, then placed a fict.i.tious-business-name statement in the ad section of the Chronicle. Chronicle. It said that Rachel Sturbridge and T. Starling were doing business as Singular Aspects, and gave the post office box as the address. She went to City Hall and bought a business license for Singular Aspects, which she said on the form produced a "mail-order newsletter for alternative lifestyles." She was pleased with the fact that the description was utterly meaningless. It said that Rachel Sturbridge and T. Starling were doing business as Singular Aspects, and gave the post office box as the address. She went to City Hall and bought a business license for Singular Aspects, which she said on the form produced a "mail-order newsletter for alternative lifestyles." She was pleased with the fact that the description was utterly meaningless.

Before the banks closed at six she managed to start a Singular Aspects bank account with the two women as signatories and a deposit of four thousand dollars. At the end of each day for the next two days she made another cash deposit. When the balance reached twelve thousand dollars, she made out an application for a business credit card in the name of Singular Aspects. She flirted a little bit with the manager on duty, a young man named Bill, and he took the application without asking any embarra.s.sing questions.

Dennis Poole had been dead three days. On the way home that night she bought the Portland newspapers at a newsstand and searched for stories about what the police were doing, but there was no mention of an investigation. There was only a short obituary that said his death had been declared a homicide. Since there was no mention of a woman, she supposed that meant her part in the episode was over, and decided that in the future she would remember only the good parts.

The next morning Rachel went to a copy center and selected a pack of ten sheets of heavy white paper with high rag content and a blank CD. She paid for them at the counter, rented a computer, and went to a Web site that she had found once before. It was a fan site devoted to every aspect of the life of the actress Renee Stipple Penrose. There were pictures of her parents' home in Barnstable, Connecticut, including some taken by a camera aimed through the windows, pictures of her elementary school and her high school, and-because there was a controversy about her real birth date-a clear and sharp image of her birth certificate.

Rachel copied the image to the computer and removed the original names and dates without altering the signatures or seals. She copied the blank birth certificate onto the CD for future use, and put the CD into her purse. Then she selected a matching type font and filled in the form to record the birth of Rachel Martha Sturbridge twenty-five years ago, and printed the new certificate onto one of her sheets of official-looking paper.

Rachel still had a driver's license she had obtained in Illinois as Tanya Starling. Now she found a matching type font, typed her new name a few times, and printed it out on a sheet of thin white paper.

When she was in her house that night she patiently scratched the old name off the license with a razor blade. She took the printout with the name Rachel Martha Sturbridge on it, cut it out in a narrow strip, placed it in the groove on the license she had created with the blade, and used a drop of clear glue to hold it there. In the morning, when it was dry, she placed a laminating sheet over the front of the license, and trimmed it carefully.

Two days later she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles office, flashed her Illinois license and her birth certificate, took a written test, and received a new California driver's license in the name Rachel Martha Sturbridge. She was so pleased that on the way home she joined the Auto Club and applied for a library card.

She let a week pa.s.s before she placed an ad in the Chronicle Chronicle and sold Tanya Starling's car for fifteen thousand dollars. She deposited the check in the Singular Aspects account so Rachel Sturbridge would be able to write checks against it. Then she bought a six-year-old Nissan for five thousand in cash. The whole process of changing names was like watching a candle burn down and begin to gutter, and using its flame to light a new one before it went out. and sold Tanya Starling's car for fifteen thousand dollars. She deposited the check in the Singular Aspects account so Rachel Sturbridge would be able to write checks against it. Then she bought a six-year-old Nissan for five thousand in cash. The whole process of changing names was like watching a candle burn down and begin to gutter, and using its flame to light a new one before it went out.

She had made the change now, and it was time to think about the future. She needed to keep working at building her savings. Her goal was that someday she would be rich, and she knew that even though she was only at the beginning of the process, her progress was going to consist of hundreds of small decisions. For now, she had to keep her expenses under control and devote most of her time to finding the next man.

It had always seemed to her that the best kind of man wanted the sort of woman who went to plays and concerts and art exhibits, so she began to read the Datebook section of the paper and then buy tickets to events. While she was there she scanned the crowds for men who did not already have women attached to them. She liked being out, but even when she saw the right sort of man in the lobby before a play or a concert-or, more often, caught one looking at her-the event would be imminent, they both would have to find their way to widely separated seats, and the lights would go out. A few times, when she had seen a promising prospect, she had even stayed in the lobby afterward and given him a chance to find her. He never did.

Sometimes, late at night, she would go to the girl in the mirror and help her become Rachel Sturbridge. For her expeditions into high culture she had developed a rapt expression to indicate artistic appreciation. If she listened to a piece of cla.s.sical music it might include a satisfied nod or a slightly troubled look around the eyes, as though she were comparing the performance with an invisible score. But her best new look was a serene, smooth-faced expression that was at once benevolent and superior, the habitual demeanor of a just queen.

She decided to try expensive restaurants in the Union Square district. One evening she sat in the bar at Postrio having a martini before dinner, her coat on the stool beside her. She liked the bar because it served as a long, narrow anteroom, where every customer had to pa.s.s by on the way to the staircase leading down into the restaurant. There was a grill at the far end of the bar, where three chefs dodged flames under a big copper hood, and there were a few booths along the wall, where patrons ate informal versions of the food served downstairs. The French doors across from the bar opened into the lobby of the Prescott Hotel, and new people entered every few minutes. She watched for unaccompanied men, dismissed several, and then saw one who looked right.

Rachel smiled to herself as she sipped her martini, feeling the icy gla.s.s on her lips and then the fire of the vodka warming her as it moved down her throat. She pretended not to see him. He stood for a moment talking with the maitre d', then stepped into the bar.

She turned her head and looked up, her face a.s.suming its new regal expression. The man was tall, wearing a navy blue sport jacket and a pair of gray pants. It was one of the uniforms all men wore when they weren't actually working, and it would have been difficult for most women to evaluate him, but Rachel Sturbridge had become a shrewd appraiser. The coat was a good cut, the fabric was finely woven wool, and the tie was tasteful and expensive. He had come in through the French doors, not the street entrance, so he was undoubtedly staying at the hotel. Shoes and watches were the best indicators, but she could not see either just yet in this light. He surveyed the bar, looking for a seat.

She caught his eye. "n.o.body is sitting here." She indicated the bar stool next to hers. She took the coat onto her lap.

"Are you sure you don't mind?"