Nightlife_ A Novel Part 4

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. AVERILL AGENCY: CONFIDENTIAL. It had It had Sturbridge, Rachel 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. 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!"

The girl half-turned to go inside, and Detective Hobbes froze the tape. The blond woman was held in place, her image quivering slightly, a band of static moving upward from the bottom of the screen, disappearing, then reappearing at the bottom. Her face was attractive but not distinctive-just small, regular features. She seemed to be one of those women whose eyelashes and brows were light, so that her eyes disappeared into her face until she put on her makeup each morning.

Detective Hobbes turned to look down at Hugo Poole, her expression controlled. "Well, Mr. Poole? Have you seen her before?"

"Never." He kept staring at the girl's image, scowling.

Joe Pitt asked, "How did you get this tape?"

"Dennis Poole had been on vacation until two weeks before he died," said Hobbes. "His credit card slips gave us the hotel in Aspen where he had been staying. We asked the hotel for their security tapes, and I went down to watch them. The ones from early in his stay were all erased, but a few of the later ones survived. This is the clearest, I'm afraid."

"Do you know who she is yet?" asked Pitt.

"Her name is Tanya Starling. She was registered at the hotel for two days before he arrived. After he had been there for about three days she canceled her room and moved in with him."

"Did the hotel have a home address for her?"

"Yes," she said. "An apartment in Chicago. The phone number was out of service, so we asked the Chicago police to find out whether the number had been changed, but the whole account was closed. They checked with the company that manages the place and found she had moved out before she left for Colorado. She left no forwarding address."

"Is the apartment still vacant?"

"No such luck. It's a fancy high-rise with a view of the lake, and there was a waiting list. They cleaned and repainted it right away and new people moved in a couple of days later. There's no chance of lifting prints now."

Hugo Poole broke his silence. "It's not right."

Catherine Hobbes frowned. "What's not right, Mr. Poole?"

"I know you don't like me, but I'm trying to tell you something about my cousin."

"And I a.s.sume you don't like me, but I'm listening."

"The girl shouldn't be like that."

"Like what?"

"She's wrong for Denny. He was a forty-two-year-old computer geek. He had a stupid laugh, he was tall in the wrong way-kind of big-footed and narrow-shouldered. He didn't talk about anything women could stand to listen to."

Joe Pitt said, "That sounds like a million guys, most of them married. If she moved in, she was interested."

"Too good-looking," said Hugo Poole. "When I saw him with women, they were always on the same step of the food chain that he was on. She should be a nice fat girl with bad teeth."

Catherine Hobbes studied Hugo Poole. "What do you think was going on? Do you think she's a hooker?"

"I doubt it. She was with him for, like, three weeks," said Hugo. "He'd have died broke and still owed her money."

"That's what I thought," said Hobbes. "Besides, the Chicago police would probably have picked up that kind of information. She could have been some single woman willing to give a guy like Dennis a little slack. His spending a lot of money on her would be flattering. She was on vacation, so the rules and standards sometimes slip a little. Somebody she wouldn't go out with at home might do for an evening in a strange place."

"Okay," said Hugo. "Lightning strikes and guys like Dennis get lucky. But there's no way a woman like that would stay for more than one night unless something besides Dennis was the attraction."

"All right, you two have convinced me," said Pitt. "There was a hidden reason why she was with him. So what was it? If she moved out of her fancy apartment in Chicago and took off for Colorado, maybe she was hiding. Maybe Dennis got killed by somebody who was after her."

"You mean an old boyfriend or a jealous husband?" said Hugo. "Dennis Poole killed by a jealous husband?"

"It might explain what she was doing moving in with him," said Catherine Hobbes. "Living with somebody who's paying for everything makes a woman hard to spot. She could also have been the one who killed him."

Pitt said, "Do you know whether any of his money is gone?"

"Nothing so far," said Hobbes. "He had some charges from jewelry stores, and some women's clothing stores. We've found about twenty thousand dollars' worth."

"Are you sure he was the one who made all of the charges?" asked Pitt.

"He was alive on those dates," Hobbes said. "And he didn't report a lost credit card."

"Then I'll go with the odds," said Pitt.

"What are they?" asked Hugo.

Pitt said, "That when you have a murder scene and a woman is missing, it's not because she was the perpetrator. Usually when you find her, she's the second victim."

"Thanks for coming up to Portland and cooperating with us, Mr. Poole," said Catherine Hobbes as she turned off the tape and took the ca.s.sette out of the VCR. "I'm sure that Mr. Pitt will let you know the minute we find anything else." She walked out of the interrogation room.

A half hour later, Catherine Hobbes sat alone in the interrogation room in front of the monitor, watching the videotape of herself, Hugo Poole, and Joe Pitt watching the hotel security tape. She studied the reactions of both men to everything that was seen or said. Then she got to the part she had been waiting for: the sight of herself walking out of the room.

She watched the tape of Hugo Poole as he stood up and looked at Pitt. "What the h.e.l.l did you do to her? her?"

Pitt went to the door ahead of him and reached for the k.n.o.b to open it. "I went to work for you."

"I was expecting her not to warm up to me. This was about you. Whatever you're doing to her, you ought to either cut it out or do it better."

On the monitor, Catherine Hobbes watched the two men walk out the door. If either of them had anything enlightening to say about the murder of Dennis Poole, he had not been foolish enough to say it inside the Portland Police Bureau.

8.

Rachel Sturbridge emptied the vacuum cleaner bag into the garbage dumpster outside her rented house. She went inside, put on disposable rubber gloves, and walked one last time through her house with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels. She stood at the window that faced north. Between two apartment buildings she could just see the taller office buildings along Market Street. She stepped to the side, sprayed the gla.s.s, and wiped it once more. It was important to be sure that she had not missed any surface as smooth as a windowpane.

She sprayed and wiped all of the handles, k.n.o.bs, and latches, then took broad swipes over all of the flat surfaces where she might have rested her fingertips in the past few weeks. If David Larson had been lying about calling off his detectives, the least she could do was to deny them the gift of her fingerprints.

Rachel took a final look at the furniture that Mrs. Halloran, the landlady, had supplied with the house, trying to find any hairs that she might have left on a cushion. She wrote "Eve Halloran" on an envelope, slipped her house key into it, and left it on the mantel. Then she picked up her suitcase, went out the door, and pressed the lock b.u.t.ton. Only after she was outside the house and in her car did she take off her thin rubber gloves.

She was out on Highway 101 by noon, driving south, away from the city. San Francisco had been a terrible disappointment to her, and she wanted to get away, but she had no destination in mind. Today it seemed to Rachel that the world was a cold and treacherous place, and the only act that was appealing was to keep moving.

For a few hours she drove and thought about her dissatisfaction with David Larson. He was a foolish man, one who had no idea what a wonderful future he had thrown away when he had betrayed Rachel Sturbridge's trust. He really deserved to die, and it bothered her that she had been forced to let him go. It didn't seem fair.

When she began to feel hungry, she looked at the clock on the dashboard and noticed that it was five o'clock. She stopped at a restaurant in Pis...o...b..ach and stared out at the highway while she ate, wishing she could see the ocean.

She refilled the gas tank and drove all the way to the Los Angeles County line before she stopped again. She found a hotel off the Ventura Freeway in the west end of the San Fernando Valley and registered with her Rachel Sturbridge credit card. When she awoke in the morning, she showered, ate, and dressed, then settled her bill in cash. It was time to begin making herself safe from whatever problems David Larson might have caused.

She needed to be anonymous for a time while she rested and decided what she wanted to do next, and the nondescript neighborhood where she had stopped looked like a good place for that. All of Los Angeles seemed featureless to her, a vast sameness. A young, white middle-cla.s.s woman could avoid notice for a very long time if she paid attention and didn't do anything stupid. She rented an apartment in Woodland Hills not far from the Topanga Canyon shopping mall by putting down money for the first month, last month, and security deposit in cash.

She went to a copying store, just as she had in San Francisco, rented a computer and printer, and took out the CD where she had stored the blank birth certificate. During the long drive from San Francisco she had been thinking of using the name Veronica, but the girl who waited on her was pretty and energetic, and she was wearing a badge that said, "Nancy Gonzales, Sales a.s.sociate." The name Nancy seemed cheerful, so that was the one that she chose. She filled in the blank with the name Nancy Mills.

Next she bought a hair dye kit and lightened her hair again, then went to a salon to have it cut. She had worn it long and loose as Rachel Sturbridge, so now it had to be shorter. Long hair gave her an advantage with men, but she had decided it would be better if she didn't attract any more of them for a while. On the way home, she went to an optometrist's shop in a strip mall and bought some nonprescription contact lenses in different eye colors.

Two days later, when she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to apply for a new driver's license, she wore the brown contacts, so in her license picture she had brown eyes and shoulder-length, light brown hair. She thought of the look as drab and ordinary, which was exactly what she wanted.

She sold Rachel Sturbridge's car through the Pennysaver Pennysaver to a woman she told she needed money to pay off a credit card debt. She could walk to restaurants, movie theaters, and even a grocery store from her apartment, so she decided that she could do without a car for the moment. Nancy Mills needed quiet and anonymity and solitude. She was disillusioned by her experience with David Larson, and had no desire to go anyplace where men might see her and talk to her, so she stayed away from health clubs, restaurants that had bars, and other spots where she had found men before. to a woman she told she needed money to pay off a credit card debt. She could walk to restaurants, movie theaters, and even a grocery store from her apartment, so she decided that she could do without a car for the moment. Nancy Mills needed quiet and anonymity and solitude. She was disillusioned by her experience with David Larson, and had no desire to go anyplace where men might see her and talk to her, so she stayed away from health clubs, restaurants that had bars, and other spots where she had found men before.

After her first week in Los Angeles, Tanya Starling and Rachel Sturbridge had been erased. Nancy Mills was already nearly invisible. She would wait and watch and see if something troublesome had followed her from San Francisco.

9.

Catherine Hobbes and Joe Pitt walked down the hall of the San Francisco police station, watching the numbers over the doors until they came to 219.

The door was open, so Catherine stepped inside. There were several desks in the room, where plainclothes officers gazed at computer screens or talked on telephones. She approached a group of three who were leaning over to look at a file opened on a desk, and said to them, "I'm looking for Detective Crowley."

"I'm Crowley. Welcome to San Francisco," said a tall, thin cop with a bald head. He straightened and held out his hand. "Are you Sergeant Hobbes?"

She flashed a smile and shook his hand. Crowley looked over her shoulder expectantly, and she remembered Joe Pitt. "This is Mr. Pitt, who is conducting an investigation for the victim's family. Do you mind talking to both of us?"

Detective Crowley shook his head, then reached past her, his arm almost touching her shoulder, and shook Pitt's hand enthusiastically. "Not at all. I've known Mr. Pitt for about a hundred years. How you been, Joe?"

Pitt said, "Can't complain, Doug. I hear you've got Tanya Starling's car."

"Well, we've found out where it is. We haven't impounded it. She sold it here about four days after you lost track of her in Portland. There was an ad in the Chronicle. Chronicle. The man who bought it is named"-he picked up a written report and scanned it-"Harold Willis. He bought it for fifteen thousand." The man who bought it is named"-he picked up a written report and scanned it-"Harold Willis. He bought it for fifteen thousand."

Pitt asked, "Was that a good deal?"

"It was close to the high blue book price, so it wasn't a steal or anything. She wasn't just unloading it fast."

"And did Harold Willis recognize the photographs of Tanya Starling I sent to you?" asked Catherine Hobbes.

"Yes. He said it was definitely her. She went on a test drive with him, took his check, made out a bill of sale, signed over the registration, and wished him luck. That took maybe two hours, so he had plenty of time to look."

"Where did the sale take place?" asked Hobbes. "Her place?"