Nightlife_ A Novel Part 5

"No. Her ad just had a phone number. She called Willis and brought the car to his house." He antic.i.p.ated the next question. "She was alone with him all that time. She wasn't kidnapped or under duress. If she had been in trouble, she could have told him about it, or driven to any police station."

Pitt said, "How about the bank account where she deposited his check? Do you have anything on that yet?"

"It was a business account at Regal Bank." Crowley handed Pitt a piece of paper. "Here's the address of the branch where she deposited it, the account number, and her home address."

"Great," said Pitt. "Thanks."

Hobbes calmly reached over and took the piece of paper from Joe Pitt.

"Could be better," Crowley said. "We called on her and found that she's moved on again. She had signed a lease for a house with a roommate named Rachel Sturbridge. They paid three months' rent in advance, according to the owner, a Mrs. Eve Halloran. She says they moved out about a week ago. The date is vague, because they left without telling her."

"Did she have a job while she was here?" asked Hobbes.

"I'm not exactly sure," Crowley said. "The two of them had run a d/b/a announcement in the paper and took out a license for a business called Singular Aspects. It lists a newsletter, which I a.s.sume was a catalog. If it was a store, they didn't stay long enough to open."

"That's what you think it was-a store?"

"I don't know. That's my guess, from the sound of it. I defer to you, though, Sergeant Hobbes. Doesn't it sound like a women's clothing store? Anyway, less than a month later, the bank account was closed and they had both moved on."

"That's the part we need to know," said Hobbes. "Where did they move to?"

"We've got nothing on that yet," said Crowley. "Neither of them left a forwarding address at the post office or with their landlady. Before they left, they closed their account at Regal Bank, so there's nothing there, either. They might easily have found a good location somewhere nearby, like San Mateo or Richmond, and moved. By now they could also be in China."

"Either way, Tanya Starling doesn't seem to be in any danger, and she certainly isn't dead," said Hobbes. "But she's still our only potential witness on why Dennis Poole is."

Pitt said, "Did Tanya buy another car before she left?"

"No. Rachel Sturbridge has one, and maybe they drove off in that." He handed a piece of paper to Pitt. "Here's the DMV printout on it. A six-year-old Nissan Maxima, black. License plate and VIN are supplied. It's registered to the address they rented here. So until she gets wherever she's going and reregisters it with a good address, we won't know where she is. If she's in-state, she probably won't get around to it until next year."

"Keep us in mind, will you, Doug?"

"Sure," said Crowley. "When we get anything more, you'll have it."

Catherine Hobbes said, "Thank you very much, Detective Crowley. Here's my card. There are numbers for my direct line, the homicide office, my cell, and my home. It doesn't matter what time of day it comes in, I would appreciate it if you'll call."

"Of course," said Crowley.

She and Pitt walked out of the police station, and Pitt drove the rental car to the house where Tanya Starling and Rachel Sturbridge had lived. As soon as Pitt found a parking s.p.a.ce at the foot of the long, inclining street, Catherine Hobbes got out and began to walk. Pitt locked the car and trotted to catch up. By the time he'd succeeded, he was winded.

"What's bothering you?" asked Pitt.

Catherine Hobbes walked along the street, her quick strides keeping her a half pace ahead of him so she wouldn't have to look at his fake concerned expression. "Nothing."

"Come on," he said. "You're going to give me a heart attack walking up this hill at this speed. Something's bothering you."

She stopped and looked at him. "We're not in some boy-and-girl relationship that requires your helping when something's bothering me. I'm a police officer working a homicide case. Your role is not to delve into my female sensitivities so you can talk me out of them. You're here with me only because my captain thought you might be able to contribute to the progress of the investigation. That was not an opinion I shared."

"It's Crowley, isn't it?"

"Do not not tell me I'm imagining things." tell me I'm imagining things."

"I won't. But-"

"I'm also not interested in being told it's not his fault because you knew each other twenty years ago, or because he's too old to get used to women in homicide, or because you two are from California and I'm not."

"Okay," he said. "It's just that it's a waste of time to get mad at me."

"I'm not."

"Or even at him."

"I'm not mad. I'm a woman cop. I'm used to being ignored, and to much, much worse. I'm looking for the house number."

"Okay," said Pitt. He followed her along the street for another half block, until they came to a narrow one-story house.

They walked up to the steps and Hobbes rang the bell, then listened for a moment to the door being unbolted and unlatched. It swung open to reveal a woman around sixty years old with dyed red hair wearing a pair of jeans with knee pads over them.

"Mrs. Halloran?"

"I've been waiting for you," the woman said. "I was just finishing up on the trim. Come on in, but don't touch any woodwork. Everything else is dry."

They went inside. The furniture in the small living room had been pushed together in the middle of the hardwood floor and covered with one large canvas tarpaulin. She pulled the canvas off on one side to uncover three chairs. "You must be Sergeant Hobbes."

"That's right," said Hobbes. "This is Mr. Pitt. He's a private investigator cooperating with us on this case."

It was not lost on Mrs. Halloran that Joe Pitt was handsome, and closer to her age than to Hobbes's. She kept her eyes on Pitt as she said, "Here, this is the only place we can sit right now." Mrs. Halloran sat on one of the chairs. "You said 'case.' Tanya Starling is involved in a case?"

"We're looking for her so we can ask her a few questions. A man she knew in Portland was the victim of a crime."

"What's his name?"

"His name was Dennis Poole."

"Oh, my goodness," said Mrs. Halloran. "No wonder she left in such a hurry. You mean you think she killed him, or that she's in danger?"

Catherine Hobbes allowed some of her frustration to show. "We just want to talk to her. She knew him, and we would like to know anything she can tell us. She left Portland, so we haven't been able to talk to her." Hobbes reached into her folder and pulled out a photograph. "Can you identify the woman in this picture?"

Mrs. Halloran held the picture a distance from her face, then close up, then farther away. "Yes. That seems to be Tanya. But you should try to get a better picture. It's so fuzzy."

"It's copied from a videotape. Did you talk to her much?"

"When I rented the house to her, we talked a bit. She said she was moving here from Chicago. Was that a lie?"

"No," said Hobbes. "Her last permanent address was in Chicago. We think she was only in Portland for a short visit."

"That makes sense. She had nothing much with her. Her roommate hadn't even arrived yet."

"What was the roommate's name?"

"Rachel Sturbridge."

"What was she like?"

"I never met her. She was going to arrive separately in a few days. I let Tanya sign the lease and add Rachel's name to it, but Tanya paid the rent and security deposit in advance with her money, and initialed the lease to agree to all of the provisions, so for the time being, she was my tenant. I a.s.sumed that later on, as a matter of course, I would meet the other one. But as a rule, when you rent to young people, you don't want to hang around all the time. You risk becoming a second mommy to them. And what you don't know won't hurt you."

"And you didn't see her when they moved, either?"

"No. They didn't tell me ahead of time, and if they had-I don't know-maybe I would have come to be sure they didn't leave the door unlocked or walk off with any of my furnishings, but they didn't anyway. They were perfectly nice. Later, when Tanya called and told me they had moved out, she said I could rent it to someone else right away. I asked if I could send her a refund at her new address, but she told me to keep the money for the trouble of renting it twice."

"Very thoughtful," said Catherine Hobbes. "Do you remember the date of the call?"

"Let's see," she said. "It must have been about a week ago."

"Did she say where she was calling from?"

"No, I don't think she did. She was in a hurry, and she said she was just taking the time to let me know about the vacancy, and had to go. I didn't want to keep her on the line."

Catherine Hobbes said, "Here's my card, Mrs. Halloran. We're very interested in talking with her, so if you hear from her again, or remember anything that might help us, please get in touch. You can call me collect. In fact, I'm going to add my home phone number so you can reach me anytime." She quickly wrote it on her card.

Mrs. Halloran took the card, glanced at it, and stuck it into the pocket of her jeans. "All right," she said.

"Thank you."

As soon as they had walked far enough from the house to avoid being overheard, Joe Pitt said, "Are you getting the same feeling I am?"

"Oh, yes. She knows somebody is looking for her, and she doesn't want to be found."

"This Rachel might be helping her lose the guy who killed Dennis Poole-if they use Rachel's car, and pay for things in Rachel's name, he'll have a hard time finding Tanya."

"But we won't," said Catherine Hobbes. "Now that we know about her it gives us two chances for a hit. When we find one, we'll have the other."

10.

Nancy Mills found her walks through Topanga Plaza relaxing. There were gangs of old people who did power walks every morning before the stores opened, going the length of the mall, then clambering up the stalled escalator to the upper galleries and striding along beside the railings. Nancy was more subtle than they were, but she had begun to use the place for conditioning too, weaving through the crowds after the stores opened.

Nancy Mills didn't go on shopping binges the way Tanya Starling often had, and Rachel Sturbridge did once or twice. Nancy still owned all of their new clothes from Aspen, Portland, and San Francisco, and at the moment, her activities were too simple to require a big wardrobe. But she liked to look at clothes.

It was Thursday morning. The plaza was sometimes unpleasantly crowded on weekends, but Thursday was still perfect. She was in Bloomingdale's trying to decide which jar of bath salts had the right scent when she became aware that a man at the next counter was staring at her. He was in his early thirties, well groomed and nicely dressed. He wore a dark sport coat and shined Italian shoes. She a.s.sumed he must be a store floor manager or a salesman for one of the cosmetics lines, but she couldn't see from this angle whether he had a name tag without actually staring at him. Part of his job was to hang around being friendly to customers, so she dismissed him from her mind.

The saleswomen behind the counters were eager because Thursday mornings were slow, so one of them came right away to sell her the bath salts while another tried to raise the stakes by showing her the rest of that company's line of products. Nancy resisted the pitch and paid in cash, as she always did. As one of the women counted out her change and the other put her receipt in the bag, Nancy became aware that the man had not gone away.

She turned to look, their eyes met, and she had a horrible moment when she wondered if she knew him, then another when she had to endure his smile. It was at once shy and hopeful. There was even a trace of the conspiratorial, as though he and she shared a secret. He looked so familiar. Could she possibly know him?

She turned away, irritated. She wanted to say aloud, "I wasn't looking because I was interested. I just sensed that someone was staring." She took her bag, pivoted away from him, and walked back into the mall. She moved past the first couple of stores, then felt an uncomfortable sensation. She stopped and looked at the next store's window display, then quickly turned to walk to the other side of the mall.

She had been right. There he was again, a grown-up, smartly dressed man, following her around a mall like an awkward teenager. She supposed she should be flattered by the attention, but his behavior was very bad news: she had shortened her hair, dyed it a dull shade of brown, and worn clothes that weren't supposed to be eye-catching. All that seemed to have accomplished was to make her appealing to creepy, awkward men.

Nancy turned again, intending to leave him behind, but he was already at her shoulder, so when she turned she was nearly face-to-face with him. "Excuse me," she said, and stepped to the side.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I was almost sure I recognized you, and I wanted to check. I'm-"

"I don't think we know each other," she said, and took a step.

"Regal Bank? San Francisco?"

She froze. Now she remembered who he was.

"I was the man who helped you open your commercial account at the bank. Bill Thayer. I'm the branch manager."

"I do remember you," said Nancy. "What are you doing down here?"

"I have family here. I'm visiting. What about you? Are you expanding into the Los Angeles area? I still remember the name of your business-Singular Aspects. Right?"

He didn't seem to know that she had closed the account. She had to be extremely careful, because if he got curious, he could look things up when he got back to the office. "No, actually, we decided that San Francisco wasn't right for us, and we're thinking about starting the business here instead. Well, nice to see you." She stepped off.

"Miss Starling? Wait."

She stopped walking. This was awful. She had forgotten that to open the account in San Francisco she had called herself Tanya Starling so she could cash Tanya Starling's check from the old account in Chicago. This Bill Thayer didn't know it yet, but he already possessed enough information to destroy her. He had seen her in this mall in Woodland Hills, just a few blocks from where she lived.

He said, "I wondered if you would have dinner with me tonight."

"Gee, Bill," she said. "I can't tonight."

"I know it's kind of sudden, but I won't be here long, so I thought I'd better take a chance."

She was afraid: she was afraid to be with him, and afraid to let him walk away. She knew that dinner was impossible. He would go to his parents' house and say he was going to miss dinner tonight because he had a date. Unless they were comatose, one of them would say, "What's her name?" He would tell them who she was and where he had met her. She smiled. "I do have some time now, though, if you'd like to have coffee."

"That sounds good," said Thayer.

"Do you have a car?"

"You can't go anywhere in L.A. without one. I rented it at the airport."

"Then you can drive. There's a really great little place on Topanga just south of the freeway."

They walked out of the plaza to the parking lot. His rental car was parked about a hundred yards off, almost by itself. When she saw it she was surprised. It was a Cadillac that looked enormous to her. "Wow. Do you drive your mom and dad around when you visit?"

"Not much," said Thayer. "They think I've gotten rusty driving up north, so they don't trust me. The big car is for taking clients around. Whenever I come down I usually try to see a couple."

They drove down Topanga past the freeway, and she said, "Keep going. It's quite a bit farther, toward Malibu."

"Is it on the left or right?"