Nightlife: A Novel

20

Catherine Hobbes sat in the homicide office of the North Hollywood station. She had borrowed a table beneath the whiteboard where someone had drawn a crude diagram of Mary Tilson’s apartment, with a body that looked like a gingerbread man. She shut the sounds of ringing telephones and the voices of the detectives out of her mind, opened the file, and looked at each of the crime scene photographs again, and then at the list of fingerprints from the two apartments that had been identified so far. There was the copy of the print that belonged to Nancy Mills. Staring at it gave Catherine a strange feeling: this was more than something that the woman had touched. It was more intimate, the touch itself.

Catherine had spent a career listening to the confident voices of experts who assured her that there were no mysteries, and that the physical evidence always told the story. This was a physical world, every cubic centimeter crammed with molecules. Any motion created a disturbance that left a trail, and anything the killer touched stuck to him. They were right about Tanya: she was leaving a growing collection of trace evidence behind her. But where the hell was she?

Jim Spengler came into the room. “I brought you some coffee.” He set a white foam cup on the table, then sat in the folding chair beside her.

“Thanks. I’ll bet when you do interrogations, you’re always the good cop.”

“I would have brought it sooner, but I’ve been checking to see if there have been any other homicides since she got here that might have something to do with her.” He looked at the photographs in front of her. “I heard you were in the lab half the night. Anything new?”

“No. I think Mary Tilson let her in, and they went together into the kitchen. I think Miss Tilson was turned to the left, maybe getting something out of the cupboard or refrigerator. When she turned away, I think Nancy Mills took the butcher knife out of the holder and stabbed her.”

“You don’t think a man did that?”

“I’m looking at the list of prints Toni’s people found. I don’t see any male prints anywhere in the apartment, identified or not. I don’t see a forced entry.”

“So she let him in.”

“A sixty-year-old single woman like Mary Tilson is going to be nervous about letting a man into the apartment if she’s alone.”

“So Nancy Mills was with him. She let them both in.”

“Even if the man is with Nancy Mills, he doesn’t go into the kitchen with Mary Tilson and wait until she turns her back.”

“Why not?”

“Because she won’t let him, and if he comes, she won’t turn her back. If a single woman comes over to see another single woman, they both might go into the kitchen while they talk. The guest at least offers help while the hostess gets refreshments. If it’s a stranger, a man, he doesn’t go in the kitchen, he stays in the living room. If it’s a man with Nancy Mills, the one who goes into the kitchen is still Nancy, not the man.”

“Why not both?”

“Because. It’s just the way it is. I’ve been a single woman for long enough so I know all the moves.” She shrugged. “And there’s no evidence that there was a man.”

“You’re also assuming that the stab in the back came first, not the throat.”

“That’s right. If you cut the throat first, the victim is as good as dead. If you stab her first, maybe she’s still up to making some noise, even fighting. That’s when you have to cut her throat—to keep her from yelling. We know the stab in the lower chest was last, because that’s where the knife ended up.” She glared at him. “I know what you’re going to say next: No woman would do that.”

“I was still back on the part about single-woman etiquette. You said you’ve been single for a long time, as though you weren’t always. Have you ever been married?”

She frowned. She had been careless, because she hadn’t been thinking about herself, or about him: she had been thinking about the sequence of events at the crime scene. “Yeah,” she said. “I was.” She avoided his eyes. Could he possibly not know that bringing up a woman’s failed marriage would cause her pain?

“When were you married?”

“None of your business.” She still didn’t look at him.

“Come on. What am I going to do, gossip? Nobody knows you down here, and all I asked was when. That’s a public record. I could look it up.”

She turned to him, feigning boredom with the topic. “A long time ago. We were young, just out of college. It was a classic starter marriage. After a couple of years we both started to realize that we’d made a mistake.”

“What was your reason?”

All right, she thought. Evasion would just prolong the badgering. “He had a problem with the ‘forsaking all others’ part.”

“So you got a divorce. And that’s how you got to be an expert on women living alone.”

“Correct. Divorce is a costly way to find out how to choreograph murders of single women, but it works.”

“Okay,” he said. “For the moment, we don’t have any sign it was a man. But my gut is telling me there is one.” He looked over the lab reports.

From across the room Al Ramirez, one of the officers who had been at the apartment building, called out, “Detective Hobbes? There’s a call for you from your department. Captain Farber.”

She stood. “That’s my boss. Where can I take it?”

“That phone on the desk in the corner. I transferred it.”

“Thanks.” She stepped over and picked it up. “Mike?”

She noticed that Jim Spengler had found something to do that kept him nearby, in earshot. The captain said, “Hi, Cath. What’s up?”

“Tanya Starling was here in Los Angeles, using the name Nancy Mills. She seems to have pushed a man off an eighth-floor balcony at the Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills the night before last.”

“How do you know it was her?”

“She got herself on another hotel security camera.”

“Pushing him?”

“No. Picking him up in a bar earlier that night. The LAPD released a picture of her with him. She seems to have seen it and panicked. She packed up, cleaned her apartment, killed the woman in the apartment across the hall from hers, and went off in the victim’s car.”

“You really think she’s doing all of this herself?”

“You sound just like Jim Spengler, the homicide detective in charge of the case.” She looked at Spengler, who shrugged. “Who also sounds like Joe Pitt, and everybody else. I can place her in Dennis Poole’s hotel room in Aspen with a picture and witnesses, and her hair places her in his house. I have pictures that can put her in a room in the Hilton hotel with the second victim, Brian Corey, and a fingerprint that places her in the apartment where Mary Tilson was murdered. What I can’t do is find a single bit of evidence that there was an unknown man with her, or after her.”

“I’ve seen a few pros who could come looking for her, kill witnesses, and take the evidence with them. I’m just saying, don’t rule out the man just yet. I assume the LAPD has the car’s description and plates out to every department.”

“Yes. I think we’re about twelve hours behind her. I think she’ll get as far as she can in a day or two, and then dump it.”

“So what do the L.A. cops need you for?”

“I suppose they don’t. I’d like to stay at least another day in case the car is found and she’s still in it.”

“All right. You’ve got a day. And I know how I want you to spend it. We still don’t know for sure that Dennis Poole’s murder wasn’t some kind of reprisal against his cousin Hugo—whether the girl did it, or someone helped her, or someone came for Dennis and she became an inconvenient witness.”

“How can I eliminate a reprisal against Hugo Poole?”

“Find out if Hugo Poole is fighting back.”

Catherine Hobbes parked her rental car on Sheldrake Avenue and dialed the number of the homicide office on her cell phone.

“Spengler.”

“It’s me. I’m on Sheldrake and I can see the theater.”

“I hear you.”

“All right. Here goes.” She put the cell phone into the compartment on the side of her purse without ending the call, got out of the car, and walked toward the old movie theater. Long experience made her dislike being on foot and alone in this kind of neighborhood: there was nobody else walking, and there seemed to be no place to take a defensive position, only big brick office buildings with bars across their doorways. She considered the possibility that Hugo Poole cast such a big shadow that it kept minor predators away from his door.

When she reached the front of the theater, a tall, muscular man about thirty-five years old was waiting on the other side of the glass with a set of keys. He unlocked the door and held it open for her, then scanned up and down the street before he closed and locked it again.

“I’m Sergeant Hobbes, Portland Police.”

“I know.”

“And you are—?”

“We’re not in Portland.”

The man turned, and she followed him into a big, ornate old lobby with an empty glass candy counter and faded art deco murals on the walls. He climbed a carpeted staircase to the upper hallway. On both ends of the hallway were loges, but in the middle there was a wall of dark polished hardwood. It took her a moment to see that there were two doors cut into the wood. One had worn gold letters that said PROJECTION, and the other was unmarked. The man knocked on that one, and a muffled voice said, “Come in.”

The man held the door open for Catherine Hobbes. “Thanks, Otto,” said the voice inside, and Catherine entered.

Hugo Poole stood behind a big old desk that must have been part of the theater’s original furnishings. He came around it, smiling. “Hello, Catherine. Or is it Cathy?”

“It’s Sergeant.”

“Oh. Should I be asking to see a warrant?”

“I’m just here to chat. When I called, I figured you would have Joe Pitt with you. Is he on his way?”

“No. I paid him off, and he went back to gambling full time.” Hugo Poole looked at her suspiciously, and for a moment she wondered if he had sensed that her question had a personal interest behind it. But he said, “I don’t know if you’re wearing a wire or not. I often have Otto frisk visitors who might mean us harm. With you that policy seemed fraught with difficulties.”

“Yes,” she said. “Fraught.”

“So I’ll have to assume you are wired.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Are you here to tell me you’ve finally caught Tanya Starling?”

“No, I’m here because a disturbing suggestion keeps coming up as we search for her.”

“What’s that?”

“She seems to be doing things that some of my colleagues believe she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do—at least alone. They think that your cousin Dennis was killed by some man who was trying to hurt you, and she was either a witness or an accomplice.”

Hugo Poole stared at her unhappily, but said nothing.

She said, “Two days ago, another man she had been with in a hotel fell off an eighth-floor balcony. There are pictures of her on the hotel security tapes, just as there were with your cousin Dennis. The day after that, the woman who lived across the hall from her was stabbed to death with a butcher knife. LAPD is saying that it seems as though a dangerous, angry man is looking for her, and killing anyone who tries to protect her.”

“I’ve heard that theory.”

“What do you think of it?”

“Not much.” He stared into her eyes. “But I don’t know much about these things.”

“No?”

“No. You’re the cop. I’m just a small businessman. But it seems to me that all of these theories are based on the idea that women don’t kill people.”

“True.”

“It seems to me your colleagues aren’t willing to see anything that isn’t statistically likely, because they’re afraid of looking stupid.”

“You could be right. But it’s hard to prove that somebody isn’t after her. And the only person anybody can think of who has a motive to hunt for her, and might have found it necessary to kill anyone near her, is you.”

“I haven’t been out of town since I was in Portland with you.”

“The last two were in Los Angeles. The hotel was right up there on Wilshire.”

“I haven’t been in any hotels lately. You said there are pictures of her on the security tapes. Did you see any pictures of me?”

“No. But I didn’t see any pictures of anyone else, either.”

“Then she did it herself.”

Catherine hesitated. “I’ll be honest with you, Hugo, but I need you to be honest with me too. I think she’s the only one. But if there’s anything going on down here that would have made someone kill your cousin, I need to know about it. Now.”

Hugo Poole shook his head and held out his hands. “I don’t have any active enemies that I know about. I haven’t heard a word from anybody taking credit for Dennis and threatening me. And I didn’t kill any of these people or pay anybody to do it.”

“I noticed that you didn’t say that you’ve never killed anyone.”

“And I noticed that the cops haven’t been able to find one young girl in all this time, even though she’s been leaving bodies all over the place.”

“She’ll be found. Be sure of that.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

She looked at him closely. “No. I just had to check and see if you knew anything I didn’t.”

He walked to the door and held it open for her. “Then you’d better be going. The traffic gets bad in this part of town right about this time of the afternoon.”

“Well, thanks for your time, Hugo. Take care.”

She walked past him into the carpeted upper level of the theater and let Otto conduct her to the front door. When Hobbes was outside and walking toward her car, she took her cell phone out of her purse and pretended to dial it. Then she said in a voice too low to be audible beyond a few feet, “Did you get all that?”

Jim Spengler’s voice said, “Sure. I haven’t heard the recording, of course, but it should be fine.”

“Thanks for doing it,” she said. “Not that it got us anything.”

“Do you think he was lying?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t see any sign that he was lying, and I’m good at spotting it. I think he was actually glad to see me at first, because he thought I’d come to tell him we had Tanya Starling.” She reached her car. “Well, I’m at my car. I’ll be there in a half hour or so.”

“Wait,” said Spengler. “I’ve got news.”

“What is it?”

“Remember that I was checking other homicides that happened since she came to town? Well, after you left, the detective who was working on another case came to talk to me. He was investigating the murder of a young man a couple of weeks ago. The victim was a bank branch manager from San Francisco named William Thayer. He was here to visit his family. He was found shot in the head in a picnic area in the hills above Malibu. His car was found in the parking lot of the Topanga Plaza, about a mile from the apartment building where Nancy Mills lived. It seems the dead guy was the manager of the bank branch where Tanya Starling and Rachel Sturbridge had a joint account.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ll be there soon.”

Inside the lobby of the Empire Theater, Otto locked the front door again. He watched Detective Hobbes get into her car and drive away, then turned to see Hugo Poole standing behind him, watching too. Hugo asked, “Did she say anything to you on her way out?”

“No. Anything I need to know?”

Hugo Poole nodded. “Yeah. All this time has gone by, and they’re no closer to finding the woman who killed my cousin than they were two months ago.”

“They’re not?”

“No. She was back here to see if I did it. She’s starting over.”

“Is there something you want done to speed this up?”

“See if you can reach Calvin Dunn. Tell him I want him.”