Nightlife: A Novel

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 assume 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 cassette 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 hell did you do to her?”

Pitt went to the door ahead of him and reached for the knob 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.