Nightlife (5 page)

After a time, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you.”

“Good,” she said. She leaned close and kissed him softly.

“I’ve even been trying to find ways to help you get your magazine started.”

“You’re sweet.” She kissed him again.

“While I was doing it I found out a couple of things that made me curious.”

“What kind of things?” She turned her body on the couch to face him. She could feel the hairs on her scalp rising. It wasn’t exactly fear, but an intense anticipation.

“Well, you said you had never been married.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m wondering if you changed your name at some point.”

She kept her eyes on his face. “You’ve hired somebody to investigate me?”

He smiled. “Now, please don’t get mad at me. It’s a normal thing to do if you’re thinking of making an investment in a start-up. I have a standing account at the Averill Agency in Dallas. Whenever I’m about to make a seed-money investment, they routinely do a quick rundown on the principal players, just to be sure none of them has a tail and a pitchfork. It’s no different from asking your mechanic to take a look at a car you’re buying.”

Rachel leaned forward, her eyes searching his. “And?”

“As you know, they didn’t find any problems, because there are no problems. But they did have trouble finding out much else about you. They said that either you’d had a marriage at some point that you forgot to mention, or maybe had petitioned for a name change.”

She stared at him coldly, sensing the urge to make him suffer. “Rachel Sturbridge isn’t the name I was born with. My family was well-off and respected, but it looked good only from the outside. From the inside, it wasn’t a group you would want to belong to. There wasn’t a lot of love.” She paused, as though bravely controlling her emotions. “What there was, was a lot of cruelty. After I grew up I spent years trying to get over it, and on the advice of my therapist, I severed the connection completely. Being really free of them meant using a different name, so I do. You’re the only person I’ve ever had to explain this to.”

He was embarrassed at his mistake. “Rachel, I’m sorry. I just cared so much about you that I couldn’t know enough.”

She stood up.

He looked horrified. “Please. I never imagined that talking to you about it would bring back bad memories. Stay with me.”

“I’m tired, and I’m going to sleep now. We can talk in the morning.” David had carried both of their suitcases into one of the bedrooms when he’d unloaded the car. Now she went into that room, took hers into the other bedroom, and quietly closed the door.

When she awoke in the morning she knew that two things were going to happen. One was that David Larson was going to buy her a big present. The other was that she was going back to San Francisco. She went into the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, and began to pull herself together. “I’m heartbroken,” she told the girl in the mirror. It was well said. She would use it.

During the time while he was in Austin she had allowed herself to grow overconfident. She had formed plans that carried them both years into the future. She had pictured them spending time in Europe together—maybe in the Greek islands, which looked beautiful and warm in the magazines, or Provence, which sounded in articles as though it existed solely to serve food and wine to people like her. She was sure David had accumulated enough money already. It seemed to her that the only reason he still traveled around chasing investments was that he’d had nothing better to do until he’d met Rachel Sturbridge. She could have made those years wonderful for him. But that was before he had betrayed her.

She watched herself in the mirror as she said, “I’m heartbroken” again. She meant it. He had told his stupid private detectives to pry into her private life looking for incriminating information, and she was just lucky they had not found anything. It had been a cold, calculating thing to do. Men always wanted you to do impulsive, risky things because you let your passion for them get too strong to resist. They wanted you to trust them completely, holding nothing at all back to protect yourself. But then, after your body and soul had gotten to be things they had, rather than things they wanted, they announced that they had reserved the right to be suspicious and cautious about you.

When David knocked and asked if she would go to breakfast with him, she called through the closed door, “No, you go ahead.”

Rachel spent the next hour working efficiently and methodically to make herself beautiful. She had started beautician’s school the summer she had turned sixteen, and had learned some cosmetology and hairdressing before she had missed a tuition payment. But she had learned her most valuable tricks years before that, in the long succession of beauty pageants her mother had entered her in beginning at age four. She had been born with good skin and small, symmetrical features, and she had a quick, practiced hand with a brush, eyeliner, and mascara.

She was good at dressing herself because she had a hard, objective eye. That was something else the pageant circuit had done for her. She could look at herself the way a contest judge would, with no sentimentality and no mercy. She accentuated her figure’s best points and hid the flaws. She tried all three dresses she had brought, chose the one that would give him the most haunting memory of her body, and put on spike heels.

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.
It had
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.

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

T
he 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.