Nightlife (18 page)

Mrs. Campbell took out her wallet. “All I have is a hundred-dollar bill.” She held it out, sensing a victory.

“I don’t have that much change.”

Mrs. Campbell looked triumphant. “Then you’ll have to come back for the money tomorrow.”

“But I’ll have to pay when I go back. The managers count the receipts against the orders every night, and everything has to add up.”

Mrs. Campbell took a breath, but the pregnant woman said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get it this time, and Julie can take my turn tomorrow.” She walked over to a desk, opened a drawer, and took out a purse. Tyler waited, avoiding Mrs. Campbell’s eyes while the pregnant woman counted out the money, hesitated, then added three dollar bills. “And that’s for you.”

“Thanks.” The amount of money didn’t matter now. She had saved him.

Mrs. Campbell snapped, “I wouldn’t tip him. He didn’t bring extra salsa or extra hot sauce, or even enough extra napkins.”

Tyler clenched his jaw and turned toward the door. He could feel his cheeks burning in anger and humiliation. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to go to the trunk of his Mazda, take out the tire iron, come back in, and swing it through her skull. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even say anything back to her. She was in his parents’ church.

As he reached the door, she called, “I’ll be talking to your parents about the way you do your job, and the way you treat your elders.”

As he opened the door and stepped out, he heard a voice say, “Oh, Julie.” He closed the door behind him, walked quickly to his car, got inside, and started it. In the car it was quiet, and a stream of cool, breathable air surrounded him. The car was a place of sanctuary. He put the transmission into drive and moved ahead a few feet, but he saw Mrs. Campbell come out the door and step toward him. He quickly pulled out into traffic and moved up the street away from her.

Tyler drove around the first corner, then came along the back of the bus station, turned right again and looked at the front entrance. The pretty young woman he had seen was gone. He wasn’t sure why he had felt he needed to look at her again, and then he knew. At that moment he had felt reckless enough to offer her a ride. It was probably a good thing that he had missed her, instead of suffering the embarrassment of having her look at him with contempt.

Tyler charged that loss against Mrs. Campbell too. She had held him up until the pretty woman had disappeared, as though Mrs. Campbell was acting on behalf of the church. He knew the young woman was nearby, probably waiting inside the station out of the sun, but he had no more time. Already he was going to have to apologize to the other people who worked at El Taco Rancho for taking such a long time. The worst part was that what he really hated was not Mrs. Campbell. It was the way his parents had put him in the power of all of the people like Mrs. Campbell.

He knew that she really would corner his parents after church next Sunday and tell them that he was lazy and slow and disrespectful, and hint at causes for it that were worse. She would tell other people too, and he would see them looking at him with suspicion. His father and mother wouldn’t defend him. They never did, and never had. They would believe Mrs. Campbell. Even if all four other women in that office said he was a good person and a responsible worker, it would make no difference, because Mrs. Campbell was saved, and the others weren’t. They were members of false churches.

Tyler was sixteen years old and working full-time by himself while his parents went on vacation. He always got good grades at school and had competed all winter on the wrestling team and started all spring at second base, but they would believe that rotten old bitch instead of him. They would punish him, take something away from him. It would probably be his car, because they knew he loved his car. It had been his mother’s for several years, but now it was his on the condition that he worked all summer for it.

Maybe they would even have a conference with Pastor Edmonds. Then he would have a chance to add on new punishments for Tyler too. They had done it when he had gone with Diane O’Hara to that party, because she was a Catholic. And then they had searched his room and found that magazine. Tyler’s parents were gullible and weak and more worried about what a lot of people in the church thought than they were about their son. They had never protected him from anything—unfair teachers, the older guys who beat him up after school, people who said things about him.

He wished he could kill Mrs. Campbell and get away with it, but he knew he was being foolish to think about it. He was only concentrating on her because he didn’t quite want to face the fact that the ones who most deserved to die were his parents. They had done what Joseph’s brothers had done to him in the Bible—delivered him into the hands of his enemies—only they had done it over and over again all his life. He wished he could kill all of them, all of the tormentors and the betrayers who told him what to do and never left him alone.

Tyler made it back to El Taco Rancho, swung into his space near the dumpster, and trotted inside. It was already one-thirty, and the lunch rush was over. Nobody seemed to care that he was late. Danny and Stewart were busy scraping the griddle clean, and the girls were all refilling salt shakers and napkin dispensers in the space beneath the television set on the wall. Maria stepped up on a chair to change the channel to a station where a woman dressed up as a judge shouted at people who wanted a divorce.

Tyler started wiping down the tables and chairs with a dirty rag. A few customers straggled in while he worked, but most of them only wanted cold drinks, so one of the girls would leave the television set to draw the drinks and take the money. After a while, when Tyler was mopping, the sound of the television changed. Instead of voices there was urgent music. He looked up and saw the words “Breaking News” in red on an orange background. He stopped and watched.

There were two pictures of the pretty woman he had seen at the bus station. One had long blond hair, and the other much darker brown than she had now, but it was definitely the same woman. The news man was calling her a fugitive, armed and dangerous. Tyler’s chest expanded with excitement. He had seen her. He knew where she was. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was two fifty-three, almost time for the three o’clock break, when half the staff took off for a half hour. The others would go at three-thirty and be back at four to prepare for the dinner rush.

Tyler thought about the woman, and he felt that she was his, in a way. If he wanted to be a good citizen, he simply had to take out his cell phone and call the police. If he wanted to be a hero, he could drive there and make a citizen’s arrest. He had seen her, and he knew that she wasn’t really dangerous. Knowing about her was power, and having power was a new feeling for Tyler. He had to guard it. He pretended that he had not noticed the television. He moved off, mopping the floor near the front window, where he could not see the television screen, and thought about the pretty young woman and what he should do with her.

At three o’clock, Tyler took the mop and bucket he was using into the back of the kitchen, leaned the mop handle against the wall, and continued out the back door. He got into his car and drove it toward the bus station.

Nicole Davis had stopped for a quiet lunch in a small Mexican restaurant a block away from the bus station, and looked at her bus schedule. There was a bus leaving for Santa Fe, New Mexico, tomorrow at ten in the morning, so she had returned to the station and bought a ticket. She would get another night’s sleep, then take the bus to Santa Fe.

She knew she was probably too early to get into her new room, but she seemed to have accomplished what she could for the moment, so she began to make her way back. She headed in the right direction, but after a time she did not see any buildings she remembered. She had somehow gone past the street where she should have turned. At each intersection she stared up the street and down, until she recognized the sign above a store on the corner two blocks to her left.

She considered correcting her course, but the street she was on had a long row of two-story buildings that threw shade across the sidewalk, and the shops had window displays of jewelry with turquoise and coral set in silver, weavings that might be Indian, and pretty clothes.

As she walked she could see that she was going to approach the hotel from the back, and that seemed fine to her. But as she came closer, she saw something else. There were four cars parked near the loading dock, all of them big American-made sedans that had short antennas sticking up on their trunks, identical but in assorted colors: navy blue, white, black. There were two men inside one of them. One seemed to be talking on a radio, and the other had his head bent down as though he was writing something.

Nicole stopped and retreated a few steps, until she was out of sight of the cars. She wanted to run, but she had to control herself, and fight the panic. She told herself there was no good reason to assume they were here for her. She walked back the way she had come for two blocks, then turned, making a wide circle around the building, trying to see more of it without being seen.

From the front, the hotel looked exactly the same. There were no police cars, no big men standing around. When she came to the parking lot side, she picked out the window of the room where she had spent last night. It was on the second floor, three windows from the elevator shaft. The curtain was open, and she saw a man walk past the window and disappear.

She walked quickly back toward the bus station. As she walked, she took out her bus schedule and scanned it. There was a bus leaving for Phoenix in thirty minutes. When she arrived, she bought a ticket for that bus, then sat in the dismal waiting room to stay out of the sun. But after a few minutes she began to be aware that somebody was staring at her.

A teenaged boy must have come in the side entrance while she was buying her ticket, and now he stood near the wall watching her. He was tall and thin with sandy blond hair, and when she looked at him, his blue eyes would turn away, toward other people in the station, then look out the windows at the street, and then return to her again, staying on her unblinking until the next time she caught him at it.

She went outside and waited near the pay phone until she saw her bus arrive and discharge the passengers from its last leg. When their luggage had been unloaded and the driver was standing by the door taking tickets from the line of new passengers, Nicole stepped to the telephone and dialed the front desk of the hotel. She heard the young girl answer, “Sky Inn. May I help you?”

Nicole Davis said, “This is police dispatch. Are any of the officers who are waiting for the female suspect close to you now?”

The girl said, “Yes. Would you like to speak with one of them?”

Nicole Davis said, “Cancel that. We’ve just reached the one we wanted by radio. Thank you.” She hung up and walked toward the line of passengers waiting to board the bus.

Suddenly the teenaged boy who had been staring at her came out of the side door of the bus station, stopped a few feet ahead of her, and said, “Come with me. Hurry.” His expression was anxious and scared, and even though he was as tall as a man it made him look young, like a boy.

She said, “What?”

“I know you,” he said with quiet urgency. “I saw you on TV. I can get you out of here. I’ve got a car.”

She looked at him for a moment, then at the bus. She put her ticket into her purse and walked toward him. She followed him from the station at a distance of about ten feet all the way down the block. He went to a small, dark blue Mazda with dark tinted windows that was parked beside the curb. He opened the door for her and she got in.

When he sat down behind the wheel, she was staring at him. “How old are you?”

His blue eyes clouded, and his soft, unlined face seemed to flatten with disappointment. “I’m sixteen. Now you don’t want my help, right?”

“Yes. I want your help. Please.”

He glanced into his mirrors, then cautiously pulled away from the curb. The sound of sirens reached their ears. He looked at her furtively as he drove down the street away from the bus station. “The cops are coming from the other direction, where their station is.”

“And where are we going?”

“My place.”

22

I
t was Catherine Hobbes’s last night in Los Angeles. Mary Tilson’s car had not turned up, and Catherine had a reservation for a morning flight to Portland. She sat at the desk in her hotel room making an inventory of the duplicate case files from the murders of Brian Corey, William Thayer, and Mary Tilson before packing them. As she leafed through the collections of photographs, lab reports, interview notes, and drawings, she began to feel a sensation of dread. All of this had happened in a period of just a few weeks since Tanya had arrived in Los Angeles.

Catherine had seen videotapes of Tanya and spoken to her on the telephone. Tanya had seemed very young and harmless, maybe even a little empty-headed, someone Catherine had needed to explain things to. But what had been behind Tanya’s pretty face and her soft, feminine voice had been this—the capacity and intention to cause the horrors in these files.

A knock on the door of her hotel room startled her. She left the files on the desk, flopped on the bed to reach into her purse, came up with her service pistol, then stepped to the door and looked through the small fish-eye lens into the hallway.

She held the gun behind her right thigh and opened the door. Joe Pitt stood in the doorway wearing a sport coat and a shirt that seemed better than the ones she had seen him in before. “You?” she said. “I thought I’d already given you the brush-off.”

“You did,” he said. “I’ve never been so thoroughly dismissed in my life.”

“I just wanted to get that straight. So what are you doing here?”

“I’m not making any money on this visit, but it’s business related. I’d have to say it’s not going to make you happy.”

“As long as it doesn’t involve my making you happy, you can come in.” She stepped away from the door, and he could see she had been holding her gun in her right hand. She slipped it back into her purse.

He advanced past her into the area near the window, where there was an armchair. “Kill any bellhops?”

“Not when they were on duty.” She closed her files and piled them on the desk, then sat down on the bed. “Go ahead. Make me miserable.”

“I heard something tonight that you need to know.”

“Hugo Poole sent you to tell me he didn’t kill anybody. I already knew that.”

“I don’t work for Hugo anymore. He paid my fee and we parted company.”

“That was a great job. You didn’t even have to show up.”

“During the twenty years I was the D.A.’s investigator, I never had an easy one,” he said. “Not once. Now that there’s money involved, it seems to happen a lot. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Not to me. What did you want to tell me?”

“That Hugo Poole has hired Calvin Dunn.”

“Who’s Calvin Dunn?”

“He’s sort of a well-known figure in this part of the world. If you don’t know anything about him, you should have Jim Spengler run his record for you. Dunn does investigations. I don’t know if he’s still got a license or not, but it doesn’t matter.”

She shrugged. “So Hugo replaced you. I wouldn’t work with you, and I won’t work with him, either.”

He shook his head. “Calvin Dunn doesn’t want to work with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He works for people who would never go to the police for any reason. If a criminal has a relative kidnapped or a shipment hijacked, he wants to find out who did it. Calvin Dunn will find out. He’s not one of us. He’s one of them. He goes down the rabbit hole, and when he comes back he’s got blood on his teeth, and there’s no rabbit problem anymore.”

“When did Hugo hire him?”

“Today, I think. It could have been yesterday.”

She stared at the wall for a moment. “Why did you decide to tell me this?”

“Because Calvin Dunn is dangerous. He isn’t going to be out collecting evidence or something. He’s not interested in seeing the girl go to trial. Even if you see him go through two sets of metal detectors, you should assume that he’s armed and doesn’t mind if you’re the one he needs to hurt to get to her.”

“Thanks. I appreciate the warning. I probably won’t be the one to run into him, though.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got to leave for Portland in the morning. My captain let me stay this long only because we thought the California police might stop her on the road. But there are other cases in Portland, so he wants me back.”

Joe Pitt shrugged. “I suppose he’s right. She could turn up anywhere at this point, and L.A. probably isn’t the most likely place now that she’s been here.” He brightened. “You know, since you’re just going to spend tomorrow in airports, you could come downstairs and have a drink with me.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Then come and have a soda with me.”

She gazed at him for a moment, wavering. She detected in herself a kind of affection toward him, maybe just because she had worked with him and then expected not to see him again. She had been feeling very alone, and maybe even depressed tonight. “All right. Just for a little while. Then I have to get to sleep.” She took her purse, went to the door, and opened it for him.

As she walked beside him to the elevator, she sensed an odd feeling of familiarity, and then realized it was walking beside a man in a hotel corridor. It reminded her of being with Kevin.

She dismissed it, irritated at her own stupidity. Joe Pitt was very different from Kevin. The two had absolutely no shared qualities except that they were both about the same height and weight. That had been all that was necessary, she supposed. The voice came from about the same distance above her ear, the sound of his shoes on the hotel carpet was the same, and so it had set off the feeling of loss again.

It was ridiculous, because it wasn’t Kevin that she missed. She missed having another presence, the other person who was seeing things at the same time and reacting, so that her thoughts were not just voices inside her own skull.

She had been surrounded by male colleagues most of the time since the academy, but she had never allowed her relationships with them to become close, let alone romantic. She had exerted her will to ignore any inconvenient feelings. It was like forcing herself to tune out a particular sound so she wouldn’t hear it, and listen instead to the other sounds that competed with it. Any approaches from other cops that she could not ignore she had brushed aside with humor. But now and then she would be surprised by a feeling, a memory, a sound.

She analyzed her vulnerability. Joe Pitt was very male and he was smart, and the fact that he seemed to like her had surprised her, so that forbidden part of her mind had been switched on when she had not been guarding it. All she had to do now was switch it off again.

“I’m only going to stay for ten or fifteen minutes. I’ve still got packing to do, and when I get home I’ll have to try to catch up with what’s been piling up on my desk.”

He pressed the elevator button and the elevator took them downstairs to the lobby. She was surprised when he stopped at the bar, ordered two colas, and carried them to a small table for two. She took hers and said, “I thought you were a drinker.”

He shook his head. “Been known to, but tonight I’m driving.”

So maybe he wasn’t a problem drinker. She found that she was losing one of the barriers that had kept her distant from him. She had to build others, distract herself, keep everything impersonal. “What do you think of the fact that she’s killed a woman this time? They were always men before.”

“Don’t you ever think about anything besides the case you’re on?”

“I’m still learning. You’ve seen more killing sprees than I have. I’ve seen solitary men, or pairs of men doing strings of killings. I’ve seen one where there was a man taking his girlfriend along for the ride. Have you ever worked a case where a woman traveled around alone killing people?”

“Is learning the only interest you have in men, or is it just me?”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“You’re interviewing me. I feel as though there’s a tape recorder in your purse. Why not let yourself relax? Your subconscious will still be working on the case, I promise.”

“I’m just making conversation,” she said. “The case is what you and I have in common.”

“We have lots of things in common. We just don’t know each other well enough to know what they are. We need to tell our life stories.”

“No, we don’t.”

“I’ll start. I was raised in Grand Island, Nebraska. I dropped out of college, spent four years in the air force, and then became a state trooper. Then I was a police officer in Los Angeles, and finally became a district attorney’s investigator. I retired from that a couple of years ago, and now I’m a private investigator.”

“Okay,” she said. “I was raised in Portland a few blocks from where I live now. I graduated from college, got married instead of going to law school, dropped out of the marriage, and then went to the police academy. I’m still in the first law enforcement job I ever had.”

“See? Our lives are exactly alike.”

She laughed. “Uncanny resemblance.”

“If I fly up to Portland tomorrow, will you have dinner with me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t date people from work.”

“Wait a minute. You’ve made it very clear that you and I are not working together, and that we aren’t going to be working together. We don’t live in the same city, or even the same state. There’s no way I can be considered to be ‘from work.’ ”

“I guess that’s probably true,” she said. “But people up there know who you are. They know we were on the same case, traveling and sharing information. If you turn up when I do and take me out, it will put me in an uncomfortable position.”

“Why?”

“People will think that we’re sleeping together.”

“Do you always behave like this—all these rules?”

“Yes.”

“Then they won’t think that.”

She laughed again and shook her head. “I’ll go out with you. I
am
out with you. It’s nine o’clock, and I haven’t had dinner. How about you? Are you hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Then let’s go across the lobby to the coffee shop and see if we can get a booth.”

“No,” he said. “I want to take you to a place I like. My car’s outside.”

“That’s too hard. I’d have to change, and then it would be too late.”

“You look beautiful, and I’m past fixing. The place is not far, and the food is better than the coffee shop. Come on.” He was already standing, and he took her arm so that in a moment they were out of the bar and on their way.

He drove her to the Biltmore Hotel, let the valet parking attendant take his car, and led her into the ornate lobby, to Bernard’s. “This is really formal,” she said. “You implied that this was going to be some kind of interesting dive.”

“I don’t think I implied it was a dive,” he said. “I distracted you by reminding you that you were beautiful.”

The restaurant was large and dimly lighted. She could see that in her business suit she was dressed as well as most of the women, so she began to feel more comfortable.

When the waiter came, Pitt said to Catherine, “Would you like a drink before dinner?”

“No thanks,” she said. “You can have one if you like.”

But he looked at the waiter and shook his head. When the waiter was gone, he said, “So tell me about your family, your pets and hobbies. All women have them.”

“I don’t have any pets right now, and not much time for hobbies except reading and exercising, which are just two aspects of the same futile, late-onset urge to improve myself. I do have parents, though—one of each. My father is a retired cop. How about you?”

“My parents are still in Nebraska wondering where they went wrong.”

“Where did they?”

“Nowhere, actually. They’re terrific people. Everything I’ve done to myself is my own fault.”

“What have you done to yourself?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess what I’ve done is spend too many years doing nothing but thinking about murder cases. When I came into your hotel room before and saw you with three case files open on the desk, it reminded me of myself. I used to lay them out everywhere in hotel rooms—on the bed, usually. Then, one day, I noticed that about twenty years had passed. I had cleared a lot of cases. I’d made a succession of D.A.s who were elected because they had good hair look smart. But I hadn’t gotten married or had kids. I didn’t even own a house.”

“How sad.” She smiled. “I’ll bet you lived just like a monk.”

He laughed. “I didn’t say that. And since I retired, I’ve bought a house. It’s pretty nice.”

In spite of her misgivings, she liked him. He was realistic about life, and yet he had a cheerful, optimistic temperament that seemed to have come through the sad and ugly things that he had seen in his career. She kept asking questions to listen to him talk.

Catherine ordered too much food and ate all of it because she didn’t want the dinner to end. She knew that as soon as it did, she would have to get back to packing and preparing herself to return to her town, her house, her job.

Finally, he asked the waiter for the check. On the way back to her hotel she was quiet, thinking hard about the way she had been conducting her life. She had been reasonably contented for the past few years, because thinking about nothing but her job had been better than being in a marriage with a man who had seemed more and more often to hate her. The life she had constructed for herself was good, but this evening with Joe Pitt was better. She wondered how much of her pleasure was just a sense of release after years of discipline and solitude.

He pulled the car up at her hotel and started to get out to let the valet take it. She said, “Uh-uh. Don’t get out. I really do have to get packed and go to sleep now.”

He got out and opened the door for her, but waved the parking attendant off. “Then have a good flight home.”

“Thanks for dinner, Joe.” She stood beside the car for a second, uncertain. The evening had been something that could only have happened unexpectedly, something she had tried to avoid and thought about at the same time. What was she hiding from? At this moment, what she wanted most was to make him want to see her again. She leaned into him, put her arms around his neck, and gave him a soft kiss on the lips, then stepped back. “If you do come up to Portland sometime, I will go out with you.” Then she turned and strode into the hotel lobby and was gone.