Nightlife (25 page)

34

A
nne Forster was exhausted from driving, but she was excited. Denver was big and busy and had lots of traffic. There were crowds of pedestrians on the downtown streets who walked past one another without really looking, just as they did in Chicago or Los Angeles. Their memories must be so overloaded with faces that ones they saw on the street left only an impression that blurred and faded within seconds.

As she came into the central part of the city on I-25, she saw a sign for something called City Park, so she took the exit. When she got to the park entrance, she pulled into a lot and turned off the engine. There were hundreds of people in the range of her vision, and they were all sorts—most looking relaxed and happy, walking or sitting, throwing Frisbees, chasing children. She got out of the car to hide her purse in the trunk, but on the way she glanced in at the back seat. She had brought along a blanket from Tyler’s bedroom in case she wanted to nap while Tyler drove. She hid the small pistol she’d taken from Mary Tilson in the pocket of her jacket, locked the trunk, took the blanket with her to the shade of a big tree on the vast lawn, and arranged herself on it.

She rolled the jacket up and used it as a pillow. She knew that since she didn’t look either poor or crazy, nobody would object to her dozing off under a tree in the park in the daytime. All she really had to worry about was the very slim chance that somebody who had seen her picture on television would come by and recognize her despite her dyed hair and new clothes, or that a patrol car would pick out Tyler’s car among the hundred parked in the lot. She listened to the sounds of the people and gradually slipped into sleep.

She slept peacefully until seven, when a car drove along the edge of the parking lot with a booming bass beat on its stereo, and she sat up quickly with her hand on the jacket and looked around. The young mothers and their toddlers, the old men and women had all gone home now. They were being replaced by teenagers, mostly slow-strolling couples or gangs of boys patrolling the park for girls. She decided it was time to go.

She stood up, put on Tyler’s jacket carefully so the gun would remain unseen in the pocket, and folded up the blanket. She stared up at the big trees and decided that she liked Denver. It was going to be the place where she would make herself safe again. She walked to the car, put her blanket in the trunk and got her purse, then went into the public restroom to wash her face and brush her hair.

She drove until she found the right kind of restaurant, a diner with vinyl booths. She ordered a big dinner, and while she ate she thought about the steps she needed to take, each in its place in the logical order of things.

The way to survive was to find someone to be. She had read somewhere that the best place to find the sort of information she was going to need was in people’s trash, and she decided that the best kind of name would belong to a middle-class home owner. She drove through nice neighborhoods until she found streets where there were garbage containers rolled out to the curb to await the morning collection, but she did not stop. Instead, she kept driving until she knew the boundaries of the next day’s pickup area.

She chose neighborhoods as though she were buying a house. She wanted houses that were recently painted, solid buildings with good landscaping and no signs of neglect or disrepair. She stayed away from the homes of the very rich, because she had a suspicion that the richest people must have security patrols watching their neighborhoods late at night.

At one
A.M.,
after she had selected the right block, she parked and walked to a set of cans. She began to open the lids, lifting and touching the trash bags. The ones that felt heavy and solid or gooey she put back. The ones that felt as though they contained paper, she took with her. She went on for an hour, collecting bags of garbage and putting them in her car trunk. When she had collected all the car would hold, she drove to a shopping mall and parked away from the lights near a dumpster.

She used the flashlight from Ty’s trunk and began to go through the garbage bags, working quickly. She set aside all of the pieces of paper that looked like bills or receipts. She dropped the bags in the dumpster and went out to get more. She kept working in the same way for four more trips. By dawn she had a big pile of other people’s discarded papers in the back seat.

When daylight came she parked in the shade of a tall, windowless self-storage building and went through the bills and papers. After an hour she had gone through all of the papers but had not found any of the information she needed.

At seven she drove to a part of the city park where she had not been before, found a parking place, and lay on her blanket under a tree to sleep. At three o’clock, the sun had moved far enough so she was lying in the sun. She awoke with a terrible glare in her eyes, and reached up to feel her face. It was hot but not tender, so she had hope that she had avoided a sunburn. She had to be careful, because people who lived on the street all seemed to have faces damaged by the sun. She had to look middle-class as long as she could.

She went to the nearest public restroom and examined her appearance as she washed and brushed her teeth. She was still okay, still clean looking and undamaged. But the fear had been planted, so she went to a drugstore and bought sunblock, shampoo, conditioner, and moisturizer, then drove back into the park to a restroom near the zoo. She washed her hair, gave herself a sponge bath, and rubbed her skin with lotion, then put on fresh clothes.

She went to the telephone beside the restroom and used the phone directory to find the addresses of three hospitals. Tonight was going to be a hard one for her, but she judged that it had a better chance of bringing her success than last night had.

She drove to the first of the hospitals, a sprawling newly expanded place with several wings and several driveways. She picked one and drove the perimeter of the hospital. There were dumpsters all around the building, but all of them had their tops locked down. When she reached the driveway where she had entered, she left. She had not been thinking clearly. Probably the hospital had to lock the dumpsters, because otherwise addicts would be there looking for half-used bottles of painkillers and narcotics.

She widened her search to the surrounding neighborhood. There were always medical office buildings within a block or two of major hospitals. The hospital might have strict security procedures, but all of the clerks who worked in all of those doctors’ offices couldn’t possibly be that careful. People just didn’t care that much.

She spent the evening finding and searching the dumpsters outside the office buildings surrounding the three big hospitals. At four
A.M.
she found something that looked right: a carbon copy of a physician’s office-visit checklist. On it the doctor had checked off the exams he had performed and the tests he had ordered for a patient. The patient’s name, birthdate, and social security number were on the sheet. It was not going to help her in the way she had hoped, because the patient’s name was Charles Woodward, and his age was seventy-one. But she put the sheet in her pocket and kept working.

At seven she went back to the park to sleep. When she woke for dinner at four, she was already breathing hard—panting, almost. She had a panicky certainty that she had been letting time go by without doing the right things, or doing them assiduously enough. She decided she was already running out of time. She had left Flagstaff on Friday, and it had taken all night and most of the next day to drive here. That made it Saturday afternoon when she had arrived in Denver, so now it was Monday. She had to get moving.

She drove to a mailbox-rental store, paid in cash to rent a mailbox in the name Solara Estates, and took a couple of business cards so she would remember the address. After it was dark, she went to a big Kmart and bought an adjustable wrench, a screwdriver, and pliers.

She drove to a street where there were auto repair shops, muffler shops, tire stores. One of the cars that had been left outside a mechanic’s shop caught her eye. It had a cover over it, and she looked beneath it to see that the hood had been removed and so had the engine. She stole the license plates, drove to a dark alley down the street, and used them to replace the Arizona license plates on Tyler’s car.

She drove to the Aurora Mall, went to the ladies’ room near the food court, washed, and did her hair and makeup. She went to Nordstrom’s, bought a purse, a pair of black pants, shoes, and a top like the ones she had always worn by preference, and changed into them. As she studied herself in the mirror she judged that she had held up surprisingly well. Sleeping in the park during the day had not been something she would have chosen, but she had actually gotten more undisturbed sleep than she’d had since she’d left Chicago. The work of wandering the city and hauling trash bags around by night—or maybe the one meal a day that she had eaten—had kept her trim. She looked good, even healthy.

When she returned to her car she opened her suitcase and put on some medium-good diamond earrings that Dennis Poole had bought her and a matching tennis bracelet. She put her Anne Forster driver’s license into the little ID wallet that came with her new black purse, then stuck a hundred dollars in with it. She locked everything else in the trunk, and kept the keys in her pocket.

She found a singles bar near Larimer Square early in the evening. There was a line outside, and it gave her a chance to see the kinds of people who thought the bouncers and doormen should admit them. It was too early in the evening to see the staff make any difficult decisions. They turned away only a couple of young men, who seemed to have done something the night before: “Sorry, man. If the boss sees you two in there after last night, I’m going to be looking for a job.” They didn’t turn any women away, which was a good sign.

When she reached the head of the line, she held her homemade license inside the wallet, but the bouncer barely glanced at it before he waved her in. Inside, the light was dim and the recorded music was loud. There was a D.J. in a booth high above the dance floor choosing cuts and operating the colored lights that strafed the crowd. The line at the bar was already three deep, and the five bartenders were lip-reading and pouring drinks methodically.

She had to have a drink to hold in her hand, so she ordered a 7UP with a lime twist, which looked enough like a gin and tonic in the changing light. As soon as she was away from the bar, men started asking her to dance with them, so she did. She had an extremely clear vision of what she had to accomplish tonight, so she used the dancing, making turns to watch the way the crowds were forming and reconfiguring.

As she danced, she could see groups of single girls sitting at the tables in the corner of the room just off the dance floor and farthest from the front door. Men lingered near that spot or walked by, surveying the selection while pretending not to, and the women made their own evaluations and decisions while pretending not to.

When she had danced enough to be sure that the young women at the tables had become used to her, she bought another 7UP and went to the women’s area to sit on the upholstered bench that ran the length of the wall beyond the tables. She began to make overtures to the women around her. “This is a great place,” she said to one of them. The woman appeared not to be able to hear her over the noise of the music. She tried the one on her other side, a thin blonde who seemed to be there alone. “Wow. I absolutely love those shoes. Would you mind telling me where you got them?”

“Zero Gravity.”

“Can you tell me where that is? I’m new here. I just moved here from Florida.” She laughed. “I don’t know anything.”

“It’s on Colfax, not far from the capitol building. It’s really a great place.”

“Thanks so much. Do you know a good place to get a jacket? The fall stuff is out already, and I thought I might pick up a jacket now. With the altitude here and everything, I’m freezing half the time.”

“Zero Gravity would be a good place to start for that too. Or, you know, there’s a mall in Aurora that has just about everything.” The woman’s eyes left hers and rose to focus on someone standing over them.

“Would you like to dance?” asked the man. He was looking at Anne.

She said to the blond woman, “Would you mind watching my purse for a minute?”

The woman said unenthusiastically, “Okay. Sure.”

She got up and danced with the man. He was tall, skinny, and young—so young that she wondered if he had used a false ID to get into the bar. She smiled at him, wondering if the blond woman she had chosen was right. If she had chosen wrong, the woman would be gone and so would her purse, fake driver’s license, and hundred in cash.

When the song was over, the young man said, “Want to dance again?”

“I shouldn’t. I left my purse with that girl.”

She went back and found the blonde still there. She said to her, “Thanks for watching my purse.”

She worked to shape the evening and make it conform to her vision. She talked with the woman and made observations, tried to make her laugh. They moved to a table when its occupants left. They became more and more comfortable with each other, and their smiles and laughter attracted another man. The blonde got up to dance with him, and she said, “Your turn to watch my purse, okay?”

“Sure.”

She waited until the girl had disappeared into the surging crowd of dancers, took out her little notebook and pen, and reached into the purse. She kept the purse beneath the table, her head up and her eyes on the dancers, so even if the lights had suddenly come on it would have been difficult to say she had been searching the purse. She looked down only when her fingers had identified something.

The driver’s license gave the blonde’s name as Laura Murray, her address as 5619 LaRoche Avenue in Alameda, and her date of birth as August 19, 1983. She copied quickly, then found the health insurance card, which gave an identification number that started with XDX and ended in a social security number. She looked into the wallet to see the issuers of the credit cards. Then she closed the purse and put away the notebook and pen. The whole process had taken barely sixty seconds.