Nightlife (7 page)

10

N
ancy Mills found her walks through Topanga Plaza relaxing. There were gangs of old people who did power walks every morning before the stores opened, going the length of the mall, then clambering up the stalled escalator to the upper galleries and striding along beside the railings. Nancy was more subtle than they were, but she had begun to use the place for conditioning too, weaving through the crowds after the stores opened.

Nancy Mills didn’t go on shopping binges the way Tanya Starling often had, and Rachel Sturbridge did once or twice. Nancy still owned all of their new clothes from Aspen, Portland, and San Francisco, and at the moment, her activities were too simple to require a big wardrobe. But she liked to look at clothes.

It was Thursday morning. The plaza was sometimes unpleasantly crowded on weekends, but Thursday was still perfect. She was in Bloomingdale’s trying to decide which jar of bath salts had the right scent when she became aware that a man at the next counter was staring at her. He was in his early thirties, well groomed and nicely dressed. He wore a dark sport coat and shined Italian shoes. She assumed he must be a store floor manager or a salesman for one of the cosmetics lines, but she couldn’t see from this angle whether he had a name tag without actually staring at him. Part of his job was to hang around being friendly to customers, so she dismissed him from her mind.

The saleswomen behind the counters were eager because Thursday mornings were slow, so one of them came right away to sell her the bath salts while another tried to raise the stakes by showing her the rest of that company’s line of products. Nancy resisted the pitch and paid in cash, as she always did. As one of the women counted out her change and the other put her receipt in the bag, Nancy became aware that the man had not gone away.

She turned to look, their eyes met, and she had a horrible moment when she wondered if she knew him, then another when she had to endure his smile. It was at once shy and hopeful. There was even a trace of the conspiratorial, as though he and she shared a secret. He looked so familiar. Could she possibly know him?

She turned away, irritated. She wanted to say aloud, “I wasn’t looking because I was interested. I just sensed that someone was staring.” She took her bag, pivoted away from him, and walked back into the mall. She moved past the first couple of stores, then felt an uncomfortable sensation. She stopped and looked at the next store’s window display, then quickly turned to walk to the other side of the mall.

She had been right. There he was again, a grown-up, smartly dressed man, following her around a mall like an awkward teenager. She supposed she should be flattered by the attention, but his behavior was very bad news: she had shortened her hair, dyed it a dull shade of brown, and worn clothes that weren’t supposed to be eye-catching. All that seemed to have accomplished was to make her appealing to creepy, awkward men.

Nancy turned again, intending to leave him behind, but he was already at her shoulder, so when she turned she was nearly face-to-face with him. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped to the side.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was almost sure I recognized you, and I wanted to check. I’m—”

“I don’t think we know each other,” she said, and took a step.

“Regal Bank? San Francisco?”

She froze. Now she remembered who he was.

“I was the man who helped you open your commercial account at the bank. Bill Thayer. I’m the branch manager.”

“I do remember you,” said Nancy. “What are you doing down here?”

“I have family here. I’m visiting. What about you? Are you expanding into the Los Angeles area? I still remember the name of your business—Singular Aspects. Right?”

He didn’t seem to know that she had closed the account. She had to be extremely careful, because if he got curious, he could look things up when he got back to the office. “No, actually, we decided that San Francisco wasn’t right for us, and we’re thinking about starting the business here instead. Well, nice to see you.” She stepped off.

“Miss Starling? Wait.”

She stopped walking. This was awful. She had forgotten that to open the account in San Francisco she had called herself Tanya Starling so she could cash Tanya Starling’s check from the old account in Chicago. This Bill Thayer didn’t know it yet, but he already possessed enough information to destroy her. He had seen her in this mall in Woodland Hills, just a few blocks from where she lived.

He said, “I wondered if you would have dinner with me tonight.”

“Gee, Bill,” she said. “I can’t tonight.”

“I know it’s kind of sudden, but I won’t be here long, so I thought I’d better take a chance.”

She was afraid: she was afraid to be with him, and afraid to let him walk away. She knew that dinner was impossible. He would go to his parents’ house and say he was going to miss dinner tonight because he had a date. Unless they were comatose, one of them would say, “What’s her name?” He would tell them who she was and where he had met her. She smiled. “I do have some time now, though, if you’d like to have coffee.”

“That sounds good,” said Thayer.

“Do you have a car?”

“You can’t go anywhere in L.A. without one. I rented it at the airport.”

“Then you can drive. There’s a really great little place on Topanga just south of the freeway.”

They walked out of the plaza to the parking lot. His rental car was parked about a hundred yards off, almost by itself. When she saw it she was surprised. It was a Cadillac that looked enormous to her. “Wow. Do you drive your mom and dad around when you visit?”

“Not much,” said Thayer. “They think I’ve gotten rusty driving up north, so they don’t trust me. The big car is for taking clients around. Whenever I come down I usually try to see a couple.”

They drove down Topanga past the freeway, and she said, “Keep going. It’s quite a bit farther, toward Malibu.”

“Is it on the left or right?”

“The right. Oh, look. There’s a nice little park up there. Can we stop for a minute?”

“I guess so,” he said doubtfully. “Sure.” Thayer drove off the road and stopped on the shoulder beside a grove of trees with picnic tables in it.

Nancy got out of the car with her purse over her shoulder. “I’ve been looking for a good place to have a small party. I wonder if I could do it as a picnic, right here.”

Thayer didn’t seem to know what to do. He got out of the car slowly, and scrutinized the ground before he took each step, as though he were afraid of getting his shoes dirty.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a better look.” She took his hand playfully and began to walk among the trees.

Thayer looked a bit doubtful, but he began to stroll with her in the deserted grove, past picnic tables and trash cans. Nancy let go of his hand and moved off a few feet to disapprovingly rock a picnic table that was set on uneven ground. He strolled on, and got a few steps ahead of her.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly ten-thirty. It wasn’t surprising that people weren’t here in the morning, but someone could arrive before long to set up a picnic lunch. She looked back at the road. There were no cars going past, and she couldn’t hear any coming. There was nobody nearby yet. It would have to be now. She let him get a few more steps ahead of her as she reached deep in her purse.

He suddenly stopped and turned to look back at her. He said, “What are you looking for?”

She smiled brightly at him. “My camera. I want to take a couple of pictures so I can compare it to some other places.”

He turned away and walked on.

Nancy Mills gripped the pistol and lifted it out, then held it tight against her thigh as she walked to catch up with him. She took one last look over her shoulder and listened for the sound of a car on the road. Then she raised the gun and fired through the back of Bill Thayer’s skull.

His head bobbed forward in a sudden nod and his body followed it, toppling straight onto the ground. She squatted beside him to take his wallet out of his back pocket, then pushed him over on his back so she could reach his car keys in front.

She stood and walked calmly to the car, started it, and drove back the way she and Thayer had come, north on Topanga Canyon. She parked his car in the mall parking lot, wiped the steering wheel and door handles clean with one of the alcohol-soaked antibacterial wipes she carried in her purse, then picked up the bag containing her bath salts and walked away.

Nancy thought about the morning’s events as she headed back toward her apartment. She had not wanted to harm Bill Thayer, but he had made it impossible not to. He’d had no right to keep pestering her. What could he possibly have been thinking?

Of course, she knew what he had been thinking. When he had seen the woman he thought of as Tanya Starling, it had probably made him feel excited. He already knew her slightly. She was a small business owner, and he was the manager of her bank. Not only could she be sure he was respectable, but he was powerful. He could raise her credit limit and get her loans approved. He could also get in her way, make things difficult for her. He was a shy, quiet man who had made so little impression on her the first time she’d met him that she had not recognized his face when it was three feet from hers this morning. But he had exercised his power over her, following her from the store, making her talk to him, keeping her from leaving, then making her agree to go somewhere with him. She’d had to get rid of him.

When Nancy reached home, she put on a pair of the rubber gloves she wore to do the dishes and sat at her kitchen table. She took Bill Thayer’s wallet from her purse and examined it. The credit cards were too risky to keep, but he had also been carrying almost a thousand dollars in cash when she had killed him.

A lot of people carried extra cash when they were traveling, but this was better than she had expected. Nancy took the money, wrapped the wallet in a paper towel to disguise its shape, and put it in an opaque trash bag.

Somewhere in the back of her mind was a feeling, almost a physical sensation that had not yet developed into a coherent thought—something pleasant, even titillating.

Her need to end the fear had been like an ache. When she had at last been able to pull out the pistol and blow a round through Thayer’s head, there had been a feeling of release. When she had left his rental car in the plaza parking lot and walked off with her Bloomingdale’s bag, she had felt herself smiling.

Nancy had not allowed herself to acknowledge it yet, but she had been missing the excitement that she took from men. She had missed the anticipation of watching and waiting for the right one, and then the care and calculation of drawing him to her. She had missed the thrill of the next phase, the charged, anxious period of flirtation and speculation, and then the longer game of divulging and concealing, withholding and succumbing. She had especially missed the sweet, warm, lazy time after that, when she was secure in the man’s love, soaking in the attention and the luxury.

Now she was beginning to notice the puzzling fact that she liked the bad parts too. When Dennis had begun to disappoint her, the resentment and anger had made her feel powerful and dangerous and clean—not like a victim, but like a judge and avenger. The building anger had made her feel energetic and purposeful. The single shot had been the best possible climax to the relationship.

She had liked the killing. The breakup with David Larson had shown her that perfectly. When David had betrayed her, she had enjoyed the process of getting angry and rejecting him and punishing him. Seeing his devastation had given her the chance to know how beautiful and desirable she could be. But it wasn’t enough. What was missing was that she had not gotten to kill him.

She took the bag with the wallet out with her garbage late that night and stuck it in the bottom of the dumpster behind an apartment building three blocks from hers. Her gun stayed in her purse. It would be foolish to get rid of her gun just when she had started to enjoy it.

11

H
ello? Mrs. Halloran?”

Eve Halloran wasn’t quite sure, but the young female voice made her think it just might be. “Yes?”

“This is Tanya Starling calling. I’m very sorry to bother you, but I wondered whether anyone had tried to get in touch with me since I left, or asked about me. There might have been a man named David?”

“No, dear,” said Mrs. Halloran. She spoke with barely suppressed excitement. “I haven’t heard from anyone like that. But a couple of days ago I did have a visit from a pair of police officers.” She stopped, waiting for a reaction.

“Police? Why? What did they want?”

Eve Halloran relished the suspense, loved holding back and tantalizing, but she could hardly withhold this information. It was too dramatic, too delicious. “There were two of them, a man and a woman. They came all the way from Portland, Oregon. They said—I don’t know how to break this to you—that a friend of yours has been the victim of a crime. It sounded as though he’s been murdered.”

“Who?”

“I think they said Dennis Poole.”

“Oh, my God. Dennis Poole?”

“That’s right.” Now Eve was feeling better. That last exclamation had carried the sort of emotion that she had been hoping for. What could that man Dennis Poole have been except Tanya’s lover? “I’m very, very sorry, honey. I hated to tell you this way, but there just wasn’t any other way.”

“I can’t believe it. How could he have been murdered? He was such a sweet man. He had no enemies. Was it some kind of robbery?” There were tears in her voice. Eve Halloran could hear the tension in the throat, the higher voice.

“They didn’t say, but I don’t think that was it,” said Eve Halloran. She allowed herself to give in to an ungenerous impulse. “That was what they wanted to talk with you about.” She felt a tiny bit of guilt about holding back the next part of what they’d said, but she was still too curious. “They seemed to think you might know something about what happened. They said you had left town just about the time when he was killed.”

“You mean they think I had something to do with Dennis’s death?”

There. That was said just as Eve Halloran had imagined it. She didn’t mind that she had to say the next part now. “Oh, no, dear. They said you were not a suspect. They definitely said that. I didn’t mean to imply anything of the kind. Stupid me. I should have said that right away, first thing.”

“I’m just overwhelmed. It never seems as though something like this can happen to anybody you know.”

Eve Halloran said eagerly, “Were you very close?”

“I just can’t believe it.”

That answer was unsatisfactory. In fact, it had been an evasion. “Was he your boyfriend?”

“No.”

Mrs. Halloran waited, but there was no more to the sentence. “Well, it’s very sad. I’m sorry.” Eve Halloran was growing tired of this conversation. She had built an expectation of a flood of intimate details, but she had been repeatedly disappointed.

Tanya said, “Did the police say how I was supposed to get in touch with them? Did they leave a number or anything?”

“I’ll see if I can find it.” Her voice was glum. This had been a disappointing conversation, and the fact that there was no further excuse to prolong it made her feel even more frustrated. She had taped the card to the wall right above the phone, but she stood leaning against the kitchen sink with her arms folded for thirty seconds. Let Tanya wait. She had become awfully demanding for a former tenant, calling up at night and expecting Eve to be her message board. After a time she sauntered back to the telephone. “Tanya? Still there?”

“Yes.”

“Have a pencil?”

“Yes.”

“The name is Detective Sergeant Catherine Hobbes. She’s on the homicide squad.” She added that part with a tinge of malice. She read off the various telephone numbers and the address of the police station, slowly and distinctly, to prolong the time of feeling important while Tanya silently copied down every word, probably with her hands shaking. When she had read everything on the card she said, “Got all that?”

“Yes, thanks. I’ll give her a call.”

Eve said, “Have you thought about hiring a lawyer?”

“No. I just heard about this.”

“Well, from what I hear, the time to think about lawyers isn’t after you’ve talked to the police, it’s before.” She was spiteful now.

“I’ll think about it.”

“You do that.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Halloran.”

“You’re welcome.” She was about to add a little jab about how she was going to tell the police that she had talked to her, but she realized that the line was dead.

Nancy Mills stood beside the row of telephones in Topanga Plaza, gazing at the food court. She looked down at the little spiral notebook she had bought at the stationery store to prepare for this call, and reread the phone numbers of the cop who was after her. The name disturbed her: she had never expected that it would be a woman.