by Thomas Perry
“Then I hope you’re willing to pretend to choke on a fish bone, so all the doctors in the place will rush to help, and I can deliver my pitch.”
“Of course. If we want the children to go to Harvard, I’ll have to do that every time we go out.”
They ate dinner, and talked happy nonsense all through it. Nancy Mills was filled with manic energy. She felt that she should never have talked herself into believing that she had to stay out of sight.
After dinner they tried to move into the bar, but it was nearly midnight now, and the crowds of people in the restaurant had swelled. The knot of drinkers ordering at the bar was just the beginning of a line that stretched outward and made it an evening’s labor to get another drink. Brian leaned close to her and said, “I’ve got a minibar in my room, and a better view than this. It’s on the eighth floor of the Beverly Hilton.”
She looked at him closely. “All right. Let’s go check out your bar.”
They drove to the Beverly Hilton and took the elevator up to his room. It was not the huge suite she had been hoping for, but it was a pleasant single room, and it had a balcony that was directly above the patio and a little to the left of the pool. He made her another martini while she leaned over the railing for a different view of the city.
She took her martini and sipped it. “Thanks, Brian. Considering the primitive conditions, that is not a bad drink.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve found that I’m about as good a maker of third martinis as anybody.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “It probably tastes like lighter fluid, and I don’t know the difference. I guess I shouldn’t drink so much.” She walked past him into the room and set her drink on the desk.
The whole evening’s adventure had been leading to this, hadn’t it? She had sleepwalked her way here. She was with the right kind of man: she had chosen him. She stepped into him, snaking her arms around his body. He held her and kissed her gently. She remembered how much she liked this feeling.
His arms were thick and strong, and she could detect the definition of the muscles, but she could also feel his hands making soft, slow swirls on her back that made her feel small and sleek, like a cat. The nerves of her spine and shoulder blades shivered, waiting their turn to be touched, and she found herself moving to make him touch her there.
The kisses and caresses grew in intensity, building quickly with her impatience. She was excited by the rightness of whatever she thought to do tonight. Her impulses all seemed to be gratified instantly. Later she lay on the bed with the blankets tumbled in a heap at the foot, feeling the fresh night air blowing in over her body, cooling and soothing her. She stared at the ceiling, feeling her breathing slowing down and becoming even again.
Brian was out on the balcony, leaning on the rail and craning his neck to look down at something. He still had no shirt, but he had put on his pants in order to go out there. She studied him, gauged the attitude of his body. He was leaning on his elbows, a picture of relaxation and ease. Minutes passed. It was time now for him to come back in and lie down beside her and say nice things to her, or at least put his arm around her again, but he didn’t. He didn’t even turn and look at her, to see how beautiful she looked lying on the white sheets, her hair spread around her head in a halo. She began to be a little disappointed in him.
She gave him a reprieve. Was it possible that while she was lying here sending him a signal, she was missing the signals that he had been sending her? Maybe he wanted her to get up and come out on the balcony with him.
Nancy slipped into the bathroom and snatched the thick white hotel bathrobe from its hook behind the door. She tied the belt at her waist and came out behind him. He didn’t seem to hear her coming. She put her arms around him and pressed herself against his back, rocking slightly from side to side. “That was really nice,” she whispered.
He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Yes.”
She felt her muscles tighten. “That’s all? You don’t want to say something sweet to me?”
He turned, and that disengaged her arms from him. He placed his hands on her shoulders and held her there while he looked into her eyes, then kissed her forehead. “I loved this evening. I think you’re a really special person, and I feel lucky to have met you.”
“But?”
“I should have told you before. I have a girlfriend back in Miami. She and I have been together for over two years.”
Nancy shrugged, knowing it made her look good and that the top of the bathrobe would open a bit wider. “I’m really not that naive, Brian. I knew when I saw you that I wasn’t the first girl you’d ever met, and it’s not like I thought that other girls wouldn’t be interested in you.”
“I really haven’t been honest with you, or with her. I loved tonight, but I didn’t really have the right to be with you. I was standing here thinking how unfair I’ve been.”
She embraced him tightly. “I understand. This was just a one-time thing. It was only for tonight, and when it’s over, that’s it. But why ruin it? What if this turned out to be the last night of your life?”
“That’s a funny way to look at it.”
She smiled up at him, and she knew she was alluring. “It’s the only way to look at it. If it was the end of your life, how would you want to have spent it—alone or with me, the way you are?”
“With you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Then smile.”
He gave her the smile she had asked for, and took her in his arms. They moved off the balcony and into the room. It was a moment before the bathrobe dropped to the floor and they were together on the bed again. This time there was something better than the eagerness and haste of the first. She imagined them to be a pair of lovers who had become old friends, and somehow had learned to enjoy each other without all the pain and hurt feelings and failed attempts to connect that people had when they were actively in love. She moved into a cycle of pure selfish wanting and receiving and appreciating and wanting. Then she lay motionless on the bed again.
Nancy waited until Brian got up and went out to the balcony again. Then she crawled to the side of the bed and swung her legs to put her feet on the floor near her pile of clothes. She dressed silently and efficiently.
She moved closer to the balcony, and she could see past him to the city below. It was the darkest, quietest time. The lightbulbs that were ever going to be switched off were off now. The fog had slid in from the Pacific, and dimmed even the streetlamps and traffic signals.
She took her first step on the concrete surface of the balcony, then the second, each quicker. If he heard her, he expected her to come up from behind and put her arms around him, just as she had done before. He did not move. He was still leaning forward, his arms crossed and his elbows on the railing.
Nancy went low, clamped her arms tightly around his knees, her legs already straightening to lift him up over the railing. Brian’s head and upper torso had already been past the railing and leaning before she’d arrived, and he began toppling over the edge before he had any notion of what was happening. His arms started flailing now that there was nothing but air for him to grasp, and he half-twisted to try to face her, but his sudden movement only helped to propel him over. In an instant he was free of restraint, falling. As he went he said something that sounded like “Unh?” Nancy stopped herself against the railing and watched him accelerating toward the earth.
It took a long time for him to fall eight floors. She watched until he hit the concrete walkway beside the building, bounced upward a foot or two, and then lay still. She could already see that there was a splash of blood where he lay, but she had no more time to look. She snatched his wallet, then wiped a towel over the glass she had used and the doorknobs and faucet handles, and quietly closed the door behind her.
Nancy knew without having to think about it that it would be best not to be in an elevator, so she stepped into the nearest stairwel
l. She took the stairs all the way down to the bottom, moving as quickly as she could. The door was locked where it met the parking garage, so she had to go up one flight, come out on the lobby level, and go outside. She avoided the parking attendant, hurried around the building to the entrance to the lot, went down and found Brian’s rental car with the key under the visor. She got in, started it, and drove up the ramp onto the street.
She turned to the east and then north, and drove as far as a public parking lot on Hollywood Way near the Burbank airport. She parked the car, then walked to the airport. She waited two hours until the first flights of the morning arrived at seven, stepped out of the terminal in the middle of a group of arriving passengers, and waited her turn for a taxi.
14
Catherine Hobbes placed the two photographs together on her desk, and looked from one to the other. Then she picked up the telephone and dialed the captain’s office. “Mike, this is Hobbes. I’ve got something I think you should see.”
She released the telephone and walked down the hall to the last office. She opened the door, then walked to the big desk where Captain Mike Farber, chief of homicide, waited for her. She reached across the desk and set the driver’s license photograph of the young blond woman in front of him. “This is the Illinois DMV’s latest license picture of Tanya Starling. It was taken less than a year ago.” She set the second photograph directly below it. “This is the picture the California DMV sent us from the driver’s license issued to Rachel Sturbridge. It was taken a month ago.”
Mike Farber was a big, broad man about fifty-five years old, with bristly gray hair. He leaned down for a moment to study the photographs, then looked up at Catherine Hobbes. “Looks like you’re not looking for an innocent witness anymore. What do you want to do about her?”
“I think it’s time to get a new notice made up and sent out to other agencies,” she said.
“We’ll want to get the D.A.’s office in on this right away. I’ll handle that. We can get a warrant on the false ID at least, and possibly intent to flee. That way we can get her held wherever she turns up.”
“She has turned up, in a way,” said Catherine. “She wouldn’t tell me where she was calling from, just Southern California. The phone company says it was a pay telephone somewhere in the 818 area code. That’s the northwest part of Los Angeles. It’s where Rachel Sturbridge’s car was sold. I’d like to go down there to see if I can pick up her trail.”
He studied her for a moment, then nodded. “Hand off the cases you have and go get her, Cath.”
It took Catherine Hobbes two hours to clear her desk of the cases she had been working on by giving them to the other detectives, and to prepare to make another trip out of Portland. The first plane to Los Angeles she could get left early that evening.
On the plane she kept working her way through the telephone conversation she’d had with Tanya Starling. She had sounded very young, and maybe a little bit slow. Catherine had spent much of the time trying to persuade her that being wanted for questioning in a murder case was a serious matter, not something that she could ignore. She had worried about Tanya, because it might take a certain amount of common sense for a person like her—a potential suspect who appeared to have fled—even to get arrested safely.
But as soon as Catherine had looked at the two photographs on the two driver’s licenses, she had begun to get a different feeling about Tanya. Innocent bystanders and slow learners with nothing to hide didn’t turn up with two driver’s licenses in different names.
As the plane came closer to Los Angeles, Catherine couldn’t help remembering that Los Angeles was where Hugo Poole and Joe Pitt lived. She kept catching herself constructing scenes in which she would call Joe Pitt to let him know what was happening. He would offer to help her get around the unfamiliar city, and maybe to help her get the best cooperation from the local police. Every time she caught herself thinking about calling him, she shook her head and cut the vision short. She knew that she had only been imagining these things because she had somehow allowed herself to think about him in a romantic way. She could recognize the idea of calling him for what it was—not a rational plan of action but the foundation for a fantasy.
Joe Pitt had everything wrong with him. He was too old for her, and he was a gambler. He was in his forties but had never been married, and he talked to every woman as though he had already been to bed with her. He was also a drinker. He was a jovial companion, the sort of guy everybody loved to have a couple of drinks with after work. When he had offered, she had always said no.
It made her feel a hot wave of humiliation to think of it now. She had managed to convince him that she was too prissy and rigid to have a drink with him. What Joe Pitt knew was the warm, easy face of alcohol, the evening gatherings with friendly people when he ordered a round and everybody went home feeling relaxed and happy. But Catherine Hobbes had a special knowledge about drinking.
When Catherine had been in college in California, she had known the pleasant side of drinking too. She’d always worked hard all week on her studies, and on weekends she had gone out with her friends to parties where for a pretty girl the price of a drink was holding out her hand to accept it. She had been funnier and more fluent when she talked, sexier and more uninhibited when she danced. She had felt that way, at least. But near the end of her junior year, she had noticed things that had scared her. She had awakened some mornings and spent an hour lying in bed waiting for the sick headache to fade and trying to remember what she had done the night before. She could retrace the stages of her night, but more and more often there were periods that were simply blank.
The problem had gone away. She had not been cured, only distracted. One night, just after she’d accepted her first drink at a party, Kevin Dalton appeared and began to talk to her. She did not have another drink that evening, and beginning the day after that, she and Kevin became inseparable. During her senior year she didn’t have any free weekends to go to bars or parties with her girlfriends because she was with Kevin. They were married the summer after graduation and bought a condominium in Palo Alto. She did not make a decision about drinking. She simply forgot to drink.
Five years later, after the marriage had detonated and blown apart, she remembered to drink. The hard side of drinking came on her gradually. She began to go out after work with some of the other young brokers each evening. They all worked long days that began at five A.M., when the New York markets opened. They all lived in the same atmosphere of controlled panic, each of them paid on commission and all of them doomed to be fired the first time their sales figures fell enough to get the managers’ attention. They drank and joked together for a few hours, then went home feeling a little better.
On most evenings, she was one of three women in a group that was overwhelmingly male. She somehow found herself more comfortable talking with the men than the women, and soon she was drinking with them glass for glass, listening to their jokes and their complaints, and making a few of her own. Early in the evening the other two women would go home, and then the party would be only Catherine and the men. Often, after she was home alone in the empty silence of the condominium where she and Kevin had once lived together, she would pour herself one last drink of whiskey to put herself to sleep.
One night she stayed late until the group dwindled down to Catherine and a friend named Nick. She let him take her home, and then she slept with him. Catherine fended off feeling ashamed by telling herself that the whole event had been good-natured—something that had happened between close friends—but they both felt awkward seeing each other at work after that, and the friendship diminished to a tacit agreement not to mention the incident again.
A couple of weeks later, it happened with another one of the men in the group. This one was Derek, a tall, thin British broker with a sallow complexion and an overbite. This time she had not even thought about being with Derek. He had simply paid the last tab, conducted her out of the bar, and kissed her. Derek drove her to his
apartment, and they slept together.
In the morning she called her supervisor, said she was sick, and spent some time wondering why she had slept with Derek. All she could do was shrug and tell herself that she’d just had too much to drink—it wasn’t her fault. But it wasn’t the first time, and it was her fault. She brought back every moment of the night and analyzed it. She had not especially wanted to be with Derek, who wasn’t a close friend like Nick, and wasn’t even attractive. The alcohol had made her feel a lazy acquiescence: she had lost control of her will in exactly the way she had lost control of her arms and legs. It had just seemed like too much effort to exert them.
Later that day she quit her job, poured her supply of liquor out in the sink, and packed her belongings into her car for the drive home to Oregon. Driving back to Oregon was a desperate retreat. During every mile of the drive, she was afraid. She had failed to keep her husband, and she had run away from her career as a broker. She had developed such a taste for the forgetfulness and indifference that alcohol gave her that she had kept drinking even after she had done things that made her ashamed. She had slept with the two men who had asked, but it could just as easily have been five, or ten, or none. Things had just stopped mattering. The landscape behind her—the past, the people, the places where she had lived—was as dead and comfortless as a pile of bones.
She had no business considering a relationship with a man like Joe Pitt. She couldn’t take the risks, and he shouldn’t have to tolerate the rules she had made for herself. He didn’t have any incentive to be constricted by her vulnerabilities and her past. She couldn’t bear even to tell him about them. By the time the plane landed in Los Angeles, she was ashamed of herself for even considering speaking to him.
A few minutes later she was in Los Angeles International Airport, pulling her rolling suitcase along the concourse toward the escalator down to the car rental counters. She walked past the gift shops, looking in as she went. On the back wall were always racks of paperback books and magazines. There was the jumble of stuffed animals, hats, and T-shirts, all purporting to be from Hollywood or Beverly Hills. And in front of the store were racks with newspapers.