Nightlife

by Thomas Perry

  “What have we got left?” asked Catherine.

  Toni looked up at the clock on the wall. “It’s nearly eleven. What I’ve got is a load of laundry and a sink full of dishes waiting at home.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Catherine. “I know I kept you here half the night.”

  “No,” said Toni. “You didn’t. When we’ve got one that fresh, I always try to squeeze all the information I can out of the trace evidence the first day. Sometimes you find something that helps catch the killer that day, and not just convict him two years later.”

  “I know. That’s why I’ve been hanging around.”

  Toni carefully poured the warm epoxy back into its jar. “How long have you been a cop?”

  “Seven years. Four in homicide.”

  “You went through the ranks fast.” She began to sponge off the counters where she had been working.

  Catherine shrugged. “It’s a small department and I’m good at taking tests.”

  Toni looked at her for a moment. “I’ll bet you are.”

  “How long for you?”

  “Fifteen years this June. For me, it’s a little different. I see some horrible things, but I don’t have to chase anybody down and drag him off to jail. There’s less stress.” She took off her lab coat and hung it on a hook. “And no fear.”

  “Well, thanks for staying late tonight,” said Catherine.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get everything we wanted, but we’ll keep working on it.”

  “Thanks to you, we know for certain Nancy Mills is Tanya Starling, and we can place her in the victim’s apartment. That’s plenty for one day.” Catherine folded her picture of Tanya Starling as they walked toward the door.

  “Do you need a ride to your hotel?”

  “No, thanks,” said Catherine. “I have a rental car.” She stepped out in the hallway and Toni locked the door of the lab. “Good night.”

  She went to her car in the police lot and drove through the dark streets toward her hotel. Talking with Toni had made her think back on her first days as a police officer. She had not grown up planning to join the police bureau. She had decided to apply to the academy during the long drive home, away from the wreckage of her life in California. It had been an act of desperation, just grasping for something in her life that made sense and didn’t need an excuse or an explanation. The months in the academy that followed, the grueling physical training and the Spartan discipline that bothered other recruits so much, had been her salvation. At times she thought it had saved her life.

  She remembered the first day after she had graduated from the police academy. She reported for work at the police bureau more than an hour early, all dressed in her uniform with her shoes shined and her heavy gear creaking against her leather belt. She had been assigned to the precinct station on the northeast side of the city.

  When she walked in the front entrance and approached the desk, a big man with a military haircut and a neck that seemed to overflow from his starched collar stepped in from the side and said, “Hobbes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Morton. Come with me.”

  She followed, watching his broad back swaying from side to side with his rolling gait. He went into his office and closed the door, then glared at her with bloodshot eyes. His face seemed to have some kind of pink, irritated rash on it that she later came to believe was a reaction to contained anger. He said, “Catherine Hobbes.”

  “Yes, sir” was all she could think of to say.

  “Your father is Lieutenant Frank Hobbes, and your grandfather was the first Frank Hobbes. Is that right?”

  She smiled. “Yes.” She felt a moment of pride, and maybe some relief.

  “I hate dynasties.” He paused, then narrowed his eyes. “A police force is a government operation, which means that nobody in this town owns any more of it than anybody else. It doesn’t matter whose daughter or granddaughter you are. You are the greenest of green rookies, and you will be treated like all of the others in every respect. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I never wanted any special privileges.” Her stomach began to sink, and she knew her face was beginning to turn red.

  “You are also a woman,” he continued. “I’m very suspicious of that.”

  “Of what—that I’m a woman?”

  “Being a woman and wanting to be a cop. In this precinct we deal with a lot of street crime. Every day a cop has to go out and drag somebody back here in handcuffs or push somebody around. You coming here and exercising your constitutional right to wear that uniform has grave implications for the rest of the people I put out there. You coming here means to me that you must be assuming that some male cop is going to be willing and able to do his share of the physical stuff and yours too.”

  She knew that her face was bright red, but there was nothing she could do about it, and she was not going to retreat. “I’m not—”

  “Being Frank Hobbes’s daughter, you cannot pretend that you didn’t know what a cop does. You can’t possibly imagine you’re going to take down some crystal meth monster who’s six feet six and two eighty.”

  “No, sir,” she said. “Most of the men in my academy class aren’t up to that either. But any one of us will do our best to help subdue a person like that if the occasion comes up, and to use our brains to be sure it doesn’t come up often.”

  He glared at her for two seconds, then smiled, and said. “You are Frank’s girl. Welcome to my shop. Now get to roll call and go to work.”

  19

  Nancy Mills drove deeper into Arizona in the night. She had hoped to be better off than this by now. When she had seen Carl for the last time in Chicago, she had said she would have more money than he had within one year. It had been most of a year already, and what did she have so far? Forty thousand? No, less. She probably had thirty thousand left, and she was driving a dead woman’s car along a highway that had signs telling her to watch out for elk. Carl would have laughed at that if he could have known.

  Carl had hated nature. He had told her that golf courses were about the wildest places he ever wanted to be. He said that people who went on hikes in the wilderness or liked animals were stupid. Now that she could look back, she knew he had thought that most of the people he knew were stupid. Compared to Carl, they probably were.

  She had met Carl in a restaurant in Chicago. She had just finished her final exams for the fall semester, and she had taken herself out to dinner to celebrate.

  The celebration felt due, because the semester had been a difficult time for her. Charlene had come to Chicago on the bus four days early. She had slept in the bus station the first night, then rented the only lodging she could afford, a room in a dirty motel not far from the campus. She had walked past her dormitory each day to see if it was open yet, and then sneaked in on the fourth day at seven A.M., when the last of the janitorial crews were cleaning up after the painters who had given the hive of cubical cinder-block rooms a fresh coat of bile green.

  She had dreaded the way the first day at the dormitory would be. She had seen simulations of that day in movies and television shows—the happy, eager students, the resigned, tearful mothers, the proud, worried fathers all haunting the dormitories—and had known there was no place for her in that event. For her it could only be an unmasking. Everyone would see that nobody cared about her, and that she was nothing.

  She put her clothes into one of the two dressers in her room, left a note to claim one of the beds, and went out until evening, after the other girls were settled and their families gone. She told the girls on her floor that her parents were living in Europe, and couldn’t come with her.

  College began badly and became an ordeal. She had hoped college would change her life, but the girls snubbed her, the city was gray and filthy, and the work was demanding and monotonous. The world was pretty much the same everywhere, and her status in it was fixed at the lowest slot. Nothing Charlene Buckner ever did was going to make more than a minor
change that would probably be temporary and might not even be an improvement.

  Near the end of the semester, Charlene began to make her first visits to another life, one that existed because she chose it. She bought two good outfits at Marshall Field’s. One was a black cocktail dress that was on deep discount because there was a tiny tear in the hem that she could fix in a minute. The other was a sleek black skirt and three different tops to go with it.

  She found a good pair of black shoes on sale because they had heels too high for most women to bear. Her mother had trained her from the age of four to dance in high heels for the beauty pageants, so she loved them. There was also a pair of black flats that she could wear in less formal places, and a small, elegant black purse. The coat she bought was intended as a raincoat, too light for a Chicago January, but she knew it looked right, so she tolerated the cold. She began to dress and go out alone at night.

  Charlene would call for her reservations in various names that she made up while she was standing at the dormitory pay phone, like Nicole Davis or Kimberly De Jong. She would go into the bar after dinner, and when men asked her name, she would give them the latest one. During the long weeks of classes she was Charlene, but once or twice a week, there would be a night when she became Nicole or Kimberly or Tiffany.

  She discovered that she could attract men. Occasionally she would go out on a Friday night, meet a man, and then not return to the dormitory until Saturday, or even Sunday. If anyone asked where she had been, she would say she had gone to visit an old school friend in Boston, or met her parents for dinner in New York. But the other girls had so little interest in her that they seldom asked.

  She loved the nights when she was someone else. The only disappointment was the men. They excited her at first because they were a few years older than she was, but they were all so involved with their careers as stockbrokers or sales representatives or junior executives that they were unable to convey anything to her about their lives that she understood, except that they worked very long hours.

  On one of those Friday evenings, at a restaurant called Luther’s, she met Carl. She’d walked in from the dining room and stepped toward the bar when she became aware that someone was close behind her. There was a tap on the shoulder, and she turned to see Carl. He smiled and said, “Please join me at my table.”

  Carl was older than the men she had been meeting: he looked about forty-five. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he was trim and had good posture, and his dark suit was beautiful. For a second when she had first turned around she’d thought he might be a hotel employee who was going to check the forged identification she’d bought outside the student union. But she looked at his expression and saw his eyebrows raised in an offer rather than knitted in anger, so she assumed a look of self-assurance she had been practicing, and went with him.

  He introduced himself as Carl Nelson, and said he had noticed her at dinner and had not been able to let her leave without meeting her. He spoke without any embarrassment or uncertainty, a feat that she could not imagine any of the younger men performing. Everything he said seemed effortless. He told her she was a young woman who deserved to be congratulated on her beauty and told her that seeing her gave him pleasure.

  She was so pleased that she invented a name for the occasion. She said she was Tanya Starling. It came to her because Tanya had always seemed to her to be foreign, and therefore frankly sensual. Starling was the corrective, a word that made her sound tiny and vulnerable, a way of protecting herself from the Tanya part.

  Carl liked her name, and he liked her. When the waiter arrived, Carl didn’t ask her what she wanted. He simply ordered two vodka martinis, up, with an olive. When they arrived, cold and clear, she recognized them. As a child she had always imagined her mother in an elegant place like this with a man like Carl, drinking something from a stemmed glass that moved back and forth to throw off reflected light when she lifted it.

  Carl was a lawyer. Unlike the younger men, he didn’t say much about his work, but it was clear he had made money. Tanya didn’t exactly lie about what she was doing, but she made getting a bachelor’s degree into “studying the arts at the university,” so it would sound like a whim of an older woman.

  When she went back to the dormitory she had to tell her roommates that she would take any calls for her friend Tanya. Two days later, Carl called her and took her to another good restaurant. After that he took her out every couple of days, and called her whenever he happened to be thinking of her. He sent her flowers because they reminded him of her. He began to see other things—a set of sapphire earrings that would set off her blue eyes, a dress that would make her proud of her tiny waist.

  He called one day at the end of February, when the ground was covered with dirty snow that had partially thawed and then frozen into ice, and the wind was punishing. He said, “Honey, I’m going to Florida for a few days on business. I thought you might like a little break, and I’d like some company.”

  “Florida?” was all she could say.

  “I’ve got to meet with a client in Palm Beach. That part won’t take long, but I’m staying until Friday. Can you spare the time for me?”

  She packed her two suitcases with the few good clothes she owned, said good-bye to her roommates early in the morning, and told them she’d be back in a week for midterms.

  That day she learned what life with Carl Nelson would be. When they arrived in Florida a limousine waited to take them to the hotel and then to the country club for lunch with the client. The client was about sixty years old with impossibly white capped teeth, a pair of red-tinted glasses, and a suntan of a depth that had not been stylish during Charlene’s lifetime.

  Carl introduced them by saying, “Tanya, this is Richard Fellowes. Richard, this is the most beautiful girl in the state of Illinois, and her name is Tanya.”

  After only a moment she realized that Carl had brought her there to be decorative, so she imitated the haughty, bored look of the fashion models of her childhood and kept all of her movements graceful, while showing no awareness that the men were having a conversation. She answered direct questions and smiled politely at Richard Fellowes when it seemed necessary, but smiled much more warmly at Carl.

  The lunch told her a bit about Carl. Fellowes had owned a chain of dry-cleaning plants in the Midwest. Carl had helped him sell his controlling interest in the business at a large profit and move to Palm Beach a few years ago. Fellowes had remained on the board of directors, but now that the new owners were considering selling it, they wanted to buy his remaining shares.

  Carl went over the papers with Fellowes while Tanya Starling gazed out over the shady veranda at the deep green lawns and the first hole of the golf course, a tree-bordered straight stretch of grass that looked to her about the length of an airport runway, with, at the end of it, a tiny flag. The only sight beyond the flag was the blue of the ocean she had never seen before.

  Carl’s voice was deep and calm and reassuring. She could tell he was smart, that he had instantly seen what he had needed to in the contract and knew exactly how much of it to explain to his client. At the end, he handed Fellowes an onyx fountain pen and had him sign. When Fellowes said, “What’s this?” he answered, “You’re just initialing there to show that you know I’m also getting a fee from the company.” Tanya let her face reveal nothing. Carl was being paid by both sides.

  On the way back to the hotel, Tanya wanted to say something to Carl about the opulence of the country club, but she didn’t. She wanted him to believe that she was sophisticated from birth, a creature of natural taste who belonged in luxury because she was unimpressed by it.

  When the week in Florida was over, they flew back to Chicago at night. There was no discussion about Tanya going back to the dormitory. Carl simply had the driver go directly to his apartment in a high-rise building overlooking the lake. The driver carried their bags to the lobby, and the doorman put them into the elevator and transported them to the apartment on the top floor. Carl
put her two suitcases in the guest bedroom and said, “You can have the closets and bathroom in here to yourself. When you’re undressed, come into our bedroom.”

  After two weeks Tanya thought to make a telephone call to the office of the dean of students and let them know she wanted a leave of absence. The next day she went to the university in a taxi, found the boy outside the student union who had sold her the fake driver’s license she’d used to get served in bars, and ordered identification in the name Tanya Starling.

  She wanted to be the perfect mistress, but it took her some time to realize what Carl expected her to be and to do. She went about it with the discipline she had been taught in the beauty pageant competitions when she was a child, and the determination that had gotten her to college. She used the pocket money Carl gave her to buy custom-mixed makeup, and had the store’s experts teach her the latest looks and application techniques. As soon as Carl left each morning, she entered the home gym he had installed in the apartment, and exercised. She studied the articles in women’s magazines about how she should look and what she should wear, and what men liked in female behavior but didn’t necessarily know they liked, and how to improve her skin, hair, nails, body, and small talk.

  In the evenings when she went to parties and dinners with Carl, she closely observed the other women. Some were attorneys or clients, but most of them were wives or girlfriends of very successful men. They were all a few years older than Tanya, and very elegant and poised. She studied manners and personality traits that she envied, and took them for herself.

  From the beginning, some of the men Carl knew would find ways to be alone with her for a moment and try to interest her in meeting them somewhere without Carl. She was extremely careful to be unremittingly loyal to Carl, but never derisive or threatening to the suitors. She understood instinctively that making enemies of Carl’s friends and colleagues could only lead to trouble for her. As she got better at her new vocation, she gained knowledge of what men were really thinking and feeling. She saw that they might have complex minds full of information she was not capable of understanding, but in their dealings with women, they were no more able to think beyond the mere prospect of sex than Tim had been.