Nightlife: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  “Do you mean that Jack didn’t intend to pull the trigger?”

  “No. I mean yes, I suppose he did. But it was because he thought Sam was a burglar, trying to kill him. It was dark, and how could he know that Sam didn’t have a knife or a gun too? He thought he had to shoot—that he was protecting his life, and mine too. Neither of them had ever seen each other before, and neither wanted to hurt anyone. It was just a terrible misunderstanding. An accident.”

  “So your husband, Jack, really thought he was being attacked, and Sam thought he was about to be murdered and jumped out to defend himself?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Hammond sat down on the couch, crying, her body bent over and shaking. “Yes. It was my fault.”

  Catherine looked down at her. The woman was so wretched that for an instant Catherine’s strongest sensation was relief that she was not Marjorie Hammond. She was not this woman bent over and sobbing, crouching on the edge of the couch with her wrists cuffed behind her, unable even to wipe the tears that were streaking her face.

  Catherine knew that she was about to do something foolish, and was violating department procedures. But she leaned down and used her key to unlock the handcuffs. She removed them, put them in her purse, and handed Mrs. Hammond a tissue. “Here.”

  Mrs. Hammond was rocking back and forth, crying steadily and silently. Almost inaudibly, she said, “It’s so stupid. It’s just so stupid.”

  “What is?”

  “I always loved Jack. I love him so much. There was nothing wrong with us.”

  “Then why?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened. I used to see Sam at the store every week, and we said hello. Sometimes we talked for a minute if he was approving a check, or I was asking him where something was. It was nothing. Then one time when I was out in the afternoon, I stopped for coffee at a Starbucks downtown, near Pioneer Square, and he was in there. He came up to me while I was waiting at the counter, and we sat together. We were there for about two hours, and we talked in a way we never did in the store—about our lives, what we thought and felt. He said he always came there on his days off, Tuesday and Thursday, at one, right after lunch, when he’d finished his errands. About a week later, I was near there again, and I went in.”

  “Was it because he was there?”

  “No, it wasn’t. I didn’t even remember it was Thursday. I happened to see the sign, and I remembered the place as pleasant. Then I got there and saw him, and I realized that the reason I thought it was pleasant was because of him. This time I went and sat with him.” She stopped and cried some more. “He was just so nice. He was good, and smart, and he’d had such a sad life. He and I talked about everything, and then the afternoon was gone.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “For a couple of months. I would think to myself that having coffee with a man wasn’t a good idea, so I would miss Tuesday. Then Thursday came and I would ask what the harm was, and it didn’t seem like there was any. So I went, and he would look up from his paper and he’d say how pleased he was that I had come. He would notice things about me, and be able to tell how I was feeling. He was interested in everything I had to say. Pretty soon I would think about it ahead of time, look forward to going to meet him.”

  “Was he married too?”

  “No. He had been engaged a few years ago, and then she’d changed her mind, and he hadn’t been able to get over it for a long time.”

  “But he knew you were married from the start, right?”

  “Of course. Jack was the center of my life, and so a lot of the time what I talked about was Jack and me. Sometimes I would tell Sam about fights or hurt feelings I had. And then one day I realized that I’d fallen into the habit of telling him things that I had not even told Jack. If there were problems he didn’t always have answers, and that was a kind of wisdom, too, to know that if the answers were that easy, I would have found them myself. Or even if there was an answer, he knew that I knew it too, but that I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself yet. At those times he would just listen and let me work it out. I tried to do the same for him.”

  “When did the relationship move out of Starbucks?”

  “After a couple of months. That was my fault. I let that happen. I was feeling really good one day, and what was making me feel good was that Sam knew me so well and still liked me so much. When he saw how I was that day, I think the contrast may have been what struck him. He was kind of subdued and maybe depressed. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me. He said his life was empty and he needed more.”

  “More?”

  “A real relationship with a woman. He said he didn’t want me to ruin my marriage and break up with Jack. He knew that it was the most important thing in my life. He just wanted to be with me.” She sobbed for a minute or more, while Catherine waited patiently. Then she looked up, almost pleading. “You understand? Jack and I were happy, and that was what he wanted, and I wanted it for him too. I just sat there at the table looking at him, and the words ‘Why not?’ came into my mind. I couldn’t think of an answer that was real. The only answer was that I wasn’t supposed to. He wanted to so much, and I did too. Sam knew that I would never leave Jack. So when I said, ‘Why not?’ this time, it was out loud. We went right from there to a hotel across Pioneer Square.”

  “That was the start. How long did it go on?”

  “We still met on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, at one. Sometimes we would go to his apartment. Sometimes we would drive somewhere, and he would have reserved a room. It’s been about six months, from March until now. A couple of times, things just seemed wrong, and I would start to break it off. But then I couldn’t.”

  “When was that?”

  “A few times. I remember once, standing by the car outside a hotel in Fairview, and we were saying good-bye for the last time, and it was raining. I was crying because I cared so much about him, and we were both getting wet, and then I could see his face was wet too. It wasn’t just the rain. And I took it all back and we kissed and went back inside, even though we knew we could be late getting home and I would have to make up a lie for Jack’s sake. I knew I was using up one of my lies, because I knew I wouldn’t have many of them. You can’t lie to someone about why you’re late on Thursday afternoons more than about twice, or they’ll know. It would have hurt Jack so much.” Saying it seemed to remind her of what was about to happen. She began to cry again.

  “I’m sorry,” said Catherine.

  “Everything is ruined, and there’s nothing to make any of it better. Sam is dead. Jack’s life is ruined. My life is ruined.”

  Catherine needed her to get the rest of the story out before she stopped talking. “Was last night the first time Sam stayed over at your house?”

  “No. There were a few times before. I couldn’t go to his place at night, because Jack might call our house from his hotel. But this time Jack didn’t call. He just came home to be with me. When Sam and I heard the car pull into the driveway, I was terrified. I looked out the bedroom window and saw the headlights on the garage door, and then the door started to open. I made Sam grab his clothes and run downstairs to hide, so as soon as Jack came upstairs, Sam could slip out.”

  “But Jack heard him?”

  “Sam must have stumbled in the dark or dropped his shoe or something. I told Jack he was imagining things, but he wouldn’t listen. I went to the top of the stairs and yelled at him not to prowl around—not just to persuade him, but to warn Sam too—but nothing worked. He opened the closet and Sam jumped out at him.” She stared up at Catherine, her eyes red and swollen, her face a mask of anguish. “It’s really the same as I said at first. I told you.”

  Catherine said, “I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry.” She gently took her to the car without taking out the handcuffs again, and drove her to the police bureau to get her statement on paper.

  By the time Catherine was finished with the statement and her report and had signed the transcript of the tape recording, it was too late
to answer any of the telephone messages that had piled up on her desk. She used her cell phone to call Joe Pitt while she drove toward Adair Hill.

  He said, “You’re going home late. Solve another murder or something?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Not a happy story, though.” She told him what had happened, then said, “Oops. Joe, I need both hands to drive now. Sleep tight.”

  “Good night. Love you.”

  Catherine had started closing her cell phone before she heard it, and now she cursed herself for ending the call. Had he really said that? If he had, what could it possibly have meant? It had sounded automatic, like a formula. She thought about it as she drove up the curving road. She decided to ignore it. If he really had intended to tell her he loved her, then he would do it again.

  She stopped in front of her parents’ house and went inside. “Mom?” she called.

  Her mother appeared from the kitchen. “Hi, honey. Just coming home from work?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I hadn’t seen you guys in a couple of days, so I thought I’d come and brighten your empty lives.”

  “You mean you don’t feel like making your own dinner?”

  “That’s right. Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s upstairs. He’ll probably be down in a minute. Want some leftover turkey?”

  “Sure. Let me get my own.” She walked into the kitchen and got herself a plate, then took the Tupperware container with the neatly sliced turkey breast in it, added some broccoli, and put it into the microwave.

  Her mother watched her. “How is your new boyfriend working out?”

  She turned her head in mock surprise. “How’s your crystal ball?”

  “It’s not that hard. I called your house the last five evenings and you’ve been out late. So how much are you going to tell me?”

  “I’ll spill my guts. His name is Joe Pitt, and he was just here for a few days. I have absolutely no business going out with him. He’s too old and too rich and has a bad boy reputation that I think he probably earned. Naturally I’m getting more interested by the day. I’ll let you know when I need to come over and cry about how it ended.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” said her mother. “I’ll set aside some time.”

  There was the sound of her father’s heavy footsteps on the stairway, and then her father appeared. “Ah, the princess has returned.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He sat down in the chair beside hers, smiling. “Working late, eh?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Nothing you haven’t seen a hundred times. Husband comes home early from a business trip. He trusts his wife, so he thinks the guy hiding in the closet is a burglar.”

  “Bang bang,” said her father. “It’s a rotten job. I told you that from the time you were a child.”

  “Practically from birth,” she agreed. “This is good,” she said to her mother. “It must have been nice to be one of the invited guests for its first appearance.”

  “Then answer your damned phone,” said her father. “We tried.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was busy trying to have a life.”

  “Anybody we know?”

  “No. He was a cop for a while, then an investigator for the Los Angeles D.A. He’s retired from that and working as a P.I. now.”

  “Sounds too old for you.”

  “He is.”

  “Of course, you’re getting older by the day.”

  “Thanks for noticing. I guess the bloom is off the rose.”

  “The second bloom is more luxuriant than the first,” he said. “You seem kind of down. It was that case, wasn’t it?”

  “You know how it is. Half the people you see are dead. The other half you’re seeing on the very worst day of their whole lives. It makes you tired.”

  Her father stood up, kissed her on the forehead, and went out into the living room. In a moment, she heard the television.

  She finished her dinner and rinsed the plate and silverware, then put them in the dishwasher with the ones from her parents’ dinner. She talked to her mother for a time about the things that had been going on in her parents’ lives. Then she and her mother both drifted into the living room and watched the meaningless activity on the screen with her father.

  Suddenly she caught herself falling asleep. She stood up, kissed them both, and drove the rest of the way up the hill to her house. As she pulled into the garage, she thought she saw something move, just beyond the reach of the lights on the eaves of her house. But she knew that sometimes that happened when a person had not had enough sleep for a few days—the mind supplied the monster that it feared.

  43

  Judith Nathan filled the small backpack with the quart cans she had bought, and then lifted it. She had not expected it to be this heavy, or this hard and lumpy. She took everything out, wrapped the cans in a towel, put them in the backpack, and slipped another folded towel into the space between the cans and her back. She put the straps on her shoulders to repeat the test, and the pack felt more comfortable.

  Judith dressed in her black pants and her running shoes, put on her black sweater and her raincoat. She inspected herself in the mirror, then looked at her watch. It was just after two A.M.

  She opened the cylinder of Mary Tilson’s revolver and made sure all the chambers were loaded. She put it into the deep right-hand pocket of the raincoat and examined herself in the mirror once more to be sure it didn’t show. She took six extra bullets from the box and put them into her left pocket. Then she went outside and locked her door.

  She had always been able to make herself feel better by going out into the night. When she was about six she had sometimes waited until her mother and the current boyfriend were back from their evening at the bars and had fallen asleep. Then she would slip on some clothes, quietly open the front door, and go out. The first time, she started by just stepping out on the front porch, looking and listening.

  The night was not black, as it had always seemed from inside the lighted house. It was made of gray-blues, deep greens, and the white moonlight. She could see the familiar trees, sidewalks, and houses, but all of them were now silent, and everything was motionless. The people had not just gone. In the deep night they did not exist. The world was quiet.

  At first she crouched on the porch with her back against the front of the house, far from the railing and near enough to the door so she had a fair chance of getting to safety ahead of whatever might leap out of the shadows to eat her. She stayed there for a long time that night and on several others before she was sure that no such thing would happen, and then stepped forward to the railing.

  After that she moved to the porch steps, and it made an enormous difference. The porch roof had kept her in the shadows and hidden her, but it had also hidden the stars and the sky from her, and blocked her from the gentle current of slowly moving air. What she could hear once she was away from the house was a silence that had a range, that came to her from a great distance, from everywhere the dark could reach.

  By the end of summer she had moved away from the house to the sidewalk, and on into the world. By the time she was eight she was in the habit of sneaking out every night and walking the streets. First she walked the streets of her neighborhood and looked at the houses she had always seen in daylight. Then she got into the habit of walking to school. The night walk became a tour of all of the places where she had been during the day. It was a chance to revisit scenes where things had happened. At night, the places were only hers.

  She would look down at a spot on the concrete steps of the school and remember it was where Marlene Mastich had stood and said Charlene’s hair was dirty. She had stood right there to say it to the other girls, not an inch to either side. But now this spot, this step, this whole school, belonged to Charlene, and all other people were only memories, disturbances left in her brain from an ugly day. People weren’t even real now, only the ground where they had stood. There was only C
harlene in the night world. The trees were real, the dark stores with iron grates across their windows were real, and Charlene was real. That was all.

  Charlene was Judith Nathan tonight, and it was time to move. She stepped around the building to the row of carports along the back. She wasn’t worried that she would wake up any of the other tenants. Each carport had a cage at the rear of it where people stored things, and behind that was the laundry room. The first room where anybody slept was one floor up, and it was Judith Nathan’s.

  She drove her Acura far across town to the foot of Catherine Hobbes’s street. Then she parked it a block away in a line of cars that seemed to belong to people asleep in a row of big old apartment buildings. She put on her backpack, walked to the foot of Catherine Hobbes’s street, and began to climb.

  The houses along the way were all dark and silent. After a minute of walking she began to feel again the peculiar sensation that had comforted her as a child, that the world was empty except for her. In the flat places downtown there were always people out and driving around, businesses with lights on. But up here on the winding, tree-shadowed street where people were all asleep, she was alone.

  Judith had walked these same steps a number of times since she had arrived in Portland, but now the feeling was different. She was taking possession of the place. The neighborhood had moved into the few hours of late night when all of the people had fallen into unconsciousness.

  She walked along comfortably even though her small pack was heavy. She was used to exercising and jogging long distances. The weight of the pack made her breathing seem louder to her own ears, but she took the extra weight in her thighs and calves instead of her back, so it wasn’t a strain.

  Judith reached the row of houses along the crest of the hill and sat down on the curb across the street to study them. She yawned to be sure her ears were clear and she was hearing every sound. It was two forty-five A.M., and the silence was still unbroken. When she felt ready, she stood and noticed that up here along the ridge there was a slight breeze. Good. That would help.