Nightlife

by Thomas Perry

  The New York Times and Los Angeles Times were in stacks, but the Daily News had one paper propped up where she could see the big color picture above the fold. The picture was a blurred security-camera shot, and that might have been what made her notice the resemblance immediately. The young woman seemed too much like Tanya to be anyone else. This time she had somewhat shorter, brownish hair, and she was wearing pants and a little sweater with a hood.

  Catherine Hobbes read the caption above the picture: WOMAN SOUGHT IN SUSPICIOUS DEATH AT HOTEL. Beneath the picture was “If you recognize this woman, please call the Tip Number . . .”

  Hobbes started toward the cash register, then, on second thought, came back for another copy. She bought them, took them to a seat in a waiting area off the concourse and looked at the picture once again, then scanned the article.

  The woman had been seen at a hotel with a young man named Brian Corey, who had later jumped, fallen, or been pushed from the balcony of his eighth-floor room. The detective who had spoken with the reporter was listed as James Spengler of the Hollywood Division.

  Hobbes held the paper on her lap, got her cell phone out of her purse, and realized that her hand was shaking. She took a deep breath, then asked the information operator for the number of the Hollywood Division. When she reached the station she was transferred twice.

  Finally, she heard a male voice say, “Homicide. Spengler.”

  She took another deep breath and tried to speak calmly and distinctly. “This is Detective Sergeant Catherine Hobbes of the Portland, Oregon, Police Bureau. I just arrived in Los Angeles a minute ago and saw the front-page picture in the Daily News.”

  “That was fast,” he said. “What you’ve seen is tomorrow morning’s edition. You don’t, by any chance, know the woman in the picture?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you have a name and address for her?”

  “I’ve got several.”

  15

  Nancy Mills had been awakened by the sun, which had somehow found a way through the blinds and made her pillow glow with painful brightness. She had dressed quickly and gone out, eager to be moving again. The killing of Brian stayed on her mind, even though he had been dead over a day now. She walked for a time, ate breakfast at the Red Robin in the plaza, then walked to the Promenade Mall and back. She spent most of the day wandering, finding anything she could to keep from staying in one place.

  She tried to think clearly about killing. She remembered that she had felt a kind of emotional satisfaction after she had killed Dennis Poole: the act of shooting him had served to purge a great tangle of complicated feelings that she’d had about him. Then she had felt frustrated, interrupted, when she had not been permitted to end the relationship with David Larson the right way. The chance meeting with Bill Thayer had been pure adventure—a strong dose of fear, some quick thinking, and then it was over. But it had left her with a peculiar tingling, a pleasant excitement. The night with Brian Corey was different from all of the others. It had been wilder, riskier, and more exciting.

  She loved being with men and feeling the strength of her ability to attract them. She liked the way they looked at her. She liked having sex with some of them. But afterward, she always detected in herself a surprising resentment for what they had taken from her. Even though she had gone out hoping that she would have the chance to make this happen, and had then struggled to get their attention, she didn’t exactly wish them well—she just needed them to want her. With some of them, she suspected that they felt superior because they had cajoled and flattered her into bed. Even when she was with the best of them, the physical act made her feel that they were controlling her, making her feel one sensation, then another, always at their discretion. After she had put all the effort into seducing them, she felt as though she had been coerced.

  She had felt that with Brian from the beginning. There had been a joy in attracting him, and in spending the beautiful warm night with him, but there had been another kind of pleasure in knowing that all along she was fooling him, manipulating him, spending the whole time patiently moving him toward that balcony.

  It was getting to be dinnertime again when she walked back to the apartment. She still felt the energy that wouldn’t let her rest, but she knew that she must be as close to invisible as she could manage. She went up the steps and opened the door, walked through the little lobby, past the mailboxes, and had entered her hallway when the door across the hall opened. “Nancy?”

  It was Nancy’s nearest neighbor. A woman of about sixty, she always looked worn, haggard, and upset, as though she were engaged in some great task in her apartment when the door was closed. What was her name? The label on her door of the big mailbox in the lobby said M. Tilson. They had met down there several times. What was it—May, Mandy, Marcie, Marilyn? No. Just Mary. “Hi, Mary.”

  Mary Tilson pulled her door open wide and touched her short brown hair nervously. “Do you have a second?”

  Nancy stepped inside. Mary seemed anxious, a bit more upset than usual. Nancy had never been inside her apartment before. She could see that the layout was exactly the same as hers, only on the other side of the building, reversed like a mirror image. There was a lingering smell of chlorine, as though Mary had recently scrubbed her sinks with cleanser. Nancy imagined her as one of those women who were always scrubbing and cleaning things, and a glance around the apartment confirmed it. The light beige carpet looked new, and the shelves filled beyond capacity with horrible china dogs were free of dust.

  Mary hurried to the well-waxed dining room table, snatched up a newspaper, and hurried back. Nancy could see it was the Daily News, the smaller Los Angeles morning paper. “Honey,” said Mary. “I’m glad I heard you come in.” It seemed an odd way for a woman who didn’t know her very well to talk. “I just came in myself. I was out at the grocery store, and I picked up both papers, because I like to see the early edition.”

  “Oh?” said Nancy. “What a smart idea.” It didn’t seem to her to be a smart idea. It seemed sad. She sensed that Mary was going to be a neighbor who bothered her with bulletins about tiny aspects of her daily life. Soon it would be recipes and coupons for the supermarket. She made a resolution to avoid being cornered like this again.

  “Yes,” said Mary. “I started doing it with the Sunday papers, because they came out on Saturday afternoon, and there was so much extra stuff in them.” She seemed to struggle to get past these topics that made her comfortable, and into something that was making her uncomfortable. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think I have to.” She handed the newspaper to Nancy. “Is this picture you?”

  Nancy held the newspaper in both hands and stared at the picture on the front page. She realized that she was in a state of amazement that was making it hard for her to think past the brute fact of the photograph. How had anyone taken a picture of her in the hotel? How could they have it in the newspaper? The picture was a random blow to her, like a runaway car suddenly veering off the street to run her down. She knew she had to force herself to react, to talk. “That’s something, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Is it you?”

  “Of course not,” said Nancy. “I guess there are a lot of girls who look like me, or sort of like me. What’s the story about?” As she chattered, she was trying to scan the two columns of print below the picture, but she was too agitated to keep her eyes on the print and too impatient to decipher it. She knew what it had to be about. She had instantly recognized the lobby of the Beverly Hilton hotel, recognized Brian, recognized herself, recognized the clothes she had been wearing.

  “It’s . . . it says that the man this woman was with the other night fell out of a hotel window.” She seemed alarmed by the way she had said it, then gave a nervous laugh. “I’m glad it wasn’t you. That would have been really awful. The man who fell, or jumped, would have been somebody you knew.”

  Nancy handed the newspaper back to her. “Well, thanks for checking. If it had been me, I guess I’d want to
know.”

  “No trouble at all. When I saw it in the store, I just couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, ‘It can’t be.’ And I was right. It wasn’t. What a relief.”

  Nancy started toward the door. She had been so edgy and full of restless energy when Mary had stopped her that she had barely been able to force herself to enter, and now the smells and the impression of clutter from the unnecessary furniture and the china dogs and clusters of framed pictures made her want to run.

  “Wait.”

  Nancy’s mind was racing. She stopped because she knew she had to. But she needed to get out and think, and her mind kept jumping from one thought to another, never settling on one. She fixed an inquisitive, friendly expression on her face, and turned to look at Mary. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was thinking. That picture looks so much like you. I wonder if you ought to call the police and tell them it’s not you.”

  “What?”

  “It looks just exactly like you. There will be other people who see it. What if everybody in the building calls them, and the people at the supermarket and everywhere else you go call them and say that the picture is you?”

  “I could hardly blame them,” said Nancy.

  “Well, then would it be better to call the police and say, ‘I know you’re going to get calls saying that’s me,’ so they know they can eliminate you ahead of time? That way, they’re not going to come looking for you. It could save you a whole lot of trouble and unpleasantness.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The paper said they want to talk to you about that man’s death, which they said is suspicious. You know what that means. If they come, they might arrest you.”

  “I doubt it. I’m a pretty harmless person.”

  “I saw this show on TV not too long ago about this young black guy who got arrested because he looked like this other young black guy who had robbed a liquor store and shot people. He was really a teacher, and he was just driving home from coaching the debating team, and they ended up convicting him of murder. When the real killer confessed, he didn’t even look all that much like the innocent guy. Not nearly as much as you look like that picture.”

  Nancy shrugged. “If I have time tomorrow, I’ll give them a call. I might end up saving them a trip. Thanks.”

  “Would you mind if I called them for you in the meantime?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because tomorrow morning, when this picture is on doorsteps all over the city, it’s going to be too late. We could have a SWAT team here kicking down the door.”

  The restless energy that Nancy had felt since the moment when she had pushed Brian off the balcony was beginning to overwhelm her again. She could feel her neck and shoulders tensing, and she clenched her hands like claws to keep them still. “I wish you wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “I’m giving you the chance to do it yourself.”

  In the next instant, Nancy’s distraction and nervousness died away. She saw the events of the past two days and the next two days at once. She knew now that she should never have gone out and found Brian Corey. It had been a horrible lapse of judgment.

  She knew that Mary was right about the picture in the paper. At seven tomorrow morning there would be copies on thousands of doorsteps. People would remember seeing her at stores and restaurants in the plaza, in the apartment building, on the nearby streets. Tomorrow morning might be optimistic. It was a sensational story, the kind that might turn up tonight on the local television news. She had to get out of Los Angeles as quickly as she could. It would take only a few minutes to pack her clothes and her money. But that wasn’t good enough. There was no time to get a car, and no time to build a new identity.

  She looked at Mary. “You’re right.” She knew that what she was considering was a form of perfection. It would fend off all of the people who wanted to do her harm, and it would give her a way to supply all of her immediate needs. It was so right that it began to happen without her choosing to do it. She didn’t plan. She simply started.

  “You’re absolutely right. I wasn’t really thinking clearly. In fact, I’d be doing them a favor too. Eliminating the need to investigate calls from fifty people is probably as good as a tip.”

  “At least it helps. And if they’ve already been called about you, it might be important.”

  Nancy gave an apologetic smile, and a shiver. “I’m actually a little nervous. I don’t know why.”

  “Then let’s do it together. Here. Let’s have some iced tea. That’ll help us cool off and calm down. Then we can make the call.”

  Mary walked to the small kitchen and Nancy followed closely. Nancy’s eyes and ears had been so sensitized by the excitement and agitation that they almost hurt. She saw Mary reach for the refrigerator’s door, and she saw the black grips of the kitchen knives sticking out of the slits in the butcher-block holder on the counter. She snatched a big one out and had it in motion before Mary’s hand could close on the door handle.

  She stabbed it into Mary’s back in the spot below the left shoulder blade that she judged must be the heart, but it hit a rib and she had to push it upward and over before it would go in.

  Mary’s arms flew out from her sides, she tried to turn, and she cried loudly, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  Nancy had to silence her. She tugged out the knife, clutched Mary’s hair, wrapping it around her fingers, and jerked the head back. She drew the knife blade across Mary’s throat under the jaw. She had heard someone use the term “ear to ear,” so she did it that way, trying to make the slice as deep as she could.

  Mary’s hands came up to her throat. There was a hissing, gurgling noise, and spurts of blood spattered the white metal surface of the refrigerator door like carnations, then streaked down to the floor.

  It was horrible. Why wasn’t she dead? Nancy held her there, her hand still caught in Mary’s hair. She hooked her right arm around Mary from behind and plunged the knife into Mary’s torso just below the center of the rib cage. She knew she had missed the heart again, so she pushed down on the handle to lever the blade upward, then grabbed the handle with both hands and drew it toward herself.

  Mary’s knees buckled and she collapsed to the floor. Nancy released her hair and stepped backward, leaving the knife in her. Nancy looked down and saw that her arms were covered with blood from the elbows to the fingertips, dripping into the pools that were merging into each other beside Mary.

  Nancy turned and stepped to the sink. She ran the water to wash the blood off her arms, twisting every few seconds to see whether Mary had moved. Was she finally dead? Maybe she was, but it seemed that as long as the pool of blood kept growing, the heart must still be pumping it out onto the floor.

  Nancy knew that her jeans and her top probably had droplets of blood on them somewhere, but she couldn’t see them and she was clean enough to accomplish the next tasks. She took the rubber gloves that Mary had left on the sink beside the cleanser and put them on.

  Mary’s purse was easy to find. She had left it in plain sight on the counter near the telephone. Nancy opened it and examined the contents. There were Mary’s keys. The apartment key was exactly like Nancy’s. The car key had a black plastic sleeve stamped with an H for Honda. There was a small wallet with Mary’s credit cards and identification, but no cash. Nancy unzipped each of the handbag’s inner pockets until she found one with a zippered change purse. Inside was folded currency, and on top were some fifty-dollar bills.

  Nancy stood in the kitchen and looked through the doorway at the rest of the apartment. Here was the grotesquely crowded living room, one bedroom, and a bath, all laid out facing hers across the hall. She knew she should spend very little time searching the place, but she knew she wouldn’t need much. If something of value wasn’t in the bedroom, it had to be hidden in the kitchen—in the freezer, or inside the pots and pans, or high on a shelf in a sugar bowl.

  Being near Mary made her feel uneasy. She wasn’t really sure that Mary wa
s dead yet, and she had the feeling that Mary was lying there awake, looking at her and listening to her as she went about her business. She had a curiosity about how Mary’s bedroom would look, so she chose to begin her search there.

  Nancy hurried to the hall and stopped in the bedroom doorway. It was just as she had expected. The furniture was pseudo-Victorian, heavy and dark, with scrollwork all over it. The bed had six ruffled pillows propped on a flowered duvet. There were corner shelves with china and glass objects, and thick brocade curtains in an ugly green smothered the windows.

  Nancy switched on the light. She knelt and looked under the bed, but found it was where Mary stored out-of-season coats and boots in see-through plastic boxes. She searched the closet, then moved to the dresser. She was disappointed to find that there were only clothes in the drawers, and the jewelry box on top contained nothing that was worth stealing.

  When she moved to the nightstand beside the bed and opened the top drawer, she felt herself flush with excitement. In the drawer, where it would be ready and within reach while she was sleeping, was a small, short-barreled revolver. Nancy picked it up cautiously and examined it. The gun was silver-toned, with white plastic handgrips. She aimed it at an imaginary target and saw the brass bullet casings at the back of the cylinder. Mary had stored it loaded.

  It occurred to Nancy that she was lucky she had chosen to kill Mary right away and in the kitchen. If Mary had been in here, or even in the hallway or the closer parts of the living room, Nancy might have been the one who was lying on the floor bleeding. The thought of it made her heart beat harder again. She had never imagined that someone like Mary would own a gun. She had been ambushed and lured into this apartment by a woman who had a gun hidden ten feet from the door. Nancy had narrowly saved herself.