Nightlife_ A Novel Part 16

"He's sort of a well-known figure in this part of the world. If you don't know anything about him, you should have Jim Spengler run his record for you. Dunn does investigations. I don't know if he's still got a license or not, but it doesn't matter."

She shrugged. "So Hugo replaced you. I wouldn't work with you, and I won't work with him, either."

He shook his head. "Calvin Dunn doesn't want to work with you."

"What do you mean?"

"He works for people who would never go to the police for any reason. If a criminal has a relative kidnapped or a s.h.i.+pment hijacked, he wants to find out who did it. Calvin Dunn will find out. He's not one of us. He's one of them. He goes down the rabbit hole, and when he comes back he's got blood on his teeth, and there's no rabbit problem anymore."

"When did Hugo hire him?"

"Today, I think. It could have been yesterday."

She stared at the wall for a moment. "Why did you decide to tell me this?"

"Because Calvin Dunn is dangerous. He isn't going to be out collecting evidence or something. He's not interested in seeing the girl go to trial. Even if you see him go through two sets of metal detectors, you should a.s.sume that he's armed and doesn't mind if you're the one he needs to hurt to get to her."

"Thanks. I appreciate the warning. I probably won't be the one to run into him, though."

"Why not?"

"I've got to leave for Portland in the morning. My captain let me stay this long only because we thought the California police might stop her on the road. But there are other cases in Portland, so he wants me back."

Joe Pitt shrugged. "I suppose he's right. She could turn up anywhere at this point, and L.A. probably isn't the most likely place now that she's been here." He brightened. "You know, since you're just going to spend tomorrow in airports, you could come downstairs and have a drink with me."

"I don't drink."

"Then come and have a soda with me."

She gazed at him for a moment, wavering. She detected in herself a kind of affection toward him, maybe just because she had worked with him and then expected not to see him again. She had been feeling very alone, and maybe even depressed tonight. "All right. Just for a little while. Then I have to get to sleep." She took her purse, went to the door, and opened it for him.

As she walked beside him to the elevator, she sensed an odd feeling of familiarity, and then realized it was walking beside a man in a hotel corridor. It reminded her of being with Kevin.

She dismissed it, irritated at her own stupidity. Joe Pitt was very different from Kevin. The two had absolutely no shared qualities except that they were both about the same height and weight. That had been all that was necessary, she supposed. The voice came from about the same distance above her ear, the sound of his shoes on the hotel carpet was the same, and so it had set off the feeling of loss again.

It was ridiculous, because it wasn't Kevin that she missed. She missed having another presence, the other person who was seeing things at the same time and reacting, so that her thoughts were not just voices inside her own skull.

She had been surrounded by male colleagues most of the time since the academy, but she had never allowed her relations.h.i.+ps with them to become close, let alone romantic. She had exerted her will to ignore any inconvenient feelings. It was like forcing herself to tune out a particular sound so she wouldn't hear it, and listen instead to the other sounds that competed with it. Any approaches from other cops that she could not ignore she had brushed aside with humor. But now and then she would be surprised by a feeling, a memory, a sound.

She a.n.a.lyzed her vulnerability. Joe Pitt was very male and he was smart, and the fact that he seemed to like her had surprised her, so that forbidden part of her mind had been switched on when she had not been guarding it. All she had to do now was switch it off again.

"I'm only going to stay for ten or fifteen minutes. I've still got packing to do, and when I get home I'll have to try to catch up with what's been piling up on my desk."

He pressed the elevator b.u.t.ton and the elevator took them downstairs to the lobby. She was surprised when he stopped at the bar, ordered two colas, and carried them to a small table for two. She took hers and said, "I thought you were a drinker."

He shook his head. "Been known to, but tonight I'm driving."

So maybe he wasn't a problem drinker. She found that she was losing one of the barriers that had kept her distant from him. She had to build others, distract herself, keep everything impersonal. "What do you think of the fact that she's killed a woman this time? They were always men before."

"Don't you ever think about anything besides the case you're on?"

"I'm still learning. You've seen more killing sprees than I have. I've seen solitary men, or pairs of men doing strings of killings. I've seen one where there was a man taking his girlfriend along for the ride. Have you ever worked a case where a woman traveled around alone killing people?"

"Is learning the only interest you have in men, or is it just me?"

"I don't think I know what you mean."

"You're interviewing me. I feel as though there's a tape recorder in your purse. Why not let yourself relax? Your subconscious will still be working on the case, I promise."

"I'm just making conversation," she said. "The case is what you and I have in common."

"We have lots of things in common. We just don't know each other well enough to know what they are. We need to tell our life stories."

"No, we don't."

"I'll start. I was raised in Grand Island, Nebraska. I dropped out of college, spent four years in the air force, and then became a state trooper. Then I was a police officer in Los Angeles, and finally became a district attorney's investigator. I retired from that a couple of years ago, and now I'm a private investigator."

"Okay," she said. "I was raised in Portland a few blocks from where I live now. I graduated from college, got married instead of going to law school, dropped out of the marriage, and then went to the police academy. I'm still in the first law enforcement job I ever had."

"See? Our lives are exactly alike."

She laughed. "Uncanny resemblance."

"If I fly up to Portland tomorrow, will you have dinner with me?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't date people from work."

"Wait a minute. You've made it very clear that you and I are not working together, and that we aren't going to be working together. We don't live in the same city, or even the same state. There's no way I can be considered to be 'from work.' "

"I guess that's probably true," she said. "But people up there know who you are. They know we were on the same case, traveling and sharing information. If you turn up when I do and take me out, it will put me in an uncomfortable position."

"Why?"

"People will think that we're sleeping together."

"Do you always behave like this-all these rules?"

"Yes."

"Then they won't think that."

She laughed again and shook her head. "I'll go out with you. I am am out with you. It's nine o'clock, and I haven't had dinner. How about you? Are you hungry?" out with you. It's nine o'clock, and I haven't had dinner. How about you? Are you hungry?"

"Starving."

"Then let's go across the lobby to the coffee shop and see if we can get a booth."

"No," he said. "I want to take you to a place I like. My car's outside."

"That's too hard. I'd have to change, and then it would be too late."

"You look beautiful, and I'm past fixing. The place is not far, and the food is better than the coffee shop. Come on." He was already standing, and he took her arm so that in a moment they were out of the bar and on their way.

He drove her to the Biltmore Hotel, let the valet parking attendant take his car, and led her into the ornate lobby, to Bernard's. "This is really formal," she said. "You implied that this was going to be some kind of interesting dive."

"I don't think I implied it was a dive," he said. "I distracted you by reminding you that you were beautiful."

The restaurant was large and dimly lighted. She could see that in her business suit she was dressed as well as most of the women, so she began to feel more comfortable.

When the waiter came, Pitt said to Catherine, "Would you like a drink before dinner?"

"No thanks," she said. "You can have one if you like."

But he looked at the waiter and shook his head. When the waiter was gone, he said, "So tell me about your family, your pets and hobbies. All women have them."

"I don't have any pets right now, and not much time for hobbies except reading and exercising, which are just two aspects of the same futile, late-onset urge to improve myself. I do have parents, though-one of each. My father is a retired cop. How about you?"

"My parents are still in Nebraska wondering where they went wrong."

"Where did they?"

"Nowhere, actually. They're terrific people. Everything I've done to myself is my own fault."

"What have you done to yourself?"

"Oh, I don't know. I guess what I've done is spend too many years doing nothing but thinking about murder cases. When I came into your hotel room before and saw you with three case files open on the desk, it reminded me of myself. I used to lay them out everywhere in hotel rooms-on the bed, usually. Then, one day, I noticed that about twenty years had pa.s.sed. I had cleared a lot of cases. I'd made a succession of D.A.s who were elected because they had good hair look smart. But I hadn't gotten married or had kids. I didn't even own a house."

"How sad." She smiled. "I'll bet you lived just like a monk."

He laughed. "I didn't say that. And since I retired, I've bought a house. It's pretty nice."

In spite of her misgivings, she liked him. He was realistic about life, and yet he had a cheerful, optimistic temperament that seemed to have come through the sad and ugly things that he had seen in his career. She kept asking questions to listen to him talk.

Catherine ordered too much food and ate all of it because she didn't want the dinner to end. She knew that as soon as it did, she would have to get back to packing and preparing herself to return to her town, her house, her job.

Finally, he asked the waiter for the check. On the way back to her hotel she was quiet, thinking hard about the way she had been conducting her life. She had been reasonably contented for the past few years, because thinking about nothing but her job had been better than being in a marriage with a man who had seemed more and more often to hate her. The life she had constructed for herself was good, but this evening with Joe Pitt was better. She wondered how much of her pleasure was just a sense of release after years of discipline and solitude.

He pulled the car up at her hotel and started to get out to let the valet take it. She said, "Uh-uh. Don't get out. I really do have to get packed and go to sleep now."

He got out and opened the door for her, but waved the parking attendant off. "Then have a good flight home."

"Thanks for dinner, Joe." She stood beside the car for a second, uncertain. The evening had been something that could only have happened unexpectedly, something she had tried to avoid and thought about at the same time. What was she hiding from? At this moment, what she wanted most was to make him want to see her again. She leaned into him, put her arms around his neck, and gave him a soft kiss on the lips, then stepped back. "If you do come up to Portland sometime, I will go out with you." Then she turned and strode into the hotel lobby and was gone.

23.

Except when he was desperate to get somewhere quickly, Calvin Dunn liked to travel by car. Today he was driving a new one, a customized coal black Lincoln Town Car. It had steel plates fitted into the door panels and a front end that had been reinforced with steel bars. The rear seat sat on a false floor so that he could carry a few extra pieces of equipment without subjecting them to public scrutiny.

The extra s.p.a.ce permitted him more ways of administering rewards and punishments. At the moment it contained fifty thousand dollars in cash, eight pairs of plastic restraints, a set of night-vision goggles, three pistols, a short-barreled shotgun, and a 7.62-millimeter rifle with a four-power scope.

His customary attire included a black sport coat with thirty hundred-dollar bills zipped into an inner pocket and a ten-millimeter Smith & Wesson pistol in his shoulder holster.

He was in a good humor today. He was in the business of doing things n.o.body else would do, so usually his ego didn't get much involved, but Hugo Poole had given him the sort of compliment that meant something to him: a great deal of money and the promise of more.

It was a pleasure for Calvin Dunn to work for a man like Hugo Poole. He didn't have to explain the things that every adult male ought to know. Dunn had not needed to say, "You will pay what you owe me on time and in cash, or I'll have to come take it and leave your body in the desert for the coyotes." Hugo Poole had not needed to say, "If you rat me out, I'll find you in prison and drive a sharpened toothbrush through your temple." They both knew how business was done.

Hugo had given him the names the girl had used so far, and this morning Calvin Dunn had driven to the police station in the Kern County town of Paston, where he lived, and obtained a photocopy of the police circular. The circular had good photographs taken from driver's licenses and her accurate height and weight. There was some confusion about eye color, but if he got close enough to see that, the job was as good as done.

Outside the police station he studied the printed information on the circular, then started his engine. He knew where to begin the hunt. He drove to Los Angeles County and found the address in the San Fernando Valley near Topanga where the girl had lived under the name Nancy Mills. He parked his car where he could easily see it from the windows at the front of the apartment building, then went inside and knocked on the door of the building manager's apartment.

The man who opened the door had a short beard that looked like a permanent three-day growth. Calvin Dunn held up a small leather case with an identification card in it that had his picture in an official-looking format and an embossed gold badge under it that had no insignia and didn't say he was anything in particular. But Calvin Dunn was tall and had muscular arms, so he looked like a cop.

"My name is Calvin Dunn, and you are-?"

"Rob Norris."

"Pleased to meet you. I'd like to ask you a few questions about a tenant, the young lady who called herself Nancy Mills."

Calvin Dunn's stare transfixed the manager. Dunn's pale gray eyes appeared to be focused on a point two inches deeper than the manager's forehead, inside the manager's skull. It was an uncomfortable feeling for him, and he felt an urge to close the door.

"Can I come in?"

The manager had no desire to let him in but no confidence in his power to stop him, so he said, "Okay." He stepped back just in time to prevent Calvin Dunn from colliding with him. When Calvin Dunn arrived, violence was not a remote possibility but something already present in the room with him. The manager sensed that his task was to keep it from becoming overt.

The manager watched Dunn standing in his small living room, his hands clasped behind him as though to emphasize the difference it might make if they weren't clasped, and rocking toe to heel on his shoes. "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you some of the questions you already answered," said Dunn.

"Okay."

"Tell me about Nancy Mills. Why did she decide to live here? Did she know anybody here?"

"No. She just called up and said she liked living near the mall."

"How did she pay for the rent? Did she have a credit card?"

"She gave me cash. It was a lot of money, when you add up first, last, and security deposit. Over three thousand bucks. I had to deliver it to the company that owns the place that day, because I didn't want to keep that much around."

"Just like that? Didn't you do a background check to see if she was a problem tenant?"

"What do you mean?"