Nightlife_ A Novel Part 32

"Three days. That's probably enough time."

"For what?"

She took his hand. "I'm going to your hotel with you now, and I'm going to do my best to make you really, really glad you brought those roses in person."

Catherine and Joe spent the next three days in isolation. It was really Catherine's isolation, but she had opened herself to let Joe into it. During the sunlit hours they went over the outside experts' reports together, compiling and evaluating possible avenues of investigation. In the evenings they ate late dinners at restaurants along the river and talked about their families, beliefs about love, theories of witness behavior and forensic evidence. Then they walked back to Joe's hotel holding hands and made love until they could hear the footsteps of the hotel's early-morning staff in the hallways.

On the last morning, Catherine drove Joe to the airport. As they stood beside Catherine's small gray rental car outside the terminal, he said, "Well? When is the next time going to be?"

"Whenever either one of us gets a chance," she said. "The second I can leave here, I'll be on your doorstep."

While she was driving to her apartment to get ready for work, she found that she was crying. She drove around the block while she dried her eyes, then left her rental car on the street in front of her building, took her overnight bag inside, and opened her apartment door. The first thing she saw was the jar of roses. The weekend with Joe had begun and ended so quickly that the petals were still fresh and a few buds were not fully open. If it had not been for the roses, she might have thought she had imagined it.

Catherine spent the next few days working more intensely than before, following the most promising leads and theories that she and Joe had developed, and then, when those failed, moving to the less promising leads. All of them served to verify evidence she already had. None of them seemed to take her to the next step, finding the place where Tanya Starling was right now.

One night about two weeks after the fire, she called the number of her bank and listened to the long menu: "For check orders, press four. For credit card billing inquiries, press five." She supposed that what she wanted was probably closest to five. After a pause, a woman answered. "This is Nan. How can I help you?"

"My house burned down about two weeks ago, and I called the next day and asked that my credit card be replaced. I haven't received it yet, and I thought I'd check to be sure that there's no problem."

"Your name please?"

"Catherine Hobbes, H-O-B-B-E-S."

"And your card was destroyed in the fire?"

"Yes. I ordered a new one right after the fire, and so it's been almost two weeks."

"Two weeks? That doesn't sound right. Let me check. Do you have your account number?"

"No. When my house burned, so did all the old bills and records."

"Social security number?"

Catherine recited the number, listened to the clicking of computer keys.

"I'm not sure what happened. It looks as though they tried to call you and verify your information before they mailed you a new card, and couldn't reach you. Do you have a new phone number and address to give me?"

"Yes." Catherine gave it to her. Then she added, "When I called before, I gave them my work number and address. I'm a police officer."

"I suppose it's possible somebody there answered the phone and said, 'Police,' and our person figured it was a hoax. Let's try to get this expedited so your new card goes out as soon as possible. It will have a new number on it. We always do that when the other one isn't in your possession."

"When should I expect it?"

"Tomorrow or the next day, if we can get it done without another glitch, and they're pretty rare. I'm very sorry about the mix-up. Have you ordered new checks and so on?"

"Yes, but if you have a way of verifying that that's being done, I'd appreciate it."

"Happy to do it. And one more thing. If you're a police officer, you've probably already thought of this, but I usually advise people to order reports from the three credit services to be sure all your cards really were destroyed and n.o.body picked one up. I can tell you that nothing has been charged to your account at this bank during that time, but you should still run the credit check."

"That's a good idea," she said. "I'll do that."

She let a day go by, and then another. Her replacement card came, and she forgot about the credit reports. But at the end of the week she remembered while she was in the office and called the three phone numbers to order her credit reports.

When Catherine came home from work two days later, the reports were in her mailbox in the lobby of the apartment building. She took them to her apartment, sat at the kitchen table, and opened them warily. For the past eight years, she had always been uncomfortable when she thought about credit. That was something she had gotten as part of the settlement after her failed marriage.

Kevin had been an optimist. When the marriage had ended, the extent of Kevin's optimism had become apparent. He had been running up the balances on his credit card accounts for a long time, on the theory that his future salary increases would make the overruns seem tiny. After Catherine divorced him, the credit companies had been quick to inform her that the growing balances on debts he had incurred before the divorce were her responsibility as much as his. It had taken time for her to legally separate her portion of the debt from his, get a second mortgage on the house she had bought in Portland, and pay off the credit companies.

It had been a painful process for Catherine, and not only because it was a time when she'd needed money, but because she couldn't keep herself from thinking about where the debt had come from. Kevin had a.s.sured her that he had gone into debt only to spend money on her. He had not been very specific, so she looked at two years of old bills. The credit cards had been used for lunches and dinners at restaurants where she had never been, and hotels in Palo Alto, the town where they had lived. Cheating on Catherine had been expensive.

Today, when Catherine read the three credit reports, she was relieved to see that her credit was extremely good. She supposed that paying off her half of Kevin's debts must have healed whatever wounds her marriage to him had inflicted on her rating. Maybe she'd gotten a few extra points for being a sucker.

She went carefully down the list of open accounts. There were a couple of department store charge cards that she had forgotten. She had accepted them years ago because they had been offering large discounts to customers who opened charge accounts. They had approached her when she was buying her first bed after the marriage. It had cost eleven hundred dollars, and getting the card had saved her about two hundred. The other occasion was when she was still in the academy and making practically nothing, and was forced to agree to go out to dinner with a visiting couple from the days when she had been married to Kevin. She had known that they were still in touch with him, and she'd needed to have them tell him that she looked magnificent, so she had bought a dress, coat, and shoes that she couldn't really afford.

There was one account that she could not remember opening. It was a Visa. She looked for the issuing company. The issuer was the Bank of the Atlantic. Her stomach dropped: Kevin? How could he have done that to her? She had already paid for his girlfriends. She repeated the question to herself. How could could he have done that to her? He couldn't. It would have come to her attention at some point in the past eight years. She looked at the date. It wasn't eight years ago. The account had been opened a month ago. he have done that to her? He couldn't. It would have come to her attention at some point in the past eight years. She looked at the date. It wasn't eight years ago. The account had been opened a month ago.

She kept staring at the entry. It wasn't right. The social security number wasn't hers. And it said, "Additional card." What did that mean? Could this be somebody else's credit card that had been added to her credit report by mistake?

She looked at the reports from the other two services. The card was listed on all of them. The one from Experion said, "Primary cardholder SSN" and listed a second social security number. That explained the "additional card" business. The Catherine Hobbes Visa card was on someone else's account. Her eyes widened as all of the implications began to pa.s.s through her consciousness at once. A person on the run could get a credit card in her own name and an additional one in a false name. She could travel under the false name, and any business that ran the credit card would get the response that it was genuine.

Catherine reached for the telephone, then stopped, her hand in midair. It was too late to reach the captain anywhere but at home, and she wasn't sure what she believed, what she wanted to tell him. She decided what she was going to do, half-stood to go to her spare room to turn on the computer, then remembered that she wasn't in her house anymore, and the computer wasn't fifty steps away in that direction. She was in a small apartment, and the only computer was the laptop she had signed out from work. She went to the big briefcase she had brought in, unlocked it, and took out the laptop.

She plugged it into the telephone line, turned it on, and waited for the connection to the Internet. It took a very long time, then failed to connect, so she started the process over again. She was so impatient that she almost unplugged the computer to reconnect the telephone, but she forced herself to wait. It would not do to make a lot of fuss over what might amount to a relatively harmless credit reporting error.

She got connected, then found the Web site of the Bank of the Atlantic. She clicked on credit card accounts, then "Access your account," then gave the account number that was on her credit reports and the social security number of the primary cardholder. A box appeared that said, "Pa.s.sword." She swore under her breath, but then thought for a second. She typed in "none." A new page appeared, asking, "Would you like to create a pa.s.sword?" She had been right: there had been no pa.s.sword entered before. She clicked on the "yes" box. She typed in "Steelhead," the name of her first dog.

What appeared next was the current month's charges for the account. There were two women on the account, Laura Murray and Catherine Hobbes. Under "Charges for Laura Murray" there was nothing. Under "Charges for Catherine Hobbes" there was plenty: "Stahlmeyer's Dept. Women's Wear, $2,436.91. Sybil's, $266.78. The Mine, $93.08. Tess's Shoes, $404.00. La Mousse, $56.88." All of the charges had been made within the past couple of weeks. Catherine copied the bill into an e-mail and sent it to herself, then studied it one more time.

All of the stores were in Portland. They were all on the west side of the river, downtown. Catherine was sure she knew who this was. Tanya had made her mistake.

Catherine was operating now on an intuition. The part of it that was defensible was something that all cops were aware of and that the captain would understand: cops knew that coincidences existed, but not in the convenient numbers that people in trouble usually claimed. When coincidences turned up in the course of an investigation, they had to be viewed with skepticism. It was possible that even though there was no other Catherine Hobbes registered to vote in Oregon, and none besides her who had a telephone number, listed or unlisted, it didn't mean that one had not arrived in the past month. But that was unlikely.

The part of what she intuited that was not quite defensible would be difficult to explain to the captain, and it was the part that seemed most compelling. Catherine had a feeling about Tanya Starling. She had noticed that Tanya changed her ident.i.ty more often than circ.u.mstances required. She seemed to change her name every time she arrived in a new city, every time anything happened that she considered unpleasant or unsuccessful. It reminded Catherine of the urge some people had to take a shower and change their clothes whenever they had a bad experience. Catherine was sure that she found it exciting, maybe even amusing. Tanya was getting very good at making or obtaining false identification.

Another thing that Tanya had done repeatedly was try to hurt Catherine Hobbes. Could a mysterious credit card in Catherine's name come up now and not be connected with Tanya Starling? It could, but it was unlikely. But how had Tanya done it? One possibility was that Tanya had been posing as the woman listed as the primary cardholder.

Catherine called the Denver Police Department and spoke with a woman who identified herself as Detective Yoon. The detective listened attentively to Catherine's story and agreed to find out whether there was a woman named Laura Murray living at 5619 LaRoche Avenue in Alameda. If there was, Detective Yoon would try to discover whether she had some knowledge of how her record and social security number had been used to get a credit card in the name Catherine Hobbes.

Detective Yoon called Catherine Hobbes the next afternoon at the police bureau. She said, "There is a Laura Murray, and she's sitting in front of my desk right now."

"She is?" said Catherine. "Is she somebody who might have helped apply for the card, or just a victim?"

"She doesn't know anything about it. She's twenty-two, with no criminal record-no record of any kind except two old tickets, one for speeding and a parking violation. She's got a good job, and has lived here all her life."

Catherine said, "Let me fax you a set of pictures. See if she recognizes them."

Five minutes later, they were on the telephone again. "She remembers her," said Detective Yoon. "They met at a nightclub about two months ago in Denver, near Larimer Square. She says that when the girl in the picture danced with a man, she asked Laura to guard her purse. Then when Laura danced, the girl in the picture held Laura's purse."

"Thank you," said Catherine. "This is a big help. Do you mind letting me speak with Laura?"

A moment later, a new voice came on the phone. It was young and nervous. "h.e.l.lo?"

"h.e.l.lo, Laura. This is Detective Sergeant Catherine Hobbes, Portland Police Bureau. I want to thank you for your cooperation. It's very important to us. I need to ask you now for a little more help."

"What do you need?"

"First, don't try to do anything about this credit card. Don't call the company or try to cancel or anything. For the moment we don't want to alert this woman to the fact that we know about the card. When the investigation is over the card will be canceled, and you won't be responsible for any debts. Can I count on you for that?"

"Sure." Laura didn't sound sure.

"The other thing I need is to have you tell me everything you can remember about meeting this woman, everything she said to you, the way she looked, what she was wearing. There is no detail that's too small to be useful."

48.

Judith opened her eyes and listened to the rain outside her apartment window. She liked it when the rain came down for two or three days at a time. It always seemed to her to be the world cleaning itself of the dirt and dead things, the unhappiness and mistakes. It rained almost half of the days of the year here.

Judith sat up in bed and looked at the window. The rain was running down past it from somewhere above, and she could hear it hitting below, splas.h.i.+ng like a tiny waterfall. She got up, pushed the b.u.t.ton on the coffeemaker, then padded out to the bottom of the carpeted stairs, where the manager left her newspaper every morning, and brought it back with her.

She sipped the coffee, sat cross-legged on the couch, and ignored the newspaper. Sitting here listening to the water outside made her feel very warm and safe. It was a feeling that she had not experienced until she had grown up. She had never liked rainy days when she was just Charlene.

In Wheatfield it sometimes rained for days like this in the spring and fall. Her mother hated the rain, hated ever being cold or wet, so she never went out. She hated being trapped in the house too, so she would wake up already irritated. Her blond hair would be in a network of ringlets that Charlene could hardly imagine having happened in the short time between last evening when she had gone out and the very next day. It looked like an unraveled rope.

Her mother's pretty, childlike face would be warm and pink from being pressed against her pillow, and it would carry impressions from the folds in the pillowcase. She would get up and stand beside the percolator and scowl at the sight of the coffee gurgling up into the little gla.s.s cap on top. She would find the green-and-white pack of menthol cigarettes on the counter, light one on the stove burner, and leave it in the corner of her mouth while she poured her coffee and went to the front window to stare out.

Years later, Charlene had realized that her mother behaved exactly like a cat. Even though she knew it was raining-had seen the water streaming down the outside of the bathroom window, had maybe even been awakened by it as it poured from the gutters out the downspout near her corner of the house, she still had to go to the front window to see if it was raining out there too.

After a few minutes of silence while she glowered at the rain and built her mood, Charlene's mother would begin. She would look at Charlene with frank curiosity. "Have you rehea.r.s.ed for the pageant next week?" Charlene would say she had spent most of the time doing homework, but she had rehea.r.s.ed. Her mother would say, "Let's hear the seash.o.r.e song."

Charlene would sing it, maybe not as well as she could, because she could see from the first seconds that her mother's expression was not admiring or pleasant. Singing for her was like pleading a case while walking up the steps of the gallows.

Her mother would hear the end of the song as a signal to respond. "How could I have spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of my time on you? You sound like a trained parrot. You dance like a cow. How can you possibly be anything but embarra.s.sing by next week? G.o.d, I should see if I can get my entry fee back. And look at your skin. Have you ever thought of eating a vegetable instead of a candy bar? You look like the ghost of a ghost."

When she had talked enough about the next pageant, which she had trained Charlene to believe was the last boat out of poverty, she would move on to a variety of new topics. "Your room . . ." "Your clothes . . ." "Your . . ." As the morning got started, her voice would rise in pitch and volume until, during a pause for breath, Charlene would hear the current boyfriend creaking the springs in the bedroom, jingling his belt as he put on his pants. There would be a heavy thump as he put a toe in his shoe and stamped it to get his foot in.

A short time later he would appear, walking through on his way out, sometimes pausing to make some excuse, and sometimes just preferring the rain to the noise. Then her mother would blame her. "You always make me look like I'm the big b.i.t.c.h. I wouldn't have to raise my voice if you'd just listen and do what you're supposed to. My G.o.d, look at that hair. I spend hundreds of dollars on cut-and-colors, shampoos and conditioners, and you have to look like the bride of Frankenstein. I'll tell you, if you don't do well on this pageant-either Miss Hennepin County or at least first runner-up-I'm through with you. You can be your own coach and manager and teacher and maid and chauffeur. Then where will you be? Miss Nothing. Miss Ugly Little Zero." She would sit on the couch with her arms folded and put Charlene through a series of ch.o.r.es or a series of rehearsals, depending on her mood and the state of the little house.

Her mother would be distracted from her when the boyfriend returned, and there would be a fight. Usually the fight made it better for Charlene, but not always. She remembered one boyfriend named Donny, who was tall and thin and quiet, with long arms and legs. He was from somewhere in the South-was Tennessee right?-and he had an accent. He came in during one of her mother's tantrums on a Sunday, around one in the afternoon.

Her mother had heard the door and spun her head around to face Donny. She shrieked, "And you too. You worthless-"

Donny's arm moved so fast that Charlene wasn't sure whether she saw it or only heard the slap and her imagination supplied the abrupt motion, the forearm bringing the backhand across her mother's mouth. Her mother went backward onto the kitchen floor, either because she had seen the movement at its start and tried to save herself, or was actually propelled by the force of the blow.

She could remember Donny's face while it was happening. When he heard what Charlene's mother was saying he might have narrowed his eyes slightly, but otherwise his face remained impa.s.sive. The long arm just swung, and there was something in it of the routine. It was like a horse twitching its tail to brush a fly away.

Charlene watched her mother. After a second or two, she raised herself on one elbow, staring, her nose and mouth bleeding. Her expression of anger and contempt was gone. She just lay there blinking, her mouth open, eyes empty and surprised, no more ready for thought than a person who had been hit by a truck.

Donny kept going toward the bedroom, and Charlene realized that the whole episode had not interrupted his progress for more than two seconds. He went in and closed the door. After a minute, her mother managed to sit up. Ten minutes later Charlene could hear Donny snoring.

Her mother had withdrawn to the couch, lying there and crying for an hour or so, feeling sorry for herself. Charlene wanted to stand over her and ask, "What did you expect? Are you blind and deaf? Did you live with him, sleep with him, drink yourself sick with him, and imagine that anything but this could possibly happen?" But she did not.

Charlene had liked Donny better than most of the others, because he had a kind of forthright simplicity. He had none of the willingness to struggle for advantage that made the others pathetic victims of her mother's manipulation. For most of her childhood, her mother's rainy-day scenes were acted out with a boyfriend of the other sort: Paul, or Mike. She would turn on the boyfriend, practically spitting venom, and he would respond. He would act exactly the way she did, as though he were not another person, really, but just her mirror and echo. Within a few minutes they would be simultaneously shouting different versions of what had caused the argument, then a list of bad things that each of them had done on other occasions, then bad qualities and habits, and, finally, there would just be an apportioning of ugly names.

It would go on all through the long, rainy day and into the evening, because her mother would not go out on a rainy night. If the weather didn't clear, Charlene would get two days of it. Between attacks on the boyfriend, Charlene's mother would deliver harangues against her for everything she was and everything she should be but wasn't.

It had taken changing herself into Tanya Starling and moving into the high-rise apartment in Chicago with Carl to teach her that there were pleasures to a rainy day. Carl had been an expert at enjoying himself. On a rainy day, if he wasn't involved in a legal case that had something urgent about it, he would sometimes stay home. They would lie around in bed and make love.

It was only when they were really hungry that Carl would jump out of bed, throw on some pants, shoes, and a rain jacket, and head for the elevator. He would be back in twenty minutes with croissants, Danish pastries, doughnuts filled with cream and jelly, and special coffee from the bakery around the corner.

She remembered how, as soon as she heard the apartment door close, she would be up, trying to use the twenty minutes as efficiently as she could. She would quickly bathe, running the water while she brushed her teeth. She would do her makeup, brush her hair, put on something that looked good on her but maintained the pretense that she wasn't bothering today. As she remembered, she felt a sharp sense of loss, not for Carl but for the days with Carl. What was lost was the way she had felt and been.

She picked up the telephone and called Greg's house. She heard his voice answer, "h.e.l.lo?"

"Hi," she said. "Are you planning to do anything important at work this morning?"

"Important, but not life-and-death important. Anything I can do for you on the way?"

"Yes. Come here instead of there, and spend a rainy morning with me. I'll make your dreams come true. One of them, anyway." She hung up. Then she went into the bathroom and threw off her pajamas. She got ready with the same efficiency that she had used in the old days when Carl had gone out for pastries. She knew it would take Greg about twenty-five minutes to drive here at this time of the morning in the rain.

Today Judith was determined to live the life she had willed for herself. It was precarious, because some stupid piece of bad luck could throw her into the hands of her enemies at any second, but that didn't matter right now. Maybe perfection was always supposed to be brief, just a limited period when everything was in its prime. The life she had imagined existed only if she was at her most beautiful and energetic, not a girl any longer but a grown woman, someone who had been loved enough to take all of the man-woman maneuvering lightly, like a dance, and not be overwhelmed by it or scared. The rest was eternal: the nights of drinking martinis with their icy, oily s.h.i.+mmer, even the shape of the gla.s.ses unchanging; the man, purely appealing because he was the man of the moment only; the dim, romantic lighting and the music; a day of soft sun filtered through rain.

There had never been anything in the fantasy about having the perfect moment go on into some decrepit old age, and it couldn't. For now, for this series of heartbeats-whether now lasted for a couple of years or now was already ending-things had reached a perfect pitch.

Judith savored her rainy morning, and in the afternoon she and Greg dozed peacefully on her bed, listening half-consciously to the steady rain. She roused herself twice, once to lift Greg's sleep-heavy arm and drape it across herself so she could press her back against his chest and feel the skin warming her. The other time it was to crawl off the bed and pick up the newspaper she had never gotten around to reading.

She took a pen to the ads for the nightspots, then looked at the ones she had circled and made a plan for the evening. They would start at the Ringside for dinner, because on a rainy night she didn't feel in the mood to ruin a pair of heels and get a good dress splashed. A leather booth in a steak house with big, warm dinner plates and a coat rack behind her felt right. Then she picked out a cl.u.s.ter of four clubs within a couple of blocks of one another, so she and Greg could move easily from one to another.

She made fresh coffee, drank the first cup by herself, and let the smell of it drift into her bedroom to wake Greg. When she heard him beginning to stir, she poured a cup and brought it to him. He sat up and took it, sipped it, and said, "I'm trying to sort out what part of this day was real."

"It's all real," she said. "The good parts have happened, or will happen, whatever they were."

"What time is it?"

"Time to drink your coffee and wake up. After that it will be time to take a shower and get ready to go out to dinner with me. You can do it all slowly, because I intend to."

"You sound as though it's all planned."

"It is. I want to walk in the rain so I can see it and smell it, but without getting too wet. I want to eat, drink, and dance a little. Are you up to all that?"

"Of course." He looked at her. "Did I tell you I like your hair that way?"

"I did get the impression you had no complaints," she said. "I'll take the first shower, because it will take me longer."

At nine they were in the Ringside, their umbrellas and raincoats hung on the coatrack beside their booth. Judith had not really eaten a meal today, just nibbled a few things from the refrigerator-a little cheese and fruit. She and Greg ate steaks and drank red wine, then sat and talked until they were ready for the rain again.