direction, with very little money. I can’t just leave everything I own in my car and park it in a lot someplace while I sit in a police station.”
“Listen carefully. Wherever you are, you’re on a telephone. Just ask the operator to connect you with the local police. Tell the police you’ve spoken with me about going in for questioning in the Dennis Poole case. They can find where you are, bring you in, and keep your car and belongings safe. Give them the piece of paper with my number on it, and they’ll call me. I’ll handle everything from there. All right?”
“This isn’t a reasonable thing to ask. You’re trying to get me put in jail.”
“I’m trying to get you into a police station to talk to you. If you’re running because somebody else killed Dennis Poole and you’re afraid, the police will protect you. I’ll make sure they do. If you’re running because you’re afraid the police will hurt you, then you can stop worrying about that too. It’s a lot less scary when you go in voluntarily. I’ll ask them not to put you in a cell.”
“I told you. I’m not running. I’m just moving, trying to get on with my life.”
“This is a detour you’re going to have to take sooner or later.”
Nancy paused, unable to think of what to say. Finally, she said, “I . . . I really don’t think I should do that without a lawyer.”
“That’s fine. If you’d like, you can have one before you answer any questions at all. They’ll get you one. But you’ve got to do this, Tanya.”
“Let me think about it.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tanya, the police are looking for you, not just here but all over. Right now nobody knows why you’re not making yourself available, so they have to assume that you’re dangerous. If you come in on your own, no harm will come to you. If you don’t, then it’s hard to predict what might happen. Go find a lawyer, and ask him to come with you when you turn yourself in. Tanya?”
Tanya didn’t answer.
“Tanya? Please.”
Tanya thought about how much better it was to be Nancy Mills, out on a summer night in Southern California. She was too restless to stay on the line. She lifted the telephone to its cradle and pressed it down. The soft, warm breeze blew across the ear where she had held the telephone, soothing it. She was free, and she wasn’t going to risk that. She saw the cab prowling along toward the front of the building, so she waved her hand and trotted to it.
She got in, rolled her window halfway down, and looked greedily out at the buildings and the people on the streets all the way to Sunset.
When the driver let her off on Sunset and La Cienega she began to walk. She passed the big faux-ramshackle structure of the House of Blues, then several restaurants. She wasn’t in the mood to go into a formal restaurant and sit in the middle of a lot of tables with men and women on dates. What she needed was a hotel bar. She knew there were a couple of hotels along the Strip that had famous nightclubs, so she decided to find them.
She walked along the sidewalk beneath huge lighted billboards of the beautiful people in movies. Paintings of giant women covered the brick sides of tall office buildings.
The dry air was electrically charged, as though it would soon reach some peak voltage and emit sparks. The cars were nose-to-tail on Sunset, moving ahead in small surges. She could feel the eyes on her, not one man that she could see but many at once that she knew were there behind the glare of headlights or beyond dark tinted windows. She knew that when one of them looked, he was evaluating, trying to see if she was Someone, or even the one they had been searching for. The once-over lasted only for the time it took for her image to move from the windshield to the rearview mirror, but then the man in the next car was already looking at her.
Nancy’s anticipation grew until she reached the Standard Hotel. It was low—only three stories. She stepped in the front entrance, trying to see everything but also trying to look as though she knew where she was going. She saw two security men—this was Sunset Boulevard, and what stepped in off the street could be literally anything— and smiled at them as she moved past the front desk. There was a girl with a pretty white face and gleaming straight black hair standing there to check people in, and behind her head was a greenish glass panel like a huge aquarium, where another girl who was naked napped on a clear inflated mattress, so that she appeared to be floating there.
This was the kind of place she had imagined. It was a sign of her magic that she had made it here. While she was still in her stuffy little apartment off Topanga Canyon she had only conceived a sense of how she wanted to feel, and what sort of place would make her feel that way, then moved toward it. She kept going until she found herself in the rooftop bar.
On the way to the ladies’ room, Nancy studied the other women she could see standing near the long curved bar and sitting at the tables. They all seemed young, thin, and attractive. A few of them wore skirts or pantsuits, but most of them wore tight jeans and tank tops. Nancy felt reassured. At the moment when the urge had taken her she had been wearing a good pair of pants she had bought in Aspen and a Juicy Couture velour jacket over a little T-shirt she had picked up in San Francisco, so she was all right.
She studied her reflection in the mirror, brushed her hair, and wiped off her makeup. She had been wearing daytime shades, so she put on thicker eyeshadow, eyeliner, and mascara, darkened her lips as she listened to the chatter in the ladies’ room. She could tell that these were not women staying at the hotel but local women who came here for the social scene. That was fine—so had she.
Nancy needed to set herself apart somehow, and be in a place where she didn’t have to compete for attention with all of these women. She went to the bar and waited for a couple of orders to be filled so she could survey the room to evaluate the men and let them see her, then ordered her martini. When she had it, she took it outside, onto the big open stretch of blue Astroturf surrounding the pool.
She sat on one of the white lounge chairs and gazed down the slope at the city, the billions of tiny distinct lights shining upward from the streets and buildings to make the air above the city glow.
The first man to follow her out had long, skinny limbs covered in an off-white suit and a black T-shirt. He had glasses with thick black frames, and hair that had receded into a widow’s peak. She glanced up at him and sipped her drink.
“Aren’t you the girl from behind the front desk?”
“No,” said Nancy. “She’s still there. Go check.”
“I mean the one who pretends to be asleep. The naked one.”
“I know you do,” said Nancy.
“The girl from last night looked just like you. She’s beautiful, and so are you.” He paused for a moment, studied her, and then said, “You and I aren’t going to be friends, are we?”
“Nope. Thanks for the compliment, though.”
“You’re welcome. Good night,” he said. He turned and walked back into the bar.
After ten more minutes, another man came out. He walked to the pool, bent over and touched his hand to the water to test the temperature, then straightened, turned, and seemed to notice her. He was dark-skinned, with wavy black hair, and she imagined him to be Brazilian. When he spoke, the impression was destroyed. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.” He had an accent from New York, maybe New Jersey. “Have you been in the pool yet?”
“No,” she said. She made a quick decision. “I just came out here to be alone.”
“Me too. Would you like to be alone together?”
“No, I like to do it the usual way.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, see you.”
He walked back into the bar. This wasn’t very promising, she decided, so she went back into the bar too. She moved to the wall, scanned the men in the room, and decided to choose one. He was standing a few feet to her right, looking over at her, when their eyes met. He was about thirty, with hair that must have been blond when he was a child but had turned brown later as hers had, and now lightened only when he had spent time in the sun. “Hello,” she said. “Do I have spinach stuck on my teeth?”
He came closer. “Sorry if I was staring. What’s the attraction out there?”
“It’s really clear tonight. It’s L.A., and you expect some smog.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Otherwise you feel like you’re not getting your money’s worth.”
