Joe Pitt had everything wrong with him. He was too old for her, and he was a gambler. He was in his forties but had never been married, and he talked to every woman as though he had already been to bed with her. He was also a drinker. He was a jovial companion, the sort of guy everybody loved to have a couple of drinks with after work. When he had offered, she had always said no.
It made her feel a hot wave of humiliation to think of it now. She had managed to convince him that she was too prissy and rigid to have a drink with him. What Joe Pitt knew was the warm, easy face of alcohol, the evening gatherings with friendly people when he ordered a round and everybody went home feeling relaxed and happy. But Catherine Hobbes had a special knowledge about drinking.
When Catherine had been in college in California, she had known the pleasant side of drinking too. She’d always worked hard all week on her studies, and on weekends she had gone out with her friends to parties where for a pretty girl the price of a drink was holding out her hand to accept it. She had been funnier and more fluent when she talked, sexier and more uninhibited when she danced. She had felt that way, at least. But near the end of her junior year, she had noticed things that had scared her. She had awakened some mornings and spent an hour lying in bed waiting for the sick headache to fade and trying to remember what she had done the night before. She could retrace the stages of her night, but more and more often there were periods that were simply blank.
The problem had gone away. She had not been cured, only distracted. One night, just after she’d accepted her first drink at a party, Kevin Dalton appeared and began to talk to her. She did not have another drink that evening, and beginning the day after that, she and Kevin became inseparable. During her senior year she didn’t have any free weekends to go to bars or parties with her girlfriends because she was with Kevin. They were married the summer after graduation and bought a condominium in Palo Alto. She did not make a decision about drinking. She simply forgot to drink.
Five years later, after the marriage had detonated and blown apart, she remembered to drink. The hard side of drinking came on her gradually. She began to go out after work with some of the other young brokers each evening. They all worked long days that began at five A.M., when the New York markets opened. They all lived in the same atmosphere of controlled panic, each of them paid on commission and all of them doomed to be fired the first time their sales figures fell enough to get the managers’ attention. They drank and joked together for a few hours, then went home feeling a little better.
On most evenings, she was one of three women in a group that was overwhelmingly male. She somehow found herself more comfortable talking with the men than the women, and soon she was drinking with them glass for glass, listening to their jokes and their complaints, and making a few of her own. Early in the evening the other two women would go home, and then the party would be only Catherine and the men. Often, after she was home alone in the empty silence of the condominium where she and Kevin had once lived together, she would pour herself one last drink of whiskey to put herself to sleep.
One night she stayed late until the group dwindled down to Catherine and a friend named Nick. She let him take her home, and then she slept with him. Catherine fended off feeling ashamed by telling herself that the whole event had been good-natured—something that had happened between close friends—but they both felt awkward seeing each other at work after that, and the friendship diminished to a tacit agreement not to mention the incident again.
A couple of weeks later, it happened with another one of the men in the group. This one was Derek, a tall, thin British broker with a sallow complexion and an overbite. This time she had not even thought about being with Derek. He had simply paid the last tab, conducted her out of the bar, and kissed her. Derek drove her to his apartment, and they slept together.
In the morning she called her supervisor, said she was sick, and spent some time wondering why she had slept with Derek. All she could do was shrug and tell herself that she’d just had too much to drink—it wasn’t her fault. But it wasn’t the first time, and it was her fault. She brought back every moment of the night and analyzed it. She had not especially wanted to be with Derek, who wasn’t a close friend like Nick, and wasn’t even attractive. The alcohol had made her feel a lazy acquiescence: she had lost control of her will in exactly the way she had lost control of her arms and legs. It had just seemed like too much effort to exert them.
Later that day she quit her job, poured her supply of liquor out in the sink, and packed her belongings into her car for the drive home to Oregon. Driving back to Oregon was a desperate retreat. During every mile of the drive, she was afraid. She had failed to keep her husband, and she had run away from her career as a broker. She had developed such a taste for the forgetfulness and indifference that alcohol gave her that she had kept drinking even after she had done things that made her ashamed. She had slept with the two men who had asked, but it could just as easily have been five, or ten, or none. Things had just stopped mattering. The landscape behind her—the past, the people, the places where she had lived—was as dead and comfortless as a pile of bones.
She had no business considering a relationship with a man like Joe Pitt. She couldn’t take the risks, and he shouldn’t have to tolerate the rules she had made for herself. He didn’t have any incentive to be constricted by her vulnerabilities and her past. She couldn’t bear even to tell him about them. By the time the plane landed in Los Angeles, she was ashamed of herself for even considering speaking to him.
A few minutes later she was in Los Angeles International Airport, pulling her rolling suitcase along the concourse toward the escalator down to the car rental counters. She walked past the gift shops, looking in as she went. On the back wall were always racks of paperback books and magazines. There was the jumble of stuffed animals, hats, and T-shirts, all purporting to be from Hollywood or Beverly Hills. And in front of the store were racks with newspapers.
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
“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
