longer was.
Tanya couldn’t be taught which clothes to wear or which wines to serve, how to behave at a cocktail party or how to please a man in bed, because by now she knew. She couldn’t be taken to a great hotel and stare in awe at the paintings on the domed ceiling, because she had already seen others as good. She had heard Carl’s stories, and he could never tell them to her for the first time again. She was no longer a protegee, just a sycophant massaging his ego, more desperate each day to keep him fooled, so she would not lose her increasingly unpleasant job.
He had betrayed her, certainly, but he had also set her free. He had supported her so lavishly that she would never have been able to translate her vague feelings of dissatisfaction into the irrevocable act of walking out the door. Now he was sending her away. It didn’t feel good, but it felt overdue, like a task she had been putting off.
Tanya went to bed in the spare bedroom, but when, a couple of hours later, Carl finished his preparations for his trip and climbed into the bed with her, she didn’t object to having sex with him. He seemed to believe he had one more night due him, and she didn’t feel like fighting. It gave her a chance to observe the extent to which she had only been going through the motions, and to try to think back to the time when sex with him had still been exciting. She realized that tonight, when she had no feeling except impatience for his departure, was not much different from the last fifty nights.
The next morning, Carl was up at five. He wrote her a big check and placed it on the antique table in the entry. “Cash this,” his note said. “It’s just in case you need anything. Call the office any time you need more.” At the door, he turned and noticed that she had stepped into the room to watch him. He set down his suitcases and embraced her. “I know you’re a little scared, but you’ll be fine. I know you’re going to be a very successful woman someday.”
She remembered her answer: “In a year, I’ll have more money than you do.” She had looked through the window to the street far below and watched the cab moving off, the tailpipe spewing steamy white exhaust into the cold morning air.
Tanya spent the next few months looking for work in the daytime and looking for a man in the evening. The evening hunting was better, but she didn’t find the sort of man she needed. Rich men were nearly all married, and they were all aware that the most expensive catastrophe likely to befall them was a divorce. They were willing to spend lots of money on her, but they weren’t willing to stay the night.
She went through a period in which she stopped looking for work and applied for readmission to the university, then spent her days trying to devise a course of study that would help prepare her for a career in law. Her observation of Carl had taught her that his clients paid him lots of money for very little work, as long as he kept them afraid.
She had begun to feel optimistic when she received a telephone call. She thought she recognized the voice on the other end as Arthur Hinman, one of the other partners in Carl Nelson’s firm. He said, “May I speak to Miss Starling, please?”
She wasn’t absolutely positive it was Arthur, so she said, “This is Miss Starling.”
“This is Arthur Hinman, one of Carl Nelson’s partners at Colefein, Park and Kayslander. I’m calling to let you know that Mr. Nelson has died.”
“Oh, my God. How? Where?”
“I believe he had a heart attack, but I’m not sure yet. He was in Spain.” He paused a full breath, which was his mourning period for Carl Nelson. Then he said, “We’re handling his estate, and the lease for his apartment is being terminated. We’ll be closing it up to inventory his effects. That means your services won’t be needed anymore.”
“Arthur,” she said. “Don’t act as though you don’t know me. You’ve been here dozens of times. You know I’m not the maid or something.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s inconvenient. But please be out of there by noon tomorrow. You can leave the key with the doorman downstairs.”
She hung up the phone and went to work, taking everything from the apartment that she was sure Carl would have missed but the law firm would not. The art and antiques, the huge record collection, the old books were probably all insured. The cash Carl kept in the toe of a shoe on his upper closet shelf, and his cuff links, tie clasps, and tuxedo studs were all small enough to take. His watches were probably insured too, but nobody would be able to prove he hadn’t lost one in Europe, so she took his Rolex. Then, as an afterthought, while she was tossing things into her suitcase, she opened the drawer that contained Carl’s gun, and slipped it into her purse.
20
Catherine Hobbes sat in the homicide office of the North Hollywood station. She had borrowed a table beneath the whiteboard where someone had drawn a crude diagram of Mary Tilson’s apartment, with a body that looked like a gingerbread man. She shut the sounds of ringing telephones and the voices of the detectives out of her mind, opened the file, and looked at each of the crime scene photographs again, and then at the list of fingerprints from the two apartments that had been identified so far. There was the copy of the print that belonged to Nancy Mills. Staring at it gave Catherine a strange feeling: this was more than something that the woman had touched. It was more intimate, the touch itself.
Catherine had spent a career listening to the confident voices of experts who assured her that there were no mysteries, and that the physical evidence always told the story. This was a physical world, every cubic centimeter crammed with molecules. Any motion created a disturbance that left a trail, and anything the killer touched stuck to him. They were right about Tanya: she was leaving a growing collection of trace evidence behind her. But where the hell was she?
Jim Spengler came into the room. “I brought you some coffee.” He set a white foam cup on the table, then sat in the folding chair beside her.
“Thanks. I’ll bet when you do interrogations, you’re always the good cop.”
“I would have brought it sooner, but I’ve been checking to see if there have been any other homicides since she got here that might have something to do with her.” He looked at the photographs in front of her. “I heard you were in the lab half the night. Anything new?”
“No. I think Mary Tilson let her in, and they went together into the kitchen. I think Miss Tilson was turned to the left, maybe getting something out of the cupboard or refrigerator. When she turned away, I think Nancy Mills took the butcher knife out of the holder and stabbed her.”
“You don’t think a man did that?”
“I’m looking at the list of prints Toni’s people found. I don’t see any male prints anywhere in the apartment, identified or not. I don’t see a forced entry.”
“So she let him in.”
“A sixty-year-old single woman like Mary Tilson is going to be nervous about letting a man into the apartment if she’s alone.”
“So Nancy Mills was with him. She let them both in.”
“Even if the man is with Nancy Mills, he doesn’t go into the kitchen with Mary Tilson and wait until she turns her back.”
“Why not?”
“Because she won’t let him, and if he comes, she won’t turn her back. If a single woman comes over to see another single woman, they both might go into the kitchen while they talk. The guest at least offers help while the hostess gets refreshments. If it’s a stranger, a man, he doesn’t go in the kitchen, he stays in the living room. If it’s a man with Nancy Mills, the one who goes into the kitchen is still Nancy, not the man.”
“Why not both?”
“Because. It’s just the way it is. I’ve been a single woman for long enough so I know all the moves.” She shrugged. “And there’s no evidence that there was a man.”
“You’re also assuming that the stab in the back came first, not the throat.”
“That’s right. If you cut the throat first, the victim is as good as dead. If you stab her first, maybe she’s still up to making some noise, even fighting. That’s when you have to cut her throat—to keep her from yelling. We know the stab in the lower chest was last, because that’s where the knife ended up.” She glared at him. “I know what you’re going to say next: No woman would do that.”
