“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 passed. 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 space 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 nobody 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.
