Nightlife: A Novel

I’m going to be looking for a job.” They didn’t turn any women away, which was a good sign.

When she reached the head of the line, she held her homemade license inside the wallet, but the bouncer barely glanced at it before he waved her in. Inside, the light was dim and the recorded music was loud. There was a D.J. in a booth high above the dance floor choosing cuts and operating the colored lights that strafed the crowd. The line at the bar was already three deep, and the five bartenders were lip-reading and pouring drinks methodically.

She had to have a drink to hold in her hand, so she ordered a 7UP with a lime twist, which looked enough like a gin and tonic in the changing light. As soon as she was away from the bar, men started asking her to dance with them, so she did. She had an extremely clear vision of what she had to accomplish tonight, so she used the dancing, making turns to watch the way the crowds were forming and reconfiguring.

As she danced, she could see groups of single girls sitting at the tables in the corner of the room just off the dance floor and farthest from the front door. Men lingered near that spot or walked by, surveying the selection while pretending not to, and the women made their own evaluations and decisions while pretending not to.

When she had danced enough to be sure that the young women at the tables had become used to her, she bought another 7UP and went to the women’s area to sit on the upholstered bench that ran the length of the wall beyond the tables. She began to make overtures to the women around her. “This is a great place,” she said to one of them. The woman appeared not to be able to hear her over the noise of the music. She tried the one on her other side, a thin blonde who seemed to be there alone. “Wow. I absolutely love those shoes. Would you mind telling me where you got them?”

“Zero Gravity.”

“Can you tell me where that is? I’m new here. I just moved here from Florida.” She laughed. “I don’t know anything.”

“It’s on Colfax, not far from the capitol building. It’s really a great place.”

“Thanks so much. Do you know a good place to get a jacket? The fall stuff is out already, and I thought I might pick up a jacket now. With the altitude here and everything, I’m freezing half the time.”

“Zero Gravity would be a good place to start for that too. Or, you know, there’s a mall in Aurora that has just about everything.” The woman’s eyes left hers and rose to focus on someone standing over them.

“Would you like to dance?” asked the man. He was looking at Anne.

She said to the blond woman, “Would you mind watching my purse for a minute?”

The woman said unenthusiastically, “Okay. Sure.”

She got up and danced with the man. He was tall, skinny, and young—so young that she wondered if he had used a false ID to get into the bar. She smiled at him, wondering if the blond woman she had chosen was right. If she had chosen wrong, the woman would be gone and so would her purse, fake driver’s license, and hundred in cash.

When the song was over, the young man said, “Want to dance again?”

“I shouldn’t. I left my purse with that girl.”

She went back and found the blonde still there. She said to her, “Thanks for watching my purse.”

She worked to shape the evening and make it conform to her vision. She talked with the woman and made observations, tried to make her laugh. They moved to a table when its occupants left. They became more and more comfortable with each other, and their smiles and laughter attracted another man. The blonde got up to dance with him, and she said, “Your turn to watch my purse, okay?”

“Sure.”

She waited until the girl had disappeared into the surging crowd of dancers, took out her little notebook and pen, and reached into the purse. She kept the purse beneath the table, her head up and her eyes on the dancers, so even if the lights had suddenly come on it would have been difficult to say she had been searching the purse. She looked down only when her fingers had identified something.

The driver’s license gave the blonde’s name as Laura Murray, her address as 5619 LaRoche Avenue in Alameda, and her date of birth as August 19, 1983. She copied quickly, then found the health insurance card, which gave an identification number that started with XDX and ended in a social security number. She looked into the wallet to see the issuers of the credit cards. Then she closed the purse and put away the notebook and pen. The whole process had taken barely sixty seconds.

The young woman came back after ten minutes to find her slightly bored and tired. They talked for a few minutes longer, and both went to the ladies’ room. As soon as they returned, the young man who had danced with the blonde before asked her to dance again. At that moment, Anne caught the blonde’s eye, pointed at her watch, and waved. The blonde smiled and waved back.

She stepped outside into the cool night air and breezed past the doormen, feeling eager. It was going to work. She knew it was going to work. She walked back to her parked car, retrieved her real purse with the gun and money in it, and drove to a 7-Eleven store that had a pay telephone on the wall outside. She searched the directory for an all-night copy service that rented computers, then drove there.

When she reached the copy center, she was pleased. This seemed to be a business that served people from the university. The customers were all her age or younger, and there were at least two dozen of them, even though it was after midnight. There were a dozen using the self-service copying machines, paper cutters, and laminating machines. There were another dozen people using the computers. She claimed one and went to work.

She went to bank Web sites and found one that would allow her to apply for a Visa card online. She brought up the application and checked her notes to be sure it wasn’t one of the banks that had already given Laura Murray credit. She entered Laura’s name, address, birth date, social security number, and driver’s license number. She said Laura was an executive trainee, effective a month ago in case the credit check revealed some other job, and that she made approximately fifty-one thousand dollars a year. Then came the question “Have you moved within the past two years?” She said yes, typed in “Solara Estates,” the mailbox number, and the street address of the mailbox-rental store. She put the effective date as today, and clicked that address as the current one.

She had noticed that the application form she had filled out had asked, “Would you like to apply for a second card for another person on this account?” It gave her an idea. She applied for two cards in the name of Charles Woodward, the elderly man whose medical record she had stolen. After filling in his name, social security number, and birthday, she said he was retired. His annual income was eighty-seven thousand dollars. Yes, he did want a second card on his account. It was for one of the names she had made up for herself, Judith Nathan. She said her full name was Judith Woodward Nathan, and that they both lived at Solara Estates.

She checked to see that the copy center was still safe, then used the scanned images of her Illinois, California, and Arizona driver’s licenses to make the paper fronts of licenses for Judith Nathan and Laura Murray, and signed off. She used a copier to copy the backs of her licenses, used a laminating machine to join them to the front sides, and a precision paper cutter to trim them to size. They still were not good enough to fool a policeman in their home states, but if she put one of them into the plastic holder in her wallet, it looked real.

When morning came, she bought a Denver Post and searched for furnished apartments. The place she found was an old motel that had become less and less desirable to travelers and was living an afterlife offering rooms by the week at cut-rate prices. After a few days of sleeping during daylight in a park, she was not critical of the place’s faults. She was delighted to have a shower and a door with a lock on it, and there was even a television set.

She drove to a hardware store and bought four sliding bolts. Late on the first night she installed two of her sliding bolts at the top and bottom of the door, and one bolt on each of the two windows. When she had done that, she slept with Mary Tilson’s gun under the spare pillow beside her head.

She slept ten hours a day, exercised, took long showers, gave herself facials, treated her skin with moisturizer, and did her nails. She watched television, thought, and planned. She went out only to buy food and newspapers and check her Solara Estates mailbox.

On the tenth day, she found her first credit card, in the name Laura Murray, in her mailbox, and on the thirteenth, the one for Judith Nathan. By the twenty-first day, she was ready to drive again. Judith Nathan packed her suitcase and began the long drive toward Portland, Oregon.

35

It was five-thirty in the morning. Catherine Hobbes stood at the big window of her dining