Nightlife Read Online Free PDF Page A

forced entry here. The other doors are bolted from the inside.”
    Pitt looked around. As a concession to the rainy Portland climate there was a small foyer with a black-and-white marble floor and a long wooden seat for changing boots, a coat rack above it, and an umbrella stand. Beyond that the thick carpet began, and everything in sight was beige or white.
    “Where did he get shot?”
    “Upstairs in the master suite. I’ll show you.” She went to the long straight staircase, and they climbed to the landing.
    Pitt walked into Dennis Poole’s bedroom, which was big enough for four bedrooms. He surveyed the furnishings. On the wall there was a plasma television about six feet wide, and below it on a cabinet a set of videocassette recorders and DVD players. There was a big desk with more computer equipment on it than anybody needed. There were shelves with so many books and magazines on them that they reminded Pitt that he hadn’t seen any evidence of a book downstairs. The bed looked like the oversized king in a good hotel suite. “Was he in debt to pay for all of this?”
    “We haven’t found any debt yet. Considering his income, the house isn’t at all extravagant,” she said. “He bought it about a year after his divorce, when he was twenty-eight. That was fourteen years ago. He lived alone, and he cleared three to four hundred thousand a year. There’s no sign of expensive hobbies or collections, no trace of drugs in his blood or the house, no history of gambling.”
    “Anything missing?”
    “He lived alone, so we haven’t got anybody who really knows. There are no dust spots where things have been removed, or marks on the walls from missing paintings or anything. We took a couple of people from his office through the house, and neither of them could remember seeing anything here that’s gone.” She held him in the corner of her eye. “Maybe you can tell me.” Instantly she wished she had not said it.
    He looked around him as though he had not heard. “Where was the body?”
    “In the bathtub.” She led him into the bathroom. It was big too, with an enormous black tub and a room-sized glass-walled shower with showerheads on three sides and a slate seat along one wall. Most of the surfaces were covered with fingerprint dust. “One shot to the head.”
    He looked down at the tub, then moved his face close to examine the blood-spatter pattern on the wall above it. “And you’re sure he didn’t just pop himself?”
    “The gun wasn’t found with him. Anyway, the angle was wrong.”
    “How?”
    “Sort of like this.” She pointed her index finger at her own head. “See? The angle is too high. You can’t get a gun up there and point slightly downward, and why would you?”
    Joe Pitt nodded and walked farther into the bathroom, examining the shower and the sinks without touching anything. “Was he taking a bath or did they just shove him in there to keep the job from getting messy?”
    “He was naked. There was soap in the tub, and a towel under his head like a pillow.”
    Pitt left the bathroom and stared at the bedroom again. “I assume your people didn’t find anything in the rest of the house.”
    “It’s all just like what you saw on the way up here. The rooms look like no one’s ever used them. It’s white couches that nobody ever sat in, and glass tabletops without so much as a fingerprint. The kitchen is beautiful, but there’s hardly anything in the refrigerator but drinks. He ate out three meals a day.”
    “He seems to have lived up here.”
    “That’s how I see it,” she said. “The television gets something like two hundred and fifty channels, about fifty of them sports. He could sit up here forever watching one game after another, and never go downstairs except for more beer.”
    “Who dusted the white couches and washed the windows?”
    “He had a contract with Mighty Maids. They have a whole crew of women come in at once, clean the hell out of everything, and go