Nightlife Read Online Free PDF Page B

interest?”
    “Let’s say the nature of my interest changed.”
    “It doesn’t have to,” said Pitt. “I’m not here to do anything wrong, and I really do make a gazillion dollars.”
    “You’re working for a bad guy,” said Hobbes. “Lips that have touched Hugo Poole’s ass will never touch mine.”
    “Your ass?”
    “My anything,” she said.
    Joe Pitt nodded. “So up here, when a known criminal asks you to investigate his relative’s murder, you say no?”
    “We don’t actually consult him. When there’s a murder we go after the killer, whether anybody wants us to or not.” She patted his arm and said with mock sympathy, “It’s not you, Joe. It’s me. I just don’t like people taking money from a crook to keep him out of a murder investigation.”
    “I wasn’t hired to do that,” he said. “Hugo Poole agrees with you. He thinks the killing is a reprisal for something he did down in L.A. If you want to pursue that, he’ll try to help you. But it’s not what happened.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “If it’s a reprisal, they wouldn’t try to make it look like a suicide. They’d make it as big and ugly as they could, and make damned sure Hugo knew why.”
    Joe Pitt stalked around the room, looking at things. “This place has been cleaned up. I asked you before if something was missing, and you didn’t know. I know now what it is. It’s the mess.”
    “But he wasn’t messy,” she said. “Downstairs each room looks like a department store window.”
    “Because he didn’t live down there. He lived up here, in this suite. But there’s nothing random, nothing out of its place up here. I know it wouldn’t look like a room in a fraternity house, but this isn’t the way it looked when he died, either. It’s been sanitized. The only person who would have done that is the killer.”
    “You think the killer took the time to go through this whole suite wiping off prints and picking up fibers?”
    “Yes, I do,” he said. “But I think that what the shooter didn’t want us to know about wasn’t his prints. I think he was removing signs of the blond woman. The killer came in and shot Poole—one round, no struggle. At that point, he could have exited without much risk of leaving anything of himself. But instead he straightened the suite, put everything away, vacuumed the carpets. He missed a couple of blond hairs on the floor and stuck to Poole’s clothes.”
    “The blond hairs on the suit don’t mean somebody cleaned the place. Maybe that’s all there were.”
    “You said the Mighty Maids were all black or Hispanic, and they cleaned the hell out of this place twice every week. That takes hours of hard work, a lot of it on their hands and knees. So where are the fibers from their uniforms? Where are the dark hairs?”
    “Oh, God,” said Hobbes. He was right. Damn him. “What if she was what it was about?”
    “Could be. Maybe some other man came here to take her—or take her back.”
    “I’ve got to find that girl.”

6
    T he girl felt some sadness, but she was satisfied. She had thoroughly experienced Dennis Poole, so she was not disappointed in herself. She was proud of herself for overcoming her shyness and fear in the hotel bar in Aspen, and being the first to speak. That alone was an accomplishment. She had found something about him appealing—his tall, slightly awkward body, the clothes he wore that seemed to be right out of the box, as though he had never worn anything all year but a business suit. She had sat in the bar at a small table near the window that looked out on the mountains, then feigned surprise to find him sitting nearby and said, “What a wonderful sky. I love the color of the sky just after sundown.” How could he not reply?
    After she had talked to him for a few minutes, she had found that she almost instantly knew what to say to him and how to say it. There had never been more than a few moments when she had needed to doubt herself. She had