Crime

by Irvine Welsh

  — He seemed a nice guy, she says, looking to Robyn.

  — I dunno, I thought he was kinda creepy.

  — I guess you would know all about that, honey.

  Robyn screws up her face a little and shrugs, turning to Lennox with a tight smile.

  Starry seems to relinquish her anger. — Look, let’s move on somewhere else.

  They discuss where to go. Lennox thinks that he should head back to the hotel. Make his peace with Trudi. Tiredness is kicking in. But he can’t face her. Better to wait till she’s asleep.

  — What’s this? Starry asks Lennox. She holds up the copy of Perfect Bride. — You planning a wedding?

  — Aye. Not my own though, he says, surprised how effortlessly falsehoods pirouette from his mouth. The difference between a cop and a villain is that we get paid a salary and make better liars, his mentor Robbo once told him. — That’s what I sell, he qualifies. — Weddings; the whole package.

  — You’re a wedding planner? Like the Adam Sandler movie? Robyn squeals in delight.

  — Well, yeah. He looks at Starry who is forcing a grim smile, before her cellphone ringtone starts to play ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. She apologises, moving to the door of the bar to answer it.

  — I guess that must be a happy job. A lot of fun, Robyn says.

  — It’s stressful, but it has its uplifting moments.

  Starry returns and is keen to go on to a place called Club Myopia, but Robyn is reluctant. — I gotta get back soon for Tia.

  — She’ll be okay, Starry says. — Just one drink. I got us a little something.

  Robyn’s eyes light up. — You mean you been – She stops herself.

  Lennox knows that the little something is coke. It’s what he wants. Needs. One line of white powder. Something to make him strong. To make him not think about dead children. To make him not care. Robyn tells him that Club Myopia is just a few blocks south. It would be on the way back to the hotel. — I’ll keep this safe for you, she smiles, putting the copy of Perfect Bride into her shoulder bag, — it’s getting pretty messed up lying on that bar.

  — Ta. Lennox winks in gratitude, and they head out and walk down Washington Avenue to the club.

  For ID, Starry and Robyn flash driver’s licences at the doorman. Lennox offers his Lothian and Borders Police Authority pass, replete with an old mustachioed picture of him. The bouncer, a big black man, meets his eye with a downward head motion, minimal, stern. Lennox slips the card back into his pocket, taking care to conceal it from the girls. He badly wants them to get the coke out. Can envision it, sweating in the wrapper, inside Starry’s handbag. So, too, from the focus in her eyes, can Robyn.

  Myopia is a dance-music club, and cast adrift amid a sea of toned, fit, beautiful youths, they are the oldest people there. Starry and Robyn waste no time in heading to the restrooms. They are gone for so long, Lennox fears that they might have slipped away. He grows restless then anxious standing at the bar alone, drenched in the pumping music and the strobe lights, with the well-dressed youngsters seeming to scan him in disapproval. The girls wear short, slinky dresses of largely one colour, which cling to their bodies as if by static electricity. The predominantly dressy shirts of the boys highlight the grubbiness of his Ramones tee. He thinks: Michael Douglas in the Basic Instinct nightclub scene, salving himself with the knowledge that he could never be quite that ludicrous.

  His edginess heightens. Over by the bar, he is aware that he’s being watched. It’s the guy from Club Deuce, the smart-arse salesman. Letting anger energise him, Lennox hits the floor, snaking through the frolicking crowd to the back of the room, then sharply double-backing so he’s standing behind the guy who’s craning his neck, scanning the floor for him. — Looking for somebody? he shouts above the sound system’s quake, causing the man to jump. — You want tae fuckin dance, or something?

  — Look, I – he begins, halted by Lennox’s hand, the one with the power in its fingers, which fastens on to his thin throat, choking him to silence.

  — Naw. You look. I don’t know what your fuckin game is, but you turn round and you get your arse out of that fuckin door right now, he demands, his grip tightening further. — You know what I’m sayin?

  In the man’s fearful eyes he can gauge the extent of his own murderous rancour. Aware that some people are observing the scene, he releases his grip. The heaving-chested man backs away, rubbing at his neck. A bouncer has partly observed proceedings, but, like Lennox, he’s content to merely track the salesman all the way to the Exit signs.

  Ordering another drink to vainly compensate for his leaking adrenalin, he fretfully waits for the girls. He commands himself to stand still and do nothing, telling himself that real composure will boomerang back if he fronts it long enough. When they finally return, Robyn particularly looking flushed and animated, they discreetly present Lennox with the gear, in a small, resealable bag. — Thought you’d run out on me, he smiles.

  — No chance of that, Robyn says. He sees the confidence the cocaine gives her. One sniff and she can be the person she’s always wanted to be. He understands. Starry doesn’t really need it. She tosses back her curly mane and grins at him. He heads to the men’s restrooms. The cubicles are flimsy with small doors. Not as private as the UK. You could see right in through the crack of them, or even look over, if you had a mind to. Not to worry. He racks up a big line on the top of the cistern. It looks good gear. Chops it finer with his Lothian and Borders Police ID card. He thinks for a second about Trudi, probably back in the hotel room, then Keith Goodwin at the NA and all the good work he’d done. Was it good work? Now he’ll flush it all away. Britney’s face: cold, blue and bruised. Mr Confectioner’s sickening gloat. He’ll flush it all away.

  The line obliterates them and Lennox emerges striding on to the dance floor like a colossus, jaw protruding. Starry and Robyn are dancing, and he moves easily with them, sleazy and invincible. The other dancers, they can feel his power, his radiant contempt for them. They shrink away like the pygmies they are. He painlessly recalls his infidelities of the past, which wrecked things for him and Trudi the first time around; each conquest a trinket on a charm bracelet of fool’s gold, every single one of them executed when he felt exactly like this.

  Why is he doing this, he asks, apart from the drive of the cocaine? His fiancée is back at the hotel, or so he assumes. Lennox is always beset with the notion that the big event, the real party, is happening somewhere else. His radar – that distressed feeling under his skin – tells him that this is the case. Then he realises that he is a cop and that the big party is always happening somewhere else, namely in civvy street. And if he finds it, his role is not to join in, but to break it up. Now, though, for these two weeks, he is a civilian. And it’s good here. The world’s crumbling around us and thank fuck there’s people just too new or plain stupid to climb on that dance floor, and act as if the party’s just begun.

  Starry sweeps her hair back and meets his predator’s glance with hard, flinty eyes of her own. — We’re gonna go back to Robyn’s. She looks to her friend.

  — You’re invited, Robyn says. — Come over and have some more blow?

  By blow he assumes that she means coke, rather than marijuana, which he hates. — Okay. Whereabouts? he shouts above the beat.

  — I live over in Miami.

  — I thought this was Miami.

  — No, this is Miami Beach, silly, Robyn playfully scolds. — Miami is across the causeway.

  — Right. He recalls how both Trudi and then Ginger had explained it all to him.

  They head outside, buzzing from the coke. Lennox goes to flag down a cab, but Starry stops him. — Here’s a bus, she says, nodding to the approaching vehicle. — Cheaper.

  This time he pays the proper money. The bus is full of drunks: the ubiquitous mobile theatre of late-night public transport. They find seats at the back, Lennox at the window with Robyn by his side, Starry in front of them. She’s conversing in Spanish with somebody on her
cell. Robyn looks agitated, this soon starting to infect Lennox. The bus has no windows at the back, which adds to his unease. It’s unnatural; not to be able to see where you’ve come from.

  — Who were you talking to? Robyn asks suspiciously as her friend finishes the call.

  — Just some friends from the diner, Starry cossets Robyn, rubbing her friend’s neck, while she expatiates about her workplace hassles. — That Mano, he’s such an asshole …

  After courting the coastline, the vehicle suddenly veers, crossing a stretch of water on a long bridge and comes into what Lennox thinks must be Miami proper. Starry’s nail scrapes at some glitter that’s stuck to the bus windows, before she realises it’s outside. The docks come into view with the towering cranes, then the freight tankers. But most impressive are the cruise ships, about a dozen of them, like floating apartment blocks, grandiose yet still dwarfed by the big towers of downtown Miami, massive sentinels guarding the harbour. Lennox is impressed, as the coke pounds his head, making him strong. His teeth grind harshly. He wants those mysterious yellow lights that glisten on the water across that filthy, slithering, black bay. Wants to become part of it all: away from the sunlight and the spotless, white, perfect brides.

  6

  Party

  THROUGH A MURKY shroud of near darkness illuminated only by a peppering of lights from the overhanging skyscrapers of the commerce district, downtown Miami appears to Lennox not only scabrous and bedraggled, but also sinisterly deserted. This impression is confirmed as they step on to the concourse of the bus station at the Government Centre. Many of the tower blocks ahead are under construction. They stand like a silent army of zombies, emerging from the earth in varying degrees of composition but unsure of what to do next. Giant skeletal cranes seem to be feeding off them like monstrous birds of prey.

  — Cheaper to get a cab from over here, Starry explains as they swagger with the purpose of the intoxicated across to a taxi rank, adjacent to the bus disembarkation point. The earlier stops at the Port of Miami, Omni Station, the American Airways Arena and the down-at-heel district of small jewellery stores, have been the points of egress for most passengers. Now only one lone drunk staggers ahead of them, his look of open-mouthed bemusement as the bus pulls away indicating that he’s alighted here by accident. Lennox looks up at the support pillars and overhead tracks of the Metromover as it snakes around and through the city buildings; Miami reminds him more of Bangkok than of any American or European city he’s previously encountered. The only older building he’s seen has been the grand, multi-tiered Dade County courtroom, impressive and beautiful with its steps and pillars, a stately home surrounded by tasteless imitations.

  They get into one of the three waiting taxis and Robyn coughs on her cigarette, rasping out an address to a suspicious-looking driver, an address which seems all numbers to Lennox sitting in the front passenger seat. A pendant flag hangs from the cabbie’s mirror, which Lennox takes to be Puerto Rico. The cop in him has quickly deduced that Miami’s most dangerous profession wouldn’t be police work or firefighting. Murder would be an occupational hazard for taxi drivers, most of them poor immigrants. The all-night gas stations would now be mainly self-service while convenience-store clerks would invariably be locked in bulletproof booths, the stores probably fitted with drop safes. But working these deserted streets with cold-callers, in cash transactions, seems a particularly risky enterprise.

  They continue through what is a barren section of the town; there are no homes down here, everything seems to be cheap and tacky retail. Grubby steel-shuttered shops are in abundance, but Lennox has yet to see a bar or anywhere indicating the possibility of social life. Growing concerned, as he feels he’s come far enough, he senses the taxi driver’s edginess from behind the Perspex screen. By the shrillness in their voices, he’s aware that Robyn and Starry are arguing in the back seat. There is a mention of a dead child. Starry’s son. It burns him. He tunes it out in favour of the city surrounding him. Miami proper seems a very different beast to Miami Beach; the city comprising flyovers like the one they sweep on to, and for a while it appears as if they are going to the airport. Then they suddenly veer from the concrete artery, down a steep slip road and into a neighbourhood off 17th Street. It’s like falling from the edge of one world and landing in another. — Welcome to Little Havana, Starry says, raising a single curved brow, recovering the effervescence Lennox feels has deserted her since the incident with the strange guy earlier.

  — This ain’t really far enough south for Little Havana, Robyn says, a little stridently. — It’s more like Riverside.

  — Bullshit; you jus don want people to know you live in a Cuban neighbourhood, Starry challenges her, only half joking, her accent changing into Rosie Perez Latina.

  — Newsflash, Robyn says. — This is Miami. Every neighbourhood here is Cuban.

  Lennox cringes at Robyn’s bland epithet ‘Riverside’. The planners back home had attempted to redesignate Leith and the other river communites as ‘Edinburgh’s Waterfront’. As Leith was associated with Hibernian Football Club and he was a Hearts fan, he’d enjoyed referring to his new flat as being ‘in the Waterfront district’.

  — See that, Starry says, looking to Lennox, — you gringos can’t see the difference between the Latino neighbourhoods!

  Lennox has to concede that his eyes detect little divergence in the dimly lit streets they drive through, all of which are cut into uniform blocks. This area doesn’t seem hugely affluent, but it isn’t a ghetto either. Most of the homes on these blocks are low-rise dwellings of one storey. When they drive through the backstreets, interior and porch lights illuminate some houses showing him, on closer examination, that no two domiciles are alike. Some fronts and gardens are well kept, to the point of obsession. Others are dumping grounds. Lennox guesses a mix of owner occupancy and rented accommodation. Robyn’s place is different; it’s in a gated apartment block, the stucco-fronted building painted a pastel orange illuminated by uplit wall lamps with a driveway for parking. An aluminium panel of intercom buzzers announces twelve dwellings, confirmed by the number of mailboxes in a chaste, functional hallway navigated by low-level night lights.

  He’s used to mounting steep Edinburgh tenement stairs, but chemical impatience and the slight gradient on these tiled platforms compel him to take two at once in long, loping strides. Robyn’s place is on the top floor, two up from ground level. Prospecting a key from the chaos in her bag, she whispers, — Shhh, as she opens the door. Lennox feels Starry’s hand nestling on his arse. He lets it hang for a bit, then moves off down the hallway, passing a table with a phone on it, above which sits a large whiteboard full of numbers and messages. Stung, Lennox quickly turns away, moving into a front room whose chattels suggest a furnished tenancy; the black leather sofa, with fawn-coloured throw and matching chairs belong to some ubiquitous 1980s warehouse that seems to supply rentals in every city he’s visited. These sit on oak hardwood floors, with a rug in the middle that looks more expensive than it probably is. A smoked-glass coffee table is stacked with magazines; the garish glint from the light above reflecting on to that cocaine accessory seems to be issuing a challenge to him. An alcove, fringed by Christmas fairy lights, leads through to a small terracotta-tiled kitchen.

  — Nice place, Lennox observes.

  Robyn tells him that she’s been here for a year. She’d come from south Alabama and moved over to Jacksonville with her daughter (it sounds like ‘daw-rah’ to his ears) in search of work. After that dried up she’d headed further south, first to Surfside where she’d briefly worked in a residential home, and then down here. She explains that the rent’s cheap and it was convenient for her job in a daycare centre. — But I had to stop working there, she says guiltily, — to spend more time with my daughter.

  — How old is she?

  — Ten. She flushes with pride, then departs to check on the kid.

  Lennox catches Starry regarding her exiting friend with a primal malevolence so poisonous she’s
briefly flustered that he’s noticed. Defensively, she tips back her head, pushing out her mouth with its lipstick gleam.

  Robyn returns, closing the lounge door behind her. — Fast asleep, she announces with relief. She tells him there have been problems at the school with the daughter. Most of the kids talked Spanish at home and in the schoolyard, so Tianna, that’s the girl’s name, feels isolated. — She’s gotten so withdrawn lately, Robyn says sadly, then catches Starry’s disapproving scowl and quickly switches into breezy mode, — but hey, this is a party. Right?

  — Right, Lennox acknowledges, slumping on to the couch, his eye falling on a dark stain on the hardwood floor spilling out from under the rug. About to comment, he hastily corrects himself. It was a party, and he was on holiday. Murder investigating, no. Wedding planning, no. Holiday, yes.

  Starry shoots another contemptuous glance towards Robyn, who turns from Lennox to the CD player. He tracks her to avoid Starry’s rapacious gaze, but the thin, distressed back of Robyn’s neck perversely reminds him of his father’s on their last meeting. She inserts a disc and as cheesy pop sounds fill the air, stands up and pulls him to his feet. The music is bland, drenching the room in spineless reworkings of rock ’n’ roll classics, forcing Lennox to think of his old mate Robbo, a soft-rock aficionado, supermarkets, and what Americans call elevators.

  Robyn steps into him, and as they dance close, he feels the sewer ebbing from her mind; him suffocating under the confining cloak of sleaze she’s draped around them. In an automated manner he responds to her tight mouth as it bites on his numb lips, the cocaine rendering the tobacco smoke from her breath just about bearable. Her eyes are as glassy and dead as Marjorie’s, his big sister Jackie’s favourite doll. Lennox recalls ‘loving’ and ‘wanting to marry’ Marjorie as a small child, coveting the toy at least as much as his bossy sibling did.

  He’d told Trudi this story once. — You like women to be passive toys, she’d snorted uncharitably, before climbing on top of him and riding him raw.