“It’s one of my personal favourites,” Barbara said, swishing forward to applaud the purchasers. She behaved as if it were they who ought to be congratulated for having made the right decision. They didn’t seem to feel patronised, however.
“Oh, that’s so great!” said Taylor, clapping her hands together girlishly. “It’s such an honour to have had you here while we were choosing.”
Barbara smiled graciously.
“It truly has been an honour, Ms. Bilder,” said Courtney gravely.
“Well,” Carol cut in brightly, “we should be getting ourselves together and heading out.”
“Reservations wait for no man,” Stanley said, happy to have found a subject on which he could pronounce with confidence.
“We had to fax the restaurant with our credit card number, and sign a form promising to be there or pay a penalty, before they’d take the booking!” Taylor informed everyone. “Can you believe it? I don’t know what New York is coming to.”
This was the cue for an outpouring of New York nightmare restaurant stories, all recounted with mock horror and, underlying that, a repressed triumph that the speakers were doing well enough to afford them. Laurence and Kevin exchanged a glance and started carrying the rejected paintings over to the lift. Once they were inside, Laurence remained there to hold them steady while Kevin and I took the stairs. Although not quite as dishevelled as Laurence, Kevin’s bland face was shiny with physical effort and his hair was not as neat as it had doubtless been when he left the house that morning.
“You guys aren’t going to the dinner, are you?” I asked.
“You must be kidding,” Kevin said bitterly. “We’re kind of lowly anyway, and today we’re just the art handlers. Goddamn Don, when I catch up with him I’m gonna kick his ass. We’ve had a shit-awful day and it’s not over yet.”
The elevator was already at the basement when we got there. Laurence had blocked the doors open and started heaving out the first Bilder. While the boys started slotting the paintings back into place in the complicated sliding storage apparatus—rather like an IKEA-designed CD stand, only on a much larger scale—I wandered through into the room beyond, Don’s territory, with its broken-down loungers and odour of cigarettes and beer. This evening I could smell whisky, too, or maybe it was bourbon. I bet Don liked his bourbon, a country boy like him.
The ashtray on the arm of one of the loungers was brimming with cigarette stubs, and a glass half full with beer stood on the floor by its side, a fly buzzing around its rim. Don might just have stepped out for a moment. It was very still in the room, the strip lighting casting weird shadows over the grey walls. I felt a rush of claustrophobia. For some reason I remembered the dream I had had in London, the part where the walls were closing in on me, and in a brief fit of paranoia from the acid couldn’t help turning my head to check that they were where they should be. In the next room I could hear Laurence and Kevin shifting paintings and swearing to each other. The sounds were strangely muffled; they seemed to come from very far away, as if heard through water.
One of Don’s paintings was turned to face the room, propped against a filing cabinet, glue jars and paint pots in a muddle next to it. I gave it a cursory glance but I was all stared out of art at the moment. Besides, it was of a huge naked woman with a bit of red paper stuck next to her, pointing to her private parts. Just what I would have expected from Don. In front of me were the sliding glass doors which led out onto the small concreted space outside, as cramped and nasty as the exercise yard of a prison. There was another strip light outside, garishly lighting up the yard’s far wall. It turned the doors into dark mirrors, reflecting the contents of the room back at me.
The reflection did not allow me to see beyond the doors. Moving closer, I pressed my face nearly up to the smeared and dirty glass and stared out. There was hardly anything in the yard besides a bicycle rack sheltered by a lean-to. A single bike stood inside it, chained by its frame to the rack. Beyond it was a pile of rubbish. No, it couldn’t be rubbish. I could scarcely imagine Carol Bergmann allowing people to use the yard as a dump. But it was covered in black plastic, and had the authentic lumpiness of an unevenly filled garbage bag.
I looked at it for what felt like a long time, fighting back the idiotic urge to giggle. The acid was trying to make a brief comeback. When I had myself under control, I took a deep breath and walked back into the storage room. The boys were dusting themselves off resentfully.
“Look,” I said, “would you two come through here a moment?”
Oddly, it was as if Kevin knew at once what I suspected. His handsome features flattened as if smeared across his face like dough, artificially blank. It was Laurence who said, wearily but quite naturally:
“What is it, Sam? I can’t think much beyond a beer at this point.”
“Just come through a second,” I insisted, leading them into Don’s room. I noticed for the first time that the sink in the far corner was dripping, very slowly, the drops plinking down like water torture.
“Shit, this place is a dump,” Laurence said absently.
“He could at least empty his fucking ashtray,” Kevin agreed. “He always keep it like this? I hardly ever come down here.”
“Look out there in the yard.” I pointed to the lean-to.
Kevin didn’t say anything. He had shoved his hands into his pockets, and stood like a statue, his face unmoving. Laurence leaned forward.
“You mean the bike? It’s mine. Don’t tell me you want to borrow it.”
“Did you bike in this morning?”
“No, I haven’t used it in a couple of days. What is this, a fitness quiz?”
He turned away. Kevin still hadn’t moved or spoken.
“Beyond the lean-to,” I persisted. “What’s that?”
Laurence sighed a long, slow, humour-the-woman sigh, and swivelled back, poised on the ball of one foot, wanting just to answer me and be gone.
“Refuse. Junk. I don’t know. Bottom line is, it shouldn’t be there. But I’m too tired to deal with it right now.”
“It looks pretty big, don’t you think?”
“I don’t give a shit how big it is.…” Laurence’s voice, which had been edgy with annoyance at being kept back from his beer, tailed off. Our eyes met in the reflection on the glass doors. We stared at each other, the shadows behind and before us stretching away into the half-illuminated night. There was a long, unpleasant pause, broken by Kevin’s feet shifting on the concrete floor.
“Well,” I said. “I think we should go out there and take a look.”
The key was in the door. We all focused on it.
“What about fingerprints?” Laurence said presciently.
I shrugged. “What can we do? We have to check.”
Laurence found a filthy rag by the sink and used that to turn the key, trying to hold it by its edges. The doors slid back. The night air was scarcely less cold than that of the basement, but damper. The yard was clammy and we shivered as we crossed it.
There wasn’t room for all of us to gather round the refuse sack. I knelt down and prodded it as gently as I could.
“It’s just garbage or something,” Kevin said, his voice loud. “Dumped here till someone got around to throwing it out.”
More than one bag had been used, and only the uppermost one was actually pulled over the mass it contained. The rest were draped over the larger part of it, which had been pulled as far behind the lean-to as it would go. I took hold of the one nearest to me and dragged the bag off, taking care not to shift anything more than I had to.
“Oh, shit,” Laurence said. “Oh shit.”
It was as fair a response as any. Don’s face, livid under the strip lighting, lolled back on his neck, looking up at us. Kevin was the furthest away, but he took a few quick steps back. Golden light projected down in long slanting rectangles from the windows on the first floor, casting an inappropriately benevolent glow over the scene. As the plastic bag came away it looked for a moment as if D
on were wearing a choker, a thin strip of leather cutting tightly into the skin of his neck. But once I had laid his head gently down on the concrete, I could see clearly that it was a long narrow bruise indenting the skin, dark and strong enough to have been traced with a marker pen. In my hallucinations earlier today I had seen something like this. Reality was contradicting me: the line wasn’t red. It was black with dying blood.
“Oh, shit,” Laurence said softly once again.
And from behind him came the sound of retching. Kevin was being sick in the corner of the yard.
“Pretty perspicacious of you, Ms. Jones.” Detective Frank leaned back in his chair and smiled at me. It was a nice enough smile, but the effect was undercut both by the floor-to-ceiling chicken wire which covered the window just behind him and the gory posters, one of a drug addict, one of a gunshot victim, which bracketed it. Nor was the view I could dimly glimpse through the chicken wire anything to mention on a postcard home. Sipping some brown hot water which tasted as if it had been made by hand-wringing coffee filters into a rusty bucket, I said “Thank you” as meekly as I could.
“And you kept your head, right? Got some witnesses together and went into the yard to check out just what was in that bag. Didn’t puke, either, not you. Not like that other guy.”
“Regular Miss Marple,” said Thurber. With horror, I suddenly realised that her deep dead voice was exactly the same as Marvin the paranoid android’s from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. No wonder I’d thought of Radiohead before. Giggles bubbled up inside me and some, despite my best efforts, made a break for freedom. Quickly I slurped down some more brown hot water and pretended to have a little coughing fit to cover the outburst. I didn’t think any further response would be required.
“Maybe that’s because it isn’t the first time this’s happened to you, right?” Thurber continued, her voice still eerily lacking affect.
“I usually do keep my head,” I said, looking her in the eye. “And this stuff at the gallery is nothing to do with me.”
It didn’t distract her. She lowered her gaze once again to the stack of paper on the desk in front of her.
“Broke a guy’s neck for him, didn’t you, a few years back?” she said mildly. “I tell you that, Ray?”
“Yeah, I think you did mention it,” Frank confirmed, tilting his chair back till it hit the chicken wire. “Pretty impressive, huh?” he said to me.
“If you think that’s impressive. I don’t. And it was self-defence. It didn’t even go to trial.”
“Sure, sure. And it’s not like you strangled him or anything,” Frank agreed, as cheerful as ever. “Now that would get us wondering a little bit.”
“So where are we on this?” Thurber said, as if she were asking me a question. I bit my tongue. One of the hardest things about police interrogations is telling yourself to shut up.
She shuffled some more paper round on her desk. Mixed in with a series of forms were some large black-and-white photographs. I couldn’t see them closely but I assumed they were of Don’s dead body.
“We have a multiple murder inquiry going on here,” Thurber went on, “and you’re not helping much.”
“I found the second body,” I said politely. “Doesn’t that count?”
Thurber shot me a glance which indicated that our bonding moment over the Monkees had been at least temporarily forgotten.
“Where were you last night?” she said.
The Q-and-A hadn’t been under way for long. They would ask me this at least twice more before they let me go and my story had better be the same every time. I took a deep breath.
“At home in my apartment. I had a friend staying with me.”
“He or she?”
“He.”
“He stay over?”
I blinked. “He stayed all night, if that’s what you mean. But he’s just a friend.” I didn’t want any rumours getting around. “He’s one of the artists who’s doing the show with me at Bergmann LaTouche. We know each other from London.”
Thurber picked up her pen. “What’s this guy’s full name, and how can we get in touch with him?” she asked.
I gave her Lex’s name. “I don’t know where he is right now,” I said, not wanting to ring my apartment in case everyone was still there. For all I knew they might have topped up their dose and be in the kind of state in which a Thurber/Frank double-pronged interrogation would send them over the edge into screaming insanity.
“Why don’t we just try your number?” Thurber suggested, too clever not to sense that there was something I wasn’t telling. To my great relief, when she dialled it, the answering machine picked up. She hung up and looked at me. “Any idea where he could be?”
“I’m sure he’ll get in touch,” I said easily. “He’s a bit of a free spirit. I think he’s been couch-surfing up till now.”
“And you don’t know any of his friends?”
This was bringing me into dangerous waters.
“He just rang me yesterday and said he needed somewhere to stay for the night,” I said, avoiding the question.
“How’d he know where you were?”
“I gave him my number in London.”
“He tell you then who he was staying with?”
“I didn’t even know he was planning to come over earlier.”
Thurber looked at me narrowly. It was terrifying. “You think he’ll be back with you tonight?”
“Lex is pretty unpredictable,” I said. “Maybe, yeah. I’ll tell him to get in touch with you as soon as I see him.”
“You do that,” she said. “So where was he sleeping last night?” There was nothing prurient about her question.
“In the living room on the pull-out bed.”
“How’s the apartment laid out?”
“It’s all open-plan, more or less, apart from the bathroom and bedroom.”
“So if you got up and went out in the night, would he know if you’d gone? Would you be stepping over him or anything?” Frank said.
“Well, maybe he’d hear the front door. The locks make a lot of noise. Though the sofa-bed’s round the L-shape of the living room, so he might not even notice. But are we really talking about the middle of the night?” I countered. “When was Don killed?”
Thurber’s eyes, already drawn into slits, sharpened as if her stare were honing down to twin points of concentration.
“Were you with this guy all evening?” she snapped back.
“We met at about seven and we were together all evening.”
“So whaddaya want to know?” Thurber said as sharply as if she were attacking me.
I spread my hands. “I’m curious. As much as you’ll tell me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Frank shoot a glance at Thurber. It was clear that she led when they danced.
“We’re looking for the same perp, if that’s what you mean,” Thurber said to me. “The guy you found was strangled with the same garotte that did Kate Jacobson. As far as we can tell.”
“It wouldn’t have been so easy to take him by surprise,” I said. “He was the size of a house. Was he drunk?”
“Don’t tell me,” Thurber said, in an almost friendly way. “You smelled the bourbon on him when you took the plastic bag off.”
“That’s right.” I returned her gaze. It was impossible to tell what game she was playing.
“Probably drugged, too,” Thurber said. “We haven’t had the results back yet for sure. But I’m willing to bet there was something in the bourbon. Knock him out a bit.”
“He was drinking beer,” I said, remembering the glass by the lounger. “He must have been offered something better. I know he used to stay late to work on his own stuff.”
“Yeah, did that quite a lot, they say,” Thurber said. She gave me a very straight look. “We need to talk to this Lex Thompson,” she said. “And you need us to talk to him, too. If what you’re saying’s true, he’s your alibi. Right?”
“Right.”
“Plus the doorman,” Frank volunteered.
“Oh no,” I said gloomily. “You’re going to have to talk to him again, aren’t you?”
“’Fraid so,” Frank confirmed, sounding about as apologetic as a bus conductor announcing that all the passengers would have to get off and wait for the one twenty minutes behind.
Thurber was unbuttoning her jacket. It swung open, and as she reached for something inside her pocket I saw the gun clipped to her belt.
“Here you go,” she said, handing me a card with her name and various phone numbers printed on it. “He should call us as soon as possible. It’s in your interest as well as his.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll tell him just as soon as he shows up.”
“You do that,” Frank said. “You do that thing.”
A ghost of a smile drifted across Thurber’s near-expressionless face.
“It’s a Clock. Porcelain,” she said, patting the gun. I realised I had been looking at it. “Point nine mill. Bet you don’t see many of those on the cops where you come from, right?”
“They don’t carry pieces over there,” Frank chimed in.
“Jesus.” Thurber stared at me as incredulously as if I came from a place where the wheel was cutting-edge technology. “That right?” she asked, her voice almost coming alive with disbelief.
“Yes, ma’am,” I responded. I didn’t know why I said that: it just came out.
Thurber’s face cracked once again into a fleeting smile. I decided that she was the scariest person I had ever met in my life. Not because of the Glock, either. It was that smile.
We went over my version of events a couple more times before they let me go. I had been interrogated by police in Britain often enough, but Thurber and Frank were something else. Maybe it was helped by the interview taking place in the middle of a crowded squad room, with people milling around us, computers buzzing, printers chattering away. It made the talk feel more informal; when a particularly noisy suspect started yelling across the room, the three of us had exchanged what-a-bore glances and huddled conspiratorially closer together so we could hear what the others were saying. In England we would probably have been in a small interview room with one bright white light overhead and the recorder on the Formica table between us tying everyone’s tongues into spools of audiotape.
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