Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  But the bottom line was that they were very, very good at their job. I had never felt so on my guard. Perhaps I too was being conditioned by the cop shows, but I had the instinct that Thurber and Frank really had seen almost everything already and by now could predict with a fair certainty when it would happen again. They were more world-weary than A.E. Housman on an off day. Or, to draw a more modern analogy, Portishead covering Joy Division.

  The squad room was positively teeming with people, most of them carrying Styrofoam cups of brown hot water as carefully as if they actually cared about losing the contents. Americans were bizarre about their coffee. Either they drank this stuff, which tasted like the dirty water that lived inside an espresso machine, or they went to a coffee boutique and bought the violently expensive couture version. A column I had read the other day had described this almost perfectly as a lengthy and complex process involving approximately one coffee bean, three quarts of dairy products and what appeared to be a small nuclear reactor. Only it didn’t mention the optional strawberry syrup.

  I squeezed past a group of cops—now I was sensitised to their presence, I was noticing the guns everywhere—and finally reached the fence on the far side of the room. Frank, who had been escorting me, opened the gate and indicated I was to go through.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he said drily, clicking it shut behind me. On a bench against the wall sat Barbara Bilder and Jon Tallboy. To my surprise, they stood up when they saw me and came towards me, looking anxious.

  “Sam!” said Barbara, hugging me. Taken aback, my instinct was to push her away, but I fought it nobly. She was wearing a Body Shop perfume, which smelt light and airy, like freshly starched linen. It clashed with her Tibetan tribeswoman look. “Are you OK?” she was saying. “You poor girl, you must be in total shock.”

  “Absolutely. And hungry, too,” Jon said.

  I found this baffling at first; then I was insulted. It took me a moment to realise that he was projecting.

  “Why don’t you come back to ours and have something to eat?” Barbara suggested. “We were waiting for you. Carol said you’re staying on the Upper West Side.”

  “That’s right,” I said feebly.

  “Well, great!” she said. “We’re in the west nineties. It’ll be easy for you to get home afterwards.”

  They seemed to have everything planned out already. Barbara was that kind of woman.

  The Bilders—technically they should be the Tallboys, but it just didn’t sound right—lived in a brownstone on a cross-street between Broadway and Amsterdam, lined with trees on one side and, on the other, flights of stone stairs leading to impossibly high ground floors. Despite its apparent smartness, the hall smelt of boiled cabbage, the drugget on the stairs was faded and worn, and some of the mailboxes were hanging crooked. It reminded me of run-down boardinghouses in South Kensington. Until Barbara opened the apartment door, I couldn’t decide if this was shabby chic to fool the burglars or if the place really was run-down.

  It was the former. Plenty of money had gone into furnishing Casa Bilder, and in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Barbara’s flowing skirts and Jon’s battered old corduroy jacket had led me to expect something resembling Nancy Bishop’s apartment, cosy and cluttered with old-fashioned furniture. But this was elegantly expensive minimalism, the kind of place in which I would have imagined Carol Bergmann living, with its shiny wood floors, white walls bare apart from the occasional painting, glass coffee tables and chairs made of strips of leather slung daringly across chrome frames. Barbara went straight through into a tiny slate-tiled kitchen and started opening drawers. It made me aware that I was hungry. Jon had been right after all. Well, I hadn’t had anything to eat since the free soup.

  “What would you like, Sam?” she called through to me hospitably.

  “Oh, whatever’s easiest,” I said.

  “No, really. What would you like? Just let me know.”

  Her high, fluting voice made her sound like a Fifties housewife from a TV sitcom rather than an internationally known artist. Jon was nodding at me. I was tempted to request lobster mornay with gratin dauphinoise and triple chocolate mousse to follow, then throw a scene when told that this was off the menu.

  “Uh—” I stalled, wimping out of the request for lobster.

  “Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Japanese—”

  Barbara came out of the kitchen with a stack of takeaway menus in her hand.

  “Here we go,” she said. “What about Chinese? Everyone likes Chinese, don’t they?”

  “Lovely, thanks,” I said with relief.

  “No one cooks in New York,” Jon said to me. “There’s such great takeout it isn’t worth it.”

  “My kind of town.”

  “We love it, don’t we, honey?” Jon smiled uxoriously at Barbara.

  “We sure do,” she said fondly back. “Jon, why don’t you pour Sam some wine and show her the apartment while I order in some dinner?”

  Showing me the apartment was a euphemism for giving me a guided tour of all Barbara’s paintings. There was no other work hanging on the walls. I wore my jaw out making appreciative mmning noises as Jon pontificated about Barbara’s vision and Barbara’s saleability, often in the same breath. In England people were more discreet: but Jon had been here long enough to have no embarrassment talking about how good her sales were and how solid her client base. I almost expected him to inform me that her name had been trademarked to avoid imitation.

  “Just keeps doing better and better, that’s my Barbie,” he said happily. “Steady as a rock.”

  I was getting rather tired of this love-fest, and since we were in their office, out of Barbara’s earshot, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t throw some cold water on it.

  “I’ve seen Kim a couple of times already,” I said firmly. “Thanks for giving me the number. She looks wonderful.”

  Jon looked flustered. “Does she? That’s good. I mean, I haven’t seen her—we haven’t seen each other—in a while now. She’s probably very busy.”

  He pulled a long face and jerked his head in the direction of the door.

  “Difficult, you know?” he said, lowering his voice. “Tricky. Of course Barbara’s fond of Kim. But still. Women can be like that, you know. Difficult.”

  “I didn’t know you were allowed to say that kind of thing in America nowadays, Jon,” I said affably. “I’m sure there’s some Unreconstructed Male Attitudes hotline number I could report you to. Or maybe that’s just me being—well, difficult.”

  Jon’s whole body sagged with embarrassment. Sam looked on her work and saw that it was good.

  “What about when Kim first got here?” I said, rallying my troops and attacking from a different angle. “Did you help her get into art school?”

  “It’s very tough here, you know,” Jon said feebly. “So many young artists trying to make it—”

  Barbara put her head round the door. “Dinner’s on its way,” she said. “What’s all this about young artists?”

  “It’s very difficult,” Jon said helplessly, clinging to this word as if it were a lifebelt. “Young artists—getting started …”

  “God, yes. You don’t have to tell me about that…. Why don’t we go back into the living room? And Sam, you must tell us all about how you’re finding it here. Is this your first time in New York?”

  “Yes,” I said, following her back through the door and sitting down on the armchair she indicated. “And I thought the murder rate was supposed to have fallen. So much for what they say in the newspapers.”

  There was a momentary silence. Then Barbara nodded to Jon, and on this unspoken command he folded his long body into another armchair, like a hinged ruler closing up on itself. Barbara perched on a lounger opposite me, spreading out the folds of her skirt. I was struck anew by her magnetism. Sitting there so neatly, her brown eyes fixed on me, she held the room as a star actress might a scene. Finally she spoke:

  “You know, I’d almost fo
rgotten for a moment? Isn’t that crazy! Isn’t that crazy, honey?” she asked Jon, who nodded gloomily. “So terrible for this to happen as soon as you get here,” she said sympathetically. “New York’s really a safe place to live nowadays, though. Much better, anyway.”

  “Unless you work for Bergmann LaTouche,” I said. “Or have a show there.”

  Another uncomfortable pause followed.

  “I’m so glad the restorer managed to clean up your paintings,” I said. “Don said they came up as good as new.”

  Whoops, I had mentioned Don. Barbara flinched. Jon said gamely:

  “Not quite, alas. But pretty good.”

  “So, Sam, tell me about your work,” Barbara said, smiling at me. “We didn’t really have overnight successes at your age, not in my day. Well, now the publicity machines and the marketing get going much faster. You just have to make sure you build your career steadily. It’s so easy to be a flash in the pan.”

  Often with Barbara Bilder I found it hard to decide whether she was being bitchy or simply ingenuous. Still, I was coming down on the side of bitchy. Barbara seemed to me about as ingenuous as Peter Mandelson caught in the middle of a nice piece of top-spin.

  “I’ve scarcely been an overnight success,” I said modestly. “This is one of my first big breaks.”

  “And then this has to happen! So unfortunate, these murders!” Barbara lamented. “And my show being vandalised like that. I wish I could think they’d catch whoever was responsible. It must have been a very jealous person, don’t you think? With an axe to grind?”

  She shot me a look I could not decipher.

  “The very night you got in, wasn’t it?” she said. “Such terrible timing!”

  This was a motif she kept repeating. I found myself staring at her. Just then the buzzer went and Barbara nodded at Jon, who jumped up to open the door to the delivery man. She kept an eye on him, I noticed, to make sure he didn’t over-tip. But this was an observation I made with the shallowest part of my brain. Another thought was whirling round the rest of the space, and the more I turned it over, the more it fitted. Had Barbara decided to invite me for dinner because she suspected me of having trashed her exhibition? The mind boggled. Did she think I was jealous of her success, or wanted to get even for her treatment of Kim? Was that why she was needling me, to see if I would give something away?

  And if she thought I had done that, then she must suspect me, too, of having strangled both Kate and Don. Or at least wonder about the possibility. In which case, it had been brave of her to invite me back to her home.

  Jon was laying out the food on plates in front of me.

  “Just help yourself,” Barbara said. “I ordered their mixed dinner for three.”

  “Mmm, thanks,” I said politely. “It looks lovely.”

  Actually by London standards it was pretty average. Nice to find at least one thing that we did better. I glanced over to see Jon cutting up his spring roll into three slices before spearing one of them with his fork, and couldn’t help laughing.

  “You always used to do that!” I exclaimed. Jon looked up, the fork partway to his mouth, and a gleam of recognition flooded his face. “Do you remember? We used to get that takeaway from the Hung Fu, round the corner from the estate, and we’d always wait for you to start eating your spring roll like that. It was like a family joke,” I said to Barbara before I realised the gaffe I’d made. “He even ate paratha with a fork,” I said feebly. “He couldn’t bear touching greasy food with his hands.”

  Barbara had stiffened so visibly that it was like watching concrete set before your eyes. Jon shot a glance at her and his nostalgic smile faded as if she had wiped it off with a J-cloth coated in cream cleanser.

  “I’m perfectly aware that Jon is very fastidious,” Barbara said coldly. “He doesn’t like getting his hands dirty. It’s one of the things I admire about him.”

  Raising my eyes for a second, I saw that Barbara’s brown eyes were still fixed on me. She looked wary, almost jittery, and her voice had wavered a little as she delivered her snub. I couldn’t blame her for being nervy. I would be too if I thought I had a killer in the house. Perhaps later on I could rack up the tension by improvising a master class on making one’s own garotte. They were probably waiting eagerly for the benefit of my expert opinion on the much-debated choice between guitar or piano wire. I had never, as far as I knew, been invited to dinner by someone I disliked who suspected me of being a murderess—sorry, that ending was very retrograde of me, apparently—murderer. It was a terrible temptation to behave badly. And, frankly, I doubted whether I would be able to resist.

  “Tell me at least that you didn’t start toying with pieces of wire in a threatening way.”

  “There wasn’t anything suitable,” I said regretfully. “Don’t think I didn’t keep my eyes open. But I put my feet up on the sofa and talked about Murders I Have Known, which kept the conversation flowing nicely.”

  Hugo snorted. “I’m sure you made huge play of the time you saved my life,” he said sarcastically. “Sam to the rescue, all guns blazing….”

  “Of course I didn’t,” I said impatiently, “don’t be stupid. I was painting myself as a homicidal maniac who so far has been able to pin her foul crimes onto innocent people—why would I go and bollock that up by mentioning actually having saved someone?”

  “You’re right, my love. Do forgive my naivete. I’m sure they double-bolted all the doors and windows and lay awake all night, clinging to each other and starting at every tiny sound.”

  “Oh, do you really think so?” I was pleased. “You say the nicest things.”

  “If I thought you were after me, I’d do more than just double-bolt the window,” Hugo assured me. “My God, I’d buy my own island and train up the local sharks specially.”

  “How’s it going there?” I asked. He was being so obliging that the least I could do was inquire about his work.

  “No need to be polite,” Hugo said. “I’m actually hoping that this monstrosity of a play will be so terrible that it’ll end the fashion for working-class homosexual drug-addled sex-abusing mindless swearing shallow pieces of garbage.”

  “Of course you’re most of those yourself,” I pointed out.

  “I,” said Hugo haughtily, “am neither mindless nor shallow. And I can assure you that having to rape Slut Boy twice a day and four on matinées is burning out a substantial part of the homosexual impulses which remain to me.”

  “Aversion therapy. Very Maurice.”

  “Absolutely. But everything else is going swimmingly,” he said, sounding more cheerful. “And I’ve been asked to read for something really exciting. Which I’m not going to tell you about in case it doesn’t happen.”

  “That’s very mature of you, Hugo,” I said nervously. I couldn’t bear it if Hugo grew up.

  “Don’t worry. It’s a brief spasm and will swiftly pass. So, tell me more about your murders. Let me live vicariously.”

  With two people dead, I had had to tell Hugo what was going on over here. But one of the things I loved most about him was that he never, ever told me to be careful.

  “It’s all very strange,” I said slowly. “It has to be someone at the gallery, or very closely connected with it. But I can’t get a handle on the motive. At first I thought that Kate had been killed to get her keys to the gallery.”

  “But then it wouldn’t have been anyone who worked there,” Hugo objected. “I mean, to kill her solely as a double bluff seems very tortuous.”

  “Exactly. So maybe whoever did it actually wanted to kill Kate, and trashed the gallery as a way of distracting everyone from that.”

  “No, that’s too complicated as well. Think of the risk of being caught in the act. Whoever did it must have really wanted to ruin the exhibition.”

  “Or embarrass the gallery.”

  “A disgruntled employee?” Hugo suggested.

  “Yeah, but who?” This was a rhetorical question. “You know, the only person I could h
alfway see doing that would have been Don.”

  “The one whose body you found?”

  “Mm. I could imagine him doing it as a twisted kind of practical joke. He was very—knowing, as if he were laughing up his sleeve at everyone. He would have loved to see the rest of them twisting themselves in knots over what had happened. But he was the one who had to clean it all up, so that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, maybe that was a double bluff.” Hugo was inventing happily. “Maybe he was strangled because the murderer found out it was him.”

  “And that doesn’t make sense either. I mean, Don having let someone get close enough to strangle him. He was built like a gorilla and he wasn’t a fool. He acted like he could handle anything or anyone.”

  “Only he was wrong,” Hugo commented.

  “Yes. He must have underestimated the murderer.”

  “Well,” Hugo suggested, “maybe the murderer is the kind of person who everyone underestimates.”

  For some reason, Kevin popped into my mind. Bland, good-looking Kevin who Laurence had described as the straightest of arrows. He was just the kind of person Don would sneer at.

  “Brrr,” I said, shivering.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A goose just walked over my grave.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t right,” Hugo said. “Don’t you mean ghost?”

  “Would you feel a ghost, though? I mean, they don’t walk.”

  “In haunted houses when they tell the story of the nun who was walled up alive, they always finish by saying chillingly: ‘And her ghost still walks the battlements, wailing for her demon lover.’”

  “Yeah, but they mean floating. And you wouldn’t say a ghost floated over my grave. It’s not so evocative.”

  “Evocative,” Hugo mocked. “That’s a big word, my sweet. Have you been hanging out with an intellectual?”