Dust

by Martha Grimes

  “And now,” said Racer with relish, “I hear you’re moonlighting again.”

  Jury feigned surprise. “Moonlighting?”

  “You’re investigating a murder that properly belongs to the Islington police.”

  “I was there because a boy I know discovered the body.”

  “He should have called Isling—”

  “Do you think that every British citizen knows the structure of the Metropolitan Police?” He sat forward to say this; now he sat back and sighed. “I told him to call the hotel management and have them in turn call the station.”

  “So what were you doing there?”

  “I told you. This lad, Benny Keegan, is twelve—well, now thirteen—years old. He knows me. He was scared.” The first two statements were certainly true. But he wondered about the third as he watched Cyril study the bottom doors of the cabinet. Now a paw reached out and worked its way between the doors and pulled slightly. As Cyril pushed inside, the bottles rattled a bit. Racer didn’t seem to hear it. He was too busy lecturing Jury. The paw reached out again, this time from the inside, and pulled the door inward. Not closed, but nearly.

  “Well, get your skates on, Jury, and get this damned Clerkenwell hotel thing sorted.” He mused. “I’ve heard of it.”

  Jury asked innocently, “Clerkenwell?”

  “No! The Zetter. Very good restaurant. I got a call from”—Racer looked down at a yellow pad on which he’d made notes (well, a note, as there seemed to be one line of writing)—“an Inspector Algar—”

  “Aguilar.”

  “Yes. Who said they’d like you to assist them, especially as you know this lad. Get this Harry Johnson thing wound up, for God’s sakes.”

  “It’s not my case.”

  Racer smacked his hand down on the table so hard that even the whiskey bottles shivered like wind chimes. “If you say it once more, I’ll have you working for Surrey.”

  “It’s Tom Dryer’s patch. The body was found in Surrey—”

  “It might be Dryer’s patch, but you’re the one getting all the publicity! It wasn’t enough your getting that press in the Hester Street thing, now you’ve got the rags on our back about this Belgravia house, also involving kiddies, I might add, and nothing gets up the public’s nose like kiddies being molested.”

  “They weren’t molested. Abducted, but not molested.”

  “It makes no difference, people get wrathful about children being mistreated.”

  Jury leaned forward again. “Look. I’ve said it again and again to the Daily Excrescence on Lies and Bad Taste, I didn’t save those children. The dog did.”

  Racer ran his locked fingers over his bald pate. “Oh God, that goddamned dog again! That’s just so much sentimental rubbish. Of course the damned dog didn’t rescue them. So then you get credit for not taking credit. You should have been a goddamned politician; by now you’d be PM!”

  “If you’re going to torture yourself with the vagaries of the Daily Express, you need a drink. Is that all?” Jury got up.

  “Oh go on, get out of here.”

  On his way out of the office, he left the door open. He smiled at Fiona and stood there for a moment. He heard Racer get up. Three seconds later there was a monstrous ya-owwwlll! which could have been Racer or Cyril or both.

  “What fun,” he said to Fiona, as Cyril rushed through the door.

  It struck him as he walked back to his office that Cyril’s way was his way: stretched out and low to the ground. Oh, for God’s sakes, he reconsidered. Cyril could run rings around you any day.

  Wiggins looked up from some paperwork when Jury walked in.

  “Some” paperwork hardly described it. Jury looked at a desk awash in it: papers, folder, envelopes, memos, directives, printed matter about the Metropolitan Police. Wiggins might have been the Met’s publicist.

  “Wiggins, twenty minutes ago there wasn’t a scrap anywhere near your desk. It was like a no-fly zone for paper. Where in hell did this lot come from?”

  “Oh, this? Messenger. You know, comes round at eleven every day. But don’t worry, I’ll have this sorted in a jiff.”

  In awe, Jury watched Wiggins’s fingers, moving faster than a Vegas card dealer’s, toss, flip, pitch, and flick the desk’s contents into waste basket, drawer, and file.

  “Amazing. You missed your calling; you should’ve been a dip.”

  Wiggins stretched his upper lip, Humphrey Bogart style. “Thanks, sweetheart. Oh, Dr. Nancy called. Says you’ll want to see her. And DS Chilten called. It’s on your desk.”

  Jury looked at the messages: Ron, Phyllis.

  “Aguilar wants you.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  “I’ll be in the morgue,” Jury said.

  That was another way.

  EIGHT

  She was gowned in green—green coverall, green apron—leaning over a middle-aged, corpulent corpse. Her gloves glistened with blood.

  She looked up. “Richard! You look like hell; you look like him.” She pointed to the body beneath her hands, chest cavity open for all to see. Quickly, Phyllis smiled.

  Maybe that’s how she hoped he’d look. Tentatively, Jury returned the smile. He said nothing.

  Phyllis moved to another stainless steel slab, stripped off her gloves, raised the sheet on the body of Billy Maples. “You came about Billy.”

  I came about you. Oh, he was in fine fettle, he was! “What have you got?” That sounded cold. Was this how he was to traverse the ground between them now? Adopting attitudes that she would most likely never believe?

  He saw her watching him, and although but a few seconds elapsed between them, it felt like an hour.

  She said his name, “Billy.” It was as if she had to snag his attention. “He died from the first bullet that entered the chest; it caused lung collapse from broken ribs, tore the esophagus, and exited; the second inflicted more internal damage: liver, bone, vertebrae. But it’s the first that killed him. No surprises here.”

  “I’m off this case, Phyllis.” He had decided this the moment he saw her, and would reverse that decision when he saw Aguilar. And it was a stupid thing to say. What was that supposed to do? Cause her to pardon him? But he didn’t know if she knew there was anything to pardon him for. Oh, she probably knew, just not the extent of it. He shut his eyes. He opened them again.

  Her arms folded, her head cocked to one side, she looked disbelieving of what he’d just said, which she’d misunderstood. “The damned idiots. There did look like a lot of fulminating jealousies and thwarted egos in that hotel room.” She waved her hand over the cold body. “And do they want my Billy back?”

  The way she said that, Jury felt tears crowding at the corners of his eyes.

  “No. Billy’s yours.”

  “That DI—what’s her name?”

  Jury cleared his throat, wondering how the name would come out. “Aguilar. Islington police. The one in charge.”

  Phyllis nodded, her freshly gloved hand now wandering along Billy’s chest, examining what had already been thoroughly examined. “I’ve worked this job for fifteen years and still can’t believe the possessiveness and preening. You’re all like a bunch of jaded film stars.” She gave him a wicked smile. “Well, not all of you. Oh, hell.” She stripped off the second pair of gloves and dropped them in the same metal container as the first pair. “Lunch?”

  Danny Wu was the most self-contained man Jury had ever met. Nothing rattled or ruffled him, including a body on his doorstep. To Jury, Danny wasn’t a suspect, not because he wouldn’t shoot a man down in the middle of Soho, but because Danny was obsessively neat and wouldn’t have tolerated a mess on the sidewalk outside Ruiyi. However, who had done the murder, Danny might well know, but if it was something that related to him, he’d take care of it himself. It would turn out to have nothing at all to do with the Triad (as Racer suspected) or any gang. What Racer didn’t realize was that Danny was very much his own man; he belonged to nothing except the restaurateurs’ assoc
iation.

  Here he came now in one of his Stegna suits, dark gray wool and silk, a tie that Van Gogh might have painted (had he been into haberdashery) with its swirl of brilliant colors. Lavender shirt that he got away with, although few men could have.

  “Ah! Detectives and doctor!” He bowed toward Phyllis, turned back to Jury. “Can you wipe out crime in London if you’re in here noshing all the time? Not that I’m not delighted to see you.” He snapped his fingers and one of the little, ageless ladies who served here shuffled over bearing a clay pot and little clay cups that she set before them with a smile.

  “Aren’t you any closer to collaring my killer?” said Danny with a smile brilliant enough for a toothpaste ad. He meant the murder of the man who had fallen in an untidy heap directly on his doorsill.

  When Jury didn’t answer and Wiggins didn’t look up from the menu, Danny went on. “No? Surely you’re not still deluding yourselves that I did it?”

  “You’re right; we’re not, Danny. You don’t kill people in Soho. You do that over in Limehouse.”

  “Really? Who do you have in mind? Or is it the entire Docklands population? I understand the suits who live in those swanky condos in Butler’s Wharf are actually living over opium dens.”

  Said Wiggins with a snigger: “No, they probably live in the opium dens. I’m having the crispy fish.”

  “You always have the crispy fish,” said Jury.

  Wiggins looked happy, bathed in the ocher light and muted sounds of Ruiyi. It always surprised Jury that a room this crowded could be so low key. There was the inevitable queue at the door, heads cranking this way and that, looking for tables where the diners were nearly finished. “Maybe he got tired,” said Wiggins, still on the subject of the Ruiyi corpse, “of waiting for a table.”

  Phyllis laughed and read the menu.

  “May I suggest today’s special? Shrimp in garlic sauce.”

  “I’m having the crispy fish,” said Wiggins again.

  “You said.”

  “Or,” Danny continued, “the Peking duck with apricots.”

  “I’ll have the shrimp,” said Phyllis as she poured herself a morsel of tea.

  “Duck,” said Jury. He went on: “The thing is, Danny, I’m also pretty certain you knew our victim and even, maybe, who shot him.”

  “He was a Caucasian,” said Danny, adjusting his lavender shirt sleeve.

  “Are you saying you don’t know any Caucasians?”

  “Only you Scotland Yard lot.”

  “Yes. Sure.” Jury drank the tea that Phyllis had poured him. The cup was thimble-sized.

  Danny smiled and went off to put in their order, stopping at several tables along his way.

  They were all eating the glazed banana dessert when the unwelcome ring of his mobile phone made Jury cringe. “Hell.” He whipped it from his pocket. “Yes?”

  It was Detective Inspector Aguilar.

  “I’m at Dust.” She hung up.

  Jury frowned and slapped the phone shut.

  “Trouble?” asked Phyllis.

  “Sir, if you don’t mind my saying,” said Wiggins, “you really ought to change that ring over from ‘Three Blind Mice.’”

  Phyllis said, “Oh, I don’t know. I think it suits him,” and went back to cracking the thin shell of glaze with her teeth as she smiled at him.

  Jury glared.

  NINE

  Dust in daylight was much the same as Dust at dark. Same customers, it appeared, though fewer, which didn’t make it less noisy; simply more cavernous, more of an echo chamber. As he made his way to the bar, Jury felt as though he had to wave away each sound, as if they covered him like cobwebs.

  She was at the bar, and Jury sat down. “You’re here why?”

  Aguilar lit a cigarette with a wafer-thin lighter that looked as if it should be in the silver vaults. She must have been getting by on more than her police pay. It was none of his business.

  “It was a gift,” she said, blowing smoke in a razor-thin stream.

  Jury was sick of mind readers.

  “From whom?”

  “Aren’t we testy today?” she said.

  “And tomorrow we’ll be even testier.”

  “An uncle,” she said, answering his question about the lighter. “Rodrigo. He lives in Buenos Aires. Filthy rich.”

  “You’re from Argentina?”

  “Brazil.”

  “Care to go into it?”

  “No.” She blew a smoke ring.

  “No details about your difficult childhood, your drug-hampered youth?”

  She turned to look at him. “You don’t need details.”

  “Right.” Jury ordered a pint of Foster’s from the current barman. “Why are you here?”

  “Instead of Brazil?” She looked at him full face, eyebrows making their point. “How easily you forget. This is a murder investigation and you’re helping me. I’m talking to Ty.”

  “I’m off—” He had meant to say it and couldn’t. He hated her. No, he hated himself. He hated the both of them. Neither. It was nobody’s fault. It was simply a collision that shouldn’t have occurred, but had.

  “Didn’t we finish with him?” Or with us?

  The barman slid a Foster’s to him and gave him a thumbs-up and Jury wasn’t sure what the gesture implied. That he’d found this woman?

  “No, we didn’t finish. The guy’s gay as a maypole.”

  “So what? That doesn’t mean Billy Maples was.”

  She turned her dark liquid eyes on him and Jury felt he was swimming into them. “You’re so naive.”

  Naive? Christ. “I don’t know that I like you.”

  “I don’t know that I care.”

  Ty reappeared with two magnums of champagne from some depth or other of Dust.

  Aguilar glanced around. “I thought this was the cellar.”

  Part of Ty’s mouth smiled; neither of his eyes did. “You getting any leads about Billy?” He was asking Jury. He’d apparently had enough of Lu.

  But she answered anyway, “That’s why we’re here, Ty. I told you.”

  Ty’s forehead crinkled like old parchment. “I told you all I know. Look: I want to help—”

  “Then stop dicking around.” She gave him a quick false smile.

  His caramel-colored skin looked soaked in ashes. “What are you talking about?”

  Again, he addressed Jury, and again Aguilar answered.

  “Ty, Ty, Ty. We know all about it.” Her sigh, smooth and false, was like the smile. She pulled a tiny leather notebook from her carryall. Rather, Jury had thought it was a notebook. But on the front in Italian was the word “Indirizzi.” She hadn’t taken any notes in it; it was an address book. He had to admit he was fascinated watching her sift through it, little page after little page, stopping to run her long finger down a blank page. “I count eight people we talked to, including Billy’s latest woman, who know you and knew Billy. So come on, Ty, chapter and verse. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  He didn’t capitulate to the drink, but he did to her tenacity; her heady presence could be smothering. Jury ought to know.

  “Listen.” Ty leaned over the bar, close in, his voice low. “I’m not a fag; neither was he—”

  Aguilar, so close to Ty he must have felt breath on his face, said, “I don’t care if you took it up your arse, in your ear, or down your throat. All I want to know is what happened to Billy Maples. That’s all.”

  His voice went up a few decibels: “Well, so do I, dammit.”

  Jury thought he heard tears in Ty’s voice now.

  “Then tell the damned truth!”

  She should have left it at that, should have let him set the pace. But she didn’t. “Was it you who had a date with him at the Zetter? You were supposed to join him for coffee and other things.”

  “No. Okay, okay, we did have something going—well, that’s not a hundred percent true; let’s say I thought we had something going; then he broke it off.”

  “When? When did he tel
l you he was through?”

  What was she doing? She was alienating him. No. She was trying to piss him off, make him thoughtless so he might give up in anger what he wouldn’t under a milder form of questioning. Jury’s kind. Jury didn’t believe in bullying suspects; he thought what you get, what information you pull from an unwilling witness was unreliable. Some would do or say anything to get you off their backs.

  Ty said, “He didn’t exactly say that.”

  “He was here last night. He left to keep a date with someone at the Zetter where he’d booked a room. You say it wasn’t you. But he told you, didn’t he, that he was meeting somebody at the Zetter?”

  “He told me nothing. All he said was that he’d booked a room there; said he was tired. I thought it was bloody funny for him to be doing that considering all he had to do was fall into a cab and go back to Chelsea.”

  “You were suspicious, is that it? So you went to the Zetter later and sussed it out, is that it? We know you weren’t here after nine-thirty.”

  Ty looked blank.

  Jury said, “Inspector Aguilar.”

  Not at all happy about being interrupted, she turned the intense heat of her gaze from Ty to Jury. “What?”

  Jury motioned his head toward the door.

  Less out of curiosity than of having nothing else to say to Ty, she got off the stool and drained the last of her drink. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Ty started wiping down the bar.

  Lu Aguilar looked at Jury, looked away.

  “We appreciate your help,” said Jury. “Good night.”

  “I don’t have my car.”

  “I have mine.” They were dodging a lorry, a Mini Cooper, and a Morris battling it out in the Clerkenwell Road. “It’s over the road in St. James’s Green. Through the passageway.”

  They passed the Zetter and were making their way through the dark of Jerusalem Passage, when Jury said, “You can be damned tough, Lu.” He laughed. “I’m glad I’m not one of your bloody suspects.” But the laughter dissolved as soon as it started. He felt a rising anger and got angrier yet because she made him feel that way. “I don’t know why you thought you needed me here.”