by John Harvey
‘Anyway, it’s not what you’re here to talk about, right?’
Sloane nodded. ‘Perhaps I’ll have a beer after all.’
Furman crossed the room and returned with two bottles of Anchor Steam.
‘You remember Jane?’
‘Which one?’
Sloane stared at him, cold.
‘No,’ Furman said quickly. ‘Of course I know which one. It’s just there’s were so many Janes back then, it seemed to be the only name. But, yes, Jane Graham. The two of you, you had quite a thing.’
‘You know she died?’
‘In Italy, I saw the obits. Yes, I’m sorry.’
‘I went over to see her.’
‘I had no idea you were still in touch.’
‘We weren’t. For years. She wrote to me not so long ago, when she knew …’
‘Knew she was dying?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘That must’ve been tough. I mean, seeing her like that. That way.’
Sloane tasted his beer. ‘She told me she had a child, a daughter, living in New York. A singer.’
Furman rested his bottle on the table top. ‘Wait, wait a minute. Connie Graham, that’s Jane’s daughter?’
‘You know her?’
‘Know of her, sure. Or did. I mean, not well. But yes, there was a time when she was around. The clubs, you know. She even made a couple of albums, but hell, that’d be way back. Eighties, something like that. I haven’t heard of her in a good while. I guess she sort of disappeared from the scene.’
Sloane was looking at him intently, rolling the bottle between his fingers.
‘Jane and Connie, they drifted out of touch?’
‘Something like that,’ Sloane said. ‘She asked me to find her if I could.’
‘Well, I wish I could help. I mean, I can ask around. But like I say, I haven’t seen her name in, oh, must be four or five years. If it’s important, though …’
‘It might be.’
‘Then I’ll do what I can.’
Earlier, Sloane had taken the A train uptown, checking out Connie’s last known address, an apartment block between Columbus and Amsterdam, a few blocks south of Morningside Park. Connie had lived on the second floor, a one-bedroom at the rear, with views out across a narrow space to the pigeons roosting on the ledges of the building opposite. The present tenant was a student at Columbia, a spectacled twenty-year-old with effusive manners and posters of Angelina Jolie on the walls. The apartment had been empty when he’d moved in less than a year before and Connie’s name meant nothing. When Sloane tracked down the superintendent in the basement he got a more positive response, without anything the man could tell him being of much use. Yes, she’d lived there. A couple of years, no more. Mostly alone, but for a spell there’d been this guy. Some white guy. Didn’t know his name. Here and then he was gone. And Connie? A forwarding address? The super laughed. All she left was bills and greasy underwear.
He’d kept her mail for a while, not that there’d been a lot of that. Junk, for the most part. Kept it for a six-month, on the off chance she might come back, then tossed it out with the trash.
Sorry not to have been more help. You have a good day.
Down in the café bar Sloane picked at chicken wings and drank another beer, while Furman ate a burger, rare, with onion rings and fries. The talk was of this and that, mostly inconsequential. They were finishing up when Furman noticed a generously built red-headed woman entering with a small party of friends, all talking animatedly.
‘Rachel! Rachel, hey!’ Furman jumped up as she approached and they kissed, leaving a faint blur of lipstick on his cheek. ‘I didn’t know you were back,’ Furman said.
‘I didn’t know I’d been away.’
‘You’re always off somewhere.’
‘Not this time.’
‘You look great anyway.’
‘Well, thank you,’ Rachel said. When she laughed it was a rich sound, starting low in her throat.
Furman half turned towards Sloane. ‘You two know each other?’
Sloane shook his head.
‘No,’ Rachel said.
Jake introduced them and they shook hands. Rachel’s eyes were green and they didn’t blink away.
‘Rachel has a gallery a block south of here. Great stuff, terrific. You should stop by.’
‘What he means,’ Rachel said, ‘I show Jake’s work. Once in a while.’
Furman grinned.
‘My friends,’ Rachel said, ‘I should catch up with them.’
Jake kissed the air close to her face.
‘Nice to have met you,’ she said to Sloane, but already she was turning away.
When Sloane left the bar some fifteen minutes later, he headed not south towards the Zander Gallery, but west towards the river. He wanted to think, clear his head. Staring out across the water, he was no more than a few blocks away from the spot where Diane Stewart’s still unidentified body had been found days before, near the edge of the West Side Highway.
15
For several nights Delaney sat in the crook of the curved bar and alternated J&B with Heineken, smoked, talked sports to the bartender, chatted amiably to the waitresses, asked solicitously about their families, their feet. At the beginning and end of each set he sent a large Macallan down to the piano player, who gave thanks with a trill of the right hand and a nod of the head. When Connie sang he sat perfectly still, silent, eyes sometimes closed but mostly open, listening as if she were Billie, as if she were Ella, as if she were Sarah Vaughan. In her dressing room there were flowers, there might be champagne; before each show a line of sweet cocaine.
Connie, unnerved at first, accepted, relaxed: all she had to do was turn up on time and sing, let Vincent take care of everything else. The way it used to be. And as she relaxed her voice gradually became more supple, regained its sense of swing.
Changed after the final number, more than polite applause, she and Delaney would eat supper somewhere quiet, expensive: steak, fish, roast sirloin of veal. Back at the hotel, when she stepped out of her clothes, tied up her hair and showered, he would watch her, ribs against wet skin – Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter – all she lacked, the numbers, blue and faded, tattooed along her arm. Sometimes they made love, sometimes it was enough for him to listen to her breathing, its soft and urgent fluttering.
Daytimes they rose late, ate breakfast in their room, Delaney swam in the hotel pool; most afternoons they would drive out to this or that mall and catch a movie, a little shopping perhaps, then back to the hotel, a nap before getting ready for the evening.
‘Hey!’ Delaney said suddenly. He was sitting across the room, reading a fat book about Kubrick he’d bought that day. Connie lay dozing beneath a sheet. ‘Hey!’ startling her awake.
Turning, she pulled the sheet automatically across her skimpy breasts.
‘I was just thinking, you remember when we first hooked up together, how it was? How we’d spend most of the time together, just the two of us. You remember that?’
Connie remembered.
‘This coupla days, it’s reminded me, you know?’
‘I know.’
‘How good that felt. How much I liked that.’
Laying the book aside, he crossed the room and stood at the end of the bed. Connie’s foot, slender, poked out beneath the edge of the sheet and, reaching down, he began to stroke it, his thumb rolling back and forth across the small and fragile bones, while his fingers massaged the soft circle of flesh beneath.
Yes, she remembered: she remembered how it was.
Back arched, her head leaned back against the pillow and she closed her eyes.
Seattle. Seattle had been the first time and almost the worst: the first time she had met Delaney and where it had all begun. Connie pretty much at rock bottom – not the lowest she would get, the absolute depths, the dregs, that was still to come, days when her self-esteem would be measured in whether she could look into the mirror without flinching or throwing u
p, nights she could not say no to whichever lowlife propositioned her, because she was afraid to sleep alone and, besides, what more did she deserve?
Now, a stag party aside where she had worn a garter belt and a child’s pink party frock and sung ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ out into a haze of cigar smoke, Connie had not worked as anything other than a waitress in ten months. Ten months and almost as many jobs. The most recent, and current, a seafood restaurant and oyster bar down near the waterfront, the kind of fake authenticity that appealed mainly to tourists: long, rough-hewn tables and red chequered tablecloths, sawdust on the floor. Connie worked eight-hour shifts, wore an apron and a push-up bra, what little cleavage she could muster adding to the size of her tips. Large black and white photos of Marlon Brando on the walls, cheap reproduction posters of Gregory Peck in Moby Dick, Captains Courageous, Alan Ladd in Two Years Before the Mast.
When Delaney came in he came in on his own, early forties he would have been back then, good suit and quiet tie, hair just so. Connie had taken his order for a dozen oysters, blue points, juicy as they come. A nod towards the name tag near her breast. ‘Thanks, Connie.’ Delaney, exercising his smile.
She’d smiled back automatically, returned to her Japanese and her Koreans, whole families of Germans, a smattering of Brits. When she picked up Delaney’s check he’d left her close to forty per cent. Nice guy. Best part of an hour later, when she slipped out back on her break, there he was, chatting to one of the bus boys. By the time she’d tapped a cigarette from her pack he had his lighter in his hand.
‘Thanks.’ Connie leaned her head back against the wall and drew smoke deep into her lungs, holding it down.
When she looked he was still there, risking the soft leather of his shoes to the slop that ran, haphazard, between the stones of the alley floor.
‘This isn’t an accident,’ she said, squinting at him through a veil of smoke.
‘No.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘I have to want something?’ Again the smile.
Connie shook her head and cracked a wry laugh. ‘You’re what? Late thirties? Forty? Not wearing a ring, but nowadays that don’t mean a thing. Slumming it back here in a suit cost twice what I make in a week, more. Of course you want something. Question is what, I mean, exactly, and how much are you prepared to pay?’
The smile was still there, in his eyes. ‘You don’t exactly beat around no bush.’
Connie glanced at the watch on her wrist. ‘You know how long I get for this break?’
‘Prob’ly better than you.’
Connie raised an eyebrow questioningly.
‘The restaurant business, it’s what I do.’
‘Then you know I’ve got time to finish this smoke, see to my face, take a pee. That’s it.’
Delaney nodded. ‘You’re off when? Twelve?’
‘Thirty.’
Delaney reached into the side pocket of his coat, slipped something into the palm of her hand. Connie’s fingers closed around a square of clear plastic, not needing to look down, guessing what it contained.
‘Help get you through the night,’ Delaney said. ‘You’re not interested, let me have it back later. Either way, I’ll be out front. Across the street. Okay?’
Delaney smiling as he walked away.
They went back to his hotel, high on the thirtieth floor with a picture view across the Sound, an expanse of darkness flecked with lights. They shared a joint, some wine, a shot of J&B, several lines of what Connie would have said was seriously good cocaine. The sex was fast and rough and then, when they woke again at three, half on the couch, half on the floor, spaced out and slow, and when she said, ‘No, I don’t do that,’ he smacked her once across the face and, of course, she did it anyway. By morning there was very little pain.
He heard her singing in the shower.
‘Hey, you can really carry a tune, you know that?’
There was a place he was buying into downtown, cash return on his investment aside, he got to book the acts that worked the lounge, all part of the deal. Within a week she’d thrown in her job waitressing and was rehearsing with a pianist, Delaney offering suggestions here and there, a few changes in her repertoire, something a little more modern to offset the Gershwin and the Kern: Art Garfunkel, Elton John, Burt Bacharach. He took her shopping, chose her clothes, Connie feeling like Michelle Pfeiffer in that movie. And the funny thing, by the time she was due to step out behind the microphone, that first night, she really believed in herself, her looks, her voice, what she could do.
Her body was her own and she gave it to Delaney, gratefully, each night to do with what he would. It would be nine months, almost a year, before he would snatch the rug out from underneath and send her hurtling down.
Now Delaney lay on the bed, watching her, always watching. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I have to go back to the city. Tomorrow.’
It was what she had been waiting for. ‘Sure you do,’ she said.
Delaney reached for her arm, circling it with his hand. ‘End of the week, when you’ve finished up here. Come join me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t.’
‘New York, it’s where you should be.’
She wouldn’t look at him. ‘Not any more.’
Delaney’s hand slid across her body to her breast. ‘There’s a spot opening up at the Mint.’
‘What? Waiting tables? Checking coats?’
‘Don’t do that.’ Anger, sharp and sudden in his voice.
‘Do what?’
‘Put yourself down.’
‘Oh, Vincent.’ Slowly, she lowered her face against his chest.
‘Say you’ll come.’ Delaney stroking the back of her neck, her hair.
‘I don’t know.’
‘The apartment, it’s getting out of hand. Needs a woman’s touch.’
She levered herself away and looked into his eyes. ‘What happened to Diane?’
‘Who?’
‘Diane, isn’t that her name?’
Reaching forward, Delaney stroked Connie’s hair away from her face. ‘What do you know about any Diane?’
Connie arched her head back and his hand fell away. ‘This guy I bumped into, a horn player … Ypsilanti, somewhere, I don’t remember … he said you were living together, you and this singer.’
‘Maybe.’ Delaney shrugged and smiled and reached for her again.
‘So what happened to her?’ Connie asked. ‘Diane?’
Delaney kissed her shoulder, letting his tongue work along the bone. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘But …’
‘Just don’t, okay? You don’t want to know.’
One hand hard against her spine, he kissed her mouth, holding her there until, his fingers sliding down, she kissed him back.
16
Sloane woke late that morning, his head, for some reason, labouring under an ache that was slow to dissolve; showered and shaved, he lifted a fresh shirt, blue cotton, from its hanger and pulled on the same pair of faded jeans. At the French Roast he waited for a favoured window seat, then sipped strong espresso while surveying the menu, eschewing finally the healthier options of granola with fruit and yogurt or McCann’s Irish oatmeal for a tomato Gruyère omelette and a side order of sourdough toast. Around him a smattering of people, sitting alone, folded back the pages of the Times or leaned their heads towards a book, clearly settled in for the long haul, while others, the majority, bustled through their breakfasts amidst perky conversation and pushed back out again into the working day.
Jake Furman had furnished Sloane with several slender leads, numbers he might call, places where Connie might have worked in the past. Aside from that he was thrown back, pretty much, upon his own devices, the pleasure of being back in the city annulled to some degree by the uncertainty of what he was doing. Suppose he found her, Connie, this woman who might – or very well might not – be part his flesh and blood, a woman long grown into a life of her
own, what then? Did he believe, as Dumar had suggested, in the jolt of recognition at first sight, in some intangible electricity of cells and genes that would catapult them into each other’s arms? He did not.
And if what Valentina had told him about Connie – even half of it – were true, and her own mother’s behaviour towards her suggested that it was, was she someone with whom he wanted to become involved? But he had made a promise to Jane, a promise made as she lay dying, and he would honour it as best he could. Fulfil – what had Valentina called it? – his quest. Pass on to Connie her mother’s love, the details of the will and walk away.
It seemed so easy, sitting there with his second espresso, replete, eyes caught every so often by the attractiveness, brisk and brittle, of some woman walking by, to decide that he would keep himself unto himself, apart, entire, separated from the world, if only by the thickness of plate glass.
Sloane asked for the check, placed money on the plate and left.
By early afternoon, two of Jake’s suggestions had proved dead ends and the others were stalled in a tangle of message services and answering machines. Sloane bought a sandwich and coffee to go and took them into Washington Square, where the skateboarders were practising their nifty moves on the steps around the central fountain.
When he got back to his hotel there was a message from Jake Furman to call him.
‘Jake? Hi, it’s me.’
‘There’s a pianist named Eddie MacGregor; he’s got a trio at Zito’s, just a block or so from where you’re staying.’
‘What about him?’
‘He used to be married to Connie Graham.’
Zito’s was discreetly positioned midway along a largely residential stretch of West 22nd; easy to walk past if you didn’t know you were looking. Even the poster advertising Live Jazz by the Eddie MacGregor Trio was restrained. Immediately inside, a long bar with well-stocked shelves and subdued lighting led towards an upscale Italian restaurant with linen tablecloths and the kind of prices that might be described as moderate by a man to whom money was little object. Piano, bass and drums were tucked in against the wall beyond the bar’s final curve. Sloane gave the interior a quick once-over – one party of six, a few foursomes and half a dozen scattered couples – before taking a seat at the bar and ordering a Johnny Walker Black Label, straight up, with a water back. The trio were easing their way along ‘On Green Dolphin Street’, drums and bass reined in, the pianist giving it some attack with his right hand but not so much as to threaten anyone’s appetite. Sloane took a small swallow from his Scotch and let it roll around his mouth. Dinner jazz, that’s what it was.