In a True Light

by John Harvey

  ‘Black,’ Vargas said. ‘No sugar.’

  ‘White,’ Cherry said. ‘Two sugars.’

  Vargas waited until Delaney was on his way back. ‘We found a body,’ she said. ‘It might be Diane.’

  Delaney barely faltered as Cherry moved across and took the cups, passed one to Vargas and kept the other for himself.

  ‘You said might,’ Delaney said.

  ‘Whoever this is,’ Vargas said, ‘she was pretty badly beaten. Injuries to the face as well as the body. Identification won’t be easy.’

  He stared at her a moment, letting it sink in. ‘You want me to identify the body?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Delaney seemed to give it thought. ‘Sure.’ He tipped a measure of Scotch into his own cup and when he offered the bottle to the two detectives both shook their heads.

  ‘One thing I’d like to ask,’ John Cherry said. ‘When she didn’t come back, get in touch, why didn’t your report her missing?’

  Delaney rolled the doctored coffee round his tongue. ‘I didn’t think it was the done thing, phoning the police because your woman left you for someone else. After all …’ looking directly at Vargas now ‘… it’s not a crime.’

  18

  It was cold. Not cold enough to freeze out the sour-sweet smell of the recently dead, but enough for Vargas to zip her jacket up to the collar, push the collar up against her neck. Cherry stood beside her, hands in his pants pockets, chewing a fresh stick of gum he’d picked up on the way. Delaney had excused himself and changed into a dark suit, two-button, cream shirt, deep maroon tie. He was showing respect.

  ‘Okay?’ the attendant asked.

  ‘Okay,’ Vargas replied.

  A shiver of metal on metal and, covered by an off-white sheet, the body slid into view. Vargas glanced at Delaney and his expression showed nothing at all.

  The attendant gripped the sheet edge between forefinger and thumb. ‘Okay?’ he said again.

  Vargas nodded and the sheet was snapped back.

  Delaney blinked. Stepped forward. One pace, two and then a third. Whoever had worked up the body had sewn up the vertical incision with more than usual care; the face lay angled to one side, one eye closed, the features somehow misaligned.

  ‘That’s her,’ Delaney said. ‘Diane.’ His voice was level, betraying no emotion.

  ‘There’s no room for doubt?’ Vargas asked.

  Slowly he turned to face her, hands down by his sides. ‘Not a fucking one.’

  Diane had family living up in Massachusetts; Delaney couldn’t remember the name of the town, some penny-ante little place, show him a state map and he’d pick it out. Parents, an aunt maybe; once in a while she said something about a brother living out on the coast. He didn’t get the impression any of them were what you’d call close.

  ‘And you?’ Vargas asked.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Yourself and Diane, you’d say you were close?’

  Delaney’s shoulders rose and fell. ‘You live with someone – what? – best part of a year. Hear ’em break wind, hear ’em snore, you pull their hairs out of the shower – yeh, I’d say we were close.’

  ‘Only you don’t seem …’

  ‘What? Cut up? Depressed? You want me to throw some kind of a fit? Break down? Say I’m sorry, I should’ve kept my hands to myself. That what you want, huh?’

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  ‘Not keeping my hands to myself?’

  ‘What you said.’

  ‘I already told you.’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘I never laid a hand on her, not a finger. Not then, not ever.’ He leaned a little towards Vargas, arms resting on the table edge. ‘Listen, one thing I know, one thing I’ve learned, this life. I know how to treat a woman, you know what I mean?’

  ‘That’s why she was leaving you?’ Vargas asked.

  Whatever was going on inside Delaney’s head, he held her gaze, didn’t let it show. ‘You want to know why she was leaving me, what I think? I think she’s met a guy, money creaming out his ass, figures she’s had enough of workin’ seven nights a week singing the folks who live on the fuckin’ hill, she’s gonna go off with this guy to some island, Hawaii, wherever, sit around drinking vodka martinis and getting fat.’ Delaney spread his fingers wide across his thighs, looked at Vargas and Cherry both. ‘I guess it didn’t work out like that, huh?’

  ‘Hawaii,’ Cherry said, ‘that’s where he was from?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know? I don’t even know his fuckin’ name.’

  ‘Baldry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kenneth Baldry.’

  ‘That’s his name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What kind of a fuckin’ name is that?’

  They were in a small room along the corridor from the lieutenant’s office. Metal chairs with canvas seats and backs, a single table replete with the obligatory scuffs and scars. Two small windows that looked out on to industrial piping, wire mesh and more pigeon shit than you could spread across Yankee Stadium.

  ‘When she left you, Diane, that evening,’ Vargas said. ‘That night. Where did you think she was going?’

  Delaney shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t care. I suppose now, thinkin’ about it, thinkin’ back, I guess I thought back to what’s his name …’

  ‘Baldry.’

  ‘Yeh, Baldry. His suite in the fuckin’ Pierre.’

  ‘That’s where he was staying?’ Vargas asked. ‘Or is that something like Hawaii, you just plucked out of the air.’

  ‘I followed her, didn’t I? That night at the club. This car he sends for her, like she’s some high-class whore.’

  ‘And if she didn’t go there? Back to the hotel?’ Cherry asked.

  Delaney shrugged.

  ‘How about friends? Girlfriends she might’ve stayed with?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. Coupla girls from the club. Terri, I think that’s what she was called. Worked the bar. Charlene.’

  ‘You know where they live, this Terri? Charlene?’

  ‘I don’t have the least idea. Ask Howard Pearl.’

  ‘You have the least idea,’ Vargas put in, ‘how Diane ended up off West Side Highway, the way she did? Beaten up the way she was? Dead.’

  Delaney looked at her evenly. ‘Not one.’

  ‘And you don’t care.’

  ‘Look …’ Delaney’s arm moved fast, fast enough to make Vargas flinch. ‘Look …’ His finger pointing at the centre of her face. ‘… when she lived with me, Diane, I looked out for her. I did what I could. Treated her good. When she left … What happened then, that’s down to you, the pair of you, your concern, not mine. We understood?’

  Vargas waited till the finger was withdrawn, the hand dropped down. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re understood.’

  ‘Then I can go? Because I got calls to make, business to take care of, things needing to get done.’ He was on his feet already, Vargas and Cherry following suit.

  ‘These things,’ Vargas said, ‘they involve you leaving the city, you should be sure let us know. Once we’ve chased a few things down, we’re going to want to be talking to you again, there isn’t any doubt.’

  Delaney smiled his slow smile. ‘Something to look forward to. Both ways.’

  ‘You like him for this, don’t you?’

  Vargas looked up from her plate. The diner was down to a third full, far side of the lunch rush, one of the waiting staff relaxed enough to whistle ‘Daniel’ as he cleared tables. Vargas had never really got Elton John, hadn’t seen the point.

  ‘You all through here?’ the waiter asked, indicating the sesame bun Vargas had carefully removed from around her burger, half an acre of coleslaw, a large dill pickle still untouched.

  ‘Thanks. Sure.’

  Cherry was still eating his way through apple pie, whipped cream.

  ‘Any more coffee?’

  ‘Please,’ said Cherry.

  Vargas shook her
head.

  ‘Delaney,’ Cherry said again, once the waiter had moved away. ‘You like him for this.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  They had already contacted the police department in Winchendon, close to the Massachusetts–New Hampshire state line and by now Mr and Mrs Stewart would have been informed about their daughter’s death. The management at the Pierre had hesitantly furnished Kenneth Baldry’s Phoenix address. Cherry had spoken to one of the local detectives, man to man: if Baldry were married, no sense unnecessarily fouling his nest. The detective would ask around, call back. Later Vargas and Cherry would go back to the Manhattan Lounge and enjoy more light-hearted banter with Howard Pearl, gain access to the staff records, begin making calls, knocking on doors.

  ‘You think things got a little too physical?’ Cherry asked. ‘Out of hand?’

  ‘I can see it happening.’

  Cherry thought he could too. He stirred sugar into his coffee, ate a piece more pie.

  ‘He must have a vehicle, right? Parked somewhere.’

  ‘Delaney? Chances are.’

  ‘I’d like to get a good look inside.’

  ‘You think he drove her out to the Highway, dumped her there?’

  ‘I think it’s a good possibility.’

  ‘His own car?’

  Vargas shrugged. ‘What else is he going to do? Call a cab?’

  Cherry shook his head. ‘Any chance you’re right, he’ll have had it stripped down, cleaned, sparkling like new.’

  ‘So what are you saying, we should take his word, let it go?’

  ‘What I think,’ Cherry said, ‘we should talk to the lieutenant. See how he feels about the two of us flying out to Phoenix. See how this Baldry shapes up, face to face.’

  Vargas nodded, liking the way he was setting his own agenda, not too pushy, reining her in. ‘Phoenix,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t be too hot, this time of year.’

  19

  The temperature had dropped at least five degrees. Sloane stopped for coffee near the corner of 22nd and Tenth, and pulled from his pocket the battered copy of Another Country he’d snapped up from a pavement entrepreneur on Sixth Avenue.

  He had seen Baldwin once, the writer back from Paris and holding court in the White Horse Tavern, a small, bug-eyed man with a lustrous smile, who smoked continuously through a shiny holder and preached the gospel of black liberation with a logic and inevitability that to the nineteen-year-old Sloane had been both stirring and chilling in its implications. Ten or so years later, when the cities of America were burning, Sloane, from the relative safety of England, had recalled Baldwin’s words, vividly remembered the occasion.

  Now he finished the first chapter of the novel, turned down the corner of the page, left a mixture of dollar bills and quarters on the table and continued westward.

  Rachel Zander’s gallery was on the first floor of yet another warehouse conversion, the space divided into three rooms with a partly shielded office space at their centre. Near the head of the stairs a young woman with silver close-cropped hair and a series of overlapping gold earrings sat squinting into the screen of a brightly coloured VDU. A short sequence of dialogue, muffled, was being relayed from the video installation in the middle room. The same words, over and over. He’ll kill us if he gets the chance. He’ll kill us if he gets the chance. Through the opening to his right Sloane glimpsed a larger-than-life image of a young girl in a white dress standing in front of a computer-generated cornfield, crows circling. Conversations with the Dying.

  ‘How may I help you?’

  Sloane turned. ‘I’d like to see Rachel Zander.’

  ‘Is she expecting you?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  The receptionist blinked. Sloane stood his ground. ‘Who might I say is calling?’ There was something European in her voice, a stiffness lodged like phlegm at the back of the throat.

  ‘A friend of Jake Furman’s,’ Sloane said. He had seen Jake’s name lower-cased in green alongside the entrance, a list of the gallery’s sometime clients: Jake nestling somewhat incongruously between Lucian Freud and Andreas Gursky, keeping company with Ellsworth Kelly and Sam Taylor-Wood.

  ‘I’m not sure if Ms Zander’s here at this moment,’ the receptionist said. She reached for the phone and punched in a number. Beyond her, Sloane could see Rachel’s hair, red against the pale wood of the office furniture.

  After a brief conversation the receptionist replaced the receiver. ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Can I get you anything? Coffee? Juice?’

  Sloane shook his head. ‘Thanks, I’m okay.’

  He wandered through the first two rooms into the calm of the third: cool abstractions in muted blues and greys. Sloane supplied the soundtrack for himself, Chet Baker in Paris: ‘I’ll Remember April’; ‘Tenderly’.

  ‘Hello.’

  At the sound of her voice Sloane turned. Rachel was wearing a loose-fitting cream dress, slit high at the side, lilac pumps with a low heel; lipstick two shades lighter than her hair.

  ‘I came to apologise,’ Sloane said.

  ‘Fine.’

  Someone came several paces into the room, hesitated, coughed and then withdrew.

  ‘Was there something else?’ Rachel asked.

  Sloane shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  Still neither of them moved.

  ‘My friend,’ Rachel began. ‘At the restaurant. Maybe he was a little out of line.’ She shrugged. ‘Wine, it affects different people in different ways.’

  ‘So I believe.’ Sloane smiled with his eyes.

  ‘Look,’ Rachel said quickly, ‘Jake didn’t send you, did he?’

  ‘Send me?’

  ‘Yes, you know. Send you to do this.’ She laughed. ‘Jake, he’s forever trying to set me up.’ She laughed again, unimpeded, drowning out the sound of murderous voices from the adjacent room. ‘Jake doesn’t take celibacy lightly, not even other people’s. I think he finds it threatening.’

  ‘And that’s what you are? Celibate?’

  ‘Just at the moment, yes.’ A smile lingered at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘Then it’s by choice,’ Sloane said and grinned, and for an instant Rachel saw him as he must have been years before, attractive and winning. Boyish, even.

  ‘In this town,’ she said, ‘once you’ve passed a certain age it’s difficult to find a man who isn’t gay or married. Or both. Either that, or they’re so seriously screwed up by something in their past it’s not worth bothering.’

  ‘Right.’ Sloane drew a breath. ‘You seem to have all that pretty sorted.’ A quick half-smile and he was turning away.

  ‘There’s a place called the Chelsea Commons, right around the corner from here, 24th and Tenth. I’ll see you there at six. Six thirty. Up front, near the bar. Okay?’ Without waiting for his answer Rachel pivoted on her heel and walked away.

  The Commons was across the avenue from a garage and a car wash. A waitress in fishnet tights, high boots and a skimpy black and white print skirt moved unsmiling between crowded tables. Rachel was sitting on a stool at the bar, laughing with the white-shirted bartender.

  Sloane crossed the stained boards into the space beside her. ‘Sorry if I’m late,’ he said.

  Rachel raised a hand to smooth the hair away from her face. ‘I was early.’ There was a wineglass in front of her, barely a quarter-inch of wine remaining. ‘Harry,’ she said, pushing the glass towards him, ‘I’d better have another one of these. And my friend will have …’ She looked at Sloane enquiringly.

  ‘Black Label,’ he said.

  ‘Straight up or rocks?’

  ‘Straight up. Water back.’

  When Harry tilted the bottle, it overflowed the measure generously. He scooped two ice cubes up into a tall glass, two-thirds filled it with water and set it down alongside Sloane’s Scotch.

  Rachel was drinking Sauvignon Blanc.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘tell me how you know Jak
e.’

  For the next half-hour they swopped small parcels of their lives, Sloane’s late teens in Chicago, his days at art school, Rachel’s obsession with horses growing up in Kentucky, her student days at Bennington. Nothing awkward, nothing difficult, no hard moves.

  ‘And do you still paint?’ Rachel asked.

  Sloane shook his head.

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘Not really.’

  She let it lie. ‘So what do you do?’ she asked.

  Sloane angled his head towards her and smiled. ‘This and that.’

  ‘Why all the mystery?’

  ‘No mystery. I used to work in an auction house in London. Since then …’ He spread his hands, palms up.

  Rachel nodded and looked around.

  The waitress leaned past Sloane and slammed a tray down on the bar top. ‘Another four Sams for those assholes on table one.’

  Rachel raised a hand towards a group of people in the doorway and waved.

  ‘Time for another glass of wine?’ Sloane asked.

  ‘Thanks, but no,’ Rachel answered. ‘I’m going across the street for dinner with some friends. The Red Cat.’

  ‘Maybe some other time,’ he said.

  But Rachel’s friends were already alongside her, fashionable and fashionably young, milling around and kissing air. When she introduced Sloane he had forgotten their names before the obligatory shake of hands and they his. ‘Enjoy the rest of your visit,’ Rachel said, before they swept her up and out the door.

  Adding some bills to those Rachel had left on the bar, Sloane swallowed down the remainder of his drink and followed them out on to the street. Turning left, he set off back towards midtown. If his conversation with Rachel had run on longer he might well have mentioned Jane Graham, said something of his reasons for being in the city. And it was Jane, more and more, who dominated his thoughts as, arms swinging loosely at his sides, he lengthened his stride.

  20

  A party, Jane had said, University Place, why don’t you come? Sloane had shaved, applied deodorant a little too lavishly and borrowed a button-down Brooks Brothers shirt from Stuart Hazel without giving away too much about where he was going.