In a True Light

by John Harvey

  When he arrived, music and laughter were bouncing through the open windows on the third floor. On the first-floor landing a couple were pressed into a hot embrace, the woman’s face tilted upwards, pale in the half-light, lips parted and eyes clenched tight. A small knot of people had spilled out into the third-floor hallway and Sloane excused his way between them and into the apartment, where he was enveloped in a fog of cigarette smoke and loud, overlapping conversation.

  Men and women, mostly men, stood shoulder to shoulder, back to back, leaned against the walls. Courtesy of a gramophone near the window, alto sax and trumpet were chasing down the chords of ‘I Got Rhythm’. As Sloane squeezed his way towards the centre of the room, a voice close behind him rose above the rest: ‘All I’m saying, all I’m asking, right, imagine this is possible, you can have either Sal Mineo or James Dean, who would you fuck first?’

  Someone had thrust a glass of wine into Sloane’s hand and he drank some of this before making his way towards what seemed to be an adjoining room.

  Here it was calmer, less crowded, a couple slow-dancing to a tune that was playing somewhere inside their heads. A small crowd of four or five was standing near the window, smoking and passing a bottle of brandy between them as they argued over the merits of a foreign movie Sloane had never heard of, let alone seen. And among the haphazard piles of coats strewn over the bed, several people sat or lounged, deep in conversation, one of them Jane Graham.

  Seeing him, only moments after he saw her, she excused herself and slithered towards him, skirt riding high along her thighs.

  ‘You came.’ Happily, she took hold of his arm and then, not quite an afterthought, lifted her face and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Yes, didn’t you think I would?’

  ‘I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure.’ Her fingers squeezed his arm. ‘I’m glad you did.’ She looked at his glass askance. ‘Swallow that down, or, better still, use it to kill one of Frank’s remaining plants. Come over and have a real drink.’

  Sloane followed her and perched, less than comfortably, on the edge of the bed while Jane introduced her friends in a blur of names which he immediately forgot.

  ‘They’re married,’ she added of one couple, ‘but what makes them so very different from most everybody else, they’re actually married to each other.’

  Sloane saw an open face and friendly smile, brown hair that was brushed forward over the man’s forehead; his companion, Sloane thought, could have stepped off the cover of Vogue, her classic features framed by dark hair, her mouth the perfect mouth.

  The man unscrewed the cap from a bottle of Dewar’s and tipped some of the Scotch liberally into Sloane’s glass.

  ‘We were just discussing,’ Jane said, ‘who’s likely to get selected for the big touring shows now that Frank’s in charge.’

  Seeing the confusion on Sloane’s face, she said, with a nod towards the main room. ‘Frank O’Hara, it’s his party. He’s responsible for what the Museum of Modern Art sends overseas. So far this year there’ve been shows in Tokyo and São Paulo, and none of us have got a look-in.’

  ‘And we’re his friends,’ someone added with a laugh.

  ‘That’s Frank,’ someone else said, ‘always bending over backwards to be fair.’

  ‘Not an uncommon position for Frank,’ another man suggested from the far side of the bed.

  ‘Bitch!’ Jane said, laughing just the same.

  Smiling at Sloane, she caught hold of his hands. ‘Come on, I didn’t invite you here to spend all night on the bed.’

  ‘That,’ the Dewar’s man said with a wink, ‘is what she’d have you believe.’

  There was live music now, saxophone, guitar and bass, and Jane, slipping her arms about Sloane’s waist, steered him round the room to a slow ballad and then a medium-tempo blues. Sloane had swallowed down the whisky too quickly after the wine and things were beginning to move through a slight haze. A handsome young man, not much older than Sloane himself, fair hair falling forward across his face, came up behind Jane and, laughing, stage-whispered something about ‘cradle-snatcher’ in her ear. Jane elbowed him playfully away and pulled Sloane closer.

  When the music finished she refilled her glass with Scotch but Sloane, reading the warning signs, shook his head.

  ‘Come on,’ Jane said, ‘let’s get you some fresh air.’

  If possible, the main room was even more crowded than before.

  ‘We ought to say goodbye to Frank,’ Jane said.

  Cigarette in hand, wearing a pressed blue shirt, creased pants and grubby sneakers, Frank O’Hara was holding court in the furthest corner of the room. Seeing Jane Graham approach, he broke off his peroration on Orpheus and Eurydice to wrap her in a quick, warm embrace.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’ O’Hara remarked, stepping away.

  ‘Not a chance.’ Jane laughed and, seizing Sloane’s hand, led him towards the door.

  ‘Larry,’ someone shouted in the hall, banging on the toilet door, ‘whoever it is you’re blowing in there, could you just speed it up a little.’

  ‘Cocteau,’ pronounced a young man on the bottom step, ‘understand him, you understand just about everything.’

  ‘I feel the same,’ his friend said, ‘about Judy Garland.’

  Jane Graham led Sloane fifty yards along the street, pushed him back against the wall and kissed him on the mouth, her tongue pushing hard between his teeth.

  21

  Vargas checked her watch for the third time in as many minutes, the official at the desk repeating her final call. American Airlines flight 732 for Phoenix leaving out of gate fourteen. Where in God’s name was Cherry? Vargas hefted her carry-on on to her shoulder and, ticket in hand, moved towards the gate. One other passenger, breathless, in front of her, she swivelled her head for one last check, swore beneath her breath, then there he was, slender and unhurried, raising a hand in greeting as he crossed the departure lounge towards her. John Cherry, wearing a lightweight suit in pale tan, pink shirt, two-tone deck shoes and no socks.

  ‘Vacation?’ Vargas queried, eyebrow raised.

  ‘More undercover.’

  ‘Blending in with the natives.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  If boyish could be handsome, Vargas thought, he was handsome when he smiled.

  Settled into their seats, Vargas found her place in the battered copy of The Shipping News she’d started half a dozen times and set aside, while Cherry riffled through the pages of that morning’s New York Times. Neither of them was to read a great deal. Instead they talked of families and music, favourite movies, what made you want to be a cop. Cherry drank Cokes, three, one after another, Vargas a diet Seven-Up. She offered him her complimentary pack of peanuts and he accepted gratefully, eating them after his own. Vargas had three brothers, two older, one – the baby – still in his teens, the result of a second honeymoon her parents had taken in Europe, conceived on a waterbed in Amsterdam, fifty dollars extra and worth every dime. Her mother taught school till she retired, her father, a police officer like his father before him, pushed papers across a desk in the Denver police department, answered the phones, a hostage to angina. Cherry’s dad had gone on a fishing trip to Key West fifteen years ago and neglected to come back; his mother worked part-time as a paralegal, rented out rooms in their 1890s house in Park Slope, painted watercolours, volunteered at the Brooklyn Museum. He was an only child.

  Vargas had danced through her adolescence to Earth, Wind and Fire, Sister Sledge, ‘Young Hearts Run Free’, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Sang herself to sleep at night with Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. Cherry had accompanied his mother to Tchaikovsky and Brahms, to free lunchtime recitals for piano and violin; listened on headphones in his room to Bowie and Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Talking Heads.

  Vargas’s top three movies were Aliens, The Philadelphia Story, Thelma and Louise. Cherry owned up to E.T. and The Man Who Fell to Earth; wisely, perhaps, kept Terms of Ende
arment to himself.

  When Vargas told her father she’d be treading in his footsteps, showed him the forms, he cried; Cherry’s mother had begged him to reconsider, wondered just where she’d gone wrong.

  The temperature at Phoenix airport was high eighties, the sky a pearly blue. The uniformed officer detailed to meet them wore a shirt several sizes too large and spoke with a slight but perceptible stutter: ‘Andy J-Jackson.’ His smile was slew-toothed but sincere. Out of uniform, any self-respecting bar would have refused him a drink without ID. It was good to know, Vargas thought, that local law enforcement was taking their visit so seriously.

  Kenneth Baldry’s house was on the western edge of Scottsdale, a sprawling retro-adobe with pink plaster walls that toned judiciously with Cherry’s shirt. Beyond some fancy fencing, automatic sprinklers pandered to swathes of lawn. Vargas spoke into the microphone embedded into the high-arched gateway, opened her identification for the camera’s scrutiny. Red dust puffed up from the thinly gravelled path as she and Cherry walked, veiling their shoes.

  Baldry was wearing a green and white striped shirt, casual trousers, leather shoes. From behind contacts his eyes blinked out into the light.

  Vargas introduced herself and then John Cherry. ‘We’d like to talk to you about Diane Stewart,’ she said.

  At first she thought Baldry hadn’t heard or properly understood. But then he stepped back and ushered them inside, across a broad hallway and into a long split-level room dominated by a wall of uninterrupted glass. Brightly coloured Navajo rugs on pale recycled boards, low settees upholstered in grey and cream. A laptop, slim and black, open on a long table of dark wood, inches thick.

  ‘You said Diane …’ Baldry began.

  ‘You were friends,’ Vargas said.

  The tense of the verb hit Baldry like a slap. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s dead.’

  Baldry’s arms moved away from his sides, flapped and were still; his mouth worked strangely, like a fish yanked into air. ‘But how …? What …?’

  Vargas outlined the bare details, all that, at that time, he needed to know.

  Baldry lowered himself on to the cushions of the nearest settee and sat there, head down, arms trapped between his legs, fingers close to the floor.

  ‘Can I get you something?’ Cherry asked. ‘Some water?’

  ‘No, no, I … Yes, yes, perhaps. Thank you. The kitchen, it’s over there, to the right.’

  Vargas listened to the clink of glass, the quick rush of water from the tap; through the wide screen of window she watched a pair of small birds playing tag among pale shrubs. Baldry didn’t move until Cherry returned.

  Vargas gave him a little time: not too much. ‘How would you describe your relationship with Ms Stewart?’

  Baldry blinked and looked away.

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose …’

  ‘More than friends?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know. I mean … Yes, yes, I …’

  ‘Lovers, then?’

  ‘Look, do we need …’ Baldry let the sentence hang. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew she was living with someone else?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And it didn’t matter?’

  Baldry laughed, bitter and short. ‘Of course it mattered.’

  ‘To you? To her? To him?’

  ‘I wanted her to tell him.’

  Vargas nodded.

  ‘I wanted her …’ For an instant Baldry’s voice caught in his throat. ‘I wanted her to leave him, come out here. Live with me.’

  ‘You loved her,’ Vargas said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you wanted her to tell Delaney that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps she did.’

  There was silence and then the sound of Baldry’s tears. Cherry waited, lifted the unfinished glass of water and held it towards him.

  ‘Did she ever say anything,’ Vargas said, ‘might have suggested Delaney would be violent towards her?’

  Baldry turned away to the window, stared out. ‘She was bruised once, high up on her arm, what could have been fingermarks, and here …’ With his right hand Baldry reached round towards his kidneys. ‘In the small of her back. As though she’d walked into something. As if she’d been hit.’

  ‘And Delaney had done this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘But you weren’t in any doubt?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. No.’

  ‘And yet you were happy for her to face up to him alone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘For her to face the music, tell this man you’d every reason to believe had been knocking her around that she was leaving him for someone else.’

  A vein was pulsing against Baldry’s temple, a small and frantic wing-beat against the paleness of his skin. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘No?’

  Baldry looked across at Cherry and Cherry looked away. ‘She said she would handle things,’ Baldry said. ‘In her own time. And I respected that.’

  Vargas stared at him for several seconds more, then turned away.

  Cherry waited until she was by the window before sitting next to Baldry on the settee and taking the empty water glass from his hand. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

  Baldry shook his head.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  Cherry gave it one beat, two. ‘The last time you saw Diane, that would have been when?’

  Baldry blinked and fidgeted with the front of his shirt. ‘Saturday. The Saturday before last. The fifteenth, is that what it was?’

  Cherry nodded.

  ‘She came to my hotel after she’d finished at the club where she was singing.’

  ‘Your hotel, that’s …’

  ‘The Pierre.’

  ‘Yes, the Pierre. And she left there when?’

  ‘Two thirty, three. Closer, I think, to three.’

  ‘By taxi?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to go with her, but she said no.’

  ‘And as far as you know she was going home?’

  Baldry nodded.

  ‘But you don’t know, I mean, for certain that’s what she did?’

  Baldry fingered loose one of the buttons of his shirt. ‘No. But I assumed … That’s where she said …’

  ‘Of course,’ Cherry said quietly. ‘Of course. And you didn’t see her after that?’

  ‘No, I said …’

  ‘Or speak to her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you left New York when?’

  ‘Six o’clock that morning. The first flight out.’

  Cherry nodded again and, with a glance towards Vargas, eased himself back along the settee.

  ‘The incident with bruising aside,’ Cherry said, ‘from what you knew about their relationship, Diane and Delaney. Would you say she was frightened of him?’

  Baldry didn’t answer right away. ‘Wary, rather than frightened. Yes, wary. That’s what I’d say.’

  ‘And when she said she was considering leaving him and coming here to live with you,’ Vargas asked, ‘you think that was serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something she fully intended to do?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes. She was going to do it. She wanted to. It was just a matter of choosing the right time, that was all.’

  Outside, the sun was higher in the sky and the temperature seemed to have risen ten degrees. Jackson was sitting behind the wheel of his car, door pushed wide, smoking a cigarette. There were several fresh butts on the ground close by. ‘G-get what you wanted?’ he asked, just a slight stammer on the ‘get’.

  ‘Hell, no,’ Vargas said.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cherry. ‘Up to a point.’

  Jackson nodded as if he understood. ‘You want to head right back to the airport or what? I’ve got
instructions, take you pretty much wherever you want to go.’

  It was almost two hours till their next flight.

  ‘Do you suppose,’ Cherry said, ‘you could recommend somewhere we could get a bite to eat? Mexican, perhaps?’

  Jackson grinned. ‘Sure thing.’ He tossed down the last third of his cigarette, worked at it a little with the heel of his boot, swung the door closed and keyed the ignition.

  They had chicken fajitas with refried beans, guacamole and jalapeno sauce, Cherry and Jackson tearing into key lime pie while Vargas watched them indulgently over her second cup of coffee. The jukebox didn’t seem other than ornamental, but the house tape served up Steve Earle and a little Lucinda Williams, Gram Parsons with Emmylou Harris and James Burton and, as they were leaving, Tish Hinojosa singing ‘Esta Cancion’.

  At the airport Jackson shook their hands enthusiastically and waved them through the gate; as the plane rose towards its cruising altitude, Vargas closed her eyes and left Cherry to stare out at the steadily disappearing scenery.

  Alongside her, Cherry shifted balance. ‘Way I see it, there’s one window.’

  ‘Philosophy, John?’

  ‘Opportunity.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Delaney and Diane fight …’

  ‘Like he said.’

  ‘Either she storms back out or he shows her the door.’

  ‘Maybe slaps her around a little first?’

  ‘Maybe he does. Maybe not. But Diane, she makes her way back to the Pierre, she could be there by what? Four thirty? Four?’

  Vargas nodded.

  ‘Baldry’s pleased to see her, overjoyed; thinks it means she’s left Delaney for good and all, nothing now to stop her following him to Arizona, but that’s not …’

  ‘That’s not what she says.’

  Cherry nodded. ‘Right. Say she tells him she’s sorry but despite everything she’s not about to follow through. Go with him. Baldry gets mad, can’t understand, things get way out of hand. Next thing you know there’s blood on the sheets, Baldry’s got a body to dispose of before he makes his early flight.’