by John Harvey
‘You suppose they offer that kind of service at the Pierre?’
Cherry grinned. ‘Body, sir? Certainly, sir. And would there be anything else?’
Vargas shook her head and leaned back in her seat. ‘John, you believe any of that?’
‘She could have gone back there.’
‘And Baldry could have killed her?’
‘Not really, no.’
With a small sound of exasperation Vargas fumbled for her book; Cherry browsed an article on e-commerce in the in-flight magazine. The drinks trolley came and went.
‘How about this?’ Cherry said abruptly.
Vargas rolled her eyes.
‘Diane leaves Delaney’s apartment, real pissed, upset. Goes for a walk, get it out of her system. Maybe she’s foolish enough to walk through the Park. Gets attacked, mugged, things go too far. Whoever it is drags her into their car, tosses her out on the West Side Highway.’
Slowly Vargas shook her head.
‘Okay, then. She leaves Delaney’s place, jumps a passing cab, no idea where to go, winds up in midtown, over on the west side. Thinks she’ll take a walk down by the river, clear her head. Crossing the highway, not really looking where she’s going – wham! – sideswiped by a truck.’ But she could see his heart wasn’t in it.
‘You still like Delaney for it,’ Cherry said.
‘More than ever.’
22
Sloane had finished Another Country, bought a Philip Roth, second-hand, and left it, largely unread and not quite accidentally, in a diner on the Upper East Side. At the International Center of Photography, high on Fifth Avenue, he spent an hour or so looking at the work of Eugène Atget, sepia-toned studies of Paris in the early years of the last century: shopfronts and shaded interiors, baroque railings, statues shrouded in mist. Zigzagging his way back downtown, he caught himself thinking of Rachel, wondering if he would see her again and surprised to find that, yes, he wanted to if he could.
Earlier in the day he had sequestered himself away with Jake’s telephone and his blessing, doing his best to track down Connie through a network of club owners and booking agencies. At one time or another between 1995 and 1997, she had played dates in Dayton, Ohio, in Sacramento, St Louis and the outskirts of Chicago. The last confirmed gig Sloane could trace was a week’s booking at the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. When she failed to show on the third night they cancelled her out.
That was April 1998. Since which time Connie seemed to have dropped from sight, leaving Sloane like someone treading water, biding time.
After a couple of beers with Jake he made the short walk to the Zander Gallery.
When he arrived, Rachel was deep in conversation with a raincoated man who seemed to be on the point of purchasing one of the larger pieces in the main exhibition, a computer-enhanced photograph of a closed casket on a barren stretch of seashore, mourners standing knee-deep in water. Sloane backed away, nodded pleasantly in the direction of the silver-haired receptionist and browsed through some back copies of Modern Painting.
Twenty minutes later Rachel was warmly shaking the man’s hand and escorting him to the head of the stairs.
Sloane got to his feet. ‘Successful?’
‘I think so. He wants another forty-eight hours to think it over and meantime we’ll hold it on reserve, but he’s a good customer. He runs some kind of financial operation; offices near Battery Park. I think he likes to impress his clients.’
‘You mean he leaves the price tag on display.’
‘Not exactly.’
She was wearing a trouser suit in what Sloane assumed to be silk, somewhere on the black side of midnight blue. Her hair was tied back from her face.
‘The other night,’ Sloane said.
‘Yes?’
He shrugged. ‘It just didn’t feel right.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was just a quick drink after work, that was all.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘And you wanted it to be more.’
‘Yes. No. Yes, I suppose so.’
She smiled again: a real smile, broad and warm. ‘You’re not very good at this, are you?’
‘Aren’t I?’
Rachel shook her head. ‘And I don’t know if, at your age, this kind of artlessness really works.’
‘That’s a no, then?’
‘A no to what? I mean, exactly.’
‘Dinner, maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘Definitely.’
The receptionist had left her desk and was hovering at the edge of Rachel’s eyeline. ‘All right,’ Rachel said. ‘Meet me here, say, seven thirty, eight. But now I really do have to go.’
Sloane waited until she had turned away, then headed for the street.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Jane Graham?’ Rachel asked.
They were in Raoul’s on Prince Street in SoHo, the two of them seated at a table three-quarters of the way back. Dark wood, silver cutlery, dim lights.
‘What about her?’ Sloane asked.
Rachel tilted her head a fraction to one side and treated him to a look that hinted at exasperation. Her hair was down now, framing her face in a Dante Gabriel Rossetti meets Toni & Guy kind of way.
‘We never had that kind of conversation,’ Sloane said a moment later.
‘Then let’s have it now.’
She reached for the bottle of Shiraz but the waiter was there before her, refilling both their glasses and then stepping smartly away.
‘All right,’ Sloane said, ‘what do you want to know?’
Rachel laughed lightly. ‘Anything. Everything. Jake told me the basics this afternoon, how you two were the hot item of the day.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sloane said, ‘it’s difficult to know where to start.’
‘How about where you met?’
‘The Five Spot. It was a jazz club, Cooper Square. It’s not there any more.’
‘And you were how old? Twenty, twenty-one?’
‘Eighteen.’
Rachel whistled softly. ‘So Jane Graham must have been in her thirties, early thirties?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Good for her.’
‘You think so?’
‘You bet. All these guys in their forties, fifties, older, schlepping around with some bimbo on their arm, young enough to have graduated alongside their daughters. Why not have a little of it the other way around?’
Sloane smiled his wry smile. ‘You think that’s what I was then, a bimbo?’
‘A boy bimbo, sure.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Oh, come on, Sloane. What do you think? She loved you for your brain, your grasp of foreign affairs? Maybe your art?’ Rachel speared a piece of veal with her fork and left it uneaten while she drank more wine. ‘You were cute, I imagine you were cute back then, tall, strong; at that age you could could probably make love – what? – three or four times a night.’ Seeing the expression on his face, she stopped. ‘Now you’re upset?’
‘No.’
‘Offended.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, God, Sloane, you loved her, didn’t you? Of course you did. And you thought that she loved you, at least you wanted her to.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sloane said, not looking her in the eye.
‘No, it does.’
‘Look, let’s forget it. Let’s talk about something else, anything, the weather, the price of real estate, the Davis Cup, the …’
‘Stop,’ Rachel said. ‘Just stop.’ And then, ‘What happened? When it finished, what happened?’
Sloane fiddled with his knife, readjusted the position of his fork. ‘She went to France,’ he said quietly. ‘She got on a boat and went to France.’
‘And that was that, the end?’
‘The end, yeah. Pretty much.’
‘You never saw her again after that?’
‘Not till this year, no.’
‘That’s incredible.’
‘Yes, maybe it is.’ He paused. ‘I saw her in Italy, a couple of days before she died. Held her hand. Watched her breathe. Just not for very long. Now can we talk about something else? And since you insisted this was all on you …’ With one long swallow he emptied his glass. ‘How about another bottle of wine?’
They didn’t talk about the weather or the Davis Cup, but in a way they might just as well have done. They spoke about Rachel’s gallery, Sloane’s days at the auction house, a little about his trans-atlantic upbringing, Rachel’s siblings, the quality of the food, the wine, how much longer Sloane thought he might stick around in New York. When Rachel said she was flying to London soon on business and Sloane said, ‘Great, let’s get together,’ neither of them thought they really would.
It was a fine night, not cold, and they walked west along Prince Street until they came to Broadway, one short block to the corner of Houston, where Rachel caught her cab.
‘Thanks for dinner.’
‘My pleasure.’
Stranded between a goodnight kiss and shaking hands, they did neither. And Sloane, picking up the tempo, set off back towards his hotel, annoyed at the way the evening had gone, surprised at the extent to which Rachel’s remarks about Jane had got under his skin.
Jane’s studio had been south of Canal, abutting the eastern edge of Chinatown, a cold-water loft she had originally shared with another artist; but since her work had begun to sell, to be seriously collected, she had taken on the burden of the rent herself, enjoying the privacy, the luxury of space. Most days she would rise early and walk towards the river, either passing in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, or going up on to the bridge itself and far enough along the walkway to see the fish market on Fulton Street, the ferry terminal, the whole Lower Manhattan skyline. When the wind blew from the southwest she could smell the money accumulating on Wall Street.
Back in her studio she would set her battered coffee percolator on the stove, while she washed, combed and brushed her hair. Wearing paint-spattered Levis several sizes too large, belted at the waist and rolled over at the ankle, a man’s plaid shirt, tail out, buttoned over a white vest, her feet bare, she would pace between several stretched canvases in different stages of completion, coffee, warm and slightly bitter, cupped between her hands.
She had totally forgotten, this particular morning, concentrating on a large, rectangular painting that was relatively new, still finding its shape, its form, that she had said to Sloane, a moment between kisses snatched, reckless and laughing, out front of the Cedar Bar, ‘Sure, come by, see where I work’ and tattooed the address in ink along his arm.
And there he was, wide-eyed and tousle-haired, clutching a bag of sweet buns he’d bought from a Chinese bakery on Pell Street, wearing workman’s dungarees and a torn blue shirt that matched the colour of his eyes.
No way of disguising from him the surprise, the momentary annoyance that fired across her face.
‘OK,’ she said, stepping back. ‘Come in. Come in and sit over there.’ Pointing to the far side of the room. ‘Sit there and don’t say a word.’
So Sloane sat for almost two hours, shifting his weight from side to side, from one buttock to the other, slowly stretching his legs, then drawing them up to his chest, as Jane, blanking him out, worked on her painting, moving, moving, rarely still, pacing, walking back and forth, in then out, close and away. The wide canvas stretched across its heavy wooden frame and stapled fast, covered then with white paint applied in broad strokes, a white, stippled ground upon which she was adding blocks of colour, gradations of alternating blue and yellow shading down to mauve and orange, their edges blurred and softened with a swab of cloth soaked in turpentine, each balanced in relation to what was immediately above and below, and to the painting as a whole.
Jane darting quickly forward now, a fast sweep of brush from right to left, a slash of darkling, curving red; and then another, finer, ending in a filigree of scarlet flecks like tracks in snow.
And Sloane, watching, in thrall, as the painting grew, took on a life, each element held in tension with the rest but all, somehow, and this the real art, the artistry, in harmony. Something he would rarely, if ever, himself achieve. Not like this. Beautiful. Thrilling. The act, the thing, the thing itself.
‘Oh, shit! Shit, shit and shit!’ Jane threw her brush aside, reached for an oily rag and wiped her hands.
‘What?’
‘You. Shut up.’
‘But it’s amazing, it’s …’
‘I said, shut up!’
Sloane scrambled part-way to his feet and with one bare foot she pushed him back, forfeiting her balance as she did so and stumbling, so that he reached up and grabbed her arm to prevent her from falling, but fall she did, awkwardly across his body, pinning his ankle painfully beneath him, her face close to his, his mouth, and suddenly she was kissing him, the smell of linseed oil in her hair and on her finger ends. ‘Christ, Sloane!’ Hauling herself round until she was straddling his thigh, pulling at his shirt as she kissed his face, his neck, tugging it free so that she could drag her hands across his chest and sink her teeth into his shoulder, as all the while, inexpertly, he tried to tug her vest free from her belt; Jane laughing as she unsnapped the fastenings on his dungarees and wriggled back, yanking them down below his knees, his erection tenting up beneath his pants; Sloane speechless, flushed, attempting to pull her back towards him, till, evading his hands, with two quick movements she uncovered him. Dipping her head so that she could touch the tip of his cock with her tongue, her hand cupping his balls and sliding up the smooth skin of the stem. Moments after she touched him he came, splashing thick across the front of her vest, her breast, Sloane blushing deep red and stammering out apologies, as Jane ducked her head again and licked away one drop that had landed high on his own chest. When she flattened herself against him and covered his mouth with hers he could taste himself, salt and slightly sour, upon her tongue.
When Sloane woke next morning, sticky with sweat, he had Rachel’s name upon his lips, Jane Graham’s body on his mind.
23
Catherine Vargas was beginning to feel more at ease in her new surroundings at the 10th Precinct. A few of the guys had asked her along to help celebrate someone or other’s fortieth and, gross as the evening had progressively become, it had been good to feel included. Even Phelan, something of a throwback when it came to women and gays, had acknowledged her the other morning with more than a grunt. Just as long as he didn’t start buttonholing her with his jokes.
Somehow, these last few days, she had found time to do her laundry, collect her dry cleaning, remember her nephew’s birthday and phone her folks like a dutiful daughter should, skilfully negotiating the end of the call seconds before her mother raised the ticklish question of going to mass. More important still, she had all but finished negotiating the rental on a studio apartment on the Upper East Side.
Between working other cases she had tracked down Diane Stewart’s ex-husband, living now in an upmarket suburb of Boston with the requisite wife and kids, and suitably disturbed at hearing of Diane’s death without giving the impression it was going to cost him overmuch sleep. He had answered Vargas’s questions politely enough and asked a few of his own; he and Diane had not set eyes on one another for close on ten years. Vargas had thanked him for his time and ran a check on him as much to keep the paperwork straight as anything else: it had come as no surprise to find he was as clean as the day is long.
She rechecked the forensic report in case there was anything she’d missed; scanned the solitary witness statement, the interview notes from conversations with Baldry and Delaney. That done, she counted one to ten, put the file aside, sent the computer to sleep, switched off the monitor and took a trip back to the Upper East Side.
When she returned, less than an hour later, there was a definite gleam in her eye.
‘What?’ Cherry said, glancing up from his desk.
Vargas looked back at him and grinned.
‘Yo
u look like the cat that caught the mouse.’
‘Could be.’
Cherry pulled across a spare chair so she could sit down.
‘The garage joining Delaney’s building, where he keeps his car – I just talked again to the guy on duty the night Diane disappeared. He thinks it’s possible Delaney might have used the car twice that night.’
‘How come, all of a sudden, he remembers it differently?’
‘I pushed a little harder.’
‘You leaned on him till he told you what you wanted to hear?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Okay.’
‘Seems some nights there’s a poker game in one of the other garages, along the same block. Our man, he sneaks across there, three thirty, four o’clock. Everything’s quiet. Only when he comes back he thinks it’s possible Delaney’s car, it’s in a different spot.’
‘Possible?’
‘Probable.’
‘How long was he away?’
‘He says no more than an hour. Time enough for Delaney to smuggle the body down in the service elevator, straight to the basement, through the rear doors and into the garage.’ She paused. ‘You think that’s enough, raise a warrant, let forensics loose on the car? Bring Delaney in again?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘Even if it’s true, on its own it doesn’t prove a thing. And if you’re right about Delaney, the last thing we want to do, haul him in, watch him lawyer up, walk out again a couple of hours later, laughing in our faces.’
All of the shine had left Vargas’s face.
‘Maybe there’s another way,’ Cherry said.
‘Which is?’
‘For now, we forget about the car. File it away, future reference. What we do, dig a little into Delaney’s background, finances, see what we come up with.’
‘Old-fashioned police work.’
‘Exactly. Except now we have PCs.’
Vargas stood and stretched both arms above her head. If she didn’t get to the gym again soon her joints were going to be so stiff she’d be like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. ‘You know what worries me,’ she said. ‘If Delaney did do this, beat Diane Stewart to death and dumped her body, chances are it’s not an isolated thing. He’s done it before, beaten up on some woman. And he will do again.’