by John Harvey
‘You were talking to Vincent,’ Connie said. ‘This afternoon.’
Sloane nodded, thinking that’s his name, Vincent. ‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘You had business?’
‘Not with him.’
Connie glanced sideways, waiting for the pitch.
‘It’s about Jane,’ he said, ‘your mother.’
‘What about her?’
‘I was with her when she died.’
For a moment Connie looked as if all the air had been sucked out of her, cheeks hollow, lips apart. Then she tore open the seal on the pack of cigarettes, lit one with a match and, eyes closed, drew the smoke deep into her lungs. Sloane watched as she swallowed down her drink and signalled for another, vodka tonic.
‘Not being able to see you, before she died. Talk to you. Know how you were. It upset her a lot.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘It’s true.’
‘So how come I didn’t hear squat from her in ten fuckin’ years?’
‘I don’t know.’
Connie looked at the wall.
‘She asked me to find you,’ Sloane said. ‘Try and explain. Give you her love.’
‘Fine,’ Connie said. ‘Fine.’ Still not looking at him, refusing to. ‘Consider it done. Now get out of here and leave me alone.’
‘Look …’
‘Leave me a-fuckin’-lone.’ Her voice ragged and loud, and close to tears.
Sloane took one of the hotel’s cards from his top pocket and wrote his name quickly on the back. ‘That’s where I’m staying. I’ll be there for a few more days. If there’s anything else you want to know about your mother, how she died, anything at all, you can reach me any time.’
Sliding the card along the table towards Connie’s hand, he got to his feet. Delaney was heading for them from the far side of the stage.
‘I thought I told you,’ Delaney said, ‘to keep away.’
‘And I told you there were things I had to say.’
‘Things to say? From her mother?’ Delaney moved closer, his voice pitched low. ‘I’ll tell you this about her precious mother. When Connie needed her, really needed her, that bitch, what did she do? Spat in her face, that’s what. And now you think she wants to hear a last few dying words?’
‘Like I said before, I don’t think that’s for you to decide.’
In the corner of Sloane’s eye, as he moved away, he saw Connie slip his card safe inside her pack of cigarettes.
26
Catherine Vargas was wearing a skirt, heavy blue corduroy: a rich rust chamois-cloth shirt from L.L.Bean over a faded blue-grey T-shirt she’d found one day in her laundry. White Keds on her feet. John Cherry was at his desk, Oxford brogues pressed up against the bevelled wood as he leaned back in his chair, speaking evenly into the telephone. His suit jacket was folded across some papers to his left, folded neatly that is; you could have peeled an apple on the crease of his pants…
‘Absolutely,’ she heard Cherry say. ‘You have my word.’ And, ‘Yes, ma’am, the minute I hear anything. Yes, right away.’ Swivelling towards Vargas, face opening into a smile. ‘Thank you, ma’am. Thank you. And a fine day to you, too.’
Setting the receiver back in place, he returned all four legs of his chair to the floor and studied Vargas’s face. ‘What news?’
Vargas grinned. ‘I’ve been doing a little of what you suggested, old-fashioned police work. The Manhattan Lounge, Delaney’s more involved than we thought. He doesn’t just book the talent, he just about owns the place.’
Cherry raised an eyebrow. ‘Something Mr Pearl omitted to mention.’
‘Too busy concentrating on labour relations.’
‘You think we should go talk to him again?’
‘Absolutely.’
Cherry reached for his coat.
‘But wait, there’s more. That fancy diner on the edge of the meat market, Kozinsky and Kelly. Blue-plate specials for the price of haute cuisine. Guess who’s the silent partner? Thirty per cent share. Then there’s a supper club on East Forty-ninth, the Mint. To say nothing of a small chain of restaurants near the Jersey shore.’
Cherry whistled appreciatively. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ Cherry said. ‘Given a little patience, what you can find out on the Net.’
Howard Pearl was venting his displeasure into a cordless phone. ‘Linguine with clams on the menu, I need fuckin’ clams. Which is what you’re supposed to deliver.… No, no, wait. You hang on a fuckin’ minute.… That’s right, I want ’em here by tonight. I want ’em here this afternoon. I want ’em here inside the fuckin’ hour. And don’t think about passin’ off none of that small shit, need a fuckin’ microscope to find ’em on the plate. Yeah, five. Five o’clock. After that, as a supplier, you’re history.’
He slammed the phone down on the counter hard enough to chip away some of the plastic trim. Looking up, he saw Vargas and Cherry, and was on the brink of dispatching them with a piece of his mind when he remembered who they were.
‘Fuckin’ job,’ he said, buttoning his shirt. ‘Ain’t worth twice what I’m getting’ fuckin’ paid.’
‘Maybe you should ask your boss, Delaney, for a raise,’ Vargas said.
Pearl paused in what he was doing, then hitched up his belt, a smile greasing across his face. ‘Been doin’ a little diggin’, a little homework.’
‘Time you could’ve saved us,’ Vargas said.
Pearl shrugged and gestured back along the bar. ‘Drink?’
‘No,’ Vargas said with a firm shake of the head.
‘Coke,’ said Cherry. ‘Lemon and ice.’
Pearl clattered ice into a long glass and set to slicing a fresh lemon with a small, serrated knife. ‘The girl. What you were askin’, it was about the girl. Him an’ her.’ He speared a wedge of lemon and dropped it down into Cherry’s glass, uncapped the bottle, tilted both bottle and glass, and poured.
‘It didn’t occur to you,’ Vargas said, ‘we might be interested in the rest? The wider picture.’
‘Look,’ Pearl said, ‘I’ll be honest with you. Vincent, he don’t appreciate folk knowin’ his business. Don’t encourage, you know, chit-chat.’
‘Really?’ Vargas said. ‘I wonder why that should be?’
‘Comes in here, far as everyone knows, he’s just the guy takes care of the floor show, pays the band. Diane, I doubt she even knew, no matter how close they were.’
‘Don’t you think that’s strange?’ Vargas was leaning one elbow on the bar, addressing her remarks to Cherry now. ‘This is a guy drives an expensive car, wears look-at-me clothes, no shrinking violet, yet when it comes to part-owning a place like this suddenly he’s all shy, Mister Modesty.’
‘You’re not suggesting,’ Cherry said, ‘he has something to hide?’
Vargas made a ‘who knows?’ gesture with her hands.
‘Some people,’ Pearl said, ‘where money’s concerned, they like to keep things to themselves. And I respect that.’
Vargas nodded solemnly. ‘Delaney, he keeps a tight hold on the finances, how does that work?’
Pearl wriggled his tongue against the underside of his mouth, fidgeting with a piece of bacon trapped, since breakfast, between his teeth. ‘I been here six years. Six, seven days a fuckin’ week. Sometimes Vincent he comes in and checks the money himself, runs through the receipts, mostly he leaves everything to me. I’m the one settles up, pays the suppliers, banks the rest.’ He looked square into Cherry’s face. ‘Anything shady going on, underhand, that the way your mind’s workin’, you think I wouldn’t have noticed? I’d’ve noticed, right?’
‘Right,’ Vargas said emphatically.
‘Right,’ Cherry agreed.
‘So,’ Pearl said, rubbing his hands together as he stepped back. ‘We through here? ’Cause if we are, I got things need seein’ to …’
‘No,’ Vargas said, ‘I think that’s it for us. For now. Unless there’s anything else you’d care to tell us about Mister Delaney, that is.’
Vargas and Cherry exchanged glances and turned towards the door.
‘You both take care now,’ Pearl said, watching them till they were out of sight, then, from memory, dialling Delaney’s number on the phone.
Kozinsky was in his fifties, no more than five six or seven tall and weighed somewhere in the region of two hundred pounds. His hair was tied back in a ponytail, throwing into relief a round, flattish face with a thin mouth and watery eyes.
He offered Vargas and Cherry coffee, and took them into the office alongside the kitchen. Behind the desk he presumably shared with Kelly, there were the usual pictures of the two of them, proprietorially smiling at the camera as they glad-handed celebrities: Jack Nicholson, Christopher Walken, Michael Jordan. Kelly looked younger than his partner, taller and neatly bearded. There were no pictures of Vincent Delaney.
‘These questions you’re asking,’ Kozinsky said, ‘they involve this place here directly? This business?’
Cherry shook his head. ‘Background,’ Vargas said. ‘Strictly background. Nothing more than that.’
‘Okay.’ Kozinsky leaned back in his chair, a little more relaxed. ‘I first met Vince Delaney ten, eleven years back. I was running this place out on Long Island, nothing so special.
‘Vince, he starts coming in a few nights a week, couple of drinks at the bar, never stays too long. Turns out he’s got some involvement with this Italian restaurant close by, taking the reins while someone else is out of the country, I never caught the whole thing and, anyway, it doesn’t matter, we get to talking, this and that, I tell him my idea, you know, a place like this, blue collar but for a different crowd, bump the profit margins till they mean something, stay in for eight, nine years, maybe ten, sell out big and retire to the Bahamas, Grand Cayman, one of those. Vince, he turns around, real serious, says I’m ever fixing to do more than break wind, let him know, could be there’s some capital he wouldn’t mind investing, strictly hush-hush.’
‘Go on,’ Vargas said.
Kozinsky swallowed down some coffee, took a drag at his cigarette.
‘A few months later this place came on the market. Great location, cost to match. Delaney checks out the property, runs his eyes across the books, forty-eight hours later he’s got the contract drawn up and ready to sign. Before the ink’s dry on the paper the money’s in the bank.’
‘His own money?’ Vargas asked.
‘Unless you’re going to tell me something else.’
‘He’s not fronting for anyone?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘But you don’t know?’
Kozinsky shook his head.
‘He leaves you to run things your own way?’ Vargas asked. ‘You and your partner.’
‘He made a few suggestions early on, good ones, too. But since then, nothing. Long as his payments are coming through okay, far as he’s concerned that’s it.’
Vargas got to her feet and Cherry followed suit. ‘Thanks for your time, Mr Kozinsky,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘My pleasure.’
‘You believe all of that?’ Cherry asked, once they were back on the street.
‘Bare bones, maybe.’
‘What didn’t you like?’
‘The way it rolled off his tongue.’
‘Like it had been rehearsed, you mean?’
‘Like Delaney was backstage, working the strings.’
They crossed the avenue to where Vargas had illegally parked the car.
‘So,’ Cherry said. ‘A little more digging, what d’you think?’
Vargas ducked her head and swung her legs round beneath the wheel. ‘I think, one hell of a lot.’
27
Sloane had finally fallen asleep with an image of Connie firmly in his mind and woken in the small hours, sheets damp with thoughts of her mother, the moment of entering her piercing his memory like a knife.
Showered, dressed, he laughed at the absurdity of it, a man of his age paddling in the wet dreams of his youth. Lust recollected in tranquillity. Great fucks from the past. Dreams of fatherhood. The thought that on the sagging couch in someone’s apartment, or down among the turpentine and paint of that studio floor you had made a child. You. The pair of you.
Over breakfast he tried to marshal his thoughts about Connie, to untangle what he felt. He had heard of families separated at birth, a mother and child who had known each other instantly after almost twenty years; a father who had recognised, in a crowded school playground, the daughter he had never previously seen. But encountering Connie for the first time the cold shock that had jolted him, that had not been the shock of recognition merely, but what he had heard, the music, one of those rare times when everything – the voice, the instruments, the melody, the words – had come together and made something special, unique. And later, recollecting their brief conversation, adrift in her silences and her sullen anger, what he felt more than anything was anger at her stubbornness and the situation he was being drawn deeper into.
Back at his hotel, from Connie there was no word.
That afternoon, restless, he headed back to MoMA and sat in front of Jane’s painting, Trinkle Tinkle, remembering watching her put the finishing touches to it one long morning. The night before they had been back at the Five Spot, listening to Monk amidst jugs of beer and lurching conversation, the pianist’s broken rhythms still resonating as she trod her familiar patterns forwards and back, towards the canvas and away, shifting an edge of colour so that it overlapped, a small dissonance that sparked the eye, then, with the quickest movement of the wrist, a final curve of brilliant blue went arcing from the tip of her smallest brush, a glittering cadenza.
‘It’s finished,’ Jane had said.
‘For good?’ Sloane asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know? I mean, how can you be certain?’
She looked at him, then back at the painting, wondering if there was any way to explain in words. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
As Sloane continued to sit in front of the painting now, other visitors moved around him, breaking his concentration, his vision. He was on the verge of going when, in the block of orange near the painting’s centre, he saw Connie, in reflection, walk towards him. Breath caught in his mouth, he swung round and, wearing a slender button-through dress in apple green, a small, soft leather bag hanging from one shoulder, it was, of course, someone else entirely. Brushing past her, Sloane hurried from the museum.
When he turned the corner on to West 11th less than an hour later, there she was again, Connie or a likeness of her, coming down the steps outside his hotel and Sloane, not wanting to be fooled again, only quickened his step when he realised, her hand on the waiting cab door, that it was in fact her.
Calling her name, he ran.
Connie’s face, sharp and drawn, dark beneath the eyes.
‘Wait,’ Sloane said, slowing. ‘Hang on. I’m sorry I …’
‘I can meet you tonight,’ Connie said. ‘After the show. Vincent’s got stuff to do, he won’t be around.’
‘All right, where shall I see you?’
Connie pointed back the way Sloane had come. ‘There’s an all-night diner on 45th, between Second and Third. I’ll meet you there. Two-thirty, three.’
‘Okay.’
A quick movement, a slamming of the cab door and she was gone. And Sloane, standing there, wondering how far the dryness of his mouth, the acceleration of his heart were due to his hundred-metre sprint along the street or something else.
There were booths front and back, a counter midway along; Sloane sat in the rear section and told himself not to keep looking at his watch. A foursome, occasionally loud and trendily dressed, was taking time out from clubbing near the door; closer to Sloane a fiftyish woman with thinning ginger hair was crying soundlessly over her griddled eggs. Behind the cou
nter an olive-skinned young man in a spotless white coat assiduously polished glasses with a soft cloth, while the waitress, a large woman with freckled arms, sat on a stool opposite him, filling in the answers in a puzzle book and drinking Seven-Up.
He was on his second cup of coffee by the time Connie arrived, a long coat, black and shiny, tightly belted over a dark skirt, a grey and white striped top. It was a quarter past three. Slipping off her coat, she leaned back and stretched, then looked around, flinching at the sight of her own face, pale, in the mirror opposite.
‘He’d kill me if he knew I was here, talking to you.’
The words set off an echo in Sloane’s head, the source of which he couldn’t immediately trace.
‘You think I’m kidding, don’t you?’ Connie said.
And when Sloane didn’t answer, just gave her a look, assuming exaggeration, she shook her head. ‘Well, you don’t know. You just don’t know.’
‘Then maybe you should explain.’
Connie laughed abruptly, then coughed. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Vincent, that’s his name?’
‘Vincent Anthony Delaney.’
‘And you live together.’
‘Ten years, off and on.’
‘A long time.’
‘I suppose.’
‘A long time to live with a jealous man.’
‘Is there any other kind?’ Connie asked.
‘I think so.’
She leaned towards him, sardonic, playful. ‘Are you living with anyone, Sloane?’
He shook his head and Connie laughed. ‘Maybe if you’d shown a little jealousy yourself, showed her what you felt, she’d still be around.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Sloane said, defensive.
‘Yeh,’ Connie said. ‘Right. It never is.’
The waitress had left her puzzle book and was standing at the end of the table, patiently.
‘I’ll have tea,’ Connie said, ‘Black. Tea with honey, can you do that?’