Now we were alone and could take our time, and being here was about foreplay, stroking and fondling, the weight of his balls in my palm and the smell of his musk. The way his mouth mapped butterfly kisses down my spine, and his hands caressed under my arms, behind my thighs, rounding my hips. Masturbating each other and me ducking my mouth down. But he was too long, so I teased him with my fingers right at his base, and a rewarding tension sprang the red bulb higher between my lips. He tasted good.
I sucked one of his nipples as I played with his balls, and he came on my belly for the second time that evening.
Playing through the night. Riding on top of him, screaming and then sinking down into his arms and to taste his mouth. And beyond the sofa, the little webcam movie of him being undressed played on and on in a programmed loop. When we made it to bed, he took me from behind, and in the darkness, I summoned the memory of being fucked on the card table, others’ hands all over me, Ayako sucking my breast and telling Neil to come all over me….
Three in the morning. When I went to the toilet, I opened his medicine cabinet and looked inside. I don’t think you need a memo that I’m nosy. I picked up a Boots prescription bottle with a label that read: fluoxetine.
“It’s an anti-depressant,” I heard Neil say behind me. I had left the door ajar.
I started in surprise and whirled around. “I know. It’s Prozac, isn’t it? I was…I was looking for some dental floss.”
He smiled and said, “No, you weren’t. You were snooping. I don’t blame you. You go home with somebody, you want to know who you’re with.”
I held up the bottle labelled as haloperidol. “This is an anti-psychotic.”
“Yes, it is,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “I’ve had…problems that started when I was a teenager. I’m…better. I stopped taking some of my medications for a while, but when things in my acting career slumped, I thought I ought to get help again.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and I replaced the pills in the cabinet.
“Teresa,” he said. “If you want to ask me something, just ask.”
“No need,” I answered, and kissed him quickly, slamming the door in his face. “Out,” I ordered, “doing business here.” And then I sat down to wee.
And told myself that his being a psychiatric patient meant nothing. Truth is, I didn’t want to even consider his mental history.
Back at Helena’s the next day, I did a LexisNexis search on Anthony Boulet. Wasn’t sure what it would get me, but going through old wire stories about him and his work for the CRE, the Beeb, helped me think about him as a suspect.
Helena happened to notice my work-in-progress but wisely said nothing, and I didn’t volunteer the bit of info that made me consider Anthony in the first place—a little unguarded admission from Janet at the awards ceremony that she’d probably never guess I’d turn over in my mind.
I wouldn’t be tossing out that bomb for a long while.
I would use it when I needed it.
A bouquet of flowers bloomed on my mobile’s text display. Neil. I resisted the urge to call or text him back—better to get on with the job. As my mind replayed him taking me from behind at the poker game, Helena, hovering over the desk (well, it was her desk, she had the right), yanked me out of my daydream.
“Clients! My God, I know they’re essential, but they sure are a pain in the arse. This Mrs.—sorry, unprofessional of me—this silly cow gets complimentary drinks from my private stock when Fitz or Raymond picks her up from the house, and still she expects me to spring for the cost of condoms! Doesn’t want the condoms the boys choose! Oh, no, has to be her brand selection. Honestly, darling, do I need this shit?”
“You like being rich,” I said to the computer screen.
“Thank you, darling. Yes, I do.”
And got back to her paperwork.
The phone rang. Helena answered it, knowing already it was her PA at the other end of the house. “Yes, Wendy?”
I waited. Helena listened for a moment, and then by the way she reacted, it was as if her PA had begun to speak to her in Portuguese. “What? Say that again…” Another long pause. “Oh, my God.” Helena listened some more and then said, “No! No—do nothing. I’ll take care of it.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Helena slid the phone back into its receiver. She looked straight at me, but my face might as well have been a window for her. No direct eye contact, her expression distracted, her face going very pale.
“Lionel’s dead.”
Days might have passed before we learned anything about Lionel, except that Wendy had phoned his extension at Buccaneer Cape only minutes earlier to offer him an escort booking. The receptionist had broken the news in a shaken whisper, confiding that it looked like Lionel had shot himself and had been found in his apartment. In the nude, the receptionist had carefully inflected.
Policemen were questioning employees of Buccaneer Cape Mining to try to determine if they knew of anything that might have pushed him over the edge.
In the meantime, the interim conclusion was suicide. It was enough for the police to keep the more lurid details from being released to the red-top tabloids. And there were more lurid details. I would have to learn what they were.
A couple of days had to pass before my best contact with the police could return my phone call—an old friend, Inspector Carl Norton. He sounded only mildly surprised that I should phone him about Lionel’s death since I had popped up in unlikely places before.
I asked if the police thought Lionel had been murdered, and Carl paused all of two seconds before saying, “Off the record, yes.” Then I explained that I was doing someone one of my “exploratory favours,” and he asked me who, and I said you know I shouldn’t tell you that.
“I think you should, Teresa,” he laughed with a mild edge in his voice.
“Come on, Carl, you know I didn’t have to phone.”
“Sure you did, Teresa. You want to know how the investigation’s going.”
“Yes, I do.”
“If your client is somehow connected in any way to the deceased or has information that could shed—”
“They don’t,” I said bluntly. If I said it firmly enough I could almost believe it myself. “I do need info, Carl, and I do have info to trade, but not about my client.”
“What kind of info?”
“I knew him.”
“From where?”
“The office.”
“You work for Buccaneer Cape Mining?”
“No, I fucked him in his office.”
“Never the blushing type,” he sighed. “You always give me headaches, Teresa.”
“Can we meet?”
“I think that’s a very good idea.”
Carl Norton is one of those innocuous-looking fellows you’d never take for a homicide detective with the Met. He’s white, rounding his forties, and if you want to be cruel about it, he has a passing resemblance to Fred Flintstone. With a certain amount of swarthiness, what with the dark black eyebrows, dark eyes and dark hair, he’s been pegged as all sorts of things—Italian, Greek, Spanish—and in truth, he can claim all this and more in his ancestry.
He’s the only member of the Old Bill I know who’s been working on his Master’s in Modern Literature so that he can escape life on the force. You don’t meet too many cops who can talk intelligently with you about Joyce and Ezra Pound.
I got to know him way back on my first snooping job for Helena and learned he was a man who could be trusted when I had to blow the whistle on a bribe-taking colleague. He hooked me up with contacts in the Scotland Yard unit that dealt with art fraud and theft, and I had a line for him on the best Ethiopian and Moroccan restaurants in the West End. I introduced him, in fact, to his wife.
Wearing one of his typical short-sleeve dress shirts with a knit tie and carrying his battered briefcase, he marched up to me a few yards away from St. James’s Park tube station.
“Friend or no,” he announced
as he walked up and traded kisses on cheeks, “you better be telling me the truth.”
“I always do.”
“Uh-huh,” he groaned dismissively. “Start from the top.”
I did—as much as I could. If I used my language very carefully I could be accused later of being less than forthcoming, but I wouldn’t exactly have lied to the police. I told Carl that someone had threatened Lionel over one of his love affairs, and Carl asked me how I could know this. I confessed that I had learned this thirdhand. At the same time, someone had made a threat of blackmail to a Highly Esteemed Personage, and then I had been brought in. I had been chasing down the theory that perhaps, maybe, possibly, Lionel had faked the first threat to cover himself for the second. Until now.
“Teresa, for God’s sake, that’s motive! You’re going to have to tell me who you’re protecting.”
“I can’t!” I said. “Look, they have an alibi. The kind that’s airtight.” I had checked this with Helena and Janet even before I dreamed of picking up the phone to reach Carl.
“And I’m supposed to take your word for it?” he asked.
“No, but you can believe The Independent and The Telegraph.” I held up copies of the previous day’s newspapers. They were running crowd photos from a charity gala at the Tate Modern from the previous night, the very night Lionel was killed. “This event ran well into three in the morning, and there must be a dozen witnesses who can account for them being there. You tell me: what’s the window of opportunity for his murder?”
He conceded the point. “Okay, yes, around one-thirty in the morning, so accepting what you’re telling me at face value, your person’s covered. For now.”
“Well, that was too damn easy,” I said. “Why aren’t you asking me?”
“Asking what?”
“You just suggested my person had motive, and if they’re a big deal, they could afford someone else to do it.”
He blew air out of his cheeks and said grimly, “True, but I doubt it. This smacks of the personal.”
I raised an eyebrow questioningly.
“You ready for this?” he asked. “It’s not pretty.”
“I’m sure I saw worse in Africa.”
He shrugged over that one, muttering he hoped not, and he pulled out the crime photos. It was indeed not pretty.
I’ve seen dead before, but never someone dead with whom I had had any kind of intimacy. Having Lionel’s cock in my mouth and his mouth lapping me below could be easily dismissed with the knowledge the guy would move on, just a past lover out there somewhere. A name to be forgotten. A face to revert quickly back to status of stranger.
But now I was looking at the same flesh I had tasted, brutalized and lifeless in vivid colours.
Lionel was naked, his ankles bound by thin leather straps to the legs of a plain chair, both his wrists similarly tied to the armrests, yet with enough slack for some movement of one arm. His body leaned forward and away from camera view because of the impact of a fatal gunshot. His left hand dangled by his side, presumably having dropped the revolver, while his right gripped his penis, grotesquely still half-erect from stimulation at the moment of dying, and then post-mortem lividity must have taken over.
You couldn’t see it in the photos, but Carl explained that there were large quantities of the victim’s semen discovered on the rug and staining his body. Baby oil had been used as the lubricant, but the medical examiner noticed that the skin on Lionel’s penis was rubbed somewhat raw from the repeated friction of his masturbation.
A pornographic video had been found cued back to its menu screen on the DVD player. Presumably, it was playing at the time and played on after he died until its finish.
“What kind of video?” I asked.
“It matters?” he asked back.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Gay porn, if you want to be precise.”
“But he wasn’t gay,” I argued.
Carl gave me a look to say hey, you would know. We agreed that it was more than likely the DVD had been chosen with the intent of increasing Lionel’s humiliation beyond death. Whatever had been playing during the torture, if there had been a video playing, wasn’t the one cued up and left behind.
Carl went back to a grisly close-up of Lionel’s body. “Shot with a revolver at point-blank range. That’s the no-brainer part. But the scene was staged to look like suicide.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Two ways. To be fair, one’s out of our league, Teresa. It’s the blokes in Forensics who came up with it. After he was shot, the killer quickly lifted the victim’s body back up and manipulated his hand in the gun to mimic shooting himself. I guess he thought if he moved him around like a puppet that when he let go, he’d get a natural, convincing pose instead of just dropping the gun by his fallen arm. He thought he was being clever, but he was still a bit dim. When he lifted the body back up in a hurry, tiny spots of blood were flicked onto our victim’s leg, mixed with microscopic bits of brain tissue. Well, that splatter pattern would be impossible if you’re holding the gun barrel right up to your temple. It had to come afterwards.”
“Okay,” I nodded. “And the second?”
“Let’s see how clever you are, my love, because the answer’s right here in the photo.”
I looked again carefully. After a moment, I said: “The straps.”
“What about them?” Carl prompted.
“I’m guessing, and I could be wrong,” I explained, “but if it’s suicide, and he’s going to shoot himself, why tie up his left arm at all? Why not leave it totally free? Let’s say he’s into kink and he wants the whole effect, it doesn’t look like there’d be enough slack in the strap for him to raise the revolver to his head.”
“You’re absolutely right,” he answered solemnly.
And the implication of this sunk in for me. “Shit,” I whispered.
His killer had used him in a sick Russian roulette game—it was the only explanation for the revolver instead of a more common semi-automatic pistol. Click went the gun as Lionel’s tormentor demanded he jerk off and bring himself to orgasm, again and again. And each time when he shot off, click went the empty chamber…Utter humiliation, so that you wondered how Lionel could have achieved an erection at all. And yet faced with the truth that you were imminently about to die and to die violently, maybe one would think, all right, I’ll taste the last ecstasy of turning myself on just before the sudden, sharp end.
The other fluid discovered on Lionel’s body was the residue of tears.
“I thought you might have something for me to break this open,” Carl said in disappointed tones. “But we have to run with what we’ve got.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re questioning a suspect already, and he looks good for it. Knew Lionel Young, had a grudge with him, and you’ve just told me that Young received a threat over a woman.”
“I think my words were ‘love affair.’ I didn’t specify gender.” I was totally flabbergasted. They had somebody? “Who? Who are you questioning?”
“Neil Kenan.”
7
As you can imagine, I didn’t endear myself to Carl by telling him that his prime suspect couldn’t possibly have murdered Lionel because he was with me that night. First I sleep with his victim, then his suspect, and I had excluded my client for him. He tried hard to keep his face blank and definitively non-judgemental, but he couldn’t resist one snide remark: “Is there anybody else in the GLA you want to provide an alibi for? I mean, you’re giving ’em out like flyers today.”
“Clever. You’re the Old Bill’s Oscar Wilde.”
“I’m doing a paper on Wilde for my Master’s, actually,” he said. “We’re going to hold on to Mr. Kenan for a little while longer.” Before I could protest, he added quickly, “Yes, Teresa, you say you were with him, and I believe you, but he’s still mixed up in this somehow.”
I asked for his rationale. I was intensely curious to know how the police had managed
to connect Lionel to Neil at all. Lionel was an executive working in The City for a mining conglomerate. Neil was paying his dues as a catalogue and store display model, getting gigs in plays that were far from the West End.
The only connection between them was the escort service and the strip poker circuit, and if Carl and the other detectives were clued in about that, they would have dragged Helena down with him. And George Westlake, Gary Cahill, Ayako, Daniel Giradeau, and scores of others in games I had yet to play in. And even Janet.
So what did they have on Neil?
Carl wouldn’t tell me, but after we finished talking, I hung around outside Scotland Yard long enough to figure out the answer for myself.
It was an hour and a half later when I saw Neil emerge through the glass doors, looking as haggard as anybody does after a grilling by the cops. He shook hands with a well-dressed young Indian man I could only presume was the legal aid solicitor on call that afternoon, and then he glanced around, failing to see me. He was looking for someone else—I realized it was Janet.
Then he frowned, as if logic had caught up with his naivety. He couldn’t very well expect that she would show up here to be by his side.
When he started for the tube station, eyes fixed two feet ahead of him on the ground, that’s when I called his name, and he looked up. He was surprised and curious to see me waiting for him.
“Hello.”
“Do you want a lift home?” I offered.
“Sure. How did you know to come here?”
“The police asked me about your whereabouts the other night,” I lied.
I led him around to the BMW, bleeped the car’s alarm, and he slipped into the passenger seat.
“I told the police I was with someone,” he said. “I didn’t give them your name.”
“That’s chivalrous of you, but under the circumstances, I think it’s okay. They found me somehow.” I pointed the Beamer into the jungle of West End traffic. “Is it over?”
“Shit, I hope so,” he muttered, and let his head fall into his hand.
Strip Poker Page 14