Kiss Me Quick

by Miller, Danny

There was silence after that. A chord had been struck. Just the one he wanted. Now she was scared.

  He called out, ‘Miss LaVita,’ but there was no reply. He was about to bang on the door, when he heard the chain sliding across. The door opened and there she was, wearing a white towelling robe that was too big. The J.R. monogram on the breast pocket explained that. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, her skin looked fresh and young. She looked good, even better than he remembered, and he prided himself on having a good memory.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  Vince gave her a small appreciative smile, and stepped over the threshold. The class evident in the lobby extended itself up into her flat, or ‘apartment’, as she called it. And the word apartment seemed more appropriate. It was huge, and the main room had the hand of an interior designer about it: exquisite opulence, Regency flamboyance, art on the walls that ranged from the old masters to the moderns. Pride of place, above the white marble fireplace, was an abstract oil on canvas, in muddied grey and swirling red mist, but not abstract enough to disguise the foreground figure of a sinewy but powerful wolf at the head of a baying pack. And not too abstract to see that the pack leader represented Jack Regent himself.

  A Louis XIV couch and chairs. A walnut and tortoiseshell armoire, a weighty-looking ebonised bureau with ornate ormolu decorations depicting exotic birds and dragonflies from the aesthetic period. There wasn’t a flat surface in the place that missed the opportunity to contain something exquisite and expensive, like those Meissen and Sèvre figures in fine porcelain and Lalique frosted-glass bowls. A glass-domed skeleton clock – obviously a horological masterpiece – sat on the marble mantelpiece. The sun streamed in through the tall mullioned windows, throwing light over walls covered in red-striped Regency-style wallpaper. On every wall, huge baroque gilt-framed mirrors, adorned with swags and cherubs, stretched up to the lofty ceiling. It was a room of mirrors that gave the already large room infinite space, but ultimately trapped you, since you couldn’t escape the sight of yourself.

  Vince waded across a thick blue carpet and sat himself down on a red velvet sofa, which was shaped like a woman’s pouting lips ready to plant a big kiss. It was the only real piece of kitsch in the room and, to the untrained eye, the only item looking as if it didn’t belong in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  ‘Can I get you a drink, Detective Treadwell?’ she asked haughtily, obviously feeling in her element now, sensing how impressed her guest was with the living arrangements. Her arched eyebrows seemed to point him out as a parochial plod sitting uncomfortably on a Dali-designed sofa, amongst antiques and art and an opulence altogether out of reach of his puny public-sector pay packet. ‘A nice cup of tea, perhaps?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said politely. He needed answers, not arguments. Last night he had got caught up in her act, letting her play him for a mug. This time he would play it differently.

  She sat down on the chaise longue opposite, her feet curling up beside her.

  ‘Nice place,’ he remarked.

  Bobbie took a cigarette from the large Asprey’s silver cigarette box resting on a marble coffee table. She lit up with a silver table lighter shaped and detailed like a pineapple, but, about the size of an apple, it looked as though it weighed a ton. She glanced around the huge room as if taking it in for the first time, blasé because it all came so effortlessly to her, as if she was to the manor born. She took a long drag of her cigarette, then, with a pinkie finger cocked high, pinched a piece of imaginary tobacco off the tip of her tongue. An unnecessary gesture she must have seen in a movie, because the cigarette was filter-tipped, but it looked very damn sexy, thought Vince. She then plumed out the smoke with a bored sigh, and wearily asked, ‘Why would those men want to hurt me?’

  Vince waited until she did him the honour of actually looking at him, then said, ‘Maybe they work for Jack. And he thinks you made the call that set him up?’

  ‘Didn’t we go through this last night?’

  ‘Maybe I was proven wrong last night. Maybe you were tired of him, bored with him, scared of him. Either way, you wanted out, and you know Jack’s not the type of man to take rejection lightly.’

  Her eyes narrowed and held him in a dissecting gaze. Then, in mock legalese, she gave her summary. ‘And I put it to you, Detective Treadwell, that your motives are personal. You want this to be true so I can be a damsel in distress and you can cast yourself in the role of my knight in shining armour. You want me to have betrayed Jack, because you don’t want me to love him. Because, let’s face it, Detective, you want me for yourself.’

  Vince felt a sudden and pressing need to do something with his hands. He took a strip of Wrigley’s spearmint chewing gum out of his pocket, carefully released it from its paper sheath and foil wrapper and popped it in his mouth. She was right. Sitting there, stripped of her make-up, and naked – as he imagined – under that soft towelling robe, he realized he did want her for himself.

  He suppressed the thought, stood up and went over to the mantelpiece to inspect the skeleton clock under its glass dome. All those little cogs, levers and gears working flawlessly away. He then checked the time, because he didn’t have all day. ‘You know, Miss LaVita, I’m making it up as I go along – just like you.’ No reply. Vince looked around to see her flicking ash into the heavy crystal ashtray. ‘The other flats in this building, are they empty?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said.

  ‘And this one is Jack’s place?’

  ‘The whole building is. It’s not in his name but, then again, nothing is. In fact, Jack is officially of no fixed abode. Even before he flew the coop.’

  ‘I admire his taste.’

  She smiled. ‘How do you know it’s not my taste?’

  ‘The Gallic influence. It’s like a scaled-down version of the Palace of Versailles, or a French tart’s boudoir.’ He then added quickly, ‘And you’re not French.’

  Her smile vanished. ‘Neither is Jack. He’s Corsican. He’s very particular about that fact.’

  ‘Your contribution, my guess, is this,’ he gestured to the red lip couch he’d been sitting on. ‘Mae West’s lips? By Salvador Dali, right?’

  She nodded and looked surprised.

  ‘When I was reading Law at university, I used to sit in on the Art History lectures.’ He knew he’d thrown her with this revelation. He’d unsettled her on her Louis XIV chaise longue and wiped the smugness off her face. She had him pegged as a flat-footed prole, and why not? Last night he’d given her precious little reason to think otherwise. He had just listened to her life story without offering any of his own.

  Vince looked at the painting of the wolf and gave it a dismissive shrug, then went over to another painting hanging to the side of the mantelpiece. It was a small portrait of a smiling, moustachioed man in a blue uniform, circa 1880s.

  ‘He’s looking happy and relaxed, but notice how he’s hiding his hands. If the painter could do hands properly, he would have painted them. Hands are a common weakness in artists, because they’re so hard to get right. And hiding them is his “Tell”. You know what a Tell is?’

  Bobbie looked at her own hands, and flared her fingers. Long, elegant, slender, soft and smooth fingers. She let them relax, but the rest of her remained tense. She smiled a rather sad little smile, and said, ‘I’ve been around enough gamblers and chancers to become familiar with the term.’

  Vince had spotted her Tell on the beach last night, and was sure he’d have found out more had they not been interrupted by the Three Stooges. He sensed there was a lot more to her story than the picture she’d painted of a rural childhood idyll.

  He was straight in. ‘That Jack might want you dead doesn’t worry you?’

  From art to brutality. She looked startled by the sudden change of subject.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ she said, ‘because it’s not true. Jack wouldn’t hurt me.’

  ‘Not even if his own life depended on it? Or he suspected you’d set him up for a fall?’ She didn’t
answer, and he continued. ‘You shared a home together, a life together?’

  ‘Only for six months.’

  ‘Six months, six weeks, six hours – he let you into his life, so he must have trusted you with things. And told you things he wouldn’t tell anyone else?’

  ‘He didn’t.’ She frowned. ‘And I think you should leave now.’

  ‘He’ll do anything to stay out of jail and you’d be deluded to think otherwise. The truth is that Jack Regent is a cold-blooded—’

  ‘How dare you!’ she shouted, and sprang to her feet. ‘You think you know Jack? You know nothing! As smart as you think you are, Detective, you’re just bumbling around in the dark.’

  They stood staring at each other for what seemed to Vince like quite a few minutes, as he tried to assemble a defence for himself. He ended up looking away from her because, however much he thought he knew about Jack Regent, he knew that Bobbie had him bang to rights. When he turned back to her, she had sat down again. Lighting another cigarette, her hands trembled.

  He muttered ‘Thanks’ by way of a goodbye, and made his way to the door.

  Bobbie unfurled her legs from under her and stood up to see him out. ‘What were you hoping to learn here today that you didn’t know already?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Miss LaVita,’ he said with a shrug, ‘I really don’t know.’

  Bobbie let out an audible sigh, then said, ‘Follow me.’ She stepped briskly back into the living room.

  Vince followed her as she headed over to the far side of the room, approaching a wood-panelled wall where yet more paintings hung. She slipped her hand behind one of them, and pressed something, whereupon a section of the wall opened up like a door.

  A secret door? A hiding place? Was Jack in there?

  Vince smiled at the thought, but went over to take a look. A mechanical skylight cranked open to reveal a room beyond. It was a study or library lined with books from floor to ceiling. It contained an antique mahogany desk with a well-used green leather writing surface, and a brass Anglepoise light on top, also a red leather chesterfield sofa and a matching armchair. Vince stepped over the threshold and went to inspect the book-lined shelves.

  It was quite a collection. No paperback penny dreadfuls, or cheap romances or hardboiled thrillers. Instead there was philosophy, western and eastern; liturgy and religious matters; fine art and antiques. And lots of French writers: Baudelaire, Balzac, Diderot, Dumas, Gide, Rimbaud, Rousseau; and the contemporaries such as Camus, Sartre and Genet. And then there were the histories. War mainly. Napoleon, the home-town boy, Corsica, not Brighton, was well represented in large volumes; conquering more shelf space than those other glorious tooled-up globe trotters: Alexandra, Attila and Genghis.

  Bobbie joined him and picked out a book randomly. It was Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. ‘Jack spent hours in here. This was his private place. We all need one, don’t we?’

  Before Vince answered, he reviewed the angles: Jack Regent, the cultured criminal in his lair, surrounded by beauty while indulging a thirst for knowledge. It fitted a profile but then, again, just because you surround yourself with this stuff doesn’t mean it rubs off on you. Take Lionel Duval for instance: a mock Tudor mansion apparently stuffed with art and uniform sets of hand-tooled leather-bound books. It was unlikely that any of them had ever been opened, never mind read. They were bought by the yard to present a facade of intellect and respectability. But Jack’s library was different, carefully hidden away and out of sight. The books well thumbed, and obviously read.

  Vince glanced around at Bobbie as she replaced the volume on the shelf. She was right, Jack wouldn’t sully her with his business. She was up on the walls with the art, and on the shelves with the books. The guilty pleasure, the weakness. He needed her. He wouldn’t hurt her.

  ‘You’re right, we do all need our little private places. Many men make do with garden sheds.’ He went over to the desk and started opening drawers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘When Machin searched the flat, did he take a look in here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he even know about it?’

  ‘No.’

  All the drawers were completely empty, except the last one contained a lone paper clip that was bent out of shape. It looked as if it was laughing at him.

  ‘It’s just books in here. Nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘I should get some of our men over to take the place apart.’

  As if calling his bluff, she said, ‘Be my guest.’

  Vince believed her, though. If there were any clues to Jack’s whereabouts here, they’d already been cleared out. He’d seen enough and walked out. Bobbie closed the door and the secret room disappeared.

  ‘So, Vincent, when are you going back to London?’

  ‘I’ll be around for another week or so.’

  ‘Good. That means you can buy me that Knickerbocker Glory we didn’t have last night.’ She opened the door for him and Vince stepped out into the hallway. ‘Where are you off to now?’ she asked.

  ‘To see my brother, Vaughn.’

  ‘Can hardly be the same Vaughn I know, who’s small and skinny with an acne-scarred face and—’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ He cut her short, not wanting to hear any more about his brother’s inadequacies.

  Her smile twisted. ‘But you’re nothing like him.’

  Vince looked wary. ‘It has been noted.’

  ‘He’s scum. Junkie scum.’

  CHAPTER 8

  ALBION HILL

  He was standing amongst the collected debris littering the entrance to Vaughn’s basement flat. But just because it was ankle deep didn’t mean Vaughn wasn’t at home. It just meant Vaughn didn’t care.

  Vince knocked on the door. No response. Eye pressed to the keyhole, he saw a window wide open, a net curtain fluttering, and a foot making a hasty exit. Vince put his own foot to the door, kicking it hard, and it flew open. A dingy hallway with a bedroom to the left. An unmade mattress, some scattered clothes, a set of dumbbells on the floor. The living room was a dark dungeon of damp: black-speckled magnolia chip wallpaper, and mismatched sticks of furniture. A roll of linoleum chucked on the floor and peeling Formica made for an unconvincing kitchen. On further inspection, there were signs of a woman’s touch. A framed photo of a married couple standing with a shy little girl, the child wincing as if almost trying to hide herself from the camera’s unrelenting gaze. One hand had dragged a lock of her hair into her mouth to obscure half of her face. Next to it stood a bunch of posies in a jam jar, making an attempt to jolly the place up.

  So this was the girl Bobbie had told him about just before he left her apartment. The same girl Bobbie had given a job to, working in the cloakroom of the Blue Orchid Club. Because she felt sorry for her. Because it was dark there. Because in the darkness of the cloakroom you couldn’t see the purple birthmark that blighted half of an otherwise pretty face. She wore her wispy mousy hair like Veronica Lake. A long fringe covering one side of her face. For Veronica it was a sexy trade mark that provided her with a look. For the girl with the wine stained skin, it was a mask, a veil.

  Vaughn had started hanging around the cloakroom, paying the girl attention, until Bobbie had banned him from the club after he was caught snorting speed in the gents. The girl had left only a week later. Bobbie said that she suspected Vaughn had introduced her to drugs. Vince didn’t argue the point.

  The back window was still open and Vaughn had made his escape. Vince wasn’t too troubled; he knew he’d catch up with his brother soon.

  Vince was now standing at his mother’s grave. He knelt down and cleared away the leaves and bracken, and laid down a modest bunch of flowers he had bought. At just eighteen, Vince’s mother had boarded the ferry from Ireland and crossed the water to England, and had ended up in Brighton. Her first job there was waitressing in the restaurant at Hanningtons, which was Brighton’s most prestigious department store. It was a popular hang-
out for ‘the racing fraternity’ of bookmakers and gamblers, and it was there that she first met Lenny Treadwell. He was then working for his uncle, who was a bookmaker, but Lenny had big plans. He wanted to become a ‘face’ in Brighton, not remain a bookie’s runner and driver. That was how he came to hang about in the shadow of men like Henry Pierce and the Jack Regent mob, who had the money, prestige and power he craved.

  Besides a nice smile, there was an innate honesty about her, and maybe that’s what attracted Lenny, since it was something he would never possess. They started going out, and he looked good in his suit. He was a handsome charmer, and a degenerate gambler, and with that comes optimism but seldom a sense of reality. Lenny fancied himself at the tables and reckoned he had a good nose for a nag but, as his uncle had always warned him, the only way to make a small fortune as a gambler is to start with a large one.

  She really liked him, no matter what her friends said about him, so one thing led to another and soon she was pregnant. Lenny wasn’t ready for this, still had his dream of the big score. He wanted her to visit a woman he knew of who got rid of such problems. She showed a steely determination and resolutely refused. They got married in the registry office and moved into a tiny terraced house on Albion Hill. There, Vaughn was born and, like most families on Albion Hill, they struggled. Whatever Lenny had dreamed of soon went out the window. And so did his luck at the tables, the races and the dogs. He couldn’t seem to back a winner, ended up throwing dud betting slips in the air like confetti. And that’s how he developed a gambler’s Tell – he started weeping uncontrollably and everywhere. Not a good look to possess amongst the hard cases he was wont to run with. As well as the belly-up gambling, he took the plug out of the jug and started drinking, crying into his cups. He started skimming money off his uncle who, after giving him a good talking to, eventually gave him a good hiding then the sack. Lenny developed the shakes, needed to swallow a quart of Scotch before he could leave the house. He started placing bets he couldn’t afford and writing cheques he couldn’t cover. When his own money was exhausted, he pawned the modest pieces of jewellery his wife’s mother had bequeathed her. Finally he started borrowing from the only people who would still lend to him. The wrong people. The Jack Regent mob.