Kiss Me Quick

by Miller, Danny

  Confusion warped Vince’s brow. He waited for an explanation. None came. So he prompted, ‘Jack was …?’

  Pierce’s brow wrinkled in equal confusion. He was confused that the young detective had needed to ask. Because to him it was obvious; it needed no further explanation. Pierce leaned in and said, ‘… Or wasn’t.’

  ‘Was or wasn’t what?’

  ‘God. Or godless.’

  Vince took a deep breath and considered this. It seemed that Pierce, like Pascal and his wager, was covering his bets by throwing his lot in with Jack. Vince moved on to a more secular plain. ‘Tell me about Max Vogel.’

  ‘Fat antique dealer.’

  ‘What were you doing with him yesterday at the races?’

  Unflinching monotone: ‘I’ve moved into a retirement home. Small room, so I’m selling the contents of my previous abode. Moving in the circles I’ve moved in over the years, I’ve picked up some interesting trinkets. And now I’m retired and stretching into the autumn of my life, I could sorely use the money.’

  Vince considered Pierce’s overly considered and out-of-sorts sensible reply. ‘You asked me what I was thinking, Henry …’

  ‘I’d dearly like to know. Now we’re alone’ – he pulled a grey-toothed grin – ‘together at last.’

  ‘I think you set Jack up. I think Max Vogel is Jack’s financier. And I think you’ve got something going with Max Vogel.’

  Pierce, without flinching, replied, ‘Sacrilege. I know my place. I’m strictly number two.’ Shaking his head in disappointment. ‘Weren’t you listening, boy? Didn’t my little story about the Scotsman tell you anything?’

  ‘That’s the whole problem. It told me what you wanted it to tell me. And let’s not forget what happened in the wrestling ring. You were number two then, and you were supposed to lose against Leo the Lion. Then you scalped him instead. Maybe you got sick of playing second fiddle.’

  Pierce put his left hand on the table, gnarled vein-streaked fingers spread out like dead coral. ‘You’re your father’s boy.’

  Vince knew he mustn’t bite. Let a man like Pierce get inside your head and he’ll wreak havoc.

  ‘Back to Jack.’

  ‘Your father. Lenny.’

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘Don’t you want to talk about your old dad? It’s important a man knows where he comes from, because it will tell him where he’s going.’

  ‘My father? I never really had the pleasure. You probably knew him better than I did. I hear he got in with the wrong crowd. He owed Jack. So he skipped town. It’s no secret, and you know that. He was a two-bob drunk and a gambler.’

  ‘You were there at the races, and I hear you were at the Brunswick. Like a gamble, do you, boy? Games of chance, easy money, just like your old dad?’

  ‘I don’t drink. I don’t gamble. I was looking for you. You’re on the wind-up now, Pierce. Forget it. You can’t touch me. Lenny Treadwell’s just a name on a birth certificate, who means nothing to me.’

  Pierce gave a smile of satisfaction, as if he had the measure of the young detective. ‘Fancy yourself, eh, boy? Full of piss and vinegar you are.’ He then took off his glasses. The good eye fixed on Vince. His dry old lips smiling.

  Vince adjusted to the new face in front of him.

  Pierce leaned in, and hissed, ‘Did you fuck her?’

  Vince pressed record. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide, Pierce.’

  Pierce pressed stop. ‘The slip. Did you fuck her?’

  Vince pressed record. ‘Gimme a name, Pierce.’

  Pierce pressed stop. ‘Bobbie Lalalala – whatever the fuck she calls herself.’

  Vince pressed record. ‘For the record, Mr Pierce asked if I quote, fucked, un-quote, Miss Bobbie LaVita. I categorically state for the record that I did not.’

  Pierce pressed stop. ‘My advice, leave town now. Before you do.’

  Vince went to press record. ‘She told me you wanted to see her. And, while we’re at it, the men on the beach and the houndstooth mob, your boys, I take it?’

  Pierce pressed stop. ‘You don’t know what you’re messing with, boy. This thing is bigger than you’ll ever know.’ Pierce pointed a finger straight up to the ceiling. ‘This goes right to the top.’

  ‘Corruption?’

  ‘More than you could ever know!’

  Vince went to press record …

  Smash. The white stick was upended and put through the tape-recorder.

  Pierce was up on his feet. Black glasses back on his face.

  Machin swung the door open, and Pierce was gone.

  Vince sat in his office, drinking a nice strong cup of tea and collecting his thoughts. In front of him was the spool of tape he’d retrieved from the broken machine. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide, Pierce … For the record, Mr Pierce asked if I quote, fucked, unquote, Miss Bobbie LaVita. I categorically state for the record that I did not.’

  He hadn’t lied either. Once he and Bobbie had got into bed – Jack’s bed – it didn’t feel right. The weight of Jack hanging over them crushed the moment. They knew the moment would come, but not then.

  Vince looked down at the newspaper on his desk: ‘Deadly Plague Sweeping Brighton’. It was a dramatic headline, biblical, mythical. He picked up the phone and called his favourite student.

  CHAPTER 16

  TREBLE DUTCH

  Terence had been waiting on the corner of Market Street, at the entrance to Brighton’s famous Lanes, for a good ten minutes before Vince turned up. Terence, ever eager, wanted to know what the caper was and how he could help. Vince filled him in as they weaved their way through the narrow Lanes, a cobbled maze of twisting and turning alleyways, lined with low-slung jewellery shops, silversmiths, curiosity, objet d’art and pawn shops with ‘Best Prices Offered’ boards swinging gently in the spring breeze. Bill Sykes wouldn’t have looked out of place selling his stolen swag to Fagin somewhere in this old rookery that used to house fishermen.

  Outside Max Vogel’s antiques shop sat a Rolls-Royce, a purple one. The driver, smartly dressed in a light grey chauffeur’s uniform with gold brocade spilling down the front and a leather cap, was leaning against the car looking self-conscious and reading a newspaper. Despite the garish colour of the car, what drew Vince’s eye was the number plate: D E 1. A private number plate. Dickie Eton’s private number plate?

  The chauffeur quickly jettisoned his newspaper into the passenger-side window, and straightened up ready for duty. And out of the shop he stepped.

  ‘That’s Dickie Eton!’ announced an animated Terence, gesturing at the cartoonish figure strutting across the pavement ahead of them.

  ‘So I see,’ said Vince, not taking his eyes off the pint-sized, preening pop mogul. He lived up to expectation. If the driver provided a sartorial appetizer, a taste of things to come, the man he ferried around was undoubtedly the main course: a flambé of over-fettled fashion. The velvet cape he wore even matched the colour of the car. The chauffeur opened the back door for his liege, and the louche Svengali stepped up to it, stepped in and purred away in the gliding Roller.

  Vince looked around at Terence, who stood there in his ‘rumpled farmer’ duds. ‘I hope you picked up some tips. Now wait here,’ said Vince, about to step into the shop itself.

  ‘Can’t I come with you?’

  ‘No, Terence, you can’t.’

  Terence switched from wide-eyed excitement at the prospect to a furrowed look of disappointment. Knowing the young scribe to be the excitable and facially volatile type, Vince didn’t pay that too much attention as he instructed him to wait in the pub opposite.

  The bell above the shop door alerted an assistant to Vince’s presence. He sprang out from behind a brown velvet curtain which separated the main shop from what Vince assumed to be the back office. He was an effete-looking man in his thirties, stick-thin with a cascade of blond curls. A pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez style spectacles hung limply from a long, rose-gold Albert chain around his neck.

  ‘May I help
you, sir?’ The sprightly assistant’s alert smile exposed twin rows of small, precise teeth.

  Vince returned the smile. ‘I’m hoping you might,’ he said, gazing around the shop. It contained three large glass-covered counters chock-full of gold jewellery, while the glass cabinets on the walls were stocked with silver Corinthian-column candlesticks, cruet sets and planished goblets. It was clear that Max ‘Treble Dutch’ Vogel dealt only in high-end goods.

  ‘I’m looking for something rather specific.’ Vince reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his notebook, tore out a leaf of paper and handed it to the effete assistant. The man retrieved the half-rimmed spectacles hanging on his hollow chest and fixed them on the tip of his long thin nose, before inspecting Vince’s drawing of the Moor’s head.

  ‘Mmmm,’ hummed the assistant, obviously having nothing like this in stock, but canny enough not to lose business over it. ‘Curious – a cameo of some description?’

  He was about to open the glass counter cabinet containing a cushion of assorted cameos, when Vince explained, ‘It’s a Moor’s head, from the Corsican flag.’ Nothing registered on those effete features, so Vince smiled and continued in a sparkly, flirtatious tone, ‘Perhaps Mr Vogel may be able to help? I believe he’s an expert on Corsican antiquities. I would be most grateful.’

  This was obviously news to the assistant, but he wasn’t about to deny it. ‘One moment, sir,’ and he disappeared behind the brown curtain. Five minutes later, his dainty head popped back around the curtain. ‘This way if you will, sir.’

  Vince slipped behind the counter, then behind the curtain, and followed him through to Vogel’s private sanctum. The man knocked on the door, and a clear-cut voice responded: ‘Come in.’ The assistant opened the door and Vince entered.

  Max Vogel sat at his desk, eating. It looked almost the same culinary set-up as at the races, only not quite such gargantuan portions. A platter of a dozen discarded oyster shells lay before him, and the crusts of four crabmeat sandwiches sat on a white plate nearby. There was a saltiness in the air that you could almost taste, and the room stank of fish.

  The whale man was smiling. ‘Forgive me, sir, I’ve been lunching. Please take a seat.’

  Vince sat down in an antique bow-backed chair. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Vogel.’

  ‘No, no, I’m quite done,’ he replied with a sated smile.

  Vince scoped the office: shelves with silver items stacked high; a huge safe, about the size of a refrigerator, took up a corner of the room; a pair of weighing scales sat on top of it. The shelves behind Vogel were lined with reference books and antiques guides.

  Vogel gestured, with a flourish of his fat hand, for the assistant to take the mollusc platter away. He did so, and exited.

  ‘Seafood, a weakness. Oysters especially. From English’s restaurant, the finest in the land.’

  ‘I know the place, but I didn’t know they did deliveries.’

  ‘I enjoy my food, as you can probably tell, sir, and am not given over to the tiresome etiquette of communal dining. So I dine alone. Just as I bathe alone.’

  Vince nodded, trying to shake off the image of the fat man at his ablutions.

  ‘And I do not enjoy watching others. After all, “’twas a brave man who first swallowed an oyster”,’ Vogel said with a chuckle. ‘But my dining habits are not what you are here for.’ He lifted the drawing of the Moor’s head off his desk and studied it. ‘Corsican, you say?’

  Vince nodded.

  ‘Whoever told you I was an expert on Corsican artefacts is mistaken. Beyond certain Napoleonic items, I am a layman. But I do have a contact up in town who may be of service to you, and that’s the reason you are now sitting before me, Mr …?’

  ‘Treadwell.’ Vince reached inside his jacket pocket and showed him his badge. ‘Detective Vincent Treadwell of Scotland Yard.’ An imperceptible smile crossed Vince’s lips, as he never got tired of reciting that in full.

  Vogel drew back, opened-mouthed and enlightened. ‘Ah, so the item you are looking for has been stolen, and you believe it has ended up in Brighton. Well, sir, I have a very good standing with the local constabulary who deal with such matters, and I shall endeavour to keep my eyes peeled.’

  Vince contemplated the whale man, and concluded that he wouldn’t look out of place with a fez on his head in some backstreet bazaar in the Kasbah, drinking tarry cups of coffee and smoking a bubbling baccy-packed hookah. Vince imagined he might suffer from gout and have a dozen passports stashed away in a drawer. The heavy gold signet ring on his pinkie finger featured a heraldic crest depicting some kind of bird. Vince wondered if it held any significance, maybe his family crest, or was just purchased over the counter as a mere affectation. Antique dealers drew from all parts of the world, in the hunt for that object of desire that would turn the greatest profit. It was a business with many shades and classes – and most of them with as potted a provenance as the goods they dealt in.

  ‘I’m here investigating “the body on the beach” case.’

  Vogel sat back in his chair, put his hands across his gut, and his fingertips together as if joining them in prayer. ‘A gruesome business. Reminds me of “the body in the trunk” crime of a few years back. The perpetrator of that crime lived not three doors away from here, in the Lanes. Before your time, I assume?’ Vogel screwed his face up, amused. ‘I must say, Detective Treadwell, I do find it amusing, if not exciting, to have you sitting here, sir. Am I a suspect?’

  ‘No. Our chief suspect is Mr Jack Regent.’

  ‘Ah, we reach the meat of the matter. The Corsican! To which the Moor’s head, the symbol on the Corsican flag, is pertaining?’

  ‘You know him, I take it?’

  ‘You come to my business armed with a sketch of a Moor’s head, so you strike me as a man who has done his research. All very clever, albeit rather overly melodramatic.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to be melodramatic, you might as well be overly so.’

  ‘First class, Detective, first class!’ Vogel gave a full-lunged laugh, that subsided into a rosy-cheeked chuckle. ‘I know Mr Regent, just as many people know Mr Regent. It’s no secret that he is a powerfully pervasive presence in this town. A man not to be trifled with.’

  ‘Do you do much business with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘May I speak bluntly?’

  ‘You strike me as a man who will do so, anyway, with or without my permission.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Vogel narrowed his already impossibly narrow eyes. ‘Trust, I reckon, has never played a big part in the law. ’Tis proof you need.’

  ‘Henry Pierce, and your little powwow at the races?’

  Vogel arched a downy-gold eyebrow in surprise. ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘You, sir.’

  Vogel nodded slowly, his jowls juddering and his chins – of which Vince counted three that rested on top of a solid goitre – rolling around like choppy waters. When he stopped nodding, there was still movement, involuntary reverberations as the rest of his face took moments to settle. Then he finally said, ‘If Henry Pierce decides to grace you with his company and converse with you, you have very little say in the matter. To put it bluntly, sir, one is hijacked, seized, enslaved, ensnared and, if I may be so bold, fucked!’

  Vince laughed. ‘Yes, I know what you’re saying about Pierce, and normally I’d agree. But it struck me that you were doing most of the talking, and Pierce most of the listening.’

  ‘Have you been – what’s the vernacular? – tailing me?’

  ‘No, him.’

  ‘And what do you deduce from that exchange, an exchange that you couldn’t possibly have overheard, and it is questionable that you could have actually witnessed?’

  ‘Oh, I saw, and I deduce that you’re not telling me the truth. You indeed work for Jack Regent. You receive the antiques and jewellery that certain associates of Mr Regent, by hook or by crook, procure.’

  Vogel’s eyes bulged with i
ndignation. ‘Receive and procure,’ he spat out, like ejecting a bad oyster. ‘Those are two words I have no truck with! Two words that in my line of business are considered an anathema!’

  ‘It gets worse.’

  Vogel clasped his hands together tight, bracing himself for the worst, the blood squeezed from his knuckles turning them white. ‘Not in my office, it doesn’t.’

  ‘We could go down to my office and, believe me, that is a lot worse.’

  ‘I have lawyers who will skewer you over your unsubstantiated slander.’

  Vince gave him an affable smile. ‘Oh, Mr Vogel, I don’t think it will come to that.’

  Vogel untangled his fingers from that tense and tightly knotted prayer position, and slipped his right hand under the desk. ‘You strike me as a clever young man. Not the usual pedestrian patter I would expect from a public servant. And pertinacious, too. That you are, sir, pertinacious!’

  Vince remained smiling. ‘I’m like a limpet once I find something worth hanging on to. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the mollusc analogy.’