Cold Heart

by Lynda La Plante

  ‘Cindy,’ he said, ‘we have to be very careful now, you know that.’

  ‘For Chrissakes, Raymond. Harry’s being pickled in brine at Forest Lawn right this minute!’ Cindy cried. ‘We don’t have to hide anything.’

  ‘Don’t talk that way about him, you tacky little piece of trash,’ Vallance snapped, and Cindy recoiled from the cold anger in his voice. For a moment she had the impression that he was genuinely in the grip of strong emotion, almost as though he were fighting back tears – but if Raymond was so crazy about Harry, what had he been doing fucking the ass off Harry’s wife every time his back was turned:

  ‘Raymond, I haven’t seen you in weeks. I’m, like, totally strung out and I’m pregnant, Raymond. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’ she began, her voice trembling.

  ‘Not particularly,’ Vallance said, in the same odd, cold tone she had never heard from him before. ‘Other people’s children have never interested me much.’

  ‘Raymond—’ Cindy wailed.

  Vallance cut her short. ‘I came here to ask you only two things, Cindy,’ he said. ‘First, what happened to the tapes?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her eyes sliding away from his.

  ‘Did the police take them?’

  ‘I can’t find them – I mean the videos. They were in the safe and now they’re gone. I took the tapes from the phone out and—’

  He interrupted her again. ‘And where are they?’

  Cindy squirmed. ‘I . . . put ’em somewhere safe.’

  ‘Cindy,’ Vallance said, grabbing the girl by her upper arms, ‘tell me where the fucking tapes are right now or I’ll break your arm.’ He shook her hard, and she saw a darkness in his eyes she had not seen before. It chilled her to the bone.

  ‘I – I hired a PI to, like, look after us,’ Cindy stammered, beginning to cry. ‘I gave them to her. I had to, Raymond, it would’ve looked worse if I hadn’t, and I checked ’em all.’

  Vallance thrust her violently away from him. She stumbled in the high, unwieldy shoes and fell backwards onto the floor. ‘You sent those tapes to a private investigator?’ he said, now white with rage. ‘Tell me her name.’

  ‘Page,’ Cindy sobbed. ‘Lorraine Page. On . . . West Pico.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take care of that,’ he said. He stood looking at the girl’s huddled body on the floor, listening to her cry. He turned to go, but then bent down beside her.

  ‘Cindy?’ His voice was oddly gentle. ‘Just one last thing I need to know, Cindy.’ She lifted her head and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing the blue eye-shadow in streaks across her face.

  ‘You killed Harry, didn’t you, Cindy?’

  She sensed danger immediately and tried to roll away from him, but in one movement Vallance caught her by the hip, turned her onto her back and sat astride her. ‘Did you kill him, Cindy?’ he asked, as though they were exchanging pleasantries at a party.

  ‘Raymond,’ she wept, almost hysterical, ‘you’re hurting me! You’ll hurt the baby!’

  ‘Answer me, Cindy,’ Vallance demanded, and banged her head hard on the floor. ‘Did you kill him or not?’

  ‘I didn’t! I swear it! I swear it on my kid’s life, Raymond – it’s Harry’s kid.’ She did not know what prompted her to add the last words, but she felt the high tension in Vallance’s body slacken.

  ‘Well,’ he said, releasing her and giving her a look almost of disgust, ‘maybe it is.’

  He rocked back onto his heels with a peculiarly graceful movement, and got to his feet, looking down at her as dispassionately as though she were a drunk he had to step over in the street. ‘See you at Forest Lawn,’ he said, and was gone.

  Decker’s phone rang. It was the doorman: there had been a delivery, in three cardboard boxes. He’d bring them up.

  The boxes were stiff-sided packing cases, thickly Sellotaped across the opening flaps, and numbered one to three. Decker and Lorraine ripped open case one.

  ‘Harry Nathan’s private recordings of phone calls and anyone who called at the house,’ Lorraine said.

  ‘Dear God, this’ll take weeks to plough through.’ Decker looked over the rows and rows of tapes, marked with dates.

  Lorraine pointed to case three. ‘Start with the most recent and work backwards. See you tomorrow after I’ve held Cindy’s hand at Forest Lawn.’ She bent down and clipped on Tiger’s lead. The big dog immediately began to drag her towards the door.

  Decker checked his watch – almost six fifteen. He packed twenty of the tapes for the last three months into his car tape case, stuck it in his gym bag and decided that he would start playing them as he drove home.

  Raymond Vallance sat in the downstairs lobby of Lorraine’s building and observed Decker carefully through the iridescent blue lenses of his last season’s Calvin Klein sunglasses. He had been just in time to see three packing cases go in, and one lady, a big dog and now quite a cute little fag come out. No boxes.

  He gave the doorman a pleasant smile, folded his newspaper and walked out onto the street. He leaned back against the wall, as Decker went to the entrance to the motor court, and took a slim leather address book from an inside pocket.

  No numbers were ever deleted from Raymond Vallance’s little black book: you never knew when you might want to look up an old friend, perhaps for a favour or, even better, suggest something that might be mutually beneficial. Not that this party was a friend exactly, but he had been useful to both Harry and himself on a number of occasions in the past with respect to little matters of entertainment – company or chemicals. But this was more serious. He dialled the number and the young man picked up almost at once.

  ‘Yo, bro,’ Vallance began in the slangy sing-song voice and Brooklyn accent he adopted when talking to black people. ‘You busy tonight? Got a little job for you . . .’

  CHAPTER 3

  NEXT DAY when Decker walked into the building he noticed that the door to Page Investigations was a fraction open and assumed that Lorraine must have called in on her way to the funeral. He extended his hand to open the door further and his nostrils burned with the smell of acid. Decker stepped back and kicked it open instead.

  The packing cases remained where he had stacked them on the floor, but the cardboard was sodden, and the tapes still smouldered as the acid destroyed even their plastic surrounds. Not one was salvageable – yet nothing else seemed to have been disturbed. He entered Lorraine’s office with trepidation – had she disturbed the intruder:

  The desk drawers were open and a few papers littered the floor. At first sight nothing else seemed to have been damaged except for a photograph of Lorraine, which lay behind the desk, acid eating into the face, burning and twisting the features grotesquely.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said quietly, and picked up the phone, about to call the police department, then hesitated. Even after working for Lorraine for such a short time, he knew that she would want any decision to involve the police to be hers alone. Instead he dialled Reception and asked casually if there had been any security problems during the night. The doorman assured him that there had not. Decker hung up and dialled Lorraine’s mobile number. He swore as an electronic voice advised him that the phone was switched off.

  Lorraine drove past the fountains and through the gates of Forest Lawn. She had never been to the exclusive cemetery before and found herself in what looked like a cross between the park of an eccentric nobleman and an outdoor department store of death. All tastes were clearly catered for, she observed, as she passed birdhouses, replicas of classical temples and ‘dignified’ churches. It had an air of frivolity and consumerism rather than reverence or repose.

  The Nathan funeral was clearly taking place in the ‘Bostonian’ church, from which a long line of parked cars tailed back. As Lorraine got closer, she observed a number of people standing about outside. Most were pretending not to notice that they were being photographed by a little knot of journalists, but some were unashamedly smiling and posing. She tried not to
stare at the wannabe actresses who had been unable to resist the chance to wear the shortest of short skirts, evening sandals, nipple-skimming necklines and elaborate hats.

  The men had mostly confined themselves to dark jackets and ties, but Lorraine noted one with a straggling ponytail in a black Nehru jacket over dirty black jeans and Birkenstock sandals – a sort of ageing rock star ensemble completed by little round John Lennon sunglasses. As he turned his head to speak to the older woman beside him, his resemblance in profile to Harry Nathan was striking. They must be the family, Lorraine thought, an impression confirmed when she saw that Kendall Nathan was standing in front of the pair making exaggerated expressions of sympathy and grief.

  She, too, was dressed like a Christmas tree, in a fussy black evening dress with chiffon yoke and sleeves, and dowdy pleated skirt. Apart from Lorraine, Harry Nathan’s mother, in a conventional dress and coat in black wool crêpe, was the only person whose appearance had been influenced by the sombreness of the occasion. She also seemed to be the only person genuinely distressed by Harry Nathan’s death.

  Lorraine turned to watch as a limousine drew up, followed by an ordinary taxi-cab. The cab disgorged its occupants first, the middle-aged Mexican woman who had let Lorraine into the Nathan house and a Hispanic man, evidently her husband, who made their way straight into the church, ignored by everyone. As soon as the staff were out of the way, the limousine door opened to reveal Cindy Nathan in a long black sleeveless dress – Empire line to accommodate her undetectable pregnancy – and black velvet platform boots. Her blonde hair was elaborately dressed into a plaited coronet on top of her head, her wrists laden with pearl and jet. A silver snake bracelet encircled one of her slim upper arms, perfectly matching the black cobra tattooed around the other. She looked like a young pagan goddess, and all the nearby long lenses were immediately trained on her.

  The girl stood motionless in front of the crowd. No one approached or spoke to her – in fact, Nathan’s family and Kendall looked away pointedly. My God, she must have been crying all night, Lorraine thought, as she observed the deep shadows around Cindy’s eyes. But as she got near enough to the girl to smile and greet her, she realized that the effect was deliberate: Cindy’s startling blue eyes and full, flower-like mouth had both been expertly made up in fashionable metallic pink.

  Cindy did not speak, but gave Lorraine a strange, controlled smile, like that of a beautiful alien, and carefully arranged a black lace mantilla over her head. With a gesture bizarrely reminiscent of a wedding, she took Lorraine’s arm and the crowd parted in front of them as they made their way into the church, leaving a wake of exquisite lily scent and audible hisses of outrage.

  ‘Fuck ’em,’ Cindy said, under her breath, as they reached the porch. Her lovely face remained immobile as she spoke. ‘Fuck the whole damn lot of them.’

  They made their way up the aisle towards the front pew, and the clergyman approached, rearranging his amazed stare into an expression of sympathy. Lorraine also noticed a tall, grey-haired man give the young widow an icy glance and immediately move way.

  ‘Who was that?’ Lorraine asked, when they had sat down.

  ‘Raymond Vallance,’ Cindy said coolly, staring straight ahead at the enormous wreath on her husband’s coffin.

  The rest of the mourners began to file in, the Nathan family occupying the front pew on the other side of the church from Cindy.

  Once everyone was settled, the minister announced a hymn, which no one bothered to sing. Most of those present were more interested in craning their necks to see who else was there. They were eventually brought back to the purpose of the gathering by the clergyman’s invitation to remember Harry in silence for a few minutes while they listened to one of his favourite songs, a rendition of ‘Light My Fire’, arranged as elaborately as an oratorio and played like a dirge on an electronic organ.

  Then the minister paid tribute to Nathan’s personal charm, energy and talent. As he moved on to talk about his civic virtues and unstinting support for many good causes, Lorraine was conscious of a stir at the back of the church. She turned to see a tall woman with strangely white hair, elegant as a borzoi, who had walked in alone. She came slowly up to the front of the church, her high heels clicking on the stone floor, and sat down with great dignity in the front pew, some six feet away from Cindy. She inclined her head, smiled slightly at the girl, and Lorraine caught a glimpse of a pair of remote, unnerving eyes.

  She immediately recognized Sonja Sorenson, the first Mrs Nathan, and tried to study the older woman unobtrusively. She was about fifty, Lorraine guessed, and although her immaculately cut, jaw-length hair was white, her lashes and brows were still dark. Her clothes were formal and elegant, a military-style black wool suit worn with black gloves, hose and shoes, and no visible jewellery. She stared straight ahead, ignoring the congregation’s scrutiny.

  When the service ended, Vallance, Nathan’s brother and four other men advanced to lift the coffin and carry it out. The congregation filed after them, to form a group around the grave. Lorraine dropped back to let Cindy and Sonja stand at the front, noticing that, the minute they got outside, the older woman had put on a pair of dark glasses. Kendall, determined not to be outdone, elbowed her way up to stand between Nathan’s other two wives, clutching a single white rose. She beckoned to Mrs Nathan senior to follow her, but the old lady shook her head as though in distaste.

  The minister read in a sonorous voice from scripture while the pall-bearers pushed the coffin carefully into the space in the wall and stepped back. As soon as the reading was over, Kendall moved forward to thrust her flower into the tomb, wailing theatrically, then stepped back as though challenging the other women to cap her performance. Sonja did not move, but Lorraine froze as Cindy took a step forward, calmly removed her wedding ring and laid it on the end of the coffin. There was an audible gasp as people wondered how to interpret the gesture: did Cindy mean that her heart was buried in the grave with Harry, or that she wanted her last remaining tie to her husband to be severed in the most public way:

  The tomb door was closed and people turned away. Lorraine scanned the crowd for Raymond Vallance and saw that he was in surprisingly heated conversation with Jose and Juana. He was certainly making a point of keeping his distance from Cindy, Lorraine thought, to whom he had not addressed a word. But as his exchange with the two Mexicans came to an end and they drifted away, she saw him glance in the girl’s direction. Sonja, she noted, was still beside the tomb.

  Cindy was looking bored by whatever the minister was saying to her and Kendall, and Lorraine decided to rescue her. ‘Cindy, I wonder if I could speak to you for a second,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I’m just going.’

  Cindy left Kendall with the clergyman. ‘You and me both,’ she said. ‘Jesus – I can’t stand to listen to Kendall saying she hasn’t eaten a thing since he died when all I can think about is how soon I can get a tuna melt. It’s the baby,’ she said, and Lorraine saw her eyes lock momentarily with Raymond Vallance’s. ‘It makes you crave weird things.’ Lorraine wondered whether it was just food she was talking about, but the girl said nothing more.

  Lorraine breezed into the office just before lunchtime to find Decker showing out two men in overalls. Half the beige carpet had been taken up in the reception area.

  Decker’s expression was uncharacteristically grim. ‘Lorraine,’ he said, ‘there’s been a . . . problem. Sit down for a moment. Somebody broke in and sprayed fucking acid over the tapes.’ He decided not to tell her about the photograph yet.

  ‘I see,’ Lorraine said, pushing her hand through her hair. ‘Well, that’s interesting. Cindy said no one else knew about them.’

  ‘Well, maybe she changed her mind about letting you listen to them,’ Decker said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Lorraine said, meditatively. ‘I can’t quite imagine her going to these lengths, though.’

  ‘Perhaps she has some more . . . extreme friends,’ Decker suggested. ‘Who was sh
e with at the funeral?’

  ‘Nobody. Though she was breaking her neck not to be seen looking at Mr Ageing Romeo himself, Raymond Vallance. Pouting and glowering on both sides, though – sexual tension you could cut with a knife.’

  ‘Raymond Vallance?’ Decker pulled a face. ‘I thought he was already planted out there. He must be about two hundred – the oldest living really terrible actor.’

  ‘Looks every day of it,’ Lorraine said. ‘Though perhaps the shock of losing his close friend Mr Nathan was affecting his looks. He and the mother were the only people to shed a tear.’

  ‘Actually,’ Decker began, serious now, ‘something else happened in the break-in.’ He picked up the photograph. ‘They did this.’ Lorraine’s face remained expressionless as she registered the damage. ‘It looks like a get-the-fuck-off-this-case message, wouldn’t you say?’

  Lorraine shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe something else. Maybe somebody who knows you,’ Decker went on. ‘It’s a really creepy thing to do, Lorraine. I knew you wouldn’t want me to call the police until you got back, but I really think you should. I mean, it’s like a threat.’

  ‘Well, thanks for the concern, Decker, but there’s no way I want the police knowing about either me or the tapes or that Cindy sent them here. I wish we’d got to listen to them, though. There must have been something on them that somebody didn’t want us to find.’

  ‘Well, we still have some . . .’ Decker said. ‘I took twenty home last night. But there’s nothing on any of the ones I’ve listened to so far.’

  ‘Sit down, boy wonder, I’ll make you some coffee – you deserve it.’ She smiled broadly. Clearly, as far as Lorraine was concerned, the subject of any personal danger was closed.

  But the knowledge that Cindy Nathan had lied to her burned at the back of Lorraine’s mind, and as soon as the office was back in shape she called her, only to be informed by Jose that Mrs Nathan was lying down after the stress of the funeral and could not come to the phone. He suggested she call again the following day.