Cold Heart

by Lynda La Plante

‘Good morning, Carina.’ She smiled at the pretty blonde girl on the desk, whose name she now knew from the plate standing in front of her.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Page,’ said the receptionist. ‘The papers are here if you’d like one to take in with you.’ Lorraine picked up a New York Times and scanned the headlines.

  ‘There never seems to be anything but gloom and doom in the city, does there?’ she said, putting the paper down. ‘I think I’ll just enjoy the peace here for another day.’

  That surely should have elicited any news of either a shooting or a suicide in the locality, Lorraine thought, but Carina simply smiled again. ‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘Save your strength for LA.’

  Lorraine walked into the room where breakfast was served, and found Raymond Vallance, sitting at a table with his large lady companion. He was now wearing a tweed suit and a battered pair of brogues, and was sitting ramrod straight in the dining chair, cracking the pages of his newspaper like whipcord, wearing an expression he clearly considered aloof and patrician. He seemed almost to have absorbed a new personality, aristocratic, European from the costume, or perhaps, Lorraine thought, this was his heterosexual persona.

  She walked towards their table. ‘Good morning, Mr Vallance,’ she said brightly. ‘How’re things at Fox today?’

  Vallance glared at her.

  ‘Oh, Raymond,’ his companion cried, ‘is this one of your Hollywood friends?’

  ‘Mrs Page and I have met in Los Angeles,’ Vallance said curtly.

  ‘We have a lot of friends in common,’ Lorraine went on smoothly. ‘I saw Sonja last night, for example.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Vallance said. ‘I must try to see her today.’ He looked at Lorraine with eyes like stones.

  ‘Who is that, pumpkin?’ asked the lady innocently. ‘I wish you’d introduce me to more of your friends.’

  ‘The former wife of . . . a close friend,’ Vallance said. ‘It’s a condolence call. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to attend.’

  ‘Apparently Sonja gets the whole of the estate now,’ Lorraine went on, observing Vallance closely. ‘The consequence of the tax-saving clause, the lawyers tell me. The other two wives died within a survivorship period and the gifts to them never took effect. It expired last night, it seems.’

  ‘So I suppose you and Sonja had a little celebration?’ Vallance said nastily. ‘Burned one of those effigies of Harry she keeps turning out, perhaps? What’ll she do for art now, poor dear?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say we were celebrating,’ Lorraine said circumspectly.

  ‘I really must try to call on her later,’ Vallance said. ‘Take my last look before she kills herself or goes up in smoke. Harry’s estate doesn’t seem to bring his ex-wives much luck, does it? You’ll be glad to get well clear of it, I’m sure.’

  Was she imagining it, or was Vallance looking at her as if he expected her to take some other meaning from his words? A coded boast about the deaths of Cindy and Kendall? A threat to Sonja – or even to herself?

  ‘I’m still working for Harry’s lawyer, actually,’ she said. ‘So I’ll be involved for a while.’

  Well,’ Vallance said, ‘see you around.’ He raised his newspaper again and Lorraine realized she was dismissed.

  She sat down at another table and ordered breakfast, wondering whether she should bother to call Sonja and say that Vallance was still hanging around, then decided not to – she was retained to investigate the art fraud, not as minder to Harry Nathan’s ex-wife, and besides, Sonja had Arthur to do that for her. Poor Arthur.

  Half an hour later she was ready to check out. There was no one at the desk, so she decided to walk to the bookstore again for something to read on the bus. She was barely out of the door when she heard a car engine revving. She looked across the street to see the Blazer being wrenched backwards and forwards as the driver tried inexpertly to manoeuvre it into a parking space. Eventually, Arthur opened the door and got out, leaving the vehicle parked at an angle: it was immediately apparent that he was drunk.

  Lorraine hurried across the street. ‘Arthur!’ she called. ‘Are you OK? Did something happen?’

  Arthur looked at her, his face drawn with strain, but blurred and slackened with drink too. ‘Well,’ he said, making an effort to talk coherently, ‘not really. Nothing new.’

  ‘Is Sonja OK?’

  ‘She’s the same as she always is.’ The man’s bleakness made Lorraine decide she could spare half an hour to try to sober him up.

  ‘Give me the keys and I’ll move the jeep,’ she said, ‘and then why don’t we get a cup of coffee in the hotel? I haven’t checked out yet.’

  ‘Sure,’ Arthur agreed spiritlessly. Lorraine reparked the jeep and they crossed back to the Maidstone Arms. Vallance and his companion had gone, Lorraine noticed, as they walked into the dining room, though breakfast was still being served. She ordered a pot of black coffee and a quart bottle of mineral water.

  ‘So,’ she said, when the waiter had left them, ‘what happened?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, I guess,’ Arthur said, with a grimace. He took a swallow of the coffee, and seemed undisposed to say any more.

  ‘Come on, Arthur,’ Lorraine said. ‘Call me naïve, but I don’t have you down for someone who gets pie-eyed by ten thirty a.m. as a matter of routine. What did you do, stay up all night?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ he said.

  ‘Celebrating Sonja’s inheritance?’ Lorraine probed: she had a feeling that this would hit a sore spot.

  ‘Christ!’ Arthur swore at her. ‘When the fuck is she going to be free of that man? She was in a bad enough state while he was still alive, but now that he’s dead she’s worse.’ He took another mouthful of coffee, his hands shaking.

  ‘Drink some water,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s better for you than that stuff.’ She poured a glass for him, but Arthur did not move. ‘Arthur,’ she said gently, ‘I could see Sonja was pretty close to the edge last night. I know you care about her but it won’t do her any good if you let her drag you over too.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She would have gone over if you hadn’t been there last night. I knew that stuff about waiting with a gun for Vallance was a lot of bullshit.’

  ‘He didn’t show up, then?’ Lorraine asked.

  ‘No. I don’t think he has the balls to do much of anything, though he has an ugly mouth.’ He picked up the glass of water and drank. ‘I didn’t know she had a gun in the house,’ he went on. ‘She wouldn’t give it to me.’ He caught Lorraine’s eye, and she got the message that he regarded the situation as serious.

  ‘Did you have a fight?’ she asked.

  ‘Kind of He gave a low, wry laugh. ‘She started watching these weird videotapes the police in California sent out to her – horrible, kinky stuff with Nathan and a bunch of other people. She kept saying how disgusting they were, how low Harry’d sunk, but she was fascinated. That’s what she’s like with him. That’s how I ended up drinking the best part of a bottle of Bourbon and taking off.’

  ‘Heavy,’ Lorraine said.

  ‘Oh, just the usual late-night special,’ Arthur said. ‘I can’t take a hell of a lot more of this. She’s been all over the place since Nathan’s death.’

  Lorraine was intrigued. ‘What the hell was it Nathan had, to have all these people carrying on about him for twenty years? I’m sorry, but I’ve been picking my way through every detail of this guy’s life and I still feel like I don’t have a handle on what he was really like.’

  ‘That was the key to Harry,’ Arthur said. ‘He was plastic. He was a chameleon. He was beautiful, of course. He could turn every woman’s head walking down the street when he was young.’

  ‘You knew him and Sonja then?’ Lorraine asked.

  ‘Oh, yeah. I’m the fucking jerk who introduced them,’ Arthur said. ‘I met her first – she was painting then.’

  ‘I didn’t know Sonja painted,’ Lorraine said, registering that piece of information with interest.

&nb
sp; ‘Well, it wasn’t her real talent, but she was taught like everyone else in art school and she was competent. She was living with some rich old guy, but it was clear she was bored. I had a few dates with her – never really got past first base. I knew she was looking for some kind of intensity, that she thought I was pretty fucking boring, and I suppose I introduced her to Nathan and Vallance to show her, you know, that I wasn’t that straight because I had these wild, crazy friends.’

  ‘How did you first meet Harry Nathan?’ Lorraine asked.

  We were at college together. He got kicked out. It was the hippie days, and he was an acid freak. He was trying to get a career together as a director, didn’t have a dime, and I never thought he and Sonja’d get together in a million years. Sonja was a real ice princess in those days, always living with someone with old masters on the walls, and Harry was so tacky – picking up girls in bars and living on tacos.’

  ‘Must have been the attraction of opposites.’

  ‘Yeah, bang, as soon as they met. A lot of it was just physical, I think, but the big deal about Harry was that he was a kind of blank space on which other people could write whatever they wanted – the stuff he made as a director was exactly like that too, reflections, if you see what I mean, rather than anything genuinely his own. Even Sonja admits that she kind of hypnotized herself with her own illusion of what he was like.’

  ‘But you love her anyway?’ Lorraine said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I love her – I’d walk on hot coals for her.’ He spoke quietly and directly, looking Lorraine straight in the face, and she knew that his anger had passed and that he was telling her the simple truth. ‘I waited fifteen years to get her back from that asshole Nathan, and I knew he still had part of her, maybe the deepest part, but I can wait another fifteen years to get that back too. It’ll end. I know it will.’

  Though it certainly didn’t show any sign of ending any time soon, Lorraine thought privately. Another raft of speculation floated into her mind. Could Arthur have killed Nathan? Either because Sonja had asked him to, or out of a belief that while he was alive, Sonja would never get over her obsession with him?

  ‘Were you still in contact with Sonja and Nathan when he bought the gallery?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Arthur said, ‘I couldn’t stand to see her with him – couldn’t stand to see her being fooled by him. And I was damned if I was going to hang around like the bad fairy, having lunch with Sonja once a month and hoping Nathan’d get hit by a truck. The way fucking Vallance did.’

  ‘Do you still see Vallance?’

  ‘Not if I can avoid it.’

  Lorraine changed tack. ‘Did Sonja mention to you what I came out here to investigate?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really. She just said you were tracing some assets belonging to the estate.’

  ‘Well, I am, in a way,’ said Lorraine. ‘She seems very detached about it all – I mean, she gets the house, and anything I can trace will go to her too.’

  ‘She’ll never live in that place again,’ Arthur said. ‘I don’t think she cares much about the money either – she has other assets of her own.’

  ‘You probably know that Harry Nathan’s major asset was supposed to be his art collection,’ Lorraine said, and thought that a trace of tension entered Arthur’s manner.

  ‘Oh, really?’ he said. ‘I hadn’t given it a lot of thought.’

  ‘Well, it turns out that the major pieces in the collection were acquired by fraud. He and Kendall Nathan sold various paintings to people with no experience of the art market, then delivered fakes. Kendall thought all the real stuff was hanging in Nathan’s house, but it seems that he pulled the same move again on her. All his own collection was fake too.’

  ‘Serves her right,’ Arthur said.

  ‘Did you meet her?’ Lorraine asked.

  ‘Just once or twice,’ Arthur said coolly. ‘So, you’re trying to trace the paintings?’

  Lorraine nodded. ‘That or the profits of the sale. Nathan used a lot of aliases, and he must have had secret bank accounts.’

  ‘Well, they could be anywhere by now,’ Arthur said. ‘People buy hot art work and keep it in a cellar for thirty years.’

  ‘But the money must be somewhere,’ Lorraine persisted.

  ‘Well, he was a film producer, wasn’t he? Surely the quickest way to make a lot of money disappear in LA is to pour it into some godawful movie. Nathan’s career was in trouble, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll ask Feinstein to go through the books at Maximedia again,’ Lorraine said. ‘Though I’m sure he’ll already have done so pretty thoroughly.’

  ‘Or, of course, Nathan could have had other production companies.’ Arthur seemed to be pushing this hypothesis, and though it was plausible enough, Lorraine wondered whether he might be trying to lead her down a blind alley – away from his beloved Sonja – and she moved back into the terrain where her true suspicions lay.

  ‘Sonja didn’t keep in touch with Harry after they divorced?’ she asked carefully. ‘I mean, she told me she didn’t, but I wondered whether maybe she continued to see him from time to time – maybe didn’t want you to know. Did you ever suspect anything like that was going on?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Arthur said evenly, and Lorraine was reminded of the housekeeper, Juana, that an unshakeable loyalty stood between her and the truth. He had already said that Sonja periodically took off, that often he did not know where she was or where she had been. ‘If you’re looking to trace off-record contacts of Nathan’s in the art world, I’d start with his brother,’ he went on.

  ‘I saw a guy with a ponytail at the funeral, looked like Nathan. Was that him?’

  ‘Yes, there were only the two of them, Harry and Nick. The mother had a weird relationship with them both.’

  ‘Is Nick a dealer?’ Lorraine asked.

  ‘No,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s a painter.’

  That was interesting. Lorraine had felt she was getting nowhere with the case, but this sounded like the missing puzzle piece she had been searching for. She could have kicked herself for not investigating Nathan’s family earlier – it was extraordinary how often what you were looking for was right under your nose. ‘Was he any good?’ she asked.

  Arthur looked out of the window. ‘Not bad – erratic, spoiled, a hysteric. Nick was very like Harry, you know, always in search of himself, and it showed in a sporadic, slapdash quality in his work. He was reasonably talented, but he would get into deep depressions. He wanted fame and fortune, but then he would switch styles to accommodate a buyer. He had a number of faithful collectors, but a few thousand dollars here and there couldn’t keep him and the woman he always had in tow – can’t recall her name.’

  ‘Do you know where I can find him?’ she said.

  ‘Nope – he took off with the woman to Santa Fe. I don’t think he and Kendall got on – she was jealous of everyone close to Harry, you know, kind of eased them out one by one.’

  ‘Who do you think killed Harry Nathan?’ Lorraine asked. She figured it was worth asking everyone who had known him. It couldn’t do any harm.

  Arthur turned away. ‘I should have.’

  ‘But you didn’t, did you?’

  ‘No,’ he said simply.

  A waiter suddenly appeared to tell Lorraine that there was a call for her. She excused herself to go and take it, knowing that the thread of the conversation had now been broken, and that she had lost Arthur.

  The call was from Feinstein. Lorraine told him curtly that she now had a lead on the forger and would be following it up.

  When she returned to the dining room, Arthur was on his feet. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I must get back to her. Thanks – it was nice talking to you, and I hope you have a good trip back.’

  Lorraine went up to her room to collect her bag, leaving her door slightly open. Outside she heard the voice of Raymond Vallance’s ladyfriend, and listened carefully.

  ‘Did you book a table?’ She must be talking about lu
nch: it was after twelve o’clock now, Lorraine realized.

  ‘Sure.’ That was Vallance.

  ‘You certainly took your goddamned time. I’ve been sitting up here in this hideous fucking place.’ She seemed very much in charge – no wonder, since presumably she was picking up the bill. ‘I wanna eat and then check out. I want to stay at the America Hotel in Sag Harbor. Book us in there.’

  ‘This is one of the best hotels in East Hampton, for God’s sake. I know the people here, and there’s nothing wrong with the room, but if that’s what you want . . .’ Vallance sounded bored.

  ‘Yes, it is, and as I’m paying, there won’t be any argument, will there? Now let’s go down and eat.’

  ‘Do you mind if I just freshen up?’ Vallance snapped.

  ‘Fine, I’ll see you in the dining room.’

  Lorraine inched towards her door as the door to the next room banged shut and the large blonde woman walked past. Lorraine hesitated: should she talk to Vallance about Nathan’s brother? Then she heard his voice again: he was clearly talking on the phone.

  ‘Sonja? Don’t hang up.’ His voice was cajoling. ‘Just hear me out. I’d really like for us to meet, just for old times’ sake. I mean, Harry’s dead now, and that hurts both of us. I know he’d hate to think of us being this way with one another.’ His voice was syrupy, nauseating. ‘Can’t we just call it all quits now he’s gone? I’d just like to see you for a few minutes.’ There was a pause, during which Vallance presumably listened to Sonja’s response. ‘Sure, sure – let me give you my mobile number.’ He dictated a number, then a moment later, Lorraine heard his voice rise in surprise. ‘Sonja?’ She had hung up.

  Lorraine felt the familiar quickening of her pulse, an impulse to shadow Vallance and go after him if he went after Sonja, the old thrill of the chase. She knew, though, that she would have to put it aside: it was not what she was paid to do, and Sonja and Arthur would find any further contact from her an intrusion. Besides, she would have to start resisting the urge to seek, to follow, to know, if she intended taking up a career as a cupcake baker and maybe . . . Well, maybe something else.