Before I left the flat for the meet, I rang Jim Cotton at the cop shop to let him know what I was at. I didn’t want my visit getting back to him from one of the minions at the Berkshire. And it was also possible that Jim might hand me a smoke grenade to lob at Sami.
“Try and get him to turn on Billy Hairless,” said Jim. “Tell him you got it from me that Billy is blackmailing half the chamber using the same girl. If Sami bites at all, we own him—and he’ll give up Billy for Spotty John for sure. ”
Not for the first time I remarked how little difference there is between the policeman’s beat and the newspaperman’s. Except, of course, they get to shoot the people they don’t like while we have to settle for writing about them. On the plus side, hacks like me tend to get quicker and easier access to the great and the good—they don’t feel as threatened. The likes of Cotton, however, wouldn’t have had a prayer of negotiating a sit-down with Zucker without a court order—even if he had warm blood on both sleeves.
“Couple of other things might be worth your while to bounce off him,” said Jim. “We found a lap-dancing cage in an outhouse at the back of the Oxfordian that we think might be connected to Spotty John’s murder.”
“What the hell was one of those doing in the Oxfordian?”
“No idea. But the exact same cage was reported stolen from the Lap It Up Emporium on Ormeau Avenue last week. And you’ll never guess who owns Lap It Up . . .”
“Sam the Man?”
“You got it. And we’ve found a couple of thin bruises on John’s shoulder which the pathologist reckons could have got there when he tried to bust his way out of it.”
“You mean you can lock them?”
“Apparently.”
“Wow. Well, at least I know now what I want for my birthday.”
Cotton laughed appreciatively.
I struck him again while he still found me funny: “You said you’d a couple of things to ask him about. What’s the other?”
“Oh yeah. We checked up on that new Merc John got to drive in for two whole days.”
“What’d it run him?”
“Twenty grand exactly plus his four-year-old Beamer. But here’s the best part: he paid in cash. And the garage still had a batch of the notes.”
“They wouldn’t happen to match the ones Sami took from his personal account last week?”
“Not quite. But they do match a bunch from a bureau de change that we reckon Billy Hairless has a finger in.”
I sighed and shook my head. “The poor dead idiot. I warned him not to get in over his head.”
“Poor dead idiot is right,” said Jim. “Though of course you’re quite wrong. He wasn’t in over his head at all.”
I was momentarily baffled. “What do you mean?”
“The pool,” he said. “It was only four feet deep in the middle. Spotty John was five-four. So whatever else, he was swimming in his own depth.”
* * *
Zucker’s suite at the Berkshire took up the entire second-from-top floor, and his personal office was about as big as my home apartment and the one next door combined.
“Come in,” he said warmly, pointing me toward a bar that looked entirely made of cut glass. “It’s just gone one, so we can break open the gin.”
I demurred just unenthusiastically enough for him to pour me a treble and invite me to slump into a leather couch, as comfortable as a mother’s lap.
Up close, Sami was older and heavier than I would have thought from his TV appearances. His tightly cropped hair was Persil white, and his complexion was very pale, apart from a couple of little brown liver spots on his hands. He’d clearly spent a lot of money on his teeth, though, which were permanently fixed into a shit-eating grin. He sat down on his La-Z-Boy, wiped an imaginary speck of dust off the trouser leg of his five-thousand-dollar suit, and raised his glass. “To happy endings,” he announced.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my tape recorder. But he waved his hand no. “Everything today is off the record.” He gestured to a door in the corner. “That’s the bathroom in there,” he said, still smiling. “Now, go in and take off the wire you’ve wrapped around your waist, or I’ll have four of my men come up here and do it for you.”
I toasted him with the glass, got to my feet, and headed for the corner.
“Your editor’s a coward with a big mouth,” he explained, answering my next question.
Ninety seconds later, I handed him over the wire and bowed respectfully.
“Only the one?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I do hope you’re a man of your word.”
“I’m too frightened not to be,” I answered.
He chuckled. “Good. So, to business. For a start, I imagine you’re wondering why the hell I’m talking to you at all.”
“Close enough,” I said, figuring it was better than my opener.
“Fact is, your people tell me you’re a bright man, Rex. And you and I could be useful to one another, not just today, but down the line.”
I’d been accused of many things in my time, but bright was a first, so I allowed myself a grin. “I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “You’re a natural. You have two great attributes, Rex. The first is that you hear everything, which is very useful for a man like myself in the business world, and the second is you say nothing, which is possibly more useful still. Oh, and you’re also exactly smart enough to know your limitations, which means you never try to be too clever. And if there’s one thing I have no time for, Rex, it is people who are too clever. Because you have to waste so much damn time watching them—and so much damn energy trying to out-think them—that it’s easier in the long run not to have them round you at all.”
“Would that include people like Billy Black?”
“Ah, the late lamented Billy Hairless.” He sighed, and his face seemed to sadden, though his eyes were still smiling.
“What do you mean late lamented?”
He pulled a face like a man at his very first acting class pretending to be astonished. “You mean you haven’t heard? The police went to Billy’s flat this morning to question him about a horrific incident at the Oxfordian. It seems some poor court clerk was killed up there a few days back. But when the police burst in on Billy, he pulled a gun on them. And I’m afraid, after that, there was only going to be one winner.”
“Dead?”
“As an old joke, and it seems the malicious allegations which poor Billy had been making against many pillars of our society have died with him. Coincidentally, it was your chum Inspector Cotton who dispatched him.”
I was stunned. “Jim Cotton?”
“Oh yes.” And all of a sudden Zucker’s dancing blue eyes turned cold and grey. “Split John’s big bald head open like a watermelon.” He paused and stared at me menacingly. “Best ten grand I ever spent.”
I had a sudden urge to vomit. Cotton was the nearest thing to straight you’d ever find in the cops. I quickly put my drink on the coffee table and half-staggered to my feet to go. Face flushed and heart pounding.
“Oh settle yourself,” said Zucker, the genial host again. “I don’t want to harm you. Not when I need you to do me such a big favour.”
The new shirt was sticking to my back with sweat. I looked again at the hall door and shook my head. “I’m not for sale.”
“I never thought you were,” he said. And he flapped his hand at me to sit again.
Slowly, I did as I was bid. Truth is, I didn’t know where else to go.
“I don’t want you to lie for me,” he went on. “I’ve enough people for that.”
“Well, what then?”
“I want you to tell the truth. Not about Cotton and Billy—no, you ever do that and you’ll go the same way yourself. But about Spotty John.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s simple. The cops are 100 percent sure Billy killed John. And there’s no one in the press who will doubt it either. Billy was an evi
l little sewer-dweller. He had the motive—and he had the form. Open and shut. Except . . .”
“Except what?”
“Well, it would be just perfect if Billy’s involvement could be, ah, corroborated by an outside source.”
“How do you mean?”
“If someone were to come forward and say that they knew how Billy had killed poor Mr. Norway. That would divert attention away from the cops’ accidental eradication of Mr. Black—and give the ombudsman enough to say Jim Cotton was damn right to go in with arms held high.”
“You mean you want me to frame Billy Hairless, posthumously?”
“Lord no. You won’t be framing anyone. Billy sent that man to a horrible end. Don’t doubt it. But it’ll look better if the story is coming from outside the camp. For example, Rex, you’ve spoken to Billy many times through your work. You could exclusively reveal that he had once suggested carrying out a carbon-copy murder on an informer he was trying to track down in his ranks.”
“And I suppose I alerted Jim Cotton to this just five minutes before he kicked down Billy’s door?”
“Precisely. Might even win yourself a press award out of it. Not to mention that news editor’s job. Plus, my own undying gratitude and a very decent wedding present. Very, very decent. Certainly as decent as the one Jim Cotton got.”
“Only problem is, I’ve no idea what happened.”
“Good point,” he said. And he was smiling, mouth and eyes, again. “So listen up carefully . . .”
* * *
Four hours later, I finished typing up my copy and e-mailed it through to Mike Mortimer, marked H.F.C.—our in-house code for Highly Confidential. In law, you can write what you want about a dead man. And I knew there’d be all manner of fanciful stories about Billy Hairless across the press the following morning, from girls to gambling to a string of gutted corpses.
But I didn’t want anyone else from the pack getting a look at what I’d got. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, I, Rex King, had struck gold.
The story began forty years earlier, when Billy was a child. A nasty-tempered brown rat took up residence in the family’s outside toilet and refused to leave, or indeed eat Billy’s mother’s poisoned cheese. Old Pa Hairless, however, was a very resourceful man and built a self-locking cage, which he laced with fresh chocolate. Sure enough, the rat got himself trapped—and it was eight-year-old Billy Junior who got the honour of disposing of the still-live pest. So he took the cage to a nearby ditch and attempted to submerge the rat in the water. The difficulty was that even when he took the cage to the deepest part of the ditch, the rat was just big enough to stand up on his hind legs and get his nose above the Plimsoll line. Then Billy had a brainwave. He went home and boiled up a kettle on the stove. Half an hour later, a drowned rat with a burnt snout was floating toes-up in the ditch.
Enticing Spotty John into the lap-dancing cage had proved just as easy. Billy Hairless knew his mark—all it took was an open door and a fifty-pound note. They’d then taken him from Lap It Up to the Oxfordian in a van, after hours, and used John’s key to let themselves into the pool area, before playing four rounds of Boil the Tea Urn. Security, it seems, had been off on the sick.
John, I speculated in my article, took at least forty-five minutes to die. Though off the record, Sami told me it was closer to an hour and a half. At least that’s how long it took Billy to ring him to tell him the job had been finished. Not that Sami was too concerned about the delay, mind. He’d had to give Billy two hundred grand of his private stash to pay off the shakedown. John, however, hadn’t managed to divulge where he’d stashed the rest of the loot—and took the secret with him to his boiling grave. That’s the damn problem with employing help who shoot first and ask questions later, Sami had told me.
Ten minutes after I sent the exclusive through to the news desk, I got a three-word reply back from Mike Mortimer: The job’s yours.
I double-punched the air and looked round at the dozen or so others in the room. My subordinates. My staff. My minions. I owned them now.
Not for long though.
My desk phone rang.
It was her. Shit. Shit. Shit. And I knew before she’d the first word out that she’d come home from London a day early.
“I got your note,” she said, choking back a scream. “Five years, and it comes to this. You dirty, low-down bastard. You couldn’t even tell me to my face.”
“I can’t talk now,” I whispered. “I’m in conference.”
“You’re scum.”
The phone line went dead and I felt a momentary pang of guilt.
Within seconds it rang again.
“Mr. King?”
“Yes.”
“Thomas Cook Travel here. Just to confirm we got you on that flight from Belfast International to New York at four thirty tomorrow morning. First class, one way, eight hundred pounds.”
“Perfect. Many thanks.”
I hung up and waved through the window wall to Mike Mortimer, who was clearly on the line to the higher-ups bumming about his upcoming Pulitzer. He gave me a big thumbs-up, then made a drinking gesture with his free hand. I shook my head no then flicked my eyebrows upward so he’d understand it was woman trouble. I was going to miss him. The gutless prat.
The desk phone rang again. The final call. Long distance this time.
“Mr. King?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Joanne here from St Kitt’s International Finance. We’ve processed that payment to your account. If you’d like to call into our Manhattan office on Fourth Avenue any day this week and sign the authority, you can make the withdrawal.”
“The full amount?”
“Well, we’d prefer you’d leave the account open . . .”
“Naturally—will do.”
“But there’s no problem with you taking out, say, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars—as long as you leave in the other ten.”
“Good to hear.”
“Oh, and bring your passport.”
“I will indeed.”
Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Plus the ten grand sterling wedding gift Sami had handed me in an envelope before I left the Berkshire. A lot of bread for a guy who three weeks ago had no ass in his trousers and no needle to sew them.
Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Just a few cents shy of one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. And no one knows I have it, and no one’s going to miss me when I’m gone.
Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. By rights, of course, it should have been a straight two hundred grand. But then I had to give Spotty John his ten percent finder’s fee. After all, a deal is a deal. The poor dead idiot. I told him not to buy that Merc.
PART IV
BRAVE NEW CITY
CORPSE FLOWERS
BY EOIN MCNAMEE
Ormeau Embankment
UTV News live shot, 5:23 p.m., 23/05/13
Press conference. CID say they are concerned about the whereabouts of Lorna Donnelly, age seventeen, from Lisburn. Last seen leaving her place of work on 13/05/13. The lead detective is DI Jim McCaul. McCaul is early forties, CID, short sandy hair. Lorna’s parents sit to either side of McCaul. Lorna’s mother is Kay. She keeps her eyes on the floor. As if she keeps some private grief under scrutiny. If she takes her eyes off it, it might get away from her. Lorna’s father is Norman. An older man. He is strongly built. There’s a steroid mass under his blue shirt. Tattoos on his arms.
McCaul holds up a photograph of Lorna. She is younger in the photograph. Her hair hangs about her face. She looks sullen. A teenage runaway. McCaul thinking about teenage runaways from the films, some backwoods couple on the lam leaving behind a trail of multiple homicides. Bound to each other by a darkness of their own making.
He shows a still taken from CCTV at Belfast Met where Lorna attends a part-time course. She’s looking at the camera in black-and-white. McCaul thinks that her face is desolate. He knows that it will haunt him. As though she had seen some
horror. Not just seen. He remembers the words they used in chapel in the days when he went to chapel with his wife. Gazed upon. She looked as if she had gazed upon horror. Record this look is what she seems to be saying. Remember it.
Traffic cam #1, Shaftsbury Square, 9:48 p.m., 20/05/13
First breakthrough. Lorna standing at the cash machine on the corner of Botanic Avenue. An overexposed night scene, a lens flare from the top right-hand corner, people passing through the frame looking stealthy and achromatic, part of some grisly underclass. There’s always the feeling that you’re witnessing someone’s last moments. Even like now when you are witnessing someone’s last moments. The juddery rewind, the uneven tail speed.
CID say do every bar and club on the street. Take the CCTV footage. Spend fourteen-hour shifts watching every frame. Nobody’s going home until it is all seen.
Submariner Bar, 11:22 p.m., 20/05/13
Saturday-night CCTV. Security men at bar doors. Girls in heels and beehives. The camera not picking up the detail that gives the place its modish jolt. McCaul observes the ’50s look right down to the scratchy film stock from nostalgia shows. The girls are Doris Day–blonde beehive and falsies. Brassy and tottering with Smirnoff naggins in their handbags. Knowing tarts. Security in evening dress and black tie, hair slicked back so you’re thinking Kray Twins, Ronnie and Reggie. The night gathering in layers. Somebody’s going to get their smile widened with a razor. Somebody’s going to end up as motorway road fill.
Security bantering with the beehives. Lorna walks past them. Not belonging in the scene. Not belonging with the ’50s look. Lorna wearing a puffa jacket, jeans, and trainers. As soon as he sees it he knows that she is no longer alive. McCaul imagines the clothes scattered across waste ground. You see them in cellophane bags, evidence tagged. A livery for the modern dead.
Submariner barcam, 12:15 a.m., 21/05/13
The anti-pilferage camera’s focussed on the bargirl who has her back to the camera. But it picks up the end of the bar in longshot. Lorna’s leaning on the bar talking to someone just out of shot. She’s intent. Stabbing the Formica with her finger. A man’s hand rests on the bar. That’s all you can see. As she talks the hand doesn’t move. She keeps talking. You’re thinking amphetamine rush. The bartender’s a sallow girl, Latvian, product of some gritty Baltic seaport. Life in the places left behind after history has had its way. CID says bring her in.
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