Stop it! I told myself. You never wanted Max when he wanted you so why should you deny him Paula? In any case it wasn’t as if there was even room in the cabin for me to have them to stay.
“Jesus!” I whispered to Cath when I followed her into the kitchen to help serve the fish pie. “How do you put up with it?”
“Oh, she’s harmless enough,” said Cath, “and it’s all about sex, isn’t it? Poor old Max didn’t get any for five years after his wife died and now he’s getting shagged senseless every night, probably every fifteen minutes for all we know. He doesn’t know what’s hit him.”
Richie, bless him, eased me into the conversation over the coffee.
“So, I told you about Lee working with Shotgun Marriott, sir.”
“How many times have I told you not to call me sir when we’re off duty,” said Max.
“Call him Maxie like I do,” Paula giggled. I derived a small amount of satisfaction from seeing Max look at Richie in alarm and shake his head.
“Hell of a thing his son getting killed,” said Max, looking directly at me for the first time. “You were there when that happened?”
I nodded. “And Bettina Pleshette. Her body was found in the woods, on Shotgun Marriott’s land.”
“You don’t mean the Shotgun Marriott? And you’re involved in a murder in the Hamptons?” Paula’s eyes had opened very wide. “Maxie’s been holding out on me. Tell us everything. Don’t leave nothing out.” She reached across the table and patted my arm. “Go on.”
And then Max surprised me. “Not now, Paula. She’s working on a book. It’s like my investigations, she can’t talk about it.” His voice was gruff and a flicker of hurt crossed Paula’s face. I felt sorry for her. In my experience Max had never bothered much with tact or sensitivity and it was clear that he shut her out of his professional life. I saw Richie and Cath exchange glances and then Cath asked Paula if she’d tried the new Safeway that had opened up in her area. Richie asked me if I was still in touch with Selma Walker, the soap opera star whose autobiography I was working on when Max had been investigating the arson murders in the Notting Hill area, one of which had taken place at the bottom of our garden. Max was silent while I filled Richie in until Paula picked up on what I was talking about and wanted to know all about Selma.
“Why don’t you just read her bloody book like everyone else?” Max snapped at her.
Why did he do it? I wondered. He was a tough detective, his heart long since hardened to granite against the murderers he hounded. But outside of his job I recalled touching glimpses of a rather vulnerable person, a helpless widower trying to cope with his laundry and preparing solitary meals without his wife to look after him. I’d braced myself once or twice against the aftereffects of his sharp tongue but more than anything I had felt sorry for him. Because of this I had been unable to think of him as anything other than a sad suit when he’d tentatively voiced his feelings for me.
“So you’re a writer then?” said Paula. “You must be so clever.”
I saw a harmless way to keep her enthralled and launched into a series of behind-the-scenes anecdotes of some of the celebrities whose books I’d ghosted. After all, I was only repeating what was already in the books, which clearly she was never likely to read.
But when the evening broke up I was in for another surprise. Max said his good-byes, ushered Paula out the door ahead of him, and then turned back to me.
“I’d like to hear about the Shotgun Marriott case,” he said to me almost under his breath. “Fancy getting together in the next day or so?”
He was looking right into my eyes, and I looked right back at him and nodded.
“Right then,” he said loudly. “Good to see you again, Lee.” And then he mouthed “I’ll call you tomorrow” and was gone.
“I saw that.” Cath was standing right behind me. “Looks to me as if his torch is still burning.”
I went home and dreamed about Max and woke up with violent feelings of guilt that prompted me to call Tommy as soon as I’d made myself some coffee.
“Know what I’ve been doing to keep me busy in the evenings and stop me from feeling a bit lonesome? I’ve been cooking,” said Tommy cheerfully, “practicing for when you come back. I’ve decided I’m going to take care of you while you write. Your idea of cooking is to open a can of tuna and that’s not good enough, Lee. I’m going to nourish you properly,” he was literally savoring the word “nourish,” “so I’m trying out some recipes while you’re away.”
I’ve got nothing to write, I’m probably not coming back, and I’ve been cooking perfectly well for you on and off for the past nine years, I mouthed silently down the phone. And if you’re eating the fruits of those recipes all by yourself then you need to stop right now, Tommy, you’re too bloody fat as it is.
“So when are you coming back?” His voice was a little more tentative now. “Because I miss you. I thought I’d let you know that.”
I thought I’d let you know that. What was that supposed to mean? You didn’t spend time sitting around thinking you were going to tell someone you missed them. You came right out and said it—spontaneously.
But I recognized the tone of his voice. He was unsure of his ground. He wanted me back where he could look into my eyes and see just what state I was in. If I was neurotic and crabby and standing right in front of him, it was a piece of cake as far as he was concerned. He knew just how to handle me. But he was no good at dealing with me over the phone.
“Tommy,” I said, “just don’t make too much of a mess. Please!”
I hung up on the sound of him spluttering at the other end of the line. It sounded like he’d just stuffed something into his mouth and was trying to speak at the same time.
Max called me about an hour later and suggested we meet for lunch at a Thai restaurant I’d never heard of. It was called Number One Café and turned out to be a stone’s throw from Wormwood Scrubs prison. When I asked him why he had dragged me up to that neck of the woods, he didn’t answer and it dawned on me that he must be conducting a murder investigation nearby.
It took us a moment or two to settle down at the table he selected by the window. He sat down opposite me and stretched his legs but there just wasn’t room under the table to accommodate them. Max is a beanpole. His feet shot into my shins, causing me to yelp in pain. We both shifted instinctively to another chair and the same thing happened again. Finally, in desperation, I got up and went around the table to sit beside him but when he decided to take off his jacket, his long arms flailed and he narrowly avoided digging his elbow into me.
I returned to my original position and placed myself at an angle. He had hung his jacket over the chair and I saw the label: Ralph Lauren’s Polo. A designer label but this jacket was seriously dated. He’d probably bought it at a cancer research charity shop in 1988. He saw me looking at his tie, a garish lapping tongue of maroon and white against his gray shirt. Undoubtedly a gift from Paula. It was a warm day for London and he removed the tie, undid the top button of his collar, and rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing unusually hairy forearms.
They had an unsettling effect on me, along with his brown eyes, soft and liquid one minute and boring into me like an eagle’s the next.
“Nice evening last night,” I commented, hiding from his gaze behind the menu.
“What do they think of Paula? Have they said?” He leaned across the table and I signaled the waitress for a beer while I tried to think what to say. “They don’t like her much, do they?”
“Actually,” I said carefully, “I think they do. More important, do you like her?”
“I have no idea,” he said and I looked at him in astonishment. “I mean, I just haven’t really stopped to think. I got so fed up with people trying to fix me up with bitter middle-aged divorcées, I told myself the minute a youngish, single, reasonably attractive female presented herself, I’d go for it just to knock the bloody matchmaking on the head. There’s a bonus,” he fingered his shirt and gave
me a sheepish look, “she takes care of my laundry.”
I laughed. There had been a time when I had felt so sorry for him, I’d done his laundry at Blenheim Crescent.
“Anyway,” he said quietly, “you were spoken for. I thought I’d just better get on with it. Can’t hang around being a moody old misery all my life waiting for you to notice me. Although Richie said you didn’t get married after all, ran away to America instead.”
It wasn’t a question. He’d done his usual trick of leading me down one path—no point pinning my hopes on you—and then abruptly switching tracks—but you didn’t get married after all—and catching me unawares.
I took a swig of my beer and eyed him down the side of the bottle.
“Tommy canceled the wedding, not me.”
“Why on earth did he do that?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” I said.
“Well,” he said slowly, “let me know when you do. Or don’t.”
He’d never actually come out and told me that he liked me, fancied me. Never flattered me, bought me a gift, or romanced me in any way. His behavior, as befitted the professional relationship that we had—he was investigating a murder and I was one of the people helping him with his inquiries—had been impeccable at all times. Yet it was clear to Cath—and ultimately to me—that he was besotted with me.
I wanted to tell him that if he were to have any hope of success with me he would have to be much more assertive. I was too shy to take the initiative myself. I needed him to be the first to make physical contact, to clasp my hand across the table, to flick an imaginary crumb away from the side of my mouth. In the past, apart from a quick peck on the cheek I’d given him without thinking, we’d barely touched.
And that was when I realized that if he ever did reach out for me, I might not be responsible for my actions. He had done absolutely nothing a man normally did when he was attracted to a woman. He had merely offered a few half-baked intimations that he was interested in me and seemed to expect that that would do the trick.
Yet my reaction to Paula’s presence in his life had shown me that I was a little more interested in him than I had bargained for.
I forced my thoughts to turn to food before I gave myself away. I ordered what I always ordered in Thai restaurants—chicken satay and pad thai—and then left them congealing on my plate as I talked him through the events surrounding the murders of Sean Marriott and Bettina. I talked for a long time, taking care to include every single detail. I was aware of him finishing the contents of his own plate and reaching across the table to pluck a few mouthfuls from mine.
“I don’t like Shotgun Marriott for those murders, not at all,” he said finally, when we had ordered coffee.
This gave me a jolt. “You don’t? Why not?”
“Well, do you?”
“Well, no. Not really.”
“Why is that then?”
I looked at him. “If I tell you, promise not to tell me I’m pathetic?” He didn’t say anything. “It’s just that—I liked him,” I continued. “I can’t see him killing someone.”
“Well, there you are,” said Max. “That’s my instinct too. I met him, don’t forget. Long time ago but I remember him pretty well. I liked him too. Not what I was expecting.”
“But surely in your”—I paused, wondering how best to describe hunting down cold-blooded killers—“in your line of work you must come across loads of people who seem really charming. And then they turn out to have—I don’t know—cut someone up and buried them in the garden.”
“Oh yes,” said Max, smiling at me in the rather patronizing way I remembered so well, “at least two or three before lunch every day. No, the thing is that they might be charming as hell but I’ve never liked a killer, personally I mean. It’s one of the hunches I try to stick to. Arrogant maybe, complacent, but you have to have something. And I think if you liked Shotgun Marriott too, for what it’s worth, that doubles the odds in his favor in my book. Innocent, I mean.”
“Well then, how do you work this out?” and I told him about Angie Marriott wanting to tell her story.
He stared at me for quite a long time. “And she requested this meeting?” I nodded. “Well then, I’m going to have to go away and think about that for quite a while and get back to you. And someone’s going to have to have a little talk with Mrs. Marriott. She and Shotgun, they both said independently that she was asleep all night at their house. The whole point of Shotgun having this separate apartment was that it was somewhere he could go after a concert and then she wouldn’t be disturbed.” He was getting pretty worked up now.
“Didn’t you talk to her when you were on the case?” I asked him.
“My superior interviewed her. And Shotgun. I was in the room. I was pretty junior back then, you know? She must have lied through her teeth, said she was tucked up in bed at home, never went near her husband’s apartment. Beautiful woman,” he added after a second.
I interlaced my fingers tightly under the table. He’d never told me I was beautiful.
“Of course we found her prints all over the place but she said she’d been there earlier in the day to check everything was okay for him. I have to say I thought that was a bit odd at the time. When we went to the house, the place was swarming with hired help. I was smoking in those days and there was one flunky following me around to catch my ash, you know, holding out an ashtray whenever the buildup looked like it was going to fall on the carpet. I remember wondering why she felt she had to go check out the flat herself when she had maids coming out of the woodwork.”
“What’s more,” I said, “she mentioned on the phone that she thought Shotgun might have killed their son. Her theory is Sean’s death was an accident. Shotgun mistook him for Bettina and he wanted to kill her because she was going to unearth the truth about the groupie murder in her book.”
He looked skeptical. “Did he have an alibi?”
“For Sean, yes. For Bettina, no. At Shotgun’s arraignment, Dumpster lied and said he was with him at Mallaby both nights but strictly speaking, he wasn’t. Dumpster told me he was there the night Sean died. He was putting up shelves in the kitchen and he overheard Shotgun canceling Bettina. She went out to dinner with Scott Abernathy instead. Shotgun omitted to mention to the detective investigating the case that he canceled Bettina. He says it just slipped his mind, but who knows?”
“Sounds like a man who’s got something to hide—in the past or the present. Didn’t he realize Dumpster was around?”
“Maybe not. It’s a big house. And he doesn’t have an alibi for the night Bettina was killed even though Dumpster lied at his arraignment and said he was at Mallaby that night too. He was—but he wasn’t at the house. He was out in the woods, hunting. He kept quiet about that because he shouldn’t have been. The hunting season hadn’t started yet.”
“For Bettina’s murder, Shotgun has possible motive, no alibi, and plenty of opportunity. And his wife says he’s committed murder before.”
“But we both like him so he’s innocent,” I said.
“Until proven otherwise,” said Max. “It’s not looking good for Dumpster either. He was out in the woods the night Bettina died and you say he was due to meet her on the beach. And there’s his bow and arrow to take into account. Opportunity, yes, alibi, no, motive? He wanted to get rid of Bettina because of what she had over his mother? Possible. Did he strike you as a hotheaded young man?”
I thought about it. “Not really,” I admitted. “Not that hotheaded.”
“Yet he was a hunter, he was familiar with those woods. And he knew Sean Marriott pretty well. I just don’t see him killing Sean; he sounds too experienced to have shot him by accident although he did have opportunity. He can’t have been putting up shelves all night. Pity about the storm destroying all the evidence before they even found the body washed up on the beach. There was a cab driver said he dropped Sean off at the edge of the woods and saw him walk into them so that’s where he was shot. I suppose the cab driv
er’s got an alibi for the next few hours? Who else lives around there? What about that weird Martha woman you mentioned?”
“She didn’t know Bettina so what would be her motive? She knew Sean and he was wearing one of her wedding dresses when they fished him out of the ocean. But she had an alibi for both nights.”
“You know,” he took a slug from his beer and looked at me sideways, “there is one person I have a few concerns about—among the people you’ve mentioned.”
“Who’s that?”
“Franny Cook.”
I didn’t say anything. Hadn’t I had my own moments of unease about Franny? But she was Eliza’s mother. And soon she would be Rufus’s wife.
“You don’t look too happy about that,” said Max. “I sense that you really like her. She’s become a friend, yes?”
I nodded.
“A friend like, say, Cath in this country? If you stayed out there on Long Island—I mean you’re not going to, are you?” He looked worried at what he had suggested. “But if you did, hypothetically, would Franny Cook become your best girlfriend? Were you becoming that close to her?”
Was Franny my American Cath? It was a very odd notion but there was some basis to it. They were both blunt, outspoken women with troublesome pasts. In their different ways they both made me feel a little inadequate but that was probably my fault as much as theirs. But this wasn’t really what Max had been asking. He’d wanted to know if I felt really close to Franny, as close as I felt to Cath. It was a tricky question. I’d known Cath virtually all my life. She knew me better than I cared to admit and even though I didn’t always relish what she told me about myself, I trusted her and felt her to be an integral part of my life. Did I feel the same about Franny? No, I did not.
But thinking about this made me realize there was someone to whom I had become enormously attached in a short space of time. Rufus. He was in a way all I had left of the Phillionaire and I really did think of him like a brother. Rufus had introduced me to Franny. Rufus loved Franny. And because of that I felt close to Franny.
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