Poisoned Cherries

by Quintin Jardine

  She must have looked at the readout and known who was calling, for she sounded hesitant as she answered.

  “Bitch!” I snarled at her. That was enough to end the hesitancy.

  “At least I didn’t screw anyone else on our honeymoon,” she snapped back.

  “What are you talking about? Of course you did.”

  “Well, yes,” she conceded, unabashed, ‘okay I did; but only after I found out about you.”

  “Is that what this is about? Do I still owe you?”

  “No,” she answered, ‘this is different.”

  I thought I could hear seagulls in the background, and the sound of other people. “Where are you?” I asked her.

  “Puerto Vallarta.”

  “I know that, but whereabouts?”

  “In a cafe.”

  “Does your drink have ice in it?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask that?”

  “Because I hope it gives you the shits. Is he there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put him on.”

  “No.”

  “Listen, sooner or later, it’ll happen. Might as well be now.”

  “Okay,” she murmured, after a while. “Nick.”

  Johnson tried to sound cool as he took the phone. “Oz, buddy, I’m sorry; you have to believe that. But these things happen; we just couldn’t help ourselves.”

  “Sure,” I said, as harshly as I could, for Miles’s benefit. “You just couldn’t help banging my wife. Well here’s something else that’s going to happen; you’d better get ready to play ugly parts. When I’m finished with you, you’re going to look like Brando did at the end of On the Waterfront.“1

  “Oz, please,” I heard the weasel protest. “This isn’t your style. Don’t act the tough guy.”

  “I’m not acting, Johnson; I am a tough guy. I’ve trained with tough guys. I know ways to hurt you that you couldn’t even imagine.” That much was true; my time working with my wrestler pals had taught me plenty. I was beginning to look forward to showing him, too.

  “Put my wife back on.” He did as he was told; I guessed I’d convinced him, because when Prim took the phone she sounded worried.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I made him a promise. Miles was going to blow him out of Hollywood, but I want that pleasure for myself. Now listen, honey; I’ll ask you this just once. Come home. Leave that bum hole sitting in the bar and catch the first plane back to LA.

  “But I really mean it. Now or never; I won’t ask you again.”

  There was a silence. The longer it lasted, the more I worried. Christ, maybe I’d done too good a job, and she would catch the bloody plane.

  So as she answered, I concentrated hard on wincing, and on not cracking an involuntary smile.

  “I’m sorry,” she told me. “I just can’t do that. I don’t love you any more, Oz.”

  “You never did love me,” I murmured, with an Oscar-winning edge of bitterness in my voice.

  “Maybe not; and maybe that cut both ways. Listen, I have to go. You do what you have to do, see a lawyer; I want a fair split, that’s all. Just don’t hurt Nicky, please.”

  “That’ll be difficult, but for you, okay; I won’t touch him.” I decided that I’d leave that piece of business until she’d signed the divorce settlement. “Take care; just don’t trust that guy.”

  “As if I would, after you,” she replied. “Goodbye.”

  I looked across at Miles, just as Dawn appeared at the poolside, and shook my head, slowly, and … I hoped … sadly. “You heard me,” I said.

  “Yes, mate, I did. I don’t know if I could have done that in your shoes.”

  “You’ll never be in his shoes,” exclaimed his wife, indignantly. She looked at me. “You called her after all?”

  “Yes, more fool me.”

  Miles opened yet another beer and handed it to me. I took it, but made a mental note to slow down. I didn’t want to get pissed, not there, not then.

  “Bruce has gone down for the night,” Dawn said. “I thought we might cook steaks and bake potatoes on the barbecue, if that’s all right with you boys.”

  “Couldn’t be better,” I told her.

  We threw a few chunks of Texas beef on the outdoor grill and sat down to eat them with the spuds and a salad, at the big oval table at the shallow end of the pool. I was starving, but I made a show of shoving my food around the plate, and sipping morosely at my Long Flat Red … Miles imports most of his booze from his home country.

  He watched me for a while, until eventually he leaned across towards me and punched me lightly on the shoulder. “I can see this has blown you right out of the water, mate,” he began. He was speaking slowly; the Tyrrell’s is heavy stuff. “Me too, I don’t mind telling you. I always thought Primavera was a straight arrow… and for her to go off with an arse hole like Johnson, that just makes it worse.

  “But you must not let it get you down.” He rapped the table with his knuckles, hard enough to make him wince. “You have a future in our business, buddy. You were good in your first movie, and better in the one we’ve just finished. You’re a natural actor, Oz Blackstone, and you could be a big star. My advice is, concentrate on your career and use it to get over what Prim’s done to you.”

  I felt myself frown. “What career, man?” I asked him. “Okay, I’ve made a couple of movies for you, and I’m very grateful for the chance… not to mention the money… but my agent in London hasn’t exactly been bombarding me with projects.”

  “Fuck him,” Miles drawled, earning a nod of disapproval from Dawn. “We’ll get you a real agent, out here in California. But even before that, I’ve got a proposition to put to you. I was going to talk to you about it in a couple of days, but now’s as good a time as any.

  “I’m making a sack of money from the last Scottish project.” I knew this for myself; I was on one per cent of the gross and up to that point I’d made one and a half million dollars. “So much, in fact, that I’m going back there for my next movie. I’ll direct, not act, but Dawn will have the female lead. I want you in the second-guy role.”

  “Oh yeah?” I felt my ears prick up, and my eyebrows rise. “What is it?”

  “It’s a cop story, based on one of a series of novels. If it works out right it might even be the first in a series of movies.”

  “Where’s it set?”

  “This is the bit you’ll like most of all. It’s set in your old home town; in Edinburgh.”

  Two.

  I made a show of thinking over Miles’s offer of the Edinburgh part; I was even pretentious enough to ask to look at the script. Because of my grief, he humoured me, and I spent a few days at Malibu reading it between teleconferences with Greg McPhillips, my lawyer in Scotland,” and meetings with Roscoe Brown, my brand new Hollywood agent.

  I briefed Greg to draw up a legal separation from Prim, and a property settlement that was fair to us both, yet left me well fixed financially. He was gob-smacked when I told him, of course; he’d known us both when we lived in Glasgow and had played a significant part in our interesting lives. His shock didn’t stop him giving me some pretty sharp advice, though, and promising me his personal loyalty in the event that my ex decided to cut up rough. I knew quite a bit about Greg’s practice, having worked for him in the past, and I reckoned that I was on my way to becoming his biggest private client.

  Roscoe Brown was positive too. Miles sent him along to see me the day after Prim dropped her bombshell. He was a young black guy, and he was offered to me as the coming player in the game. I figured out why, straight away; the reek of sharpness coming from him was as strong as his Eau Sauvage. I wasn’t sure who was interviewing who … sorry, whom … at our first meeting, but whatever the truth of it was, we both passed.

  It took him three days to make me realise that I didn’t have to go back to Scotland. He came back to see me on the following Tuesday with offers of parts in three different projects, two of them to be shot in the States and the third ba
ck in Canada, in Vancouver this time.

  He also brought with him an offer of a voice-over in a golf ball ad. I admit that I went a bit Hollywood when he tabled that one; I thought it was a step back down the ladder, until he showed me the money on offer. It was enough to change my mind. “If it’s good enough for Jack Nicholson,” I told him, ‘it’s good enough for me.”

  When it came to choosing a movie, Roscoe was all for me staying in the States. He told me what I knew already, that sooner or later I had to cut the string that tried me to Miles. I heard him out but I decided that it would be later. I would take the Vancouver movie, I said, but first, since the schedules allowed it, I was going back home to shoot Miles’s cop flick.

  What I didn’t tell him, or anyone else… least of all Dawn and Miles… was that I had another reason for going back to Scotland.

  I had a promise to keep.

  Three.

  I wasn’t sure how I’d feel, walking back into my old flat in Glasgow. It was part of a conversion of a classic nineteenth-century building: Jan and I had bought it on a whim, lured by its spectacular views across the heart of the city; but it had brought us only a few months of happiness, before it all went to rat-shit.

  I should have moved on straight after Jan’s death, but I didn’t. I was pretty numb at the time, so I stayed there, until it became home to Prim and me as we renewed our ruptured relationship, drifting eventually into our brief, rancorous and disastrous marriage.

  When I did sell it. I had misgivings about the buyer; call me superstitious if you like, but if the fucking place was cursed, as I thought, I wasn’t sure if I should take the risk of passing it on to her.

  But she had insisted, and when Susie Gantry digs in her heels it would take a pretty strong guy to deny her what she’s after. Besides, she offered me twenty-five per cent over valuation.

  “You cut it bloody fine!” she exclaimed as she opened the door that fair Saturday morning, but she was smiling, big white teeth, tan and freckles, all framed by lustrous red hair.

  She was right too. Although we’d spoken about business a couple of times… I’m a non-executive director of her company… and exchanged a few text messages I hadn’t seen Susie since January, eight months before. She’d been in fine shape then; she still was, only that shape was different. For all she was wearing a big white housecoat, you could tell she’d filled out a bit.

  “So it seems,” I agreed as I stepped inside. “Have you been hanging on for me?”

  “Not quite,” she answered, ‘but if you hadn’t turned up this weekend I was going to get in touch with you. Officially, I’m due a week on Wednesday, but when I saw my consultant last Tuesday, he was talking about inducing her a few days early.”

  “Her?”

  “That’s right, Pops. The heir to the Gantry empire’s going to be an heiress.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about Susie G. When I’d first met her she’d been going out with my copper pal Mike Dylan, and her old man had been in his pomp as Lord Provost of Glasgow. Neither of them were around any more; Mike had succumbed to a terminal case of greed, and a policeman’s bullet, while Jack Gantry had succumbed to several men in white coats, who’d taken him away to a place in the country, with a very high fence topped off with razor wire.

  After those misfortunes, Susie was left to rescue the family construction group from potential disaster, which she did with a skill that made a nonsense of Darwin and his theories. Not many people knew that Jack wasn’t her real father, and many of those who didn’t insisted that his business skills were in her blood. (The same sycophants passed over the fact that he was barking mad, and that by their logic Susie might have been too.)

  The business was all she had, though; that apart, she had been a lonely wee lass when she’d turned up on my doorstep in Spain, on the very day that Prim had gone off to be with her sick mother. She didn’t stay lonely for long, mind you.

  I learned a lot in those few days, most of it about myself; I won’t say that Susie made me a better person, but she sure as hell made me more honest with myself. Until then, I’d gone through life subconsciously pretending to be like my father, who is unquestionably the nicest man I’ve ever known. Macintosh Blackstone does not have an enemy in the world, and that’s the truth… made all the more amazing by the fact that he’s a dentist.

  The thing was that, as his son, I just assumed that everyone thought that the sun shone out of my arse as well. Everyone at school was my pal… it didn’t occur to me for years that in a small town no one in their right mind would have wanted to fall out with the local dentist’s lad … and afterwards I was everyone else’s. I was good old Oz, short for Osbert… a laugh in itself… the finest lad you’d meet in a day’s march. Okay, so my police career was so brief that afterwards I didn’t even talk about it… well, we’re not all cut out for a disciplined service. Okay, so I was a bit of a one for the ladies… well, we all sow our wild oats, don’t we. Okay, so I was laid back to the point of indolence… well, we don’t want to work any harder than we have to, do we?

  Then I met Primavera Phillips; my luck changed, my life changed, and somewhere along the line, Oz Blackstone emerged from the chrysalis as the man who had been evolving, someone who wasn’t nice all the time, but who stopped making excuses for his ruthlessness and his nastiness and who even enjoyed it on occasion.

  I still think my Dad is the greatest man in the world; but I know now that he’s too hard an act for me to follow. (Actually I think the same thing may have dawned on my sister Ellie. Since she dumped her apathetic husband, she’s turned into a mid-thirties raver and she loves every minute of it.)

  In time, I would probably have worked all that stuff out without Susie Gantry’s intervention, but I thank her for it nonetheless. She opened my eyes to me, and she opened them to Prim as well, to what she was really like, and what we were like as a couple.

  As for what she taught me about herself… let’s just say that if the Glimmer Twins had met her, they’d never have written “You can’t always get what you want’. On the other hand, when Steve Winwood wrote “While you see a chance, take it…”

  Susie saw me there, on my own in Spain, and she knew me. She was needing, she saw her chance, and she took it. Love had nothing to do with it. As she said often enough, “Susie doesn’t love.” Just as well, I told myself; neither does Oz.

  I liked her, though. I liked her frankness, and I liked her honesty… plus, she was tremendous under the duvet.

  She didn’t turn up in Spain with a game plan … not one that involved banging me, anyway. If she had, the baby probably wouldn’t have been part of it. But when she happened, it just seemed right, somehow. It didn’t alarm either of us, and it didn’t add to our expectations of each other; we had sorted out our relationship by that time.

  “What are you going to call her?” I asked, as I followed her into the big living space that I knew all too well.

  “What are we going to call her, you mean. She’s your daughter as well. Or do you want to keep that a secret, for Prim’s sake?”

  “There’s no need for that. We’re finished.”

  “You haven’t left her, have you?” she gasped. I thought I caught an edge of concern in her voice, one that had little to do with Prim, and more with the prospect of me as a single man. “You said you were going to try to make it work.”

  “No I didn’t; I said I was going to go along with it at least until I’d finished the new movie with Miles. And no, I haven’t left her.” I told her about Nicky Johnson and the Mexican love nest

  “Serves you right, I suppose,” she said when I was finished, but with a smile.

  “No; it serves him right.”

  “That’s not fair; Prim’s not a bad girl. You treated her like shit on your shoe; that’s the truth of it.”

  “So did you. Fucking someone’s husband on his honeymoon is not the act of a friend.”

  “Ah, but I never said I liked her.”

  I laughed. “So you’l
l not be calling the baby Primavera, then.”

  “Hell, no. Actually, I was thinking about calling her Janet, maybe Jan for short. I really did like her. How would you feel about that?”

  I wanted to pick her up and hug her, but I hung on to my cool. One of my new life rules is “Never get emotional’. It’s the same as being drunk; you tend to say things without a thought of the consequences. Right then I might just have asked Susie to marry me, and I couldn’t have been certain she’d have turned me down.

  “I’d feel fine,” I told her… a considerable understatement.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” She smiled at me in a way she never had before. I think I realised in that moment that what we had between us was the closest we were going to get to total happiness for the rest of our lives.

  “So what do you want to do, now you’re here?” she asked.

  I scratched my chin. “Well, looking at the size of you, I suppose a shag’ll be out of the question.”

  “It’d be a bit crowded,” she agreed.

  “In that case, you pack an overnight bag, I’ll have a shower, a shave and whatever else, then we’ll drive sedately up to Anstruther and see my Dad and my stepmother.”

  “Sedately? That’s not like you.”

  “Girlie, I’ve just flown in from Los fuckin’ Angeles, so my body thinks it’s the middle of the night. I can fool it for the rest of the day, but please, allow me just one piece of untypical behaviour.”

  She stepped up to me, then stood on tiptoe and kissed me. “Nothing you do is typical, my love.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “Oops,” she exclaimed. “Sorry… slip of the tongue; won’t happen again, I promise. Okay, we’ll do it your way. But how much have you told your Dad?”

  “I’ve told him the same as always; everything. He’s up to date; he knows Prim’s gone. He knows I was coming here, and he’s half-expecting us.”

  “He knows I’m…?”

  “That too; the day I keep secrets from him, I’m done.”

  Susie grinned. Sometimes, when she does that, she can light up a room. “The day you keep secrets from me you might be done, too. Listen,” she went on, “I’d offer to drive us, but I have this problem with my feet just now. I have to put the seat so far back to get behind the wheel that they don’t reach the pedals.”