NINE
TO: RJ
FR: JK
MESSAGE: ZILCH
Jury read this aloud to the recumbent figure on his sofa, the one who had written it on his “While You Were Out” pad. Carole-anne Palutski lay with her arms gracefully crossed on her breast, sunk in her “meditations.” Jury had once asked her, Why the plural? Because there was more than one. The tone added: obviously.
Her eyes, which could shift through a range of semiprecious-stone colors, ranging from turquoise to lapis lazuli, were gently closed, meditatively, or so it would seem.
Jury looked from the message to Carole-anne’s placid, pellucid face. “Carole-anne, what does ‘zilch’ mean, exactly?”
“Exactly nothing.”
He glared at her and her pleased-as-punch little smile. “On the other end of a telephone line, it’s impossible for a caller to say ‘exactly nothing.’ Unless heavy breathing’s in progress.”
“You know what I mean.” As if she were flicking away flies, she gestured with her freshly manicured fingernails.
“No, I don’t.”
Carole-anne yawned, sat up, and reached for her manicure gear—Koral Kiss, Jury saw, was the color of the nail varnish bottle—preparatory to continuing the job. “She just wanted to know were you back in London yet?” Her chin on her updrawn knee, she set about giving her toenail a lick of Koral Kiss.
“And you said . . . ?”
“Didn’t know, did I?” The sleeve of her coral-colored silk top slipped from her shoulder when she shrugged.
If Christian had depended on Carole-anne to carry his messages instead of Cyrano, Roxane would have ended up an unwed crone.
“ ‘Didn’t know, did I?’ ” Jury chirped in mimicry. “Well, now, let me point out clues to my whereabouts, shall I?”
Jury had gone to Belgravia to see Lady Cray after a brief stop at his Islington digs, a stop just long enough to check his mail and his messages—chief of which he had just read off to his beautiful neighbor who occupied the top-floor flat in the terraced house, together with Jury (ground floor) and Mrs. Wassermann (basement). In between his and Carole-anne’s was the vacant first-floor flat of which Carole-anne was overseer: meaning, she had convinced the landlord to entrust her with its rental. (“We don’t want a lot of riffraff, Mr. Mosh, now, do we? You’ll see. I’ll get someone superior, like ourselves, with whom you’ll have no trouble.”)
Poor Mr. Mosh. Mr. Moshegeiian to the rest of the world. Carole-anne had turned down or turned away dozens of applicants, most of whom, according to Mrs. Wassermann, at least, seemed perfectly nice. According to Carole-anne, they had been totally unsatisfactory, squalling babies (“You want that living over you, Super?”), Shepherd Market whores, thieves, cutthroats, or New Agers. Carole-anne really had it in for the New Agers, with their exotic minerals and stones and out-of-body experiences. But given her job at a Covent Garden emporium as fortune-teller and Principal Ornament, where she plied tarot cards in her silken tent, her objection to the mystical and astronomical concerns of New Agers struck Jury as somewhat hypocritical. Granted (Jury had thought), for Carole-anne to have an out-of-body experience verged on the tragic. Why she troubled to paint any part of herself—lips, eyes, toenails—baffled him. It was the ultimate in lily gilding, like dipping stars in sequins.
Acidly, he pointed out the signs of his having stopped in his flat. “As-yet-unpacked bag sitting by the bookcase; mail brought in and opened; milk, ditto; coffee cup and remains of bread roll on table, there; note to Mrs. Wassermann cello-taped to my door reading, ‘Back from the country and will see you this evening, RJ.’ All signs of human habitation in general and mine in particular. You noticed none of these pointers?”
Carole-anne squinted up at him as if she’d gone momentarily blind. “I’m not one to pry, am I?”
Curiously enough, this was true. He had given her a key and told her to answer his phone if she heard it, done more for her benefit than his. Jury and Mrs. Wassermann were the extent of Carol-anne’s “family,” as far as he knew. And he also knew just what that lack felt like. Anyway, a toss of his rooms would reveal nothing. He wondered if he even had a secret life.
Jury fell into a heap in his big easy chair. “Elaborate on ‘zilch’ or you’ll be sorry.”
She raised the coral-painted nail brush and sat back, gazing at her handiwork and wiggling her toes. “I guess it was a bad connection.”
Any call from a Jury lady friend would be a bad connection if Carole-anne was taking it. “Did you put the receiver down and go in my kitchen to do one of your fry-ups while she was trying to talk to you?”
Carole-anne rolled her eyes in her best oh-God-grant-me-patience manner. “No. Lemme see. She was talking about soup.”
“Soup?” Jury frowned, then his frown relaxed as he remembered the soup Jenny Kennington had served him when he’d last seen her. Melon and mint, smooth as glass. “She’s a cook,” he said absently.
“Oh? Well, I expect we all got to make a living.” Condescension oozed from her every pore.
“She doesn’t have to do it to make a living. She’s just a superb cook.”
“Really? Didn’t sound like it. She was going on about what she was putting in it. The soup, I mean.”
Jury studied Carole-anne for signs of subterfuge. “Somehow, I can’t picture you and Jenny Kennington exchanging recipes.”
“Not me, Super. I’ve better things to do with my time. I admit I wasn’t attending all that closely. Said something about a pub.”
“She’s going into the pub business.”
Carole-anne’s look was disapproving. “I’ve always wondered about women publicans.”
“Wondered what?” She’d never given women publicans a passing thought, Jury was sure.
“Well, I think it makes a woman a bit hard, don’t you? Or maybe it’s the hard ones go in for it.” Daintily, she recapped the bottle of Koral Kiss and wiggled the toes of her other foot. Then she folded her hands behind her head, whose dazzling reddish-gold was illuminated by the light reflected up from the bright pink sweater—she looked like a sunset over the Salisbury Plain—and said, “Coarsens one, that’s what I think.”
“Well, it won’t coarsen this particular one, lovey.”
“No, I expect not; I mean, not someone who sounds as snobby as her.”
No one could change a tune quicker than Carole-anne. So if Jenny couldn’t be coarse, she could at least be a snob. “Snobby?”
“It’s that la-di-da kind of way she’s got of talking.”
“Memory returned, has it?”
She thought for a moment. “I didn’t say I forgot, did I? Only, she didn’t say nothing—anything—worth remembering. You don’t have time for a lot of chat.” She sighed and shook her head wearily. The demands that other women made on his time and energy were scarcely to be tolerated. “You’ve more important things to do.” Here she planted her two feet on the coffee table and studied the pedicure.
“Like counting your toes? In the time, Carole-anne, we have been sitting here imitating two people exchanging views, you could have delivered a parliamentary White Paper or the entire Report to the Commissioner, much less a simple telephone message.” Jury slid down in his chair, glowering. “I’m getting an answering machine.” He loathed them; Lord knows Carole-anne loathed them too, because she wanted to be his answering machine. How else could she screen his life? “Getting an answering machine” was merely an old, standard threat, in the category of “getting my lock changed” or “found a pretty woman for the first-floor flat.”
Now she looked at him as if it were he who was the cause of this little fracas. “You needn’t get shirty. You needn’t keep interrupting. You needn’t—”
“—resist the impulse to get the kitchen breadknife.”
Infinitely patient, Carole-anne held up her freshly manicured fingers, patting air, calling for silence. “The reason I didn’t write the message, if you must know—” pause for fabrication—“is because I
knew you’d be tired, exhausted from your trip, and I didn’t see any reason you shouldn’t get a bit of rest before returning calls.” She folded her white arms and tapped her Koral Kiss fingertips against their skin, lips pursed, waiting for him to come to his senses.
“Well? I’ve had my bit of rest sitting here with you. So what did she say?”
Carole-anne shrugged as prettily as she could. “Well, that’s all, just about that soup.”
Jury sighed, impatiently. “Anything else? Anything at all?”
She pursed her mouth. Deep concentration. “Oh, and she wants you to call, is all. But I expect you could have guessed that.” With another fake yawn, and so as to distract him, she bounced up from the sofa and went to the window, where she might have been measuring for new curtains. “Your windows need cleaning. You should get a char, you should. Can’t expect me to do everything.”
“Just stand in front of it. You’ll steam it clean.”
“Who’s that then?” She had her face plugged against the glass.
“Who?”
“Down there, look.”
Jury moved to stand beside her. Across the street, a rather dumpy, middle-aged couple were standing, talking. “Those two? I don’t know.”
“No, no, not them. Mrs. W.’s down on her steps with someone, some fella. Here, come over here.”
Jury maneuvered around and close beside her, a pleasant proximity, he had to admit, and tilted his head against the glass. Mrs. Wassermann was outside, at the top of her downward set of steps, talking to a tall young man, who kept looking up, and Jury would have thought for a moment he was looking at them, there at Jury’s window, until he realized that he was looking higher. Mrs. Wassermann was pointing.
In one swift move Carole-anne had gathered her belongings and headed for the door. “Got to get ready for work. Ta!”
At first he thought she was going to pound down the stone steps outside, but he heard her pounding, instead, up to her own flat. This he surmised was done so that she could slip into something of even hotter coral.
Jury himself went out and down.
“Mr. Jury! I did not know you had returned. Look, look, here is someone come to view the flat.”
Which is what Jury thought, when he’d seen him looking up. The man was probably in his late twenties, nearly as tall as Jury, dressed in black leather. Totally. Black bomber’s jacket, black trousers, tight. Brilliant hazel eyes, sandy hair, muscles beneath the leather, cheekbones planed for model or movie star.
Randy Tyrone.
At least that’s the name Mrs. Wassermann gave out by way of introduction. Nobody, Jury thought, was really named Randy Tyrone. The grip splintering a few tiny, unnecessary bones in Jury’s hand, Randy Tyrone (or whoever he was) said, in a voice modulated beyond belief, “Mrs. Wassermann told me about you. This should be a pretty safe place to live.”
How clever. Jury did not return the smile; he was looking at the motorcycle—a Mercedes Benz, no less—parked at the curb. Sleek and shiny black, just like its owner. “That yours?”
Randy Tyrone nodded, mouth curved in a supercilious smile. “Gets me around quicker than a car.”
“From where to where?”
“I’m an actor. Resting, at the moment. A spot of modeling between acting jobs.”
“An actor!” Mrs. Wassermann was thrilled.
Jury didn’t think “acting” had bought the Benz. A stint in Soho, maybe. With a regretful shake of his head, he said, “Golly, what a shame, Randy. You’ve come all this way for nothing. Place was just rented not fifteen minutes ago.”
Mrs. Wassermann’s mouth dropped. Then she said, “Why . . . Carole-anne never told me anyone was coming to see it. My goodness . . . I didn’t see anyone.” Helplessly, she looked at Randy Tyrone.
Jury pointed to the couple still conversing on the other side of the street. “Right there. I expect you must’ve just missed them.” Gaily, Jury waved at the couple, who stared at him, at each other, and then waved back, but rather tentatively.
As Jury was listening for signs of Carole-anne, Randy Tyrone zapped on his black helmet, twitched a muscle in his cheek several times, sketched an abrupt goodbye to both of them, and (just as Carole-anne came out the front door) shot away in a black blur.
“Who was that?” she fairly whined, on the pavement, making for the middle of the street to get a better look.
“Just one of those messengers on bikes,” said Jury, signing Mrs. Wassermann to keep still. She had lived long enough around him and Carole-anne to sense potential trouble; she nodded.
“For who, then?”
“Me,” said Jury.
“On a bike?” She frowned. “Must’ve been important.”
“Not really.”
“Well, what was it, then?”
Jury yawned. “Zilch.”
TEN
Thank God tea was born before Wiggins.
That was Jury’s first thought as he walked into his office at Scotland Yard at four o’clock to find the detective sergeant with his hand poised over the electric kettle, just working up to a hiss and a screech, as if he wanted to grab it before it took wing. It did screech and Wiggins’s hand did clamp down on it, and moved it toward the two waiting mugs.
“Tea’s up,” said Wiggins, with a beamish smile, when he saw Jury. “I knew you’d be here right about now.”
Jury didn’t know how he knew, but said nothing except “Not so much sugar this time, thanks.”
“You know I don’t use sugar these days, sir. Honey, that’s the ticket.”
“Uh. Not so much honey, then.” Jury looked down at the massed papers that had landed all-anyhow on his desk, wiped his hand over them as if this action might disclose one that was important, then shoved the whole lot aside. “What’d you find out about the Tate art lovers?”
“Beatrice and Gabriel? Nothing yet; I’m expecting a call from C Division. How much milk?” asked Wiggins, keeping his priorities straight.
“The usual.”
Wiggins poured a careless amount into the mug and set it before Jury. He then proceeded with the more serious matter of infusing his own tea with one or the other of the medications arranged in vials along the front of his desk. He picked up first one, then another little brown bottle, studied it with a care Jury doubted even the pharmacist had expended on the prescription, pursed his lips, shook his head, picked up the next.
Jury was in a state of ungovernable suspense. As long as he’d known him, Sergeant Wiggins had been dispensing pills, syrups, herbs, potions, biscuits, capsules, anodynes, and amulets, everything short of a necklace of garlic cloves to ward off evil spirits. The spirit world held no terrors for Wiggins; he was afraid of what crept and crawled along planet Earth, not ill-defined and amorphous masses from either Hell or Heaven. Planet Earth had spawned enough corporeal diseases for Wiggins to tolerate or even contemplate; he wasn’t the least interested in the soul’s ills. Jury watched him fix his gaze on a clear glass vial that held some viscous greenish stuff.
“What the hell’s that?” Jury asked in spite of his oft-broken promise to himself never to inquire into Wiggins’s medications.
“This? Oh, this is for my chest.” Wiggins made a few experimental rr-rrks and ahs, not a cough exactly, more of an aborted laugh. “Chesty, sir, I’ve been these last few days since you’ve been gone. It’s all this weather we’re getting.”
Jury sipped his too-sweet tea. “I’ve never known a day without it.”
“Sir?” Inquiring eyebrow lift.
“Weather. Same old February stuff, to me. Damp and drizzle. Unless you’re talking about the ozone again.”
Wiggins had been making dark prognostications for some time now about the dramatic weather changes in Britain—and elsewhere, of course, but elsewhere could take care of itself, since he didn’t live there—hot summers, worse winters. Such changes were ominous. “Next, it’ll be hurricanes, tropical hurricanes,” he had said last summer.
Having inspected the row of via
ls, Wiggins now was eschewing them in favor of one of his favorite anodynes—the black biscuit. This was a disgusting-looking biscuit, a black-as-bile biscuit that was supposed to make the digestive system fully operational. Wiggins enjoyed one or two at teatime.
Having completed his ablutions, Wiggins asked Jury about the case. After Jury gave him a rundown of the conclusion Macalvie had drawn, Wiggins said, brushing away black crumbs, “Probably right.”
“Right? My God, I’d sooner bet blindfolded at Cheltenham races.” Jury was not at all convinced of this, though.
“Well, remember Dr. Dench, sir.”
Macalvie had locked horns with his friend Dennis Dench over a question of bone identification a few years back.
“Mr. Macalvie was right, then, too,” said Wiggins. “And Dench was the expert. And he was wrong.”
Jury shoved aside a stack of papers and clamped his feet on top of his desk. “He’s talking funny, too.”
Wiggins frowned. “ ‘Funny’?”
“For Macalvie. He’s turned philosophical, mumbling about abstract notions of time, and so forth.”
“Oh, he always was.” Wiggins said this with calm assurance.
Jury stared. “Macalvie? Macalvie was always one of the most straightforwardly pragmatic people I ever met. He loves cold, hard facts. He’s not a philosopher.”
“He’s not a forensic anthropologist, either. But he managed to be one when he had to.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jury muttered just as the telephone rang.
Wiggins picked it up, announced himself, listened, put his hand over the receiver, told Jury it was C Division about the Tate Gallery. Listened some more as he pulled over a pad and a pencil. “Slocum, that’s her name? S-L-O-C-U-M. . . . Right. . . . Gabriel Merchant. . . . Uh-huh. . . . Bethnal Green, right. . . . Both of them? . . . Uh-huh. . . . ” Sergeant Wiggins’s expression changed dramatically; he banged forward in his swivel chair. Finally, he choked out a “ta very much” to the caller and hung up.
Jury waited. Wiggins was silent.
Rainbow's End Page 7
