Everything was a story to Harry. It wasn’t a case Jury was dealing with, but a story.
“—about a young woman found murdered in the grounds of the Black Cat in Chesham, dressed in a gown by Yves Saint Laurent and shoes by Jimmy Choo—”
“And the shoe designer was not in the paper, either. There was a picture of the dress and the shoes, but Mr. Choo was not mentioned.”
Harry’s sigh was dramatically Harry’s. “I live on the fringes of Upper Sloane Street. I’ve often walked by Jimmy Choo and stared at his shoes enough to think I’d recognize them. Like you, I found the way she was dressed fascinating. All I had to do was go online—it’s called the Internet—and there were the shoes. Six, seven hundred quid, I think. Okay, now, we’ve got the resplendently dressed young woman, who is also the quite unsplendid little librarian. That’s the backstory—”
“I’m aware of the backstory.” Jury signaled Trevor.
“Good. The question, your question: why would a plain little librarian keep going off to London to work for an escort service, trick herself out in expensive finery, and go to a lot of trouble to keep her London life a secret?”
Jury twisted the stem of his glass around in the accumulated condensation on the bar. “I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
“Well, I don’t know, do I? The thing is, you’re not looking at this problem the other way round.”
“What other way?”
“It’s as I said before: we always seem to look at disguise as elaboration—the fright wig, the chalk white face, the painted face. Makeup. Remember what Hamlet said to Ophelia?”
“I’m trying my level best.”
“‘God gave you one face and you paint yourself another.’ We speak of making ourselves up, not down—simple librarian turns into gorgeous call girl. How do you know it wasn’t the other way round? That it wasn’t the librarian hiding herself in the hooker, but the hooker hiding herself in the librarian? The librarian was the disguise.”
Jury looked at him. “If that’s the case—”
“The librarian wasn’t keeping the escort secret; the escort was keeping the librarian a secret. The face that was kept plain and unadorned—that was the life to be kept secret.” He turned in his chair and looked at Jury. “So you’d better get your skates on, pal. You could have a long way to go.”
20
At ten-thirty the next morning, Jury was standing in the door of his flat, waiting for the clump clump clump of Carole-anne’s Tod’s. Tod’s, she had told him (as if he wanted to know), were really hot at the moment and sturdy enough for work. Her job at the Starrdust in Covent Garden hardly needed “sturdiness,” but he let that pass.
Clump clump clump. Here she came.
“Super! You waiting for me?”
In that sunrise misty yellow getup with one sleeve off the shoulder, anyone would be waiting for her. The Tod’s were ankle boots with a pointed toe. Jury said nothing; he merely held up her unreadable telephone message with the heart.
She took it. Her pearly pink lips moved as she mimed the words. She handed it back, her aquamarine eyes (sunrise over the sea, this morning), said, “Better get Jason.”
Then down the stairs, clippity-clippity clop, quick as could be before Jury’s mouth could close around, “Get back here!”
Again in his flat, he tossed the bit of paper in the trash and sat on the sofa. Before him on the coffee table, in addition to his mug of tea, he’d laid out the photo of Mariah Cox, the snapshot of Morris that Dora had pressed on him, the Rexroths’ guest list, and the rough map he’d made of the area of the Lycrome Road between the Black Cat and Deer Park House. An easy walk, he’d make it inside of ten minutes.
Jury picked up the guest list again, noted the other names of men who’d gone unaccompanied by women, wondering if any of them had had experience with the Valentine’s escort service. Even though Simon Santos had already agreed that he himself was to meet Stacy Storm, still ...
Still, nothing. He picked up the phone and rang Wiggins.
“Meet me at Valentine’s Escorts in half an hour, will you? The other men on the list, the single men Cummins said he’d spoken to. They’d been at the party all night from nine to midnight.”
“Why are you interested in them? She was there to meet Simon Santos.” Wiggins’s voice was frowning.
“I know.”
“He’s really the prime suspect, sir.”
“If he killed her, he was being pretty stupid about it, about not covering his tracks and not seeing he had an alibi somehow. Pretty stupid.”
“Most murderers are pretty stupid.”
“Right. Meet me there.”
Maybe they were, as Wiggins said, pretty stupid. He dropped the receiver into its cradle; he refused to trade the old black phone for one—as Carole-anne suggested—“you can take with you round the flat.”
“I’m not going anywhere; I don’t want to take a phone round the flat. I want to sit and talk or at least stand in one place. I don’t want to be in the kitchen frying up sausages whilst I’m talking about a serial killer.”
He was grumpy even in fantasy. He pulled his jacket from the back of a chair, picked up his keys, and left.
Mrs. Blanche Vann was gracious. Jury doubted many of the owners of escort services would be offering them bananas and cups of coffee, coffee made, for heaven’s sake, in a cafetière. Jury was never sure how long to wait before you pushed down the plunger. He didn’t much like these devices; he wanted to see coffee run from the little tongue of a pot.
“Thank you, Mrs. Vann. You’re very kind.” He left his banana on the small table she had pulled over between Wiggins and him. Wiggins had started in on his own banana.
Jury said, “I talked to Rose Moss—or Adele Astaire, as she calls herself—”
“Silly name,” said Blanche Vann. “I told her she might just do well to think up another.”
“Fred Astaire’s sister, that was,” said Wiggins. “Married the son of the Duke of Devonshire.” He peeled his banana down another inch.
Jury fixed him with an icy smile.
Said Mrs. Vann: “No? I didn’t know that!”
Neither did Wiggins, yesterday. Jury said, “I’ll call her Rose. She said Stacy had been living in her flat with her most weekends for the last six months.”
“That’s right, as far as I know.” Mrs. Vann stirred cream into her coffee with a tiny spoon.
“Rose has been with the agency how long?” he asked.
“Quite a few years. Six, eight. She looks younger than she is. One or two clients like a girl on the young side.” She sipped her coffee, showing no embarrassment at all at the implications of that statement.
“Were Rose and Stacy good friends?”
“Were they? Well, I’d think so, sharing a flat and all that.”
“But only on weekends. Did you know that Stacy lived in Chesham?”
Her mouth tight shut as if to emphasize her point, she shook her head, then said, “I did not. The address she gave was in Fulham, same as Rose’s. Well, I’d have no reason to doubt that, would I?”
“You would have had to reach her at times she wasn’t there, though, to set up appointments.”
“That’s right. Usually the girls called in. But if I needed to ring her, it was all done on her mobile; indeed, all the girls worked that way, since they’re so often not at home.”
“That makes sense.” Jury looked around the room again, at the dark moldings, the restful pale gray walls, the comfortable furniture, surprised the room could be so pleasant here in this nondescript office block in the Tottenham Court Road.
She said, looking thoughtfully at her cup, “Adele once said she thought Stacy a bit of a mystery.”
“I’d say that Adele is right.” Jury smiled at her and got up. “Thank you, Mrs. Vann. We’ll be talking to you.”
Walking to the car, Jury said, “You hungry, Wiggins?”
“Yes. That banana didn’t really fill me up.”
As if
it were supposed to.
“It’s nearly two. I have to make my weekly check on Danny Wu.”
Wiggins broke out in a big smile as he opened the car door. “I’m with you; but it’ll be bloody crowded now.”
“Ruiya’s always crowded.”
“Right, boss.”
Jury rolled his eyes. So now it was “boss.”
21
The queue even at this late hour stretched out the door, nearly to the corner. Jury and Wiggins didn’t bother with it but went straightaway to the front.
When the old waiter saw them at the door, he held up his hand, fingers crooked, bidding them come back to where he was. The waiting lunch crowd, those who saw this, acted as if it were some sort of guerrilla takeover and objected strenuously until Jury whipped out his ID and said, “Police business.” That struck some of them as a poor excuse, and their reproaches followed the two detectives on the way to their table. Jury was used to it; it happened nearly every time he’d been here.
Theirs was the only table in the room with a “Reserved” sign. Ruiva didn’t take reservations; hence the crowd beyond the door.
“You’d think they’d learn, wouldn’t you?” said Wiggins, looking disdainfully at the line.
“Learn what? What choice have they unless they want to get here at five a.m.? Like a Springsteen concert, this is.”
The old waiter, who might or might not have understood these words, smiled and swept the plastic sign from the table, motioning for them to be seated. He bowed and went away. Jury and Wiggins sat down. Wiggins began immediately looking at the long, thin menu as he always did before he would order the crispy fish as he always did.
A little elderly woman replaced the old waiter now, probably kin. She came with tea and to take their orders.
Jury said he’d have the shrimp tempura.
Wiggins was still concentrating on the menu, brows knit together in rapt thought.
“And he’ll have the crispy fish.”
Annoyed eyes regarded Jury over the menu’s edge. “You might allow me to order my own lunch.”
“Might, but won’t. You always eat the crispy fish.”
The little woman looked amused, which was reward enough for the bulletlike glances still zinging their way, the long queue looking as if it hadn’t shortened at all. No one had moved a foot forward.
“I wasn’t planning on ordering that this time.”
“Sure you were.” Jury sipped tea from the thimble of a cup.
Wiggins was silent, put down the menu with a martyred sigh. “I’ll have the crispy fish, I think.”
The woman’s nod was closer to a bow. She padded off.
It was a little like their own private cabaret, for the next person to show up was Danny Wu, the owner. Today he was wearing Hugo Boss, more constructed than Armani, another designer Danny favored. He was as good as any model. With his dove gray suit he wore a shirt the shade of a blue iris, a tie several shades darker. The only person Jury knew of with such sartorial elegance was Marshall Trueblood. Trueblood, though, sometimes tipped the scales into flamboyance, which Danny didn’t. Both of them made Jury think that perhaps he should revisit his own wardrobe, until he thought, What wardrobe?
“Are you here professionally?”
“No, we’re here amateurishly. We seem to have caved completely in discovering who left the dead man on your doorstep.” That investigation had been going on for months now, booted over to the drug squad, then back to CID, given the Met’s conviction that Danny was a serious contender for London’s drug king—a conviction Jury had found dubious at least and ridiculous at best. Danny was too smart for that crown (which would rest extremely uneasily on one’s head); he was also too fastidious to shoot a man in his own restaurant. Jury went on: “No one’s sussed it, Danny, why he was killed here.”
“This is Soho, remember? You’ll find bodies on a lot of doorsteps. Soho is no stranger to murder.”
“Thanks for that lesson in social dynamics. I hadn’t heard.”
Danny sported a smile.
Jury started to say something, then stopped when he saw Phyllis Nancy shoving past the queue and coming toward them. “Phyllis!”
She looked worn. It would take a lot of wearing to make her look that way.
“Ah, the beautiful medical examiner,” said Danny, who immediately pulled a chair round from another table.
Phyllis thanked him, and Danny bowed out gracefully. It would have been clear to him that Phyllis had something to report.
“I thought you’d be here,” she said. “I’ve just come from hospital. I’m sorry, Richard, but Lu Aguilar has sunk into a coma. It happened this morning.”
Jury looked at Phyllis, shocked, but the shock was not only for Lu’s condition; some was for his own response to it. In that brutally honest moment when one first hears of someone’s misfortune and before one can throw up defenses against one’s own selfishness and insensitivity—feelings that constitute a person’s image of himself as a good and caring person—in that single swift moment, what he felt was relief. That moment had to be drowned, sunk from consciousness. He was on his feet.
Phyllis clamped her hand around his wrist. “There’s nothing you can do; she won’t know you’re there.”
No, he thought in a cold assessment of this new picture of himself, but I’ll know.
Then the old Jury slipped back in place; he reconstructed his old self, his self of ten seconds ago, a caring man who deeply wanted Lu Aguilar to recover and take up her old life, or at least manage the new life in another country.
He left Ruiya and the car to Wiggins and flagged down a taxi.
At the nurses’ station, the doctor had told him that the prospects of Lu’s coming out of the coma were not especially good. “Still, don’t lose hope; people do come out. Usually within two or three weeks. If not by then, well, it’s a safe bet they won’t at all. It can be less or more devastating.”
Less or more. For God’s sake, that about covered it, didn’t it?
And the doctor told him something else: “She did not want heroic measures taken.”
“What do you mean?” Jury knew exactly what the doctor meant. But he wanted to distance himself from the meaning. He literally stepped back.
The doctor was kind-eyed and rather young. He had slid a paper from a folder and passed it to Jury. “She doesn’t want to be kept alive by machines.”
Everything in him rebelled against this. “Heroic measures.” What a stunning euphemism.
White. That was all he could see, as if he had stumbled into some polar country: the corridors, the walls, the sheets, her face.
The silence in her room was all there was. Except for the steady ping or hiccup of the monitors and machines, there was nothing.
He took her hand and found it marble cold. He thought for a panicky moment she must be dead and leaned close to her face and felt her frail breath. Cordelia. The broken Lear and Cordelia. “Come on, Lu. Come out of it. Come on.” He shook her hand in a way he remembered someone doing to him when he was a kid; some adult, seeing his attention wavering, shook it back again.
Jury sat for a few minutes watching her before he rose and walked round the room, back and forth, stopping to look at her. An effigy was what she reminded him of. The incomparable, commanding, relentless detective inspector Lu Aguilar, still as stone and helpless. What he felt now was that he would never be able to understand his feelings for her, what they had been. Or hers for him. That part of his mind would be still as stone and helpless, too.
Jury turned to look out the window, seeing shadowed grass in the distance, thinking, It should be covered with snow; there should be the blankness of snow to render shapes null and void, the way the sheet did her own shape, the way it was drawn up to her shoulders.
Nurses in white entered from time to time to adjust tubes and check fluid levels and look at the machine. They smiled and left. One—but they might all have been the same one—said something about visiting hours. Jury nodde
d, although he hadn’t really heard her, and stayed. He didn’t know how long.
Finally, he got up from a chair, bent, and kissed her forehead. He was surprised to find it was not marble cold, but warm.
“Wake up, Lu.”
He meant it, too.
22
He left St. Bart’s, near Smithfield, and after that didn’t look up, walking down one narrow street then another, all snaking into some center and making him feel pleasantly claustrophobic. He felt as if he’d wound himself into the center of a ball of string. Tired, he’d been walking for hours. It was dark now.
When “Three Blind Mice” started up, he yanked out the bloody mobile (what Orpheus should have had instead of string). “What?”
“I’m in Bidwell Street. Near St. Bride. There’s been a woman shot.”
Jury frowned. “St. Bride. That’s not us, Wiggins; that’s City police. Right near Snow Hill station, isn’t it?”
“I know. They’re here.”
Jury could hear the background noise. “All right. But why are you there?”
“I was trawling for information about the Mariah Cox murder. I’ve a friend at Snow Hill, and I was there when he caught this one and came along. Thing is—this woman, put her in her early thirties, very good-looking, and dressed to kill, you might say—well, I’m probably wrong, but it seems similar to the Chesham murder.”
“Okay. I’m in ...” Where? He looked up to see the very familiar area in Clerkenwell in which he and Lu Aguilar had spent so much time. He could see the Zetter hotel down there at St. John’s Square. Why was he here? As if he didn’t know. “Clerkenwell. I’ll find a cab and be there in five minutes.”
There were a couple of cabs moving along the Clerkenwell Road directly in front of him. He flagged one down, shoved the mobile back in his pocket, and opened the door. “You know Bidwell Street? It’s near—”
The driver smiled. “I know it.”
Jury pulled the door shut and fell back against the seat. Or gravity pushed him back. Yes, they knew all of them, these drivers, every last inch of street, road, alley, courtyard—all of it. Plus every shortcut.
The Black Cat Page 10
