Death in Disguise

by Sally Spencer

  He was right, she thought.

  ‘Could you, at least, tell me what Melissa Evans’ real name is, Mr Traynor?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If anybody else asks me for the name, I’ll say I promised my source I’d never reveal it.’

  ‘Whereas, in fact …?’

  ‘Whereas, in fact …’ Traynor paused. ‘I’m in a good mood, so I’ll tell you what you want to know, but on the strict understanding that not only is it off the record, but you don’t pass it on to anyone else.’

  ‘All right,’ Paniatowski said, hating herself for agreeing to his demand.

  ‘I can’t tell you what her real name is because my source didn’t tell me, and however much I grovelled – and I can do a very good grovel for the right people – he simply wouldn’t budge.’

  ‘If I knew who the dead woman really was, that would probably help me to catch her killer,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Yes,’ Traynor agreed, ‘it probably would.’

  ‘Don’t let him get away with it,’ Paniatowski urged. ‘Give me the name of your source.’

  ‘No chance!’

  ‘Don’t you have an ounce of human decency in you, Mr Traynor?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Traynor frowned, as if he was really considering the matter.

  ‘Nope,’ he said finally, ‘I don’t think I do.’

  As Paniatowski drove home, the skies opened and the rain lashed her windscreen with a fury to match her own.

  Sometime in the next few hours, when you realise you’ve made a big mistake, you’re going to feel very foolish, Mr Traynor, she’d said at the press conference – even though she’d done dozens of press conferences before, and knew she should be circumspect; even though she’d seen the camera lenses winking at her!

  And what had Traynor said in reply?

  Not as foolish as you’ll feel when you discover I was right all along.

  But she could live with looking foolish – could even live it down, in time – because everybody made mistakes.

  What was really getting to her was that there was one very important question that she simply had no answer to.

  ‘I wish I knew how Traynor’s source knows Melissa Evans’ real name,’ she said aloud.

  And her windscreen wipers, battling against the storm, went ‘swish, swish, swish’ as if to mock her.

  How could this source – whoever he was – possibly know the name? she asked herself for probably the twentieth time.

  How could any one person – and a person, furthermore, in little Whitebridge, for God’s sake! – know what the combined might of the Mid Lancs Constabulary and the New York City Police Department didn’t know?

  As she pulled into the driveway, she was surprised to see that the lounge light was still on, because Elena was normally in bed by that hour, and the nanny, coming from a Spanish family where money was tight, was almost fanatical about not wasting electricity.

  She parked the car, and entered the house through the side door. Elena was sitting on the sofa. She looked miserable, and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Paniatowski asked in a complete panic. ‘Is it one of the boys?’

  ‘The boys are fine,’ Elena assured her.

  ‘Then why are you looking so unhappy?’

  ‘Mrs Green, the lady from next door …’

  ‘I know who Mrs Green is.’

  ‘She bring her puppy round, for the boys to stroke.’

  ‘And did it bite one of them?’

  ‘No, it was very good – very friendly.’

  ‘Then what, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Philip grab hold of the puppy’s tail. He pull it very hard. The puppy is crying and Thomas is crying. I say, “Philip, let go of the puppy,” but he only laugh and pull harder. He only let go when Mrs Green shout very loud at him.’

  ‘He’s only a baby,’ Paniatowski said. ‘He was just playing. He didn’t know he was hurting the puppy.’

  ‘I tell him …’

  ‘You can’t expect a baby to understand the concept of inflicting pain on others. It’s far beyond their mental reach.’

  Elena looked as if she was about to argue, then she said, ‘Mrs Green is very angry.’

  ‘I’ll deal with her in the morning,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Thank you for staying up so late, Elena. It was very thoughtful of you. But you can go to bed now.’

  As Elena climbed the stairs, Paniatowski allowed her body – which was as weary now as she could ever remember it being – to sink down into the sofa.

  Is this how it begins? she thought. Is this how the bad seed starts to emerge?

  ELEVEN

  When Detectives Franco and Henning were ushered into Harvey Morgan’s office by Linda, his secretary, Morgan himself was on the phone.

  ‘Listen Hank,’ he was saying, ‘you need to clear the presses, because you got to have the capacity to reprint her books … yeah, all of them, even the early ones … I don’t know … fifty thousand, maybe a hundred thousand copies of each …’ He looked up and seemed to notice the two detectives for the first time. ‘Give me a number between twenty and thirty,’ he mouthed.

  ‘Uh … twenty-four,’ Henning said.

  ‘I shouldn’t need to be telling you this, Hank, because you’re the publisher, and you should already have the figures at your fingertips,’ Morgan said into the phone, ‘but when Vladimir Nabokov died last year, his sales went up twenty-four per cent! That’s right. Twenty-four per cent! And he died of natural causes!’ He paused for a moment, then continued, ‘Yeah, it makes a difference how she died. You’re gonna have one surge in sales at her funeral, and you’re gonna have a second surge when the guy who killed her goes on trial. And you’d sure as hell better be ready for both of them.’

  When he hung up, Franco said, ‘It didn’t take you long to cash in on Melissa Evans’ death, did it, Mr Morgan?’

  ‘You’re damn right it didn’t,’ Morgan said, with evident satisfaction. ‘That’s why I’m at the top of the tree. That’s why I have writers queuing up to have me represent them. Besides,’ he added, perhaps finally detecting a hint of criticism in what Franco had said, ‘it’s what Melissa herself would have wanted.’

  ‘Sure she would,’ Franco said, not even bothering to try and hide his scepticism.

  ‘Sure she would,’ Morgan echoed, ‘because fifteen per cent of what she makes goes directly into the foundation.’

  ‘What foundation?’

  ‘The Melissa Evans Foundation – it’s some kinda charity.’

  ‘Does the foundation really get fifteen per cent of her income – or is that another figure you’ve just made up?’ Franco growled.

  ‘Steady, Pete,’ Henning cautioned.

  ‘Did you make it up?’ Franco persisted.

  ‘I’m thinking about it,’ said Morgan, apparently impervious to Franco’s anger. ‘Yeah, it was fifteen per cent. The reason I remember is because I had to talk her down from twenty – and boy, was that hard work.’

  ‘How well did you know Melissa Evans?’ Henning asked, in an attempt to steer the conversation into safer waters.

  ‘How well did I know her? I was like a father to her,’ Morgan said.

  ‘So tell us about her,’ Henning said quickly, before Franco had the chance to say something which was almost bound to be unhelpful.

  ‘About six or seven years ago now, she comes in here with a biography of John Lennon she’s written,’ Morgan told him. ‘What it has to say is God awful boring, because all she’s done is collect up information that’s already been published – but the way she says it is just great. It’s like Lennon leaps off the page and he’s there with you in the room. I sign her up on the spot, and give her $5,000 dollars – out of my own pocket – so she can do some research.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean by research?’ Franco asked.

  Morgan sighed, as if he’d just realised that he was dealing with a
numbskull here.

  ‘Research is when you pay people to tell you things.’

  ‘And by “people” you mean post-graduate students and recognised experts in their field?’ Franco asked.

  ‘Yeah, people like that,’ Morgan said, unconvincingly. ‘But also chauffeurs and maids, and doormen at nightclubs – especially doormen at nightclubs.’

  ‘Did you see her very often?’ Henning asked.

  ‘Sure, we were both in the loop, so we were always meeting at parties and receptions.’

  ‘I meant socially.’

  ‘Like I said, we were always meeting at—’

  ‘Did you ever get together just as friends?’

  ‘Get together as friends? Who the hell has time for that?’ Morgan asked dismissively.

  ‘I’d like the names and addresses of her family and all her friends,’ Franco said.

  ‘I don’t know anything about the family,’ Morgan admitted.

  ‘What about the friends?’

  Morgan thought about it for a moment.

  ‘I can’t help you there, either,’ he admitted. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just gotta—’

  ‘Do some more cashing in?’ Franco suggested.

  ‘Move some more product,’ Morgan corrected him.

  They stepped into the outer office, and Linda looked up from her desk and smiled at them.

  ‘He’s not always as crass and insensitive as he seemed today,’ she told the two detectives.

  ‘He couldn’t be,’ Franco replied. ‘No one could.’

  The secretary held out a piece of paper for Henning to take. ‘This is the name and address of Melissa’s best friend.’

  Once they were back out on the street, Henning turned to Franco and said, ‘You’re getting too involved in this investigation, Pete – way too involved.’

  Franco sighed. ‘You’re right,’ he agreed. ‘Maybe I’d feel better if we could find just one person who was really mourning Melissa Evans’ death.’

  Patricia Courtney, who lived in a loft in the middle of SoHo, was about the same age as Melissa Evans had been, but was a little shorter, slightly stockier and had spiky purple hair. She was a painter, and several of her works were hanging on the bare brickwork walls.

  Henning supposed that her paintings must be art, because that was what paintings were, but he himself could not relate to the display of female body parts which any decent woman would only uncover in the dark.

  Franco, on the other hand, displayed no such embarrassment, but instead studied the pictures with interest.

  And while he was studying them, Patricia Courtney was studying him, her body language saying that she knew he was about to launch an attack on her work, and she was more than ready for it.

  ‘Do you sell your paintings, Miss Courtney?’ Franco asked.

  ‘Yes, I sell them,’ Patricia Courtney replied aggressively. ‘I’m an artist. It’s what artists do.’

  ‘But you don’t need to sell them,’ Franco said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I’m no expert on the acrylic painted vagina market – I’m much more into Roy Lichtenstein—’

  ‘That phoney!’

  ‘But I’d be willing to bet your paintings – which I rather like, as a matter of fact – didn’t earn you nearly enough to buy this loft.’

  She could go one of two ways, Henning thought – she could explode, or she could smile.

  She smiled, and – not for the first time – Henning was impressed by his partner’s skill in reading people.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Patricia Courtney agreed. ‘I bought the place with money from my trust fund.’

  ‘According to Harvey Morgan’s secretary, you were Melissa Evans’ best friend,’ Franco said. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes … and no,’ Patricia Courtney told him. ‘I enjoyed her company a great deal, and I spent a lot of my free time with her when we weren’t both working. She was intelligent and amusing, and sometimes we’d even hop into bed together, though that was mostly for old times’ sake.’

  Henning looked down at his shoes, and wished he was somewhere – anywhere – else.

  ‘What you’ve just said sounds like a description of best friends to me,’ Franco told her.

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But what really makes best friends, in my opinion, is that they tell each other everything.’

  ‘And Melissa didn’t tell you everything?’

  ‘Melissa told me practically nothing – she played her cards real close to her chest.’

  ‘So what do you know about her?’

  ‘I know Melissa Evans wasn’t her real name, because that’s one of the things that she did tell me.’

  ‘But she didn’t go any further than that, and tell you what her real name actually was?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I know that her father died a couple of months ago. He’s the reason, incidentally, that she changed her name.’

  ‘Could you explain?’

  ‘Sure. She always believed she was going to be famous – although some people might prefer to call her infamous—’

  ‘Is that what you’d call her? Infamous?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call her anything. Hey, I’m an artist. I create things of beauty. And if Melissa wanted to churn out dross to pay the bills, then that was absolutely no business of mine.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I interrupted you,’ Franco said. ‘You were telling us about why she changed her name.’

  ‘Yeah. She knew that when she was famous, the tabloids would try to dig up dirt on her, in pretty much the same way as she was digging up dirt on the subjects of her books.’

  ‘And she didn’t want her father to be bothered?’

  ‘That’s right – but there was more to it than that. It seems that he had his own skeleton in the closet …’

  ‘What kind of skeleton?’

  ‘That I don’t know, but I got the impression that it related to something that happened a long, long time ago. Anyway, the skeleton was there to be found, and she didn’t want it brought out into the daylight and given a thorough rattling in front of the cameras.’

  ‘Did her father live here in New York?’

  Patricia Courtney shrugged. ‘She didn’t tell me he didn’t, but I don’t think that he did.’

  ‘What leads you to that conclusion?’

  ‘When he died, she dropped out of sight for about a week. If she’d have been here, I’d have seen her, because New York is a big city, but the New York that Melissa and I shared is just a village.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can say that might help me, Patricia?’ Franco asked.

  ‘Maybe this. When she came back from his funeral, she said, “I’m really going to miss Dad. The one consolation I have is that I’m now free to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time.” And I said, “Honey, you’re a free spirit. If you really wanted to do it, how come you let your father stop you?” And that’s when she came over all strange, like she wasn’t really with me anymore. “I know you think nothing good can come from opening old wounds,” she said, “but sometimes you have to do it, so the wounds have a chance to heal properly.” I think she was talking to her father at that point.’

  ‘I think so too.’

  ‘And maybe that had to do with the skeleton.’

  ‘Yes, maybe it did.’

  Patricia stepped back a couple of paces, and ran her eyes critically up and down Franco’s body.

  ‘You wouldn’t like to come around and model for me sometime, would you?’ she asked.

  Franco smiled. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the right sort of equipment, Patricia,’ he said.

  ‘I can see that for myself,’ Patricia Courtney agreed, ‘but I’ve fallen into a bit of an artistic rut, and I think it’s time to branch out.’

  Franco’s smile became a little sadder.

  ‘I’m a recent widower,’ he said.

  Most people
would have grown all embarrassed and regretful at this point, Henning thought, but it didn’t look to him as if Patricia Courtney was about to become either of those things.

  He was right.

  ‘You’re a widower and I’m a dyke,’ she told Franco. ‘But sometimes you have to leave the past behind, and set off in a new direction.’

  ‘The widower and the lesbian,’ Franco mused. ‘Nah – that kind of thing only works out in the movies.’

  Brad Jones, the more senior of Melissa Evans’ bodyguards, lived in Brooklyn, and agreed to meet the two detectives in a bar just off Utica Avenue.

  Jones was around six feet two inches tall and tightly muscled. But he also had a pair of brown eyes which revealed both compassion and intelligence. Franco guessed he was an ex-marine, and decided that he could trust the man, and probably might even like him.

  ‘The reason I didn’t invite you up to my crib is that it’s a shit-box,’ Jones explained, when they’d ordered their drinks. ‘Hell, I don’t need anything better, ’cos I’m hardly ever there.’

  ‘Every man should have a place that he can call home,’ Henning said solemnly.

  ‘You’re right,’ Jones agreed, ‘and mine, my friend, is a log cabin in the Catskills.’

  ‘Are you working at the moment?’ Franco asked.

  Jones shook his head. ‘No. I’ve got a good name in the business, and the second it was announced that Melissa was dead I started getting offers, but she paid me till the end of the month, so I reckon I’m still working for her.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Henning pointed out.

  ‘But not buried,’ Jones countered. ‘I won’t consider my job finally over until she’s laid to rest.’

  ‘You sound like you were quite fond of her,’ Franco said.

  ‘Yeah, she was a real nice lady. We weren’t friends – I was the hired help – but we got on well.’

  ‘Did she really need a bodyguard, or did she just keep you around because famous people have to keep proving to themselves that they really are famous, and having a bodyguard is one of the ways to do it?’

  ‘She really needed a bodyguard,’ Jones said. ‘Most of the time, it was just little things that I prevented – people screaming abuse in her face or throwing ink at her. You know the kind of shit that goes down.’