Amphetamines and Pearls (4 page)

So she spent her days rushing from one tiny cellar to another, with her costume in a tiny leather case. At first she even used to remember which name she was dancing under and where. But then she had realised that it didn't matter. No one was buying her name: they were buying her body—across the haze of the floodlights and through the poorly recorded music. Which was as near to true contact as most of them wanted or dared.

Somewhere along the way we had slept together. After I had stopped being a legitimate cop and she no longer resented me expecting it as fair trade. And when she had lost any thought of charging me as just another customer.

It had been nothing to do with love, nothing to do with any ideas of romance: it was all to do with the needs of the body. And it had worked. We knew we did not have to be suspicious of each other; neither of us wanted more than the other. What we both wanted was pleasure—and relaxation afterwards without feeling soiled by guilt or money.

It had continued to work.

Sandy stood up. She was tall: five eight or nine. She had on a red and black patterned blouse in some see-through kind of silk, a short black skirt that stopped a couple of inches above black boots which came over her knees; her light reddish hair curled down to her breasts at the front and it hung down from below a wide-brimmed black hat which had a band of blue and white beads at the crown. More beads—blue, yellow and white—hung from her neck down her blouse.

I reached up a hand towards her. She smiled and took it in her own.

‘Scott Mitchell! You just sat there and watched me taking great care about putting on my make-up. If you think I'm going to get it all messed up just because you decide to feel randy in the middle of the day then you've got another think coming.'

I reached up my other hand and pulled her down. ‘That's not what I've got coming—not exactly.'

She kissed me gently at the base of the neck. ‘Don't you ever think of anything else?'

I sat up and seriously considered the matter.

‘Well, there was a half-hour last Thursday week, when I distinctly recall thinking about steak.'

She pulled the hat off her head and hit me with it. I aimed my mouth for the riot of red hair she had set free and held her fast. We rolled back across the bed and when I raised myself above her the buttons at the front of her blouse had worked themselves undone. I knew her breasts were beautiful but still I never tired of the first sight of them; swelling from lace that looked sizes too small or free and naked. I lowered my head, and ran my tongue between them, pushing the edges of the material away until I could tease her nipples. Tease and bite.

Sandy jumped and gave a small shriek. Then she reached her fingers down towards the swelling inside my trousers. As she began to pull at the top of my zip I looked into her eyes and thought of Vonnie's face that morning. Alternately smiling and pleading. Then I thought of Candi's face last night. Empty. Dead.

Sandy's eyes were green and alive and they didn't want anything more dangerous or confusing than this. I closed my own eyes and kissed her. Hard.

5

Like I said, it didn't work for long but at the moment I felt good. I could even take the fact that old bum-freezer was waiting for me round the corner, standing inside a call box holding a non-existent conversation. They were probably the kind he did best.

I could even take the fact that I should have reported in to West End Central and hadn't, which meant that by now the law would be getting a little anxious and starting to shift uneasily on its fat arse. I could take the fact that I found some drugs in Candi's flat and that someone beat the hell out of me to get them back. I could take the look of fear behind the puffed-up slits of Maxie's eyes when I mentioned his visit from Godzilla. Just at that moment I could take a heck of a lot. Some big feller!

The office building still hadn't quite fallen down when I got back to it and the paint was still flaking away. At least the phone had stopped ringing.

When I got into the room the blinds were pulled down and they were waiting. They looked like hoods everywhere. They had the same anonymous clothes, the same anonymous faces, the same anonymous minds. They were all spawned from the same gutter and they never lifted as much as a little toe out of it until the day they lay back down in it again and stopped moving. All they knew about was taking orders and taking what they could get. All they gave in return was a kind of dumb loyalty and a blind, stupid obedience. If they were told to work somebody over good they would do it, no matter what.

And here was I thinking I was ripe to conquer the world: I said the feeling didn't last long.

Then one of them surprised me. He spoke. They were really high class!

‘We've got a word for you, Mitchell.'

‘I bet it's the same one I've got for you.' I was still feeling pretty snappy, but the slight jolt in his glazed expression told me that was something I might live to regret. If I was lucky.

‘You listen! The word is—take a holiday.'

I was going to inform him that was three words but what was the use of asking for trouble when it had already arrived—packaged by arrangement with crombie.

‘Is that all? Maybe I'd like to know who's sending me get well messages before I'm ill.'

He moved around the desk. His friend, the strong silent type, stayed where he was—between me and the door. If they hadn't already taken it there was a gun in my desk drawer. Maybe if I waved that at them they would go away and play somewhere else. Though I doubted it; they would only come back later and wave some heat at me.

‘Okay, Mitchell, remember what we said. Leave town. Do yourself a big favour. Blow.'

They talked in clichés; they looked like clichés; they hit like clichés. The same old punches to the same old, bruised places. The talkative one swung a fist at my head while his partner aimed another low into my kidneys. I rode the first with a duck of the head and turned towards the second. The fist was bunched like a pound of bananas but it wouldn't do me as much good. I caught at it with both hands and held fast; then I swung up my knee. It hit him full in the groin and he gasped and tried to pull away. I held on and was about to give him the treatment a second time when something like a ton weight descended on me from what seemed to be a great height.

One of them picked me up and sat me in my office chair; the other kicked the chair out from under me. The chair splintered against the wall and I fell to the worn carpet with a thump and a fast loss of breath. The boot struck me in the left shoulder at the right height to numb my arm. To make sure the feeling had gone, they hauled me up by it and threw me down on top of the chair.

This was getting a little too repetitive for comfort. When the kick came in again I grabbed underneath it and hoisted it on its way towards the ceiling. At the same moment I was off the floor and diving into the gut of the hood beside the desk. He caught at my head as it buried itself into the cloth of his overcoat, but couldn't stop the impact. We bounced across the room and I got up fast, trampling on him as many times as I could in the process. I needed to get back to my desk first: I damn near made it.

Maybe next time. Maybe if I can get in a little more practice. Maybe.

The one with chorus-boy ambitions was waiting and he had a nasty-looking piece of piping raised above his shoulder. The nearer it got to my head the nastier it looked. Then I stopped seeing it altogether.

There's this movie called ‘The Big Sleep'. I thought about it now; thought about a little guy in the movie called Jones. Jones is little and weedy and looks like a born victim. He gets himself hired to tail the hero around but he isn't very good at it. He gets himself spotted but he sticks to it all the same. Perhaps he needed the money, perhaps it was his pride. Who knows? He stuck to it when he should have gone home to his wife and kids and read a good book—any kind of a book.

Jones got too close at the wrong time. He ended up getting too close to death. He ended up drinking from the wrong cup and getting himself poisoned and then he slept all right. For good.

He was a mug playing a mug's game but I felt sorry for him: like a child trying hard to be a man and not knowing it wasn't worth it.

Bum-freezer hadn't got himself poisoned but he had got himself killed. I found him half-way down the stairs leading out on to the street. He had either been on his way up or on his way out: either way it made no difference. He wasn't going anywhere now. Arms and legs were crumpled at all directions from the break in the stairway. His head couldn't be seen at first, but when I knelt down beside him I saw it tucked down into his body and towards the
wall as though it did not want to be hit any more. It was bloody and pulped on one side as though whoever had hit him was in a bad mood and wanted to take it out on something. He just happened to choose bum-freezer's head.

I looked carefully and delicately in his pockets for anything that might be useful. The only thing I found was a card: it read—

James Cook

Car Hire

01.485.7684

I put it in my top pocket and let the corner of his leather jacket fall back into place. In my head I drank a toast to success.

Then I went back to my office to call the police. They beat me to it by three strides. It was Tom Gilmour and he was annoyed. He was even more annoyed when I told him about the body that was cluttering up the stairs in a fine neighbourhood like mine. He even told me that if I touched the body before he got there he would haul my arse into the cells quicker than forked lightning. They should never have sent him on a year's exchange to New York: it's done nothing for his language. Nothing at all.

There was nothing else on Cook to identify him; I guessed that the
solitary card had been a mistake. Just one more in a lifetime of mistakes. A short lifetime and probably not a happy one. I wanted to keep that information to myself for a while. If I could find out who had hired him to follow me it might help. Whoever it had been it wasn't the same person who had me warned off, that was sure. He dealt in professionals.

I told Gilmour I had seen him earlier that day and that maybe he was a tail. I told him about my visitors. Not that I could have kept that a secret. The top of my head looked like a launching pad at Cape Canaveral.

‘What do you think they wanted? I'm behind with the gas bill. It's a new way of collecting debts: they get these riggers fresh from working in the North Sea and set them to work on dry land. It's more effective than sending reminders printed in red.'

‘Listen, stupid! Don't fill my ears full of that wise-cracking shit! Already I could book you for failing to report first thing this morning. You just happen to be a prime suspect on a murder charge or maybe you'd forgotten that sweet fact? Now you've got dead bodies crawling out of the woodwork as though they're going out of style and a lump on your head the size of one of Raquel Welch's tits. You're in no position to make jokes; even if they were funny.'

‘Tom, go easy will you? I've had enough pounded out of me for one day without you as well. I thought British cops were always calm and thoughtful and gave out with cups of tea and cigarettes. That time in Manhattan South really stirred you up.'

He sat back in the one remaining intact chair in the office and looked up at me, perched precariously on the edge of the desk. Down on the stairway men were dusting the walls and bannisters for prints and drawing chalk marks around what had been James Cook of James Cook Car Hire. Limited. Very.

Since he had got back from the States, Tom even dressed differently. His suits were somehow fresher, sharper; he walked with a certain bounce which hadn't been there before; he flung words around with disregard for whom they hit and how. He had added to the basic training and experience that had made him a good cop a toughness which threatened to make him a great one. And here was I withholding information and trying to beat him to the punch.

‘They were interested in my health. They told me to take a holiday. I tried to argue with them and they didn't like it. That's all.' I looked up at him and saw he was listening, just. ‘I don't know where they came from or who sent them. As far as I know I've never seen either of them before. If you like I'll come down and look through some mug shots and see if I can pick them out. Otherwise
…'

I let the sentence hang and looked at him, waiting for him to interrupt. He wasn't going to so I went on.

‘The other guy I told you about. I saw him earlier today, once definitely, twice maybe. I thought he was following me, but I couldn't be sure. The first time I knew he was near the office was after I came round from my visit from the tourist agency. I found him on the stairs. Then I phoned you.'

‘What did you take from the body?'

I looked him full in the eye. ‘Not a thing.' I stayed looking at him until I thought my integrity was certain. Whatever else I could do, I could lie with the best of them.

Gilmour went to the head of the stairs and looked down. He shouted a couple of orders then came back. Lit a cigarette and sat down again.

‘And last night … ?'

‘Is that your case?'

‘Don't give me is that my fucking case! I've gone out to bat for you more times than I can remember. So don't try to get official with me or you might get some of the same.'

I closed my eyes and concentrated for a moment on the dull pain inside my head. I knew that he was right. I said so. I also said, ‘It was just like I told the cops in Nottingham, nothing left out. She phoned me the previous evening and asked me to go up. When I got there she was dead. As I came out of the flat I was jumped. It's this week's in thing: hit Mitchell and claim the jackpot.'

Something inside my lump throbbed in sympathy.

‘You used to know her, didn't you? Know her well, I mean. Did you tell them that?'

‘I told them I knew her: I guess I didn't go into details.'

He grinned. ‘I bet you didn't or they would be having a field day. Ex-lover kills mistress in rage of jealousy. Boy, you would be good for a going-over on that one!'

‘Tom, I hadn't seen her for what—three, maybe four years. Does it seem likely that I would get a sudden burning desire to go and put a bullet in her back because she was being unfaithful to me?'

‘No. But when you're without a better lead that would do.'

‘And are they stuck for leads?'

This time he smiled outright. ‘How should I know? Like you said, it isn't my case.'

He got up and looked round the shambles of a room. ‘Why you left the force for this I'll never know. You don't look as though you make enough to keep yourself in toilet paper. Are you working at the moment?'

The view from the window was one of a partly-demolished wall which had been decorated with technicoloured graffiti and admonitions to the developers to keep out. They needn't have worried: there was no sign of anyone developing anything in a hurry. I looked down at the wall and still wasn't sure if I should tell him. But I did.

‘Sure I'm working. Since this morning. Someone paid me a nice retainer to investigate Miss Carter's murder.'

Gilmour let out a low whistle.

‘You're really chasing your own tail this time, aren't you? You're going to investigate a murder for which you're your own suspect. Christ. Mitchell! You do things by your own rules and nobody else's, don't you?'

I shrugged my shoulders. I was beginning to think that it was time Tom went. I wanted to be alone with my own stupidity.

‘How long do you think they're going to let you wander around free? You think you can solve a case from inside a jail?'

I looked at him and wondered how much he knew that I didn't. I guessed about as much as I had ahead of him. For now, anyway.

‘Look. Clear up this mess here then come down to the station. Sign a statement and then get the hell out. But for Christ's sake go easy—or the next time I come to scrape somebody's head off the stairs it will be yours.'

With that encouraging thought he left. If that's the way your friends think about you maybe you didn't have much of a chance. I picked a piece of broken wall mirror up from the floor and surveyed my head. I wished I hadn't bothered. Then I knelt, down and looked at the pieces of my shattered chair to see if they could be stuck together. To do that would have been a gesture of hope too: and about as useful as writing on brick walls before they were pulled down.

I left the pieces and went out without bothering to lock the door behind me. The only thing worth taking was the gun and that was now in my pocket.