Cold Heart (12 page)

Half an hour later she was still shaking as she sipped hot water and lemon juice, and paced the black Astroturf with which she had carpeted her bedroom; the building’s beautifully preserved thirties exterior had not deterred Kendall from filling her apartment with screamingly modern design as near to the décor of the Nathan house as she could afford. The sight of all these things now, which had previously given her such satisfaction, filled her with fury as the possibility of Harry Nathan’s treachery sank in.

She wanted to scream, wanted to get back into the jeep and get over to the Nathans’ house, but she knew she had to be calm. If the
famille rose
vase was a fake, what had happened to the original, worth three quarters of a million dollars? She had to find out without betraying how important it was to her. And it
was
important: the vase represented part of an art collection worth twenty million dollars, half of which she knew was hers. Eventually she slumped onto her bed, and nausea swept over her.

Lorraine was in her bathrobe, eating chicken with spinach and walnut salad. She had just settled down in front of the video recorder to play some of Harry Nathan’s tapes when the phone rang. She looked at the clock – it was almost eleven, and she wondered who was calling so late.

‘Lorraine? It’s me, Cindy Nathan.’

‘Oh, hello. I came by the hospital earlier – how are you?’

‘I’m okay. They give me somethin’ for the pain, but it’s the one in my heart that hurts more. I lost my baby.’

‘Yes, I know, I’m so sorry.’

‘So am I, and I would have liked to talk to you.’

‘I’ll come by tomorrow -1 need to talk to you too.’

‘There’s a reason I called, but I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. It’s just I know something about, well, I think I know somebody with a motive for shooting Harry. I think it might be Kendall.’

Lorraine reached for her cigarette pack. ‘Can you just answer me one thing? You know the telephone tapes, the ones you sent over to my office? Who else did you tell that you were sending them to me?’

‘I didn’t tell anyone else – well, not exactly. You see, there’s a locked room, Harry’s office, and I couldn’t find the key. It’s one of those plastic card things, you know – some hotels use them. I couldn’t find it, an’ I didn’t know how to get into the room.’

‘Did Jose and Juana know?’

‘Hell, no. I wouldn’t tell those two nothin’. I called Harry’s wife, Sonja, and she said she didn’t even know there was a locked room. Well, she wouldn’t have, she hadn’t been living there for a long time, so then I called Kendall.’

‘Did you mention the telephone recordings to either of them?’

‘Yes, well, maybe I did, I can’t remember.’

Lorraine wondered if this was true, or whether the girl was trying to throw suspicion on the other two wives – she had seemed certain before that nobody else knew about the tapes. ‘I’m sorry, I got to go now. I’m too tired to talk. They give me something to help me sleep.’

‘Well, I’ll come by in the morning. You sure only Mr Nathan’s ex-wives knew about the tapes?’

‘Yeah. I didn’t tell anyone else. G’night now.’

The phone went dead. Lorraine moved back to her new white sofa, which Tiger was now occupying. ‘Get off.’ He gave a low growl. ‘Hey, man, cut that out. You’ve moved in on the office and don’t try it here. Get off.’ He got up and padded into the bedroom. ‘Not on the bed either, Tiger,’ but he had already disappeared.

She pressed Play on the remote control and settled back, only noticing as she lifted the fork to eat her supper that the chicken leg had been removed. She was about to go after Tiger when the tape started, a shot clearly set up in Nathan’s bedroom. Cindy was spreadeagled naked and face down on the bed, and Nathan was working her over.

Lorraine felt sick as she watched three more videos, two showing explicit sex acts with Cindy, one with Kendall, each more violent and degrading than the last. Cindy was made to beg on all fours, while Nathan beat her with a thonged leather strap. He was into S and M in a big way, screwing her so violently, every muscle straining, that the sweat dripped from his body and matted his dark hair. He had tied Kendall over the back of a chair in a way that enabled him, with a jerk of the rope, to splay her legs wide apart, then insert a selection of objects, animal, mineral and vegetable, into various orifices, while some unknown female friend shrieked in the background with hyena-like laughter.

Worse was to come. Threesomes featuring not only Cindy but other very young girls were next on the tape, then a sickening sequence starring Raymond Vallance. In this session, Nathan sat watching, grinning and jerking off as the girls strapped on black, studded dildoes and forced Vallance down on all fours. Lorraine couldn’t watch another minute of it and went to bed. What she had seen might provide Cindy with a provocation defence, or at least a position from which to bargain down the charge, but it also gave both her and Kendall Nathan a motive and a half: both women had been subjected to the grossest abuse.

Tiger lay sprawled across one side of the bed and didn’t move an inch when Lorraine got under the duvet. He sighed with contentment when he realized that she wasn’t going to push him off.

It was the first time in her life that Lorraine had owned a dog, and she understood now what it meant to have something that asked nothing from her but a half-share of her bed. Tiger had the love she found so difficult to give elsewhere, but he could not fill the void inside her - and it was a void. Lorraine was more lonely than she had ever been, and although she was financially secure, it frightened her to think about her future. Only Tiger heard her fears, and only he saw the vulnerable side of Lorraine that she showed to no one else - so in need of love, and so afraid she would never find it.

Decker had swept up the nightly shower of ficus leaves, had placed a fresh vase of lilies in Reception, and a jug of coffee was percolating. He had already sorted the office mail, mostly bills and circulars, when Lorraine arrived at eight thirty.

‘Morning. Another lovely sunny day,’ he said brightly, watching Tiger set off in search of a blue rubber boxing glove Decker had bought him, which he adored chewing and flinging about. ‘He seems fit and well.’

‘Yeah, so he should. He had a good two miles’ walk this morning, ate half my supper last night
and
demolished his own.’ She threw her hands up. ‘Shit! What is happening to me? He’s a goddamned dog! He’s taking up too much of my life!’ The boxing glove was hurled across the room, and Lorraine laughed.

‘You know, Mrs Page, you have a wonderful laugh,’ Decker said.

‘Yeah, just not a lot to laugh about. You want to come in with the coffee and I’ll give you an update, before I go to see Cindy. She’s in hospital.’

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Get the coffee and I’ll tell you.’

The curtains had been pulled back from the windows that formed one whole wall of Cindy Nathan’s hospital room, giving her a beautiful view of the early-morning haze clearing from the Hollywood Hills. In daylight, the room looked even more like a luxury hotel to Lorraine, and the breakfast on the tray table could certainly have come straight from room service.

Cindy was sitting up, a bed-jacket draped round her shoulders, eating orange and date muffins and fruit compote.

Lorraine drew a chair close to the bed. ‘Right, tell me about Kendall Nathan.’

‘She’s a vicious bitch for a start-off. She claims she owns half of Harry’s art collection, so I don’t get it along with the house.’

‘Has Feinstein told you the value of the estate?’ Lorraine asked.

‘Well, there’s not nearly as much money in the company as anyone thought – Harry hadn’t made a film that did any business since
Mutant Au-Pairs
, so the art’s likely to be the big thing.’ Lorraine waited, noting that the girl seemed much recovered and even quite cheerful. ‘Means I don’t have as much of a motive, do I?’ she said cheerfully. ‘Assuming I knew he was pretty broke, which I didn’t, of course.’ Cindy was a prosecuting attorney’s wet dream.

Lorraine waited as she carried on with her breakfast, pouring some juice and drinking it thirstily before she lay back on the pillows.

‘Harry was a con merchant, and anythin’ he could steal he did. He used everybody – that’s how he got his kicks, right?’

Lorraine remembered the videos – he had got his kicks in a lot of other ways as well.

‘The gallery was real expensive – I mean, it’s on Beverly Drive, right? Clients got a lot of money, and they paid through the nose. But I think he and Kendall were up to something crooked.’

Lorraine sat back. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, all those paintings at the house, they had to be insured. Lot of dough for the premiums, which is why we got such high security – all the stuff in there is the real thing, unlike what those other poor schmucks have got. Harry got the lot – that’s including pre-Columbian stuff, and there’s a Giaca—’ She hesitated. ‘A Giacaroni and stuff like that. You with me? ‘

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Now, Kendall was paying Harry the money for the insurance premiums, which she says is because they had agreed that half the art was hers – like, in her dreams.’ Cindy licked up the wheatgerm still adhering to the rim of the juice glass with a practised flick of her tongue. ‘Still with me?’

‘Yes.’ Lorraine sighed – it wasn’t too taxing to keep up with Cindy’s thought process.

‘She asked me to find the insurance certificates. I didn’t know then it was for some scheme that she and her lawyer have cooked up to show she owns the stuff, so I got ’em out. But the only ones I could find were out of date, which means he hadn’t been paying the cover. So ask yourself why.’

‘Perhaps you’d tell me.’

‘Well, look at the security at the house. The place is jam-full of lasers – you move one of them things off the wall and it’s the full orchestra, you know what I mean?’ Lorraine nodded.

‘Well, I checked the dates when he stopped paying the insurance – it was when he got all the security in and started taping all the phone calls. I only checked because I knocked this vase off its stand. This is some Chinese rose vase supposed to be worth three quarters of a million dollars.’

Lorraine smiled encouragingly.

‘It fell off the plinth, an’ I got real worried. I thought the fucking alarms would start screaming, but nothing happened. It just broke.’

‘Yes, I saw it.’ Lorraine was wondering where all this was leading.

‘Broke into lots of pieces,’ Cindy said.

‘I noticed. Go on.’

Cindy held up her hand. ‘One: no alarms. Two: I find a sticker inside it, a modern sticker like a price thing – the vase had this long, thin neck so that normally you would never see inside. There was a name scrawled on it – Classic Reproductions. I dunno who they are, but what’s their name doing inside some piece of porcelain that’s supposed to be a billion years old?’

‘It’s a fake.’

‘Right. Which brings me to Kendall Nathan.’

Lorraine waited while Cindy licked her lips.

‘She thinks she owns half the so-called art stuff, and she thinks it’s all legit, but if it’s not it means Harry sold the real art on, took the money and didn’t tell her. Now if she found that out, it’s one hell of a motive to kill somebody, wouldn’t you say? It’s called being fucked over twice. He ditched her for me, then ripped off all her money. She was paying him to cover the insurance and he took that as well. You see what I mean, Lorraine?’

‘Do the police know this?’

‘Hell, no. I only just worked it out myself when the vase fell off its perch. I started to put it all together and then—’

‘Then?’

‘I lost my baby.’

Lorraine’s mind worked furiously. Having seen the videos, and learned that Cindy and Raymond Vallance had been having an affair under Nathan’s nose, the possibility that either Cindy or her lover had shot him seemed, as Decker had said, the obvious conclusion. She wondered if Cindy was dragging out all these ideas about art in an effort to throw her off the scent. She said, ‘Cindy, I won’t press you if you’re feeling low, but when you called me, you said somebody was at the house. I saw the rooms were wrecked.’

Cindy nodded. ‘I thought I saw someone, like a young black guy, going down the stairs to the gym. Then I went upstairs and saw the place had been trashed. It really freaked me out.’

Another convenient mystery burglar, Lorraine thought sceptically, but it wasn’t out of the question that the same person who had destroyed the tapes in her office could have broken into the Nathan house. ‘You didn’t mention that when you called me.’

Cindy plucked a tissue from the box at her bedside. ‘Didn’t I? I guess I wasn’t that together – I mean, it was just before . . .’ She gestured weakly at her belly. She blew her nose, then turned her gaze back to Lorraine. ‘I know things look bad, but I swear I think somebody’s framing me, because I’m sure now I didn’t kill Harry, I know I didn’t.’ Cindy lay back again, and put her hand over her eyes.

‘Cindy, there’s a couple of things I need to ask you about,’ Lorraine said quietly.

‘Sure,’ Cindy said, blinking back tears.

‘I found some videotapes, hidden in a wall in Harry’s office.’ There was a pause: Cindy wouldn’t look at her. ‘I’m sure you know the ones I’m talking about. I think your lawyers should see them, plus—’

‘No way,’ Cindy said, crumpling the tissue in her hand. ‘I won’t allow anyone to see them, especially not those fuckin’ lawyers. I hate ’em.’

‘But you were subjected to extreme violence and a lot of sexual abuse.’

‘Yeah, I sure as hell was.’ Lorraine watched the girl pluck at the tissue. ‘Me and God knows how many more.’

‘Like Kendall Nathan and Raymond Vallance, for example,’ Lorraine said casually. ‘Jose and Juana seem to think that you and Mr Vallance were . . . close. Is that true?’

Cindy said nothing for ten, twenty seconds, then, ‘Yeah, we had a thing. Lasted all of five minutes and then he pissed on me too. It’s like I have a sign round my neck, which only guys like him and Harry can see, that says, “Fuck Me and Dump Me” - oh, and “Beat Up on Me While You’re There.”’ She began to cry in earnest.