Cold Shoulder (23 page)

Rooney took her over the photographs, pointing out each woman in turn, where they were found, the dates. She looked closely at Hastings. Pinned next to it was one of him in drag.

‘How about that for a turn-up? Drag artist in his spare time, I found that out,’ Rooney said, as if he expected her to applaud.

She remained with Rooney for two more hours. Back in his office, he talked on and on. She knew he was running everything by her, for no other reason than that he wanted to ran it all by himself. She let him ramble on with barely an interruption and wondered if at the end of all this he was going to book her. Then came: ‘You ever think about that kid? The one you took out?’

She turned away. She didn’t think of him, and she suddenly felt guilty. But Rooney continued, ‘You were good, you know. I wish I had someone here with your dedication. If you’d not got on the bottle, you’d be somewhere now. A lot go the same way — well, not quite as low as you. You hit the skids, didn’t you? Worked the streets?’

‘Yes. Look — can I go?’ She stood up.

‘No, you can’t. Fucking sit down.’

She sat down, and then he blew her away. ‘I want you to do something for me.’

She stared.

‘Make you a deal.’ He picked up the charge sheets between finger and thumb and dangled them. ‘See what you can come up with for me. Ask around the whorehouses, the—’

‘You kidding me?’

He shook his head, his voice suddenly low and unpleasant. ‘No, I’m not kidding. The deal is I’ll clear these,’ he indicated the long list of charges, ‘if you help me out. Somebody’s got to know these hookers, somebody’s got to know something, maybe where Murphy’s hiding out. We’re trying to trace Helen Murphy’s husband but so far no joy and I doubt if it’s him. If you find anything, any link, you got a clean sheet.’

Lorraine laughed. ‘I got a job, Bill.’

He leaned closer to her, and she could smell his stale breath. ‘This is not a job, sweetheart, this is a deal. You get a clean slate for helping me out or I’ll bust you.’

‘Then I’ll need a car—’

‘Fuck off, Lorraine! Look at this. You’ve been charged on eight counts for driving without a licence, without insurance and under the influence. No way can I get that cleared. The other stuff, yes — the no-show for court appearances, prostitution.’

‘What about expenses?’

He laughed, shaking his head. ‘You sure try it on.’

‘I got to eat, pay rent. I walk out of my job, and—’

He sneered, ‘Do what you did before, Lorraine, sell your little ass—’

She leaned over the desk. ‘Screw you. Take those charges and shove them up your ass — it’s big enough to take the entire filing cabinet.’

He roared with laughter and slapped the desk with his hand. ‘Okay. Fifty bucks.’

‘Aday?’

‘A week.’

‘Fuck off. I know how much you pay informers, I also know you’ll have a nice little stash that you’ll divvy out between you and your pals at the end of each month, filling in fictional names and places. I know, Billy. Fifty bucks a day. I can go on the streets, into the bars, the clubs. I’ll find someone with information. Like you said, I was good.’

Rooney got up and crossed to his window. He stood playing with the blind. ‘How long you been sober?’

‘I told you, a year. Call my husband, he’ll tell you. Call my room-mate, she’ll tell you. I’m straight, Bill.’

He picked at his nose — it was a habit. No wonder it was always so red, Lorraine thought.

‘You’ll call in every day?’

‘I’ll call in on the hour, if that’s what you want.’

‘Yeah, it is,’ he said quietly, and opened his wallet.

Lorraine couldn’t believe it: he was going to pay her there and then. ‘Is there any way I can get copies of the statements you got to date?’

Rooney nodded, counting out a hundred bucks. ‘This is it, Lorraine, and believe me when I say I’ll have you brought back in here so fast if you mess me around. I need information.’

‘I’ll also need photographs — everything you got so far.’

Rooney looked at her, suddenly uncertain.

‘I got to know what’s going on, Bill.’

‘Yeah. I guess you do.’

Rooney watched Lorraine walk out of the building and flag down a taxi before he let the blind flip back into place. He told himself he must be nuts, especially as he’d not even got her to sign for the cash. Added to that, he’d handed over copies of the case files. He had a moment of blind panic: if she was to take it to the press he’d be screwed to the floor. Then he relaxed; he was almost nailed there already. He checked the time and put in a call to Andrew Fellows.

‘Ah, Captain, I’m so sorry not to have got back to you since you gave me this new stuff on Hastings. Reason is, I’ve not had too much spare time, I’m on a lecture tour.’

‘I’d appreciate your input as soon as possible,’ Rooney rumbled.

‘I’ll get back to you soon as I’ve got a moment to go over the file, but I’m up to my ears right now.’

Rooney listened to the drawling voice, half smiling at the ‘ears’ line, waiting for what he suspected was coming. It came.

‘I don’t suppose there’s some way you could finance me, is there? Only it does take up a considerable amount of my time.’

Rooney said he would run it by his chief and dropped the phone back on the hook. The chief would, no doubt, arrange payment — it had been his idea to bring Fellows on board, so let
him
budget for him. Rooney was stretched and he was not about to pay Fellows out of his own pocket, not like Lorraine.

He remembered finding her on the floor in the old precinct, looking into her face in the patrol car when he held that poor kid’s Sony Walkman under her nose. She’d given that half-dazed smile. He remembered that moment now. That kid would’ve been alive if it wasn’t for that bitch. He wanted to be deeply angry, but he couldn’t, and it confused him. She had to be pretty tough to have survived, to have got herself back together. At least he hoped she was: that she wasn’t right that moment walking into a bar with his case file in one hand and his cash in the other. If she was, then he would make sure, no matter what else he did, that she paid a high price.

Lorraine read through the files all night. Her concentration blanked out Rosie and her television shows. When Rosie went to bed, Lorraine continued working, sifting through every statement, studying each photograph, jotting down notes. It was four in the morning when she stretched and got up. She had sat with her legs tightly crossed, just the way she had when she was working in the old days. She massaged her thighs, easing out the cramp, then sat staring into space. Rooney was right, they had nothing: no witnesses but herself. If only he knew! Lorraine had seen the killer — had almost gone down on him, had almost got herself killed. And she also had a clear memory of the killer’s cufflinks. She wondered if Norman Hastings had ever bought or owned a reconditioned vintage car. From what she had read so far, she doubted it — but, then, everyone had been wrong about him being the perfect family man.

Lorraine didn’t go to bed until almost five, and by then she was so wired up she was unable to fall asleep. The sofa bed was uncomfortable and too soft, her back ached and her legs still felt as if they were going to cramp up. She was in the half-dream state when suddenly she had a vivid image of the boy. She saw him running, saw the flash of the Superman striped jacket.

‘Freeze!

She sat up, wide awake now. She didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to see herself, didn’t want to see the boy’s jerking body as the bullets tore into him. She flipped over the sheet, got up and drew back the curtains. She forced herself to think about the murderer, remembering exactly where he had picked her up. Was he local? Somehow she doubted it — he was too flashy, too well dressed. Again, Murphy, the only suspect, did not tie in. Lorraine closed her eyes and visualized his face: the rimless, gold-framed glasses, the blue close-set eyes, the sharp nose and the wide, wet, thick-lipped mouth. She conjured up a picture of his hands, went over exactly what he had said, how he had picked her up, how he had reached into the glove compartment. She wasn’t scared, she just let the killer move into her mind. And just as she had done with the Laura Bradley murder, she repeated to herself, over and over again, her voice a soft whisper: ‘I’ll get you.’

R
OSIE WAS so immersed in the horror of the statements and pictures she didn’t hear Lorraine walking into the bedroom.

‘That was private, Rosie, you shouldn’t be reading it.’

Rosie looked up and hunched her shoulders apologetically. ‘It’s those mortuary shots that get me — really close up, aren’t they? I didn’t know you looked like that when you were dead, how they can clean them up…’ She held up Helen Murphy’s photograph. ‘This is her when they found her, and this is her at the morgue and this is her — I mean, she looks like she’s sleeping.’

Lorraine walked into the bathroom. ‘They had her face fixed up with plaster for an ID. Made-up, that’s all. The only suspect they got is her husband, a trucker, but they’re way off, he’s not the killer.’

Rosie shut the file. ‘I doubt if anyone’ll grieve over these women, they look like they’re all pretty shot up — in fact some of them look happier dead, know what I mean? Well, not the little blonde girl, she’s sort of cute.’

Lorraine leaned on the bathroom door. ‘Yeah. She doesn’t fit in, does she? All the others are older, worn out, hard…’

‘You know what I think?’ Rosie licked her lips. ‘I think he picked
you
up. You were hit on the back of the head but somehow you got away from him. The taxi brought you back here and… I remembered it was the seventeenth of last month.’ Then she shrugged her heavy shoulders. ‘It couldn’t have been you, though, could it?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that was the day Norman Whatcha-call-it was done — they found him in his own car, right? So he wouldn’t have been whacking you over the head and killing somebody else, would he?’

‘I fell on the pavement, Rosie.’

‘Yeah — and I’m Sharon Stone’s lookalike.’

Lorraine walked into the shower and pulled the curtain round her. Rosie surprised her — not that she had said anything intelligent, or especially intuitive even: Lorraine had been cracked over the back of the head in exactly the same manner as described not once but eight times in the files. But it was the simple dismissal of the possibility that the man could have killed Hastings and then an hour later attempted to kill again. Lorraine made a mental note to check through the exact times and dates of each murder.

Lorraine felt tired, but a good sort of tired. She’d worked hard last night just assimilating all the evidence and, although she didn’t like to admit it, she had liked chatting over it with Rosie. That’s what had surprised her: that she had, for a few brief minutes, felt like a player again. ‘Marking out the jigsaw’ was the way she used to describe it to Mike.

The water jets sprayed into her uptilted face. Mike and she had talked over her cases to begin with, but gradually he’d become uninterested, telling her that he didn’t want to hear about the whores or the details of the murders, he had to study. She had no one to talk it out of her system with: she had just bottled it all up inside.

She gasped, turned the taps to cold. She didn’t want
him
to come back into her life, not now, please not Lubrinski, she couldn’t deal with him. It had been Lubrinski who realized she was bottling up all the horror, anger, disgust. It had been Lubrinski after a particular heavy night when they had found two teenagers in a boarding house, stiff from death, stiff from drugs, stiff and stinking, but they were so beautiful, like frozen angels the pair of them, who had insisted they go to a bar, insisted they get smashed. And drunk she had suddenly broken down and Lubrinski had gripped her tightly, had even cried with her as he said it was okay to let go, to let the poison out, rather than have it seething inside her. Lubrinski.

Rosie was eating muffins with a jam smear across her cheek and also over the file, which Lorraine promptly snatched away from her. ‘You don’t get it sticky with jam!’

Rosie washed her hands in a great display, and then returned to reading the files and statements. ‘This Andrew Fellows is something else, isn’t he? You read what he came up with about Helen thingy? The killer really likes them in bad shape, doesn’t he?’

Lorraine couldn’t help but be drawn in. ‘Apart from Holly.’

‘Oh, yeah. Well, maybe he just got lucky that night.’

Lorraine dressed and made up her face. When she came back into the room Rosie was still engrossed in the files.

‘Could you borrow that car from Jake’s friend?’

‘What do you need a car for?’

‘I need to go to Santa Monica. A bit of investigation work. Maybe you could help me.’

Rosie’s face lit up. ‘Do I get paid?’

‘Yeah, you’ll get paid, Rosie.’

They eventually found ‘W-rent W-rent Wreckers’ where Lorraine had to pay a hundred bucks down in case there were any further dents to the Mustang. The man was not overly interested in the licence Rosie waved at him, but the car cost fifty bucks for a week, plus gas, with the hundred-buck deposit. Rosie drew a diagram of all the dents to avoid them being conned on their return, and in a cloud of exhaust fumes, bangs, and the engine clacking at an alarming rate, they bombed out of the yard.

The roof was down — it could not go up — and as it was a bright clear day, Lorraine rested back on the torn seat and considered how they — she, she corrected herself — would go about interviewing the men working at the vintage car garage in Santa Monica. All she wanted to know was if they sold cufflinks; if so, how many, and how many men they employed. And she needed to know if they had someone fitting the description of the killer. With Rosie at the wheel, Lorraine relaxed for the journey, as much as Rosie’s driving style would allow: she was an incurable horn tooter, thrusting an abusive finger up to anyone who cut her up. Yet, and again Lorraine found herself surprised, she was a competent driver, even if she did cut across lanes. But she did it so positively that it didn’t make Lorraine nervous.