Lovers and Liars Trilogy (49 page)

“You mean he never even met Suzy? Not once?”

“Not exactly.” Hazel smiled. “We reckon he saw her. Once.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because the last time the secretary rang, in December, she said he wanted to take a look at her. On approval. I mean, bloody cheek! So Suzy has to go round to some plush West End hotel, sit in the lobby for half an hour, then leave. Which she did.”

“And he was in the lobby too, you mean? Checking her out?”

“You tell me.” Hazel shrugged. “If he was, he never spoke to her—nothing like that. I thought, maybe he was so choosy, and when he saw her, she didn’t come up to scratch. Anyway, the secretary rang back, poor kid, and canceled again. Then I never heard another word. It cost him, mind you. Full fees for late cancellations, an extra fee for the hotel visit. The best part of two thousand quid. He must be loaded.”

“Credit card?” Gini said.

Hazel unscrewed the bottle of nail polish and began to apply a second coat.

“Cash. By courier,” she said. “The easiest money we ever made, right, Bernie? I wish all our customers were like that,”

On the sidewalk outside, Gini’s mind raced. It had to be Hawthorne, surely, and it was the first possible outside corroboration of McMullen’s story that she had. An English secretary on the telephone, an English voice calling ICD about those parcels: There must be a connection. The coincidence was too great. She glanced back at the agency office, wishing she had been able to examine that appointment book for herself. But it would probably have told her little: Hawthorne would use an alias. Besides, there was another way to discover more about this.

She turned to Bernie, who lingered at her side, to thank him for his help. As she did so, the door to the basement video studio opened, and a group of people spilled out. Two, a good-looking young man with long, dark, curling hair, and a very pretty young girl, might have been the stars of the sex instruction video. The others looked like technicians—cameramen, soundmen, perhaps.

They were followed by a tall, thin man in his mid-forties with reddish hair drawn back in a ponytail. He was resplendent, head to foot, in mustard-yellow Armani. At the sight of him, Bernie ducked aside and drew her into a store doorway until he had passed. He was clearly not eager to be seen.

Gini said, “Your boss, was it, Bernie?”

Bernie shuffled his feet “One of them. Put it like that. I’d better get back. Keep in touch, right?”

The Armani-clad man climbed into a brand-new black BMW. Bernie, looking shifty, sloped off in the opposite direction. Gini made for the tube, where she stood on the platform, thinking hard. The next person to talk to was Suzy, obviously. She did not have Suzy’s real name or her telephone number or her address. Further inquiries at Elite Introductions might cause suspicion. But Suzy’s company could be hired by the evening. Gini might not be able to hire her—but Pascal certainly could.

A
T THREE THAT TUESDAY
afternoon, about the time Gini arrived at the escort agency, Pascal finally persuaded Lorna Munro to talk to him. Her photographic session over, he took her for a drink in the Deux Magots café on Boulevard St. Germain, just across the street from the St. Germain church.

This elusive American girl looked no more than eighteen. She was at least six feet tall, Pascal calculated, and could have weighed no more than one hundred pounds. She was still in the strong makeup she’d needed that afternoon for monochrome shots. Her short thick hair, on close inspection, was naturally blond. She had wide-set sapphire-blue eyes, a broad, friendly smile, and an air of radiant health. She was wearing flat shoes, black leggings, a man’s white shirt, and a man’s tweed overcoat. Despite this androgynous outfit, every male in the café turned to stare when they walked in.

Lorna Munro seemed impervious, or indifferent, to this. They were seated in the café’s glass-enclosed sidewalk section, fronting the boulevard. Lorna Munro looked at him somewhat warily, then grinned.

“Okay,” she said. “I did my best. Tell your friend in England I’m sorry. Will you do that? I might have known you’d catch up with me one way or another. …You mind if I order some food? I’m ravenous. It feels like a week since breakfast. …” She turned to the waiter with a dazzling smile. “I’ll have a large steak sandwich,
pommes frites
on the side, a green salad no dressing…Oh, and maybe some hot chocolate. It’s freezing out there. My hands are numb. My feet are numb. My butt’s numb, come to that.”

Pascal smiled. With the freakishness peculiar to fashion magazines, Lorna Munro had been required to model Gaultier’s summer collection on a January day, on a windswept sidewalk. Most of the dresses in which she’d posed had been sleeveless and backless; several had featured metallic conical breast shields. Lorna Munro had been professional enough to ignore the crowds this attracted, and the goose flesh it induced.

He said, “Hot chocolate? A steak sandwich? And I thought all models were supposed to be anorexic.”

“No way. Not this baby. I eat like a horse, always have—and I never gain a pound. Life’s unfair….” She paused, took one of the cigarettes Pascal offered, then looked at him in an assessing way. “Pascal Lamartine. I’ve heard of you. You took those Sonia Swan pictures, right? And those ones of Princess Stephanie, back in the summer last year?” She made a face. “Heck, if I’d known it was you chasing me, I’d really have run a mile.”

“This is rather different,” Pascal said quickly. “Not necessarily a news story as such….”

“Oh, come on.” She grinned again. “I’m not that dumb. That woman from the
News
in London—what’s her name? Gini?—she must have left a zillion messages. She calls Milan, she calls Rome, she calls the agency. And I don’t think she wants to arrange a modeling session, right?”

“No, she doesn’t. And neither do I. We want to ask you about some parcels. Four parcels to be exact. You delivered them to a courier office in London, one week ago today.”

There was a silence. Lorna Munro drew on her cigarette. Her blue eyes fixed themselves on his face. She made no reply.

“You’ve been identified for us,” Pascal continued. “By the woman at the courier office. I suspect you were meant to be identified. If you hadn’t been, I think they’d have hired someone less memorable to deliver those parcels.”

“You think I’m memorable? That’s nice.” She gave him a flirtatious glance.

Pascal responded with gallantry. He said, “Very beautiful women usually are.”

Lorna Munro was not stupid. The compliment made her smile. “Come on, you can do better than that. Don’t pretend to be interested when you’re not. I can always tell when a man’s really interested. It takes me five seconds. I just look in their eyes….” She frowned thoughtfully. “So, you’re not interested in me, but you are interested in those parcels? You came all the way here to Paris, just to ask me about those?”

“No, I didn’t. I was in London, working with Gini. But I’ve been in Paris since yesterday. My daughter’s ill.”

“Hey, I’m sorry.” She seemed genuinely concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“Scarlet fever, the doctor says. She’s only seven. Yesterday she was in a bad way. Today—well, she’s better. Picking up. I just left her now.”

“You have a picture? I like kids. I’ve got four sisters myself. The youngest’s your daughter’s age.”

Pascal drew out his wallet and passed her a photograph. Lorna Munro smiled. “Oh, she’s cute. What a lovely face. She takes after her father, I can see that. What’s her name?”

“Marianne.”

“Well, tell her from me to get better quickly, okay? Oh, here’s the food at last.”

The waiter laid the food before her with silent admiration. Lorna Munro began to eat rapidly, and with evident enjoyment. Pascal sipped his black coffee and waited. He could see she was assessing him, deciding what to say, perhaps deciding whether to lie. “Okay,” she said eventually. “Tell me this first. Suppose I admit I delivered those packages, so what? Delivering packages isn’t a crime.”

“No. It’s not.” Pascal met her gaze. “You don’t have to answer my questions. But I hope you will. You see, one of those parcels was sent to me—as you’ll know. Another went to Gini—as you’ll also know. What you may
not
know is what was inside them.”

“Oh, my God.” She stopped eating. “Not drugs?”

“No. Nothing illegal. In my case, a glove. In Gini’s case, a pair of handcuffs. No message. No note.”

“Handcuffs? To a woman?” She frowned. “That’s not nice.”

“Exactly.” Pascal paused. “So, someone has been playing a little joke, we think, Gini and I. We’d like to find out who that was…and why.”

There was another silence. Lorna Munro continued to eat her meal. When she had finished, she pushed her plate aside and accepted another cigarette. She watched its smoke drift for a while, then turned back to Pascal, as if she had made up her mind.

“Okay. For what it’s worth, I’ll tell you what I know. Handcuffs—that’s not funny. I’m surprised. He seemed like such a regular guy….”

“Who did? It was a man who gave you these parcels?”

“Slow down.” She smiled. “I’ll start at the beginning, right? It starts in New York. You won’t know him, I guess, but there’s a man there I know, he’s like some kind of tipster for gossip columns. Name of Appleyard.”

“Johnny Appleyard?”

“Right. One of the parcels was addressed to him.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “If you know this much, I guess you know that too.”

“You’re right.”

“Okay. A few weeks back, before Christmas, I ran into Appleyard at a party in SoHo. I’d met him once or twice before—I didn’t know him exactly, just enough to say hello. He’s the kind of guy I avoid like the plague, usually, because he’s on the lookout for scandal ninety-nine percent of the time. And he’s everywhere, you know? Restaurants, gallery openings, theater first nights—you name it, Appleyard’s there. He hangs around the agency, snoops on photo sessions, gossips with the makeup artists. He gets a lot of stories, models, their private lives. …” She paused. Pascal said nothing. It was obvious to him Lorna Munro had no inkling that Appleyard was dead. “So, as I say, I ran into him that night in SoHo….”

“Can you remember the exact date?”

She frowned. “Yes, I can. I was flying home for Christmas the next day, so it must have been the night of December twenty-third.”

Two days after McMullen disappeared, Pascal thought. He said, “Good. Go on.”

“Well, Appleyard came up to me at the party, said he’d heard I’d just been signed by Models East, congratulated me….I could tell he was leading up to something. Eventually, he came out with it. Would I be free to take a modeling job—an unusual one—in London? I’d need to be there just two days, Monday, January third, and Tuesday, January fourth.

It was an easy job, and well paid. …” She hesitated. “I almost said no. Any modeling job that came via Appleyard spelled trouble. Then he mentioned the money.”

“It was generous?”

“Oh, sure.” She gave him a glance. “Twenty thousand dollars in cash, no percentage to the agency, no questions asked.
Plus
a first-class air ticket each way, overnight accommodation at Claridges, no less—”

“Claridges?”

Lorna Munro grinned. “Funnily enough, that’s what swung it as much as the money. I’ve never stayed in a place that grand—and I thought, this doesn’t sound so sleazy. …So I listened some more.”

“Did Appleyard explain what you’d have to do?”

“Sure. He said no photographs were involved. All I had to do was turn up in London, wear some classy clothes, and pay a visit to someone on the Tuesday morning. He said it was for a friend of his, a kind of elaborate practical joke this friend wanted to set up.”

“You believed him?”

“Not really, but in the end, I decided to give it a try. After all—twenty thousand dollars, that’s a lot of money. I’m not averse to that. I can be a material girl.”

“You don’t look it. You don’t sound it. …”

“Nice of you to say so.” Loma Munro smiled. “Let’s say I’m realistic, then. If I’m lucky and I work hard, I can make a good living at modeling for what—the next ten years? After that, you’re starting to go over the bill. So you make what you can, when you can. I told you, I’ve got four sisters, a mother and a father getting harder up every year. I don’t plan for us all to stay poor.”

Pascal’s liking for Lorna Munro grew. He liked her directness, and he liked her smile. He lit another cigarette for her, then leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Go on. You flew to London….”

“I flew to London. Went to Claridges, and there was a suite reserved for me. How about that? Flowers, fruit, champagne in an ice bucket. I thought, whatever happens, this joker friend of Appleyard’s has style. I had a return airline ticket. I thought, so things go wrong, I can always just cut and run, no problem. As it happened, it couldn’t have been easier. And nothing went wrong.”

“Who made contact with you in London?”

“An Englishman. He called Monday around noon. He came to the hotel later that afternoon. He brought a Chanel suit with him, shoes. I tried them on. That was the only problem, I’m so skinny, the suit was loose, too large.”

“Did the man give you a name? Can you describe him?”

“He said his name was John Hamilton. I didn’t ask for ID. He was very English—kind of stiff-upper-lip, you know? About five ten, slim build, fair-haired, well-dressed, polite. Pretty formal in manner. Forty-something. As I said—a regular guy.”

“Was this the man?” Pascal had two photographs ready. One of McMullen and one of John Hawthorne. He passed across McMullen’s photograph first. Lorna Munro examined it carefully.

“It looks like him. Yeah, I guess so. It’s difficult to tell when he’s dressed like that He looks younger here. …Yes, I’d say that was him.”

Pascal stared at her. “You’re certain?”

“Yeah. Now that I look at it closely. It’s him.”

Pascal replaced the photographs in his pocket. This meant revising many of his previous ideas. He leaned forward. “So, did he explain what he wanted you to do?”

“Yes.” She smiled. “In detail. He went over and over it, where I had to go, what I should say. Like some goddamn military briefing…He gave me these names and addresses I had to learn. I said—if I’m posing as your wife, shouldn’t I wear a wedding ring? He said no.”