The Black Cat (8 page)

The door buzzed as Jury entered; a salesperson in a knockout draped black dress came toward him. The dress would look stunning on Phyllis, but then again, what wouldn’t?

“Sir?” Her smile was wide, but it faded when he showed her his ID. She looked stricken, as if he’d slapped her.

Then Jury smiled and all was well again, the waters calm. “I just need to ask you a few questions, Miss…?”

“Ondine-”

Did she work for Valentine’s, too, with a name like that?

“-Overalls.”

No. “Miss Overalls-” He bit his lip to keep from smiling.

“Just Ondine.”

“Ondine. Thank you. Is this the main Yves Saint Laurent in London?”

“Of course. We’re not a chain.” She whipped out a “just kidding” smile.

“Ah. I’m interested in a dress purchased by this woman-” Jury hated showing morgue shots, but the only others would have been of a very different-looking Mariah Cox. The photographer had managed to polish this one so that she didn’t look, well, too dead.

Ondine picked up narrow glasses with metal frames and put them on. Her head bent over the photo, she nodded. “I remember. I thought she was a model; I mean, the way she moved. She looked wonderful in our gowns.”

She gestured toward the mannequins stationed side by side in one area, as at the rail of a luxury ocean liner, watching, blind-eyed as they were, the coast of some country fall away.

Ondine looked like a model herself, makeup perfectly applied in little dots of cream-something, gray dust whisked across her eyelids with a supple brush, lipstick drawn on.

“You mean she’s-dead?”

“I’m afraid so. She was shot to death.”

Ondine looked a little wildly around the shop and at the mannequins, as if some guilt might attach to them. Then, sensibly, she placed her hand on her breast and took a deep breath, then another. She said, “Yes, that’s one of ours. Poor thing, she’ll never wear it again.”

Jury smiled a little at this summing-up of the good life.

“When was she here?”

“It was… Tuesday week. I remember it very well. She tried on several dresses and looked, I must say, delicious in each. That”-she looked again at the picture as she spoke-“was the best of them. Well, given the price”-she looked round the room, blameless and empty except for the mannequins-“it should have been: three thousand seven hundred pounds.”

Jury gave a low, appreciative whistle. “Was she alone?”

“Oh, yes, quite alone. But she did make a call. I didn’t hear what she said.”

“Did she use a mobile phone?”

“Yes. The battery was down in hers, so I let her use mine.”

“You did? Do you have it here?”

Ondine moved over to a counter, reached behind it, and came back and handed the mobile phone to Jury. He brought up a list of phone calls; there were probably a good fifty of them. “Have you erased any outgoing calls here?”

“Not lately. I forget to do it, anyway.”

Jury handed back the mobile, saying, “Take a look at these and see if there are any numbers you don’t recognize.”

Ondine ran her eyes down the list and was about to say something when the door chimed and a couple walked in, probably in their seventies, clearly rich and rather fragile. They moved with their torsos slightly inclined, not bent, just forward, as if trying to get somewhere ahead of themselves. They both wore light gray capes, his part of his coat, hers a coat in itself. They made Jury think of shorebirds.

“Excuse me just a moment,” Ondine whispered before she went to the couple to offer assistance. Jury couldn’t hear what she said; he thought it rather pleasant that nothing got above a murmur in this elegant, graceful room. As moneyed as these people seemed to be and as expensive as the clothes that were sold, the atmosphere still wasn’t steeped in materialism.

Ondine was back. “Let me look at this-” She took the mobile and pointed out a number. “I think it was this one: I don’t know it, and it was placed just about when she was here.”

Jury pulled out his notebook, wrote it down, a London number.

At this juncture, the gray-haired couple, who appeared to act always in concert, raised their hands to beckon Ondine over.

“Sorry,” she whispered again. “There’s just me here today. Charlotte ’s sick again.” She sighed. As if Jury knew Charlotte and her sham illnesses.

Jury watched her glide over to them. Murmurs again.

Honestly, the place would do for a meditation center; he smiled at the idea of several monks sitting around the room on the silk and satin cushions. He watched Ondine go to the counter, where she seemed to be checking something, possibly the price of the gray gown the two of them-the man and the woman-were holding between them. Folds of gray chiffon and silk. The man seemed perfectly at ease in this room sacred to women.

Wiggins walked through the glass door at that moment. “Guv. Blanche-”

Wiggins got on a first-name basis very quickly with witnesses.

“-was pretty cooperative, and it may be you were right about the names: there were no matches with the Rexroths, but Blanche did turn up two Simons-a Simon St. Cyr and a Simon Smith.” He was looking at his notebook and thumbed up a page. “According to the Valentine’s records, Simon Smith was down with Stacy Storm five times. I’ve got the dates. Five isn’t much for a hot romance, but he was down in the book those five times, and something tells me that’s not every time that he saw her.”

Jury nodded. “According to Rose Moss, she was seeing some fellow off the books. I don’t suppose Blanche Vann could describe him.”

Wiggins shook his head. “Their clients don’t call round; they ring and set up times according to Valentine’s schedule. The office isn’t much, just a room. But it’s nicely fitted out: big, airy, fresh flowers and fruit. The girls come round every so often. ‘My girls,’ she calls them. Bit of a mother hen, you ask me. I got the impression she was genuinely fond of Stacy. Pretty broken up about her death. And very surprised about this double life Stacy and Mariah led.”

“How’d she find out? Papers?”

“No, from your Adele Astaire. Blanche said she rang up and told her. Blanche doesn’t read the papers a lot.”

“Okay, get onto Thames Valley, to DS Cummins, and get this Simon Smith’s address, or, rather, get him to find out if the Rexroths have any idea who the ‘Smith’ might actually be.”

Wiggins nodded, turned away while punching in the number on his mobile phone.

Finding Ondine free of the gray-winged couple, Jury walked over to the counter. “Ondine.”

She looked up with a slightly mischievous smile.

“How did Stacy Storm pay for the dress?”

Ondine pulled over a large black ledger, opened it, and ran a red-coated fingernail up and down columns. “Barclaycard.”

“That must have been quite a credit line she had.”

“I don’t know, except it was approved.”

“All right. I won’t take up any more of your time. You’ve been a world of help, Ondine.” He handed her his card. “If you remember anything at all-”

“Including my name.” Big smile. “Believe me, I will.”

What a flirt.

“I have a friend who’d look terrific in that black gown in the window.”

Again, Ondine whispered, “Tell her to pop round. I might be able to give her a very nice price.”

“I’ll do that,” Jury whispered back.

The doorman or security guard or greeter at the door told them in chilly tones that the shop was just closing.

“No, it isn’t,” said Jury, holding up his ID and pushing past him into the light, bright air of Jimmy Choo.

Whereupon the man immediately went to get someone else, a lithesome-looking woman who had a way of standing with her feet crossed and her hands crossed inside out before her. He thought this difficult pose came naturally to her, and he wondered if she had been a model. Models seemed able to accomplish the most unusual and uncomfortable-looking postures.

In this clear and uncluttered interior, Jury thought he might be reassessing the common attitudes toward wealth and materialism. In the cathedral-like quiet, in their little niches, the artfully arranged jewel-toned shoes covered the walls like stained-glass windows.

These shoes looked both impossibly rich and flyaway at the same time. They were displayed, in their lit-up little alcoves, as works of art. And rightly so, Jury thought as he took in that metallic silver sandal with the jewels running all the way up the instep, or that silver snakeskin with its four-inch heel and straps twining up the ankle, or that glittery leather with its narrow straps impossibly entwined. The architectural detail of these sandals was remarkable. Wiggins was nearly inhaling them, he was so close to the wall. He was getting down with the shoes.

Jury made a guess and asked the saleswoman if she recalled a woman purchasing the shoes in the photo he held out, perhaps a week ago? He thought after buying the dress, Mariah might have walked across the street to Jimmy Choo’s.

He was right. The purchase had been made, but there was no phone call that she remembered. Yes, she’d paid with a Barclaycard.

He walked over to Wiggins. “You thinking of buying a pair for that cousin in Manchester?”

“Not bloody likely; do you see what these things cost? That’d be-” Wiggins’s mobile sounded, and he flipped it open, spoke his name, and listened. Then he thanked the caller. “That was Cummins. Simon Smith is probably Simon Santos. He knows Timothy Rexroth from his work in the City. Simon’s in mergers and acquisitions. And we’re in luck; he lives right around the corner.” Wiggins inclined his head in that direction. “ Pont Street. I’ve the number; should I call?”

Jury looked at his watch. It was nearly six, a good time for drinks before dinner. From whatever he did in the City, Simon Santos might just be relaxing over one. “No. Let’s surprise him.”

He answered the door with a drink in his hand, whiskey by the look of it, and in a cut-glass tumbler that cost a hundred pounds by the look of it. It was, after all, Pont Street, just steps away from Beauchamp Place and Harrods, high in the Knightsbridge heavens.

Simon Santos had his French cuffs rolled up, his silk jacket casually tossed over a rosewood banister, and his Italian leather shoes polished to mirror brightness.

Jury and Wiggins pulled out their IDs simultaneously, and Simon Santos regarded them, apparently unsurprised.

And, Jury noticed, apparently unresentful.

Holding the door open wider, Santos said, “I just got in.”

Not from work, surely, Jury thought. Nothing he could thus far see in this house looked as if it had done a day’s work in its life.

Santos invited them to sit down in a room that could serve as a template for any voguish magazine spread. A massive fireplace with all sorts of baronial brass fittings, above which hung a portrait of a truly beautiful woman dressed in green velvet with white skin against which her dark red hair burned. On the hearth lay two chocolate Labradors, their heads raised, and so alike that they could have been a pair of andirons. Well-mannered, too. After a brief scrutiny of the interlopers, they yawned and lowered their heads to their paws and resumed their snooze. Jury reached out his hand and ran it over the silky head of one, which made the dog sigh.

There was a lot of butter leather interspersed with damask furniture and a ton of dark green velvet dripping down the long windows and puddling on the floor. Jury and Wiggins sat in club chairs from which Jury wondered if they would ever rise. There was something to be said for money.

It was one of those rooms one could only describe in accents of taste: luscious, delectable, ambrosial, scrumptious. The room’s rich brown walls and creamy moldings made Jury feel as if he were sunk in a chocolate mousse.

“What can I do for you? Care for a drink?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Santos. We’re looking into the death of a young woman named Mariah Cox.”

Jury saw a muscle tighten in Santos ’s handsome face, then relax when he heard the name, which Jury supposed meant nothing to him.

“I don’t know anyone of that name.”

“No, but you do-or did-know Stacy Storm. That was Mariah’s professional name, so to speak.”

Tightness returned and went to every muscle, not just the one in his face. He killed a little time by rising to get himself a fresh drink: a cube of ice plinked; a siphon hissed. He returned to the sofa.

Jury wondered if he’d be stupid enough to deny all knowledge of Stacy Storm.

No. Santos took a couple of swallows of his whiskey, then he returned to the sofa and said, “That was terrible. Awful. I was…” He had been leaning forward, glass dangerously loose in his fingers (considering the plummage-swept rug beneath it), and now he sat back to consider what he was: “Devastated.”

Jury studied the man’s expression and what it told of devastation, but he couldn’t read it.

It was Wiggins who asked, “How well did you know her, sir?”

Santos ’s smile was tight as he looked from Wiggins to Jury and back again. “I expect you know, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“No, actually, we don’t, other than that you, ah, engaged her on several occasions as a Valentine’s escort.”

“I did, yes.” The tone was bitter, and he looked away.

“What we’re interested in, though, is whether you saw her at other times; that is, as Ms. Storm’s flatmate put it: ‘off the books.’ Not as a Valentine’s escort.”

“Well, I expect she won’t get in trouble now with Valentine’s.”

“No, Stacy’s in as much trouble as she’ll ever be in again.”

Santos regarded him. “You say that, Superintendent, as if you sympathize.”

Jury said nothing, just went on looking at him.

“So, yes. We saw each other any number of times ‘off the books,’ as you say.”

Wiggins said, “What’s ‘any number’?”

“Every week in the last three months. She was only in London on weekends. Now I know why. I mean, if she was also, or really, another woman. Mariah?”

“Mariah Cox. So, getting down to it, Mr. Santos, you went to a party given by a couple named Rexroth last Saturday night, is that true?”

He nodded. “And you’re wondering, of course, how that’s connected to Stacy. She was to meet me there. I wanted to pick her up-wherever she was. You see, I didn’t know where the devil she was during the week. She’d never tell me-”

“You didn’t know she lived in Chesham?”

“No. She told me nothing.”

“When she was found, when Stacy Storm was found, she was wearing a dress bought at the Yves Saint Laurent shop on Sloane Street. And Jimmy Choo shoes, also Sloane Street. Did you buy her gifts like that?”

“Not gifts like that, but those very ones. That costume, those shoes. It was actually my idea. I wanted her to feel no woman in the room could touch her. Stacy was rather… I don’t know…”

Jury waited, but Santos still didn’t know.

“She was to meet you at the Rexroths’, was she? How did she come to be at the Black Cat?”

“Christ!” The dogs both looked up, disturbed, first glancing at Santos, then at the two strangers, as if they, the dogs, were making up their minds about them. They resettled themselves when Simon Santos spoke in a quieter tone. “Do you think I haven’t asked myself that a hundred times? I’ve no idea.”

“No idea?”

He shook his head. “The Black Cat must’ve been part of her other life…” He shrugged. Then he sat forward, rolling the whiskey glass in his hands, forearms on knees. “I could never quite take her measure. There was something I didn’t get about her. What I thought was that there was somebody else, some other man. Which she denied.”

“What time did you leave the Rexroths’ party?”

“About ten, I think. When she didn’t come and still didn’t, I had no reason to stick around.”

“You came back to London? To here?”

Santos looked a mite surprised Jury would even wonder about this. “Yes, of course.”

“I only meant you might have stopped off someplace, to have a drink, get a bite to eat, somewhere along the way.”

Santos shook his head, looked at the dogs, sleeping soundly, looked up at Jury, puzzled. “I’m being stupid, aren’t I?”

Wiggins half-smiled. “Are you, sir? About what?”

“Well, for God’s sake, I’m a bloody suspect!”

Dogs awake again, looking worried.

Looking at the anxious dogs, he sat back and lowered his voice a little. “A suspect without an alibi. To answer your question: No, I didn’t stop off to eat or for any other reason. I came directly home, had a nightcap, and went upstairs to bed. No telephone calls, nothing. Just me alone.”

The way he said it, without self-pity, held an awful poignance.

Jury said, “Is it correct to assume Stacy meant a lot to you? Your meetings… well, they were more than a casual arrangement.”

Santos glanced up at the portrait, then looked away. He nodded. “Much more. At least on my part. Stacy-as I said, Stacy was difficult to read. She was extremely kind, and I might have misinterpreted the kindness as love.” He paused, then said, “Mariah Cox, Stacy’s other self, what was she like?”

Jury told Simon Santos about Mariah’s rather circumscribed life, lacking glamour, lacking Saint Laurent, lacking those bejeweled shoes that lined the walls of Jimmy Choo. But he left out Bobby Devlin.

Then he rose, nodded to Wiggins. “We’ll be in touch, Mr. Santos. We’d appreciate it if you’d stay in London for a time.”

Simon Santos had risen too as Jury said this and stood, hands in pockets, looking uncertain and rather bereft. He was directly beneath the portrait over the fireplace, and Jury could see the resemblance.

Santos followed his glance and turned to look back at the portrait. “My mother, Isabelle. Beautiful, wasn’t she?”

That needed no confirmation. “I see the resemblance between you,” said Jury. But one not nearly so strong as the resemblance between the woman in the portrait and Mariah Cox.

This must have been Simon Santos’s obsession.

Jury thought of Lu Aguilar; he knew about obsession.

“What do you think, sir? Here’s what I can’t understand: a man like that, got everything going for him and a ton of money besides. Must have women lined up on his doorstep. So why does a man like that go and hire an escort, a tart? Doesn’t make sense.”

She wasn’t a tart, Jury wanted to say yet knew he had no business saying. “You saw the photo of Stacy.”

“Yes-”

“You don’t see the resemblance to Isabelle Santos? Stacy Storm was solace.”

They were standing by the car in Pont Street. “You want me to drop you in Islington? Then I’ll take the car in.”

Jury shook his head. “I’m taking a cab. I want to go to the City.”

“It’s near seven. What for?”

“The Old Wine Shades.” Jury pulled the Rexroths’ guest list out of his pocket, smiling.

Wiggins snuffled up a laugh. “Harry Johnson.”

“Right. I can hardly wait to hear him on this.” Jury held up the list.

“Do you think you’ll ever get him in the frame?”

“Oh, I’ll get him, never you worry. In the frame and in the end.”

Wiggins had the car door open. “Let’s hope it’s not.”

“What?”

“The end.”

They said good night, and Jury hailed a cab.