The Black Cat (9 page)

Dickens, as history had it, drank here. But more important (at least to Jury right now), so did Harry Johnson; this was his favorite place. He was sitting in his usual bar chair, drinking some bloodred vintage and talking to Trevor, barman of the Old Wine Shades.

“Hello, Harry,” said Jury, sliding into the chair beside him. “How’ve you been keeping?” As if he cared.

“Well, for Lord’s sake, it’s the Filth. I haven’t seen you in a whole couple of weeks.” Harry had drawn out his silver cigarette case and was now lighting up.

What Jury had drawn out was the Rexroth guest list. He assumed a patently insincere smile and tapped the folded pages against Harry’s arm.

“Ah! You finally got a warrant, did you? High time, as it saves you looting my house illegally. But go ahead and search away.” Harry’s smile put in its own claim for a patent on insincerity.

That Jury had never been able to get a warrant because there was no probable cause-nada, nil, nothing, zip-really stuck in his craw. Harry had done that murder in Surrey, and Jury meant to prove it.

But at the moment he had this list of names. “Where were you last Saturday night, Harry?”

“In Chesham. At a party. As you know or you wouldn’t be asking. It’s your case, isn’t it?” Harry tried on the smile again, then a woeful look, just as insincere: “I’m sorry about the wretched girl-”

No, he wasn’t. He couldn’t care less.

“-lying in the cold outside of the Black Cat in nothing but Yves Saint Laurent.”

“How do you know that, Harry? That detail wasn’t in the paper.”

Harry looked at Jury with the sort of indulgence one reserved for little children. “Are you dim just one night a week and is this the night? The Rexroths, of course. The Rexroths were in a frenzy of excitement. They would have steeped themselves in the details. Not much happens in Chesham. I called them when I read about it.”

“How do you know the Rexroths?”

Harry sighed. “Is this what tonight’s conversation will be? A lot of ‘how do you know’ questions? I know Timothy, or Tip, as he’s called, because he comes in here for lunch.”

“Where did you go after you left the party?”

“Home. Would you care for a glass of wine? It’s a Cote de Nuits.” He pointed to the bottle that Trevor had rested in a wine bucket and that Harry now pulled out in invitation.

“How long were you at the Rexroths’?”

Harry thought. “Got there around nine, left around ten. I didn’t stay long because I had to allow enough time for meeting up with and murdering your victim.”

Jury managed to suppress his desire to throw Harry off his bar chair. It wasn’t easy.

Harry blew a perfect smoke ring. “It’s getting tiresome. Any woman murdered within thirty miles of London you think is down to me.”

Jury pulled over the bottle of Burgundy, looked hard at the label (as if he’d know). “Are there any witnesses to place you at any stop on your journey back to Belgravia?”

“No stops. I got home before eleven. That’s it.”

“You didn’t stop in at the Black Cat?”

Harry frowned. “In Chesham? No, of course not.”

“You’ve never been there?”

Harry sighed. “To save you the trouble of taking my picture so as to show it around-or stealing one from my house-I have been to the Black Cat. Back in… March, or early April. I’ll say this-” His smile was gleeful. “The motive is going to be bloody hard to pin down-I don’t mean my motive, as I didn’t kill her, and consequently had no motive. No, you’ve got not one, but two victims, haven’t you? The glamour girl escort and the plain Jane librarian.”

“How do you know about the librarian?”

“Well, it just so happens I can read.” Neatly, Harry folded the tabloid at his elbow and slid it in front of Jury.

Who, irritated again, ignored it. Instead, he spoke to Trevor, who had come down the bar from the crowded far end. “Couple of fingers of something incredibly strong, Trev.”

“Right.” Trevor moved away.

Harry said, “This young woman-and this is all according to the Daily News, whose rigorous journalistic practices leave no doubt as to the truth of their reporting-”

“Shut up, Harry. Thanks,” he said to Trevor, who placed a glass of tar-dark whiskey before Jury.

Harry did not shut up; he smiled at the idea of it. “The paper showed pictures of her-beautiful woman, wouldn’t you say? And then today, of a picture of that lovely girl looking much plainer. But she was clearly not working as a librarian in that dress she was wearing.”

“You didn’t know her, then?”

“I didn’t know either of them.”

“Then who was your date?”

Harry looked puzzled. “My ‘date’? I didn’t have one.”

“I believe the Rexroths think you did,” Jury lied.

Harry studied the very devil out of his cigarette. “Am I to be responsible for everybody’s errant thinking? If they thought it, they were wrong.” He paused and blew another smoke ring.

Their perfection annoyed Jury no end.

Then Harry said, “We always think of disguise as elaboration, for some reason.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“No. I suppose you don’t, as you’ve been hopeless sorting my own case.”

“I can’t imagine why, given you’re a pathological liar. It’s hard to put two and two together when in your case they make three.”

“Trevor…” Harry raised his voice but kept it under a shout. “Give me a bottle of the Musigny. You know the one.”

“I’ve a nice half-bottle of that,” said Trevor, coming nearer.

“Not a whole one?”

“Well, yes, I could dust one off if you want to spend the extra hundred quid.”

Harry swiped ash from his cigarette off the counter. “Nothing is too good for my friend here. So bring it on.”

Harry was heavily invested in wine.

“Don’t do it for me,” said Jury, raising his glass of whiskey, of which only a shadow remained.

Harry was busy with another smoke ring. “It’s all about you, isn’t it?”

“You bet.”

“So, tell me. Have you sorted it?”

“What?”

“My God, but you have the attention span of a flea. Mungo would have worked it out by now.”

Jury looked around. “I know. Where is Mungo?”

“Home, being extremely busy about something. He gets like that.”

“Tell me, do you keep Mungo around because he’s so independent? Or is he independent because he’s stuck with you?”

“Both.”

“Do you have to hedge every bet? Can’t you just pick one or the other?”

“And you a detective superintendent. You can’t go much higher. What’s above you?”

“Chief superintendent.”

“What’s above him?”

“Divisional commander. London ’s divided into areas. But you know that.”

“I don’t know nuffin’, mate. I do know the City of London has its own police force.”

“A friend of mine, Mickey Haggerty-” Jury stopped. He had no idea why he’d brought Mickey up. Jury had returned to that dock many times in dreams. In dreams he and Mickey would walk back from the dock, toward the lights of the City, arms flung around each other’s shoulders.

“Something wrong?”

“Sad end of a friendship. One of us died.”

“You sure it wasn’t both of you?”

Jury flinched. Harry could be nerve-racking at times in his prescience. He wondered if it was true, that part of him had really died on that dock on the Thames.

Trevor was back with the wine and the glasses. He poured a mite into Harry’s glass, and Harry raised, sniffed, and tasted. “It’s worth every penny, Trevor.” Trevor filled both glasses.

“Now, let’s get back to it. You’ve got a story-”

Everything was a story to Harry. It wasn’t a case Jury was dealing with, but a story.

“-about a young woman found murdered in the grounds of the Black Cat in Chesham, dressed in a gown by Yves Saint Laurent and shoes by Jimmy Choo-”

“And the shoe designer was not in the paper, either. There was a picture of the dress and the shoes, but Mr. Choo was not mentioned.”

Harry’s sigh was dramatically Harry’s. “I live on the fringes of Upper Sloane Street. I’ve often walked by Jimmy Choo and stared at his shoes enough to think I’d recognize them. Like you, I found the way she was dressed fascinating. All I had to do was go online-it’s called the Internet-and there were the shoes. Six, seven hundred quid, I think. Okay, now, we’ve got the resplendently dressed young woman, who is also the quite unsplendid little librarian. That’s the backstory-”

“I’m aware of the backstory.” Jury signaled Trevor.

“Good. The question, your question: why would a plain little librarian keep going off to London to work for an escort service, trick herself out in expensive finery, and go to a lot of trouble to keep her London life a secret?”

Jury twisted the stem of his glass around in the accumulated condensation on the bar. “I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

“Well, I don’t know, do I? The thing is, you’re not looking at this problem the other way round.”

“What other way?”

“It’s as I said before: we always seem to look at disguise as elaboration-the fright wig, the chalk white face, the painted face. Makeup. Remember what Hamlet said to Ophelia?”

“I’m trying my level best.”

“‘God gave you one face and you paint yourself another.’ We speak of making ourselves up, not down-simple librarian turns into gorgeous call girl. How do you know it wasn’t the other way round? That it wasn’t the librarian hiding herself in the hooker, but the hooker hiding herself in the librarian? The librarian was the disguise.”

Jury looked at him. “If that’s the case-”

“The librarian wasn’t keeping the escort secret; the escort was keeping the librarian a secret. The face that was kept plain and unadorned-that was the life to be kept secret.” He turned in his chair and looked at Jury. “So you’d better get your skates on, pal. You could have a long way to go.”

At ten-thirty the next morning, Jury was standing in the door of his flat, waiting for the clump clump clump of Carole-anne’s Tod’s. Tod’s, she had told him (as if he wanted to know), were really hot at the moment and sturdy enough for work. Her job at the Starrdust in Covent Garden hardly needed “sturdiness,” but he let that pass.

Clump clump clump. Here she came.

“Super! You waiting for me?”

In that sunrise misty yellow getup with one sleeve off the shoulder, anyone would be waiting for her. The Tod’s were ankle boots with a pointed toe. Jury said nothing; he merely held up her unreadable telephone message with the heart.

She took it. Her pearly pink lips moved as she mimed the words. She handed it back, her aquamarine eyes (sunrise over the sea, this morning), said, “Better get Jason.”

Then down the stairs, clippity-clippity clop, quick as could be before Jury’s mouth could close around, “Get back here!”

Again in his flat, he tossed the bit of paper in the trash and sat on the sofa. Before him on the coffee table, in addition to his mug of tea, he’d laid out the photo of Mariah Cox, the snapshot of Morris that Dora had pressed on him, the Rexroths’ guest list, and the rough map he’d made of the area of the Lycrome Road between the Black Cat and Deer Park House. An easy walk, he’d make it inside of ten minutes.

Jury picked up the guest list again, noted the other names of men who’d gone unaccompanied by women, wondering if any of them had had experience with the Valentine’s escort service. Even though Simon Santos had already agreed that he himself was to meet Stacy Storm, still…

Still, nothing. He picked up the phone and rang Wiggins.

“Meet me at Valentine’s Escorts in half an hour, will you? The other men on the list, the single men Cummins said he’d spoken to. They’d been at the party all night from nine to midnight.”

“Why are you interested in them? She was there to meet Simon Santos.” Wiggins’s voice was frowning.

“I know.”

“He’s really the prime suspect, sir.”

“If he killed her, he was being pretty stupid about it, about not covering his tracks and not seeing he had an alibi somehow. Pretty stupid.”

“Most murderers are pretty stupid.”

“Right. Meet me there.”

Maybe they were, as Wiggins said, pretty stupid. He dropped the receiver into its cradle; he refused to trade the old black phone for one-as Carole-anne suggested-“you can take with you round the flat.”

“I’m not going anywhere; I don’t want to take a phone round the flat. I want to sit and talk or at least stand in one place. I don’t want to be in the kitchen frying up sausages whilst I’m talking about a serial killer.”

He was grumpy even in fantasy. He pulled his jacket from the back of a chair, picked up his keys, and left.

Mrs. Blanche Vann was gracious. Jury doubted many of the owners of escort services would be offering them bananas and cups of coffee, coffee made, for heaven’s sake, in a cafetière. Jury was never sure how long to wait before you pushed down the plunger. He didn’t much like these devices; he wanted to see coffee run from the little tongue of a pot.

“Thank you, Mrs. Vann. You’re very kind.” He left his banana on the small table she had pulled over between Wiggins and him. Wiggins had started in on his own banana.

Jury said, “I talked to Rose Moss-or Adele Astaire, as she calls herself-”

“Silly name,” said Blanche Vann. “I told her she might just do well to think up another.”

“Fred Astaire’s sister, that was,” said Wiggins. “Married the son of the Duke of Devonshire.” He peeled his banana down another inch.

Jury fixed him with an icy smile.

Said Mrs. Vann: “No? I didn’t know that!”

Neither did Wiggins, yesterday. Jury said, “I’ll call her Rose. She said Stacy had been living in her flat with her most weekends for the last six months.”

“That’s right, as far as I know.” Mrs. Vann stirred cream into her coffee with a tiny spoon.

“Rose has been with the agency how long?” he asked.

“Quite a few years. Six, eight. She looks younger than she is. One or two clients like a girl on the young side.” She sipped her coffee, showing no embarrassment at all at the implications of that statement.

“Were Rose and Stacy good friends?”

“Were they? Well, I’d think so, sharing a flat and all that.”

“But only on weekends. Did you know that Stacy lived in Chesham?”

Her mouth tight shut as if to emphasize her point, she shook her head, then said, “I did not. The address she gave was in Fulham, same as Rose’s. Well, I’d have no reason to doubt that, would I?”

“You would have had to reach her at times she wasn’t there, though, to set up appointments.”

“That’s right. Usually the girls called in. But if I needed to ring her, it was all done on her mobile; indeed, all the girls worked that way, since they’re so often not at home.”

“That makes sense.” Jury looked around the room again, at the dark moldings, the restful pale gray walls, the comfortable furniture, surprised the room could be so pleasant here in this nondescript office block in the Tottenham Court Road.

She said, looking thoughtfully at her cup, “Adele once said she thought Stacy a bit of a mystery.”

“I’d say that Adele is right.” Jury smiled at her and got up. “Thank you, Mrs. Vann. We’ll be talking to you.”

Walking to the car, Jury said, “You hungry, Wiggins?”

“Yes. That banana didn’t really fill me up.”

As if it were supposed to.

“It’s nearly two. I have to make my weekly check on Danny Wu.”

Wiggins broke out in a big smile as he opened the car door. “I’m with you; but it’ll be bloody crowded now.”

“Ruiya’s always crowded.”

“Right, boss.”

Jury rolled his eyes. So now it was “boss.”