Cold Heart (33 page)

‘Ah! She’s out in the studio. Wait a second, this’ll rouse her. It’s at the back of the house.’ He disappeared, and Lorraine heard what sounded like a ship’s bell being rung.

‘She’ll be right with you.’

Lorraine smiled.

‘When she starts working, she’s in a world of her own. We’re meant to be going to a deer meeting in town tonight if I can drag her away.’

The main door of the house opened, and the tall woman Lorraine had seen at the funeral appeared, raising one of her hands, deeply tanned with long, strong fingers and blunt-cut nails, to pull her strange white hair loose from a band which held it scraped back. She was less glamorously dressed today, in an old pair of chino pants and a deep blue linen shirt, but her intense, slightly cool presence was just as arresting.

‘Mrs Page?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry if I disturbed you. Were you working?’

‘Oh, that’s okay. I was just packing something,’ Sonja Nathan said, with a taut smile.

Lorraine walked up the steps and extended her hand. ‘It’s very nice to meet you properly. Thank you for agreeing to see me and, by the way, it’s Lorraine.’

‘It’s a pleasure,’ the older woman said, with the same quick smile, no more than a social reflex. Her eyes, Lorraine saw at close quarters, were grey-green and her gaze had a curious quality of restless abstraction, like a sea, Lorraine thought, a cold northern sea. She noticed, too, that Sonja Nathan did not invite her to call her by her first name, though perhaps that was down to preoccupation rather than hauteur.

‘Do come in,’ Sonja Nathan said, standing back to usher Lorraine into the house.

As she walked inside Lorraine gasped: nothing could have prepared her for the view. The house had floor-to-ceiling windows on all four sides, like complete walls of glass, and outside, drawing her in like a glorious living painting, was a vista of the most breathtaking seascape. ‘A woman from LA came here a few days ago. She called it awesome. Tiresome word, but it does describe it.’

Sonja led Lorraine down a flight of stairs and into a spacious kitchen with a wood and brick fireplace. The view seemed less spectacular from here than it did from upstairs, but still drew attention.

‘Now, what would you like to drink?’ Sonja said, opening the fridge.

‘Anything cool, really – water, juice, Coke.’

Sonja produced a can of Coke, a tall glass and ice from the dispenser. She poured some coffee from a percolator for herself, not seeming to notice that it looked cold, tarry and unappetizing.

‘You’re working for Mr Feinstein, did you say?’ Sonja said, moving towards the doors. ‘Let’s sit outside.’ Lorraine followed her out onto the veranda. ‘I must say, I never much cared for Feinstein,’ she continued.

‘Well, I imagine he’ll be becoming something of a fixture in your life for the next few months at least – the estate is complex, he says.’

Sonja Nathan immediately detected Lorraine’s attempt to work the conversation round to her having inherited all her ex-husband’s property, and clearly was not disposed to play ball. ‘So it is. What exactly did Feinstein tell you to ask me?’

‘Oh, he didn’t send me here, exactly. He’s retained me to investigate an art fraud, which it seems Harry and Kendall were pulling.’ Sonja Nathan did not react, but the restless movements of her green eyes stopped, and her gaze became opaque. ‘It seems they sold genuine canvases then delivered fakes. Feinstein got stung – as did a lot of other people who haven’t tumbled to it yet.’

‘That is an extraordinarily audacious piece of dishonesty,’ Sonja said. ‘They might be found out at any time if the owner had the painting valued or sold it again, or if someone who could tell wheat from chaff just happened to come to the house.’

‘I was wondering, Mrs Nathan, whether you might have fallen into that category,’ Lorraine said. ‘Did you go to Harry Nathan’s house recently? I don’t suppose you noticed anything about the paintings at any time? If I were to give you a list of the paintings, would you tell me if you ever recall seeing them at the house?’

Lorraine went back inside to find her briefcase, which she had left in the hallway. She took a quick look around the room as she picked it up: there were a number of large canvases, some carvings, wonderful pottery and antique tables. Nothing matched, but as an ensemble they worked well.

When she returned to Sonja she gave her the list, which Sonja glanced at and handed back. ‘I never went there,’ she said evenly. ‘I haven’t set foot in the house since I left LA seven years ago.’

‘Do you ever go back to LA?’ Lorraine asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Sonja said lightly. ‘I still have friends there. And the city, of course, was important to me at one time.’ She got up, looking out over the woods and water.

‘I’ve seen pictures of the work you did there – it’s very powerful,’ Lorraine said. ‘Have you been back recently except for Harry’s funeral?’

Sonja looked her straight in the eye. ‘I haven’t been there other than then for a year, and I wasn’t in LA the day Harry was killed, if that’s what you mean.’ There was a moment’s pause, and Lorraine felt that it was almost as if the other woman were defying her to prove anything different.

‘Feinstein is concerned only to make good his own losses, but it affects you too, of course,’ Lorraine went on, resisting the other woman’s efforts to close the subject. ‘I mean financially. Harry Nathan apparently pulled the same scam twice. He had the originals in the house, then switched them again, we think to cut out Kendall. The original art at the house was Nathan’s major asset. If we can’t recover it, the value of the estate, which I believe now comes to you, is greatly reduced.’

Sonja shrugged, pushing back with her arms to propel herself off the rails of the verandah. ‘I never expected to inherit a penny of Harry’s and I couldn’t care less if I don’t.’

‘Sonja.’ A deep voice spoke suddenly from inside the kitchen, and Lorraine thought she detected in it a note of warning. The man she had met earlier came out to them; he had clearly heard every word of what Sonja had just said.

‘I’m going to take the kayak out for an hour,’ he went on. ‘I’ll be back in time for lunch.’

‘Fine,’ Sonja said, glancing at him only briefly. ‘You be careful now, Arthur dear.’

Lorraine watched the couple with interest as Arthur spoke again, apparently casually. ‘You too, sweetheart.’ She did not meet his eye. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Page. I imagine you may be gone by the time I get back.’ He spoke courteously, but both Lorraine and Sonja understood his message. Lorraine was conscious of a certain relaxation in the other woman once they heard him leave the house.

‘Does Arthur . . . have a problem with Harry’s having left you so much money?’ Lorraine asked, with bold naturalness, assuming an intimacy with Sonja she knew didn’t exist. She was surprised when Sonja answered equally directly.

‘He has a problem with Harry. It’s just jealousy, I guess, that I shared so much of my life with Harry, that we were something to one another that Arthur and I cannot be. It’s just the way life is. One can’t go back. Can I get you another drink?’

Sonja had picked up the empty glass before Lorraine had time to say anything and disappeared into the kitchen with her own untouched coffee: it was clear she wanted an excuse to absent herself for a few moments. Lorraine would have liked a closer look at the rest of the house, while Sonja clattered with the ice-dispenser in the kitchen, but it was the studio she most wanted to see, and now that she had mentioned the art fraud, she could hardly ask to see it without as good as announcing to Sonja that she suspected her. But did she suspect her: The woman didn’t seem interested enough in money to commit such a crime – but, on the other hand, there was something about her that made one feel that death was near her.

However, by the time she came back with a tray, Sonja had readjusted her manner.

‘How well did you know Raymond Vallance?’ Lorraine ventured.

Sonja snorted with laughter as she handed Lorraine another tall glass of Coke. ‘Raymond Vallance was an albatross round Harry’s neck.’ For all her amusement, there was venom in her voice. ‘He destroyed any talent Harry might have had, convincing him that all those disgusting frat-party movies he made were worth a good goddamn. Any merit there was in that whole period of Harry’s career he drew from me. That’s where my own creativity went – he sucked it out of me and put it into his own work.’

‘I’m sure,’ Lorraine agreed. Vallance and Sonja were like a pair of bookends, she thought, perfectly matched in their unshakeable belief that the other had been Nathan’s evil genius and they themselves the true muse.

‘Raymond never forgave Harry for marrying me, needing me more than he needed him,’ Sonja went on, well into her stride now in ripping the ageing matinée idol apart. ‘He hated both of us, in a way, though he tried to get me into bed, of course. I thought, talk about obvious, darling, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one
he’s
with.’

Lorraine smiled: Sonja was no slouch in the bitching department. She said, ‘He had something similar going with Cindy, it seems.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ Sonja said. ‘Poor kid – I never met her except at the funeral, though, of course, I saw pictures.’

‘I don’t suppose she ever wrote to you,’ Lorraine asked casually.

Sonja looked at her with interest. ‘Yes, she did – pages and pages. I knew why she wrote – she was embarrassed about calling, never thought she was entitled to five minutes of anybody’s time. Sometimes I wish I’d given her a little more . . . I don’t know, time, assistance.’ There was real sadness and self-blame in Sonja’s voice.

‘You never felt jealous of Cindy?’ Lorraine asked gently.

‘Not really,’ Sonja said. ‘Harry wasn’t the same person I had known by the time he married her. Vallance and . . . and Kendall had carved him up between them by the time Cindy got him. He was no longer a man . . . but, then, Kendall was never a person at all.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lorraine had now dropped all pretence of confining her questions to the art fraud: she was trying to find out who murdered Harry Nathan, and wondered whether the killer might be sitting right in front of her.

‘Kendall was similar to Harry in a way. There was something central missing from both of them,’ Sonja said, with some deliberation. Lorraine had the impression she was delivering verdicts she had considered for years. ‘Kendall, however, was full of insecurity, or she was to start with, whereas I don’t think Harry ever had a self-critical thought in his life. Kendall came into our lives when our relationship was hitting a transition. Harry had been eating me to keep himself alive and fuel his work for years. Perhaps if we had had children it would have been different, but . . . I let him do it. I suppose it took me quite a while to grow up.’ Sonja gave another wry smile. ‘Then I wanted to live my own life and create for myself, and Harry would have had to find some reason to be with me other than what . . . he could consume of me. Obviously that was difficult for him. Harry never liked to do anything that was difficult.’

Sonja had got up again, part of her seeming barely conscious of Lorraine, though another part of her, Lorraine somehow knew, had been waiting for years for an anonymous listener – a confessor. ‘I don’t really think Kendall set out to destroy our marriage. She loved me first, if you like. She had nothing, was nothing, knew how to be nothing when I met her.’ She was staring out to sea, as though hypnotized, her gaze drawn to the horizon like a compass needle to the north. A moment later, though, her voice seemed more normal as she went on. ‘As I said earlier, to try to repeat the past is a sort of death.’

‘But Harry must have loved you, even at the end,’ Lorraine said, conscious that she was perhaps pushing the other woman into deep water. ‘You were the constant in his life.’

Sonja shook her head. ‘Vallance was the constant. I realize that now. He was there before me and he was there after me.’

‘But Harry left Vallance nothing in the will. He must have wanted to recognize something in leaving the entire property to you.’

‘It comes to me only by default,’ Sonja said. ‘Neither he nor I could ever have predicted that both Kendall and Cindy would drop dead.’ She turned round. ‘And, of course, who knows? I might drop dead. I have another day to go, don’t I?’ There was a strange, hunted look in the back of her cat’s eyes that chilled Lorraine, as if she were waiting for an executioner to arrive, for an axe to fall.

Lorraine realized that she had been sitting very still, barely blinking. She made herself move now, swirling the ice in her glass as though to chase away ghosts with the sound. ‘I think that’s correct – but you’re most unlikely to die.’

‘Well,’ Sonja said, and again Lorraine had the sense that she was listening to the expression of thoughts that had been considered and rearranged many times, ‘there is life and life. Or, rather, there is life and there is existence without dignity, which one betrays oneself to endure. I used to think that there was some kind of other dignity in endurance, but it is better to be dead than betrayed, I think now.’ She had been talking rapidly and fell silent just as suddenly, then turned back to the sea again.

‘Who do you think killed Harry Nathan?’ Lorraine found herself asking, without really meaning to do so, as though it were the only chance she would ever have.

‘Harry Nathan killed himself,’ Sonja said, her voice low, resonant, beautiful. ‘He became a thing that someone would destroy.’

The screen door banged at the front of the house, and Sonja started and looked round. ‘Arthur,’ she said, with a smile. ‘He doesn’t trust me alone for too long.’

No wonder, Lorraine thought, glancing at her watch. He hadn’t been gone long and Sonja was already circling round the subjects of killing and death.

Sonja walked back into the kitchen and called upstairs, ‘We’re down here, Arthur.’

Did she want to warn him that she wasn’t alone: Lorraine wondered.

The big man lost no time in joining them and Lorraine saw his eyes go immediately to Sonja, as though trying to gauge her mood. ‘Mrs Page, how nice you’re still here,’ he said, with a polite smile. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I join you.’