Sleep of the Innocent (9 page)

“What time did you say this man came around? Ten-thirty?”

For a brief miraculous moment, there was a pause. “Yes. Because I had just gone out into the garden, and I go out at ten-thirty, right after my tea, and he was just walking up the path between the houses.”

When he got back to Jennifer Wilson's flat, his ears still ringing from the monologue, the front bedroom was clear for inspection. He stood in the center of the room and looked around him. The double bed was almost unrumpled. She must have climbed out of bed when she heard her attacker, leaving behind that slight hump in the bedclothes and a flash of visible sheet. Why hadn't she screamed? Or perhaps she had, and no one had heard her. Another question for the neighbours.

He started with the closet. It was small and jammed with clothes. On the left she kept her spangled, gaudy-looking stage costumes; next to them was an assortment of ordinary casual garments: skirts, sweaters, sweatshirts, and jeans. But every piece of clothing was tiny. As was all the underwear lying in the drawers. No one larger than Jennifer Wilson could have struggled into any of it. The walls were covered with posters and photographs of the real Jennifer as Stormi Knight, some of them alone, some with the five male members of the band surrounding her.

On the top shelf of the closet (how had she reached up that high? he wondered, and then saw a solid-looking stool pushed into a corner) were three hatboxes. He carried them over to the bed and looked inside. There were the wigs the neighbour had seen: the Dolly Parton; the black one-long and straight, designed to make her look ghoulish; and the dark red one. And this was the reason that little Jennifer Wilson was dead. For owning a black wig and, one gloomy day, modeling it as a joke for her neighbour, to cheer her up when she wasn't feeling well.

The sun, sulking behind some ineffectual clouds, had almost set before Lucas got back to his desk. His head ached, his hands were shaky, his stomach rebellious. Guilt and misery and total bafflement, that was why he felt this way. Guilt because it was his inefficiency that had caused a harmless girl to be killed, and guilt because his first reaction when he saw that silky blond hair and realized that the victim had not been
his
Jennifer Wilson was profound relief. After a moment's consideration he added hunger. There had never seemed to be a moment in this day when going off to eat lunch had been even a slight possibility.

The interview with Mrs. Wilson had been acutely painful and completely useless. She was confused and baffled, unable to understand why anyone could want to harm her Jennifer. As he listened, a nagging voice in his head was muttering, No one did want to kill her; he wanted to kill an over-made-up, perfumed little whore, who for some reason borrowed your daughter's name. For a horrified instant, he thought he had said the words aloud, but Mrs. Wilson had continued to stare helplessly at him, tears sliding down her cheeks unheeded, with no change in expression. It wasn't going to help the woman bear her grief to hear that Jennifer's death was just a mistake. And perhaps it wasn't. There are, after all, many painfully familiar reasons for pretty, fragile-looking, harmless girls getting themselves killed. He had ventured to ask her if her Jennifer had known another Jennifer Wilson, a girl with black hair, and Mrs. Wilson had silently shaken her head. She had no time for such irrelevant questions, she seemed to be saying. Not now.

She had come to the conclusion, finally, that Jennifer's death had been caused by a demented person, not responsible for his actions, and that, curiously enough, she did find comforting. Miserably, Rob Lucas agreed that this could very well be what had happened, and assuring her that they were doing everything in their power to find whoever it was, he fled from the scene.

He had sat in his car a block away from the Wilsons' house and thought. It was possible, of course, that the man in the green hat had had nothing to do with the Wilson girl's death. He hadn't believed it when he first heard about him; he didn't believe it now, but he still had to behave as though the possibility existed. So now it was time to look at the boys in the band.

Kevin was tiresome. He bounced between playing the aggrieved juvenile, defensive and hostile, and the horrified adult, ready to string sex murderers from the highest tree. For just as Mrs. Wilson had clung to the notion that Jennifer had been the victim of a poor demented creature, Kevin clung to an image of sex-crazed pervert. He did, however, provide a rational explanation for the band's disappearance. This had been the first time that they had had a full week off since before Christmas, and they had spent three days in a borrowed chalet, skiing and eating and drinking and sleeping. And which of them, Lucas had asked, had been sleeping with Jennifer? None of them, Kevin swore. Not since Ryan left. She had said she would never mix work and sex again. And she hadn't. What had happened with Ryan had almost broken the group up just when they were getting somewhere. Rob filed that away for future reference and left Kevin to cope with his grief and how to find another girl singer.

The rest of the group—Steve, Scott, and Brad—had all been huddled together in Scott's apartment, looking nervous, confused, and alike. Their only contribution was that Ryan was capable of smashing his ex-girlfriend's skull in if he hadn't been in San Francisco that week. But none of them, not Kevin, not his three interchangeable sidemen, had ever seen or heard of a girl with black curly hair who called herself Jennifer Wilson. Lucas yanked the keyboard closer to him and started to write up a report. Maybe he'd get something to eat later.

Lucas walked in the next morning to discover a major reorganization in workloads. Kelleher was now coordinating the investigation into the death of the Wilson girl. Lucas could feel the weight lifting from his shoulders. With luck, he might never have to face Mrs. Wilson again.

“Great,” he said. “Just watch the woman next door. She'll strangle you in the world's longest sentence.”

“She can't be worse than my mother,” said Kelleher. “And I've survived thirty-five years of listening to her.” He got up and reached for his jacket. “I think I'll be off and have a look at that rock band. I'd like to get them before they're awake. I read the stuff you wrote up last night—anything left out as not suitable for Baldy's tender ears?” Lucas opened his coffee and took out his Danish, shaking his head, and then stopped. “Yeah—there is one thing. I sent someone to check the prints in the Wilson girl's apartment against my missing witness. Any results?”

“You haven't seen them? Your witness's prints are all over the place. The back room, the victim's bedroom, everywhere. When you find her, I'd like a word. Like, where was she in the middle of the night?”

Lucas turned his back on the rest of the room, put his feet up on the window ledge and worked on his breakfast while he considered the problem of finding Miss X. The chances were pretty good that her name was nothing like either Jennifer Wilson or Stormi Knight, so he might as well stop thinking of her as Jennifer. That, of course, explained why she didn't react to being called by name. What had looked to him to be general contrariness and sulkiness had been simple unfamiliarity. So we call her X, he thought, taking a bite of Danish. And X is either a whore or a musician—or something else altogether. But let's start, he continued to himself, by assuming she is one of those two things. Of course, he reflected, there is nothing to stop you from being both a whore and a musician at the same time. And where does that get us?

All I need is a picture and a visit to Vice. That will take care of the prostitution end of things. Maybe. If she's known to them. Or a picture and a lot of visits to places where local musicians hang out. He thought with a sinking heart of the hundreds of little bars and clubs in the city and suburbs where rock musicians played, and groaned aloud. “What's wrong?” asked a passing constable of Kevin's generation, and Lucas suddenly felt old. In the six years since he had been twenty-two, he had lost touch with the world of groups and teenage wonders.

“Where would you start looking if you wanted to find a singer with a rock group?”

“Any singer? Or a particular one? I mean, if you want to hire a band—”

“No, I'm trying to track down a girl. A witness.”

“The witness you lost? I didn't know she was a rock singer. I thought she was—”

“Yeah, well, let's assume she's a rock singer. I need a name for her. And maybe even an address. But I'll take a name, to start with.”

“Try the record stores. Those guys that work there, they know everybody. Here, start with the big ones—I'll write them down for you,” and muttering energetically to himself the names of a host of establishments, he wrote furiously for a minute or two. “I don't have the addresses, but they're not hard to find. Besides, you might even know some of them,” he added with good-humoured contempt. “They sell classical stuff, too.” Lucas's reputation for having peculiar tastes was well established.

“Would you believe I also listen to country and western? No, you wouldn't. Thanks. You're a pal.” And he reached for the phone to track down their sketch artist and plead for an instant drawing of X.

Two hours later he was heading for Vice, armed with a pile of copies of a sketch of X. On the whole, he thought it had come out a reasonable representation of her, although maybe it made her look a bit too pleasantly respectable. Vice did not greet him with enthusiasm. “Jesus, Lucas, do you know how many hookers there are in the city? What do you think we are?” said someone resentfully, tossing the picture back at him.

A sleepy-eyed detective in plain clothes picked up the sketch. “I don't know,” he said. “Maybe. She looks vaguely familiar. But that doesn't mean a thing. You want to sit here and go through mug shots of every hooker we've booked in the past couple of years, be my guest. I don't think you'll find her, though. I haven't noticed her working downtown. How old is she?”

“Early twenties?”

“Naw. I thought maybe she was one of those kids who come through for a couple of weeks and then get whisked off home again or somewhere by some social worker. There are so many of them, I can't tell them apart. No can do. Sorry.” That was it. And off Lucas went in search of record stores.

Every store seemed to have at least one clerk with an amazing knowledge of the local scene. They all knew Sex Kitten—a group Lucas had never heard of before this week—and that gave him a certain confidence in their opinions. He started with the two largest stores. In the first he drew a complete blank. In the second, the clerk stared at the picture and then called to someone poring over a stack of computer printout in the office. She stared at it, too, and frowned. “I can't place her,” she said. “But she looks familiar.”

“Could you have run into her at a party?” suggested Lucas. “She's about your age.”

The girl shook her head. “Not familiar that way. Familiar, like I saw her on a record jacket or something. Can I keep the sketch?” Lucas nodded. “Give me your name, and if it comes to me, I'll call you.” She wrote his name down on the back of the picture and whisked off again.

He turned an inquiring eye back to the clerk. “Sorry. She looked, like, vaguely familiar, that's all. That's why I called Betsy over. But if Betsy can't come up with the name, no one can. She has a phenomenal memory. Still, if Betsy remembers her, like on a record jacket, the kid is probably a singer or something. Somewhere, for somebody.”

“Betsy wouldn't have seen her hanging around on the street outside, or in the store looking at records, and remember her from that? Get the girl confused with someone else?”

“Definitely not. Betsy remembers faces, like, in context, you know? If a hundred people she'd seen before walked into this room, she could say, those ninety are customers, I saw those two on television once, that's a waitress somewhere, that's a politician, that's a hooker who works the street out there—she's good.”

“Thanks. Betsy should join the police force.” And he left the store feeling elated. Somewhere in this city someone had to know who X was.

Nineteen record stores later, his faith in the phenomenal Betsy began to fade. Nineteen clerks stared at the picture, consulted their friends, shook their heads, said they knew every singer in town, and she wasn't one of them. He walked into the twentieth tired, hungry, thirsty, and discouraged. The more discouraged because the lead had seemed to be so fertile in the beginning. If he'd been searching for a needle in a haystack right from the start, he wouldn't have objected so much. After all, he was used to that. It was the irrational rise that Betsy had given to his expectations that had caused this corresponding depression. That and hunger. The twentieth clerk looked at him and handed back the picture. “How the hell should I know? What do you think I am? This is just a part-time job I got, mister, not a goddamn career,” he snarled. “I don't even like music. You wanna buy a record? Pick it out and give me the money.”

Lucas walked out onto the pavement in a rage and looked around him. To the east were more record stores and some fast-food restaurants; to the west were two pleasant shops across from the University's Faculty of Music that carried a lot of hard-to-get classical music. There were also a couple of cheap, slow-paced, friendly restaurants, where one could spend hours over a meal, one Middle Eastern and one Italian. This late in the afternoon they'd be almost empty. Obviously he should head east, grab a quick lunch, and finish this damn thing up today. He headed west.

The Middle Eastern restaurant was about ten shop-fronts away to the west. To get to it he would have to pass the first record store. Perhaps he would slip in, show them his picture, just in case, and see what they had that was new and interesting. Then lunch. Then back east to the grind. The entrance was down a flight of concrete steps, and the shop itself was long and narrow. Bins filled with CDs lined the two side walls. The cash register, unattended as usual, was at the front; the only other human being in the place was sitting at the order desk in the back, working in a little pool of light, listening to a recording of
Pelleas et Melisande
that Lucas particularly liked. The shop was dimly lit after the brightness of the afternoon, and it took a minute for his eyes to adjust. “Excuse me,” he said, opening his small briefcase for the twenty-first time that day, and stopped dead.