Strawberry Tattoo (23 page)

“Shit, Lex, don’t look at me like that,” I said, finishing my drink. “You’re upsetting me. It’s like torturing a puppy.”

“Well, if you’re upset, how do you think
I
feel?” he said unanswerably. “What am I going to do, Sam?”

I speak from experience when I say that it is near-irresistibly seductive to have a pretty boy throw himself, metaphorically speaking, at your feet, begging for your protection. Now I was feeling more like Sam Spade. Or Mike Hammer again. The setting helped: this was the right kind of scuzzy dive on the perfect mean street. Though I should be sitting at the bar, drinking neat bourbon, to make the picture complete. And the woolly hat would have to go.

With an effort I dragged my thoughts back to the present. Lex was looking ever more helpless, clearly sensing that this was the way to appeal to my better side. He was taking a calculated gamble that I had one.

“First I need another drink,” I said. “Same again?”

He nodded dumbly. I went to the bar and got in another round.

“Look,” I said, setting the glasses on the table and sitting down, “who exactly knows you’re here?”

He stared at me. “Well, I told Leo I was going out, but he doesn’t know where exactly. I said we’d probably be hanging on Avenue A.”

I felt my eyes rolling. I didn’t remember Sam Spade having to cope with this kind of moron.

“Here in New York, idiot,” I specified.

“Oh, right! Well, Leo, of course. And his mates. But, I mean, they’re not going to go to the cops, are they?”

“Anyone from the gallery?”

Lex shook his head. “Kate really didn’t think Carol would go for it,” he said. “I don’t think she told anyone.”

“So how come you were staying at hers?” I asked curiously.

“Oh.” He shrugged. “It was just one of those things. I got this impulse to come over early and I rang the gallery to see if Carol knew anywhere I could stay. But Carol wasn’t there and I got Kate on the phone instead. I met her when I was over before, so we sort of knew each other, and she said I could bunk down at hers as long as I didn’t tell anyone. Nice of her, right? I mean, she was taking a risk. She said Carol’d have sacked her if she found out.”

It was bizarre that Kate would have risked so much for someone she didn’t even know; it didn’t make sense. But I put this one aside to puzzle out for later, not wanting to distract Lex too much from the main subject under discussion.

“Was she meeting you that evening? The evening she died?”

Lex started, as much as he could; the depth of the leather sofa stifled sudden movements at birth.

“No way! I swear to God!” He looked crestfallen, turning to face me full on. This manoeuvre caused the sofa to squeak excitedly under his weight like a flood of rats in a panic. “But I can’t prove it. I didn’t see anyone I knew. I just went to a film at the Angelika—that one with Demi
Moore as the deaf-and-dumb nun—and then I went up to St. Mark’s and scored some blow, and then I went for a couple of drinks. I must have got back to Kate’s about midnight, but I don’t remember anything, you know? I was well out of it.”

“Do you know where she was going?” I asked.

“I’ve really tried to think,” he said, creasing his forehead as if to mime the tortuous nature of his thought processes. “I mean, if I knew anything then obviously I’d go to the cops. But all I remember is she said she had a heavy night ahead and she might be back late. And she pulled a face when she said it. I mean, she didn’t act like she was meeting up with a guy. It was more like”—he sat up straighter, grabbing one of my knees excitedly, the sofa sounding like a baby pig being slaughtered—“like it was a work thing that she couldn’t get out of. But not a work thing because she would have said.”

I stared at him. “Did she seem excited at all?” I asked slowly.

He thought about this. “More on edge. Worked up about it.”

It was that quality Suzanne had noticed when Kate said goodbye to us, which had made her assume that Kate was seeing Leo again; a heightened sense of tension about her, as if she had something tricky to face. Would she have looked like that before going off to trash the gallery she worked for? But that had been too early. Everyone agreed that the graffiti at the gallery could not have been done till at least midnight and probably later. Until then there were simply too many people still in SoHo for whoever had done it to be sure of being able to enter and leave without being seen. And Kate had been dead by midnight.

“Did you hear about what happened at Bergmann LaTouche?” I said.

Lex nodded. “Not till today, though. I got the papers.”

“And did you know that the gallery wasn’t actually broken into?” I said. “They came in with the keys and they knew where the burglar alarm was and how to switch it off.”

Lex was staring at me with acute concentration.

“You mean
Kate
—” he said. “No, that’s crazy. She wouldn’t do that. Shit!” he suddenly exclaimed. “I heard something! I know I heard something!
Kate was talking to someone on the phone, about keys. Oh shit, I can’t remember. Something like: ‘yeah, sure I’ve got the keys’—and there was something else, but I can’t remember it.”

I proffered his glass. “Have a drink,” I said. I always found that helped.

He gulped down some vodka and tonic.

“Shit,” he said. “I’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night and remember it. I was just coming out of the bathroom and I only caught the end of the conversation. I don’t think she wanted me to hear it.”

He stared at me imploringly. “It could be really important, couldn’t it?”

“You didn’t hear the name of the person she was talking to?”

He shook his head. I grimaced.

“But there was
something
,” he insisted doggedly. “Sam?” The puppy-eyes were back. “What am I going to do?”

I sighed. This damsel-in-distress thing was actually quite wearying.

“Well, from the purely selfish point of view, you could just keep your head down,” I suggested. “You haven’t got anything to tell the police. Yet. You could always hang on till you remember whatever it was that Kate said. Then you’d actually have something to tell them, rather than some lame story about panicking because you were still tripping on the finest puff New York has to offer.”

“What if I don’t?”

I shrugged.

“And you won’t tell anyone I’m here?”

I shouldn’t have promised. I knew it was a mistake. But he was giving me that pleading look up from under his eyelashes and his lower lip was trembling. From this angle he strongly resembled the dark and luscious Adrian Pasdar, the star of a vampire film called
Near Dark
made by Kathryn Bigelow before she got big budgets and went out of control; Adrian, as a country boy called Caleb who was seduced by a beautiful vampire, was definitely on my top-ten-of-all-time list. The flesh is weak and mine was no exception.

“All right,” I muttered gracelessly.

Lex promptly hugged me.

“Thanks, Sam,” he mumbled into my shoulder. “I
knew
you wouldn’t let me down. Sam? Please can I stay at yours tonight? I’m scared. And if I come back to yours no one will know where I am. Please, Sam?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Oh,
please
.? Go on! I’ll be really quiet, you’ll hardly know I’m there….”

I doubted that profoundly. But he was batting his eyelashes again.

“All right,” I said finally. “But just for tonight.”

And that was another great, whopping, cosmic-sized mistake. I would have to watch myself. Lex was a serious danger to my good judgement.

It seemed very late when we left the bar, and it was an effort to drag ourselves away. Outside, the orange flashes of streetlights were like streaks of graffiti sprayed across the dingy, sodium-lightened charcoal sky. The New York night, colourless and murky, gave a strangely unhealthy tinge to everyone who passed; it made them into weirdly lit and shadowed caricatures, the occasional flare of neon light across their faces giving an artificial and distinctly unflattering wash of lurid pink or green. No wonder that people kept their heads down and walked fast. I had noticed before that though you might see people in bars dressed with great extravagance, in the street everyone was covered in long overcoats and woolly hats. Display was something kept strictly for the ambience of one’s choice.

I was amazed to realise that it was only nine-thirty. Already I felt tired and ready for bed. The bar had been a black hole in more ways than one, sucking in all my energy and providing me with a mere handful of vodka and tonics in return. But I had promised Kim that I would drop by the bar where she worked, if only briefly, and now I had Lex coming back to the flat with me, too. I felt irritated and scratchy, as if people were forcing their presence on me; all I wanted right now was to jump in a taxi and head for my temporary home, curling up in Nancy’s four-poster with the Comedy Channel on TV, some popcorn, and a bottle of beer.

“Where are we headed?” Lex said passively. The Mr. Cool About Town
pose had been abdicated for the time being, not to mention the Randy Seducer. Clearly he had decided that Little Boy Lost was more effective.

“To see this friend of mine. She’s working at a bar near here,” I said. “Second Avenue and Fifth.”

“What’s it called?”

“The Hookah,” I said. “Good name, eh?”

“Bit obvious,” Lex said dismissively.

“No, hookah A H, not hooker E R,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s pretty clever,” he admitted, once he’d worked this out. It took him a little while. I wasn’t going to admit that I’d made the same mistake myself. “They must get a lot of people confused, though.”

“It’s the way you say it.” I experimented with a Laurence-esque British accent, thinking of the way he’d said “my deaah.” “Hookaaah. Hookaaaaaaaah.”

“Didn’t the caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland
smoke a hookah?”

“Yeah, that’s right!” I remembered it now. “Sitting on the mushroom with his pipe.”

“That guy Lewis Carroll was so on drugs,” Lex said profoundly. “He must have been stoned from morning to night.”

“When he wasn’t photographing little girls dressing up as hookers.”

“You what?” Lex said blankly.

“Hook-ERS, not hook-AAAAHS.” I was beginning to feel that we were doing a slacker comedy set-piece. Only we should be sitting in a diner. And I would be played by … um, Jennifer Tilly.

“Who would you want to play you in a film?” I said.

Lex thought hard for a while, quite unfazed by my sudden change of subject. “That guy who plays Joey in
Friends
,” he said finally. “I always think he pretends to be more stupid than he is, to get away with stuff.”

I was impressed by this. I’d expected him to propose Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio, someone blindingly obvious. And Lex did resemble Matt LeBlanc, when the latter wasn’t too pudgy.

“Good one, eh?” he added smugly. “Bet you thought I was going to say Johnny Depp.”

“Not at all,” I lied.

“What about you?”

“Oh, Jennifer Tilly. With dark hair.”

“God, I really fancied her in
Bound
.”

“She was playing a lesbian,” I pointed out. “You’d have fancied Princess Anne if she’d been doing some hot girl-on-girl action.”

“Not totally true. Not outside the bounds of possibility, but not totally true. What about the silly voice, though? And I don’t mean Princess Anne. Though she’s up there with the best of them on that one.”

“I know,” I said, grimacing. “Jennifer’d have to promise to talk normally.”

“Who said anything about
Jennifer’s
silly voice?”

I shoved him and he shoved me back. We found ourselves scuffling around in a friendly way for a while, letting off a little steam from the tensions of the situation: God knew there were plenty of those. Lex was a fugitive from justice; I was sheltering him; someone we both knew had recently been garotted; and we hadn’t really dealt with what had happened between us in the Hoxton Square toilets. As an American would put it, we had issues.

“Oh look,” I said, fending off a push from Lex which would have taken me into the street, “this is Second Avenue already. It should be somewhere round here.”

“You know what,” Lex said reflectively, “this bar sounds familiar.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, losing sympathy with him once more after our brief bout of sibling-type bonding. “You’ve been here too, have you? You’ve been bloody everywhere. What d’you do, split yourself down the middle so you can hang out at two places at once?”

“Don’t get all snarky with me,” Lex said, hurt. “I haven’t been here, as it happens. I just said it sounded familiar, all right?”

He had dropped the Americanisms for the time being, which was a relief. I was too busy looking for the bar to express my gratitude. There was no one to ask; hardly anyone else was out on the street but ourselves, and the few souls around were hurrying as if a bombing raid were about to start
and they needed to get to the shelter fast. That was the East Village for you. As I swivelled round, a girl went past quickly, wearing a camouflage -patterned balaclava pulled down over her face and the regulation army surplus overcoat. I stared after her in disbelief, momentarily distracted by the balaclava. Talk about urban paranoia. Or maybe she was just suffering from a bad outbreak of acne.