Strawberry Tattoo (29 page)

“Oh, shit,” Laurence said softly once again.

And from behind him came the sound of retching. Kevin was being sick in the corner of the yard.

“Pretty perspicacious of you, Ms. Jones.” Detective Frank leaned back in his chair and smiled at me. It was a nice enough smile, but the effect was undercut both by the floor-to-ceiling chicken wire which covered the window just behind him and the gory posters, one of a drug addict, one of a gunshot victim, which bracketed it. Nor was the view I could dimly glimpse through the chicken wire anything to mention on a postcard home. Sipping some brown hot water which tasted as if it had been made by hand-wringing coffee filters into a rusty bucket, I said “Thank you” as meekly as I could.

“And you kept your head, right? Got some witnesses together and went into the yard to check out just what was in that bag. Didn’t puke, either, not you. Not like that other guy.”

“Regular Miss Marple,” said Thurber. With horror, I suddenly realised that her deep dead voice was exactly the same as Marvin the paranoid android’s from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. No wonder I’d thought of Radiohead before. Giggles bubbled up inside me and some, despite my best efforts, made a break for freedom. Quickly I slurped down some more brown hot water and pretended to have a little coughing fit to cover the outburst. I didn’t think any further response would be required.

“Maybe that’s because it isn’t the first time this’s happened to you, right?” Thurber continued, her voice still eerily lacking affect.

“I usually do keep my head,” I said, looking her in the eye. “And this stuff at the gallery is nothing to do with me.”

It didn’t distract her. She lowered her gaze once again to the stack of paper on the desk in front of her.

“Broke a guy’s neck for him, didn’t you, a few years back?” she said mildly. “I tell you that, Ray?”

“Yeah, I think you did mention it,” Frank confirmed, tilting his chair back till it hit the chicken wire. “Pretty impressive, huh?” he said to me.

“If you think that’s impressive. I don’t. And it was self-defence. It didn’t even go to trial.”

“Sure, sure. And it’s not like you strangled him or anything,” Frank agreed, as cheerful as ever. “Now that would get us wondering a little bit.”

“So where are we on this?” Thurber said, as if she were asking me a question. I bit my tongue. One of the hardest things about police interrogations is telling yourself to shut up.

She shuffled some more paper round on her desk. Mixed in with a series of forms were some large black-and-white photographs. I couldn’t see them closely but I assumed they were of Don’s dead body.

“We have a multiple murder inquiry going on here,” Thurber went on, “and you’re not helping much.”

“I found the second body,” I said politely. “Doesn’t that count?”

Thurber shot me a glance which indicated that our bonding moment over the Monkees had been at least temporarily forgotten.

“Where were you last night?” she said.

The Q-and-A hadn’t been under way for long. They would ask me this at least twice more before they let me go and my story had better be the same every time. I took a deep breath.

“At home in my apartment. I had a friend staying with me.”

“He or she?”

“He.”

“He stay over?”

I blinked. “He stayed all night, if that’s what you mean. But he’s just a friend.” I didn’t want any rumours getting around. “He’s one of the artists who’s doing the show with me at Bergmann LaTouche. We know each other from London.”

Thurber picked up her pen. “What’s this guy’s full name, and how can we get in touch with him?” she asked.

I gave her Lex’s name. “I don’t know where he is right now,” I said, not wanting to ring my apartment in case everyone was still there. For all I knew they might have topped up their dose and be in the kind of state in which a Thurber/Frank double-pronged interrogation would send them over the edge into screaming insanity.

“Why don’t we just try your number?” Thurber suggested, too clever not to sense that there was something I wasn’t telling. To my great relief, when she dialled it, the answering machine picked up. She hung up and looked at me. “Any idea where he could be?”

“I’m sure he’ll get in touch,” I said easily. “He’s a bit of a free spirit. I think he’s been couch-surfing up till now.”

“And you don’t know any of his friends?”

This was bringing me into dangerous waters.

“He just rang me yesterday and said he needed somewhere to stay for the night,” I said, avoiding the question.

“How’d he know where you were?”

“I gave him my number in London.”

“He tell you then who he was staying with?”

“I didn’t even know he was planning to come over earlier.”

Thurber looked at me narrowly. It was terrifying. “You think he’ll be back with you tonight?”

“Lex is pretty unpredictable,” I said. “Maybe, yeah. I’ll tell him to get in touch with you as soon as I see him.”

“You do that,” she said. “So where was he sleeping last night?” There was nothing prurient about her question.

“In the living room on the pull-out bed.”

“How’s the apartment laid out?”

“It’s all open-plan, more or less, apart from the bathroom and bedroom.”

“So if you got up and went out in the night, would he know if you’d gone? Would you be stepping over him or anything?” Frank said.

“Well, maybe he’d hear the front door. The locks make a lot of noise. Though the sofa-bed’s round the L-shape of the living room, so he might not even notice. But are we really talking about the middle of the night?” I countered. “When was Don killed?”

Thurber’s eyes, already drawn into slits, sharpened as if her stare were honing down to twin points of concentration.

“Were you with this guy all evening?” she snapped back.

“We met at about seven and we were together all evening.”

“So whaddaya want to know?” Thurber said as sharply as if she were attacking me.

I spread my hands. “I’m curious. As much as you’ll tell me.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Frank shoot a glance at Thurber. It was clear that she led when they danced.

“We’re looking for the same perp, if that’s what you mean,” Thurber said to me. “The guy you found was strangled with the same garotte that did Kate Jacobson. As far as we can tell.”

“It wouldn’t have been so easy to take him by surprise,” I said. “He was the size of a house. Was he drunk?”

“Don’t tell me,” Thurber said, in an almost friendly way. “You smelled the bourbon on him when you took the plastic bag off.”

“That’s right.” I returned her gaze. It was impossible to tell what game she was playing.

“Probably drugged, too,” Thurber said. “We haven’t had the results back yet for sure. But I’m willing to bet there was something in the bourbon. Knock him out a bit.”

“He was drinking beer,” I said, remembering the glass by the lounger. “He must have been offered something better. I know he used to stay late to work on his own stuff.”

“Yeah, did that quite a lot, they say,” Thurber said. She gave me a very straight look. “We need to talk to this Lex Thompson,” she said. “And you need us to talk to him, too. If what you’re saying’s true, he’s your alibi. Right?”

“Right.”

“Plus the doorman,” Frank volunteered.

“Oh no,” I said gloomily. “You’re going to have to talk to him again, aren’t you?”

“’Fraid so,” Frank confirmed, sounding about as apologetic as a bus conductor announcing that all the passengers would have to get off and wait for the one twenty minutes behind.

Thurber was unbuttoning her jacket. It swung open, and as she reached for something inside her pocket I saw the gun clipped to her belt.

“Here you go,” she said, handing me a card with her name and various phone numbers printed on it. “He should call us as soon as possible. It’s in your interest as well as his.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll tell him just as soon as he shows up.”

“You do that,” Frank said. “You do that thing.”

A ghost of a smile drifted across Thurber’s near-expressionless face.

“It’s a Clock. Porcelain,” she said, patting the gun. I realised I had been looking at it. “Point nine mill. Bet you don’t see many of those on the cops where you come from, right?”

“They don’t carry pieces over there,” Frank chimed in.

“
Jesus
.” Thurber stared at me as incredulously as if I came from a place where the wheel was cutting-edge technology. “That right?” she asked, her voice almost coming alive with disbelief.

“Yes, ma’am,” I responded. I didn’t know why I said that: it just came out.

Thurber’s face cracked once again into a fleeting smile. I decided that she was the scariest person I had ever met in my life. Not because of the Glock, either. It was that smile.

We went over my version of events a couple more times before they let me go. I had been interrogated by police in Britain often enough, but Thurber and Frank were something else. Maybe it was helped by the interview taking place in the middle of a crowded squad room, with people milling around us, computers buzzing, printers chattering away. It made the talk
feel more informal; when a particularly noisy suspect started yelling across the room, the three of us had exchanged what-a-bore glances and huddled conspiratorially closer together so we could hear what the others were saying. In England we would probably have been in a small interview room with one bright white light overhead and the recorder on the Formica table between us tying everyone’s tongues into spools of audiotape.

But the bottom line was that they were very, very good at their job. I had never felt so on my guard. Perhaps I too was being conditioned by the cop shows, but I had the instinct that Thurber and Frank really had seen almost everything already and by now could predict with a fair certainty when it would happen again. They were more world-weary than A.E. Housman on an off day. Or, to draw a more modern analogy, Portishead covering Joy Division.

The squad room was positively teeming with people, most of them carrying Styrofoam cups of brown hot water as carefully as if they actually cared about losing the contents. Americans were bizarre about their coffee. Either they drank this stuff, which tasted like the dirty water that lived inside an espresso machine, or they went to a coffee boutique and bought the violently expensive couture version. A column I had read the other day had described this almost perfectly as a lengthy and complex process involving approximately one coffee bean, three quarts of dairy products and what appeared to be a small nuclear reactor. Only it didn’t mention the optional strawberry syrup.

I squeezed past a group of cops—now I was sensitised to their presence, I was noticing the guns everywhere—and finally reached the fence on the far side of the room. Frank, who had been escorting me, opened the gate and indicated I was to go through.

“We’ll be in touch,” he said drily, clicking it shut behind me. On a bench against the wall sat Barbara Bilder and Jon Tallboy. To my surprise, they stood up when they saw me and came towards me, looking anxious.

“Sam!” said Barbara, hugging me. Taken aback, my instinct was to push her away, but I fought it nobly. She was wearing a Body Shop perfume, which smelt light and airy, like freshly starched linen. It clashed with her
Tibetan tribeswoman look. “Are you OK?” she was saying. “You poor girl, you must be in total shock.”

“Absolutely. And hungry, too,” Jon said.

I found this baffling at first; then I was insulted. It took me a moment to realise that he was projecting.

“Why don’t you come back to ours and have something to eat?” Barbara suggested. “We were waiting for you. Carol said you’re staying on the Upper West Side.”

“That’s right,” I said feebly.

“Well, great!” she said. “We’re in the west nineties. It’ll be easy for you to get home afterwards.”

They seemed to have everything planned out already. Barbara was that kind of woman.

The Bilders—technically they should be the Tallboys, but it just didn’t sound right—lived in a brownstone on a cross-street between Broadway and Amsterdam, lined with trees on one side and, on the other, flights of stone stairs leading to impossibly high ground floors. Despite its apparent smartness, the hall smelt of boiled cabbage, the drugget on the stairs was faded and worn, and some of the mailboxes were hanging crooked. It reminded me of run-down boardinghouses in South Kensington. Until Barbara opened the apartment door, I couldn’t decide if this was shabby chic to fool the burglars or if the place really was run-down.