Strawberry Tattoo (33 page)

He shrugged. “I told you, she’s obsessed with this. I’m sure she’s trying to check out some theory about who killed Kate.”

“Don’t you think it was the same person who killed this Don guy, then?” Kim asked him.

“Oh, I assume so. It’s just—well, frankly, it’s not because Don’s dead that she’s gone on this one-woman crusade.”

We fell silent, as if paying respect to the dead. In front of us, in the centre of the park, was a miniature amphitheatre, a sunken circle surrounded by rings of steps. In the middle sat a black guy, his face creased and lined into a rubbery mobility almost too expressive to be human. He had a big
old amplifier next to him and a mike in his hand, and was holding spellbound the crowd of people sitting all around him on the steps, rapping, talking, singing the blues, taking whatever came into his head and turning it into a performance. A posse of young white kids sitting right in front of him were clapping along as he sang, yelling: “Right on!” when he said something they particularly appreciated.

Most of them were dressed in army surplus and camouflage, mercenaries in the urban jungle who had bought big into the
Escape from New York
myth. As I glanced round the people in the amphitheatre I noticed a girl sitting on the steps with her back to us who, besides the inevitable oversized army overcoat, was wearing a knitted hat which looked oddly familiar. Maybe I’d tried it on in Urban Outfitters a few days ago. I couldn’t help eyeing it up. It wasn’t really me, but it might work anyway. I was becoming corrupted by New York street style.

“Right,” Lex announced nonchalantly, jumping to his feet. “I’m off to turn myself in. You still coming with me?” he said to Kim more hesitantly.

“Sure. I mean, until I have to go to work.”

“Fine. Don’t suppose you want to come too?” he said to Laurence and me.

“Yeah, right,” Laurence said nastily. “Just how I wanted to spend my Monday afternoon.”

Lex looked wounded. “Sorry, mate,” he muttered, temporarily forgetting to sound American. “I mean, it’s me that’s got to go and face the music.”

Laurence, abashed, was lost for words. Fishing in his pocket, he pulled out some gum, holding it out like a peace offering.

“Careful, Lex,” I said to lighten the mood. “It’s probably drugged. Ro-hypnol gum. He’s going to drag you behind a bush and sexually abuse you.”

“Drugged
gum?
” said Lex blankly. “I never heard of that.”

“Yeah,” Laurence said, playing along. “I’ve just had one myself, actually. I always drop one when I’m out, just in case someone feels like taking advantage of me. I have to make it easy for them.” He gestured at his lanky frame self-deprecatingly. “Come and get me, I’m semi-conscious, is basically the message I want to send.”

Kim and I were giggling by now. I took some gum and started chewing.

“God, the sky’s very blue all of a sudden,” I announced.

“Oh dear, Sam’s coming up on the gum. I must have got out the wrong packet,” Laurence said, pretending to fumble in his other pocket. “Don’t worry, I’ve got some Wrigley’s Downers somewhere….”

We were laughing now, in the way that happens when the tension has been running high and everyone seizes gratefully on a funny moment as a blessed relief.

“Jesus, look at those squirrels!” Lex said, as one bounded right in front of us. They were the tamest I had ever seen, bouncing from one small square of grass to another like feathers on springs, quite unafraid of the many dogs in the park. The latter were on leads and clearly, being city dogs, were quite unused to chasing anything; they stared bemused as the squirrels ran rings around them contemptuously.

“Whoah!” Kim exclaimed, as a blader shot towards us just as a squirrel dashed across the path; there was an instant of confusion and then the girl jumped into the air, right over the happily oblivious body of the running squirrel, landing neatly on the other side with a smack of her wheels. We all clapped. She kept going, acknowledging the applause with a flip of her Angers.

“Good luck, Lex,” I said as they turned to go.

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Yeah, right.”

“Sam!” Kim swung round. “We’ll ring you later, OK? Or why don’t you come in to the bar?”

“OK. Whatever.”

“Well,” Laurence said when they had gone, stretching out his long thin limbs on the bench now that Lex was no longer there to compete with. “The afternoon stretches in front of us like an unrolling carpet richly embroidered with possibilities.”

“You don’t much like Lex, do you?” I said bluntly, noticing how much he had relaxed with the latter’s exit from the scene.

Laurence looked embarrassed. “He’s got a lot of charm,” he said. “But don’t you think he’s rather loud and childish?”

“If you look at it right that’s all part of the charm. He’s this bad little boy who women want to mother.”

“But not you.”

“Nope. I have the maternal instincts of a nanny with Miinchhausen’s by proxy.”

“Tasteless,” Laurence said appreciatively. “So tell me, is there something weird and suspicious about Lex being over here early?” He was horribly acute.

“Why d’you say that?” I was instantly wary.

“I just got the feeling there was more to it than he was saying.”

“I think he was embarrassed he’d been caught out in the city without having come in and said hello to everyone at the gallery,” I suggested. “Shall we walk a bit? I’m getting stiff just sitting here.”

We stood up and started strolling across the park, heading towards the south-west corner. It hadn’t distracted Laurence, though.

“Lex doesn’t strike me as being that socially sensitive,” he commented witheringly. Laurence really was very like Hugo: the intellect without the sexiness. “I still think there’s something more to it.”

“When are Mel and Rob due over here?” I said, wanting to slide away from this weak point. “Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“Yup. So what are they like?”

“Well, Mel’s quiet, almost withdrawn. But you get the feeling that there’s loads of stuff swirling around beneath the surface. She’s got this reputation for being pretty obsessive, but I haven’t seen any sign of it. Mind you, I don’t know her that well. Rob seems nice and easy-going. A bit boring. Lex and I are definitely the loudmouths of the group.”

“Do they drink much? I don’t think BLT could take four Brits with the alcohol problems of you and Lex. Needy and addictive,” Laurence quoted winningly. “I wanted to ask Java for some help cards for the pair of you.”

“Piss off,” I said, grinning.

We passed a group of little folding tables, each with a chess set on top and a very bored man sitting behind them.

“Chess hustlers,” Laurence said absently.

But the only table with a customer at it bore a neat handwritten sign which read: “My name is STEVE. I am a chess teacher. I can teach you. NO GAMBLING.”

“No gambling, no drinking. The new puritans,” Laurence said, “purged of the sins of the flesh. Plenty of ’em around.”

“Which reminds me,” I said thoughtfully. “Talking of the sins of the flesh.”

I had got Lex to give me Leo’s phone number. I wanted to go dancing tonight, and it would be a bonus if I could lubricate my energy channels with some magic powder. Tom would have shot me down in flames for that metaphor, but he wasn’t here, and I hadn’t said it out loud.

“Let’s go and find an unvandalised phone,” I suggested. “And then maybe we could cruise up to Urban Outfitters. There’s a hat I want to try on.”

The toilets of the Angelika Film Center were the most foul I had ever seen in a long life of attending cutting-edge cinema. The queue stretched right out into the downstairs lobby, and when I finally reached the head I realised why. Two of the toilets were blocked and the door of the third wouldn’t lock; it kept swinging open while the occupant was still engaged in whatever she was doing. When I finally emerged into the lobby I was feeling dazed, a sensation which the ultraviolet lighting did nothing to dispel. It was like tripping underwater, if you imagined the water bright mauve and the sea bed thick carpet; the violet slowed you down, made you dizzy, and threw in the weird white gleam of strangers’ teeth and eyeballs into the bargain. I was glad to locate Laurence—impossible to miss, with the UV lights mercilessly highlighting his dandruff—and head upstairs.

“I can’t believe we went to see that,” Laurence said as we pushed our way through the self-consciously arty black-clad filmgoers in the entrance lobby. They should twin this place with the Hampstead Everyman.

“It was worth it for the curiosity value alone,” I argued. “And we laughed.”

“We certainly did.”

“That bit where they find her in the jungle—”

“Wearing mascara, and that pair of panties she’d somehow managed to weave out of plant stalks—”

“And then they take her back to civilisation and find out that apart from being Demi Moore, which you would have thought quite enough of a disability in itself, she’s deaf and dumb as well.”

“My favourite bit was when she tries on the tights for the first time and starts stroking her legs in girlish wonder—”

“No, no, when she puts on the wimple and looks at herself in the mirror—”

“—and you see Brad Pitt behind her turn away sadly because he’s lost her to the Carmelites—”

“Oh God, I nearly wet myself laughing.”

“Thank God we saw it here. They’d have thrown us out of a multiplex.”

“There were lots of other people laughing.”

“Not like us.”

“And the bit”—I started giggling again—“right at the end, when she sees the jungle out of her cell window, and starts talking to herself in the mirror in sign language about whether she should go back or not.”

“God knows what she’d wear for knickers, they must have thrown her plant-stalk ones away when she joined the nuns.”

“Maybe she wove herself a new pair every morning,” I suggested. “Hy-genic, with a built-in deodorant… New! Jungle Chlorophyll Fragrance For All-Day Intimate Freshness!”

“Ugh, I hate the word intimate, it’s so knowing,” Laurence said.

“I have to go,” I announced. “I said I’d meet Leo at eight.”

“Go with God,” Laurence said sourly. I hadn’t actually told him I wanted to get hold of some coke, but he had a pretty good idea of why I was meeting Leo, and he didn’t approve. And I doubted that he would be mollified if I said that I also intended to see if Leo had any theories about who might have killed Kate.

“I take it that means you don’t want to come,” I said.

“I’d just slow you down,” Laurence said. “You don’t need the protection of skinny little me in Alphabet City. It’d be the other way around.”

“Laurence,” I said firmly, “bitter is not attractive. Anyway, thin for boys is in at the moment. Look how tiny those men’s shirts were in Urban Outfitters.”

“The printed nylon ones? Thanks a bunch. I sweat plenty as it is.”

“It’s a shame about that hat,” I said wistfully. “I could have sworn that was where I saw it.”

“Trust me,” Laurence said. “We took a fine-tooth comb to that store. No way that hat could have escaped us.”

And on that note we parted. I was glad to have a little time on my own; there was something nagging at me, something I hadn’t yet pinned down but thought I might if I had half an hour to myself. I doglegged up from Houston Street, across towards the East Village, counting the streets off with the ease of nearly a week’s practice. I was meeting Leo at a coffee shop on 2nd Avenue and I was early, not having realised how close I was.

Ordering a cappuccino and an organic strawberry muffin, I sat down, still deep in thought. The coffee shop was cosy in a Fifties-meets-late-Nineties way, done up in pale blue with scarlet plastic booths at the back beyond the counter, for people who wanted to be private, and small tables in post-modernist retro Formica at the front for the rest of the world to check each other out. Everyone was keeping an eye on the new arrivals to see if they could up their cool points by knowing more people than anyone else.

A magazine rack hanging from the central pillar offered
Harper’s, Newsweek
, and a selection of leftie papers I’d never heard of. Above them was a sign saying: “Instant Karma #457: depriving someone of enjoying the magazine you just read by taking it with you.” A girl glided in and over to the counter in one smooth swift movement which made me blink until I realised that she was on blades. The ramps for handicapped access must have been the best news for bladers since kneepads. As so often in New York, I felt as if I were on a film set.

The guy sitting next to me had his own soundtrack playing on a Walk-man,
his woolly hat keeping in the earpieces. He hadn’t taken off his big coat either, which was par for the course. Everyone in this town seemed to live in a perpetual hurry, needing to be in Place B even before they had sat down in Place A. It was a never-ending competition to show that they were busier than the next person.

I looked at him again and a little bubble burst inside my head. The woolly hat… the big coat… the Walkman … suddenly I felt extremely clever. The only trouble was I had no one to share my brilliance with. Where was Laurence when I really needed him?