The Black Cat (7 page)

But Morris didn’t move except to pick up a paw and set it down, pick up the other one and set it down, in the way Mungo himself had done if he didn’t know what to do.

I want to go home, said Morris.

Mungo felt sad, as homesickness seemed to fill the place that hunger had just left.

Really, said Morris.

Mungo didn’t know how to send a message back, with that.

Wasn’t it possible, Jury wondered, looking down at his telephone message pad on this late Thursday morning for Carole-anne Palutski to write in the King’s English? And hadn’t they pretty much exhausted this subject? Apparently not, for here was another one:

“S.W. c’ld t’ tell you the b.c. w’mn was i.d. by o’nr of ag’cy c’d ♥.”

A heart. Was something called “Heart”? No. Was Valentine’s Day coming up? No. It was May. “Sergeant Wiggins called to tell you-” That much was clear. Of course, what wasn’t clear was the point of what S.W. called to tell you, right?

Hell. Jury picked up the receiver and punched in his office number. No answer. He mashed the receiver into the cradle (he had a telephone left over from the Pleistocene age), collected his keys, and left the flat.

“ ‘Heart.’ That’s funny, guv.” Wiggins gave a spluttery laugh.

Jury stitched his lips shut to keep from yelling. “Then do you think you could enlighten me as to what ‘heart’ means here?”

“Sorry. What that refers to is Valentine. Valentine’s Escorts. Mariah wasn’t exactly soliciting the curb crawlers in Shepherd Market, see. She was with an escort service. A little more respectable, maybe, but still pros. Valentine’s has offices in Tottenham Court Road.”

At last. “Good for you, Wiggins. I forgive you the message.”

“Nothing wrong with the message. It’s the one who took it you should have a word with.” Wiggins said this self-righteously.

“I have had a word. A word does not penetrate. How did you work it out about this escort agency?”

“Well, I didn’t, did I? It was her flatmate called us-”

“Adele-I think Edna Cox said.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Wiggins whipped out his notepad. “Adele Astaire. There’s a name for you. Adele said she’d only just now seen the paper and that she was sure it must be Stacy.”

Jury waited. But Wiggins didn’t continue. “Stacy? Is there a surname to go with that?”

“What? Oh. Stacy Storm. There’s another name, right? That’s Mariah Cox, when she’s at home. I mean, literally. ‘When she’s at home.”’

Wiggins thought this extremely funny. Jury didn’t. “Look, can you just stick to it?”

“Sorry. I bet Adele Astaire’s not her real name, either. Maybe working for an escort service, they don’t want to give out their names.”

Jury didn’t comment. “Where’s Adele live? Mariah’s aunt said Parsons Green or Fulham.”

“Fulham. You want to go and see her?”

“Of course.” Jury extended his hand. “Give me that.” When Wiggins handed over the paper on which he’d written the address, Jury said, “You get onto this Valentine’s place. Take that list of names the Rexroths gave me with you. The person who runs Valentine’s-”

“That’s a Blanche Vann. But she’s going to scream client privilege and make me get a warrant.”

“Probably. Nevertheless, what you’ll want to do is match up names, the names of the men at the Rexroths’ party who came without women on their arms, against any such names on Valentine’s list.”

“Her clients would likely change their names, wouldn’t they?”

“Some would, yes. Assuming that Ms. Vann is helpful at all, if the full names don’t ring a bell, then try just the first names. A person might change the last name but leave the first in place.”

Wiggins had the list out and studied the names. He said, “Here’s a Simon; Simon’s a common name. She’s bound to have a few of those.”

“Depends how many clients she has. But if a surname is being disguised, it could be the person comes up with an absurdly common substitute, like ‘Jones.’ So ‘John Jones’ would be a red flag.” Jury was up and getting into his raincoat, which he liked. He liked rain, too. “Adele…,” he said in a musing way. “Doesn’t she know that was Fred’s sister?”

Wiggins was dropping a teabag in his mug as the electric kettle hissed and burbled. His lunch waited beside his tea mug. It was something peculiar-looking wrapped in what appeared to be a cabbage leaf and purchased at Good Earth, a tiny healthy-eats place nearby that Jury had never patronized and never would. “Guv?” He frowned.

“Fred Astaire. His sister was his dancing partner for years.”

Wiggins poured steaming water into his mug. “We used to do the same thing.” He was sitting down, reflecting, stirring his tea like the old Wiggins.

“What?” What was he talking about?

“My sister. Me and my sister, B.J.-Brenda Jean’s her name. We used to dance a lot.”

Jury stood in the doorway, trying to get his mind around that. Or trying not to. “Wiggins, this is Fred Astaire we’re talking about.”

“Right. The tap dancer,” said Wiggins.

Jury chewed his lip to keep from talking. Then he was out the door.

“A dele Astaire?”

Over the key chain, she nodded. Or the half of her face he could see did. The half looked rather young to be employed by an escort service. “I’m Richard Jury, Scotland Yard CID.” He held out his ID.

She slid back the chain and opened the door and took the ID as if it were a calling card. She studied it, frowning, as though trying to memorize the fact of it before she handed it back.

Jury found the close scrutiny amusing. Rarely did people do more than glance at it.

“Well, you better come on in, then.” Her tone was more friendly than resentful of this detective on her doorstep.

Now he could see all of Adele Astaire-not her real name, as she was quick to tell him, apparently embarrassed by her made-up one-and she still looked a lot younger than she must be. She wore her brown hair in bunches, with an uneven fringe that she scraped this way and that on her forehead. Her cotton dress was pinaforelike, pink and white stripes that made it a little hard to discern the figure beneath it. He hadn’t seen anything like it in years; she must buy her clothes at some retro shop. On her feet were furry slippers.

Her flat was neat and furnished with worn chairs and a small cream-colored sofa. On the shelves of a built-in arched bookcase were some Beatrix Potter figurines-he recognized Benjamin Bunny, for he had had one as a child. On a small table by a chair stood a Paddington Bear lamp.

“It’s really Rose, Rose Moss,” she said. “People call me Rosie, mostly.”

Jury smiled, thinking of one of the little girls they’d rescued from the Hester Street operation. And then he stopped smiling, remembering the cupboard full of little clothes, miniature versions of the costumes he imagined this Rosie might have in her own cupboard. Hester Street had been a pederast ring. That tiny girl’s name had been Rosie, too.

Rosie said, “Blanche Vann-she runs the place where I work-says we’re to have phony names to make us untraceable. Like we couldn’t have clients coming round or ringing us in the middle of the night, could we?”

Untraceable. No matter how clear the prints of the Jimmy Choo shoes, they might not lead to the killer.

Rosie was giving him a great deal of unasked-for information. He’d said nothing about where she worked. Now she continued.

“I just thought, you know, Rosie was kind of unsophisticated. You know, childish.”

Which fit her perfectly, for it was the way she looked, childlike, and the way she coiled an errant lock of dark hair round her finger. No makeup. Skin as pale and smooth as sand left by receding waves. Startled brown eyes; small, neat nose.

“Thing is,” she went on to say after they were seated on the sofa, and as if she’d read his mind, “I’m popular with the clients who’ve got these little-girl fantasies, you know what I mean.”

Yes. They’re a step away from pederasty. Again, he thought of Hester Street.

“I can dress up-I’ve got like schoolgirl costumes-”

Jury thought she would have been a knockout as a child. He felt himself flush at such a thought. And he wondered if pederasts saw the woman in the child, the child holding the woman at bay. A strange inversion of woman and child.

“But of course, I can be an adult, too, if required.” She lit a cigarette.

What a bleak statement. But he had to smile at the way she was processing her cigarette, blowing smoke out in little puffs, off to the side so as not to blow it his way. She did this in the way Bette Davis did it. No one smoked the way Bette Davis had smoked. All About Eve. “I ran all the way.” Phyllis Nancy, rain-soaked, in his doorway, saying that. Lu Aguilar. The crashed car. Jury tried to shut it all out.

“… nervous. You know.”

He’d missed her first few words. “Nervous?”

“You being Scotland Yard. Being here.”

“Please don’t be. It’s only routine. We just need your help with information about Stacy-the name she was using, Stacy Storm.” What sadly affected made-up names. “Mariah Cox was her real name.”

“I know. But I can’t see how I’ll be much help.”

“Your friendship with her could be important. You’d be surprised at how sparse the information has been on her.”

Rosie picked up her glass, whiskey or tea, rattled the ice cubes in it. “I don’t know as I’d call it friendship, exactly; I mean, she never talked, well, hardly ever talked about her other life.”

“Well, mates, then.”

Her accent was a little rough around the edges, a little nasal, a far cry from Chelsea or Knightsbridge, more Brixton, perhaps. She could relate to “mates.”

“Yeah, mebbe. You could say. We worked together, I mean for the same firm.”

“This is Valentine’s?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Nothing to tell except that I think they treated the girls fair. I been working there years.”

“You don’t look old enough.”

“Now, how old do you think I am?” She stubbed out her cigarette.

Jury shrugged, generously guessing, “Twenty?”

That went further than two dozen roses would have. “Listen to you. I’m thirty-one years old.”

She was, too. The eyes always give it away. In hers was a kind of flatness, inexpressiveness, weariness. “My Lord, Rosie. Where’s the fountain of youth? I could use a glassful of that stuff.”

Now, she’d be on his side. “Oh, I don’t know. You look okay to me.” Fetchingly she said this, as she let one leg slide off the sofa.

Before a full-blown flirtation could get under way, he said, “How did Stacy feel about her job? Did she ever mention any of the men she dated?”

Rosie leaned forward and shook another cigarette out of a pack, lit it, then minded her manners and pushed the pack toward Jury.

“No thanks.” Jury thought everyone in Britain must smoke except him, Dora, and Harry’s dog, Mungo. And he wouldn’t take bets on Mungo.

Pulling over a tin ashtray that advertised a pub named “Batty’s” or maybe it was a beer, she said, “Thing is, she never told me their names.”

“Whose names?”

“There was this one bloke she really liked; she dated him awhile-I mean, off the clock. Well, we’re not supposed to, you know.”

“Was she serious about him?”

Rosie looked away and out the window behind them. “Not really. I think she just liked him better than the others.”

“Did she describe him? Do you have any idea what he looks like?”

She shook her head. “Only he was handsome, is all. He bought her things. ‘Like a prince,’ he was, she once said.”

Was it the Cinderella story in Jimmy Choo shoes? Or Snow White’s story, the men always charming, handsome, rich? The women always in jeopardy? He didn’t imagine any of Valentine’s clients would have qualified as Prince Charming. In any event, Prince Charming wouldn’t have needed Valentine’s.

“Funny thing, though. He wanted her to dress a certain way and change her hair.”

“What do you mean?”

“Stacy said it must be someone in his past. He wanted her to color her hair red. So she did. I mean, I did.”

“You did?”

“See, I used to be a stylist. I was in that real chic shop in Bayswater. I was good at color. Good at makeup, too.”

Jury asked, “You mean every weekend she’d have you color her hair?”

She nodded. “With this semipermanent color I use, it’s not so hard on the hair. But her real hair was darkish brown, and it’s tricky turning that coppery color back to brown. You have to use an ash brown to get it that shade. Her clothes, though, he must’ve paid for most of them. Those shoes alone cost seven, eight hundred quid.” Rosie stretched out one leg and moved the furry slipper up and down. “Me, I got myself a pair of Christian Louboutin for a tiny price at one of those consignment stores. It’s called Go Around Twice.”

Jury had a feeling it was hard enough for Rosie to go around once. “How does it work? How do you meet up with the clients?”

“Blanche calls us-that’s Blanche Vann, did I say?-and tells us who and where to meet the bloke. He’d already have paid. So any money changes hands between me and him, that’s a tip.”

“And what about you? Ever met anybody who’s like that? The man Stacy met?”

“Ha! Not bloody likely.” Again, she looped a strand of hair round her finger, curled it and uncurled it.

“Still, it’s possible.”

But as he was the police and fairly out of bounds as a client, she said only, “Yeah.”

Jury said, “Her aunt didn’t know about Stacy Storm, either. Mariah kept the two identities separate.”

“You know, I always did think-”

Jury sensed hindsight coming down the road.

“-she was worried about something, something was bothering her, and I asked, but she never would say. I don’t think it was him, though, causing whatever the trouble was. Not him-he was ever so generous.” She sighed. “Stacy, she was always a bit of a mystery, wasn’t she?”

He wasn’t expected to answer that. He said, “Did he buy her the Saint Laurent she was wearing when she died?”

“He must’ve bought it all.”

Yves Saint Laurent was on Upper Sloane Street; so was Jimmy Choo. He rose. “Thank you so much, Rosie. You’ve really been a big help. I may want to talk to you again.”

“All right,” she said. Saddened by the death of her friend or by his leaving or both, as if he’d brought Stacy with him and was now taking her away, Rosie got up and walked with him to the door.

In the hallway, he gave her his card and told her to get in touch if she remembered anything else. He looked down at her.

Rosie Moss, in her candy-cane-striped dress, her furry slippers, and her hair in bunches, and felt as if he’d weep, and turned away.