White Rage (20 page)

‘Had he seen her before?'

‘No, but he gave me a description. About five-two, weighed maybe seven stone, slender, black hair to the shoulder. Wore designer blue jeans and a blouse – white, he thinks. Might be beige.'

‘I wonder if she looks anything like this,' Perlman said. Worth a shot. Why not? When you were fumbling in the dark you reached for the light switch. If you found it –
illumination
. If you didn't, you kept groping. Besides, there were connections here, albeit thin ones: if the girl was involved in White Rage, then she couldn't be overlooked in the matter of Tilak Gupta's death. She had to be located and interviewed. He took a copy of the portrait from his pocket and handed it to Bogan.

Bogan said, ‘Beat you to it, Lou. I got a copy of that earlier. I showed it to my man at the Corinthian.'

‘And?'

‘He says mibbe aye, mibbe no. He tells me the face hasn't got the mouth right, plus the brow's too narrow. The girl looked happy when she was with Gupta. The face here makes her seem like somebody having a bad period.'

A
farbishener
, Perlman thought. He took the picture back, looked at it. The eyes stared straight through him, as if fixed on a point far beyond his own field of vision. Perhaps she'd been the last person to see Tilak Gupta alive. Perhaps she'd been the one who'd led Helen Mboto out of the Tinderbox. Mibbe aye, mibbe no. A policeman's life; the only gospel truth was that uncertainties abounded.

‘We need to find this young tottie, don't we? We need to sit her down – ' He was interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone ringing. He reached without thinking into his pocket, but his own phone was dead. He shook it vigorously, as if he might infuse the moribund battery with life.

‘You're supposed to keep these things charged,' Bogan said. ‘Did nobody tell you that? Did you not read the wee book of instructions?'

‘Pish off,' Perlman said, annoyed with himself.

The ringing phone had been Murdoch's; the young constable was speaking into it. He handed it to Perlman and said, ‘It's for you, Sergeant.'

Sandy Scullion's voice was stressed, like that of a man trying to kick a drug habit. ‘Get over to Partick,' he said.

‘Specifically where?'

‘The fish and chip shop. The one your pal owned.'

23

When he was angry Leo Kilroy developed several new chins. He looked like an overfed parakeet ruffled to the point of insanity. His plump face was blood-pressure scarlet. He wore a long black double-breasted jacket with velvet lapels, tailored for him in Genoa. His boots, Blum observed, were Texan-style, hand-carved and decorated with turquoise ornaments.

‘Let me say this once and for all,' Kilroy said. ‘I don't recognize the voice. I've never heard it before. For all I fucking know, it might have come out of the ether, or through the wooden head of a ventriloquist's dummy. Am I getting through to you, Nat?'

‘I'm listening,' Blum said.

Kilroy sat in a pink cane chair in his conservatory and gazed across the garden where the waterfall slid over stones. He was fuming, hugely irritated by the tape Blum had played for him. His heart was going a little too fast. Fucking tape, fucking Perlman, fucking anonymous voice on an answering machine.

‘I am up to here, Blumsky. Up to
here
. I feel pressures you would not
begin
to believe. All I ask is sweet sweet peace. Now I'm being hounded and harassed, and I don't have to be a fucking
mindreader
to guess who's behind it.'

‘Perlman says there's no trickery, Leo. He received the message on his home phone. He's as puzzled by the ID of the caller as you are.'

‘Aye, right, oh I bet he is. Listen, Blum, he's playing a bloody game. And you're falling for it because you Jews, you stick together. You're like members of a club. But keep in mind I didn't come up the Clyde on a water lily, old china. Fat Leo conceals a shark. Remember? A sleakit bastard shark.'

Blum's face reddened. ‘I remember, Leo. As for your comment on Jews sticking together, you're off target. Perlman doesn't get special treatment just because we share a heritage that doesn't mean a whole lot to me, frankly.' He tightened his grip on the cassette. The Fat Man was a trial, an ordeal. He longed to ask Kilroy if he remembered his exact whereabouts on the night of December 15 last year, but he choked the question back. Beware Kilroy's wrath. Beware the anti-Semite. Did Porky Pig really believe there was some international Jewish freemasonry, a conspiracy? Or was he just anti-Semitic in the way of most goyim, a reflex thing, like a sneeze caused by a mild allergy?

Kilroy said, ‘Don't get so touchy.'

‘I wasn't being touchy, Leo.'

‘You people are always touchy.' Agitated, Kilroy tapped his knees with his fingertips in the manner of a compulsive sitting at a typewriter. ‘All I ask is you use your noodle, Blum. What would I be doing driving down Dalness Street that late at night? I don't even know where Dalness Street is.'

‘It's in Egypt, where Perlman makes his residence, Leo.'

‘And I'm supposed to know that?' Kilroy asked.

Blum turned his back on the waterfall. Tacky. The whole house was a flamboyant exercise in very bad taste. He surveyed the objects gathered on Kilroy's travels – African spears, leopardskins, sombreros, rhino horns, Stetsons, muskets, Navajo blankets – and thought how mismatched it all was. The collection suggested the work of an indiscriminate jackdaw. The world was Kilroy's to plunder.

‘What worries me is the fact the caller makes a reference to unspecified evidence, Leo.'

‘Am I talking to myself or are you going deaf? How the fuck can there be any evidence when I wasn't even in the bloody car? Open your ears, sonny. Listen to the client. The client is always right. The lawyer is only a glorified dog-walker. He creeps along behind the client carrying a wee brush and pan and he sweeps up the jobbies the client drops. Don't forget that, Blumsky.'

I went to law school for this
, Blum thought. This abuse. The pooper picker-upper. Sod that.

‘Give me the tape,' Kilroy said.

Blum handed it over. Kilroy ripped the plastic case open and yanked the tape out and cracked the cassette in his fingers, then he tugged the tape loose, section by looped section, until a long brown coil lay on the floor.

‘And don't even tell me Perlman has a copy,' Kilroy said. ‘I just wanted the simple satisfaction of tearing the shite out of this one.' He ground the plastic with the heel of his boot. ‘Fucking tape, fucking fairytale
shite
. It's not even clever, as ploys go. Who does Perlman think he's fooling, eh?'

Sweat oozed from his face as freely as juice squeezed from a blood orange pulverized in a vice. He experienced a light-headed sensation that passed in a matter of seconds. Anger, sudden exertion: how unfit he was, corrupted by his own lifestyle. He spread his legs and felt a nagging pain clutch the centre of his chest. His bloody ulcer. Stress. Absolute undiluted stress.

‘You all right?' Blum asked.

‘Don't I look all right?'

‘You look in pain.'

‘Imagine I kicked the bucket sitting right here in my conservatory. Let's say the old ticker exploded and I expired. Would you miss me, Blumsky? Or would you miss your bloated retainer more?'

‘That's an insult, Leo,' Blum said.

Kilroy smiled and rose slowly. ‘I pay you enough. That gives me a right to insult you. I fucking
own
you. You're a chattel. What are you, Blum?'

I'm a lawyer.'

‘You're a
what
?'

‘A lawyer, Leo –'

‘I'm not hearing you, Blum. Say it. Say chattel.'

‘All right. I'm a chattel.'

‘Oh, sonny, you disappoint me. Why don't you tell me to go fuck myself?'

Blum said nothing. His stack was about to blow. Consider the consequences of telling Kilroy to eat shite. He was calculating how the lack of the Fat Man's retainer would affect his lifestyle. He'd have to make changes. Then he realized that if Kilroy took his business elsewhere, so would all the other scum the Fat Man had brought him as clients, and then what? Where would he put up his brass plate next? He wouldn't have the plummy offices in Waterloo Street. He wouldn't be able to keep up payments on the penthouse. He'd have to downsize somewhat.

Downsize? Who was he kidding? He'd be lucky if he had enough work to afford a semi in Pennilee and share an office with an ambulance-chaser in a rundown Victorian ruin in a less than salubrious part of town south of the river. He'd be taking on charity cases and wearing off-the-peg suits – hell's bells.

Frankie Chasm appeared in the doorway that led from the conservatory to the house. He moved, grim and silent, bearing a tray of drinks. Two glasses, one that held G&T for Kilroy, the other sparkling water for Blum. Blum picked up his drink, caught Chasm's eye a moment, then looked away. There was a provocative aggression in Chasm's stare, like that of a man seeking any old pretext for punching your face in. He always made Blum very uneasy. What did he do for Kilroy anyway? What role did he play? Blum wasn't falling for this butler pantomime.

Kilroy picked up his drink, sipped, then looked strangely poignant and calm, as if the brief scene with Blum eased him. ‘Once upon a time, I was the proprietor of this bloody city. I owned it. Nothing touched me. I had absolute
immunity
. Cops? They didn't give me any trouble. They were my friends, some of them my best pals. As for villains, they knew better than to give me any grief. And now … ffff. The roof falls in. The world changes.'

‘Change isn't always bad.'

‘Oh aye it is, Blum. It can be downright shite. Know what's the worst thing? There's bugger-all you can really do to stand in its way.'

‘I suppose,' Blum said, watching Chasm leave the room.

Kilroy turned his glass round and round in his hand as he stared out at his garden. ‘But a man can try, Blumsky. If he has the balls.' He winked, one blubbery lid rising and falling, then he hummed I Was Born Under a Wandering Star' before he was interrupted by the reappearance of Chasm.

Chasm held a white envelope. ‘This just came, Leo.'

‘What is it?'

‘Special Delivery. I don't know what it is.'

‘Who delivered it?'

‘The van was from TransClyde Express Services.'

‘Open it carefully,' Kilroy said.

Chasm slowly slit the envelope with a penknife. Inside, he found a single sheet of blue-lined paper wrapped round a photograph. He handed these items to Kilroy.

Kilroy read the note. He looked at the photograph.

He said, ‘Fucksake.'

‘What is it?' Chasm asked.

Kilroy's ulcer kicked like a mule's hoof. He was thinking: Perlman, you fucker, you kike fucker.

‘The bastard has gone a wee bit too far this time,' the Fat Man said.

24

The windows and doors of Cremoni's had been blown out, the interior reduced to broken fragments of furniture and crockery, the ceiling brought down in piles of rubble: a bomb might have fallen from the sky. Perse McKinnon's office in the rear had been ground zero, desk flattened beyond recognition, computer equipment squashed, filing cabinets picked up and hurled in disarray around the room.

Perlman smelled the chemical stench of scalded plastic. He moved carefully around the edge of the office, skirting the engrossed figures of the forensics people, hearing glass and unidentifiable items crunch under his feet. He saw Tizer Dunlop take photographs of the wreckage.

The scene distressed him. All McKinnon's labours, his years of obsession, had come down to this: records ruined, a life terminated. Blood, flecked with powdery plaster, stained the walls.

When he couldn't breathe the air any longer, Perlman walked outside and cleared his throat and spat on the pavement. The street was thick with patrol cars, assorted cops, bystanders – more than two hundred of them, two fifty – gawking from the other side of the crime-scene tape.

He thought how still the day had become. No wind blew. The soft rain had stopped. The city seemed motionless all around him, suspended, as if waiting for a transfusion of life. He stared the length of the street, then turned his face to the sign above the restaurant. Only the C of Cremoni's remained, a blue letter on lemon glass that had somehow escaped the blast.

And he remembered: Perseus McKinnon had been black.

He'd never thought about McKinnon's colour before. He'd been indifferent to the man's pigmentation. McKinnon was a friend, a confidant.

But now he was also black.

Scullion moved along the pavement towards him. Glass crackled underfoot. Scullion knew the role McKinnon had played in Perlman's world. Archivist, collector of facts. He'd been Perlman's connection exclusively. Nobody else in the Force ever asked favours of McKinnon.

Scullion said, I'm sorry, Lou.'

‘It was a risk he always ran,' Perlman said. ‘It never seemed to bother him. He kept all that information, some of it obviously dangerous for him to have …' He waved a hand, indicating the wrecked restaurant, and the adjoining tenements, some of whose windows had been shattered in the blast.

‘They're trying to ID the other body,' Scullion said.

‘Amazing there's enough of anyone left to examine, Sandy.'

Scullion watched Perlman light a cigarette. The hand that held the match trembled a little. He thought Perlman looked haggard.

Perlman said, ‘It could've been worse. It might have happened when the restaurant was crammed … Anybody got any idea how the explosion happened?'

‘Not yet.'

Perlman said, ‘Christ, I badly want to believe it was a faulty gas main, something like that. I don't want to think it was anything except an accident. Trouble is, my heart's singing another tune.'