Cold Heart (36 page)

‘On myself,’ Sonja said, and the peculiar resonance was back in her voice.

‘With a gun?’ Lorraine asked.

‘Smoothest tool of all,’ Sonja said, still not looking at Lorraine, and a smile spread across her face, as though she was looking at an unseen watcher. Then she turned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I sound like Raymond Vallance. I think about death a lot. Liquor makes me maudlin. But you can stop babysitting now.’ She poured herself more vodka and gave Lorraine a meaningful look. ‘I’ll never die drunk – in case people say I didn’t have the guts to do it sober.’

‘I used to think that,’ Lorraine said, ‘that I should have died. My husband left me too, you know.’ She knew somehow that, despite what Sonja had just said, she had to keep talking.

‘Did you get divorced?’ Sonja asked.

‘Yes, I did, and he got custody of the children. Rightly so – I wasn’t capable of looking after myself, never mind the kids.’ She lit a cigarette, no longer feeling like weeping, no longer feeling anything except the awful, cold guilt that she would carry to her grave.

‘Everyone who loves has a right to be loved, Lorraine,’ Sonja said. ‘Whatever happened in your past can’t change that.’

The sigh was long and deep, and Sonja noticed that Lorraine’s hand was shaking as she flicked the ash from her cigarette. ‘You want to bet?’

‘Try me,’ Sonja said softly.

‘OK. I was on duty, a few months after my partner had died. I had been drinking heavily. We’d been called out to what they thought was going to be a drug bust to act as backup because they said the kids were tooled up. There were four kids and they split up and ran. One ran past my patrol car, so I got out, chased him and cornered him in an alley. I gave him three warnings to stop or I would shoot. He didn’t stop, and I fired all six rounds. I couldn’t stop squeezing the trigger, even when he went down.’

She let the smoke drift from her pursed lips, then turned to look at Sonja. ‘He wasn’t armed. It was a Walkman he had in his hand, and he had earphones in so he couldn’t hear me. He was just a kid, and I killed him because I was drunk. If I’d been sober I would have fired a body shot.’

‘That’s hard to live with,’ Sonja said quietly. She seemed to be watching Lorraine with particular intensity.

Lorraine stiffened as she heard a sound outside. ‘Do you hear something?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I do,’ Sonja said evenly as she picked up the gun and cocked it. God, Lorraine thought, gooseflesh breaking out all over her body: she had meant what she had said about Vallance. Now they could both hear someone’s footsteps right outside the door, which still stood an inch ajar. Sonja turned round slowly, noiselessly, until the gun was aimed chest high at the door panels. After a moment they heard a knock.

‘Who is it?’ Sonja said. Her voice was sweet and pure as a bell, as though a longed-for visitor had finally called, and Lorraine saw the beatific calm of the central figure of her wood of women appear on her face.

‘It’s me, Sonja,’ a voice called. A man stepped into view. Arthur.

‘Jesus,’ he said in surprise, finding himself looking down the barrel of a gun. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’

‘I’m sorry, Arthur,’ Sonja said, lowering the gun. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Page got me rattled. Apparently Raymond’s been in town making threats.’

‘Not to me he hasn’t,’ Arthur said. ‘I saw him a couple of hours ago and he was sweetness and light. We’re all old friends now.’

Lorraine saw him scan the room as he spoke, and although his voice did not alter, she knew that he knew exactly why Sonja was holding the gun.

‘I thought you were lying down,’ he said. ‘I was worried about you.’

‘You’re so sweet,’ she said, and Lorraine saw the flicker of pain in Arthur’s eyes at the lack of interest in her voice. He loved her, Lorraine could see. ‘I’ll go and lie down now.’ She walked out into the night.

‘Can we offer you a nightcap, Mrs Page?’ Arthur asked as they followed Sonja out of the building. ‘I guess Sonja’s lucky you showed up, if Vallance is roaming around out there.’ She knew what he meant: if she hadn’t showed up Sonja would have been dead.

‘No, no, thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll just call a cab.’

They walked out into the darkness. Lorraine could feel the urgency with which Arthur moved to catch up Sonja, to try to take her hand, knowing that he felt the same instinct she herself had experienced earlier to try to hold on to the woman. But Sonja slid away, graceful and aloof, and walked on alone.

W
HEN
L
ORRAINE
woke next morning, she was surprised to see that it was already almost nine. She had lain awake for some time after she had got back to the hotel, half expecting some call from either Arthur or Sonja, but apparently nothing had happened. She dressed and called the airline to book herself a flight to LA. All they could offer her at such short notice was a seat on an early-evening departure, so she decided to spend the afternoon in New York. She packed the few things she had brought with her and set off downstairs.

‘Good morning, Carina.’ She smiled at the pretty blonde girl on the desk, whose name she now knew from the plate standing in front of her.

‘Good morning, Mrs Page,’ said the receptionist. ‘The papers are here if you’d like one to take in with you.’ Lorraine picked up a
New York Times
and scanned the headlines.

‘There never seems to be anything but gloom and doom in the city, does there?’ she said, putting the paper down. ‘I think I’ll just enjoy the peace here for another day.’

That surely should have elicited any news of either a shooting or a suicide in the locality, Lorraine thought, but Carina simply smiled again. ‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘Save your strength for LA.’

Lorraine walked into the room where breakfast was served, and found Raymond Vallance, sitting at a table with his large lady companion. He was now wearing a tweed suit and a battered pair of brogues, and was sitting ramrod straight in the dining chair, cracking the pages of his newspaper like whipcord, wearing an expression he clearly considered aloof and patrician. He seemed almost to have absorbed a new personality, aristocratic, European from the costume, or perhaps, Lorraine thought, this was his heterosexual persona.

She walked towards their table. ‘Good morning, Mr Vallance,’ she said brightly. ‘How’re things at Fox today?’

Vallance glared at her.

‘Oh, Raymond,’ his companion cried, ‘is this one of your Hollywood friends?’

‘Mrs Page and I have met in Los Angeles,’ Vallance said curtly.

‘We have a lot of friends in common,’ Lorraine went on smoothly. ‘I saw Sonja last night, for example.’

‘Oh, really?’ Vallance said. ‘I must try to see her today.’ He looked at Lorraine with eyes like stones.

‘Who is that, pumpkin?’ asked the lady innocently. ‘I wish you’d introduce me to more of your friends.’

‘The former wife of . . . a close friend,’ Vallance said. ‘It’s a condolence call. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to attend.’

‘Apparently Sonja gets the whole of the estate now,’ Lorraine went on, observing Vallance closely. ‘The consequence of the tax-saving clause, the lawyers tell me. The other two wives died within a survivorship period and the gifts to them never took effect. It expired last night, it seems.’

‘So I suppose you and Sonja had a little celebration?’ Vallance said nastily. ‘Burned one of those effigies of Harry she keeps turning out, perhaps? What’ll she do for art now, poor dear?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say we were celebrating,’ Lorraine said circumspectly.

‘I really must try to call on her later,’ Vallance said. ‘Take my last look before she kills herself or goes up in smoke. Harry’s estate doesn’t seem to bring his ex-wives much luck, does it? You’ll be glad to get well clear of it, I’m sure.’

Was she imagining it, or was Vallance looking at her as if he expected her to take some other meaning from his words? A coded boast about the deaths of Cindy and Kendall? A threat to Sonja – or even to herself?

‘I’m still working for Harry’s lawyer, actually,’ she said. ‘So I’ll be involved for a while.’

Well,’ Vallance said, ‘see you around.’ He raised his newspaper again and Lorraine realized she was dismissed.

She sat down at another table and ordered breakfast, wondering whether she should bother to call Sonja and say that Vallance was still hanging around, then decided not to – she was retained to investigate the art fraud, not as minder to Harry Nathan’s ex-wife, and besides, Sonja had Arthur to do that for her. Poor Arthur.

Half an hour later she was ready to check out. There was no one at the desk, so she decided to walk to the bookstore again for something to read on the bus. She was barely out of the door when she heard a car engine revving. She looked across the street to see the Blazer being wrenched backwards and forwards as the driver tried inexpertly to manoeuvre it into a parking space. Eventually, Arthur opened the door and got out, leaving the vehicle parked at an angle: it was immediately apparent that he was drunk.

Lorraine hurried across the street. ‘Arthur!’ she called. ‘Are you OK? Did something happen?’

Arthur looked at her, his face drawn with strain, but blurred and slackened with drink too. ‘Well,’ he said, making an effort to talk coherently, ‘not really. Nothing new.’

‘Is Sonja OK?’

‘She’s the same as she always is.’ The man’s bleakness made Lorraine decide she could spare half an hour to try to sober him up.

‘Give me the keys and I’ll move the jeep,’ she said, ‘and then why don’t we get a cup of coffee in the hotel? I haven’t checked out yet.’

‘Sure,’ Arthur agreed spiritlessly. Lorraine reparked the jeep and they crossed back to the Maidstone Arms. Vallance and his companion had gone, Lorraine noticed, as they walked into the dining room, though breakfast was still being served. She ordered a pot of black coffee and a quart bottle of mineral water.

‘So,’ she said, when the waiter had left them, ‘what happened?’

‘Oh, nothing, I guess,’ Arthur said, with a grimace. He took a swallow of the coffee, and seemed undisposed to say any more.

‘Come on, Arthur,’ Lorraine said. ‘Call me naïve, but I don’t have you down for someone who gets pie-eyed by ten thirty a.m. as a matter of routine. What did you do, stay up all night?’

‘Pretty much,’ he said.

‘Celebrating Sonja’s inheritance?’ Lorraine probed: she had a feeling that this would hit a sore spot.

‘Christ!’ Arthur swore at her. ‘When the fuck is she going to be free of that man? She was in a bad enough state while he was still alive, but now that he’s dead she’s worse.’ He took another mouthful of coffee, his hands shaking.

‘Drink some water,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s better for you than that stuff.’ She poured a glass for him, but Arthur did not move. ‘Arthur,’ she said gently, ‘I could see Sonja was pretty close to the edge last night. I know you care about her but it won’t do her any good if you let her drag you over too.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She would have gone over if you hadn’t been there last night. I knew that stuff about waiting with a gun for Vallance was a lot of bullshit.’

‘He didn’t show up, then?’ Lorraine asked.

‘No. I don’t think he has the balls to do much of anything, though he has an ugly mouth.’ He picked up the glass of water and drank. ‘I didn’t know she had a gun in the house,’ he went on. ‘She wouldn’t give it to me.’ He caught Lorraine’s eye, and she got the message that he regarded the situation as serious.

‘Did you have a fight?’ she asked.

‘Kind of He gave a low, wry laugh. ‘She started watching these weird videotapes the police in California sent out to her – horrible, kinky stuff with Nathan and a bunch of other people. She kept saying how disgusting they were, how low Harry’d sunk, but she was fascinated. That’s what she’s like with him. That’s how I ended up drinking the best part of a bottle of Bourbon and taking off.’

‘Heavy,’ Lorraine said.

‘Oh, just the usual late-night special,’ Arthur said. ‘I can’t take a hell of a lot more of this. She’s been all over the place since Nathan’s death.’

Lorraine was intrigued. ‘What the hell was it Nathan had, to have all these people carrying on about him for twenty years? I’m sorry, but I’ve been picking my way through every detail of this guy’s life and I still feel like I don’t have a handle on what he was really like.’

‘That was the key to Harry,’ Arthur said. ‘He was plastic. He was a chameleon. He was beautiful, of course. He could turn every woman’s head walking down the street when he was young.’

‘You knew him and Sonja then?’ Lorraine asked.

‘Oh, yeah. I’m the fucking jerk who introduced them,’ Arthur said. ‘I met her first – she was painting then.’

‘I didn’t know Sonja painted,’ Lorraine said, registering that piece of information with interest.

‘Well, it wasn’t her real talent, but she was taught like everyone else in art school and she was competent. She was living with some rich old guy, but it was clear she was bored. I had a few dates with her – never really got past first base. I knew she was looking for some kind of intensity, that she thought I was pretty fucking boring, and I suppose I introduced her to Nathan and Vallance to show her, you know, that I wasn’t that straight because I had these wild, crazy friends.’

‘How did you first meet Harry Nathan?’ Lorraine asked.

We were at college together. He got kicked out. It was the hippie days, and he was an acid freak. He was trying to get a career together as a director, didn’t have a dime, and I never thought he and Sonja’d get together in a million years. Sonja was a real ice princess in those days, always living with someone with old masters on the walls, and Harry was so tacky – picking up girls in bars and living on tacos.’

‘Must have been the attraction of opposites.’

‘Yeah, bang, as soon as they met. A lot of it was just physical, I think, but the big deal about Harry was that he was a kind of blank space on which other people could write whatever they wanted – the stuff he made as a director was exactly like that too, reflections, if you see what I mean, rather than anything genuinely his own. Even Sonja admits that she kind of hypnotized herself with her own illusion of what he was like.’