Dead Beat (24 page)

“Schneids,” I announced.

“I told you all I could about the Smarts,” he said, wagging a finger at me. He was right. He’d given me a head start in my inquiries. He’s a great source, is Dennis, as long as the people I’m after have no connection to his friends or family. Well, those of his extended family that he’s on speaking terms with at any given time. And sometimes, he spontaneously brings me little gems if he owes someone a bad turn. His moral code is stricter than that of a Jesuit priest, and not a lot easier to figure out.

“It’s not the Smarts I’m interested in right now, I don’t think. It’s a guy in Bradford called Fat Freddy. Mean anything to you?”

Dennis frowned. “I think I’ve heard the name, but I can’t put a face to it. He’s not connected locally.”

“He’s in the schneid merchandising area—T-shirts, pirate cassettes. Anyway, there’s a tie-in to another case I’m working. What I’m trying to get at is why someone who’s legitimately involved in the merchandising business would have anything to do with a schneid merchant.”

Dennis lit a cigarette and flicked a trace of ash off his shell suit bottoms. “S’easy, Kate. Say I’m licensed to produce the straight gear for a top band like Dead Babies, and I’m a bit bent myself. I find out who’s doing the schneids and I offer them a deal. I won’t shop them if they cut me in on their scam. I mean, a couple of years ago, shopping someone was no big deal. They just got raided and their gear confiscated. But now they’ve changed the law, you can go down for these trademark jobs. So it’s a real threat. Also, if I was double bent, I’d offer my schneid merchant advance copies of the designs I was going to put out next, so he’d have a head start against the competition.” He sat back and blew smoke rings, well pleased with himself. It made a lot of sense.

“I like it. Thanks, Dennis. That was the brain bit. Now the muscle bit. You know a dealer called Paki Paulie?”

Dennis scowled. He hates dealers more than he hates bent coppers. I think it’s something to do with having two young kids. He once broke the legs of a pusher who was hanging round the local school gates, after the local police had failed to arrest the guy. There were a dozen mums who saw Dennis go berserk with a baseball bat, but not one of them ID’d Dennis when the cops arrived. They’re used to rough justice round there. “Yeah,” he growled. “I know that scumbag.”

“I need to know if he sold any heroin to one of the people involved in this case I’m on. I’ve got a funny feeling he’s not going to roll over for me. That’s why I need a bit of muscle. You game?”

“When do we start?” Dennis asked. He drained his coffee mug and leaned forward expectantly.

   We found Paki Paulie an hour later in a seedy bar in Cheetham Hill. The front bar looked like any other run-down pub, its clientele mainly middle-aged, poor and defeated. But the back bar was like walking into another world. In the dim light, a handful of guys in expensive suits held court at the tables lining the walls, accompanied by their muscle. Scruffy kids meandered in and out, pausing by one table or another for muttered conversation. Sometimes cash was passed over fairly discreetly in exchange for dope. More often, the dealer got up and accompanied his punter out of the bar’s back door into the car park.

On my own, I’d have been scared I’d be taken for a cop. But with Dennis by my side, there was no danger of that. He nodded towards one of the corner tables while we waited for our drinks.

“That him?” I asked, trying to keep my glance casual. Dennis nodded.

Paki Paulie wore a shimmering silver gray double-breasted suit over an open-necked cobalt blue shirt. The clothes were obviously expensive but he looked cheap as a bag of sherbet lemons. He was leaning back in his chair, gazing at a point on the ceiling as if his only worry in the world was what to drink next. Next to him, a hard-looking white youth stared gloomily into an almost-empty pint pot.

Dennis picked up his glass and strolled over to the table, with me in his wake. “All right, Paulie?” he said.

“Dennis,” Paulie acknowledged with a regal nod.

“How’s business?”

“Not good. It’s the interest rates, you know?” Paulie replied, twitching his mouth into a smile. That was all I needed. A smack dealer with a smart mouth.

“A word, Paulie,” Dennis said softly.

“Dennis, you can have as many words as you want.” Paulie’s urbanity was firing on all four cylinders now, but it wasn’t polished enough to cover the quick flicker of concern in his eyes.

“You heard about Jack the Smack?” Dennis asked innocently. Paulie’s eyebrows rose. He clearly knew all about Dennis’s little vigilante action. “Bad time for accidents in your line of business,” Dennis went on conversationally. “State of the health service these

Paulie’s protection seemed to gather himself together and shifted forward in his seat. “You want to …” was all he got out before Paulie snapped, “Shut it.” He turned back to Dennis and said, “I hear what you’re saying, Dennis.”

Dennis gestured towards me with his glass. “This is a friend of mine. She’s looking for some information. She’s not the law, and if you’re straight with her, there’s no comeback.”

Paulie looked directly at me. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“The company I keep,” I answered.

Dennis put his glass down and cracked his knuckles dramatically. Paulie’s eyes flicked from me to Dennis and back again. I took a photograph of Tamar out of my bag. It was one I’d clipped from the papers that morning, with Jett cut out of it. “Has this woman ever bought anything from you?”

He barely glanced at it and shrugged. “Maybe. How do I know? I serve a lot of punters.”

“I can’t believe you’ve got a lot of punters like this, Paulie. Natural blonde, doesn’t dress out of a catalogue, accent like Princess Di? Come on, you can do better than that.”

Paulie picked up the picture and studied it. “I seen her down the Hassy,” he finally conceded.

“How much did you sell her, then?” Dennis butted in, thrusting his face forwards till it was only inches from the dealer’s.

“Who said I sold her anything? Shit, man, what is this? You joined the drugs squad?”

Dennis’s head snapped back, like a cobra ready to strike. Before he could complete the maneuver that would spread Paulie’s nose over his face, the dealer shouted, “Wait!” Dennis paused. The sound level in the room had dropped to an ominous level. A sheen of sweat had appeared above Paulie’s top lip. His hand fluttered at his bodyguard who was straining at an invisible leash. “It’s OK,” he said loudly.

Gradually, the noise picked up. Paulie wiped his face with a paisley silk handkerchief. “OK,” he sighed. “About a month ago, this tart came up to me in the Hassy saying she wanted some smack. She didn’t seem to know what she wanted or how much.

I believed him. It wasn’t so much the threat of Dennis breaking his nose that had changed his mind. It was the thought of what would happen to him if the O’Brien brothers came looking for him. Even bodyguards have to sleep.

The thing that bothered me was that Dennis’s methods hadn’t bothered me. Maybe I’d been reading the wrong books. Perhaps tonight I should tuck myself up with an Agatha Christie and a few balls of pink wool.

   I was thirty pages into
The Murder At The Vicarage
when Richard breezed in through the conservatory. “Sorry to interrupt you while you’re working,” he teased. I put the book down as he sat down beside me and pulled me into his arms. It was a long kiss, as if to make up for the little time we’d spent together in the previous few days.

“Fancy an early night?” Richard whispered.

“That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me today,” I replied, snuggling into him. “How in God’s name do you manage to put up with your job? If I had to spend my time with assholes like that lot, I’d slit my wrists.”

“You just tune it out. I always treat it like I’m watching
Dynasty
or the
South Bank Show
. You know, it’s either glitz or pretension. I never let myself believe it’s the real world. Sometimes I feel like David Attenborough, sitting in a hide watching the habits of a strange species,” he told me. “It’s fascinating. And I like most of the music, so I try to forgive them their worst excesses.”

“Like murder?”

“Maybe not murder,” he conceded. “Though I’d have to say I think that someone like Jett is a bigger contributor to the quality of life than your average copper.”

“He’s not contributing much to the quality of my life right now. This job is mission impossible. A house full of people and not a decent alibi among them. And everybody has some kind of a motive. Except for Neil, who seems to be the only person who had a vested interest in her staying alive.”

Richard snorted. “Him? I wouldn’t put it past him to have bumped her off just to stir up a bit of scandal for his book.”

“That’s outrageous!” I protested. “Besides, she was an important source for him on Jett’s early days in the business.”

“Yeah, well maybe he milked her dry then bumped her off. From what I hear, he’s been talking to the world since she died.” Richard sounded mean and spiteful, which isn’t like him.

I tried to show him he was just talking out of blind prejudice, explaining that Kevin had asked Neil to handle all the press liaison. “So of course he’s had to talk to people.”

“It’s not just all the copy he’s been flogging,” Richard replied, still peeved. “He’s been doing the hard sell on this biography too, telling people that there’s going to be stuff in there that no one else even guessed at before.”

I was puzzled. I remembered Neil telling me that his biggest problem with the book was that there were no new, exciting revelations. However, that had been before Moira had reappeared on the scene. “Maybe he’s just talking it up,” I suggested.

“I don’t think so. I suppose he could just be trying to cash in on the interest in Moira’s death by trying to stitch up a serialization deal sight unseen, but most feature desks won’t play unless they’ve got a bloody good idea what they’re getting for their money. Everybody’s under the cosh financially these days. The golden age when you could talk a story up and still get paid when the end product didn’t match up to expectations is long gone. The emperor’s new clothes trick just doesn’t work any more. Now they want to talk to the tailor.” Richard shifted away from me and got up. “I need a beer,” he said, heading for the kitchen.

While he was off examining his collection of exotic beers of the world, I thought about what he’d said. I still couldn’t believe he seriously thought Neil would have killed Moira for a few headlines. But I know from Richard that there is still big money to be made in the seedy world of newspaper exposés. I began to wonder just what Moira had told Neil. I’d have to ask him some more questions. The trouble with this investigation was that I just didn’t know the right things to ask. It wasn’t like insurance fraud or software piracy, where I knew who knew exactly what I needed to know. I was floundering, and I knew it.

Richard came back with a can of Budweiser and leaned against

   An hour later, I felt different again. It’s amazing how good sex with someone you love puts everything back into proportion. If I didn’t discover who had killed Moira, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’d have given it my best shot, and that was all anyone could demand from me. Richard wouldn’t think any the less of me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to beat myself up for not being clairvoyant.

I pulled my arm out from under Richard’s shoulders as I felt the tingle of pins and needles. It disturbed his little post-coital reverie and he turned on his side to plant a soft kiss on my nipple. I felt warm and languorous, and kind of sorry for Miss Marple.

“What’s happening about your schneids case, by the way?” Richard asked, with all his usual tact and sensitivity.

“You pick your moments, don’t you?” I complained. “The police and the Trading Standards guys are planning another raid some time in the next few days, I think. They probably won’t tell us till it’s all over, if they even bother then. They’re a bit embarrassed about us doing their work for them.”

“So they should be. You’d think they’d be a bit more grateful that you’re there to hand them the stuff on a plate.”

“It doesn’t work like that. There’s still a fair few of them who think that proper coppers shouldn’t be spending their time on things like trade mark infringements,” I told him ruefully.

“Well, they can’t catch burglars or car thieves. They should be glad somebody’s doing something that gets a conviction or two.”

Sometimes I think Richard’s spent so long in the cloud cuckoo land of rock that he’s lost touch with the real world. But what he’d said about schneids had reminded me of something I wanted to ask him. “Is there a lot of schneid merchandising around on the rock scene just now? You know, sweatshirts and all that?”

“You wouldn’t believe the half of it,” he assured me. He was wrong. After the day I’d had, nothing would stretch my credulity. “It’s an epidemic. Top name acts are losing a fortune from it. Do you know, sometimes the schneid gear even ends up on sale

My ears pricked up. “You mean, it’s an inside job?”

“Depends. It can be done one of two ways. Either they hire a couple of kids locally to run the stall and they’re doing it as a bit of private enterprise, if the schneids are good enough. Or else somebody high up in the organization is slipping them in and not putting them through the books. I don’t really know how it would work, but that’s the word on the street.”

I needed the answer to one more question. “Do you happen to know if Jett’s been having any problems like that?”

“If he wasn’t, he’d be unique. But I don’t know for sure. Why don’t you ask him?”

I did just that. I rolled over, picked up the phone and dialed Jett’s private line. Tamar answered, and called to Jett that it was for him. A couple of moments later, he was on the line.

“Hi, Jett. Just a quick query. You know you told me Moira thought you were having problems with merchandising rip-offs? I mean copycat versions of your tour T-shirts and sweatshirts, that kind of thing? Did she give you anything specific?”