Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (5 page)

I was drained.

My brain was fizzing with images and sparks, altogether too many thoughts that were failing to connect to one another. A headache was building, but my body was too tired to follow through on it.

I’d gone the whole day without food, and as the night set in I decided to do what I always did when I was hungry: I checked in at Posada for a couple of drinks. I settled in at the bar for a while and talked to some of the regulars. Their jokes were as bad as usual, but laughing at them made me feel human again. My wires cooled down. I flicked through the day’s paper. Usual crap. The local council was going bankrupt, the police were short staffed. There was a story of a guy in Walsall who’d been lying dead in his council flat for three years before anyone noticed. You couldn’t make that shit up.

How could you be dead for three years and nobody notice? Not even a creditor. Dark thoughts, nothing you want floating round your head unchecked.

As I sipped at a pint of mild, not really in the mood to get drunk, a woman slid in next to me at the bar. I kept my eyes on my drink. There was no way on earth I was making the same mistake two nights running.

After a few seconds, though, I could feel her looking at me.

Don’t
.

Don’t
.

“Hello,” she said.

Fuck
.

Somehow I’d known she was going to talk to me. In hindsight, I should have made the connection there and then, but at the time all I wanted to do was be left alone. I didn’t think an all-out glare would be a fair response. Nor did it seem the moment to explain that the last woman I’d chatted to in here was dead.

So I ignored her instead.

“Fine, then.” She ordered a glass of Coke and said to the kid behind the bar, “Grumpy here is paying.”

For some reason I turned and half smiled at that. Maybe it was the class with which she’d handled the situation, maybe it was just stupidity.

Leaning against the bar she looked to be a few inches shorter than me, maybe around five feet seven, and maybe a year or so older. Her nose had been broken and reset at some point when she was younger, but it suited her, added a little wear and character, which was backed up by the mischievous glint in her eye.

“Oh, now he’s interested.”

She turned to smile at me, and it took a few years off her age. I revised my guess and put her about five years younger than me—and very attractive once you’d looked at her a couple of times.

And she was a prostitute.

I felt safe in the guess. Sometimes you can just tell.

“I’m broke,” I said and returned to my drink.

“And tactful too,” she said.

I smiled again. I couldn’t help it. I liked this girl, and she seemed to like me.

Of course, liking me was her line of work.

She looked down at the bar and smiled, just a little, like it was a game. Mary had pulled the same look. Like she’d been counting in her head how long it would be before my next move.

But this girl didn’t wait for that move.

“Don’t know about you,” she said. “But I’m tired and worn out. I’ve had a crap day, and nobody seems interested in me when they can get a younger model. I could do with a cheap laugh.”

I held my hand out, and she took it.

I used the keys Bobby had given me to let us into flat number 34. It was modern and tidy and lacked any kind of character. It had a small hallway that opened onto a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. The living room had a small kitchen area in an alcove. The walls had just been painted, as Bobby had said, over the plaster. There were marks on the wall in the hallways, dents where something heavy had hit. The whole place smelled too clean, as if someone had worked hard at disinfecting and covering bad odors. I didn’t want to think why.

I sat down awkwardly on the sofa and thought, Yes, you’re really doing this, and she is really here. “So what do we do now?”

“You need it explained?” She smiled, but there was a sad, distracted look in her eyes that I would have missed if it wasn’t part of what was attractive about her.

“Well, no, I just…ah…I’m not used to this.”

“Imagine I’m just a girl you picked up in a bar.”

“God no, don’t go there.” I wanted to think about anything but picking up girls at bars. Because that meant thinking about Mary.

“OK. Normal small talk it is. Where do you like to go?”

A smile played across my face as I thought of a list. This was working. I’d spent at least a few minutes already pretending that I hadn’t found a dead girl in my house that morning.

“Films,” I said. “I love the cinema, but that’s never very good for dates because you can’t talk. It’s not a good thing.”

“You think? I always liked the cinema for a first date; it replaced the awkward silences with explosions and maybe even dinosaurs. Then you could talk about the film afterward, and you’d have some kind of common ground to base a conversation on, to break the ice.”

“You know, I never thought of it that way before.”

“What’s your favorite movie?”

“Funny, I have no idea. I mean, I love a lot of movies, but I’ve never thought of what my all-time favorite would be.”

“You strike me as a
French Connection
kind of guy. I bet you love that movie.”

“You’re not wrong, I do.”

“You’ve got that harried look, like the guy in it, the younger one.”

“Roy Scheider,” I said. “He was in
Jaws
too.”

“You know his name?” She laughed. “He looked different then, though. But in
The French Connection
? Totally looks like you.”

That wasn’t a look I’d choose, but it was better than Gene Hackman.

I was warming to movie chat now. “Or maybe something really old with one of those old-time actresses in it. Bacall, someone like that.”

“Yeah, those are great movies. The women are the only people who ever really know what is going on.”

“How about you?”

“I never know what’s going on,” she said.

“No, what’s your favorite movie?”

She closed her eyes and beamed.

“Easy.
Big Trouble in Little China
. It’s just so much fun. When Kurt Russell says, ‘How’d you get up there,’ and the old guy shouts down, ‘Wasn’t easy.’ Makes me laugh every time.”

And just like that, we knew each other and we had sex.

And it was good. It was easy and functional, and we both seemed to enjoy it. It was sober sex, something I’m not so used to. We smiled as we went. We didn’t make too many mistakes. We didn’t overdo the noise or hurry through it. I relaxed into my orgasm, and she let out a contented groan, but then I’m sure she always seemed to enjoy it.

I lay back and thought I might actually sleep, but my stomach wouldn’t let me be. It wanted actual food, which was just inconvenient.

“How about I buy us some food and a decent drink?”

“I’d like that,” she said.

Before I stood up, I took some cash out of my wallet and left it on the side table for her. I’d never paid a prostitute before and didn’t know the polite way to discuss price, but I figured she’d tell me if it wasn’t enough.

I shopped at the all-night garage down the road and returned to cook a meal fit for royalty. I assume kings and queens enjoy a fry up as much as the rest of us. I cooked us a plate full of chips, bacon, and beans and my famous scrambled eggs.

I tried to pour her a drink, but all she wanted was coffee, so I made up for it with a large whiskey for myself.

She leaned over the plate and pointed at me with a forkful of egg.

“So what other movies do you like? Anything made since the seventies?”

I had to think about it.

“Well, yeah, there have been a lot of good movies since then, but I guess it’s just easier to stick to the old ones, y’know? When you’re younger, you’ve got more time to take in movies and to think them through. But now it’s a bonus if you get time to watch one, and they have no relevance to your everyday life.”

“True. But that can be a good thing, the escapism of it. Let’s face it, neither of us is a secret agent, and neither of us has a spaceship, so it’s fun to watch something like that.”

She looked at my empty glass. “You got through that quick.”

“It’s all in the reflexes.”

She laughed. As her smile faded, I caught a glimpse of her off guard, with that distant look in her eyes. I always seemed to go for people with a doomed look about them.

The meal earned me a freebie. That or my taste in movies. It was different the second time, colder and meaner. Neither of us had our minds or hearts in the room with us. I kept imagining it was Mary in bed with me, living and breathing.

I must have dozed off then—a mixture of the day’s stress and the big meal, not to mention the sex—because I don’t remember her leaving.

I woke up on my own. My wallet was still on the bedside table, and she hadn’t taken any cash. I decided that made her the most honest person I’d ever known. And I’d never asked her name.

I was thinking about honesty as I drifted back into dreams.

“I’d like to report someone missing.”

I was in the reception at the Wolverhampton police station, a large redbrick building in the city center with modern lines and too many windows. It had been my station for a while, near the end.

I’d woken up still thinking about honesty. The police had resources. I’d have a go at reporting Mary as a missing person and fill in a bit of paperwork. The police could well do nothing, but if there was some drug investigation going on that she tied into, alerting them would make more progress than any amount of street walking I could do.

The clerk at the desk wanted to know who I was reporting missing.

“Her name is Mary.”

“That’s her first name?”

“Yes. I think.”

“You think?”

“I’m not exactly sure.”

The cop in me was cringing.

If only I’d thought this through. Or thought it through a bit more than I had.

“What relation are you to this missing person?”

“She talked to me in the pub.”

“So you’re not family?”

“No.”

“Not a boyfriend, husband?”

“No.”

“A friend?”

“Not really, no.”

“And you don’t know her name.”

“Not getting very far here, am I?”

While I’d been talking, the desk sergeant had taken a form out of a filing cabinet against the far wall. He’d got as far as putting down the date and his name when he started asking me the details, but now he put the form down behind the desk, out of sight.

“How long has she been missing?”

“About a day and a half, two days at the outside.”

“So this girl, this woman, you
think
her name is Mary. And she’s not related to you or friendly with you in any way. How, exactly, do you know she’s missing?”

Because she died in my bed
.

“Because I haven’t seen her since the pub.”

“Had you ever seen her before she turned up at the pub?”

“No.”

“And has anyone spoken to you about her since?”

“No.”

Well, she has spoken to me a couple of times, but that’s just my mind playing tricks.

“Are you willing to put this in writing?”

I shook my head and let my frustration show. I was wasting my time. I didn’t know why I’d thought this would be a good idea.

I needed to regroup.

I left the station, blinking in the daylight, and ended up in the darkest, oldest-looking coffee shop I could find.

It looked like a relic from the eighties. Old women behind the counter served you while wearing burgundy aprons, and the selection of cakes looked homemade. If I’d ordered something fancy, like a latte, I’d probably have been met with a blank stare.

I settled in near the window with the day’s paper, a filter coffee, and a slice of carrot cake. I scanned the paper, starting on the back page and working toward the front. The front-page news was about a pensioner being handcuffed to a radiator and beaten. She had broken bones in her face and arm, and it was all for her savings of eighty-six pounds. She had given up the money as soon as she was threatened, but the assailant beat her anyway.

A shadow fell across my paper and stayed there, waiting to be acknowledged.

I knew who it was before looking up, as he had a way of sighing when he was waiting me out, the sound of him climbing up to a moral high ground.

“Becker,” I said. “Of all the gin joints.”

Terry Becker was probably my best friend. He was the only person willing to put up with my shit for any length of time, and I was the only person willing to put up with his attempts at improving himself. He went through phases: foreign cinema, ethnic music, bad food. He went to great lengths to try and be somebody he wasn’t.

Which was probably the real reason we got on so well.

He’d also introduced me to my wife, Laura, which was something I’d still not killed him for. He was local CID, out of my old office, and he was either here for a favor or to lecture me. Probably both. He was holding two drinks, a Coke for him and what looked, unfortunately, like a Coke for me too, and he slid in opposite me and pulled my uneaten cake toward him. He sighed again as he sat down, and I noticed
the increased bulk that was pushing against his shirt. His cheeks too were a little rounder than they used to be.