I Was Dora Suarez (21 page)

‘You had your chance,’ I said to Margoulis. ‘Well, now this is your last one before we switch on and put the juice through this. Also if you don’t cooperate, you’ll find yourself doing some basketball around the place. I don’t like it much, but there’s a rush on for the answer with this one.’

As I spoke, the door opened and Rupt and Drucker appeared, Drucker first. He was in boxing gear – spotless white T-shirt, sneakers and pink nylon shorts. ‘Evening,’ he said. He wasn’t a big man; he was vast, and when he flexed his shoulders, Room 202 seemed to like get in the way.

‘How’s the sporting life?’ Stevenson said to him.

‘Getting better,’ Drucker said. ‘Three hours’ punchball tonight; it’s the heavyweight semi-finals with Wembley police Saturday night. You coming? I can get you tickets.’

Rupt had been looking Margoulis over. He said to Stevenson: ‘Was this all you could find for us today then?’

‘The point is he knows things we want to know,’ Stevenson said.

‘Even so, I think they might send them up a bit tougher,’ Rupt said. ‘Seems a pity somehow, having to mark up old men.’

All the same he took hold of Margoulis’ cheek between his thumb and first finger and pulled hard. ‘What do you think?’ he said to Margoulis. ‘Fancy getting into training then, Grandpa?’

‘They get worn out climbing all the way up from the street I reckon,’ Stevenson said. ‘They seem to get kind of weary on the stairs.’

‘Well, three days in St Stephen’s after we’ve finished with this one,’ Drucker said, ‘and it’ll be like a bank holiday for the geezer.’

I said to Margoulis: ‘Well, you see, this is the sergeants’ mess.’

‘And what a mess,’ Rupt said. He said to Drucker: ‘Let’s see if I got that bit of karate right this evening.’ He smacked Margoulis’ chair with the cutting edge of his hand; the top rail of the chair shattered and bits of Ministry of Works woodwork flew about the place. ‘Sorry,’ said Rupt. ‘Had a row with the old woman earlier, always makes me nervous.’

‘How do you feel, Margoulis?’ I said. ‘Up to looking at some pictures now? You just speak up loud and clear and then I swear there’ll be no bother.’

Margoulis made a noise of some kind, so I handed him Cryer’s photographs. ‘And try telling us something interesting about him for a change,’ I said as I gave them to him, ‘like his name or something.’

‘That way we can eliminate him from our enquiries,’ Stevenson said. He switched the appalling light on and off several times.

Presently Margoulis said: ‘Roatta hired him.’

‘Why?’ said Stevenson. ‘For the rats?’

‘I know nothing about rats.’

‘Can’t you smell if there are rats in a place?’

‘I know nothing about rats.’

‘He don’t even realise he is one,’ Drucker said.

I said to Margoulis: ‘We probably wouldn’t even be so interested in the individual except that for some extraordinary reason, no one in this case so far appears to want to know about him with a barge-pole.’

Margoulis said: ‘I’ve heard that Mr Roatta reckoned that the geezer owed him money down to something, and that he might help pay it off by working upstairs, something like that.’

‘Was it the man in the photograph who brought the rats in?’

‘I don’t know anything about any rats, I keep telling you.’

Stevenson said to Rupt: ‘Just slap him. Not hard, we don’t want him bedridden.’

In the confined space the blow went off like the roar of a 303 rifle. Stevenson said: ‘OK, now pick him up, dust him off, set him up in his chair and we’ll start yet again.’ He took the doorman by his back hair and turned his face up to the ceiling. He said: ‘You all right? Makes your ears ring a bit at first, doesn’t it? Still, as you are a hard man …’ He didn’t finish the sentence; there was no need. He added: ‘Cooperate. You can see we haven’t much time and that we mean business.’

I said: ‘Until you do answer these questions we’re just going to go on and on putting them to you, Margoulis, it’s our only way, so what you need to do now is be clever and cut this as short as you can.’

Stevenson said: ‘This man again now. The man in the photograph taken by the girl with the burnt legs the night of Roatta’s party at the Parallel, and the face in this new set, do you think the face is the same?’

Margoulis said: ‘It might be.’

I said: ‘Come on, love, is it or isn’t it?’

Margoulis said: ‘I think it is.’

I said: ‘You’ll be required to make a statement.’

Margoulis said: ‘But I enjoy life.’

‘Street accidents are the scourge of this city,’ said Stevenson, drowning a yawn with the back of his hand, ‘but what do you expect the police to do about it; we’re seriously undermanned.’

I said: ‘This boy in the photograph, he got a name?’

Margoulis said at last, in the same sighing tone with which a man dies or has an orgasm: ‘Tony.’

‘He’s only learning!’ Drucker said with admiration. He picked Stevenson’s ashtray up off the desk and spun it to Rupt, who caught it and spun it back again. They were getting bored.

I said: ‘Any second helping like a surname to go with it?’

‘Just Tony, I knew him by.’

‘There has to be a bit more to it than that,’ said Drucker.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘In and out of the club every night, was he?’

‘Three, four nights a week,’ Margoulis said. ‘Staff hardly noticed him, he was just around. Mr Roatta gave me the word on the door that it was OK for him to be around and I let it go at that.’

I said: ‘Did he frat at all?’

‘Frat?’

‘Yes, like chat up the bird that worked in the place, you know.’

‘Yes, well, he did a bit.’

‘Fancied himself?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Margoulis, ‘he certainly thought he was OK. Look,’ he added, ‘I don’t know what I’m getting into here, telling you people all this – I might as well be dying, what I’m telling and getting myself into.’

‘You just concentrate with all your might on what you’re trying to get out of,’ Stevenson said.

Drucker said to Rupt: ‘They say there’s a life after death, but by Christ this one don’t look in good shape for it.’

Rupt said reasonably: ‘That’s because the people up there don’t play enough football. They want to get some of them doubling out there Saturday mornings up north in the wet at Drifield Park; that way they’d soon get a bit of lead in their pencil.’ He trod heavily on Margoulis’ West End doorman’s hunting boot; it squeaked.

I said to Margoulis: ‘Take all the time you need to think, then tell me how many times you ever saw this Tony with Dora Suarez, say during the three months before she died.’

Rupt stirred in the shadows. Margoulis said in the end: ‘Six times anyway.’

I said: ‘Was it like trouble talk they had? Like was it animated?’

He said: ‘Well, it was quite intense.’

I said: ‘Describe this intensity.’

‘No, well, it was just like sort of quite intense,’ said Margoulis helplessly, ‘that’s all.’

‘Did they ever disappear upstairs together?’ I said.

He said: ‘Well, I couldn’t always be looking because of the customers on the door, but I made them having it away together three, four times, yes.’

‘They stay up there long?’

Margoulis sighed. He said: ‘The time it took me to drill a hole in a floorboard.’

‘Shut your mouth,’ said Rupt.

I said to Rupt: ‘Don’t touch the friend, he’s starting to be helpful now.’ I said to Margoulis: ‘We’re not in the business of knocking folk about.’

Margoulis felt his big face where it had been tenderised and said: ‘Really?’

I said: ‘It’s only when we’re in a hurry to catch a man, and then the frightened folk that could lead us to him won’t talk.’

Margoulis said: ‘You know what the West End is, and a man’s health does sometimes come into it, yes.’

‘You should have seen the state of Dora Suarez’s health,’ I said, ‘and you’d have thought yourself well off with both your legs smashed with an iron bar.’ I stood up. ‘Well, that’ll do for the present.’ I said to Drucker: ‘Get all that down in front of the stenographer and turn it into a statement for blokey here to sign, everything he’s just told us.’ I added to him and Rupt: ‘Be kind to him, show him the family spirit a little because he’s been helpful and besides we’ll need him in court.’

I went towards the door. Stevenson said: ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve got this other idea,’ I said. I picked up three or four of Cryer’s photographs and a photocopy of the club one; I put them in my pocket.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Drucker said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘and until I’ve nailed this man I don’t care.’ I added: ‘You don’t either. Nobody does when there’s this work on.’

I was starting to leave, but then the phone rang; Drucker picked it up. He covered the squawk end and said to me across it: ‘Robacci wants to come up.’

‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘let’s have him up.’ I said to him and Rupt: ‘You both stay here, help us get a shape put to all this.’ I said to Stevenson: ‘Something’s giving.’

Stevenson said: ‘Yes, let’s do it now.’

Drucker said: ‘Well, we don’t want this prick around if Robacci’s dropping by.’

‘No, quite right,’ said Stevenson, ‘Mr Margoulis can now get to bed, wheel him away.’

We had Margoulis wheeled away; he looked glad about that.

Presently Robacci arrived. He looked a bit afraid when he saw the scene in 202; even so, he smiled like an old trouper, a weary and familiar smile, and said: ‘Look, I’ve been thinking this lot over.’

I said: ‘Good, that’s what your brains are for.’

He said: ‘I was just the floor manager.’

‘And my name’s Adolf Hitler,’ I said. ‘Did you know Tony?’

‘Tony?’

‘Don’t start,’ I said, ‘the man who looked after the rats upstairs.’

‘The rats?’ Robacci said. ‘The rats? What rats?’

I said to Rupt and Drucker: ‘Find this gentleman a comfortable seat.’

They put him into what was left of Margoulis’ chair. Drucker said: ‘You’ll be sitting on a few splinters, but by the time this is over, you won’t give a fuck.’

Robacci said: ‘Am I likely to get hurt?’

Rupt said: ‘It could happen.’

‘When?’ said Robacci.

Drucker said: ‘Any time. Depends on you.’

‘My graft was to deal with the customers,’ Robacci said.

I said, ‘Everyone who screwed up there had AIDS.’

Stevenson said: ‘When we’ve got time, we’ll go into your membership list for upstairs, but right now this is a triple-murder enquiry and we want to nail the man, which we think is the same man who did all three of them, and we are beginning to think his name is Tony. So tell us about Tony, and don’t tell us you’ve never heard of rats at the Parallel Club, darling, the time for silly stories is really over.’

‘The point about AIDS in a man is what it does to his member,’ I said. ‘I’ve found time to do a little reading.’ I placed a book down on the table and opened it. ‘Have a look at these,’ I said. ‘Are you
in tip-top screwing form yourself, Robacci? Here are photographs of Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on the penis, and do you feel you could screw with your cock in that state? Well?’ I said. ‘Look at the pictures and answer my question, do you or don’t you?’

Robacci shook his head.

‘I entirely agree with you,’ I said. ‘However, what you do if you’re infected and got the money for it, is watch a man or a woman have an orgasm by means of an animal put into her fundament and even get your rocks off over it. Singers at the Parallel Club?’ I said. ‘People with no money and a pretty face, you mean, trailing round with a mike to make it look good for half an hour, and then it’s away up to the punters on the first floor. Your backers seem to have thought there was money in it.’

Stevenson said: ‘So now you see why you’re here, Robacci; it’s to keep the dirtiest part of this city from turning jet black.’

‘I deny everything!’ Robacci shrieked. ‘I tell you I didn’t even know there was an upstairs.’

‘That won’t do at all,’ I said. ‘You’re beginning to look as if you were in need of a bit more polishing.’ I looked at Drucker.

Drucker came forward with eight fingers out. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I was getting bored.’ He said to Rupt: ‘Let’s try it out on this old cunt here if this Japanese trick here really works.’

Rupt said: ‘Well, I don’t know, but I burst a bag of straw in two with it only this evening.’

Robacci said: ‘Christ, stop them.’

‘I don’t know if I could,’ said Stevenson. ‘In any case, what’s sure is that time’s money in this room, and your time don’t count a great deal. So don’t tell us fairy tales, we’re very busy, we’ve heard them all, and besides they get like very boring.’ However, he looked at Rupt and said to Drucker: ‘Still, just wave your crazy mate down for a moment, will you?’

I said to Robacci: ‘You’re in the most dreadful bother, blackhead – as far as the Parallel’s concerned, you’ll be up in front of other officers, Serious Crimes, most likely, Chief Inspector Bowman and that mob as like as not, God help you; but that’ll be the subject of
another enquiry. What we’re interested in here are these three deaths – the rest of it will go on from there.’

‘Tony, now,’ said Stevenson, ‘the man in these photographs. Are you sticking to it that he never existed? Are you telling us that just like the others? Is that it, then? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Be very careful now, Robacci,’ I said, ‘You are waltzing Matilda, you’re just gambling away your long-term future here. The more lies you tell now, the bigger and filthier the splash this is going to make on page one when you go to trial. A prosecutor hung all over with L-plates could pull the trick – and I will tell you, the way you’re going now, you are steering the straightest possible course for Canterbury; if I was blind myself, I couldn’t miss it.’

‘I’m trying to help you as best I can.’

‘Well, it’s not good enough,’ said Stevenson. He said to Rupt and Drucker: ‘Take him away and like carpenter him into a statement. I want it like yesterday was too late. When you’re satisfied, have the berk sign it.’

Drucker said to Robacci: ‘Come on then, sweetie. Folks are always so glad when they get away from signing with me.’

Robacci shouted at Stevenson: ‘I want to live!’