Killing Time (9 page)

Slider caught Hart’s eye. ‘Hang on a minute, Freddie,’ he said. ‘Are you sure about that time of death?’

Freddie looked up enquiringly over his half-moons. ‘You know better than that, old boy. Anything over four hours can never be certain. The variations and exceptions are endless. It’s my opinion, but I wouldn’t stake half-a-crown on it if you know better.’

‘Well, we’ve got witnesses—’

‘A witness takes precedence over the jolly old Three Signs, you know that. What time do you want, then?’

‘Eleven-thirty on Tuesday evening. Not an eyewitness, but two separate witnesses to the door being kicked in and the sound of furniture overturned.’

‘Eleven-thirty? That gives me not quite eight hours. Well, I’d have thought it was a bit short, but anything’s possible. Now I look at him, he’s thinner than I first took him for. Nicely built, but not an ounce of fat on him, so he could have cooled and stiffened very quickly, especially lying through the night in an unheated room. And of course,’ he added with a bland look at Slider, ‘he’s shaved off all his body hair, so he’s got no fur coat for insulation.’

‘Shaved?’

‘Or waxed. The things some people will do for love! Let’s have him over, John.’

The examination continued. ‘Hypostasis well developed on the trunk and lower limbs. Ah, you see here the evidence that our chap was a practised sodomite: hairless and smooth as a baby’s cheek. Depilatory cream followed by Oil of Ulay, I suspect. Epithelium cornified, smooth and less elastic than normal, and there’s a lack of sphincteric tone. No sign of venereal disease, or proctitis. Practised but careful. Ah, but here, do you see this? Some peri-anal bruising, and a couple of tiny haematomata. Our friend’s had a bit of rough sex quite recently. Not immediately pre-mortem, though. Not part of the homicidal attack – twelve to twenty-fours hours before that, I’d say.’

‘He went to see his lover the day before, apparently,’ Slider said.

‘Did he? You’re not worried about this, then? Can we move on?’

‘We haven’t identified the lover yet. It could be important.’

‘In that case I’ll take swabs.’

Freddie came at last to the head injuries, and as he approached them he began to whistle quietly through his teeth, a defence mechanism which caused his typist considerable pain during transcription. ‘Injuries to the head are consistent with having been caused by repeated severe blows from a hard object. The wounds are considerably overlaid and it is impossible to say with any certainty what the weapon might have been. The blows were inflicted with great force, sufficient to crush the skull.’

‘In fact,’ Slider said, ‘it was our old friend, the frenzied attack.’

‘Quite.’ Cameron whistled on. ‘Let’s have him over again.’

‘Ah, now, this is better. There appears to have been a single blow to the face, across the bridge of the nose, again with enormous force. The clean-cut edge to the wound here – d’you see, Bill? – suggests it might have been something with a straight edge or a square section. A metal bar, for instance, rather than a baseball bat or a knobkerrie.’

Slider made a note.

‘The blow to the face was the first and fatal one, delivered with sufficient force to drive splinters of bone into the brain. Death would have been instantaneous. The rest of the blows
to the skull were carried out post mortem.’ Cameron paused. ‘What’s up, Bill? With all the blood down the front of the shirt and none down the back, you must have come to that conclusion yourself.’

‘Yes,’ said Slider, ‘but it doesn’t make it easier. If you sneak up on someone, it’s usual to do it from behind.’

‘Bit of a breach of protocol,’ Freddie agreed.

‘And there was no sign of a struggle, and no defence injuries—’

‘True,’ said Freddie. ‘The fatal blow was undefended.’

‘But if someone had kicked the door in, why didn’t he see them coming? Unless he was drunk. Or drugged.’

‘If he was unconscious through drink or drugs,’ Freddie said, ‘it could explain the rapid fall in body temperature and quick onset of rigor. Did he drug?’

‘Not according to his flat mate, but she wouldn’t necessarily know everything. Or even necessarily tell the truth.’

‘Well, the blood tests may show something. D’you want the stomach contents analysed as well?’

‘Yes, it may help.’

‘I’ll secure the whole thing and send it off, then.’

The ground-floor-level manifestation of the Pomona Club was a stuccoed wall painted with a mural of a tropical jungle prominently featuring a grinning snake and an apple. Entrance was via a side-alley, and the door sported a state-of-the art neon sign of an apple which flicked back and forth between being whole and having a large, deckle-edged bite out of it. Below the apple little red dots chased themselves round the border of a space which read alternately
Pomona
and
Cabaret.

Despite the apple theme, Slider happened to know, because an amused O’Flaherty had told him, that the club had been named for entirely different reasons. Billy Yates, the owner, had had a long rivalry with a fellow businessman, Brian Hooper, who being from Sydney himself had referred to Yates’s enterprise as ‘that club with the Pom owner’. The name stuck, and Yates, ever a pragmatist, made the best of a bad job and renamed it the Pomona to make it look as though he had thought of it first. Despite his many business interests, Yates seemed to have a particular attachment to the Pomona, spending more time there than might seem warranted.

The neon sign was off now, of course, revealing the secret of its pseudokinesics in an unseemly display of unlit tubes and bulbs. The door below gave access to a steep flight of stairs: the club itself lived in the basement. Hart wrinkled her nose as she descended behind Slider. ‘Mouldy place. How’d they ever get a licence?’

‘God knows,’ Slider said.

‘I should’ve thought it would never pass a fire certificate.’

‘Contributions in the right boxes,’ Slider suggested. ‘Friends in the right places.’

‘On the square, you mean?’

‘You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.’

The club wore an insistent and insincere glamour, an air of having had just enough spent on it to make it appear to a casual or drunken glance to have had a great deal spent on it. It was gloomy now, lit only by the bar lights, and the reflection from the back-curtain to the dance stage, which was made of vertical shimmery stuff like giant Lametta. It smelled of cigarette smoke, spilled alcohol, disinfectant, cellar-mould, and a faint, spicy whiff of something that was either joss-sticks or a certain popular recreational tobacco substitute.

‘What a dump,’ Hart murmured, keeping so close behind Slider he could feel the heat of her body. Nervous, he thought; or perhaps she didn’t have very good night vision.

They had not been unobserved. A door revealed itself over beyond the bar as an oblong of light, and a dark figure came through and quickly stepped aside so as not to be outlined. ‘Can I help you?’ a man’s voice asked unwelcomingly.

‘I’m looking for Mr Yates,’ Slider said. There was a click, and fluorescent lights in the ceiling came on, pinning Slider and Hart like bugs on a table.

‘If you’re tryin’ to ge’ a job for your daugh’er,’ the voice said with grim humour and a splendid array of West London glottal stops, ‘forge’ i’. She ain’t got the tits for it.’

The voice belonged to a tall, very fit-looking young black man – the glossy, dessert-chocolate black of Africa – dressed in a suit of the same cheap-smartness as the club decor, and with his right hand tucked casually in under the left coat of his jacket. The hard eyes had already summed up Slider and Hart as not being dangerous, so the gesture was purely theatrical, meant to impress.

‘Detective Inspector Slider, Detective Constable Hart. Mr Yates is in the back, is he?’

Now the right hand moved with the invisible-lightning speed of a lizard out from under the coat and down into a pocket. The alert pose became casual. A wide and perfectly false smile decorated the features. ‘Oh, yeah, he’ll be glad to see you. Always glad to see you lot, is Mr Yates. Come on through.’

So, Billy Yates keeps an armed guard at his side, Slider thought
as he crossed the room. Now what has he got to be afraid of, I wonder?

The man led the way through into a narrow corridor. He knocked on a door, opened it and said, ‘Mr Yates, it’s the fuzz. Coupla detectives.’ He stretched his arm to usher them in, favouring Hart with a salacious look. ‘F’you want an audition, darlin’, I don’t mind waivin’ the tits if you don’t. Geddit?’ he added with a grin of delight at his own wit.

Hart looked witheringly as she passed him. ‘Jerk,’ she said.

‘Shut up, Garry, and get out,’ a colder, older voice from inside commanded. Slider followed Hart into the tiny room, and the door was closed behind them. Billy Yates sat behind a cheap metal office desk piled high with papers. There were two cheap office chairs and a bank of filing cabinets on this side of the desk, and that was all. The room was so tiny there was only just room between the cabinets and the desk for the chairs. To open a filing cabinet drawer you would have had to lift a chair out of the way.

Yates was a big man who had once been muscular and was going slightly to seed. Still, he was big enough and strong enough to have taken care of himself, especially as, Slider calculated, in any situation he was likely to get the first blow in, and the first blow from him would be the only one in the fight. His face was big-featured, tanned with an expensive, overseas tan which Slider guessed he would sport all year round, and would have been good-looking if it had had a pleasant expression. But there was no smile in the mouth, no humanity in the eyes. It was a cartoon face, just lines drawn round a space, without animation, a representation of a human rather than the real thing. His hair was carefully coiffeured, his cufflinks large and gold, his aftershave filled the small room, but though his suit looked expensive, Slider’s eye, tutored over the years by Atherton, saw that it was merely new, and would not last the pace. Cheap-smart again, just a better class of cheap-smart than his henchman’s. Was Yates a man who was satisfied with what would pass muster, rather than the real thing, or did he dress down for the venue? If rumour was even half right, he had a wad the size of Centre Point, so he must be spending it on something.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. He waved a hand towards
the chairs. Slider sat. Now on a level with him, Yates’s face waited for him without expression, his grey eyes stationary as oysters.

‘Jay Paloma,’ Slider said. ‘He works for you—’

‘Not any more,’ Yates said sharply.

‘Since when?’

‘Since he didn’t turn up to work. I don’t give second chances. Not when there’s a hundred people out there eager for his job.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘Monday night – or Tuesday morning, rather, at about ten past four, when he left to go home.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘As far as I know.’

‘And when was he due to come in again?’

‘Seven Tuesday evening. Seven till four were his hours, with an hour and a half off. He didn’t show up, and that was that as far as I was concerned.’

‘No message or telephone call?’

‘Nothing.’ Yates shrugged. ‘And after I’d taken a chance on him, given him the job when there were younger dancers I could have had.’ And paid him accordingly, I bet, Slider thought.

‘When you last saw him, did he seem in normal spirits?’

Yates only shrugged, picked up a cigarette box from the clutter of the desk, offered it to Slider and Hart, and then took one himself, making a slow business of lighting it. To give himself time to think, Slider thought, keeping silent. At last Yates said, ‘As you mention it, he did seem out of sorts on Monday night. Hadn’t got his mind on his job. Performed like crap. Fortunately Monday’s a quiet night. But I made a mental note that he’d have to pull his socks up or get out.’

‘Well, you’ll be glad to know that you’ve been saved the trouble of making the decision,’ Slider said, watching Yates’s eyes. ‘He’s been murdered.’

There was no flicker, only a serious, considering look of inward thought. ‘I’m sorry,’ Yates said tersely. ‘When?’

‘Tuesday night.’

There was no response to that at all.

Slider went on, ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you know about him.’

Yates made a dismissive gesture. ‘I knew nothing about him, beyond his work.’

‘Did he meet anyone here? Did you see him with anyone?’

‘If I did, I wouldn’t have made a mental note of it. The staff are supposed to be friendly to the customers, make them feel at home.’

‘Who were his special friends amongst your staff? Who did he talk to during his breaks?’

‘I don’t know that he had any friends. I pay my staff to work, not to fraternise.’

‘Well, perhaps I can talk to the people he worked with. Perhaps they’d be more forthcoming.’

Slider expected Yates to object to that, but after a slow, moveless look into Slider’s face, he said, ‘Do as you please. Just don’t do it during my open hours. It wouldn’t please my customers to have detectives hanging around asking questions.’

I’ll bet it wouldn’t, Slider thought. He was about to get up when, unexpectedly, Yates spoke again.

‘There is something.’

‘Yes?’ Slider said encouragingly.

Yates seemed to be having difficulty in bringing himself to be helpful. At last he said, ‘I do remember seeing him with someone just recently. For the last few weeks. Not every night, but a couple of times a week. Out in front – in the club. He’s been sitting with a man, talking, during his break.’

‘Did you know the man?’

‘No. It wasn’t unusual for Jay to talk to customers. But I noticed this one because he wasn’t a fag.’

‘How could you tell?’

For the first time there was a flicker of animation – a withering look. ‘In my business you have to know. This man was—’ He hesitated. ‘He wasn’t a customer. He wasn’t enjoying the club. He was there on business of some kind.’

‘Drug dealing, perhaps?’ Slider said blandly.