Amphetamines and Pearls (8 page)

For the first time he spoke: ‘Sure. We're on our way out now.'

I looked at his glasses and wished I could see behind them. Next time I would.

‘All right. I'm going out of here behind you and I'm leaving the club. But I'll be back to see you again and you won't know when it's going to be. If anyone tries to follow me tonight or to get to me in any way then I'll use this. I'm fed up with being pushed around and taken for a patsy. Okay?'

He nodded. I turned to the guy on the chair.

‘You'd better put that thing away and roll your sleeve back down. There's a law against that sort of thing, you know.'

I walked past the copper at the bar without a glance. I waited outside to see if he was going to follow me: or if anyone else was. When nobody emerged in five minutes I called down a taxi and went to collect my car from the car park. I had an appointment with Maxie.

9

Rain had filled the air and washed the streets. There was a newness, a freshness that had no place where I was walking. My feet carried me along a path that could only lead to death: my own and how many others I could not reckon. It was an inescapable path yet a bitter one—bitter with the reek of cordite and the sharpness of broken promises. A street lined with nightmares and tainted with death. This rain was a liar and a cheat and I cursed it as I turned the corner towards the arcade.

It was nearly three and I was late: the lights inside the arcade were dimmed; the place was deserted except for a grey tabby rubbing its leg against the leg of one of the pin tables. I bent to stroke it and its back reared as it jerked its head away and spat. I moved past it and on towards the door.

The light showed dimly over the woodwork. I knocked twice and the sound was lost in the blankness of the moment. After a few seconds waiting I tried again: this time I thought there was a faint scuffling sound from the other side of the door. The handle refused to turn to my grip.

Time to use a little force, I said to myself and then the scuffling grew louder and began to scratch at the wood. I stood quite still: my hand was on the butt of my .38 and I watched as something applied pressure to the handle of the door. A long pause followed by a faint but distinct click and then the handle itself began to turn.

My gun in my right hand, I stepped across the face of the door and yanked it open—fast. Falling from the dying light of the room, something collapsed into the space directly in front of my feet. Something large, something that might have been a bundle of old clothes and sacking: but for the remains of a human head which landed nearest to my toe. Something that was Maxie—or what was left of Maxie.

I knelt among the unswept grime and cradled that mewling thing in my arms. The already swollen leprous face was now a morass of congealed blood and opened flesh. I knelt and held him because he was still human and because that made him more important to me than the cat which moved silently behind me.

Maybe.

Or maybe it was because there was life somewhere within his beaten form and I wanted to get the information that I needed as long as there was the slightest chance.

I lifted the body and carried it into the room, banging the door closed with my foot. I laid him on the table and fetched water from the filthy sink in the corner: I took out my handkerchief and began to clean away his face.

When I had done what I could I went out of the arcade and walked back to the car. From the compartment under the dashboard I took the half-bottle of scotch I had bought to keep me company on the cold journey home. There was enough left—I hoped. I took the bottle back and started to force the contents down Maxie's throat through the torn purse of his lips. After a while he began to cough and splutter and hold his body against the racking pain.

I leant my head close to his face and had to inwardly clench myself to keep it there.

‘Maxie. Can you hear what I'm saying? Can you see who it is?'

His eyes showed nothing at the back of their slits but he managed to nod his head. I went on.

‘You had something for me. Tell me what it was?'

No movement of the head this time: no acknowledgement.

I shook him not too roughly by the shoulder nearest to me.

‘Maxie! The information! I need to know. Now.'

His head rolled away from mine and I pulled it round again to face me. There was a cut below his left eye which was like an over-ripe plum that has been bitten into by the sharp beak of a bird. I closed my eyes for a second and put my mouth closer to his ear.

‘Look, Maxie. The drugs. Where would I get a nice steady supply of drugs; all clean and without danger? Where, Maxie? Come on, you know where, Maxie.'

Once more the rolling away of the head: once more the pulling back. Each time more desperate: each time fiercer. Knowing that time was running out—Maxie's time. My time. Time.

‘Maxie! For Christ's sake!'

I raised him from the surface of the table and supported him with one arm, while I tried to get more whisky into him. He gulped and choked and most of it slobbered back down his face, stinging him as it ran through his sores.

Then the puffed balls that were his eyes seemed to grow more aware. The hold I had on him tightened; the hole beneath his nose tried desperately to form words. I put the side of my head to his face and listened.

‘Scott … you … you've got to get me to … doctor … too late oth … erwise … there's no ch—' He broke off as a pain cut through the length of his body: his hands went to his chest and the hole that was his mouth opened wide. I held him to me: I was sure he was dying and so was he.

But it passed this time and he made another effort to speak.

‘Doctor … now … now Scott … dying.'

‘Okay, Maxie, I'll take you to the doctor. But first tell me about the drugs. The drugs, Maxie! You just tell me and then I'll put you in the motor and we'll go to the doctor.'

He said nothing, whispered nothing. I just prayed he was still listening.

‘You said it was getting more difficult. You said that someone else was moving in. Someone big. Who, Maxie, who?'

‘East End … running stuff for some—uh! my chest! like a strap across me! … I don't know who … they use the muscle … knocking small boys out
…'

I shook him hard.

‘I know that, Maxie, I know all that. You gave me that before. What I want now is names. Names, Maxie! If you want to get to that doctor give me some names!'

He spoke again but the sound was getting more and more feeble every time.

‘Don't … know … names … young feller … moustache long hair … a nigger … big as houses … big as—ooh! pain! it was him as done … as done me
…'

The sound trickled off into a constant moaning.

I lifted his head and held it in front of mine.

‘You must know more than that
,
Maxie. More than if you want help.'

He slumped back and I felt as though he was slipping away from me. I looked at the whisky bottle—it was empty.

‘Maxie!'

I pulled back my hand and slapped him hard across the face. Twice: across and back. The mouth-thing opened slightly. I bent my ear to it.

‘Don't need … no help … no doctor … now.'

I shook him. I pulled him upright. Shook him again. Laid him back on the table
.
Listened for a
pulse that no longer beat.

I went over to the sink and washed my hands; took up the whisky bottle and put it in my pocket; used the handkerchief smeared with his blood to wipe any of my prints from the tap, the table and the door. From the dirt and grease of his clothing they would learn nothing. Using the handkerchief, I closed the door on Maxie's body.

The cat was still in the arcade. It sniffed its nose up in the air as I came out of the room. Slowly, gracefully, it walked towards me and went to rub itself against my leg. I swung back my foot and kicked at it, kicked at it as hard as I could. Then went out into the wet streets.

By the time I got home it was too late to go to bed, too early to do anything else. I made coffee and couldn't drink it. Everything I touched or tasted had the feel, the stench of decay. I ran a bath and lay in it and tried to think.

Candi was hooked on something: from the things I found in her flat it was probably something like amphetamines or barbiturates. She was hooked and she was broke, probably from having to pay for whatever she was hooked on. Then somebody killed her. It could have been because she was refusing to pay up any more; it could have been because she was threatening to bite back on her source of supply and whoever that was got scared. It could have been something else altogether. But suppose it was something to do with the drugs. What then?

I knew that Howard was involved with drugs in some way, but if he was pushing then he had to get his supply from somewhere. And if someone was moving in on the market and trying to get it sewn-up, they wouldn't stick to London. They would move out into the provinces as well. Which made it very likely that Howard had been squeezed out. Besides, I couldn't see him killing anyone himself and if Cook was typical of the kind of no-hope help he hired then he wouldn't get anyone to do it for him. No. It was far more likely to be someone from outside. Someone from this mob. Maxie had said an oversize Negro and a young moustache. The Negro I had certainly seen and from his looks and from the way he had dealt with Maxie, I couldn't imagine him using a little .32 on Candi. He wouldn't even have been able to hold it between his fingers.

But a young, long-haired moustache. There were hundreds and hundreds of them and they all looked alike. How could you tell one from the other? Until you knew one, of course.

I thought about dear John, opening the door with a servile smile and a gun bulging through his jacket. John with the trust of Mr Thurley with an ‘ey'.

Altogether too smooth, Mr Thurley with his Eton and Guards airs and graces and his library full of unread leather-bound books. Bought by the yard. Bought from where? What had Vonnie said about Martin's little business venture?

I had to talk to Vonnie again. And to Thurley.

But before I talked to either of them I wanted to speak to Tom Gilmour. There was some more information I could do with and which he might have.

The water in the bath was growing steadily colder and a light scum had formed across its surface. It was time to get out: I should have got out sooner.

10

Tom Gilmour's office had the air of a room where things happened: I didn't think it would be wise to query what too many of them were. When you spent your life dealing with petty hoods and larger villains, it didn't pay to be over-gentle. So if the blinds were pulled down once in a while and the door was locked, what did it matter what went on inside? As long as the course of justice was being pursued.

It mattered if you were the one sitting on this side of the desk. It mattered if you were the one they suspected, the one they needed to talk, the one they thought was withholding information.

‘You had no idea who that mother with his skull bashed in on your stairs was?'

Gilmour looked sharp even at this hour of the morning, when I am usually only working on half-cylinders. He looked sharp in his American-style suit and with his eyes cutting the space between us. Not a man to treat without caution
;
not a man to lie to.

‘No idea,' I lied.

He rolled a pencil around the blotter on his desk. A new blotter, virgin white: perhaps he didn't write much; perhaps it was stationery day. Perhaps he was a very particular man. He spoke carefully. I listened the same way.

‘He was a man called Cook. A small-time guy, a grafter with not much sense and very little in the way of know-how. But he might have had something in the way of guts.

‘You were right when you said you had seen him around. He was tailing you all right. We don't know who put him on to you, but we do know it started straight after the papers leaked it that you found Candi Carter's body. Or maybe before that—maybe it was after the murder but before the news hit the streets. Now that's a whole new ball game.

‘If Cook was put on to you before the morning that means whoever hired him knew you were there because they were there themselves. Or they knew someone who was—someone who would want to tell them about your being there. If that was so, it makes it look good for you as far as the murder is concerned, but it leaves us wanting very much to find out who hired Mr Cook.'

Gilmour got fed up with rolling the pencil; he pushed his chair back against the wall and stuck his feet out on to the desk. He crossed them on top of his nice new blotter. This morning he just didn't care.

‘Who hired him to tail you, Mitchell?'

I continued to look at the soles of his shoes. At times like that anything was better than having to stare continually at his face.

When I didn't bite he went on, ‘Oh, but then you didn't know anything about him, did you. I forgot.'

He swung his feet down suddenly and stood up. He moved round from behind the desk and the muscles in my body tensed. His hand came to rest alongside my shoulder at the back of my chair.

‘I'll tell you something interesting, Mitchell. Cook was only a little man, a small man in many ways. He ran his business from a Victorian terraced house—car-hire with a single car and a little snooping on the side. Not an especially careful man by all accounts: if he had been careful he wouldn't have got his head smashed in, would he? Not careful and yet you would have thought there would have been some record of business, even if only for tax.

‘Do you know—and this is going to take you by storm, pal—do you know there was nothing there.'

The hand moved a fraction closer to my back: I was aware of it tensing, then it moved away and he was back in his chair at the far side of the desk.

‘One of his kids—there were a whole mess of those—said her dad used to have a little red book in which he wrote down all his jobs. She looked for it and couldn't find it. We looked and we couldn't find it either.'

I had to ask. There was no way I couldn't—not for my own peace of mind.

‘Was there no one else you could ask? Didn't he have a wife or anything?'

Nothing for what seemed a long time. Gilmour went back to his pencil and began to doodle with it around the heel mark left on his blotter.

‘Interesting question, Mitchell. Interesting.'

The point of the pencil dug hard into the white paper; dug through it and snapped.

‘Sure he had a wife. When we went over to see her, after a constable had gone round with the news, this little girl came running up the road. Running and screaming. Ran right into us. Smack dab in the middle of us. She was crying and shouting and she didn't make sense so we took her back with us to the house.

‘It was an old-fashioned house, with a bathroom added on at the back, out beyond the kitchen. The girl took us to the door and pointed: then she ran away.

‘The door was ajar. You could just see a shape, a shape hanging. When we opened the door we found Mrs Cook all right; hanging from the light flex in the centre of the room. One leg trailed over the bath, the other over the floor. The floor was wet: the front of her dress was stained.

‘When we found the rest of the kids in the upstairs part of the house they were sitting playing with some crayons. There was crayon everywhere—all over the floor, the wall, all over their hands and faces, in their mouths.

‘Two women pc's came and cleaned them up and took them away. Now they're in a home. Until they're eighteen they'll be in care.'

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘In care. Maybe they'll be better off. It didn't look as though they were getting too much care where they were.'

Tom Gilmour stood up and stared out of the window, down on to the street. My mind left the building, the country; settled in a camp for itinerant workers in California. I saw the faces and bellies of kids who hadn't eaten a good meal for weeks. Saw the faces, the eyes, staring widely, wildly. Staring at a large pot full of stew made from bones of meat. Children fed on the Grapes of Wrath.

But fuck it! Children in another country, in another age, in a fucking movie! Why couldn't I think of what was real, what was here and now. Why couldn't I think of kids smearing each other with jam, kids asleep with foul dummies in their mouths, children who did nothing but whimper and cry?

What about a little reality, Mitchell? Too strong for you to take, huh? Too much for a big private eye with a Smith and Wesson under one arm and a hole where his heart should be?

Then Gilmour was asking me a question and I didn't know how many times he had asked it before.

‘I said you wouldn't know anything about an old guy called Maxie being killed some time late last night? An old guy who ran an amusement arcade?'

‘Sorry, Tom. I drove straight back from Nottingham and went to bed. As soon as I woke up I came round here. Why, anyway? Is there any reason why I should know him?'

‘Easy,' Gilmour said. ‘Stay cool. I thought you claimed to work as a private investigator. I thought it was your job to know things like that.'

I smiled. He was the only English police inspector I knew who would tell anyone to stay cool and meant it seriously.

I followed up the smile with a question or two of my own.

‘I could do with some help, Tom. Nothing much, just a little information. About a man called Thurley, for instance. You know him?'

Gilmour thought for a moment.

‘Sure. He lost his kid. Girl of about sixteen. She went on the run from school and he thought she might be in the golden mile. I had some people look around, ask a few questions. We didn't come up with anything. In cases like that we rarely do—unless we happen to strike lucky quick. I suggested he try you. I thought you might fancy a few days sleazing around the porn shops and strip clubs: besides, he looked as if he'd pay well. And you look as though you could use the money.'

I thanked him for the hand-out. Then asked if he knew anything else about Thurley.

‘Nothing. Seems he used to work in merchant banking and moved from there into various directorships. I don't know any more than that. Why? Have you got any reason to suspect there's any more?'

I showed him two empty hands: ‘Nothing. Except a feeling that he wasn't all he seemed under the veneer. Could you run a check on him?'

Gilmour stood up. He had work to do, but I wasn't quite ready to go.

‘And there's a youngish feller who works for him. About twenty-five, long hair and moustache. Unless I'm mistaken he carries a gun in the holster under his jacket. Either that or he's got a strange growth.'

Tom Gilmour was looking more interested now, though I didn't get the impression I had rung any bells inside his head.

‘Thanks, Scott, I'll ask around. Get someone to keep an eye open.'

I was on my way through the door when I let him have the last question.

‘A big black Negro—strictly maxi-size. How about him?'

This time the bell rang and the coins came rolling out for free.

‘Wilson Marley. Six eight. Over two hundred pounds and every one of them weighs killer. He's working as muscle for a guy called Jupp, Frankie Jupp.

‘For years Jupp worked strictly around the East End—gambling, girls on the game, robbery with violence. Big in his way but limited. Now suddenly he's putting feelers into the West End—and out of London altogether. The Drug Squad have been getting rumours for some time about Frankie moving some really hard stuff around. Hard and expensive. If he can do it, then it makes sense from his point of view.

‘If he can shut up the small guys dealing in cannabis and LSD and push stuff like cocaine, amphetamines and barbiturates then he stands to make a lot more money. But it's a strange move for him and my guess is that there's New York money behind it. Whatever he is up to, Marley is doing most of the footwork and most of the fistwork, too.

‘Anything you turn up about those boys, Scott, you'll be doing me more than a favour. What I wouldn't give to nail those mothers! But—Scott—take care. That Marley will take your head off as soon as spit in your eye.'

When I got across town to my office I had visitors again. Or rather a visitor. And she was prettier by far than on the last occasion.

Her hair was pulled down and back so that it just framed her face, which was pale and without an apparent trace of make-up. She wore a pale blue dress that clung to her above the waist and fell away loosely below it. The neckline and the hem were ornamented with soft brown patterned leaves. She stood outside my door, looking very demure except for one thing: or two. Where the material clung to her breasts the nipples stood out as firm as stones. I wondered how precious they were. I wondered who she was out to tease—or make. I wondered if that someone were me, and if it was then I wondered why.

I pulled my keys from my pocket and went to unlock it; then I remembered that I didn't need to do that. I had never locked it.

‘You could have come in,' I said when we were inside.

She smiled faintly: ‘I did try the handle … but then I didn't like to go in. I mean, it would have been prying, wouldn't it?'

And again I caught myself wondering.

‘Have you found out anything, Scott?'

‘Very little, Vonnie, but I'll tell you what I know.'

I told her about Howard and about her sister's involvement in drugs. She didn't seem in the least surprised at that; thought it only to be natural for the kind of life she was leading. And I supposed that she was right. I added that the murderer might be whoever had been supplying her with the dope. She nodded her head and said it sounded likely. What did I think I was going to do next.

I said that I wasn't sure.

It seemed that she had ideas of her own.

She came and stood beside my chair so that her dress was close to my face. I had only to push out my tongue …

She eased her hand on to the shoulder of my jacket.

‘It must have been a shock for you, Scott, finding Ann like that. Alone in that room with just her picture on the wall for company.'

For the second time that morning I was aware of a hand moving close by my head. Only this time it began to stroke my neck, finger by delicate finger.

‘You were very fond of her, weren't you, Scott. I can remember seeing you together when you brought her home to the house after taking her out. I can remember seeing you kiss her: I was only young at the time, really.'

The pressure from the fingers was stronger, their message more insistent. The phone rang. I leaned forward across the desk and lifted the receiver. When I spoke into it, Vonnie was standing away from the desk, taking a sudden interest in the faded carpet.

‘Scott Mitchell. Who is this?'

The voice at the other end of the line was educated, well-oiled and well-fed.

‘Ah, Mr Mitchell. I tried to contact you earlier, but no doubt you were out working.'

I coughed something down the phone which he could take for whatever he wanted to take it for.

‘I merely wondered whether you had come up with anything yet, Mr Mitchell. I do realise that you have had very little time
…'

I interrupted: ‘You're right, Mr Thurley, I have had very little time and every time something starts to happen I get interrupted.'

I sensed him bristle, but he covered well.

‘I'm terribly sorry, Mr Mitchell. It was merely a parent's anxiety, you know. I hope you didn't mind my calling?'

‘Not at all, Mr Thurley. You do that anytime. Now if you will excuse me?'

He did so in a most polite fashion. I have rarely heard a telephone receiver put down with such good breeding.

Vonnie was sitting across from me, on top of the low filing cabinet. I couldn't be sure how angry she was, but the paleness of her face was highlighted by two red spots by her cheekbones.

‘What did you say Martin was doing on the side?'

‘Scott! On the side makes it sound unpleasant, almost illegal.'

I gave her one of my best smiles. She returned with one of hers. Anyone watching from the centre of the room would have thought they were at Wimbledon.

‘He's buying and selling books, Scott. Rare books, leather-bound ones—heavens, I don't really know much about it.'