Rough Treatment (13 page)

“All right,” agreed Resnick. “If I could make a couple of calls from your office …”

“Help yourself.”

Harold Roy walked through into the studio and when Resnick started back along the corridor he found that he had Robert Deleval at his side.

“You’re a detective?”

“Inspector. Yes, that’s right.”

“Murder—you deal with murders?”

“Sometimes.”

“In that case I might be seeing you again.”

Resnick looked at him. “How’s that?”

“Because,” said Deleval with feeling, “if that bastard continues to murder my scripts the way he has up to now, I might end up by killing him.”

Twelve

All the way in the taxi he hadn’t touched her: not then, nor down the pebble drive, nor on the step behind her while she nervously fitted her key into the lock. Which was why, when he set his hand, spread flat and wide, against the small of her back, the shock nearly jolted her off her feet.

“Wait,” she said. Maria. “Wait.”

Her head was being pressed awkwardly back against the wall; a table, low and spilling with circulars and misdirected post, cut into the backs of her legs.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

But already his thumbs were moving against her nipples, his head bending towards her breasts.

“What’s your name? I don’t even know your name.”

“Grabianski.”

“No, your other name.”

“Jerzy.”

“What …?”

“Jerry.”

“But you said …”

“It’s what I was christened, baptized. Jerzy.”

“When did you change it?”

“When I stopped going to confession.”

“When was that?”

“When I couldn’t go on embarrassing the priest any longer.”

She looked across at him, waiting for his smile. She was propped against pillows, little makeup left on her face. She had not bothered to collect her other things from the foot of the bed, the carpet, the stairs; had slid, instead, inside a half-slip, creamy silk.

“Jerzy,” she said quietly.

“Okay,” he grinned, “now are you going to give me absolution?”

She moved so as to stroke the skin inside his upper arm, soft and surprisingly smooth. So much of him was like that, the smoothness of a younger man, never slack. She wriggled some more and rested her face against his shoulder, one of her breasts squeezed against his ribs. She said something else that he couldn’t hear. Grabianski knew that if they stayed in that position for long, he would begin to get cramp. Already he was wanting to pee.

“Maybe she’s not the brightest woman in the world,” Harold Roy was saying, “but on a good day she can tell black from white. Smoked salmon she might forget, come home with mineral water and some fancy new knickers instead, but that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?”

He offered Resnick an extra-strong mint, placed one in his own mouth and, almost at once, crunched it with his teeth. Always a disappointment, preferring them to last till they were wafer thin, a sacrament. Jewish father, Catholic mother, the nearest he got nowadays to religion and ritual was this: communion with a plainclothes officer while balancing fragments of peppermint on the back of his tongue.

“She would have been frightened, Mr. Roy.”

“Terrified. Out of her wits. Any woman would be.”

“In the circumstances, she might easily have panicked.”

“It’s an awful situation.”

“It could have been worse.”

“I suppose so.”

“For your wife, I mean.”

Harold Roy closed his eyes for several seconds. “I don’t like to think about it,” he said.

“Even so,” Resnick continued, “when she spoke to the constable, it’s possible she was still in a state of shock.”

“Confused, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

Resnick watched as Harold Roy popped another mint.
The booze and all the other junk you use to pickle what once might have been a brain.
He didn’t suppose that Mackenzie had been alluding to Trebor Extra-Strong.

Harold knew the time without looking at his watch; he was ahead and needed to stay that way, had to be back in the studio inside ten minutes, less.

“Inspector, if …”

“Sometimes, once people have made a statement, even the most innocent of people, they feel worried about changing it—as though, in some way, it might incriminate them.” Resnick waited until Harold’s eyes were focused upon him. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“If your wife wanted to change her statement, for whatever reason—if, with time to think more clearly, calmly, she had reconsidered—she would let us know?”

“Of course she would. I mean … of course.”

“Nothing she said, to you, nothing she’s said, suggests she might be having—what shall we call it?—second thoughts?”

“Nothing.”

Through a succession of glass-paneled walls he could see people working at keyboards, speaking into telephones, drinking coffee. Should any of them glance up they would see me, Harold thought, closeted here with a shabby police officer when I should be getting on with the job.

“Inspector …” Harold Roy began to rise.

“Of course,” said Resnick, “I understand.”

They stood for a while longer, facing each other across the small, anonymous room.

“Maybe you’d speak with your wife; if there is anything, encourage her to get in touch.”

Harold Roy nodded, opening the door. “Whoever it was broke into your house, the sooner we can put them out of business, better for all concerned. Especially while there’s still a chance of recovering your property, some of it, at least; whatever they might not have been able to dispose of right away.”

In some indeterminate way, Harold felt he was being almost accused of something, without understanding what. “Back past reception, Inspector … you can find your own way out?”

“No need to keep you, Mr. Roy. Thanks for giving up your time.”

Designer clothes, expensive haircut, Resnick watched him move through a maze of rooms, stride lengthening with each one until he had gone from sight. For the present. Though he didn’t know exactly why, Resnick felt certain that he would need to talk to Harold Roy again.

From the heaviness of her body, the change in her breathing, Grabianski knew that Maria had drifted into sleep. If he angled his head, he could read the time on the clock-radio beside the bed. No wonder his stomach was beginning, gently, to complain. He should have had something to eat in the tearooms, that waitress trying to come on, all airs and graces. Grabianski smiled: how he’d enjoyed sitting there the way they had, feeling her up under the table and those others knowing it, trying hard not to look, trying their damnedest to look without making it obvious.

Saliva spooled on to his chest from the corner of Maria’s mouth.

It had been good, Grabianski thought, better than good, better even than he’d imagined. It was possible to go for months, years, believing sex was overvalued; sometimes, in the soiled beds of strange towns, over-priced: a quick loss of joy. Then this.

Maria groaned and rolled her head away, a trail of spittle stretching from her mouth like translucent gum until it bubbled and broke.

“I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”

“That’s okay.”

He took hold of an edge of sheet and dabbed carefully at the side of her mouth.

“What have you been doing?” she asked.

“While you were sleeping? There wasn’t an awful lot I could do.” He smiled at her and she thought, God, here is this man seeing me like this, no makeup, bleary-eyed and slobbering, and he can smile like that. “Watching you,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“Thinking.”

“About what?”

The smile broadened. His hand started its move back towards her breasts.

“Is that all?” Maria said again.

Grabianski quickly pushed back the covers and didn’t miss the sharp look of disappointment in her eyes, concern. “If I don’t pee,” he said, “I’ll burst.”

“Second on the left,” she called after his disappearing buttocks.

But then as she lay back down she remembered that he already knew the house quite well.

Resnick walked back along the narrow corridor by which he had entered the studio, remembering Diane Woolf and regretting he had come up with no good reason for seeking her out, other than to get caught staring.

Again.

“Drooling at the mouth, Inspector?” He could hear her voice inside his head, imagine the expression on her face as she said it.

Resnick walked through into the car park and was face to face with Alfie Levin.

“Mr. Resnick.”

“Alfie.”

Born again or simply biding his time, Alf Levin was unable to disguise the alarm he felt at Resnick’s sudden presence: the old enemy.

“Still looking for Harold Roy?”

“This time I found him.”

“Not the most popular round here.”

“So I’m beginning to realize.”

“You’re not the only one looking for him, neither.”

Resnick stepped aside to leave room for two men in overalls carrying a fifteen-foot ladder between them, smelling of cigarette smoke and paint. “Are you about to tell me something, Alfie?”

“Not in the way you mean, Mr. Resnick.”

“Which way’s that, Alfie?”

“Merely passing on a bit of information, the kind that crops up in conversation. Not informing. Not that.”

Resnick nodded, waited.

“Skinny bloke, thin on top …” Without meaning to, Resnick found himself looking at Alf Levin’s toupee, searching for the join. “… hanging around when I parked the van. Did I know when they’d be through for the day,
Dividends?
”

“Did you?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t going to tell him.”

“Why not?”

“Kosher, he’d go through reception, wouldn’t he? Same as anybody else.”

“What did you think he was after, then?”

Alf Levin shook his head, took one hand from his trouser pocket and offered it towards Resnick, palm up. “Way I see it, that poor sod’s got troubles enough. He doesn’t want some feller who can’t afford decent shoes …”

“Shoes?”

“Yes, he was wearing them trainer things, filthy too. Hanging round to put the squeeze on him, if you ask me. Tap him for a loan or something like that. Probably some actor, down on his luck.”

“Have you seen him around before?”

“Maybe, once or twice.”

“Talking to Harold Roy, looking for him?”

Alf Levin thought about that. “Can’t say, Mr. Resnick. But I can say when I saw him last.”

“Yes,” said Resnick, “so can I. I was there that night, remember?”

“Can I forget?”

“Then you won’t forget what we were talking about?”

“You were talking about.”

“You’ve been thinking it over.”

“I told you …”

“I’m not asking you to grass on anyone you know, Alfie. What I’m after—a little occasional conversation. Much like this one. Nothing more than that.”

“I don’t believe you, Mr. Resnick.”

“Might be better if you did.”

“Who for? For you, yes, okay. But me …?”

Resnick laid a hand on Alf Levin’s shoulder, aware of the memories it would bring rushing back. “Insurance, Alfie. Now you’re going straight that’s the kind of thing you ought to be thinking about, a little insurance.”

Resnick walked round him and headed towards his car, keeping his eyes open for Harold Roy’s Citroën on the way. It wasn’t impossible that a lean man, prematurely aging, would be skulking close by, rolling one of his own. I should have checked his description through records before, Resnick thought, I shouldn’t have been so sloppy. If it were Divine or Naylor, I’d have given him a bollocking.

He wondered, as he drove past the security guard at the gate, whether Kevin Naylor had fetched up with anything that would point them in a new direction, if Graham Millington had found the time to renew acquaintances with Lloyd Fossey. Something, somewhere had better move soon, or it would be like last time, over and gone before they even got close.

Maria Roy was wearing little enough and even that was a whole lot more than Jerry Grabianski. She stood against the couch and it was impossible to stop her legs from trembling.

“I see you bought some more vodka,” he said, the same old smile (that’s what it was to her now, already). “I thought you might.”

There it was, the quiet cockiness about him that she liked. Not like his partner, the one he’d been talking about, Grice. That was different: harsh, totally without humor. The only kind of jokes she could picture Grice laughing at were those in which people suffered indignity or pain.

“Want one?”

Maria shook her head; it was light enough already.

This is where I first saw him, she was thinking, this room, the way he stepped through the doorway and made me shake as much as now. Just look at him, standing there so naturally, naked, as if he belonged. A man who knew he still had a good body and had no need to be ashamed of it; what it felt; what it did; the way it looked. Moving back towards her, he deposited his glass on the table so that both hands were free.

They were the kids who’d that day discovered what it was all about; couples sneaking into a borrowed bed after weeks of cars and cinemas. Maria recalled the first time she’d been away with a man, a boy—well, seventeen and straddled in between—she had lied to her mother, brazened out her father, caught the early evening train to Weymouth and met him on the front, close by the pier as planned. Two nights in a hotel with measured cornflakes and weak tea and she’d been so sore she could scarcely walk her way back to the station.

“We’ve got to talk,” Grabianski said.

“Not now.”

“Good a time as any.”

She looked down at him. “You sure about that?”

He grinned. “Well, maybe in a little while.”

“Yes,” said Maria, touching him, closing her eyes.

As he’d told both his mother and father, separately, and together and seemingly forever throughout his adolescence, he didn’t believe in God. Neither version. Not unless (he had loved the abrupt downturning of the mouth that signaled his father’s disapproval, the frisson of horror that had juddered like a migraine across his mother’s eyes) he had announced, He was born again in Tupelo, Mississippi, in a two-room country shack. But, the way things had started to turn around today, Harold Roy might be persuaded to believe in miracles. Even Jesus in blue suede shoes.