Verismo Bliss Chapter 4

4.

The gun looked like a relic from one of the World Wars, but the hand that held it was firm. And the rest of her body certainly wasn’t flabby: it had more curves than the Monte Carlo Rally. And Harry figured she could be just as dangerous. Her skin was a very light olive colour; her eyes were deep brown with long eyelashes; her lips full and painted with reddish brown-lipstick;
‘That thing work?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Like to find out? It’s a Mauser HSc; this particular model made in 1942. A German pistol. Small, but packs a punch.’
‘A Nazi gun.’
‘A gun isn’t political.’
‘You seem to know your antiques – you going to take over your father’s business, Ramona?’
She gripped the gun tighter. ‘Don’t talk about my father. Who are you?’
‘I’m working for the police.’
‘In what capacity?’
‘Private detective. Sub-contracting.’
‘ID?’
‘May I?’ he said, indicating the inside pocket of his jacket.
She nodded, watching him carefully. He pulled out his ID and she took it from him.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said.
She nodded, passed back his ID and put the gun down next to the family photographs, her gaze lingering over the images.
‘That you?’
She picked up the one he had indicated. ‘I was just one day old in this picture. By the time I was 5 my mother was dead. I try to remember her, but all I can see are these photographs, and the home movies, in my mind.’ She smiled. ‘I guess I’m an orphan now.’
Harry moved a little closer to her. ‘Your mother was very attractive. Your father never re-married?’
‘No,’ she said, putting the photograph down.
‘Any girlfriends?’
‘Is that how you do your job?’ she snarled. ‘You say you’re sorry for my loss, tell me my mother was beautiful and then start digging for dirt.’
Harry took a step back. ‘It’s a bad habit, I guess. But the way it works is that I try to build up a picture, a story, with information and facts, and sometimes the blank parts of the story are the most interesting, because it’s what people don’t tell you that often leads to the truth. Sometimes that means I piss people off, but it’s the only way the job can get done.’
‘And what have you found out so far?’
‘Not much. I only started last night. You heard about the murder in Long Acre?’
‘I saw it on the feed this morning. Is it connected?’
‘The police think so, yes.’
Ramona looked down at the bed, and the stain on the mattress. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.’
Harry shrugged. ‘I guess it would make it more random, not so personal, but either way, your father has gone.’ He said it softly, with care, and she looked up at him, and there was a hint of regret in her brown eyes, like a smudge of morning mascara from a heavy party. ‘I’d like to talk to you about your father, but here’s not the place, maybe we could meet up for dinner later?’
She picked up the gun. ‘It wasn’t loaded.’
He smiled. ‘Remind me never to play poker with you.’
She saw him out of the shop having agreed to meet him at 8 for dinner. He suggested Café Pacifico but Ramona said nobody cooked Mexican like her dad, so they agreed on Peking Joe’s in Chinatown.
When she closed the door of the shop on him, Harry nudged Khan with his DM’s, ‘You could have warned me.’
‘Shit, man, what could I do? She was in the place before I knew what was happening.’
‘You seen her around before?’
‘Sure, it’s old Luz’s daughter. Hot taco, eh?’
‘She here the day he died?’
‘I wasn’t here in the day, only got here later. Then the screaming started.’
Harry dropped into Blinker & Simpson and spoke to a surly young trainee called Paul, who needed to be tamed with a threat of hindering official business before he pulled out details on Luz Noche. Mr Noche was looking to sell up. He got a valuation on the property and had looked at properties in Notting Hill and Pimlico. The chickenfeed he would get for his Goodwins Court shop wouldn’t pay for a doorframe in those areas.
Harry was just leaving when the trainee said, ‘Shame about Mr Noche, he seemed a nice guy. I guess his wife must be broken up – give her my condolences if you see her.’
‘Wife?’
‘Sure, Gloria. Nice looking and a lot younger than him. No offence meant, but she was a looker. You seen her?’
Harry shook his head.
‘Well I wouldn’t mind comforting her,’ he said with a leer that Harry would have liked to smack to Hong Kong.
‘Description?’
‘Blonde. About 30. No older than 35. Plump in the right places, if you get my gist. And tight clothes to let everybody see them curves.’
‘They say they married or you presuming?’
‘’Hell, I thought it was his daughter to start with. Nah, he said, he and his wife…actually, you know what, he said his wife to be. Yeah, wife to be. Not any more though, I guess. Anyway, he said they were looking to move away from this bad area and she was all over him, saying how she couldn’t wait to find a place with a big bedroom – then gave me the slowest wink I ever had.’
‘You feel that wink all the ways from your toes to your lips?’
‘Sure – you been winked at like that before!’
Harry made his way back to Mercer Street. In his office he checked his messages. There were two more from Adam Cannon. Harry decided to bite the bullet.
‘Cannon? Harry Reed.’
‘Mr Reed. Mr Falsham would like an update.’
‘I’m afraid there’s not much to tell yet. It takes a lot of legwork, a lot of questions and a heap of luck to find somebody who doesn’t want to be found.’
‘Mr Falsham wants to meet you. Friday. 10am sharp. If he isn’t happy with your progress then your services will be terminated.’
End of call.
Harry logged into the police computers. Now that he was registered as working on a case he could legitimately use the majority of the cop’s library. He brought up the ID database that held details on every legal citizen in the UK and the activity on their ID cards.
Ten years ago, Harry thought, he would have been able to call up video footage of Goodwins Court and see who came and went the night Noche was murdered, but now, with the Freedom of Persons Act passed a few years back, every camera in every road and alley across the UK had been taken down and yet the police could still track you with your ID card through every bus stop, train station, road monitor, and see what you bought at the supermarket, what your favourite restaurant is, and who had accessed your sexual health records. And this was allowed under the Freedom of Persons Act because all the information was held on a closed computer system. Go figure.
He typed in Gwendolyn Falsham. There weren’t that many to scroll through and he found her records quickly. She had last used her ID card on the 24th July. At 10.02am she had entered Epping Tube station (the Falsham manor was located just outside the town) and at 10.52 she had exited Covent Garden Tube station. Harry smiled: so Khan was right. At 11.15 she had a meal at McDonalds and then at 13:06 her card was read by one Wat Tyler, and then it fell silent.
Harry lent back. Wat Tyler – English rebel. He typed in the name Wat Tyler and his card details came up - or rather they didn’t. There was no activity on Tyler’s card for three years, but his reader had been busy. Seems that a lot of people last used their cards with Mr Tyler – an average of 2 or 3 a week. Mr Tyler’s address was listed as a postcode only: SW1A 1AA. When Harry put that into GigaEarth it centred on a rather large house in the middle of the city that was surrounded on three sides by parkland. Everybody in London knew it as Buck House and Harry thought it unlikely that the King was sub-letting a room to a guy with such an incendiary name as Wat Tyler.
He then typed in the name Barry Penny. Penny had entered Epping Tube Station at 10.02am and at 10.52 he had left Covent Garden Tube station. At 11.17 he bought a meal at McDonalds and then at 14:06 he re-entered Covent Garden Tube and emerged at Epping Tube some 54 minutes later. Harry scanned down the activity report – Penny had been to Covent Garden again on 27 and 30th July and the 09 August. On each occasion he had been in a restaurant and paid for two meals.
Harry grinned; he’d have the girl found by the time of his meeting with Falsham. Easy money.
Since his luck was running good he typed in Luz Noche, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. He had hoped to get some skin sellers names, but they nearly all used blanked or stolen readers. He’d have to wade through the scanned in address book and see if he could get any names from that. He typed in Gloria Noche but it came up zilch.
Finally he called up Ramona Noche. She liked to shop. And eat out. That was pretty much it. But he let his eyes linger over her photograph and he wondered what she would wear that evening.

Peking Joe’s was on Gerard Street in the heart of Chinatown. As soon as you entered the street the smell of stir fried meat hit you and made your stomach leap with anticipation. It was an eclectic crowd that gathered around the streets: there were the old Asians who sat playing chess, mah-jong or cards for more money than somebody like John Khan would see in a lifetime; the young Asian men stood around with cigarettes hanging out the sides of their mouths, eyes covered by the coolest shades and legs squeezed into tight jeans, looking like fags trying to look hot for women; the Asian girls flounced up and down screeching greetings to each other and laughing at the studs who looked like fags; the Eastern Europeans looking for a mark; the Americans looking for some authentic London flavour; the theatre and cinema goers looking to eat before taking in their entertainment; the urchins from the Garden looking for coin to beg or pockets to pick; the skin-sellers from the Garden and Soho poncing for business.
Peking Joe’s was hip with the in crowd since the gossip rags had reported that the Bollywood star Amarjit Nagani had eaten there before his latest movie, Star Crossed Caste, had premiered at the Odeon in Leicester Square. The bouncers on the door wore turbans with golden stars. The waiters wore crisp white shirts and black trousers pressed to perfection. The patrons dressed casually with jewellery that could have bought Zimbabwe and still have change over for a tip. And, Harry thought, they probably tipped big at Peking Joe’s.
When he arrived it suddenly occurred to him that they wouldn’t get a table, but she was there in situ waving him over. They shook hands and Harry wished he had a better suit to put on. He also wished he knew how to behave when talking to the beautiful ones. When making a speech they say you should imagine the audience naked to get over your shyness, but that didn’t help with the beautiful ones; it made it much, much worse. He asked Ramona how she’d bagged a table at such short notice and she’d shrugged, saying she knew the manager. Peking Joe was a lucky guy.
A waiter handed them a wine list that was so beautifully bound and decorated it would have made the monks at Kells envious. Harry didn’t trust himself with wine and ordered himself an Anchor; he knew where he was with beer. Ramona ordered a demi bottle of Chianti. The menu was as large as an old broadsheet and when opened it blotted Peking Joe’s out from the world. Ramona asked him if he was happy with the set meal for two, option B, as she liked to mix and match. Harry said sure he wasn’t averse to a little variety. She asked him if he was married, as though his meal choice was somehow connected with his marital status. When he told her his wife was dead she surprised him by asking what had happened; most people just offered pity and changed the subject.
‘She spent half her life trying to find something at the bottom of a bottle, but all you find there is self-pity and death unless somebody can drag you out.’
‘And you couldn’t drag her out?’
‘They have to want to be dragged.’
The drinks arrived and he raised his bottle to her. ‘To good health,’ he said grinning. ‘What about you?’
She took a sip from her glass and the Chianti shimmered around her lips. ‘I was engaged once, but then found out he was married so that put the kibosh on our wedding.’
‘It would tend to do that. Has it ruined your appetite for commitment?’
‘Let’s just say I don’t fall head over heels until I’ve had a good look to see if I’m falling in to shit or clover first.’
The food was delivered by three waiters who moved with perfect chorography around the table, delivering dish after dish. They bowed in unison. Harry expected them to goose-step away, but they floated away like swans on the Serpentine.
Over large portions they made small talk. He told her how he had been head of security for Grabsco, a large multi-national with pudgy corporate fingers in everything from oil to recreational drugs, but had lost his job during the meltdown (but who hadn’t? Those who didn’t lose their jobs had to endure such severe pay cuts they might as well have been serfs). He’d considered joining the police but his wife had a record – nothing major, but enough to blot his application – so had gone private, forming Reed & Hopkins with an old friend who just happened to be an ex-cop. Hopkins was long gone, another victim of an internet romance that had seen him move to Maine, New England. So now it was just Reed and business was pretty good – especially since the Police Outsourcing Bill had allowed the police to sub-contract cases to licensed private detectives.
Ramona told him of her shorter life. It was just her and her dad. She often wondered what life would have been like if her mother had lived; but her father had been happy enough, she felt, and she had done all she could to make him happy. He had always been interested in antiques and she had spent a lot of her life at auction houses up and down the country. Luz had opened his first shop in Brighton and then moved to Covent Garden when Covent Garden was still tourist central. Things hadn’t been going well recently and he had been looking to move. She’d had one disastrous love affair and a few meaningless but fun flings and now she wasn’t sure what to do once she was over grieving. She had been left everything in the will. Did that make her a suspect? Wasn’t it true that most murders are committed by people who know the victim?
‘Only if you ignore wars and genocide,’ Harry said.
‘So am I? A suspect, I mean?’
‘It doesn’t work like that. Not with me, anyway. I don’t draw up a list of suspects; chances are the murderer isn’t on the list. I just gather evidence until I have the answer, or not.’
‘Do many murders go unsolved?’
‘Oh, no murder is ever unsolved in the strictest sense. The dead know who did it. The killer knows who did it. And always somebody else – a friend or a lover of the killer. I prefer to think that no murders are unsolved, it’s just that some remain secrets.’
Over desserts and coffee the conversation changed gears.
‘Just for the record, where were you the night your father was killed?’
She smiled and looked down into the coffee which was the colour of her eyes. ‘I was at the movies – the Odeon in Shaftsbury Avenue - with a friend. We saw Balaam & the Devil – it wasn’t as good as the critics said – then we went for a couple of drinks and home by about 1.’
‘Where is home?’
‘I’ve got an apartment in East Ham. You want my friends name and address, the one I went to the movies with?’
‘She good looking?’
Ramona laughed, the bracelets on her arm tinkling like beads falling on glass.
Harry nodded. ‘It would help with my accumulation of knowledge.’
She opened her handbag and wrote a name and address onto a notelet. He took it and, without looking at it, put it in his pocket.
‘If business was going bad, could your father have got mixed up in debts he couldn’t pay?’
She shook her head. ‘Business was going bad but he still had a lot of money in the bank. More than I knew of, to be honest, until…well, until the will…’
Her head sank a little and a stray lock of hair fell across her face. Harry resisted the desire to reach out and touch her not because he lacked compassion, but because he knew his motive in touching her wasn’t to comfort.
He took out a small plastic zip bag and put it on the table. ‘You know what that is?’
‘Looks like Bliss to me.’
Harry smiled. ‘I must be getting old. How come I never heard about this stuff until yesterday?’
‘Are men ever interested? Before all this fertility problem the majority of men still didn’t carry condoms, presuming that the woman would be taking some contraception and trusting to blind luck not to catch anything, so why should men care now if a woman takes something to enhance her pleasure?’ She picked it up then, holding it up to the light. ‘This stuffs been around since the Sexual Involution; they were looking at ways to enhance pleasure since nobody was interested anymore. By the time of the Second Sexual Revolution the pill was being used by pimps to keep their whores happy; because of that it got a bit of a bad rap – it wasn’t what you took if you were doing sex for fun, only if you were a working girl.
‘But then it became illegal to claim dominion over a persons body – if they wanted to sell their flesh and somebody wanted to pay then that was between them. But, as you know, the sanctions against those who profited from others selling their bodies were increased. The pimps were dead, long live the Bliss dealers. Production was upped and Bliss was marketed as a respectable drug for the enhancement of the female orgasm – mainly sold through ex-pimps.’
‘Not illegal?’
‘Semi. I understand the government are still conducting tests on it, which is why you can’t buy it over the counter at your local Boots.’
‘What does it do to men?’
‘Men? As far as I know nothing – you thinking of taking it? Getting in touch with your feminine side?’
‘Believe me, if I could find a female side I’d be touching it.’
She smiled.
‘I guess there’s no point asking if you’ve used it.’
She arched an eyebrow at him. ‘And no point asking how you found out about it…yesterday.’
‘Did your father use skin-sellers?’
The smile dropped like a coin in a fruit machine. ‘My father’s name was Luz Noche – you know what Noche means?’
‘Night.’
‘What about Luz?’
Harry shrugged.
‘It means light. I think there’s something of my father’s name in you, Harry Reed – the night fighting with the light.’
‘So did he?’
She fiddled with her coffee cup. ‘I really don’t know.’
‘Any girlfriends?’
‘None that I know of.’
‘What about Gloria?’
Harry had studied articles on body language but thought it was mostly bullshit. You couldn’t make such a precise interpretation of such subtle movements when there were too many imponderables and unknowns to begin with: was the person in a bad mood anyway; how do people react to death; are they impotent; are they nymphomaniacs? Harry had discarded it as a useful tool in his detective armoury. Having said that, the flash of anger that went through Ramona’s eyes, the clenching of teeth, then the subtle intake of breath and false smile wouldn’t just have been a tell in poker, it would have been a politician’s speech.
‘Gloria?’
‘Wasn’t she a good friend of your father’s?’
‘Ha, not so you would notice. Gloria Isles was a cheap little…grifter. She worked with dad for a while, sorting out his accounts, until he found out she was transferring some funds to her own account. He was always too trusting.’
‘He tell the police?’
‘He wasn’t only too trusting, he was too nice, as well. He jut sacked her; didn’t even ask her to re-pay the money she’d stolen.’
‘Men usually only do that for a woman when there are complications.’
‘Complications? Harry, you don’t seem the sort of person to prevaricate, why don’t you say what you mean? You want to know if dad was fucking Gloria? Is that what it always comes down to?’
‘Sex and death are nearly always linked some way.’
‘Harry, I was close to dad, but I was still his daughter, he didn’t tell me who he was fucking. I hope he wasn’t doing that with Gloria – I’d like to think he had better taste.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Don’t know and don’t care.’
They went Dutch on the meal and outside in Chinatown the night had descended like a humid curtain. If anything the streets were busier and they spoke little as they dodged through the crowds and made their way to Wardour Street where Harry hailed a cab.
‘If you can think of anything that might help, get in touch.’
‘You mean you only want to see me again on a professional basis?’ she said and, suddenly, she had wrapped herself around him, her arms inside his jacket and around his waist, her legs pushing against him and her mouth upon his.
It was one of the better kisses he had known. She smelt like he had fallen into the Mediterranean Garden at Kew, and he could taste the Chianti on her lips, mixed with the almond taste of her lipstick. It was an explosion of a kiss that was over before his limbs could be re-arranged.
Then she was gone and he stood alone on Wardour Street. Except for the hundreds of other people. But they didn’t count anymore. Hell, they didn’t exist. There was a vibration in his pocket that didn’t surprise him at all - until he realised it was his smart. It was a message from Carr: Another one. Matthews Yard.