When the cab driver showed up, Cindy gave him the boxes of tapes with Lorraine’s address and twenty-five dollars. Good riddance, she thought. Mrs Page was welcome to listen to all the rambling rubbish Harry recorded. There was nothing to find.
The videos, though, they were something else — but where the fuck were they? Harry had kept all the recordings together in the safe under the floor in his dressing room but the videotapes, both the ones from the security cameras and the... the other ones, were gone. Cindy tried to tell herself that if she couldn’t find them, nobody else was likely to, but the possibility that they might be circulating somewhere out there tormented her.
It was more likely that the tapes had never left the house, she told herself. Harry had just moved them again, the mistrustful, suspicious-minded bastard. She set off for the stairs to have another look in the gym, where there was certainly no visible hiding place for the substantial stack of videos. She deduced he must have had a new cavity let into the floor or the wall.
The noise of Cindy’s tapping on what she considered various likely spots on the walls masked the sound of the doors opening to the pool area. At first she didn’t notice the man’s presence, and for over a minute he watched her in silence before he spoke.
‘Cindy,’ he said, his voice curiously cold and flat.
She froze.
‘Cindy,’ he said again.
‘Jesus, Raymond, you gave me such a fucking scare! Don’t ever do that to me again! How did you get in here?’
In front of her was a tall man with thinning silver-grey hair, and an extraordinarily handsome face. When he began to speak, it became clear that behind the distinguished façade was a vapid, unstable personality. There was only one thing Raymond Vallance could ever have been, and that is what he was: an actor.
‘Through the pool doors. I still have the key to this fairy bower, Rapunzel, remember?’ He had the mannered and over-emphasized diction of the lifelong performer, and shook the key at Cindy before he put it back in his pocket.
‘Well, long time, no see,’ Cindy said, trying to ignore his apparent froideur and assuming a coquettish air as she moved across to him. She made to slide her arms round his waist, but Vallance stepped away immediately. Close to, she could see that he was grey in the face, haggard, as though he hadn’t slept in days, and his clothes were creased and dirty. Not that that was necessarily anything new with Raymond, she thought, but he was clearly in no mood for fun and games.
‘Cindy,’ he said, ‘we have to be very careful now, you know that.’
‘For Chrissakes, Raymond. Harry’s being pickled in brine at Forest Lawn right this minute!’ Cindy cried. ‘We don’t have to hide anything.’
‘Don’t talk that way about him, you tacky little piece of trash,’ Vallance snapped, and Cindy recoiled from the cold anger in his voice. For a moment she had the impression that he was genuinely in the grip of strong emotion, almost as though he were fighting back tears — but if Raymond was so crazy about Harry, what had he been doing fucking the ass off Harry’s wife every time his back was turned:
‘Raymond, I haven’t seen you in weeks. I’m, like, totally strung out and I’m pregnant, Raymond. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’ she began, her voice trembling.
‘Not particularly,’ Vallance said, in the same odd, cold tone she had never heard from him before. ‘Other people’s children have never interested me much.’
‘Raymond—’ Cindy wailed.
Vallance cut her short. ‘I came here to ask you only two things, Cindy,’ he said. ‘First, what happened to the tapes?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, her eyes sliding away from his.
‘Did the police take them?’
‘I can’t find them — I mean the videos. They were in the safe and now they’re gone. I took the tapes from the phone out and—’
He interrupted her again. ‘And where are they?’
Cindy squirmed. ‘I... put ’em somewhere safe.’
‘Cindy,’ Vallance said, grabbing the girl by her upper arms, ‘tell me where the fucking tapes are right now or I’ll break your arm.’ He shook her hard, and she saw a darkness in his eyes she had not seen before. It chilled her to the bone.
‘I... I hired a PI to, like, look after us,’ Cindy stammered, beginning to cry. ‘I gave them to her. I had to, Raymond, it would’ve looked worse if I hadn’t, and I checked ’em all.’
Vallance thrust her violently away from him. She stumbled in the high, unwieldy shoes and fell backwards onto the floor. ‘You sent those tapes to a private investigator?’ he said, now white with rage. ‘Tell me her name.’
‘Page,’ Cindy sobbed. ‘Lorraine Page. On... West Pico.’
‘Well, I’ll take care of that,’ he said. He stood looking at the girl’s huddled body on the floor, listening to her cry. He turned to go, but then bent down beside her.
‘Cindy?’ His voice was oddly gentle. ‘Just one last thing I need to know, Cindy.’ She lifted her head and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing the blue eye-shadow in streaks across her face.
‘You killed Harry, didn’t you, Cindy?’
She sensed danger immediately and tried to roll away from him, but in one movement Vallance caught her by the hip, turned her onto her back and sat astride her. ‘Did you kill him, Cindy?’ he asked, as though they were exchanging pleasantries at a party.
‘Raymond,’ she wept, almost hysterical, ‘you’re hurting me! You’ll hurt the baby!’
‘Answer me, Cindy,’ Vallance demanded, and banged her head hard on the floor. ‘Did you kill him or not?’
‘I didn’t! I swear it! I swear it on my kid’s life, Raymond — it’s Harry’s kid.’ She did not know what prompted her to add the last words, but she felt the high tension in Vallance’s body slacken.
‘Well,’ he said, releasing her and giving her a look almost of disgust, ‘maybe it is.’
He rocked back onto his heels with a peculiarly graceful movement, and got to his feet, looking down at her as dispassionately as though she were a drunk he had to step over in the street. ‘See you at Forest Lawn,’ he said, and was gone.
Decker’s phone rang. It was the doorman: there had been a delivery, in three cardboard boxes. He’d bring them up.
The boxes were stiff-sided packing cases, thickly Sellotaped across the opening flaps, and numbered one to three. Decker and Lorraine ripped open case one.
‘Harry Nathan’s private recordings of phone calls and anyone who called at the house,’ Lorraine said.
‘Dear God, this’ll take weeks to plough through.’ Decker looked over the rows and rows of tapes, marked with dates.
Lorraine pointed to case three. ‘Start with the most recent and work backwards. See you tomorrow after I’ve held Cindy’s hand at Forest Lawn.’ She bent down and clipped on Tiger’s lead. The big dog immediately began to drag her towards the door.
Decker checked his watch — almost six fifteen. He packed twenty of the tapes for the last three months into his car tape case, stuck it in his gym bag and decided that he would start playing them as he drove home.
Raymond Vallance sat in the downstairs lobby of Lorraine’s building and observed Decker carefully through the iridescent blue lenses of his last season’s Calvin Klein sunglasses. He had been just in time to see three packing cases go in, and one lady, a big dog and now quite a cute little fag come out. No boxes.