‘I’m sorry, Mr Vallance. I only just heard about Cindy and...’
She looked carefully at him: his head was bowed and he was weeping, covering his face with the white cloth. Lorraine picked up the glass of water and held it out to him, but he shook his head and turned away from her. It was about three minutes before he composed himself, checked his nose again and looked at the spots of blood on the handkerchief before he put it back in his pocket. He reached for the glass of water and raised it to his lips, his hand shaking badly. He sipped carefully, then slowly replaced the glass on the desk.
‘How did she do it?’ he asked flatly.
‘She took some cord, wrapped it round the shower head and then round her throat — only a short distance, but enough. She was kneeling, as if she was praying, according to the servants.’
He sighed, and reached for the water again, drained it and held the empty glass in his hands. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe she wasn’t as tough as I thought.’
‘Nobody ever is,’ she said, and he looked up. ‘Can I ask you frankly, Mr Vallance, do you think Cindy killed Harry Nathan?’
There was a moment’s silence, and Lorraine had the impression of a curtain falling at the back of the man’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, I do. She would never have been convicted, of course. Harry should have kept right away from women — he just wasn’t himself with them, they made him dirty, sucked him dry. I used to tell him that he ought to regard women as liquor to an alcoholic, that they were something he would have to cut right out of his life, just accept that they brought out negative things in him, things he didn’t need.’
‘Harry was different then, away from female company? ‘
Vallance gave a strange, bitter-sweet smile. ‘He was such a prince when he could cut loose from all that, the kindest, funniest, most generous guy you could meet, and so damn talented...’ God, Lorraine thought, he sounded like some high-school girl gushing over her first beau. ‘Cindy never gave a damn about Harry,’ Vallance went on. ‘She never gave a damn about anyone but herself. She wanted his money, and she thought... I guess she thought she’d got it.’ His quick correction didn’t escape Lorraine. Could Vallance have had anything to do with Cindy’s death? Was it possible that he and Kendall had acted together:
‘But, Mr Vallance, although you say you and Harry were such good friends, I have to say that I know he was blackmailing you.’
He laughed softly. ‘That’s what I mean. The women changed him, made him dirty, selfish. That’s not the way he started out, but it was sure as hell the way he finished up. Once Harry stopped making money, I doubt if there was anyone he knew that he didn’t put the squeeze on. He wouldn’t think of it as blackmail, though — he would probably have been shocked if you called him a blackmailer. Conman might be a better description.’
‘Did you pay him?’
He stared at a point on the wall. ‘I guess so. I paid Harry in women, but he also paid me his way — sometimes my rent, phone bills or whatever. He liked me to have to ask him for hand-outs, but he could be generous.’
Lorraine waited. Vallance was digging deep inside himself, and she knew from his body language that it hurt: he seemed to have shrivelled, as if he was ageing in front of her.
‘So why did you put up with it?’
His shoulders lifted. ‘It didn’t happen overnight, darling. Our sort of relationship goes back a long way.’ Again there was a pause, and Vallance sat back, as though watching a movie playing on her office wall.
‘I knew Harry before any of them — we used to share an apartment.’ What a surprise, Lorraine thought. ‘We used to work out together — this is before anybody worked out. Harry always kept himself in shape. We’d pick up these little girls and bring them home, and we’d both come on with the heavy romance, and they’d think they’d met these two really great guys.’ Vallance almost chuckled. ‘And then, after a while, of course, we’d get them in bed and give them all the I-never-met-anyone-like-you-before crap, and then as soon as we’d fucked them, Harry used to put on this crazy voice and yell, “Grand Central Station, ladies and gentlemen!”’ Vallance produced an odd, caterwauling yodel like an Appalachian railway porter. ‘“All change!” And then, of course, I’d fuck his and he’d fuck mine. Sometimes the girls’d kick up a fuss, and Harry’d say,’ Vallance’s face contorted with amusement, ‘“A fuck is only a fuck, my dear, but a friend is a good cigar.”’ He laughed, slapping his thighs. ‘That was when Harry started all the goofy kind of comedy he used to do later on. All that came right out of that apartment we used to have, I swear it.’
Jesus, Lorraine thought: Vallance imagined he was not only Harry Nathan’s heroic friend, ideal lover, but also his muse. The reality, however, was painfully clear: Vallance couldn’t get sex with Harry, so the next best thing was sex with the women who did, and preferably thirty seconds after Harry had pulled out.
‘Presumably all this fun and games had to stop when Harry got married?’
‘You bet it did,’ Vallance said bitterly. ‘What he ever saw in that fucking Swedish bitch, God knows. She was great-looking, of course, but, Christ, they all were.’
‘So, you didn’t see so much of Harry after that?’
‘Oh, I saw him okay,’ Vallance said. ‘Harry was innocent, and he just assumed we’d all be friends. He started making a lot of money with his movies, but Sonja just pissed on all that too. I used to go out to the house most weekends, watch her spending Harry’s money doing the place up like fucking Versailles. Then when she finished the house, she started saying how bored she was, so Harry bought her the gallery. Anyone else would have got down on their knees in gratitude, but Sonja said Harry did it to stifle her talent, to make her play shopkeeper when she wanted to be alone, to create...’
‘But she must have had talent of some sort,’ Lorraine said. ‘I mean, she has quite a reputation now.’
‘You can sell just about anything on the modern art market, Mrs Page, provided it’s full of enough neurosis, sickness and self-possession, and Sonja Sorenson had all those things to burn.’
‘So what happened? Why did they get divorced?’
‘Well, Sonja was miserable. Nothing was ever right for her, and first it was Harry’s fault, and then it was my fault,’ Vallance said, and something in his voice told Lorraine that he was about to embark on another pack of lies. ‘She started blaming me for everything, trying to turn Harry against me, saying I was at the house too much, saying I was just taking money off him. Sonja got more and more up her own ass, and then they couldn’t have kids, and by the time they finished up she was in her forties and she looked pretty terrible.’
‘She didn’t look so bad at Forest Lawn,’ Lorraine said, thinking of the elegant woman she had seen at the funeral.
‘That’s just clothes,’ Vallance said dismissively, turning round to lean against the sill.
When Vallance was lying, an airy nastiness entered his voice, and Lorraine knew he was lying now. She was quite certain that his account of the Nathan marriage was as biased, distorted and selective as it was possible to get.
‘So, did you encourage him to leave her?’ she asked.
Vallance sat down again, brushed at his immaculate suit and adjusted his perfectly knotted tie. ‘Let’s just say I helped along what was going to happen anyway. Kendall was on the scene by then, and she was digging Sonja’s grave from the minute she walked through the door.’
Lorraine pricked up her ears.
‘So you and Kendall helped things along together?’ she suggested. ‘Did you get along well with Kendall?’