‘Christ!’ Arthur swore at her. ‘When the fuck is she going to be free of that man? She was in a bad enough state while he was still alive, but now that he’s dead she’s worse.’ He took another mouthful of coffee, his hands shaking.
‘Drink some water,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s better for you than that stuff.’ She poured a glass for him, but Arthur did not move. ‘Arthur,’ she said gently, ‘I could see Sonja was pretty close to the edge last night. I know you care about her but it won’t do her any good if you let her drag you over too.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She would have gone over if you hadn’t been there last night. I knew that stuff about waiting with a gun for Vallance was a lot of bullshit.’
‘He didn’t show up, then?’ Lorraine asked.
‘No. I don’t think he has the balls to do much of anything, though he has an ugly mouth.’ He picked up the glass of water and drank. ‘I didn’t know she had a gun in the house,’ he went on. ‘She wouldn’t give it to me.’ He caught Lorraine’s eye, and she got the message that he regarded the situation as serious.
‘Did you have a fight?’ she asked.
‘Kind of He gave a low, wry laugh. ‘She started watching these weird videotapes the police in California sent out to her — horrible, kinky stuff with Nathan and a bunch of other people. She kept saying how disgusting they were, how low Harry’d sunk, but she was fascinated. That’s what she’s like with him. That’s how I ended up drinking the best part of a bottle of Bourbon and taking off.’
‘Heavy,’ Lorraine said.
‘Oh, just the usual late-night special,’ Arthur said. ‘I can’t take a hell of a lot more of this. She’s been all over the place since Nathan’s death.’
Lorraine was intrigued. ‘What the hell was it Nathan had, to have all these people carrying on about him for twenty years? I’m sorry, but I’ve been picking my way through every detail of this guy’s life and I still feel like I don’t have a handle on what he was really like.’
‘That was the key to Harry,’ Arthur said. ‘He was plastic. He was a chameleon. He was beautiful, of course. He could turn every woman’s head walking down the street when he was young.’
‘You knew him and Sonja then?’ Lorraine asked.
‘Oh, yeah. I’m the fucking jerk who introduced them,’ Arthur said. ‘I met her first — she was painting then.’
‘I didn’t know Sonja painted,’ Lorraine said, registering that piece of information with interest.
‘Well, it wasn’t her real talent, but she was taught like everyone else in art school and she was competent. She was living with some rich old guy, but it was clear she was bored. I had a few dates with her — never really got past first base. I knew she was looking for some kind of intensity, that she thought I was pretty fucking boring, and I suppose I introduced her to Nathan and Vallance to show her, you know, that I wasn’t that straight because I had these wild, crazy friends.’
‘How did you first meet Harry Nathan?’ Lorraine asked.
We were at college together. He got kicked out. It was the hippie days, and he was an acid freak. He was trying to get a career together as a director, didn’t have a dime, and I never thought he and Sonja’d get together in a million years. Sonja was a real ice princess in those days, always living with someone with old masters on the walls, and Harry was so tacky — picking up girls in bars and living on tacos.’
‘Must have been the attraction of opposites.’
‘Yeah, bang, as soon as they met. A lot of it was just physical, I think, but the big deal about Harry was that he was a kind of blank space on which other people could write whatever they wanted — the stuff he made as a director was exactly like that too, reflections, if you see what I mean, rather than anything genuinely his own. Even Sonja admits that she kind of hypnotized herself with her own illusion of what he was like.’
‘But you love her anyway?’ Lorraine said.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I love her — I’d walk on hot coals for her.’ He spoke quietly and directly, looking Lorraine straight in the face, and she knew that his anger had passed and that he was telling her the simple truth. ‘I waited fifteen years to get her back from that asshole Nathan, and I knew he still had part of her, maybe the deepest part, but I can wait another fifteen years to get that back too. It’ll end. I know it will.’
Though it certainly didn’t show any sign of ending any time soon, Lorraine thought privately. Another raft of speculation floated into her mind. Could Arthur have killed Nathan? Either because Sonja had asked him to, or out of a belief that while he was alive, Sonja would never get over her obsession with him?
‘Were you still in contact with Sonja and Nathan when he bought the gallery?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Arthur said, ‘I couldn’t stand to see her with him — couldn’t stand to see her being fooled by him. And I was damned if I was going to hang around like the bad fairy, having lunch with Sonja once a month and hoping Nathan’d get hit by a truck. The way fucking Vallance did.’
‘Do you still see Vallance?’
‘Not if I can avoid it.’
Lorraine changed tack. ‘Did Sonja mention to you what I came out here to investigate?’ she asked.
‘Not really. She just said you were tracing some assets belonging to the estate.’
‘Well, I am, in a way,’ said Lorraine. ‘She seems very detached about it all — I mean, she gets the house, and anything I can trace will go to her too.’
‘She’ll never live in that place again,’ Arthur said. ‘I don’t think she cares much about the money either — she has other assets of her own.’
‘You probably know that Harry Nathan’s major asset was supposed to be his art collection,’ Lorraine said, and thought that a trace of tension entered Arthur’s manner.
‘Oh, really?’ he said. ‘I hadn’t given it a lot of thought.’
‘Well, it turns out that the major pieces in the collection were acquired by fraud. He and Kendall Nathan sold various paintings to people with no experience of the art market, then delivered fakes. Kendall thought all the real stuff was hanging in Nathan’s house, but it seems that he pulled the same move again on her. All his own collection was fake too.’
‘Serves her right,’ Arthur said.
‘Did you meet her?’ Lorraine asked.
‘Just once or twice,’ Arthur said coolly. ‘So, you’re trying to trace the paintings?’
Lorraine nodded. ‘That or the profits of the sale. Nathan used a lot of aliases, and he must have had secret bank accounts.’
‘Well, they could be anywhere by now,’ Arthur said. ‘People buy hot art work and keep it in a cellar for thirty years.’
‘But the money must be somewhere,’ Lorraine persisted.
‘Well, he was a film producer, wasn’t he? Surely the quickest way to make a lot of money disappear in LA is to pour it into some godawful movie. Nathan’s career was in trouble, wasn’t it?’
‘Maybe I’ll ask Feinstein to go through the books at Maximedia again,’ Lorraine said. ‘Though I’m sure he’ll already have done so pretty thoroughly.’
‘Or, of course, Nathan could have had other production companies.’ Arthur seemed to be pushing this hypothesis, and though it was plausible enough, Lorraine wondered whether he might be trying to lead her down a blind alley — away from his beloved Sonja — and she moved back into the terrain where her true suspicions lay.
‘Sonja didn’t keep in touch with Harry after they divorced?’ she asked carefully. ‘I mean, she told me she didn’t, but I wondered whether maybe she continued to see him from time to time — maybe didn’t want you to know. Did you ever suspect anything like that was going on?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Arthur said evenly, and Lorraine was reminded of the housekeeper, Juana, that an unshakeable loyalty stood between her and the truth. He had already said that Sonja periodically took off, that often he did not know where she was or where she had been. ‘If you’re looking to trace off-record contacts of Nathan’s in the art world, I’d start with his brother,’ he went on.