‘Busy.’
‘Make it if you can. Peter wants to ask you something about surfing.’
I plugged the mobile charger into the mains and made the connection. I killed time. At five o’clock sharp, just as I was expecting the phone to ring, Price walked through the door I usually leave open.
‘I couldn’t stay at home any longer so I thought I’d… No sign of Danni and the mobile still doesn’t answer.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sit down. How are you?’
He lit a cigarette. I could smell liquor on the smoke he expelled but he seemed sober enough. ‘Ratshit.’
‘Did you have any thoughts about the twins?’
‘Yeah. It came to me just before I left. Gretel and Anna Larson. Danish.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ve got a phone number. Danni scribbled it down on the telephone book one time and I remembered it being there.’
He read the number off the palm of his hand and I wrote it down. Price didn’t strike me as the sort of man who’d normally write numbers on his hand but I had to make allowances for circumstances. He was smoking pretty furiously, obviously shaken to the core. His colour was bad and he couldn’t keep still.
‘So what’ll you do?’
‘If the name’s not in the book I can crosscheck phone numbers and addresses. One of the tricks of the trade. What’s wrong?’
Price had jumped from his chair and was pacing the small space there was to pace in. He stopped, looked around for an ashtray and I slid the w.p.b. towards him with my foot. He bent and stubbed the cigarette out. ‘I… I didn’t tell you everything when we first spoke.’
‘No?’
‘No. The police are treating Sammy’s death as suspicious.’
“They always do that with overdoses.’
He lit another Camel and blew smoke impatiently in my direction. ‘No. This is to do with the phone call that alerted the emergency service. Someone was in the house. Someone…’
‘Take it easy.’
‘They always suspect the partner, don’t they?’
I nodded. ‘It’s generally a safe bet, but you’re in the clear. You were at work.’
He shook his head. ‘No, God help me, I wasn’t. I was at Junie’s.’
14
Price dropped his cigarette on the floor and hid his face in his hands. I came around the desk, retrieved the cigarette and stubbed it out. I wanted to comfort him in some way but didn’t know how. I touched him briefly on the shoulder and went back behind the desk. He was wearing an expensive suit like the ones I’d seen him in before, but now his tie was slipped down, the lapels of the jacket were wrinkled from its being thrown somewhere and there was something spilled on the front — at a guess, cigarette ash and whisky. His thick, dark hair was awry; he was one of those men with sinister dark-blue beard shadows, like Richard Nixon, and he was well overdue for his second shave of the day. He looked a mess.
I tried a firm but friendly tone. ‘Marty, you need to go home, swim in your pool, eat something, have another couple of drinks and get some sleep.’
That was a slip — how was I to know he had a pool? But pool owners don’t usually object to people assuming they have them and, anyway, he wasn’t listening.
‘I don’t want to get her involved.’
With adulterers, as I know from personal experience, a statement like that can be code for, I don’t want to be found out. But that didn’t seem to fit Price’s case just now. I made a gesture intended to be sympathetic. ‘The police will want to question her to confirm your whereabouts,’ I said. ‘All being well, it shouldn’t go any further than that. Have you made a statement?’
He looked sullen and in his dishevelled state that gave him an aggressive, threatening appearance that wouldn’t go down well with the cops. ‘Not yet, but they said I’d have to make one. It’s obvious you don’t know who Junie is.’
I was wavering in my reaction to my troubled client — between respect, sympathy and dislike. ‘No, Mr Price,’ I said, ‘I don’t. Should I?’
‘She’s Jade Delaney’s sister.’
I switched off from music round about Dire Straits and couldn’t tell the Spice Girls from Bardot, although I know the names. Jade Delaney was something different again. The media billed her as a cross between Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin, both of whom I’d liked, so I’d taken the trouble to listen when she came on the radio and had even seen a video clip once. She was a tall blonde with white hair and a long jaw that was almost misshapen but wasn’t. Stick-thin in black leather, she was erotic, anorexic, neurotic-looking, an assemblage of jangled nerve images that compelled you to look at her. All that combined with a voice that threatened to cause your head to explode and part you from your senses. I could see the similarity to Junie — the pallor and the face structure, the huge eyes.
‘That’s difficult,’ I said.
‘The media vultures’ll eat this up.’
There was truth in what he said. Everything Jade Delaney did or touched was newsworthy and a sister involved with a drug death was about as bad a story as her handler could dream of. Or maybe not.
‘A nine-day wonder maybe,’ I said. ‘All publicity is good publicity for pop stars isn’t it? Look at Keith Richards.’
‘That was then, this is now. It’s all different. Drugs are out, God is in.’
‘Well fuck that.’
Price was pulling himself together again and he helped the process along with a cigarette. ‘Easy for you to say. Junie idolises her sister. The thought of damaging her in any way would tear her apart. And she’s just on the brink of starting a singing career herself.’
None of this was cutting much ice with me. Presumably Junie volunteered to screw the boss whom she knew was married. No happy ending guaranteed. It seemed to me that Price had more important things to worry about, like who might have had a hand in his wife’s death and what he was going to do about his daughter. I got up and sat on the end of my desk, a move calculated to budge him from the seat he’d settled down into with despair in his body language.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘What you have to do is contact your lawyer. I assume you have one?’
He nodded. Blew smoke.
‘Talk to him and…’
‘Her. Cathy Jacobsen.’
Great, I thought, I hope you’re not screwing her as well. ‘Her then. Tell her everything that’s been going on, or as much as you feel able to. You know, about your wife’s behaviour and what you suspect about Danni.’
‘Suspect bullshit, I know! Jason…’
‘Yeah, well you might not know as much as you think you do. You’ve admitted that you had poor communication with Danni. Leaving each other notes you said. And I think there were sides to Jason that weren’t obvious. He wasn’t the most truthful kid in the world. I think he got you in. I suspect he was a bit of an actor for one thing.’
He leaned forward, interested now. ‘And what else?’
Like he was fucking your wife as well as your daughter, I thought. ‘He had more money than he should have for a start. And as you know I followed Danni this morning.’
‘And found her celebrating her stepmother’s death.’
‘I didn’t say that and I don’t know that she’d think of her as a stepmother,’ I said. ‘But she didn’t look like a freaked-out druggie to me. She’s hell on wheels with those rollerblades and a skateboard.’
He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up, rubbing his bristled chin. ‘I’m too buggered to think. I’ll do what you say — ring Cathy for some legal advice — and go home and knock myself out.’
‘What about Junie? You should warn her.’
He moved towards the door like a man who’d just experienced bad cramp in both legs. ‘You’ll look for Danni? I’m good for whatever it’s costing.’
I nodded. ‘And what do I say to her when I find her?’
Price shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said and went out the door.
I opened a window and waved at the fug of smoke Price’d left in the air. I had the office repainted a couple of years ago but old stains had seeped back through and as a good many of my clients seem to be smokers the ceiling has taken on that brown-grey look cigarette smoke leaves behind. What with a bit of mould, dead insects and spilled coffee and red wine, the place had quickly re-acquired the worked-in look I quite like.