Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (38 page)

Whichever book you wind up doing, it’s surely going to be a big plus to have access to her.”

She was right. It was just there was a part of me that didn’t relish discussing Shotgun with her. For some curious reason I felt a kind of weird loyalty to him. But I was also aware that such hesitation was about as unprofessional as you could get. After all, I was going to be putting everything in a book for the whole world to read eventually. I reminded myself that Bettina would have been around there like a shot and held out my hand for Angie’s number.

“I’ll call her,” I said.

“And you might as well have Bettina’s file. She lodged a whole lot of stuff with me for safekeeping. She dug up such a lot of dirt on people that she became a little paranoid, if you must know.

She always thought people would be after her tapes and the names of her sources so she’d send me these sealed packages to store for her. But there’s one marked ‘Shotgun Marriott’ so I

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think you might want to take a look at what’s inside, don’t you?

It’s not like she’s going to be needing it anymore.”

I carried it home wondering how long Genevieve had been planning to sit on it.When I walked into the house my father was on the phone. “I need to call someone,” I mouthed at him. “I won’t be long,” he mouthed back and after a second or two I realized he was talking to my mother again.As I went upstairs I heard him say:

“Vanessa, I’ve always wanted to live in America.”

News to me.

“Nathalie,” I heard him shout a few minutes later, “I’m off the phone and your mother sends her love. Sorry she didn’t have time to speak to you but she was just rushing out.”

Nothing changes, I thought as I dialed the number Genevieve had given me.

“Hello?” The sound of Angie Marriott’s throaty mid-Atlantic drawl took me straight back to our meeting at the Old Stone Market.

“It’s Lee Bartholomew,” I said. “I’m in London and my agent said you wanted to get together.”

“I certainly do,” she said.

“I understand you want to do a book now?” I said.

“I’m certainly thinking about it,” she said. “It’s taken me an awfully long time to come to this decision but I feel I have no other option. I have to tell my side of the story and I’m ready to tell the world what really happened that night.”

“What really happened,” I repeated.

“How my husband killed that girl. I was there. I saw it all and I’m going to talk. Come and have a drink tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything.”

C

17

H A P T E R

P

T HE FOLLOWING EVENING CATH OPENED THE DOOR

to me in her bra and knickers.

I was shaken at the sight of her in a state of undress—I could have been anybody—and my face must have registered my disapproval because she laughed.

“Oh, come on, don’t look like that. Relax, Lee. I took a look through the peephole before I opened the door, saw you standing there.”

I bristled.
Relax, Lee
. Cath never missed an opportunity to have a go at me but that was part and parcel of our friendship.

“Anyway, come in, come in. I don’t want to be caught standing here in me undies if one of the neighbors comes by. I strip down whenever Marcus has his bath because I always get soaked.

By the time he’s finished there’s always more water outside the bath than in.You might think about doing the same.”

“I’ll just stand in the corner and watch,” I said.

“Oh, come
on,
Lee. You’ve got to get into the spirit of the thing. Sometimes I even climb in with him.Think of it as practice for when you have your own.You and Tommy made any plans in that direction yet?”

Oh, great, jump right in and put me on the spot, why don’t you, Cath? I was about to tell you of my doubts about my future

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with Tommy and ask your advice but, oh no, you have to go right past the finish line and start talking about kids.

“I told him, Lee. Once I’d persuaded him to get up off his butt and go to America and be with you, I said to him, what she wants is a baby,Tommy. And he’d be a terrific dad, you know he would.

Hasn’t he been on about settling down and having kids all these years he’s been with you? So now he’s got the chance, what does he do but run a mile in the opposite direction. Men! Typical!”

“Hold on a sec, what do you mean you persuaded him to go to America to be with me? Didn’t he want to?”

“Of
course
he wanted to, stupid. Just like he wants to marry you more than anything else in the world. He just doesn’t
know
it. He needs telling, that’s all.”

“And you told him?”

“I did. I said ‘Tommy, this is your last chance.You don’t marry her now, she’s going to give up on you once and for all.’ Never mind he’s been the one been pestering you to get married for umpteen years and you’ve been the one running in the opposite direction.You’ve got to make them think they’re losing their control over you and then they try to assert it all over again, the nitwits. So he goes ‘Right, I’m on it’ and the next thing I know he’s running round showing me moody head shots for his passport photo.‘Which is my best profile, Cath? I think the left, don’t you?’ I ruined it all by telling him he needed to be face-on for a passport photo. So has he put the cork back in the champagne bottle and repopped the question yet?”

“I was the one who popped it in the first place,” I said.

“Well, it’s his turn then. Now take off your top at least and come and help me try and wash Marcus’s filthy little feet.”

Watching her with Marcus—a scrappy little toddler with Cath’s carrot-colored hair—I saw how having a baby had soft-

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ened her, just as being around Eliza seemed to take the edge off Franny Cook’s bravado.

“By the way,” she said, winking at me and squeezing the water from a sponge over Marcus’s head, causing him to squeal in glee and beg for more, “we’re trying for another.”

“What about your teaching?” I said and realized immediately it was the wrong thing to ask. But Cath had been obsessive about her work before she got pregnant.

“Well, I’m not going back, am I?” she said, smiling at me. “It’ll be a bit of a scrape making ends meet but Richie seems prepared to have a go. Having Marcus changed everything for us. That’s why I’m telling you, Lee. You and Tommy should get started.

You’re going to be forty next birthday, if I’m not mistaken?”

I was about to start fretting about when I would be able to have a baby when the front door banged and Richie’s voice shouted up the stairs.

“I’m home! Max is just parking the car. He and Paula’ll be here in a jiff.”

I looked at Cath and she made an
Oh dear!
face.

“Sorry, should have told you straight away. I invited Max Austin to join us for dinner. Did I tell you about Paula?”

“No,” I said, feeling suddenly numb, “you did not.”

“His new girlfriend,” she said, winking again, “not that he ever had an old one.” She paused. “Except you, I suppose.”

“I was never his girlfriend,” I said. “There’s this bloke called Tommy Kennedy, remember? Been hanging round my neck for nine years like an overweight knapsack until he fell off of his own accord and now I can’t seem to straighten up without him.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in Max’s mind you were his potential girlfriend. He had the mother of all crushes on you. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

I hadn’t forgotten. Far from it. In fact I couldn’t understand

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why I was experiencing this sudden feeling of outrage that he had found someone new. I should be pleased for him. His wife—

by all accounts a colorful character and not just because her Jamaican skin had been café au lait—had been murdered. The ultimate irony for Det. Insp. Max Austin in charge of the arson/

murder investigation that had swept through the Notting Hill area barely two years ago. Until he fell for me, he had not looked at another woman for five years.

It was a case of unrequited love, I hasten to add. He was a moody piece of work, probably understandable under the circumstances, sometimes downright caustic and dismissive.Yet he was pretty interesting in the looks department, very much the type I went for—dark, deep-set brown eyes, straight nose. Brooding, tendency to give you mocking looks and then disarm you with a flash of wit or unexpected flattery. It was the unpre-dictability that I liked. You never knew where you stood so it woke you up, kept you on your toes.

Tommy, by contrast, was a big blond bear by whom I had always been able to set my clock—until it came to the most important thing of all, our wedding.

So why was I so irritated that Max Austin had found someone?

Because I was complacent enough to still think of him as mine and I was no good at being competitive. I was already dreading holding my own with Paula because she had to be smart and challenging to keep him interested.

She wasn’t.

She was a silly little creature with a tinny high-pitched giggle and somehow that made it even worse. It brought out the snotty side of me and I could see Cath beginning to look very worried as we heaped taramasalata onto our pita bread and sipped our Soave.

Max Austin looked daggers at me when he walked into Cath’s

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living room and picked his way around a pile of building blocks, a giant stuffed panda, and a plastic crate of assorted toys that signified Marcus’s total rule of the apartment. If I hadn’t known him better I’d have been worried, but a glare from Max could easily mean
Fuck! I’d forgotten how much I’m attracted to you and how
much you mean to me
. He did nothing to introduce Paula but it didn’t matter because she introduced herself and didn’t stop talking.

“You and Maxie know each other, do you? Funny, he’s never mentioned you but Cath and Richie, they talk about you nonstop.

So what’s it like living in the Hamptons? Do you see movie stars all the time like they say? Have you been to any of those parties we read about? The girl who did my pedicure last week, she was working out in the Hamptons at one of those spas on the ocean last summer, said it was chockablock with celebrities. I keep saying to Maxie that he needs a holiday. Maybe we could come and stay?”

I was still trying to get my head round the “Maxie.” The amazing thing was he didn’t appear to mind. I had to admit she was engaging with her streaked blond hair tied back in a ponytail that seemed to bob with excitement as she chattered. She had wide apart gray eyes and a cute little turned-up nose covered in freckles. But the best thing about her was her smile, because I could tell it was genuine. She was a good-natured airhead and I was a miserable old has-been.

Stop it!
I told myself.
You never wanted Max when he wanted you
so why should you deny him Paula?
In any case it wasn’t as if there was even room in the cabin for me to have them to stay.

“Jesus!” I whispered to Cath when I followed her into the kitchen to help serve the fish pie. “How do you put up with it?”

“Oh, she’s harmless enough,” said Cath, “and it’s all about sex, isn’t it? Poor old Max didn’t get any for five years after his wife

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died and now he’s getting shagged senseless every night, probably every fifteen minutes for all we know. He doesn’t know what’s hit him.”

Richie, bless him, eased me into the conversation over the coffee.

“So, I told you about Lee working with Shotgun Marriott, sir.”

“How many times have I told you not to call me sir when we’re off duty,” said Max.

“Call him Maxie like I do,” Paula giggled. I derived a small amount of satisfaction from seeing Max look at Richie in alarm and shake his head.

“Hell of a thing his son getting killed,” said Max, looking directly at me for the first time. “You were there when that happened?”

I nodded. “And Bettina Pleshette. Her body was found in the woods, on Shotgun Marriott’s land.”

“You don’t mean
the
Shotgun Marriott? And you’re involved in a murder in the Hamptons?” Paula’s eyes had opened very wide. “Maxie’s been holding out on me.Tell us everything. Don’t leave nothing out.” She reached across the table and patted my arm. “Go on.”

And then Max surprised me. “Not now, Paula. She’s working on a book. It’s like my investigations, she can’t talk about it.” His voice was gruff and a flicker of hurt crossed Paula’s face. I felt sorry for her. In my experience Max had never bothered much with tact or sensitivity and it was clear that he shut her out of his professional life. I saw Richie and Cath exchange glances and then Cath asked Paula if she’d tried the new Safeway that had opened up in her area. Richie asked me if I was still in touch with Selma Walker, the soap opera star whose autobiography I was working on when Max had been investigating the arson murders in the Notting Hill area, one of which had taken place at the bot-

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tom of our garden. Max was silent while I filled Richie in until Paula picked up on what I was talking about and wanted to know all about Selma.

“Why don’t you just read her bloody book like everyone else?” Max snapped at her.

Why did he do it? I wondered. He was a tough detective, his heart long since hardened to granite against the murderers he hounded. But outside of his job I recalled touching glimpses of a rather vulnerable person, a helpless widower trying to cope with his laundry and preparing solitary meals without his wife to look after him. I’d braced myself once or twice against the aftereffects of his sharp tongue but more than anything I had felt sorry for him.

Because of this I had been unable to think of him as anything other than a sad suit when he’d tentatively voiced his feelings for me.