Not the End of the World (19 page)

‘And because she wasn’t a random victim, later on, when some more associates of yours disappear, you think that ain’t a random event either?’

‘In the space of six months? It’s a bit of a coincidence.’

‘This whole world’s just full of coincidences, Dr Arazon, believe me, and they’ll lead you a crazy dance if you let them. Tell me this: can you connect the victims of these two incidents through anything more than a shared academic field?’ She sighed irritably. ‘No, Sergeant, right now I can’t.’

‘Me neither. So to graduate from coincidence to conspiracy, we’d need at least one more link.’

‘Well you won’t find one if you’re not prepared to look.’

‘Oh, I’ll be looking, Dr Arazon, and I’ll be looking hard. But you gotta understand this: I do needles in haystacks, I don’t do wild‐
goose chases. So anyway, why did Peter Steel come see you back then?’ He heard her swallow, sigh, try to still her frustrations. ‘I was a friend and one‐
time academic colleague,’ she told him. ‘Steel was looking to build up some background on Sandra, what her work was about, who her contacts were.’

‘Trying to figure out possible reasons why she was killed.’

‘I guess so. What’d he tell you?’

‘Everything and nothing, which is consistent with the FBI. Just when you think they’re getting expansive, that’s usually the sign that they’re keeping the good shit back. He says they still don’t know why she was murdered. I believe him on that. He was scrubbing in the dirt for leads. That’s why he chased me.’

‘Hmm,’ said Arazon, wryly unconvinced. ‘He tell you about her computer?’

‘No, what about it?’

‘Sandra’s sister Beth was what you’d call executor of her estate. She passed Sandra’s books, papers, folders – and her Apple Mac – on to her department colleagues at UCLA for them to salvage what they could of her work. But when they hooked up the machine, the hard disk had been cleaned out.’

‘Erased?’ asked Larry.

‘Not exactly. The system software was still installed, and there were a few basic applications on board, but whatever else had been on there was gone. Plus she had a SyQuest drive in the apartment but no SyQuest cartridges, suggesting they’d been removed – possibly by her killer.’

‘So what should have been on this Mac?’

‘Plenty. She did everything on her computer. Sandra and I went through college together, and we shared a lot of interests, but that was where we seriously diverged. I mean, I use computers, in fact I couldn’t exist without them, but I didn’t share her enthusiasm for how you actually program the things. I like to come along when the technical part’s done, just press the right buttons and get the results. Sandra liked to take the programs apart like they were the engine on her car. Whenever she started talking about it, I’d just be lost. Stuff was way over my head.

‘Obviously I didn’t follow the number‐
crunching side, but I do remember her big hobby‐
horse was constructing 3‐
D seismological models, you know, for trying to project what would happen along this faultline if that crustal plate moved in such‐
and‐
such a direction. Hardly explosive material, I know. So there must have been other stuff on her files that somebody was either interested in or worried about.’

‘Certainly sounds like it,’ Larry observed. ‘But now it’s gone and so’s she. When did you last speak to her?’

‘Around May of last year, on the telephone. She was taking a sabbatical for the spring semester to work on a personal project.’

‘And apart from computers, what was Professor Biscane’s particular area of interest?’

‘Tidal waves.’

Strictly speaking, you couldn’t call it love at first sight, as Steff had seen Madeleine Witherson on television before meeting her face to face. But then maybe TV didn’t count, and maybe in‐
the‐
flesh was the only true, ’fishell first sight. Steff sincerely hoped so. His reminiscences might not seem quite so soft‐
focus and dreamy if he had to admit that his first glimpse of the woman with whom he’d become besotted was of her being shagged doggy‐
style by some bloke with a catastrophic Michael Bolton mane while she simultaneously blew a second hairspray ad at the other end. At least, that’s what he’d assumed was going on: the hotel’s in‐
house pay‐
per‐
view adult movies had suffered the vigorous attentions of a censor’s scissors to render them soft‐
core, and this had lent the film a certain New Wave ambiguity. Steff estimated that if the male duo’s barber had shown half as much enthusiasm, they’d both look like Ed Harris. In fact, he thought it was a pity the coiffeur’s and censor’s roles hadn’t been reversed: all right, you’d lose the Greek‐
god look, but at least there’d be some honest humping on view. Steff was baffled as to whose sensibilities the PPV company were attempting to protect. Maybe they’d had letters from irate businessmen, saying that they had paid their money and pressed the button in good faith, expecting wanking material that observed certain standards of taste and respectability, then were horrified to be presented with programming that was no more than pornography. He thought of what Jo said about businessmen in hotel rooms wanting to watch dirty movies without thinking they’re the kind of guy who watches dirty movies in hotel rooms. Steff was less troubled by such duality: he was inclined to fire off a sharp note because he didn’t normally like his filth quite as clean. Actually, that was a lie. Steff was troubled by plenty of duality over his decision to press the SpanVision button and watch Babylon Blue. For a start he was carrying the standard confused‐
lefty baggage about ‘the exploitation of wimmin’ as well as concern as to whether he should be putting in an advance order for a big raincoat. And topping it all off was a generous helping of the sexual turmoil that comes free with every Catholic upbringing. Nonetheless, he justified watching the movie on the time‐
served rationale that, as it featured Maddy Witherson, it counted as research. But the main factor influencing his decision was that he had woken up at five again, and there was, in the immortal words of the Sex Pistols, fuck‐
all else to do. He’d been in hotel rooms with pay‐
per‐
view systems before: for more than the price of any cinema ticket you could watch a slightly out‐
of‐
focus, shakily pan‐
and‐
scanned four‐
month‐
old movie. Still, it was amazing what a bargain this could seem like at twenty past five in the morning. Unfortunately the Armada’s PPV selections were all in the ‘adult’ category, with Babylon Blue the only heterosexual option on offer, and that was probably only for the curiosity value surrounding the star being a senator’s daughter. As it turned out, Steff might as well have plumped for one of the gay features, as the ‘softening’ of Babylon Blue had meant the majority of the footage was of hairy male arses bobbing up and down, wobbling male buttocks having been deemed less likely to shock and corrupt the viewer than the sheer horror of labia. From what was left of the flick, Steff could deduce that Maddy Witherson was not exactly a megastar of the famous West Coast porn scene. He was able to recognise which of the girls she was because it was her face that adorned the card atop the TV set, advertising details of the available features, but on‐
screen she was listed well down the opening credits, and not by her own name, either. Her alias, or nom de shag, was Katy Koxx, as was also explained on the glossy card, and it didn’t grace the screen until Lotte Luv, Felia Cumming and Randy Steed had been flashed up in larger lettering. The discovery of Katy Koxx’s true identity, and more significantly her father’s identity, had evidently happened after Babylon Blue hit the shelves down at the local Whacking Emporium. Each time a new female appeared in the movie, Steff checked to see if it was her by looking up again at the small thumbnail of Maddy’s face on the card, sixth in a row that also included Boystown IV, Pump Action VII and, rather entertainingly, a feature entitled Postman Pat’s Backdoor Deliveries. The film had run for more than half an hour before she appeared, and when she undressed Steff decided that the card would be more helpful if it informed you not that Maddy Witherson was ‘(a.k.a. Katy Koxx)’ but ‘(the one with her own tits)’. Few of her co‐
stars looked entirely bio‐
degradable. She was small and skinny, with blonde strands curling half‐
way down her back in a hairstyle that looked suspiciously too big for her head. At one point she straddled one of the Bolton Brothers, facing the camera, the screen framing her from head to navel. She was moving up and down, eyes closed, accompanied by moaning noises that just had to be dubbed. No woman really made noises like that. Farm animals didn’t even make noises like that. She seemed, like all the girls in the feature, to be doing an impression of what men thought a woman should look like while having sex; movement, gestures, facial expression. Hollywood‐
style dramatic humping. Then for a second, Steff noticed, she giggled. Just a tiny laugh and a smile, a bashful bite of the lip, before the ‘serious shagging face’ came back on. That was when Steff understood that even though she was having sex on‐
camera, she was still playing a part. It was the only remotely titillating bit in the whole movie. Steff saw her in the flesh later the same day, but he had to wait longer still for a sighting of the real Madeleine Witherson. There was a press conference and photo‐
call scheduled to promote Angel’s Claws, the pish‐
looking ‘erotic thriller’ la Witherson was making her feature film debut in. It wasn’t due to start shooting until April, but its producer, Line Arts, was giving it big licks to boost the pre‐
sales while its star was still news. The photo‐
call was to happen beside the main swimming pool, down on the Beachview terrace, with the Q&A set up around a table nearby. Jo wasn’t going, and she told Steff he had no real need to either. Jo had set up a proper one‐
on‐
one with Witherson, who had agreed to it because Scope was a British mag and she quite fancied giving her viewpoint to a readership who wouldn’t have quite so much prior information – or misinformation. It had helped also that Jo knew her agent, Tony Pia, whom she described as ‘a sleazy bastard in a hazardously appealing kind of way’. She further informed Steff that Pia was treading on egg‐
shells around the AFFM after the uproar he had caused two years previously, when a stalker was apprehended for plaguing an actress client of his. The problem was that Pia had in fact hired the stalker in an attempt to increase his client’s media profile, on the grounds that it was the latest de rigueur accessory for a Hollywood star, and ‘far cheaper than a Humvee’, as he told Jo. The whole stunt had the actress’s blessing, and it had been working out, too, until one of the PV’s security staff made his own bid for stardom and collared the guy. Jo told Steff the press conference wasn’t really worth bothering with, as it had been made clear that Witherson was there only to answer questions about Angel’s Claws, and anyone enquiring about other matters would be asked to leave. The photo‐
shoot was to be a strictly staged affair, an opportunity for the trades to get a glamour pic to fill a space in their market dailies. There’d also be photographers from the agencies, consumer film mags and a few of the less pretentious newspapers, getting some fresh stock‐
shots of Maddy Witherson before the world forgot her name again. Steff was, like Jo, going to get her to himself later, but he decided to check out the circus anyway. He thought it might be illustrative to include some shots of her doing the star‐
holding‐
court thing, but mainly he was just impatiently intrigued. It was like a reverse of the normal male curiosity. Having watched Madeleine Witherson naked and having sex earlier on, he was dying to see what she looked like fully clothed and just going about her day. The party had already started when Steff breezed down to the terrace at the edge of the hotel’s private beach. The hacks sat in a semi‐
circle of chairs facing a wide table, sipping mineral water laid on by Line Arts, taking the odd note and holding up their pens for the chance to ask the next question. Maddy Witherson sat behind the table flanked by two men, a clutter of tape recorders surrounding the microphones in front of them. The men were, according to place‐
cards, Zip Spigelman and Tobe Delgado, respectively the producer and director of Angel’s Claws. Witherson had no place‐
card; Steff didn’t know whether this was an oversight or a compliment to her supposed celebrity. The big blonde curls, almost certainly a wig, were gone. The new Madeleine Witherson had short, straight black hair in what, in his limited knowledge of such terminology, Steff could only think to describe as a Cleopatra cut. She wore a lightweight black dress that was presumably supposed to be vampish and thus suggestive of her role in the film, black gloves up to the elbows surely serving no other purpose at that time of the morning. Her heavy makeup was consistent with the vamp look, and served more to obscure than enhance her features; a plastered‐
on face, as they said back home. But then she wouldn’t be wearing her own face: she was still acting. Saying the right things in the right enthusiastic‐
but‐
relaxed tone, smiling all the time, talking about the story, the script, the director, playing the actress at the press conference. Steff took up position ten yards or so back from the encircled hacks and clicked off some shots of the whole assembly. To his right he could see the photographers setting up by the Beachview pool, around which the film’s cardboard promotional displays had been erected. He zoomed in on the main attraction, and was momentarily surprised to see that she was effectively zooming in on him, her gesticulative, including‐
everybody delivery suspended for a second as she stared with consternation at the giant blond geek with the camera. The hacks didn’t notice, as she hadn’t skipped a word. Steff, aware that his presence could be distracting at the best of times, decided to cut the girl some slack and sit down, pulling up a chair in the backmost row of the semi‐
circle. He glanced around at the reporters. Most of them looked bored; after all, it was just another market puff conference for a straight‐
to‐
video B-movie. But a few others wore a uniformly ironic sneer, in which assorted forms of contempt were writ large: Maddy Witherson was merely the latest recipient of random, lightning‐
strike fame that would otherwise never have been conferred upon such a nonentity. Tomorrow’s oh‐
so‐
fucking‐
hilarious columns were taking shape behind smug faces. Arch glances were exchanged, a silently conspiratorial hack pack version of the schoolboy snigger. The nature of her previous career was playing a big part in wrinkling their noses, Steff guessed, as they smirked at the thought of her perceived indignities, or made the snobbish but common assumption that having worked in dirty movies meant she had to be thick. Eventually, one of them remembered what he was being paid for and asked a question. ‘How do you envisage that your role in Angel’s Claws will differ from your previous acting experiences?’ he said, loading as much innuendo into his tone as was possible without hiring Eric Idle to pop up and add, ‘Know what I mean? Eh? Eh? Nod’s as good as a wink to a bliiiind bat, eh?’ Witherson reached for a gulp of mineral water, the producer looking to her for a signal that she’d like to skip the question. Steff caught the tiny shake of her other hand that told Spigelman she was cool. ‘Well,’ she said, putting the glass down and smiling again, ‘I guess first of all there’ll probably be fewer come‐
shots, and it’s my understanding from the script that I won’t have to fuck anybody. Is that what you were getting at?’ Stick that up your arse and light it, Steff thought, delighted. The hack turned pale, then tried to look unruffled and continued his question, but it was too late. The tables had been turned and the schoolboys dismissed. He ambled around to the photo‐
call later, again keeping his distance and observing from the side, like a lion checking out the herd for the infirm. He had the haircut for it. It was also pretty obvious which of the assembled photographers a predator would go for. There was one poor bastard in there who looked like he had spilt a napalm‐
bomber pilot’s pint then paid for the cosmetic surgery with the last of his pocket change. It was short odds the guy didn’t do a lot of portrait work: having a melted head can be very distracting for the subject. The boy looked like he really ought to be covering air crashes and car pile‐
ups, although the difficulty there might be fighting off the paramedics mistaking him for one of the casualties. Steff backed up a little and took some pictures of the picture‐
takers taking pictures of Witherson. Who watches the watchmen? Juvenal asked. Me, Steff answered. The girl posed amid the cut‐
outs to the whining accompaniment of film‐
winders and shutter clicks. She threw a few sultry shapes for a while, then her two press conference buddies came along for a three‐
shot that no one would use, because who the hell was interested what they looked like? Steff remembered the first time he had seen Witherson between two men and felt vaguely embarrassed.