Rainbow's End (14 page)

“You still do.”

The sarcasm went unnoticed. “Well, that's what I'm telling you. I expect you don't know anything about the New Age?”

Don't comment
; the voice was more alarmed. Jury knew that to ignore this warning would be to lose himself in the labyrinthine ways of Carole-anne's circuitous conversational routes. If he pursued this absurd New Age thread, he would only have himself to blame when he ended up staring at the Minotaur. He looked from her lapis lazuli eyes up to the lightning-bolted ceiling and wondered if Zeus would toss one at him. . . . My God! She already had him going in circles.
Don't comment, don't comment
, the voice clattered.

He commented. “What I know about the New Age is that its followers wear their hair long, travel in caravans, and end up in Wiltshire or Sedona, Arizona.” In his mind's eye, Jury saw the newspaper clipping on the wall of the Rainbow's End.

The Minotaur had herself another helping of cake.
Plop
went the slice onto her plate. “See, the New Agers know all about raising your consciousness. We're all of us a little psychic, if only we practiced. Even you.” She looked him up and down. “More or less.”

“In other words, even I could have told your unfortunate lady her hubby was getting it on with his shorthand typist.”

“No. And one wouldn't put it like that.”

“Wouldn't one? Well, one certainly messed up one's relaying of Lady Kennington's message.”

“Ohhh.” Disgust. “Are you
still
on about that? I
told
you—”

“ ‘Soup' was the word. Did she tell you—now think carefully—that she was ‘in the soup'?”

Dawn broke. Jury could see from the way her mouth dropped, her fork stopped midair, and her blue eyes shone with sudden light that she really
had
made an honest mistake. Anyway, he knew Carole-anne well enough to know that if anyone (pretty ladies included) left a message suggesting trouble, she'd make sure to convey it.

“Wait a tick. That
is
what she said. Gee, Super . . . ” The beautiful eyes looked ceilingward, as if calling on the psychic powers that had temporarily deserted her.

“Never mind.” He smiled at her.

The blue eyes regarded him. Sympathetically, slightly patronizing. “Well, maybe you are.”

“Am what?”

“Psychic.”

A thunderclap made both of them jump. Zeus commenting.

INSTEAD OF
unpacking and repacking his suitcase (which Jury considered an absurd waste of time) he decided to open the bag and let the contents air. While this airing proceeded in the living room of his flat in Islington, Jury looked at his mail—his bills and circulars—and stared at his telephone, thinking he really must buy an answering
machine, much as he hated them. His flat was not a touchstone of technological wizardry: no VCR, stereo, CD player, voice mail, fax machine, or surround sound (unless Carole-anne's conversations counted). At the moment he didn't even have a television. It was not a snobbish disdain for what the telly had to offer; it was because he had loaned his set to Carole-anne. He calculated, as he went into his kitchen for coffee, that the loan had taken place about a year ago. Once, when he was up in her second-floor flat, watching some mindless show and drinking beer with her, he had asked her how she got around the TV licensing fee. She'd said she had a “special arrangement” with the installer. This had been in her pre-Starrdust days, so she wasn't providing free palm readings, and Jury was curious as hell as to how she had hoodwinked the licensing authority.

The kettle whistled (despite his standing there watching it) and he stirred instant coffee into a cup. No matter what brand he used or how strong he made it, instant coffee always tasted watery and metallic.

Back in the living room, he tried ringing Jenny again. Still no answer. He sipped the coffee that tasted of nickels and stared at the telephone, willing it to ring. It didn't. He sat down and shook out the paper, looking for a follow-up account of the death in Wiltshire. It should have provided the media with a bit of gristle, if not with meat. He was surprised that no columnist had capitalized on the bizarre resting place of the dead woman, hinting, perhaps, at arcane religious rites and sacrificed virgins. Something like that. Here was a column on the inside pages, but not much, and nothing new. Detective Inspector Gordon Rush's name figured prominently, but his comment was “No comment.”

Jury looked over the edge of the paper and glared at the telephone that refused to offer up its secrets, its hidden messages, its trapped voices. He closed his eyes and Lady Cray's turquoise sculpture swam before them. Not unusual for that part of the country, turquoise and silver. Last year, the windows of Harrods had been done up with stuff from the American West: fringed jackets, boots, Indian blankets, silver jewelry and belts. He looked down at the picture of Chief Inspector Gordon Rush in the newspaper and thought he looked decent, intelligent, approachable, even with a touch of humility, the way his head was bent that way.

There was no denying that all three of these women had apparently been in or near Santa Fe at the same time. And you might put the deaths of the two older women down to some sort of heart thing, but the younger one? That seemed very unlikely. Macalvie was right; the Wiltshire police should be running tests for poison—but what kind? Well, there was little to connect the three dead women except for a thread or two. But he had to agree if you pulled a thread it often unraveled a lot of material.

Again, he looked over at the telephone, thinking that if she didn't call, he would have to stop over in Stratford-upon-Avon. Not an unpleasant prospect. He smiled, remembering the first time he had ever seen Jenny Kennington. Her anxiety had made her irritable, truculent, unforthcoming, even somewhat rude. These were postures Jenny would never strike in her own interests, but only in the interests of others, in this case the stray cat Tom. Jenny seemed so resolutely packed inside her own body, so there. He recalled what Gertrude Stein had said about Los Angeles: there's no there there. With Jenny, it was the opposite. She was so there; she was so very much
there.
And where in hell was she?

Then through these drowsy reflections came the unfamiliar strain of piano music: not “music” precisely, but bunched notes. He might not have recognized them as piano notes, had he not known that in the flat overhead, the vacant one, was an old grand piano. Jury sat up suddenly, staring at his ceiling. There had always been that piano ever since the three of them—Jury, Mrs. Wassermann, Carole-anne—had lived here. No one knew where it had come from and it was the only piece of furniture up there. Not even Mr. Moshegeiian knew the origins of the piano; he could not remember any of his tenants having one. Jury remembered his saying, with his little purse of a mouth opening and shutting on a laugh, that perhaps it would attract “an artiste.”

Plink.
Keys on the high end of the scale.
Plink.
Slightly lower.
Plunk, plunk.
Silence. Perhaps Mr. Moshegeiian had sent someone over to clean and air the place. Since when? Jury scratched his head. Moshegeiian never did anything; he left it up to Carole-anne. But Carole-anne's virtuosity was exercised only in interviewing prospective tenants (for all the good it did them). Clanging pipes, dripping faucets, creaking boards, falling plaster—these were not in Carole-anne's provenance, their course not decided by crashing stars or colliding planets. Pipes and plaster were Jury's job.

Plink. Plunk plunk plink.
He kept looking upward. It was as if a child might patiently be trying to teach himself a tune. He left his flat and climbed the stairs to the first floor (each flat taking up one entire floor, which seemed spacious until one realized how narrow the terraced house was). He stood outside the door for a moment, listening. He heard nothing. He knocked, lightly. No answer. He knocked again. No answer, again. Jury scratched his head again in perfect cartoon rendition of a puzzled man. He listened, ear close to the door.

A mystery.

 • • • 

“
PIANO MUSIC
?” Mrs. Wassermann looked at him curiously. Then she looked down at his feet. “You've forgotten your shoes, Mr. Jury.”

As if only crazy shoeless people heard piano music. “I went upstairs and knocked. Nobody answered and the music stopped.”

She was twisting her intertwined, chubby fingers, and seriously considering this problem. “Do you think it's the dog?”

Jury blinked. “Well, no, I actually
didn't
think that. I still
don't.
” Sarcasm fell wide around Mrs. Wassermann. “I don't know what you're talking about, Mrs. Wassermann.”

“The dog in the first-floor flat.” As if that were adequate, she turned toward her kitchen. Jury trailed after her as she said, “I'm just taking my nut-and-ginger cookies out of the oven, Mr. Jury. Your favorite. Come and have some.”

Mrs. Wassermann always assumed everything was Jury's favorite. “Why is there a dog in the first-floor flat?” He didn't want to ask why it was playing the piano. The dog itself was enough to contend with.

She stopped and turned. “You mean Carole-anne didn't tell you?”

“Tell me what? That she let the flat above me to a dog?”

Mrs. Wassermann, who seldom laughed, did now as she bent down to open the door of the oven. “It belongs to the new tenant, of course. He moved in this morning while you were at work.”

Jury was stunned. Then he was mildly furious. “
What
new tenant? I talked to her not two hours ago. She didn't say anything to me about letting—”

Mrs. Wassermann stood there with her big red oven mitts on, shaking her head. “I
told
her she should wait until you returned. ‘Wait
until Mr. Jury returns, Carole-anne,' I told her.” She raised the red mitts toward the kitchen ceiling as if enjoining either God or the dog to hear her pleas. Then, her stagy bit over, she bent to slide the cookie sheet out of the oven. “But Carole-anne said it would be perfectly all right, since he was your idea in the first place.”

“
My
idea?
Mine
? Mrs. Wassermann, I don't know what in hell—excuse me—I don't know what you're talking about.” He said this slowly and evenly, as if calm would restore the Islington house to its former three-person occupancy. Sans dog.

“Well, it's very strange. He's
your
friend. That's what she said. ‘Stanley's a friend of the super.' ”

“I don't know one living soul named Stanley.”

Now Mrs. Wassermann looked very upset. “You
don't
? But Carole-anne stood right there. . . . ” Sadly she shook her head. “Why would she lie about that?”

Oh, ha.
“What's he like? I mean besides being extremely good-looking, somewhere in his mid-twenties, early thirties, very available, and—colorful, let's say?” “Flash git” would be nearer. And he'd just managed to get rid of Randy Tyrone, too. That flat had stood vacant for years with Lord only knew how many people turned away by Carole-anne because they didn't meet the Palutski standards.

“So you
do
know him!” Mrs. Wassermann held out a plate of cookies.

Absently, Jury took a cookie, shaking his head. “I'm merely listing the credentials. Does this Stanley shill in Piccadilly or Oxford Street with his performing dog?”

Inwardly, he fumed. Bloody
dog
upstairs. To say nothing of bloody Stanley. Jury muttered under his breath as Mrs. Wassermann poured him a glass of milk.

“Now, now, Mr. Jury. It is definitely not like you to lose patience. Your patience is your most lovable quality.” She patted his arm and held out his glass of milk.

He drank. “I don't get it. Why'd she say he's my friend?”

“Because it is you who introduced them.”

“Me? Look, Carole-anne's gone round the twist, or something. She's been doing too much star gazing. I think we should be worried about her.” Jury held out his glass for a refill and munched his cookie.

“We've never had a dog before.”

This did not strike Jury as being of primary importance. They'd never had a Stanley before, either. “What kind of dog?” What a stupid question.

“Labrador. Stanley says he'll be a good guard dog for all of us.”

Oh, hell, people that wanted in
always
said that. “When somebody breaks in, he runs them off with Mozart? Or maybe he tells us, ‘Now, if you hear Adagio in G Minor, it means they've got guns'?”

Mrs. Wassermann sighed. “You're not taking this very well. I told Carole-anne you'd be upset. I said, ‘Carole-anne, dear, Mr. Jury—' ”

“Okay, o-
kay.
What's this guy do for a living? I mean besides shill?”

“He plays gags. I'm out of milk.” Mrs. Wassermann was peering in her fridge.

Jury stopped in the act of picking up the cookie plate. “He plays
gags
?” He thought he was going quietly insane, right here in Mrs. Wassermann's kitchen.

“But that's all right. The dog will be down in a moment. It's nearly one.” She was rinsing out the pint bottle.

Was he actually having this conversation? Or had he fallen asleep upstairs and dreamed it? He clutched the plate of cookies, as if its concreteness would lend him strength.

There was a knock at the door. A sort of knock, anyway.

Mrs. Wassermann went to the door with the empty bottle and didn't even bother checking the peephole before opening it. Obviously, the visitor was expected. And welcome. “Come in, come in and meet your new neighbor.”

A dog of a beautiful caramel color entered. He was wearing a red bandanna round his neck.