CHARLES REALLY FELT unsophisticated when he saw how many children there were on the flight to New York. All these cosmopolitan tots were plugging in their in-flight entertainment earphones and summoning stewardesses as if they’d been doing it all their lives (which can’t have been very long) and there was he, fifty-one years old, peering round at the unfamiliarity of a jumbo jet interior, locating the loos, reading his safety instructions, checking that he hadn’t dropped his passport, and generally making it obvious that he had never crossed the Atlantic before.
And was childishly excited about it. In spite of the sadness of the reason for the trip, he felt a ridiculous glee at the prospect of finally going to America. All kinds of corny songs about Manhattan and Broadway and Fifth Avenue came unbidden into his head and he tried to stop himself from humming them. Apart from showing up his shameful inexperience of the world, it might also be an inappropriate invasion of Frances’s mood.
Actually she seemed to be taking it pretty well. The second heart attack had hit her mother the night before she was due to be discharged from the hospital. It had been huge and final. Frances had been businesslike and unsentimental when Charles rang through on his return from the Montrose. And she had maintained that practical exterior since then. No tears, just plans, organising the flight (she had done the trip many times before), sorting out things at school so that she could leave in the last week of the summer term. Very practical. Too practical. Charles, knowing her, knew how much she was holding back. When she relaxed, when there were no longer any arrangements to make, that was when the tears would come.
He had wondered for a dark moment whether she had already broken down, succumbed to tears, but regarded him as now too distant from her to be privy to such weakness. But no, surely she wouldn’t think of him as a stranger. In spite of everything, he felt very close to her and thought she sometimes shared the feeling.
He looked around the plane again. Of course all the sophisticated kids were with their parents. Happy families. To outsiders they must look the same. A happy family. The three of them, husband, wife and daughter. Charles, Frances and Juliet.
He took Frances’s hand. She seemed to welcome the gesture. By instinct his finger moved to stroke the familiar kitchen-knife scar on her palm. At such moments it was inconceivable that they had ever split up. But he knew such moments were suspended of time, little capsules of experience, magic, but unrelated to daily life.
He looked across Frances to Juliet and the familiar numbness came over him. He knew he felt a lot for his daughter, but a lot of what? Not admiration, surely. She was a reasonably attractive housewife in her twenties, but he found her irredeemably boring. He knew, from observation and from conversations with Frances, that Juliet had deliberately restricted the horizons of her life in reaction against the lack of organisation in her father’s, but he couldn’t find that a justification for her total predictability.
And yet, although she bored him, she still affected him powerfully. He remembered her as a tiny child, how cuddly she had been, how giving. Then they had got on all right, then they had had a relationship. But not one that could survive growing-up. Presumably that was all he would ever feel for her now, a cumbersome bulk of undefined emotion.
Still, she seemed happy enough. Matched up with her husband Miles, who was apparently doing awfully well in insurance. Charles got on all right with Miles (or as all right as two men could, whose similarity was restricted to their number of arms and legs). The only two things he really objected to were that his son-in-law kept trying to sell him a private pension scheme and then compounded the felony by calling him ‘Pop’.
It had been fun leaving Miles at the airport, though. He was in charge of his twin sons, at least until the weekend, when his mother, a strange lady interested in flower-arranging, was going to Pangbourne to help out. Miles, one of those boring young men who could always ‘cope’ and was ‘sensible’ about things, was clearly beginning to doubt his omnicompetence as the moment came for the twins’ mother to leave them. He was in complete control while he explained the intricacies of his camera (which he was lending to his wife at great personal cost), but less secure at the prospect of being alone with his sons.
Damian and Julian, in spite of their names, or perhaps in reaction to their names, seemed determined to show that the sleeping gas of bourgeois convention had not yet penetrated their systems. After the most casual of farewells to their mother, Damian had found a melted Mars Bar, which he proceeded to rub into his hair, and while Miles was attempting to clean that up, Julian, who was in the process of being potty-trained, gravely lowered his dungarees and started peeing against his father’s Marks and Spencer’s checked trousers.
For a long time Charles would treasure the expression he saw on Miles’s face as they disappeared into the Departure Lounge.
He was impressed by how quickly the flight went. All the seasoned cosmopolitan tots seemed to find it boring and predictable, but to his inexperience, the natural breaks were well spaced. First fiddling with the headset, dipping into the in-flight entertainment, noticing how it’s always the same names who seem to corner the market on that sort of show biz spin-off production; then having a couple of drinks; then lunch (which, contrary to the accepted wisdom of hardened travellers, he found quite tasty); and then the movie. This was an unexpected bonus. It was a long time since he had last flown at all, and he’d never been on such a long trip, so the idea of watching a film in the middle of the Atlantic was mildly glamorous. The fact that it was an awful movie didn’t matter. It passed the time and felt (though it wasn’t) like something for nothing.
It was only after the film had finished, while Frances, who hadn’t slept for two nights, dozed beside him, that he could think about the two apparent suicides. Since the news of his mother-in-law’s death, things had moved quickly and the case had been pushed to the back of his mind. And, he suspected, because of his feelings for Steve Kennett he had been content to leave it there. But now he made himself think about it.
Apart from any emotions it might raise in him, Steve’s revelation also provided Mark with an alibi for the night of Klinger’s death. Which was inconvenient, because Charles had been working on a theory that Mark had killed Andrea to prevent her from revealing their affair to his wife, and then, following the threat in his letter, had killed Klinger because of his involvement with Andrea.
Mind you, that still required the premise that Klinger had got involved with Andrea. Which was by no means certain. Since they had only been in New York at the same time for four days, they’d have had to work pretty fast. And, since there was no proof that they’d ever even met, and since Mark now had an alibi for the time of the second death, the whole theory began to look pretty tenuous.
Unless Steve and Mark were in league. Maybe the alibi she had supplied for the Tuesday night was a lie, maybe she was just covering up for him. But why? He found it difficult to cast Steve in the role of villain. He was fairly sensitive to real and false emotion and Steve’s distress at her friend’s death had been genuine.
Then there was Andrea’s husband, Keith, the BBC malcontent. But again, why should he be involved in his wife’s death? Charles didn’t even know if he had been in Broadcasting House at the time. Though that could be checked.
No, probably the true solution was the obvious one. Andrea Gower had committed suicide for reasons of her own which outsiders could only guess at.
And yet . . . And yet . . . Why did he think it was murder? Only really from what Steve had said about her friend and from his own brief meeting with her. Through all the confusion, he couldn’t believe that Andrea Gower had deliberately killed herself.
Various other unlikely combinations of circumstances circled through his mind. He must have dozed off. He was wakened by Frances nudging him to do up his seat belt as they approached Kennedy Airport.
The hotel had been described by the travel agent as ‘budget’, but Charles was still impressed by the presence of a colour television in their room. (Somehow, there had been no question of Frances not sharing a room with him. Equally, it had been with mutual, almost desperate, fervour that they had made love on the evening of their arrival.) The funeral was to be at twelve and they would get there in good time. In the morning he lazed happily in his dressing gown, channel-hopping with glee from the confessional mania of breakfast-time evangelists to patronising children’s programmes and endless cartoons. Frances had to chide him into showering and getting dressed in his one suit (believed by archaeologists to date from circa 1965 A.D.), reminding him of the seriousness of the occasion.
They met Juliet, pursing her lips with impatience, in the coffee shop downstairs. She said they’d be late for the bus out to New Jersey, from long experience blaming her father for the delay. Frances calmed her, pointing out that they had plenty of time to get to the Port Authority Bus Terminal by ten o’clock. (She retained her ability to understand and memorise the bus system of any town within minutes of arrival.) The funeral was to be at twelve and they would get there in good time. Rob was going to meet them at the bus terminal in Summit. He had offered to drive into Manhattan to pick them up, but Frances had vetoed the suggestion, knowing that he’d have plenty of other things to cope with.
The waiter in the coffee shop was a jolly Italian, who recognised them as English and, as he served pancakes and sausages to Charles, asked which sights they were going to see that day. ‘You should try the World Trade Center. Get up to the top. Amazing view there. You’ll really enjoy it.’
‘Another time, maybe,’ said Charles. ‘Today we have to go to a funeral.’
‘Oh, well, have a nice day.’
The funeral was decorously conducted in Summit. None of the excesses of which Charles had read in articles on American funerals were in evidence. There was no open coffin, nor was he treated to the sight of his mother-in-law made up and dressed in her favourite ball-gown.
But it all seemed unreal to him, like something out of a television series. He kept expecting the proceedings to be interrupted by commercials. Partly, it was the modem discretion of the surroundings, the reticence of muted lights, lush curtains, bright stained-glass and flowers. He missed the anachronism of English churches, like those where both his parents had had their farewells said. Death stirred in him an atavistic need for ancient ceremony.
The other false note was struck by the fact that the minister had an American accent. Charles knew he was being very naive, that, if he rationalised it, he would realise that in America everyone had an American accent. But, like most British people, his main contact with the United States had been through the country’s enormous exports of films and television series. These produced a reflex reaction that anyone with an American accent must be acting. So the minister, with his neatly-trimmed silver-grey hair and the deep sincerity of his voice, looked to Charles like one of those very skilled character actors who turn up in every other American television series. By the end of the ceremony, he could almost put a name to him.
Charles realised that a lifetime of hearing about the States and not being there had filled him with a lot of silly prejudices.
After the ceremony, all the mourners went back to Rob’s house for a party. Perhaps a more dignified word should be used, like ‘wake’ or ‘memorial reception’, but in fact this one was a party.
It wasn’t that they forgot the occasion that caused it. It was just that they had not met for some time and were all agreed that Frances’s mother would have preferred to go quickly than return home to be constantly aware of her invalid status. Also, Rob was the only one for whom she had been a daily presence and even he had been weaned from such dependence by her stay in hospital. So, while there was no lack of respect or love for the deceased, it was still possible for them all to have a good time.
Charles certainly did. He was already disembodied with jet lag and a couple of drinks put him into a state of euphoria, triumphantly excited at just being in America.
He also met some very nice people and quickly revised his opinion that all Americans are character actors from soap operas and police thrillers. He got on particularly well with the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of Rob’s first marriage, who was called Pattie. There was no sexual attraction (which was just as well, because it would have been singularly inappropriate under the circumstances), they just had similar senses of humour. Everything Charles said seemed to amuse her. She kept giggling and saying, ‘Hey, that’s neat’.
Charles didn’t know what she meant. But he didn’t think she was talking about his suit.
The following day Frances had to go and see her mother’s lawyer. Charles offered to accompany her, but his lack of enthusiasm was transparent and she willingly released him from the chore. In fact, she was relieved. She didn’t like official occasions when she had to define the lack of definition about their marital status.
So she set off in a cab from the hotel after breakfast, looking very businesslike. The night before, as they were going to bed, she had finally broken down, undamming the flood of emotion she had contained for so long. Charles was glad he was there when it happened and she seemed glad of his presence. He knew he was good at comforting her and at such moments he felt useful, a tower of strength, in command of their relationship. It was really the only time – well, then and when they were making love. If marriage were all making love and comforting wives when they cried, he would have been very good at it. But that was only a small part; there was all the waking up in the morning and going shopping and washing up and paying the mortgage and replacing fuses in plugs and spending evenings when there was nothing on the television watching it. Those were the bits that killed.
With his wife recovered and bound for a smart address on the Upper East Side, Charles was left with his daughter. Juliet didn’t want to do any sightseeing yet, but was very keen to buy some children’s clothes in Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and some toys in F.A.O. Schwarz. Charles tagged along dutifully, giving what he thought to be a reasonable impression of a properly interested grandfather, but it was an audition he failed. Juliet grew increasingly exasperated with his obvious lack of interest in dungarees and Spiderman T-shirts and soon dismissed him, arranging to meet up at one o’clock in Bloomingdale’s children’s clothes department, where they already had a tryst with Frances.
So he was free. Free to see a sight, go up a tall building, do whatever took his fancy. He walked up Broadway, while he decided how to use this precious bonus of time.
Just walking up Broadway he found exhilarating, just being there. He ambled along, unashamedly tourist, head bent back, fascinated by the height and unexpected peaks of the buildings.
It wasn’t how he had hoped to come to Broadway. As an actor and playwright, his ambitions had been starrier. And when his one successful play, The Ratepayer, had been running in the West End, there had been talk of a transfer to Broadway.
Talk. Always talk, never action. And always talk to other people, never to Charles. He sometimes felt that all his life he had been in some sort of antechamber, an annexe to the real room where real things happened. All he ever did was hear talk through the door. But he had never passed through it. Or perhaps he had never had the nerve to try the handle. So he just knew there was talk. And with The Ratepayer’s transfer, as with so many other projects, the talk had gone on for a bit, and then they had all stopped talking about it.
But he didn’t let the memory spoil his mood. The elusive quality of major success was now for him a fact of life, not a constant source of disappointment. And here he was in New York, with a million sights to see, some of the most amazing feats of architecture in the world, an unrivalled selection of galleries, museums and exhibitions, all there and ready for him. He had only to decide which of them he should go to and hail a cab.
He decided to have a drink and went into a bar.
His first choice proved somewhat uncomfortable. He had sat down and ordered a beer before he noticed the askance looks of the two other customers and the barman’s fishnet tights. He downed his drink quickly and left.
It was very hot outside and bright. Nearly August, the sun had gained power during his brief dive indoors. Maybe another drink was a good idea. But how was he to know the proclivities of the many different bars? He had a guidebook. Frances had thrust one into his pocket, convinced that he’d get lost on his own. He fished it out and waited at an intersection, obedient to the ‘Don’t Walk’ light. Now where was he? Broadway and . . .? He looked up at the yellow sign on the traffic-light post. West 44th Street. Now why did that ring a bell?
Of course, that was the address of Musimotive, the source of the odd man out among Andrea Gower’s cassettes.
It seemed criminal to come so far, to be presented with the opportunity for a little investigation, and not to take it.
The building was extremely tall by British standards, but now dwarfed in a constantly aspiring New York. When it had been built it may well have been the last word in efficiency and sophistication, but sixty years had passed since then and its smartness, like its height, had yielded to newer buildings. It carried an apologetic air of neglect.
Charles pushed through the revolving door and went up to the security desk. The uniform behind it had, like the building, once been smart, but suffered from the same lack of maintenance. It gave the impression of having had many incumbents, but its current owner was Puerto Rican. He looked up at Charles with surly interrogation.
‘Good morning, I’ve come to see someone in Musimotive.’ Charles indicated the name on the board behind the security man’s head.
‘Not here now.’ The Spanish intonation was so heavy, Charles half expected the man to add ‘gringo’.
‘What, you mean, the office has moved?’
‘No. Gone, finished, busted.’
‘Is that because of Mr Klinger’s death?’
The doorman shrugged. He didn’t know who Mr Klinger was. He hadn’t been there long. It wasn’t his business what the people in the building actually did.
‘So there’s no one in the office now?’ A shake of the head.
‘And you have no contact with anyone else from the firm?’
Again the head moved decidedly from side to side.
‘What about post?’
‘Post?’
The man’s bewilderment reminded Charles that he was in a foreign country and should speak the local language. ‘I mean “mail”. What about mail? Isn’t there someone you redirect the letters to?’
The head started its movement, but stopped in mid-shake. ‘Oh, mail. Fat Otto picks that up.’ He said it as if it were self-evident, that everyone should know it was Fat Otto’s job.
‘Did he work for Musimotive?’
‘Sure. Still does bits for other outfits in the building. Music publishers, you know.’
‘Do you know where I can contact him?’
The doorman looked at his large gold watch. ‘Most mornings Fat Otto’s in Motti’s Bar. Two blocks down on the left.’
Motti’s was not a gay bar, but Charles still had the feeling he was trespassing. It wasn’t a tourist bar and it didn’t want to be; the customers all had reserved seats. Charles went up to the bar and ordered a beer.
The barman produced one sourly. He didn’t want to extend his clientèle.
Charles decided to speak while he still had a modicum of the man’s attention. ‘I’m looking for Fat Otto.’
The barman wasn’t going to waste words on a newcomer. He nodded to a corner table and turned abruptly away. Charles decided not to say thank you; he didn’t think he’d get a ‘You’re welcome’ back.
He could have worked it out for himself. Fat Otto was fat. His belly and buttocks were so big that he couldn’t sit in the normal upright position, but subsided like a sack against a wall. His legs, crossed beneath him, looked incongruously small, too weak to support their owner’s bulk. He was dressed in a marquee of a tartan shirt which bowed out between the buttons to reveal pod-shapes of black sweatshirt. Sweat glistened on his brow. His dyed black hair seemed to grow only on the very top of his head, an optical illusion created by the opulence of his chins. Eyes, nose and mouth looked unnaturally close together, three dots in the big circle of a child’s drawing.
Charles went across to the pile of flesh. ‘Excuse me, are you . . .’ He hesitated. Maybe the man wasn’t aware of his nickname. ‘. . . Um . . . Otto?’
He needn’t have worried. ‘I don’t know about Umotto; I’m certainly Fat Otto.’
‘I wondered if I could talk to you about Musimotive?’
Tiny furrows of suspicion appeared in the smooth expanse of face. ‘You a cop?’
‘No, no, certainly not.’
Fat Otto looked at him for a second, then emitted a wheeze of laughter. ‘No, you wouldn’t be either.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, I know cops choose some pretty crazy fronts, but none of them’s going to put on an English accent.’
‘Why not?’
‘Hell, they don’t want to be laughed at.’ He chuckled with the wheezing regularity of a bicycle pump.
Charles wasn’t yet sure how good-natured the insult was, but laughed along and offered Fat Otto another drink. He accepted a Budweiser.
When they were settled, the fat man said, ‘I can’t tell you much about Musimotive. Never knew much. I only worked there. Danny did all the business.’
‘Danny Klinger?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Just the dispatch, packing up the tapes, sending them off, that sort of crap. Answer the phones when he’s not there, you know.’
The present tense prompted Charles to ask whether Fat Otto knew that Klinger was dead.
‘Sure. I heard. Good thing, I reckon. Without the business, he hadn’t got anything. And he needed a lot of bread for his . . . you know, the drinking.’
‘That was a problem?’
‘Not for him it wasn’t.’ Fat Otto puffed out another laugh. ‘Danny sure liked his oil.’
‘And you say the business was finished before he died? It’s not because he’s dead that it folded?’
‘Hell, no. He heard about it. Happened while he was in England. I had to call him all the way to England to tell him. I guess that’s why he killed himself.’ Fat Otto spoke without guilt, even with mild satisfaction. He was only the messenger of bad news; he wasn’t responsible for the effect that it had on the recipient.
‘When you say it happened while he was in England, what exactly happened?’
‘The cops came and said the firm was under investigation. Stop trading. They wanted to talk to Danny. Don’t know, maybe they wanted to arrest him, they didn’t say.’
‘Do you know why?’
The fat head moved resolutely from side to side, rippling its chins.
‘You mean you don’t know of any malpractices that were being committed in Musimotive?’
‘If I understand your question, and I’m not too sure through all those long words, the answer’s no. Hell, I only packed up the cassettes.’
Only obeying orders, it was a familiar defence. And yet Charles believed it. Fat Otto gave an impression of detachment. He’d get on with what he had to do and wouldn’t ask questions. Just as he felt no connection with Klinger’s death, although he had passed on the news that may have caused it, so he would feel no connection with Klinger’s crimes, although he may have helped in their execution.
He continued, clarifying that this was indeed his view. ‘Listen, I knew Danny Klinger a long time, really long time, and he was always good to me. Whenever he moved on to something new, there’d always be a job in it for me. He was a nice guy, he’d always buy me a drink, always got a friendly word, so, so far as I was concerned, he was okay.
‘Now I know he did some bad things, I heard people talk about them, but I never asked no questions. I just didn’t want to know. I guess that’s why he went on giving me jobs – well, and I hope he kinda liked me a bit – but really I don’t know what he was doing. So far as I know, he never made me do anything illegal and that was good enough for me. I told all this to the cops. They kept asking me about the business, I reckon they still think I’m holding out on them, but no way. I just don’t know anything – except that he’s dead and I’m out of a job.’
‘Hmm. Have I got it right – Musimotive produced background music for bars and factories and waiting rooms and lobbies, like Muzak?’
‘Yeah, same sort of idea.’
‘Did you have anything to do with the music side, the sessions and –?’
‘Like I said, I only packed the cassettes and sent them off.’
‘So Danny dealt with all the music recording and that sort of stuff?’
‘Must have done. There was only him and me.’
‘And so far as you know the business was pretty healthy?’
‘Seemed okay. I got my paycheck every week. Danny could afford a nice apartment on the Upper East Side, always seemed to have enough for a bottle of Scotch.’
The mention of Scotch prompted the offer of another drink. Fat Otto accepted. The barman had not gained any social graces since the previous order.
When Charles returned with the drinks, Fat Otto’s mood had changed. He started on a series of maudlin reminiscences of his former boss. ‘He was quite a guy. When I first met him, he worked in this radio station where I was janitor. He used to do the lot, bit of disc jockeying – hell, he was a terrible jock – compiling shows, sorting out quizzes, fixing music sessions, jawboning record companies, organising the bread – it was a public subscription station, kept running out of bread. He was always dashing around, fixing, all the time until . . . well, until he left.’
Charles was quick to pick up the hesitation. ‘Was there some trouble?’
‘There was always trouble where Danny was. All kinds of talk after he’d gone. Payola from the record companies, selling off pre-release discs, even putting some of the dough they raised on the auctions into his own pocket, but –’
‘Auctions?’
‘Yeah, they used to have these crazy auctions. When the station ran out of bread, they’d have twenty-four-hour non-stop programmes auctioning off all kinds of trash – you know, pop star’s shorts, guitar strings, locks of hair – and the kids’d ring in with bids and they’d make enough dough to keep the station running another couple of weeks.’
How different, Charles thought, from the home life of our own dear BBC. ‘And Danny was pocketing that money?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. Some people said so. Certainly he left the station. Wasn’t my business. I liked the guy, and when he called a couple of weeks later and offered me a job in a record-plugging outfit he was setting up, I said sure. And I followed him around since. He was a lot of fun to know. I tell you, he could bullshit his way out of anything.’
‘But he never said to you whether he took the money or not?’
‘Never mentioned it. Hell, why should he? I wasn’t interested. All I know is, him and Mike left at the same time and everyone said it was because of the dough, that they’d had their hands in the till.’
‘Mike?’
‘Mike was his buddy. Another jock on the station. Another real bright guy. Hell, the things those two got up to. They used to send each other messages over the air. Real dirty talk sometimes, but none of the listeners would ever know, because they had this code. They’d send out dedications and they’d choose discs with some kind of message in them. Hell, they were real guys, those two.’
Charles wanted to press on with questions about Klinger’s criminality rather than his lovability, but Fat Otto was not to be deflected from reminiscence. ‘I remember a time when Danny was screwing the wife of the guy in charge of the station and they’d got this great thing going where Mike would send a message when the poor jerk of a husband was on his way home. He’d say something over the air and give Danny and the dame time to straighten out the sheets. Don’t know how many times they did that. They had these code-words. Mike’d play the disc of Danny Boy as a warning, or another one – they’d send out a message to Mrs Joylene Carter of Ditmas Avenue, Flatbush, never forget that. That was the signal that a message was coming. Time for one last screw.’ The bicycle-pump laugh started up again at the recollection. ‘Hell, Danny was a horny bastard.’
‘And was this guy Mike involved in Danny’s other business ventures?’
‘Nope. Don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he stuck in the music business, went into some other branch – plugging, producing, agenting – I don’t know. Maybe he moved out to Salt Lake City and start selling insurance.’ Two more strokes of the bicycle pump.
‘What was his second name, this guy Mike?’
‘Fergus. Michael Fergus. Never forget, when he was doing the all-night shift, he’d start, “This is Mike Fergus roaming in the gloaming with you until the wee small hours”.’
‘And you think it’s possible O’Grady may also have been involved in taking the money?’
‘Listen, I said I don’t know anything about money being taken. I don’t know nothing from nothing.’ For the first time Fat Otto sounded annoyed. Charles bought him another beer and changed the subject. ‘You don’t know if Danny met an English girl over here the week before his death?’
‘Hell, I don’t know what he did with his spare time. I didn’t have no bug in his bedroom.’
‘No, this girl may have come to the office. English, as I say, fairly tall, blonde hair.’
‘Oh, her? Yes, I remember her all right.’ The small eyes looked at Charles with suspicion. ‘She asked a lot of questions, just like you. Had some kind of swanky name.’
‘Andrea Gower.’
‘That’s right.’ Fat Otto now talked a lot slower, his suspicions hardening. ‘You connected with her then?’
‘No, I just know her – knew her.’
‘You sure you ain’t a cop?’
‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘I figured maybe she was some kind of police.’
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. Just she came round and a couple of days later we have the cops there closing us up.’
‘Did Danny think she was a cop?’
‘He never met her. He’d left for England a couple of days before she turned up.’
‘Oh, really?’ Farewell, all theories based on an affair between Andrea and Danny Klinger.
Fat Otto’s expression was now one of total distrust. ‘Hell, why is it all you English people get so interested in Musimotive? Did you have dealings with Danny over in England?’
‘No, I never met him.’
‘But you know the girl?’
‘I met her once just before she . . .’ No, there was no point in getting Fat Otto involved in all that. ‘Just the once.’
‘And what about the other English guy, the one who came over in the Fall?’
‘Other English guy?’
‘Yes, his name was Kelly. That’s what Danny called him, Kelly.’
‘I don’t think I know him. Did he ask a lot of questions too?’
‘Not so many. I think he and Danny may have been setting up some deal. They talked a lot.’ Fat Otto was going slower and slower, undecided whether to release more information.
‘What was this guy Kelly like?’
The gate came down. Nothing else was forthcoming. ‘Since you don’t know him, I don’t see how it matters to you. I gotta go. Doing some deliveries for one of the music publishers.’
Fat Otto, with surprising grace and balance, rose from his seat and walked out of Motti’s bar.
It was ten past two when Charles met up with two very cross ladies in Bloomingdale’s children’s department.