‘No, no, I didn’t.’ Lorraine frowned.
‘Are you going to?’
‘No. Guess I’ll just be careful where I park.’
‘You got any idea who it might have been?’
‘No, absolutely none,’ Lorraine said, and Sharkey checked his watch again. ‘I gotta go. Sorry I couldn’t be more help. If you come up with anything, you know my mobile number.’
‘I’ll pay the cheque,’ she said, opening her purse. She took out three hundred-dollar bills and folded them. ‘You settle up for me, will you?’
‘Sure,’ he said, as he raked the bills across the table. ‘You string out your PI job, sweetheart. I would if I was in your shoes — you’ve got a while before the trial. Get what you can, and if anything else happens, I’d report it. You lived quite a life, didn’t you? So I’d think about who might want to fuck with your car.’
Lorraine stood up. ‘Thanks for the advice.’
He watched her walk out, pause at the edge of the terrace and slip on a pair of dark glasses. He wondered how much she was getting paid by Cindy Nathan, and how he’d slip in the video and phone recordings to the new lieutenant. They hadn’t had a sniff of that but he’d look into it now.
It was just after three when Lorraine collected her car and drove back to the garage under the office, making sure to ask the valet to park her car close to his booth. She felt hot and tired, and the meeting with Sharkey had given her nothing new. She couldn’t stop thinking about who had wanted to harm her. She wasn’t frightened, exactly, just uneasy, and by the time she got into her office she was in a foul mood.
‘Cops have Cindy Nathan down for it, don’t even appear to be looking elsewhere,’ she told Decker. He was elbow-deep in all the data they had got together so far on Cindy’s case. She walked towards her own office, ignoring the thump of Tiger’s tail. ‘Book me a flight tomorrow for East Hampton, New York State. I want to see Sonja Nathan.’ She kicked her door shut and sat down at her desk, where her mood become blacker.
Five minutes later, Decker tapped on the door. ‘I’ve got you a flight at eight a.m. with American Airlines. Manhattan International limos will collect you and drive you to East Hampton, and you’re booked into the Maidstone Arms. I have no idea what Sonja Nathan’s address is — do you want me to call Cindy and check? Be a pity to go all that way and find out she may not be there.’
Lorraine muttered something, and Decker moved closer. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Ask Cindy Nathan for the phone number, and leave me alone — I’ve got a headache.’
‘Fine, and when you are, so to speak, in the air, do you want me to look after Tiger? I’m not supposed to have pets in the house, but for one night I don’t see that’ll be a problem.’
‘Yeah, thank you,’ Lorraine answered gruffly.
He shut the door quietly.
Lieutenant Jake Burton, new head of the detective division in the Beverly Hills Police Department, stood with his back to the room, noticing that the room still smelt of paint. His office had been freshly decorated, and was now as immaculate as the man himself. Burton stood six feet two with a tight, muscular body, and blond hair cut close to his head in an expensive salon style that flattered his chiselled face. His slight tan made his light blue eyes appear even bluer, and his teeth even more brilliantly white. His nickname in the Army had been ‘Rake’, but now that he was in the police force, and had moved up the ranks with ruthless determination, he didn’t like nicknames any more. He knew that his subordinates thought he was a cold bastard, and in some ways he was, but he had been shipped in to clean up rumours of officers taking bribes and kickbacks, and it was a job he intended to do to the best of his ability.
Burton was originally from Texas, but he had travelled widely and his roots were now detectable only as a faint burr in his voice. It was in the army that he’d qualified as an attorney — he was prepared to thank Uncle Sam for that, but not for shipping him out to Vietnam with one of the last units dispatched. He had been there only two months before the conflict ended, but those two months lived on in his mind, and had marked him deeply. He never talked about it, or referred to himself as a veteran simply because he didn’t think of himself as a one, having spent so little time in Vietnam and taken so little part in the war. It had been a nightmare experience which he buried deep inside, and on his return, he had left the army and enrolled in police academy. He was then only twenty-three, but older than most other recruits, and used that to his advantage. Before he had even graduated from the academy, he was earmarked as an officer to watch. He had been married for a short while and his wife, a secretary, had claimed in her divorce petition that, in fact, he was married to his job. He still was in many ways, although he was hitting the mid-forties. He had some private life now but it was mostly fraternizing with other officers, playing squash or tennis, for Burton was as obsessive about his physical fitness as he was about his job.
He had done such good work in Santa Barbara, cleaning up the department and weeding out officers who were found to be taking bribes, that he had become known for his ability and, above all, for his unimpeachable integrity. Jake Burton was as straight as they made ’em, and when the opportunity arose to move to LA, to a job with enhanced status, he had readily accepted it.
He had, at the time, been involved with a divorcée and the time had seemed right to move on from her too. Recently, he had been dating a girl from the legal department, a well-groomed, pretty brunette with intelligent brown eyes, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to make a commitment.
At the knock on his door Burton’s attention snapped back to the present. ‘Come in,’ he said sharply, straightening the row of brand new, sharpened pencils on his pristine desk.
‘You wanted to see me, Lieutenant?’
Burton nodded and opened a file of reports on the Cindy Nathan case. ‘Sit down.’ He gestured to a hard-backed chair in front of his desk. ‘What’s this about tapes?’
Sharkey cleared his throat. ‘I got a tip-off. Apparently Nathan recorded everything but bowel movements.’
‘And this is the first we’ve heard of it?’
Sharkey nodded. ‘He filmed everyone coming in and out of the house on security cameras, and also some porno stuff with the wives, but I doubt if the tapes will tell us anything we don’t already know. I mean, everybody in LA knew Cindy Nathan was a fucking whore.’
‘Really?’ Burton said coldly. ‘You had access to these tapes?’
‘No, sir.’
‘So did this informant — whoever tipped you off — have access to them?’
‘Cindy Nathan sent them to her.’
Burton turned the pages of the report, then tapped it with his index finger.
‘Why would Cindy Nathan send the tapes to this informant?’
Sharkey squirmed in his seat. ‘Well, she’s a private dick, hired by Mrs Nathan.’
‘Really?’ Burton said softly. ‘So how did this interaction come about?’
‘Well, she called me...’
‘Yes. And?’ Burton waited for a reply, tapping his desk with one of the needle-sharp pencils. He neither liked nor trusted Sharkey.
‘She wanted information — you know, do a trade.’
Burton waited, his eyes on Sharkey. A trade in what, exactly, Detective?’
‘Well, you know, what I’d got — et cetera, et cetera.’
‘Did you tell her anything relevant to the investigation?’
‘Hell, no, nothing like that.’
‘Did she pay you?’
‘Of course not. Didn’t give her nothing.’ Sharkey grinned.
‘I sincerely hope not. So what is the lady’s name?’