He broke a couple of eggs into a bowl, added milk, forked butter into the bottom of a pan. He grated in some parmesan and opened the cupboard for the Tabasco sauce. Do you ever do anything in the way of exercise? You’re starting to look a little plump. Resnick tore the health club’s free offer into four and dropped the pieces into the bin. When the butter was beginning to sizzle up, he tipped in the egg mixture, stirred it round a couple of times and then, taking a carton of cream from the fridge, added a more than generous helping.
It was still only mid-evening and there was no point in getting to the club before eleven. At a sudden thought, he gave the eggs a stir, turned the gas low, and went to the phone.
Chris Phillips answered.
Resnick imagined that was who it was. He said: “Is Rachel there?”
“No, she’s at a meeting,” Phillips said.
Resnick said, “Oh,” wondering whether he should leave a message and ask her to call him, meet him later.
“Can I take a message?” Phillips said.
“No, it’s okay. Thanks.”
“Who shall I say called?”
“Em, Resnick. Charlie Resnick.”
“Didn’t you ring the other night?”
Resnick set down the phone. When he took his plate through to the living room, Johnny Hodges was still playing. “Satin Doll.” When he had started listening to jazz, Resnick had thought Hodges the best saxophonist in the world. Still, there were times when his sound was the only one that worked.
when I listen to Johnny Hodges
I am ashamed
to carry loss
like a sick-note
like a dream of sailing
Come on in, the water’s fine! It didn’t matter that Ben Riley was somewhere on the prairie, that Rachel Chaplin wasn’t home: right now, Resnick felt better than all right.
There were nightclubs in the city where men had to wear a tie before they could gain admittance and the toilets were swabbed out three times of an evening. There was one with a style bouncer who checked you over carefully and if you were found to be wearing anything from Marks and Spencer or Top Shop they wouldn’t sell you a ticket. Resnick had heard rumors of another with a membership fee that was roughly equal to his monthly salary, where the furnishings were pure white and they played nothing but Frank Sinatra and Vic Damone.
The Stardust was squeezed between a pub and a stationery warehouse on one of the main roads through Resnick’s patch of inner city. The music was solid reggae and calls to complain about the insistent throb of bass were almost as consistent. Cabs lined the pavement between two and four. The sign above the cash desk announced that members had to show evidence of membership when entering, but nobody seemed overly concerned about dress code. Non-members were supposed to be signed in by a member but Resnick showed his warrant card instead.
At the far end of the room, a singer with a full beard and a brightly striped woollen hat was holding the microphone too close to his face. There were a few tables, but most of the clientele were on their feet-lining the bar, leaning back against the opposite wall, mostly twos and threes with an occasional male on his own, staring off into the middle distance, swaying lightly. Others were dancing. A sinewy black was winding his way around a woman in a vast velvet dress who turned through a small circle, never taking her eyes from his face. Four girls swayed around a pile of handbags. The majority of the men were Afro-Caribbean in origin; almost without exception the women were white and when Resnick first came to the city they would have worked in one or other of the hosiery factories that lined the road leading out through Kimberley and Eastwood towards Heanor. He wasn’t sure what they did now, these women. Even the old Players factory had been demolished now, the one on Prospect Street.
“Trouble?” The man running the bar was overweight and white.
“Guinness,” said Resnick, drawing in his stomach.
“Paying for it?”
Resnick placed a five-pound note on the counter and left the change where it lay. “Know a man named Warren?”
“Warren Oates.”
Resnick looked at him, the studied insolence in his eyes.
“Rabbit warren.”
Resnick scooped the change away and dropped it down into his pocket. He made his way slowly across the room, skirting round the handbag girls and waiting for a slim-hipped man with dreadlocks and a bright red and green skinny-ribbed jumper to finish dancing.
“Jackie, this here’s Detective Inspector Resnick.”
The woman blinked at him from a face that saw too little natural light. She turned with a shrug and moved away.
“New girlfriend?” Resnick asked, pleasantly enough.
“Slag,” said the man, leaning against the wall beside Resnick, head arched back, pelvis jutting out.
“I can see why you’re such a success with the ladies,” Resnick said. “It’s your natural sympathy and charm. That and the obvious respect you have.”
“You come to me for lessons?”
“Information.”
“Lessons cost.”
“Information comes free.”
“Who says?”
“It was free last time.”
“You shut it about that!” He was close now, close enough to smell the sweetness of the marijuana.
“You were only doing your duty.”
“Shut it!”
“An honest citizen.”
“I grassed.”
Each and every way, Resnick thought, enjoying the joke.
“What you grinning all over your face at?”
“You gave up somebody because it was in your own interests to do so. Someone who’d been putting girls on the streets you thought were yours to work. The right time, the right place and now he’s still waiting for parole.”
“You complaining?”
“Asking for more.”
“Get fucked!” Swiveling away.
“Warren,” Resnick said after him. He hesitated, half-turned.
“I need to talk with somebody called Warren.”
The man turned away again.
“Maybe, before I leave, I should get up on the mike and announce that you’re our newest recruit to the Neighborhood Watch.”
He didn’t stop walking, but he heard.
Resnick waited a while. There were other faces that he recognized; by that time more who recognized him, knew who and what he was. He began to count those in the club whom he’d arrested, seen sent down. At five, he stopped and went back to the bar. The woman, Jackie, was standing there and when he put down his empty glass she spat in it.
“Guinness,” said Resnick to the barman. “Fresh glass.”
The same short fur coat, the same shiny trousers. She was with a man Resnick had tried to turn over twice and failed; after that he’d got passed on to the Serious Crimes Squad but they hadn’t had any more luck. With George Despard you needed more than luck: more than most money could buy. The man loitering by the entrance Resnick knew to be Despard’s minder.
He waited until the couple had sat down at one of the tables and made his way over, careful to approach from the front. Despard wasn’t the kind of man you risked going up to from behind.
Resnick nodded at George Despard. “I hope you haven’t left the Porsche parked outside,” he said to Grace Kelley.
“We came in the Ferrari,” Despard said.
Grace Kelley smiled. “Hello, Inspector. Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“What’s a nice clean copper like me doing in a place like this?”
“Something like that.”
“Didn’t expect to see you in here, either, George,” Resnick said. “Not coming down in the world, are you? Hard times?”
“I’ve read it,” said Despard. “Less of a ramble than most of his books. Course, you got to respond to the symbolism.”
“Christ!” said Grace. “What is this? Evening classes?”
“A little self-improvement never hurt a soul,” said Despard solemnly.
“And you’re sitting next to the living proof,” Resnick said to her. “The very model of a self-made man.”