Martha Grimes - The Black Cat

Ondine was back. “Let me look at this-” She took the mobile and pointed out a number. “I think it was this one: I don’t know it, and it was placed just about when she was here.”

Jury pulled out his notebook, wrote it down, a London number.

At this juncture, the gray-haired couple, who appeared to act always in concert, raised their hands to beckon Ondine over.

“Sorry,” she whispered again. “There’s just me here today. Charlotte ’s sick again.” She sighed. As if Jury knew Charlotte and her sham illnesses.

Jury watched her glide over to them. Murmurs again.

Honestly, the place would do for a meditation center; he smiled at the idea of several monks sitting around the room on the silk and satin cushions. He watched Ondine go to the counter, where she seemed to be checking something, possibly the price of the gray gown the two of them-the man and the woman-were holding between them. Folds of gray chiffon and silk. The man seemed perfectly at ease in this room sacred to women.

Wiggins walked through the glass door at that moment. “Guv. Blanche-”

Wiggins got on a first-name basis very quickly with witnesses.

“-was pretty cooperative, and it may be you were right about the names: there were no matches with the Rexroths, but Blanche did turn up two Simons-a Simon St. Cyr and a Simon Smith.” He was looking at his notebook and thumbed up a page. “According to the Valentine’s records, Simon Smith was down with Stacy Storm five times. I’ve got the dates. Five isn’t much for a hot romance, but he was down in the book those five times, and something tells me that’s not every time that he saw her.”

Jury nodded. “According to Rose Moss, she was seeing some fellow off the books. I don’t suppose Blanche Vann could describe him.”

Wiggins shook his head. “Their clients don’t call round; they ring and set up times according to Valentine’s schedule. The office isn’t much, just a room. But it’s nicely fitted out: big, airy, fresh flowers and fruit. The girls come round every so often. ‘My girls,’ she calls them. Bit of a mother hen, you ask me. I got the impression she was genuinely fond of Stacy. Pretty broken up about her death. And very surprised about this double life Stacy and Mariah led.”

“How’d she find out? Papers?”

“No, from your Adele Astaire. Blanche said she rang up and told her. Blanche doesn’t read the papers a lot.”

“Okay, get onto Thames Valley, to DS Cummins, and get this Simon Smith’s address, or, rather, get him to find out if the Rexroths have any idea who the ‘Smith’ might actually be.”

Wiggins nodded, turned away while punching in the number on his mobile phone.

Finding Ondine free of the gray-winged couple, Jury walked over to the counter. “Ondine.”

She looked up with a slightly mischievous smile.

“How did Stacy Storm pay for the dress?”

Ondine pulled over a large black ledger, opened it, and ran a red-coated fingernail up and down columns. “Barclaycard.”

“That must have been quite a credit line she had.”

“I don’t know, except it was approved.”

“All right. I won’t take up any more of your time. You’ve been a world of help, Ondine.” He handed her his card. “If you remember anything at all-”

“Including my name.” Big smile. “Believe me, I will.”

What a flirt.

“I have a friend who’d look terrific in that black gown in the window.”

Again, Ondine whispered, “Tell her to pop round. I might be able to give her a very nice price.”

“I’ll do that,” Jury whispered back.

The doorman or security guard or greeter at the door told them in chilly tones that the shop was just closing.

“No, it isn’t,” said Jury, holding up his ID and pushing past him into the light, bright air of Jimmy Choo.

Whereupon the man immediately went to get someone else, a lithesome-looking woman who had a way of standing with her feet crossed and her hands crossed inside out before her. He thought this difficult pose came naturally to her, and he wondered if she had been a model. Models seemed able to accomplish the most unusual and uncomfortable-looking postures.

In this clear and uncluttered interior, Jury thought he might be reassessing the common attitudes toward wealth and materialism. In the cathedral-like quiet, in their little niches, the artfully arranged jewel-toned shoes covered the walls like stained-glass windows.

These shoes looked both impossibly rich and flyaway at the same time. They were displayed, in their lit-up little alcoves, as works of art. And rightly so, Jury thought as he took in that metallic silver sandal with the jewels running all the way up the instep, or that silver snakeskin with its four-inch heel and straps twining up the ankle, or that glittery leather with its narrow straps impossibly entwined. The architectural detail of these sandals was remarkable. Wiggins was nearly inhaling them, he was so close to the wall. He was getting down with the shoes.

Jury made a guess and asked the saleswoman if she recalled a woman purchasing the shoes in the photo he held out, perhaps a week ago? He thought after buying the dress, Mariah might have walked across the street to Jimmy Choo’s.

He was right. The purchase had been made, but there was no phone call that she remembered. Yes, she’d paid with a Barclaycard.

He walked over to Wiggins. “You thinking of buying a pair for that cousin in Manchester?”

“Not bloody likely; do you see what these things cost? That’d be-” Wiggins’s mobile sounded, and he flipped it open, spoke his name, and listened. Then he thanked the caller. “That was Cummins. Simon Smith is probably Simon Santos. He knows Timothy Rexroth from his work in the City. Simon’s in mergers and acquisitions. And we’re in luck; he lives right around the corner.” Wiggins inclined his head in that direction. “ Pont Street. I’ve the number; should I call?”

Jury looked at his watch. It was nearly six, a good time for drinks before dinner. From whatever he did in the City, Simon Santos might just be relaxing over one. “No. Let’s surprise him.”

He answered the door with a drink in his hand, whiskey by the look of it, and in a cut-glass tumbler that cost a hundred pounds by the look of it. It was, after all, Pont Street, just steps away from Beauchamp Place and Harrods, high in the Knightsbridge heavens.

Simon Santos had his French cuffs rolled up, his silk jacket casually tossed over a rosewood banister, and his Italian leather shoes polished to mirror brightness.

Jury and Wiggins pulled out their IDs simultaneously, and Simon Santos regarded them, apparently unsurprised.

And, Jury noticed, apparently unresentful.

Holding the door open wider, Santos said, “I just got in.”

Not from work, surely, Jury thought. Nothing he could thus far see in this house looked as if it had done a day’s work in its life.

Santos invited them to sit down in a room that could serve as a template for any voguish magazine spread. A massive fireplace with all sorts of baronial brass fittings, above which hung a portrait of a truly beautiful woman dressed in green velvet with white skin against which her dark red hair burned. On the hearth lay two chocolate Labradors, their heads raised, and so alike that they could have been a pair of andirons. Well-mannered, too. After a brief scrutiny of the interlopers, they yawned and lowered their heads to their paws and resumed their snooze. Jury reached out his hand and ran it over the silky head of one, which made the dog sigh.

There was a lot of butter leather interspersed with damask furniture and a ton of dark green velvet dripping down the long windows and puddling on the floor. Jury and Wiggins sat in club chairs from which Jury wondered if they would ever rise. There was something to be said for money.