Линда Ла Плант - Cold Heart

The visits were the worst, when they seemed to ignore what she was saying, talking at her, not to her, not hearing when she called their names. Then she listened intently, and realized that the high-pitched chattering voices she had been hearing day after day belonged to her daughters, talking about what they wanted for Christmas. She wanted to cry with happiness that they were there with her — but why couldn’t they hear what she was saying? She could hear Mike, and told him how pleased she was that he had brought the girls, asked him if he had met Jake. She asked so many questions, and sometimes she laughed at what they were saying, especially old Bill Rooney, forever droning on about some case he knew he should have beaten, then complaining that Tiger had chewed up his best sweater. Her visitors came and went, not hearing her answers, her voice, and when it was night she wept, because it felt as if she would never see them again, and she couldn’t understand what had happened, or where she was. She started to be strict with herself, telling herself to pull herself together, that she had to straighten out. Crying every night was not doing any good: it was just using up all her energy, and she had to start thinking about other things. She forced her brain to be active, even though it hurt to think — yet she had to do something.

Lorraine felt as if she was gritting her teeth with determination, that if she could just get through the pain barrier her mind had erected, then she was sure she would be able to see again, see her loved ones. She told herself that she was having a nightmare, that she’d wake up soon, but that she had to make herself do it by retaining a mental connection with her active, waking self and her life, and convince herself that she would soon be coming back to them.

Worst of all were those silent night hours when all she heard was the clatter of things around her, the alien whispers, sounds that reminded her of a hospital, and her mind drifted back to the last time she had been in a hospital, when she’d had the plastic surgery on her cheek to get rid of the scar in an expensive private establishment. She made herself visualize the place, taking herself on a tour of her room, the corridors, the television lounge, the day room, the other patients.

Lorraine had had no visitors then — no one had even known she was undergoing surgery — so she spent many hours alone in the sunny, comfortable TV lounge, not that she had ever had much interest in television but this was the only room in which patients were allowed to smoke, and she had passed the time by watching the others, playing detective as to their real ages and backgrounds.

Most were women between forty and sixty, and some had already had so much surgery that at first sight they looked much younger, but there was always some incongruity between their faces, uniformly taut, tanned, slightly android-looking, and the way they dressed, moved or, most noticeably, spoke, that betrayed their real age. There were other dead giveaways too: the slight slackening of skin tone on the under surface of the arm that no amount of exercise could firm, plus, of course, the hands and feet. There were a couple of veritable Zsa Zsa Gabor lookalikes, dyed blonde hair piled up, stretched and lifted faces that could have passed for mid-forties, but with the liver-spotted hands, thickened knuckles and prominent tendons of old age. Only a lucky few seemed to escape that tell-tale sign of time’s passing. There had been a woman in a wheelchair, wearing dark glasses and still bandaged so that virtually none of her face could be seen. Lorraine had assumed, from the few visible strands of white hair, that she must be in her sixties or seventies, but she had noticed that the woman’s large, fine, restless hands were those of someone much younger, conveying an unusual impression of simultaneous flexibility and strength. She remembered noting how short the nails were cut, and had thought at the time that the woman must use her hands — perhaps as a musician or, at her age, a music teacher — which would explain how they had escaped shrivelling into an old lady’s claws. Now she knew that the woman was no musician, no teacher, and no old lady: it had been Sonja Nathan, she would have taken an oath on it.

The woman had kept herself to herself, only coming into the TV lounge once and taking no part in any of the casual conversations that were going on around her. Lorraine had thought, though, that she had seemed to pay attention when she herself had revealed to a chatty lady who worked for a real estate company that she was a private detective — they had commented quietly that they seemed to be in a minority here of working women: most of their fellow patients were pampered wives. When Lorraine had said she might be looking to rent a new office shortly, the woman had insisted on knowing Lorraine’s full name and the name of her company, Lorraine remembered, and she remembered, too, how she had thought of trying to draw the bandaged woman into their conversation, but some separateness and aloofness in her demeanour had deterred her from doing so. It was that indefinable froideur , as much as anything in Sonja Nathan’s physical appearance, that now made Lorraine certain it had been her.

Sonja Nathan had left the clinic knowing exactly who Lorraine was and, weeks later, had been able to recall those details.

Sonja had said that she had not been in Los Angeles at all for the previous year. That was a lie, and Lorraine was positive now that Sonja had also lied when she had said she had not made the call to Lorraine’s office on the morning of the murder. Lorraine already had documentary evidence — presumably lying in her apartment, she thought, in her briefcase — that Sonja and Harry Nathan were in contact after their divorce. Now she had the last piece of the jigsaw: proof that Sonja Nathan had been in LA the day her ex-husband was killed. She was sure now that if she ever got out of this goddamn hospital and was able to get voice experts to analyse the recording Decker had made of the call which had to be somewhere on that tape, they could identify some feature of Sonja’s mid-Atlantic, faintly European accent. That would be the final link and would put the woman behind bars.

It was painful to drag up each memory, worse than any headache she had ever known. The pain was excruciating, but Lorraine wouldn’t, couldn’t stop. Now everything had fallen into place, and Lorraine understood Sonja’s odd concern about Cindy, her saying that she wished she had given her more time — ‘or assistance’. Sonja’s lack of interest in the fact that so much money was missing from the estate had also seemed strange — but not, Lorraine thought wryly, when one knew that the assets had been taken before the bizarre sequence of events that had left Sonja, ironically, Harry Nathan’s legitimate heir.

Sonja Nathan knew the house, the gardens, and more than likely her ex-husband’s routine — or she could readily have arranged to meet him in advance. Sonja was clearly capable of premeditation, as she must deliberately have hired a jeep identical to Kendall’s to conceal her comings and goings at Nathan’s house — perhaps she had even hoped to incriminate Kendall, Lorraine thought, and she had managed to take every nickel of the woman’s money through the art fraud. Even if Kendall’s death really had been accidental, Sonja bore some indirect responsibility, as it had been after realizing that she had lost her stake in the paintings that Kendall had been tempted to try to burn down the gallery for the insurance. That must have given Sonja considerable satisfaction, Lorraine thought, for, as Arthur had said, she was all too human — or inhuman — under the cool, superior façade, and had clearly hated Kendall as intensely as she had ever loved Nathan.