Peter James: Love You Dead

Instantly she made her move, crushing out her cigarette, scooping up her glass and her bag. Then she strode across to his table, in her silky Ted Baker dress and red Jimmy Choos, and sat down opposite him. Putting on her poshest, cut-glass English accent, she said, ‘You look as lonely as I feel.’

‘That so?’

He lifted his eyes from his phone, and gave her a melancholic stare. She raised her glass. ‘Cheers!’

Obligingly, at that moment, the waiter produced a fresh Martini for him. He raised it and they clinked glasses. ‘Cheers,’ he said back to her, a little hesitant, as if unsure whether he’d just been hit on by a hooker.

‘Jodie Bentley,’ she said. ‘I’m from Brighton, England.’

‘Walt Klein.’ He set his glass down and folded his arms.

Mirroring him, deliberately, she set her glass down and folded her arms, too. ‘So what brings you to Vegas?’ she asked.

‘You want the trailer or the full three hours with intermission?’

She laughed. ‘I don’t have a train to catch. So as long as there’s ice cream, popcorn and alcohol involved, the intermission version is fine by me!’

He grinned. ‘Yeah, well, right, I’m here to try to forget for a while.’ He opened his arms and placed his hands either side of his thighs. Instantly, but subtly, she did the same.

‘Forget?’

‘I went through a pretty bad divorce. Married forty-four years.’ He shrugged and his heavy eyelids lowered, like theatre curtains, then raised again.

Once more she mirrored him. ‘Forty-four years — you don’t look old enough! Married in your teens, did you?’

‘Very flattering of you! I’m probably a bit older than you think. What do you reckon?’

‘Fifty-five?’

‘You’re being too kind. I like your accent. Love the British accent!’

‘Well, thenk yew,’ she said, exaggerating it even more. ‘OK, fifty-seven?’

‘Try seventy-seven.’

‘No way!’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You look twenty years younger! You must take good care of yourself.’

He held up the cigar then nodded at his Martini. ‘These things take good care of me. Only kidding! Yep, I work out daily. Play tennis regularly, and I like to ski in winter.’

‘I like to keep fit, too,’ she said. ‘I belong to a health club back home. And I ski whenever I can. Where do you like to go?’

‘Mostly Aspen, Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Park City in Utah.’

‘No kidding? Those are resorts I’ve always wanted to go to, particularly Aspen.’ She opened her handbag and pulled out her cigarettes, took one out and held it up, mirroring him again.

‘You know the place I’d really like to go is Courchevel in France!’

‘It’s the best skiing in the world,’ she said.

‘You know it, do you?’

‘Really well.’

‘So maybe I should take you there?’

‘Tonight?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘If you want.’ He looked at his watch. ‘OK, so it’s eight thirty. France is — if I’m working it out right — nine hours ahead of us, so five thirty in the morning. If I chartered a jet now we could be there in time for dinner tomorrow night.’

‘There’s just one problem,’ she said.

‘Which is?’

‘There’s no snow there right now. It’s August!’

‘Good point.’

‘How about a nice dinner here instead?’ she suggested.

‘That would mean cancelling my dinner plans,’ he said.

‘Which were?’

‘There was a famous gourmet in your country, back in the 1950s, way before you were born, a multi-millionaire Armenian called Nubar Gulbenkian. He once said, “The best number for dinner is two — myself and a good waiter.”’

‘I’m not sure I would totally agree.’ She gave him a mischievous look. ‘So you were going to have dinner with yourself?’

‘Yep.’

‘I waited tables once,’ she said. ‘When I was a student.’

‘You did?’

‘Didn’t last very long. I poured someone’s very expensive wine into a water glass by mistake, and it still had water in it!’

He laughed. ‘Hope they didn’t take it from your wages.’

‘Luckily not, but they fired me.’ She smiled. ‘So,’ she asked. ‘Your divorce — what happened?’

Walt Klein looked sheepish. ‘Well, after my divorce I married my second wife, Karin, who was much younger than me. I thought we had a good relationship and that we’d be together forever. My kids and my five grandkids adored her. Then one day, I guess about two years back, she suddenly said to me, in a restaurant, “You make me feel old.”’ He shrugged. ‘That was kind of it. She told me she wanted a divorce. I asked her if there was anyone else and she denied it.’

‘And was there?’

‘She was into art and had been bored for some while. I’d bought her an art gallery down in the West Village. I heard through a friend she was screwing a sculptor whose work she was exhibiting.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jodie said.

‘Shit happens.’

‘It does.’

‘So what’s your story?’

‘Do you want the trailer or the full three hours, with intermission?’

He laughed. ‘Give me the trailer now — then the full three hours over dinner.’

‘OK.’ She gave him a wan smile. ‘I was married to a wife beater.’

‘That’s terrible. Poor you.’

‘It was, it’s been a nightmare. A total nightmare. I’m not sure I could ever trust a man again.’

‘You want to start from the beginning?’

Jodie nodded. ‘Sure. If you don’t mind listening?’

‘I have all evening,’ he said. ‘Another drink?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, seeing the way he was looking at her. Knowing she already had him in the palm of her hand.

She made an excuse that she had to visit the Ladies. Locked in a cubicle there, she googled ‘Walt Klein’.

He was a stockbroker, investment adviser and financier, with a Wall Street securities company, bearing his name, and an estimated eight billion dollars under management.

Smiling happily, she slipped her phone back into her handbag and went back out. Walt Klein would do very nicely.

Very nicely indeed.

Jodie Danforth had a ton of homework to do. But she wasn’t able to concentrate. Instead she sat cross-legged on her bed, barefoot in jeans and a Blur T-shirt, holding her diary in her hand, sobbing, in her perfectly untidy bedroom upstairs in her parents’ perfect house. It was a square, white-painted mock-Georgian villa, with green shutters, set in an immaculate garden, still bathed in late-evening May sunlight, in a tree-lined street of almost identical houses on the outskirts of Burgess Hill, a town a few miles to the north of Brighton.

Everything was always in its place. Her mother cleaned the house obsessively. Her father cleaned their cars obsessively, and proudly. Out at the front on the drive sat her father’s immaculate new black Jaguar and her mother’s Saab convertible. Perfect parents, with one perfect daughter — her elder sister, Cassie. And one big embarrassment. Their problem daughter. Herself.

Posters of Jodie’s icons were on her bedroom walls. Madonna; Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise; Kylie Minogue; Take That; Blur and Oasis. All of them perfect, too. With perfect noses.

Unlike her own.

Through her tears, she wrote in her diary:

Everywhere I go people are pointing at me and laughing, because I’m so ugly. Telling me I’m a freak. My nose is ridiculous. I watched my reflection in the window of the bus taking me to school this morning. It’s not a nose, it’s a great big hooked beak. A snozzle. A snout. Some bitch left a picture of the aeroplane Concorde on my desk this morning, with a Post-it note attached, on which she had written that my nose was like the front of the plane. Hooked and dipped.