The One a Month Man (10 page)

‘Making them worthless currency for political blackmail,’ I said, demonstrating that I had paid full attention.

‘The pics did surface, however. They were given gratis to a Sunday scandal-sheet, as a means of discrediting not just the two MPs but also the government; depicting Western decadence, etc. The MPs didn’t stand for re-election at the next General Election, so the Soviet spy network had achieved a limited return on its investment.’

‘Was Tina a known radical?’

‘No. Her philosophy was that of the capitalist; a free
marketeer
. The Soviets were putting business her way. You could say that they were
her
agents, finding her work, for which she was paid twice.’

‘By the Soviets and her sleeping partners,’ I said, perversely impressed.

‘A nice little earner,’ Sean agreed, almost admiringly. ‘She was in it purely for the money. The Soviets were masters of honeytraps.
Tina was perfect for their range of black arts. The last thing they wanted was someone with a left-wing extremist political agenda because someone like that is driven by ideology and is one-
dimensional
and might as well be wearing a badge of allegiance. She needed to be intelligent, attractive, mercenary, self-disciplined, a free-thinker, flexible, manageable, ruthless and amoral, but most definitely not an overt tart. With Tina, all the boxes were ticked.’

‘Was any action taken by our side?’

Sean gave this question more consideration than any of my previous ones.

‘It all ended very abruptly,’ he said, cagily.

‘Is that a
yes
to my question?’

Sean avoided eye contact. ‘Sergi was discovered dead in his home, an empty bottle of pills on his bedside table. An empty bottle of scotch on the floor.’

‘He’d overdosed?’

‘Well, that’s what the coroner said.’

‘Is that what
you’re
saying?’

He just shrugged.

‘No suicide note?’

‘Of course not.’

‘So it
wasn’t
suicide?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Accidental?’

‘Hardly. The pathologist had a problem. The OD was massive: barbiturates, which are an old-fashioned drug, rarely prescribed nowadays; not too much in those days, either. The margin between a safe and a fatal dose too narrow. Oddly, there was no residue in his stomach.’

‘So how did he explain the mystery?’

‘Only one explanation: the fatal dose was injected straight into the bloodstream.’

‘So if self-administered, there must have been a used needle nearby.’

‘But there wasn’t.’ Now he eyeballed me as an evil,
bittersweet
smile trickled slyly across his enigmatic face.

‘So the OD couldn’t be matched to the empty drugs-bottle?’

‘Correct.’

‘How about the booze? Any evidence of alcoholic poisoning?’

‘He would have passed a breathalyzer test.’

‘As mysterious as Marilyn Monroe’s death, eh?’ I suggested.

‘But without the headlines. There wasn’t one reporter at the inquest. The press didn’t follow it up, even when the coroner recorded an open verdict.’

‘Sergi was murdered?’ I concluded, in the form of yet another question.

‘That’s one possibility.’

‘What are the others?’

‘None that immediately spring to mind.’

‘And who could possibly have wanted him dead, other than your lot?’

‘His paymasters, the Soviets. But who cares? You don’t, do you? You’ve stressed constantly that your involvement is motivated only by Tina.’

‘You got me there!’ I conceded. ‘So what happened to Tina? She must have stayed on the Intelligence radar.’

‘Only briefly.’

‘Go on, then, finish the story,’ I urged.

‘She was scared shitless when she heard about Sergi’s fate. Within two days she’d sold her car, drawn out a large amount of cash from her bank account, packed her bags, and boarded a flight to the USA.’

‘Where was her point of entry?’

‘LA.’

At least that was one fact Frankie Cullis got right.

‘What reason did she give for entering the US?’ I said. ‘I assume that she didn’t tell US Immigration that she was on the run.’

‘Vacation. Immigration, as was normal procedure then, allowed her a stay of up to six months. Rubber stamped.’

‘Were the CIA tipped off?’

‘Eventually. And the FBI.’

‘Can you define
eventually
?’

‘Matter of weeks.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Yep.’

‘No follow-up?’

‘Nope. The file went to the vaults and gathered dust and the hue of jaundice, only to surface in the last few hours – for your benefit.’

‘No requests for further background from the CIA or FBI?’

‘Not that’s in the file.’

‘She simply disappeared into the ether, is that what you’re saying?’

‘Doubtlessly reinventing herself. Survivors always do. They develop feral instincts and antennae. They become chameleons, morphing into whatever it pays them to be.’

‘If she stayed in the USA, it would have been as an illegal immigrant,’ I surmised.

‘You don’t know that, Mike. She might have married a rich Yank. Sergi was dead, so she was free to re-marry without a divorce. Till death us do part: she’d won early release. She may have become legitimately employed and given a green card, for all we know. There have always been lawyers in the States willing to bribe bureaucrats to issue Green-Card work permits for their foreign clients. By now, if still alive, Tina may well be a naturalized US citizen. Voting for the Republicans. A diehard Tea Party stalwart. A Stars and Stripes patriot, lamenting the dissipation of moral standards and Christian virtues in decadent Western society.’

‘You think? Sounds to me as if her mantra’s more likely to be,
Screw the lot of ’em
!’ I said, cynically. 

‘She’d already achieved that!’ observed Sean, his humour finally breaking through.

‘I
t seems to me that I’m superfluous to requirements,’ said Sarah, obviously inviting a contradiction. ‘You might as well return me to sender. “Can do very well without, thank you.”’

I suspected that she was seeking reassurance that her input was a constructive contribution and that she wasn’t a passenger, kept on board purely for company and night-time
entertainment
.

‘We’re a team, a fifty-fifty partnership,’ I said, sincerely. ‘It’s impossible to forecast who will get the breaks.’

‘So far they’ve all come your way,’ she said, not jealously, just concerned about being much more than a sleeping partner. The one thing you could always say about Sarah was that she
continuously
pulled way above her weight.

‘The important thing is that we both keep pitching. When the game’s over, we’ll have broken even, you see.’

She thanked me with a reserved smile, not completely assuaged. But she was genuinely pleased with the progress made, albeit ponderously. Rather than an action thriller, this was a sedate drawing-room drama, characterized by subtle manoeuvring and delicate finessing, advancement by minimal increments and not with one gigantic leap. We now had new names which Tina Marlowe might have been using – Tina Chekov or Juliette Trayner – and a location, LA. Of course, she could have re-married, giving her yet another different
surname. But there would be records in the USA; also bank, credit card and phone trails. The next step was across the Atlantic.

Firstly, though, Sharkey had to be brought up to date.

‘What’s the strength of your information?’ he asked,
sceptically
, with his first question.

‘Gold-plated.’

‘Can’t you be more specific?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I was sworn to secrecy. Without giving that
guarantee
, I wouldn’t have made this breakthrough.’

‘You call this a
breakthrough
?’ he taunted me.

‘Well, it’s certainly a breakthrough alongside the previous thirty years of inertness on behalf of my predecessors working this case in
your
force.’

Sharkey grinned boyishly. He enjoyed a playground scrap.

‘So you’re angling for a freebie holiday in Tinsel Town, playing with Hollywood cops?’

‘Without going to LA we’ll be at yet another impasse,’ I said, in a take-it-or-leave-it tone.

‘Not sure if I can swing it,’ he said, in the pressured manner of a manager faced with a request for a pay rise. ‘What with all the cutbacks and economy drives. How do I sell it to my chief?’

‘As a
fait accompli
,’ I suggested.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, snorting, his way of dismissing me from his office. ‘You may have given your
gold-plated
contact a guarantee of
omerta
, but you’re not getting any promises out of me.’

‘Well, you can only do your best,’ I said, getting up and leaving languidly. Just before the door closed behind me, I poked my head through the gap, adding, ‘Oh, I almost forgot, I’ll need two airline tickets. One for me and the other for my partner, Detective Sergeant Sarah Cable.’

Then I bolted.

Forty-eight hours later, I was boarding, with Sarah, a United Airlines flight from London Heathrow to Los Angeles. By then, Sarah’s uncertainties and misgivings were ancient history.

Before leaving Oxford, I’d made contact with the LA bureau of the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department, advising them of our travel plans and smoothing the way for assistance; routine international police protocol. We would have no
jurisdiction
outside the UK, so there could conceivably be situations that required US cops to act as our agents, therefore building a trusting relationship from the outset was
paramount
.

Reservations – two separate rooms, of course – had been made for us at a Holiday Inn in Santa Monica, just a couple of hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean, the period-piece pier, the glorious beach and the palm-lined promenade, where chess players and skateboarders co-existed harmoniously.

After the twelve-hour, brain-numbing flight and crashing through so many time zones, we were in no mental or physical state to focus on our assignment, so we ordered an early meal from Room Service and were asleep before putting out the cart in the corridor for collection.

When we awoke, it was morning of the next day, with the sun already high in a vibrant-blue sky, with only a handful of wispy clouds, like loitering jetstreams that had been cut up and rolled into floating party-balloons.

Following breakfast and several coffees around the pool, I spoke on the phone with a Lieutenant Dan O’Malley of the LAPD. He was friendly enough, but it was readily evident that he wouldn’t be breaking sweat or burning rubber on our behalf. Finding a witness to a batch of thirty-year-old murders in Britain was no big deal in the land where serial killers were endemic and
notched up tallies resembling phone numbers. Single-number killings were small beer.

O’Malley beefed about ridiculous workloads and staff
shortages
. Forget his accent and it could have been any administrative cop in the UK griping.

‘I’d love to help,’ he said, ‘but …’

There had to be a
but
, the preface to every cop-out; an appropriate pun in the circumstances.

‘We’re not going to get far over here as Lone Rangers, not without badges that carry a punch,’ I said, sort of plaintively, though trying not to sound too wimpish.

‘The best I can do is put you in touch with a PI,’ said O’Malley. ‘But don’t think I’m fobbing you off.’

That’s exactly what I was thinking.

‘Charley Emerson is a one-woman, spectacular show. She’s talented, honest and her rates are competitive. She won’t rip you off. Neither will she give you the runaround with bullshit. If she isn’t getting anywhere, she’ll come clean and won’t attempt to keep the meter running. If you like, I’ll call her first. She owes me a couple of favours. Maybe I can persuade her to forego a charge until she’s done some groundwork and has an idea about the possible outcome. She relies heavily on our co-operation, so it’s in her interest to keep our relationship nicely oiled.’

Clearly this was going to be the best – and only – offer on the table.

‘I’d be obliged,’ I said, garnishing my voice with sincerity. ‘What can you tell me about her, apart from the fact that she’s competent and doesn’t cheat her clients?’

In an instant, he was into auto-pilot. ‘Ex-cop. Divorced,
naturally
. Husband’s still with the LAPD. One kid, in her custody. Mother cares for the boy while Charley’s working a surveillance. Been in business a couple of years. Works from home. Contact number is her cell-phone so clients and the opposition don’t have her address, though anyone determined to get to her could
soon find out where she rests her head. She’s in a dangerous game for a lone female, but it’s her choice. Must be turned on by the roll of the dice, I reckon.’

‘I know the type,’ I said, eyes on Sarah, who cocked her head curiously.

‘She has long black hair; well, she did have when I last saw her, which was a couple of months ago. Green eyes. Toned figure. Jogs two miles daily ahead of breakfast, before the heat rises. A smile that can melt a Mafioso’s heart. When she seeks a favour, she rarely has to pay for it. If you don’t lust for her, your testosterone-reservoir must have dried up.’

I was glad that Sarah was standing away from the phone so that she couldn’t hear O’Malley, who hadn’t finished his
monologue
.

‘She’s sassy and feisty, alternating from one to the other, a trick that she doesn’t even know she’s performing. Mother’s Irish and father, who died a year ago, was Italian. A fiery mix, huh? I need say no more.’

I knew he would, though.

‘She never goes out without a gun in her handbag and another strapped to a shin, under her pants.’

For someone overworked in an understaffed department, O’Malley was certainly being generous with his precious time.

‘How old’s her kid?’ I asked.

‘About ten.’

That gave me a handle on Charley’s age.

‘As I said, I’ll have her call you,’ he continued. ‘Then the two of you can work out together how to play it.’

‘How soon?’ I pressed.

‘As soon as we’re done, I’ll start the ball rolling.’

‘We’re done,’ I said, thanking him before guillotining the connection.

Charley Emerson came to us. We arranged to meet poolside at 4.30 that afternoon.

She was exactly as described by O’Malley, although her eyes hid behind reflector shades. Her hair was allowed complete freedom, some of it falling over her face, apparently without
irritating
her. Her jeans were sufficiently flared to allow for a weapon to be attached to a lower leg without being outlined. A white, sleeveless silk blouse hung loose over her thighs. Prominent cheekbones and a modest mouth sculpted her face into a magnet that turned heads. She wasn’t as tall as I’d
visualized
, but her sheepskin boots gave her lift. O’Malley was right about her having style. Her poise and posture were
all-Hollywood
as she sashayed towards us. Picking us out was easy for her because there were only a handful of people at the white, plastic tables around the rectangular pool and a couple of teenagers skylarking in the water.

I had a chair already pulled out for Charley, whose smile was indeed
melting
as she reached us. Politely, she removed her glasses while we shook hands with her, giving us a close-up of those green-for-danger, Irish eyes, inherited from her mother.

She said yes to a drink: a double espresso, no sugar. Sarah and I had already drunk in one day more than our ration of caffeine for a week, so we both ordered iced orange juice from the
waitress
who patrolled the pool area solicitously.

‘How much did O’Malley tell you?’ I said.

‘Next to nothing,’ said Charley, her voice much softer than I anticipated.

‘Not surprising, because he knew next to nothing,’ said Sarah.

Charley treated us both to that killer smile of hers; a Great White masquerading as a skittish dolphin, I suspected.

‘OK, so what is the storyline?’ said Charley, true to the
soundtrack
of Hollywood.

In order to avoid any possibility of compromising her loyalty,
I left out the name of the male identified as the ‘The One-
A-Month Man’
and the fact that he was a CIA agent. Charley made notes, jotting down the names Tina Marlowe, Tina Chekov and Juliette Trayner. I also refrained from mentioning anything about Tina’s whoring and becoming mixed up in the murky world of espionage. Although I had forewarned law-
enforcement
agencies of our itinerary, I’d kept the purpose of our visit very narrow: the pursuit of a witness to a cold-case series of murders; no less and certainly no more. Never muddy the waters if it can be avoided.

‘The beginning should be easy, a mere formality, establishing her entry into the country,’ she said, tapping her notepad with a silver Cross pen. ‘After that, who knows … I’ll just go where it takes me.’

‘I ought to make something clear upfront,’ I said, my
discomfiture
difficult to disguise.

‘Let me say it for you,’ said Charley, once again taking off her shades to treat me to another dance of those tantalizing eyes. ‘You’re saddled with a tight budget?’

‘Wrong. We
don’t have
a budget.’

Now Charley’s eyes lost some of their luminescence.

‘Let me clarify, we’re not hoping to freeload,’ I started to explain.

Some of the radiance returned.

‘We thought we’d be getting action-assistance from the LAPD.’

‘But sweetheart O’Malley has off loaded you on to me.’

‘In a word, yes,’ I said.

‘And you require fiscal approval from your brass in the UK?’

‘Spot on,’ said Sarah.

‘After my talk with O’Malley this morning, I didn’t expect him to move so fast,’ I said.

‘He didn’t,’ said Charley. ‘I’m the fast-mover.’ Any shadow that had been cast over her had been washed away. ‘I presume
O’Malley put you in the picture about me; that I’m an ex-cop?’

‘He did,’ I said, simply. ‘His summary of you amounted to a star-studded testimony.’

Charley was as susceptible as anyone to blarney, another of her Irish heritages.

‘So I know how these things work, how bureaucracy can be the biggest obstacle,’ she said. ‘But if they’ve sent you this far, I can’t see them allowing a few hundred bucks to come between you and a result.’

‘That’s sound logic, which isn’t something our hierarchy is renowned for,’ said Sarah.

Charley toyed with her empty coffee cup as she said, ‘I owe O’Malley.’

I didn’t let on that O’Malley had mentioned that to me; to have done so might have been to break a confidence.

‘Normally I’d demand a retainer and an advance on expenses, but I’m prepared to forego those formalities for a couple of days, by which time I should have some idea how much work is going to be involved.’

‘And we should have clearance from our chiefs,’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t think we can take this any further today,’ said Charley, standing and proffering a hand, very direct and
businesslike
, to which I warmed. ‘I live quite a way from here, in the Valley, and I have a young son to collect en route. This time of day traffic will be gridlocked on the freeways. I’ll make a start for you in the morning and I’ll be in touch as soon as I have something to report.’

‘Good to do business with you,’ I said.

‘Likewise.’

We had lift-off.