Framed

16

In the sitting room of Suite 340 at the Hyde Park Hotel Lola del Moreno was taking a telephone call. It was nine o’clock in the evening; she had just stepped from the bath when the call came. Now she stood wrapped in a towel, listening as Detective Sergeant Jackson explained himself. Charlotte Lampton stood beside Lola. She was grinning.

“You are in reception?” Lola said. “You want to come up and see me?” She wriggled, making Charlotte giggle. “I’m all alone. No! No! Please come up.”

She put down the receiver and screeched with laughter.

“I don’t believe it!” she howled. “I do not believe it! He’s here... He’s here! At the Hyde Park Hotel!”

“Brilliant.” Charlotte was suddenly bustling and businesslike. “Okay...” She grabbed her handbag. “I’m off. Put some clothes on.” She picked up her coat as Lola hurried into the bedroom. “No, on second thoughts, don’t.” She went to the door. “Get whatever you can out of him,” she called. “I’ll get them to send up food. And open the champagne, it’s chilled already. Who’s the lucky girl?”

Lola emerged from the bedroom in a smoky see-through wrap.

“Don’t you mean lucky boy?” she said, winking. “Go on, hurry! He’ll be here — oh!” A thought occurred. “Oysters! Get oysters!”

Less than three minutes later Larry was standing outside Suite 340, combing the fingers of both hands through his hair. He took a deep breath and tapped the door with his knuckles, trying to make it soft, nothing like the harsh rap he used as the bearer of tough tidings. Coming up in the lift he had asked himself, again, what he was doing here. Beyond the superficial excuses it wasn’t simple to rationalize. There were several reasons. For a start, he didn’t want to feel excluded from the case, even during a lull when there was no option but to suspend questioning. And now there was incentive to keep himself involved, because he had either been made privy to an important secret, or he had been spun a cynical lie by a man he had begun to trust and respect. There was, too, the undeniable fact that Larry was a changed person — changed and still changing — and he wanted to explore the limits of the alteration in himself. To do that he had to skirt his normal patterns of behavior. It was also true that he didn’t really want to go home yet, but he refused to let his mind do any probing in that area.

He knocked on the door again, unaware that Charlotte Lampton was peeping at him around the corner of the corridor.

The door opened and Larry felt something like a blow at his solar plexus. Lola, small and beautiful, stood before him in her diaphanous wrap, her golden body a shadowy glow through the folds.

“Hi!” she said brightly, smiling, showing him her perfect teeth. “Come in.”

She turned away sharply and walked back into the apartment, leaving Larry standing in the doorway. Awkwardly he straightened his tie and stepped inside, closing the door. His feet were silent on the rich carpet Lola settled herself in the corner of a chaise longue, folding one leg beneath her with a flash of thigh. She indicated a chair opposite. Larry sat down, quietly dazzled by her, hardly able to believe this was the same woman who had radiated such malice and called him a little prick the last time they met. He began, haltingly, to explain why he was there, but Lola interrupted him wordlessly by getting up and wandering out of the room. She i came back carrying an ice bucket between her small hands, a bottle of Cordon Rouge sticking up out of the ice. She put the bucket on a side table, snatched up the champagne bottle and opened it with an admirable lack of struggle. Larry took up the thread of his story again. He explained how he had managed to trace Lola to the Hyde Park Hotel. “I called the villa, you see. The housekeeper said, after a bit of difficulty, because I don’t really speak Spanish... anyway, she explained that you—” Lola handed him a glass of champagne. “How is he?” she said, shortcutting the narrative. “He’s okay. He... there was an accident, a car crash. But he’s fine.” Lola sipped her champagne and lowered herself onto the chaise lounge again, elegantly blasé, exposing so much leg this time that Larry had to glance away. When he looked at her again she was smiling pleasantly, apparently unconcerned by the news about Von Joel.

“So what brings you to London?” he asked. “What do you think?”

Lola sipped from her glass and appeared to hold the champagne in her mouth for a moment before she slowly swallowed it. “I also needed some new clothes. Azzedine Alaia is divine.” She tilted her head. “You like sexy clothes, yes? This man is special because he has, how do you say, finesse? Yes? Class.” Larry let that wash over him. He took a cautious sip from his glass, savored the mellow tang, then took a bigger sip.

“How long have you known Eddie... Philip?”

“Two and a half years,” Lola said. “We lived together for the past eighteen months.” She leaned forward, displaying quality cleavage. “Can you give him a message? Will you tell him Bruno and Sasha are fine? They are the dogs. Do you have a dog?”

“No. Tell me, have you ever heard Philip mention a brother?”

“No.”

“His name was Mickey.”

“I’ve never heard of him.” Lola got up and brought over the champagne bottle. As she topped up Larry’s glass the door buzzer sounded.

“I hope you haven’t eaten,” Lola said, putting down the bottle. “I ordered for two.”

She went to the door and opened it. A steward brought in a trolley covered with silver dishes and wheeled it to the center of the room. He locked the wheels and deftly flipped out the leaves, turning the trolley into a table. He put a chair at either end, and as he arranged glasses and cutlery Lola told him he could open the wine. She pointed to the leather folder with the service bill.

“You want me to sign?”

The steward opened the folder and held out his pen.

“No, no...” Larry came forward, flapping his hand, embarrassed at the mounting generosity. “I’ll do this.”

Lola stared at him as he took the pen.

“I insist,” he muttered.

“Gracias.” Lola smiled. “Excuse me, one minute...”

As she walked off to the bedroom Larry looked at the bill and felt a thump in his stomach for the second time that evening. He looked up, gave the steward a strained smile.

“Will you take a check? I’ve got a card...”

The steward inclined his head gently, just once, assenting with the merest shadow of a smile. Larry, fighting down speculation about how he would explain this one, fished out his checkbook and flipped it open.

When the steward had lit the candles he left. A moment later Lola came out of the bedroom wearing a skimpy black evening dress with a semitransparent top. She turned a dimmer switch on the wall, lowering the lights until the warm candle glow was the brightest illumination in the room. She sat at one end of the small table and motioned for Larry to take the chair at the other end.

“This is delightful, yes?” For a moment she gazed at the dishes set out before them, then pointed at one, an iced tureen, and lifted the lid. “Oysters.” She smiled at Larry, her teeth lustrous in the candlelight. “Do you like oysters?”

“I’ve never had one.”

Lola scooped a little champagne into the bowl of a dessert spoon. With her fingers she placed the flesh of an oyster on top, being careful not to spill any champagne.

“Allow me,” she said, leaning toward Larry with the spoon. “The first time must be savored, and you will either love it or want to puke. Open your mouth, Sergeant...”

Larry drew back his head, squinting at the unlovely presence under his nose.

“Come on,” Lola coaxed, “open wide.”

Larry opened his mouth, simultaneously closing his eyes. Lola pushed the spoon gently into his mouth, tilting it to make the oyster slide onto his tongue. A trickle of champagne ran down his chin.

“Swallow. Swallow it, don’t chew, that’s not the point. The whole point is the sensation, the texture of the oyster slithering down your throat.”

Lawrence gulped as the cold flesh touched the back of his throat. The oyster slipped over his tongue and was gone. He stared at Lola, dabbing his chin with his napkin.

“Well?”

“Nice!”

“The second is as important as the first,” she said. “If you liked numero uno, the next qualifies the experience, so that the memory, the total taste sensation, will be conjured up every time you order them.”

As delicately as before, she eased the spoon past Larry’s lips and let the oyster and the champagne glide onto his tongue.

“They are also an aphrodisiac, taste being one of the main senses of the equilibrium. Now...” Lola poured Larry a glass of red wine, then one for herself. She picked up Larry’s glass and held it close to his face. “Smell. No, no, don’t drink it, smell it, tell me what it’s like... the bouquet.”

Larry sniffed, sniffed again, then shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

Lola put her elbow on the table and leaned forward, eyes lowered confidentially.

“My father,” she said, “can tell twenty-two different vintages just by sniffing the cork.” She paused. “He is an alcoholic.”

They both laughed. As the sound of it died they stared at each other across the table.

“Well, Sergeant,” Lola said, “are you going to screw me or not?”

Larry felt his mouth drop open.

During the next ten minutes, or it could have been twenty, Larry revisited the sweating tensions of his adolescent days, the gland-locked period of his life when just the closeness of a girl put his mind and body in such a ferment that he could neither think nor act rationally. Sex in those days had worked on him like a brain solvent, wrecking his coordination and obliterating his sense of right and wrong; when the urge struck, all that mattered was the headlong drive to penetrate and climax.

At some point in the proceedings music had started to play, sexy music with a strident beat, flawlessly reproduced and pulsing through the scented air of the bedroom, which they had reached by a process unclear to Larry. He fell back across the bed, mildly surprised at the effect of only two glasses of champagne. He tried to stop Lola as she began unbuttoning his shirt.

“I’ve got to go,” he protested. He hadn’t been this excited over a woman in years, and in one ludicrous respect this time was unique: he was the one resisting. “This is crazy.”

Ignoring his protests, Lola pulled the front of his shirt wide open and began licking his nipples. As he groaned she stopped and looked up at him.

“It isn’t crazy.” She touched his lips. “You’re not doing anything wrong. I am eighteen.”

“What?” Larry stared at her, stricken. “Eighteen?”

“I consent,” Lola said, kissing his neck. She began undoing his belt. “And I have banana-flavored condoms.”

Lawrence cupped his hands around her face, drawing her close to him.

“I can’t do this,” he said, his voice agonized. “Please...”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Lola whispered, easing her face from his grasp, unzipping his trousers. “Think that you can and you will. It is all in the state of mind.”

Larry’s lips drew back in a taut rictus as the tension between lust and a sense of responsibility leveled out. Eyes wide, scarcely breathing, he watched Lola’s dark little head move down. She paused. It was a moment of almost holy intensity. Slowly, her wicked mouth encircled him. He gasped.

Two miles away, in Von Joel’s dimly lit room at the hospital, the nurse called Jackie had come in carrying a kidney dish covered with a folded cloth. She put down the dish, drew the blinds on the connecting window, then took a chair and eased the top under the door handle. Von Joel pushed himself up in the bed, smiling at her. Jackie turned to face him, undoing the buttons on her uniform dress. “Not too many,” Von Joel whispered. “I want you to keep it on.”

“Kinky.”

“What a lovely old-fashioned word.” He beckoned her to the bedside. She came and stood beside him. He realized she was trembling. “You’ll have to indulge an invalid, darling.”

He put his arm up around her hips. She bent down and he kissed her softly on the mouth. His arm began drawing her forward, gently unbalancing her. She looked at him.

“Are you sure about this?” she whispered. “I don’t have very long and I mean, you’re hurt...”

“It’ll be a terrible day when I’m hurt that badly,” he said. “And it’s not as if I’m handicapped, is it? I mean, they took away the cage from my legs, and look” — he held up his right hand, bandaged thickly at the wrist — “no sling.”

“You were supposed to keep that on.”

“I’ll put it back after.”

“After what?” Jackie said coyly.

He squeezed her hip once, firmly, before letting his hand drop away from her.

She drew back the bedclothes, looked down at him. “Jesus...”

“I said I wasn’t handicapped, didn’t I?” He pulled her down on top of him and held her by the wrists, guiding her hands to the sides of the bed, making her grasp the security rails.

She panted against his neck as he pulled up the hem of her uniform, exposing sheer black stockings and the garters she had put on for his benefit. His knees probed between hers, spreading her legs until she was astride him.

“Don’t move,” he whispered in her ear. He kissed her mouth and shifted his body, the slightest motion of his hips. Suddenly he was inside her.

She gulped. “My God...”

“Don’t move!” he insisted. “I told you!”

She groaned as his hips drove against her, a measured thrust, jiggling her, making her hang on tight to the rails. As he began moving faster Jackie tensed her legs, dug her knees into the mattress. His hand crept around her hip and spread out flat on her rump.

“Okay,” he whispered as she began to moan. “You can move.”

She didn’t need to be told twice. She began bouncing on him, drawing him to her, her neck taut as she cried out.

“Oh, yes! Now, baby! Now!”

Out in the corridor a night-security guard stopped near Von Joel’s room, listening, convinced he had heard a woman scream. As he listened he heard it again, softer this time, more of a dying howl. He heard it one more time, muffled, and now it seemed more like the kind of sound cats make in the dark. He stood there for another minute, straining his ears. Everything had gone quiet.

Inside Von Joel’s room Jackie was standing by the bed tucking strands of hair under her cap. Von Joel lay back under the covers, serene, a faint smile on his lips.

Jackie patted the cap to make sure it was centered. At the door she removed the chair from under the handle. She picked up the kidney dish she had brought, took it to the side of the bed, and whipped off the cloth with a magician’s flourish, revealing a portable telephone.

“You know I could get into trouble for doing this,” she whispered. “You can have it until I go off shift.”

She put the telephone on the bedside cabinet. On her way to the door she stopped.

“While I remember, will you thank your mum for the brooch? It was very kind of her.”

Von Joel nodded. “She’s a very sweet lady,” he said. “Sadly, she can’t get around so much lately, but if you take another little note for me tonight, I think she’ll appreciate it. Just leave it at the hotel reception.”

As Jackie opened the door he held up the phone. “Thank your sister for me!”

Faint daylight glowed on the curtains as Lola opened her eyes. She turned her head on the pillow and saw Larry bending over a chair, peering down behind it.

He was fully dressed.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Home. I can’t find my tie.”

He went through to the sitting room, closing the door behind him. Lola turned and saw that the light on her telephone was blinking. She picked it up. Waiting, she noticed Larry’s wallet lying on the bedside table and flipped through the contents.

“Hello? Senorita del Moreno, you have a message for me?” She scrabbled for a pencil and wrote down a number. “Yes? What time did the call come? Thank you. Any other messages left for me at the desk? No? Oh, gracias... Thank you, no, no, I’ll come down to the desk. Good-bye.”

She sat up properly, wedging a pillow behind her, then dialed the number she had written down. After the second ring Von Joel answered.

“Oh, my love, my love,” she whispered, snuggling down. “Dios mio, te echo de tnenos...”

She continued to croon to Von Joel in Spanish, telling him first how she missed him, then turning to practical matters and explaining that, almost at the same time as she and Charlotte sat planning how to locate Sergeant Jackson, he had shown up at hotel reception.

“He was here, yes, the little sergeant... Honestly!”

Larry walked into the bedroom, holding up his tie.

“Found it,” he said. “Oh, sorry.” He froze in the doorway. “You on the phone?”

“Hang on,” Lola said into the telephone, “my friend is just leaving.” She looked up at Larry. “It’s my papa — say hello.”

Larry shook his head and backed away.

“Oh, come on,” Lola coaxed, “he won’t mind me having someone in bed with me... Say Buenos dtas...”

Larry, feeling distinctly silly, leaned down over the bed and let Lola put the receiver to his mouth.

“Buenos dias,” he said.

“That’s good morning,” Lola told him as he straightened again. Into the phone she said, “You would like him muy bien, Papa.” She mouthed little kisses at Larry as he went to the door, knotting his tie. “Don’t forget your wallet, Sergeant Jackson,” she called.

He came back, took the wallet, and squeezed her shoulder. She pouted at him and pulled the duvet over her head. When he left she tossed the duvet aside and giggled into the telephone.

“He came all by himself, in the literal sense. No, he’s gone.” Her face became serious as she picked up her pencil and pad. “What’s the next move?” She nodded. “No problem. He said he would contact me tomorrow. Bank?”

She lay back, nodding again, making notes, cradling the telephone as if it were Von Joel himself.