The Big Over Easy

29. Lola Vavoom

“How many?” asked Jack, who had taken five minutes out to eat a sandwich after his return from a brief trip to St. Cerebellum’s.

“Ninety-seven — and rising,” said Baker. “We don’t have time to take statements; Ashley and Tibbit are taking names and addresses and checking to see if they have any ‘pertinent information.’”

“Do they?”

“Not yet. They just want to help.”

News of Humpty’s death had elicited an unpredictable reaction among his ex-girlfriends, paramours, affairs and liaisons. The arrival of floral tributes outside Grimm’s Road had begun as soon as his death was announced, and they had now spilled into the road. There was talk of a candlelight vigil that night; the long trail of ex-lovers who wanted to help with the investigation had begun a few hours ago and now absorbed all available manpower, which was never that great to begin with. The one girlfriend they did want to speak to, however, had yet to turn up.

“Thanks, Baker. Tell Ashley and Tibbit to come straight to me if they hear anything potentially relevant.”

Baker nodded and picked up his mobile.

“So what did you discover?” Jack asked Mary, who had also grabbed a quick bite to eat.

“Not much,” she replied, looking at her notes. “Winkie’s supervisor at Winsum and Loosum’s was a man named Whelan, who said that Winkie was an excellent worker and much liked. The narcolepsy was a problem, but they worked around it — Winsum’s has a good record of employing people with health issues. I couldn’t fault them. There were several occasions when jokes could have been made at a narcoleptic’s expense, but no one made them.”

“Did he seem to them like the sort of man about to try to blackmail a killer?”

“He had been preoccupied and a bit jumpy — about what, no one could say. Are you still thinking Solomon Grundy might be involved?”

“I don’t think so. He laid all his cards on the table for us, and as you say, he’s got enough money to write off a two-million-pound scam without thinking. And as Briggs pointed out, it was fourteen years ago.”

Jack took a swig of tea. His trip over to St. Cerebellum’s had been equally inconclusive. Winkie’s doctor, a helpful chap named Dr. Murphy, told him that Winkie had been treated for narcolespy as an outpatient for nearly eight years, with sessions twice weekly. Winkie had missed the previous day’s session, so it was possible something was on his mind. Jack had also bumped into Dr. Quatt, who asked him how things were going. She had referred to Humpty as “Hump,” so Jack wondered whether perhaps she might not have a floral tribute for him, too.

Jack finished his sandwich, wiped his hands and mouth on a hankie and thought for a moment. All those women.

“By the way,” said Baker, “Giorgio Porgia said he’d see you tomorrow at nine A.M. sharp.”

Jack snapped his fingers as he suddenly thought of something. “Of course. Baker, the apartment that Porgia gave to Humpty in return for the money laundering…?”

“What about it?”

“Do we have an address? I know Humpty lived over at the Cheery Egg with Laura for eighteen years, but he might have kept it on. He would have had to take all those girls somewhere.”

Baker rummaged through paperwork and eventually came up with an address in one of Humpty’s old arrest reports. “Here it is,” he announced: “614, Spongg Villas.”

Humpty Dumpty’s old residence was in a large block of flats that had been built by the Spongg Building Trust in the early part of the century for Reading’s trendiest set. After a period of fashionable existence in the thirties and forties, its popularity had begun to wane. Expensive to maintain, the unprepossessing block had changed hands regularly for ever-decreasing amounts as successive landlords took the rent and never bothered to bring the place up to date or even carry out anything other than essential repairs. It had started out as a good address but was now a shabby wreck, an upmarket version of Grimm’s Road, its paint long since faded and the stucco rounded and softened by the corrosive action of the wind and rain.

Jack, Mary and Baker stepped into the musty hall and were greeted warmly by the ripe odor of decay. Out of two hundred apartments, they understood from the ancient doorman, who wore a stained bellhop’s uniform, barely eight were still occupied. The others had been boarded up and the basins, baths and toilets smashed to discourage squatters. The owner was a wealthy financier who was waiting for the last tenants to leave before he flattened the site and built a deluxe car park in its place. The doorman pointed the way up the stairs. The lift, he explained, had been out of order since 1972.

Humpty’s apartment was on the sixth floor, and as Baker led the way up the creaking circular staircase, Jack looked over the banisters and up at the domed skylight, whose myriad leaks he could see had been crudely repaired with waterproof tape. The banisters were rickety, and the dust of dry rot rose when they touched them. Padlocked doors greeted them on every landing.

“Which was his apartment again?” asked Jack.

“Number 614,” whispered Baker. “This way.”

He led them slowly down the hall, through fire doors that were wedged open and past corroded wall lights glowing with bulbs of minuscule wattage. Dust rose from the aged carpet as they approached Humpty’s front door. Jack pulled out his penlight to examine it more closely. They could see that the dirt and fluff had drifted against it; the doorknob had a small spider living on it, and everything was veiled with a thin coat of dust.

“No one’s been in here for rather a long time,” observed Baker.

A low, husky woman’s voice answered from behind them.

“About a year, actually, dahlings.”

They turned to see a woman of perhaps fifty-five standing dramatically in the shaft of light that shone out of her apartment door and pierced the stygian gloom of the corridor. She watched them all with a well-practiced air of laconic indifference, a half smile on her lips. Her hair was up in rollers, and she was smoking an expensive-looking cigarette. She had hastily covered her mouth with crimson lipstick and wore a lacy blouse that was unbuttoned enough to display a large volume of cleavage. Her shoulders were draped with a light tan cashmere sweater, and she wore a knee-length skirt that hugged her well-proportioned frame tightly. She paused for a moment, leaned on the doorframe and regarded them in a manner that might have been described as “smoldering sexuality” had she been twenty years younger.

“Sorry?” stammered Jack, quite taken aback by the curious vision that had appeared in front of them.

“About a year,” she repeated. “I called them about the shower, but they never came. They’re arseholes, you know, dahling.”

She inhaled on her cigarette and blew the smoke upwards. Jack walked over to her.

“I know who you are. You’re Lola Vavoom. You used to be big in movies.”

“I will treat that feed line with the contempt it deserves, dahling. I’d never tread on Norma’s toes. Who might you be?”

“Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division. These are Detective Sergeant Mary and Constable Baker.”

She nodded in Mary’s direction but didn’t look at her. She put a languid hand out towards Baker, just out of his reach so he had to step forward to shake it.

“Detective Baker,” she cooed.

“Constable Baker,” he corrected with a small smile.

Despite her faded grandeur and worn poise, Lola had a certain grace and bearing that still made her extremely attractive.

“That’s a beautiful name. I had a lover named Baker once. He was hung like a hamster.”

“Is that good?” asked Baker, unsure of her meaning.

“It is if you’re another hamster.”

Jack managed to turn a laugh into a cough. Baker blushed, but Jack quickly took charge of the situation.

“Miss Vavoom — what are you doing here?”

“Here, dahling?” she replied with a smile. “Why, I live here!”

“We thought you’d be in Hollywood… or Caversham Heights at the very least,” added Mary, who remembered seeing Lola performing Anthrax! live when she was a little girl.

“Hah!” Lola spat contemptuously. “Being waited on by an army of cosmetic surgeons? No thanks. What you see is what I am. I’ve not had my boobs done or my arse lifted, no nips, no tucks. No ribs removed, nothing. Those little strumpets we see on the silver screen today are mostly bathroom sealant. They buy their breasts over the counter. ‘What would you like, honey, small, medium or large?’ They give us stick insects and tell us it’s beauty. If someone of their size went for an audition in my day, she’d have been shown a square meal and told to come back when she was a stone heavier. What’s wrong with curves? Anyone over a ten these days is regarded not as an average-sized woman but a marketing opportunity. Cream for this, pills for that, superfluous hair, collagen injection, quick-weight-loss diets. Where’s it going to end? We’re pressured to expend so much money and effort to be the ‘perfect’ shape, when that shape is physically attainable by only one woman in a million. It’s the cold face of capitalism, boys and girls, preying on misguided expectations. Besides, I always found perfection an overrated commodity.”

Her voice had risen as she spoke, topping her tirade on a high C. She paused and collected herself, then continued in a normal voice.

“Sometime I’ll make a comeback, and when I do…”

Jack and Baker just stared. Lola looked from Baker to Mary and then back to Jack again. She tapped her heel against the doorframe and lit another cigarette.

“So. You’re the police. I heard about Humpty. I was sorry, I thought he was a nice guy. A bit short for my taste, but there you have it.”

“When did you last see him?” asked Jack, trying to gather his senses.

She flicked the ash off her cigarette. “About this time last year. I saw Hump come lumbering out; he never could move very fast with those short little legs of his. He looked a bit agitated, and I asked if he was all right. He was a bit startled when he saw me and said everything was fine, then went downstairs. I went back indoors, but I could still hear the shower running. Humpty never came back, and I called the maintenance engineer the following week. He didn’t turn up, and it’s still running. My guess is that they’re trying to make the building unsafe so we all have to move out.”

She looked around the shabby corridor and pulled at a piece of curling wallpaper disdainfully. It tore off easily in her hand, and she crushed the fragment to little pieces.

She suddenly looked bored. “Can I go? If you want me, you know where to find me. I don’t go out a lot.”

Lola didn’t wait for a reply. She just looked at them all, smiled at Baker, went back inside her room and closed the door noiselessly behind her.

Jack sighed and put an ear to one of the glass panes of Humpty’s front door.

“We’ve just met British cinema history,” he commented.

“She was rather a cracker in her time, sir,” declared Baker.

“I think she still is.”

“Well,” announced Mary, “if I look that good in my fifties, I’ll be a happy girl.”

Jack raised a finger to his lips. “Quiet a second, guys.”

They all stood in silence for a moment.

“She’s right. The shower is still running.”

He stepped back and gestured to Baker to force the lock. They pushed the door open against a mound of junk mail that had collected in the hall and then went on to the second door that separated the hall from the rest of the apartment. Jack paused and looked at Mary and Baker, seeing his own feelings of foreboding reflected on their faces.

As Jack grasped the door handle, it came away in his hand, and the door itself fell away into a rotten, soggy heap. A wave of damp air blew over them all. The moisture in the air had exacted a terrible toll on the apartment. Everything they could see was in an advanced state of rot. The carpets and furnishings were thickly mildewed, and the paper had peeled off the walls and lay in heaps next to the moldy skirting. The books in the bookcase had rotted down to a dark mulch, and everything in the flat was covered with a thin layer of moisture. There was a heavy smell of damp, and Jack noticed that several varieties of fungi had started to grow on the walls and floors. He felt the floorboards collapse gently under his weight, the patterned carpet keeping him from falling through entirely. He trod gently into the bedroom and saw that the sheets had rotted off the bed and the contents of the wardrobe had fallen off their hangers into a soggy mass. As he called to Baker to turn off the shower, his eyes settled on a badly corroded cartridge that lay on the wet carpet. He looked closer and found another, then two more. He bent down and prodded one with a pen, but it had stuck fast to the carpet.

Jack heard the shower stop. There was a short pause, and then Baker spoke, his voice solemn and quavering slightly.

“Sir, I think you’d better come and have a look at this.”

The SOCO team was there in under an hour. They looked around curiously at the decayed room and walked carefully on a floor that now undulated where the floorboards had partially collapsed. One officer busied himself cutting out the squares of carpet that had the cartridges corroded to them, but the fingerprint boys were sent away almost immediately.

Shenstone scratched the back of his head when he saw the mess. “How long has the shower been going?”

“A year.”

It posed severe problems. The photographer was still busy as Mrs. Singh arrived, breathless after hurrying up the stairs. Jack was sorting through the heap of junk mail and private letters, most of which seemed to be either bank correspondence, invitations to functions or pleas for charitable donations. There were hundreds of love letters, too — obviously brief amours hastily cast aside. The oldest postmark dated back almost a year, which seemed to tie in with what Lola had told them.

“Jack, Jack,” said Mrs. Singh, shaking her head sadly, “what’s going on?”

Jack took her to the bathroom, finding her a safe passage over the rotten floorboards. “Body in the shower. Probably been dead about a year.”

“A year? Well, as I said, dead men do — ”

But then she saw the body. A flash went off at that moment to punctuate the discovery.

“Not much for me to work on, is there?”

“Not really.”

The corpse wasn’t much of a corpse. Since the body had been in a shower for nearly a year, the flesh had been quite literally washed down the drain. All that remained of the victim was a yellowish skeleton, held together by hardier pieces of tendon and gristle. Wisps of hair were attached to a small area of scalp on the side of the head, and the left foot, which was the only part of the body outside the oversize shower basin, had putrefied and was now host to a large crop of fungus.

“The shower was on when you found him?” asked Mrs. Singh.

“Yes. Him?”

“Male skeleton. Mid-thirties at a guess, not far off six foot. But this is what interests me.”

She pointed at the small collection of lead bullets that lay scattered beneath the corpse. They had dropped from the body as the surrounding tissue rotted away but were too heavy to be moved by the water. Mrs. Singh pulled out a Magic Marker and noted the position of one, and had the photographer take several pictures before she picked it up with a pair of forceps and looked closely at it.

“Looks like a.32. Make any sense?”

“There are.32 cartridges scattered all over the carpet just behind you.”

“Any idea who he is?” she asked without looking up.

“We think his name is Tom Thomm, aged thirty-four and a missing person — found his wallet in a pair of rotted 501s. Do I need to ask how he died?”

Mrs. Singh knelt by the shower basin. Jack squatted next to her.

“Not really,” she continued. “One shot grazed his lowest rib just here but was not fatal; another bullet that shattered the ulna indicates that he had raised his arm in an attempt to protect himself. There is another slug lodged in the hip joint which probably caused him to fall over, and the last two were fired to finish him off. One lodged in the side of his skull and the other nicked his rib.”

“How do you know two shots were fired to finish him off?”

She smiled and with a flourish drew back the shower curtain. It had three bullet holes at abdomen height and then two much lower down.

Jack looked at the holes and got up, rubbed his chin and stood just outside the bathroom door facing the shower. The ejected shell cases had been found there, so it was a fair bet that this was where the shots had been fired from.

“So they fire from here three times, hear the person slump in the shower and shoot twice more?”

Mrs. Singh stood up. “I’d say that’s about the tune of it. Get Skinner to have a look. I’ll leave the corpse there until he’s done.” She stared down at the body. “Seems hard to believe that a shower could be run for a year. Didn’t anyone complain?”

“Next-door neighbor. Lola Vavoom — ”

“The actress?”

“The same. She complained, but they ignored her. No one lives below. It’s a mess down there, too. The damp has got into everything.”

Mrs. Singh was deep in thought, but not, as Jack found out, about the corpse.

“Lola Vavoom, eh?” she said excitedly. “I was about the only person who liked My Sister Used to Keep Geese, and my husband and I saw Fancy Free in Ludlow eight times. I must get her autograph.”

She hurried off, leaving them both staring at the shower curtain.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Jack.

“Mrs. Dumpty?”

“Bingo. First three shots at abdomen level. Humpty was about four foot six. If she thought he was in the shower, that’s where she would have aimed.”

“What did Mrs. Dumpty say in her suicide note?” mused Mary.

“‘I went to his home and prayed for God to forgive me as I pulled the trigger.’”

“Only when we came around to interview her,” continued Mary, “she didn’t know we were investigating something that had happened that morning — she must have thought we’d just discovered the body.”

“It explains why Dumpty had been lying low,” added Jack. “He obviously didn’t want her to have a second go at him.”

He stared at the skeleton in the shower basin.

“I reckon he’d only just discovered Tom Thomm’s body when Lola saw him.”

“Why didn’t he report it?” asked Mary.

“Because,” said Jack simply, “he was up to no good — and up to no good big time. But it still doesn’t tell us where Humpty had been living this past year.”

“So… are we any closer to who killed Humpty?”

“We know they used a.44-caliber handgun, that it’s probable Winkie saw them do it and — ” He thought for a moment. “And that’s about it.”

The rain had stopped by the time they stepped out of the building. The sky had darkened even though it was barely midafternoon, and cautious motorists had switched on their headlights, causing the wet road to glisten. The doorman, inspired by all the activity, had put his pillbox hat on at a jaunty angle and saluted as they walked past.

“Briggs called,” said Baker as he saw them to the Allegro.

“Let me guess. Press conference?”

“In one.”