“What’s happening?” asked Burns.
“Terry Hewitt was killed, you probably heard.”
“I did, aye.”
“I was named as next of kin. They made me ID the body on Saturday night.”
Burns thought back to Sunday. “You never said.”
She nodded out to Pete in the kitchen. “Well, anyway, I may be a bit freaked by that, and I know I’m overprotective, but Callum Ogilvy’s out of prison and he’s gone missing. I just don’t want Pete in the house or alone in school. It doesn’t feel safe.”
“What happened to Terry?”
“He was shot in the head.” She lifted her cigarette to her mouth but couldn’t face it and dropped her hand. “D’you remember Kevin Hatcher?”
“No.”
“A photographer. He was working with Terry on a book.” She shook her head, bewildered now she thought about it. “A bullshit book, a coffee-table thing. Nice pictures, nothing. Anyway, I was looking through his letter box-”
“How like you.”
She shut her burning eyes. “Please, George.”
“I’m teasing. Just trying to get a rise out of you.” He touched her knee again, telling her to go on.
“Kevin was lying on the ground. He’d had a stroke, swallowed a lot of cocaine, which he wouldn’t. Now he’s dead, there’s no trace of him arriving at any casualty department in the city, the police are warning me off and a bit of the book was missing.”
He stopped her. “You’re not making any sense.”
She tried to sort it out in her mind but gave up. “I used to be fearless about these things. ’Member Kate Burnett? ’Member Callum Ogilvy? Back then I was scared but not like this, not shaken and shitting it and crying all the fucking time.” She took a puff of the cigarette and looked at the floor. A white carpet. What sort of idiot would choose a white carpet in a house with a child? She looked around for an ashtray but there was nothing in the room but the empty coffee table. “Since Pete was born, it really matters if I die, you know?”
“Is that why you’re smoking again?”
She managed a shaky smile.
He looked at her stubby cigarette. “Can you think of anything less regal than Regal?”
They took three puffs to smoke, were favored by women who went to bingo and rebelling teenagers because they were cheap. Feeling in her handbag, she found an old paper hankie. Burns watched her make a bowl shape out of the crumpled tissue, spit into it, and touch it with the tip of her cigarette, letting it hiss itself to death.
“Seeing you spit into a dirty paper hankie makes me want you in the worst way.”
“Fuck you, Burns.”
He smiled. “There’s my brave girl. I’d get you an ashtray but then I’d be implicated. I’ll get battered when Sandy smells it.”
“I doubt you get battered for anything much, George.”
He shook his head slowly. “You don’t know what goes on, Pad. See this room, this white, empty room? You could do operations in here.” He did a stage sigh she’d heard many times before. “She has got… problems.”
She nodded, trying not to smile. George Burns had been confiding that his relationship was in trouble since she first met him, seven women ago. It was a sore lesson, she’d fallen for it often, but over the years she had finally realized that what George wanted wasn’t a big helpful chat to sort out his feelings; it often wasn’t even mindless sex with her, really. What George Burns craved was to win over disapproving women. Temporary was an essential precondition of what he wanted. No single woman in the universe was enough for him. Although they laughed about him and he was a philandering arsehole, his craven need to be well thought of was still kind of adorable. She just hoped it wasn’t genetic.
She crumpled the tissue into a ball and put it in her handbag, already smelling the rank stink and thinking of McBree’s awful breath.
“Can I leave Pete with you, George? Until they pick Callum up, I don’t want Pete staying where he could find him.”
“Well, I don’t know what Sandy ’ll say but… I suppose I could take him to work with me.”
“Could you?”
“I’ll get one of the production girls to look after him.”
Sandra didn’t work and Paddy knew she had a cleaning lady who came in three days a week. She allowed herself the luxury of a snide aside, since she’d had a shock. “What does Sandra do all day?”
He looked out of the picture window. “Shops for clothes. Takes them back. Shops for more clothes.”
She already had a guilty aftertaste in her mouth. “Good,” she said, bringing the conversation to a close.
He slid towards her on the sofa and softened his voice, inclining his head towards hers. “D’you ever think about us?”
It should have made her feel special, but she knew him too well to mistake it for lingering affection. He would do some variation on the move to whichever woman he was left alone with. She looked up wearily.
“George, give me a fucking break. I don’t want to have a fight.”
He slid back in his seat, offended. “Are you and Dub together?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Burns was as suspicious as a faithless man could be. He could never accept that most people made friends and kept them, met lovers and stayed with them. His world was in a perpetual state of tectonic shift and he wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t so for everyone else.
“So much for the Three Musketeers,” he said caustically.
She didn’t have the energy to be angry. “No one ever called us the Three Musketeers but you, and you’re the one who let both of us down. You left me to move in with that bint Lorraine, and you got another manager when Dub told you to turn down the TV show. He was right, wasn’t he?”
He chewed his tongue for a moment and shrugged. “Suppose. Who’s he handling now?”
“Loads of people,” she lied. “Word got out that he advised you against it and the phone’s never stopped ringing.”
“This new guy-he wants me to cash in on the TV show, tour the workingmen’s clubs.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m not going to.” He looked sheepish. “But the money’s good.”
The clubs were a graveyard. He’d never get back on the circuit again and that was where the radio and television executives went looking for talent to pin shows on.
“Don’t do it,” Paddy told him. “It’s a dead end.”
“Would Dub talk to me, do you think?”
“You want him to manage you again?”
“Possibly.”
“I don’t know. He’s pretty hurt by what you did. If you’d left him and found a new manager that would have been one thing, but you did it behind his back.”
George dipped his chin and looked up at her, puppy-dog penitent, asking her to fix it. Paddy knew that Dub was signing on and the dole paid next to nothing. He represented a number of comics but none of them had half of George’s talent. Onstage Burns was the man every woman wanted to be with and every man wanted to drink with, but offstage his persona was a bit more problematic. He was unpopular and not just because the TV show was crap: he kept sleeping with people’s wives just because he could and had a habit of launching into his act in the middle of a conversation, reducing the listeners to passive audience members, obliging them to laugh.
“You should talk to Dub, see what he says.”
“I never see him.”
“Phone him.”
“He’s never in.”
It was a power play: Dub was in all the time but Burns wanted Dub to come to him.
“Are you troubled at all by the fact that your son and I came here in mortal danger and now we’re discussing your career?”
