Cold Heart by Lynda La Plante Page B

Decker looked at her with his head on one side. ‘Go well, did it?’
    Lorraine tossed her purse down. ‘You try interviewing Cindy Nathan. The porch light’s on, but there’s nobody home. She’s not sure that she didn’t do it, because she dreamed that she’d just pulled the trigger when she heard a gunshot, or as she told me repeatedly, it might have been a car backfiring!’
    ‘What’s your gut feeling?’
    Lorraine leaned back in her chair. ‘I don’t think she did it, but I’d better find something fast to prove that she didn’t because, pushed by any decent prosecutor, she’ll admit that she did. She’s that dumb.’
    ‘Why would someone like Harry Nathan marry such a flake?’
    Lorraine sipped her coffee. ‘Because she’s twenty and he was a fifty-year-old guy dyeing his hair and having face-lifts, and she’s got a body like a fourteen-year-old Venus, and an angel’s face. He also had quite a line-up of women as well as Cindy, plus remained friendly with his ex-wife, who still, by the way, runs his art gallery. I’d say Cindy was the classic babe armpiece for a man with a small dick.’
    ‘Oh, he had one of those, did he?’ Decker said, camp.
    ‘According to Little Miss Bimbo he did, but she’s having his baby. Not that he seemed all that interested – almost punched it through her backbone. I saw the bruise.’
    ‘So,’ Decker said, leaning on the doorframe, ‘what’s the next move?’
    ‘I think she’s hiding something about tapes Nathan made at the house – phone conversations, security videos. She didn’t tell the police and she kind of let it slip to me, but she said she’d send the tapes over. We’ll just have to wait and see what we get.’
    Cindy Nathan brought the boxes upstairs from the gym herself and stacked them in the hall. She had listened to some of the conversations again and again, just to hear his voice, but they had agreed a code and stuck to it and there was nothing to make Harry or anyone else suspicious: even the police could have listened to them, if they’d found them. She dialled a cab company, said she wanted some items delivered, and sat down to wait for the driver to come. It would have been easier, of course, to send Jose, but she was sick of Harry’s housekeepers knowing all her comings and goings, the pair of them always watching her. They had been surprised when she had given them the rest of the day off, but within half an hour they had been on their way to Juana’s sister.
    When the cab driver showed up, Cindy gave him the boxes of tapes with Lorraine’s address and twenty-five dollars. Good riddance, she thought. Mrs Page was welcome to listen to all the rambling rubbish Harry recorded. There was nothing to find.
    The videos, though, they were something else – but where the fuck were they? Harry had kept all the recordings together in the safe under the floor in his dressing room but the videotapes, both the ones from the security cameras and the . . . the other ones, were gone. Cindy tried to tell herself that if she couldn’t find them, nobody else was likely to, but the possibility that they might be circulating somewhere out there tormented her.
    It was more likely that the tapes had never left the house, she told herself. Harry had just moved them again, the mistrustful, suspicious-minded bastard. She set off for the stairs to have another look in the gym, where there was certainly no visible hiding place for the substantial stack of videos. She deduced he must have had a new cavity let into the floor or the wall.
    The noise of Cindy’s tapping on what she considered various likely spots on the walls masked the sound of the doors opening to the pool area. At first she didn’t notice the man’s presence, and for over a minute he watched her in silence before he spoke.
    ‘Cindy,’ he said, his voice curiously cold and flat.
    She froze.
    ‘Cindy,’ he said again.
    ‘Jesus, Raymond, you gave me such a fucking scare! Don’t ever do