by Uc Amalu, Jr
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jay stepped through the doors of Café Cino and into a
bustling hive of activity. Waitresses were running from
one side of the room to the other carrying orders and the
air was alive with the humming of dozens of
conversations. Sounds of a radio station were echoing
softly from six or so, small speakers, which were mounted
sporadically on the walls of the café. Jay wondered why
they even bothered having the sound system in place; it
didn’t appear that anyone was even listening to it above
the droning of their own voices.
Cino’s light mocha coloured walls always amused Jay, to
him it felt like the owners were trying to give the patrons
the perception that they were inside one giant
muggacino. The large white tables and sofa chairs only
added to the inner coffee experience by looking like over-
grown marshmallows. It was a novel idea, though not
quite to Jay’s taste. He walked deeper into the café and
scanned the tables for Paula. All he could see were
yuppies, uni students and bookworms, sitting at their
regular tables with textbooks and loose papers spread
out in front of them. Most looked to be deep in thought
or in the throws of an assignment, the rest were on
mobile phones, sipping their latte’s.
“Bloody Yuppie-Ville,” Jay scoffed to himself before
taking a seat on a comfy marsh-mallow at the main
servery counter.
A petite waitress approached Jay and took out her order
book. “Can I get you any-thing, Sir?” Her slow drawl
annoyed Jay, almost as much as the surroundings.
“Where’s, Joany?” He spat at her.
“It’s her day off today,” the waitress droned back at him.
“Damn it!” he scanned the chalkboard menu above her for
a few minutes and then said, “I’ll have bacon and eggs
with a round of toast and a white, unsweetened coffee.”
The waitress rolled her eyes at him, shifted her weight
from one foot to the other and said, “Latte, cappuccino,
long, short, decaffeinated, strong, weak, in a cup, mug or
a glass?” She grinned at him.
His expression blank, Jay leaned in closer to the young
woman and replied, “I just want a normal bloody coffee in
a normal bloody mug with no sugar and lotsa milk! Is
that so hard?” He rubbed his hands over his face and then
added. “I want bacon that comes from a pig and eggs that
come from a hen…”
“Sure. You want wholegrain, multigrain, brown or white
toast?” Her grin was now broadening to a full-blown
smile.
Jay knew she was toying with him now and he was
amused that she was able to give as good as she got.
“I just want toast… You figure it out!”
The waitress smirked cheekily at him and slid an order
number across the counter to him. “You gonna eat right
here or you want a table?”
“I’m meeting someone,” Jay answered, grabbing the
number from her. “So I’ll be moving to a table very soon.”
“No problem, I’ll bring it over when it’s done.” She began
to walk away and then turned back to him. “Any sauce?”
Jay threw his hands into the air in defeat and just shook
his head. No wonder he never comes here much any
more. With the table number in his hand he stood up and
walked around the corner of the counter. His eyes spotted
Paula sitting at a large corner booth towards the back of
the café, he walked over and slid into the chair opposite
her.
“Next time ya wanna meet somewhere, Paula, make it
somewhere that normal people inhabit!” He looked
around and eyed his surroundings some more. “These
people belong on Pluto or something.”
Paula laughed and patted Jay on the hand. “Nice to see
you too Jayy.” She pulled her hand back and rested it on
top of the file in front of her. It was roughly half an inch
thick and a few pieces of paper were poking out the side
of the cardboard jacket they were tucked inside of.
“So that’s the juice eh?” Jay asked, nodding his head
towards the file beneath her hands.
“Boy, you don’t mess around with pleasantries do you?”
“Pleasantries are for pleasant people Paula, and I am not
one of them.” He sat back deeper in his chair and allowed
the waitress to place his coffee on the table. He looked up
at her and asked, “How’s the feed going? Will it be much
longer or are ya still chasin’ the pig around the kitchen?”
The waitress eyed him, her sense of hu-mour almost as
free as Jay’s. “I’m sure it won’t be too much longer, Sir. I
believe they were still harvesting the wheat to make your
toast.” With that, she spun on her heel and marched
away.
“She got you there, Jayy…” Paula broke into another fit of
laughter.
Jay smiled to himself and picked up his coffee. “So what
did ya find for me?” He ignored Paula’s comment.
“Anything worth writing home about or just a few nit-
picky, tid-bits?”
“You got a real work of art here, my friend. I don’t know
what this woman has done to make you check her out but
I am guessing she wouldn’t want too many people
knowing about this stuff.” She flipped open the file and
pulled the first sheet of paper out and handed it to Jay.
He snatched it anxiously and scanned it line by line.
“She’s had a pretty rough trot growing up, by the look of
this.”
Paula enlightened him. “Her mother, Carol Mavis Stockton
(Nee Beetson) left her and her father when she was just
three. I guess most kids could learn to cope with that, but
not when your father is an abusive alcoholic.”
“Abusive?” Jay asked. “How so?”
“Physically and sexually. I’d be only guessing here, but I’d
say there was some psychological abuse in there too.
Usually is in those sort of circumstances. Started around
age seven, from what I can gather.”
“How do you know that?”
“Her emergency room reports. Every time she went to the
hospital for treatment, the Doctor’s were meant to phone
welfare. Normal procedure when they think a child has
been abused. But somehow, they always managed to
forget to make the call.”
Jay remained silent. His face sullen.
“At least three times she was admitted with vaginal
bleeding and in 1967 she had a broken arm. That’s only
the beginning, she was also seen over the years for
numerous cracked ribs, a dislocated jaw and other
general bruising and abrasions, countless urine
infections and in 1973 she was admitted again with severe
abdominal pain and internal bleeding. It turned out she
had an ectopic pregnancy and had to undergo surgery.”
“Jesus!” whispered Jay. His heart sank. Ben had told him
about her abusive childhood and ectopic pregnancy, but
he never imagined the hell she must have gone through
at the hands of her drunken father. All those fractures and
cases of vaginal bleeding, he couldn’t believe that she was
being abused and the hospital did nothing to report it.
This was definitely a case of another one slipping through
the cracks. Although Jay was no doctor, he knew that
when a seven-year-old child has broken bones and
vaginal bleeding, the cause can’t be natural.
“Where did her mother go?” He finally asked.
“Seems she couldn’t handle the father or his abuse so
she left the daughter with him and skipped out to her
parents place in Harten. Apparently she was emotionally
and mentally unstable.”
“You’d have to be, to leave a kid with a menace like that,
wouldn’t ya?” Jay replied in more of a statement than a
question.
“Well the father, Arthur, was a labourer and was prone to
violent tempers and outbursts. I suppose Carol just
couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Yeah, I can understand that…‛ Jay stopped and thought.
‚But why not take the kid with her?”
Paula shook her head and continued on with the brief
family history. “Anna Louise Jameson was born Anna
Stockton on May 17th 1960. After her mother left, her
father dragged her around the countryside before settling
Bayside. Her schooling was erratic at best, but child
services could never catch up with Arthur and Anna
because they moved so frequently.”
“Why did they move so much?”
“I guess Arthur moved to where ever the work was. He
picked up the odd labouring job on building sites.”
“What about the mother, did she have any further contact
with them?”
Paula sifted through her papers and read a line here and
there to fill in the blanks for Jay. “Carol died of bone
cancer in 1981, while living with her parents and Arthur
was murdered in 1973.”
“What? Murdered?” Jay’s ears pricked up. He leaned
forward just as the waitress returned to his table with his
food.
“Here we are, Sir. Enjoy.” She slid the plate under his nose,
sat a knife and fork beside it and left.
Jay completely ignored the waitress and just stared,
wide eyed at Paula. “What do you mean murdered? Are
you sure?”
His memory was trying to recall what Ben had told him
that night at Bluey’s. He was sure he had told him that her
father had abandoned her when she was thirteen!
Something was definitely amiss, either Ben was lying, or,
and more to Jay’s way of thinking, Anna was. It was
clearer than ever now why Anna had been so evasive with
Ben regarding this case. She had her own secrets to
protect and getting caught in the middle of a serial
murder investigation was not a good way to keep the
skeletons locked in the closet.
“Sure as I can be. I’ve got his death certificate, cause of
death, autopsy report, case file notes from the murder…”
“Okay, I get the picture,” sighed Jay, picking up his knife
and fork and pushing his bacon around the plate. He
suddenly didn’t feel terribly hungry anymore. “So who did
it and what happened?”
“Are you ready for this?” Paula asked, her excitement hard
to miss.
“Shoot,” Jay blurted out, clanging his fork against the
china plate and wishing he could have a cigarette.
“Anna Louise Stockton,” Paula began reading from the file
in front of her, “was arrested on March twenty-fourth 1973
for fatally stabbing her father, Arthur Robert Stockton. She
was taken into child custody. Anna was tried for
manslaughter in May, 1973 and was acquitted on the
basis of self defense. She was, however, detained until her
eighteenth birthday at Grimshore Girls Home in Bayside.”
Jay’s mouth fell open. He reached over and snatched the
papers from Paula, eager to read the particulars for
himself. “You’re shitting me?”
“I certainly am not,” said Paula before clicking her tongue
loudly.
Jay’s eyes skipped over the papers, be-fore burying his
head in his hands. He thought hard about everything he
had just read. Anna sure was no Miss Innocent, but
anyone could see from what he had read and from what
Paula had told him, that she was a victim of abuse and
abandonment. She had nothing to be ashamed of. She
killed a man yes, but it was kill or be killed by the sound
of things. To some degree it made sense to him that
Anna would want to keep her past hidden, but from her
husband? It just didn’t add up for Jay, why would she
even marry a cop if she wanted to keep her criminal past
quiet? It was a pretty big gamble, thinking he would never
find out.
“No wonder she has been playing cat and mouse with us,”
he blurted out, more to himself than to Paula.
“Should I read on?” Paula pushed Jay.
Lifting his coffee to his lips, he sent her a simple nod.
“Upon her discharge from Grimshore Girls Home in 1978,
Anna Stockton applied to legally change her name to
Anna Louise Jameson. She gained employment at various
convenience stores around Bayside before returning to
school where she completed her year eleven and twelve
equivalency test.”
“So she tried to make a go of things then?”
“Seems so,” she replied. “I can see why you wanted this
kept hush, hush though. Why didn’t you tell me she was
Ben’s wife Jay?”
“I dunno,” he started. “I didn’t want to make a big deal of
it, because of that reason I guess. Is that all you got in
your bag of goodies there, Paula?”
“Far from it, I’m afraid. Although I’m sure you know this
part,” she read on with some mundane details. “In Sep
1981 she married Benjamin James Payne, a Showsdale
City Police Officer. From Feb 2000 until August 2004 she
studied and gained her Diploma in Counselling. She
legally separated from her husband in Jan 2007. She
currently runs her own Counselling Centre in Showsdale.”
“Yeah, at least there are no surprises there.”
Her life after Grimshore appeared clean enough, Jay was
impressed at her drive and determination. She rose out of
the hell she had been born into and made something of
herself. Jay knew that was no easy thing to accomplish.
The more he heard, the more he was convinced that Anna
was just secretive and had no role in the murder
investigation. He was thinking that in this particular case,
it might be better to let sleeping dogs lay. Ben had
poured his heart out to him just a few nights ago and
now here he was digging up the dirt on his ex-wife. It
would crush Ben if he knew all the sordid details. Jay
was overcome with a rush of guilt. What had started out
as a fishing expedition to show Anna for who she was,
had somehow turned into something very different. He no
longer wanted to run to Ben an
d shove this information
under his nose.
“Her adult criminal history is pretty bland, nothing but a
few parking tickets and a drink driving offence in 2005,”
Paula soldiered on with her findings.
“So her adult life was pretty dull,” said Jay. “I’d expect
that, after all, she was married to a cop by then.”
Apart from the murder, which by now he was
sympathetically justifying to himself, Anna was quite
clean. In some way he felt disappointed, yet in another
way relief was washing over him in waves.
“Jay,” Paula pulled one last document from her folder
and held it to her chest. “ I found this document after I’d
done the background search. I don’t know how, but she
managed to cover her tracks well and I almost missed it.
It was just a pure stroke of luck that I even discovered
this.” She handed it across to Jay and then quietly said,
“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that all Juvenile files
are sealed and this information never fell into your lap.”
The pair sat silently for a moment.
“This is going to rock your world, Jay.”
He accepted the document from her, his eyes fixed
intensely on hers before pulling them down to the paper
he now held in his hands. He read the paper slowly, trying
to fully compre-hend what he was seeing. His gaze darted
back to Paula, almost begging her to tell him that he
wasn’t really seeing what his eyes were telling him he was
seeing. “Is this right? There’s no mistake?”
“I checked and double checked Jay, it’s all correct I’m
afraid.”
“Paula, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… You’re the
best damn dirt hound I’ve ever met!” Jay scooped all the
paperwork up and shoved it back into the file. He swilled
down the last of his coffee, grabbed a piece of toast from
his plate of uneaten bacon and eggs, squeezed Paula on
the shoulder and rose from his seat. “This is just between
us right?” He asked, waving the file at her.
“You got it,” she answered.
Jay threw a twenty-dollar note on the table and said,
“Thanks Paula, you’re the best.” He then raced out of Café
Cino, and headed straight for the Station House.
