Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing

by Lord, Gabrielle

  She jumped up, heart racing. Shelly and the lace-gloved blonde were now linked together—they both worked as sex therapists. And the woman with the gloves was inextricably entwined with Benjamin Glass. Shelly was dead. Benjamin Glass was dead. But now they were dead together in the same picture. What the hell was going on?

  Cherchez la blonde, thought Gemma.

  Thirteen

  Ric Loader took her into his room at the end of the corridor. The Analytical Laboratory was a warren of offices, examination rooms, laboratories and sterile rooms housing specialist equipment for reading the traces sent to them by the Crime Scene examiners.

  ‘This attacker you’re after,’ Ric said. ‘We’re starting to think he must be in the rag trade, we collected so many wool and rayon fibres from the driver’s seat of the Ford. That blouse you sent us?’ Gemma nodded and he continued. ‘Microscopic fragments of the same wool and rayon all over it.’

  ‘Maybe he’s a traveller,’ she said ‘a salesman, who stacks up samples in his vehicle.’

  ‘On the driver’s seat?’ Rick looked incredulous. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘So it was the same guy?’

  ‘You know we don’t say things like that.’ Ric smiled. ‘All we can confirm officially is that we found traces of the same material in the Ford and on the blouse you sent us after you were attacked.’

  Gemma’s injured flank twinged painfully. Even though the DNA testing result was not reportable, things seemed a little lighter now.

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ she said.

  •

  The new information Gemma had unearthed about Minkie Montreau’s Masters thesis and the connection between the glove-wearing blonde and Benjamin Glass had changed the energy of the whole day. Now she could take her focus off Steve and Lorraine Litchfield.

  Impressed by Gemma’s ID and the seriousness of the matter, Pauline Chester, the therapist from the Chester Clinic, a tall woman with a neat page-boy haircut and a woollen jersey-knit dress, ushered her into a discreetly furnished office.

  ‘We have to be very cautious,’ Pauline said, gesturing Gemma to a chair opposite her desk, ‘about the wrong sort of publicity. You can appreciate how sensitive this issue is for our male clients. We have to be able to guarantee complete confidentiality. That’s why I have to be so careful about giving out any information. And with Mr Glass’s disappearance such a shock to us all . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gemma.

  ‘And that’s why,’ said Pauline, ‘we only use women and girls with particular skills. We like to take graduates or women who’ve studied Applied Psychology, but’—she shrugged—‘just plain common sense and trainability can be sufficient, given the right person. We deal with all sorts of clients, from self-made men like Mr Glass to academics, poets, scientists, wharf labourers. All sorts.’

  ‘I need to talk to the other woman who worked with Shelly. It’s important.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Pauline. ‘I hope we’re not going to lose her, too. It’s so hard to get surrogates with the right experience and the right attitude.’

  ‘Purely routine,’ said Gemma.

  ‘I can give you her business card,’ said Pauline. ‘There’s nothing confidential about that—she left a pile of them here. It only has her phone number. So then it’s up to her if she wants to take things further.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gemma, flashing her brightest smile, taking the business card. Beneath the phone number, the name ‘Skanda’ was embossed in flowing magenta on a black lace background.

  Gemma’s CD-ROM back-to-front phone book program did the rest and she soon had the street address of Skanda Bergen, Private Consultant.

  •

  Less than half an hour later Gemma pressed the security buzzer for apartment number 12 in a handsome 1930s block at Elizabeth Bay. Slender, with just a hint of neo-gothic in the shapes of architraves and door lintels, the building rose out of a small garden of dense green shrubs.

  A breathy woman’s voice answered the intercom.

  ‘It’s Gemma Lincoln,’ Gemma said in reply. ‘I’m a friend of Shelly’s. I need to talk to you.’

  There was a silence finally broken by the hum and click of the front door unlocking. Gemma pushed it open and stepped inside the entrance hall. It was panelled and carpeted and smelt of good wood polish, faded perfumes and somewhere, just a touch of tomcat piss. She walked up to the first floor and the door was opened before she’d had time to knock.

  ‘What do you want?’

  The woman standing in front of her was as attractive in the flesh as she was in her photograph despite the gloves she was wearing—no trademark black lace today, thought Gemma, but pink rubber household gloves. Seizing the opportunity, she stepped through the open door, aware that her presence could become extremely unwelcome very quickly.

  ‘I want to talk to you about Shelly,’ she said.

  Skanda Bergen closed the door and now that she was safely inside, Gemma focused on her hostess. Close up, she was still beautiful, although in the clear northern light of the open windows, Gemma noticed a rough, matte-like finish to her skin, as if she’d been scrubbed or sandpapered and there was a wildness in her eyes. Maybe too many men does that to a woman’s skin, Gemma thought. Or maybe she’s had one skin peel too many. But apart from the sharkskin, and the hypervigilant, darting eyes, Gemma had to admit that Skanda’s features were flawless, as was her figure. Only the tiny lines around her eyes and mouth indicated her maturity. Gemma guessed late thirties, but because of a certain tweaked look of constant surprise around the eyes, surgical intervention couldn’t entirely be ruled out. She could even be older than me, Gemma speculated.

  ‘You a cop?’ Skanda asked. Gemma shook her head.

  ‘I’m a private investigator,’ she said.

  The woman picked up a cloth and started to clean table tops, window sills and chairs. The apartment was neatly furnished, in soft understated pastels. Nothing too demanding to frighten the mugs, Gemma thought. Opposite the front door, through the open window, Gemma could see two doves sitting on the terracotta ridge tiles along the top of the angled roof outside. Beyond the doves, a few intrepid sailing boats leaning hard into the wind dotted the harbour. Skanda sprayed something out of a container over everything and went over the surfaces again. The place was already spotless and in the corner of the room, a space age vacuum cleaner stood ready for action. Several photographs on top of a cabinet caught her attention and Gemma drew closer to see: Skanda and another blonde woman laughing together, a group of children at a picnic, and separate framed photographs of a man and a woman. Family shots, Gemma surmised.

  ‘I only have a few minutes,’ Skanda said, wiping over the backs of steel piping furniture that already gleamed, ‘and housework is never ending.’ She flashed Gemma a glance of complicity. ‘So you’ll forgive the lack of hospitality. I have to get this finished before the next client.’

  Never-ending housework had never been a problem to her, Gemma thought. Never-starting would be more accurate.

  ‘I can’t tell you much,’ said Skanda between further swipes at the coffee table and chairs, ‘except I’ve been really scared that whoever attacked Shell might come after me. You know?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘I’m convinced that it was someone from the clinic. The Chester Clinic. Shelly and I worked with the psychologists there, Pauline and Jerry Chester.’ Skanda pulled the rubber gloves off and threw them expertly across the small living area into the kitchen sink. ‘I’ve got clients who love it when I wear those,’ she said, looking at them as they lay on the shining stainless steel. ‘Can you imagine getting off on rubber gloves?’

  Despite Skanda’s precautions, Gemma noticed that the skin on her fingers was peeling. That’s what too much house-cleaning does, Gemma thought fleetingly
and with satisfaction.

  ‘No,’ said Gemma. ‘I can’t. Why do you think it’s someone from the clinic?’

  Now Skanda was washing her hands, sleeves rolled right up, rubbing soap over her hands and forearms. It’s how a surgeon washes, Gemma thought. Or a theatre nurse. No wonder her skin was so dry if this was a regular routine.

  ‘Ask yourself this,’ said Skanda. ‘How come Shell’s worked the street and the houses for years and never come to any harm—well, not real harm. She’s been working over twenty years. And then she does just a couple of jobs for Pauline Chester and whack. That’s it. She’s murdered.’ Skanda rinsed her hands and arms, drying herself thoroughly, then applying some sort of moisturiser over the just-washed area, rubbing it right up to her elbows.

  ‘Shelly worked with someone called Peter,’ Gemma said. ‘Did you?’

  Skanda shook her head. ‘He was one of Shelly’s clients,’ she said. ‘The mugs get used to one woman. They’re regulars.’

  ‘Do you know what he looks like?’ Gemma asked, pulling out the envelope with the picture she’d printed from her visit to Peter Fenster’s house.

  ‘He looked like a mug,’ snarled Skanda. ‘Like they all do.’

  Gemma handed her the picture and she studied it then shook her head. ‘That’s not him. He was a skinny-looking thing.’

  ‘Do you know anything about this Peter?’ Gemma asked, putting the picture away.

  Again, Skanda shook her head. ‘The men we see are psychologically disturbed,’ she said, screwing the lid back on the tube of moisturiser. ‘I’ve had just about enough of this sort of work. It’s bad enough dealing with mugs off the street without having to deal with murderers as well.’

  ‘But these are men who want to be helped,’ said Gemma. ‘They’re hardly your free-ranging psychos.’

  ‘All I can say is, you think about it,’ Skanda said, pulling her sleeves down. ‘You don’t have to have a major in psychology to work out that men who can’t get it up feel threatened by women. And people hate and fear what threatens them.’

  She disappeared behind the fridge door. ‘That’s not psychology,’ she continued, ‘that’s just how it is.’

  Gemma had a fleeting glimpse of what looked like a small pharmacy in the white interior—jars, bottles, tubes and assorted containers with their prescriptions attached. Then the fridge door closed. She should talk about nutcases, Gemma thought, with her compulsive cleaning and her fridge full of pharmaceutical products.

  ‘And do you have a major in Psychology?’ Gemma asked, picking up on the cue.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I do,’ said Skanda as she turned from the fridge with one of the phials, poured some of its contents into a glass, added water, stirred it and drank it down. ‘It was one of the strands in my degree.’ She picked up the empty glass, added a little water and swirled it round to collect any remaining sediment. ‘You look surprised,’ she challenged, ‘at the notion of a well-educated whore?’ She toasted the ceiling, before draining the glass. ‘Sydney’s full of them. And that’s not counting all the women married to wealthy men.’ She laughed, but the effort wasn’t convincing. ‘I wasn’t so lucky,’ she said, and Gemma caught a glimpse of some personal disappointment, some failed relationship behind this remark. ‘I couldn’t find work apart from very low paid postgraduate positions. The universities are in their death throes. There’s no money for research anymore. So I ended up going back to work in my area of expertise.’

  ‘Which is?’ Gemma asked, wanting to be clear on this point.

  ‘I am very good at being the sort of woman a certain sort of man likes to buy. How else could I have paid my uni fees and survived?’ she said. ‘They think they can buy a woman, but that’s not so,’ she added. ‘What they buy is a service, but some of them forget that.’

  Gemma considered this and decided on a sudden pounce. She kept her voice very low and expressionless. ‘And did Benjamin Glass fall into that category?’

  Great shot, girl, Gemma congratulated herself. It was a direct hit. The question had shocked Skanda Bergen so much that Gemma thought she was going to drop the glass, but slowly it was lowered onto the spotless surface of the kitchen counter. All colour left her face, leaving her lips as pale as her suede-finish skin, and her tweaked blue eyes widened even further.

  ‘Why are you asking me this?’ she whispered.

  ‘Did he?’ Gemma repeated.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Skanda, turning away and picking up the cleaning agent.

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Gemma, ‘because I have photographs in my possession of you and Benjamin Glass.’

  Skanda’s face hardened, then changed to a careless mask. She put the container down again and Gemma watched closely. She thinks she’s worked it out, she thought. And now she’s come up with the defence.

  As if on cue, Skanda turned around, the colour returning to her collagen-plumped lips. ‘So what if you have?’ she said. ‘He was just another client at the clinic.’

  If that were true, Gemma thought, you wouldn’t have looked as if you were about to drop dead when I mentioned his name. Now Gemma could see something else in the woman’s face, a nuance she wasn’t sure about, something masked and dangerous.

  She chose her next words carefully. ‘I have reason to believe,’ Gemma said, ‘that he was more than just a client.’ She thought of the hidden cache in the safe—the marked cards and the photos of this woman—the two loves of Benjamin Glass. ‘The police will certainly want to talk to you once they know about the connection.’ For a moment, Gemma felt guilt about the information she was withholding from the police and in her mind Section 316 of the Crimes Act wagged a scolding finger at her. She overrode it.

  ‘What do you want? Money?’ Skanda’s contemptuous voice brought her back to the situation.

  Gemma shook her head.

  ‘Then why did you come here with your bullshit about being a friend of Shelly’s and then do this business with the photographs?’

  ‘It’s no story,’ said Gemma. ‘Shelly was a friend of mine. I met her when I was a cop years ago and I kept in touch. I cared about what happened to her.’

  She looked through an open door to the small bedroom and caught a glimpse of a large portrait of Skanda over the bed, wearing just her sandpaper skin and her black lace gloves. Her signature image. Gemma looked back at the living original and saw that Skanda was shaking.

  ‘It’s such a shock,’ she said. ‘Benjamin and now Shelly. It’s like a curse on me, my friends dying like this.’

  And not real cheery for your friends, either, Gemma thought, intrigued by the woman’s self-centredness.

  ‘I’m really, really scared,’ Skanda was saying, as if Gemma didn’t believe her.

  You’re scared all right, Gemma thought. But of what?

  Skanda returned to the kitchen, pulled on the rubber gloves again, picked up another spray cleanser and started rewiping the already spotless surfaces. Gemma wondered what Kit would make of this cleaning compulsion and she thought of Lady Macbeth.

  ‘You’d better go,’ Skanda said without turning around. ‘I have a client due any minute.’

  Gemma started to walk towards the door and only then did Skanda swing round, still ashen-faced.

  ‘Those photographs,’ she said. ‘Who has them?’

  ‘Only me at the moment,’ Gemma lied. ‘So far, no one else knows who you are.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell them about me,’ Skanda said. She put the spray container and cloth down. ‘Please. I was just a sex surrogate. I’ve got nothing to do with Benjamin Glass or his life. I was just someone who worked for him, like his cleaner or his driver. No,’ she added. ‘Not even as important as that.’

  ‘If that’s the case,’ Gemma said ‘why do you need to keep it secret? What’s
the big deal?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake! Don’t be so stupid!’ the woman snapped. ‘Why would anyone—especially someone like me—want to get dragged into a fucking murder investigation?’

  Gemma decided to be cheeky. ‘Your duty as a citizen who respects the rule of law and supports democratic principles?’

  Skanda stared at her with blank hostility.

  ‘When did you meet Benjamin Glass?’ Gemma said.

  ‘I’ve told you. Through the Chester Clinic. A while ago.’

  ‘How long?’

  Skanda screwed up her pretty face as if it was hard to remember. ‘Bit over a year.’

  ‘And he was still undergoing sex therapy with you?’

  ‘Yes he was.’

  Gemma thought there’d be no harm in a straight question. ‘Ms Bergen,’ she said, ‘did you kill Benjamin Glass?’

  Skanda’s wide eyes became wider. ‘Why the hell are you asking me a question like that?’ she said. ‘Do you think I’m the sort of person who goes round killing people?’ Her jaw had dropped in shock. ‘You must be crazy.’

  ‘I’m not crazy,’ said Gemma, ‘I’m investigating the case. I’ve been retained by a client and I want to know the answer.’

  Skanda viciously sprayed cleaner on a spotless wall and scrubbed hard. ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ she said. ‘Benjamin Glass came here with a referral from Pauline or Jerry—’

  ‘From the clinic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We’d do what we had to do.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Book a time, darling, and I’ll show you,’ Skanda snarled, grabbing the vacuum cleaner and pushing it aggressively in Gemma’s direction. ‘I don’t have to answer your damned questions. I can tell you to go to hell, you know.’ She switched on the machine.