by Candice Fox
“Amanda Pharrell, would you kindly butt out?” Chief Clark snapped, his eyes wandering blindly over the mirrored glass. “I’m noting the interruption of private investigator and notorious pest Amanda Pharrell for the tape. She has not been invited into this interview and was permitted to watch from the observation room, silently.”
“This is not silent.” Amanda pushed the button again, her sudden voice making Sweeney jolt again. “This is me saying this confession is bullshit. Rather loudly, actually. This thing is hideously loud. Is there a volume control?” Amanda experimented with the buttons on the panel beneath the speaker. One produced a high-pitched squeal.
“Interview suspended at three forty-five p.m.,” Sweeney breathed, shutting off the tape as her chief marched out of the room, throwing open the door. She followed at a run, locking the door behind her, sure she was going to see the big man holding Amanda by the throat as she turned into the observation room.
“Am I going to have to have someone escort you from the building?” Clark panted with rage. “You do not just chime in to an official police interview like you’re a fucking sports referee!”
“How ungrateful!” Amanda balked. “I’m trying to save you time. Well, I’m trying to save me time, really, by getting Sweensy Peensy out of there so we can get back to the case.” She gestured to Sweeney. “Stephanie is turning your police station into a filthy whorehouse of lies, Chief. Why would you want to waste your time on that? Time is money, chump.”
“The interview has been running for, what, ten minutes?” Clark snapped. “You’re saying she’s lying? You know that? Already?”
“Amanda is right, uh…” Sweeney bit her lips as Chief Clark turned on her. “She’s right about some of the things Stephanie has said so far. We believe that Andrew was startled by his attacker outside the pub, possibly out the back, before the shooting, for example. That doesn’t wash with Stephanie’s account that she walked into the front of the bar and the two only saw her when she reached the counter. That, at least, I’m in support of Amanda about.”
“The whole thing’s bullshit.” Amanda glanced at Stephanie through the glass. “Look at the size of her. You think she’s going to hold up a pistol for the first time with one hand, arm extended like Dirty Harry? No way. It’d be far too heavy for her. And okay, sure, maybe she could have got a kill shot in after she got them both on the ground. Doing Keema would have been easy. But it took multiple shots to kill Andrew and they all hit their target as he moved. There’s no way that girl got used to the recoil so fast.”
Amanda took her wallet and keys from the table like she was preparing to go.
“The kicker for me was her account of what she said,” she snorted. “How could you? or Why? Yeah, sure. That’s what I’d have had her say if this was an episode of Days of Our Lives. But this is the real world. If she was that hepped up on blinding, murderous rage she’d never say something as lucid and calculating as How could you? She probably wouldn’t have said anything at all.”
“She said she took the gun with her,” Chief Clark said. “So there’s been no talk of blinding rage. It was premeditated.”
“No, she said she can’t remember taking the gun with her.” Amanda pointed a finger in the air. “She said, and I quote, ‘I was so angry at the time that I think my brain just didn’t record certain things.’”
Chief Clark looked through the glass at Stephanie, who had hidden her face in her hands, the scrunched tissues peeking out from between her fingers.
“You ask me, it’s a false memory or she’s covering badly for someone,” Amanda said.
Sweeney felt the air leave her lungs in a long, sickening sigh. She had been so exhilarated to bring her first homicide to a close. The first notch in what would surely be a long row before she found her confidence in the role, before she would believe that her colleagues over in Holloways Beach weren’t laughing at her for taking the placement so early out of patrol. But she acknowledged now the tiny seedling of doubt that had started growing in her the moment she saw Ted Conkaffey walking Stephanie up the steps of the police station that afternoon. Not Stephanie.
“She’s tired.” Sweeney cut into a low stream of Chief Clark’s threatening and grumbling at Amanda for interrupting their official interview with her wild theories. “Stephanie. She’s tired and guilty and grief stricken. Confused about how angry she is at Andrew that he had the affair and how sad she is that he’s gone. She hasn’t had a stitch of emotional support since the thing happened, except from Andrew’s father, who’s grieving himself. Maybe she … I don’t know. She’s constructed a memory in which she killed Keema and Andrew and rolled it around and around in her brain enough times that she now thinks it’s true.”
Chief Clark folded his arms, stared Sweeney down. She could almost hear his thoughts. His quiet calculation of how he was going to get her out of his police station, this fuck-up, this trainee detective who’d brought him nothing but unusable witnesses.
“I’m not ready to release her.” Clark gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Maybe she is tired and confused, but she’s all you’ve managed to dig up so far. Get her into a cell, get her to sleep and when she wakes up put her straight into a room with a psychologist. Search her house. I’ll organize a warrant. And you”—he turned on Amanda—“you’re banned from this station. I don’t want to see you unless you’re under arrest for something.”
“Ooh.” Amanda smiled, clapped the chief on the shoulder as she passed him, making for the door. “Don’t tempt me, Clarky. You know I’m a naughty girl.”
* * *
Amanda was standing on the steps of the police station when Sweeney emerged from the glass doors. The strange investigator was standing stiffly, facing away from the building, her elbow out at an awkward right angle from her body. As Sweeney approached she noticed an enormous multicolored butterfly walking the length of Amanda’s forearm, wings upright except for the occasional pause when it spread flat, seeming to want to blend with the vibrant tattoos crowding Amanda’s arm. Sweeney felt the humiliation and dread of the past few minutes shift slightly, not completely lifted, but resisting a definite push from the sight before her. Amanda turned her arm as the butterfly strolled over her wrist, onto her palm and settled there on the bare pink flesh, stark against the rest of her colored skin.
Amanda looked at Sweeney and shrugged, offering no suggestion for how the creature’s visit had occurred, or why.
“Do you think Stephanie’s covering for someone?” Sweeney asked, watching the insect on Amanda’s hand.
“Dunno,” Amanda replied with another shrug. “If she’s just confused, trying to question her further on why she’s confessed would be a waste of time. You’ll only tangle her mind into impossible knots. Leave it to the shrink.”
A taxi pulled up to the curb before the police station and a man and a woman exited, immediately presenting themselves as outsiders to the Cairns region. The woman was far too heavily dressed—long sleeves, and impractically formal in a silk shirt and slacks, dark patches emerging beneath her arms and at the center of her chest from the humidity. As the man got out of the taxi, the fronds of a short palm tree at the edge of the lawn brushed the back of his neck. He swiped irritably at the plant.
“Keema’s parents,” Sweeney said.
Amanda saw that Keema’s mother had the same immaculate, caramel skin and slightly upturned eyes. Sweeney swallowed hard, took a couple of steps down to intercept the parents on their march toward the door.
“Brian, Sefina,” Sweeney said, cringing slightly. “I’m Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney. I didn’t think you’d be here until tomorrow.”
They shook hands. Sweeney shared her commiserations. Amanda leaned on the concrete banister nearby and tried to keep a straight face as the butterfly walked up the back of her arm and onto her shoulder, where she lost sight of it, barely able to feel its tiny, hairy legs as it traversed the side of her neck.
“The leads we have thus far are very promising,�
�� Sweeney lied. “I’ll take you inside and we can sit down with my chief for an overview.”
“I have to tell you at the outset that I’m distressed that we’ve had to come here,” Sefina said. Received Pronunciation. Amanda liked the sound of it. Felt a strong desire to burst into an impression. “Could we possibly organize an extended meeting at the hotel where it’s more comfortable?”
“Oh, ah,” Sweeney struggled for words and glanced at Amanda, almost looking for assistance. “I could … It’s possible we could—”
“When Keema said she was going to tour Australia, I envisioned Sydney,” Sefina said. “Melbourne. I’ve been to Melbourne. Really lovely, some of the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life. Here? Here, I mean.” The woman gestured helplessly to the road, the distant mountains. “Our taxi was delayed on the way from the airport because a gigantic bird was dashing all over the road. Some prehistoric man-eating thing. I didn’t see it, but the whole bloody road had been shut down. I was terrified.”
“A cassowary.” Sweeney blushed. “Yes, sometimes they get themselves trapped inside the road barriers. It’s best not to try to carry on when that happens. If you hit them it’s … They’re quite large. An endangered species, actually.”
Amanda listened intensely. Grief again, yet another form, this one the micro-focus type. She knew that grief sometimes made people focus on minute or unimportant things as a distraction from what was at hand, the huge and foreboding burden that was loss. It made people keep their appointment with the hairdresser on the evening of the day their spouse was killed. Focus on tasks. Focus on objects. Anything but the horrible truth.
She thought she might actually be feeling something, a sad little stirring, encouraged by her analysis of Keema’s parents’ grief. But the butterfly stepped across the threshold of her ear canal and Amanda laughed hard, just once, a sort of exhilarated cough. The three people standing on the stairs turned toward her. She waved at the creature and it fluttered away.
“Let’s go inside.” Brian Daule put an arm around his wife. “We’ll get this over and done with.”
There were a couple of aggressive incidents on my way down to Sydney this time. Fewer than I expected, actually. While I used the self-service check-in kiosk at Cairns airport, a couple of young men with backpacks stood nearby watching and sniggering threateningly, and when I passed one of them shouted, “Kiddie-fucker! Piece of shit!” There were some dirty looks on the plane, no vive-la-résistance wine and cheese this time. A few people stopping in their tracks and pointing as I made my way through the terminal at the other end. As I got into a taxi a woman in the queue yelled “Hey! Hey!” trying to get my attention. I slammed the door without responding and we drove off, but I did catch her mouthing something that didn’t look particularly friendly at me.
When Kelly was working, before Lillian, she used to manage a gym in the CBD, the kind that takes in polished men and women in corporate getup and spits them out glossy and half-naked, their taut bodies strapped into colorful Lycra. It gave me a little boost of self-esteem that she hung around these beautiful, powerful people doing impressive sorts of things all day—lying on gym mats putting their feet behind their heads while making multimillion dollar deals on Bluetooth earpieces—and at night she came home to me, the drug squad meathead. Sure, there was intelligence and cunning in what I did for a living. Sometimes I used world-class surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques to nab some of the most dangerous criminals in the country. I’d been a part of teams that ordered private jets out of the sky, that sealed diamonds as big as garden peas into evidence bags, that posed cheekily for pictures with confiscated gold-plated AK-47s.
But then again, sometimes I burst in on filthy apartments looking for dope, and some drug dealer’s girlfriend threw a day-old plate of fish fingers and mashed potato at my face.
When I would meet Kelly for dinner in the city sometimes, we’d go to a tiny Chinese place off Goulburn Street called Emperor Duck. When she suggested we go back there this time I was torn. The food at Emperor Duck was incredible, and I hadn’t been anywhere near the place since long before my incarceration. But as I walked along George Street from my hotel toward the restaurant, I sensed dread emerging between my thoughts, an almost-angry stirring at what had been taken from me since I last walked these streets, my wife’s hand in mine. When I slid open the glass door to the dim, small restaurant I found Kelly sitting at a table just inside the door, our usual spot, where she could watch youths walking up the hill from Chinatown in their crazy flashing shoes and studded belts, the girls with fluffy rabbit-fur handbags dyed in impossible colors. It hurt to be here. The big, milky-eyed barramundi hovering dismally in the green-tinted tanks behind the counter could have been the same creatures I’d seen when I last paid the bill over two years earlier.
The dread deepened when Kelly stood to greet me. She was wearing a cute little black dress and playful red heels. Her calves were like something out of an athlete’s health magazine. I hadn’t showered since that morning, and my shirt was rumpled from the plane. I’d planned to have a quick dinner with her, get back to the room and watch my interview on Stories and Lives alone. I was saving the shower for what I predicted would be such an excruciating, cringing shame after the show aired that I would need to steam off the surface of my skin with an hour or so under the fount.
“So,” she said as we sat down. “The big day.”
“Mmm,” I groaned, smoothing out the paper tablecloth. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”
“Are you absolutely sure you don’t want me to watch it with you?”
“Positive,” I said. “I know how it goes. It’s terrible.”
“I’m just thinking about you all alone in that hotel room with no one to support you.”
I thought about how long I’d spent in a prison cell, all alone, with no one to support me. I was going to mention it, but guessed it was a bit soon for prison talk. She’d ordered wine. I poured myself some.
“I brought you these.” She pulled some photographs from her handbag and slid them across to me. They were happy snaps of Lillian. Joy punctured the dread. I grinned and laughed, flipping through them slowly, careful not to leave prints on the images with my grimy hands.
“Look at this.” I stopped at one of Lil in the bath, her hair all soaped up, molded into a shark fin on top of her head. I glanced up and noticed that Kelly was looking at my bare finger, the spot where my wedding ring used to be. I’d taken it off and left it on the bedside table in the hotel room. I folded my hands closed and she noticed that I’d noticed her staring.
The arrival of the appetizers saved us. I picked up chopsticks from the metal canister by the window.
“You don’t know how to use chopsticks,” Kelly said.
“You wanna bet?” I pinched her on the knuckle with them, picked up a dumpling and dipped it in soy sauce.
“Who taught you to do that?”
“Amanda.”
“Huh,” Kelly said. She didn’t seem hungry. I had assumed Kelly had invited me here to talk about the divorce, about getting the paperwork moving again. Perhaps there was something she wanted to tell me about Jett, that it was getting serious maybe. But as she watched me eat, she told me instead about the emergence of Lillian’s speech, how worried she’d been when our child stalled at “Mama” and “Nanna” and seemed determined not to say more before bursting, almost overnight, into small sentences.
“My mother’s minding her right now. Not Jett.”
“I wouldn’t have minded if Jett was taking care of her,” I said. “He seems like a reasonable guy. A dick. But a reasonable dick.”
“I know,” Kelly said. “It just must be hard, that’s all. I do realize that it must be painful, you know. I’m not ignorant to everything.”
“Of course it is.” I was about to go on, talk about how undermining and emasculating it was for me to see another man providing for my child, whether it was care, money, or affection. But Kelly cut me
off.
“It is for me,” she said.
I was momentarily confused. I drank my wine.
“Seeing you getting on with other people, I mean,” Kelly said. “Other women.”
I waited for an explanation. There wasn’t one.
“Oh, you mean Amanda?” I laughed. “Oh no. There’s nothing between Amanda and me.”
Kelly scoffed.
“There really isn’t.”
“You’re telling me you guys have spent the amount of time you have together and there hasn’t been something?” she asked. “Come on. Didn’t you save her life?”
“I’m not sure I really saved her life,” I mused. I’d carried Amanda up a hill in the rainforest after she’d been mauled by a crocodile and fought the thing off. The newspapers had described the event gleefully. Amanda had regaled journalists from her hospital bed about going for the animal’s eyes with her fingernails. “She was probably just resting after the attack. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d dragged herself up the hill on her own if I hadn’t managed to find her. She’s tough as nails.”
“Ted,” Kelly sighed.
“She’s not a sexual person,” I said. “At least not around me. It would be a complete stab in the dark for me to guess what the hell she’s attracted to. It’s like that, trying to decide on anything at all about her. She’s completely without reason.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like…” I sat back, shook my head, watching the barramundi watching me. “Like, for example, if she’s not on a case, every Saturday afternoon, at three o’clock on the dot, she smokes a single cigar and watches GoodFellas.”
“GoodFellas?”
“With Robert De Niro.”
“I know the movie,” Kelly said. “Why that movie?”
“No idea.”
“Are we talking every Saturday afternoon?”
“Every single one,” I said. “At three o’clock. You can’t call her on the phone when it’s on. She won’t come to the door even if she knows you’re standing there knocking. You have to wait for it to finish. It’s one hundred and forty-five minutes long, in case you were wondering. I don’t think she’d leave the building if it was on fire.”
