by Tara Moss
‘A lot of women have more character with age,’ Bogey said, putting in his two cents’ worth as he returned to the table to pick up the last of the cutlery.
What would Andy’s response be in a similar situation? He would probably stay out of it, knowing that emotions ran high among women when it came to body image. But Mak smiled at Bogey’s well-chosen comment, feeling she had found a co-conspirator at the table in this Elvis man who seemed far too sensitive to be a friend of a guy named Donkey.
Maroon still had some anger to vent. ‘Yeah, how come men are allowed to grow old and have “character”, when a woman just gets “wrinkles”?’
Donkey looked bored. ‘Just as long as they’re hot, go naked,’ he said.
Mak was no longer in the spirit of their little debate. She had other things on her mind.
Speaking of body images…
‘Hey, guys, sorry to change the subject, but does anyone know where Lonsdale Street is?’
‘Lonsdale Street? Sure,’ Maroon answered. ‘That’s where all the barristers and strip clubs are. It’s about fifteen minutes by car. Is that where your hotel is?’
Strip clubs and barristers…an interesting mix.
‘No, it’s just a work thing.’
‘Mak’s a private eye,’ Loulou said proudly, making Mak sound like she should be wearing a fedora and smoking a cigarette. ‘Are you on trial?’
Mak smiled and shook her head. ‘Nah. I’m not on trial.’ Not this time.
She had been briefed in her investigators course on how to handle giving evidence in the witness box if the situation came up. Mak could probably have used some of those pointers when she’d taken the witness box in the Stiletto Murder trial. Perhaps that would have kept the tears from rolling down her cheeks while she was asked to recall every last gruesome detail of her abduction and attack. Most likely she wouldn’t need to get back in a witness box again until she was practising in psychology. That was, unless she got herself mixed up in something really messy with her investigation work.
‘I’m sorry to eat and run, but I do have to get going.’ Mak stood up. ‘It was really nice to meet you all. Thanks for dinner.’
‘Oh, sweetie! Stay for another drink!’ Loulou cried, clearly not wanting to let her friend go.
‘I have to go, really. It’s a school night for me. I have a big day ahead tomorrow.’
‘You have to stay over here next time, though, okay? Promise me?’ Loulou urged. ‘We have a guest bedroom and it would be all yours. Pleeeease?’
Mak was amazed at how quickly Drayson and Loulou had shacked up together, and how quickly her friend was using the word ‘we’—‘We have a guest bedroom’. Loulou’s kamikaze relationship style was probably not the most successful, but still, Mak had to admire her openness. It took Mak much longer to trust anyone. Maybe it took her too long.
‘Okay,’ Mak agreed with some reluctance. ‘Next time I promise I’ll stay. But now I have to go.’
‘I have to head home, too,’ came a voice. It was Bogey. He had put on his leather jacket, having already cleaned up the kitchen while Loulou, Drayson and Maroon were busy drinking. He didn’t even live there and he cooked and cleaned the place. Wow. ‘I have a project that needs delivering in two days,’ he explained, grabbing a big set of keys off the hall table. ‘I haven’t even begun the staining yet.’
‘Ohhh, now everyone is leaving!’ Loulou cried, obviously upset that the evening was coming to an end so soon.
‘I’m staying,’ Donkey muttered. ‘You’ve got more beer, right?’
Bogey and Mak descended the five flights of stairs in uncomfortable silence.
‘Would you like a lift?’ he asked as they reached street-level.
Oh boy.
Mak thought it might be safer, temptation-wise, to say no, but she didn’t have a car—and, in truth, she wanted to find out more about him.
‘Yeah. That would be great,’ she answered, not looking in his direction. ‘Is Lonsdale Street too far out of your way?’
‘No problem at all.’
If she had been single she would not have been able to resist asking him for a drink somewhere before she went off to work. But she was not single: she was what the Australian Immigration Department referred to as a ‘de facto spouse’. A spouse of any description was someone who was far from unattached and, furthermore, she was attached to a high-ranking homicide detective. Her live-in boyfriend had barely left the country.
A ride made sense, though.
When they reached the open street she saw that Bogey drove an immaculately restored late-sixties blue convertible Mustang. Not quite the enormous Cadillac she’d imagined, but close enough. And it was awfully close in body shape and appearance to Zhora, her beloved turquoise 1967 Dodge Dart Swinger, which she had reluctantly sold when she’d moved from Canada to Australia. With the Australian roads geared to driving on the opposite side, it would have been an unnecessarily expensive and complicated proposition to ship it down and mutilate it for local driving. Ah, Zhora. Mak missed her. She had named her car after the ill-fated snake-carrying replicant in Blade Runner. She named all her vehicles. Her bike was Theroux.
‘I’m sorry for boring you with those stories,’ Bogey said. ‘I don’t know why they made me tell you all that stuff.’
‘I found it interesting. Really. I’ve never met a coffin maker before.’
‘And I’ve never met a PI.’
Mak smiled as he opened the passenger-side door for her. She got in and buckled up, the seat making a soft hiss under her weight. The seats were leather—and beautifully kept—not like her Zhora, whose vinyl bucket seats had been in terrible shape from the day she bought her. Mak had never got around to fixing her up properly. But this man clearly loved his car, and was happy to sink time and money into restoring it.
‘Where to on Lonsdale Street?’ he asked as he started the engine. The car purred.
Mak told him the address and he looked puzzled.
‘I didn’t know there was a hotel around there,’ he said.
‘There isn’t.’
CHAPTER 29
It took Luther Hand little time to track down the house in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills.
He arrived wearing black from glove to boot, blending into the shadows as he moved. He was more than ready to get the assignment under way, and he had in his kill kit one additional item specific to the job.
A hatchet.
Luther did not ring the doorbell. He picked the lock and slipped inside, and within seconds he had sped up the stairs and entered the hallway. Everything was as his instructions had said: the number of steps, the layout of the building. The office of Lee Lin Tan was two doors to the left at the top of the stairs, but even before he reached it, a man appeared in the doorway before him. He had been heard.
Luther recognised the man from his driver’s licence photo. ‘Lee Lin Tan,’ Luther said.
There was recognition.
‘Are you Lee Lin Tan?’ Luther demanded again. He wanted an answer.
There was a weak nod.
Luther gripped the hatchet and swung, not quite taking Lee’s head straight off in the first blow. A spray of blood spread out across the doorway behind him, pooling and beginning to run along the paint. Lee gripped his neck as he went down, blood spilling through his fingers. It had been an effective first blow.
Good.
Luther stood over Lee Lin Tan as the man crawled pathetically along the hallway carpet, perhaps trying for the stairs and the front door, choking and gurgling on his own blood. Incredibly, he managed to lift himself up to a half-standing position against the wall, shaking with shock.
Luther swung again, this time precisely.
He took off the man’s left arm at the shoulder joint, and the dismembered arm fell to the carpet with a sickly thump. Lee’s eyes lost focus and he fell back against the corridor wall, leaving a bloody handprint and a downward streak across the wall. His head fell forwards and his last breath was exp
elled from his body with one final gurgle.
There was a scream.
Luther spun around in the direction of the noise, ready. He had been warned that Mrs Tan might be present.
A woman burst into the hallway. She had a shotgun in her hands and raised it unsteadily, her awkward grip on the trigger revealing her lack of experience with the weapon. Her dark eyes drifted to the sight of her husband in bloody pieces in the hallway, and she let out an even more high-pitched scream, dropping the gun to her side, the butt slipping and hitting the carpet. Luther moved towards her and she retreated in a panicked run to the office, a ramshackle room with a desk and shelves, and a threadbare couch that looked like it had been doubling as someone’s bed. She tried to close the door before he reached it, and failed, so she backed herself into a corner by an open drawer, whimpering and crying hysterically.
She tried to hide her face under the overhang of the heavy open wooden drawer.
Luther strode forwards, pulled the drawer straight out of the cabinet and tossed it behind him with a crash, then grabbed the woman by the hair in one hand and raised her to her feet. He swung the hatchet. It took her head clean off, and her body dropped to the floor underneath it, leaving the head dangling in his hand, her tangled hair like Medusa and her serpents.
Luther dropped the head next to her body and looked around.
He squinted. The drawer he had flung across the room had been full of passports—Filipino, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian. The passports and documents were spread all around the room.
Voices.
More witnesses.
Luther left the office and made his way down the hall with the crimson-soaked hatchet in his hand, ready for a methodical search for witnesses if necessary. There were voices beyond one of the doors.
He flung it open.
Inside were women—at least a dozen of them, some wearing silk slips, some in jeans and bra tops. They huddled in fear at the sight of him filling their doorway holding the dripping hatchet. A few of the women mumbled in unfamiliar languages through hot tears, but not one of them screamed. They were too terrified.
Witnesses. A dozen of them.
He noticed there were bars on the window. The beds were few, but it was clear they had all been living together in that wretched room.
Luther stepped back into the hallway and closed the door again. As soon as he did, the voices began again, the low and quivering tones of frightened women who did not know what was going on. Still, no one screamed.
He considered his options.
These women were no threat to his client. They would not talk. And even if they did have anything to say about a man in black with a balaclava and a hatchet, they would be deported before they testified.
Luther walked back along the corridor to the office, picked up several of the passports and returned to the door. He opened the bedroom door and left the passports in a pile.
He stepped over the body of Lee Lin Tan on the way out, and left the Surry Hills house with the front door wide open.
CHAPTER 30
‘I never did ask…what’s your instrument?’
The city centre was only about fifteen minutes from the Elwood apartment, and the trip seemed to go by too quickly for Mak, who was enjoying the former coffin-maker’s intriguing company. They had driven most of the way caught up in small talk about Bogey’s experiences in Drayson’s band.
‘Guitar,’ Bogey replied, his eyes on the road.
My God, he is Elvis, Mak thought. She smiled mischievously, and he turned in her direction in time to catch her expression.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing.’
The streets were quiet as they cruised through the central business district of Melbourne, a concrete jungle of metal and glass where the buildings were tall and modern, and the streets were nearly empty at this late hour. The suits that crowded the footpaths during the weekdays had dispersed to their various suburbs to rest in closets for the weekend, starched and pressed for their Monday meetings.
‘No, really,’ Bogey said. ‘What is it? What’s that look?’
Mak couldn’t help it. She kept grinning. ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,’ she ventured, ‘but when I first saw you I figured you as an Elvis man. I should have guessed that you played guitar. I can just picture you on stage with a guitar strap around your neck, swivelling your pelvis.’
Bogey huffed a little laugh. Thankfully he didn’t seem offended by the comparison. ‘You take me as an Elvis man, do you?’
She nodded. ‘Well, they do say Elvis is king.’
‘Elvis is king,’ he agreed. ‘Do you imagine me in one of those white satin jumpsuits with the big collar?’
‘Oh, no, no.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m thinking of his black-suit-and-skinny-tie phase. Young Elvis,’ she assured him.
‘But I can’t sing. I listen more to the Sex Pistols, Spiderbait or The White Stripes.’
‘If Elvis were alive I’m sure he would be listening to The White Stripes, too,’ Mak said.
He pulled up at a red light. ‘You’re in Melbourne for a job?’ he asked, and turned to her while he waited for the light to change. He had that pleasing face, but she could see his punk influence too. He might be more Sex Pistols than ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, but she still thought he looked like an Elvis man. Maybe a punk Elvis?
She looked away. ‘Um…yeah, I’m working, but visiting Loulou mostly,’ she answered, wanting to evade the details of her work. ‘We’re good friends. Pretty inseparable most of the time. I moved to Australia only a year or so ago and I still don’t know that many people,’ she admitted. She hoped her comment didn’t make her sound lonely. ‘Still, I’ve been here longer than in most cities I’ve lived in.’
Bogey nodded in response, then turned right down a main street and drove a few blocks. They passed the Supreme Court and the Magistrates’ Courts. ‘It sounds like you’ve travelled a lot.’
‘Yeah,’ Mak agreed. ‘I’ve become so used to it over the years that I don’t even notice any more. The other day I realised that since I have been an adult I had never actually lived in any country for longer than twelve months. This has literally been my longest stay anywhere.’ Mak realised she was telling him her life history for some reason, and thought she really should switch the subject. ‘So how did you get a name like Bogey? Is that Bogey as in an evil or mischievous spirit, or the number of strokes a player is likely to need to finish a golf hole?’
He glanced at her with a raised a eyebrow, and Mak recalled, too late, that not everyone liked to read the dictionary for kicks.
‘It’s no golf reference. It’s because my name is Humphrey. Humphrey Mortimer.’ He said the name quietly, and rather quickly, she thought.
‘Ah, Humphrey. Actually, Humphrey Mortimer is not such a bad name,’ she said, trying to reassure him. ‘It couldn’t be any worse than mine, surely—“Makedde Vanderwall” is a mouthful! Humphrey suited Mr Bogart just fine. You know, my opa looked exactly like Humphrey Bogart. In all my old black-and-white photos of him, he’s the spitting image…’
‘Yeah?’
They had reached Lonsdale Street.
Well, that’s it.
Mak looked out the window at the grand neon signage of Thunderball Gentlemen’s Club. The entrance to the club opened brazenly and incongruously onto a street almost entirely inhabited by barristers’ chambers, just as Maroon had said. Both the Magistrates’ and Supreme courts were a stone’s throw up the road. It seemed an odd location for a club of its kind. She could guess that more than a couple of the Melbourne legal fraternity would be on a first-name basis with the staff inside. Perhaps that had come in handy from time to time for the owner.
‘Well, um…I’ll get out here. Thanks for the lift,’ she said, regretting the end of their little journey together.
Bogey pulled the car into one of the available spots on the street and shut off the engine. Mak opened her door, panicking inside. Why is the engine
off? What is he doing?
‘You’re going into the club, right?’ he asked her.
Mak nodded, not looking in his direction. She gathered her purse as casually as she could and turned to say goodbye. When she looked at him their eyes locked again like they had in Drayson’s apartment, only this time she could see that he was concerned.
He broke their gaze and looked down at the steering wheel. ‘It worries me a bit that you are going in there alone.’
Mak felt a rush of relief that his turning off the car had to do with her getting a lecture on safety, and not a pressured sexual proposition of any kind—not that this guy seemed the type. She laughed. Any hormonally influenced thoughts had no doubt been entirely in her head.
‘I’ve been a lot of places,’ Mak said. ‘A strip joint doesn’t worry me, honestly.’
A stranger like this could not guess what she had gone through in her life. Walking into a men’s club would surely be the least of her horrors.
‘I am an investigator. This sort of thing is what I do, and I do it alone.’
Well, that was embellishing it a bit—she was only a fledgling PI and she had never actually been into a proper strip club before, let alone on her own. But he didn’t need to know that. His being worried was silly, regardless.
‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to wait outside with the car in case you have some trouble.’
Mak didn’t have a response ready: she had not seen this coming. ‘You want to wait outside until I’m done?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You would do that?’
‘I’ll be parked right here,’ Bogey insisted.
‘No, no…that’s crazy. I’ll be a while, and you have your project to start on tomorrow—the staining you haven’t started yet, remember?’
‘I know.’ But he seemed to be immovable in his desire to see that she was safe. ‘I’m just not comfortable leaving you in this area when you are alone and you have no car.’
