Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Epilogue
Bayer
Rubdown
Simone Kirsch Book Two
Leigh Redhead
© 2005
PRAISE FOR PEEPSHOW
‘Stripping with irony, all bundled up into a ripping crime novel!
I can’t wait for more.’ — Stiletto Magazine
‘With Peepshow, Redhead announces herself as the bright new kid on the crime block.’ — Sydney Morning Herald
‘Robust, good natured and enjoyable thriller. Who needs imports like Evanovich when there’s a Redhead in St Kilda?’
— The Age Review
‘Best new [crime] novel of the year . . .Witty, quite brilliant first novel.’ — Weekend Australian
‘A wonderful debut.’ — NW Magazine
‘Redhead has created a true original.’ — The Daily Examiner
‘Tarts with hearts are always winners.’ — Sunday Times
LEIGH REDHEAD has worked on a prawn trawler and has been a masseuse, waitress, stripper and apprentice chef. Peepshow (2004) was her first book in the Simone Kirsch series.
To all the massage girls and working ladies.
And the good clients. You know who you are.
Chapter One
I walked up to the brothel and rang the bell, smoothed my hair and looked around. The South Melbourne industrial area was all converted cottages and boxy factories. A high machinery whine stabbed my ears and my nose twitched with the scent of freshly sawn pine and chemical solvents.
The building was a double fronted, single storey terrace painted livid maroon and a sign in foot high letters told me I was standing outside the Good Times Club. As the mesh door opened I recalled the seventies TV show of the same name and half expected JJ to greet me with a buck toothed ‘Dyn-o-mite!’
‘Help you?’
The autumn morning was cool and bright and it took a while for my eyes to adjust to the gloom within. The voice had come from a middle aged woman with frizzy red hair and thin eyebrows.
‘I was wondering if you had any work available?’ I asked.
‘Come on in.’
I stepped inside and she locked the screen behind me, crossed to a melamine reception desk and spoke into an intercom.
‘Boss won’t be long.’
The vinyl couch squeaked as I sat down. Penthouse Black Label magazines fanned out on a side table and the walls and carpet were the same purple-red as the exterior. A large photograph of a blonde draped over a Ferrari hung behind the desk. Classy stuff. I heard the swish of polyester slacks and turned to see a man enter the room.
His beer gut forced his red polo shirt to pouch out and his mousy hair stood up in thinning tufts. As he got closer I saw his nose was bulbous and pockmarked, and guessed he was in his fifties. I stood up and shook his hand. The palm was sweaty.
‘Neville,’ he said. ‘I own the joint.’
‘Vivien.’ It was my old stripping name and I answered to it more readily than Simone.
‘What sort of work you after, darl?’
‘Dunno, what have you got?’
‘Full service or massage. What you done before?’
‘Neither.’
Neville and the woman exchanged a glance. He took a pack of Horizons from his pants pocket and shook one out. ‘Take her around, Marla, show her the rooms, tell her what’s involved.’
I followed Marla down a dim hallway and realised her enormous tracksuit-panted rump was out of proportion to her tiny upper body, then felt bad for noticing. A door with a number three painted on it was ajar and she led me inside.
Marla said, ‘Rule number one. If the door’s closed, don’t open it.’
I could understand the logic behind that.
There was a double bed on one side of the room and a foldout massage table on the other. The bed was covered with a fitted sheet and two pink towels, pleated like napkins at a Chinese restaurant.
A bedside table held home brand oil, baby powder, tissues and air freshener. A white shower unit had been moulded into the corner.
I smelled damp carpet and that powdery stuff you sprinkle on the floor in the hope the room will smell like a ‘Country Garden’.
Mirrors were stuck to the walls, along with framed black and white prints of big-boobed eighties gym bunnies in sweat bands and G-string leotards bearing the legends Sweat and Pumped up Down Under.
Marla was looking at me expectantly so I said, ‘Nice.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, Neville’s recently spent quite a bit doing the place up.’ She leaned against the massage table and the joists squeaked in protest. ‘How come you’re here if you’ve never worked before?’
‘Curious, I s’pose. I’ve never been inside a place like this.’
‘You a student?’
‘How did you guess?’ I was wearing a miniskirt with black tights, knee high boots and a face full of makeup. So much for thinking I looked like a hooker.
‘We get lots of students, need money to study. What course you doing?’
‘Um, arts.’ I sat on the sagging mattress, careful not to disturb the origami towels. ‘So, uh, what do the girls have to do?’
‘Massage is full nude, bodyslide and hand relief. Up to you if you let them touch. Most ladies allow the boobs, outside the pussy. It’s sixty for the half hour, fifty-fifty split. Full service pays better, naturally.’
‘That’s sex, right?’
‘Uh-huh. Massage, French, then sex. Client pays one-eighty for the hour, a hundred for the half and we have a ten minute special for sixty.’
Thirty bucks a fuck. It wasn’t exactly Pretty Woman.
Marla went on: ‘Fantasies like schoolgirl and light B and D are an extra twenty and Greek’s fifty. It’s up to you if you do Greek.’
‘And Greek is?’
‘Anal.’
‘Ouch.’
Back at reception Neville was smoking and drinking instant coffee out of a Garfield mug.
‘How’d you go?’ He forced a smile and crinkled his eyes up.
‘I don’t know, I’ve never done anything like—’
‘Piece of piss. You’ve had a fuck before, haven’t you?’
; ‘Well, yeah.’
‘And I bet you’ve rooted jerks for nothing. Why not have sex with some nice gentlemen and get paid for what you were giving away for free?’
Gee, now you put it that way … ‘I’m just not sure I could go through with it.’
Neville slurped his coffee and smacked his lips. ‘What about massage then? Money’s not quite as good but all you got to do is a bit of a rub, bit of a tug. Hand shandy. Like shaking a Coke can up and down.’
I stared at the blonde on the wall getting jiggy with the sports car and chewed on a fingernail. ‘Can I talk to some of the other girls first?’
Neville frowned, sighed. ‘Yeah, okay. But don’t let them put you off. Like a bit of a whinge.’
Marla led me down a corridor on the other side of the building to the girls’ room. Six workers, aged from early twenties to late forties, lounged around on brown velour couches and shabby mismatched chairs. Mugs left wet rings on the smoked glass coffee table and Bert Newton delivered double entendres from an ancient, wooden framed TV.
A blonde girl with a wide mouth and freckled, tip-tilted nose sat cross-legged on the floor in front of an age speckled mirror.
She wore a white lace bra and pants set with a pink scarf knotted at the hip, and had her lips open, applying mascara. I casually shifted my handbag so the hidden video camera would get a better shot of her.
Her name was Tamara Wade. I had found my target.
Chapter Two
The day before I’d been at a legal firm, Wade and Associates, sitting opposite high-profile criminal lawyer Emery Wade. I was there with my boss, Tony Torcasio, a stocky ex-cop who’d tutored me at the Australian Security Academy. Five months earlier I’d quit my career as a stripper and started working for him as an inquiry agent.
‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.’ Emery Wade looked like an actor playing a lawyer in a daytime soap. He was late fifties with a tennis tan and eyes the colour of Port Phillip Bay on a cold winter morning. The floor to ceiling window in his fifteenth floor chambers overlooked the Docklands’ shiny new towers, then the smoggy sprawl of shipyards and the western suburbs beyond.
‘No problem, what can we do for you?’ Tony slouched back in the burgundy leather chair, ankle on opposite knee. He’d exchanged his usual Hawaiian shirt for a black suit and looked like he was on his way to a mafia funeral.
‘It’s my daughter Tamara. She’s gone off the rails.’ Wade leaned across his vast mahogany desk and handed Tony a newspaper clipping. I sat up straight, notebook in my lap, trying to figure out why I felt so uncomfortable. Was it my cheap chain store jacket?
The daunting law volumes and framed certificates? The fact that I felt more at home in strip clubs or biker bars than glass and metal towers reeking of respectability? Maybe it was because Tony had introduced me as his associate and Wade only glanced at me once, a withering, dismissive look you might afford a cane toad that had been squashed on the road.
Tony handed me the clipping and I recognised the section from the Sunday social pages.
GUESS WHO? DON’T SUE!
The daughter of which William Street lawyer and his blonde wife is raging way too hard. So much so she’s taken up a very interesting profession to pay for the party favours.
‘Tamara?’ I said.
Emery Wade rubbed the silver at his temples and addressed Tony: ‘Who else would it be?’
I started thinking he really looked too distinguished to be true, and wondered if he painted in the grey hairs every morning.
‘What would you like the A1 Agency to do?’ Tony asked.
‘Follow her, find out if the rumours are true. My wife Susan and I would like to stage an intervention, get her into rehab. If we confront Tamara now she’ll deny everything so I want evidence, and lots of it. Proof of where she’s working, drug use. I want her followed around the clock.’
I wanted to ask some questions but my mouth wouldn’t work.
I wasn’t usually intimidated by men but right now I felt like I was back in year eight, dragged into the principal’s office for being drunk at the social, selling a joint on the bus or having my hands down Andrew Miller’s shorts behind the sports shed.
Luckily Tony asked for me: ‘How old is Tamara?’
‘Twenty.’
‘She live at home?’
Wade shook his head. ‘Flat in East St Kilda.’
I scribbled on my notepad. Tamara Wade. Pill popping pro?
Officially an adult. Old enough to do her own thing.
Tony said, ‘We’ll need an address, photographs, car registration.’
Wade slid a buff manila folder across the desk.
‘It’ll be expensive. Around the clock surveillance will require myself, Ms. Kirsch—’ Tony nodded in my direction—‘and another subcontractor.’
‘Bugger the expense.’ Wade took a chequebook from the inside pocket of his pinstriped jacket. ‘Take cheques?’
I perched on an old armchair and torn vinyl nipped my thighs.
The working girls gave me the once over.
‘I’m thinking of getting a job here but I’ve never worked before. What’s it like?’ I addressed the question to all of them but it was Tamara who replied.
‘Massage or sex?’ She swigged from a litre bottle of Coke, lit a cigarette and shook out the match.
‘I don’t know, what do you do?’
‘Massage, it’s the best. They lie down, you stand up, you’re the boss and you only have to use your hand. Shit easy.’ She leaned back on her palms and a tall Islander girl with crimson lips pulled a chair over and started brushing Tamara’s shoulder length hair.
‘No it’s not,’ said a desiccated older blonde with a voice like sandpaper. ‘That fucking massaging’s hard yakka. Thirty bucks for the half hour versus fifty? And for your information I am always the boss when I’m in the room, even if I’m lying on me back.’
Tamara snorted and smoke plumed out her nostrils. I hoped I hadn’t started a fight.
A fat lady, her tight pink dress revealing every stomach roll, guffawed and broke the tension. She put down the scarf she was knitting and nudged the older blonde in the ribs. ‘Only reason Taylor doesn’t massage is she’s too lazy to get off her back.’
‘Piss off, Janine.’ Taylor smiled as she lit a cigarette.
The Islander was styling Tamara’s hair into an up-do using bobby pins with small roses attached. ‘Maybe you should start with massage, love. Less likely to fuck with your head.’ From her low, rich voice I guessed she was, or used to be, a man.
A sweet faced girl with a brunette bob waved her copy of Personal Investor magazine to clear the cigarette smoke. ‘You’d do well at massage. Marketable looks. Just make sure you set a financial goal, put aside a percentage of your earnings and quit when you’ve reached your target. I’m saving for an investment property and a blue chip share portfolio and then I’m out of here.’
Janine cackled again. Her boobs, more twin planets than breasts, threatened to spill from the hot-pink sheath. ‘You’ll be back.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘I started in eighty-six,’ Janine told me. ‘Only going to work long enough to buy a secondhand car.’
Taylor nodded, ‘Ten years ago I needed money for Chrissie pressies for the kids. Thought I’d work two weeks but you get used to the cash, it’s addictive.’
‘And impossible to save.’ The Islander blasted a mist of hairspray at Tamara’s head and I was amazed her ciggie didn’t cause the whole room to ignite. ‘Sex industry money slips through your fingers like sand.’
‘Not as long as you set goals,’ the brunette said.
Taylor blew smoke toward the ceiling and ran a hand through her over-bleached crop. ‘I don’t want to leave anyway. I like the job. Before this I waitressed at the local club for fifteen years getting paid nothing, customers giving me crap all day. Someone pisses me off here I refuse to see ’em, plain and simple.’
I knew what she was on about. I’d n
ever felt degraded taking my clothes off, but I sure as shit had while I was waitressing and working in retail.
A news break interrupted ‘Good Morning Australia’. The latest bombing in Iraq then highlights from Sunday’s AFL match.
Young men with bulging triceps leapt into the air reaching for the ball. I knew nothing about footy—pretty shameful for someone who’d lived in Melbourne for four years. A handsome blonde player squared up to the goals and Taylor pointed to the TV.
‘Hey, Tammy, isn’t that your brother Blaine?’
‘Stepbrother,’ Tamara sighed, stubbing out her ciggie.
That got my interest, but I didn’t say anything, just plucked at the threadbare brown carpet and checked out a poster of a black guy in a red Phantom suit. Condom Man says, ‘Don’t be shame, be game!’
‘He’s hot,’ Taylor rasped at the TV. ‘Get him in here and I’ll do him for free!’
‘I’ll pay him!’ said Janine and all the girls laughed.
The Islander fluttered her false lashes. ‘He’s worth it.’
‘In your dreams, Lulu,’ said Taylor. ‘He’s going out with that singer chick. Used to be on the soapie, “Sassafras Street”. What’s her name? Valerie?’
I glanced at Tamara and saw she was rolling her eyes like it was all too boring for words.
‘Veronica,’ said Janine. And suddenly it came to me.
Blaine Wade was Emery’s son and he and his equally famous fiancée Veronica were staples in the social pages and glossy magazines, Australia’s answer to Posh and Becks. Blaine was the clean-cut rising star of the AFL and Veronica was one of the new breed of ‘virginal’ pop stars who kept their clothes on in videos and claimed to attend church. Apart from their regular incomes they made a mint in endorsements. No wonder Emery Wade wanted Tamara locked up in rehab before a scandal broke out.
I wondered why Wade hadn’t given us the whole story. Had he assumed we’d know who his son was?
Marla’s voice crackled over the intercom: ‘Intro, ladies.’
They jumped up, primping hair and checking lipstick before filing into the hall. Tammy was back before the others. She grabbed her Coca-Cola and sat close to me in an orange plastic chair, eyes occasionally darting over my shoulder. I was glad the digital video made no sound. She smelled of vanilla body spray and her slightly buck teeth pushed her lip into a pout and gave her a sultry look.
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