‘Searching for a phone number.’ My top lip trembled as I tried to keep my voice together. ‘Your wife let me in.’
‘Susan. Susan! Get in here.’
She came through from the kitchen, hands floating around the delicate gold chain on her neck.
‘Why did you let her in? What in god’s name were you thinking?’
‘She said it was alright with you.’
Emery almost smiled as he stepped towards me, pointing his index finger. ‘False pretences. Unlawful entry. Lying to a grieving mother. I’ll have you struck off.’
‘Can I just explain what’s—’
‘Step away from that box. Get your grubby hands off my daughter’s things. You won’t just lose your licence, I’ll have you arrested. Susan, call the police.’
She looked around as if the neighbours were watching. ‘Are you sure that’s necessary?’
‘Christ, I’ll do it myself.’ He pulled a tiny silver mobile from his jacket pocket and dialled triple 0.
My heart was pounding. This was really not a good time for me to be in jail.
I hung my head and looked resigned, and as soon as he was caught up reciting the address I made a run for it, bolting past him and out the garage. He lunged and grabbed my sleeve, but I didn’t slow down and it snapped out of his grasp like a giant rubber band.
His Audi was parked in the drive, the gate still open, and I sprinted straight through with Emery right behind. I ran for my car, but he was so close there was no time to unlock it and I veered off at the last minute, running toward St Kilda Street. I quickly out-paced him thanks to my relative youth and bi-weekly canalside jogs, and when I got to the main road I stopped and looked back, sucking in air and wiping sweat from my brow.
Emery began limping and stopped halfway down the street.
He was bent at the waist yelling into his mobile, one hand grasping his side.
I knew I shouldn’t have, but I lifted my arm, smiled and waved.
His laser-beam glare cut through me from a hundred metres.
I jogged up St Kilda Street, wondering how long the police would take and cursing my bright red jumper with no t-shirt underneath. Looking around for a cab I saw the 600 bus lumber toward Elwood and ran to the next stop, hailed it and jumped on.
So much for a benevolent PI-protecting deity. My sleeve was stretched into a gorilla arm and the cops were on my tail.
And then I thought, how the hell did Emery know I was in his garage?
I changed buses in St Kilda for the 246 to Richmond. As we rumbled up Punt Road I tried Tamara’s phone and my heart sank. There was a bit of charge left, but it was asking me for a PIN number. How could I have been so stupid? I’d risked my licence and livelihood for nothing. I almost burst into tears, but breathed deeply and talked myself down. Phones were stolen and rebirthed all the time. There had to be someone in this town who could unlock the damn thing for me.
Vincent’s place was off Bridge Road on a street full of freshly painted workers’ cottages with neat little gardens. Until you got to his house. It was twice the size of the others, rendered in a white pebbly substance, with Corinthian columns supporting the porch roof. Orange tiles blanketed the front yard and two concrete lions guarded the steps.
Vincent answered the door wearing slacks, slippers and a patterned jumper he must have stolen from Bill Cosby back in the eighties. He clasped my hand in both of his and motioned for me to follow as he waddled down a hall full of fussy, gilt edged antiques. The patio at the back of the house looked out onto a garden with fruit trees and vegetables planted in neat rows.
Grapevines twined the fence and a white rabbit nibbled on a celery stick in a wood and wire hutch.
I sat opposite him at a white wrought iron outdoor setting.
‘Great garden. ‘We’d had a big vege patch when I was growing up but you didn’t see many in the inner city.
‘It gives me great pleasure. Coffee?’
‘Black, please.’
He shuffled off to the kitchen and returned with a silver percolator, espresso cups and a plate of biscotti. He poured coffee and the cup and saucer rattled as he passed it over.
He stared at me. ‘Your face?’
I’d checked my makeup on the bus. Purple bruises showed through the foundation, but my lips had deflated. Pity. I’d liked my Hollywood pout.
‘Ran into a door,’ I said and changed the subject. ‘You may be right about Tammy. There’s definitely something going on.’
He tonged four lumps of sugar into his tiny cup and stirred.
‘Neville?’
‘Craig, a woman named Wu Chan and he are setting up an illegal brothel and flying in women from China. Tammy may have known about it and tried to get money from them in return for keeping quiet. Would she do something like that?’ I took a sliver of biscotti just to be polite, bit off a fragment and sipped the espresso. It dissolved on my tongue in a nutty, sugary mess. Divine.
He shrugged. ‘She always need money. Ask me to loan two hundred thousand.’
‘Two hundred grand? What for?’
‘To buy apartment. Too much. I could not give. You tell police about Neville?’ His hands shook as he lifted his cup.
‘Yep. They’re going to follow them from Tullamarine on Wednesday. Get evidence and make the bust.’
‘You know Neville kill Tammy?’
‘No, I don’t. I have no proof she was blackmailing him and I just can’t see how someone would have got into her flat.’
‘Is something he could do. Is clever. And evil.’
‘Don’t like him much, do you?’
He drained his coffee, ambled over to the hutch and pulled out the rabbit. He held it close to his chest and stroked the fur between its ears. ‘Twenty years ago my son, Paolo, is involved with Neville, bringing in the drugs from Thailand. My wife and I, we know nothing until we see him captured on the television.’
‘Busted in Bangkok?’
He nodded. ‘Neville tell Thai police Paolo have drugs.’
‘Why the hell would he do that?’
‘So others with large amounts get through.’
‘What happened to your son?’
‘Sentenced, twenty years. He die in prison after ten.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Vincent ran his finger up and down the rabbit’s nose. Its little pink eyes were closed. I asked if he knew Tammy’s mobile code or where I could find Lulu, but he shook his head and placed the rabbit back in the cage.
‘You said Tammy had family troubles. What exactly? Was Billy Chevelle involved?’
‘She not like any of them. She say they look down on her.
Like a putana. She say they, hypo…’
‘Hypocrites?’
‘Yes.’ He stood in front of me. ‘You do good work. I give you something before you go.’
Something turned out to be a plastic bag full of zucchini, carrots, beans and radicchio. On the way back through the house he filled another bag with red wine and coffee beans and handed me a small velvet box with an ugly gold brooch nestled inside.
‘You’ve been generous enough. I can’t take all this.’
‘You take,’ he insisted and closed the door behind me.
Chapter Sixteen
Back at Sean’s I rustled up a sort of potato free salad niçoise using Vincent’s beans, tuna from the pantry and some organic free range eggs I found in the fridge.
I was exhausted from the last few days and felt like vegging out in front of the TV, but since there wasn’t one I checked out the bookshelf instead. It was an interesting mix, and alphabetised like the CDs, which was a bit of a worry. Margaret Atwood, Li Cunxin, Milan Kundera, Jung Lee, Susanna Moore, John Steinbeck, Christos Tsiolkas, and Irvine Welsh were all lined up neatly. The bottom shelves were given over to language texts and a whole bunch of novels written in some Asian language I couldn’t identify.
I was more of a crime fiction girl myself. Couldn’t get into a book unless someone died grotesquely i
n the first fifty pages.
I tipped Welsh’s Ecstasy from the shelf, flopped on the couch, with my ankles on the armrest, and started reading about a morgue worker having sex with a corpse.
Next thing I knew it was dark and I was woken by a door closing and the rustle of plastic bags. Sean switched on a lamp with a tassled orange shade and I struggled into a sitting position, rubbing my eyes.
‘Sorry to wake you.’ He set the bags on the kitchen counter.
‘S’okay. What’s the time?’
‘Six.’
‘Shit. I’ve been out four hours.’
‘Must have needed it. How was your day?’ he asked, unpacking groceries.
‘What’s in that brown paper bag?’
‘Bottle of merlot.’
‘Pour me a glass while I have a shower and I’ll tell you all about it.’
I showered quickly, washing off dried sweat from the chase in Brighton, brushed my teeth and jumped into jeans and a faded Mickey Mouse t-shirt. I put on a little makeup—just for myself you understand—mascara, lipliner and translucent powder to take away the shine.
When I left the bathroom Sean was standing at the kitchen counter, shirtsleeves rolled up, brandishing a chef ’s knife and one of Vincent’s zucchinis.
‘Can I use this?’
‘What for?’
He opened his eyes wide and waggled the vegetable.
‘Girlfriend!’ For a straight boy he sure could act camp.
Ella Fitzgerald was on the stereo and the faint smell of marijuana hanging in the air reminded me of my childhood. He handed me an oversized wine glass half full of red, we clinked and I took a sip. Smoo th and plummy. I wasn’t in cask town anymore.
‘So what did you get up to?’ he asked.
‘The usual. Entered a premises under false pretences, lost my car, ran from the police. What you making?’
‘Tofu vegetable stirfry. Not too healthy for you?’
‘I ate worse growing up with hippies in the hills near Byron.’
‘You grew up with hippies?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And now you’re a PI.’
‘Who tried to become a police officer. The only way I could rebel was to do something really straight. You want a hand with that?’ I nodded to the veges laid out on the counter.
‘Sure.’ He cleared space on the thick wooden chopping board, handed me a red capsicum and slid a knife out of a stainless steel block. ‘Can I trust you with this?’
‘Kitchen monkey was one of my many crap jobs. I think I can wrangle this vegetable.’
We sliced and julienned side by side, sipping wine and tapping our feet to Ella and the big band doing ‘Lady is a Tramp’.
Occasionally our arms brushed but Sean didn’t seem to notice. He asked about the rest of my crap jobs and I told him the whole sorry story. Waitressing, prawn trawling, checkout chick, peepshow girl, almost finishing an arts degree. He told me that before he moved to Australia his parents had had a jazz band and gigged around the UK
and Europe, his mother singing and his father playing guitar. His dad had run off with an Italian woman after a show in Pisa and Sean hadn’t seen him since.
‘That’s terrible.’
‘He’s tried to contact us, just in the last couple of years, but I don’t want anything to do with him.’
‘What’s your mother doing now?’
‘She’s brilliant. Remarried and runs a singing school. What about your parents?’
‘They divorced when I was five. Dad lives in America doing something with computers—never could work out what exactly.
My mum’s a professor at Sydney uni, women’s studies. Actually, I think they call it Gender Studies these days. Brother’s a model.
He’s gay.’
‘A model, seriously?’
‘Yeah. Based in New York. Travels all over. Jasper totally scooped the family gene pool.’
‘Come on, Simone, you didn’t do too bad yourself.’ He bumped my waist with his hip.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen me in high school. Chunky and spotty with an assortment of unfortunate haircuts. I wasn’t that popular with the boys.’
‘At least you weren’t a skinny, redheaded music nerd.’
‘I’m sure you’ve made up for lost time since becoming a hot shot detective.’
He put on a tough-cop voice. ‘You better believe it, baby.’
The vegetables were all chopped and stacked on a plate. He put brown rice and cold water on the stove. Absorption method.
Good. Meant we still had forty minutes of drinking time.
I leaned on the counter and elaborated on my day. When I got to the part about Wade chasing me up the street Sean cracked up laughing and grabbed the pantry door for support.
‘It’s not funny.’ I started laughing too. ‘I’m in deep shit.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll check the computers tomorrow and see if Wade’s put in a complaint. And I’ll help you get your car back.’
‘Thanks. Hey, you know how to unlock a mobile?’ I dug Tammy’s phone out of my bag and handed it over. He pressed a series of buttons and gave it back unlocked.
‘Cool. Is that something they teach you in detective school?’
‘Nah. I just tried 1234.You’d be surprised how many people use it for a PIN.’
I could have kicked myself.
I went into the names section, selected ‘search’ and typed in ‘Lulu’. There were two numbers: a home and a mobile. The home phone rang out and a recorded message told me the mobile was switched off or out of range.
You could buy a CD-ROM of the white pages that worked like a reverse directory: type in a number and the corresponding address popped up. Or you could ask your friendly neighbourhood senior constable after he’d finished stirring the rice.
‘Piece of piss,’ Sean said, ‘but you have to do something first.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Dance with me.’ He plucked the wine glass from my hand and led me to the middle of the lounge room, turning up the music on the way. It was the Gershwin tune, ‘S’Wonderful’.
‘For real?’
‘You’re an ex-stripper. Surely it’s not beyond you to bust the occasional move?’ He slid an arm round my waist and twirled me about. I stepped on his feet.
‘Relax into it, let me lead.’
I closed my eyes and tried to go with the flow. The less I thought about it the better it worked. I rested my head against his shoulder and smelled the aftershave he’d put on that morning, muted and mixed with the warm scent of his skin. When the horn section got loud he spun me out and around a couple of times then back in tight. I had one hand on his shoulder and my other palm on his shirt, feeling his firm chest beneath the thin white fabric. His fingers had slipped from my waist to my hips, found their way to the gap of flesh between the bottom of my shirt and the top of my low slung jeans. I felt each separate fingertip sear into my skin.
I said, ‘So this is what people do when they don’t have television,’ trying to sound flippant even though my stomach was fluttering right up into my throat. I had always thought old time dancing was wholesome and chaste, something your grandparents did in between lawn bowls and attending church. Boy, had I been mistaken.
Sean pulled me closer and crooned the words in my ear, hips swaying into me. He was hamming it up. Or maybe he wasn’t. My boobs pressed against his chest and I felt the temperature of his body surge like someone flicked a thermostat.
‘S’wonderful,’ he whispered, warm breath tickling my earlobe.
‘S’marvellous.’ He pulled back and looked at me. He was a couple of inches taller than I was, maybe five ten. I dragged my gaze from his perfectly formed lips to his blue-denim eyes. I closed mine and somehow our lips came together, then our tongues, melting in, all soft and buttery.
Maybe I took too much bad acid in the nineties, but I fancied we were alone in a fifties dance hall, spinning around in slow motion, a mirror
ball showering us with points of light. Then even that image disappeared and all I felt was liquid heat from Sean’s palm pressing the base of my spine and a warmth that bloomed and spread wherever our bodies converged.
I’d had some great kisses in my time, but that one, shit. It took me outside myself, floating around some distant universe. Sean’s lips were narcotic and I’d definitely OD’d.
A tinny electronic song interrupted my swoon. Louder and louder, impossible to ignore. Sinatra’s ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, mobile phone style.
Sean pulled his lips away and reality slapped me like a Narcan hit. Everything was grey and cold and smelled like boiled rice.
I was seriously coming down.
He dived across to the kitchen bench for the phone. ‘Yep. Uh-huh. Be right there.’
I stood in the centre of the room, hugging myself as he gathered up his jacket and car keys. ‘What is it?’
‘Sword fight outside a nightclub.’
‘You’re shitting me.’
‘I shit you not. Gotta go.’
‘What about the stirfry?’
‘Save me some.’ He winked. ‘And hold that thought.’
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning Sean still hadn’t come home. I’d been curious about such a terrific guy not having a girlfriend. Now I knew why.
I schlepped around the kitchen in my PJs wondering how I was possibly going to make it up the road for coffee without first having a coffee when I opened the pantry door and realised I was in love.
A packet of Lavazza and a single cup plunger sat on the middle shelf, tied together with the sort of cheap red bow you can buy from any newsagent. A small card with Garfield the cat in one of his wide eyed, manic moods hung from the ribbon and read, Don’t drink it all at once.
He must have bought it the night before and stuck it in the cupboard while I was in the shower. A goofy grin sprouted on my face and stayed there while I brewed coffee and breakfasted on leftover stirfry. I played Ella Fitzgerald again and danced around the kitchen thinking about the night and feeling all kind of sparkly.
I wondered what time Sean was getting home. I wondered if I should buy something to cook that was healthy, but tastier than tofu. From the tuna in the pantry I deduced he wasn’t averse to fish. Maybe salmon, seared, on some kind of bok choy thing? And good wine. Champagne. Not the crap sparkling I usually guzzled.
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