The Polka Dot Girl

by Darragh McManus

  The rest was hearsay, assumption and muddled intelligence. Madeleine dived headfirst into a life of drink, sex and partying, of fast cars and faster women, running through money in the reckless manner beloved of those with too much of it, and Misericordiae kept a close watch the whole time. I assume she had detectives following Madeleine almost round-the-clock, but even those consummate chameleons can’t gain access every- where, so there were bound to be gaps in the narrative. It must have chewed Misery up to see this disintegration in her only daughter ’s life, but Madeleine was discreet enough, so the grand name of Greenhill was somewhat protected. As the old girl had already told me, she figured the rebellious typhoon would blow itself out eventually. And in the end it did, but not in the manner either of them would have hoped for.

  File number two: the atlas of Madeleine Greenhill’s life for the last 24 months or so. Places she went to, places she stayed over, places she blew money, trips she took and escapades she enjoyed. I knew virtually all of the names on the list, either as a patron myself or as part of my work. A lot of bars: some respectable, some quite sleazy, none particularly dangerous in my estimation. Jazz clubs, supper clubs, discotheques, burlesque houses, theaters, cinemas, casinos… This young lady’s appetite for destructive adventure was only surpassed by her energy. Most of these joints were alright, as in they weren’t the sort of estab- lishment a pillar of society likes associated with their family, but they were safe, upfront, legit…or semi-legit, anyway. Not the sort of dump where an argument about spilled drinks spills over into a knife fight or worse. (Unfortunately, I know quite a few of those, too.)

  I had a gut feeling that Madeleine’s murder wasn’t directly connected to this list, on which only one name stood out as unfamiliar: That Island, identified by Misery’s PIs as “a private club”, with an address way out in the ’burbs, nestled quietly in the bosom of a prosperous residential area. Strange sort of location for a club. I filed it away in the back-brain and moved onto the remaining file.

  This detailed Madeleine’s known associates during her adult life. Given her ubiquity across Hera’s night-life underworld, the girl must have known a hell of a lot more people than would fit onto a few A4 pages. I figured Misery and her staff had evaluated and then discarded the temporaries, the transients, the one-night stands and fleeting friendships, the roulette wheel buddies and drink-sodden hook-ups. Thanks for making my job easier, Madam Greenhill. I scanned the names quickly to begin, then reread each entry more carefully, searching for a clue, a sign, a direction to take, trying to open my mind to suggestion.

  After 40 minutes I was satisfied with my own evaluation and had prioritized ten women to track down and interview. If I struck out there, I’d work my way down to the next ten and the ten after that, though I hoped and expected that this wouldn’t be necessary. Normally a case resolves itself one way or another within a few weeks, either with or without the investigating officer ’s contribution. If experience was anything to go by, one of these ten would help me find Madeleine’s killer, and if they didn’t the forensic evidence would, and if that didn’t we’d catch a lucky break or a confession or a helpful snitch, and if that didn’t do it something else would. And if none of that came to pass, I wouldn’t catch her at all and Madeleine’s murder would go un- avenged by the woman investigating it. So it goes for us, and for all the dead girls.

  This was my top ten:

  Bethany Gilbert. Former classmate in the LaVey Institute, kept in touch since Madeleine dropped out. Drinking partner and general all-round moocher. From a working-class background, got into LaVey on a scholarship and far from affluent. Treated Madeleine like a flesh-and-blood cash machine. In her final year at college.

  Mary-Jane Tussing. Likewise to Gilbert, though her mother was in a higher income bracket. Therefore presumably not a scholarship candidate…? Anyway, she sponged off Madeleine plenty. Also in her final year.

  Azura LaVey. Founder and sole owner of the eponymous “institute.” Strange, exotic sort of creature. Murky background, the biographical details constantly changing; a relentless self- mythologizer. Dangerously charismatic, said to exert an almost messianic influence over some of her students. I’d never met LaVey but anyone I knew who’d had the privilege summed the woman up in three words: don’t trust her.

  Camilla Castelmagno. Casino and nightclub queen of Hera City. Tough cookie, though I’d always found her to be straight- talking and free of bullshit. Suspicions of criminal activity— smuggling, bootlegging, money-laundering—never quite proven by the HCPD. The kind of broad whose sins are more venial than mortal. I was guessing Madeleine had dropped enough money over the years to pay off several of Camilla’s mortgages.

  Virginia Newman. The “dreary” girl Misericordiae mentioned. Mother the architect, daughter the New Age flake. One of the last people known to see Madeleine alive. Bump Virginia up near the top of my to-do list.

  Winona (Noni) Ashbery. A psychologist and guidance counselor Madeleine visited during her bulimia/anorexia phase and stayed in contact with. Lived alone, had a private practice. Not much about her, maybe because there wasn’t much to know.

  Seemed like a solid citizen.

  Orianne Queneau. Professor of Metaphysics at Hera University. Elegant woman, famously looked much younger than her years. Said to be a brilliant mind, though I couldn’t say: I was about as au fait with metaphysics as I was with moonbeams, medieval militarism or macaque monkeys. Sometime guest lecturer, I noted, at LaVey. Probably didn’t mean anything, maybe meant something. I’d find out.

  Sasha Hiscock. Here was an interesting one: television presenter and socialite, as familiar with the paparazzi flashbulb as with her own kitchen. A strikingly good-looking woman, tall, almost fearsome in her angular beauty. Too-perfect women like that always made me nervous. Knew Madeleine from the whirl of Hera’s high society. Currently dating the Deputy Mayor, a complete asshole with ambitions for higher office. Yeah, I’ve tangled with her once or twice.

  Anneka Klosterman. Champion athlete in an impressive range of disciplines: fencing, skiing, diving, shooting, distance running. God, what sort of freak of physiology was this? Often seen accompanying Madeleine to the fights; not thought to have ever been a romantic couple.

  And the last shall be first: Odette Crawford. I had been a little surprised to see Odette’s name on the original document; I didn’t realize her and Madeleine remained acquaintances after the music classes fizzled out. I wondered why she didn’t mention it to me the other day, figured it was nothing, but decided to put it to her anyway. I was following a lead, sure, but I was also being nosy. I wanted to know things about Odette’s life, things that she didn’t want me to know. Of course Odette had nothing to do with any of this—she didn’t really need to be on this list—but I wanted to sneak into her life anyway, wanted to indulge my voyeurism and poke around in the underwear drawer of her private business. And no, it doesn’t make me feel any better to admit that.

  Now I had a list of names and addresses, a bunch of questions needing answering, a half-packet of cigarettes and a newfound sense of get-up-and-go. So I got-up-and-went, heading for the underground parking lot where I gut-punched my car into life, got stuck into that half-pack and hit the trail. First stop: Winlatter docks. As luck would have it, the same two bozos who were there the night Madeleine was killed were on duty this afternoon. By the dull, empty expressions on their faces, the fact that their feet were propped up on the CCTV desk in their crappy little shack, and the air of slack-jawed indolence about the place, I figured them for typical on-site security goons. Dumb broads with just about enough brain-cells to do what was required: check locks, keep an eye on the cameras, have a stroll around every few hours, roust the winos and hookers if they were beginning to clutter up the place…shit-work like that.

  The docks, as an unwritten rule, operated under their own steam and their own jurisdiction; things generally got taken care of, nobody fucked around with the dockers or the merchandise, and if they did, a knuckle
-duster to the mouth three or four times tended to ensure that they wouldn’t do it again. We hardly ever got brought down here, certainly not for thefts and suchlike; the women of the docks handled that by themselves. The cops were only called upon when something really bad went down: sexual assault, serious drugs felonies, murder.

  And murder there had been so here I was. I rapped on the glass door of the security shack—you were right, Officer Browne, it was a stupid place to locate them—and stepped inside without waiting for an answer. I flashed my badge and said, “Auf der Maur, HCPD, Homicide. You guys have been expecting me, I presume?”

  They nodded like mentally deficient cattle and looked at each other. I said, “Names, please?”

  The fat one pointed to the fatter one. “She’s Minsky. I’m Brite.” I smiled and said, “I’m sure you are”, pulling up a stool and

  whipping out my notebook. “Alright, ladies, I can see you’re busy so I won’t take up too much of your time. You were both working on the night of the 15th, correct?”

  They nodded simultaneously.

  “How comes it that you’ve moved from nights to days?”

  Brite said, in a rural-sounding drawl, “Shift change, Detective. You work four nights, two days off, then a week of days, then three days off. No, four days off. Which is it, Skee?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “One of you tell me what happened that night. How you heard about the girl.”

  Minsky took up the story. If anything, she spoke even more slowly than her partner. “We were here playing cards. Playing gin rummy. I had a run of good hands. To be honest we didn’t know nothing was wrong until that patrol officer come in here and told us a body’d been found.”

  Brite said, “In the water.”

  “Yeah, in the water. Officer Browne told us the full story. A dead girl, floating out by Pier 22. We just done what we were told, Detective. We didn’t know nothing was wrong until right that very moment.”

  “Don’t know why that old whore didn’t come to us first,” Brite said, screwing up her eyes like she was concentrating really hard.

  I said, “But that’s it? You didn’t see or hear anything suspi- cious, anything out of the ordinary? Think back to that night. Did you notice anything unusual? Maybe someone you hadn’t seen around here before?”

  Minsky—no, actually it was Brite—said, “Mmmm…no. Can’t say we did. The usual couple of pros working it. Four or five of ’em. ’Bout a dozen tricks over the course of the night. The weather was kinda shitty, so business was bad, I guess.”

  “We’re not in trouble for letting that type of thing go on, are we, Detective?” Minsky interjected. “The bosses, they just say,

  ‘Turn a blind eye, ladies.’ Ain’t our business, they tell us.”

  “No, you’re not in trouble. How many other prostitutes were here when Officer Browne came in to you?”

  “I don’t think there was any. Figure they must have gotten their asses out of here when they heard sirens. Only old Rose stayed put. Which, you gotta hand it to her for that.”

  A dead-end like I’d expected. I said goodbye to the two geniuses and had a stroll around the docks, beginning in the main entrance yard and working my way slowly to where Madeleine had been discovered. I didn’t really know what I was looking for or hoping to find, if anything—the tech team had already scrubbed the place clean for physical evidence. Maybe something less tangible, a hint, or a hint of a hint. I stood at Pier 22 for five minutes, smoking and not thinking about the case, hoping to trick the universe into letting its guard down and letting me in. I finished my cigarette and flicked it into the water, hearing that soft fizz as it quenched, and turned to go. There was nothing down here, nothing but rusting metal and crying birds and sad little girl ghosts whispering of vengeance.

  Chapter 8

  Azura

  BY that evening I had an empty tank, all my cigarettes smoked and a tiredness headache the size of a hungover horse. Unfortunately, what I didn’t have was much more skinny than I’d had when I started. Literally pulling out the list and ticking the names off one by one with my trusty green pen, I had begun to track down as many of my top ten as I could find. First stop, purely because it was geographically closest to Dicks HQ, the LaVey Institute: two students, one sometime teacher, one curious, enigmatic founder.

  Let’s deal with her first. My grandmother, a traditional kind of lady with a wealth of homely expressions, used to say of someone she instantly disliked on meeting, “I took a set against her.” That was her only explanation and that explained every- thing: she took a set against the person, meaning she uncon- sciously made a snap decision that she didn’t care for them, or didn’t trust them, or didn’t want anything to do with them. There was no logic to her thinking but it made sense. And I took a set against Azura LaVey when I shook her bejeweled hand across a ridiculously over-large desk in her ridiculously over-decorated office situated in the main building complex.

  Actually, I went further than Nana: I didn’t like LaVey before meeting her, carrying a sort of prejudicial premonition with me as I drove through the manicured gardens of the Institute to which she gave a name and an ideology. I didn’t like the fact that she made me wait in the anteroom to her office for 20 minutes, despite the fact that I had phoned ahead and what the hell was more important than assisting the police in a murder investi- gation? I didn’t like the atmosphere of pretentious weightiness, the ethnic doodads and trinkets dotted inside and out across the small campus, the cod-philosophical slogans rendered in oh-so-tasteful tapestries and chiseled into artfully asymmetrical sculp- tures. ‘The end is the beginning is the end’? Oh, please. What does that even mean? And I didn’t like the cold-eyed stares of her receptionist, almost literally suffocating under the orange foundation make-up plastered across her borderline-hideous face. I consoled myself with the spiteful thought that I’d probably be unpleasant to others, too, if I looked like that.

  And a set was irrevocably taken by the time we’d said our hellos, I’d sat back into an annoyingly low armchair and LaVey had retreated in a cloud of organic perfume to the far side of the desk. And when I say far, I mean far. I felt like asking for a bullhorn just to conduct the interview properly. Her office was sun-drenched and warm, suffused with the color of melting gold, furnished with soft throws and tiny works of pottery and outlandish-looking plants that would have been at home on the set of a sci-fi horror movie.

  She shifted her bottom on her chair and assumed an air of almost cosmic placidity, like it was a pretty humdrum occurrence to be answering the questions of a Homicide dick. I figured, either she really is as Zen as all that, or she’s too cool to be wholesome and has prepared herself for this well in advance. She really looked the part, I had to admit, of a visionary pedagogue, a preacher of esoterica: her features an intriguing mélange of races and cultures, of unknown histories; her clothes soft and flowing, all wispy materials and discreet adornments; her dark hair with its defiant white streak, bundled loosely like a water nymph. Or maybe a doyenne of Olympia, nonchalant and imperious, floating through the enchanted bubble of her own little paradise. Chalk all that down as more black marks against Madam LaVey. I hate people who are so much more poised than me.

  She didn’t say anything, didn’t even offer me a token cup of Joe, so I shrugged and thought, Fine, let’s get to it. “You know why I’m here?”

  LaVey sighed, an embellishment in the sigh, and looked towards the ceiling. “Yes. Poor Madeleine. That poor, sweet girl.” “She was a student of your college until less than two years ago and remained friends with some of your girls.” “Correct. You’ve done your homework, Detective.”

  She gave me the most patronizing smile imaginable and I wanted to smack it off her face. Instead I said, “We don’t call it homework, Ms LaVey. We call it gathering information as part of a homicide investigation. Do I have your full co-operation now?” That took a bit of the edge off her attitude; the smile disap- peared like a magic trick. I continued, “What
can you tell me about Madeleine? What you knew of her during her time here.” “I never knew Madeleine particularly well. She was a quiet girl. Kept to herself. Obviously she had friends, many friends, we encourage the girls to be sociable, to get to know others… The LaVey Institute believes in educating the whole person, not just in the academic sense but as a fully rounded spiritual entity.” “Very admirable. May I ask: what exactly is this place, anyway? What’s your, ah, your philosophy?”

  “Our philosophy—I say ours, I mean mine. As I’m sure you know, I founded the Institute 15 years ago as an alternative to the existing third-level educational establishments in Hera. Though those are all commendable in their own way. This is a haven of learning outside the mainstream, you might say. We focus on those subjects which, in my judgment, can help make this city a more enlightened, evolved place. The humanities, art, archi- tecture, music, drama…an appreciation of aesthetics and ethics, culture and spirituality. The investigation of beauty and truth.”

  She smiled again, supercilious; she’d found her footing once more. The spiel simultaneously felt rehearsed and wholly genuine. I said, “And Madeleine took Comparative Religion, correct? Seems a heavy sort of subject for a girl of 18.”

  “Oh, no, Detective. Heavy? Not at all. Madeleine was a highly intelligent young woman, highly gifted, a deep thinker, thoughtful, almost profound… Comparative Religion is one of our more intellectually rigorous courses and it suited Madeleine. She liked to apply herself to something, to test her intellect. And of course, she was also a seeker. She yearned for something more, something deeper. Such a pity she didn’t find it here.”