Dead Sexy

by Linda Jaivin

  ‘Yes, but…’ Nicola blanched. ‘It’s not what it seems.’

  ‘What is it then? Tell me.’ Detective Mann leaned back in his chair and regarded her over his stubbly jaw. He seemed strangely familiar to her. She decided that was because he looked a little like Russell Crowe, but squarer, more compact, as if someone had fastened one arm of a vice onto the top of his head and the other onto the soles of his feet and compressed all his bits. Nicola couldn’t pick his age. He was the sort of man who’d look pretty much the same at forty-five as twenty-five.

  ‘Well? Nicola?’ He rolled each syllable of her name over his tongue as though tasting it.

  Nicola said nothing.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ drawled Da Mann. ‘How’s about you tell me about your relationship with Mr Wright?’

  Nicola made a sound that was between a sigh and a laugh. ‘I wouldn’t call it a relationship.’

  ‘You sound bitter.’

  ‘Oh, you know. I didn’t exactly want him in my life anyway.’

  Detective Mann leaned forward. His chair creaked. He reached out. It appeared as if he was about to stroke her knee. When he withdrew his hand a moment later and placed it back in his lap, she felt an inexplicable sense of disappointment mixed with relief.

  Mann sat up straight again, and folded his arms over his barrel-like chest. His eyes narrowed. ‘Is that why you topped him, Nicola? ‘Cause you didn’t want him in your life? Huh?’

  ‘I never topped him,’ she replied, confused. ‘He wouldn’t allow it. He always had to be the dominant one, even when he was—’

  ‘Topped, as in killed. Croaked. Knocked. Wiped.’

  Nicola’s jaw dropped. Tears sprung into her eyes. ‘Look, you’ve got it wrong…I didn’t kill him, all right? We had a…a date. When I left, I, uh, forgot something. I went back and found him there, you know, dead. That’s when I saw you.’ Taking off her glasses, she rubbed the lenses furiously on the sleeve of her blouse. She blinked up at Mann. ‘That’s the truth.’

  ‘I see,’ he drawled. ‘A date. And what did your fiancé think of your midnight date with Johnny B. Wright?’

  Although she herself had not long ago written that it was important to ‘Talk through Your Feelings with a Good Listener!’, Nicola was not prepared to workshop the state of her relationships with Detective Mann. ‘Who said I had a fiancé?’ she retorted, and immediately felt a stabbing pain of guilt, as though by denying Fox’s existence she’d betrayed him even more cruelly than when she was with Johnny.

  Mann grinned, and Nicola experienced a hair-raising sense of deja-vu, as though she had seen that grin somewhere before, her nightmares perhaps.

  ‘You might recall fainting back there? You dropped your bag, and your wallet fell out. There was a photo in it. Good-looking bloke.’ Looks like a pillow-biter. ‘Besides, you’ve been twisting your engagement ring round your finger like you’re tryin’ a open a jar a pickled onions.’ Mann pressed on. ‘So what’s his name?’

  ‘Fox.’

  ‘Fox.’ Da Mann grinned. ‘Crafty sort of bloke, is he?’

  ‘Not at all. He’s…’ What was she doing telling him about Fox? ‘Let’s leave him out of it, OK? He’s got nothing to do with this.’

  ‘You sound sure about that. But ya know, sweetheart, if I were him and you were making, what did you call it, dates with the notorious Johnny B. Wright at midnight, I might decide I didn’t wanna be left out of it. You say you didn’t kill Johnny. OK. Let’s say I choose to believe you. What makes you so sure that it wasn’t Fox then?’

  She tried to think fast, but her brain had lost its running shoes hours ago. Something Mann said stuck in her head. ‘Why do you say “notorious”?’ she asked cautiously, not certain that she wanted to hear the answer. ‘Did you know Johnny then?’

  Detective Mann snorted. If you knew Johnny like I knew Johnny… ‘You’d be surprised at how many people knew Mr Wright. He got around a bit—in the biblical sense, if you get my drift.’

  She knew it. Johnny was such bad news. ‘Look, I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t Fox either.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘He’s working. He’s a fireman. He’s got a shift tonight and is staying over at the station. Feel free to check. It’s the one on Castlereagh Street. Anyway, how do you know it wasn’t self-inflicted?’

  ‘What, he cuffed his hands to the table then got up and slammed the door?’

  Nicola put her head in her hands. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with it.’ She looked up as if something had just occurred to her. ‘Don’t I get to make a phone call?’

  Mann raised his eyebrows and indicated the phone on the console with his chin. ‘Feel free. Press zero.’

  Nicola reached for the phone. She frowned into the receiver. ‘There’s no dial tone,’ she said.

  ‘Whaddya know. Looks like they haven’t organised the connectage yet. Wanna borrow the mobile? Off-peak rates.’

  ‘Oh forget it,’ she said crossly. ‘Who would I call? I don’t even have a lawyer. And it’s what’—she looked up at the clock on the wall—‘nearly one in the morning.’

  ‘You could call Fox at the station.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Nicola shook her head. ‘Hello, Fox? I know you think I’m supposed to be home but I’m being questioned by a cop because he thinks I killed Johnny—you know, the fellow I promised you I wouldn’t see any more—in an act of erotic asphyxiation.’

  Da Mann rubbed his hands together. ‘Who said anything about erotic asphyxiation?’

  Nicola bit her lip. Da Mann imagined those lips moving up Johnny B. Wright’s inner thighs. He spread his legs a little wider. ‘Tell me about “erotic asphyxiation”,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if I’m entirely familiar with the concept.’

  Nicola scrunched up her face. ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’ she whispered. The truth was, she’d been in trouble from the day she met Johnny.

  ‘Maybe you are. Maybe you’re not. All I know is that I found you with a strangulated stiff, you claim you didn’t do it, and you say your boyfriend didn’t do it either because he was working. Well, I happen to have seen someone who looked an awful lot like the guy in the photo lurking round the building tonight.’

  Nicola swallowed dryly. ‘That’s funny,’ she said after a pause.

  ‘Funny odd or funny ha ha?’

  ‘Funny odd.’ She’d had a sense that Fox had been there, somehow. She’d felt his presence when she’d left the building, but put it down to guilt. Was he…? Could he have…?

  She realised that Mann was speaking to her. ‘There are tourists and there are travellers. Tourists ride coaches, travellers take buses. Tourists take photos, travellers write journals. Tourists want to see the sightage. They all end up at the Opera House. Travellers want to go to the places no one else knows about. They all end up on Bondi Beach. What about you, Nicola? Are you a tourist or a traveller? Sexually speaking?’ He smiled, a perverse vision dancing before his eyes of her tied up, naked except for stockings and those wicked shoes, gagged and blindfolded, and being expertly aroused by Johnny B. Wright.

  ‘Pardon?’ She gulped. His tone was creepy; if he hadn’t been a policeman she’d have been scared. She wasn’t quite following. Maybe she missed something. The air conditioning was making her feel like a recipe for gazpacho. Shivering, she wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Could we continue this some other time? Or am I under arrest?’

  Detective Mann leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees and locked his fingers together under his chin. ‘Yeah. We can continue tomorrow—but I need some more detailage from you first. And no, you’re not under arrest. Tell me once more like you mean it, though—should you be?’

  When Nicola got home to her one-bedroom flat in Potts Point, she switched on the light. Fox’s red braces were draped over the back of the chair in the entryway.

  ‘Hey, honey.’ Fox’s sleepy voice greeted her from the next room.

  ‘Fox,’ she cried, star
tled, immediately killing the light. ‘I, uh, didn’t know you’d be here!’

  ‘I swapped shifts with Vince. He’s got some family thing in Woy Woy he needs to go to on the weekend.’

  ‘Woy Woy,’ she repeated.

  ‘Come to bed, Nic.’ His voice sounded unusually stern. ‘Please?’ he added, more by way of command than plea.

  Nicola hesitated. ‘I’m just going to have a shower first. Be right there.’

  She shucked off her clothes and stuffed them into the laundry hamper. Under the hot jet, Nicola scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. Tears poured down her face and she washed them away as well. Drying herself with a big fluffy towel, she patted her body with a luscious old-fashioned powder puff—‘It’s Never the Wrong Time to Pamper Yourself!’ Finally, she crept over to the bed, hoping that Fox had fallen asleep.

  He was lying on his side, his back to her. As she slipped under the sheet, he rolled over to spoon her. ‘What’s the time, honey-doll?’ he mumbled into her back.

  ‘Dunno. Late.’

  There was a pause, then, his lips against her shoulder-blade, ‘So where were you?’

  Anabelle says, Honesty is not always the best policy!

  ‘I, uh, went to meet Johnny B. Wright,’ she blurted.

  ‘I told you that if he contacted you again, I’d kill him.’ Fox’s voice sounded like it came from a faraway place.

  ‘I wanted to tell him it was all over.’

  There was a long pause. ‘I wasn’t kidding,’ Fox stated.

  A chill went through her. She wriggled around until she was facing him. His eyes were closed, his beautiful features expressionless. She tried but couldn’t read anything in them. ‘Fox? Fox?’ He was breathing evenly and deeply. He couldn’t have fallen asleep that fast, surely? ‘Fox?’ she whispered. ‘I won’t be seeing him again.’

  There was a very long silence. Fox’s response tumbled slowly out of those sexy lips. ‘I know.’

  He knew?

  When she finally fell asleep, Nicola dreamed Detective Mann was simultaneously himself and a pug that she had on a lead. She sat in a long narrow cafe with him at her feet. She was pulling on his little ears and swilling dry martinis—there was a row of them on her table—while people hurried up and down the aisle by her table, carrying their genitalia under their arms. Detective Mann licked her ankles. The scene dissolved. She turned into a cucumber, honey and coconut facial and ate herself.

  Arriving late at the office, shaken by the night’s events, jittery from too little sleep, Nicola poured herself a cup of instant in the tearoom. She wouldn’t have come to work at all if she could have helped it, but Fox wasn’t due at the station again till the afternoon and she didn’t think she could hold herself together in his presence. She also had a deadline to meet. Returning to her desk with a mug of foul brew, she sat and forced herself to sift through her mail.

  Dear Anabelle, I think you’ve been a very naughty girl and I want to spank you…She got half a dozen of these every month. She skimmed through the rest of the fantasy…my ginormous member ploughing the paddock of your vagina…your sweet red pomegranate lips wrapped around my huge pulsating rod…She screwed up the page and chucked it in the bin.

  Pomegranate lips? Nicola tried to get her head around the image. What did that mean? Seedy?

  With perfect timing, Liz chose that moment to lurch into the office, hair like a rat’s nest, bags under her eyes that could carry the porters, and her Morrissey silk shirt on inside out. ‘Bloody men,’ she declared. ‘You can live with ‘em, you can live without ‘em.’

  Nicola smiled despite herself. ‘I think that’s “you can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em”.’

  Liz squinted at the ceiling and repeated the phrase. ‘Whatever. Oh fuck it. Where are the samples?’ Nicola pointed to a stack of boxes containing the freebies with which cosmetic, hair care and perfume manufacturers inundated them in exchange for editorial mention. Liz pawed through the boxes until she had an armful of product and slewed off to the toilets.

  Dear Anabelle, my husband likes to wear a Playboy Bunny costume when he does the housework…Dear Anabelle, I have fantasies about the ticket machines on the Melbourne trams, the main one being that I am a ticket machine, and commuters are putting coins into my slot…

  Nicola put her head in her hands. Why were people so weird?

  If they weren’t, would Johnny be dead? Johnny B. Dead?

  She desperately wanted to talk to Liz about the events of the night before. But Detective Mann had warned her in a severe tone of voice that there were ‘confidentiality issues’. He said she could be in far bigger trouble than she was already if she talked to anyone at all about what had happened. She wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘confidentiality issues’. He wanted to see her back at Bent Towers after work, at six, to ask her some more questions. She didn’t feel happy about returning to the scene of the crime, but he’d insisted. She’d ask him about this confidentiality thing then.

  Liz returned, collapsed in front of a bookshelf and began clawing through the back issues. ‘Your Best Hangover Cures!’ she muttered. ‘Gotta be in here somewhere.’

  Nicola scrounged in her desk drawer for a cylinder of Berocca. She fetched a glass of water from the cooler, and dropped in one of the wafer-sized vitamin tablets. As it began to fizz, she handed it to Liz.

  Gratefully, Liz went to knock it back. She sneezed as the bubbles went up her nose, spraying pink liquid all over Nicola’s blue computer.

  ‘Bless you,’ Nicola said automatically, plucking a tissue out of the box on her desk and wiping the beads of moisture off the translucent casing.

  Liz didn’t reply. She looked like she’d suddenly remembered she’d left on her iron, an electric heater and all four gas rings on the stove when she’d left the house. Her eyes widened. The Berocca drink went flat in her hand.

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘Nicola. I really really really want to talk to you about something. It’s about Johnny.’

  Nicola paled and swallowed. ‘You know?’

  Liz’s lower lip quivered. She looked as though she was about to break into sobs.

  ‘Oh, Liz.’ Nicola had no idea how Liz could possibly know about Johnny but she was too tired to care. Relief flooded through her. ‘I’m in so much trouble.’

  ‘I suppose the important thing is that we’re still friends,’ Liz blurted.

  Though she wasn’t sure why they wouldn’t be, Nicola leapt to her feet and embraced her boss. She and Liz sniffled into each other’s shoulders.

  ‘Ahem.’ Lip’s marketing manager approached and cleared her throat. ‘Hate to break up a beautiful thing, ladies. But we’ve got an all-day meeting ahead of us, Liz.’

  ‘Shit, I forgot all about it,’ Liz sniffed, pulling away reluctantly. She turned to Nicola. ‘How about a drink tonight? We can talk about everything then.’

  ‘That’d be great,’ Nicola sighed. ‘I’ve got to see someone at six, but we could get together after that. Say seven o’clock. Where?’

  ‘Woolloomooloo?’

  ‘Why not? That’s where it all began.’

  Just two months earlier, on the Friday afternoon before the Christmas break, Paddock, the publishing group that owned Lip, threw its annual Christmas party at an open-air restaurant on the finger wharf at Woolloomooloo. The party was for the staff of all the Paddock publications, which included professional-based journals such as Udder People’s Money (the financial broadsheet of the dairy industry) and Architextual.

  It was a glorious, full-colour tourism supplement sort of day. The restaurant was decked out with giant floral arrangements whose fragrant scents mingled with the smells of salt air and the seared tuna and other snacks passed around by flamboyant waiters. Sunlight sparkled on the water like sequins on a fancy frock. Seagulls swooped and squawked like gossip columnists and the nautical rigging of the moored yachts tinkled like bangles on long brown arms. Nicola’s colleagues, giddy with champagne and their impending freedom, sh
rieked out each other’s names and hooted with laughter as they exchanged jokes and scandal and holiday plans.

  It was the first office function Fox had attended since Nicola’s rise to the dizzying heights of the editorial department. When they’d arrived at the party, a gaggle of female colleagues had surrounded Nicola. Fox edged away as inconspicuously as possible. He was looking at the water and wondering if he’d embarrass Nicola by asking for a beer when he was cornered by a monotonal American who introduced himself as Zane—‘as in zany!’ So far as Fox could tell, Zane was about as zany as a cat up a tree. But at least he had someone to talk to.

  Gesturing in Fox’s direction, Liz pinched Nicola’s arm. She pulled her aside from the others and exclaimed, ‘So that’s him! He’s gorgeous! Unbelievable! What a spunk!’

  ‘Talking about me?’ The voice came from just behind them. Liz and Nicola spun around to see a good-looking man who wore a lopsided grin, fashionably tailored black trousers and a red silk-knit pullover.

  ‘You’re cheeky,’ Liz said, glowing in her beaded Collette Dinnigan frock like a cooked prawn in a particularly elaborate fishing net. They’d recently done a cover story on how to ‘Prevent Sun Damage Before It’s Too Late!’ but Liz had gone off to Palm Beach the weekend before with sample alphahydroxy-acid products that she’d mistaken for sunblock.

  ‘The name’s Johnny. Johnny B. Wright.’

  Liz squealed like she’d won a Lancôme makeover. ‘Johnny B. Wright! The architect!’ She batted her eyes so wildly that her thickly mascara-ed lower lashes adhered to her upper ones.

  Nicola smiled. ‘Any relation to Johnny B. Goode?’

  If Johnny had heard this joke a thousand and one times, he didn’t let on. ‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘But Johnny B. Bad’s a very close cousin.’

  ‘His firm, Wright Angles,’ Liz excitedly informed Nicola after prising her lashes apart, ‘is doing that massive complex up on Bent Street.’