‘Did you know Sean is handling the homicide of my sister’s killer?’ I asked as casually as I could.
Her eyes went very wide. She looked like a big, brainless, china doll, and I never did like dolls.
‘You mean the body found in Cuba Street?’
I tried for a complicit look. ‘And I hear he’s got a really good lead on who might have killed him.’
‘That’s what I heard too.’ She lowered her voice for effect. ‘I heard he’s thinking it was some kind of payback.’
Things were just getting interesting when a ting announced the arrival of the lift. Tilly, clutching a manila folder, approached the outer door, swipe card at the ready. Carol glanced over and, suggesting we ‘do lunch sometime’, hurried to take advantage of the open door. I was one of the few people in the world who knew Tilly’s full name was Chantilly, and right now I was tempted to remind her of that, but she had no idea what she had interrupted, so I thanked her and took the folder back to my office.
It took less than twenty minutes to read. Steven Grigg had gone missing on the fourth of March 1970, exactly one month after his twenty-second birthday. His father had made the initial call to police, and it was obvious from the dismissive reports and follow-ups over the next few days that the cops were confident he’d turn up under his own steam. But the parents never let up, and there was even a terse report of Mr Grigg senior assaulting an officer whom he accused of not doing enough to find his boy.
After a couple of weeks of parental harassment, and the fact that Steven didn’t turn up, it was easy to read the escalating concern as weeks and then months went by. But although Steven didn’t ever return, there was never any reason — no evidence, that is — for the missing person case to be ramped up to anything more serious. The parents insisted that the only reason their son wouldn’t contact them was because he couldn’t. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been enough for the cops to upgrade the investigation to homicide.
I sympathised with the parents, as no doubt the cops at the time did, but they could do nothing unless there was a clear sign of an offence having occurred. Or foul play as they used to call it. The case officer had done his work, interviewing all of Steven’s workmates and friends and canvassing the neighbourhood for any sightings. He’d even parked a police caravan in the street where Steven lived, and another one near his workplace, but there was no new information, no leads. Nothing.
There were a couple of photos of Steven in the file which I studied closely. I didn’t expect to see a resemblance between him and the headless skeleton, but I was hoping for a sign or a feeling, a whisper of something. I didn’t get anything. All I saw was a skinny guy in tight, faded denims and open-necked shirt, white sneakers and oversized sunglasses. He had shoulder-length, wavy, dark hair and looked as though he could use a shave.
In one photo he was shading his eyes, pointing and grinning at the camera. In the long fingers of the pointed hand a cigarette sat proud, and when I held the photo under the lamp I could make it out as a rollie. He was a good-looking guy, but his full, pouting lips gave him an indulged look. I suspected that if I met him I’d want to bite that lip — and not in a good way.
I checked through the other photos, studying the footwear, hoping to spot my tramping boot. I knew it was a long shot and wasn’t too disappointed when I didn’t get a hit. Okay, I thought, Steve Griggs could be my John Doe. He was certainly worth a look.
According to the file, Steve’s parents were Margo Alice and Steven Alphonse Grigg. Starting with the main cities, I did a quick white page internet search under those names but found nothing. Not surprising since his parents, if alive, would be in their eighties at least. I checked the file again. Steven had two brothers and a sister. The elder brother had been blessed with his father’s middle name, Alphonse. I did another white pages search for Alphonse Grigg and got a hit in Wellington. Bingo. I jotted down the inner-city apartment address in my notepad, and exited the computer.
Tilly had already gone for the day but she’d left my new laminated ID card in a big envelope on the desk that I’d minded so faithfully. I checked out the photo. Yep, I was scowling again. Which just goes to show that I am, if nothing else, consistent.
CHAPTER 11
Alphonse Grigg lived on the sixth floor of an apartment block in Marion Square. By day a vaguely grubby but entertaining part of town, by night it’s where the local trannie prostitutes ply their trade in doorways. It’s definitely one of Wellington’s more colourful areas. I pushed the intercom for apartment 6B, expecting to give name and explanation into the grill, but I was buzzed in without saying a word. So far so easy.
When I stepped out of the lift I saw the apartment door open in readiness. I tapped on it, called out a greeting, and waited. Nothing. I was about to call out again when a square-shaped man in his sixties appeared, with a towel around his waist and his face covered in what I hoped was shaving cream.
‘Mr Grigg? Alphonse Grigg?’
He lifted the bottom of the towel to his mouth, revealing more than I needed to see, and wiped a hole for his lips. He looked me up and down several times.
‘You’re not my five-thirty, are you?’ he said, ducking his head to look down the hall.
I didn’t think I wanted to be his five-thirty.
I introduced myself, told him about the John Doe being found, and why I was there. Feeling like a magician with a rabbit, I produced the oblong evidence box containing the tramping boot. All the time Alphonse stood motionless in his towel skirt and cream Santa beard and stared at me. When I stopped talking, he told me I’d better come in then. He returned to what I presumed was the bathroom and shut the door.
There was only one room to wait in, so I waited in it. I placed the box next to an empty coffee mug on the tiny table, uncomfortably aware of the similarity between the shoebox and the room itself. Even the colour of the apartment, which probably had a name like Void or Infinity, was exactly the same as the interior of the box. Nothingness. The only interesting thing in the room was the splatter of snapshots above the bed. I was studying these when Alphonse spoke behind me.
‘That one on the far right is Steven. It was taken a couple of weeks before he went missing.’
Alphonse was now, thankfully, dressed in chinos and black T-shirt. The shaving cream had been wiped off except for a tiny blob on his earlobe. I resisted the urge to lean over and tweak it away. He was stalled by the table, looking at the tramping boot in the open box but not touching it.
I turned back to the photo of Steven. It was the only one I could see of the missing brother, pinned up separate from the others. Aphonse came close, enveloping me in a musk of shaving cream. He pointed out a young guy holding a surfboard.
‘That’s my younger brother, Charlie. He was only fifteen when Steven went missing. Just starting out.’ His hand pressed the photo like a blessing. ‘He was a lovely boy. And that,’ he said, touching a black and white photo of a young girl in a miniature wedding dress and veil, ‘is my sister Robyn. This was taken at her first holy communion.’
So she was a child bride then. The invisible groom being good old God himself. I waited, knowing Alphonse would get there eventually; he just needed to do it at his own pace. Finally he unpinned a tiny black and white photo curling at the edges and handed it to me.
‘That was us before Steve buggered off. I’m not saying we were anything special. Just an ordinary family. Mum, dad and the kids.’
I studied the photo. The little group did indeed look like an ordinary family, their image frozen forever in the midst of what looked like a big work picnic. Mum and Dad were caught in the act of laying out food on a tartan blanket. Robyn, this time in shorts and T-shirt, was standing on one foot, clasping the other behind, her head thrown back for balance. Two boys, who I guessed were Alphonse and Charlie, were tying their ankles together with torn up pantyhose. They were sharing a complicit grin in anticipation of the three-legged race. I glanced surreptitiously at Alphonse; he’d kept the same surpr
ised smile that he had as a kid, but that was about it.
‘We won that day. Can’t remember what we got for it. Nothing, probably.’
The smile was gone. I studied the third boy in the photo. I hadn’t noticed him the first time I looked. Older than the other two, he stood at the edge of the picnic blanket, looking away from the family towards something off-camera. No one else in the photo was seeing what he saw.
‘This is Steven?’ I asked, sure it was but wanting to keep Alphonse talking. I had a feeling this guy opened and shut like a valve. Alphonse took the photo and studied it as if for the first time.
‘He didn’t bugger off until a couple of years after this was taken, but this is the last time I remember us all being together as a family.’ He pinned the photo back on the wall. ‘He was always a selfish prick.’
The pin went in dangerously close to Steven’s head.
‘We lost our parents the day Steven went missing. I had to take over being the grown-up and I didn’t do too good at it. Charlie killed himself a week after his seventeenth birthday.’ Alphonse walked stiffly to the table and picked the boot out of the box. ‘And Robyn might as well have,’ he added cryptically.
I watched him weigh the boot in his hand, the sole flapping like the jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He’d gone somewhere else — somewhere I didn’t want to follow him to. I thought he might throw the boot at me and took a step towards him just in case. The movement seemed to remind him I was in the room.
‘One day Steven just up and disappeared, and for all that Mum and Dad noticed us after that, they might as well have gone with him.’ He placed the boot carefully back in the box and held it out. ‘This isn’t his.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Steven had huge feet right from when he was a kid. Poor kids remember things like that. I wore his hand-me-downs. Anyway, I never saw him in any kind of boots. He sure as hell wasn’t a walker. My bet, he got himself killed over some drug deal, but who the fuck knows.’
I left Alphonse in his little shoebox apartment, scraping over the coals of memory, blowing on the embers of resentment. I felt bad about reviving the hurt although it hadn’t seemed too deeply buried before I started digging. And when his five-thirty passed me in the corridor I stopped worrying. From the look of her, I figured Alphonse wouldn’t be thinking about his family for the next little while. At least, I hoped not.
I grabbed a coffee from Floriditas, a café in Cuba Street with large windows. Wolf’s walker Damian works the odd shift there, so it’s a useful haunt for me when I’m in need of a bit of staring out of windows. The coffee’s pretty good, too.
I had no reason to disbelieve Alphonse when he said the boot didn’t belong to his brother, but this was an annoying dead end. There were only two missing persons on the police database that fitted the timeline and only one of them was in the probable age bracket of my John Doe. Now it looked like he wasn’t a match.
That left two possibilities: the initial autopsy evidence was wrong, or my John Doe had never been reported missing. Smithy would be the first to say his initial report to me was premature and therefore likely to be incorrect, but from experience I thought that unlikely. Smithy is the best and I couldn’t remember him ever being wrong in his initial assessment.
Which left me with the other alternative: my wheelbarrow JD had never been reported missing. That wasn’t so unusual. There are far more loners in this world than we’d like to think, and when those people disappear they can just slip-slide away, unremarked and unnoticed by anyone. What I needed to do next was try and figure out if this particular JD wanted to disappear or whether someone else wanted it. I needed to go back to where the body was found. If I could establish where he died, that could help me with how and maybe even why. With those answers in place, I might be able to have a go at the most of important question of all: who.
Damian wasn’t on duty at the café, so I scribbled a note asking him to drop the shoebox off at my house tomorrow when he came to walk Wolf, and handed the note and evidence box to the manager to put in Damian’s locker. Maybe it was the coffee, maybe it was that little cubicle Alphonse was scratching his life out in, or maybe it was the address I’d seen in my notepad while I was scribbling the note to Damian — whatever it was, I needed a walk, which was handy since I wouldn’t get my car back until I met up with Robbie later.
I’d walked as far as the DeeVice sex shop when I remembered I’d agreed to bring along a friend tonight. I didn’t want to consider if there was a connection between the shop and my remembering. As I walked I rang Gemma and asked if she’d like to join me for a drink at eight thirty. It’s true I mentioned neither Robbie nor his mate, and I certainly didn’t use the words ‘double’ or ‘date’, but it was better that way for two reasons: one, Gemma would actually turn up; and two, I wouldn’t have to listen to her scornful laugh before she hung up on me.
It was also, I admit, insurance for my own safety. One of my few good points is that when I say I’m going to be somewhere I always turn up, unless something really serious happens to prevent it. People know that about me. If I didn’t turn up for drinks, Gemma would know something was seriously amiss — she’d know I was in trouble. And tonight, if that happened, she’d have two other cops on hand to share her concern with, though admittedly she didn’t know about the other cops yet.
I paused outside the little junk shop beside the charcoal chicken outlet at the top of Cuba Street. I knew from the newspaper report that Snow’s body had been dumped in the gutter outside this shop. With no security cameras in this part of town, and with little vehicle or foot traffic in the wee small hours, there had been no witnesses. If anyone in the apartments nearby had seen anything they sure as hell weren’t rushing forward to tell the cops.
According to Sean, the police theory, backed by minimal forensic evidence, was that Snow had been killed elsewhere and his body tipped here from a moving vehicle. It seemed such an appropriate place to drop him — in a gutter outside a junk shop — that I couldn’t help but wonder if the killer wasn’t making a metaphorical statement. Then again, maybe it was time I cut down on my television crime-show viewing.
I looked along the gutter and the shop edge of the pavement but couldn’t see anything of significance. The shop window displayed a collection of tobacco tins, and tragically discarded soft toys leaning together as if for comfort, all covered with a thick layer of dust. The sign on the door said ‘Back in 10’ but I doubted it. It looked like the place had been locked up and deserted years ago.
I continued on up Webb Street and dodged the traffic to get to the dairy on the corner of Willis, then made my way up Aro Street, checking off the house numbers as I went. Outside the Aro Street video store I stopped and re-checked Snow’s address in my notepad. Having read it upside down in Sean’s car, it was possible I’d written an incorrect number, but this looked like the right place — a little run-down cottage up a long driveway that snaked between the video store and a block of apartments.
The bland and soulless apartments had replaced a garage called MM Motors. Rumour had it that the initials were short for Mickey Mouse Motors, an apparently fitting name for a business run by a bunch of cowboy film makers from the ’70s who specialised in ‘blowing shit up in movies’.
Under the guise of checking out the video store’s specials bin, I made sure there were no cars parked up the driveway directly outside Snow’s place.
On closer inspection the cottage looked derelict and deserted. I checked my watch. It was just after seven. I had time to have a quick look around inside the house, get back home, change, and still be on time for drinks downtown with Robbie at eight. Although I wasn’t anticipating trouble, Gemma would be expecting me at eight thirty and if I didn’t turn up she’d know something was wrong.
All I had to do was figure out how to break into Snow’s place.
CHAPTER 12
I knocked, waited a full thirty seconds, then knocked again, louder this time. Still nothing. Th
e gravel underfoot crackled like cornflakes along the narrow alley between the house and a concrete retaining wall. I glanced at each of the windows along the side of the cottage ready to wave a confident hello if anyone suddenly appeared — but they were too thick with dust and cobwebs for me to see inside. I knocked loudly on the back door to be sure no one was inside, and then I clasped the door handle. Nothing ventured and all that, but this time nothing was gained either.
I glanced around the back porch. We’re a funny bunch humans, each thinking we’re different from the rest. That we’re the only one with a particularly bizarre fear or desire. That we’ve each got our own quirky, exclusive ways of doing things. It’s what keeps us believing we’re individuals in control of our own destiny. It’s also what keeps us lonely, but that’s another matter. The fact is, eight out of ten people put their house key under the welcome mat at the back door. Though I know it drives cops and insurance brokers up the wall, I find that little example of human frailty endearing. A free-thinking four per cent of us put the key under a pot plant, brick, gumboot or sneaker within a metre of the door it opens. The truly maverick stick it on a ledge above the door.
I looked in all these places but found nothing, which proved that my suspicions about Snow were correct — he wasn’t like the rest of us. Then again, the cops might have taken the key from one of these ‘hiding’ places after they’d been through the place, and maybe the only thing that set Snow apart from the rest of us was that he’d stuck a knife in my little sister’s back.
A fine drizzle had started to fall, and a gloom had set in, probably a summer storm brewing. If I was going to climb in through windows I should do it before dark — neighbours are usually less suspicious of daylight break-ins. That’s another of those odd little human foibles.
Surrender Page 10
