Peaches and Cream both nodded enthusiastically, like I was a slow student finally getting a handle on what was being taught.
‘And then he blackmailed them and took that money as well?’
The sisters actually smiled at each other before nodding. Next they’d be putting a star on the back of my hand for being such a quick little learner.
‘Well, in that case,’ I said, ‘what the fuck was Niki getting out of this deal?’
The sisters shrugged, disappointed with me. They’d been sure I’d get there without their help.
‘Drugs, of course,’ Peaches finally answered.
‘Snow was her supplier,’ Cream added.
Okay, I admit I’d been slow, but not that slow. There must have been something in my look because Peaches suddenly became defensive.
‘Hey, he got her off the crap P she was taking and found her a supply of good clean ice from offshore.’ She pressed the point. ‘He wasn’t all bad, you know.’
The sisters were disappointed with me all over again when I refused to settle back and join them in watching Niki having kinky sex with her tricks. Their opinion of me may have improved when I grabbed the remote off Peaches and told her that, unless she handed over every recording they had of my sister, I’d rip them both apart with my bare fucking hands.
They relinquished the plastic bag of discs with a minimum of fuss, assuring me this was ‘all there was of Niki’. I’d like to think the phrase was just tactless and not intended to wound the way it did. Cream told me the cops were responsible for the discs being scattered over the floor, the result of their search, otherwise known as a ransack, of the place after Snow’s death. She indicated the bag I was clutching to my chest and with a conspiratorial grin told me the pigs didn’t know Snow’s secret hiding place for the ‘special’ discs. It dawned on me that Snow and his sisters had grown up in this house, and so they’d known exactly where to look. I wondered what else they’d found in that secret hiding place. As if reading my thoughts, Peaches assured me there was nothing else in the house of interest to me.
They let me go, even holding the front door open for me. As I thumped down the path, Peaches repeated her assertion that we were on the same side. Their sudden politeness might have had something to do with the way my fists clutched that plastic bag, the way my jaw was clenched, the way I was breathing hard through my teeth. I was struggling to hold back a rage that beat like a trapped gull inside my chest. I strode down the driveway towards Aro Street, trying to hold back the memory flashes of my little sister on the bed. I’d only caught a glimpse of that freeze-frame, but it had been enough. More than enough.
There was a taxi in Willis Street and the driver assured me he knew the quickest way to The Tasting Room. On the way I turned on my phone and watched as it registered eight missed calls. Three were from Gemma’s number, and ‘Robbie’ appeared twice. I recalled punching his name into my phone’s address book while in the hearse outside Wainuiomata station, and that memory brought up an image of Robbie’s hitched grin. Checking the phone’s clock confirmed I was about an hour late meeting up with Gemma, Robbie and his mate. Since Gemma didn’t know anyone else was joining us, and since neither Robbie nor his mate knew Gemma, I doubted they’d connected up.
One missed call on my phone was from Sean. His number came up under ‘X’. I made a mental note to change that next time I was in a more adult frame of mind. No telling when that might be, but probably not before my mortgage was paid off or hell froze over — whichever came last.
The other two calls were from numbers I didn’t immediately recognise. I checked to see if my credit cards were still in my wallet, and was relieved to find that the forty bucks cash was all the sisters had taken. To be fair to them, forty bucks seemed a reasonable fee for my breaking and entering their family abode, though in my own defence nothing was actually broken except possibly my skull and my pride, and the sisters were responsible for both of those.
While the driver zip-zapped my MasterCard, I checked my face in his rear-vision mirror. I had a half-hearted, foolish idea of tidying myself up before heading into the bar, but one look told me a lick and a promise wasn’t going to cut it. I looked a train-wreck.
The only good thing was that I didn’t look nearly as bad as I felt.
CHAPTER 13
It’s handy that bars have security guards ready to step in if things get out of hand or ugly. I was counting on them to do just that if Gemma took it into her head to deal to me for being late. I didn’t believe Robbie and his mate would still be there. They were expecting me at eight and who waits an hour for a no-show date? So it was a surprise when Robbie waved to me from a table at the window. And even more of a surprise that Gemma was at the table with him. Well, that solved the other little problem waiting to bite me in the butt — telling Gemma I’d set her up on a double date.
The Tasting Room is primarily a designer beer bar but they also have a good selection of wines and pricey but generous servings of breads and olives, or chips with golden aioli for those not too worried about, or failing to keep to, their diets. Patrons can choose to squat on stools at tit-height bar tables, or squeeze behind tiny wooden tables that make them look like they’re holding a Ouija board on their lap. My group had scored one of those pinny-sized tables, tucked in an alcove against the window.
Robbie stood as I approached. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt over dark dress pants, the sort of shirt worn out rather than tucked in. Nice. He held out his hand for me to shake and then presented that amazing smile as an accessory. He looked even better in civvies than he did in uniform, and again I found that smile damn difficult to resist. I beamed stupidly back at him.
My goofy smile soon vanished when I saw Gemma’s scowl, but having had a previous taste of Robbie’s warm handshake I wasn’t going to let her deprive me of another. A girl takes what she can get in the way of male contact when she’s been celibate for as long as I have. We squeezed palm to palm, and when I released him Robbie introduced me to his mate Wayne, and I leaned across Gemma to shake his hand too. With the same fair hair and wide shoulders as Robbie, Wayne had a sharp, alert, impatient look that suggested intelligence rather than nerves.
I squeezed in to a tiny space beside Robbie and opposite Gemma and Wayne, who’d scored the uncomfortable skinny-legged wooden chairs. I rolled the top of the plastic bag of discs over and discreetly stashed it behind my ankles. From the way Wayne looked at me I figured he’d already noted that I was holding my head steady in an attempt to stop it falling off. I was betting Wayne was a detective, though all cops, uniformed or otherwise, get pretty quick at noticing things like that. Sean was a master at it. Nothing escaped him. Nothing except me, that is. Not that I’d been trying to escape, I’d just gone way out on my own somewhere and then couldn’t find my way back to him.
I launched into my apologies for being late. I muttered about traffic, and having lost track of the time — entirely accurate — and being unavoidably delayed, along with variations on the theme.
There hadn’t been time to make up a good fabrication, and I knew from ghastly experience that it was better not to try and lie on the spot. Instead I went for obfuscation and trying to move the conversation to safer ground as quickly as possible. I was acutely aware of Gemma’s droll gaze on me as I twittered on, though I did my best to avoid meeting it.
Wayne told me he and Gemma had met at a police negotiators’ course about a year ago, and that this was the first time they’d met since. He glanced at Gemma and added that it was odd they hadn’t banged into each other before now, given how small the police community was in the greater Wellington area. Gemma sipped her wine without response, which was churlish even for her.
I insisted on buying a round and asked the hovering waiter to bring another of whatever everyone was having. I was struggling with waves of nausea, and had the bizarre sensation that my pounding heart had relocated to the back of my head.
After ten minutes, hoping I’d papere
d things over enough to allow myself a breather in the bathroom, I excused myself, asking Robbie to keep an eye on my ‘shopping bag’ under the table. That incriminating bagful could more accurately be classed as ‘possible evidence in a murder case’ if one was to be pedantic. The pedantic one I had in mind was my ex-husband, C/O of the investigation into Snow’s homicide, but I couldn’t think too much about that or him right now. Reluctantly, I removed my leg from its warm contact with Robbie’s and launched myself across the room to the Ladies. I made it without staggering. I think.
The wash basin wasn’t a basin at all, but a long, flat slab of marble cambered for drainage at the back. Looked great, very trendy and all, but it didn’t allow for a full facial immersion, which had been my plan. Going for next best, I rested my elbows on the marble, filled my hands with cold water, and lowered my face into it.
I’d done this several times before the door swung open and Gemma joined me in front of the mirror, which up until now I’d avoided.
‘So where the fuck were you, and what’s the deal with setting me up on a double date without the courtesy of asking me if I want to go on a double fucking date?’ Gemma was, as always, to the point. ‘Jeez, you look like shit,’ she added.
I braved a look in the mirror. She was right. I definitely did look like shit. If I’d been wearing mascara — about the only make-up I ever wear — I would have looked even worse, but that was small consolation.
I wiped my face with paper towels before launching into my explanation for lateness. I told her Snow’s sisters had held me up — an entirely accurate description of what they’d done. I explained that we’d been talking, which was also accurate, and that I’d lost track of time — likewise.
Luckily, this being a week night, the toilets weren’t in hot demand, and I was able to fill Gemma in on a fair bit of my conversation with the twins. I’d just told her about Niki’s part in Snow’s blackmailing scam — registering the fact that Gemma didn’t look surprised by any of this — when we were rudely interrupted by women with the audacity to want to use the toilets.
Forced to relocate, we sidestepped through the drinkers and back to the table where Robbie and Wayne were having a conversation of their own. They stopped as we approached, and Robbie threw that smile at me again. It was a real Heath Ledger of a smile he had going there, and for a minute I completely forgot where Gemma and I were up to.
While she and Wayne checked out the snacks menu, bickering none too politely, Robbie rummaged in his jacket pocket and held out my car keys. I thought it was good of him not to mention the Day-Glo alien figure attached, and even better of him not to lecture me for having left my car unlocked and with the keys in such an obvious location it would have been anathema to refer to it as a ‘hiding’ place. Knowing something doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve learned it, as far as keys and hiding places go.
‘It’s pretty much right outside.’ He hitched his thumb towards Courtenay Place. ‘About five or six cars thataway.’
I dropped the keys into my shoulder bag, and thanked him for bringing my car all the way into the city. When I added another apology for being late, he shrugged.
‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere else I had to be.’ He leaned ever so slightly towards me so that our arms connected. ‘You had a pretty tough day, eh?’
The warmth of his body was heady, and I felt mine incline towards him in response. ‘Yeah, a bit,’ I admitted.
He let that statement lie between us, giving me time to pick it up if I wanted. I didn’t, but the silence was comfortable between us. I filled him in on the little I’d learnt about our John Doe. I gave him a brief rundown of Smithy’s preliminary autopsy findings. The only body injury Smithy could find was a broken ankle, which the JD certainly hadn’t died from. Finding the missing skull might confirm if he’d been killed or if it was a suicide, but then again, it might not. Identifying a bullet hole in the skull wouldn’t be a guarantee either way unless it was at a really odd angle such as at the base of the neck pointing up.
Robbie nodded and leaned across the table for the jug of water, holding it above my glass and lifting his eyebrows.
‘Yeah, thanks. Great,’ I responded.
He poured all four glasses while I rabbited on about the boot our John Doe had been wearing, and how I had narrowed down the earliest year our guy could have walked it into the forest. Robbie settled back with his arm running down the entire length of mine. I really had forgotten how pleasantly warm a man’s body could be, but my body was sure as hell remembering it all over again. Robbie, either less affected by my body heat than I was by his, or really quick with numbers, did the maths easily.
‘If 1969 is the earliest he could have been wearing those boots, and if Smithy’s right about his being twenty something when he died, that makes him born around 1949. If he’d lived, he’d be sixty-odd now.’ Robbie sipped his water as he thought through the implications. ‘Which means his contemporaries — wife, brothers, sisters, friends — most of them should still be alive. Maybe even his parents. Nothing showed up on the missing persons at HQ?’
‘Well, actually there was one,’ I admitted, and told him about Steven Grigg and my meeting with Alphonse. He nodded, then without any change in tone asked how the back of my head was feeling. ‘Ice packs really do work,’ he added, throwing me one of his hitched half grins. I was still struggling with how to answer this when I caught Gemma staring at me.
‘What?’
She leaned across the table. ‘How did you get into Snow’s house? ’Cause I’m betting the twins didn’t invite you in.’
‘Sure they did.’ I gave her my most aggrieved tone. Hell, I would have believed me. ‘More importantly,’ I said, leaning to meet her halfway, ‘how come you’re not surprised to hear Niki was the bait in Snow’s blackmailing scheme?’
Gemma held my gaze for some time before leaning back in her chair. ‘Yeah, we knew about that. Snow even gave up the names of some of the guys he’d scammed when we hauled him in for questioning over Niki’s death.’
I could see her words were harsher and more casual than she felt. This was just Gemma’s way.
‘We looked at some of those guys too, running the angle that maybe Niki got caught up in some payback — but we hit a blank wall with that line of enquiry.’ She’d reverted to police-speak out of deference to the other cops at the table.
The guys seemed a bit embarrassed by this sudden change in the conversation. That we were talking a case, which is pretty much all cops do talk about, wasn’t the problem. In fact I’m sure it was a relief to them both, but they’d picked up the tension between us, and no doubt they’d picked up the emotional heat coming off me. All my talk and behaviour screamed ‘personal involvement’ and it was freaking the hell out of them. I wasn’t feeling too shit-hot about it either but I couldn’t keep from pushing Gemma one step further.
‘You knew Niki was using, didn’t you?’
‘Yep,’ she shot back.
‘Even when she was alive, you knew, didn’t you?’
Gemma, hesitated, and then nodded. ‘She was trying real hard to get off it.’ She snapped up one of the starched linen napkins, frowned at it, then started smoothing it into pleats. ‘She was making progress.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? I could have done something.’ My voice broke like a pubescent boy’s and I swallowed hard.
‘What?’ Gemma leaned in again, elbows on the table. ‘What could you have done, Diane?’
My anger was threatening to brim over. I knew I should stop now, but knew also that I wouldn’t.
‘Talked to her. And if that didn’t work I’d have grabbed her arse out of there. I would have stopped her taking that shit, got her out of that … that place. Away from that prick who killed her!’
The only way I could stop myself from crying was to keep my anger up. I knew I was being unreasonable. Knew I shouldn’t be talking to Gemma like it was her fault. Gemma turned her attention back to the napkin folding
and pressing. I focused on her chipped nail polish, and tried to keep my voice steady.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I knew she was stripping. I think I even knew she was whoring. But drugs? Blackmail? I can’t believe she was so stupid.’
There was silence at the table. I could almost hear my blood pressure lowering. Wayne was turning his wine glass round and round. Robbie had created a very effective-looking paper dart out of his napkin, which at any other time might have impressed me. Gemma was folding and refolding the linen into squares. No one was looking at me. They were all giving me time to get it together. I took a sip of water and a deep breath and managed half a back-pedal.
‘Look, I’m not blaming you, Gem, really I’m not. None of us is to blame. Not you, not Sean, not me. Not any of her so-called friends. We all gave her plenty of chances.’ I took another sip of water, pleased I hadn’t said or done something I’d really regret. ‘You know, I even offered her a job. All she had to do was straighten out her life and we could have gone into business together.’
I remembered Niki’s excitement when I’d made the offer. She said, ‘Really?’ and hugged her knees like she was fourteen years old. ‘All she had to do was get her shit together,’ I concluded.
Gemma wasn’t looking at me. She’d squeezed the napkin down to the size of a small mobile phone. Robbie and Wayne made no pretence of doing anything but staring at it, mesmerised by the tension and movement of her fingers. Gemma’s eyelashes twitched on her cheeks as her eyes darted back and forth.
‘Anyway,’ I added. ‘She made her own choices.’
I felt Robbie’s attention shift, and glanced up. Gemma was looking right at me and the look was not pretty.
‘You think she didn’t try and get her shit together? Do you have any idea how hard she tried to stop using that shit?’
I wanted to lean back out of the range of Gemma’s breath. It wasn’t that it was bad. It was the intimacy of it, and I knew instinctively I was about to hear something I didn’t want to. My legs twitched in a classic flight or fight response. But Gemma’s gaze held me in check. She leaned even closer — so close I could see that latticework of age lines around her eyes.
Surrender Page 12
