I
don’t spend a lot of time in Glebe, but when I do I go to the AB Hotel. The food is served in obnoxiously large portions and the place is a big mess of levels and private function rooms and lounge areas.
I was in Glebe to pick up some papers from my contact in the archives—some maybes and probably nots from the unnamed mug shot categories, Jane Doe files, and informant catalogs in my search for a Jimmy or a Kimmy connected to Sharon Elizabeth White. Sonya, a short woman who never wore makeup and was always in green, handed me three tattered, badly arranged manila folders and wished me luck. I lost my hold on all the papers as soon as she was out of sight and had to gather them up from the asphalt before they were taken by the wind.
I sat at the bar sipping a glass of rum on ice and looked through the files. I’d already dug up everything there seemed to be in the official records on Sunday, but I’d learned from some old Department of Community Services records that Sunday’s sister, Adam White’s mother, was in the records, too.
Lynda White had been removed from the care of her mother in a similarly chaotic roundup of Aboriginal children as the one that had claimed Sunday. But the two sisters weren’t united in the system—foster family shortages meant there wasn’t a home available for two little black girls. Sunday was sent to Sydney and Lynda remained in the southern state. According to a psychologist’s report on Lynda accompanying some financial support she’d applied for in the eighties, she’d tracked down Sunday in the Cross when both girls were working in the sex industry in their late teens. What a reunion.
I fiddled with the stack of coasters nearby and stretched my neck, taking a break from the faded transcript to look around the bar. Maybe I could find Kimmy or Jimmy through Lynda. Maybe they knew each other. Were arrested together. Anything. I sighed. My hunting quarry had tripled. I was now trying to follow the movements of three ghost girls vanished into the halls of time. I dropped the archive files and pulled out my phone.
Juno answered after one ring.
“How’s the Naked Detective?”
“She’s all right.”
“Working hard?”
“She does. Works really hard for someone who’s not actually a farmworker. It’s like she actually cares.”
“Well, I’m working hard, she’s working hard. Don’t you go exhausting yourself watching my partner’s perfectly sculpted ass morning and night. Take a break now and then. Rest your eyes.”
“I guess I’ll try.”
“Anything juicy?”
“A couple of things, I guess. Someone vandalized Eden’s van. Pissed in it. Fairly classy. I don’t have any cameras on who it was, exactly, and nothing was said about it in Jackie’s van.” I could hear Juno moving things around, clicking. “I ran a check on those guys who were hanging around the night Nick climbed into Eden’s bed. Nothing spectacular. Just lowlifes. I get the feeling Eden’s going to use the girl to cozy up to Rye. Not basing that on anything really other than the fact that she’s making besties with the kid for no other apparent reason.”
“I’d love you to keep me updated on that.”
“This place is so full of fucking degenerates, I don’t know how you’re going to pin it on Jackie, man,” Juno said. “This morning these bitches laid into one of the younger girls just for giving some lip. Some pretty conversational, nonaggressive lip, if you ask me. Nothing that deserved being bashed half to death and then hosed down for.”
“Trash.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a big difference between mob justice and first degree, though,” I yawned. “What you witnessed was likely very routine, a passing thrill for those involved. Something to talk about. You do away with three whole human beings on the other hand. Well, that takes some planning. Commitment.”
“So in a way I guess we’re not looking for the most outwardly violent.”
“Most likely we’re looking for the exact opposite. I’ve got my money on the most organized. The most measured.”
A woman came to the bar and stood beside me. She picked up the coasters I’d been playing with and arranged them in a fan shape on the woolly bar runner. I looked up as she tucked a curl of long black hair behind her ear and hailed the bartender from way down the room.
In her earlobes were tiny red earrings.
Ladybugs with gold feet. Painted thickly with gloss.
“. . . I mean how long you gotta be doing this shit before you begin to think like that?” Juno was saying.
“It’s not the length of time.” I coughed, thumped my chest. “It’s what happens to you.”
I hung up on Juno and put my phone away. Far away. Put it by the canister of straws. I gripped the bar and waited for the woman with the ladybug earrings to go away. The woman with the black hair. The tall, lanky woman with the dimpled smile and the bony wrists who wasn’t Martina. No, because Martina was dead. In the ground. Under the dirt because I hadn’t been there when she needed me.
I took a packet of Oxy from my back pocket and popped three. Crunched. Made it four.
“Right, mate?” The bartender flicked his beard at me.
“Yeah. Another.”
It was only about eight when Max Fara tapped on my shoulder. But I was drunk. Badly drunk. Three drinks past cutoff point drunk, but I’ve got a pretty good drunk’s poker face, and I know how to keep my mouth shut and shuffle the bartenders, so I didn’t think I was that close to being turfed.
I’d arrested Max Fara for a series of break-and-enters in my early days on the beat. So often had we encountered each other that we’d formed a sort of understanding that what happened between us wasn’t personal, and that I didn’t in fact go out of my way to come across him climbing in or out of windows all over Blacktown in his college years. By the time I was getting ready to sit the detective’s exam Max, or Mustafa as he was on his birth certificate, had begun treating our little interactions as a cat-and-mouse game. His father was some big government official over in Lebanon, so the thefts had been a game, one with little consequences besides the regular promises that Dad’s bail contributions were well spent. Now he had someone to share the game with, and I didn’t mind that much. He’d always been nice enough.
“Not you.”
“Sergeant Francis Bennett. Oh. My. God.” Max flashed a set of huge white expensive teeth at me.
“It’s Detective Inspector now, dickhead.” I swallowed my rum.
“What are you doing here? You don’t live here. Don’t tell me all that pavement-pounding and crim-collaring has driven you to the drink?”
It was slightly alarming for Max to know where I didn’t live. I pushed the alarm aside.
“There’d be something wrong with me if it hadn’t. I’m just having a quiet drink and trying not to associate with any criminals. You know. The usual.”
“God, it’s so weird to see you. Such a fucking blast from the past. You still a Westie?”
“No.”
“North Sydney?”
“Parramatta.”
“That’s where the big HQ is, isn’t it?”
“Been there once or twice, have you?”
“What you doing at HQ?”
“Homicide.”
Max submitted to laughter again. His bottom row of teeth were all gold, the center four studded with small white diamonds. I wondered what Daddy thought about that. If he knew. The young man also seemed to be wearing some kind of razor tailored suit with a cummerbund. It had been years since I’d even seen a cummerbund in a shop window.
“This explains why you look so shit. Hanging around stiffs all day. You’re beginning to look like one. Look at your eyes.”
“Thanks.”
“You look tired, old mate.”
“You look like a penguin. What is all this?” I flipped his buttons.
“Just styling and profiling, Francis, like I always do.” He popped out his chest.
“Christ.”
“Let me get you something to perk you up.”
I scoffed. Began gathering up my papers.
“Nah, come on, please. Serious. Serious. You’ve always been good to me, Sergeant Bennett. I’ve always been such a stupid boy. An idiot. Those days are gone now, all right? Maybe I learned something. Maybe I changed. I remember where I came from though. What I’ve been through.”
“Oh yes, it’s a hard life being the idle son of an absent millionaire. You should write a rap ballad about it.”
“You always softened it up for my father, even though I never asked you to. I never asked, did I?”
“I don’t remember.”
I remembered something about him being sixteen and crying in the back of a divvy van, telling me he was going to get thrown out onto the street. Something like that.
“Come on.” He swung an arm around my neck, dragged me into his Lynx cloud. “There’s a party going on and you’re missing it.”
“What party?” I was letting myself be led now. Surrendering. Answering the call into the wild. It was so easy. “Where?”
I’d never been to a Lebanese wedding. The experience was something like walking onto the stage of a great opera at the moment of a battle or dramatic death. People were shoving against me, rushing forward, dancing or embracing with cries so deep and guttural or high and piercing they could have been anywhere on the spectrum of human emotions.
The men reeked of cigar smoke and the women of expensive perfume. The food was laid out around the room like the walls of a great fortress—roasted, oiled, fried, bricks of cake, bread, meat. I must have been brushed by every texture of fabric in existence just getting into the room—scratchy gold-embroidered silks and rough leather and wool suits that cost more than my monthly rent. People were unafraid to touch each other, to touch me, dark-eyed beauties with skin drenched in glitter grabbing my fingers, wrenching me sideways, pulling my neck, insisting on a swing around.
Max put a drink into my hand. I must have been introduced to fifty people, ten of them in the dark courtyard area of the pub. A man I didn’t know, some cousin or brother or uncle, dabbed a little expensive something, a good and hard-hitting something, into the webbing of my hand. Turning away, respectful gestures for disrespectful doings. My eyes watered. Men yelled in my ears. I indulged a little in cop storytelling, once I’d deemed it safe. A few young Lebanese boys hiding from their mothers so they could stay out late perched on the bricks around the cigarette garden, trying to make like their older brothers, disguising their awe with quizzical frowns. Questions were fired at me.
A wind started in the palm trees above the courtyard, a whipping sound, and the boys looked up, howled with delight as a plastic bucket tumbled off the roof, spilling paintbrushes and rollers into the garden. A light rain. Everyone leaked back inside into the noise. I felt warm. My hair was getting wet. Max put a hand on my shoulder, tried to get me inside, but I wanted to look at the stars, watch the black clouds eat them one by one.
It was some wonky-eyed teenage bartender who finally brought me in, fed up with all the noise and mess the Lebanese function was making of the upper floor. I stood inside the door and brushed rain off the hair on my arms, felt great.
When I looked up and spotted her sitting there at the tables on the mezzanine area I felt even better. A surge of electricity between my shoulder blades like I’d been prodded forward by a cheeky angel, a cupid. She was sitting with some strange half-monkey with a heavy sloping brow that wasn’t helped by a quiff turning into a mullet behind his ears, a denim jacket lined with orange faux fur. Dr. Stone looked angry and he looked pleased with himself. Laughing at some joke he had just made. She turned her glass on the tabletop.
I strode forward and grabbed a chair from the empty set beside them, dragged it over, grinned down at her horrified face.
“Dr. Stone, if this isn’t the luckiest night of my life.”
“Oh Jesus,” she said, looked away.
“Mate, I’m Frank Bennett.” I offered my hand to the Neanderthal. He considered, pumped it halfheartedly. Wrinkled his big features.
“Curtis.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt. I just saw you from up there and I thought,
No, way. It isn’t
. And then it was! It was you. How hilarious. You look beautiful, Stone. My God. I mean, what are you trying to do to us, ay?” I nudged Curtis. He swayed.
She was beautiful, though. She was wearing something red. I couldn’t tell if it was a dress or a long shirt but it was the color of something freshly bleeding, full of life, and it made her freckles stand out like gold stars. The dress was textured with little upraised squares. I wanted to touch it. She was frowning at her wineglass.
“Frank, you’re drunk.”
“No, I’m not.”
“We’re sort of having a bit of a private moment here,” Curtis said. “Seems like the best time to catch up would be some other time.”
“Is this a date?”
“No. It’s not.” Stone gave me some eyes that might have killed me had I not been so drunk.
“Well, actually it is,” Curtis said.
“Is it?”
“No.”
“He says it is.” I jerked a thumb at the ape.
“It isn’t, Frank.”
“Is there some problem with him knowing that it is?” Curtis laughed once, like a cough.
“You’ll just encourage him.”
“I’m easy to encourage,” I admitted.
“Mate, you’re really playing with fire right now.”
“Hey, I’m just being friendly. Excuse me. We’re old friends, Dr. Stone and I.”
“This really . . .” Stone licked her lips, looked at me. “You need to just . . .”
“Just tell him to fuck off.” Curtis flicked his chin at her. Looked at me. “Mate, fuck off.”
“Whoa!” I faked being thrown back in my chair. “Lordy! The new beau’s got a temper.”
“Just settle down, the both of you. Frank, you’re drunk. Now’s not a good time.”
“You’re right. I’ll leave now so Captain Caveman here can apologize for using such foul language in your presence. On a first date and everything. What would your mother say, Imogen?”