11
A
fternoon, the quiet and constant call of brown doves in fig trees that lined Alloe Street in North Sydney. Eden and I sat in the car watching the town house for ten minutes. It seemed strangely turned in on itself, the face of the building hidden by overhanging bougainvillea vines and a large red awning, and the windows disappearing behind ornate iron bars.
We had visited two other houses that day. One belonged to a man who had removed himself from the transplant list because he thought he was too old to endure the surgery. His widow had answered the door, sheepish and confused about what we wanted, smelling of Vicks. The second, a woman in her thirties with pancreatic cancer, had made the arduous journey down her apartment stairs to greet us on the street. She was seeking alternative therapies and was wearing a sprig of some leafy plant in a tiny glass jar around her neck. Her eyes were bright beneath the colorful headscarf and her skin was white and soft like milk. When we left I felt surprisingly charmed and optimistic. Her smile had been infectious and knowing, like she had something on me. Like she’d known I was coming and had set a hilarious booby trap.
“What are you doing tonight?” Eden asked without looking at me. The question caught me off guard. It sounded like she was asking me out on a date. I knew she wasn’t but that strange kind of ludicrous hope flickered.
“Dunno. What are you doing tonight?”
“It’s State of Origin Two.”
“I noticed,” I said, nodding at the blue streamers on the car in front of us.
“Yeah, well, the guys at the station have this stupid roster for the football season where we have to watch a game at someone’s house every two weeks. Captain James started it to develop some camaraderie and no one’s got the balls to drop it.”
“And you’ve got it this week?”
“Uh huh.”
“Sucks to be you. Are you inviting me?”
“Well, I suppose it would look weird if you weren’t there.”
“You sure know how to make a guy feel special. I’ll have to check my diary. I was going to clean my shower.”
Without warning she got out of the car and walked towards the house. I jogged after her, laughing.
Knocking on the door of the Sampson place didn’t raise anyone. I walked around the back of the house but found it locked tight, the venetian blinds closed. Eden stood on the doorstep, looking down at a pile of Woolworths catalogues that had wilted in the rain.
The two cars registered to Ronnie and Julie Sampson were parked in the street. The red sedan had a ticket stuck to its windshield and bird shit all over the hood. Ronnie had been on the transplant list for a year and a half and wasn’t much nearer to the top than when he’d been diagnosed. The local football club had raised a few thousand dollars in coin tins to help out his wife and kid during his hospital stay, but aside from that the great suburban empire of the Sampsons had been slowly crumbling, the doors of their furniture shop closed and their kid missing days at school. Ronnie had removed himself from the list two weeks earlier and no one had heard from the family. I kicked some leaves around on the porch and thought for a while.
“Skipped out?” I asked Eden, trying to imagine what was so fascinating about Woolworths catalogues. I looked at her eyes. She wasn’t seeing. She was thinking.
“They’re dead,” she concluded in a tone that made it sound like she was telling me the time. “We should get a bus down here.”
I stood looking at her for a moment, trying to take this in. When I didn’t move she pulled out her phone and dialed the forensic team herself.
“Wait up a minute here,” I scoffed. “What makes you so sure?”
I had the gut-clenching feeling that I had missed something obvious. I looked about me and sniffed the air. It was silent and cold in the street and that smell, that warm, wet smell I and my colleagues in homicide spent so long tuning our noses to, wasn’t here.
“Can’t you feel it?” she asked.
“Feel what?”
“The
emptiness
.”
“You’re weird,” I said. She shrugged and waved her hand dismissively at the door. I guessed she wasn’t in the right shoes for it.
Eden pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of her pocket as I kicked my way in. She gave the barest wrinkle of her nose as the smell engulfed us. She flipped on the lights and walked right into the hall, through the living room and into the kitchen like she knew the place. I staggered forward, bewildered, and came to a stop behind her. Eden stood looking up at the hanging corpse of Ronnie Sampson, with blue-green face and swollen features. From where I stood, I could see the limp legs of a child and a spray of blood on the wall in the next room. The tight rooms had contained the smell. The air was thick with the feral animal scent of spilt piss. There was a gun on the table. A half-empty bowl of cereal, the milk lumpy and congealed.
Eden walked around the man’s body and lifted the back of his soiled cotton shirt. The corpse swung gently on the end of a nylon towing strap wrapped around a ceiling fan. Eden ran her fingers over the curved scar where Mr. Sampson’s poisoned kidney had been removed and replaced with a new one, a clumsily stitched gash that hugged the curve of his right love handle.
“You see a note?” she asked me. I looked around. There were bills tacked to the fridge that were never going to be paid. On the table by the cereal was an orange piece of cardboard with “Student of the Week” printed on it and a spattering of gold stars.
There was no note. I walked into the bedroom and looked at the bodies of the mother and child. Mrs. Sampson had hugged her arms around the girl like she knew it was coming.
“No note?”
“Nah.”
Eden walked to the windows, a long row of louvres looking out into a weed-filled garden. Her silhouette barely moved as she breathed. She opened her palms and looked down at them as though considering them for the first time.
I watched, trying to forget everything, trying to blink the bodies of the mother and child from the backs of my eyelids and take in the image of my partner instead. There are some things you know you will never be able to unknow, to unsee. In this job you don’t talk about them. You don’t think about them. You collect them, carefully and deliberately, until your retirement from the force, at which time you have every right—no, you are
expected
—to completely lose your shit, to become one of those vile, unforgiving old men who no one can stand. I wondered idly if that was the sort of stuff that fuelled my weird reluctance to fill my life with people. The way I pushed women and their dreams of babies away. I didn’t want to see their faces there. In my dreams. It was easier if it was just me and the strangers.
Sirens on the hill. Through the front windows I could see press vans arriving, having heard the call on their scanners.
Eden met me at the door to the child’s bedroom, her eyes taking in the bodies, the fireworks of blood splatters on the bedspread, the walls, the toys. I shuddered, shaking myself from head to toe, and she pursed her lips and nodded like she agreed.
“So this party,” I said, following her out to meet the vans. “Am I supposed to bring something?”
I ended up bringing two bags of Doritos and some salsa, having paced the snack aisle for a good fifteen minutes, analyzing the implications of various choices. I avoided anything with the words “light,” “grain,” “decadent” or “sensuous.” Having narrowed it down to “classic,” “crunch” and “salty,” I grabbed the first thing that fell under my fingers.
Eden opened the door to her apartment and gave me one of those smiles that made her look like she was being pinched somewhere I couldn’t see. There was music playing and a couple of the owls were perched on the back of the sofa, too noncommittal to sit down.
“You look beautiful,” I told Eden. She gave me an awkward frown. It was true though. She’d let her hair out and it was falling dead straight over her shoulders and brow. Helplessly angry eyes. The only enthusiasm she’d expressed for the theme of the night was a Bulldogs pin on the neck of her tight black shirt. I felt instantly dumb in my Blues jersey. Neither of the owls were wearing team colors.
“Got a cooler going?” I asked, lifting up my six-pack. She led me to the massive stainless-steel refrigerator at the back of her kitchen. It was hardly a cooler but it seemed to do the job.
“Forensics confirmed the Sampson case as a murder-suicide,” she said, taking my beers. “No note, but Ronnie Sampson has a number of public phone calls on his mobile leading up to the day he removed himself from the transplant list. And we’ve got a specialist saying the transplant wounds are consistent with the style of the bodies we found at Watsons Bay.”
“The
style
?” I asked.
“Yeah, all surgeons have a style apparently. Some cut here, some cut there. Some are neat, some aren’t. I don’t know. Don’t ask me, I’m not a quack.”
“So someone approached Sampson and he agreed to take the deal, and then the news reports spooked him. Thought he’d check out and take the family with him before we came a’knocking.”
“Looks like it.”
“What a prick.”
“We’re holding a press conference tomorrow morning, so don’t get pissed.”
“How are you going to take advantage of me on the couch after everyone’s gone if I’m not pissed?” I asked.
“No one’s taking advantage of you,” she sighed. “Will you just help me with these?”
I was filling thick black china bowls with snacks on the kitchen counter when Eric walked in from the balcony, carrying a glass of red wine. He was wearing a textured, collared shirt of black and deep blue weave. Eric smiled at me and grabbed a chip from one of my bowls.
“I like the jersey,” he crunched. “You look like you’re about to crack a stubby and smack your wife.”
“I like the shirt.” I nodded at his chest. “You look like you’re about to get a pedicure and a brow wax.”
“Enough,” Eden snapped. “One of you answer the door. I’ve got my hands full here.”
Eric gave me a sidelong glance and headed for the door. I noticed Eden had taken some of her paintings down. The ones she had left were figureless. Dark landscapes and unlit houses snuggled in rainforest nests. She’d replaced the violent sculpture of the fighting men with a floral vase. I noticed other little things had been tucked away—notebooks and stacks of papers, trinkets and photographs.
Darkness was falling beyond the balcony rail. A deep purple hue had taken over the horizon. I drank the first two beers quickly. Eden avoided the chatter around the television set by playing the overworked host, but it looked like she was just finding things to do. Some of the female detectives gathered in the kitchen and began whispering conspiratorially. She didn’t join them.
There was an air of fakeness to the gestures and voices of the guests. Nervous looks and harsh laughter. People glanced discreetly at their watches. Eric sauntered around like a prison warden, smugly enjoying the company of his inmates.
“Let me do something,” I told Eden, who had worked up a sweat over a tray of small pies. “You’re not having any fun.”
“I don’t want to have fun.”
“There’s enough food out.” I took her hands from around another bag of chips. “It’ll go to waste.”
She extracted her hands from mine and tucked a loose strand of black silk behind her ear. Across the room Eric was throwing peanuts in the air and catching them in his mouth.
“I don’t . . .
like
this.”
I waited for her to go on. She rubbed her thumb over her fingernails, one at a time, as though polishing them.
“When Doyle got it,” she continued, “they came around here. All of them. Talking and questioning and helping and
supporting.
Bringing me frozen meals and comedy DVDs, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t want them here. I don’t want anyone here. This is
my
place.”
“Everyone’s got their secrets,” I chipped in.
She eyed me cautiously. I waited. She didn’t bite.
“I’m not as social as Eric. Not to offend you but I was enjoying working by myself after Doyle’s funeral. I knew someone would have to replace him eventually but for a while there I was relieved. I didn’t have to play the game.”
“What game are you playing with me, Eden?” I asked, watching her as I sipped my beer.
She didn’t answer. I was about to lean in and lay it on her—tell her that I knew something was off about her and Eric, ask her about the names in her wallet and the picture I was sure I’d seen in a newspaper or on a wanted poster somewhere. But Eric knocked over a schooner glass and it crashed loudly on the glass coffee-table. By the time Eden had cleaned it up and come back to the kitchen she was obsessing over the food again.
“Have you eaten anything?” I asked.
“I ate before you got here.”
I leaned against the counter and pulled the top off one of the pies. She stopped fussing for my benefit and sipped her wine, looking nervously at the guests.
“Here,” I told her, “let me make you a Frank Bennett special.”
I pulled the top off another steaming pie and jammed a slice of cheese into the innards. She watched me scroll a delicate circle of tomato sauce over the cheese before squashing the lid back on.
“That’s not how you eat a pie,” she said, taking it from me.
“Oh, so there are rules now?” I asked, making myself one.
“Stop that. You’re jeopardizing the integrity of the pie by opening it.” She smiled a little. “You put the sauce on top. Cheese in a pie is un-Australian.”
“Who’s wearing the Blues jersey here? You don’t get to tell me what’s un-Australian.”
Eric came up behind Eden, let his hand brush her hip. A look passed between them. Eden took her phone from the counter and retreated to the balcony. I pretended to eavesdrop on the girls talking low in the corner. Eric sampled the snacks spread out before him, mixing dips and getting crumbs everywhere and humming gently to the music. I thought about moving out of the kitchen but a stupid stalemate for kitchen space ensued. Eric sipped his wine and watched me. I cracked another beer and raised it in a salute to him. We stood locked in tension, neither wanting to be the one who moved away from the other.