After a couple of minutes Marian stepped out of her office and waved Mak in.
The infamous Marian Wendell was a woman of perhaps sixty-five years, and birdlike in size compared to Makedde’s Amazonian stature. She had big auburn hair that almost seemed to dwarf her features, and a penchant for expensive, glamorous clothing. She had been a very attractive woman in her youth, as evidenced by photos on a filing cabinet, and in her later years she still took great pride in her appearance and presentation. Marian’s hair was always meticulously dyed and styled and her make-up flawless; and, though a bit outdated, her wardrobe was flattering and well maintained. Marian had a handsome office—a practical space cluttered with neat files, but also a soothing space, with the distinctly feminine touches of a ceramic aromatherapy oil burner on the wide working desk, along with a crystal vase that was always stocked with yellow roses, and a romantic-looking Art Deco statue of a nymph on a
square display table taking pride of place in the room. Behind it, an Aboriginal dot painting of muted earthy tones depicted a giant serpent of the Dreamtime. Another wall was entirely covered by an impressively jumbled floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. From one tall window there was a view of the Sydney cityscape. Not a postcard of the Opera House exactly, but an impressive view nonetheless. It was a far cry from the dark, masculine quarters of a Philip Marlowe or a Mike Hammer.
‘This guy in the hallway freaked out when he saw me step out of the elevator. I think he figured you’re doing work for bikie gangs now.’
Marian laughed.
Mak was used to being misunderstood. The expression ‘looks are deceiving’ was not the exception but the rule for her. Marian, at least, thought it helped her protégée to look past the appearances of others to see their true nature. Perhaps that was right.
‘You are my secret weapon,’ Marian said, clearly pleased with her new agent. ‘Mrs Anderson was very happy with the result. Her husband was so embarrassed at being caught out that he’s agreed to half of her demands already.’
‘I am glad she was pleased,’ Mak replied.
When it came to domestic jobs, not all clients were happy with an investigator’s results. The truth could hurt—
a lot.
Which was one of the many reasons Marian discouraged marital jobs from male clients. A woman might see evidence
of her husband rooting the secretary and respond by getting a good lawyer, while a man might respond to the same situation by getting himself a good baseball bat, and then there were serious domestic violence issues to contend with on top of everything else. It was that ugly side of the business that gave it a bad name, depending on the way the operator handled it.
Even the most respected PIs found themselves on the occasional infidelity case, though many of the big agencies denied it and discouraged such jobs in favour of corporate clients. However, infidelity was the bread-and-butter work. The three full pages of ads for Investigators in the Yellow Pages were a testament to the popularity of marital mistrust:
DO YOU NEED PROOF OF INFIDELITY
?
IS YOUR PARTNER CHEATING
???
DON
’
T BE THE LAST TO KNOW
.
To her many female clients, some of whom were likely soon to be divorced, Marian represented not only a ‘private dick without the dick’ but a necessary role model at a time when the clients needed a reminder that successful singledom was possible. Marian had been widowed some twenty years and yet she was happily solo and successful. A photo of her late second husband, Reg, still sat in a frame on the filing cabinet. As Marian had confided in Mak, Reg had been a much older man who was her ‘soul mate’. He had respected her independence, her business acumen
and her decision to never bear children; she clearly felt no need to replace him. Marian spoke of Reg often. She never talked of her first husband, however, and Mak guessed it had not ended amicably. Perhaps one of those desperate-sounding ads for AAAA CHEATERS Investigation Agency—the ‘AAAA’ ensuring the first listing in the phone book—was what had given Marian the idea of becoming a private investigator in the first place. Maybe she had taken it upon herself to bust the kind of bastard she had first married?
‘Sit down, honey,’ Marian said. ‘This is a good one. Top rates.’
Top rates for Mak meant $80 an hour for research and $100 an hour for field work. The job paid well, though not as well as some of her modelling gigs had, of course.
Mak’s special ‘entrapment’ rate for luring errant husbands to hotel rooms was much higher because of her close proximity to the target—and her particularly good qualifications for the job. So far she had a 100 per cent success rate in the handful of such jobs she had completed. Had Mrs Anderson’s glowing report spurred Marian into giving Mak this new job? Or was it just that none of her more experienced investigators was available?
Mak took a seat. Her black leather pants squeaked faintly as she crossed her legs.
Marian had a couple of notes in front of her but she didn’t look at them. She closed her eyes as
she spoke, recalling the meeting with her formidable memory. ‘The client is Mr Robert Groobelaar, a real estate agent, originally from South Africa. He has a company called Trident Real Estate. His personal assistant was found murdered in her apartment last night. A young girl. Good-looking.’ Marian pushed a glossy photo across the desk. It showed a smiling girl with a pale blonde bob that fell just below her jaw.
Wow. A murder case.
Mak felt a weird mix of sadness and a rush of excitement. This was more than the usual domestic dispute or corporate espionage case. She pulled a large notepad out of her backpack and wrote down the details.
Trident Real Estate. Robert Groobelaar…
‘Her name?’
Marian closed her eyes again. ‘Meaghan Wallace—he says she was unmarried, no children, twenty-three years of age,’ she explained. ‘She worked for him for about the past six months. I’ll get my contacts to run off a file for you with her stats.’
Mak wrote it all down. ‘Okay.’
‘The police have a suspect in custody. The client wants to know everything you can get on him.’
‘No problem.’ A few background checks would not take a lot of time. Marian had great contacts she could rely on to get leads on up-to-date information. A fair number of Marian’s
investigations were to find missing persons—runaway teenagers, AWOL spouses, deadbeat dads, that sort of thing. Record checks on any vehicles, leases, mortgages or change-of-address applications in their names were invaluable in revealing not only a person’s whereabouts but a lot about their lifestyle and habits as well. If this subject was in jail already, though, Mak couldn’t see how she would be needed for more than two or three days of work at the most. Given Marian’s magical and somewhat mysterious contacts, there would be little for her to do.
‘The client wants a complete report on the suspect’s background, and what the case is against him.’
Ah. The case against him.
Was Mak expected to lean on her police contacts to learn about the case?
‘Do you know the kind of outcome he is searching for?’ Mak said. ‘Perhaps to get the information he feels the police don’t have, or aren’t telling him?’
Marian looked up. ‘I would say so,’ she said. ‘He wants everything you can get.’
So he feels dissatisfied by the way the police are approaching the investigation…
Mak shifted awkwardly in her chair. ‘Um, Marian, I didn’t get the job because I have police contacts, did I?’
‘You got the job because you are turning into a good investigator,’ Marian said.
Mak smiled at the compliment.
‘Who has good contacts,’ she added sharply. ‘Nearly all of my investigators have police contacts of some kind, Mak. No one is expecting you to jeopardise your relationships for an investigation. That would be counterproductive.’
Mak nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, though she still wondered if those relationships were the main reason she had been chosen. Her ties to the police—to both her lover, Andy, and her friend Detective Mahoney—might give her an advantage in a case like this, but if either of them helped her out with information and was discovered, it could put their careers at serious risk. So far, she had not considered exploiting them for that kind of help.
Marian slid a piece of paper with a name and address on it across the desk. ‘The client took his PA to a party on Wednesday night and that was the last he saw of her. Yesterday she left him a message that worried him. That was the last anyone seems to have heard from her. The client thinks she might have gone home with someone who was there called Simon Aston. He wants you to check him out.’
Sounds like a jealous lover to me.
‘Where was the party on Wednesday night?’ Mak asked, her pen poised.
‘He wouldn’t say.’
Mak frowned. ‘He wouldn’t say, or he didn’t say?’
‘He wouldn’t say,’ Marian repeated.
‘Well, do I get to meet the client? Ask him a few more questions?’ Mak asked eagerly. She was new to the business of private investigation, but it seemed to her that she could get a lot more information if she just talked to the client directly.
‘No. As far as he is concerned you don’t even know his name, so there are to be no mentions of him and no contacting him. He is paranoid about his confidentiality.’
‘Oh,’ Mak replied, disappointed. She thought for a moment. ‘Is he married?’ She suspected a guilty affair with the deceased.
‘Yes,’ Marian answered, but failed to add any juicy personal details. ‘Mak, stop analysing the client. That’s not your job.’
Mak smiled.
Sorry.
‘There’s more.’ Marian closed her eyes again as she continued to speak. It was one of her unusual quirks that she spoke this way—eyes closed—when recalling details of a case or a conversation. It was rumoured that she had a photographic memory. Mak sometimes found this mannerism of Marian’s unsettling. She never knew where to look. The tops of her boss’s lavender-painted eyelids? The desktop? ‘The client wants everything you can get on the victim’s life in the weeks leading up to her murder—her close contacts, secret lovers—everything, and any relationship she might have been having with this
Simon Aston, any contact they had with one another.’
Mak nodded. She was beginning to see why it would take a week. In fact, it would probably take longer with that kind of field work. ‘That’s a lot to cover.’
‘He has you on retainer for a week, all expenses. Get everything you can.’
This was definitely Mak’s biggest job to date. With any luck she would be able to tuck another couple of grand into her savings account soon. ‘Does he want photographs, a log of the guy’s activities, anything like that? Does he want this Simon Aston followed, or does he just want information?’
‘Information. He already knows Aston and what he looks like. Follow him if it helps, but the client isn’t asking for surveillance.’
He just wants to know if the guy was banging her. And maybe if the suspect was too. I get it.
‘No problem. What do we know about the guy in custody?’
‘His name is Tobias Murphy,’ Marian said.
‘Where are they holding him, do we know?’
‘He’s in juvey.’
Mak was surprised. ‘Really? He’s underage?’ That might blow her theory on the victim having an affair with the murder suspect. Maybe.
‘It seems so. The boy has some priors, according to the client. That’s what the police told him, anyway.’
Getting records of any convictions on a juvenile was tricky.
‘I don’t want to ask too many stupid questions here but if the police already have a suspect in custody, why does the client want it all investigated? Did he say?’ Mak asked.
Marian’s sharp hazel eyes opened. ‘It’s not our job to wonder why we have been hired. The client is happy to pay your rate for at least a week, possibly more. It’s legit work. That’s all we need to know. He is particularly paranoid about confidentiality, are you clear? So you didn’t get his details from me.’
‘Yeah.’
‘
Particularly paranoid
,’ Marian repeated, as if she had read Mak’s thoughts.
‘If he didn’t want me to know who he was, then why did you tell me?’
Marian smiled slyly. ‘Because I knew the first thing you would do was waste his paying time figuring out who hired you.’
Mak laughed. Marian was right.
‘So now you know. Go do your job.’
‘One last thing…’
‘Yes?’
‘You said the victim left the client “a message that worried him”. What was the message?’ Makedde asked.
‘Yesterday Meaghan called his private line to apologise to him that she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come in to work. She said that someone
at the party had drugged her, and she also said she had something important she wanted to tell him.’
Something important…
‘She never got the chance to tell him. Groobelaar wasn’t at work—he missed the day and only heard the message when he got to work this morning, right before learning of her murder.’
Mak narrowed her eyes.
And it didn’t take him long to decide to look up a private investigation agency.
‘Okay. I’m on it,’ Mak said, her mind brimming with unanswered questions. She needed to find out everything she could about Tobias Murphy and Meaghan Wallace, and her first stop would be the simple, unglamorous basics: the local telephone directory and the wonders of the internet.
Maybe she liked the water. She just wanted to touch it.
Tobias Murphy felt boneless and anaemic, his flesh trembling uncontrollably in a way that made his teeth chatter. He could not sleep. He held his arms close to try to stop the shaking, shaking, shaking—but the shaking wouldn’t stop.
Why won’t it stop?
‘
Krista!
’
Memories leaped forwards into the space where Tobias’s thoughts should have been. Instead of the white room he was trapped in, he saw scenes of his childhood in washed-out colours and grainy shapes, like an old colourised movie, scratched and decaying. Fading. The voices sounded tinny. He heard his mother calling out for her two-year-old niece, Krista. ‘
Krista?
’ He saw the linoleum of the kitchen floor, and he saw the cupboard handles that came up to his chest. Crawling, he hid under a kitchen chair and wrapped his arms around the wooden crossbars, his chubby legs sticking out straight. He saw a scab, poking out under a curling sticking plaster
on his shin, and he picked at it. His mother came back into the kitchen, still looking, still searching. ‘
Krista?
’ He crawled over and tugged on her long skirt, but she didn’t say anything. He clung to the fabric, his small white fingers disappearing into the colourful pattern of flowers.