Cherry Pie (17 page)

I stared at it, trying to breathe in the white light and expel the negative energy, as she would have wanted, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the case.

After the hit and run I was convinced the attack by the wheelie bin was no random mugging, but what was the point of it? Who had been hiding there, all dressed in black, and why?

I had a feeling it wasn’t the dude in the blue sedan. Anyone who was capable of running over a guy, twice, wouldn’t have settled for a love tap in a laneway. My mind was going around in circles. Trip Sibley. Sam Doyle. Yasmin. Andi. What had she been working on and where was she now? I knew there was nothing I could do and that the police would be going gang-busters, but it didn’t stop me feeling guilty, like I’d abandoned her. After all, she’d called me for help.

I rubbed my eyes, struggled off the couch and wandered to the fridge where I rested one hand against the open door and leaned forward to stare at the shelves, just in case some brie and pate had miraculously appeared. They hadn’t, so I mooched back into the lounge, moved some books and journals from the piano seat and sat at the upright bashing out ‘Chopsticks’, willing the harsh jangling to clear my mind. I noticed a bunch of old photo albums stacked on the bottom shelf of the nearest bookcase and after I finished the only tune I knew how to play, I flopped down to the floor and lay on my belly on the faded oriental rug, hoping the proverbial trip down memory lane might distract me.

The album was bound in orange vinyl with a spiral spine, and the first few pages contained pictures of my mum and dad before I was born. Her: a hippy goddess with a waterfall of waist length, centre parted hair and the widest flares I’d ever seen.

Him: a kind of bohemian surfie with a shoulder length blonde mane, straggly goatee, and perpetually toting a guitar. He’d moved to America over a decade ago and apparently worked with computers, was remarried and had a couple more kids, but I hadn’t spoken to him in years.

Leafing through, I came to my baby pictures. I’d like to say I was a gorgeous infant but the truth was I had a widow’s peak and an intense stare which combined to produce an interesting ‘spawn of Dracula’ effect. My brother was a different story. The next sequence of photos had all been taken in New Zealand and after a couple of pages of my heavily pregnant mother backdropped by rolling green hills and snow-capped mountain peaks, Jasper appeared with his angelic smile, big round eyes and shock of dark hair. His father was part Maori, hence his exotic good looks, and damned if the kid hadn’t known how to work the camera even then. On the next page there was a photo of me holding him, and none too happy about it by the way I was staring into the lens like Damien from
The Omen
. For half siblings we didn’t look at all alike—in fact with their shared ancestry he could have passed for Andi’s brother much more readily than my own.

Andi. The photos of us at Potts Point should have been in between my baby shots and the ones of New Zealand, but they weren’t. When I thought about it I couldn’t recall ever having seen any, but they’d definitely been taken. I remembered my mum urging me to stop crying and smile for the camera during the Tonka Truck Christmas. I checked the rest of the album, wondering if receiving a prime mover as a four year old was the reason I was so fucked up in the present day, then flicked through the others but couldn’t find the pics and resolved to ask my mum about it.

The absence of photographs reminded me of Andi’s missing pictures and then I was back to obsessing about her, wondering if the credit card being used meant she was in Sydney, or if someone was laying a false trail. An image of Trip Sibley flashed into my head. He’d been here since this morning. I got a wobbly feeling in my guts and my pulse started to race. Maybe I could just have a look around … No. I’d promised everyone I’d stay here, let the cops work it out and wait for everything to blow over. Hey, maybe it already had.

I scrambled off the floor and jogged up the hallway to the room Mum and Steve used as an office. It was crammed with shelves and filing cabinets and two huge desks covered in books and papers were wedged adjacent to each other. Mum’s overlooked the veranda and a paperbark tree in the narrow front yard and I sat, booted up her iMac and checked the
Age
and
Herald Sun
websites. The vehicle used in the hit and run had been found burned out in semi-rural Hallam. It had been stolen from a supermarket car park earlier that day. I also learned the police were questioning all the employees at Jouissance, and that the restaurant was closed for a few days. I wondered if they’d talked to Trip yet. I checked my email next, hoping for something from Sean, but it wasn’t to be. There was, however, a message from Chris Ferguson, the journo who’d written
All
That Glitters
. I opened it.

‘Sorry for lateness of reply, been away. Re: your question. Yes, Andi Fowler did contact me. We met up in June. Give me a call.’ Then his number.

I hesitated. I’d told the police about the missing library book, but didn’t know if they’d follow up on it. And even if they did, it might be days before someone got around to interviewing Ferguson. If I spoke to him, then passed on any relevant information, it wasn’t like I was actively investigating the case. It was just, like, being a concerned citizen, right?

I picked up the phone.

At ten minutes to midday I emerged from the Kings Cross underground station and walked up Victoria Street, past majestic plane trees and three storey terraces, some immaculately renovated, others with sagging roofs and crumbling brickwork. It was a gorgeous spring day, a deep sapphire sky peeking through branches dotted with budding green leaves.

At eighteen degrees it would have been a heatwave in Melbourne but a fair few Sydneysiders considered it cold enough for a scarf and beanie. Puhlease.

I was too hot in my flannie so shrugged out of it and knotted the sleeves around my waist. Bad move. I instantly felt like the world’s biggest bogan and untied the thing, bunched it up and carried it in my hand. Did I really used to dress like this? And more to the point, had I ever dressed like this and picked up guys? I seemed to remember that I had. The world was indeed a strange and amazing place.

I’d wanted to meet Chris Ferguson in person as visual cues are the only way to tell if someone’s being straight with you, and also because I’d been desperate to get out of the house.

After giving him a brief rundown over the phone he’d suggested the Goldfish Bowl, a bar attached to the Crest Hotel and so named because of the plate glass windows that made it a cinch to see in and out. Not the best place to hang if someone wanted you killed, but then no one knew I was in Sydney.

I was a couple of minutes early and the bartender, a chunky blonde guy with fat sideburns, was just upending barstools and laying down beer mats. I ordered a Virgin Mary that came in a tall glass with a giant stick of celery poking out, took it to a high round table and watched the passing parade on Darlinghurst Road. Not that there was much to see. Even Sydney’s most notorious vice district was pretty quiet before noon on a Friday. Apart from a couple of dodgy guys in thongs and jail tatts, all I saw were tourists: an endless parade of khaki shorts, polo shirts, chunky sandals and bumbags. Suddenly I didn’t feel so daggy in my nineties jeans and band t-shirt.

A skinny older guy pushed through the glass door and glanced over at me. Chris Ferguson had told me I’d recognise him by his facial hair and he wasn’t fucking kidding. He had a beard a bushranger would have been proud of. He would have looked like he’d sailed in on the First Fleet if it hadn’t been for his faded red t-shirt, Dunlop volleys and jeans with a yellow form guide sticking out the back pocket. I waved, he nodded, and after ordering a schooner of beer, he ambled over and sat opposite.

I shook his bony hand. ‘Thanks for meeting with me.’

‘No worries. How long’s she been missing?’ His voice was sandpaper.

‘Five days, give or take.’

He nodded. His cheeks were hollow, deep lines bisected his forehead and his thinning hair was the same grey-brown as his beard. He dug around in his front pocket and produced a pack of unfiltered Camels. ‘You mind?’

My throat hurt just looking at them. ‘Go for your life.’

Ferguson sparked up, shook out the match and gazed at me from behind the billowing cloud of smoke. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘When exactly you talked to Andi, and what about, if that’s okay?’

He sipped his beer and foam clung to his moustache. ‘Let’s see, Andi called me in mid-June. Said she was in Sydney and wanted to meet up to talk about the Cross, in connection to some story she wanted to write. I’d met her once before after my lecture at RMIT and we’d had a smoke and a bit of a natter.

She’d lived around here till she was fourteen and it turned out I knew her mum, vaguely.’ He drew back hard on his ciggie, as if it were a joint.

‘Really? You might have met mine. Peta Kirsch ring a bell?’

‘Can’t say it does. I’ve met a lot of people over the years and this doesn’t help.’ He lifted his beer and took another mouthful. ‘Anyway, I arranged to meet her, mainly to turn her off the idea.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s a good kid, and Canning told me she was talented, but it’s all been written about before. Corrupt cops and politicians, dodgy developers, Juanita Nielsen going missing, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp murdered. And by people who actually lived through it, not some journalism student who was in nappies at the time. I was gonna suggest she devote her time and skills to something more original, more relevant to her experience and what’s happening today.’

I was listening to him, pulling little stems off the top of the celery and gnawing on them. I nodded so he’d go on.

‘Anyway, turned out the story hadn’t been covered after all.’

‘What was it?’ I stopped chewing, sat up straight and stared at him. Finally, I was getting somewhere.

‘Article about a missing person.’

‘The one she wrote for uni in May?’

‘Nah, new one.’

‘She writes about missing people and she becomes one.

That’s too weird.’

‘It does have a certain irony.’ Ferguson sucked on his smoke and the ash grew long but didn’t fall.

‘Who’s it about?’

‘Melita Kracowski.’

‘Who?’

‘Her working name was Melody and she disappeared from around here in nineteen eighty. Andi came across her on the national missing persons website while researching her earlier piece. Wanted to know if I knew her.’

‘Did you?’

‘Not personally. Knew of her.’

‘Pro?’

‘Dancer. Well, she did work at the Love Tunnel so who knows what she was doing out the back. They’re not all strictly strip clubs around here.’ He nodded at me knowingly, and I realised he knew exactly who I was. Christ, the whole world did these days.

‘The Love Tunnel,’ I said. ‘I read in your book that Sam Doyle used to run it. I’m starting to see how this all came about …’

‘How what came about?’

‘Andi started working at a restaurant Doyle co-owns after she got back from Sydney in June. She befriended his son-in-law and … it was all to investigate her article …’ Things were becoming clearer, but not clear enough. Did the money laundering have anything to do with the story or was that just coincidence?

‘You write about Melody in your book?’ I asked.

‘No. There were rumours, but I’d have got my scrawny arse sued if I printed them. The fucking libel and defamation laws in this country.’

‘What rumours?’

‘Well, Sam Doyle was a suspect for a while. He was her boss and he’d been shagging her.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, but he was rooting most of the girls at the Fuck Hole—sorry, Love Tunnel. It’s what everybody used to call it way back when. Not very subtle.’

‘Forcing himself on them?’ It was a sore point with me.

Ferguson laughed, dragged on his ciggie to the butt then crumpled it in the glass ashtray. ‘From what I heard it was the other way around. They didn’t call him Hollywood Sam for nothing. Bastard was good looking, especially compared to most of the other weasels on the scene. And charming, so I’ve heard. Everyone liked him, it’s how he worked his way up from being a shitkicker at the illegal casinos.’

‘And he was investigated in Melody’s disappearance?’

‘Yeah, but never charged. No evidence. You won’t believe his alibi for the night she went missing—he was swanning around at a bloody police retirement do.’

‘A gangster who ran a strip club?’

‘It was the eighties. Maybe you’d better read the rest of my book.’

‘Why would he have killed her?’

‘They say all murders come down to sex and money, or variations thereof, so take your pick. Not long after Melody disappeared Sam came into a whole lot of dosh. A girl he used to go out with at the club got hitched to some rich druggo, Edwin someone, and inherited the lot when he OD’d on smack. Then Sam married her and they were both on easy street after that. Got out of the strip biz and into property, a hotel, restaurants, gourmet food importing. Both well off and living the straight life ever since. Well, so they reckon.’

So Holly’s dad had been a junkie and Dillon’s despised stepmother-in-law, Rochelle, a dancer at the Love Tunnel.

Dillon hadn’t been kidding when he referred to the whole situation as
Days of Our Lives
.

I absentmindedly broke the celery stick in half, took a bite and pointed it at him. ‘Andi was so sure Doyle was involved that she went to work at his restaurant. Why, when no one else had any evidence?’

‘No idea. I can tell you she had a photo of Melody though.’

‘What, from the missing persons website?’

‘No, this was an original.’

‘Where’d she get it?’

‘Wouldn’t tell me, cagey little thing. Even after three more schooners I couldn’t pry it out of her. We played a bit of pool, put a couple of bets on and all she’d tell me was that the story had fallen into her lap. Saw it as a gift, and reckoned it was a ticket out of her McJob. She also said she was becoming completely obsessed with the case and I told her that was a good thing. Can’t be an investigative journalist without it. How else you gonna see the whole thing through to the bitter end? In hindsight, maybe that was the wrong fucking thing to say.’