Fall (18 page)

I got home at nine. I'd started calling Imogen's place ‘home' about a month after we began dating, around the time I got my own drawer in her bedroom closet and started keeping a toothbrush in her bathroom. The moment you have your own toothbrush at your lover's place you live there too. The personal toothbrush is the key that opens the door to finding a spot for your underwear and dirty clothes on their bedroom floor, to reserving a favourite mug from their collection. It's the key to adding things to the fridge – the milk you like or the chocolate bar in the freezer or your brand of beer. Imogen-home wasn't the favourite of my two homes. That would always be where Greycat was, and right now that was at my burned-out terrace. Greycat was a complete arsehole, but he had that quiet kind of stability a cop needs in his permanent dwelling. Every now and then I would return to my Imogen-home and find my psychologist in a bad mood and her hair all crazy or the place smelling of bleach and her clothes all stained with it and all my stuff in a pile on the laundry floor. Greycat was never frazzled. If he was a person, he'd have been a total stoner.

There are rough days on Homicide, of course there are. But they're not the kind of rough days people imagine. Again, Hollywood misinterprets things, or reinterprets them in more
socially acceptable ways. On television, a bad day in Homicide is finding a woman hanging by her neck in her apartment with her guts on the floor and her mother crying in the hall. As a matter of fact, the finding of a body is a good day in homicide. Things are fresh. Exciting. Hopeful. You've got a case. You haven't interviewed anyone yet. The scene is laid out in all its intricacies and curiosities. You'll get to know this gutted woman better than you know some of your family members. You'll become a weird and mismatched and not wholly welcome part of her family. You'll have beers with her brother and listen to her father's war stories. You'll play with her dog. You'll watch her be buried, mourned, forgotten. Watch someone else take over her job and pack up her desk. The first day is the best day. It's like a very successful date. You've got it locked in. You haven't fucked it up yet. Missed something. Underestimated the importance of a vital piece of information. It's all downhill after the first day, until the day you land the killer. That's the second best day.

The bad days are the days when nothing happens. There's nothing to look at. No one to talk to. Everyone with something to say about the case has said it. All the photographs and CCTV of the area have been reviewed and set aside. All the witnesses have been interviewed, all the ex-boyfriends leaned on, all the photographs and fingerprints and mouth swabs collected and sent off. The measurements taken and the powder spread and wiped back up. The case falls from the news and journalists stop calling you.

It's day four. Five. Fifty-seven. The parents stop calling you, except at Christmas and on the victim's birthday. A new case comes along.

It was only day four of Ivana Lyon's murder but I had that feeling of dread that starts accumulating at the pit of my stomach like heavy black bile when more leads are dismissed than present themselves in a day. The ratio tips, slowly, slowly, until the end of the seesaw bangs on the ground and you feel its painful shudder through your legs. I could feel myself falling.

I'd spent the afternoon going back over the autopsy reports on Ivana and Minerva, looking for inconsistencies and trying to understand what they meant. Eden and I had argued with each other for forty minutes over knuckle size and spread. We could measure the size of the perpetrator's hand from knuckle-print bruises on Ivana's collarbone. The hands were small. I thought there was a ring indentation on one. Eden disagreed, said it was a scratch. I'd yelled at her that she needed to get her eyes checked, she was going blind as well as deaf. That had been the catalyst for me going home. It had been a cheap shot. Eden had come away from the last case with deafness in the left ear from gunshot damage and I knew she was supposed to wear a hearing aid but didn't, probably out of pride. We had got nothing done on the case and I'd been mean to my partner. I wondered how early I could get through the daily pleasantries with Imogen and then get into bed.

When I walked in the door, I found all the apartment lights on and the hall smelling of grilled haloumi. Ed Sheeran was playing. Female laughter erupted somewhere to the left of the hall and I froze with my hand on the knob and one foot in the stairwell.

‘Baby!' Imogen said. She walked down the hall towards me. I closed the door.

‘Have you got friends over?'

‘I have,' she said. ‘Sorry. I forgot to tell you. Come in – there's plenty of food.'

She ran her fingernails over my scalp and ruffled my hair. I was being pulled in two directions by a magnetic force right in the centre of my chest, one beckoning me back out into the stairwell, whispering warnings embedded in the male psyche about the age-old danger of women with wine, the other pulling me forward with promises of food. I was biologically befuddled for a second. When a tall woman passed the hall with a packet of Smith's Original chips in her hands it was settled. I can spot Smith's from a mile away.

I bypassed the living room and went straight for the kitchen, the fridge. Plucked a cold fake beer from the box on the top shelf.

‘Oh baby,' I said, and took the first painfully cold sip. Imogen was standing behind me. I turned and drank at the same time, peered at her with one eye, surveyed her temperature.

‘Something amiss?'

‘I'm just waiting for you to come and say hello,' she said. Not cheerlessly. Not warmly either. I sucked air between my teeth, tasted imitation beer on the vapour of my breath. Dismissed the word ‘just' from what she'd said, connected ‘I'm' with the inherently dangerous ‘waiting for you', and noted the hands on the hips. A performance was in order. I kissed her forehead.

‘I just need a minute,' I said. I rolled my shoulders, cracked my neck. ‘I've had a really rough –'

‘Frank,' a woman in the doorway chirped. She was a beautiful little Indian woman in a bright yellow dress. Red necklace of polished wooden beads and red pleather heels. A bit dressy for wine and bickies with the girls. The others would talk about
it while she was out of the room. Her colours. Her eagerness. ‘You must be Frank. We've heard so much about you.'

‘Frank, this is Deepa.'

‘Deepa,' I grabbed her hand and pumped it.

‘We're all so interested to hear about your job. Imogen's given us a taste but there's so much she can't answer.'

Suddenly, the kitchen was full of women. My dad had taken me to a battery farm once and it was very much like this. Smelly and loud. I looked down and found my beer was empty.

‘Frank, this is Shauna. This is Erica. This is Kim.'

I was turning to get another beer at the exact same moment Kim was plunging in for a kiss on my cheek. The fridge door got trapped between us and she planted her kiss right on the corner of my mouth. Her breath tasted of wine.

‘Oh, hi.' I laughed, put an arm around her narrow shoulders, hugged her into the fridge door. She laughed uncomfortably. My face burned.

The place swelled with chatter. I found myself holding my beer bottle against my temple.

‘She did say he was handsome.'

‘Very handsome.'

‘He's got that Joel Edgerton, outback Australiana flavour to him.'

‘Joel Edgerton. Oh god. Now that's a flavour I wouldn't mind getting a taste of.'

‘Oh Jesus. Save it, Shauna.'

‘Don't mind them, Frank. They're drunk.' Kim stroked my arm.

‘What are you doing?' Imogen pulled my beer down from my head. My temple was ice cold, deliciously wet. ‘Stop being weird.'

‘Let's go back to the living room,' someone suggested. ‘I'll be the first interrogator. Are you ready for your interrogation, Frank?'

‘I'm really not,' I murmured to Imogen. ‘I'm really not ready for rooms full of women and noise and interrogations. I'm not. At all.'

‘Don't be difficult.' Imogen glanced at the hall, the women retreating. ‘It's just a bit of fun. Just give us five minutes.'

‘I've had a really rough day,' I said again.

‘I would have told you about the dinner,' she smoothed my hair back from my temple, ‘I just forgot. Okay? I forgot. Just come and say hello for five minutes and then you can make an excuse and leave.'

‘I don't want to be interrogated. I've spent my week thus far actually interrogating people. I don't want to be the centre of attention. Keep them off me, Imogen.'

‘Or what?' she laughed humourlessly.

‘Frank. Come on!'

‘Immy, please,' I said.

‘Frankie, please,' she imitated me, slipped into my arms, rubbed my chest. ‘Don't be a baby. Come on. I've got plenty of treats. Bring a couple of beers with you.'

She pulled my arm, never giving me a chance to grab the beers. I was led into the living room. There was a huge platter of antipasto on the coffee table, barely touched. The olives glistened black and wet like droplets of mercury. I gathered up six olives and a handful of salami and sunk into the couch. Pulled a bowl of chips towards me. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it surrounded by my faithful brothers – meat, salt and imitation alcohol. The lights were hot.

‘So Imogen tells us you're on the Sydney Parks Strangler case, Frank?'

‘I'm one of the members of a task force charged with that, yes.'

‘How intriguing.' Kim sat back in the armchair nearest to me, adjusted her stockings at the knee. ‘You've got to give us the lowdown. What are the major leads?'

‘I read in the paper you don't think it's a man. Is that right?'

‘Well, there's no evidence thus far to suggest –'

‘I don't think it's a man either,' Deepa said, barely managing to swallow her wine before the words were out of her mouth. ‘The faces. It's very personal. Identity-driven, not power-driven. Sociopathic, rather than psychosexual, if you ask me.'

‘Oh, here we go. She'll be quoting Wilhelm Reich in a minute. It's always Reich with her.'

‘You're a psychologist too?' I asked. Where was all my beer going? I glanced at Imogen helplessly but she ignored me.

‘We're all psychologists,' Deepa smiled.

‘Oh. Excellent.'

‘Imogen's the only law enforcement specialist among us,' Kim said, letting one of her navy blue velvet slip-ons slide off one heel. ‘The only one with murderous interests.'

‘When we heard she'd snagged you off the client list we were so excited,' Deepa grinned.

‘Yes, off the client list,' Shauna tutted at Imogen. ‘Naughty, naughty.'

‘We'd love to hear about some of your cases.'

‘Yeah,' Erica breathed. ‘The really bad ones.'

‘Tell them about the chainsaw guy,' Imogen said. A low moan of excitement rose around me. I felt Imogen's hands on
my shoulders, trying to massage them but only succeeding in making them tighter. ‘I love that one.'

I wasn't sure exactly what was happening here, and felt strangely wary that it was some sort of test. In a room full of psychologists, I was being asked to rank my case history from ‘best' to ‘worst'. It was a bizarre request. Yes, indeed, there were good days and bad days. Exciting days and boring days. But that there could be a ‘best' among my cases, a story that could be ‘loved', was beyond my understanding. Murder simply was to me. As meat was to a butcher. It came and it went. Some of it was easy to manage, some of it was more difficult. It was the material that I worked with. There was no value system attached to it. Especially the kind of value system that would rank the ‘really bad ones' as the ‘best'. I'd seen the aftermath when a mother drowned her three kids in the family bathtub, one at a time, like kittens, while her husband was up the street getting milk. That was bad. Really bad. My ex-girlfriend had been found disembowelled centre stage in a room painted with her blood. The attending officer had actually used the word ‘painted' in the police report. That was bad. Really bad. Were these my ‘best'?

Sometimes I wondered about Imogen and her propensity to burst out with a sick kind of enthusiasm for homicide detection, like it was some fantasy job she'd always wanted. Did she want to be a cop? Sometimes I could tell she was pretending not to be interested in details about some of my past cases, and sometimes she overtly tried to squeeze them out of me, the way she was doing now. It was strange.

Everyone was staring at me.

‘Uh,' I scratched my head. ‘The chainsaw one?'

‘A bunch of twenty-year-olds are holding a work party at Palmer & Co. You know Palmer & Co?' Imogen spread her hands theatrically.

‘Oh, I know that one.'

‘I love that place.'

‘Well, these kids are having a party there. A dress-up party. There's, like, fifteen of them, all went to uni together, all work for the same company. They're mostly film buffs, so they decide the party'll have a theme. Favourite horror flick.'

I looked around. All eyes were on Imogen. I wondered if I could slip away to get another beer. I looked past Kim into the kitchen. The lovely beers. She caught my eye and slow-winked.

‘This idiot kid turns up with a real chainsaw.'

‘Oh Jesus, no way.'

‘What horror film is that?'

‘
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. God you're slow, Deepa.'

‘When was this?'

‘Last year.'

‘Oh man, I think I read about that.'

I squeezed out from between the couch cushions, almost tripped on Kim's legs. Grabbed a handful of chips on my way to the kitchen. Imogen's voice was everywhere, inescapable.

‘The bar staff doesn't even notice it's the real thing. They just think it's a convincing prop. Next thing you know, half the guys at the party are on ecstasy and someone grabs hold of the chainsaw and fires it up, like it's a joke, swings it around. He's high as a kite, doesn't know what he's doing, and some kid gets his fucking arm lopped off. Chainsaw goes in at the armpit, comes out at the neck, hacks the whole thing off like
a chicken wing. Kid bleeds to death on the floor before anyone's even called it in.'