The Killing Hour (2 page)

He looks down at her hands, at her fingernails, wondering if any skin from her killer is trapped under them, wondering what she would have done differently the last time she had a manicure if she’d known so many people would be looking at them. He wonders just how much that manicure cost. Life and death and the details in between all have price tags. The cost of death starts out small. Like a fifty-dollar visit to the doctor. You begin throwing good money after bad. You try to chase away the cancer or one of a hundred other diseases that riddle your body and ride it down. Sometimes it isn’t even fifty dollars. Sometimes it’s only five. Or ten. A ten-dollar investment. A knife, for example. Or a pair of garden shears. They slice through skin and flesh quicker than any disease. There are expenses no matter what savages you. New clothes to replace the bloody ones. Smaller clothes to replace the ones that no longer fit your wasting body. Booze to calm the nerves. The family of the victim shops through glossy catalogues for coffins, choosing colour and craftsmanship and style, what’s in at the moment. The graveyard plot, prime real estate these days, adds to the bill, along with a new suit or a dress for the corpse. New clothes for the mourners. When the bad news comes from a cop rather than a doctor the expenses add up faster. One murder and the cash is flying around. Man hours. Court cases. Lawyers. News stories. People charging and making money from evil.

The day is cooling off. It certainly needs to. The air inside the house is thick – it tastes and smells like aging fruit. He can’t turn on the air-conditioning, can’t open any windows – not allowed to do anything that will alter the temperature of the house. The medical examiner and the forensic guys would all have fits. He moves over to the window, looks out at the slowly ebbing day and wonders if it will ever actually end. The neat backyard with its golden pebbles and expensive plants has been surrounded by yellow plastic evidence markers. With their black numbers they’re larger versions of the order discs he’s been given at pizza restaurants. He wonders if the same people make them or if they’re made to order.

The neighbouring house has the sun. It bounces off the dark blue steel roof and makes the lemons on the nearby tree look purple. He balls his hands into fists. The people in the townhouse are standing by their windows. They’re staring at him, their eyes wide and their mouths open as they watch in awe. He wishes he could arrest them. Wishes he could fire the guy who hasn’t got around to hanging large tarpaulins to block their view. He turns away in disgust.

He picks his way across the room, stepping carefully. There are several areas of dried blood, several signs of violence. It’s the same as the other crime scene.

The room has a definite woman’s touch – two vases of flowers, dreary paintings of romantic scenes, candles on the dressing table. The sort of thing his own wife had lying around when she used to be his wife. A collection of make-up and hair products is scattered beneath a mirror on the wall with smudges of hairspray on the glass. A hair dryer lies on the floor next to several pairs of shoes. A rubbish basket full of tissues and cottonbuds. A pair of slippers made to look like cartoon lion heads. A calendar showing vintage movie posters on the wall by the wardrobe. February shows a pissed-off 1933 King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, fighting off planes while holding his damsel in distress. No dates have been circled, no messages jotted down. Nothing to indicate a bad day was coming.

The room is covered in fingerprinting dust and dozens of empty plastic evidence bags. Spare gloves, notebooks and scene forms litter the floor. The medical examiner quietly ties paper bags over the dead woman’s hands and feet to protect any evidence beneath the nails. One of his kits sits nearby, containing a selection of scissors, blades, cottonbuds and needles. Small labelled containers containing specimens of hair, and fibres and blood are lined up evenly inside a larger plastic tray. There are inventories of items found in the house, dozens of scattered rubberbands, rulers and tape measures. It wasn’t this messy when he arrived. Now it’s starting to look like a whirlwind came through here. Just inside the bedroom door waiting to take the cause of that whirlwind away is a neatly folded bodybag.

A forensic examiner with a hairy neck and a nervous twitch is photographing the body; the whining and firing of the flash has been grating at Landry’s nerves for the last half-hour. He has two cameras around his neck, one a 35 mm, the other a digital. Every few minutes he needs to change film.

Landry picks up the victim’s address book, moves to the corner of the room, and starts going through it for the third time. Some of the people in here probably don’t even know yet what has happened. Others are crying on shoulders or into drinks, wondering why in the hell the world is such a shitty place.

Suddenly he’s had enough. Taking the address book, he makes his way out of the room, barging past other detectives in the hallway. They say something to him, but suddenly he has to get outside, now. He moves quickly down the stairs and heads for the front door. A radio jingle is caught in his mind, an ad for security systems. Would this women still be dead had she heard that ad? He fights the urge to start humming it.

He tugs at the collar of his shirt. The house is hot, so damn hot. Aside from the bedroom the house has no other signs of violence – no broken furniture, no bloodstains. The other crime scene is the same. No broken windows. No forced entry. Just two dead women and no reason why. That’s always the way.

He makes it outside and rushes around to the side of the house where he squats down and gulps in the cool evening air. From his pocket he pulls out two evidence bags. He puts the address book into one. Then, making sure nobody is watching, he holds the second bag over his mouth. The vomiting is over within a few seconds, and then he’s coughing the remaining dregs into the bag. He seals it and carries it to his car.

He can’t go back inside. Not yet. Probably not even again tonight. Normally he would go through everything, spend all day there – as long as it took. But normally he doesn’t have as strong a lead as he has this time. He puts the bag of vomit into the boot. He can imagine the hard time he’d get if one of his colleagues knew he’d thrown up. The address book he takes out of the bag and goes through once again, looking for any reference at all to Charlie Feldman, but there’s nothing. Which is strange. Because in a third evidence bag, this one tucked inside his jacket pocket, is a memo-pad he found beside the corpse. Landry wants very much to find out how Mr Feldman’s name could end up on a pad soaked with blood.

3

I pull up the driveway. A dozen or so of the paving stones wobble beneath the weight of the car, stones I wanted to cement back into place but never got around to doing so. I come to a stop in front of a garage with freshly painted black doors and shiny new handles. The house is fawn with black trim and a black concrete tile roof. I helped to paint it. A couple of the weatherboards at the bottom have rotted more since I last saw them. They’ll need replacing within the next year. I wonder who’ll do it.

The best thing I can do right now is back out of the driveway and never come back, and every muscle is telling me to leave but I can’t bring myself to walk away. I should catch a plane somewhere. Things might look different from a pilot’s point of view. All of my problems would fade away as we climbed towards the sun. I feel like I’m not really here, that this is all part of the same dream I’ve been having all day. I reach out and trail my hands along the weatherboards of Jo’s house. The wood is hard and smooth. When I reach the door I suck in a few breaths and bite down on my lip. This is crazy. I knock and my hand doesn’t pass through the wood. I don’t wake up.

Jo’s smile disappears when she sees me. She lets one arm fall to her side; the other she keeps up high on the side of the doorframe. Her greeting towards me doesn’t include the word ‘hello’. She has this look on her face that suggests she has just eaten a bad piece of chicken. I can smell freshly brewed coffee.

‘Hey, Jo, can I come in?’

‘What do you want, Charlie?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘You think I care about what you need?’

‘Please. It’s important.’

She looks me over, studies the wounds on my face. Then she sighs as she reluctantly decides. ‘Make it quick.’

‘Can I at least come in?’

She sighs again, this time more loudly, then steps aside. When I’m in she closes the door and leans against it as if to block my exit. Jo’s a few centimetres shorter than me, a couple of years younger, but twice as mature. She has hazel eyes, soft until she frowns at me, which she’s currently doing. The tanned skin of her face is sprinkled with light freckles. Her hair has been cut, stopping just above her shoulders. Her body is toned and athletic from her visits to the gym. She looks better than the last time I saw her.

‘So no “How are you doing, Jo?” or “You look nice, Jo,” or “I’ve been missing you”?’

‘I was getting to that. You look good, Jo. I like the new haircut.’

‘I haven’t had a new haircut, Charlie. Now, if that’s all …’

‘I need your help.’

‘I don’t know whether to be flattered or concerned. Does needing my help involve that bump on your head?’

‘In a way.’

‘Somebody finally decided to beat the crap out of you. Wish I could have been there.’

‘No, you don’t.’ I shouldn’t be here. ‘I’m in serious trouble. I don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘You never know what you’re doing.’

‘But you always seem able to help.’

‘I’m not your shrink.’

‘Please, Jo, just hear me out.’

‘If it’s serious go to the police.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘I’m clever.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t think I can understand?’

‘That’s why I’m here. I need somebody to understand.’

‘So you argue that you want my help, then argue against telling me?’

‘I’m only arguing against going to the police. You’ll understand soon enough.’

‘Understand what?’

How do I carry on? With a drink, that’s how. While she pours me some of the coffee she’s just made I stare at the magnetic poetry on the fridge door. I make a square and a triangle with random words but I can’t line them up to make sense of the last twenty-four hours. The lounge is warm from the afternoon sun. I sit on the sofa and lean forward. I’m frightened that if I sink back and relax the sofa will swallow me. I look around the room to see if anything has changed but it’s mostly the same. The only difference is what isn’t here – no photographs of us together, nothing to show I ever existed. All those memories have been packed away.

‘Well?’ she asks.

‘This is difficult for me.’

‘Difficult for me too, Charlie. You think I want to spend my Monday night with you?’

‘You have other plans?’ I turn to face her and immediately I’m annoyed at the pang of jealousy we both heard.

‘That isn’t the point.’

‘Okay, okay, just give me a few seconds.’

I stare down at the coffee table, at the small nicks and scratches that have built up over time. Some of them I remember happening, others had happened well before Jo inherited the table from her grandmother.

‘I was on my way home,’ I say, and I wish that was the whole story just there – that I was on my way home and nothing bad happened.

I was steering my Honda around the sweeping bends of the empty motorway. The road was dark with half-circles of light spilling across from the streetlights. I had my window down to enjoy the summer breeze. The air was warm and dry. The mercury was hovering around the shorts and T-shirt end of the thermometer. The motorway was bordered by paddocks. Thin wire fences stopped the large willow and oak trees, the poplars, the patches of knee-length grass and the thinning creeks from escaping. Cows and sheep and horses were standing vigil, all unaware that day by day technology was slowly making their homes smaller. I felt like I was the only person in the world.

‘It happened when I turned off the motorway towards home. It was so …’ I shrug. ‘I don’t know. If it wasn’t for the news and the blood. I don’t know. I guess I would think it was all a dream.’

Jo leans forward and for the first time she looks concerned. I pick my coffee up but can’t bring myself to take a sip.

‘What blood, Charlie?’

‘I went around the corner and that was when she stepped out in front of me.’

‘Who?’

‘Luciana. Luciana Young.’

Jo’s mouth falls open and she falls back. The effect is almost comical. ‘This had better not be some sort of sick joke.’

‘I wish to God it was.’

As I turned the corner, my headlights washed into the paddock opposite, lighting up the same bank of trees they always light up. The trees looked like large deformed fingers pushing through a farming landscape. Twisted and broken, they were the sort of thing Salvador Dali would paint, along with some melting clocks and a naked woman.

‘What happened? Did you run her over? Charlie?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ I snap, though that would have been easier.
Sure, I hit her with the car, and boy, you should have seen her fly.
‘She just jumped out from nowhere.’

‘And you hit her? You killed her?’ Jo sounds scared, scared because I’m crazy and making this up, or I’m crazy because I’m not.

The moment I saw Luciana I tugged on the wheel and jumped on the brake, swerving my car around her. In my rear-vision mirror I saw a woman drowning in the glow of my brakelights. All that red skin, red clothes … I didn’t know at the time it was a premonition of things to come.

‘No, I didn’t hit her, but it was close. She climbed into the car. She was panicked. I wanted to go to the police. You would have too if you’d seen her. If you’d heard her.’

‘Panicked about what? Why didn’t you go to the police?’

Her dress was shredded above her chest as if she’d been repeatedly clawed by a big cat. There were several cuts over her chest that looked like tiny canals, and a red sea was welling up over the edges. Her face was smeared with dirt and her eyes were full of desperation. She had to be desperate to jump into the first car that came along. Her blonde hair was matted with twigs and leaves, stained with soil and blood that in the weak light of my car looked like oil. There was a line of blood on her leg. She wore a bandanna necklace that had been a gag. When she closed the door the interior light blinked off and we were plunged into darkness. Monday’s darkness.