The Mak Collection (108 page)

‘She’s still
in situ
, apart from the garbage,’ Peterson continued.

‘Who found her?’ said Andy.

The girl had been discovered by a homeless man as he scrounged through the heaps of cardboard next to the dumpster to find something worth keeping, perhaps as shelter. The man, who called himself Barney, was occupying a couple of constables with his rambling account of the discovery.

‘…my wife, she don’t see me no more…’

‘Yes, Barney,’ the constable pressed. ‘But tell us again about how you found the body.’

Barney’s eyes rolled back and popped forwards again. He had a long beard and deeply lined skin. ‘I was jus’ looking round. I thought I smelled somethin’. I thought it might be rotten fruit. I thought I could find somethin’ to eat.’

Andy grimaced. He would let the constables deal with Barney.

‘
Skata
,’ Jimmy offered. ‘She’s ripe, all right.’

The autopsy would give a better idea of the time of death, but Andy guessed that the remains were a couple of days old, perhaps accelerated by the weather. He covered his mouth and nose with one hand and moved closer to her. The girl looked Asian, and young, though given the state of the body it was difficult to tell whether she was in her teens or twenties. He noticed lacerations around her wrists. She had been tied up, but there were no binds on her now.

Andy wondered what could have happened for her to end up in a back lane like this, becoming his last gruesome case as part of the team he had worked with for so many years.

Simon Aston walked across one of the vast living rooms of the Cavanagh house, his sneakers treading on a giant, cream fur rug that stretched metres across the hardwood floor. Through the glass doors that opened out to the harbour, Damien was laid out on a sun lounge, wearing silk shorts as he baked himself on the balcony. An exotic silk robe hung over the lounge at his back and a newspaper lay in sections beside him.

‘So, man, how are you?’ said Simon.

Despite Damien’s relaxed surroundings, he didn’t seem settled. The dark circles under his eyes were more pronounced than usual. He looked up when Simon approached, but said nothing.

‘Yo,’ Simon said, ‘I brought you a coffee from your favourite. Double shot.’

Damien snatched it without thanking him. ‘This new maid makes shit coffee,’ he murmured.

Simon nodded and pulled up a lounge next to his friend. ‘So, how are plans for the party coming?’

‘I dunno,’ Damien said dismissively and looked out at the water. He sipped the coffee from its cardboard cup.

Simon took a furtive glance at his watch; it was approaching eleven. He wanted to call Warwick O’Connor well before one o’clock, just to be on the safe side. It would be best if he knew whether or not he would have any cash to negotiate with before he called. In Simon’s experience, cash had a great way of solving problems. In fact, he couldn’t think of any problem that money couldn’t solve. It just depended on how much you had to throw at it.

‘Look, buddy, I hate to bring it up,’ he said nervously, now wringing his hands. ‘But, uh, I’m going to need a bit more money to wrap this thing up.’

Damien looked over at him. ‘Is it that guy Lee?’

‘No, Lee is fine.’

‘So what is it, then?’ he said with audible impatience.

One million dollars. I want an answer by tomorrow at one, or I’ll contact the big man myself…

Simon couldn’t tell Damien about the trouble with Warwick. There was no way he could tell Damien that some lowlife wanted one million dollars of his money and was threatening to blackmail his father. What if it was seen as Simon’s fault? He would quickly become persona non grata, not just with the Cavanaghs but the whole of Sydney’s A-list.

‘Nothing,’ Simon lied. ‘Everything’s fine. It’s just a little extra to cover all the bases.’

Surely Warwick was bluffing. Surely he wouldn’t really contact Jack Cavanagh himself? He doesn’t have the balls, does he?

Damien dropped a hand over the side of the lounge, the cup of coffee dangling. He let go, and it dropped the few inches to the floor and fell on its side. Simon dived in to right it again, but the remaining coffee had spilled.

‘Leave it,’ Damien said and turned his head. ‘Estelle!’ He began fumbling through the pockets of the silk robe for his cigarettes. ‘Did Lee say anything?’ he asked, still searching. ‘Estelle!’ he yelled again. ‘
Where the fuck are my cigarettes?
’

Estelle instantaneously appeared with a packet and placed it in Damien’s open hand. She was the new maid; lithe, pale and beautiful, with cascading locks of raven hair tied in a loose ponytail at her nape. Her eyes were huge and doelike. Estelle was gorgeous and French. Only the Cavanaghs would have a French maid who was actually French, probably to try to appear more cultured. They went through a maid once or twice a year it seemed. Damien drove the ugly ones away, and messed with the pretty ones. He wondered if Damien had fucked her already or not, or if he’d be okay with him making a try.

Damien put a cigarette in his lips and Estelle lit it. In a flash she had mopped up the coffee and disappeared again.

Simon watched the exchange with fascination. ‘Lee’s fine. It’s nothing,’ he continued, getting the conversation back on track. Time was ticking on. ‘He doesn’t have a problem at all. It’s just a bit of extra dough to smooth things out.’

Even if he was foolish enough to ask for it, Simon knew that Damien didn’t have access to a million dollars. Not liquid, anyway. His father, Jack, controlled the family fortune, and what Damien himself actually had in his name was a mere drop in the ocean compared to his mighty father’s personal wealth, or compared to what Cavanagh Incorporated was worth, with all its various interests. Simon wouldn’t dream of getting them to cough up a cool mill for the likes of Warwick O’Connor. That would be outrageous, a rip-off, and probably the end of his friendship with Damien. Anyway, O’Connor was probably bluffing about what he knew.

Simon was sure that if he could meet with him face to face and show him what another twenty grand in cash looked like, he would stop his quibbling and take the money. Warwick was no big-timer; all that cash was bound to look good to him. And then this thing would be over…

‘I want a new personal trainer,’ Damien said out of the blue, pinching one of his oiled-up browned biceps.

‘You look good, man,’ Simon told him, though he didn’t really think so. His friend was already starting to look a bit drug ravaged. Besides,
Damien never worked hard enough to get the muscles he wanted. He had a slim build and he was slightly concave chested. There wasn’t much to him. He’d gone through four or five trainers in the past year but always ended up dumping them. He’d sacked his last trainer, Dave, two weeks before. Simon wondered why Damien bothered with training at all, when he obviously didn’t like being told what to do.

‘Who’s that guy Will keeps talking about?’
Will Smith.
‘The guy who got him in shape for that film?’ Damien asked. ‘You know the one?’

‘I dunno. I’ll ask him.’

Damien dragged on his cigarette and watched the boats. ‘How much do you need for this thing to go away?’ he said.

‘Thirty-five,’ Simon found himself saying. He’d planned to ask for twenty, but he’d decided that he needed the extra fifteen for his own spending money. He was broke again after the last party. It could get expensive being a friend of the rich.

Damien nodded. ‘I’ll organise it.’

‘It would be good if I could have it, uh…soon.’

Damien seemed unperturbed by the demand. He dragged on his cigarette. ‘I think we’ve got that in the safe.’

Simon was quietly relieved. If Damien hurried, Simon might still have time to get to Warwick with some tempting cash at one o’clock.

Damien flicked the waistband of his black silk shorts, making a snapping sound. ‘Do you like these?’ The waistband announced that they were a Prada design.

‘They look good on you, man. Super cool,’ Simon told him, nodding.

Damien sighed at Simon’s comment, and gave a sneer at them. ‘I dunno…’

And with that, the subject had been changed.

At twelve-thirty Makedde Vanderwall’s mobile phone rang. She turned
The Monster Show
by David J Skal face down and snatched the phone off the coffee table. She’d spent the morning reading through a psychology journal on advancements in the experimental treatment of violent psychopathic inmates in Canada and had eventually moved on to lighter fare—and different monsters.

‘Hello?’ she answered.

‘Are you still in bed?’ The familiar voice was accusing.

‘No. It’s the afternoon. Do you think I am out every night until six?’

‘If I were your age, I would be. And I would enjoy it, too.’ The voice belonged to Makedde’s sometime employer, Marian Wendell.

Mak chuckled.

Marian was quickly down to business. ‘I have something for you if you want it. The client just left my office. Are you available?’

‘Yup.’ Mak sat up.

‘You would be needed all week,’ Marian warned.

‘Even better.’

A meaty job was just what Mak wanted to sink her teeth into. A lot of jobs could be knocked over in a few days—a full week’s work would be her longest assignment to date. Normally it was Marian’s more experienced investigators who got the bigger gigs.

‘The job starts today. What time can you get here?’ Marian asked.

‘Give me thirty minutes.’

Mak didn’t bother asking what the assignment was. If Marian was throwing a job her way, she would take it without hesitation—particularly if it was a full week’s work. She needed the money.

After a lightning-fast shower and basic grooming, Mak was primed and on the road in her motorcycle leathers within fifteen minutes. The quickest way to get anywhere in Sydney was on two wheels, and Mak’s horny 1200cc bike was her transportation mode of choice since her move to the city. Thanks to her bike, the astronomical price of car parking was an expense she rarely had to contend with; and with soaring petrol prices, the economy of her bike was even more appealing by the day. On the occasions that she grudgingly borrowed Andy’s car for work, she found herself spotting gaps in the traffic and wanting to accelerate through—a physical impossibility on four wheels.

Of course, a scooter might be equally practical for the city, but it had never been an option for Mak. A particularly infantile pleasure of hers was to pull up to scooter-riding men at the traffic lights and smile at them from the vantage point of her big BMW bike.

Vroom.

Now Mak’s tall, naked K1200R tore up the roads towards busy Bondi Junction and passed the standard daily traffic jams with an ease possible only on two wheels. With time to spare, she stopped her bike on the kerb outside Marian’s office, flicked it into neutral, placed it gently on its kickstand and shut the warm engine off. She grabbed her backpack and made her way inside the building.

Marian Wendell’s office was on the second floor of a three-storey block that Mak imagined might have been glamorous when Marian had first bought up in 1975. It had all the hallmarks of an ill-conceived mid-seventies architectural vision that now left it looking like a rundown concrete box. The colour scheme was brown and weak yellow; the token ground-floor lobby had wood veneer panelling where wallpaper would otherwise be; and the fixtures were decidedly tired. But rather than offend Mak’s aesthetic sensibilities, she felt the place had atmosphere. Mak used her favourite word of the Australian vernacular when describing the building; it was ‘daggy’—dishevelled, uncool, but rich with
character. Thanks to the colourful history of Marian Wendell’s private investigation agency, a lot of exciting cases had passed through those doors, and Mak thought she could sense it in the walls.

If only the wood veneer could talk.

She made her way up in the slow-moving elevator, ready to take on her new assignment, helmet and backpack in hand. When she stepped out onto the off-green and yellow carpet of the second-floor hallway, she found that she was not alone. A small bespectacled man a few feet down the hall stiffened at her presence and gave her a long unfriendly look before disappearing into the shared bathrooms at the end of the hall.

Well, hello to you, too
, she thought, slightly perplexed by his aggressive glare. He looked like one of the stiffs who worked in the accountancy practice across the hall. Mak realised that when she came to and from work on her bike she probably looked more like a motorbike courier—or maybe even a member of a bikie gang—than a young investigator with a PhD to boot. And some people just had issues with motorcyclists. On one amusing occasion Mak had decided to do some banking on the way home, and a man on a bench seated outside the bank had been utterly convinced that she was about to stage a hold-up before leaping onto her bike and speeding off. He’d been so relieved when she had calmly
emerged with her helmet in hand and put her bank slip away that he actually told her what he’d thought she was going to do.

Mak had chosen a sporty bike, but she might as well have a long beard and a Harley.

‘Boo,’ she said under her breath, but the freaked-out accountant couldn’t hear her. She left the man to his paranoia and, with a faint rustle of leather on leather, stepped through the door of Marian’s office, on which was written:

MARIAN WENDELL AND ASSOCIATES PROFESSIONAL PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

A bell chimed to alert Marian that she had a visitor. A closed-circuit camera would confirm Mak’s identity to her boss as she walked in.

‘Be with you soon, Mak,’ came Marian’s booming voice from down the hallway.

‘Okay,’ Mak called back, and took a seat in the waiting room.

She made herself comfortable, taking her stiff leather jacket off and looking for something to read. She sifted through a couple of newspapers and a selection of out-of-date magazines in a stack on a glass coffee table in the waiting area.
The Australian Women’s Weekly, New Woman, Woman’s Day, National Geographic, Cleo
—the plethora of women’s titles was there for Marian’s strong female client base, the women who came to her with problems of errant husbands or
suspicious work practices and wanted a ‘private dick without the dick’, as Marian put it. Having read each of the old magazines twice over on previous visits to the office, Mak found a copy of the previous day’s
Australian
newspaper and perused it instead, speed reading articles on business and federal politics, the sale of Telstra, troops in the Middle East and handshaking on plans for a bullet train between Sydney and Melbourne.