Thrill City (46 page)

‘Do you really know people?’ I asked.

‘No, that bit was bullshit.’

The card machines sang electronic songs and Chloe lit another Winnie off the butt of the first. I wanted one too but I’d given up a few months before.

‘Tell me what I should do,’ she said.

I’d finished my investigative services certificate in October and gained an inquiry agent’s licence soon after. Since then the girls at work considered me the last word on all matters of law and order. They asked me about custody disputes and apprehended violence orders, taxation and drug busts. No matter that I hadn’t found a job and my training covered following people and pissing into a funnel.

‘How many people heard you threaten Frank?’ I asked.

‘’Bout fifty.’

‘You should go to the cop shop now and tell them about Saturday night. Makes you look innocent.’

‘I am innocent!’

I drained my champagne. It had given me a nice buzz and I was tonguing for another.

‘Come on, I’ll take you.’

•

We caught the number 16 tram and rattled down Swanston Street. The top end where it intersected Lonsdale was home to the Shaft and a bunch of sex shops and as we moved towards the river we passed takeaway stores, discount clothing outlets and shops with spruikers out front flogging perfume rip-offs and cheap sunglasses. The Flinders Street station end had all the druggies. Junkies in bad tracksuits hung around the fast food joints and the alcoholics congregated on benches outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Swanston was the street they never showed you in the tourist brochures. I knew it well.

We passed the Queen Victoria Gardens and the Domain and got off at the St Kilda Road Police Complex. I led Chloe straight up to the reception desk.

‘We’re here about the Parisi murder,’ I told a young cop. ‘My friend worked for him and she’d like to speak to someone.’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ Chloe exclaimed.

The uniform grinned. ‘That’s what they all say.’

Chloe smiled back. She was wearing a low-cut top with ‘Pornbabe’ written across the chest.

I was good at flirting but Chloe was better. She could flirt for Australia. They stared at each other, smiling, while he picked up the phone and spoke to someone.

‘Detective Talbot will be down in a moment,’ he said.

I sat in the corner and left them to it. Just as she asked to see his gun a door opened and a female detective with bobbed auburn hair stuck her head out a door. ‘Chloe?’

She followed the D and I settled back to wait. Crimestopper’s posters adorned the walls and cops went in and out the automatic doors. I watched them and couldn’t help wondering what they had that I didn’t. I’d tried to join the police force a year before and hadn’t got past the application stage. They’d rejected me when I told the truth about my work history. Either I didn’t have the moral credentials to be a girl in blue or the Victoria Police had enough scandal without dropping a stripper into the mix.

It was a weird career to aspire to after growing up in a hippy community where the kids were taught to hate the ‘pigs’ and our parents lived in fear of the choppers that buzzed the hills around harvest time. But aspire to it I did, partly from rebellion and partly because of something that happened when I was thirteen.

My mum had hooked up with a man named Russell, an ex-bikie, straggly but good looking in his own way. He’d come to our town to buy dope to sell in the city, but liked it so much he decided to stay. My younger brother Jasper and I weren’t too happy when he first moved in, but he brought us round with jumbo packs of M&Ms and hand-held, battery-operated computer games. He even hooked up a small black and white TV to a car battery so we could watch
Countdown
.

The trouble was he had a problem with alcohol, and heroin, and when he was really drunk, or couldn’t score, he’d lose the plot. Anything would set him off and his arguments with my mum escalated from yelling to pushing, to slapping her in the face.

We wondered why she didn’t just leave him. She’d been a women’s libber in the seventies and had worked at a battered women’s shelter, but Russell seemed to have her under some sort of spell. He could go from frightening to charming, and after one of his outbursts he’d be extra sorry and romantic, and promise never to do it again.

He’d been living with us for three months when Jasper and I were woken by shouting. We peered down from the attic loft where we slept. In the light of the kerosene lamps we saw Russell looming over our mum, hand raised, face twisted with rage. Jasper, who was only eight, started sniff ling.

‘I’ve called the police,’ she said, but this got him angrier.

‘Are you fucked in the head, woman? I’ve got ten pounds drying in the shed. You have got to be the stupidest fucking unit I have ever met.’ He was pacing back and forth on the faded oriental rug, a bottle of bourbon in his hand. All of a sudden he dropped the bottle and punched her in the face. She staggered back, crashing into the unlit potbelly stove and knocking out the flue.

I half climbed, half slid down the ladder and ran at him as he raised his fist again, jumped up and hung off his arm. He swung it back and I flew off onto the floor.

My brother’s cry was now a high-pitched wail. Mum was cowering in the corner, Russell advancing on her, when the front door crashed in.

‘Police!’

Two uniformed officers stood there, one male and one female. Russell grabbed a poker from beside the stove and wielded it like a baseball bat. ‘Come on,’ he yelled. ‘I’ll have ya!’

The woman had her hand on the butt of her gun. The male approached Russell with his hands out, talking in low tones, calling him mate. Russell swung at him and the cop leaned back and grabbed the poker, pulling him off balance, so he fell face first to the floor. It was the coolest move I’d ever seen. The female officer leapt into action, wrenching Russell’s hands behind his back and digging her knee in as she cuffed him tight.

They made sure we were all right and took Russell away. It turned out there were a number of warrants out for his arrest, and we never saw him again. And since that day I’d wanted to be a cop. But the cops didn’t want me. So I’d done the PI course; it had seemed like the next best thing.

When I’d graduated, one of my lecturers said he might have a bit of surveillance work coming up. Tony Torcasio was an ex undercover officer who had his own agency, a good guy, but so far nothing had eventuated. There were ads in the paper for investigators from time to time but if you didn’t have experience or weren’t an ex-cop you didn’t have a hope in hell.

I loved dancing but after three years it was time to quit. I’d turned twenty-eight two days earlier and although I could pass for twenty-three, I felt old. Maxine was a well-preserved forty-five but that didn’t stop the younger guys yelling, ‘Get grandma off stage.’

‘All done.’ Chloe stood in front of me, wiggling her hips.

‘They’re not going to throw your arse in jail?’

‘Nuh.’ She skipped off to the front counter, whispered something to the constable and handed him one of her cards. I could have sworn I heard ‘bring your handcuffs’.

•

Ten days later, November thirteen, I was sitting on my balcony in Elwood among palms and potted herbs. My first floor unit was in a block of sixteen and although the building was ugly brown brick the one bedroom flats were renovated and the street, Broadway, was full of oak trees. Dean Martin was on the stereo and I had a glass of cask wine and half a pack of individually wrapped cheese singles in front of me. I love plastic cheese. It was Thursday evening, still light because of daylight saving, and I felt the itch to go out. It was a toss-up between seeing a band and getting so pissed I ended up pashing some grungy rocker, or going to the Godard version of
Breathless
at the Astor. Decisions, decisions. The wine flowed through my limbs, relaxing them, and a breeze that smelled of saltwater came in off the bay.

The phone rang. It was my mum.

‘You’re home, I don’t believe it. How’s work?’

‘Great, fantastic,’ I lied.

‘I worry about you, you know. Not so much the peepshows but the bucks’ parties. What if the guys get out of hand? What if it turns violent?’

‘It’s really not dangerous. There’s always heaps of security. And the bucks are more scared of us than we are of them. Just last weekend—’

‘It irks me. It just does.’ She actually said irk. I wondered if I’d heard anyone say it in conversation before and decided I hadn’t.

‘I know.’ I started craving a cigarette.

‘And apart from your physical safety I worry about your psyche.’

‘My psyche?’ I would have killed for a cigarette. And something a bit stronger than wine. I leaned back in the canvas director’s chair and put my bare feet up on the balcony railing.

‘It’s got to affect you, pandering to men, reinforcing ridiculous stereotypes about women, buying into the whole madonna/whore thing—’ ‘I don’t buy into—’ ‘I know
you
don’t but by working in that industry you perpetuate the myth. And to think I named you after Simone de Beauvoir.’

My mum was an old school feminist who lectured in women’s studies and I couldn’t win an argument with her. I turned into a petulant fifteen-year-old every time I tried.

‘It’s an art form, Mum, like . . . like Josephine Baker or Gypsy Rose Lee.’

‘Did Josephine Baker do “f loor work” and show the world what she had for breakfast? I think not.’

I picked at an ingrown hair on my leg and didn’t say anything until she changed the subject: ‘I heard from Jasper.’

‘What’s he up to?’

‘He’s doing really well, said to say hi. He’s in New York doing some stuff for
GQ
, then he’s off to Canada for fashion week in Montreal.’

My brother had scooped the family gene pool and worked as a model. I considered asking my mother if she didn’t think modelling was similar to stripping but restrained myself.

‘How’s Steve?’ I asked instead. Steve was my mother’s ‘partner’. They met a few years after the Russell episode and had been together ever since, eventually moving to Sydney where my mum became an academic. Steve ran courses in mud-brick housing and solar power at the College of Adult Education.

‘He’s great, really busy though, organising a rally against the government’s stance on greenhouse gas emissions.’

‘I’ve got my inquiry agent’s licence,’ I said. ‘There might be some work coming up.’

‘Why don’t you finish your degree? You’ve only got one semester to go and you could finish it in Melbourne. I’ve looked into it.’

‘I’m a bit busy at the moment.’

‘You could study part time. A qualification would get you out of the sex industry.’

‘I dunno about that, heaps of strippers have arts degrees.’

There was a beep on the line. Call waiting. Hallelujah.

‘Mum? I’ve got another call, I have to go . . .

‘Hello?’

‘Simone,’ Chloe sounded out of breath, ‘you’ve got to come quick. Someone’s trying to kill me.’