An Easeful Death (26 page)

‘Tosser.’

‘Who put the hair up your arse, then?’

Monty decided to jump in before the fireworks started. With a nervous swipe at his mouth with his jacket sleeve, he said, ‘How about we talk some more over there?’ He pointed to a dark service lane between the cafe and the boutique next door.

Clacking heels followed him, whispers and a high-pitched laugh. When they were congregated at the mouth of the alley, Monty said, ‘I’m looking for a girl.’

‘Oh duh,’ Peroxide said, failing to hold back a giggle.

‘So which one of us do you want?’ The coat’s smug expression suggested she’d figured her earlier performance had clinched the deal.

Monty looked from one to the other of them and hesitated. ‘You’re all gorgeous. I’ll come back for you some other time, but tonight I’m in the mood for Champagne Charlie.’

He reached into his pocket and produced a fistful of notes. As he did so, a sachet of chilli powder fluttered to the pavement. Polly eagerly picked it up. Her face fell when she sniffed the innocent contents, then she exploded into a squawk of a sneezes.

Monty said, ‘Bless you,’ and put the sachet back into his pocket. He started to shuffle the notes in his hands into numerical order.

‘No offence, mister,’ Peroxide said, her eyes not wavering from the money, ‘but you’d be in much better hands with one of us than with Charlie. She’s been around the block a few times if you know what I mean.’

Coat added, ‘Past her use-by date by a few years I reckon.’

Polly sneezed again.

Monty dealt a ten-dollar note to each of them. ‘Where can I find her?’

Peroxide shoved the note into her cleavage. ‘I don’t know if she’s even working tonight.’

The woman in the coat eyed the remaining notes in Monty’s hand then glanced at her companions. ‘Saturday night? Course she’s working.’ She put her hand out to Monty. ‘She hangs around outside the train station in Wellington Street.’

He slipped her another ten. ‘She work alone?’

As if not wishing her professional sister to come away any richer, Peroxide added, ‘She’s a bit wacky, no one wants to stick with her, though sometimes her pimp hangs around. You need to watch him. Don’t try any funny business, he doesn’t miss much.’

Monty handed her another note.

Polly sneezed again. He handed her one, too. ‘Bless you.’

***

He found her in a bus shelter, just down from the railway station. A nervous-looking middle-aged couple hovered just beyond the shelter, not wishing to get too close to the feral-looking woman curled up on the bench. They clasped matching green grocery bags, his with milk and orange juice; toilet paper peeked over the top of hers. Monty glanced from one to the other of them.

‘She was like this when we got here. I think she’s just asleep. She’s not sick or anything.’ The man sounded as if he was expecting to be accused of leaving the woman to die.

Monty moved over to the bench, brushed back strands of knotted hair and felt for her carotid. ‘She’s okay.’

The whoosh of a bus’s air brakes masked any sigh of relief the couple might have uttered.

‘This is ours,’ the woman said, waving a hurry-up to her partner and diving for the opening door of the bus. The driver shrugged his question at Monty. He shook his head and the bus took off from the curb, leaving him alone with the woman on the bench.

He shook her shoulder. ‘Champagne Charlie?’

She moaned. Without opening her eyes she said, ‘Whadayawant?’

‘I want to buy you a coffee, have a chat.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Just a chat, Charlie.’

‘Fifty will get you a blow job.’ She was on automatic, still hadn’t opened her eyes.

‘That’s not what I want. I want to talk to you. It’s about my daughter, Lorna Dunn. I’ve been told she was a mate of yours.’

At the mention of Lorna’s name, a pair of bleary brown eyes opened. Charlie pulled herself into a sitting position, filling the air with an unpleasant musky odour as she attempted to focus on Monty.

‘You look like her, it’s the...’ She pointed to her own hair and made pinching gestures with her fingers, as if trying to pluck lost words from the air.

‘That’s right, red hair’s a family trait.’

Monty tried to assess Charlie’s physical and mental condition. Stick-like legs were curled under her body in a position unique to the female sex. Above her legs, concealing little, she wore a strip of red micro skirt. There was no doubt in his mind the sleeves of her black vinyl jacket hid a highway of track marks. Under the streetlight the pupils of her sunken brown eyes were as big and round as eight balls. He was beginning to wonder if she was worth the effort when she finally spoke again. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘There’s a McDonald’s over the road,’ he nodded towards the golden arches. ‘I’ll buy you dinner.’

She unfurled her legs and made as if to stand, then seemed to think better of it. Bringing her arm to her mouth she started to suck on the skin of her wrist, leaning forward on the bench to view each side of the bus shelter as she did so.

‘Maybe I’d better not,’ she mumbled through her sucking. ‘If Pedro catches me slacking on the job, I’m history.’

Monty handed her a twenty. As she reached and took it he saw how the top of her wrist was raw from sucking. ‘Tell your pimp this was for services provided. I’ll give you more after you’ve had your feed and you can put it in one of the station lockers so he can’t take it from you.’

The streetlight caught the nicotine-tarnish of her smile.

***

Champagne Charlie took a bite of her second Big Mac, running a weary hand through her tangle of dyed black hair as she chewed. Aware that she wasn’t getting something for nothing, she regarded him through eyes dark with suspicion.

‘Well?’

In between sips of a milkshake Monty gave a similar story to the one he had spun Peter Sbresni, only in this version the pathos fell like tears from each sentence.

Despite his Academy-Award-winning performance, his words seemed to have little effect. She picked up an empty burger wrapper and began to lick the juices with a long, studded tongue. Monty ignored the pathetic attempt at sensuality and started to reminisce on Lorna’s upbringing, striving to touch the right emotional chord. Before he knew it he was recounting one of Izzy’s antics.

‘I’ll never forget catching her in the kitchen with an empty bag of flour. She was about three years old, it was just before her mother and me split. When we walked into the room it was like suddenly being caught in the middle of a blizzard. She’d said she wanted to make it pretty like in her Hansel and Gretel book.’

Charlie put her burger wrapper down and scratched at her arm through the vinyl jacket. ‘I never knew my parents, brought up in foster care.’ Her words were vacant and empty of expression, as if she was too far gone even for bitterness.

But then she surprised him. ‘She was always talking about you. Said you’d promised to take her to Disneyland when she was a kid. The silly cow thought that’s why you robbed the liquor store.’ She giggled and folded one of her fries in half before popping it into her mouth.

Monty stopped sucking on his shake as a wave of shame crashed over him. How easily he had slipped into the stereotype of the ex-con, never even contemplating that the real Dunn, still locked away in prison, might have genuinely cared for his daughter.

Monty tried to meet Charlie’s eye, but she looked at everything except him. She licked at the specks of salt on her lips as she stared around the place, a creamy strand of mayonnaise glistening on her chin.

‘The cops said Reece Harper killed her,’ he said.

‘Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!’ she sang to the restaurant as if it were the chorus of a song. A bit wacky was clearly an understatement. He made a placating motion with his hands. ‘Shhhh ... do you want us to be thrown out before you’ve finished your burger?’

She laughed, high and sharp. ‘I have finished.’ She burped to prove it and sat down again. Monty handed her a cigarette and they both lit up. There was a No Smoking sign over the door but he doubted anyone would be brave enough to challenge them. He pushed a paper napkin towards her, hoping she’d wipe the mayonnaise off with it. She didn’t.

He returned to his question. ‘So, why not Harper?’

Charlie stared at him through the curling smoke of her cigarette, trying to remember. For a girl like this, four years must seem like a lifetime.

‘I sometimes gave him a turn, felt kinda sorry for him. He was a bit slow, but always a gentleman. He would never have hurt no one.’

‘Some of the other girls said he was pissed off that night because Lorna turned him down.’

‘Lorna was more choosy, she wasn’t so good at closing her eyes and thinking of England.’ She giggled at the tired joke.

Monty pulled his face into an expression of fatherly concern.

‘Reece stank like a fart and was ugly as a sack of smashed crabs, but I gave him a mercy fuck all the same. We talked for a while after, then he calmed down and went home.’

‘So, you mean after the fight with Lorna he...’

‘Reece was no murderer, that’s what I told the cops then and that’s what I still say now.’

‘Remember which pigs you spoke to?’

She said nothing. Her eyes narrowed as she jetted a stream of smoke into Monty’s face. He knew he was onto something; it was as if she was trying to think things through, trying to balance the reward with the risk.

Finally she said, ‘You said you’d give me some dosh for the railway locker.’

Monty dug into his pocket and produced a crumpled fifty. He unfolded the note and laid it on the table just out of Charlie’s reach, then repeated his question.

‘I can’t remember their names.’

He softened his voice. ‘They frightened you?’

She hesitated and placed a skinny hand over her mouth, nodded without looking at him.

‘There was a pig working Vice at about this time, his name was Tye Davis,’ he said, noting her gleam of recognition. ‘He was accused of taking bribes from a pimp, to look the other way when you and your mates were picking up tricks.’

‘Yeah, he used to get freebies from us girls. I never had much to do with him. I don’t mix with cops. There was talk, but.’

‘What kind of talk?’

‘That him and some other cops were setting up business, planning on running some girls of their own. Kitty and Lorna were recruiting for them. They were going to be the managers or some such shit.’

‘Kitty Bonilla?’

‘Yeah.’

The first KP murder victim. Monty’s mind began to whirl. Perhaps taking bribes had been the very least of Tye’s misdemeanours.

Aloud he said, ‘I have a cop mate in Central. He looked at the records and said part of your interview was missing. There’s no mention that you saw Reece Harper after his fight with Lorna. They reckoned Reece followed Lorna after she turned him down and killed her in the park.’

Charlie sprang to her feet. ‘Why should I give a fuck?’ Heads in the fast food restaurant turned. ‘If the cops want to pin it on the wrong bloke, who’s now dead, what do I care? It’s not going to get Lorna back.’

Twitchy and anxious now, Charlie lifted her wrist to her mouth and sucked, staring out of the window into the city night.

Then something or someone in the street caught her attention. She drew breath with a gasp and whipped her head back to Monty, lunging for the fifty on the table. The speed at which she moved took him by surprise. Before he knew it she was on her feet and out of the door.

He reached the pavement outside McDonald’s just in time to see Champagne Charlie running across the road, dodging traffic. A taxi missed her by inches, its honking horn almost drowned in the sound of squealing brakes. On the other side of the road now, he could see her heading for the steps leading down to the station.

He had to catch her.

About to step onto the road he was forced to leap back when a souped-up VL swerved by him. He heard adolescent male laughter and flipped them the obligatory bird. When there was a break in the traffic at last, he flapped across the road as fast as his loose trainers would allow, down the steps to platform one. He stood for a moment under the vaulted glass roof, his eyes taking in the echoing vastness of the near-empty railway station as he searched for Charlie. Few silhouettes darkened the window of a train as it slid from the platform with barely a pneumatic hush. A man was buying a ticket from the automatic machine. A group of tired soccer fans stood around a boarded up newsstand, spitting, smoking and talking.

The clanging of a locker door and the sound of hurried footsteps ahead drew his attention and he saw Charlie’s sticklike figure heading towards the exit stairs. He ran to follow and soon found himself on the street again. With her head hunched and her stride brisk, Champagne Charlie strode under the green tubular footbridge that stretched like a caterpillar above the road, up the pavement and towards the quieter end of the street.

Several minutes later Monty found himself in the same stretch of road where Linda Royce had been abducted. The absence of pedestrians was eerie compared to the hustle and bustle of the club district only a few streets away.

Ahead, a vacant plot of rain-washed weeds marked by a developer’s sign stretched alongside the railway track. Here Charlie stopped and leaned against a light pole, breathless after the exertion of her walk.

Monty caught up with her as she was adjusting the plastic strap of her high red sandal.

‘Hey, I still need you to talk to you about my girl Lorna.’

She opened her mouth, no doubt to tell him to do something physically impossible to himself, but her sentence petered out before it started. Her eyes widened as she tried to focus on something over Monty’s shoulder. He turned to see two men walking up the pavement towards them. In the flicker of the faulty streetlight their movements looked jerky, like computer graphics. He had to squint to make them out. Both were wearing long coats, one man was tall and beefy, the other smaller and wiry.

Champagne Charlie echoed his own thoughts when she said, ‘Oh fuck!’

He glanced back to see her toeing off her shoes. In an instant she’d stepped out of them and was thumping away bare-footed up the pavement.