Cherry Pie (16 page)

‘Simone, what a surprise.’

‘Hey.’

Alex jumped up and hurried over, kissed her cheek and grabbed her bags, placing them on the benchtop. ‘We’re just on our way to St Kilda Road. Simone witnessed a hit and run, then the driver tried to take her out, too. It’s tied up with that restaurant case I’m working on.’

Suzy widened her eyes. ‘How awful, are you alright?’

‘Fine. Just a few cuts and bruises.’

‘I know we’re supposed to meet the florist in half an hour …’ Alex said.

‘Don’t worry about it. This is much more important. I’ll be fine on my own.’

Alex disappeared into the bedroom to get changed and it was just me and Suzy. I had to admit she looked better since she’d quit drinking. Clear eyes. Glowing skin. Or maybe it was true what they said about blushing brides.

‘How are the wedding plans going?’ I tried to nudge Graham from my lap but he flexed his claws and they pricked into my thigh.

‘Good. Lots to do but we’re getting there.’

‘Set a date?’ I stood up. Graham hung on. His hind legs were skipping about on the couch and his front paws were hitched to my jeans. It must have looked like we were dancing.

‘November seven. I’m glad you’re here, actually.’

I found that hard to believe. I dislodged Graham by unhooking each individual claw, then scratched him behind the ears to show there were no hard feelings.

Suzy rummaged in one of her boxes and pulled out a white card with embossed lettering. She wrote on it and handed it to me.

‘You’re inviting me to the wedding?’

‘That’s not all. I was wondering if you’d be a bridesmaid.’

Was she completely tripping? Alex walked out of the bedroom wearing a suit jacket and doing up his tie. By the way he stared at her I could tell he thought so.

‘Jeez, Suzy. I’m flattered, I really am, but we hardly know each other. Isn’t there a friend, a relative …?’

‘One of my girlfriends just found out she’s going to be overseas, so I thought that since Sean’s a groomsman and you guys are going out, it would be nice if you were both in the bridal party.’

‘Won’t he still be in Vietnam?’

‘Gets back the morning of the wedding,’ Alex said. ‘Misses the buck’s though.’

They were both looking at me. ‘Um. Well. Sure. Be delighted.’

I’d never been a bridesmaid before and wondered what sort of flouncy pastel monstrosity I’d be forced to squeeze into. At least there would be free food and booze and the opportunity to observe Victoria’s finest pissed to the eyeballs and dancing to

‘Nutbush City Limits’. I wondered what you got a couple of cops for a wedding present. Fluffy handcuffs? Matching flak jackets? A toaster?

‘Great. There’s a dress fitting in a couple of weeks so I’ll get your number off Alex.’

Graham sprang onto the granite benchtop and Suzy smacked his nose and pushed him straight back down. ‘Bad cat! You shouldn’t let him up there, Alex. It’s unhygienic.’

The cat flattened his ears, got down on his belly and shimmied under the couch.

Alex grabbed his keys and his phone. He was kissing Suzy goodbye when my mobile rang. I turned away to answer.

‘Simone Kirsch.’

It was Joy. ‘There’s been a development,’ she said. ‘Andi’s credit card’s been used—in Kings Cross.’

The interview with the Homicide Squad took a couple of hours. I told them everything I could remember about the hit and run and all I’d uncovered regarding Andi’s disappearance.

The shit was gonna hit the fan at Jouissance, but it wasn’t my problem anymore.

Alex had driven us to the police complex in his Commodore, and I’d had a long chat to Joy during the ride, telling her what had gone down. She’d agreed it was best I back away from the case and I assured her that after Gordon’s murder the cops would go all out to find Andi, including following up the Sydney lead.

By eight o’clock I was waiting for Alex in the lobby, watching cars and trams flash by on St Kilda Road and plain clothes and uniformed officers come and go through the automatic doors. Before becoming a PI I’d applied to join the Victoria Police and had been rejected, probably because of my ‘showbiz’ past and the fact that I’d spent my formative years with a whole bunch of dope growing hippies.

I’d always thought the urge to enlist stemmed from a childhood incident in which a female copper saved my mum from a violent boyfriend, but there was probably a bit of rebellion involved as well—what better way to flout an alternative upbringing than join up with the filth? I also had a sneaking suspicion that prancing around doing policewoman shows had made me hot for the uniform, cuffs and gun. It was probably just as well I’d never gotten in. Kowtowing to authority wasn’t exactly my strong point and everybody on the force except Alex and Sean seemed to hate me. The Homicide detective sergeant who interviewed me about Gordon actually said he’d find something to charge me with if I showed up again, which was so unfair. It had been at least three months since I’d visited the squad.

My mobile chirruped. I was expecting my mum, knowing Joy would have talked to her as soon as I’d hung up, but it was Curtis.

‘What’s the deal?’ He didn’t bother with the usual pleasantries like hello.

‘What deal?’

‘The missing waitress, the murdered chef and Trip Sibley. Word on the street is you were almost roadkill.’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘C’mon, I heard you’ve given a statement.’

Word sure travelled fast out there on the street.

‘No comment. How’s Chloe?’

‘Fuck. Even more psycho than usual. You know those posters she stuck up? Put her own phone number on them and in between strip shows she’s running around interviewing every basket case who calls. Hey, you’re not giving someone else an exclusive, are you? John Silvester? That bloody Andrew Rule?’

They were the big guns of Melbourne crime writing and Curtis couldn’t stand it. I suspected he had an inferiority complex after years of writing for a titty magazine.

I decided to wind him up. ‘So what if I talked to them?’

Curtis sputtered down the other end of the phone. ‘But, but what about our friendship? And all the times I helped you out with information? Look, I need this story. I’ve been working on the book full time and my byline hasn’t been seen for months. This is my career we’re talking about.’

‘And that affects me how?’

I hung up and was just thinking I ought to write a book of my own—How to Lose Friends and Alienate People—when the phone rang again. This time it was my mum.

‘Joy told me what happened. Were you actually going to call or was I supposed to find the story on page three of the
Sydney Morning Herald
, like last time?’

I explained that I’d had to turn my phone off during the interview and she settled down some. When she asked who tried to kill me I told her I didn’t know, despite my suspicions.

‘Are you alright?’ she asked.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Have the police caught them?’

‘Nope.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Well, I can’t go home. The cops agreed that whoever tried to run me down probably knows where I live so I’m looking for somewhere else to—’

‘Stay here.’

‘What?’

‘It’s perfect. You’ll be miles away, safe, and you can go home when the police make an arrest. I’ll buy you a ticket on the internet. Can you make it to the airport before nine?’

I thought about it. Surely things would be resolved by the end of the weekend and in the meantime I could stay at Mum’s, eat her gourmet food, drink her pricey wine, enjoy the warm Sydney weather and loaf around. Sure, I’d have to put up with her hassling me to finish my degree, and the occasional dig about stripping, but it’d be better than staying at some crap motel on my own. I had clothes and stuff stored there and it would end up being a cheap weekend, which I desperately needed since my erstwhile best friend had cut off my only source of income.

‘Sure. I can make it by then.’

She rang off and called back a couple of minutes later.

The flight left at nine fifteen. As I hung up Alex emerged from the lift.

‘How’d you go?’ I asked.

He loosened his tie. ‘Reprimanded for failing to warn you off and my commanding officer told me to stay the hell away from you, said you were a jinx.’

‘You believe that?’ I was starting to think it wasn’t too far off the mark.

‘I’m not superstitious.’

‘Give me a ride to the airport then? I have to fly to Sydney.’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘I thought you were off the case. You’re not—’

‘My mum wants me to stay with her till the trouble blows over.’

He looked like he didn’t quite believe me. ‘Promise you won’t start chasing Sam Doyle around?’

‘Cross my heart.’

I opened my eyes, blinked and looked around. I was in the spare room, lying on a single bed beneath a quilt embroidered with the astrological wheel. A large mahogany wardrobe loomed directly opposite, and my old student desk was to my left, petrified chewing gum stuck to the underside. Sun streamed in the window, passing through a translucent parrot sticker, and when a grevillea rasped against the pane the colours danced on the wooden wall. For a moment I imagined I was ten years old, in my loft bed in our house in the bush. Mum’s Sydney Queenslander was a lot like our old place, only bigger and plonked down in inner city Annandale. It was painted forest green, surrounded by native plants, and Tibetan prayer flags hung from the rafters of the bullnose veranda.

The springs squeaked as I got out of bed wearing a pair of men’s paisley pyjamas I’d picked up from Newtown St Vinnies ten years before. I opened the door to the lounge and padded through a dark room crowded with bookcases and overstuffed thirties furniture, passed through the kitchen, with its scarred oak table and garlands of chillies and garlic hanging from the curtain rail above the sink, and headed for the bathroom at the back of the house. The mirror was all steamed up and the clear shower curtain hanging over the old claw foot bath was new and patterned with multicoloured fish. I peed then wandered back to the kitchen and opened the freezer, rooting around for the coffee tin like a rat in a rubbish bin.

‘Hey, honey, sleep well?’

Mum walked in clipping small silver hoops into her earlobes. She was shorter and thinner than me, with close cropped brown hair, high cheekbones and blue-green eyes. In her grey hipster pants, thin red belt and fitted white shirt she looked hot, especially considering she was pushing half a century. The only signs of age were the fine lines around her mouth and eyes and a sprinkling of silver hairs that glimmered in the light. They did say fifty was the new forty. So what did that make twenty-eight? The new eighteen?

I let her hug me for a few seconds before I pulled away. ‘Can’t find coffee,’ I croaked, opening and closing cupboard doors.

‘There isn’t any.’

‘You’re kidding.’

She always had the good stuff, a special blend from Jamaica, hand harvested by Rastafarians, apparently.

‘It’s no joke. Steve and I have been detoxing. Organic food, no dairy, wheat, coffee, alcohol. We’ve been making our own tofu, too, fermenting soybeans in the laundry.’ She picked up her rectangular, black framed glasses and slid them on her face. They were her trademark, along with the burgundy lipstick she was never without. ‘We feel great.’

‘Absolutely fantastic.’ Steve appeared in the doorway. He was in his late fifties, wiry, and always wore his white hair back in a ponytail. He walked over and shook my hand. He’d been on with my mum for ten years, but we still hadn’t got to the hugging stage. Give it time.

‘How’ve you been?’ he asked.

‘Great,’ I said, which was a complete lie considering I’d almost been killed and there was no coffee in the house.

Steve checked his watch. He was usually a massage sandals and drawstring pants sort of guy but was dressed in jeans, a black t-shirt, corduroy jacket and desert boots. I guessed he was off to TAFE where he taught environmentally sustainable building techniques. Mudbricks and shit.

‘We should get going,’ he said.

‘Yep.’ My mum gathered a couple of takeaway containers from the fridge that held either vomit or baby shit, it was an each-way bet.

‘Chickpea curry,’ she explained. ‘There’s more in the fridge if you want some for lunch. As for dinner I’m thinking of organising a barbecue.’

‘Won’t all the little bean sprouts fall through the grate?’

Not my best effort, but my bloodstream was completely devoid of caffeine.

‘We’re allowed seafood. You should try to detox while you’re here, cut out the booze and coffee, lose the stress. Your whole lifestyle is no good for you.’

I smiled through gritted teeth. I didn’t just crave coffee now, I also wanted whiskey and a cigarette. Hell, I could have gone some crack.

She hugged me again, kissed my cheek and rested her hands on my shoulders. ‘It was good of you to help Joy, even though you didn’t find Andi.’

‘I just hope the cops can.’

‘Don’t we all. I’m so glad you’re here and you’re safe. I worry about you, do you know that? When Joy told me someone had tried to run you down, my god. I had heart palpitations, I could hardly breathe. Do you have any idea what that’s like?’ She’d started shaking me a bit.

‘Jeez, Mum, settle down. I’m fine.’

She let go my shoulders and took a deep breath. ‘We’ll be back at six. Oh yeah, before I forget.’ She dug around in her voluminous shoulder bag, pulled out a glossy brochure and threw it onto the table next to the carved wooden fruit bowl.

Sydney University. Bachelor of Arts. ‘Thought you might want to take a look.’

A couple of hours later I’d been to the shops and back, got my coffee fix, eaten some eggs, an organic tomato and a piece of soy cheese that tasted like a pencil eraser. I’d showered and dressed in an old pair of ripped black jeans, a Breeders tee, a red flannelette shirt and a pair of chunky Rossi boots I hadn’t worn for years. I slapped on a bit of my mum’s dark lipstick and bam, it was the nineties and I was on my way to uni. Or, more accurately, the uni bar.

I wandered around the house scratching myself, perused a bunch of books whose titles were enough to put me to sleep and watched a half hour of daytime TV before switching it off and lying back on the couch. The lounge room smelled faintly of charred wood from the open fireplace, and the sandalwood/vanilla scent of burned out Nag Champa incense. Above my head there was a square hatch with dirty fingermarks on the edges that led to the attic, and a round, rice-paper shade hanging from a light bulb. Probably the same one we’d had in seventy-nine. Mum was a hoarder, never threw anything out.