Eden (10 page)

I
t was a good sleep. I got home and sank a quarter bottle of scotch or so, then popped three Oxy and showered, leaning my head against the wall, thinking. Worrying, a little, about Eden. I knew I didn’t have to worry about Eden but I did anyway. Got to convincing myself, as I did sometimes, that she was a woman like other women I’d known, who needed guidance and protection, who was likely to do silly things if left alone too long.

I woke up with the cat on my neck, sprawled across from shoulder to shoulder like a great woollen scarf, heavy enough to make me catch my breath. It yowled when I shoved it off. I knew cats could kill babies lying on them like that. Cot death. Cat death. Could they kill cops in their forties who drank too much? I lay looking at the creature. Pretty little killer. Like Eden. I don’t know why I kept it, what piece of Martina I hoped could be preserved by a lazy, angry, smelly thing that whined all the time and had probably forgotten she ever existed.

I wanted to see Hades but I didn’t have the time, so I called while I laced my boots, the phone wedged in my ear. “You owe me ten grand.”

“That was swift.” His voice, gruff, grating on years of whisky and cold air.

“I don’t really have the time to be otherwise.”

“Eden?”

“Doing what she does.”

“You tell her to come out to me when she gets off.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“So.”

“Did you kill a girl named Sharon Elizabeth White?”

Dead silence. I listened to it. Tried to fathom what would come next. I straightened up and held the phone against my ear.

“This again,” he said finally.

“Seems so.”

“No, I didn’t kill Sunday.”

“Well, you’ve got a problem then, haven’t you?”

“Who is it? Her sister?”

“Sister necked herself.” I patted the cat. “Nephew’s on the case. Adam White, badly dressed, hell of a right arm swing.”

“It never ends, you know.”

“I can imagine.”

“You want to solve my problem for me?” The old man set his coffee mug down. I heard it clunk on his kitchen table.

“No, I don’t. I really don’t.”

“You find Sunday’s killer and I’ll give you a hundred grand.”

I stopped patting the cat. It head-butted my arm, walked around the back of me, climbed onto my lap.

“That’ll make for interesting conversation with my accountant.”

“Get an ABN. Register yourself as a private investigator. I’ll pay through my lawyer. Anonymous, unless the case is ever investigated. Which it won’t be.”

“I can’t just—”

“Don’t spend it too quickly in your mind. I don’t see you getting it. Nobody ever found Sunday.”

I felt cold. The way he said it, like there was a Sunday to be found somewhere, cold bones lying in dry earth. No one ever found Sunday.
I don’t do this shit for fun, boy-o.

“I’ll come out there this evening,” I said. He hung up. I shook myself all over, decided to put thoughts of Hades and his dirty money out of my head. The eager cat got under my feet as I headed out into the kitchen to feed it. Soft toes squished under mine. It hissed and skittered away from me.

 

 

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t late to a meeting with the families of the missing girls. They’d agreed to get together at Keely’s mother’s house, but I’d seen footage of them fighting about the girls on the news and knew tensions were frayed. I sat in traffic and beeped and sweated and swore, crunched Oxy, and tried to find a radio station not saturated with advertising. White noise. I phoned headquarters half an hour before the meet time and told them to warn the families to break out the cigarettes.

I parked outside the Manning house and noticed a few men were following my advice, standing on the pebbled concrete steps peppering the garden with orange butts and ignoring each other. If not for the number on the mailbox, there would have been no distinguishing this place from hundreds of other rental town houses lining the street. They all shared the same neutral tones—apricot cream, pastel pink, ivory rose. Hardy plants that would withstand the blazing treeless summer sprayed from garden beds in black and red spikes.

I walked up to the house thinking about the girls. This was the last place her family had seen Keely before she headed to Bankstown to grind out some cash in the sex trade. What she usually did was sink into the body-perfumed sheets of the upstairs bedroom until noon every day, when
Dr. Phil
woke her, then off to the shops for cigarettes and frozen lasagna—a cycle with its own biology. The pretty lazy girl with the curly hair.

One of the men on the doorstep jutted his chin at me. Same curls. A brother? I’d wondered if there would be press hanging around the front of the missing girls’ houses, but by the look of these two I could understand why there weren’t. These were the kind of guys who’d chase you off the lawn with cricket bats given half the chance.

“Getting hot in there,” he said.

“Sounds like it. Sorry. Traffic.”

I offered my hand but he didn’t take it—held the screen door open instead. Maltese terriers crowded at my feet, three of them, the haggard panting of animals fed too much and locked inside with dope smoke all day.

I led my brigade of dogs into a small living-dining room. Venetian blinds, some missing, blocking off a view of the yard. Yellow clouds on the ceiling. The reek of smoke. Everyone turned and looked at me. The only sound was the consistent peal of budgerigars in a cage hanging from the edge of the window over the oven in the open kitchen. The bottom of the cage was misshapen and covered in spaghetti sauce splatter. As I neared the cage, the birds panicked and flapped around, spraying seed husks and feathers out of the bars.

“Frank Bennett.” I offered a hand to the nearest woman, a big hulk of curly-haired suburban mother I assumed to be Keely’s mother. Tit tatts. Her whole arm seemed to take the tremor of my contact like a seismic monitor made from cellulite.

“About time you got here.”

“Let up, would you, for Christ’s sake,” another mother said from across the room. The Kidds. About five of them, crowded around one of the overstuffed faux-suede recliners. Mother, father, confused pre-teens, all of them thin-faced and angular. I picked out the Benfields across the chess board from them, holding down the opposite recliner, Mum and Dad only. The thin rodent-like Kidds and the fat speckled, curly Mannings. The Benfields distinguished themselves by being economically superior to the others, given the disdain with which they observed their surroundings. Mrs. Benfield brushed at her forearms like they were picking up toxic dust. The only two people in the room who seemed to be getting on were a pair of toddlers sitting on the shag rug in front of the television, trying to swallow bits of Lego.

“I’m really sorry about the time.” I cleared my throat, tried to face them all. “I understand you’re all frustrated. And you’re right if you’re thinking you’re probably going to spend the next couple of hours repeating to me everything you already told my case workers over in Parramatta. I’m the principal on your case, however, and I’ve got to see you all together. So I’m going to try to make this as painless and as meaningful as I can.”

I was very careful to get my “ful” and “less” in the right spots. There was a silence in which they all made sure. Then everyone tried to talk at once. No one invited me to sit down. So I went to the couch in front of the toddlers and sat anyway. One of the babies began fooling with my shoelaces.

“Mr. Bennett, was it?” said Mrs. Benfield, still scratching her arms. She was making me feel itchy. Someone thrust a coffee into my hand, spilled it on my fingers, on the throw over the couch.

“Hi, yes.”

“We had a principal on our daughter’s case. What happened to Detective Ellis?”

“When we conclusively connected your daughter’s case with those of the other missing girls, the file shifted out of Missing Persons and over to me and my partner. I’m sitting down with Detective Ellis and Detective Costa this afternoon to get a briefing.”

“Who’s your partner?” asked someone behind me.

“Eden Archer. You might have seen her on the news. The surgeon case.”

“Ellie who?”

“Eden.”

“What kinda stupid name is Eden?” The father, Michael Kidd.

“Who gives a fuck what her name is? Where
is
she?” One of the brothers, accusatory.

“She’s operating on this case in another capacity right now.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“She’s off,” I turned my head, gave him my profile, “doing other shit. This is a one-man job.”

“A one-man job. You hear that? Three young girls missing and they send us one fucking guy.”

“There are plenty of people working on the case right now.” I rubbed my eyes. “But sitting here with you for a briefing is a one-man job.”

“I’m writing to the papers about this.”

“Mr. Kidd, I understand you’re upset—”

“So, the cases are connected.” The Benfield father seized the floor with an expression like he’d smelled something foul, like something rotting inside him was giving off fumes up the back of his throat. Rage. “They’re connected through Jackie Rye, aren’t they?”

“Right now Mr. Rye is a person of interest. There are a number of persons of interest at present.” I slurped my coffee, wondering what I’d find at the bottom if I ever got there. It tasted of margarine.

“You arrested him?”

“No.”

“The fuck not?” One of the Kidds.

“Look,” I held up a hand, “I know what you want right now is action. Arrests. You have to understand that sometimes making an arrest straight away can be the worst thing you can do. Your case is being handled with the utmost tactical consideration. I can’t tell you how, but people are on this with everything they’ve got, and some very dangerous shit is going down for members of my team. Trying to pull apart the investigation is a natural reaction, and I totally get it, but it’s a waste of time. Everything that can be done is being done.”

The crowd considered this for a second or two. The babies at my feet babbled and sang. The one with the shoelace fascination, a Manning by the curls, grabbed my fingers and pulled herself up by them. I sat and let her tug at my hands like the reins of a horse, jostling, investigating the buttons on the cuffs of my shirt. The baby’s trust seemed to win me over to the watchers. Their attention left me and turned on each other.

“Someone should be taking these lot aside and talking to them about how long they’ve known Jackie Rye,” the Manning father snapped. He stabbed a finger at the Kidds. “I haven’t heard a single thing yet about your relationship with that man. Your daughter introduced our daughter to him. You
knew
he was trouble and you let my daughter—and your own—go out there.”

“Erin was the one who knew Jackie. We met him once.”

“Didn’t you buy a car from out there?”

“Yeah?”

“Wasn’t that two years ago? Don’t you also buy speed off him? Haven’t you bought speed off him in the last six months?”

“This has nothing to do with anything.” The Kidd father was burring up, shoulders back, chest out like a gorilla trying to ward off a rival, nipples jutting at his damp T-shirt. “Stop thinking you’re some kind of fucking Sherlock Holmes. This fuckwit’s been spreading shit around the entire town about us and how we raised our kid.”

“Oh fuck off.”

“You fuck off.”

“I don’t have to spread any shit about your mob, mate. You do it just fine yourselves.”

“Our daughter is missing, too, you moron.”

“Is she? Is she, or is she out there somewhere with him? She and Jackie are probably selling my daughter’s bones. Erin could have talked Keely into anything, she was such a manipulative little slut.”

The Kidd father was up, halfway across the room before he found himself tangled in the arms of one of his sons. I sat back and watched, making notes on the pad on my knee. This was what I’d wanted, after all—for them to forget I was there, to talk about speed and stolen cars and who knew who and didn’t want to implicate themselves. The women were sneering at each other now, about boyfriends stolen and skirts worn too short and a birthday party ruined by a drunken confession. The babies seemed used to all the turmoil. One stood by my knee, trying to take the pen from my fingers. I reached up and patted down the infant’s blond hair, tried to tell if it was a boy or girl in its shabby gray tracksuit.

The Benfields were watching the argument, tears running down the mother’s cheeks. She was watching the faces of those around her like she was trying to imagine how they could have appealed to her baby, how she could have felt at home among this type. I’d seen the look before on the mothers of junkie girls whose murders and overdoses and hotel balcony dives I’d investigated back in North Sydney, girls who had been sold, used, discarded like used fast-food wrappers.

Some mothers have bad girls and they know it. But they’re always shocked when they see the kind of friends she kept, the bed she died in, the state she’d let her body get into when the clothes were stripped away and she was laid out on a morgue table—meat made of a person you created, a person whose safety you obsessed over once. You ignore these things when you have a bad child. You get blinded by your own love.

I kept listening, sipping my bad coffee. It took a good twenty minutes and about ten pages of notepad for everyone to work up a sweat, a couple of women to storm out, a few death threats to be fired back and forth. I didn’t take much notice of the death threats. People like this killed each other in a drunken, angry snap over a barbecue on a Saturday football night, chips spilled everywhere, glasses broken, no time for threats, for thinking, for planning. It was all very boring. The urban-sprawl homicide beat was an easy beat. Dave-o stabbed Johnno. Oh no.