Peepshow (3 page)

‘Do you know why I’m here?’

Chloe shook her head but I’m sure we both had a fair idea.

‘She didn’t kill him.’ It didn’t even sound like my voice.

‘Of course she didn’t, look at her, five foot nothing in her stockinged feet. Blue—’ He addressed the red-haired guy who went over to Chloe, grabbed her hair and put the gun to her head.

‘Owww,’ she cried.

‘Hey!’ I wanted to run at him but my legs wouldn’t move.

‘Who’d you get to cut Francesco’s throat?’ Sal inquired, opening the pizza box and taking out a slice.

‘No one!’

Blue cocked the gun. ‘Tel him, and I’ll make it quick.’

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘She didn’t have anything to do with it.’

‘And who are you exactly?’ Sal took a bite.

‘She’s a stripper,’ said Blue. ‘Works with this one at the Shaft.’

Sal chewed the pizza and wiped a piece of mozzarella off his chin with the back of his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘you probably didn’t have anything to do with the murder. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time, what you gonna do?’

God. That sounded so final.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said.

‘My brother is dead.’ Sal threw the rest of the pizza back in the box and the corners of his mouth turned down. ‘I now have two responsibilities. To avenge his death and to send a message that anyone who hurts my family or my business interests will suffer.’

This prick was serious. Chloe stood there paralysed and I knew I couldn’t run, couldn’t grab her and dive through a window. All I could do was talk.

‘What if I could tell you who really killed Frank?

What if I could prove it?’

Sal cocked his head to the side. ‘What do you know?’

‘Well nothing yet, but I could. Easily. I’m a private investigator.’

Blue sniggered.

‘Check my purse.’ I nodded at my bag on the coffee table. Sal picked it up and opened my wallet. He found the inquiry agent’s license, turned it over and laughed.

‘Simone Kirsch, private detective. How are you going to find the killer if the police can’t?’

‘Because,’ my mind was racing, ‘I can go undercover at the club. People will tell me things they won’t tell the police. I’ll find out and I’ll come straight to you with the information. You can waste the guy, send a message to the underworld, cops won’t even connect the killing to you. No mess, no fuss.’

God, that was lame. I was fucking dead. We both were. I hoped I lived long enough to be able to scrawl the bastard’s name on the wall in blood.

No one spoke. The tick of the clock on the wall was deafening.

‘OK,’ said Sal, ‘you’ve got a week.’

‘A week’s not long enough. I need a month at least.

I have to build up trust, it’s essential to undercover work.’

All the stuff I’d learned in class was coming back to me.

‘Two weeks. No longer than that. You better be a good private detective.’

‘I am,’ I lied. ‘I’m great at it.’

‘OK.’ Sal stood up and wiped his hands together to get rid of the last of the pizza crumbs. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

I couldn’t believe it was that easy. Soon as they left we could call the cops. Maybe we’d have to go into witness protection.

Blue kept his hand on Chloe’s neck and dragged her towards the door.

‘Get your fucking hands off me,’ she spat.

‘Whoa,’ I said, ‘I thought we had a deal.’

Sal smiled. ‘She’s the insurance. It will encourage you to find the killer and ensure you don’t involve the police, some of whom, by the way, are close personal friends of mine. We’ll be watching, and listening.’

‘Simone!’ Chloe struggled against his grip.

‘Please—’ I begged.

‘Shut up,’ said Blue, and they were gone.

I raced out to the balcony and saw them get into a black sedan but it was too dark to see the make or numberplate. The car took off up Broadway towards St Kilda and I grabbed the phone, ready to dial triple zero. I hesitated, trying to predict what the police would do. Come over here for a start. What if Sal had someone watching the flat or had bugged it? I searched under the coffee table and around the stereo but couldn’t see anything. What if he had someone outside with a directional microphone? We’d learned about those in class. Oh shit. I walked around in circles. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. If I called the police and Chloe ended up with a bullet in her head I’d never forgive myself.

Tears filled my eyes and I remembered when I first moved to Melbourne and found it really hard to make friends. Then I met Chloe when I started stripping at the Crazy Horse and she’d taken me around and shown me all the secret bars down alleyways and the best places to get a souvlaki at four am. Oh god.

I had to calm down and stop panicking. Chloe’s Winfields were on the coffee table and I grabbed the packet and lit one. Cancer and heart disease were the least of my worries right now.

The act of sucking in smoke worked like a meditation—my heart rate slowed and my mind cleared.

Chloe would stay alive while I was investigating, so that’s what I had to do. It would at least buy me some time to think of a better plan. I took a deep breath, called the Red Room and asked if I could come in for a job interview. Now. The receptionist laughed and said it was great I was so keen and booked me in to meet the manager at one the next afternoon. I threw the pizza in the bin and drank wine until it was no longer possible to think or stay awake.

The Red Room was in a stately bluestone building on Flinders Street, around the corner from King and across the river from Crown Casino. The name was spelled out in neon above heavy wooden doors. I pressed a button on the intercom and looked around. It was the middle of the day and office workers hurried about like they were on important business. Lunch, probably. Slashes of deep blue sky were visible between buildings and the trees on the median strip had small green leaves.

It was different after hours. When it got dark this area turned into a nightclub precinct and was jammed with cabs and Pplated cars. Young girls with bare midriffs shared the footpaths with hyped-up guys from the suburbs and minibuses disgorged drunken hens and bucks. Drive-by shootings of club bouncers happened from time to time.

The intercom crackled to life: ‘Yeah?’ a man answered.

I put my mouth up close: ‘My name’s Simone, I’m here about a job.’

‘I’ll be right down.’

A minute later a key rattled in the lock and the door swung inward.

‘Simone? I’m Jim.’ He was early thirties, blond, boyish and a little bit crumpled. He held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger.

‘Nice to meet you.’ I stuck out my hand. He transferred the cigarette to his mouth and we shook. I noticed faded blue tattoos on his knuckles. Jim looked me up and down. I’d worn a black, knee-length skirt, slingbacks and a red halterneck top. Sexy yet sophisticated.

‘This way.’ He locked the door and I followed him up a flight of stairs, past a cashier’s booth and into the club. It was a cavernous, slightly shabby room and the predominant smell was stale smoke and beer. A bar took up the area to the right of the entrance and there was a stage on the left. Wooden podiums with brass poles dotted the room and red-upholstered couches and booths hugged the walls. I followed Jim across the crimson carpet, through an arch opening onto a hallway.

The passage was home to the men’s and women’s toilets and a door marked ‘staff only’. Jim unlocked an unmarked door I hadn’t noticed was there. Opposite us was another arch draped in gauzy curtains. He saw me checking it out.

‘The private rooms are through there,’ he explained as he led me into the office. He sat down heavily in a leather swivel chair behind a large desk. I took a seat and glanced around the room. It was a bunker, small and grey with a concrete floor and no windows. A couple of filing cabinets were crammed into a corner and a bank of video monitors flashed onto different areas of the club. Jim rolled up his shirtsleeves and yawned.

‘Sorry, we had a big one last night. Haven’t been to bed yet.’ He lit another cigarette and held the pack out to me. I showed restraint and shook my head. ‘So, you worked tabletop before?’

‘No, but I’ve stripped.’

‘Where?’

‘Bucks’ parties, Crazyhorse. Also the Shaft, the adult cinema.’

He laughed, ‘Fuck, that place has been around since the seventies. I reckon some of the girls have been around since then too. Stan still run the place?’

I nodded.

‘The Shaft,’ Jim chuckled. ‘No offence, Simone, but you’re too good lookin’ for a dive like that. Peepshows are like a retirement home for old strippers, four kids, tits down to here covered in tatts.’ He placed his hands at waist level and mimed pendulous breasts. ‘You don’t have any tatts do you?’

‘No.’

‘Good. The customers hate it. We get the girls to cover ’em with makeup.’ He grabbed a folder from a pile on the desk, pulled out a photocopied form and wrote on it. ‘Tattoos? No.’ He looked up at me: ‘Measurements?’

‘God, I don’t know exactly. I’m a size twelve. About five seven?’

‘Bra cup?’

‘B.’

He made a note, put out his cigarette and leaned back in the chair with his hands behind his head, ‘You can make a lot of money in tabletop,’ he said. ‘A lot. But you’ve got to be motivated. You can’t just sit on your arse and expect it to come to you. It won’t.’

I nodded, pretending to take him seriously.

‘You’ve got to be able to talk to the guys, flirt with them. You’ve got to be bubbly and outgoing. There’s an art to it.’

‘To hustling?’ It just slipped out. Jim gave me a sharp look. ‘We see it as customer service. Hustling’s something prostitutes do. If you don’t understand the difference then maybe you’re in the wrong place.’

Ouch. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’

He waved my apology away. ‘It’s OK, don’t mind me, I’m just tired.’ He offered me a conciliatory smile.

‘Diet Coke?’ He pulled two cans from a bar fridge under the desk. ‘We have to be really careful here. The laws are outrageous. You get too close to a customer during a dance—the wowsers can say that’s prostitution, close us down.’ He took my contact details and photocopied my driver’s license, which I wasn’t real crazy about. ‘We need girls Friday and Saturday nights. Are you right for tonight?’

‘Sure.’ I sipped my Diet Coke. It tasted like wet cardboard.

‘Good, be here at eight so we can show you around.

By the way, what’s your working name?’

‘Vivien.’ My alter ego for the past three years.

Jim made a note, stood up and unlocked the door. I followed him out across the club. A man with a vacuum cleaner harnessed to his back sucked cigarette butts off the carpet. As we descended the stairs Jim asked, ‘I’m curious, why did you come to the Red Room? Why not Goldfinger’s or Men’s Gallery?’

‘A friend of mine used to work here. Chloe?’

He looked blank.

‘Paris was her working name.’

‘Oh yeah, little blond chick, great tits.’

‘Plus I heard it was really busy now after the, you know . . .’

‘After Frank was murdered?’ We were at the front doors and he stopped and looked at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I winced. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Very well. But don’t be sorry, you’re right. The place is pumping. You know what they say about any publicity being good publicity . . .’

‘See you tonight,’ I said. ‘It was nice to meet you.’

‘Ditto.’ Jim locked the heavy doors behind me.

I took the number 96 tram from Bourke Street to St Kilda. I didn’t drive my car into the city—it was impossible to find a park. Plus I’d never got used to turning right from the left lane and there was a strong possibility the Futura would stall and a tram would run up the back of me.

I wrote down everything I could remember about my encounter with Jim. Like they said at detective school: if it’s worth a mental note it’s worth a written note. Every time I thought of Chloe my guts clenched up. I was desperately worried. I was also paranoid. If someone glanced in my direction I imagined them working for Sal.

I got off the tram at the end of Fitzroy Street and walked towards Elwood along the path that followed the bay. It would conveniently take me past the stretch of water where Frank had bobbed up, the closest I’d ever got to a crime scene.

I passed the new St Kilda Sea Baths complex. I’d considered going to the gym there until I found out the annual membership fees cost four times what I’d paid for my car. It was for expensive people, the kind who never sweat because they don’t have any pores. Rollerbladers and bike riders whizzed past and the fashionable crowd sat at outdoor tables in front of the Stokehouse, drinking champagne in the sun. It seemed wrong that the day was so beautiful when Chloe was locked up somewhere.

My slingbacks began to chafe so I kicked them off and walked barefoot in the sand. Sunbathers lazed on the beach and some folks were actually swimming in the flat, polluted water of the bay.

I sat on the sand in front of Donovan’s restaurant where Frank’s body had eventually been dragged to shore. I’d read all the newspaper reports. Pity the poor tripper who’d mistaken him for a dolphin. The Westgate Bridge gleamed in the distance and I tried to figure out how Frank’s body had ended up in the bay.

He’d only been in the water for a few hours so he must have been dumped somewhere around St Kilda beach. If it was from a boat the police hadn’t located it.

I supposed someone could have just dragged him in, but the foreshore was so public, there were people around all hours of the day and night.

A small rocky headland jutted out to the left of the beach. It adjoined the marina and had a small lighthouse.

You could dump a body off there in relative privacy. To my right the pier stretched five hundred metres into the bay. It was wide enough to drive a car down. I wrote the theories in my notebook, sketched the scene for good measure and felt like a proper detective.

I brushed the sand off my butt and continued home.

On the way I bought a red icy-pole from a kiosk and ate it quickly before it melted. The path went right through the marina and I admired all the boats. The big ones were very ‘Miami Vice’ drug dealer and I wondered what had become of Don Johnson. I passed the sailing school at the southern end of the marina. A middle-aged man was cleaning one of the school’s yachts with a bucket of soapy water. It was twenty foot long and not very flash.