by Clare Kauter
My mind wandered back to my conversation with Ella. Beautiful Ella, with her black hair and perfect teeth and eyes that hinted she knew more than she was letting on… Speaking of which, what was it she’d said about Nat? Why would they make her your boss? Typical. I had no idea what she meant by that, and if she hadn’t acted so strangely after she’d said it I might have let it go. Typical. Did she know what Bruno was up to, pairing me with Natalia? But no, she’d said we were going out with Bruno tonight and that she’d tell me there. Surely she wouldn’t tell me his great master plan right in front of him. It had to be something else. But what?
There was a knock on the office door and it opened, a head peeking through. The second I saw it I felt my jaw and fist clench and I had to intentionally relax myself.
Bruno. I hated him so much I had a physiological reaction to simply seeing his face.
“I hear you’re coming out drinking with us, Billy,” he said, smiling. No, not smiling. He just kind of stretched his lips. ‘Smiling’ implies that there was some sort of emotion on his face instead of just those cold, dead eyes staring limply at me. Yes, a limp stare. Like an old stick of celery, sagging over. I know it doesn’t make sense. I’m just telling you what I saw.
“Yes, I am,” I replied, forcing my own smile and making sure my stare was appropriately turgid. (Yep, I hate myself for that turn of phrase too.)
“Good to have you back,” Bruno lied. “I’ve missed kicking your arse at pool.”
I frowned. “I think maybe your memory is a little hazy, Bruno. I seem to remember you curled up in a ball in the corner crying after your own arse-kicking.”
He laughed, but his eyes stayed emotionless. “I think you might be the one misremembering, Billy.”
“Why don’t you just whip your dicks out and compare them?” Nat asked, leaning back in her chair and crossing one foot over the other on top of her desk. “Save a little time.”
“You coming tonight, Natalia?” Bruno asked, and for the first time I saw some kind of life in his eyes. I didn’t know what that meant, but I suspected. Really? Bruno had a thing for Nat? The plot thickened. Now it was nearly as thick as Bruno.
“Sorry, Bruno. Got shit to do.”
“Like what?”
“Pressing matters.”
“Like?”
“Anything other than spending time with you.”
He stared at her for a moment more before looking back at me, his eyes returning to their usual state. “You ready?”
“Let’s go.”
Half an hour later, I was seated at the local pub (although it was a little too fancy to really be called that) with Ella on one side of me and the Sydney branch manager, Drew, on the other. Bruno was sitting on the other side of the table talking to a couple of guys I didn’t know. They both worked in security, apparently. Drew had introduced me to them, as well as a couple of the new PIs. It struck me as kind of strange how many new employees there were since I’d last worked at the Sydney branch. Bruno and Drew were the only guys here I recognised. There were a couple of familiar faces back at the office, but they didn’t seem to hang out with this crowd. I briefly wondered what the reason for the high employee turnover rate was, but then my eyes flicked to Bruno across the table. He was management now. No wonder people had wanted to get out.
“Did you work with many of these guys before you transferred?” Ella asked, sipping her cocktail through a striped paper straw. Her drink was bright pink and glittery, like unicorn piss. Not that I said that to her.
I shook my head. “No, just Bruno and Drew.”
She nodded. “Well, they’re good guys. Fun to have a drink with. I’m sure you’ll make plenty of new friends even if your old buddies are gone.”
I didn’t point out that I hadn’t really had that many buddies last time I was here. That sounded kind of sad. And I was sure Bruno would point that out for me in good time. “I’m not too cut up about it,” I said, smiling at her. “Especially the receptionist you replaced.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh my god, that guy John?”
I nodded, grimacing at the mere memory of him. He’d once lodged a complaint against me for signing an email to him with ‘thanks’ instead of a more formal signature. “He was… I don’t have the words.”
“A loser?”
I frowned at her. “When did you meet him?”
“When I began at Baxter & Co. last year they wanted to make sure I was trained up properly, so I started a few days before he left.” She shuddered. “I think I was allergic to him.”
“Allergic to a person? I don’t know if that’s a thing.”
“I didn’t think it was until I met him either.”
I laughed. “He’s awful. What happened to him?”
“Transferred out, I think. Not sure where.”
I grimaced. “I pity the people who ended up with him.”
“Better them than us.” She leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “I think Bruno might have had a hand in getting him transferred out.”
Taking a sip of my glass of red wine, I thought about that. Was that true? Did Bruno really have that kind of power now? If so, I would be on a plane back to Brisbane within the week. Great.
“So, Billy,” said Drew, turning to me, “how does it feel to be back?”
I gave him my most convincing smile. “Great,” I lied.
“How’s your case going?” Bruno asked from across the table. “I know it’s a bit of a strange one.”
The other conversations had died down and now all eyes were on me. “It is strange,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting to get thrown into such a high profile case on my first day back, to be honest.”
Bruno raised his eyebrows. “High profile? Aren’t you chasing a ghost?”
“Chasing a murderer, actually,” I said.
He nodded. “Right. But you’re working for the ghost.”
I frowned. “How could I possibly be working for a ghost, Bruno? You know they’re not real, right?”
He crossed his arms. “So you haven’t had any word from the spirit realm yet?”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Have you managed to find any suspects?” he asked. “I thought they’d decided that case was just a random mugging.”
I frowned. “Whoever thinks that is an idiot.”
“Really?” he said. “You have a better idea, then? One day on the case and you’ve got a stronger theory about what happened than the cops came up with after a month of investigating?”
“We’ve got several better theories,” I said. “Not that the cops make it hard.”
“We?” he repeated. He made a show of pretending he’d just remembered he’d lumped me with a babysitter. “Oh, right. You’re working with Natalia. How’s that going?”
One of the guys sitting next to him snickered. “I’m sure she’s a bucket of laughs.”
A couple of the other guys laughed along with him. I kept my face impassive, but in truth I was amazed. Seriously? There were three managers at this table – Drew, Bruno and the dude in charge of the security department – and yet they were openly bagging Nat out. They weren’t even trying to be professional. My gaze flicked to Drew. I was expecting him to step in, but instead he laughed along with the others. Then he appeared to remember I was sitting there because he glanced at me and his face sobered.
He cleared his throat. “We really shouldn’t speak about her this way,” he said. “It’s not professional.”
It took some effort not to roll my eyes at him. Drew and I had always gotten along fine, but it had seemed to me that he was way too easily influenced by those around him to make a good manager. He had a pathological need to be liked that made him easily manipulable. I hadn’t minded too much having a boss like that back in the day – it meant that I knew how to get my own way. In situations like this, though, it would have been nice to have someone who actually did their job properly.
It seemed like Nat hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d
said everyone in the office hated her. Nat and I barely knew each other, but even so I didn’t like seeing a table of people slagging her off like this. She was blunt, sure, but nevertheless I liked her.
Bruno rolled his eyes. “Oh, Drew, you worry too much. This won’t get back to her.” He gave me a pointed look. “We’re all friends here.”
“Why have you got such a big problem with her?”
“She’s a bitch,” said Bruno.
“Really?” I replied. “When I first saw the way you looked at her, Bruno, I actually thought you might have a crush on her.”
He laughed, but it was forced. Yep, I was right. Bruno had a thing for her. But then why was he being such a fuckwit about her? Was he really that clueless about relationships? Had no one told him that being a total bag of dicks doesn’t really get you anywhere when you’re trying to pick up? Well, it might get you somewhere, but it was more likely to be a punch in the face than a date.
“Billy, I’m not the one with the crush on Nat.”
My brow wrinkled. What was he talking about? “What do you mean?”
He sighed. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Billy,” he said. “She’s not very good at her job.”
I frowned. “She seemed alright to me. And her record –”
“We give her the easy cases. Minor things that are easy to clear up, you know. Just to keep her happy.” He paused. “Or as happy as someone like that can be.”
“It’s true,” Drew chimed in. “She got her position less based on talent and more on… other assets.”
I gave Drew a look of disgust. “Are you telling me you hired her because she’s hot?”
“I didn’t hire her!” he said quickly.
I glanced across at Bruno who shook his head. “I didn’t hire her either.”
“Then who did?”
Bruno leaned forward in his chair, placing his elbow on the table and propping his head up with his hand. “Who do you think?”
“I don’t…” I trailed off as the realisation hit me. They couldn’t be talking about…
Bruno nodded. “Looks like you’ve finally caught on.”
“Are you telling me – are you talking about –”
He nodded and picked up his beer in the hand not occupied with holding up his head. “Yep. She was hired by Adam Baxter.”
Just the sound of his name made my blood run cold.
“So?” I said, trying to stay calm. “Not that weird that he hired someone. He is second in charge of the company.”
“It wouldn’t be that weird if he hired someone good,” said Bruno.
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t notice how clueless Natalia is?”
I frowned. “Clueless?” Seemed to me that was a bit of a weird way to describe a private investigator. Clues were kind of our business.
Bruno snorted. “Don’t worry, Billy. She had us all fooled at first, too. She covers it up pretty well, but she’s got no idea what she’s doing.”
“She seemed to do fine today,” I said. Except when she took over questioning Audrey earlier, but hey, she was technically in charge of the case. And she’d seemed perfectly capable the rest of the day. Bob, the head homicide detective, clearly trusted her. Then again, he wasn’t the most discerning individual. No, what was I thinking? Bruno was just being a dick. “Her case record is nearly perfect.”
“She’s fine with the easy cases.”
“If she’s so terrible, why did you stick me with her?” I asked, leaning back in my chair. “Come to think of it, if she’s that bad why don’t you just fire her and hire someone better?”
“Sorry about making you work with her, Billy,” Drew said. “We, uh, we felt bad about that, but we didn’t really have a choice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We can’t get rid of her,” said Bruno, “as much as we’d like to.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re fucking each other.”
My eyebrows headed for the ceiling. “Excuse me?”
“Adam and Natalia. They’re screwing.”
I opened my mouth, but I wasn’t sure what to say. “Are you serious?”
Bruno nodded, and I looked to Drew to confirm it. Either everyone at this table had a really good poker face or they weren’t just messing with me – they were telling the truth. But Nat and Adam? Seriously? No way. I mean, I didn’t think much of the guy, but I couldn’t see him being this unprofessional. “You really think that Adam Baxter would cover for someone being terrible at their job just because he wants to sleep with them?” I said. “Please.”
“Seriously, Billy? You’re defending him after what he did to you?”
I swallowed, unable to form a reply. Finally I managed to get my throat under control and choked out, “That was different.”
“What, you telling me you fucked up on that case?” said Bruno, raising his eyebrows. “You, Billy Defranco, actually made the first mistake of your life?”
The words sounded like a compliment, but the tone certainly didn’t. “You know I didn’t fuck up,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Exactly. And yet you wound up demoted and transferred to another state because Adam Baxter’s friend got hurt,” said Bruno. “And you think what we’re telling you is out of the question?”
“That’s what I meant before,” said Ella from beside me. I’d almost forgotten she was there.
“What?”
“What I said about Nat,” she explained. “She’s always getting her own way no matter how much she screws up and none of us can do anything about it because she’s sleeping with the boss.”
Somehow hearing it from Ella’s lips made it that much more believable. That could have just been me getting distracted by her lipstick again, though.
“Does she screw up that often?” I found myself asking.
“All the time,” answered Bruno. “And it’s not just that she messes up cases. She does whatever she wants. Shows up late or hungover. Treats everyone else like crap.”
Ella nodded. “She even broke poor Bruno’s nose once.”
I bit my inner lip to keep myself from smiling. Sure, Nat might be screwing the man who’d made my life a living hell for more than a year, but breaking Bruno’s nose was definitely one mark in her favour.
Chapter Eleven
Natalia
While Billy was off having drinks with Drew and his merry band of dickheads, I took the opportunity to spend a little time in the office. There were a couple of things that had happened today that had gotten me thinking, although I wasn’t quite sure why, and I decided I’d better do a bit of extra research. Not on the case. No, I felt like I was pretty much done on that for the day.
I wanted to look into Billy.
A few times he’d reacted strangely to things I’d said, and I wanted to know why. Whatever the reason he’d left, he didn’t seem particularly forthcoming with it. From what I’d gathered earlier, Billy had broken up with his boyfriend after deciding to move to Queensland, so he hadn’t transferred for personal reasons. It seemed likely, then, that something had happened at work to make him want to move away. But what?
Logging into the computer, I looked him up once more. I didn’t have the highest level of access when it came to looking at other employees’ records, but I could see some things. Enough to know that Billy’s clearance rate back when he’d been a PI the first time around was near perfect. But I already knew all that. I opened the record of his transfer, hoping maybe I’d missed some detail there last time I’d combed through this, but there was nothing.
Employee requested transfer into security department. To be stationed in Brisbane office.
I know, so poetic it should have been on a greeting card. OK, so no details had magically appeared there over the weekend. Nothing at all to indicate why he’d requested the transfer. I clicked back to his main file and opened up the record of his last case. Scanning through it, I didn’t really find anything interesting.
He was investigating a burglary. Not a particularly tricky or dangerous case. It was just the kind of thing that often got passed onto us because the police didn’t have the resources to look into it. There was security footage from outside the house that had been broken into and everything. Billy had identified the person in the footage and the guy had been arrested. The whole thing had taken three days. The burglar likely didn’t even know Billy was involved. Nothing about the case to indicate why Billy might have requested a transfer. So what did that mean?
Just for kicks, I opened up his security files as well. That wasn’t nearly as interesting as the investigation stuff. He’d watched monitors, acted as a bouncer, installed security systems, corralled crowds at high profile events, been employed as a bodyguard – it seemed to me he’d done a bit of everything. It hadn’t taken him long to work up to the more important, cushy security jobs either. It looked like he had the same talent for security as investigation.
My brow wrinkled as I studied his record. If someone had put this page in front of me without telling me whose record it was, I would have assumed it was someone new to the company working as hard as they could to get promoted either into management or into the PI division. Some people were happy staying in security, but this didn’t look like the file of someone who was happy in their job. This looked like the file of someone who was trying to climb out.
There was something weird here and I didn’t know what it was. Why had Billy asked to be demoted only to seemingly try to work his way back here as fast as possible? Was the job he transferred into just a lot worse than he’d expected? Surely not. Scrolling to the top of the page, I saw that Billy had started out in security five years ago here in Sydney. He’d worked his way up to the investigation department. So he’d known what he was getting into when he transferred back. It seemed unlikely, then, that this was just an ill-informed decision.
Had he left because he wanted to move to Brisbane? That couldn’t be it. Firstly, Billy didn’t seem totally insane, and secondly, he seemed to really, truly love Sydney. The way he’d looked at Bondi Beach was damn near indecent, and he’d practically salivated at the view of the bridge from the restaurant where we’d met the detective. Well, before he started to get all weird and mopey at least.