by Candice Fox
Exactly what I need, I thought. I don’t know why. Sweeney never finished the thought.
“I find her fascinating,” Sweeney said.
“She’d probably love to hear you say that.”
“I’d never tell her.” Sweeney gave a guilty little smile. I thought there was a hint of sneakiness to her face, a covert kind of joy. But I wasn’t sure. I glanced over, trying to see if I could catch a flash of it again, some clue to her tone. But she was lost in her thoughts. I took her lead and retreated into mine. The old car rattled around us.
The burly, gray-haired Michael Bell stood with a lean, young blond woman outside the Barking Frog, off to the side of the crime scene tape, their arms folded. I parked behind them and the big man dropped his arms and took in the sight of me, probably measuring me against my infamous images in the morning’s newspapers.
“They’ve fucked it up,” he said, gesturing angrily to the bar.
“Mr. Bell,” I said calmly. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here. I was—”
“You.” He ignored me, pointed a stubby finger at Sweeney as she arrived. “Your people should have been here to stop this kind of bullshit from happening.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The owner,” the blond woman said. She was thin and pale, small-eyed, the kind of absurd Queensland resident who couldn’t take the harsh sun. “She’s turned on the sprinkler system. It’s doused the whole bar. Those police scientist guys, they said they weren’t done in there yet.”
“Oh Jesus. Why didn’t anyone call me? Oh, Jesus!” Sweeney breathed, running and ducking under the tape. I stood at the edge of the cordon, feeling like I should do more to assure my clients before I went inside. But there were no pleasantries. Mr. Bell turned on me like a disturbed guard dog.
“Have you got any leads yet?”
“It’s only been forty-eight hours. We’ve just got our feelers out. We’re searching—”
“Feelers?” Mr. Bell snapped. “Feelers! What are you, a cockroach? I don’t need a fucking cockroach on my son’s murder. I need a bloodhound.”
“We—”
He stormed off toward the edge of the road. I scratched at my scalp, thinking I should probably get away from the woman beside me before any press turned up. Photographs of me beside petite young blondes always sold well, no matter the woman’s actual age.
“I’m Stephanie Neash,” she said. “Andrew’s girlfriend.”
“Right.” I turned to her with renewed interest. “My apologies for Amanda’s tactlessness at your first meeting. She’s not the most sensitive person who ever lived.”
“She was right,” Stephanie said. She pursed her lips, tried to drive out encroaching tears with a hard frown. “He was cheating with Keema. We were talking about getting engaged soon, you know. All our friends knew about our plans. We’d even picked out a wedding venue. And there he was. With her. There was a G-string…” she trailed off. A couple of sobs, a humiliated cringe. “I logged into his Facebook account. It was all there. The messages. I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
She bit her lip hard, her face reddening as she fought to hold back the tears. I thought about hugging her, but it was too risky out here in the open, where someone could snap a picture, sell it to the press. I looked at the treetops, the dirt beneath my feet, anything.
“You weren’t stupid,” I submitted, and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing the top of her arm.
“It took some weirdo investigator lady to tell me he was cheating, and she knew from taking one look at a necklace, for Chrissake.”
“I wouldn’t base the obviousness of Andrew’s affair on what Amanda saw,” I said. “She sometimes sees things no one else could possibly see. She balances out her occasional genius by being excruciatingly impractical the rest of the time, believe me.”
“I wish I could ask him why he did it,” Stephanie said. One tear was caught in her eyelashes. I wanted to wipe it away, but didn’t dare. “I’d just need five minutes. What did I not do? What did I not say? What about me wasn’t enough?”
“It wasn’t you, Stephanie.”
“Then what was it?”
I struggled to offer something. This woman I didn’t know was young and fragile, and looking to me, an impartial stranger, to tell her what she needed to hear. I didn’t know anything about the ways of cheating partners—I’d never cheated, and no one, to my knowledge, had ever cheated on me. Of course, there were obvious theories to grab at. Andrew had probably been her first serious relationship. Maybe she was his, and he got scared or bored or seduced by the beautiful and exotic Keema, and the distant, fantastical life she represented. Maybe Andrew was just mean. A narcissist. A sex addict. But there again the rabbit hole yawned before me, diagnosis and the shallow comfort it offered. There was nothing I could do for Stephanie—even if I consoled her about the cheating, she was stuck in the middle of the mother of all bad breakups—the death of a partner. I felt like a fraud even as I began to speak.
“You’re allowed to hate what he did,” I said. “Even if he’s dead. You can still love him and hate what he did.”
Stephanie didn’t seem to know whether to believe me or not. How could I tell her that I still loved my wife and hated that she had left me to bear the horror of the past year alone? That I thought nightly of going home. Of pretending it had all been a dream. That I actually fantasized about opening the door to my house and finding her there waiting for me the way she had done in the old days, even though I was so consumed with resentment for her that I felt like a hole had been burned in my stomach.
Andrew’s father returned from the roadside. It seemed he had been crying, the rims of his eyes red. He made a sad figure walking back across the barren dirt toward us, trying to drive out the emotion with hard eyes, a tight mouth.
“Do you still think it was a burglary?” Michael asked.
“We’re looking into that angle. Sweeney has officers checking up with suspects of that type in the area. People with past convictions.”
“If they catch him and you guys make out like it was a robbery gone wrong at trial, he might get less time. Voluntary manslaughter, not premeditated murder.” Michael Bell took a deep breath, seemed to struggle to let it out without it catching in his throat. “This was not a robbery gone wrong. It was a cold-blooded execution. My boy and that girl were on the ground. They were helpless.”
Stephanie hid her face in her hands.
“Maybe there was a robbery afterwards,” Michael snarled. “But it was murder first. I hired you and that woman, Amanda, so you could be here from the start. You better make sure there are no illusions about what this crime really is when it comes to trial.”
“Try to put thoughts of a trial to the back of your mind,” I said. “We need to think about catching the guy now. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Right now it’s time for—”
“For what?” he snapped.
“For being sad.” I shrugged. Stephanie was crying into her hands. We both watched her, unable to help. “Right now, you and your family, you just need to be together and be sad. Leave the rest to us.”
The big, burly man submitted, took his dead son’s girlfriend into his arms. Sweeney appeared on the porch of the Barking Frog and I excused myself from them to meet her there. She was speaking with an old woman dripping in jewelry, huge sapphire earrings pulling on her furry white earlobes, her hair an orange tangle pinned here and there with jeweled clips.
“This is Claudia Flannery.” Sweeney gestured angrily at the woman. “The owner. Ms. Flannery has taken the extremely helpful measure of activating the bar’s fire sprinkler system, so that we’ve now lost anything forensically useful that might have been remaining after the murders. I have to tell you, Mrs. Flannery, that this is a deeply suspicious act.”
“You think I did this deliberately?” Claudia raised a penciled orange eyebrow. “You actually think I deliberately flooded my own establishment? Unbelievable. Unbelievable! Why would I want to add wate
r damage to the already substantial mess your officers have made of my business?”
“Because you want to sabotage our investigation?” Sweeney asked.
“What exactly are you insinuating?” Claudia asked. “That I murdered two of my young staff with a gun? I’ve never so much as seen a gun in real life. Young lady, I’m seventy-eight years old.”
“You think because you’re seventy-eight I’m just going to exclude you from our inquiries?” Sweeney said.
“It would be sensible, in my opinion.” Claudia looked at me as though Sweeney was mad.
“How did the system become activated?” I asked.
“No idea.” Claudia shrugged, pulling her light kaftan up at the shoulder where it had sagged, revealing spotted brown flesh. “I came here last night to check everything was in place, and the system just went off. It might have been activated by my cigarette. Who knows? I didn’t bother smoking outside. The place is already trashed. What harm could a little ash do?”
“You weren’t supposed to access the scene at all!” Sweeney’s neck had become red with fury, tendrils of color threatening to creep up her cheeks. “We specifically told you to stay out until our investigation was through. Don’t you want to catch the person who did this?”
“Of course I do.” Claudia gave an indignant snort. “But those children are dead. They’re gone. We might learn something from their spirits, if they’ve chosen to linger. But you’re not going to catch who did this by scraping up gunk from between the tiles in the kitchen and spreading your harmful chemicals all over my walls.”
“Their spirits?” I ventured.
“I’m a certified medium.” Claudia’s tone softened. She took my hand and squeezed my knuckles. “Hospitality is just a means to an end for me. My true interests lie in spiritual guidance.”
“Oh Jesus.” Sweeney put her hands up, surrendered, and walked off.
“What happened here two nights ago was a dark act,” Claudia continued, rubbing her thumbs over the back of my hand. “A slaughter. The man who did it brought the most extreme kind of negative metaphysical forces into this place when he killed those children. The sprinkler system was probably just a reaction of the building’s forces.”
“The building itself has … forces?” I asked.
“Of course it does.” She gestured to the moldy roof above us, dripping with wisteria. “This place is older than me. You think it hasn’t learned a thing or two in its time sitting here, taking human souls into its belly every evening, spitting them out every morning? It knows what happened to those kids. It’s not going to tell you unless you treat it properly.”
Claudia treated me to a wide, yellow grin. I extracted my hand slowly from hers, thinking I’d go and have a crisis meeting with Sweeney where she stood huffing with anger at the end of the porch.
“While you’re here.” Claudia grabbed me again, entangling my hand and forearm again like an ancient, glittering octopus. “You seem like a warm, gentle kind of man. A very perceptive man. The kind who listens.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to get your law enforcement colleagues to do something about the noise from Victoria Songly’s house.” A hard look came over her features, pinching the corners of her eyes. “And no one is heeding my call.”
“Victoria Songly?”
“She lives back there.” Claudia thrust an arm dramatically toward the back of the bar. “Having renovations done, it seems. She’s complained about the noise at night in the bar here on dozens if not hundreds of occasions. She gets away with it because her husband was Tom Songly. The commissioner. And now she thinks she can have jackhammering going on outside council-approved hours. Well, it’s not fair. Don’t we want things to be fair around here, Mr.… I’m sorry, I never caught your name.”
“Collins.”
“Mr. Collins?”
“How long has it been going on?” I asked.
“I only noticed it this morning.”
“Maybe it’s just a short-term thing,” I reasoned. “I mean, the bar’s not even open.”
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Mr. Collins, that it’s the principle of the matter.” Claudia smiled. “You seem like a principled man.”
“I’ll check it out.” I pulled my hand free of her tentacles again. “No problem, Ms. Flannery.”
Walking to the edge of the porch, I began to perceive a faint jackhammering noise coming from the direction of the back of the property, somewhere beyond the tangle of rainforest at the side of the building. Sweeney reeled around to face me as I approached, almost sticking me in the face with an angry finger.
“The sprinkler system didn’t just come on,” she snapped. “She turned it on so that she could open the bar back up. She’s losing money, the old cow. All that spiritual guide bullshit is so completely fake.”
“Whoa.” I held my hands up in mock surrender. “Your aura is so dark right now.” The joke bounced off her.
“My mother was one of those ‘spiritual’ people,” she sighed, staring at the people gathered by the side of the road. “She fluttered off like a mystically liberated butterfly when I was fifteen, never to be seen again.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she huffed.
“It seemed like a bit of a desperate measure for a bar that doesn’t make a lot of money,” I said. “The week’s takings were only twelve hundred bucks.”
“She has to make more money than that here,” Sweeney said.
“She said she was a certified medium,” I suggested. “Maybe she does psychic readings.”
“What garbage. How do you certify a medium? What’s the test for that? Guess your star sign? Guess your credit card numbers, more like it.”
I shrugged, not wanting to push it.
“There are rumors far and wide the place is a biker hangout,” Sweeney said. “They probably make drug exchanges here to the truckers heading up and down the coast dropping packages. I mean, we said it, didn’t we? That if this was a robbery, it was a gross overestimation?”
“Have your people checked out the biker angle with Michael Bell?” I asked. “Amanda told me his father was—”
She held up a hand to stop me. “We’ve looked into it.” Her voice had dropped low. “He says he’s legit, and there’s nothing in his criminal record or his bank accounts that would suggest he has any kind of unsavory connections. I have a couple of officers tailing him to see if he meets with anyone in the next few days who we can connect to anything drug or biker related, but if he finds out about that he’s going to lose his fucking mind.”
“Right.” I glanced back at Michael, who was ranting to Stephanie, pointing at the bar. I changed the subject. “Who’s Tom Songly?”
“What? Oh, Songly—he’s the ex–New South Wales police commissioner, mid-1970s. The house is back there.” She waved a hand toward the back of the bar. “I sent officers around there too. Old lady didn’t hear or see anything.”
I nodded. “I thought I knew the name. Songly. Everybody flees north, huh? He was involved in all that seventies stuff.”
The mid-1970s in Australian policing was a dire time for corrupt officers who had spent decades handling crimes with a less-than-professional approach. Cops were heavy-handed in their interrogations, free and easy with their violence toward criminals, and sticky-fingered with evidence, particularly of the paper kind. The center for this dark style of policing seemed to be New South Wales, but underworld wars in Melbourne marked the reach of the infection there. An inquiry revealed many cops were being paid off by criminals in the drug and prostitution trade in exchange for turning a blind eye to their occupations, and the reek of corruption climbed throughout the ranks. I didn’t know if Commissioner Tom Songly had copped any heat during the royal commission, but making a break for it to the tropical north in his retirement years had probably been a sensible move given all the blame games in New South Wales.
“Does the old man still live there?”
“He’s dead,” Sweeney said. “Died of an aneurism a couple of years ago. What’s the interest?”
“She’s making too much noise for our resident spiritual goddess.”
“She’s complaining about the noise in the middle of our murder investigation?” Sweeney let out a long, heavy sigh, massaging her brow. “I’m so annoyed, I’m giving myself a headache.”
“I’ll deal with it,” I told her.
I left her to make the necessary phone calls about the ruined crime scene and wandered around the side of the building to the back of the bar, where the rainforest gave way to a lush creek bed. It was wet here. The air was alive with clouds of fruit flies feeding on a wild passion fruit vine draped between enormous eucalypts. The jackhammering grew louder, an inconsistent grinding sound that echoed down the green tunnel of forest spreading out on either side of me, accommodating the creek as it trickled toward the river. Further downstream there was a group of cops sweeping the bank with metal detectors, one walking slowly in waders through the creek. I walked down the slope and hopped across some big rocks and up the other side, and was about to turn around the side of the house when I noticed a movement through the fence.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” someone answered. I put a boot on a big rock and rose up, holding on to the triangle points of the top of the fence. There was a lean, black-haired young man in the backyard making a pile of broken concrete shards and splinters of wood.
“How are ya?” He smiled.
“Yeah, good.” I reached over and shook his dusty hand. “Ted Collins. I’m with the police back here at the bar.”
“Oh, yep.”
“What you guys up to?”
“Just rippin’ out a bathroom.” He nodded toward a darkened living room. “It’s my nanna’s place. We’re making moves to sell it.”
Through the glass doors to the living room I could see a couch, the lap of an old lady sitting there, her feet in socks and pale blue terrycloth slippers. The television in the corner was on, a news update wrapping up, thanking the people who dressed the hosts in a roll of credits. In the corner of the yard I spotted a fishpond. It was a cute little place. I hoped the renovations weren’t going to destroy its charm.