by Tara Moss
‘I thought that it was you, but I had to be sure you came alone,’ the blonde said. ‘You did come alone, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Mak assured her.
Amy seemed only slightly reassured. She nodded nervously and looked towards the glass doors at the front, obviously petrified of something—or someone. She was small and held herself even smaller, arms folded tightly across her chest. She looked to be no older than twenty, with shiny bare skin and large brown eyes.
‘I heard you when you dropped by,’ Amy said, keeping her eyes averted. ‘Larry has been such a sweetheart, taking care of me. I told him I didn’t want anyone to know I was there, you know. That’s why he had to say I wasn’t home. He did it for me.’ When she looked to Mak again she gave her a quizzical look. ‘He’s right—you do look like a model. You’re really a private eye?’
Mak nodded. ‘Technically I am a forensic psychologist, but I also work as a licensed private investigator. Here is my card.’ She produced a business card from her wallet. ‘If you ever need to contact me about anything, you can call me day or night.’
Amy read the card before putting it in her purse. She looked Mak over. ‘You never thought about dancing?’
‘No, not me,’ Mak replied, discomfited by the statement. It seemed an odd thing to say to a near stranger. As a dancer, perhaps it seemed normal to Amy to comment on other women’s bodies.
Meaghan had been sucked into that world. Likely this was the reason for the unexplained gifts to her family—wanting to show her mum she was doing all right but still not able to tell her what she was doing to earn it. All the while poor Noelene knew there was something her daughter wasn’t telling her, but she didn’t know what. Mak wondered if Noelene would want to know, and if she herself should tell her at some point, so that she was no longer in the dark about her daughter’s career, or whether it was kindest to leave the grieving mother with her photographs and her memories.
‘Thank you for meeting with me,’ Mak said. ‘Can I get you something to drink? Another coffee?’
Amy looked alarmed.
‘I noticed that you had been sitting with a coffee mug before, that’s all. But I didn’t know it was you.’
Amy shook her head. ‘No, thanks. I’ve had enough coffee…starting to get the jitters.’ She did indeed look like she had the jitters. Badly. Mak had got Amy this far, but she could see that the rest wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. Amy was a very jumpy young woman.
‘What can I get you?’ Mak offered again.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
‘I’ll get us some water, okay?’
Mak got up and went to the bar to ask for water, giving the young woman a minute or two to relax.
After she returned with two glasses of water they sat in uncomfortable silence for several seconds. At every noise Amy’s red-rimmed eyes darted nervously around the room, with Mak unsure of how to move forwards without further spooking her.
‘You haven’t been in to work much since all this started?’ Mak said to start the conversation.
Amy had acrylic nails, and one was broken. Long nails like those were usually an obsession for dancers, and kept well. Her hair was also unkempt, the dark roots starting to show. She guessed that this girl had not only been absent from work recently, but quite possibly had not left the house since her friend’s death.
Amy nodded. ‘I wasn’t in last night. One of the girls told me you had been looking around.’
Mak nodded. ‘Are you getting by all right?’
‘Larry’s a nice guy,’ she said. ‘He’s just been taking such good care of me and everything. I didn’t want to leave the house alone, so he came with me.’ Mak could see Larry reading a paper and enjoying a coffee at one of the tables outside. ‘Plus I have some savings,’ Amy said with a flicker of pride, then looked down quickly.
‘That’s good,’ Mak said.
Like young models, Mak supposed that only a few strippers were good at building solid savings before their lucrative years were up. The temptation of an expensive lifestyle was too alluring for many, and by the time the work began to dry up, it was too late. The ones who were smart with their money could own their own real estate by the time they were twenty, and set themselves up nicely. But Amy hardly seemed like one of those girls. She didn’t look secure and pampered. She was pretty, but her eyes were tired and unstable—she was clearly a girl with a lot of late nights up her sleeve, and a lot of worries to keep her from being content.
‘So tell me about Meaghan,’ Mak said.
Amy looked around nervously.
‘You worked with her at Thunderball?’
‘Well, sort of. Megs only worked there a few times. She lived in Sydney but, like a lot of the girls, she came over for the Grand Prix weekend a few years ago. It’s huge. There are about sixty or seventy girls who come to the club just for that weekend. Big bucks.’
‘And you two became friends?’ Mak prompted.
‘Yeah. I moved to Sydney not long after that and we hung out a lot and worked in a few of the clubs together—Dancers, Legs, MG. But Meaghan wasn’t really cut out for it.’
Amy began fidgeting with her hands in her lap, perhaps uncomfortable with what she had revealed. She needn’t have worried: Mak, of all people, was not going judge her on her experiments in unconventional career paths.
‘So you and Meaghan worked together and became friends.’
Amy nodded.
Okay, here goes…
‘Amy, do you know a guy named Simon Aston? Was he a friend of Meaghan’s?’
Amy’s mouth formed a tight line. She didn’t answer, but Mak could see that she knew the name.
Come on…speak to me.
Mak nodded to indicate that it was okay for Amy to go on. Then she tried a different tack. ‘You must be upset over Meaghan. It’s terrible, what happened to her.’
Amy nodded, eyes wide and mouth distinctly shut.
‘If you have some information that could help bring justice for your friend,’ Mak began as cautiously as she could, ‘then you need to tell me. It is very important.’
Amy responded by frowning and crossing her arms again.
‘It can be hard to be caught up in something like this. I know how you feel. I really do,’ Mak said, imploring her to tell all.
‘Ha! Like you would know how it feels!’ Amy blurted, her words catching in her throat.
Mak gave her a moment to calm her anger before speaking. ‘I’ll let you know something personal about me. Five years ago my best girlfriend was murdered. She was an orphan. I was the closest person to her; I felt like her big sister. When she was killed I believed I had to take care of things. I took it upon myself to make sure her killer was caught.’
Amy’s mouth hung open, and her brown eyes fixed on Mak, listening carefully.
‘It was a great responsibility. But I had to do it. I loved her as a friend and I needed to know the truth.’ Amy’s eyes were widening, her brows turning up at the centre. She was finally connecting with Mak. ‘I know how wrong it is when something like this happens. People should not assume the right to kill one another. Your friend’s murder is an injustice, and the person who did it should pay.’
Amy’s lower lip quivered, those big brown eyes glassing over before she looked away and began madly searching her pockets for something—perhaps her packet of cigarettes, which Mak could see were right in front of her on the table. The search of her pockets became desperate, and tears sprang from her eyes. Mak pushed the cigarettes towards her silently, and when the girl noticed them she opened her mouth to speak but said nothing. She picked up the packet, shaking, but before she could bring the smoke to her lips, she broke down again. She sobbed quietly for a few minutes, holding her face in her hands, mascara-stained tears streaming out from beneath her fingers.
‘You can tell me, Amy.’
‘No-no…Simon…wasn’t a friend of Megs. But I know who he is. Everyone knows who he is. His friend…it’s his friend…’<
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‘What friend? What do you think happened? Do you think the police—’
‘Toby didn’t do it,’ she blurted. ‘I know it wasn’t him.’
There it was again: that certainty that Tobias was not the one, just as Mrs Wallace had.
‘Why do you think that?’ Mak asked.
Amy didn’t answer. Her face was lined with streaks of wet mascara. She began puffing on her cigarette eagerly.
‘Tell me, Amy.’
But Mak could see she had clammed up again.
‘Do you know Tobias?’ Amy had called him Toby, with a familiar tone. She had to have known him.
‘A little,’ Amy admitted. ‘I met him a couple of times. Megs used to talk about him a bit. He was, like…I dunno, her pet project or something. She wanted to help him. He wouldn’t…he wouldn’t hurt her. That would make no sense.’
‘How do you mean, “pet project”?’ Mak asked.
Amy leaned her head to one side, her stringy hair falling with it. ‘Well, he was living on the streets. Did you know that? Megs felt sorry for him because he was her cousin. She had a soft spot for him, I guess.’
Mak took mental notes. She didn’t want to write anything down in case it made this nervous young woman stop talking. Mak had learned that the hard way in the past, and had developed the skill of sharp memory recall to help her with her work.
‘What sort of things did she used to do to help him?’ she asked Amy.
‘Aww, well she used to give him some money all the time. They had this kind of routine where she would give him cash when she got paid each fortnight.’
Mak began to tingle—this was something. She was actually getting somewhere.
‘Do you happen to know which day of the week she got paid?’ Mak asked.
Amy frowned. ‘Um, Thursdays I think. Doesn’t everyone get paid on Thursdays? I dunno. Something like that. Yeah, Thursdays.’
‘So he came over every second Thursday,’ Mak confirmed.
‘Right.’
Meaghan had been killed on a Thursday night, and Tobias had been there. Had one of their usual meetings gone horribly, violently wrong for some reason? Or did someone who had known he would be there set him up?
‘How about any other times? Do you know if she saw much of him?’
‘I don’t think so. It was like he only ever came for the money and she knew it, but didn’t care. I think she believed he would change,’ Amy said.
The thought made Mak sad. Here was this young woman who had a soft spot for a cousin she used to play with as a kid. Enough of a soft spot to let him into her house every fortnight and give him money out of her own pay cheque. If Tobias really had killed her, it made the act even more heartless and terrible.
If? Mak herself had obviously grown sceptical about his guilt.
‘Why do you believe Tobias didn’t kill her?’
Amy’s demeanour changed. She sat upright and squinted into the distance, thinking hard. She was struggling with something internally, some decision. Mak thought that the girl seemed so unstable that she was afraid to say anything further to her, in case it set her off. So she just waited until Amy eventually pulled a crinkled piece of newspaper out of her leather purse. It was the front page of the Melbourne Herald Sun. She unfolded it.
‘Him,’ Amy said, pointing to a young man in the newsprint photo, posing in a suit with several other business-suited men. ‘He’s the guy.’ She wiped under one eye, only succeeding in smudging her make-up even more.
Mak examined the piece of newspaper with curiosity. The headline read DEALMAKERS SHAKE ON BULLET TRAIN PLANS.
A group of men in business suits was pictured shaking hands. Mak squinted at the face of the man Amy was pointing at. He was young, perhaps in his early thirties. She didn’t recognise him.
‘He’s what guy?’ Mak asked.
‘He is the reason Megs is dead,’ Amy said, her emotions finally giving way to fresh tears that rolled down her cheeks silently. She bowed her head and stared down at her glass of water, hiding her face. She wiped her cheeks.
Mak was trying to come to grips with her statement. What could the connection possibly be between the death of the young woman in Sydney and this Melbourne news article about a group of businessmen and politicians? She looked to the names in the caption: New South Wales Premier John Grant, Victorian Premier Michael Yep and businessmen Jack Cavanagh and Damien Cavanagh. Apart from the Victorian and New South Wales premiers, none of the names rang any bells to Mak. She supposed her Canadian heritage did not always serve her well in matters of Australian current affairs.
‘Amy, why do you think this man has something to do with Meaghan’s death? What do you know about him?’
Amy raised her head and pushed her hair back. Her mascara was smudged into dark circles and her bare skin was flushed.
‘All the girls had heard about him. When I was working the clubs in Sydney he was practically all they talked about.’
‘About Damien Cavanagh?’ Mak asked, reading the name off the caption to be clear about who Amy was referring to.
Amy winced a little at the sound of his name. ‘Yes,’ she whispered and looked around. ‘I can’t be heard mentioning his name. You shouldn’t either. Trust me.’ She folded the newspaper over to hide the article and continued in a low voice. Mak was concerned that perhaps this young woman’s theory was less than real.
‘Everyone knows he’s one of the richest heirs in Australia,’ Amy said. ‘He would buy girls the best champagne there was, and he gave the most amazing tips, especially to the little Asian girls. Everyone knew he loved Asian. He used to have these wild parties and invite some of the girls over. I was always hoping to meet him and go to one of his parties, but I never did. Probably wasn’t his type. He was the one we always hoped would come in, though. He was free with the tips…lots of tips for everyone.’
Mak imagined the fuss a group of exotic dancers would make over a rich man like that in a strip joint. He’d make the Peacock Man with his crinkly fifty-dollar notes pale by comparison. Around Damien Cavanagh it would be a free-for-all battle of toned flesh and murmured compliments.
Mak waited to hear more.
‘Then, after a few months, he stopped coming to the club. Just like that. We heard that he started getting into those other girls—the Asians who get brought in…you know, illegal.’
Mak paused. ‘Illegal? Do you mean trafficked women?’
‘You know, the girls brought from Asia to be hookers. They’re everywhere in Sydney these days. Word was that he had an inside track on the new arrivals and was breaking them in.’
Breaking them in.
Mak felt sick to her stomach. She knew that the Government had introduced legislation against trafficking into sexual servitude in 1999, but that the first arrests hadn’t taken place until 2003, at which time there had been a couple of small news articles on the first cases going to court. At the time, Mak had read reports that there were up to 1000 trafficked women in Australia, most from poverty-stricken villages in Thailand or the Philippines. Because they were in the country illegally, many of the women were put straight into immigration detention when discovered, and then deported before they got around to testifying against those who had entrapped them. Mak didn’t know much about the cases or how the women found themselves working in Australian brothels, but it seemed to be a horrible fate. Whether they were trafficked sex slaves or the more sanitised-sounding ‘migrant sex workers’, as some described them, it seemed cruel and unjust to force anyone to have to service over 500 men before being free of the debt contracts that had brought them into the country.
Why would a rich boy want to be one of those 500 clients?
‘Where did you hear about this?’ Mak asked breathlessly.
Amy averted her eyes. ‘You know…word was going around,’ she said, avoiding a straight answer. Amy still did not meet Mak’s gaze, and Mak became sure that she was keeping something important from her.
But what does all th
is have to do with Meaghan?
Amy placed her fingers against her forehead as if plugging the hole in a dam of information that wanted to spill out. For a while she didn’t respond, still clearly assembling the rest of her response.
‘I know Tobias,’ Amy finally said. ‘He’s a junkie but he’s no killer. He could never kill someone, let alone Megs. She was the only one who believed in him. She supported him and she was probably the only one in the world who loved him and never gave up on him.’
Mak waited. She could sense that Amy was still not telling her everything.
‘Amy, what does this man—’ she pointed to the newspaper article—‘have to do with what happened to Meaghan?’
‘I saw it. I know why she was killed. Megs was killed because she saw too much. She sent it to me and she got killed.’
‘Saw what? What did you see? Tell me, please. Tobias might be in jail for the rest of his life if you don’t come forward.’
‘I can’t. You don’t understand.’ The crying started again, this time heavier tears and loud sobs.
‘You have to. Come on, talk to me,’ Mak pressed. ‘I can get you police protection. I know a lot of officers. They will take care of you. You will be okay.’
Amy was shaking her head. She looked increasingly distressed. In a flash she darted up from the table and started for the door. Mak grabbed her arm.
‘You know you can trust me. This is important—Tobias may be sentenced to life.’
But Amy pulled her arm away violently. ‘Sorry…I’m so sorry…I can’t…’ she mumbled through tears, and fled the restaurant. Mak’s heart sank as she watched the girl go. She didn’t know what she could do. She couldn’t keep her there, and following her out would only upset her more.