by Unknown
‘You didn’t grow up around here, did you, Tammy?’
‘No,’ she said, giving me a curious look.
‘Where did you come from? Is Tammy even your real name?’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘A lot, actually. See, I’m not sure if Dallas or Fletch in there explained this to you, but this is how it works. If you want to play up around here, then I need to know who you are and where you’re from so I know who to contact if I ever have to identify your body.’
I let that sink in, ignoring Novak shifting on his feet. Tammy drew on the cigarette and blew out smoke in cool defiance. I wasn’t worried. I’d had this conversation before and I assumed Novak had too, albeit with a different intention.
‘Tammy, if you work around here, then sooner rather than later you’re going to need the police,’ Novak said. ‘It works best if you establish a rapport with them. It’s a very simple understanding: you help them and they’ll cut you some slack. Some bogan drives past and hurls a beer can at you, maybe they’ll let it slide; but if you get robbed or raped, they’ll show good form. I’ve worked here for twenty years and I’ve met some real arsehole cops. Sometimes the only difference between them and the crims are the badges.’
She remained silent, thoughtful.
‘But things are different now,’ Novak went on. ‘Very different. These days I vouch for the local cops, especially the detectives. They’re hard but fair. They might rub you the wrong way, maybe even disrespect you, but they’ll never go lazy on you.’
‘Yeah, righto. What do ya want from me?’
I squashed my half-finished cigarette and made sure it was completely out, but still didn’t risk flicking it into the garden bed below.
‘Well, you can start by telling me your full name,’ I said. ‘Where you come from, where your parents live, how old you are, what sort of tricks you turn, who your regular clients are. All the usual stuff.’
‘And whether I come here often?’
I didn’t smile and eventually she got the hint and told me her story. Tamara York had grown up in Tasmania in a family of loggers. A high school dropout, she’d stolen cash and got a one-way ferry across the ditch to Melbourne in 2007. She tried to tell me she’d had no idea about St Kilda and had simply arrived here by chance, but I knew that was bullshit. I’d heard the story so many times before I could write the script. Like most of her kind, she was running from her past. A deviant uncle perhaps, maybe a mother who took the uncle’s side. Either way, it didn’t matter. The drugs and the street gave her a family, a daily mission, a purpose. That was the commonality.
I knew there were gaps in her story but that was fine. I’d heard enough for now, and told her she could expect more chats with me in the future. If she lasted. Novak gave her a business card and said he’d also be available if ever she needed him.
‘Thanks,’ she said, nodding towards the cigarette pack in my pocket. I gave her another and studied the bruise on her neck as she lit it.
‘You know, it’s not right for him to do that to you,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Fletch.’
Tammy screwed up her face. ‘Fletch didn’t do this. He saved me.’
‘Saved you?’
‘Yeah, some rich freak tried to strangle me the other night. Fletch got there just in time, belted the guy over the head and dragged me away.’
Yet again, I wondered why these girls persisted. A few hundred a night wasn’t worth it. Surely there were other ways to fund a habit. Then something about her explanation caught my interest.
‘Why do you say he was rich?’
‘Easy, he was driving a Beamer.’
‘Did you report it?’ Novak asked.
Tammy shook her head, probably regretting not doing so now she knew we would follow it up.
‘So what happened?’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s too late now, isn’t it?’
‘Tammy, I told you, I like to know what goes on around here. This is my patch, and whether you people like it or not, we’re in charge. We control the street, not you or your feral clients or any other shithead who decides to come down here. So tell me what happened. If there’s some nob rolling around touching up the girls, I want to stop him.’
She looked at Novak and I had the sense she was embarrassed about something.
‘It’s fine, Tammy,’ he said. ‘We’ve heard it all before. Nothing you say will offend us.’
‘Suit yourself. I was down in Elwood the other night, near the beach – you get better crawlers down there – and this fat slob in a Beamer rolls up and asks how much for a smoke. I doubled my usual price once I saw the car. He nodded and I climbed in.’
I took a few notes but mostly listened. When she used the word ‘smoke’, I knew she was talking about oral sex.
‘Anyway, we went around the block and parked outside the gardens on Dickens Street. I went to work on the guy but he couldn’t get it up. He kept patting my head and telling me I’d been a good girl but now I was bad. He had this foreign accent, like Russian or something, I couldn’t tell. That always creeps me out,’ she said. ‘When they talk. You can do whatever you like with your hands and face and your dick, but just don’t talk to me.’
‘So he wasn’t a regular of yours?’
‘Not of mine, but he is a regular in St Kilda. I’ve seen the car before. Navy blue, dark windows, big alloys. Personalised number plates. I’ll know it if I see it again.’
‘You remember the plates?’ Novak asked.
She shook her head and finished the cigarette. ‘I would’ve told you that straight up, wouldn’t I?’
‘Okay,’ I said, annoyed again that Novak had interfered with my questioning. ‘What else?’
‘I couldn’t get him hard and was about to say something when he just started to strangle me, like really tight. I almost choked right there. Lucky he had sweaty hands and I managed to twist away and start screaming. I think I might’ve scratched him, which isn’t bad considering I chew all my nails.’
I looked at her fingers and considered the possibility of having them checked for skin, but figured it was too late and an assault wouldn’t get priority anyway.
‘I guess the guy didn’t notice Fletch following us. He sure copped a shock when the door opened and a baseball bat came flying through.’
I nodded approval as did Novak. Some rich prick out there with a big old shiner on his face, making up a story to the wife about being done over in a road rage incident. I waited for more details but the story was finished and I decided to leave it for the moment. I might pass it on to Finetti or one of the others, but right now I wanted to focus on Dallas Boyd.
‘So you say Fletch isn’t your boyfriend, just a spotter?’
‘Yeah. Like I keep telling you, Dall and I were together.’
‘Sure?’
‘Why would I lie about that?’
I didn’t want to believe this could all boil down to a simple love triangle, but couldn’t discount it completely. Men did all kinds of crazy things in the pursuit of the opposite sex. We were a pathetic species sometimes.
‘Well, now that Dallas is gone, maybe you need someone to help you through the grief, someone to look out for you. Maybe you and Fletch can work something out.’
‘Look, mate, Dall was my only boyfriend. Fletch might throw me some dice for a bit of play every now and then, but that’s just business.’ She let her dressing gown fall to the side, exposing her bruised shoulder. ‘Nobody rides for free.’
I had to smile. Her boyfriend was dead, some fruitcake had beaten the crap out of her and she was living in a cesspit with a guy who probably fed her smack every night just to keep her dependent. All this and she still had a whore’s pride.
‘Does Fletch see it that way?’ I asked. ‘Maybe he got sick of paying, wanted Dall to move on.’
‘Bullshit!’ she snapped. ‘Fletch is just . . . he just looks after me.’
Novak pointed to an abscess at t
he crook of her elbow. ‘Looks after you, does he?’
Tammy yanked her arm back. ‘Dall and I were gonna go places. See, that’s what I loved about him. Most of the people around here are too lazy to even go on proper welfare. Not Dall, he had goals, you know? He had plans. He was trying to get us outta this shithole.’
‘What kind of plans?’ Novak asked. ‘Far as I knew, he was happy in his apartment.’
‘Well, he never said nothing specific, but he kept talking about getting Rachel outta the flats and us all moving away, starting a new life and shit. All we had to do was stick together, and then . . .’ She didn’t finish, instead turning away and looking out over the dry garden below.
The man I recognised from the green Valiant stepped out of the flat in a pair of boxer shorts. A large tattoo of a dragon crawled up his lean torso.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ he said to Tammy.
‘I’m fine, Fletch. We’re just talking about Dall.’
Fletch put an arm around her, revealing a line of track marks up his wrist.
‘Want me to stay here with ya?’
She straightened her dressing gown and turned around, composed. ‘No. We’re nearly done. I’ll be in soon. Go back to bed.’
Fletch gave us both a cold look. When he’d gone, I decided to move things along.
‘So you went to McDonald’s with Dallas. Then what?’
‘Well, I left with Fletch. Dall had to meet somebody. Somebody from the park.’
‘The park?’
‘Luna Park?’ said Novak.
‘Yeah, a perve, you know; a rock spider.’
I was confused, then suddenly I remembered Dixie’s response when I’d said Dallas had cleaned up his act. Clean, if that’s what you want to call it.
‘Hang on. Dallas was meeting a paedophile?’
‘S’pose so. That’s what he did.’
Novak moved closer. ‘What, are you saying he prostituted himself? I’ve never heard such –’
‘Fuck no,’ Tammy said. ‘He was too much of a sook for that. He was just a scout, you know? He’d line up other kids to go in the movies they were making. Get a finder’s fee and a percentage of the profits, plus he kept copies to flog on the side.’
‘He was making kiddie porn?’ I said, disbelieving.
She nodded. ‘Not much I wouldn’t do – done almost everything there is to be done. Some real sickos come down here. But Dall, he worked for a whole other type. I’ve seen some of the movies and they’re real freaks, man. Make me look like a nun. He used to keep a whole box of them in his room. He’d go down to Luna Park and sell ’em like hot dogs. Some nights he’d have to come home and burn more copies.’
‘Jesus,’ Novak said, clasping his mouth. He looked as though he wanted to puke.
I wasn’t usually surprised by the things I saw or heard in St Kilda, but this jolted me. Dallas Boyd selling child porn wasn’t what I’d expected, especially given his concern about Rachel. Then again, everyone in St Kilda had a hustle. If you weren’t hooking, stealing or selling drugs, you had to earn your money somehow.
‘Who was he supposed to meet down there?’ I asked.
‘Dunno. Never told me any of that. Glad.’
‘Don’t lie to me, Tammy.’
‘I dunno,’ she insisted. ‘Like I’d wanna. All I know is he left us at Macca’s to go meet someone at Luna Park. Obviously felt safe enough to wait for whoever it was by himself. I mean, there were still a lot of people around.’
I pictured the Acland Street junction late at night. It was a busy intersection, about fifty metres from where Boyd’s body was found. There were always people there after dark, usually drunks from the nearby nightclubs and gutter crawlers cruising for hookers.
‘What time was this?’
She shrugged.
I waited for a guess but none came. I should’ve expected it. A lot of these people had no concept of time. They only knew whether it was day or night.
‘Okay, how long was it after you went to the 7-Eleven?’
‘Maybe an hour.’
That was good. I now had a timeline to work from. It looked like Tammy wasn’t going to be able to assist much more and I wanted to finish, but there was one more loose end I needed to tie up.
‘Dallas had his mobile phone on prepaid, correct?’
She smiled at me. Gapped teeth. Yellow from methadone. ‘Ya know how it is, they’re harder to trace.’
‘What sort of phone was it?’
‘Dunno. Nokia something. Annoys the shit out of me.’ She looked past me then, towards the sky. ‘Stupid bloody ringtone. “Hi Ho Silver”.’
I wrote this down, along with the other notes I’d made, unsure of the significance. When I looked up I saw that Tammy’s lips had stretched to an odd smile as she stared at the clouds. Maybe she could see Dallas up there, like a memory playing out in her mind.
‘Do you know a kid named Stuart Parks?’ I asked Novak. ‘Calls himself Sparks.’
‘Sure, he’s a local,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows him.’
Then I should know him too, I thought. Just went to show how long I’d been off the ball.
‘Where can I find him?’
He gestured towards the south. ‘Maybe try the squat down on Clyde Street.’
I knew the place and decided to end it there. ‘Thanks for your time,’ I said to Tammy.
She didn’t reply and we left her in the doorway, hugging herself as though it were cold. I looked back on the stairs and our eyes met. Hers were wild and alert now and the smile had gone. The cynic in me said she just needed another hit, but I saw genuine grief there too. This was the human element. Death didn’t care about money. It hurt everyone, rich and poor. I just nodded to her. There was nothing else I could do.
22
IT WAS FOUR THIRTY BY NOW and the festival crowd was at full peak. The Acland Street intersection was packed with families and daytrippers either pounding the pavement or spilling out of the trams.
I stopped outside the hostel and waited for Novak to get out, then saw someone pull out and decided to leave my car there.
‘You’re going there now, aren’t you?’ said Novak. ‘To the squat?’
I nodded. ‘Sparks left a message on Dall’s answering machine. I think he knows something.’
Tears welled in Novak’s eyes. He wiped them with his hand and looked across the O’Donnell Gardens to the café Dallas Boyd had died behind.
‘I had no idea Dall was into any of that . . . that filth. Just when you think you know someone, bang, out pops a secret that floors you.’
‘Yeah, that came out of left field for me too,’ I said. ‘There was no way we could’ve seen that coming. Like Tammy said, he kept it quiet.’
‘You know something?’ said Novak. ‘I’ve never let these kids fool me into thinking they’re angels, because they’re not. They lie, they cheat, they hurt people. But if you give them a chance you can build a rapport with them and eventually they trust you. If they trust you, then you can help them. I figured as long as I had that attitude, I’d never have the wool pulled over my eyes. But this has got me stumped. I thought Dall told me everything. I thought he trusted me.’
‘Everyone has secrets,’ I said, fishing the key to Dallas Boyd’s apartment out of the glove box and handing it to him. ‘Thank you, Will. It’s not every day I get this kind of help.’
‘Not every day a kid like Dall gets killed. Well, maybe that’s not true any more, not with this other boy dead.’ Novak let out a long sigh. ‘What the hell’s wrong with this place?’
‘Sometimes I ask myself the same question.’
‘Yeah, well, I hope you find the son of a bitch, nail his hands to the front of Luna Park, let every street kid in St Kilda come down and kick the shit out of him.’
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘when all this is over, maybe we can catch up for a beer sometime.’
‘Sure, I’d like that. Maybe I’ll ask my brother to come along too. He always asks about you. How’s the a
partment going, by the way?’
‘Ah, you know, same old story. Too small, but it’s close to all the action. I don’t think I’ll ever get out of there.’
‘And Ella, how’s she? Still over in Carlton?’
‘Yeah, she’s doing well, mate. Listen, what say I give you a call tomorrow, let you know how it’s going with the case? Maybe then we’ll put a time together for a beer?’
‘Sounds good, I’d appreciate that. Thanks again. You take it easy.’
I slid the capsicum spray in my pocket then pushed my way through the crowd, past McDonald’s where herds of parents lined up to buy their children food. A cacophony of adults shouting and kids screaming meshed with the smell of frying fat. I made my way towards Clyde Street, a quiet lane shaded by elm trees and lined with European cars parked outside renovated homes that had made many of the local real estate agents filthy rich. In the middle of them all I found what I was looking for: a run-down cottage surrounded by overgrown weeds, with windows boarded over with plywood and corrugated iron. Across the front of the house somebody had spraypainted The Apocalypse is Coming. I wondered whether it had been written by somebody who lived there or by one of the developers who valued these properties as much as the homeless.
I crept up a gravel drive and stopped at a rock wall beside the house that had probably once been draped with azaleas or home to a fernery. All that was there now were a scattering of syringes, rubbish and an old sprinkler system. The thing I hated most about squats was that there were no clear entries. The doors and windows were always boarded up and the only way in was usually through a vent or a makeshift manhole that the residents had created. And you never knew what fruitcakes would be inside. Being on my own only made it worse.
I knocked hard on the side of the house and a dog barked on the other side of the wall.
‘Sparks, you in there, mate?’ I called out. The dog barked again and I heard it trot across the floorboards. ‘Anyone home?’
‘What ya want?’ came a reply.
‘Lookin’ for Sparks,’ I said, putting on my best junkie voice. ‘Is that you, mate? I gotta fix ya up with some cash.’