Fall

by Candice Fox

  Being overly cautious was only one of the many natural behaviours that made a successful con artist. Amy had discovered each in turn the hard way, because people like her – liars, cheats, shadow people – were impossible to find and were sole operators when they did reveal themselves. Tandem teams of con artists, Amy had discovered, were an invention of Hollywood. It took a being of broken, malfunctioning or completely absent morality to do what she did, and the chances of two of them collaborating successfully required each member of the team to be incapable of loyalty yet be helplessly enslaved by it. No, real con artists were loners. They were meticulous, over-prepared, adaptive and artful. They didn’t look back.

  Amy was in no way ignorant of the fact that Ian, master dead-ender of Skytree Industries, would stay up all night thinking about her. That he’d dress dangerously tomorrow – the salmon shirt he’d bought on a whim at Big’n’Tall which had looked striking and bold on the mannequin in all the ways that Ian was not. That he’d think the encounter on the street had meant something, had been the zingy pesto he’d been waiting for in the iceberg lettuce salad of his life. But Hooky didn’t feel anything about this other than satisfaction, a sense of equilibrium, now that she’d gained access to Imogen’s building. Checkpoint: passed. If there was one thing Hooky understood, it was balance.

  As she moved through the building, Hooky thought smugly about Imogen at the counter of the police station with her stupid lunch for Frank. Hooky would show her what this ‘child’ could do, just how much Imogen should have held onto that worry she had about Hooky’s place in Frank’s life. No, she wasn’t after Frank. The suggestion was ridiculous. But that didn’t mean she was someone who could be spoken down to. Imogen had no idea what power she held. The woman had tried to strip that hard-earned power away with a single word. Well, no one got to do that to her.

  Hooky could fuck up people’s entire worlds. She was not a child and she wasn’t going to let anyone think she was.

  There are plenty of things on a personal laptop can ruin a person. Even the most measured of people. For women she found erotic photographs, letters to the ex-boyfriend, secret bank accounts, fake dating profiles. For men, unconventional porn, party photos, gambling accounts. Amy headed straight for the laptop and brought up Imogen’s email account, flipped through the recent correspondence. A lot of it was client mail about appointments and referrals, mental health care plans. Some reports back to the department about police officers who had completed programs or still had outstanding sessions keeping them off duty. Amy wondered if Imogen had ever been Frank’s psychologist – if in fact that’s how the two had met. It made sense. She glanced at the darkened door to the hall and then searched the computer for documents with ‘Bennett’ in the title. To her surprise, she came upon a file named ‘BennettArcher.doc’.

  Monday 17 September: Frank stonewalling but clearly in trouble. Takes time to go on the nod whenever Eden’s queried. Endone? Check prescription frequency. Weight loss. Outwardly aggressive at mention of Ducote.

  Of course. Martina Ducote, Frank’s girlfriend, the one whose heart was cut out by Jason Beck. They never found the heart. Not at the scene. Not outside, where he was spotted by a garbage collector – leading to the chase that finally ended him. Amy wondered idly what happened to the woman’s heart. Wondered if Frank wondered about it too. Beck was clearly off the rails at that point. It’s possible he ate it. Fed it to the cat. Flushed it. Burned it. The hardest things about murder were the unanswered questions. Was she afraid? Did she fight? Did she say anything? What did he do with the heart? Confessions and forensic analysis and criminal profiles could answer some things, but not many, about murder. Amy had plenty of unanswered questions about her parents’ murder. Questions that popped and popped into her mind all the time, sometimes triggered, sometimes not, coming at the strangest times, when she was eating lunch, when she was falling asleep.

  What had their faces looked like in those last seconds?

  There was no porn on Imogen’s computer. No dating profiles in her internet history. Amy wandered through the cookie files in Imogen’s browser and settled on one that piqued her curiosity – sandersinvestigations.com.au. Amy glanced at the contact email address, then went back to Imogen’s email account and found a correspondence stream in the Sent folder.

  imogenstone77@gmail.com: Brent, long time no see! Can I call on that favour you owe me for the Harrowe case?

  brent@sandersinvestigations.com: Nothing slips by you, Imo. Tell me what you need and we’ll call it square.

  imogenstone77@gmail.com: Really need registry files on Archer, Eden. No middle name, apparently. Weird. Particularly interested in Daddy, if you can make it happen.

  brent@sandersinvestigations.com: You know I love a challenge. See attached.

  Amy sat back in Imogen’s chair, rapped the tabletop with her fingernails. There were five files attached: birth certificates belonging to Eden, her brother Eric, her father Heinrich and her mother Sue, plus there was a conviction report for Heinrich Archer – no middle name either – beginning with thefts, assaults and loitering charges in 1970. In the pale white light of the laptop, Amy drew her legs up beneath her on the chair and leaned forward, digging deeper into Imogen’s search history.

  I got home at nine. I’d started calling Imogen’s place ‘home’ about a month after we began dating, around the time I got my own drawer in her bedroom closet and started keeping a toothbrush in her bathroom. The moment you have your own toothbrush at your lover’s place you live there too. The personal toothbrush is the key that opens the door to finding a spot for your underwear and dirty clothes on their bedroom floor, to reserving a favourite mug from their collection. It’s the key to adding things to the fridge – the milk you like or the chocolate bar in the freezer or your brand of beer. Imogen-home wasn’t the favourite of my two homes. That would always be where Greycat was, and right now that was at my burned-out terrace. Greycat was a complete arsehole, but he had that quiet kind of stability a cop needs in his permanent dwelling. Every now and then I would return to my Imogen-home and find my psychologist in a bad mood and her hair all crazy or the place smelling of bleach and her clothes all stained with it and all my stuff in a pile on the laundry floor. Greycat was never frazzled. If he was a person, he’d have been a total stoner.

  There are rough days on Homicide, of course there are. But they’re not the kind of rough days people imagine. Again, Hollywood misinterprets things, or reinterprets them in more socially acceptable ways. On television, a bad day in Homicide is finding a woman hanging by her neck in her apartment with her guts on the floor and her mother crying in the hall. As a matter of fact, the finding of a body is a good day in homicide. Things are fresh. Exciting. Hopeful. You’ve got a case. You haven’t interviewed anyone yet. The scene is laid out in all its intricacies and curiosities. You’ll get to know this gutted woman better than you know some of your family members. You’ll become a weird and mismatched and not wholly welcome part of her family. You’ll have beers with her brother and listen to her father’s war stories. You’ll play with her dog. You’ll watch her be buried, mourned, forgotten. Watch someone else take over her job and pack up her desk. The first day is the best day. It’s like a very successful date. You’ve got it locked in. You haven’t fucked it up yet. Missed something. Underestimated the importance of a vital piece of information. It’s all downhill after the first day, until the day you land the killer. That’s the second best day.

  The bad days are the days when nothing happens. There’s nothing to look at. No one to talk to. Everyone with something to say about the case has said it. All the photographs and CCTV of the area have been reviewed and set aside. All the witnesses have been interviewed, all the ex-boyfriends leaned on, all the photographs and fingerprints and mouth swabs collected and sent off. The measurements taken and the powder spread and wiped back up. The case falls from the news and journalists stop calling you.

  It’s day four. Five. Fifty-seven. The parents
stop calling you, except at Christmas and on the victim’s birthday. A new case comes along.

  It was only day four of Ivana Lyon’s murder but I had that feeling of dread that starts accumulating at the pit of my stomach like heavy black bile when more leads are dismissed than present themselves in a day. The ratio tips, slowly, slowly, until the end of the seesaw bangs on the ground and you feel its painful shudder through your legs. I could feel myself falling.

  I’d spent the afternoon going back over the autopsy reports on Ivana and Minerva, looking for inconsistencies and trying to understand what they meant. Eden and I had argued with each other for forty minutes over knuckle size and spread. We could measure the size of the perpetrator’s hand from knuckle-print bruises on Ivana’s collarbone. The hands were small. I thought there was a ring indentation on one. Eden disagreed, said it was a scratch. I’d yelled at her that she needed to get her eyes checked, she was going blind as well as deaf. That had been the catalyst for me going home. It had been a cheap shot. Eden had come away from the last case with deafness in the left ear from gunshot damage and I knew she was supposed to wear a hearing aid but didn’t, probably out of pride. We had got nothing done on the case and I’d been mean to my partner. I wondered how early I could get through the daily pleasantries with Imogen and then get into bed.

  When I walked in the door, I found all the apartment lights on and the hall smelling of grilled haloumi. Ed Sheeran was playing. Female laughter erupted somewhere to the left of the hall and I froze with my hand on the knob and one foot in the stairwell.

  ‘Baby!’ Imogen said. She walked down the hall towards me. I closed the door.

  ‘Have you got friends over?’

  ‘I have,’ she said. ‘Sorry. I forgot to tell you. Come in – there’s plenty of food.’

  She ran her fingernails over my scalp and ruffled my hair. I was being pulled in two directions by a magnetic force right in the centre of my chest, one beckoning me back out into the stairwell, whispering warnings embedded in the male psyche about the age-old danger of women with wine, the other pulling me forward with promises of food. I was biologically befuddled for a second. When a tall woman passed the hall with a packet of Smith’s Original chips in her hands it was settled. I can spot Smith’s from a mile away.

  I bypassed the living room and went straight for the kitchen, the fridge. Plucked a cold fake beer from the box on the top shelf.

  ‘Oh baby,’ I said, and took the first painfully cold sip. Imogen was standing behind me. I turned and drank at the same time, peered at her with one eye, surveyed her temperature.

  ‘Something amiss?’

  ‘I’m just waiting for you to come and say hello,’ she said. Not cheerlessly. Not warmly either. I sucked air between my teeth, tasted imitation beer on the vapour of my breath. Dismissed the word ‘just’ from what she’d said, connected ‘I’m’ with the inherently dangerous ‘waiting for you’, and noted the hands on the hips. A performance was in order. I kissed her forehead.

  ‘I just need a minute,’ I said. I rolled my shoulders, cracked my neck. ‘I’ve had a really rough –’

  ‘Frank,’ a woman in the doorway chirped. She was a beautiful little Indian woman in a bright yellow dress. Red necklace of polished wooden beads and red pleather heels. A bit dressy for wine and bickies with the girls. The others would talk about it while she was out of the room. Her colours. Her eagerness. ‘You must be Frank. We’ve heard so much about you.’

  ‘Frank, this is Deepa.’

  ‘Deepa,’ I grabbed her hand and pumped it.

  ‘We’re all so interested to hear about your job. Imogen’s given us a taste but there’s so much she can’t answer.’

  Suddenly, the kitchen was full of women. My dad had taken me to a battery farm once and it was very much like this. Smelly and loud. I looked down and found my beer was empty.

  ‘Frank, this is Shauna. This is Erica. This is Kim.’

  I was turning to get another beer at the exact same moment Kim was plunging in for a kiss on my cheek. The fridge door got trapped between us and she planted her kiss right on the corner of my mouth. Her breath tasted of wine.

  ‘Oh, hi.’ I laughed, put an arm around her narrow shoulders, hugged her into the fridge door. She laughed uncomfortably. My face burned.

  The place swelled with chatter. I found myself holding my beer bottle against my temple.

  ‘She did say he was handsome.’

  ‘Very handsome.’

  ‘He’s got that Joel Edgerton, outback Australiana flavour to him.’

  ‘Joel Edgerton. Oh god. Now that’s a flavour I wouldn’t mind getting a taste of.’

  ‘Oh Jesus. Save it, Shauna.’

  ‘Don’t mind them, Frank. They’re drunk.’ Kim stroked my arm.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Imogen pulled my beer down from my head. My temple was ice cold, deliciously wet. ‘Stop being weird.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the living room,’ someone suggested. ‘I’ll be the first interrogator. Are you ready for your interrogation, Frank?’

  ‘I’m really not,’ I murmured to Imogen. ‘I’m really not ready for rooms full of women and noise and interrogations. I’m not. At all.’

  ‘Don’t be difficult.’ Imogen glanced at the hall, the women retreating. ‘It’s just a bit of fun. Just give us five minutes.’

  ‘I’ve had a really rough day,’ I said again.

  ‘I would have told you about the dinner,’ she smoothed my hair back from my temple, ‘I just forgot. Okay? I forgot. Just come and say hello for five minutes and then you can make an excuse and leave.’

  ‘I don’t want to be interrogated. I’ve spent my week thus far actually interrogating people. I don’t want to be the centre of attention. Keep them off me, Imogen.’

  ‘Or what?’ she laughed humourlessly.

  ‘Frank. Come on!’

  ‘Immy, please,’ I said.

  ‘Frankie, please,’ she imitated me, slipped into my arms, rubbed my chest. ‘Don’t be a baby. Come on. I’ve got plenty of treats. Bring a couple of beers with you.’

  She pulled my arm, never giving me a chance to grab the beers. I was led into the living room. There was a huge platter of antipasto on the coffee table, barely touched. The olives glistened black and wet like droplets of mercury. I gathered up six olives and a handful of salami and sunk into the couch. Pulled a bowl of chips towards me. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it surrounded by my faithful brothers – meat, salt and imitation alcohol. The lights were hot.

  ‘So Imogen tells us you’re on the Sydney Parks Strangler case, Frank?’

  ‘I’m one of the members of a task force charged with that, yes.’

  ‘How intriguing.’ Kim sat back in the armchair nearest to me, adjusted her stockings at the knee. ‘You’ve got to give us the lowdown. What are the major leads?’

  ‘I read in the paper you don’t think it’s a man. Is that right?’

  ‘Well, there’s no evidence thus far to suggest –’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a man either,’ Deepa said, barely managing to swallow her wine before the words were out of her mouth. ‘The faces. It’s very personal. Identity-driven, not power-driven. Sociopathic, rather than psychosexual, if you ask me.’

  ‘Oh, here we go. She’ll be quoting Wilhelm Reich in a minute. It’s always Reich with her.’

  ‘You’re a psychologist too?’ I asked. Where was all my beer going? I glanced at Imogen helplessly but she ignored me.

  ‘We’re all psychologists,’ Deepa smiled.

  ‘Oh. Excellent.’

  ‘Imogen’s the only law enforcement specialist among us,’ Kim said, letting one of her navy blue velvet slip-ons slide off one heel. ‘The only one with murderous interests.’

  ‘When we heard she’d snagged you off the client list we were so excited,’ Deepa grinned.

  ‘Yes, off the client list,’ Shauna tutted at Imogen. ‘Naughty, naughty.’

  ‘We’d love to hear about
some of your cases.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Erica breathed. ‘The really bad ones.’

  ‘Tell them about the chainsaw guy,’ Imogen said. A low moan of excitement rose around me. I felt Imogen’s hands on my shoulders, trying to massage them but only succeeding in making them tighter. ‘I love that one.’

  I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening here, and felt strangely wary that it was some sort of test. In a room full of psychologists, I was being asked to rank my case history from ‘best’ to ‘worst’. It was a bizarre request. Yes, indeed, there were good days and bad days. Exciting days and boring days. But that there could be a ‘best’ among my cases, a story that could be ‘loved’, was beyond my understanding. Murder simply was to me. As meat was to a butcher. It came and it went. Some of it was easy to manage, some of it was more difficult. It was the material that I worked with. There was no value system attached to it. Especially the kind of value system that would rank the ‘really bad ones’ as the ‘best’. I’d seen the aftermath when a mother drowned her three kids in the family bathtub, one at a time, like kittens, while her husband was up the street getting milk. That was bad. Really bad. My ex-girlfriend had been found disembowelled centre stage in a room painted with her blood. The attending officer had actually used the word ‘painted’ in the police report. That was bad. Really bad. Were these my ‘best’?

  Sometimes I wondered about Imogen and her propensity to burst out with a sick kind of enthusiasm for homicide detection, like it was some fantasy job she’d always wanted. Did she want to be a cop? Sometimes I could tell she was pretending not to be interested in details about some of my past cases, and sometimes she overtly tried to squeeze them out of me, the way she was doing now. It was strange.

  Everyone was staring at me.

  ‘Uh,’ I scratched my head. ‘The chainsaw one?’

  ‘A bunch of twenty-year-olds are holding a work party at Palmer & Co. You know Palmer & Co?’ Imogen spread her hands theatrically.