I opened the tuna and realised he was right, it did look a lot like pet food.
‘I’m not here for information,’ he said.
I snorted, mixed in the fish and opened the fridge to retrieve the cottage cheese. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘I’m here because I’m not the only one who recognised you in the photos. Our case is at a critical juncture and my boss ordered me to tell you to stay the hell away from Trip Sibley.’
I was halfway through peeling the foil back on the plastic tub and froze, every muscle tense. ‘Why?’
He laughed. ‘C’mon, Simone, you’ve said it yourself. You’re trouble with a capital T.’
I swung around and when he saw my face he held out his palms. ‘Hey, I’m not saying you’re a bad investigator but you have to admit, things have a habit of going pear shaped when you get involved and we can’t risk tipping the suspects off. Look, it’ll only be for a week or so, just until we’ve wrapped things up. If I find out anything about the waitress along the way, I’ll let you know.’
He thought I was a fuck-up. The whole goddamn police force did. I was about to tell him just where to shove his orders when I had a better idea. It was risky, I might not be able to pull it off, but if I did I could possibly help Andi and prove Alex wrong all at the same time.
‘Okay, sure. I’ll back off.’ I turned and scooped about half the cottage cheese into the bowl, added salt, pepper and Tabasco sauce, and stirred.
‘Really?’ He sounded like he didn’t believe me.
I leaned back against the bench, bowl in hand, and tried to look sincere. ‘Yeah. I don’t want to piss off you guys and risk losing my license again. And realistically, I blew my cover last night. There’s no way I’d get away with waltzing back into Jouissance. I was already thinking I’d concentrate my inquiry on other avenues, like the boyfriend and stuff. You promise you’ll let me know if you find anything on Andi?’ I forked the cauliflower mixture into my mouth. It really was a taste sensation.
‘Absolutely.’ He smiled, relieved, then screwed up his face when he saw what I was eating. ‘That smells like an old folks’
home and looks like something my cat sicked up. What the hell is it?’
‘Kind of like tuna mornay?’ I said through a mouth full of slop. ‘But not.’
Chapter Eleven
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was sprawled across a couple of city blocks on the northern edge of the CBD and comprised maybe twenty different buildings, from gothic bluestone to modern structures of concrete and steel. I drove to the city and parked under a new shopping complex that took up a whole block between Lonsdale Street and Latrobe, then followed Liam’s instructions to Bowen Street. It was more of a lane really, blocked off to traffic, skinny trees and wooden benches lining either side. Students in coats and bulky jackets, weighed down with backpacks, hurried into buildings, out of the cold and rain. Wherever Andi was, I hoped it was somewhere warm.
The cafeteria where I’d arranged to meet Liam was a couple of hundred metres down the lane and the entrance looked like something out of Playschool, a wall of glass squares coloured blue, yellow and red. I looked around. The only person I could see was a gangly guy leaning against a tiled pillar, smoking a cigarette and sheltering from the rain.
‘Liam?’
He was all in black, from his jeans to his gel-spiked hair. He had a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple and the face on top was slightly beaky. He was no more than nineteen, with remnants of teenage acne that looked raw and inflamed where he’d shaved. Guys that young did nothing for me, but I noted he had a kind of intense poutiness that might turn into something in five years’ time.
‘Simone Kirsch?’ His voice was a little strangled.
‘That’s me.’ I held out my hand and the wooden beads around his wrist rattled as he gave it a limp shake.
‘I’ve read all about you. Big fan of Curtis Malone. You look different than I imagined.’
‘I’d normally show up in a G-string and pasties, drawing a gun from my garter belt, but it’s too fucking cold.’
He laughed and stubbed out the ciggie under one of his Doc Marten boots. ‘You’re not wrong, let’s go inside.’
The cafeteria was set up like a food court with a linoleum floor and counters selling coffee, sandwiches, burgers and noodles. The air was muggy and the smell reminded me of school in winter: wet wool and tomato sauce. I bought us both a coffee, Liam grabbed a bucket of hot chips and we sat at a metal table beside another glass wall, this one clear glass, posters advertising dance parties and student rallies fixed to the squares.
‘Thanks for agreeing to speak to me.’
‘No problem.’ He blew on a chip and the sharp scent of vinegar hit my nostrils. ‘Just tell me to shut up if I talk too much. Got up early and popped six Sudafed so I could finish off an assignment. Works like speed, turns me into a motor mouth.’
‘Motor mouth is good. Tell me everything. Talk all you like.’
‘Sure, but like I said on the phone, I don’t know where she is or what happened to her. I mean, we were still friends but we broke up a couple of months ago.’
‘How long were you guys going out for?’
‘God, not more than three months. I met Andi when we started at the beginning of the year. We were in a lot of the same classes and I liked her on sight but I never thought anything would happen. She was one of the mature age students and I’m just out of school. I still live with my parents. You know, majorly uncool. But we worked together on this project for Introduction to Journalism and just clicked. After we’d handed it in Andi took me out to the Stork Hotel and we drank about fifty million beers and played pool and, shit, she totally whipped my ass, drank me under the table then took me back to her place and … you can guess the rest. We were pretty much inseparable for the next three months. God we had a good time. Saw heaps of bands, drank probably half the beer in the state and the sex … my last girlfriend was sixteen, she just used to lie there. So being with an experienced woman … wow. My friends were so jealous. They thought she was ace. She’s the only girl I ever met who actually liked playing video games, she could burp the alphabet at will and she’d fart on people, as a sign of affection.’
‘Really?’
‘She was way cool.’
He shoved four chips in his mouth at once and licked the salt off his fingers and I resisted the urge to peck at his carton like a seagull. If there was anything that tasted better than somebody else’s hot chips, I’d never heard of it.
‘Sounds like you really dig her, but you don’t seem upset you’ve broken up.’
‘Man, I knew it wouldn’t last from the start. She didn’t want anything serious and I’m too young to anyway, so I decided just to have fun and go along for the ride. Isn’t that what going to uni’s all about? Andi took me to see some awesome music, taught me how to brew beer and then there was the other stuff she showed me, in the bedroom, if you know what I mean.’ He wiggled his eyebrows and one side of his mouth tugged up in a lopsided grin. ‘Plus there was the added bonus that my parents hated her. They’re really straight.
I took her around once and she called my mum mate, and she argued with my dad about politics, and then when we went to bed she was so fucking loud. Holy shit. I mean, I’m allowed to have girls home but they didn’t expect that.’
‘Sounds like a real wild child.’
‘That’s what my folks thought. But what they didn’t realise was that she was a really dedicated student. She’d work three nights a week, party with me, and get top marks on her assignments. I worked hard on my VCE to get into journalism, but I’d never seen someone so determined.’
‘Why do you think that was?’
‘She wanted to get the fuck out of the hospitality industry. She’d never liked it but kind of fell into it, you know? Andi told me that when she first finished school she was accepted into law at Sydney uni, but decided to defer and go backpacking for a year. She waitressed to get the money an
d when she came back she did it again to pay off her debts.
By this stage she wasn’t interested in law anymore and spent the next six years in restaurants, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. Now that she has, she doesn’t want to waste a second.’
Liam shoved in another handful of chips and his motor mouth was temporarily silenced. Chairs scraped the lino.
Noodles sizzled. Chatter, laughter and mobile ring tones filled the air. Students passed by in duffle coats and scarves, arms loaded with folders and books and I thought back to my two years at uni. I wondered how I’d got any assignments in at all considering I’d pretty much majored in sex, drugs and rock ’n roll.
‘Why’d you break up?’ I asked.
‘It happened after she started at Jouissance in July. We were fine when she worked at Bistro Verve but within a week of changing jobs she was different.’
‘How?’
‘Distant, unavailable, there but not there. I knew it was over.’
‘Why’d she change jobs anyway?’
‘No idea.’ He shrugged. ‘She visited her mum in Sydney in the June holidays, came back and a week later she’d quit and started at Jouissance. I know why she was acting weird though.’
‘Why?’
‘She’d met someone.’
‘At Jouissance?’
‘Maybe.’
‘How did you know?’
‘She never said anything, but I could tell from the way she behaved. Like, when I first started seeing her, I was still going out with my sixteen year old girlfriend, right? I wanted to break up with her but I didn’t want to be the bad guy, so I did the same detached act that Andi ended up doing to me. Serves me right, I guess. Anyway, I pulled the plug, Andi seemed relieved and we stayed friends. End of story.’ He swirled the last scraps of chip around in the carton, tipped them into his mouth, and drank them down with the vinegar.
I thanked Liam for his time and finished my coffee. ‘If I wanted to speak to one of her lecturers, who would you suggest?’
‘Derek Canning knew her best. I’ve got his class in an hour so he’d probably be in his office. Building six, second floor, turn right at the glass. Hey, you got time for a beer, game of pool?’ He wiggled his eyebrows again. Cheeky bugger.
I patted his hand. ‘It’s a lovely offer but I’m sure there are a heap of girls on campus in need of your new-found skills a lot more than I am. Go get ’em, tiger.’
Chapter Twelve
The journalism department was located in the School of Applied Communication, six storeys of pale brick with some rather fetching ivy smothering the front and a prison-like stairwell within. I hurried out of the cold, boots echoing on the concrete steps, and turned right at the glass doors. The staff offices were a grey carpeted rabbit warren, and, oddly, every second door was painted peach. I found Canning’s room and knocked.
I’d half expected a fusty professor with a white beard and leather elbow patches but Derek Canning was a bit of a spunk. A young looking forty, maybe, with dark brown curly hair, sideburns, grey green eyes and glasses. His jeans were faded, his mauve shirt was rolled up at the sleeves and worn brown Blundstones encased his feet. I wondered if it were possible for me to meet a man, any man, without instantly gauging his rootability. Wasn’t it a bit sexist? Wasn’t it something a nymphomaniac might do?
‘Simone Kirsch.’ I flashed my license. ‘I’m looking into the whereabouts of Andi Fowler. Can you spare a couple of minutes?’
‘Absolutely. Simone Kirsch, huh? We had a friend of yours in here a few weeks ago.’
An image popped into my head. Chloe in her cowboy hat and leather chaps riding a naked Canning through the hallway, whipping him with a crop.
‘Really?’
‘Uh-huh. Curtis Malone was guest lecturer and the students hung on to his every word. I don’t know which stories they liked better, him covering the strip shows for Picture or the time he got shot in the hip hanging out with you.’
‘Arse.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘He was shot in the butt.’ Trust Curtis to make himself sound cooler than he was.
Canning ushered me into a tiny rectangular office dominated by a large desk covered in newspapers. Crowded bookshelves reached the low ceiling and posters for the Art Gallery, an industrial relations rally and Triple R community radio filled the remaining space. A small window looked onto the back of a brick building where rusted pipes leaked steam.
Derek took the high backed leather swivel chair and pointed to a padded vinyl number that sighed when I sat down.
‘I’ve actually spoken to the police on the phone,’ he said, ‘but there wasn’t much I could tell them. She hasn’t shown up for class this week, totally out of character, and nobody knows where she is or where she might be.’
The coffee percolator on the filing cabinet hissed as the last drops trickled through the filter. I must have been ogling it because he offered me a cup, which I accepted, then poured one for himself. Nolan and his crony hadn’t said anything about me being a dirty, low-down caffeine whore.
‘That’s what everyone says, so in the absence of any concrete information I’m trying to get a sense of her. What was she like?’
‘As a student or a person?’
‘Both.’ I sipped my coffee. It burnt the tip of my tongue and I placed it on the corner of the desk, on top of the Age business section.
‘Great student. The mature age ones are often a lot more diligent than the school leavers. Perfect attendance, very good writer, always got her work in on time. You wouldn’t believe how many of them ask for extensions. You want to be a journalist? It’s all about deadlines. I despair sometimes.’
‘And as a person?’
‘Well, things have been a lot quieter around here since she’s been missing. Very forthright, curious about the world around her, highly intelligent, down to earth. She’s first year so I haven’t known her very long, but that’s what I’ve picked up from the tutorials. I think she’ll do very well. We’re constantly drumming into the students that it’s not enough to be able to write well, to report, but you’ve also got to be able to find the news. Andi certainly wasn’t shy. I think if anyone could ferret something out, it’d be her.’
‘Find the news, huh? It’s interesting you should say that because I found a lot of library books at Andi’s on investigative journalism and a book called All That Glitters, about corruption in Kings Cross, was missing. Is that related to something she’s working on here at uni?’
‘I seriously doubt it. We don’t get into investigative journalism until third year. Right now it’s basic reporting and news writing, the ethics of journalism, that sort of thing. She could be interested in it for the future. As for the book on Kings Cross, that was written by a Sydney journalist, Chris Ferguson.
He did a guest lecture for us here just before the holidays in June. Anyway, I’ve got to get ready for this tutorial. Sorry I couldn’t have been more help.’
‘No, you’ve been great,’ I said. ‘Do you have a contact for Ferguson?’
Derek checked his computer and scribbled an email address on the back of a card. My brain was buzzing. And not just from the coffee.
By five that afternoon the rain had cleared and a half assed sun hung low in the cold blue sky. I was standing outside Jouissance peering through the slatted wooden blinds into the restaurant.
Silver cutlery and Riedel glasses glinted in the lemon yellow light and Gordon and the apprentices buzzed about the kitchen, stirring pots, chopping vegetables and joking around.
I walked up the road a couple of paces. The sign on the glass door read ‘Closed’, but Dillon and Yasmin were at the bar chatting, him polishing glasses, her cutlery. I knocked loudly and windmilled my arms and she turned, set down a knife and chamois and swished over. Adrenaline bubbled and every instinct told me to piss-bolt down the street. She’d kicked me out sixteen hours earlier. Would she recognise me now?
She unlocked the door and
propped it open with one shiny court shoe. Her black shirt was immaculate, her long apron crisp and her blonde hair was twisted into a neat chignon.
‘Yes?’
‘I called ya about the dishie job, aye? You Jasmine?’ I’d lifted the accent from the rednecks who’d tormented me at my country high school, and was determined to end each sentence in a question.
‘It’s Yasmeen.’ She looked down her perfect little nose at me with undisguised revulsion.
I can’t say I entirely blamed her. I’d spent the afternoon trawling secondhand shops and buying up big at a place in Richmond that stocked theatrical makeup supplies, then gone home and really done a number on myself. I’d tucked a Garfield the Cat sweatshirt into high waisted, multi-pocketed, acid wash jeans and slipped on a pair of green army boots a couple of sizes too big. A mullety brown wig hid my real hair, and a bright yellow trucker’s cap disguised the fact that it was a wig. Special contact lenses made my eyes bulgy, like I had a thyroid problem, and the fake teeth weren’t too far removed from the kind you get at a joke shop. Still, when I’d checked myself out in the mirror I realised something wasn’t quite right. It was the eyebrows. I was really proud of my brows. They were dark, not too thick or too thin, had a nice, forties style arch and just wouldn’t do. There was no way in hell I was shaving them so I brushed over the hairs with flesh coloured concealer. That did it. I was unrecognisable. Actually, I was worse than unrecognisable. I was a no-eyebrowed freak.
‘Follow me,’ said Yasmin.
So far so good. She led me past the bar and through the archway to the kitchen, and as I passed Dillon he gave me the same revolted once-over she had, shuddered and looked away. I almost said, ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,’ but stopped just in time.
Yasmin snaked between the tables and I shuffled along behind her until she halted in front of the kitchen like she’d come to the end of the Armani runway, jutted her hip and pouted. The kitchen ignored her.
‘Gordon,’ she addressed the fat, red faced chef, ‘someone here for the dishwashing position.’
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