Simone Kirsch 03 - Cherry Pie

by Leigh Redhead

  I trundled out to the bins and when I’d made sure no one had followed me, waved at the window where Alex was conducting surveillance, gave him the finger with both hands and performed a twisting, prancing, piggy little dance of joy.

  I drove home on a total high, fanging for a drink and a cigarette. There were no ciggies but I slammed down a well-earned glass of cask then poured another. A good result in undercover gave you the same kind of high as a great strip show. The buzz beat any drug, and I knew ’cause I’d tried them.

  My phone was ringing but I ignored it. Probably Alex.

  I’d talk to him eventually, but first I had to get out of the wig and the rest of the crap and wash off every last disgusting trace of Kezza. I’d just stepped out of the shower, wrapped myself in a towel and was combing out my wet hair when the intercom squawked. I picked up the plastic handset and answered.

  ‘It’s Alex. Let me up.’ He didn’t sound happy.

  After the previous night’s abstinence and no dinner, the wine had gone straight to my head and I was feeling a little cheeky. ‘Jeez, I dunno. It’s pretty late.’

  ‘Open the goddamn door.’ His voice had lowered an octave and I imagined the tone was the same one he used to apprehend fraudulent scoundrels. I couldn’t wait to let him know how clever I’d been so I buzzed him in, quickly swiped on some lip gloss and refilled my wine glass. When I opened the door I noticed his eyes wander over the towel, a quick up and down, then focus back on my face. Men.

  ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’ I smirked.

  ‘I told you to stay away.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He pushed past to the bathroom and came out holding the wig and the Garfield shirt at arm’s length. The wig looked like a dead fox terrier.

  I smiled. Revenge was so fucking sweet. ‘Alright, you got me, babe. Drink?’

  ‘Are you deliberately trying to get me in trouble?’ He threw the top and wig back onto the bathroom floor.

  ‘Oh relax, Detective, I was brilliant, the pig of glory, a master of disguise. No one knew it was me and I bet you your colleagues didn’t recognise me either. And the shit I found out … but you wouldn’t want to see the photos, would you?

  Maybe you should leave now before things go … how did you put it? Pear shaped?’

  ‘Photos?’ he asked.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I sashayed over to the coffee table, booted up my laptop and plugged my digital camera into the USB port, preparing to download. As I bent over the towel almost fell off, as they do, and Alex fixed his eyes on a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls poster over my right shoulder.

  ‘Put some clothes on.’

  ‘In a sec.’ I sat on the couch in front of the computer and patted the cushion next to me.

  He paused, then finally walked over and sat down. The faintest trace of faded aftershave reached my nostrils and his trouser leg brushed my thigh. I busied myself transferring photos and lifting my glass for a couple of comprehensive swigs. I clicked open the first image.

  ‘Check it out,’ I said. ‘A whole box of plastic wrapped cash.

  Money laundering, has to be. And I got that.’ I pointed to the can. ‘Probably just broad beans but it could be full of drugs. Sam Doyle’s doing, you reckon?’

  ‘I really can’t say.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll have to find out on my own then.’

  ‘This isn’t funny.’ He sighed. ‘What do I have to say to get you to leave this angle alone?’

  I glanced at him, trying to think of a witty riposte, but the wine had kind of floored me and my mind went liquid and blank. I got caught up checking out his straight black brows and the coffee-coloured eyes fringed by surprisingly long lashes. Then my gaze dropped to his large hands, veins on the back of them, and a smattering of dark hair. I remembered a time not so long ago when he’d kissed me at the entrance to my flat and those same hands had snaked under my top and I’d felt his erection pressing against me. God.

  He looked up from the computer. ‘What?’

  I leaned over, put one hand on his upper thigh and moved my lips to his. He abruptly turned his head and my mouth brushed his ear. I sat back. He removed my hand from his leg and stood up.

  ‘Simone, I’m getting married. You’re dating my best friend.’

  Before I could say anything he turned and walked out the door. As his shoes echoed down the concrete stairwell mortification hit me like a punch in the stomach and my skin prickled with a full body blush. I must have seemed like a desperate freak. I jumped up from the couch, threw off the towel and grabbed my jammies from in front of the heater, dancing and hopping as I pulled them on. I raced down the stairs, out the security door and down the concrete path, twigs and gumnuts digging into the bare soles of my feet. I had to catch him and explain that I hadn’t really meant it, it was the wine on an empty stomach.

  But I was too late. I heard the low growl of his Commodore starting up and by the time I popped out of the gate his tail lights were disappearing down Broadway, halfway to Glenhuntly Road. I groaned and slapped my forehead. Idiot.

  Idiot! I turned and walked up the footpath to my block, pausing to stick my hand in the letterbox as I’d forgotten to check it on my way in.

  What I felt in there made me scream out loud.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was a possum. Not a whole one.

  I grabbed a plastic wrapped community newspaper and swept the severed head out of my letterbox. It fell onto the concrete path and rolled a small way and I crouched down to examine it in the yellow glow of the night lights lining the walkway. What I’d plunged my hand into was the meat and bone of the neck, chopped clean through with an axe or a cleaver. I nudged it face up with the rolled newspaper. The lips were drawn back, exposing sharp teeth in speckled grey gums.

  Worse than that were the bloody sockets. Someone had plucked out its eyes.

  Upstairs I scrubbed the hand covered with dark specks of possum viscera and shuddered, a convulsion like you get slugging cheap scotch. I badly needed a cigarette and reached into the cupboard above the fridge where Chloe stashed one of her many travel bongs. I pulled down her mull bowl and found a Winfield Blue nestled in a cone’s worth of debris, half the tobacco rubbed out and the cigarette paper twisted up.

  I lit it. Dry, stale, but better than nothing.

  After finding the head I’d checked the street to see if anyone was watching but all I saw were leafless oaks, parked cars and dark, silent houses. I’d briefly debated calling Alex but decided he’d see it as some bid for attention, since my lunge on the couch hadn’t worked. I could call the cops but honestly, what would they do? Pull out the blue and white tape, get the medical examiner and cart the evidence off to the morgue?

  Yeah, right. They already thought I was flaky. Eventually I’d picked up the head using two rolled-up community newspapers like giant chopsticks, carried it around to the back of the flats and dumped it in someone else’s wheelie bin.

  I stubbed the cigarette out and tried to rationalise the possum head as the cops would have done. A prank. Kids. The work of some random freak. And I might have believed it if it wasn’t for the eyes. That was a message meant for me.

  After the late night I woke at ten and when I wandered out onto the balcony in my jammies, steaming cup of coffee in hand, I discovered there was a heatwave going on. Seriously.

  Blue sky visible between the rooftops and bare branches, no freezing wind and had to be at least sixteen degrees. In the warmth and light the possum head didn’t seem so scary. In fact it struck me as totally lame. In my time I’d been shot at, stabbed, nearly raped. What sort of idiot thought a possum head would scare me off? I wasn’t going to waste any more time thinking about it and spent the next half hour jotting notes to myself, trying to figure out what was going on with Andi’s case.

  I knew she was alive, at least she had been on Tuesday evening, and that certain things had been removed from her place. By her o
r somebody else, I wasn’t sure. I knew she was working on some potentially explosive story likely to ruin reputations at the very least, and I knew that Trip and Yasmin had lied. I’d been attacked, which could have been coincidence, but the possum head was no accident.

  I couldn’t entirely discount the theory that Andi was a bit unbalanced and had disappeared and made the phone call as a bid for attention, but after all I’d found out, and knowing how ambitious she was, I highly doubted it. They tell you in inquiry agent school that you should keep an open mind and not make assumptions but I couldn’t help myself. I knew it in my guts. A story of a celebrity chef involved in some sort of money laundering scam was news alright, and could be just the sort of big break Andi needed to get out of the hospitality industry for good. As Curtis was fond of reminding me, journalism was a hard gig to crack. It had to be about Trip, and Jouissance, and the ‘colourful’ Sam Doyle.

  The next thing I assumed was that someone had found out what she was up to. Trip? Yasmin? Doyle? Had they done something to her? Possibly, but what sort of halfwit would kidnap someone and let them keep their mobile phone? More likely was the possibility that she had been discovered, disappeared before they could get to her and come to grief along the way.

  Whatever it was, I had to find out what happened that night at Jouissance, and I had to find out more about Sam Doyle. And Alex couldn’t stop me.

  I could go spend a couple of days trawling through company records and court reports to get more information, or I could do it the easy way and call my old boss, Tony Torcasio.

  He was an ex-cop who knew a lot of Sydney policemen and PIs and he subscribed to databases that I didn’t have access to.

  Sure, he’d fired me, but in a friendly way, and he’d always said that if I needed any help …

  ‘Hey, Simone.’ He seemed pleased to hear from me.

  ‘How’s it going? Been getting much work?’

  ‘Matter of fact I’m on a case right now.’

  He groaned when I told him it was missing persons, but I filled him in, right up to my triumph the night before. Tony could keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Undercover as Kezza the dishpig. Jesus. Only you.’ I was sure he was shaking his head.

  ‘I was just wondering if you or any of your Sydney mates know anything about Sam Doyle?’

  ‘You just said Alex told you to back off from that angle.

  Stick to the background, family and shit.’

  ‘Yeah but I can’t. It’s all connected. I reckon Doyle will lead me to Andi.’

  ‘If Alex is already investigating the man then I’m sure he’ll keep you posted.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll let me know what’s going on when it’s all over, but that might be too late! She might be dead!’

  ‘Very dramatic.’

  ‘Please, Tony, any scrap you can throw me …’

  ‘No.’

  It took me a couple of seconds to register what he’d said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. I’m not going to say anything except stay away from him. I know you. I give you information and you’re straight up there, in his face, following him around, probably fucking up the fraud investigation, and then all hell breaks loose. I don’t want to be responsible. So, no.’

  He was as bad as those fucking cops at Elsternwick. ‘Well thank you very much for your help, Tony, you obviously think very highly of me.’

  ‘Anytime.’ Tony hung up.

  There was only one thing to do. I called Curtis.

  ‘What’s going on with you and Chloe?’ he said, instead of hello.

  ‘You’re not at hers are you?’

  ‘No, Fitzroy.’ Curtis was subletting Sean’s place, the downstairs of an old terrace converted into a flat.

  ‘She tell you we had a fight?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well, I’m waiting for her to apologise.’

  Curtis laughed and laughed, then he laughed some more.

  ‘Like that’s gonna happen. Just bite the bullet and tell her you’re sorry. I did. It’s the only way.’

  ‘After what she did the other night? You may be willing to let her walk all over you but I’m not.’

  ‘Hey. She’s not walking all over me. I thought it was the best thing to do under the circumstances. Have you noticed she’s been acting weird lately?’

  ‘Weird is her middle name.’

  ‘I’m serious. Violent mood swings. Much worse than usual.’

  ‘She smoking more dope?’ I asked.

  ‘Not possible—there are only so many hours in the day.’

  ‘Stronger shit, like hydro?’

  ‘It looks and smells like the same old weed to me.’ Then he twigged: ‘So what are you after? You never call unless you want something.’

  ‘I need to find out about Sam Doyle. Colourful Sydney businessman, runs the Doyle Food Group and co-owns Jouissance with Trip Sibley.’

  ‘What’s the big juicy story, babe? C’mon, you don’t get nothing for nothing.’

  It drove me crazy the way he tried to tough-talk, like a character in a forties film. If Curtis thought he could get away with wearing a hat that had a press card stuck in the band, he’d do it.

  ‘Missing waitress.’

  ‘The one whose poster Chloe’s sticking up all over Melbourne?’ I heard him yawning on the other end of the line.

  ‘Maybe you could do an article about her,’ I suggested.

  ‘Get some publicity.’

  ‘What’s the angle? She also a model working part time as a call girl? Left behind a blood splattered uniform? Having an affair with a high powered government minister?’

  I couldn’t tell him about the suspected money laundering so I said, ‘There isn’t one.’

  ‘Then forget it.’

  ‘What about Sam Doyle?’

  ‘Name rings a bell, but that’s all.’

  ‘Could you find out?’

  ‘Shit, Simone. If you didn’t know, I’m writing a very long, very complex true crime book here and I have a deadline. Do your own research. What are you, lazy?’

  ‘No. It’s just that time’s running out. If I don’t find her soon she might die.’

  ‘And that affects me how?’

  I hung up on him, stewed for a while then had an idea.

  Doyle owned a Kings Cross restaurant and the library book that had disappeared, All That Glitters, was about Kings Cross too. I rang all the local bookshops to see if they had a copy and struck paydirt at Chronicles on Fitzroy Street. I drove down there, bought it, and took it to the café next door. I ordered a coffee and flipped straight to the index. Doyle, Sam. There were three entries. Damn I was good.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By the time I got home my stomach was baying for food so I set to fixing an omelette, roughly chopping spring onions, red capsicum, zucchini and mushrooms then flipping them around in the nonstick pan, mulling over what I’d read.

  Sam Doyle had been a fixture at the Cross in the seventies and early eighties, starting as a bouncer at illegal gambling joints. He was employed by some of the big-time crooks of the day and worked his way up, managing a restaurant, then a strip club, before getting into property development and the hospitality industry and becoming respectable. A black and white photo from seventy-nine showed a lean man out the front of the Love Tunnel wearing an open necked bodyshirt, a gold chain, and a shit eating grin. He had intense eyes, big sideburns, a nose that looked like it had been broken once or twice, and a ton of dark hair boofed up Elvis style. A pretty handsome dude, compared to the rest of the shifty eyed crims in the photos. Of course it had been taken a quarter of a century ago and he was probably a bloated old fat cat these days.

  I beat four free range eggs with a little salt and cracked pepper, poured the mixture into the pan and turned the gas right down so the bottom would set. If he was delivering boxes full of cash then maybe he wasn’t quite the respectable businessman he appeared to be. I wondered if the author, Ferguson, had any more infor
mation on Doyle and slung him an email using the address Canning had given me. I wasn’t sure if it’d get to him but it didn’t hurt to try.

  As I waited for the omelette to cook I wondered how to find out about Andi leaving Jouissance with Trip and Yasmin.

  I briefly considered contacting Gordon, as he didn’t seem to like Trip much, when it hit me. Patsy, the gay waiter. He was the friendliest of the lot, had stood up for poor old Kezza and I knew that Chloe had his phone number. She’d got it while trying to recruit him as a stripper. That meant I had to call Chloe, but it was about time one of us broke the ridiculous standoff anyway. We’d been giving each other the silent treatment for two days now. Time to kiss and make up.

  I took the cordless phone into the kitchen so I could keep an eye on my brunch, leaned back on the laminated counter and dialled her number. I was stupidly nervous, like when you call a guy for the first time, and felt relief when her answering machine kicked in. It wasn’t quite midday. She was probably still in bed.

  ‘It’s Simone,’ I spoke into the machine. ‘Can you give me a call? I need Patsy’s number. The buff waiter from the other night?’ I thought about tacking on a quick apology and stopped myself just in time, thank god. I wasn’t the one who had behaved like a complete psycho and saying sorry would only condone her behaviour. I finished with a clipped ‘thanks’ and hung up.

  Using an egg flip I scraped the omelette back a little from the pan. The bottom was golden brown and the top was still runny. Every time I tried to turn an omelette it morphed into scrambled eggs so I fired up the grill. I switched on the gas, crouched down, waved a match around and turned my head away, eyes half closed. Flames whoomped out, sucked back in and my heart galloped. I’ve never gotten used to those things.

  I scavenged in the fridge for cheddar but all I came up with were singles so I unwrapped four and lay them on top, admiring the way they glistened in the morning light, shining like no cheese had a right to.

  My phone rang. It was Chloe.

  ‘Oh three one one two three six three three four.’ Her voice was flat.

  ‘Wait, lemme get a pen.’ I raced to the lounge room, found a pen and picked up my notepad from the dining table.