by Chris Krupa
Amanda’s legal firm resided in the heart of the business district of Nowra, situated above a bank. I walked to the end of a mezzanine, to a glass door emblazoned with ‘Nicholson & Law’ in gold letters.
The receptionist, a young woman with layered hair streaked with platinum blonde and luminous red, immaculately applied makeup, and crisp designer clothes, greeted my presence with a clapped-on smile.
I nodded and said, ‘Matt Kowalski... I have an appointment to see Amanda Hotchkiss.’
She told me to take a seat and offered free Wi Fi and coffee, then put a call through and went back to her computer.
My shabby chic exterior, replete with scuffed boots and two-day growth, clearly sat inharmonious to the professional, elite image the company wanted to project.
A door opened and a woman appeared, wearing a dark pants suit and high heels, of average height, with dyed blonde hair and sharp features. Her black-rimmed glasses framed dark eyes that were pinched back at the sides. She offered a limp-wristed handshake as I introduced myself and told her I was there to discuss a delicate matter with Amanda Hotchkiss. She made a face I could only read as contempt.
‘Mister Kowalski, I’m Suzanna Gildstein, the managing director of Nicholson & Law. And you have no official legal business here.’
Before letting me respond, she crossed her arms and lifted her chin. ‘Ms. Hotchkiss has already spoken to the police, and therefore I cannot grant her leave to discuss anything with a P.I. You’re rather redundant, Mr. Kowalski.’
I’d encountered a few ice princesses in my time, but this one.... Her face barely moved, frozen in place with practised ease, no doubt from defending the scum of the neighbourhood for years.
I kept my cool. ‘I’m obliged to my client to follow any possible leads in the case.’
‘Then in this instance, your client is going to be sorely disappointed, because Ms. Hotchkiss has nothing further to add.’
‘I’d rather hear that from her, if you don’t mind.’
‘I do, actually. In the future, if you could direct any further inquiries to me, Mr. Kowalski, it would be appreciated.’
I fixed her with the Kowalski stare. ‘I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding, Ms. Gildstein. I’m sensing that you’ve assumed I’m here in a professional capacity. Far from it. Ms Hotchkiss’s fiancé, Rob Demich, was my cousin. I’m here to pay my respects to Ms Hotchkiss. Therefore, my business with her is of a personal nature.’
She hesitated, but I detected a chink in her armour, and she knew it.
I smiled.
She bit her lip, then turned on her heel and disappeared behind the same door she’d come from.
After a moment, the door opened and an Asian woman in her thirties introduced herself as Wendy, Amanda’s team leader, and handed me a visitor’s badge.
I pinned it to my tee shirt and followed her lead.
The back offices consisted of partitioned workstations where people spoke into fancy headsets or busily entered data into their computers.
She led me to a small, drab cubicle where a short woman with teased, mousy blonde hair wearing a crinkled second-hand suit struggled to type quickly.
‘Amanda? This is Mr. Kowalski.’ She spoke in inflections, every sentence ending on a high note, as most Australians tended to do. ‘He’s here to see you about a personal matter.’
Amanda turned in her chair, and I startled, recognising her as the young woman the German Shepherd latched onto on YouTube.
Wendy left us alone, and I carefully leaned against the partition for lack of seating.
Amanda was pale and extremely thin. Her pants suit had seen better days, her blonde hair had dark roots, and her eyes were bloodshot and large.
‘Hi, Amanda, thanks for taking the time to talk.’
‘S’okay.’
I looked around at the suits tapping away at their computers. ‘Interesting place. What exactly do you do here?’
She eyed me warily. ‘I’m a document coder.’
‘Right. I’ll get straight to it. I’m here to talk to you about your fiancé, Rob.’
She straightened the crease in her skirt and cleared her throat.
I couldn’t tell if she was sad or merely uneasy.
‘Ex-fiancé,’ she said. ‘We split up over a year ago.’
‘Right. Sorry to hear that. Can you tell me anything about what happened last week? Do you know why Rob was at the work site at ten o’clock last Monday night?’
‘How should I know?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘We weren’t living together. I’ve already talked to the cops about all this.’
She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands, either twisting them, or pulling at her fingers, or doing both at the same time. She played smart and sophisticated, but the act didn’t quite sell. An element of roughness showed around the edges, and although her body was skeletal, she possessed a pretty face in an unblemished, Kate Moss way. Her desk sat relatively bare, not decorated with the usual paraphernalia an office worker accumulated over time.
‘I understand this is something of an inconvenience,’ I said. ‘However, I’ve been hired by Rob’s father to get to the heart of the matter. I know this is very personal, but can I ask why you called it quits?’
She studied my face for a moment and, despite my rough features, perhaps saw something good in it, because her shoulders relaxed and she sighed. ‘We were together since high school, but I was so sick of his shit. It’s just... he was always up to no good, and I was sick of not knowing when—or if—he was going to come home. I didn’t know where he was going all hours of the night. He liked his mates over me, but we were practically married. I loved him, even when he did this.’
She pointed to a faint scar above her right cheekbone. ‘He came at me with a knife when he was high on ice. I knew it wasn’t really him, though, and it didn’t stop me loving him. I reckon we just grew apart.’
I nodded. Despite the heavy drug use, she carried the weight of a woman who’d escaped a long, abusive marriage. Again, she couldn’t sit still, and crossed and uncrossed her legs. I put it down to nerves.
Then she smiled, and I noticed one of her incisors was missing, and that the rest of her teeth may have been following suit. I remembered the photos of ice users on the net—the dreaded ‘meth mouth’.
She glanced at her computer screen, and murmured something about having an extended lunch break with an extremely important client. She didn’t seem high enough on the ladder to have clients, but I took it in stride.
I gave her my card in case she ‘remembered anything’.
She stood and awkwardly ushered me out of her cubicle. At the door to the reception area, she wasn’t sure whether to shake my hand or not, so I left it.
I took the stairs back down to the street, crossed the road, and took up a spot in a fruit market, pretending to inspect the stone fruit.
Within minutes, Amanda emerged from the glass doors. She stopped and touched up her lip-gloss, then walked to a nearby café called Zest. She took a seat at a table on the footpath.
A couple minutes later, a man in a black tracksuit and hoodie sauntered up to the table, took a seat opposite her, and offered her a smoke.
They chatted animatedly for a few minutes and sucked their cancer sticks—a habit I dabbled in during my twenties, and quit cold turkey after government-sponsored advertisements worked their magic on me. He made her laugh on more than one occasion, and at one point, he got up and strolled into the café.
Amanda smoothed her hair against her scalp and adjusted her top.
The man returned with two wraps, which they ate with a side of coffee and a cigarette chaser. The man pulled his hoodie back to reveal spiked blonde hair with a rat’s tail, and a southern cross tattoo running down the side of his neck. He matched George’s description of Michael Le Mat.
As they finished up and made ready to leave, I left the fruit market and hustled back to the council car park, got in the ute, pulled out of the car pa
rk, and drove back along Kinghorne Street. Lucky for me, I’d timed it right.
Michael got into a Holden and pulled out into the traffic, heading north. Amanda sat beside him, her head rising above the passenger seat.
I did a quick, illegal U-turn amidst beeps and rude gestures, and followed their car for a block before they turned east and pulled into a little place called George Bass Motor Inn. I continued past, did another quick U-turn, and parked a little way back from the driveway. The building itself was bricked and plain, with a row of rooms numbered one to twenty, and a tiny car park.
There was no question what Amanda and Michael would be doing for the next half hour, so I didn’t stick around.
I drove back to Kinghorne Street, lucked out with a parking space on the main street, and went into the Zest café. I made do with a piece of banana bread, and a bottle of water to keep me hydrated. Fifteen bucks and eighteen minutes later, I pulled up back across from the motor inn.
It took a further twenty minutes for the lovebirds to emerge, all glowing and with rumpled clothes. They drove away together. No doubt he’d drop her back at her place of work.
I got out, crossed the street, and entered the tiny reception area. An air conditioning unit hummed at full bore.
A small Indian woman in her fifties greeted me. Her coiffured hair and rose gold bracelets jangled on both wrists as she fired up her PC and asked if I had a reservation.
‘No, not today,’ I said. I opened my phone wallet and showed her my CAPI licence. ‘I’d like some information.’
She scrutinised my licence and raised her hands. ‘No trouble, thank you. No police.’ She turned away from me and tried to look busy.
‘I’m not police, and I’m not going to make trouble.’
She ignored me and flustered about on the computer.
‘I’m investigating the murder of my cousin. There was a man here just a moment ago who might be directly involved. Please, if you could help in any way, it would be greatly appreciated.’
She finally turned her head and looked me up and down. ‘Like Akram. My brother in law.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘He thinks he is a God. I don’t want to talk to you.’
In stalemate situations, it was necessary to consider broader options. I needed information she wasn’t willing to give, so I simply had to work out by which means I would get it. I decided to take the capitalist path, and made a show of taking two fifties out of my wallet and placing them on the desk.
‘I need the name of the man in room sixteen earlier this afternoon. Blonde hair, rat’s tail. He came with a woman—thin, early twenties. I’m not going to arrest anybody or make any trouble for you.’
The woman eyed the money, stared at me with fiery indignation, and picked up the fifties. ‘That is private information, and I will never be bought.’
She tossed the notes in my direction, and they floated to the floor.
I bent down and retrieved them, then straightened to my full height. I hadn’t been close to Rob, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to find his killer any less. I’d made a promise to Zio Fausto, and I couldn’t afford to let things go for the sake of a lousy name.
‘I wonder if the Department of Fair Trading could find a few holes with this operation.’ I pointed to an Asian woman emerging from one of the rooms with a laundry trolley. ‘Is her visa up to date? What about penalty rates for weekend work? All it takes these days is one simple phone call.’
I swiped the screen on my phone to emphasise my point.
She clicked her tongue and shot me a penetrating gaze, then turned to the PC and clicked the mouse with extreme agitation. After a moment, she announced, ‘The man in room sixteen was Michael Smith.’
The ‘Michael’ confirmed his identity, and the ‘Smith’ confirmed his lack of imagination.
I thanked her and walked out, ignoring whatever she mumbled in her own language—swear words, probably.
Back in my car, I wound the window down, the temperature having risen a few degrees, and considered the situation.
Amanda was having a dalliance with her supplier, and Rob’s number one enemy. I wondered what Rob would have thought of that, and how deep this particularly salacious rabbit hole would go. Michael wasn’t exactly slinking around in the shadows, which pegged him as an arrogant egotist in my book. He probably thought he was invincible against any and all recriminations. Judging by how hot and heavy things appeared to be, and the fact Amanda risked an hour lunch break for a midday tryst in a very public motel so close to work, they might be deep in the throes of a passionate honeymoon phase.
I pulled out my laptop, opened the file on Rob, and tried to decide my next course of action. Large clouds had come over, and the banksias that lined the street copped a bit of the wind.
A full hunger kicked in, and the time on my phone said 1:46 PM, so I decided to try my luck and head back to the Tavern. By the time I got there, the lunchtime specials had finished, but I went to the bar anyway. The daylight hours afforded the place a brighter outlook. Three men in their fifties sipped schooners in the TAB area, their bored faces bent over form guides and lined with the daily tedium of whittling their pensions away on placing’s with low totes. I ordered a steak sandwich, chips, and salad, with a house red from the bar, and found a spot by the front windows.
When I’d finished, I ordered a beer and asked the same barmaid if I could speak with Andy Coates.
She poured the beer with too much head, as some of the young ones tended to do, and promptly disappeared into the back room.
A tall formidable figure dressed in a cut-off denim jacket and jeans emerged.
My hackles rose as I realised his height and girth matched the psycho who came at me with a baseball bat Monday night. Because of Annette’s presence, I’d focused on her rather than him, so I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.
I put the feeling aside and instead appreciated his singlet. On the front, someone had hand-stitched the Hell Spawn insignia, a falcon, wings outstretched in front of a red sun. A thick blonde moustache sat over his top lip, completely incongruous with his bright red face. He asked me if I was a cop—the sign of a guilty conscience.
‘I’m a private detective. My name’s Matt Kowalski. Are you Andy Coates?’
He looked me in the eye. In his prime, he would have been intimidating, but he was overweight, and I could smell weed and bourbon on him.
‘A pretend cop, eh?’ He let out a long-suffering sigh. ‘Look, I’ve been clean for five years.’
I told him I was looking into Rob’s murder and needed to know where he stood on the situation.
He leaned close to my face and sneered. ‘No comment.’ He then turned and disappeared into the room behind the bar.
Soon a man in his sixties appeared by my side with a middy in his hand. ‘Mind if an old man joins you?’
I shook my head and indicated the seat on the opposite side.
He sat with a groan, sighed, and held out his withered hand. ‘Name’s Damien. Everyone calls me Damo.’
‘Matt.’
When we shook, his hand felt cold and appeared withered by the sun. ‘What brings you to these parts?’
‘How can you tell I’m from out of town?’
‘I know every bastard in here.’ He chuckled. ‘You fish?’
‘Not since I was a kid.’
‘What do you do for a crust, you don’t mind me askin’?’
‘I’m a private detective.’
‘No shit.’
I shook my head.
‘You workin’ a case?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Maybe you can ask me some questions. I might know a few things.’
I told him the reason I was in town.
He nodded. ‘I read about the murder. That sort of thing doesn’t happen around here. Shockin’.’
‘You know Andy Coates?’
‘I do.’
‘He was pressing charges against Rob. You know anything about that?’
> ‘I might know a few things, but I’m down a few hundred from the trots.’
I took out my wallet. ‘I could make it worth your while.’
‘How much?’
‘Hundred bucks for twenty minutes?’
‘Righto. Let’s see it.’
I pulled out two fifties and placed one on the table. ‘Half now, and half if I think the information’s got legs.’
He quickly scooped up the note. ‘Righto. Ask away.’
‘What do you know about Andy Coates?’
‘He’s part owner of the tavern.’ He looked around and lowered his voice. ‘And I reckon he does some business on the side, if you get my drift.’
‘I’m going to need a bit more detail.’
‘Guns and the like.’ He took a nervous sip on his middy and looked around again.
I said, ‘I understand Andy Coates pressed assault charges against Rob Demich last month. Do you know anything about that?’
‘I was here when it happened. Rob and his mate Mick were selling stuff out the alcove near the men’s dunnies. He was out there every Friday dealing the ice. As far as I know, Andy bought some off Rob. They had a barney at the bar. Andy says, Hey you little prick, you fuckin’ stiffed me. And Rob turns round and says, Bullshit, I get it direct from the source. And Andy says, It’s fuckin’ laundry detergent. And Rob gets in his face and says, You calling me a fuckin’ liar? And Andy turns around and slams his fist in Rob’s face. And then you should’ve seen it. It was on for young and old—tables turnin’, fists flyin’. Half the pub got in on it that night. Andy reckons they caused about three grand worth of damage. It was psychotic. That’s what that ice does to you. But this doesn’t go anywhere, okay?’
‘It stays between you and me.’
‘The cops showed up, and I suppose Andy pressed charges. They were all bloodied and battered, bruised like the bejesus. It wasn’t the first time he was off his face on that shit.’