by Zane Lovitt
The shopfront I can see in my rearview has women coming and going. Some of them push prams. Others don’t, but it’s all women. I rotate my body and squint hard through the rain. I’d like to forget what I’m listening to and solve the puzzle of this store. But the rain’s too heavy now.
‘She felt responsible? For what she thought had happened to Glen?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about you?’
Kiara’s voice is suddenly dried up. ‘It comes and goes. Some days are really bad. The idea of leaving someone to die…It makes me sick. I want to ring up the detective and confess. I have this sense of wanting to be punished. Like, I want to pay the fine and go home.’
‘Do you think you’d feel better if you told your sister the truth?’
Kiara takes in a big breath. ‘I did. I told her…two or three months ago.’
‘What prompted you to do that?’
‘That was one of the bad days. I’d had a glass of wine. Steph had been having a bad day too. Talking about Glen. Wanting to visit his mum in Perth. I started to cry, and then she started crying. Then I told her.’
‘How did she respond?’
‘It took a long time for her to understand what I was saying. Once she did, she was so forgiving. Immediately she’s telling me, don’t worry, we’ll keep it a secret. I think maybe she was relieved… Like, she didn’t have to feel guilty anymore.’
In my rain-splashed mirror a hugely pregnant woman is looking at my car, then she turns and waddles through the shop’s screen door and suddenly it’s obvious what the store is selling. Maternity clothes. Those mannequins are pregnant mannequins. The woman who walked in looked like Annie. Or at least, how Annie would look if she were pregnant. Blood pumps into my head and I have to remind myself that it’s not Annie. We only broke up a couple of years ago. She’s not going to be settling down, having a family.
‘You still have bad moments?’
‘Since I told her? Yeah, of course.’
‘Maybe telling your sister wasn’t enough. Have you considered talking to your fiancé?’
My headphones fill with laughter. ‘Nooooooo.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d lose my triple-A rating.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Rodney couldn’t marry me if he knew about this. I love him, but he’s two-dimensional in some ways.’
‘You think he’d break it off?’
‘Do you tell your wife everything?’
‘Well…I won’t tell her I had cannelloni for lunch today. But you’re talking about something with real psychological implications.’
‘It’s not an option, doctor. Rodney’s too conservative. It’s just not an option.’
The woman I saw go into the store is coming back out now. The one who looks like Annie. I watch her slowly close the screen door and wait in the shelter of the portico, and now I see that she looks like Annie because she is Annie. About eight months pregnant. And she’s standing there to stay dry and she looks over at my car again and then she steps out into the rain and she looks over again and then she’s gone.
I take off the headphones.
The light in here has changed in the last fifty minutes, or maybe I’ve changed and so I’m noticing the light now. I’m on my back on the bed with my head pillowed forward, aimed at Rodney. He rubs a hand across his brow, pushing deep into the skin. He’s about to get up out of the chair, then doesn’t.
‘Fucking well bugger me,’ he says.
Without the light behind him he’s smaller. His face has more lines in it than before, showing years I hadn’t noticed—he’s at least ten years older than Kiara. Even so, I don’t remember his hair so thin or his neck so flabby. Listening to that disk has aged him.
‘Do you think it would be suspicious if I broke it off immediately?’
‘Uuuuuh.’ I feel like I just woke from a coma. ‘I don’t know.’
I reach for the gin bottle and pour into my glass.
‘Can I get one of those?’ he asks. Like I’m going to get up and mix him a drink. I hold the bottle out and it hovers in the air until he comes and takes it.
‘Christ…’ he says, moving to the bar fridge. He seems oblivious to the state I’m in. ‘Last month we thought she was pregnant. She wasn’t, but we thought…Christ. Can you imagine if she was?’
Just that word prompts uncomfortable thoughts. To distract myself I finish my drink, heave myself forward and let the alcohol drain from my head. There’s a stiff ache in my neck. I stand painfully, move to the computer and eject the disk.
Rodney sips his drink and sits back down, reclines, crosses his legs. He’s already philosophical. ‘Well, it was nice while it lasted. She was a good girl, Kiara. I tell you what, you wouldn’t think it would be so hard for a bloke like me to find a wife.’
I carry the disks to the motel sink, drop them in and squirt the lighter fluid over them. Then I light a match and drop it on the disks. The smoke is thick and black and I push open the window, fan at the vapour. The blue fire peters out and the disks shrivel into black clumps. I look down at them for a long moment, then I turn and fold my arms. It takes a second for my eyes to focus properly on Rodney because the image of the flames seems to have burned into my retinas. I try not to slur.
‘So…you’re gonna break it off?’
‘Of course. I mean, I don’t like to be so predictable. But the fact is she’s absolutely right about me.’
I adjust myself against the sink.
‘It’s just that you might be missing the most important…the most important angle.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well…’ I shrug like what I’m saying is obvious. ‘Isn’t it ideal? Knowing her secret like this?’
‘God, no. Don’t be naive. This is a scandal waiting to happen. Banker’s Wife Charged with Murder. My reputation. My livelihood. My mother, for Christ’s sake.’
‘But isn’t it ideal. If she decides she doesn’t want to be with you after all. If she starts up with another bloke. You make one phone call and she’s had it.’
‘She wouldn’t start up with another bloke. She’s not that kind of person.’
I snicker, loud. ‘Now who’s being naive? Take it from me, every relationship goes sour eventually. And then, when that happens, you threaten to call the cops and tell them she confessed to you and you just can’t live with the knowledge. She won’t hold up under questioning. Neither will her sister.’
‘Come on,’ Rodney rears, laughing. ‘I’m saying to you that I couldn’t bear that kind of upheaval—’
‘But it would never come to that.’ Something that might be an alarm is ringing softly in a corner of my brain. I pause, but it’s nothing I can’t douse with another swig of gin. I take several small steps to the fridge and pour some into my glass.
‘When things get tough, you tell her what you know. That’s enough to put her in jail. Then you lay down the law. You tell her how things are going to be.’
I add tonic to the glass, splashing some down the fridge door. When I turn back to Rodney he’s calmly analysing me and maybe he knows that what I’m talking about is more than just him and Kiara.
But what he says is, ‘You mean, like insurance?’
I say, ‘Yes.’
I add a little more tonic, which requires a moment of intense focus.
‘But if it came out. The stigma of it,’ he shakes his head. ‘My wife the murderer…People would say I was duped.’
‘People would say you’re a survivor.’ I drink a long sip. ‘But it would never come out because…You’re gonna have kids, right? If she’s got kids, she’ll do anything to stay out of prison. No man could be better positioned for when his wife tries to dump him or just… you know…fuck him over.’
That alarm is ringing louder so I finish my drink and now the alarm is gone, leaving only the acrid stink of burnt plastic that’s filled the room. I balance my way to the front door and open it. Light pours in and I take refuge on the
far side of the bed, slump there cradling nothing.
Rodney is shaking his head. ‘I see your point. But the risk is… It’s professional suicide.’
He puts on his jacket. I pull his mobile phone from my pocket and toss it onto the bed and he picks it up and says, ‘I guess this is goodbye. You’ll forgive me for saying I hope I never see you again.’
I shrug, fall back onto the pillows, feel my head swim. Rodney sees me, seems to judge me, so I close my eyes.
He says, ‘Did anything happen that might make her suspect anything?’
‘Like what?’
‘Did she see you? Did the doctor find the microphone?’
‘I took the microphone out. No to all three questions.’
‘So when I tell her it’s over, and if she decides to investigate for herself to find out why, she’s not going to find out why, is she?’
‘Not unless she bugs your shrink’s office.’
I laugh at my hilarious joke. There’s no response from Rodney.
I say, ‘I hope I never see you again, too.’
No response to that either. After a moment I open my left eye. The door is still open and Rodney is gone. Even in those shoes, the war in the distance that they sound like, I didn’t hear him creep away.
The electronic picture frame does what it’s been doing all the while since I got here. The restaurant photo of Rodney and Kiara reappears, the two of them with their mindless, charming grins. Kiara’s face in that picture is as different to the one that’s next to me on the bed as a face can be.
Right now, she looks to have the worst kind of hangover, eyes bloody and swollen from crying and rubbing. She sits hunched, clutching the pillow which is all she’s had to wipe her face on and now you can see tears and saliva and make-up smeared across the fabric.
She doesn’t want to leave this room to get a tissue. She doesn’t want Stephanie to see her like this.
‘I can get you something.’ I say. ‘A towel or something.’
It’s late now and we’re lit by just a blue silk lampshade on the other side of her bed. I remember how dark it was in my car, when I first heard her tell her story. It’s like that in this room.
‘Why are you here?’ She asks, sniffing back the mucus.
‘I saw the announcement in the paper.’ The folded premarital agreement lies on one of Kiara’s pillows and I pick it up, flick through it. It’s good to have something to focus on that isn’t her. I find what I’m looking for on the last of the four pages. I read it out loud:
‘In the event that either party is convicted of an indictable offence, that party’s rights under this agreement are void. That’s not an unusual clause, your solicitor probably didn’t care much about it. But it sorts things out for Rodney. It means a court can’t alter what the agreement says, and you have no rights under the agreement. You’d be lucky to come away with what you own now.’
She stares at the floor in front of her and I don’t know if she’s listening. I’m partly expecting her to deny this is happening and throw me out.
‘No…’ she says. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
Her hands shaking, she rubs her eyes with her wrist bone one more time. Her voice is just a chesty croak, slow and lifeless.
‘You could easily have slipped an anonymous note under my door. But you chose to come and see me and sit through this.’
‘I felt bad…’
‘But you must have known you’d feel bad. Before you did it. And you did it anyway. And now here you are.’
This isn’t exactly unfamiliar. People who get bad news, sometimes they like to make it about me. They want to make it that I’m the problem, that if it weren’t for me they wouldn’t be feeling this way. People like this, they might have a point.
‘I needed the money,’ I say. ‘I hadn’t had a paying job in weeks. Look—’
‘Bullshit.’ Despite her broken face her eyes flare with anger. ‘I’ve got kids like you in my group. They play up just for the attention, then I sit them on my knee and tell them off, then they start crying and I give them a hug. Six-year-old catharsis junkies.’
‘I didn’t come here for a hug.’
‘So why are you here?’
Her whole body is ragged and drained like she’s been through an exorcism. I don’t know where she’s getting the energy to speak.
‘Look…’ I say. ‘I don’t feel bad about telling you the truth about Rodney Fisher. If what I did means you’re not going to marry that prick, then you can analyse me all you like, but—’
‘Who says I’m not going to marry him?’
Someone dumps a load of bottles into the recycling bin two storeys down. A guffaw made of glass.
‘You still want to marry him?’
‘I’m thirty-eight, for God’s sake.’
‘So what?’
She shrugs, wipes away more snot. ‘I’m pregnant.’
God. Is there anyone who isn’t?
‘Does Rodney know?’
‘Not yet.’
‘It doesn’t mean you have to marry him.’
‘I’m a primary school teacher. How else would I raise a child? On hand-outs?’
That electronic photo frame, Kiara must have watched it dissolve a million times, from the picture of her and Rodney to the picture of her and all those children. Over and over and over.
She says, ‘You have to leave now. I’m sorry I couldn’t offer you the emotional purge you were looking for.’
‘Hey, don’t worry about it.’ I stand up, pull on my jacket. ‘I can hug myself without much trouble.’
‘Maybe you’re the one who needs to see Doctor Gustafson.’ Her Italian eyes shine. ‘You’re the one with the real issues.’
She’s genuinely baiting me, picking a fight in a room itself the size of a confessional. I don’t say anything, open the bedroom door and step out.
Stephanie isn’t there. When I reach the other side of the living room, I see that her bedroom door is ajar and inside she’s lying on her single bed, in her underwear, big headphones around her head, reading a magazine. Her legs kick back and forth between the bed and her backside. She has no idea of there being anything else in the world.
I linger for a moment, wanting to say goodbye. But it feels like a lie, so I walk on and reach the front door.
‘You might be wrong, you know.’ It’s Kiara’s voice. She’s come to her bedroom door, the document in her hand. She waves it gently. ‘You said yourself that that clause is standard for these sorts of things. Rodney might have decided he wants to marry me because he loves me. Did that occur to you? That he just fucking loves me?’
‘I know what people look like when they’re in love. And when they’re not.’
‘You’re what? The world’s greatest detective?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with being a detective.’
It takes me half an hour to find a taxi in the rain.
I make a point of not looking at the coffee tin, the one that’s catching the leaking water, until after I’ve sat down at my desk. When I do look, I see that it must have overflowed at least an hour ago. The shape on the floor is now a woman with a great big belly standing in the rain.
That’s fine. Let her do that. Let me get back to watching the leak in the roof.
I wonder about the first drip, the first one to make the tin overflow, some time earlier tonight. At the moment it landed, when the water first crept out over the rim, maybe something coincided, like a car crash outside, or a thunderclap.
But what’s more likely is there was nothing to announce it. And I wonder, even if I’d been sitting here watching, if I would even have realised it had happened.
DEATH AT LE SHACK
DEMETRI CALLS ME with a job.
One of his clients is sitting in a living room in Sandringham with a dead prostitute on his couch. When I get there I’m supposed to make sure the police don’t cause problems.
I say, ‘Isn’t that what they’re for?’
‘T
his is just a drug overdose. Frank wasn’t even there when it happened. But the cops know Frank. They could try anything.’
‘What’s his last name?’
‘Tenant.’
‘Haven’t heard of him.’
‘He’s not a big fish. Maybe he thinks he is. Usually his bag is to be less than forthcoming with the ATO, though he’s never been prosecuted. But there was an incident a few years ago…I helped him on a possession charge, which blossomed into a conviction, and he still maintains the police planted the coke on him.’
I have to ask. ‘So did they?’ I’m thinking of Vincenzo Gruppo, a carpet salesman the news has been all about lately. Cops set him up for possessing ecstasy and last week the Supreme Court apologised and freed him and now police integrity is the new bandwagon célèbre.
‘I never saw the proof, but Frank’s still ropable about it. He doesn’t want it happening again.’
‘He thinks they’ll fix him up for murder?’
‘To hear Frank tell it, the entire police force is champing at the bit to fix him up for murder. I’ve tried explaining that they couldn’t care less. His business is taking off, it’s legal, they’re not interested in him anymore. But Frank’s got this…victim mentality.’
‘And the customer is always right…’
‘I don’t mind sending someone over to make sure what isn’t going to happen doesn’t happen.’
‘Was she alone when she died?’
‘Seems so. But I’ve had all of a two-minute conversation with him that ended ten seconds ago, so I don’t know much. He and some friends picked her up last night and took her back to his house in Sandringham. Today they go out for lunch, leave her behind, come back and there she is, hypodermic right there on the floor. They didn’t even know she had the stuff with her. No foul play suspected.’
‘By Frank.’
‘Honestly, the only thing he’s worried about is that the cops are going to do to him what he did to her the night before. And if he says it’s cut and dried, then I don’t need to bugger up my Saturday when I can bugger up yours.’
‘So I go over there and, what? Look tough?’
‘That’s right. They won’t call triple zero until you arrive. If Frank flips out you can give me a bell, but I don’t expect him to be a problem. Frank doesn’t use heroin and he doesn’t kill prostitutes. This is just bad luck.’