Vodka Doesn't Freeze

by Leah Giarratano

  'Jill, the more you react, the worse he gets. He sets you up, and you bite every time,' Scotty had told her. 'He's a splitter – he's gathering his crew around him, telling them how you're going to respond, and when you overreact, exactly as he predicted, he looks good and you look like a dickhead.'

  Jill knew he was right, but there was something about the macho posturing of Elvis that she couldn't fail to respond to. It wasn't just his set-ups and put-downs; she felt he was too close to the Wollongong bikies they had taken down. Her investigations had led to his little brother, Luca Calabrese, at almost every turn. Calabrese Junior was a made member of One Percent, the outlaw motorcycle group that ran amok on the South Coast. Witnesses had told her they'd made police statements about assaults, rapes, drug deals, all related to the gang, but nothing had ever eventuated; for the most part, police had not contacted them again. Elvis and his brother had grown up in the area and still knew everyone in town. A couple of their local mates had also joined the service. They knew her bust had made them look bad, and she felt their knives poised at her back.

  She hadn't told Scotty about the dildo left on her desk last week, but he'd seen the crude phallus inked onto her locker in black marker. She knew that formal complaints were just what Elvis wanted – to make her look overly sensitive, a whinger who couldn't take a joke, who might put in a complaint about any member of the team. Scotty had offered to back her up with a complaint to their commander, but she'd seen his relief when she'd brushed the suggestion aside. They'd stayed late one afternoon, cleaning the locker door with solvent.

  Tour complete, Jill walked back to the kitchen. She poured the carton of cold milk into the blender and then peeled the fat mango, dropping globs of it into the milk. She planned to drink the smoothie, tidy the mess and catch a shower before settling down to the reports.

  Her mobile pealed. 'Shit.' Sucking mango juice from her fingers, she flicked open the phone with one hand.

  It was Scotty. 'Yo, J. Dead one. We're up.'

  Scotty was running, she could hear him breathing hard.

  2

  JILL LET HERSELF SMILE, watching Scotty striding up the sand-hills, sunglasses on, joking with the uniformed cops who were almost running in their attempts to keep up with him. He was on his way to a murder scene, but for Scotty this was still a trip to the beach.

  Her mask slipped back into place when she reached the cordoned-off homicide site, regaining her breath quickly after the hike up the hot beach track. She took in the scene around her. The colours were exaggerated – opal blues of the ocean and sky, blinding white sand dunes, the wet red and purple smashed face of the man lying in the dirt. An ill-looking couple of kids stood a few metres away, looking everywhere but at the body.

  'Gordon,' Jill acknowledged the uniformed cop who worked downstairs in their unit. 'What've we got?'

  Gordon was overweight and bright with sweat. Jill took the smallest step backwards when he spoke. His breath smelled like cigarettes and constipation.

  'The kids over here found the body about half an hour ago,' said the officer. 'They called it in. Looks like he's forty-ish. Killed this morning. We interviewed the kids. They didn't see anything.'

  He averted his eyes from hers and Jill detected something unsaid. She waited. When nothing was forthcoming, she decided to look around for herself before she spoke to the witnesses. A chopper droned above the scene, circling lazily, a massive buzzard. She squinted into the glare overhead. Channel Nine. She tugged the rim of her baseball cap lower and walked through hot sand to the body.

  She took in the camera next to some neatly packaged sandwiches on the ground; a cling-wrapped bunch of grapes. It was like a child's packed lunch. She stood next to, but not disturbing, the blood-spattered towel on which the dead man had been sitting. There were already numerous sets of foot-prints leaving and leading to the towel. Some of the sandy indentations were blood smeared. She needed to find out how close the kids had come to the body. Glancing at them through her reflective glasses, Jill thought they now looked as if they wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

  Movement below the cliff face caught her eye. Kids, swimming and playing in the wading pool at the edge of the ocean. Their giggles bubbled up with the breeze. On the rocks by the side of the pool, a woman changed a baby's nappy; another slathered sunblock over the plump belly of a toddler. She squatted carefully next to the towel, her head now at sitting-height. Perfect view. Sick fuck. Her disgusted glance at the corpse revealed that his fly was undone.

  Jill straightened, tasting bile, and swayed for a moment. Telling herself it was just the heat, she made her way over to where Scotty was talking to the kids who'd called in the body.

  They appeared no older than seventeen. Locals probably. It looked like the girl's nose had been sunburnt a few times already this summer; her skin peeled over her freckles. Right now, she looked pale under her tan, white around her eyes and mouth. She wore long board shorts, a bikini top, and no shoes. Her boyfriend's arm hugged her shoulders. They seemed to be holding each other up. He was tall, but he still had to look up at Scotty as he spoke.

  'Jill, this is Adam Harvey and Tamara Wade. They live down on Clovelly Road. Came up at about eight this morning for a walk and found the body. Tamara's not feeling too good, and I told her she could go home and have a shower before they come in to make their statements.' Scotty turned to the boy. 'Before you go, Adam, I'd like you to meet Sergeant Jillian Jackson. Could you tell Jill about the car you saw before you found the body?'

  'Yeah. All right.' The boy's voice sounded like he looked, thin and shaky. 'When we got to the car park around the back of here there was this new Mercedes. Red. A coupe? Tamara said she wants a car like that, and we just checked it out a bit, looked in the windows, you know.'

  'Was anyone in the car, Adam?' asked Jill.

  'Nah.'

  'What about other cars?'

  'Ah, yeah, like we were saying before, it was pretty quiet. Surf's shithouse, you know. But there was a van, surfer's van, probably. No-one was in the van either,' he said.

  Jill asked, 'Did you see anyone around, Adam? Who else was around here?'

  'We didn't see anyone up here, but when we were coming up from the beach we saw two guys with their boards heading down. We can't remember anyone else.'

  'Do you remember seeing anyone, Tamara?'

  'No. I've already told four people that.' Tamara was teenage-indignant, but her lower lip trembled. 'Can we go now? It stinks here.'

  The sun was high and hot now. A sheet of blowflies surfed air currents over the body. The smell filled Jill's mouth and had permeated her hair. She nodded, and Scotty directed the kids away, ensuring he had all their details, then came back to where Jill was standing with the uniformeds.

  'Did you see the camera?' Scotty wanted to know.

  'He could've been an artist.' Jill didn't believe it.

  'With his pants down? This guy's a squirrel.'

  Jill's silence indicated her agreement. Together they watched two men draw closer. The man leading was older, his shiny head already scorched by the sun. The officer behind him, a boy in comparison, offered his hand when the man's footing slipped in the sand. It was slapped away.

  'Finally. The ME's here,' Scotty said.

  Scotty and Jill walked over to join the police medical examiner and his assistant. The kid dropped the heavy bags he'd been toting.

  'Could you be any more rough with that equipment, Jarred? Honestly!' The medical examiner wiped at his forehead with a lavender handkerchief. Scotty smirked at Jill while the man leaned on his assistant and emptied the sand from his shoes.

  'Let's get everyone away from this area,' he snapped, motioning Jill and Scotty to follow him. 'This is a crime scene.'

  No kidding, Jill sighed inwardly. She fell in behind the bristling doctor. They'd be in the sun for a while yet.

  Mercy Merris didn't notice the driver of the courier van screaming 'Crazy bitch!' as he over-corrected and almost lost con
trol when she sped past. Already two lanes away from him on the freeway heading southwest, her black curls streamed with her cigarette smoke out the window of her red Mercedes CLK. Belting out Aretha Franklin, she half-read one of the files propped open on her passenger seat; files she wasn't supposed to have removed from the psych hospital. She expertly flipped open her phone when it rang and overtook two cars in the left lane. Late again. They'd want to tell her her 11 a.m. appointment had arrived and her 10 a.m. patient was becoming impatient.

  She recognised the voice of an ex-patient, Lisa, crying, halfway through a sentence that didn't make sense.

  '. . . and I wasn't there for her and I said I would be . . .' The voice on the phone sounded fractured, slightly hysterical.

  'Lisa. Calm down. What's wrong?' Mercy was surprised to hear her so distraught. Their therapy had been over for months now, and the last time they'd talked Lisa had been functional, rational. Mercy hadn't thought she would regret giving Lisa her private phone number.

  'Calm down, Lisa,' she said again, suddenly tired. 'What's happening?' She glanced at the dash clock. Shit, she swore inwardly as she saw the time. She pressed the accelerator a little harder, then noticed a cop car ahead. Great, she thought, that's all I need, another speeding fine on the way to work. She jabbed the CD off and swerved her car into the break-down lane. She braked hard and the files from the passenger seat flew forward, merging into a mess on the floor.

  Mercy heard Lisa's voice from the mobile still in her hand.

  'It's Carly Kaplan,' Lisa sobbed. 'She killed herself last night. You weren't there for her either.'

  Mercy felt, rather than heard, a high-pitched whine begin in her head. Guilty thoughts of her last session with Carly, one of her most troubled patients, stabbed at her consciousness.

  Carly had threatened suicide in her last session, as she did almost every session, but Mercy had helped her consider other options, refusing to give in and admit her again to hospital – Carly seemed to deteriorate further when in hospital. She'd seemed calm when the session ended.

  When Carly hadn't shown for her appointment yesterday, Mercy had been relieved rather than worried, kicking off her heels and reclining in her chair to read. She knew she should've called her, but she had been so tired, and she'd felt angry that Carly was manipulating her again by failing to show up. She'd told herself to discuss this resentment in her next supervision session, at the same time knowing she wouldn't – she'd already decided to skip supervision again.

  And now Carly was dead. Mercy felt her racing thoughts slow, becoming syrupy and hard to grab hold of. Her patient had committed suicide and she had breached at least five hospital rules regarding her care. She hadn't written up her file notes in weeks, and she had the file off the hospital grounds; she hadn't brought Carly's case to the team supervision session for two months, and she hadn't mentioned to the team that Carly had threatened suicide again, even though the threat would be clearly recorded in the session audio tapes. The hospital would be looking everywhere for the file by now. There'd be a formal enquiry.

  Mercy found she'd disconnected the phone with Lisa still speaking, but she hadn't registered any words since she'd heard that Carly had killed herself.

  When she realised her pager was sounding, Mercy calmly picked it up and stared at it blankly. She pressed the pager into the dashboard with the heel of her hand until the plastic casing snapped, a shard slicing into her skin. She didn't flinch as blood welled up in her palm.

  3

  JILL GOT BACK TO HER apartment with a headache that felt like sunstroke. She let herself in and went straight to the fridge, opening its stainless steel door and leaning into the cool interior. She grabbed some water, drinking half the bottle as she kicked off her shoes and pulled her socks off. She padded barefoot across the pale granite tiles to the medicine chest over the sink. She reached for the Panadol and downed two capsules with the rest of the water.

  She tipped her now warm breakfast smoothie into the sink. The orange pulp of the mango triggered images of the smashed head in the sand. Even the hot, sweet smell was evocative of the death scene on the beach; the effect was disorienting. She placed a sweaty palm on the cool benchtop and directed her attention to the muted colours of her apartment. Her mum said the unit was too plain, that she should add decoration, but Jill loved the all-white and beech interior, colours broken only by cool steel.

  After her ritual tour of the unit, she buzzed open the motorised vertical blinds in her loungeroom and let the day-light in. Although the surf could barely be heard through the double-glazed balcony doors, right now its blue brilliance was too bright. She used the remote to shut it out again.

  She stripped down to singlet and briefs and entered the laundry, pleased with the shining newness of the German appliances. She sorted clothes to be washed, soothed by putting colours with colours, whites with whites, taking back control. The flashback on her bike had been so real that morning. It had been months since she had felt like she was actually back in the basement. It usually took hours to still her mind after an intrusion that real. Her head still thumped.

  What a day. Not what she'd been expecting. The hour with the ME had paid off already; fingerprints identified the body almost immediately. David Carter. He'd done twelve months weekend detention for teaching his seven-year-old stepdaughter how to insert tampons. Just trying to teach her, he'd offered in his defence in his police statement.

  The photos on his camera could all pass for innocent if they were of your own kids – children paddling, some of them toddlers, too young even for swimming costumes. Close-ups of their wide smiles, round bellies, short, fat legs. Scotty had taken a call from the cops going through Carter's home, now also a crime scene – they had found a library full of child porn, much of it movies of him with Asian girls under ten.

  Jill hadn't seen the movies, but she knew what they'd look like. She'd had her own mental film projector playing for twenty years. Mostly she could keep the curtains drawn, but she was always aware of the tape running.

  She felt hatred burning her diaphragm, a metallic taste at the back of her throat. Head throbbing, shoulders knotted, she tried to slow her breathing. She couldn't catch her breath. She tried to focus again on the washing, but felt her throat closing, her chest crushed. Grey spots danced in front of her eyes.

  'No, not again,' she moaned. Waves of anxiety rolled over her, washing nausea up from the pit of her stomach. She tried to distract herself, to listen to the front-loader rhythmically turning her clothes, but her heart was pounding louder than the machine.

  She stumbled from the laundry as angry tears began. She hadn't had a panic attack in two years. Now, gasping for air, she ran to the balcony, pushing through the blinds, fumbling with the locks, sliding open the doors. She leant on the railing. With nothing in front of her, it felt like she had more access to air. She held on tight, dizzy. A salt-soaked breeze dried the sweat on her forehead and played with her hair. The panic began to subside.

  Watch the waves, Jill. Slow your breathing. She tried to match the rhythm of the ocean with her intake of breath. Her vision began to clear. She could breathe again, but her chest felt bruised, like someone had been standing on it for half an hour.

  She stepped back into her lounge room, furious with herself. Why am I letting this stuff back in my life? It was the case, she knew. A paedophile with his head caved in. The real-life manifestation of a fantasy she'd had for years had not been as satisfying as she'd thought it would be.

  She lay on the sofa for a while with her eyes closed. She would love to sleep, but knew that was never going to happen feeling this way, so she picked up the phone to call home. Talking to her mum usually helped when she felt like this.

  Her sister, Cassie, two years younger than Jill, picked up the phone. Great.

  'Hey, Cass. It's Jill. What're you doing home?' She kept the tears from her voice.

  'Jill. Hi. I'm just back from Morocco. I came home to eat some real food before I'm off again
.'