Scarlet Stiletto - the First Cut

by Lindy Cameron

  “Thank goodness,” she said. “We need this.”

  Already the heat had lessened, and the heaviness had cleared from her head.

  She turned and went back into the family room. Stooping towards the coffee table she picked up the remote control and switched on the television. She’d missed the beginning of the gardening programme but, as she sank back into the comfortable armchair, a new segment had just started.

  “If you want strong, healthy plants,” the gardening expert was saying, “it is essential to fertilise the soil regularly. And, as I’ve so often said on this programme, there’s nothing like good old blood and bone for the garden.”

  “Mmmm, blood and bone.” Eunice smiled and nodded her head knowingly. “There really is nothing like blood and bone for a garden.”

  Ronda Bird

  Malice Domestic, 2000

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Dead Woman in the Water

  I woke up screaming; a dead woman’s body was in the water. Her eyes stared vacantly at the sky and her hair floated about her like dark seaweed. All around me other people screamed and my mother turned my face into her belly while the floor rocked under my feet. I switched on the light and lay sweating in bed, waiting for my heartbeat to subside. Gradually it slowed, my stomach stopped churning and the terrible image receded, but it was a long time before I slept again.

  “Hard night?” Kevin asked as I entered the office next morning.

  I flapped a non-committal hand and sat down. There’s just the two of us, apart from a woman who comes in part-time to do the social pages, and when there’s just the two of you, you have to get on so it was just as well I liked him. He was a local boy and not bad looking in an Irish, slightly-going-to-seed kind of way. When I began at the Star I half-expected the occasional snide comment or even a casual hand on the bum but he’d been alright. If he knew about my history, he didn’t let on. Now he regarded me quizzically and put down the morning’s Star.

  “That girl who was found washed up at Stanthorpe’s Bay the day before yesterday. The police have released her name.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “She’s Melissa Dalton, nineteen years old, a kind of freelance pro. She used to advertise in our illustrious journal.” He circled something in the Star’s ‘Personals’ section and pushed it across the desk:

  introducing

  gorgeous Tiffany

  petite busty blonde

  for caring and discreet service

  There was a mobile number listed underneath. There was a whole column of these kinds of ’leggy brunettes’, ‘curvaceous redheads’, even the occasional ‘exotic Asian’, all selling the same thing and yesterday I wouldn’t have given them a second glance but that was yesterday.

  “I’ve been on the phone to the pathologist,” Kevin said. “The autopsy’s done. Apparently her bloodstream was full of cocaine.”

  “Well, drug use isn’t unusual in her line of work.”

  “No. On the surface it looks as though it was suicide—life getting her down, a drug habit—but I want you to get onto it. See if you can find out a bit of background. Family details, stuff like that.”

  I stared at gorgeous Tiffany’s advertisement. Another dead woman in the water. It would make a change from reporting the prize-winning dahlias at the local agricultural show or tallying up the footy scores after the weekend. ‘ The Sleepy Hollow Times’, I usually told my friends from the city when they asked me the paper’s name. I did cover pretty much everything from sheep dog trials to debutante balls, so a dead woman in the water was major news, indeed.

  “Start with the family.” Kevin turned back to his computer screen. “I think they live out in the bush somewhere.”

  Out in the bush. It was all ‘out in the bush’ as far as I was concerned but then, I spent my formative years on the North Richmond Housing Estate. I got out the phone book, rang three Daltons at out-of-town addresses, getting polite denials on each attempt. On my fourth try a woman answered then abruptly hung up when I identified myself. I figured this had to be Melissa Dalton’s mother so I set off. As I drove out of town the sun, which had been shining brightly all morning, momentarily went under a cloud, turning the sparkly blue water captured in my rear-vision mirror to a bleak grey. A few fishing boats moved along the horizon. I shivered. Some people love the ocean; I’m not one of them. When I’d got my marching orders from the Big Paper I’d hoped they’d send me somewhere inland, but I didn’t have any choice about that.

  Thirty kilometres later I turned off the highway then down another road that eventually narrowed to a gravel track. There were only a couple of houses; Melissa Dalton had grown up in the small cream fibro one. Several car bodies in various states of disrepair sat in the front yard and the trailer part of a semitrailer was parked along one side of the house. I searched my mind for the appropriate piece of Australian lexicon. ‘Battlers.’ The Daltons were battlers.

  The woman who opened the door to my knock looked as though she’d been battling all her life. She had a frazzled perm and the prematurely aged skin I’d seen on so many Australian countrywomen. She looked a bit surprised to see me but I’d got used to that around here.

  “I’m Vee Nguyen, from the Star.” I held up my card. The only people who have ever called me Veronica are my parents and the nuns at school.

  “Go away.” She started to close the door but I got my foot there first.

  “Look, Mrs Dalton, I know you’re grieving, I know you’ve suffered a terrible loss ...”

  “You don’t know anything about it!”

  “... But don’t you really want to know what happened to your daughter? There are rumours of suicide—would Melissa have killed herself?”

  She hesitated. Her face was haggard from sleeplessness and she had the look of holding in too much emotion. I assumed my most compassionate expression.

  “You better come in,” she said, reluctantly.

  There was a big old wooden table in the centre of the kitchen, spread with a sheet of flowered plastic.

  “D’you want a cup of tea?”

  “Thanks, Mrs Dalton.”

  “Call me Val.”

  She boiled the kettle, set the two mugs on the table and slumped into a chair. Suddenly she started talking in a flat monotone, a far-off expression on her face.

  “Melissa was a bright kid but always in trouble, wouldn’t listen to anyone. Ivan was always away driving trucks and I was left with the kids ... She left school and worked in a supermarket for a while but the money wasn’t enough. She started doing telephone sex—just for a joke, really She said it was safe and clean ...”Val Dalton’s voice broke; I nodded sympathetically.

  “When she started ... seeing men ... I tried to talk her out of it. I cried, I got angry, but nothing I said would change Melissa’s mind. She just laughed and said they were stupid to part with that much money for something that lasted three minutes.”

  “Is that when she started doing drugs?”

  “No! Melissa didn’t take drugs!”

  “What about the cocaine?”

  “I don’t know!” Val Dalton almost shouted. “But Melissa didn’t take drugs—I would have known!”

  Oh, yeah. If my mother knew everything I’d ever done her hair would be snow white, not its current steel grey.

  “She lived in town but she kept some of her things in her old room,” Val said, rising suddenly. “She wasn’t a bad kid, just easily influenced.”

  The room was small and painted pink. Stick-on pictures of rabbits covered the cupboard doors.

  “She had some nice clothes,” Val said.

  She had some very nice clothes, I noted, before the doors were quickly shut. Versace. Armani. Expensive wear for a country call girl.

  “Here’s her photo.” A rounded, slightly chubby face stared from a chrome frame. The frame was cheap, the face pretty but unexceptional, with blonde hair smudged darkly at the roots. A bluish-green dolphin curved across the swell of her lef
t breast and buried its snout in her cleavage.

  “Here’s another.” A younger, thinner, dark-haired Melissa stood on a beach with three boys. All four held surfboards and smiled. They looked as though they were enjoying themselves. I repressed a shudder at the thought of all that water around me.

  “Very nice.” I gave Val back the photos, asked her a few more general questions, then thanked her and left. On the way to my car two teenage boys, who had been fiddling with one of the old wrecks outside, gaped at me and sniggered. I flicked them the finger and drove off.

  That night I dreamed about the woman in the water again. Nothing remarkable about that because I’d been having that dream as long as I could remember. It was something I carried with me—like an ulcer or an ache—but I’d never had it two nights running. The cold sea slapped against her dead flesh and the waves rolled her over and over until she sank from sight. I lay sleepless and sweating at 3 a.m. and thought about Melissa floating in the dark and hostile ocean. Something didn’t add up. The autopsy had shown that Melissa hadn’t had sex recently, which seemed to rule out a client turning nasty. The cocaine in her bloodstream had been almost pure, which was unusual. On my way to work, irritable and bleary-eyed, I rang Val Dalton.

  “The three boys in the photo, the surfies. Who are they?”

  She thought for a moment. “Dazza, Wayne and Chook,” she said finally.

  Chook. How I love these charmingly whimsical Aussie nicknames. I’d never met a ‘Chook’ although I did know several boys born in the Year of the Tiger.

  “Where can I find them?”

  “As far as I know they’re still surfing,” she said and hung up. Damn! Never mind. Kololoroit had only two beaches— the ‘surfie’ beach and the ‘family’ beach. Dazza, Wayne and Chook shouldn’t be too hard to track down. All this would have to wait, though, because this morning I had to interview the mayor.

  “Nguyen, eh?” said the big, florid-faced man heartily after his secretary ushered me into his office. “I was in ‘Nam myself.”

  “So was I,” I replied, smiling. Like it takes a genius to work out that Nguyen is the Vietnamese equivalent of Smith.

  He gave a burst of laughter and gestured towards a chair. “What can I do for you, Vee?”

  “I’d like your perspective on this development project the council is proposing, the large-scale building of luxury waterfront apartments.”

  “Look, it’s a fantastic opportunity for Kololoroit, Vee.” He gestured expansively again. I got the feeling Peter McCulloch liked to think of himself as an expansive sort of bloke. I watched him as he sat behind his big, well-ordered desk, with the big wall planner behind him, neatly marked. One corner of the desk held the photo of a handsome, slightly hard-faced woman. I noted the absence of children.

  “... And, of course, besides creating jobs in the construction sector, it’ll bring a lot of tourist dollars into the town.”

  “What about the opposition from various community groups? Aren’t there concerns about what the development will do to the habitats of various marine life?”

  “You mean the greenies who’re worried about the porpoises, ratbags led by that stirrer, Rod Shannon?”

  “Well, you can understand their concern.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “The council will commission a full environmental impact study when the development project goes ahead.”

  By whom, I wondered, but I left it at that for the moment. I asked a few more questions about his hopes for the project then wrapped up the interview. As I stood up to leave I noticed some small, whitish-gold stones sitting on the corner of his desk.

  “Hoping to strike it rich?”

  He looked at the pieces of quartz and gave a slightly embarrassed laugh. “I was up north attending an official function last week in the centre of the gold rush district. I used to go fossicking there with my father when I was a kid. Brought those back for old time’s sake.”

  He escorted me to the door and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt his slight but unmistakable ripple of sexual interest.

  “You take it easy now, Vee,” he said.

  I was in my car on my way back to the office when my mobile rang. Bloody Kevin, I thought, but it was another male voice.

  “Is that Vee?” it asked nervously.

  “Yes.”

  “Vee the journalist?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Dazza. You wanted to talk to me about Lissa.”

  “That was quick work, finding me.”

  “Yeah, well, word gets ‘round.”

  Oh, it certainly does. I arranged to meet him on the beach where Melissa’s body had been found, swung the car into the opposite direction and contemplated how quickly word can get around. Ten months ago I’d been an A-grade reporter on a major metropolitan daily. I was hot. I was so hot I’d managed to uncover a paedophile ring. I’d watched and followed, researched, then had done some more watching and following. I’d gone close enough to take photos of some of the men I’d believed were involved. One of them was the newspaper owner’s son. I’d gone to my editor with the photos. He’d spread them out on his desk then looked at me.

  “If you try to make a story out of this, I’ll fire you.”

  I was stunned. I’d counted on his support.

  “You can’t do that,” I said at last.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No, you can’t!”

  We stared at each other for a moment and he looked away first.

  “This is the wealthiest, most powerful family in the country,” he said.

  “Who just happen to own this paper and pay your $ 100,000 salary and provide your company car and all the other perks that go with your job.”

  He picked up a pencil from his desk and turned it over and over in his hands.

  “If you don’t drop this, I’ll drop you.”

  “You gutless prick!” I stormed out of his office, so angry that I had to go for a walk to calm down, which was stupid, stupid, stupid because by the time I got back my desk had been mysteriously rifled and the photos and the file about the paedophile ring had disappeared. I stormed, I ranted, I accused, but because I’d told no one else about the photos, I couldn’t prove I’d ever had them. Anyway, it was too hot for me to stay in the city. Eight weeks later I was working on the Kololoroit Star.

  I sat on the beach and waited until the three black specks far out on the ocean paddled in. The bleached blonde from Val Dalton’s photo stuck his hand out.

  “I’m Dazza.” Chook was short and chunky with a square, acne-scarred face. Wayne was lean, dark and taciturn-looking.

  “Good weather for it.” I gestured towards the water. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  Dazza shrugged. “Val said you were all right. What do you want to know?”

  What did I want to know? It suddenly seemed pointless being here. All I had were a couple of half-arsed ideas and a feeling in my gut.

  “I don’t know ...” I floundered about. “Why did Melissa like surfing?”

  “She liked the freedom,” Chook said. “She used to say that riding a great wave was like flying.”

  “She used to go surfing at night,” Wayne said.

  “At night!” I remembered my dream—it’s always night in the dream—and shuddered. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Lissa was wild.” Dazza glanced across the ocean as though searching for something—or someone. “She was a wild chick. You couldn’t tell her anything. In warm weather she’d go out on her board and sometimes she’d be naked. She used to say it was like being bathed in starlight.”

  Shit. It sounded bizarre but then, so does bungy-jumping and plenty of people do that. I pressed on.

  “What else did she do?”

  “When she wasn’t working, you mean?”Wayne glanced at me sharply. “She liked raging, she liked a few drinks ... she liked reading.”

  “Reading?” Not an activity I’d envisaged her spending much time on.

  “She acted lik
e a bimbo when it suited her, but she wasn’t dumb,” said Chook. “She liked to read poetry and that.”