Surrender

by Malane, Donna

  To add to the god-awful picture I presented to the mirror, the bruise from Peaches’ cover drive had spread a jaundiced mottle from my neck to my throat. Sean used to run his fingers along the line of my clavicle. He said it was one of the sexiest things about me. I wondered if ten minutes ago he’d even noticed that my sexy clavicle had a dirty purple bruise across it. The best thing to do with mirrors is not look at them. It’s the only way to shut them up. Amazingly, Chris Ross’s address was listed in the online white pages: Ambrosia Court, a dodgy apartment block rumoured to hire rooms on a twelve or twenty-four hourly basis. Mostly the place was used by fences shifting hot electronics, and drug dealers needing a discreet place to do business. Its popularity owed a lot to the apartment block’s elaborate security measures. Around the perimeter of the building was a high, mock stucco wall effectively creating a gated community, with security cameras perched at each of the four corners. Cameras also peered down from either side of a set of electronically controlled gates which was the only entry point for vehicles.

  The place was a rat-hole because of both its design and the behaviour of its inhabitants. Every apartment had tortuous narrow stairwells for entry and egress. The overall effect was to make the apartments difficult for cops to raid without alerting the occupants in plenty of time for them to make an easy, if admittedly undignified, getaway. Which was why, of course, it was so popular with those people in the melodramatically named ‘criminal underworld’. Ironically, what the occupants of Ambrosia didn’t know was that their every action could be viewed in detail from a run-down penthouse perched at an oblique angle at the top of the office building opposite the apartments.

  When I was there, a bit over a year ago, the ‘penthouse’ — little more than a converted shipping container, really — was being used as a photographic studio by a bunch of polytech students. I’d gone there to ask if a young student named Marie Wilson could come down to the station to identify a ring that had turned up in the gut of a small shark caught off Mana Island the previous day. Marie’s brother had disappeared six months earlier and was presumed drowned. The last sighting of him had been at Plimmerton beach. Marie’s brother suffered from bouts of depression, and he had a history of suicide attempts.

  Marie asked for a few minutes to prepare herself before looking at the ring and in that time, while I made small talk and she drew deep breaths, I watched two separate deals go down in one of the Ambrosia apartments opposite. When I couldn’t hide my distraction any longer, I asked Marie if she was aware of what was going down in the apartments across the road. It was no news to her. She explained to me the odd positioning of the apartment — how it was tucked under a low-hanging eave at an oblique angle. Also, her window — the one with the bird’s eye view — had an unusual type of reflective coating to minimise the amount of light getting into the studio. The effect of all this was that, unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, from Ambrosia’s point of view, Marie’s place didn’t exist.

  The two other students who shared the studio with Marie referred to the one-way viewing window as their ‘entertainment unit’. Marie told me that on Friday nights the three of them would crack open a cask of wine, line up the beanbags, and spend an entertaining couple of hours watching whatever was going down in Ambrosia. They’d witnessed various drug deals — even the occasional orgy.

  Trying my best not to sound like a school prefect, I’d asked why they hadn’t told the cops about it. According to Marie they held a vote every month to decide if they should, but so far, the majority had always been in favour of maintaining the status quo. As she explained it, they had to weigh up the entertainment value of one big blockbuster of a police raid versus a nightly crime drama series, and the consensus, up until the time of my visit anyway, had always been to stay with the nightly event. And, she pointed out, there was always the risk the cops would make the raid when the students were at class, which would mean they’d miss out on the blockbuster and have no evening entertainment either.

  They’d obviously discussed the pros and cons in some detail. Up to their necks in student loans, they couldn’t afford anything like concerts or big screen televisions, and were keen to hang on to their free entertainment for as long as it lasted. I remembered Marie referred to it quite accurately as ‘good value’. I’m sure on some level her parents, who I knew were both accountants, would have been proud of her budgeting skills. She asked me not to tell anyone at work about it. Since ‘work’ was police HQ, and since I was, at that stage, married to a cop, and since I was at the studio on police business, I’d struggled with the ethics of my silence for a full ten seconds. At nine seconds I went with ‘a girl has to get her entertainment where she can’ and agreed to keep quiet about it. What was the harm?

  That had been over a year ago and I hadn’t thought about Ambrosia or the studio’s little ‘window of opportunity’ since then. There was always the chance that the students had voted for the blockbuster option over the nightly crime drama, and the place had been raided and dealings shut down.

  It seemed unlikely that Marie and her two student buddies would still even be there. A lot had happened to me in that year since we’d met. My sister had been murdered, my husband had left me and gone and gotten a pixie pregnant, I’d lost and subsequently semi-regained my job, and my sister’s killer had been murdered.

  Maybe I lead a particularly full and busy life. Maybe the three girls were still there and had changed little more in their lives than their brand of shampoo. There was only one way to find out. I still had an hour and a half to fill before meeting Sarah Crossen-Smith and putting my John Doe case to bed. I decided I might as well go and check out if Marie was still in residence at the studio, and if her entertainment unit was still functioning. I just might be able to catch a glimpse of Chris Ross in his apartment, or better still, Marie might be able to fill me in on any extra-curricular activities Ross had going on.

  Access to Marie’s studio was via the next-door building which housed seven floors of car parking. Car park buildings are creepy places. I hate them and do my best to avoid using them. It’s nothing to do with a fear of being attacked. I never believe those movies. In my experience car park buildings are too well monitored, too busy and too bloody cold for anything much at all to happen in them, even crimes. Criminals feel the cold too, you know. The occasional skateboarder sneaking in to have a smoke and ride down seven floors of ramps is about the most heinous crime committed in them.

  The reason car park buildings creep me out is because, as a Wellingtonian, I’ve always got my antennae out for the next big shake — there’s nowhere worse to be in an earthquake. Seven floors of concrete slabs neatly arranged one on top of the other — well, as soon as I drive up the first ramp I break into a sweat imagining how the floors would squash down one on top of the other at the first shudder. Give me an attacker any day.

  Despite the stink of piss and petrol and the smattering of condoms, I walked up the entire seven flights of stairs. Being in a car park building when an earthquake hit would be the pits, but being in a coffin-sized elevator in one would be even worse.

  At the top of the final flight of steps were two doors. One led to the rooftop, the other, lurid with DayGlo graffiti, sported a keypad but no handle. Unless you knew it led to the studio, it looked like the door to a storeroom or utilities cupboard.

  The doorbell screamed like a fire alarm. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was a fire alarm rigged to the little plastic button by the keypad. A tall, bearded guy in his early twenties wearing leprechaun-green skinny jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘art sucks’ opened the door. I figured the studio was still occupied by students. When I asked if Marie was there he blinked myopically at me through tortoise-shell framed ’50s-style glasses, then turned and walked back into the gloom. I took that as an invitation and followed his hunched shoulders and flapping canvas camouflage boots through the plywood anteroom. I tried and failed to forget that this was the bridge between two seven-storeyed bui
ldings.

  I explained to the guy’s back that I’d met Marie a year ago and wanted to ask her about the Ambrosia Court apartments across the road. Without turning, he nodded enthusiastically as he led me into her room. Well, what used to be her room. Now, there was nothing in it except a row of three factory-clean La-Z-Boys facing the windows. Leprechaun-pants continued nodding as he lowered his frame into one of them, and levered himself back. It was only then that I saw the earphones and realised he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. And the reason for the fire-alarm doorbell. I leaned over and yanked the plug out of his ear. He let out a yelp as if I’d unplugged his life-support, which perhaps I had.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ he said, blinking rapidly at me.

  ‘My problem,’ I said, pushing his chair further into its reclining position, ‘is that I’d like to talk to Marie.’

  Leaning over him made me feel like a dentist. The sensation wasn’t as bad as being a dentist’s patient, but it still wasn’t pleasant. What I’d thought at first sight were whisker bristles, I could now see, from this uncomfortably close surveillance, was a small but well-stocked forest of blackheads.

  ‘I don’t know where she is,’ he said, levering his chair back into a sitting position. ‘I paid her twenty bucks for an hour’s viewing, and she gave me the door code.’ His attention shifted from the window to me long enough for him to appraise and dismiss me as unworthy of attention. ‘She didn’t tell me there was going to be anyone else here.’

  ‘You paid Marie twenty bucks to view the apartments?’ Clearly Marie’s entrepreneurial skills had developed since I last saw her.

  ‘Yeah. I always do Thursdays,’ he grinned and added in explanation, ‘Benefit day. It’s when most of the deals go down.’

  ‘Right. Of course,’ I said, failing to sound cool and in-the-know.

  ‘P’s the drug du jour,’ he explained, ‘but sales for weed are still strong for the ACC guys with actual pain.’ He checked the time on his phone. ‘That’s not for another hour yet, though.’ His attention went back to the window. ‘Meantime, I’m watching the cartoons,’ he said, grinning. Leprechaun-pants darted a suspicious look at me. ‘Is Marie giving you a freebie?’

  It was easier just to play it out. ‘Nah,’ I said, lowering myself into the adjacent chair, ‘I’m paying. I just didn’t know I’d have company.’

  ‘Same,’ he said, and stuck his earphones back in.

  I watched him settle his chair back into a viewing position, all attention now on his ‘cartoons’ across the road. The La-Z-Boy was extremely comfortable and, apart from the farting sound it made every time I moved, made for perfect drama-viewing. I had direct sight into three separate Ambrosia apartments. They were identical in layout: an open plan living area next to a bedroom, and ceiling-to-floor glass doors across both rooms opening out on to a small deck area. The three decks were separated by concrete partitions so that no apartment could see what was going on in either of the others — the irony being that from my personal ‘gold lounge experience’, I had prime viewing of the interiors and the decks of all three.

  There was nothing going on at the southernmost apartment — the one furthest from my sight line. My fellow voyeur’s attention was focused on the middle apartment. At first shocked glimpse, I thought he was watching a middle-aged man attacking a young woman. She was clutching the back of a sofa to stop herself being dragged backwards by the man pressed up to her. He had her long hair wound around his fist, and had wrenched her head so far back I thought her neck would snap. His other hand was on her throat. I was about to leap out of my La-Z-Boy — never an easy task — but the little pleasure grin on the leprechaun’s face made me look again. The man released his hold on the woman’s hair and fell forward. He stayed like that, resting his forehead between her shoulder blades as he slid out of her. The woman wriggled her skirt back down over her hips and straightened her back.

  The leprechaun, not surprisingly, hadn’t registered my mistake, but I still felt myself blush. I had a sudden flash memory of the first time I ever saw the sexual act. I hadn’t recognised it for what it was then, either, but I was probably only about seven at the time, so had total lack of experience as an excuse. I’d stumbled upon a couple of dogs going for it on the back veranda of the house. I thought the male was attacking the bitch — she seemed so helpless and resigned to the male’s grinning, slobbering violence. Well, that’s how it seemed to me at the time. Needless to say, my attitude changed once puberty hit.

  The woman stretched the kink out of her neck, and secured her hair back into a clasp. The man turned away and lit a cigarette. The dogs I’d watched when I was a kid had shown more affection afterwards. At least they’d licked each other’s face.

  Despite the cold, the glass doors of the third apartment, the northernmost one directly in front of me, gaped wide open. The living area was such a total mess I decided it had either been ransacked or been the setting for one hell of a fight. The sofa cushions had been ripped open, and the stuffing spread around the room. A glass-topped coffee table had been tipped on its side, and bottles and glasses scattered everywhere. Stains formed continents on the beige carpet. A hole, suspiciously the size and shape of a head, had been punched in the wall. In the bedroom, the mattress had been half dragged off the bed, and a fully clothed man lay face up, spreadeagled across it. Another was slumped in a corner of the room. Both were asleep, dead, or unconscious. Since I’d nearly made an embarrassing mistake about what was going down in the middle apartment, I decided to play it cool with this one and not jump to any hasty assumptions.

  Chris Ross’s apartment had been listed in the white pages as number four. I fart-noised my way out of the chair and, pressing my forehead against the window, tried to figure out which one of the three was his. There were three identical apartments under the ones I was surveying. Presuming they were numbers one to three, that would make number four either the apartment directly in front of me — the one with the two sleeping beauties — or the empty one at the southern end of the block.

  The leprechaun whistled for my attention, and pointed to a pair of binoculars on a hook beneath the windowsill. They were padlocked to the wall, but the chain was long enough to allow viewing from the full width of the windows. Marie was obviously keen to provide a totally positive shopping experience. That girl will go far, I thought.

  I scrabbled around in my shoulder bag for the sheet of photos, and then focused the binoculars on the spreadeagled guy. He was breathing. And he was Maori. I checked the photo of Ross just to be sure my memory was correct. Ross was dark-haired and olive skinned but definitely not Maori. I picked out the other guy slumped in the corner of the room. His knees were drawn up with his arms encircling them, head resting on his forearms. He looked about the same body type as Ross, but I couldn’t see his face well enough to tell if it was him or not. I decided I could either come back some other time when Marie was there, and quiz her, or wait until this guy regained consciousness. I had about forty minutes before I was due at Sarah’s, and I’d just decided to pack it in and come back some other time when I saw movement on the deck of the southernmost apartment — the one I’d thought was empty.

  Chris Ross had been standing on his deck the whole time I’d been checking the Ambrosia out, but he’d been masked by the concrete partition between his place and the middle apartment. As I watched, he stepped out of the shadow of the dividing wall, used the toe of his boot to stub out a cigarette, and leaned on the deck railing. His body was still and attentive, like a cat watching for a rat in a compost heap. He seemed to be looking down at an alleyway that ran between Ambrosia and the two-storeyed building next to it. I couldn’t see what he was looking at, and couldn’t quite figure the layout of the buildings.

  I left a twenty dollar note under a beer fridge magnet in the kitchen, and let myself out. I’d asked the leprechaun if he knew what Marie was up to these days. He said she was spending all her time taking photos of sharks. When he asked me, ‘How weird is
that?’ I really had no answer for him. The previous time I was here Marie had identified the ring found in the shark as the one her missing brother had always worn.

  The car park building had the same piss and petrol smell, the same condoms, but it was easier going down seven flights of stairs than up them. I’d never noticed the narrow alleyway between the Ambrosia block and the art deco building next to it. It was barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and definitely too narrow for vehicles.

  The view from the pavement across the road wasn’t nearly as good as from Marie’s studio, but even from here I could make out Chris Ross’s rapt attention as he leaned on the balcony’s safety rail and peered down at the alleyway below. There was something about his stillness that bothered me. Dodging traffic, I jaywalked across the busy street to the alley’s entrance. From here, I was directly below Ross, but if I kept tight to the building the overhang of his deck meant I was invisible to him.

  It was a dank, pissy, dead-end lane with mossy drainage run-off from buildings on either side. A freezing southerly sent plastic bags and newspaper pages swirling up to slap at the building truncating the lane. Tragic pigeons cooed on ledges, the white and green streaks announcing they’d taken up undisturbed residence some years ago. There was an exit door out of the building at the closed end of the lane. A single bare bulb in an old-fashioned copper housing hung above it.

  I couldn’t figure out which building this door exited from. A flurry of wings too close to my head made me look up. Chris Ross was leaning over the railing of his deck and staring directly down at me. Heart pounding, I adopted an air of nonchalance. Wandering up the alley, I tried my best to look like a city council inspector or land agent. I even jotted a few things in my notepad. Actually I was writing ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ — which would have been equally appropriate if I had, in fact, held either of those jobs.