Tall Dark Heart

by Chris Krupa

‘Meet me in the main bar in half an hour.’ His face hardened again. ‘I would also appreciate your complete and utter discretion with this matter. I won’t have the likes of you discrediting my reputation.’

  ‘Absolutely, Mr. Malouf. Wouldn’t hear of it.’

  The Union Hotel hugged a corner of the Pacific Highway, its art deco brickwork no doubt a welcome sight for soldiers returning from service, but the pressed tin decals clashed with the old school hardwood of the main bar. I ordered a schooner of Pale Ale and sipped it slowly, until Malouf made his entrance, ordered a middy, and joined me at a low table positioned under a collection of wartime beer posters. Now that we were in mutual territory, I noticed he wore both expensive clothes and a smell to match.

  ‘I’ll admit Tamsin was in my house on the twelfth,’ he said. ‘But I swear to God I haven’t seen her since. You have to believe me.’

  ‘Okay, but I’ll need to ask a few questions. What’s the arrangement between you?’

  ‘I call her. She comes. Sometimes she comes with another girl. They do a show for me.’

  ‘Do you know the other girl’s name?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Is it a routine? Do you see Tamsin and the other girl on a regular basis?’

  ‘I usually book Tamsin only every Wednesday night at 11:00 PM for an hour. Sometimes I beg.’

  ‘Why?’

  His face softened and became almost boy-like. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’d rather not. I know how ridiculous it sounds.’

  ‘I’ve heard lots of things in my line of work, Ari. If you don’t mind being on a first name basis?’

  He shrugged. ‘Up to you.’

  After taking a long pull on his beer, he smiled for the first time, but only slightly. ‘I’ve fallen in love with her.’

  I swallowed a large slug of beer to hide my face.

  He scoffed and stared at the table. ‘There it is: the condescending judgment.’

  ‘I don’t judge you, Ari.’

  ‘Please don’t pity me. I’m sick of it.’

  ‘I don’t pity you, ether.’

  ‘Bullshit. This society is built on old principles established by a conservative patriarchy that frowns on the bourgeois. Society is not the individual, it’s a scared machine who judges without compassion.’

  I let it go. ‘Does Tamsin feel the same way?’

  His bottom lip quivered, and his eyes turned glassy ‘Please, call her Anastasia.’

  I nodded. ‘Okay, fine. Anastasia. Is that her... working name?’

  He sighed. ‘I said you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Make me understand.’

  He ran a hand over his face and readjusted himself. ‘When she’s with me, Tamsin disappears. Tamsin is a lost little girl who looks up to her father as if he’s a god. Anastasia is a woman. Anastasia is independent, sexy, voracious, comfortable in her own skin. Anastasia is a woman free of her domineering father, free of society’s boxes and labels. When we’re together, we have a connection. When I look into her eyes, I can almost see what she’s thinking. Sometimes, we’ll just lie together and talk, and she has a habit of saying things a certain way. She’ll say, ‘Da Vinci’ when she means ‘Dali,’ or ‘Barack Obama’ when she means ‘Osama Bin Laden.’ I know what she means, but she doesn’t always mean what she says.’

  ‘Does she advertise on campus?’

  ‘God, no. She has a page on Sydney backpages.’

  ‘Could you show me?’

  Ari took out a rose gold iPhone, tapped the screen a few times, and turned the screen to me.

  A photo showed a young woman dressed in a black teddy, taken from the neck down. She stood in a low-lit bedroom, and the camera focused on her breasts squeezed into a black lace top, and the front of the teddy was opened to reveal a toned midriff. I scrolled past the FAQs and found a sentence that said Anastasia worked weekends at the Lotus brothel in Surry Hills. I made a note of it.

  ‘How has she been?’ I said. ‘Has she become withdrawn, or the same, or...?’

  He sighed again. ‘She’s been very stressed lately, maybe a little bit distracted. She told me she wanted to take some time to think about her future—you know, with university... where she wants to be, what she wants to do, that sort of thing. That brought her down a little bit. You have to understand—I only want what’s best for her. If she needs a break, I respect that.’

  ‘Did she say that to you?’

  ‘In not so many words. She called me the next day.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said she was very sorry, but we couldn’t see each other again. She said goodbye and hung up.’

  Chapter 13

  On the train back to the city, I searched a popular escort website and filtered my search down to the Sydney CBD using the name ‘Anastasia,’ and got two hits. The names appeared above a row of emoji’s featuring red lips, love hearts, and smiley faces. Each profile offered a short description along with a gallery of nine photos. The first Anastasia didn’t show her face, but the size sixteen frame and fake G-sized breasts made me scroll down.

  The second Anastasia didn’t show her face either, but her biceps showed some definition and her stomach had the first hint of a six pack. Her hair appeared in one of the photos, brown, straight, and cut to blunt ends. I couldn’t be certain, so I called the number and waited. It rang out. I tried again with no luck.

  If Ari’s testimony was true, I wondered what Tamsin meant when she said she’d never see him again? Did she feel her life was in danger, or was she merely leaving Sydney for greener pastures?

  A hawker spruiked a bin full of cheap umbrellas at Central station, so I swapped him a fiver for the last one, and did my best to shelter under it on the walk back to my car at the university car park. Google maps said the Lotus brothel sat less than three clicks away in Surry Hills.

  I fought my way through lane-swapping cabbies and speeding city buses east to Surry Hills, an old suburb laden with hotels and mixed businesses. Thai restaurants, pubs, and trendy eateries vied for tourist dollars on the main street, and senior citizens fortified themselves in their terrace houses worth millions of dollars.

  From Albion Street, I made a hard right into an old toilet access lane, wedged the ute between a motorbike and a Mitsubishi Colt, and walked the four blocks back to the brothel’s front entrance, nestled within a semi-detached, two-storey house. I rang the doorbell, and a young blonde woman opened the door surrounded in a cloud of lavender and dressed in a black mini skirt, thigh-high sheer stockings, and heels. She glanced nervously to her right, then looked at me with large blue eyes. ‘Sorry, sweetheart, it’s not a good time right now. Are you able to come back in an hour?’

  She started to cry.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I can help. What’s going on?’

  She wiped her nose with the back of her hand in an upward sweep. ‘I just don’t know what to do!’

  I made my way past her.

  She followed close behind And said, ‘Keep going down the hall. She’s in the kitchen. It’s on the left.’

  In a tiny kitchenette, a short middle-aged woman with her hair set in a perm sat with her back propped up against the fridge, her thick-calved legs straight out in front of her. Loose knee-high stockings peeked out from under her tie-dyed gypsy skirt, and a dark crescent-shaped bruise surrounded her swollen, half-closed left eye.

  ‘Bev?’ the blonde said. ‘I’ve got help. You okay?’

  I put a hand on Bev’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, love, watch your head. I’m opening the freezer to get some ice out.’

  She nodded weakly and murmured. ‘Thank you, sweetheart.’

  The door cleared her head by a foot, and I dug out the ice tray and turned to the blonde. ‘Have you got a tea towel?’

  She clacked across the scuffed timber floor, opened a cupboard, and passed two to me.

  I cracked the entire tray into one of them, wrapped it up, and smashed the
whole lot against the sink a few times.

  ‘Alex?’ Bev murmured. ‘Be a dear and divert the phone? That’s a good girl.’

  I knelt next to Bev and gently pressed the towel against her face.

  She nodded and took it with one hand. ‘You’re an angel, love. Fix us a drink, will ya?’ She pointed a shaky finger at some higher cupboards. ‘First one on the right. The Beefeaters, next to the toaster. Fix one for yourself, love.’

  I poured a solid slug of gin into each of two glasses and passed one to Bev.

  She gulped it in one hit, held the glass up, and offered half a smile. ‘Almost as good as Fentanyl.’

  Alex returned and stood nervously in the doorway.

  I said, ‘What happened?’

  A muffled thud came from the hallway, and Alex met my eyes, shushed me, and whispered, ‘He’s still here.’

  I rested my glass on a 1960s green Formica dining table and peered down the hall. I turned back to Alex and put a finger to my lips.

  She nodded.

  The hallway bent into an ‘L,’ then continued into darkness around a blind corner to the right. I gingerly stepped out of the kitchenette. When two floorboards creaked under the thick carpet, I stopped and preened my ears. A TV upstairs spruiked an advertorial. A cob web hung from the corner architrave and danced in an unseen breeze. I slowly stepped out into the hallway with blood pumping in my ears. A door stood open at the end of the hall, exposing a brown tiled floor. A soap dispenser and a bottle of green mouthwash sat perched on a vanity. Two doors stood to the left, both closed.

  I hugged the wall and inched along until I reached the first door. I placed my ear against it, gripped the handle, and pushed it down ready for a fight. An unoccupied double bed occupied an otherwise empty room.

  I stepped back out into the hall and edged along the worn and threaded carpet to the next door. Nothing came through the wood. I gripped the handle with sticky fingers, positioned myself like a runner, and quickly swung the door in.

  A naked woman lay face down on the bed. An arm hung over the side and blood matted her dark hair. Sitting up on the opposite side of the bed was a shirtless bald man I recognised as Gav, the pommy bouncer who’d denied me entry to Lyons’ launch party in the Domain the previous Friday.

  He scrolled his phone, then looked up and said, ‘For fuck’s sake.’ He stood and thrust his phone into one of his tight jeans’ pockets. The knuckles on his right hand were cut and bloodied.

  I tried to fill up as much of the doorway as I could. ‘Get away from her.’

  He raised his hands. ‘All right, all right, chill out. I’ve ‘ad my fun.’

  I took a breath and sized up the situation. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Gav spread his arms, Christ-like. ‘Thought I’d cop off with a slag while I was ‘ere. The old man always said don’t waste an opportunity.’

  He casually crossed the room to a small lover’s seat, where he retrieved a tee shirt and turned it inside out.

  ‘I had you pegged from the uni, you pillock,’ he said as he slipped the shirt on over his hairless, wiry frame. ‘Jumped the same fuckin’ train, talked to that towelhead in the wheelchair. He told me you were coming here to see Lyons’ slag of a daughter. Haven’t seen her, have ya?’

  I glanced over my shoulder.

  Alex stood in the hall and stared at me, petrified. When I held my hand up, she nodded twice and slowly stepped back, toe to heel, out of sight.

  ‘She’s not here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you leave before I put your face through the wall?’

  He reached into his back pocket and rotated his wrist. A blade clicked open, and he lifted the knife level with his eye. He watched how the light played on the metal. ‘Just stick it to her, he says. Give it to her up to the hilt, he says.’

  ‘Put it away.’

  ‘You gonna try and talk me down, cunt?’

  I bunched my hands into fists. ‘Do I look like a negotiator?’’

  ‘Nah, you look like a cunt who’d dog-slot a bloke.’ He ran at me at a sprint, the knife straight out.

  I’d barely stepped to the side as the blade pierced my skin under the collar bone, and I gripped his arm and wrenched it away. The blade came free, and he ducked away from my hands like a jackrabbit. I followed out a rear screen door into an alleyway behind the brothel, and lost sight of him as he rounded the far end of the building. By the time I’d reached the road and looked around, he’d vanished.

  Chapter 14

  I carefully rolled my bloodstained tee shirt off over my head and grimaced as I lifted my arms. I threw the shirt onto the bathroom floor and examined the gash in the mirror. Blood oozed slowly out of a cut that looked wider than it was deep. I snatched a towel off the rack and pressed it hard against the wound.

  Alex cautiously peered in. ‘What the fuck happened? Are you okay?’

  I gave her a blow-by-blow and told her to call an ambulance. I couldn’t decide what shook me more, becoming a stabbing statistic, or the fact Gav used a single-edged butterfly knife with a squared-off back, quite possibly the same weapon used to kill Renee Prestwidge and Pavali Singh, as mentioned by the coroner.

  Paramedics arrived and worked on the unconscious woman. They tried to revive her, saying, ‘Can you hear me, sweetheart?’ in that heart-wrenching tone they use.

  Alex watched from the hall with a hand over her mouth and tried to stay out of the way.

  Bev shuffled into view and looked twenty years older.

  A screen door opened and slammed shut, and high heels clacked and scraped across timber. Two women appeared from the back of the hall, a short, shapely African American girl with cornrows, and a tall Brazilian woman in tight jeans and a Felix the Cat tattoo on her arm. They gasped when they saw me, and stepped aside as Alex gave them the low down.

  I stepped around and behind the women, and kept pressure on the wound. Shock kicked in and white lights danced before my eyes. I did my best to breathe and take my mind off it.

  From the bedroom, the paramedics talked about ‘possible hematomas’ and ‘orbital fractures,’ then loaded the woman onto a gurney and carefully negotiated her out through the hall and out the back door.

  One of the paramedics, a fresh-faced kid with a straight part, approached us. ‘I think she’s going to be okay. There’s a steady, strong pulse. She’s a fighter.’

  Bev cried out when he said that, and Alex put an arm around her.

  He made careful eye contact with all of us. ‘Is it okay if I get a name for the admin staff?’

  ‘Ally Crookwell,’ Bev muttered.

  He nodded his thanks. ‘We’ll take her to St. Vincent’s. I highly recommend you report what happened to the police. Call Sydney Central and ask for Constable Nicholls, and make sure you get an E number.’

  His eyes fell on Bev, and he pointed to her head. ‘All right if I see?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll be right, love. Ally needs you now.’

  ‘C’mon, Bev,’ Alex said. ‘Let him take a look.’

  ‘It’s nothing, love,’ Bev said, her voice firm.

  The paramedic eyed me, and as he walked over I told him what happened. He inspected the wound, said it didn’t need stitches, and patched it with some gauze. He said to re-dress it regularly and handed me a stack of stick-on patches, and recommended I go to the police, then left through the back entrance.

  Angels on wheels.

  We all stood in an awkward silence until Bev said, ‘Alex, be a love and lock the door, will you? Put the closed sign up. That’s a dear.’

  I rolled up the blood-stained towel and laid it on the floor in the bathroom by my shirt. The African American girl shot me a look. ‘And who the hell are you?’

  ‘Matt Kowalski. I’m a private detective.’

  ‘He’s good, Imogen.’ Bev said. ‘Ally’s alive thanks to him.’

  Imogen twisted her mouth and crossed her arms.

  The Brazilian, who stood level with me in white stilettos, smiled and held out her
hand. ‘Wow, a real-life detective. Nice to meet you. I’m Cherice.’

  I smiled, and we shook hands. Her fingernails were long and painted gloss red.

  ‘I absolutely love detective novels,’ Cherice continued. ‘Karin Slaughter is my fave.’

  Bev went to move but Imogen cut her off. ‘Why we closed, Bev? My daughter’s school fees won’t pay themselves.’

  Bev lowered the tea towel and leaned her cheek in close to Imogen’s face. ‘Because I can’t man reception looking like the fucking Elephant Man, unless you want to volunteer tonight?’

  Imogen pursed her lips and looked at the floor.

  Bev nodded. ‘You want to clean out the room, too?’

  ‘It’s okay, Bev,’ Alex said. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Alex. Imogen, I’m sixty-four years old. You can’t expect me to clean the kitchen after you and wash the cum off your sheets. We are a team! Lots of hands make lighter work... have you ever heard that?’

  ‘I was offered two shifts a week at the Golden Apple for twice the money I’m getting here.’

  ‘Then go work for them!’

  Cherice raised her hands. ‘That’s enough, you two! Please! Go and cool down, or something. I can’t stand this fighting all the time!’

  Bev shuffled into the last bedroom on the right. ‘I’ll call Stefan and see if he can come in for the next two shifts.’ She re-emerged with an oversized men’s tee shirt and threw it at me.

  I thanked her and gingerly slipped it on, wincing at how the meat folded over itself when I moved.

  We followed Bev in a procession line back into the kitchenette, where she carefully eased herself into a chair. She kept the tea towel pressed to the side of her face as I topped up her glass with more gin. She smiled weakly.

  Cherice slowly settled into her own chair and looked forlorn.

  Imogen violently pulled out a chair and threw herself into it with a huff. She crossed her legs at the ankles.

  Alex stuck her head around the door jamb. ‘Sorry, girls, I’ll just be out the back. I need a smoke. I’m shithouse with this stuff.’

  Cherice inclined her head slightly. ‘Are you here because of Ally? Because of what happened now?’