by Chris Krupa
I flipped him onto his left side and felt his other pockets. I found an iPhone and four hundred in cash. ‘I’m taking this phone too.’
He groaned. ‘Like fuck you are.’
I hit him hard in the kidney, and he moaned and went limp. I then wedged the phone into my back pocket and returned the cash to his pocket. ‘Where’s Evelyn going?’
‘I dunno. Meeting some investor at The George.’
I took a photo of him with my phone for either future reference or leverage, whichever came up first. A sharp kick to the tailbone guaranteed time to get away. I got into the ute took off, and broke some laws looking up directions to The George on my phone. After about three clicks, I spotted Evelyn’s grey Mercedes in the traffic ahead. She drove carefully, stayed under the speed limit, and timed her lane changes. She anticipated not only the traffic but the lights, and showed all the signs of a woman in control who wouldn’t let those around her phase her. It’s hard enough to tail someone without arousing suspicion, but the tricky part comes when they stop, and you have to double back or park quick snap.
She pulled into the car park adjacent to The George, an old pub set back a little from the highway.
I carried on with the traffic, found a spot farther up along the main road, and parked. I walked back to the pub and spotted Evelyn sitting at a bar table with a middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair and glasses. They’d already ordered a wine and were deep in friendly conversation. Despite the frosty goodbye that morning, I still felt the closeness of her body from the night before, and felt a twinge of jealousy.
I stayed clear in the TAB section, flipped open the Nokia phone, and checked the call logs. Only one phone number appeared in the calls received log. I called it.
Evelyn stopped chatting and excused herself. She reached into her bag, dug out a black flip phone, and stepped out the front.
The call connected. ‘Why are you calling me?’ she said down the line. ‘I call you. That’s how this works.’
I hung up.
Chapter 22
Two buses converged in front of me, so I pulled hard right and copped a horn from the Mazda on my tail. They dropped back as I gripped the wheel and gunned it through a fresh red. Sydney’s a city of perpetual no right turns, which meant looping around a full city block and finding a loading zone close enough to the entrance to the Gentleman’s Club.
The same guy from Monday night grinned at me from behind the front desk, this time wearing a royal blue silk shirt instead of a red one.
Before he could say anything, I said, ‘I need to talk to Pricic.’
‘You with the cops?’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to have to see some ID.’
I showed him my investigators licence, and he frowned.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that before.’
‘Doesn’t mean it’s not legit. I’m looking for a missing girl, and I need information from Pricic. Now.’
He leaned forward on the desk and lowered his voice. ‘You need to go through the right channels, my friend. He only ever meets people who’ve been cleared.’
I dug out Lyons’ dirt-stained fifty dollar notes I’d collected from the mud at The Birches, and counted out the lot: eight hundred and fifty bucks. ‘Maybe he can make an exception.’
He eyed the money and sniffed. ‘No way Pricic’s puttin’ his hands on that. You better wash that shit.’
‘Quit jerking me around. Do we have a deal or don’t we?’
He looked around my shoulder and scoped the stairs. ‘What exactly do you want?’
‘Information on Tamsin Lyons. She met with Pricic maybe two weeks ago—pretty girl, classic look, long straight hair to the shoulders, fit.’
He considered the money again and sniffed. ‘Put it away, man.’
He disappeared into the main bar area and returned in less than a minute. ‘He’ll meet for a thousand, even.’
‘He’ll meet for eight-fifty, and he’ll meet today.’
He sneered and considered me seriously for a moment.
I smiled.
‘Belmonte’s in Leichhardt,’ he murmured. ‘Be there in two hours, and don’t be a fucken minute late or the whole fucken thing is off.’
***
The Italian Forum was known as Sydney’s ‘Little Italy,’ where post-war settlers purchased surrounding properties, in the now affluent suburb of Leichhardt, following the influx of migrants in the 1950s. Belmonte’s was situated on the second level above the central piazza, and I got there fifteen minutes early. To kill the time, I checked the surrounding bins for weapons, and tried to spot anyone out of the ordinary—odd ‘uns, as they used to call them in the industry.
Everything looked clean.
The bar inside stocked Sambuca in an array of colours, and the barman proved efficient in serving the thirsty lunchtime crowd. I held up a spot at the end of the bar and tried to look sophisticated sipping a light beer. At best, I came off as a cheap extra in a soap opera. Someone tapped my arm, and I turned to face a Torres Strait Islander with three inches and thirty kilos of muscle on me.
‘Seein’ Pricic?’
I nodded.
He said, ‘Let’s see the dough.’
‘And you are?’
‘Donald fuckin’ Trump.’
‘Come on. I need to know you’re legit. What’s the asking price?’
He rocked on his feet. ‘Eight-fifty.’
I coughed up the cash via a waist-high handover.
He glanced down and counted silently with his mouth, then shoved the lot into a pocket. ‘Follow me, champion.’
I downed the rest of my drink and followed him to a table where the guy in the silk blue shirt sat wearing mirrored sunglasses.
He took of his glasses and smiled. ‘I can’t do business at the club. Too many eyes, you understand? Lucky for you, you checked out. We’re cool. Take a seat.’
As I took up a chair, I said, ‘I’m so glad I passed your little test.’
He shot me a dark look. ‘I’m two weeks away from completing a correction order. I breach that in any way, I’m in the slammer for three years. I’m not givin’ up my liberty for no stranger. How’d you get onto me?’
‘A woman I’m looking for, Tamsin Lyons, knows one of your dancers, Alyssa Shumak. I talked to her and she put me onto you.’
A waitress put a large platter of antipasto on the table in front of Pricic. She showed him the wine bottle and, on his nod, opened it expertly. She produced a fresh glass, and he tasted the wine and nodded again.
He scooped up the few remaining nuts and olives and ate them before using a small fork to spear pieces of meat and cheese, which he gobbled. ‘What do you wanna know?’
‘I want to know why Tamsin saw you.’
‘A give people a new start. Know what I mean?’
‘So, what did Tamsin want?’
Pricic counted each one on his fingers. ‘New birth certificate. Queensland drivers licence. I told her 35K for the lot. She took it. Paid cash.’
‘Did she tell you why she needed it?’
He raised his hands. ‘And implicate myself so my parole officer can lock me up and throw away the key? Fat fucking chance, my friend.’
‘What’s the name on the birth certificate?’
‘Anastasia Morrison.’
‘And what was the date when she saw you?’
He groaned. ‘Man, I don’t fucking know.’
‘It’s really important. Can you try to remember? What was the day? Give me that.’
He stared at his plate, speared an olive and chewed on it, then snapped his fingers. ‘I got it. It was a Friday. I had to kick one of my girls to the curb. She was fucking Mickey, my head of security. I was pissed off. I remember.’
That put the meeting on the day she left town.
‘Anything else that jumps out? Did she say anything to you?’
He shook his head, and the waitress re-appeared with another antipasto plate. Pricic pointed
to the table and said, ‘Grace, Antoinette.’
He waitress curtsied and smiled in response, and Pricic stared at her behind as she walked away.
I said, ‘Won’t you spoil your appetite?’
‘I don’t wanna upset my Zia. She works hard to please her customers, including me.’
He offered me the plate, and I took a slice of thinly shaved prosciutto. ‘So, we good?’ he said. ‘Cuz I got other shit I need to do.’
I nodded and made to stand up.
Pricic put a hand on my arm. ‘Oh yeah, she said it was a birthday present to herself. Any idea what that means?’
***
I listened to the ‘Live on the Night’ CD from Dire Straits on the eighty-eight-minute drive back home, and let the easy transitions of Knopfler’s guitar lull me into a relaxed reverie. With the shooting and a long line of highly stressful confrontations, I felt reinvigorated not only knowing Tamsin had bought herself a whole new identity, but I also had a location for her. Having no experience looking for people interstate, I’d have had to bone up on online Queensland resources. The timelines matched, too.
The usual turnaround for a cheque to cash is three business days. If Tamsin took the cheque from her mother’s house on the 12th and banked it, she’d be able to draw funds after three business days. That confirmed Tamsin’s movements from Clovelly on the night of the twelfth, seeing Pricic for a new birth certificate and drivers licence on the fourteenth, and paying him on the seventeenth.
After forty clicks, I filled up at a 7-11 and called Alice, and we agreed to have Chinese for dinner. The dashboard clock said 4:55 PM, so I told her to wait out front.
On Cliff Road, the sun had gone behind the line of strata complexes, and as I approached mine I saw a man talking to Alice by the mailboxes.
I swerved to the wrong side of the road and pulled up hard against the gutter. ‘You okay, honey?’
The man turned and the lazy eye of Detective Constable Ivers stared through me.
Alice leaned in my window and gave me a peck. ‘Hi, Dad.’
I stored it in my ‘cherish vault,’ and said, ‘Hi, A-Girl.’
Her schoolbag burst at the seams, undoubtedly stuffed with pajamas, face creams, and her assortment of hairbrushes.
I met the Detective’s eyes. ‘Sorry, I didn’t recognise you.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘My line of work, you understand.’
‘Alice said you wouldn’t be long, so we’d thought we’d sit tight and talk shop. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘No, not at all. You’ve met the apple of my eye.’
Ivers nodded. ‘Smart young lady.’
I looked at her, smiling. ‘You want to be a detective now?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe a forensic pathologist.’
I met Ivers’ good eye. ‘Are you here for business or pleasure?’
He hugged his portfolio and a manila folder to his chest. ‘Let me put it this way: we have similar interests and share a common goal.’
‘Let me park and I’ll give you the tour.’
We trudged up the stairs single file, and Ivers said, ‘I won’t take up too much of your time. I’ll need to ask you a few questions.’
When I unlocked the door, Alice went in before us.
Ivers removed his shoes.
Alice pulled her phone out of a side pouch of her schoolbag. ‘I’ll be in the spare room.’
I wrapped an arm around her neck and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’ll keep the food warm in the microwave while I talk to the Detective Constable.’
‘Cool.’ She receded down the hall, turned left, and disappeared into the darkness of the office-slash-spare-room, her face lit by her phone’s screen, thumbs already tapping a message to someone.
As I placed the bag of Chinese in the microwave, Ivers pulled his trousers up at the knees and took up a chair at the breakfast bench. A strong wind broke against the windows, and a moaning sound came from the bathroom.
‘It’s just the old piping,’ I said. ‘Nineteen-seventies architecture at its finest.’ I popped the door on the microwave, slid the containers in there and closed the door.
Ivers said, ‘Are you concerned I’m here?’
‘If you were laying charges, you’d have a partner with you.’ I held my hand out. ‘My heart’s at a steady ninety beats per minute.’
‘Nice detective skills. I’m here because I think we both want the same thing.’
‘Coffee?’
He nodded.
I pulled out a percolator, packed it tight, and put it on the stove.
‘Saw your name come up on COPS today,’ he continued. ‘That shooting in Knox Street. You mind telling me what happened?’
‘Before all that, I was wondering if you had any information on the murders of the two girls?’
He shook his head. ‘Not how this works. It goes this way.’ He pointed to me, then to him. ‘Then it might go the other way.’
Ivers came across as one of the more enlightened and self-assured officers I’d met in quite a while, which made my decision to share what I knew easier. The fact that two women had been murdered in cold blood, and Lyons’ security personnel were involved, trumped any level of confidentiality I held with Lyons.
I pulled my shirt collar down and showed him the gauze over my left collar bone. ‘I followed some lines of inquiry and ran into a guy named Gav at the Lotus brothel in Surry Hills. Tamsin works there on weekends. Based on witnesses’ accounts, he said he’d cut her up if she didn’t get rid of the book. Turns out another sex worker named Heather Morrison wrote an unauthorised biography on a number of high-profile men who are sex predators, and interviewed Tamsin for the book. All unsubstantiated, as no charges were ever laid.’
I took a breath. ‘He’d bashed one of the women unconscious, and I confronted him. He stabbed me under the collar bone with a butterfly knife—blunt back, about fifteen centimetres.’
Ivers met my eyes.
I continued. ‘I traced the manuscript to a publishing house and arranged to meet one of the production editors, Warwick Fripp, to get more information. We met in the Knox Street bar. He said there’s an interview with Tamsin Lyons in the book, in which she accuses her father of sexually assaulting her when she was eight years old.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Fripp was on edge the whole time. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on antidepressants. I only found out today that Lyons’ former sister-in-law and PA organised an extortion operation, using a copy of the manuscript as leverage, to the tune of twenty thousand dollars a week. It fits with what Fripp told me.’
‘Which was?’
‘He confirmed a man called him every week and told him what his son was doing at school at any given time. In other words, keep your nose clean, keep the manuscript under lock and key, and nothing happens to your family. I paid him for the information and followed him out to the street. A man on a road bike came out of nowhere and shot at us. I managed to get out of the way, but Fripp wasn’t so lucky. Detective Constable Casuamo took my details while they loaded Fripp into a wagon. I confronted Lyons at St Vincent’s to get his side. He admitted to sleeping with prostitutes.’
‘A blindside?’
‘More than likely.’
‘And how did you find out about his PA blackmailing him?’
‘I had a run-in with a bodybuilder I call Mr. Bandana. He’s got some connection to Lyons, or Evelyn, or both. I don’t know yet. He had a disagreement with my fists, and when I went through his pockets, I found a burner phone. I took it, followed Evelyn, and called the number. She answered.’
‘When you say Evelyn, are you referring to Evelyn Turner?’
I nodded.
Ivers said, ‘A woman named Evelyn Turner took Tamsin to the police when she was nine years old, but she didn’t press any charges.’
He produced a series of labelled, colour photographs from his folio. ‘These are stills taken from a camera positioned over the entrance to the Queen Mar
y dormitory building in Camperdown, exposed at 19 minutes and 27 seconds after 9:00 PM on 13 March, clearly showing Pavali Singh being escorted into the building by our person of interest.’
The percolator started to whistle as Ivers tapped the photograph with a stained finger. ‘Recognise him?’
Gav’s protruding chin, shaved head, and whippet-like body was unmistakable.
Chapter 23
‘That’s the prick who stabbed me,’ I said as I lifted the percolator off the burner and rested it on the sink.
‘We believe this man accosted Ms. Singh on her way back to the Queen Mary dormitory,’ Ivers continued. ‘We believe he was armed with a knife and forced Ms. Singh to grant him entry to the building, where they proceeded to room 221. It’s possible he put Ms. Singh in the bathroom as he confronted and murdered Renee. He then forced Ms. Singh at knifepoint to leave the building, then took her to Camperdown Park and murdered her. The state coroner all but confirms the same weapon was used to kill both Ms. Prestwidge and Ms. Singh.’
Ivers showed the next image. ‘And here they are exiting the building exactly twelve minutes later.’
I threw a teaspoon as hard as I could into the sink. ‘Fuck!’
Alice peeked in from the hallway. ‘Dad?’
‘Sorry, sweetheart. Your dad has had a very big day today.’
She walked up to me, gave me a hug, smiled at Ivers, and went back into the spare bedroom.
I picked up the photo and stared into the black pools of Gav’s eyes. ‘Jesus Christ. He was right there in front of me.’
‘He’s a UK citizen named Gavin Poulson,’ Ivers said. ‘Currently in Australia on an expired visa. Immigration are busting their chops to deport him, if they can find him.’
‘Is this where I come in?’
‘You see him, you call me.’
I tipped three heaped teaspoons of sugar into a cup and poured the coffee. ‘I could have stopped the prick at the brothel.’
‘Do not beat yourself up. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. You know how many of us have to live with that knowledge when we catch repeat offenders putting an axe into their girlfriends while out on parole? We always say we could have done something, but it doesn’t change anything. You stopped him from killing the woman at the brothel.’