Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) (7 page)

‘“Zombie face”?’

He flipped the mirror down in front of me. He was right: I looked decidedly undead. I rubbed my eyes and raked back my apparently homosexual hair, slapping the mirror away.

On the phone screen was a video on pause. I clicked play, and the car was filled with the sound of deep-throated groaning and grunting.

‘Urgh.’ I threw the phone back at him with barely a glimpse of the bare thrusting ass on the screen. ‘You’re disgusting.’

‘I’m not sharing my porn with you. That’s our victim, Claudia Burrows.’

I took the phone back and watched. The camera panned around the ass and up the thighs of a petite blonde woman. I’d seen that mouth before, with Tox Barnes’s finger in it.

‘Where’d you find this?’

‘I was trying to figure out how she got those tits,’ he said, pulling away from the kerb. ‘Her bank account showed she’d never been able to afford them. Then I got to thinking – adult film producers will sometimes pay for larger hooters for their actresses if they agree to appear in a certain number of movies. The films sell better if the girls have got a set of big juicy—’

‘All right, all right, all right.’

‘She appears in that video as Claudia Dee.’ He pointed with his cigarette. ‘Had an old porn addict I know dig it up for me. It’s about a month old. Straight to DVD, not available online.’

‘Nice work.’

‘Maybe that’s where the big pay-off was coming from,’ he said, roaring through the traffic like a lunatic, weaving in and out of the oncoming cars. ‘Maybe there was a feature film coming up.’

‘Yeah, and maybe she pulled out of the big film,’ I said, ‘and someone decided they weren’t going to be messed around like that. I’ve met plenty of these porn guys. Women are just like horses to them. When they break down, or they go wild, you take them out the back and put a bolt in their brains.’

DIABOLIC VIDEOS HAD
a studio on the upper floor of a building on bustling George Street, up a flight of carpeted stairs that reeked of petrol. A huge pink neon sign at the top of the stairs blinded me as I arrived at the tiny foyer where a girl with too many piercings sat texting.

‘What is that smell?’ I covered my mouth and nose with my T-shirt.

‘Some girl’s ex-boyfriend came in here last week lookin’ for her.’ The pierced girl yawned. ‘Poured petrol all down the stairs. Said he was gonna light the place on fire if she didn’t come out.’

‘She come out?’ Tox asked.

‘The place on fire?’

‘We’re looking for people who know this girl here.’ I showed her a picture of Claudia her parents had provided us with. Piercings hardly glanced at it. She only had eyes for Tox.

‘You don’t look like no cop.’

‘What do I look like?’

‘I dunno.’ The girl leaned on the counter, wriggled her booty. ‘But I like it.’

‘This! Girl! Here!’ I slapped the photo on the counter.

‘OK! OK! Jeez!’

She pushed aside a curtain and led us through. The space was divided into quarters by painted black partitions. I could hear whips cracking in the furthest corner. We passed an empty bed and arrived in the middle of a film set. Two huge black cameras were manned by men. On a satin-sheeted bed, an unnaturally hairless woman was propped, the hem of a blazing-white tennis skirt flipped back over her thighs. Her cotton polo shirt was ripped across the middle and tied tight beneath enormous breasts. She twirled a blonde pigtail in one hand and licked the handle of a tennis racquet she held in the other.

Tox pointed. ‘What is she gonna do with that racquet?’

‘Excuse me!’ A man with a clipboard stepped out of the glow of the lights. ‘You’re in the middle of a live shoot here!’

‘I’m Detective Blue. This is Detective Dirtycreep. We’re looking for someone who was close to Claudia Burrows.’ I flashed the picture. ‘We know she did a film here a couple of months ago. We want to speak to anyone who has any knowledge about her murder.’

‘I’ve never seen that girl before.’ The producer turned his nose up at the picture. ‘If she’s dead, it’s her own fault.’

Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around, only to be yanked face first into yet another pair of breasts. The girl hugging me was wearing six-inch silver sparkle heels, and nothing else.

‘Harry!’ she squealed. ‘Oh my God, you little doll, what are you
doing
here?’

I’d handled Vicky Varouma’s sexual assault claim at Surry Hills a couple of years earlier.

‘Vicky!’ I smiled up at her. ‘Hi! Tell me you know this girl.’

‘Oh man.’ Vicky’s face fell as she took in the picture. ‘Now there’s a piece of bad news.’

‘
SHE WAS TALKING
about everything changing,’ Vicky said. ‘She was outta here. She asked me for some money so she could get set up, and said she’d pay me back when she came into her big win.’

‘What was the money for?’ I asked. We were sitting in the Diabolic Videos dressing room. I’d caught sight of myself in the mirror and realised Vicky’s hug had covered my face and neck in body glitter. It was proving difficult to wipe off. Tox stood nearby, examining bottles of perfume.

‘I don’t know. But I saw her near Potts Point wearing some pretty flashy clothes. I was driving by and she was with another girl. Maybe she had a job or something.’

‘Who was the other girl?’

‘I don’t know that either. They were shopping for handbags. On
Macleay Street
. Damn, girl must’ve hit something good.’

‘Why did you say out there that Claudia was “bad news”?’ Tox asked.

‘Oh.’ Vicky looked embarrassed, turned to the mirrors and started braiding her hair. ‘I feel bad now. She’s dead. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’

‘You should if it’ll help us.’

‘She was just a slimy character, our Claudia,’ Vicky sighed. ‘The kind of girls who end up in this industry aren’t usually your silver spoon types. But I’d met Claudia’s parents and they seemed like nice, quiet people. Regular people. I couldn’t figure out how she ended up the way she was. So deceptive. She always had a scam on the go.’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, like she’d tell you she knew where to get cheap ecstasy or something, you know, for the weekend. She’d take your money and come back crying, telling you the dealer had robbed her, smacked her around. She’d show you bruises that were non-existent, or days old. That sort of thing.’

‘Right.’

‘She lied like you wouldn’t believe, so she made a good actress for Diabolic. I think her parents thought she was a waitress or something. But she lied about things that didn’t matter. She exaggerated and exaggerated until you were basically being asked to believe she had this crazy, wild, extravagant life. She was dating movie stars and international spies.’

‘How sad,’ I said.

‘She was always on the verge of a “new life”. The big money she was supposed to be coming into? I don’t know.’ Vicky shrugged. ‘Sounds like bullshit to me. I think she’d applied to university. She was going to buy an apartment, transfer up into a law-school programme, be a criminal lawyer. She kept watching clips from legal dramas on her phone, practising them out loud. I mean
please
– girl could barely read.’

‘How’d she get into university if she could barely read?’

‘I’d say she had a friend fill in the application form for her. She’d have paid them to pack it full of lies about how she was ready to knuckle down and study.’ Vicky looked at me. ‘I can see why she was so determined to live a “new life”. The life she was living here was a total fabrication.’

HOPE’S PLANS HAD
stalled. She knelt on the deck of her yacht, sanding the scratches in the polished wood, trying to keep her fury contained. The scratches went all the way from the anchor mount to a door at the side of the vessel, from where she’d dragged the anchor she had tied Claudia to.

In the first days, Hope had been sick whenever she’d thought about it. All that would go in time. Already she couldn’t remember her face. Piece by piece, the memories would fall away. She just had to continue with the plan.

Hope heard a shifting in the bathroom. She got up and marched there, slammed open the door. Finally he was awake. Ken was just coming to his senses, shaking the chloroform fog from his head. He looked down at his sleeping wife, at the sheen of sweat on her skin. The woman was ghost white.

‘So I had a magnificent time at the bank,’ Hope snapped.

‘You got the money?’ Ken’s eyes widened. ‘Now you can let us go. You can—’

‘Don’t pretend you didn’t try to send me into a fucking trap, Ken.’ Hope slammed the door again so that it banged against the shower frame. ‘The joint signatures? You were hoping to trip me up, and your plan failed.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Ken panted, swallowed hard. ‘Hope, look, I didn’t try to betray you. I just want to get my wife to a hospital. I just want this to be over. Jenny has got hours, not days, until her kidneys are going to fail and she’s going to die. Do you understand that?’

‘Do you think I’m a fucking idiot?’ Hope sneered.

‘No.’ Ken shook his head. ‘No, of course not. You’re very clever. It would take someone very clever to pull something like this off.’

‘I’ve planned every aspect of this thing,’ Hope said. ‘Nothing is going to stop me. I deserve this, you understand? I’ve waited my whole life for my moment. You’ve got to make your own life, Ken. You’ve got to change your own destiny. Nobody’s gonna change it for you.’

‘Imagine if you staged an incredible plan like this without hurting anybody.’ Ken nodded along. ‘Wow! You’d show everybody. You’d go down in the history books.’

Hope sighed. She’d been enjoying Ken’s praise, but he’d taken it a step too far. The man must know what had happened to Claudia. Two young, professional women had approached him about his boat. Those same two had accompanied him and his wife around the harbour, followed him down into the engine cavity to inspect the boat’s inner workings. Now that their real purpose had been revealed, one of those girls was gone. Even from the bathroom where she’d locked them, Ken and Jenny must have heard Claudia’s scream as Hope had brought the hammer down on the back of her skull. The scrape of the anchor. She felt exhausted as Ken launched into his tired pleas again.

‘It won’t take long. All you have to do is bring the machine in here,’ Ken said. ‘There might be enough dialysate left for one more dose. Just untie one of my hands, and I’ll—’

‘You’re going to die, Ken,’ Hope said suddenly. The man before her stiffened, his eyes wide. Hope shook her head, bored, as she continued: ‘You’re both going to die. You might as well just accept that now.’

TOX AND I
settled in a bar on the strip in Kings Cross, sitting at the open window, watching the pimps and prostitutes wander up and down in the light rain. It seemed appropriate to head into Sydney’s red-light district. What we’d learned of Claudia’s life made me gravitate here, where the liars, cheats and criminals came to play. The homeless crowding into corners to escape the wind and the hopeless slouching around the bars, tired from weeks of endlessly drinking away reality. Kings Cross was also just around the corner from my apartment. I hoped to wander back after a quick drink and get some much-needed sleep.

My phone calls and emails were ceasing to have any effect as word spread throughout the police force that I was working with Tox. When I called to see if the full autopsy on Claudia’s body had come in, an officer at my station put me on hold for half an hour, and then hung up. I only got the report by calling back and pretending to be someone else. I couldn’t get hold of the secondary detectives I’d tasked to look after the Burrowses, so I called their counsellor and asked if everyone was OK. I stared at Tox while I waited on the phone, trying to decide how the man himself ever got anything done without fabricating multiple identities and ringing around the world every time he wanted anything.

While I watched, I found myself trying to imagine him as a small child in a wild pack of other kids, pulling and grabbing and yanking an adult mother to the ground, stabbing her in a hurried rush, blood soaking their tiny clothes. I imagined him cornering her son, a boy his age maybe, holding the knife to the kid’s throat. Why had they done it? Tox had a mean look to him, particularly with the bruised nose and double black eyes, the leather jacket that reeked of smoke. But I knew there was no ‘killer look’. I’d known baby-faced pre-teen boys in school blazers and caps who’d assaulted girls so viciously they’d broken their victims’ spirit for life.

Maybe it was all just a rumour and Tox was innocent. But if it was, why didn’t he do anything to change the black mark against his name?

I was just starting to imagine him as a kind and gentle man wrapped in the shell of a dangerous one when he put his whisky glass down, got up and strode across the room with violent intent. I watched him take a pool cue from the rack, snap it over his knee and roll the heavy end in his fist like a batter coming up to the plate.

‘All right, buddy,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

His target was a heavier, taller man who’d been playing a game of pool by the back doors of the bar. The heavy man and Tox lunged at each other.

I WAS UP
and across the bar before I’d really taken stock of the situation. My sheer bewilderment at the fight, and my own fatigue, had me diving into danger without a plan. I ran over and grabbed at Tox, but one of the heavy man’s mates pulled me off him and threw me into the edge of the pool table. That hurt. My fists came up immediately, and I gave the guy a couple of warning punches to the jaw. But that only made him madder. He swung a heavy fist at my head. I ducked, surged up with an uppercut that crunched teeth and bone, and knocked him out on his feet. Before he could fall forward onto me, I shoved him back. He fell into a table full of glasses where two old men were seated. They hardly moved.

The room was suddenly full of people. I felt a hand on the back of my head, grabbed and twisted it, heard a man scream. I kicked his knee out and he flopped to the floor. I looked up just in time to see another fist swinging at me. It glanced off my brow. I ducked too late and shot the guy with a sucker punch to the gut that folded him in half.