Cherry Pie (20 page)

Alex, to his credit, kept strolling nonchalantly but the man stuffed his camera into a padded bag, turned and started to race-walk towards the ferry wharves. He glanced over his shoulder and when he saw Alex catching up he bolted. Alex started running too, but was about a hundred metres behind.

As the guy ran past the Oyster Bar I leapt out of my seat and took off after him, ignoring the shout of the waiter who must have thought I was doing a runner.

Camera guy was short and rotund and although his chunky legs were really pumping it didn’t take me long to close in. He ducked and weaved through the crowd, and almost fell after he leapt over a busker playing a didgeridoo. He staggered, caught himself, whirled around to see Alex and me gaining ground and took off again. I was in front of Alex, only a couple of metres away from camera guy and so close I could hear his panting and smell his acrid sweat.

I was just about to lunge when the guy veered towards one of those sketch artists who draw everyone’s faces exactly the same. Grabbed the guy’s easel and chucked it at me. I put my arms up to deflect it, almost tripped over my boots and he gained a few metres. Alex caught up and ran past me, tie flying over his shoulder.

‘Go back,’ he shouted.

Not likely. Zigzagging between tourists and crowds of commuters I chased both of them into the station behind the ferry wharves. The train lines ran above the Quay and to reach them you had to take the escalators or stairs up to the platforms. Two rows of ticket barriers stood opposite each other and Alex covered one while I blocked the other. We had him cornered and the guy whipped his head around, sizing up his chances. He obviously decided I was the best bet, rushed me and darted away at the last second, scrabbling over the far turnstile.

I lunged and had just grabbed the tail of his shirt when I felt a crushing weight on my back and went down hard, hit the concrete with my palms then crumpled and rolled on my side, someone on top of me. I screamed and kicked and the weight lifted. Alex had the waiter from the Oyster Bar by the back of his shirt.

‘Go after him,’ I yelled, pointing towards camera guy, who had made it inside and was running up the escalator. Alex took off and the waiter pounced, pushing my face into the ground, wrenching my wrists behind my back and shouting to the gathering crowd that I’d done a runner and he was making a citizen’s arrest. Children pointed and old people tut-tutted and I wanted to explain but couldn’t open my lips lest I copped a mouthful of filthy concrete. Alex eventually returned, puffing, flashed his badge and the waiter finally let me go.

‘He slipped into a train,’ Alex said. ‘He’s gone.’

After we’d cleared things up with the overzealous waiter, paid the bill and collected Alex’s jacket, he insisted on driving me back to Annandale, which was fine with me. On the drive we threw around ideas about who the guy had been, and who’d want me under surveillance. I put forward a theory that whoever had attacked me at Andi’s, left the possum head, organised the hit and run and now the surveillance were not necessarily connected. The methods were too diverse. Unless of course some evil genius was just trying to do my head in, in which case they were succeeding.

I’d braced myself for Alex to lecture me about dropping the case and getting the hell out of Dodge but he didn’t, and I was glad. I thought my information was really going to help the cops find Andi and from the way photo guy had taken off through Circular Quay it was obvious he wasn’t any sort of threat. After an eternity stuck in rush hour traffic on Parramatta Road, we pulled up in front of my mum’s.

‘Thanks,’ I yawned. I was tired and dirty and just wanted a shower and another drink. ‘Guess I’ll see you back in Melbourne. Call me if you find out anything about Andi during your travels.’

‘Can I come in for a sec?’

‘Best if you don’t.’ I didn’t particularly want Alex meeting my mum and there was a good chance Steve was still growing a hydroponic dope crop out in the back shed.

‘Come on, I’m busting for a piss after that beer.’ He slipped out of the car before I could protest. Damn.

Opening the front door I heard muffled music and conversation wafting through the house. I crept down the hallway, Alex following close behind, and was relieved to find the lounge room and kitchen empty. Peeping out the windows above the sink I made out approximately fifteen people, some sitting at a table on the back deck, the others milling around the yard.

I shoved him into the bathroom. ‘Hurry up. Soon as you’re done you’re out of here.’

‘Can’t I meet your mum?’

‘No. She won’t like you. Nothing personal, but she loathes cops. Just pee and get out, okay?’

If Alex had been a wallaby on the tundra earlier, seeing him in my mum’s house was like watching the Reverend Fred Nile go-go dance in an Oxford Street gay bar. I stood outside the bathroom, bobbing up and down on the balls of my feet and keeping watch through the open back door. The yard was paved and ringed by native plants, except for the lemon tree dragging its branches in the far corner. Mum and Joy were sitting on an old church pew next to it, deep in conversation.

Steve had the barbie set up on the other side of the yard, in front of his mudbrick shed, and the orange glow of bamboo torches cut through the twilight.

I heard the toilet flush, seat flip down—good man—and tap begin to gush.

‘Come on, come on,’ I muttered under my breath. Just as Alex emerged from the bathroom my mum looked up and saw us. I grabbed his elbow, pulled him through the kitchen into the lounge and was just about to race him down the hallway when I heard her right behind us. I hadn’t known she could move so fast.

‘Simone! Who’s this?’

Alex turned and beamed at her.

‘He was just leaving.’

‘Don’t be rude,’ Mum said. ‘Introduce us.’

I sighed. ‘Mum, meet Detective Senior Constable Alex Christakos, Victoria Police. Alex, meet my mum, Peta Kirsch.’

Alex stepped forward and shook her hand. ‘Ms. Kirsch. It’s terrific to finally meet you. Simone talks about you all the time.’

No I didn’t. What a bullshit artist.

‘Are you Simone’s …?’ She tilted her head.

‘No, Mum.’ I said quickly. ‘That’s Sean. This is Sean’s best friend.’

‘So how did you two …?’ She pointed from him to me.

‘Alex is in Sydney following up a fraud investigation and we just happened to run into each other.’

‘Where?’

I gave him a look that said
lie, damn you
, but he chose to ignore it.

‘Kings Cross,’ he offered.

My mum frowned.

‘I was doing a little sightseeing,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Alex was nice enough to give me a lift home and now he’s going back to his hotel.’ I grabbed his arm and tried to hustle him up the hallway but he stood his ground and smiled at her.

‘Before I leave I want to tell you I really enjoyed your dissertation. What was it called? “Politics and Power”? “Formations of Identity in Gendered Hierarchical Cultures”?’

I did an actual double take. Say what?

‘You read it?’ Mum’s hand fluttered up to her chest.

‘Christ, I wrote that for my PhD.’

‘I actually cited you in my Master’s.’

‘What did you study?’

‘Criminology. My thesis examined redressing the masculinist nature of policing and I particularly liked what you said about proactive equality strategies. I thought your ideas were spot on.’

I stared at him, mouth dropping open. He’d never let on that he knew anything about my mother, let alone studied her.

Alex pointed at the piano. ‘You play?’

‘I’ve just started lessons again. Got grade five exams coming up.’

‘They’re tough. What piece are you performing?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’ She looked him up and down.

‘Would you like to stay for a drink?’

‘Love one.’

‘Come out and meet Steve. I have to warn you we’ve been smoking a joint. You’re not one of those overzealous “war on drugs” cops, are you?’

‘Not at all. Whatever consenting adults want to do in the privacy of their own home is fine with me.’

‘Did you want a toke?’

‘The drink will be fine.’

I crossed my arms and turned to my mum. ‘I thought you were detoxing.’

‘It’s organic, darling.’

She stepped around me and hooked her arm through Alex’s. As she led him out he glanced over his shoulder and winked at me. I stood there wondering if there’d been a tear in the space–time continuum and I’d inadvertently blundered into a parallel universe. Sure felt like it.

I jumped in the shower and scrubbed off the day, dabbed tea-tree cream on my scrapes and dressed all in black: a pair of stretch pants left over from my waitressing days, the boots I’d worn down from Melbourne, and a long sleeved, scooped neck top of my mother’s. I brushed my hair, whacked on a bit of makeup and checked the fridge. My mum may have been detoxing but her guests certainly weren’t. I grabbed the biggest wine glass I could find, filled it with someone’s sauvignon blanc and considered my chances of scabbing a cigarette. Probably not good. Perhaps I’d have to stand over the barbecue and inhale.

The back veranda had been extended into a wooden deck and a bunch of people in their forties and fifties sat at a stained pine table eating olives and drinking red wine from outsized glasses. Lights shaped like chili peppers wound round the railing, glowing red, and Joni Mitchell emanated from the stereo speakers. A few of the people looked familiar so I waved in their general direction, muttered a quick, ‘Hi, everyone,’ and descended the porch steps. Others hung around the sizzling barbecue where Steve, back in his drawstring pants and sandals, was rotating vege skewers and laying down marinated fish fillets and Balmain bugs. The seafood smells mingled with the scent of frangipani and smoke, a plane roared overhead and in the distance cars beeped their horns and trucks growled, air brakes spitting as they stopped and started on nearby Parramatta Road. The evening was getting darker but there was a preternatural orange glow in the sky.

Alex was sitting on the pew by the lemon tree, drinking a Coopers Red, Mum on his left and Joy to his right. As Joy wasn’t yelling at him and calling him a pig it seemed he had charmed her also. Jesus. No one was that good.

Mum, who appeared to be stoned and in quite good spirits, waved me over. ‘I was just telling everyone about when you were a kid, how you got lost in the bush and we found you wedged down a rabbit burrow. Should have known you’d end up a PI.’

‘Alice in Wonderland?’ Alex looked up, amused.

‘
Watership Down
. I thought Hazel and Pipkin might be down there. I lived in the bush. I didn’t have any friends.’

I grabbed a canvas deckchair and sat close to Joy. Alex turned his attention back to my mum and said something in her ear, causing her to lift her chin and laugh. Good god, was he flirting with her? Steve glanced over before turning his attention back to the barbecue.

‘How you holding up?’ I asked Joy.

‘Not so good. It’s the not knowing that’s the worst.’

I leaned in close, elbows on my knees, and lowered my voice. ‘I tried to call you today but your phone was switched off.’

‘I was at the hospital with Mum.’

‘Of course. Look, I was just wondering, when Andi was in Sydney in June, did she ever mention anything about a woman named Melita Kracowski? Melody? She disappeared in nineteen eighty, used to work at the Love Tunnel for Sam Doyle.’

Joy went pale all of a sudden and her pupils expanded.

Her hand started shaking and her wine glass slipped from her grasp, bounced off her lap and shattered on the ground. Her t-shirt was soaked with red.

‘Are you okay?’

She didn’t reply, just shot a look at my mum and disappeared into the house. My mother stood and followed her. Steve grabbed a dustpan and brush from underneath the barbecue and Alex and I helped pick up the large pieces of glass. I was just about to go after them when I got cornered by some guy with a beard and elbow patches who asked if I thought real life PIs were influenced at all by their fictional counterparts, since he’d just written a paper about the effect of TV cop shows on police recruiting campaigns.

Steve and Alex started bringing the barbecued food to the table and arranging more chairs. Joy and Mum had been gone about ten minutes so I told beard guy I had to pee, went inside the house to look for them and ran into them in the kitchen.

Joy had changed shirts. I’d thought she might have been having another one of her freak-outs but she was dry eyed. Mum, who looked more distressed than she did, went straight to the fridge, poured herself the rest of the sav blanc then drank about half of it in one go. She was holding two sheets of paper and her hand was trembling slightly.

‘I’m sending you back to Melbourne,’ she said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s safer.’

‘Mum, I’m not unsafe.’

Alex walked in from the deck and looked around. ‘Bottle opener?’ he asked. Mum reached to the bench behind her, picked it up and held it out.

I glared at him. ‘You told her about today.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I swear. I didn’t tell her about the bikies who almost molested you, or the guy following you with the camera, the attack in Melbourne by the wheelie bin, the severed possum head, and, let’s see … the hit and run she already knows about …’

Bastard. No wonder he hadn’t said anything in the car. This was his grand plan to get me off the case. Mum looked me over.

I tried to hide my grazed palms but just drew more attention to them.

She crossed her arms. ‘I was right. It’s far too dangerous.

I’ve already bought your plane ticket over the internet. You leave tonight.’ She handed over a piece of paper: a printed itinerary.

I stood there with my mouth open, hardly able to believe what I was hearing. ‘You’re the one that asked me to stay.’

‘And now I’m telling you to go back to Melbourne.’

‘But my flat isn’t safe.’

She thrust out the second sheet. ‘I’ve booked you into a motel near the airport. It’s out of the way, and in Steve’s name.