Dirty Weekend (9 page)

‘That we know about,’ I added. ‘Have you checked to see if he’s got a record?’

‘I’ll do that next.’ Brian made a face. ‘But, Jack, you’ve got to
care
to kill someone. This was just a casual root with an available woman. He just dropped around now and then.’

‘That’s what he’s told us. He admitted that they fought and he was pretty protective of the girlfriend. What if Tianna had threatened to tell her that Damien was playing out of school? People have died for less than that.’ I knew that the best way to lie was to tell the truth, but leave out the last part. ‘What if the fight wasn’t about staying in and watching a video but about going dancing? Let’s say they
did
go to the nightclub but kept on fighting and she threatened to tell Kylie, and late at night, when all is quiet, he takes her out to the car park, smokes a joint with her, then kills her? That take-it-or-leave-it attitude might change dramatically if he felt threatened.’

I recalled some of the people I’d spoken with in the aftermath of a violent death, with the body lying in another room, the ghost of a just-dead lover, spouse, or friend hovering around the edges of our dialogue. I’d witnessed the range of human emotions: rage, grief, despair, hatred, terror, numbness, denial, and shock to the point of hysteria. But the carelessness I’d witnessed in Damien Henshaw—apart from one expression of disbelief—made me wonder.

I looked up at Brian, who was lost in his own inner discourse. Not wanting to interrupt him, I pulled on a pair of gloves I always carried and picked up a framed photo from the bedside table. In it, Tianna was cuddling up to a fair-haired man who was neither Earl Richardson nor Damien Henshaw. The entwined lovers sat with a group of people gathered around a table on which glasses and wine bottles stood. Behind them, the timber of the banquette they were sitting in was carved in fake Jacobean twists. Some bar or hotel, I thought. Tianna seemed to have been a very busy, sociable girl.

Brian must have broken from his trance because he moved over and looked at the framed photo too. ‘We need to know who this guy is,’ he said.

‘We sure do,’ I replied. ‘She’s keeping him in the bedroom, for private display only, not out in the living room with the family and the friends.’

‘Maybe the family and friends didn’t know they were an item,’ Brian suggested.

I checked the frame of the photograph, prising it open in case Tianna had further secrets locked behind it, but found nothing. I passed it to Brian who bagged and labelled it then went over to study the dressing-table.

It looked to be just as Tianna had left it—hairbrush lying on its side, three different perfume bottles standing in a row and a Cecil Peabody jeweller bag. I peered inside to see a smaller, maroon velour jewellery pouch and a receipt. First I opened the drawstring of the little pouch. A pair of earrings winked up at me, fancy dangly things, silver sprays dripping with black crystals of some sort. I hooked one out and stared at it for a moment before examining the receipt.

‘Look at these,’ I said, turning to show Brian.

‘Nice,’ he said. ‘They’d really suit you.’

‘She didn’t wear them that night,’ I said. ‘Yet they would have gone perfectly with her outfit.’ Sofia Verstoek’s taunt came back to me, yet again.

Brian shrugged dismissively. ‘She probably just liked those little green and gold numbers with the pearls.’

I picked up a docket lying on the floor near an open cardboard box and read the details of the purchase. ‘She bought this gear only the day before she died,’ I said. ‘Stewart Chambray cocktail suit, $489. That’s a lot of money for a doctor’s receptionist.’ I put the docket back in the empty box.

‘What are you suggesting?’ Brian asked, puzzled. ‘That she’s a working girl?’

‘Not that,’ I said, recalling the spangled black and silver top I’d seen on Tianna Richardson’s body, under the black and silver jacket. The black and silver shoes, the beaded handbag. Black and silver. I looked again at the docket and over to the smart black and silver skirt I’d noticed lying over the back of the bedroom chair. I picked it up and checked the label—it was the bottom half of the Stewart Chambray cocktail suit.

‘I don’t know much about women’s clothing,’ I said, turning around to Brian, ‘but I’ll swear this is the skirt that goes with the jacket she was wearing at the Blackspot. Same fabric. This is the skirt from that suit.’

‘But she was wearing a long winter skirt,’ said Brian.

‘That’s right.’ I recalled the charcoal woollen skirt bunched up mid-thigh.

‘It’s hot work dancing at a nightclub’s disco,’ said Brian. ‘So who’d wear a long woollen skirt like the one she had on when she could’ve worn this?’

‘Usually I don’t ask questions about what women wear,’ I said, remembering how my daughter and her mother had dressed on occasions. ‘Yet I can’t stop wondering why the hell she didn’t wear the matching skirt and the matching earrings she’d just bought. Everything else she had on her was black or silver. And judging from this room, she seemed to be into matching colour schemes.’

‘You’re an artist,’ Brian said, frowning. ‘Isn’t there something called contrast?’

I nodded, considering this.

‘Well, she wanted some of that,’ Brian added.

‘But remember what Sofia Verstoek said. If a woman draws attention to something odd in another woman’s clothing, it’s usually just bitching. But it’s a different sort of comment at a crime scene.’

‘Yeah, but the Kiwi Krait is in a league of her own, she’s so poisonous,’ said Brian. ‘But even if what she decided to wear
is
weird, what the hell does it mean?’

I tried to imagine Tianna Richardson, alive and well, dressing for what would turn out to be the last night of her life. I saw her taking the new clothes out of their boxes, angry and hurt by her young lover’s rejection
,
pulling them on, enjoying their newness like women do.
Damn you,
she might have been thinking
. I’m going out dancing by myself. I’m an attractive woman even if you don’t think so. I’m going to wear my cute new outfit and damn you.
Then I tried to imagine her rejecting the sexy matching skirt and digging out a heavy dark woollen one that came down almost to her ankles. Then doing the same with the black and silver earrings, choosing the antique interlinked gold filigree hearts with the peridots and pearls instead.

I held the docket out to Brian, indicating the skirt hanging over the chair. ‘So why didn’t she wear the skirt of her new suit, or her earrings?’

‘I don’t think we’re qualified to even think about those questions,’ said Brian. ‘I wouldn’t dare question anything about women’s fashions.’

‘The palynologist did. She questioned and she’s a woman,’ I said.

Brian was deep in thought. ‘Tianna decides to go out dancing by herself,’ he said. ‘She puts on her smart new gladrags—’

‘—not all of her new suit,’ I corrected. ‘Her new shoes and
half
a new suit. She doesn’t wear the skirt of her brand new outfit. Or the earrings that match.’

‘Maybe the skirt was too small, so she’s grabbed something else that fitted better,’ said Brian, coming over to check out the earrings more closely. ‘My girlfriend put three different outfits on the other night before we went out and asked me which one looked best. I told her they all looked great, so she decided not to wear any of them. Then she got really pissed off with me.’

I knew what he meant. I went to the painted wardrobe and opened it, leafing through the hanging clothes. ‘There are two black skirts here and even I can see that either of these would be a better match than the woollen one she wore,’ I said, pulling them out and swishing them around near the unworn skirt, then holding the waistbands against each other. ‘They’re all the same size. Why would she pay almost five hundred bucks for a skirt that she couldn’t fit into?’

‘My girlfriend does it all the time,’ said Brian. ‘She calls it motivation.’

‘And at the nightclub, decked out in half a suit and a woollen skirt, she meets a stranger—’

‘Or someone she knows,’ interrupted Brian.

‘Right,’ I said, thinking of Damien Henshaw. ‘And he goes outside with her, drops her on her head. At speed.’

‘And after he’s dropped her, he gets down and bites her with his deformed jaws.’ Brian’s eyebrows hit maximum altitude. ‘Mate,’ he said dryly, ‘there’s something we’re missing.’

We continued our search, going through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, but didn’t find anything that could throw any light on either the mystery of the spurned new skirt or the unknown fair man.

Under the lining of the underwear drawer—a favourite place for women to hide their love letters and other secret things, as I’d discovered over the years—I dug out an envelope of polaroids. Tianna Richardson keeping company with the fair mystery man again, this time naked and doing all sorts of fun and interesting things.

‘Athletic, isn’t she. I wish my girlfriend would do that,’ said Brian, bagging them while I blew my nose. My head cold seemed to be getting worse.

‘We definitely need to find this fellow. I’ve seen more of him than I need to.’

‘Already we’ve got four potential suspects,’ I said. ‘Damien Henshaw; her husband, Earl; her son, Jason. And the mystery man in the photographs. You’ll be busy checking all of them out.’

It wasn’t long before we found some things that were not Tianna Richardson’s—a pair of men’s underpants and overalls.

‘These must belong to Earl,’ said Brian.

‘Or Damien. Or the other one,’ I said. ‘Or someone else we don’t even know about.’

We went over the living room again, opening drawers, looking through the photo albums.

‘I spent a while with the staff at the Blackspot,’ Brian said as we flipped through the photographs. ‘We’ve only got one person who remembers Tianna Richardson. And she couldn’t tell us much. The doorman says he doesn’t recall what time she arrived, but said she could easily have just walked into the place without him noticing. It was one of their busiest nights and he had a couple of fights to deal with.’

‘What’s the name of the person who remembers seeing her?’ I asked.

Brian pulled out his notebook and scrolled pages until he came to it. ‘Here she is,’ he said. ‘Danby. Michelle Danby.’

I took the details, deciding I’d have a quiet chat with this witness. Sometimes people remembered things after an interview and never got round to contacting the police again.

I checked outside in case there was a hungry, thirsty animal languishing forgotten on a chain—a situation I’d come across more than once at a murder victim’s house. On the way back inside, I noticed a pair of work boots standing near the back door. I could see at once that, although they were far from new, they’d been recently cleaned. Carefully, I picked one of them up with my gloved fingers, turning it upside down. These could be the work boots young Damien was so keen to recover.

‘We need to check these against that partial bootprint you fixed in the nightclub car park,’ I said to Brian as he joined me outside.

Brian turned the boots over. ‘Sure looks similar,’ he said before bagging them.

Similar wasn’t good enough. We would need an exact match and fit. I watched Brian label and log the boots before he was interrupted by a phone call. It sounded as if there’d been a delay with the food, but Debbie was now on her way.

I looked around the neat backyard; it was surrounded by a fence with double gates opening onto a quiet lane. I hauled myself up and looked over, seeing only other fences and garages and garbage bins that hadn’t been collected. I dropped down again. On the clothes line, jeans, shirts and pretty underwear waved in the light breeze, a load of washing that would never be brought in by its owner. I stood staring at Tianna’s clothing for a few moments.

Brian’s intermittent grunts into the phone were punctuated by the shrieks of a plover. If CrimTrak didn’t have tabs on the semen depositor, this could turn out to be a very complex job, I thought, especially now we’d turned up a third man. I glanced over the fence and saw the plover running with its wings outstretched towards something that had either disturbed it or stepped too close to its eggs or young.

Just as I was glancing at my watch, Brian hung up. ‘Thank God, Deb’ll be here in sec with pizza. Want some?’ he asked.

‘I keep thinking of that damned skirt,’ I said. ‘It reminds me of her bedroom.’

‘How’s that?’ asked Brian, following me back for a last look at Tianna Richardson’s bedroom. I focues on the decor, ignoring the distraction of the boxes and shopping bags spread around.

‘Everything matches in here, except that dark brown bedspread,’ I said.

A few moments later, we were done. I walked out with Brian and waited as he locked the door.

He was on his way down the steps when he turned. ‘Do people still have cocktails?’ he asked.

‘I’d be the last person to ask about that,’ I said as we parted.

I was still thinking about Tianna when I walked into the bar of the Cat and Castle and looked for a quiet corner where I could wait for Kevin Waites to arrive.

The smell of beer, disinfectant, stale cigarettes and humanity made me think of Starro, my informant of many years, now a guest of Her Majesty at the Long Bay Hilton
.
All thoughts of Starro stopped when I noticed the fake Jacobean carving on the first banquette along the wall and recognised it as the background to one of the photographs of Tianna and the unknown man. I got a buzz of adrenaline as a piece of information, no matter how inconsequential, fell into place.

I ordered a lemon, lime and bitters from the barman and, as he returned with my chaste drink, flashed my ID at him, making sure I did it too fast for him to notice that I wasn’t a police officer any more.

‘Tell me,’ I said, as he put my drink in front of me, ‘know of a woman called Tianna Richardson? She used to drink here.’

He frowned.

‘The woman whose body was found outside the Blackspot Nightclub,’ I prompted. ‘Maybe you haven’t heard? I’m involved with that investigation.’

‘Oh, yeah. That one. She was often in here. Different guy every time,’ he said, his face taking on a sour, disapproving expression.

Tianna Richardson, I thought, I wish you’d stayed home. You’re making life more difficult for me.

‘The people from the Ag Station also drink here, I believe,’ I continued.

The barman’s sour expression worsened. Had I come across the only Calvinist working in a pub?

‘That lot,’ he muttered. ‘They’re dickheads.’

‘Dickheads?’

‘I could tell you a thing or two.’

‘I’m sure you could,’ I said.

‘Those people from the Ag Station, they’re worse than Tianna Richardson ever was.’

‘Tell me more,’ I said, interested.

‘I hear things from over here,’ he said. ‘I see things going on.’

‘Like what?’ This vagueness wasn’t promising; maybe he was just being self-important. I looked around, keeping an eye out for Kevin Waites.

The barman leaned closer, conspiratorial. ‘You’ve heard of
swinging
?’ he asked.

The old-fashioned term took me by surprise. ‘Swinging
’
belonged back with Formica table tops, red ceramic bulls and the famous print of the green-faced Chinese beauty. It hailed from days when people spoke of flower power and free love. These days, people just had sex.

‘People from the Ag Station swing?’ I asked, affecting astonishment.

‘You bet,’ he sniffed. ‘I didn’t know scientists behaved like that! They come in here for drinks and then they play up.’

In a flash, the murders of Tianna Richardson and Claire Dimitriou fused together, heightening my adrenaline buzz. This hotel was common ground for both women. It could be a coincidence or it could be very important. In any case, I knew from long experience to always take note of connections. Claire Dimitriou could have been involved in a swinging group.

‘They think they’re being real discreet but I know what’s going on,’ the barman was grizzling. ‘Different partner every week.’

‘Tell me more about that,’ I said, looking stern and disapproving.

I waited while he served a local lout who’d clearly had more than his share and was staring, bleary-eyed and belligerent, at his reflection in the mirror behind the rows of bottles of spirits.

‘They played this game,’ said the barman, returning. ‘Like a lucky dip.’ He leered. ‘Lucky
dip
all right.’

‘It’s not making much sense to me,’ I admitted.

‘Listen, mate,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand around answering your bloody questions all day.’

I put a twenty dollar note on the bar. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’

At that point, the morose lout started a topple that would have ended up with him on the floor, but at the last moment he over-corrected and fell on the other side instead. There was a lot of scraping and sliding and swearing near my feet as he got himself upright again.

‘Some bastard’s got dog shit on his shoes,’ he yelled.

I realised I’d put the wrong shoes on this morning and moved away from him.

The bartender whipped the twenty dollars into his pocket. ‘I don’t drink while serving,’ he said.

‘The lucky dip? You were going to tell me more about it,’ I said.

‘I want a head job with no ice and sex on the beach for my friend,’ came a female voice from behind me, addressing the barman.

I watched while he made up the two drinks, a pink foaming thing with a little umbrella and its twin in green with an olive. Yes, Brian, I thought, people do still have cocktails, although only very dedicated drinkers would be ordering such drinks at this hour of the day.

‘Okay,’ said the barman, leaning closer as the girl carried her drinks away. ‘This is how it goes. After everyone has a few rounds, these two envelopes come out. I couldn’t see what was in them—looked like white paper in one and coloured paper in the other. You know that coloured paper we used to cut up in school?’

I remembered the squares of brilliantly coloured flint paper—red, crimson, orange, turquoise, blue, yellow, green, black and white—that Sister Celestine and Miss Ogilvie had handed out in kindergarten and first grade for our infant craft works. I recalled those particular colours vividly. This could be very good information—if it were true. Sometimes you got things on a plate like this, without having to lift a finger. But not often.

‘So how did the lucky dip work?’ I asked.

‘How would I know?’ said the barman. ‘I can only tell you what I saw.’

The drunk was insisting on another beer but the barman wasn’t playing. ‘Go home, Tiger. It’s the law. I’m not permitted to serve you any more.’

‘So what did you see?’ I persisted.

Ignoring some slurred invective from the lout, the barman hunched over. ‘They’d take a white card out of the first envelope and then pass it on to the next person. When that envelope had gone round the group, they’d do the same with the second envelope.’

‘The one with the coloured paper?’ I asked. ‘And?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s all I can tell you. That was it. I don’t know how it worked.’

I deeply regretted losing my twenty bucks.

‘That was their favourite spot,’ he said, pointing to the banquette across from the bar. ‘They always sat there. One of the women asked
me
one night if I wanted to join in. She’d been checking me out all night. Moll,’ he growled.

I was intrigued by the game and wondered what the different piece of paper meant. If Tianna were a player with this group, it was possible she had met her killer as part of the lucky dip game. She may not have picked up a stranger that night at the Blackspot. She could have known him from here.

‘When does the group usually come in?’ I asked.

The barman glanced at his watch. ‘Towards the end of the week. Sometimes as early as Wednesday.’

I wondered if they’d come in this week or would lie low? I pulled out my card and circled my mobile number. ‘If they come in, no matter what time it is, I want to know. I’ll make it worth your while,’ I added.

I didn’t think I’d be hearing from him in the next little while. The group would surely be in shock and, conceivably, even in hiding after what had happened to one or possibly two of their number.

I was leaving a message on Brian’s mobile, informing him that the unknown man in the photograph with Tianna Richardson drank here, when the double doors from the street flung open. I felt sure the approaching man in a tight-fitting, buttoned jacket was Kevin Waites. After years of stakeouts and clandestine meetings, I’d identified something like a current that seemed to run between the investigator and the target.

Waites breasted the bar a little distance from me, looking around, checking out the people standing drinking and those clustered in the alcoves around the room. I wondered why he didn’t undo a few buttons on his too-tight jacket. He reminded me of Mo, from the long ago days of my childhood and black and white television and the Three Stooges.

I picked up my drink and went over to him. ‘Kevin?’ I asked, putting out my hand. ‘Jack McCain.’

We shook and I asked him what sort of drink he wanted.

‘I’ll have a double Scotch,’ he said.

Interesting choice, I thought as I bought it for him, along with another fizzy drink for myself, then together we made our way to a quieter spot, sliding into the seats, resting our drinks on the oak veneer surface.

‘I appreciate you taking the time to meet me,’ I said and explained where I fitted in the investigation. When I mentioned a couple of other local investigations I’d been involved with, he visibly relaxed.

‘I’m not the police,’ I explained. ‘And you’ll need to do a statement for them.’

He nodded, throwing back some Scotch.

‘Anything you can tell me about that argument you overheard on Monday afternoon?’ I asked. ‘Between Dr Dimitriou and Peter Yu.’

‘Dr Dimitriou was a real nice lady. I used to clean her lab most days—the areas she’d let me touch anyway. Often she’d still be there, late, and say hello. She wasn’t up herself like some of those people. She’d ask me how I was. Have a chat.’ He paused, rattling the ice in the Scotch.

‘Tell me everything you can recall about the last time you saw—or heard—Claire Dimitriou.’

Kevin took a pull on his drink and looked around. ‘Have you got a cigarette on you?’

‘Sorry. Can’t help you. I don’t smoke these days,’ I said.

I waited while he went back to the counter and made his purchase, then we took our drinks outside to the desolate beer garden, a narrow strip of paving between two wings of the hotel, so he could smoke. Several miserable pot plants stood around, their soil poisoned by the many cigarette stubs half buried in them.

Kevin Waites stared at the wall as he began to speak. ‘I was outside Dr Dimitriou’s office. I was having a bit of trouble getting the dead fluoro tube out of its housing and it broke,’ he said, lighting up and inhaling deeply.

‘Where exactly?’ I asked.

‘Her office is in the administration wing of the Ag building. It runs off to the right of the main entrance some distance away from the old laboratory.’

The direction Dallas Baxter had been hurrying from, I recalled, when he’d rushed over to meet me yesterday.

‘I put my stepladder against the wall and started cleaning up the mess,’ Waites continued. ‘That Asian fellow—’

‘Dr Peter Yu?’

Waites nodded, sucking on the cigarette, his other hand fiddling with the cellophane on the packet. ‘He came running down the hall from the laboratory wing. Just about knocked me over—I don’t think he even saw me. He went straight into her office and they started talking. I wasn’t especially listening. No point, really. I never understand a bloody word they say. Not when they’re talking shop. And he’s got a bit of an accent.’

‘Go on.’

‘Their voices just got louder and louder,’ he said, wiping his fingers free of the condensation from the glass, using his handkerchief. ‘See, it was the tone of their voices that made me take notice.’ He paused. ‘Distressed. Dr Dimitriou was really upset. That’s what made me sort of stop and—I didn’t mean to be deliberately listening in to a private conversation, you know. But I couldn’t help it. They were so loud.’

He paused and I nodded encouragingly, willing him to continue. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he said finally. ‘Dr Dimitriou was crying. She kept saying “She saw, she saw! She saw sixteen blue!”’

I was suddenly riveted, thinking of what the barman had told me about coloured paper. ‘You’re sure she said “sixteen blue”?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure, all right. There might have been another word after that, but I’m positive that’s what I heard. I keep hearing her voice. She’s dead and I still keep hearing her voice.’

I touched him briefly on the arm. ‘Please continue.’

‘She was always kind to me. Some of the scientists don’t even see me. I’m just the cleaner, invisible. Not important like them. But Dr Dimitriou was different. She used to answer my questions, tell me about her work. And she understood that I’d sometimes get sad when one of the animals died.’ He glanced at me to take in my reaction. ‘You probably think that’s stupid—that a grown man could care when a lab sheep dies.’

‘I don’t think it’s stupid at all,’ I said.

‘I like all the animals, even the sheep. They all have little stalls with their name on and whatever disease they have. You get to like them. They don’t know it, but they’re doing something very important for their brothers and sisters, they lay down their lives for the betterment of their friends.’

‘I suppose they do,’ I said. ‘Somewhere there’s a monument dedicated to all the experimental animals.’

‘Is there?’ he said, pleased. ‘They become like friends. Especially when you’re lonely. Dr Dimitriou used to say, “Don’t worry, Kevin. None of my rabbits are going to die. My work is to stop them breeding, not breathing.”’

I saw his expression soften further and I noted down Claire’s words thinking, yes, Dr Dimitriou did sound like a kind woman. Her research didn’t involve lethal experimentation.

‘Anything else you want to tell me?’ I asked.

‘That’s it really. That’s how it went. Him saying “We can’t! You mustn’t!” And her saying “Don’t you see now we have to!” She kept saying that over and over.
“
Peter, we have to!” And he kept begging her not to—“No, no, we can’t! We mustn’t!”’

I pulled out my notebook and wrote the words down, underlining ‘sixteen blue’ and adding three dots after the last word.

Kevin Waites jerked his cigarette at it. ‘You’re not recording what I’m saying, are you?’

‘It’s just for my own use,’ I explained. ‘Did you hear anything else?’

He paused to knock off the last of his drink. ‘They might have gone on a bit longer. But it was all the same stuff. Arguing. Her crying. I’m still upset about it. Maybe if I’d done something, she’d be alive now.’

‘You weren’t to know,’ I reassured him and we sat in silence awhile.

‘I wish I hadn’t been there,’ he finally said.

Thank God you were, I thought, because this was the only information we’d had so far about the scientist’s state of mind and that of her colleague shortly before her death.