Shooting Star (8 page)

‘Sit down,’ I said and I went over to look at the prints, precise drawings of small and elegant buildings, some with domes and pillars and steps, one a tapering tower with a curiously fluted roof. For a time in my early adolescence, I’d had dreams about being an architect, taken books out of the library, tried to copy the illustrations I liked. ‘Don’t be so pathetic, Frank,’ my mother said one day. ‘Only babies copy things.’ I didn’t do any more copying, tore up my drawings, didn’t take out any more books on buildings.

Whitton sat on the edge of a sofa, pale eyes uneasy, blinking rapidly. ‘So what can I…’

‘What can you?’ I said. ‘What can you?’ I moved to look at the view from the window. A small vegetable garden, then a wall. There were brick paths between the dormant beds, dark soil mounded like plump graves and, against the wall, a low lean-to glasshouse.

‘What I told you on Thursday,’ Whitton said, ‘that’s pretty much it.’

I didn’t look at him. Who had lived in this cottage, worked in the kitchen garden? The Carsons had bought up the whole block, all their neighbours and their neighbours’ neighbours, consolidated the properties, taken down the fences, encircled the whole with a barrier, only two entries, gates and cameras. That the Carson family might live here free from fear, immune to the envy and resentment of those beyond the walls. But only here. They still had to leave the sanctuary, go into the world, onto the streets, into the city, see the passing world through windows, pale teenagers with chemical eyes, poor people clutching plastic bags holding a gas-ripened tomato and two hundred grams of fatty mince, sad men with mortuary stubble eking out their days. Even sitting in the Merc at the lights, cool in summer, just right in winter, the Carsons had no choice but to hear the crude and throaty menace of bored-out Holdens beside them, feel the redline bass from eight speakers penetrating their German monocoque, vibrating it, violating it.

‘Pretty much it,’ he said again, voice tight.

I turned and looked at him. His face was tight too, pale, colour gone from the flesh, dying fish colour, blood gone elsewhere, to where it was most needed.

‘Fucked her,’ I said. ‘Fifteen.’

His head was pointed left, he shook it a few times, changed his mind, made a rocking movement with his body, still didn’t look at me.

‘Fucked her,’ I said.

Whitton closed his eyes. He looked much younger that way, spiky eyelashes, spears, a fence of eyelashes. Moisture appeared, a rim of liquid, tears, trembling, a sigh could break the surface tension.

He sniffed, shook his head, the heart’s pure waters broke, rolled down his face, met his lips.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Just once, just once.’

I sat down in a comfortable armchair opposite Whitton, leaned back, stared at him, waited for him.

He kept his gaze down, wiped his cheeks with the back of his right hand. ‘Carmen tell you?’

‘What kind of jobs you going for after this?’ I said.

He put his big hands between his knees, squeezed them with his thighs. ‘You don’t know her,’ he said. ‘It’s not like she’s a little girl. Had two blokes rootin her in her room at Portsea in January, the one’s about thirty, maybe more, rubbish she picked up on the beach, they ring her on her mobile, she let em in the gate at two in the morning.’

‘I don’t want to know her,’ I said. ‘I want to find her. So let’s move on from this What-I-told-you-on-Thursday-that’s-pretty-much-it shit.’

I took the tiny tape recorder out of my inside jacket pocket and put it on the coffee table.

‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave out a fucking thing.’

When he’d finished, I said, ‘Draw me a map. Show me exactly where you dropped Anne.’

Whitton was in the kitchen looking for paper when my mobile rang.

‘I’m home, got the slippers on, sitting here with a beer, in about twenty minutes we’re eating octopus. Caught today by my cousin. And where the fuck are you?’

Detective Senior Sergeant Vella. It was Saturday.

‘Is that octopus Italian style?’

‘No. This is octopus cooked in the Mongolian style. You sew it up in a goat’s bladder, full, and…’

‘Say no more. Twenty minutes, I’m there.’

Whitton came out and showed me a piece of paper, neatly drawn map. ‘Here’s the school,’ he said.

I looked, folded the paper, put it in my shirt pocket.

He took a pace backwards, exercised his thick neck. ‘Me and Anne,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘You got to understand, she’s the one…’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t have to understand. I don’t care. I’m not telling anyone. Yet. I might not, depends. Just stay close. I don’t want to have to look for you.’

Orlovsky and I walked back to our quarters in the Garden House, through what resembled a small park, gusty night, oak trees shaking, shedding leaves like big flakes of dandruff. Orlovsky said, deeply scornful, ‘You like this kind of stuff, don’t you? Army, cops, you’re cross-trained in arsehole skills.’

I breathed deeply, no smell of pollution here, only wet greenery: the rich have power over the wind. ‘Listen, wimp,’ I said, ‘your kind are the first ones to ring for a cross-trained arsehole when they hear a noise in the night.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but does he come?’

SUNDAY MORNING at 9 a.m. with a hangover is a good time to knock on people’s doors and ask them questions without having any identification. But Orlovsky, coming from the other end of the genteel Brighton block, hit the paydirt quickly. He fetched me.

‘Mrs Neill, this is my associate, Frank Calder,’ said Orlovsky,

smiling at me.

I shook her hand. She was in her seventies, at least, straight back, hair whipped into stiff peaks like egg white, two-piece tweed suit suitable for church. Anglican, probably.

‘I endured it for two weeks,’ she said. ‘Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then I adopted my late husband’s attitude. Thus far and no farther. He also believed in confronting your fears and mocking them. To the very end, I may say.’

‘What did you do?’ I said.

‘I simply marched out there and knocked on the window. His head was leaning against it. Gave him no end of a fright. The Lord knows how they can be in a confined space with noise like that. I swear the whole vehicle was moving.’

‘And?’

‘Well, he wound down the window, my dear, and the noise was even worse and I said, I shouted, this is a residential street and you are making enough noise to wake the dead. So he switched off the record player, whatever those things are, and he turned out to be a rather nice young man, rings in his ears but rather nice. Very apologetic. Took me aback. I was ready for a fight.’

I took out the photograph of Anne. ‘The girl who got into the vehicle, is this her?’

It was a recent photograph, taken by Carmen in January at the Carson house at Portsea. Anne was sitting on a low white wall, laughing, a big piece of dirty-blonde hair falling forward. I could see Whitton’s point. In a black one-piece bathing suit cut high in the legs and low in front, there was nothing of the gawky adolescent about her. No barman would have asked her for ID.

Without hesitation. ‘Yes. Pretty girl in a raincoat. A yellow raincoat, one of those plastic ones.’

A raincoat to cover her school uniform.

‘What did he look like, apart from the rings in his ear?’ I said.

‘Ears. Both of them, three or four little rings. Well, he was darkish. Mediterranean, I would say. If one’s allowed to these days.

Hair combed back.’

‘About what age, would you say?’

‘Oh, I’m hopeless at ages. They all look so young. Twenty-five perhaps.’

‘Long hair?’

She thought. ‘No, not long, not short, tidy hair, little sideburns.’

‘Moustache, beard?’

‘No. Has he done something?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Well, he was a tradesman, I’m sure of that.’

‘What makes you sure?’

‘Overalls. He was wearing those overalls they wear a tee-shirt under. Winter and summer. Don’t seem to feel the cold, tradesmen, have you noticed that?’

‘It’s their training,’ said Orlovsky.

‘Also, I could see tools and things in the back.’

‘Tools?’ I said.

‘A sort of saw thing, a power thing. And a cabinet with drawers, a metal cabinet. Against the side.’

‘Anything else?’

She paused, moved her head in a birdlike way. ‘He must like boxing.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘He had two boxing gloves tattooed on his arm, high up, just peeking out of his sleeve. With a little key under them. And two tiny boxing gloves hanging from the mirror, you know the way some people hang things in their cars? Quite dangerous, I think. Distracting.’

I asked more questions but the well was dry. We said our thanks.

In his car, Orlovsky said, ‘Anne the poor little rich girl and Craig the crafty tradesman. Probably rooting while the brother or the cousin makes the phone calls.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. It’s too stupid. Carmen knows his name, Anne knows Whitton’s seen her getting out of a yellow fucktruck. Anyway, the bloke’s got a trade.’

‘There’s that,’ said Orlovsky, starting the car. ‘Something to fall back on.’

‘Boxing gloves.’

‘I like those fat pink dice.’

‘On his arm. Any decent coffee around here?’

‘What do you think these Brighton moneypuppies do on a Sunday morning? Sit in the park with a stubby?’

He was right. The sleek inhabitants of the bayside suburb were in the shopping area eyeing one another, drinking coffee, having breakfast, reading the
Sunday Age
through dark glasses, talking on their mobiles. We found a table on the pavement outside a place called Zacco, ordered coffee.

‘The verb to earn,’ said Orlovsky, looking around. ‘The very concept of earning.’

‘What?’ Since he didn’t bother with preambles, it was often hard to work out what Orlovsky was talking about.

‘Nothing that someone whose entirely non-productive life has been paid for out of the public purse would grasp.’

‘Earning? I grasp the concept with ease. They want it, you do it, they pay you, you’ve earned it.’

He closed his eyes and shook his head in a pitying and dismissive way. ‘Stick to killing people, Frank, that’s what you’re good at.’

A young woman wearing a long white apron such as might be worn on the Left Bank in Paris put our coffees on the table.

Orlovsky put twenty grains of sugar into his short black, stirred it with the stem of his spoon. ‘You don’t seem to be considering the possibility that this is the second grab by the same people,’ he said. ‘Can I be privy to your thoughts, master?’

I took a sip, burnt my tongue. ‘No point in considering it,’ I said. ‘Got any idea what the cops would’ve thrown at the Alice kidnapping? They’d have turned over every last person and dog with a possible grudge against the family. Down to the sacked Carson office boys and the miffed Carson hairdressers. That leaves people just doing it for the money. I’m taking the eccentric view that people like that don’t wait seven years and then have another go at the same family. They move on. World’s full of rich families.’

Orlovsky thought about this for a while, then he nodded in an unconvinced way and said in a musing tone, ‘A tradesman called Craig. How many would there be? Thousands, probably the name of choice for tradesmen.’

‘A boxer called Craig,’ I said. ‘How do you find a boxer called Craig?’

We drank coffee. Orlovsky took on his meditative look, gaze upwards, hands in his lap. There was a quality about the tranquil Orlovsky that made people look away lest he come out of it and catch them looking at him.

I looked away, studied our fellow members of sidewalk society. A table within earshot were behaving as if being filmed, assuming poses, bursting into fake laughter, talking with hands, touching hair and skin. A plump man in an advertising agency’s idea of yachting wear was in charge, conducting the ensemble.

A boxer called Craig. There would be a boxing association, a federation, some body that registered boxers. He might not be registered now. About twenty-five, Mrs Neill thought. Get all the Craigs for the past ten years. Would our Craig live on this side of the city? How far would a tradesman drive for a quickie in the back of his van? In the case of Anne Carson, going by the photograph, to the ends of the earth, probably.

‘Heraldic,’ Orlovsky said, still looking upward.

I paid no attention, had the last sip of black, the last tablespoon. ‘Give me that little telephone of yours,’ said Orlovsky. ‘And a pen.’

I gave them to him.

He pulled out a paper napkin from the dispenser, laid it flat, punched numbers. ‘Melbourne,’ he said, ‘Boxer, that’s B-O-X-E-R, business, yes. Boxer something. I don’t have an address.’

He waited. I waited.

I shook my head.

‘That would be it,’ he said. ‘Dandenong. Right.’ He listened, wrote numbers on the napkin, shut down the mobile, closed the flap, gave it back to me. ‘You see gloves, you think boxer, pugilist. A literal mind, best suited to mundane tasks like killing people.’