Surrender (13 page)

A premonition fingered my spine. Chloe glanced over her shoulder then leaned towards me, lowering her voice to a whisper.

‘It was the other way round. Niki didn’t work for Snow: Snow worked for Niki.’ She sounded spiteful, but I couldn’t tell if that was directed at me, at Snow, my dead sister, or just anybody in her line of fire.

I kept my voice steady. ‘How I heard it, Snow ran the scam. He arranged for Niki to have weird-shit sex with guys and then he blackmailed them. He paid Niki in drugs.’

‘Wro-ong,’ Chloe said, and added a game-show loser’s buzzer sound to emphasise her point. She was animated suddenly, confident and chirpy, her little foot jiggling and her talons flashing. ‘It was Niki’s show all along. Her idea, her scam.
And
she made a shit-load of money out of it.’

‘Snow worked for Niki?’ I said, trying it out loud. It didn’t sound nearly as stupid as I wanted it to.

‘Yup,’ Chloe agreed. ‘He called himself her enforcer.’

It was the clincher. I’d got it all wrong. Again.

‘She never asked me to work for her,’ Chloe added. I detected an edge of disappointment in her voice. She glanced over her shoulder again. The sassiness gone, she seemed genuinely nervous of being overheard. ‘But I know she got Vex to. Work for her, I mean. Vex didn’t want to, but she must have owed Niki or something, I think, and Niki must’ve got her to work off the debt.’

Chloe cupped both breasts and did a lift and drop action. I wasn’t sure what this was supposed to accomplish, but it seemed to appease her sharp-eyed assessment of them. She flashed me a brilliant smile.

‘Promise you won’t tell Vex I told you, or she’ll totally kill me.’

I
opened the front door to Wolf excitedly tap-dancing on the floorboards. Although I didn’t show it in quite the same way, I was just as happy to see him. It had been one hell of a long day. I felt like I’d never completely thawed out from the cold of the Rimutaka forest, but maybe it was something about the atmosphere in Pussy Galore that had given me the shivers. Whatever. It felt good to be home.

Wolf’s food bowl was empty, and though his expression swore black and blue that he hadn’t eaten a single thing all day, a note from Damian confirmed that he’d been walked, fed and smooched. I suspect the smooching is part of a communion with nature Damian enjoys with herb and hound. I wouldn’t be surprised if he spent a good part of the walk sitting somewhere on Mt Victoria stroking Wolf’s ears and blowing dope smoke rings for him. Not that Wolf would object, though as an ex-police dog he might suffer some guilt. Maybe he just doesn’t inhale.

It was late. There was no real food in the fridge, so I defaulted to my favourite fast-food supper — a bowl of cornflakes washed down
with a glass of Pinot. Actually, a glass of anything alcoholic would have been fine, but I happened to have a bottle of the good stuff, and the fine cuisine à la cornflakes deserved top shelf.

I retrieved the John Doe boots from my office, and placed them on a sheet of newspaper on the table. They looked cartoon-like, curled up at the toes and gaping. I poured a second glass of wine, then pulled the anglepoise lamp around for more light. The manufacturer’s name had already enabled me to age the boot to somewhere between thirty-five and forty years. The right boot, found on the body, was in worse shape than the one from the long-drop. The decomposing flesh had rotted away the cushioning leather at the Achilles area. In fact, almost the entire inside of the right boot was rotted and stained a disturbing maroon colour.

I took another spoonful of cornflakes and sip of Pinot before examining the left boot. Its much better condition made me suspect it had been in the dunny for a number of years. Hopefully the finder of the boot would get in touch and I’d be able to confirm that.

As I reached again for the wine glass, my wrist hissed on the halogen bulb — shit! I wrenched my hand back, knocking the lamp head. Lit from this new angle, faint lettering appeared on the inside where the heel nestles. Sucking my wrist, I shifted the lamp further. It
was
writing. Faint. Very faint. But I was sure now. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t resist a little victory dance. Wolf wasn’t impressed but I didn’t care.

For the next hour I angled the hell out of that poise without much success. I could decipher some of the letters, but not enough to make out a name that made sense. Then, despite or because of the third glass of Pinot, I had a brainwave.

Anyone who’s doctored a digital photo of themselves to remove evidence of cellulite or scars or an annoying ever-present frown, knows what a brilliant program Photoshop is. It worked a treat.
I took a few photos, downloaded and enlarged them. The handwritten lettering in the boot was the capital letter B followed by the name Crossen. There was no Crossen in the white pages, but there was a Sarah Crossen-Smith.

I blew on my burnt wrist and counted ten rings before a woman answered. She sounded grumpy, like she’d just woken up.

‘Hi, my name’s Diane Rowe and I work for the police,’ I said, and heard her sharp intake of breath. ‘It’s okay. Nothing’s happened. This is just a routine enquiry.’

‘If it’s nothing then why the hell are you ringing me at two in the morning?’ she shot back. Shit, I’d completely lost track of the time.

‘Your surname is Crossen-Smith?’ I asked. She didn’t answer but I could hear her breathing. ‘I’m trying to contact relatives of a Mr B. Crossen.’ Still just the breathing, but I forged on. ‘I’m sorry to ring so late, but if you could assist us, we’d be very grateful.’ I tried to make it sound like the entire police force would be whooping it up.

‘What about him?’ She was awake now.

‘I’d rather not talk about it over the phone. Can I come and talk to you tomorrow?’

‘Sure. Why not.’ She didn’t sound enthusiastic.

I crossed my fingers and asked my question again. ‘So you
are
related to a Mr B. Crossen?’

There was a long pause before she finally answered.

‘Yeah, you could say that.’

Trying to keep the excitement out of my voice, I made arrangements to meet the next day. Well actually, it wouldn’t be the
next
day — it would be later
today
, as she coolly pointed out. I could take her sarcasm because I was already fantasising about how I’d deliver the solved missing persons file onto McFay’s desk, i.e. with a flourish. Definitely a flourish.

I’d need to find out why Sarah hadn’t notified the cops when our Mr B. Crossen went missing, but that was small print. Tonight, I told myself, I could sleep the deep, satisfied sleep of someone about to close a case. Partly that was an instruction to myself. I was warding off nightmares. That suffocating black cave had given me the willies, and I was hoping it wouldn’t invade my dreams with claustrophobia.

But it wasn’t like that at all. I dreamt I was standing on a wide open plain with a big, empty blue sky above me. And then I realised it wasn’t the countryside at all. I was in the middle of a huge, manicured golf course that went on and on forever. It was an exaggerated version of the place where Niki’s body had been found, but in my dream it was endless and very, very empty. I was searching, hunting for some sign of her, but there was nothing. She was so gone, so utterly not there, it was as if she’d never existed.

It was the worst nightmare I’d ever had.

W
ide-eyed, tit-balanced Chloe had reluctantly agreed to give Vex a note from me, but she’d clapped her hands over her ears when I began to explain what the message said. Giving Vex the note was ‘the totally last thing’ Chloe was going to do for me, ‘
ev-er
’. I hoped the hundred dollars I gave her as payment meant one less blow job Chloe had to give. In reality, I’d probably just scored her a line.

I didn’t really expect Vex to turn up, but just in case, I was at the Sandwich Bar early. I’d ordered my second coffee by the time the lowing lunch crowd stampeded in. I’d written in the note to Vex that I’d be wearing an orange jacket and my habitual scowl. I thought I’d leave it to her to approach me. I didn’t want to scare her by letting on that I knew what she looked like. I wasn’t sure I’d recognise any of the other girls I’d seen at the club, but the fact that Vex had clothes on when she was dancing made it easier somehow.

Vex’s dance routine had disturbed me in ways I’d still not got a handle on. She’d seemed so young and innocent with that swinging ponytail and mesmerised dance routine aimed at her own
reflection, yet she must have been aware of the effect she had on the men watching her. So? What was my problem with that? I still couldn’t figure out what was niggling at me. Most likely it was because she reminded me of Niki. If it was true that Vex worked for Niki, then she was the closest link to my sister I’d found so far, and I needed to play this meeting very carefully.

Suddenly Vex was at my table, clutching a bottle of Diet Coke and holding out a small, cool hand for me to squeeze.

‘Diane? Hi. I’m Veronica.’

‘Veronica,’ I echoed as the thin, cool fingers slid from mine.

She perched on the edge of the chair and unwrapped herself from a lengthy sky-blue silk scarf. ‘It’s a terrible name, isn’t it? Sounds like something out of a 1950s comic. I don’t know what my mum was thinking. Sometimes I think I should change my name to Vex, full stop.’

I was about to speak but didn’t get the chance.

‘I don’t mean Vex Fullstop,’ she giggled and took a sip of her Coke. ‘But anyway, I don’t mind if you call me Vex.’

‘Okay,’ I said. We hadn’t made eye contact yet.

‘Oh gosh, listen to me,’ she said, as if I had any choice. ‘I’m talking non-stop because I’m nervous.’

She took a deep breath, and then for the first time since she’d arrived she looked directly at me. Grey eyes, the whites startling in their healthiness. No mascara. No make-up at all that I could see. With a sand-sprinkling of freckles across her nose, she had the complete girl-next-door look. Although, actually, none of the girls I’d lived next door to were very nice. One stole my trike when I was four, and another stole my boyfriend when I was fourteen. That might explain why I’d never understood girls next door getting such a good rep.

From close up, in midday light, no make-up, and hair pulled
back sharply from her face, Vex should have looked a lot less pretty than she did under the flattering club lights. If anything, she looked younger and, well, sweeter than before. She swallowed hard, and when she did speak her voice was strained.

‘You look so totally like Niki.’ She dropped her eyes to the Coke but not before I saw them flood.

I felt my throat thicken in empathetic response. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We used to get that a lot when we were young.’ There was silence while we both fought to hold back tears. ‘I think we both secretly liked it but pretended to each other that we didn’t.’ I realised suddenly how much I missed having someone look like me. With no mother, no children, no sister, there wasn’t a single person in the world who resembled me. A feeling of loneliness engulfed me, surprising me with its intensity. Sensing this, or maybe still thinking of Niki, Vex touched her cool fingers to my wrist, and then quickly withdrew them and picked up the bottle of Coke.

We were distracted for a minute by a woman asking if she could take the spare chair from our table, looking from one to the other for approval. Thankful for the break in the spell, we nodded enthusiastically and ‘yessed’ and ‘of coursed’. When she finally left, I took a deep breath and started.

‘Well, thanks for coming.’ I watched Vex attack the Coke bubbles with her straws. ‘I really do appreciate it.’

She prodded the bubbles some more. ‘When I first saw you through the window I thought, no way can I go in there and talk to her. I mean, I thought it would just be too weird, if you know what I mean.’

I nodded and knocked back the dregs of my coffee. Cold. Bitter.

‘So I walked up and down the street for a while trying to work up the courage, and then I thought …’ She leaned her elbows on the table and dropped her voice almost to a whisper. ‘I thought that
talking to you would be like the closest I’d ever get to talking to Niki again.’ She leaned back in her chair and fixed those grey eyes on me. ‘And I thought that would be so cool.’ The whites of her eyes were slightly bloodshot from the tears. ‘So, ta-dah!’ she said, like a magician’s assistant whipping back a curtain. ‘Here I am.’

Indeed she was.

I started with basic questions about the blackmailing scam — straight forward stuff that I already knew the answers to. Vex was nervous and watchful at first, glancing around furtively at the lunchers, but eventually she relaxed. With that same innocence and candour I’d seen in her dance routine, she told me about her role in the scam. She had agreed to do some jobs for Niki, and though she was a bit scared at first, my little sister had apparently been ‘such a good boss’ and ‘really fair about the money side of things’, offering Vex not just a fee for ‘the job itself’, by which I assumed she meant the sex, but a share of ‘the big money’ when the guy being blackmailed paid up.

The trick for me was to keep my tone as conversational as hers as I probed for the details I wanted, while avoiding those I didn’t. When the first wave of lunchers were scraping back their chairs and stretching arms into coat sleeves, I thought it was time I started on some of the hard questions.

I asked Vex what happened if the guy being blackmailed refused to pay up. She glanced defensively at a group of women at the table close by as if they had asked the question, but turned back to answer me.

‘They nearly always did. Occasionally one of them would come over all macho and say he didn’t care if we went public and all, but that hardly ever happened. The truth is, they all care about people knowing that kind of stuff about them.’

She glanced again at the women behind her then tilted her
head, captured her bronze ponytail, and glided the hair between thumb and finger before grabbing the top again. She repeated the movement several times. The petting routine seemed to calm her. I kept my voice quiet and conversational, like I was asking about a recipe. ‘
But what if I didn’t put the baking powder in …?
’

‘But what if they
did
refuse to pay up?’

‘Well, then Niki would send Snow round to the guy’s house. He would kind of remind the guy what he had to lose if the neighbours found out he liked to have sex with someone dressed as, you know, whatever.’ She draped the ponytail over her shoulder and stroked it like a sleeping kitten. ‘But Snow was a jerk.’ With a flick of her fingers she threw the kitten over her shoulder. ‘Niki was really fair and gave him, like, a cut of the pay-up as well as his fee and everything, but I think he was getting paid both ways.’

‘You mean Snow kept some of the blackmail money for himself? Money that Niki didn’t know about?’

Vex captured the kitten by the neck and ran it rhythmically through her palm again.

‘Niki knew about it. I told her. Snow thought he was so shit-hot, ripping Niki off, but he wasn’t.’

‘You’ll have to explain to me how the scam actually worked,’ I said, manoeuvring my hands under my butt. It was the only way I could stop myself slapping that kitten out of hers. ‘Financially, I mean. Who got what money?’

Thankfully, Vex used her fingers to count off the details, laying them out for me like I was really slow.

‘Well,
for example
,’ she said, pushing back her index finger, ‘Niki would do her thing with the guy who would pay her, like, say, two hundred, two-fifty, whatever.’ The middle finger was pressed back. ‘Then she’d pay Snow, like a thousand to make the guy pay up. They call that “shaking down”,’ she added helpfully.

‘Got it. Thanks. And how much were the guys “shaken down” for?’ I tried not to sound prim.

‘Well, let’s see … um, this one guy,
allegedly
…’ She waited for my acknowledgement that this was confidential. I thought better of patting the side of my nose in the time-honoured gesture. She was the wrong generation, and would probably think I was asking her to score me a line. A nod seemed to do the trick, and she picked up where she’d left off.

‘Well, this guy, he had heaps of money, so he was supposed to pay up, like, ten thousand dollars. So that was all cool. Snow showed him the photos from the vid he’d taken, said he was going to send them to the guy’s wife and his daughter and his boss
etcetera
and the guy paid up the ten thousand
in cash
.’

I searched for an ambiguous response. ‘Wow,’ I managed.

‘Totally. But then scumbag Snow told Niki he’d only been able to shake this guy down for like, maybe, eight thousand, and Snow kept the rest for himself.’

This was new. ‘Snow told you this?’

‘Yeah! Can you believe that? Like he thought I’d keep his stupid little rip-off secret to myself. The jerk.’

I watched her anger spark, then dissipate just as quickly. She went back to sipping her Coke and twirling her hair round her finger. She had the faraway, blank look a cat gets when it pads a cushion. There was a lot about Vex that made me think of cats — the sudden spats of anger, the expressive but unreadable, wide, grey eyes. I was sure she was capable of a convincing purr as she curled around on her hapless clients’ laps, too. My thoughts about cats had taken my attention off Vex who’d finished her Coke and was looping the long scarf around her neck, preparing to leave.

‘So let me get this straight.’ I leaned forward into her eye-line. ‘You told Niki that Snow was ripping her off.’

She stared at me with those big, healthy, grey eyes. ‘Sure. I mean Niki was a really cool boss, so, like, when it was me who did the job, the sex and all, Niki paid me the two hundred or whatever,
plus
twenty per cent of whatever the guy eventually paid up.’ She blinked rapidly. ‘Which is another reason Snow was totally dumb to tell me he wasn’t giving Niki all the money, because that meant he was ripping me off too!’

From her startled expression and the way she yanked her scarf in a final loop around her neck, I suspected that this had only just occurred to her.

‘And,’ she added, pausing as if to get it sorted in her mind, ‘she paid Snow his thousand dollars, just for him doing, like
nothing
.’ She appeared to mull this over. ‘All Snow had to do was show the guy the photos, and say he was going to send them to other people. Like how difficult is
that
?’

I might have argued the point with her, but hell, I wasn’t Snow’s agent. Someone else could fill her in on the finer and not so fine challenges of his job.

‘What did Niki say when you told her what Snow was up to?’

‘I remember exactly what Niki said: “I know he’s ripping me off. I’ve factored that in”.’ Vex smiled proudly as if the words were her own. ‘“Factored it in”,’ she repeated, shaking her head. ‘She was a really cool businesswoman, you know. Smart as. She could have done anything.’ Vex reached for her coat and laid it across her lap before giving me her feline stare. ‘She was going to go into business with you, wasn’t she? Once she’d got herself totally clean.’

My mouth went dry. ‘She told you that?’

‘Actually, that’s why she started the whole blackmail business. She said she wanted to have some money of her own, so that when she went into business with you she could hold her head up.’

As if to emphasise the phrase, Vex freed the end of her ponytail
from the scarf and tilted her chin up. It was an oddly childlike gesture of defiance, one that I’d seen Niki perform. Maybe Vex had learnt it from her.

‘Niki was real cool,’ she repeated, as if I’d suggested otherwise.

Niki was cool, all right. I watched Vex do up each of the oversized buttons on her duffel coat, and pet her ponytail some more, while I waited for my heart to stop thumping. Then I asked the question I’d been holding on to for some time.

‘Vex?’ I waited until she looked at me. ‘Do you know who killed Snow?’

She clasped both hands in her lap, staring at them, taking her time before answering.

‘I think it was probably one of the guys that Niki had … you know …’

‘Blackmailed,’ I added helpfully.

‘Yeah, blackmailed,’ she agreed, with a tiny shrug of her shoulders. ‘I think Snow probably pushed some guy for money, and the guy’s thought, I’ll just kill him, and then I don’t have to pay anything. Something like that.’

‘Snow went on shaking them down even after Niki was dead?’

She gave that tiny shrug again. I waited to see if there was more, but she seemed spent. The nervous energy gone, she looked even younger. How old was this girl — seventeen? Eighteen?

‘Do you have any idea who that guy might be?’

‘I hope it wasn’t one of the guys I … did. That would be too creepy.’ She shivered, and sought comfort in her ponytail. ‘But I only did it, like, a few times. More as a favour to Niki, really, and I …’ She glanced at me nervously. ‘I owed her money for some
stuff
she’d got me ages ago, and she agreed I could pay her back in, you know …’

‘Sex.’

‘Yeah, sex. I mean, it was
her
business. Her “baby”, she called it. She did, like, a hundred times more guys than me. She worked really hard.’

I sincerely hoped Vex was the exaggerating type. I didn’t want to imagine that number of men having sex with my little sister. It was no easier when I flipped it and had my little sister on top having sex with that number of men. I couldn’t figure out how the Niki I knew and the Niki Vex knew were the same person. Maybe neither of us really knew her. I was having trouble getting it straight in my head. My little sister, whose favourite book was
The Little Prince
, had been running a blackmail sex scam. That Niki,
my
Niki, had made this naive cat-girl pay off a drug debt to her by having her perform all kinds of weird and dangerous sex with men — so that Niki could then blackmail them.