Worse than Death (Anna Southwood Mysteries) (10 page)

I started with Rex, who’d been mainly asked about the night before Kylie’s disappearance, when he’d taken the girls out to McDonald’s. I made a note of the fact that it was a Tuesday night instead of his usual Friday, though it didn’t seem very significant. When I read the second interview with him I saw that the police had noticed it too — Rex had explained he was going interstate the next day, so he’d changed the night. He’d done that occasionally at other times. There was a note on the report to say that they’d verified this. He’d been booked on a Wednesday afternoon flight to Perth. The police seemed to have been reasonably thorough all round, cross-checking most of the statements. I made a face at the sight of Birkett’s name on some of the reports.

The other note I made was something in Joe’s statement that I hadn’t known about — he said in his third or fourth interview that he’d just remembered it might have been that night that he’d gone down to the creek to cut bamboo. The police had pushed him on this, obviously delighted that his already shaky alibi was crumbling, but he’d remained confused about whether it was that night or the next. I wondered if, with gentler questioning, he might be encouraged to remember more. I asterisked the note — I’d try to see him, too, the next day.

I moved on to the other interviews, with a fresh coffee and a new packet of cigarettes. There was very little that I hadn’t got from the original summaries. Beth Channing agreed that sometimes her father changed the night of their dinners if he had other commitments. She confirmed that Kylie often went out with them and that she’d seemed just the same as usual that night. She’d been excited about a school dance on the Friday because a boy she liked was going to be there.

I thought about that for a minute — it seemed that, at least on Tuesday, she hadn’t had any immediate plans for leaving home. Kylie had a new dress for the dance, Beth said. She’d seen it. It was a small thing, but it knocked out Frank Johnson’s theory as far as I was concerned. I was relieved — perhaps I needed patterns as much as Carol.

Rex had driven the girls home, dropping Kylie off first. He hadn’t gone in to the Channing house — he never did, Beth said. Beth had seen Kylie the next day, but not to talk to. They usually walked to and from school with friends from their own classes, unless one of them was going to the other’s house, which they still did occasionally. Kylie had not approached Beth to give her an excuse for the afternoon. Beth had not seen her again after school. The police had questioned her several times about this, with unusual tact, but she was clearly telling the truth.

Mrs Kominsky’s interview had nothing to add. A note attached to it said she’d been asked about Joe cutting bamboo from the creek. She’d confirmed that he sometimes did that — he used it for kite frames — but she had no way of knowing if he had collected it that night. He dried it on racks in the shed, where she seldom went.

A thought struck me, and I turned back to the last interview with Joe, which I hadn’t read thoroughly. The police had picked it up as well — they’d asked him how he’d cut the bamboo and he’d given them a small scythe. I sighed. I assumed they’d tested it and found nothing, or it would have been grounds for an arrest.

I was tired. I gathered up the sheaf of papers waiting to be read and took them upstairs. I put the lasagne in the oven and settled down to read.

Chapter 11

Graham arrived on time the next morning and on the way to Liverpool he told me what Murray Baxter had had to say. It was almost exactly what he’d said in his interview with the police, which I’d read the night before.

“He’s a nice bloke,” Graham said. “I got the impression that he more or less looks after Joe — gets him the odd council job, goes out fishing with him. They went to school together, apparently. Anyway, he said it was quite usual for Joe to bring garden rubbish to the tip before opening hours if Murray was there. He’d arranged for Joe to have a special pass — says it makes him feel important, though it’s got no real official status.”

He shuffled through the tapes in the box on the floor and put on Roy Orbison. ‘Only the Lonely’ seemed to underline the thoughts of Joe Kominsky. Graham looked at his notes.

“Joe dumped his garden rubbish in the pit — there was no one around at that hour, so no one saw exactly what he tipped in. Then he had a coffee with Murray in their office. Murray remembers it was a particularly busy morning after that — lots of trucks getting rid of building materials — and Joe stayed around to help a bit. He liked driving the fork-lifts if they’d let him.” He fiddled with the dials and the Big O’s peculiar counter-tenor blared out into the streets of Cabramatta, causing elegant Vietnamese shoppers to stare when we stopped at the lights.

“Yeah,” I said gloomily, over the loud music. “Doesn’t help much, does it?”

“What?”

I turned the noise down a bit. “Did you ask him any background stuff about Joe? Things he wouldn’t have been asked by the police?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t add anything. Just the picture as before. A lonely kid, bullied at school because he was slow, then ostracised later. You know how cruel adolescents are. Murray took him under his wing — even let him be best man at his wedding. His wife came to the tip while I was there — she was really angry about Joe being a suspect. She says she lets her kids go out flying kites with him — he’s made them some little beauties of their own, too. She had them in the boot of her car.” He looked at his notes again — “‘Gentle as a lamb’, that’s what she said.” He turned the volume up again and looked out the window, muttering.

“What?” I said.

“I said, it makes me sick,” his voice was raised against the music. “People like Joe. Why can’t we find a decent role for them? Give them some respect? What sort of society are we?”

I made a sympathetic face, but there wasn’t anything to say.

I negotiated the turn-off from the freeway and pulled up outside Leonie Channing’s house. It was a brick-clad bungalow in Illawarra Crescent, another cul-de-sac that ended in vacant blocks adjacent to the football field. I thought of the holidays I’d spent on the Illawarra coast, the clean yellow-sand beaches under the looming rainforest of the escarpment, and I wondered who on earth had named this street.

We walked up the cracked concrete path through unmown grass and weeds. A dusty pink oleander flowered bravely from a thicket of Scotch thistles, and potato vine rampaged over the fences. We knocked three or four times before Leonie Channing answered the door.

It was the same dark, rather closed face of the newspaper photos, but there were new shadows under her eyes and her straight black hair was dirty, pinned back severely behind her ears. The heavy makeup was missing, too. She had on a wilted print housecoat, under which she was thin to the point of gauntness, and scuffed plastic slippers. Her bare legs were slightly marred by varicose veins, but still shapely. I imagined that she had been a fine athletic-looking woman once.

“Come in,” she said, with no other greeting. She led the way into an untidy kitchen with dirty dishes piled on the sink and milk-encrusted cat-food bowls on the floor. I saw what Graham had meant about the ‘things’. There were ornaments and knick-knacks on every available surface, and samplers and homilies in poker-work crowded against a calendar of a Tasmanian winter scene hanging on the wall above the stove. Leonie put the kettle on automatically and gestured for us to sit at the Laminex table.

I noticed that her back windows also looked out onto the oval and the creek, with a mobile home factory in the left foreground. I thought that must have been where Frank Johnson had worked. The football field seemed a pivotal point for all these people — Joe with his kites, Rex and Birkett and Murray Baxter with their club and their Saturday games. Presumably there wasn’t much else to do around here, nor much other open space. I imagined it was where all the kids congregated on weekends, too, with their bikes and cricket sets. I wondered if it was also a scene of murder, down by the reed-clotted creek.

“This is Anna Southwood,” Graham said when Leonie had finished making weak instant coffee and put it on the table with a carton of milk and a bowl of sugar.

She nodded, then looked around vaguely and went to the bench for her cigarettes and an ashtray. She emptied the butts into the kitchen tidy before she sat down, pushing an untidy pile of magazines out of her way. She lit a cigarette and waited, uninterested and passive.

I took a scalding sip of coffee and cleared my throat.

“Mrs Channing, we’re mainly investigating Kylie Johnson’s disappearance,” I began, taking the approach we’d already agreed on. “The police have been harassing Joe Kominsky again over your daughter’s case, and Mrs Kominsky wants it cleared up.”

“Joe didn’t do it,” she said listlessly, rubbing at her eyes as if they were stinging.

“What makes you so sure?” I asked.

“I just know he didn’t.” Her voice was flat and slightly husky.

“Well, that’s what we want to find out,” I said. “Definite proof that he wasn’t involved, either with Beth or Kylie. Mrs Channing, did Beth still see him sometimes? After Kylie’s disappearance?”

“No,” she said. “She was too old for kites. Too up herself for poor old Joe these days, as well.” There was almost a spark of feeling in her voice — contempt? I wondered, or just tired maternal irritation?

“Do you think Kylie was murdered?” I lit a cigarette myself, while she drank coffee, not answering.

“Yes,” she said finally. “She’s dead.”

“And Beth? Do you think she was murdered too? By the same person?” I waited, wondering if I had gone too far, if she’d break down. But her face became even more closed and her eyes looked wary.

“Yes,” she said again. “Beth’s dead and gone.”

“And you think the same person’s responsible for Beth’s disappearance, too?” Talk about blood out of a stone, I thought, no wonder Paul was so pissed off.

She almost seemed to smile as she thought about the question. “Yes,” she said, and her voice seemed more definite.

“Do you know who it is?” Graham asked gently.

She half shook her head, not quite a denial. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “She’s gone. What does it matter now?” She lowered her head and stared into her lap. It was hard to know if it was a gesture of grief or a simple stubborn refusal to say any more.

“You’d better go now,” she said suddenly, raising her tired face. “I can’t help you. I’ve got things to do.”

I looked at Graham and he shrugged. We got up and she walked ahead of us to the door, dragging her feet slightly.

“Mrs Channing,” I said on impulse as we left, “please take my card. If there’s anything we can do to help, please ring us…”

She took the card and put it in her pocket. She didn’t reply to our goodbyes or thankyous, but stood at the open door watching while we got in the car and drove away.

“Jesus wept,” I said. “That was a totally useless exercise.” I turned into a street that looked as if it led to the oval.

“Let’s walk down to the creek,” I said. “Clear our heads and look for the scene of the crime or something.”

I parked by the wooden posts that marked the pedestrian access to the field and we climbed over the turnstile.

“That’s the footie club,” Graham said, pointing at what looked like brick municipal dunnies. I’d imagined a much bigger building.

“It’s not League,” he said, reading my thoughts. “Union’s pretty small beer here. It’s just a sort of room for refreshments after the game and a few beers after practice.”

We went over and tried to peer through the wire-meshed windows. They were too dirty and the inside was too dark to see anything. There was a large padlock on the steel-framed door.

“The caretaker doesn’t seem to be here,” Graham said. “Inside there’s just a few tables and chairs and a sink — an urn and stuff, too. There’s photos all over the wall of old footie teams. That’s where I saw the pictures of Birkett and Rex.”

We turned away and began to walk across the oval, avoiding a pile of broken bottles and plastic bags next to the empty garbage bin.

There was a maze of tracks down to the creek through the sheoaks and bamboo — it was a good place for kids to hang around, getting tadpoles and probably the odd leech, but it wasn’t the sort of creek for lovers’ trysts. The slimy banks gave onto weed-choked sluggish water where beer cans and other rubbish lay silted among the bamboos, and there was a dank chemical smell.

“Jeez, you’d have to be desperate,” Graham said, pointing to a half-submerged condom by the path that ran beside the water. We struggled a little way along it, but it was too rough and slippery to go very far.

“Had enough?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to disentangle myself from a blackberry cane. “It’s very atmospheric, though.”

Graham laughed. “What for?
Monsters
of
the
Deep
Lagoon
or something?” We turned back, and as we walked onto the rough turf of the field, I said, “That looks like Joe. He’s carrying a kite, anyway. Good. I want to talk to him.”

We waved and Joe started to veer towards us. He was carrying a splendid bright red and black kite and a reel of coiled-up string on a sort of pulley arrangement. I could see the bamboo frame, and as he came closer the pattern on the kite emerged — a bold dragon shape in calligraphic style.

“Did you paint that?” I asked.

He gave us a shy smile and nodded.

“It’s beautiful. Are you going to fly it now?”

He nodded again. “Yes. It’s a good wind today.”

I hadn’t noticed the breeze until he spoke, but a sudden waft of foetid air from the creek convinced me.

“Joe, do you remember us?” Graham said. “We came to see you. We’re the private detectives…”

“Yes,” he said, and waited, looking nervous. I don’t think he had remembered who we were until then.

“Mutti gave you coffee,” he said suddenly.

“Mutti? Oh — your mother. Yes, that’s right. And lovely biscuits,” I said.

“She’s a very good cook,” he said in a proud voice. “She makes nice biscuits and cakes and dumplings and… and pie. I like the cakes best. They’re chocolate. Sometimes with icing.”

“Joe,” I said, “do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”

He looked uneasy again and turned his head in the direction of his house.

“Mutti…”

“No, it’s all right. They’re very easy questions.” I sat on the rail and smiled at him.

“All right.” He stood with the kite dangling from his drooping hands, looking like an overgrown lost boy.

“Joe, the night Kylie disappeared — did you come down to cut bamboo here?”

“The policeman asked me,” he said sullenly. “I don’t know. Don’t remember.”

“Well, if it was that night, did you see anyone else down here? Can you remember that?”

Graham gave me a surprised look. I remembered he hadn’t seen the police transcript and winked at him.

“It was dark,” Joe said. “I put on my new rubber boots. I’ve got a big flashlight, too, and a slasher. The policeman took my slasher but he gave it back.”

I looked around. There were street lights down to the oval and the caravan lot was probably lit up at night.

“Yes, but did you see anyone else on your way? You didn’t see Kylie, did you?”

“No. She said she was at Beth’s house. She told a lie.”

I sighed. Then I looked at the caravan lot again. It was about an acre of vans and mobile homes up on blocks. Its sagging wire fence ran parallel to the creek. Surely, I thought, kids or someone like Joe would find it irresistible.

“Did you go anywhere else? Or just to the creek and straight back? Did you go and have a look at the vans?”

“Don’t like the caravans. Too small. The little houses are better.”

I tried to relax “Did you look at the little houses that night, Joe?”

He gave me a shifty look. “No Trespassing,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Graham said. “We won’t tell. Do you like looking at the little houses sometimes?”

Joe nodded. “They’ve got fridges and stoves and sinks. I like them.”

“Yes, I would, too,” I said. “Is there a hole in the fence?”

He nodded again.

“Did you stay there long that night?” Graham asked. “Did you see anyone else?”

“No. I was frightened,” he said. “He might catch me again. He shouts at me.”

“Who? Who might catch you, Joe? The night-watchman?”