Thrill City

By Leigh Redhead

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2010 Leigh Redhead
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74114-737-7
CHAPTER 1

It was a hot November day when I first met Nick Austin. Venetian blinds slapped the glass as he pushed open my office door, strolled in and looked around the waiting room, taking in the blue Freedom Furniture couch, wilting rubber plant and faux-timber coffee table fanned with second-hand magazines. Sitting in the office proper, I saw him through the door and freaked. I’d forgotten to lock up when I came in from the shops, and clients never just fronted up. They called or emailed first, or texted if they were young and annoying.

He wasn’t young, mid forties maybe, and he was handsome in a rugged, slightly asymmetrical way. His light brown hair, longer at the front than the back, was still thick and his height — nearly six feet — helped to disguise the beginnings of middle-aged spread. He wore an expensive grey shirt with rolled-up sleeves, a jacket slung over one shoulder, and could have passed for an ageing catalogue model — or a hitman, I thought, panic prickling my bare arms. There were any number of people who’d pay good money to have me bumped off, and there I was, idiot, leaving the office unlocked so they could waltz on in. If I couldn’t get to the back door and sprint to my car, I was dead.

Then I came to my senses. Surely contract killers were only suave looking in the movies, or overseas, say Paris or Milan. The Australian version would probably show up in stubbies and a blue singlet, sporting jail tatts and supermarket thongs. Not strolling bare-faced past my security camera in the middle of the day.

The guy wasn’t acting particularly hitmannishly, once I thought about it. In fact, he was looking around in almost wide-eyed wonder, as though my waiting room was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. I’d seen similar expressions on trippers late at night at the 7-Eleven, delighted the store stocked something so hilarious as canned tongue.

‘Can I help you?’ I leaned back on my desk and crossed my arms, trying to sound stern and professional because I sure didn’t look it. I was wearing cut-off denim shorts and a ‘Damn Right I’m a Cowgirl’ t-shirt, and my long dark hair was in a ponytail, wispy bits escaping and sticking to my lip-gloss. Normally I went for a pantsuit-and-white-shirt combo at work — made me look like a plain-clothes copper and seemed to inspire respect and confidence in clients — but that day I wasn’t expecting anyone and had been washing my car out back with a bucket.

My PI business was in a narrow street-level shop-front that had housed a shoe store before I took over and partitioned the space with a cheap plasterboard wall. Sunlight shafted through half-open venetians, brightening up the waiting room, but the office at the back was dim. He wandered over to the doorway and peered into the gloom.

‘I’m looking for Simone Kirsch.’ His voice was deep and he was well-spoken. Educated with just a hint of ocker.

‘And now you’re looking at her.’ I pushed off from the desk and walked over, switching on the overheads. His eyes adjusted, pupils pinning then enlarging as he spotted my outfit. He smiled as though it confirmed something, or amused him, I wasn’t sure which. In the fluorescent light I noticed his cheeks were marred with faint, pitted acne scars — although marred was probably the wrong word. The scars added character, gave him a Richard Burton kind of vibe, and without them he would have looked handsome but bland. He stuck out his hand and I shook it.

‘I’m Nick Austin,’ he announced, as though it meant something.

It didn’t, so I just nodded. Up close my finely honed detective skills allowed me to notice something else. He held it well, but he’d been drinking. The glassy eyes and the faint reek of whiskey on his breath and in his sweat gave it away. Pretty hardcore for a summery weekday afternoon, but it explained the kind of bright-eyed way he’d been looking around.

‘I’m a writer,’ he continued when I didn’t respond. That got a reaction. I snatched my hand away.

‘Journalist?’ I’d had enough of them after all the crap I’d gone through. When would they get it into their heads I wasn’t going to do any interviews?

‘No. Crime.’

‘True crime?’ Just as bad. Journos with stamina.

‘False crime. I mean, crime fiction. I write the Zack Houston private detective books. They turned the first one into a telemovie. Aired last month? Cameron Davies played Zack.’

‘Oh yeah …’ I retreated behind my desk to the fake-leather recliner and gestured for Nick to sit on the blue armchair that had come as a set with the couch. ‘I mighta read the first one.’

‘Dead Reckoning? What’d you think?’

‘It was good. I liked the character of Zack …’

‘But?’

I squirmed in my seat, torn between wanting to be honest and possibly offending a potential client. ‘Well, it was a bit unrealistic …’

‘How so?’ He leaned forward and didn’t seem offended, just interested, so I relaxed a bit and grabbed the bottle of whiskey from my bottom drawer. What the hell, it was almost four and if it was good enough for Ernest Hemingway over there …

The corners of Nick’s mouth tugged up as I poured a couple of fingers each into some cheap tumblers I kept at hand. We clinked and sipped and the whiskey lit up my gullet, burning and medicinal. He finished half in one go so I topped him up, then myself. He relaxed back into his chair. That was me, always putting people at ease.

‘What did I get wrong?’ he asked.

‘Jeez, where do I start?’ I said, feeling immediately fortified by booze. ‘Like, Zack always gets a park right outside of wherever he’s going, even St Kilda or Fitzroy or the CBD. He must have a bladder of cast iron, since he never pees during surveillance — in fact, he never hangs a leak ever, despite sinking copious quantities of Coopers Pale. And the chicks …’ A little snort escaped my nose.

Nick frowned. ‘What about the chicks?’

‘They’re always throwing themselves at him.’

‘Zack’s a tough, good-looking guy.’

‘I don’t care how tough and good-looking he is, no one’s gonna be … you know … within seconds of meeting him. Girls don’t do that.’ Then I thought of my boyfriend, Sean, who was getting back from an Asia-Link police exchange in Vietnam any day. But that had been different. I’d known him for at least twenty-four hours, we’d been shot at, I’d been drunk …

‘You sure? What if the character was a femme fatale, trying to manipulate him ?’

‘Dude, in my experience the best way to manipulate men is to not root them.’

Nick laughed, clapped his hands and sat back, looking satisfied. ‘See, this is why I need to hire you. Curtis was right.’

‘Curtis Malone?’ Curtis was an acquaintance of mine, a titty-mag hack who’d gone to the dark side and started reporting crime. He’d got me fired from my last job, knocked up my best friend and was writing a book about a case I’d been involved in. He was a pest.

‘Yeah. We were just having lunch at the Stokehouse with our mutual publisher and a couple of other writers from Wet Ink Press. I mentioned I wanted to introduce a female PI in my next Zack book and he suggested I talk to you.’

‘So that’s why you’re here, to speak with me?’

‘More than that. I’d like to spend a bit of time with you, maybe tag along on a couple of jobs, really get an understanding of what it’s like, being a woman and a private detective.’

‘I’d imagine it’s much like being a man, only we have to stick a funnel into the juice bottle before we piss in it. Look, I’m happy to answer a few questions but I don’t want any more publicity and I usually work on my own.’

‘You don’t have to worry about being identified and the thing is, I don’t have any specific questions to ask. I just wanted to soak up the atmosphere, see how you go about things. It’s the little details that add veracity. Like the whiskey bottle. I wouldn’t have expected that from a female PI.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘In my rough draft I have her drinking green tea.’

I stuck my fingers in my mouth and pretended to gag.

‘You have to admit, the whiskey’s a bit of a cliché. Along with the chrome desk fan.’ He nodded in its direction. Cheeky bastard.

‘I’d pay you for your time,’ he went on.

‘Yeah?’ I tried not to look too interested, but the truth was I was desperate for money. I’d gone into the red to get myself started and the paying jobs were only just starting to dribble in. I wasted a lot of time talking to window shoppers and freaks who’d seen me in the paper, knew I’d worked as a stripper and wanted to gawk or, worse, ask me on a date. I had debts coming out my arse and the combined rent on my office and one-bedroom flat in Elwood was nearly five hundred bucks a week.

‘Yeah. I’m pretty flush after the TV adaptation. I’ll pay your going rate just to be able to ride around with you. Say, a couple of days, sixteen hours or so? You’ll be doubling your money for the same amount of work. What is your hourly rate?’

I briefly considered lying, but it was advertised on my website and in my newspaper ads. ‘Fifty.’

‘That’s ridiculously cheap.’

I shrugged. He was right, but being a relatively inexperienced one-woman operation who’d gotten herself very publicly in trouble more than once, it was the only way I could get work. It was my unique point of difference, to use small-business parlance.

‘The only stuff I have coming up is pretty boring,’ I said. ‘There’s a WorkCover job, following some guy who reckons he’s got a crook back.’

‘Sounds great. When’s it start?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘Count me in.’

‘I’ll need the money upfront.’ Sixteen hours was eight hundred bucks and I was determined to get paid before he sobered up.

‘I don’t actually have any cash on me.’ He patted his pockets.

‘I have EFTPOS.’ I waved towards the card-swipe machine with a gameshow-model flourish. ‘Credit, cheque or savings?’

CHAPTER 2

Nick showed up at six the next morning looking relatively chipper and I wondered if he’d quit drinking and crashed out early, or woken up and consumed a heart-starter.

The job, though boring, was a great success. Tooling around in my work car, an innocuous nineties-model white Ford Laser, we tracked the target from his home in East St Kilda to a lumberyard in Moorabbin and eventually to a house site in Carrum where I got plenty of photos and video of him lugging timber, bending, stretching and even clambering about on a roof with the agility of a spider monkey. He knocked off at three, drove to an industrial area in Cheltenham and parked around the back of what looked like an old factory. We stayed on the street.

‘More building stuff?’ Nick squinted and scrutinised the facade.

‘Brothel.’

His eyes opened wide. ‘How do you know?’

‘No name on the building, street number so big it’s probably visible from space, windows blacked out.’ I’d spent a lot of time skulking around knocking shops on a case six months before.

Nick pointed to a smaller sign underneath the bright yellow numbers.

‘Rear Entrance. That a pun?’

‘Unintentional. I’ve got more than enough here to keep the insurers happy. Want to knock off and go to the pub?’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’

The Balaclava Hotel sat half a block down from my office and was one of the last watering holes left in the area that actually looked like a pub. The place was the size of a large lounge room, crammed with chipped tables and covered with well-worn carpet patterned in hieroglyphs of orange, brown and green. The bar in the back left-hand corner was just a metre and a half across and completely devoid of mirrors or fancy downlights. The only adornments on the beige walls were an old footy tipping chart and two posters, one for Fosters and the other advertising Carlton Draught. Half the patrons were over sixty and wheeling vinyl shopping trolleys. The other half sported faded tattoos on their arms, necks and, in one case, shaven scalp.

The Balaclava was my kind of place. Unpretentious, with cheap booze, and the regulars were friendly, regardless of the rough-looking tatts. Nick mustn’t have minded it either because despite his flash clothes, which got a few looks from the locals, he seemed quite at home as he sauntered off to the bar. I’d have bet money he was mentally rewriting his book though, removing his female PI from the juice bar and substituting her wheatgrass frappé for something a little more substantial.

I grabbed a seat at the window facing Carlisle Street, watching trams, traffic and pedestrians go by. Balaclava had been sprucing itself up, but still wasn’t as trendy as nearby St Kilda and Elwood. Old ladies trundled past, dodgy dudes in shiny tracksuits, mums with prams and the occasional hipster who hadn’t been able to afford the soaring real estate prices over on the leafier, prettier side of Brighton Road. The shopping strip was dotted with discount stores, delis and bagel shops, and orthodox Jews strolled by in full regalia. The suburb had character, and if I tried really hard and squinted I could almost imagine I was living in some borough of New York.

Nick returned with a pot of Coopers for himself, champagne for me, and a whiskey for both of us. What with the warm day and the cheap champagne it wasn’t long before a fuzzy, pleasant sensation washed over me, and it took a second or two to distinguish the unfamiliar feeling as contentment. Winter had been harsh, and not just because of the temperature. Summer was going to be different. Sean would be back, work would trickle in and life would be calm and cruisy for once. I clinked my glass against Nick’s and grinned.

‘Getting your money’s worth?’

‘Oh yeah.’ He slid his notebook out of his breast pocket and flipped it open. ‘I learned that female PIs drive like maniacs, swear like wharfies, urinate frequently and dress dog-ugly when they’re trailing a guy.’

‘You didn’t like my tracksuit?’

Nick just shuddered and I couldn’t really blame him. It was no sexy, low-slung velour number but a cheap grey fleece that ballooned out in the middle and came in tight around the wrists and ankles. The set had cost twenty bucks at a discount store and made me look like a pregnant rhinoceros. I’d teamed it with no makeup and my hair tucked into a cap. Not even a builder was gonna look twice. Soon as we’d got back to the office I’d ripped the vile thing off, changed into jeans and a Willie Nelson t-shirt and slapped on a little powder, mascara and lip-gloss. Not that I was trying to flirt with Nick. Sure, he was hot for an older bloke, but I had a boyfriend and I didn’t do that anymore. Although there was no guarantee it would work out with Sean and me, if it did go to hell, I wasn’t going to be the one who’d screwed it up.

I had pretty much spilled my guts in the day spent in the car. You did when you were sitting around bored and it had made the day go faster. I’d rambled on about my hippy childhood, half-finished uni degree and all the stupid jobs along the way. Deckie on a prawn trawler, waitress, checkout chick, and finally stripper when I’d had enough of bitchy supermarket customers giving me the shits. He’d asked how I got into the inquiry agent racket and I’d explained the circuitous route, how I’d always wanted to be a cop — partly rebellion, partly because a policewoman had once saved my mum from a violent boyfriend — only I’d been ridiculously, scrupulously honest about my background on the application form and they’d decided it was best not to let me join.

I’d told him about the PI course, which had seemed the next best thing, my best friend Chloe getting kidnapped and my short-lived job with an agency. A case I’d gotten involved with degenerated into an absolute shit-fight when the lawyer who’d hired me ended up trying to kill me, and I’d been fired after the media splashed my mug across the television and newspapers. The stripper angle thrilled them to bits and allowed tabloids and broadsheets alike to print pictures of poles and girls bursting out of tiny bikinis. My boobs were on the modest side, which is why they usually supplemented the articles with pictures of Chloe: a bottle-blonde with far more impressive assets. I’d been approached to tell my story more times than I could count, and could have made a lot of money, but I was enough of a joke as it was. I didn’t want to go on A Current Affair and lose what last shreds of professional dignity I had left.

For all my raving I hadn’t said a word to Nick about what had happened to my mother, even though I was sure he knew. Three months earlier a missing person job had turned ugly and gotten too close to home. Mum survived, just, but her partner Steve had been killed. I was still pretty fucked up about it and the last thing I wanted was sympathy or, god forbid, a hippy-style back-rub. I’d seen a counsellor for a while but she’d had such a hard time getting me to talk that she actually suggested we quit the sessions until I thought I was ready.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Thrill City by Leigh Redhead. Copyright © 2010 Leigh Redhead. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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