My thoughts were everywhere and my body was floating way, way up in the clouds. I closed my eyes, hoping to bring order to chaos.
I was an idiot. My thinking had been out of focus. I’d been caught up in the Jimbo Jameson circus and the race to get through the list of suspects and was definitely missing something important but I couldn’t put my finger on it. And I’d been too busy fucking my brains out instead of using them.
So I went back to square one.
What did I know for sure? Three people were dead. Were they connected? And if so, how?
So what had we missed? What had I missed?
Basil had told me that the Melbourne paid hit was a two-fer but I hadn’t taken him seriously because he was Basil and I was pissed. I should have listened.
Quentin Armstrong had been the first to die. He had been the real target. Jimbo was a freebie and Chelsea had got in the way of a couple of bullets meant for him. But her lunch had already killed him.
The real question was who killed Quentin Armstrong, the homosexual bookkeeper who had made a brave but ultimately fatal decision to testify in a Sydney trial. He thought he could hide in Melbourne, but he’d been eliminated to send a message to the other two witnesses for the prosecution.
And I should have listened when Dominique had said that she hated her father. She said that she hated him because of what he had done to her mother, but she really hated him because he hadn’t done anything to her. He hadn’t loved her. She just didn’t register on his radar. And she knew it.
Dominique had been sent away by her mother, which no doubt added to her rejection issues. And at boarding school she had teamed up with Maria, who was probably there for her own protection. They were opposites, but I could see how they complemented each other. Maria had a sister and a share of French haute-couture respectability, and Dominique had a family. A mafia family.
Marco had told me that Dominique and Maria were partners in crime, but I’d assumed he meant teenage girl-type crime. And when I’d interviewed them, I had seen them as two spoiled bratty airheads. Which was true. They were spoiled. They were brats. They were rich. And rich spoiled brats can be dangerous, especially if one is a mafia princess and the other is a resentful brat.
I could remember my teenage fantasies of dissolving my mother in an acid bath because she’d forgotten to pick me up from a birthday party. So what hell had Dominique dreamed up for a father who had forgotten that she existed?
Dominique had the means, the motive and the opportunity to have her bestie’s brother bump him off. What if Maria’s brother had flown into Melbourne, popped Quentin and then hopped up to Sydney to shoot Jimbo on the way back to Rome? After all, he was already in the neighbourhood on “business”.
When Dominique kissed Paolo Napoli she was thanking him for killing her father.
How had he known where Jimbo would be? And then I remembered that Suzie had told me that he and Chelsea were regulars at the hotel. When you have a routine you’re easy to find and Blind Freddy could have found Jimbo. At the hotel. Where airline pilots stay, wheeling their bags and impressing everyone with all that gold braid and their sexy hats, but no-one notices them because there are so many of them. And we’d been too interested in ticking off the pilots’ names against the reservations. Paolo didn’t have a reservation. He had a uniform and a hat and a pilot’s bag. He just walked in and out, and no-one had noticed him.
I had forgotten how mean girls can be. Dominique had Paolo kill her father just because she could. If they had left immediately with Paolo, or even flown commercial, it would have been the perfect crime.
However, for reasons known only to a couple of spoilt rich airheads they had stuck around for the funeral. Just as arsonists stick around to see the drama they’ve created, Dominique couldn’t resist the opportunity to see the results of her plot. That was her mistake. And now all I had to do was prove it.
Paolo had come back to Sydney to pick them up, and now they were….where?
Bugger it. When had they said they were checking out of the hotel? I reached for my phone.