Nineteen
Billie ventured to Circular Quay West and stepped into the shadows of the dark-brick- and sandstone-trimmed arches of the morgue on Mill Lane. The night was heavy and warm. It was after midnight.
She was overdue to visit Sydney City Morgue for this case, though the case itself seemed to have been keeping her from whatever it held within its walls. She sincerely hoped the missing boy, Adin Brown, would not be waiting on a slab as an unidentified guest, a tragic end to a calamitous day, sealing her latest case with a sad resolution on top of the growing violence it seemed to spawn. No, she hoped she wouldn’t find him here, for his family’s sake, but she couldn’t keep away no matter how battered she felt. In missing persons cases, such visits had become routine for her, and now, with the words of the meat-faced thug, she had another reason to be there, a reason she could not possibly have anticipated on Friday afternoon when Nettie Brown had first walked through the door of her office with a seemingly simple case of a runaway teenage son. The events that had unfolded since had made Billie restless in her bones and anxious for answers. Sleep seemed far away.
Billie paused, deep in thought, absentmindedly rubbing the bruise on her rib cage through the fabric of her dark clothing.
What did Con have to tell me that was worth killing him over?
Why is Moretti tailing me? And why the thugs outside the auction house?
Is he the one who spiked my drink? Did he kill Con? Why? For whom?
The many puzzle pieces had not come together yet, not by a long shot, but a couple of things were certain—foul play, and a strong desire to keep her away from the case.
Billie leaned against a sandstone arch. The facilities inside the city’s morgue were basic, with a receiving room, the main morgue, a postmortem room, and a small laboratory. It was considered a less than hygienic space—notoriously so. During the gravediggers’ strike of Christmas 1944, the place had been overflowing with “stinking dead bodies,” according to witnesses. Billie believed it. Two years on, the city morgue still lacked refrigeration and anything approaching adequate space, though she understood there were plans for an upgrade. Though still cramped, things here were, at least, an improvement on the prewar setup at the morgue that rather unfortunately had allowed the guests aboard visiting cruise ships coming in and out of Sydney Harbor to see into the building and the bodies stacked there. Not good for tourism, to be sure.
In anticipation of this late visit, Billie had changed out of her ripped ensemble of the afternoon—yet more mending to be done—and donned dark blue cotton pants, an ivory silk blouse, a navy driving coat, and old over-ankle leather-soled boots that could be easily cleaned. She usually preferred the quieter crepe or fabric soles, so the sharp sound of her feet on the stones in the dark had come as a surprise.
Another thought pulled at her, one she couldn’t let go of. Was there corrupt police interference in this affair? If so, why?
As death took a rest for no one, the death house operated day and night, but apart from the necessary police identifications made by relatives of the deceased, it didn’t welcome living civilian visitors. Billie, however, was an exception. She knocked at the door and was let in, her arrival met with the unabashedly delighted smile of the young man who had been stationed at the desk. Billie had known whom to expect. She’d cultivated a warm welcome in this cold place. Despite the silent company, it could be a lonely sort of place, she imagined, most of all at night.
“Good evening, Mr. Benny,” Billie said.
“Oh, call me Donald, Ms. Walker. It’s such a pleasure to see you.” He did indeed look pleased.
“Or perhaps I should say good morning?” She looked at her delicate watch.
He nodded. “Yes, it’s quite late.”
Donald Benny was a slim, bent fellow with a complexion nearly as waxen as that of the clients he guarded. He was about Sam’s age, twenty-four, but there the similarity ended. Bookish in appearance, he wore round spectacles for his vision, a white collared shirt, and a dark tie visible above a collarless white lab coat. On this occasion it had no noticeable bloodstains or unidentifiable marks on it, which Billie took as a good sign. As usual, Benny appeared entranced by Billie’s presence. She smiled warmly at him, having no intention of letting her hold on him go until she was ready to leave.
“I brought you a book,” Billie said and reached into her satchel to reveal a paperback detective novel. “A Georgette Heyer.” Heyer was better known for her historical romance novels set in the regency and Georgian eras, but she’d written some fine detective books.
Benny’s cheeks had colored, she noticed. With his anemic complexion, his every private emotion sat on the surface. His eyes went to the book, then wandered to her hand and its long, elegant fingers, and wandered farther up to her neck, which was exposed on one side with her dark hair cascading down the other. “Death in the Stocks,” he said, reading the title of the book aloud once he was able to bring his eyes back to it.
“You haven’t read it, have you?” she inquired.
“Oh, no, I haven’t. How do you always seem to know which ones I haven’t read?”
She simply smiled again. “I was wondering if I might have a little look in at your guests tonight? Is there anyone unidentified at the moment?”
His face became serious, a show of professionalism against the almost giddy welcome. “Two unidentified,” he said, avoiding the word stiffs, though Billie could see it was on the tip of his tongue.
“May I . . . ?” she ventured, looking at the open door to the morgue’s main room.
Benny tore his attention from her to look around at the quiet office, as he always did, then nodded, as he always did. Billie didn’t know what he expected to find when he silently questioned the room each time, but as the dead did not protest, he led her quietly through the door into the main morgue. She followed close behind him, hands in her coat pockets.
“Have you a handkerchief?” he asked.
She nodded and pulled one from her pocket. In a quick motion she soaked the cloth with tea-tree oil from a small vial she kept for this purpose. Though Billie knew what to expect, the room still had a most unpleasant smell—the same smell that had greeted her upon waking. Something like rotten leaves, or animal meat, but not exactly the same as either. The tea-tree oil reduced the pungency but could not stop that distinctive smell from taking hold somewhere deep within her. She hoped that when it came her time, she’d be bathed in French perfume and buried fast, before too many people had taken a gander or a whiff. Billie did not fear death, but she did have some unsettling feelings about how her body might be handled once she could no longer protect it. Death could be terribly undignified, she knew. It was something to come to terms with, she supposed.
“You haven’t had an Adin Brown through here? A boy of about seventeen? Five foot nine, curly hair, no identifying marks?” she inquired, sweeping her eyes across the room and bringing the handkerchief to her face.
It’s too late. The words kept cycling in her mind. Too late.
Billie’s eyes stung a little from the sharp waft of tea-tree oil. There were about a dozen deceased guests, of a variety of ages, sexes, and shapes—slim, plump, male, female, old as the hills and as young as Adin. Death did not appear picky tonight.
Benny stopped by the first of the corpses and thought for a moment, bringing a thin finger to his lips. “No. I’m sure no one of that name has been through recently, and neither of the unidentified men has been of that age.”
That was a small relief. Benny’s memory was good, and Adin would have been a quite recent arrival. There wasn’t much risk he’d been here. That didn’t mean, of course, he was still alive.
Her guide began to move again, and Billie took a step forward to follow her host, then realized with horror that she was looking down at the skinny doorman, Con Zervos, his face but inches from her right hip. A chill went up her spine as if he’d reached up and touched her. His eyes were mercifully closed now, but somehow he was still looking at her as he had in his hotel room, strangled by his own necktie.
She gasped.
“Ms. Walker?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I ate the wrong thing for dinner. Seafood. It’s unsettled my tummy.”
“Would you like some tea?”
“I’m fine,” she assured him. She tried to smile again, but it wouldn’t form.
This was hardly the first dead body she’d seen—the war had taken care of that, as had multiple trips to the morgue—but it was the first she’d woken up with, the first violently taken civilian in peacetime that she’d walked in on unawares, and as such the death of Con Zervos had shaken her. Her guard had not been up when she’d walked into room 305. She hoped the grisly discovery would be an isolated incident. She blinked and brought her body back into line, doing her best to remain calm. Con Zervos was no longer a man but a hollow, human-shaped cast, as lifeless as a dressmaker’s dummy. The face was shrinking back, eyes falling deeper into the skull, the whole of his flesh abandoned utterly by the life-force that had filled it at The Dancers. The sight of it, of what had been him—so wiry and nervous and alive—made her heart thud beneath her blouse, despite the fact that she’d expected to find him here already, if Sam had done his job well. In fact, this was what she had hoped. Nothing could be done to breathe life back into him, but now that he had been collected, he would be cared for by Benny, and his family could be informed of his fate.
“Are you okay?” Benny asked suddenly. She must have paled.
“What’s his story?” Billie managed, running a hand over her hair.
“Sorry, it’s a bit gruesome, this one.”
“You know I can handle it.” She tried another smile, and this time her cheeks worked, and his confidence in her appeared to return. She hoped he hadn’t heard the story of her claiming to have found his body in room 305.
“You are one of a kind, Ms. Walker,” he told her admiringly, then turned and regarded the corpse. “This poor fellow was found out the back of the People’s Palace tonight. Strangled, he was. They do get some rough trade. The night watchman identified him. Some Greek immigrant who came out here for a new life, and this is what he got for his troubles.”
She swallowed. The night watchman. She wondered what he thought of all the confusion with the police on Saturday night, and now this.
“Isn’t that a temperance hotel?” she asked, trying to strike a normal conversational note.
“Fat lot of good it did this fellow,” Benny remarked.
“Indeed.”
Billie told herself to resist the urge to chat. It was easy to begin talking needlessly when you were nervous and keeping secrets, and then those secrets had a way of tangling you up. It wasn’t every day you woke with a corpse. If the police did find out, it would do her no favors. Had the force been less corrupt, she might have trusted them with her innocence, but her father had taught her better than that. Silence was best. Silence or brevity. Reg, the city coroner, would likely give young Con Zervos an autopsy the next day, if budgets allowed. How long would it take his family back in Greece to find out his fate? She walked on, fighting the impulse to look back at Zervos or ask further questions about him.
“Sorry your kid isn’t here,” Benny said, a welcome change of topic.
“I’m not sorry,” she said, and was sincere. “I still hope to find him alive.”
It’s too late. Too late . . .
“Of course,” Benny said. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“I’m reading one of those American detective novels where they go out and bury the body in the desert,” Billie said, changing the subject as they returned to the front desk. “The desert around Vegas is full of bodies, apparently.” She noted his interest. “I was wondering, where would someone do something like that around here? Hide a body, I mean.”
“Why, the Blue Mountains, of course.” His answer was immediate.
“Is that so?”
“If you don’t have time to drive all the way into the outback—and that’s risky, you know, the longer you have the body with you. I mean, you could be pulled over, your automobile could break down, all kinds of things could go wrong. So if you don’t go all the way to the outback, you go to the Blue Mountains. It happens all the time. Better than the country, where the locals and their dogs pick things up and know what’s about. No, you’d settle for the mountains and all those wild areas. It’s hard to tell a murder from an accident after a couple of weeks under a cliff,” he added matter-of-factly. “Or a suicide. The roads must be backed up with all the poor souls heading up there to take a walk off the Blue Mountains escarpments. It’s a damned shame.”
“I never thought of that,” she said. He had given her an idea.
“Otherwise it’s the harbor.”
She had thought of that. “Then they would end up here, wouldn’t they?”
“Eventually,” he said. “If they were found at all.”
When Billie arrived home she walked through her rooms with her Colt drawn and, once satisfied, double-checked the lock on her door and closed and locked her windows. She undressed, pulled the freshly washed sheets on her bed back, and sat on the edge. After a moment she rose again, walked to the kitchen, and pulled some old newspapers from the lower cupboard. She padded back to her bedroom and closed the door behind her. One by one she pulled the newspaper sheets out, crumpling them in her hands and scattering them in a large arc around her bedroom floor, like a circle of protection in some novel about the occult.
No one, but no one, was going to creep up on her again.
She did not sleep well, but she did sleep. And that was something.