River of Blue Fire, Page 45

  “Did you ever think this might be a lot of trouble for a bad case?”

  Calliope expelled her breath with an angry huff. “All the damn time, Stan. Just let me try this and if nothing happens, we’ll discuss bagging the whole thing. Okay?”

  “Okay. Are we there yet?”

  “Shut up.”

  The foothills had become mountains, bold headlands of weathered rock, whiskery with blue gum and evergreen. Calliope’s underpowered car had dropped back behind even the cement truck now, and made noises as it climbed like a walking toy trapped in a corner.

  “. . . Look, Stan, I’m just saying that someone doesn’t do what this guy did—the stones in the eye sockets, all those stabs and cut wounds—unless he either had a grudge, or he’s a real textbook sadist, and those kind don’t stop at one when they’ve had success. So either there’s someone in her past we need to find out about, or we’ve got an unrecognized serial killer out there. Nobody in Kogarah knows of any grudges there, not even any boyfriends. Checking the IPnet, we’ve got nothing either.” She finished her squeeze bottle and dropped it over her shoulder into the small rear seat.

  “So we look for what? Someone who followed her to the big city from out here, stalked her for two years, then slashed her? A stretch, Skouros.”

  “I know it’s a stretch. Damn it, was that the turnoff for Cootalee?”

  “She mixed on the streets, she fixed on the streets, she got sixed on the streets.”

  “Christ, Stan, will you quit talking like a cop? I hate that shit.”

  “How do you want me to talk?” He fell silent as she made what was doubtless an illegal u-turn across two lanes of empty freeway and a dirt center divider. “‘Calliope Skouros, you have captured my heart. I love you madly. Please let me take you away from all this homicide-related sordidness. . .’?”

  “Oh, that would work out well—a Greek lesbian and a Sino-Australian fairy-boy.”

  His bared his very good teeth in his sunniest smile. “I’ll have you know that I am exclusively, and perhaps one could even say enthusiastically, not a fairy-boy.”

  “Like that really improves the odds, Chan.” She shot him a sudden, worried look. “You were joking, weren’t you? You haven’t been carrying around some hopeless crush on your unobtainable partner, have you?”

  “Joking.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  She drove for a while in silence, waiting for Cootalee, advertised but not yet delivered. She fiddled with the car system, but after a while turned the music down again. “Okay, here’s an old one,” she said.

  “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe.

  “Adam and Eve fell in and drowned—which one of the three was saved?”

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Come on, Stanley, which one?”

  “Which one what?”

  “Which one of the three was saved?”

  “What are my choices again?”

  “You’re just being an asshole, aren’t you? Adam and Eve and Pinch Me.”

  “I would guess . . . Adam.”

  “No! Pinch Me!—ouch! God, you’re a shit, Chan.”

  “You just missed the Cootalee offramp.”

  “I think it’s only fair to tell you,” she said fifteen seconds later, as she laid tracks across another center divider, “that the engagement is definitely off.”

  “She’s gone?”

  The woman peering around the door of the trailer had the aggrieved look of someone unfairly accused. “I told you. She took off a month ago.”

  “Where?” Calliope looked at Stan Chan, who was inspecting the blocks placed underneath the trailer as though they were a feat of engineering rivaling the Pantheon. The woman, in turn, was watching Stan Chan with great distrust, as though at any moment he might snatch those same blocks of oil-scummed wood and run away with them.

  “How should I know? I didn’t know the bitch, but her goddamn dog kept me awake all the time. Good riddance.”

  “You see,” Stan said a few minutes later, as they motored slowly out of the trailer park. “Quality folk.”

  “I hope her employer has some idea,” Calliope said glumly. “Or you’re going to start looking awfully right about coming up here. For once in your life.”

  The address from the files, listed as Polly Merapanui’s stepmother’s place of employment, turned out to be a modest house on the far side of Cootalee. A huge gum tree stretched its branches over most of the yard. A pair of dark-skinned children were squirting each other with a hose in its patchy shade, shrieking, while a small brown dog barked and circled them in a paroxysm of joyful excitement.

  The door was opened by an Aboriginal woman wearing glasses and an apron. She wiped her hands dry on the apron as she examined Calliope’s identification, then said, “Come in. I’ll get my husband.”

  The man who emerged from the back room buttoning his shirt wore his curly black hair in a puffy, incongruously young style. A long, narrow beard made him look like something out of the Flemish school. “Hello, officers. I’m Reverend Dennis Bulurame. What can I do for you?”

  “We have this address listed as the place of employment for Lily Ponegarra, also known as Lily Merapanui. We wanted to talk to her.”

  “Ah. She’s not here, I’m afraid, but she did work for me. Well, for the church. Come into my study. You might just grab that chair and bring it with you.”

  Reverend Bulurame’s study was a smallish room which contained little more than his desk, an inexpensive wallscreen, and a number of posters advertising church events—sales, concerts, carnivals. “Lily cleaned for the church, and sometimes for us, too.”

  “You say it in the past tense,” Calliope pointed out.

  “Well, she’s gone. Left town. She met a man, is what happened.” He shook his head and offered a rueful smile. “There wasn’t much to tie her here, anyway. It’s not like the church job was making her rich.”

  “Do you know where she’s gone? The name of the man?”

  “Billy, Bobby, something like that. That’s all I know—probably not too helpful, am I right? And she didn’t say where she was going, just that the two of them were going away. She apologized for not giving two weeks’ notice, I’ll say that. Is she in trouble?”

  Stan Chan was examining the posters. He had to step to one side to let the reverend’s wife through the door with a tray of lemonade and three glasses. “No. We just wanted to ask her some questions about her daughter.”

  “Her . . . ?” It took a moment. “Polly? After all this time?” Bulurame shook his head. “Terrible. But I’d almost forgotten. Strange, that something so dreadful could slip into the background. Lily was devastated. That girl was all she had.”

  “Nobody ever caught him, did they?” said Mrs. Bulurame. “That devil-devil man who killed her.”

  “Have you made an arrest?” The reverend leaned forward. “Is that why you’re here? Preparing a case?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” Calliope took a drink of lemonade, which could have used more sugar. She unpuckered and asked him, “Did either of you know Polly?”

  “Not really. Saw her in the street or down at the store occasionally, but Lily hadn’t come to work for us then. In fact, it was partly because the murder hit her so badly that I decided the church could use some regular cleaning, if you know what I mean. Give her something to do. She wasn’t in good financial shape either. There are some people who did well out of the second Land Settlement Bill, Officer, but others like Lily who . . . well, they just let it slip through their fingers.” The clear implication was that the reverend and his wife were among those who had done the sensible thing and invested their Settlement money in a nice house and a home station to get them all the netfeeds.

  Calliope sighed inwardly. They were going to hear v
ery little of interest from this pleasant, self-satisfied man, she felt sure. She forced herself to work through the rest of the questions as Stan Chan sipped lemonade and acted as though he found nothing more fascinating in all the world than advertisements for bake sales. The results were as disheartening as she had suspected: the Bulurames knew nothing of any boyfriends the daughter might have had, and couldn’t even tell them if the stepmother had any friends still in town who would know something of the family’s history.

  “Lily didn’t go out much,” the reverend explained. “That’s why this man—well, I don’t think it was a spiritual relationship, if you know what I mean. She’s almost a little simple, Lily is, bless her—I worry that she’s easily led about.”

  Calliope thanked him for his time. He did not get up. As his wife was letting them out the door, and Stan was looking sour at the prospect of having to dodge past the hose-waving children, Calliope turned back.

  “You said ‘that devil-devil man,’ Mrs. Bulurame. What did you mean, exactly?”

  The reverend’s wife opened her brown eyes wide, as though Calliope had ventured a complete non sequitur—perhaps asked her if she liked to skydive naked. “Oh! Well, it’s . . . it’s just like that story, isn’t it?”

  “Story?”

  “I heard it when I was a little girl, from my grandmother. About the Woolagaroo. The devil-devil man with crocodile’s teeth. Someone made him, carved him out of wood, but he had stones for eyes. Just like what happened to poor little Polly.”

  An hour and a half later, all other leads dry as the backroad dust that had settled on Calliope’s department car, they drove back out of Cootalee.

  “Woolagaroo,” she said. “Do you know anything about Aboriginal folklore, Stan?”

  “Sure. In fact, it was an important part of my police academy training, Skouros. We spent hours every day reading about the Bunyip and How the Kangaroo Learned to Jump. If we had time after that, we sometimes squeezed in a little pistol-range work. Wasn’t it like that for you, too?”

  “Oh, shut up. I’ll take that as a no.” She put on the music, a modern piece by someone whose name she could never remember, downloaded off a late-night show. The music filled the car, sparse and bittersweet, like something played beside a Japanese ornamental pool. Stan Chan closed his eyes and reclined his seat.

  Woolagaroo. Calliope silently tasted the word. Devil-devil. Stones for its eyes, just like the old story, she said.

  It was nothing, of course. But it was a little better quality of nothing than anything else so far.

  “BUT since you are an attorney, Mr. Ramsey, surely you of all people can understand that we don’t give out our performers’ home lines or any other private information. That would be unheard of. Impossible.” Even as she shot him down, the public relations woman’s smile did not change. In fact, with the shimmering, animated Uncle Jingle poster covering the entire wall behind her, and the inset window featuring the live feed from the show her fixed professional grin was about the only thing on Catur Ramsey’s wallscreen that wasn’t moving.

  “I’m not asking for her home code Ms. Dreibach. But I have a matter of great importance to discuss with her, and she hasn’t answered a single one of my messages through any of the other channels.”

  “That is her right, isn’t it, Mr. Ramsey?” The smile lost a little of the rictus quality—she was perhaps a tiny bit concerned. “If this is a legal issue, shouldn’t you be contacting our legal department directly?”

  On the live feed, Uncle Jingle was being swallowed by a whale, or something that would certainly have been one if cetaceans were made of bricks. Ramsey had Watched enough of the Uncle Jingle show during the past week to know that this creature was called the Walling Whale. Uncle Jingle’s melodramatic terror was not entirely comfortable to watch. What did kids really think of this stuff, anyway? “Maybe I haven’t made myself clear,” he said, tearing his eye away from the miniaturized spectacle. “Olga Pirofsky has done nothing wrong. My clients have no complaint with either Uncle Jingle’s Jungle or the Obolos Entertainment Corporation. We simply want to talk to Ms. Pirofsky about something very important to my clients, and I’m asking for your help because she isn’t answering my messages.”

  Ms. Dreibach patted her helmet of glossy hair. She looked relieved, but not entirely convinced. “I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Ramsey. Obolos is the world leader in children’s entertainment, you know, and we don’t want to see unfounded rumors of some kind of legal problems all over the nets. But I don’t think I can do anything to help you. I can’t force one of our employees to take your call, after all.”

  “Look, is there anything you can think of? could someone hand-deliver a message for me? Assure Ms. Pirofsky that she might be able to help my clients with a very important matter, at no cost to herself except a few minutes for my phone call?”

  “Well . . .” The public relations woman had weathered her tiny storm of doubt, and now appeared to be thinking about potential tradeoffs down the line. “We’d hate for you to go away thinking that we don’t do our best here at “The Happiest Place on the Net.” I could give you the office line for the show’s director, I suppose. Perhaps she . . . oops, it’s a he this week!” She made a “silly-me” face that took ten points off her IQ and added almost that many years to her age. “Perhaps he could give your message to Olga. To Ms. Pirofsky.”

  “Thank you. That would be wonderful, Ms. Dreibach. I can’t tell you how helpful you’ve been.”

  She went still again as she consulted her directory. On the wall behind her, Uncle Jingle turned a cartwheel that never ended, spinning around and around and around.

  The call came in at a few minutes before ten o’clock, just as he was thinking he might actually be ready to go home. He sighed and sank back into his chair. “Answer.”

  The incoming line was voice-only. The voice itself sounded very, very tentative, with a faint trace of accent which he had never noticed on the Uncle Jingle show. “Hello? Is there someone there named . . . Ramsey?”

  “Decatur Ramsey, Ms. Pirofsky. That’s me. Thank you so much for returning my call. I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy . . .”

  “What do you want?”

  So much for formalities. The director had as much as said that she was an odd bird. “I’m an attorney—I hope they told you that. I’d like to ask you some questions on behalf of my clients.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I’m not at liberty to disclose that just now, I’m afraid.”

  “I have done nothing to anyone.”

  “No one’s saying you have, Ms. Pirofsky.” Jesus, he thought, this woman isn’t just regular odd—she sounds frightened. “Please, just listen to the questions. If you don’t want to answer them, all you have to do is tell me so. Don’t get me wrong—you will be doing my clients a huge favor if you do help. They are dealing with a very, very difficult problem, and they’re desperate.”

  “How can I help them? I don’t even know who these people are.”

  He took a breath, praying to the God of Depositions for patience. “Just let me ask you the first question. Are you familiar with something called Tandagore’s Syndrome?”

  There was a long silence. “Go on,” she said at last.

  “Go on?”

  “Let me hear all the questions, then I’ll decide if I’m going to answer you.”

  Catur Ramsey was half-convinced that he’d stumbled onto some kind of lunatic—the kind who believed that the government had a bunch of little green men stashed away somewhere, or that the intelligence agencies were beaming messages into their brains—but since his clients’ own case was pretty damn strange, there was at least a remote chance he might be onto something.

  “I can’t really ask you the rest of the questions unless I know the answer to the first,” he explained. “I suppose they would
go something like, ‘Do you know someone who has it? If not, why are you interested in this and other related medical conditions?’ See, Ms. Pirofsky? Like that. But I need to get that first answer.”

  There was an even longer silence this time. He began to think she had soundlessly cut the connection when she abruptly asked, in a voice little more than a whisper, “How . . . how did you know I was interested in the Tandagore sickness?”

  My God, he thought. I’ve scared this poor woman almost to death.

  “It’s no secret, ma’am—I mean, Ms. Pirofsky. Nothing shady. I’m researching these syndromes for my clients. I’ve been contacting lots of people who have asked the mednets for information, or have written articles, or even who have just had undiagnosed illnesses in their family that resemble the Tandagore profile. You’re not the only person I’ve contacted, by any means.” But you’re certainly one of the most interesting, he did not say aloud, since you work on the net itself, and directly with children. You’re also one of the most ridiculously damn difficult to get hold of.

  “I’ve been having these terrible headaches,” she said, then hurriedly added, “oh, God, you’re going to think I’m a crazy person. Or that I have a brain tumor or something. But I don’t. The doctors say I’m fine.” She fell silent for a moment. “You’re going to think I’m even crazier, but I can’t talk to you about this on the phone.” She laughed nervously. “Have you noticed how hardly anyone says ‘phone’ any more? I suppose that means I’m really getting old.”

  Ramsey struggled to sort through the clutter of ideas. “You don’t want to talk on . . . on the phone. Is that right?”

  “Maybe you could visit me?”

  “I’m not sure, Ms. Pirofsky. Where are you? Somewhere near Toronto, right?” He had found a newsnet snippet on her from five years back, a minor personality piece from a small net magazine.