St Kilda Blues Read online

  The two men drank icy lemon squash from cans and watched as the meal was prepared. Round flatbread was warmed on the grill next to the skewers of lamb then spread with a smear of white creamy paste. Berlin glanced over at Roberts.

  ‘It’s called tzatziki, Charlie. Cucumber and yoghurt and garlic and stuff. It’s nice.’

  The tzatziki was topped with shredded lettuce and diced tomato and onion and the cook layered the meat from the skewers across the top. Each souvlaki was sprinkled liberally with dried oregano and then rolled up in waxed paper. They came to the table on plastic plates. Berlin peeled the waxed paper back and took a bite. After a second mouthful he decided he would add Greek food to his list of good things to eat.

  Roberts finished off his souvlaki before Berlin was halfway done. He leaned back in his chair and let out a loud belch. Hanging around with a bunch of twenty-year-olds appeared to have also affected his manners.

  Berlin took a two-dollar note from his wallet. ‘Why don’t you pay for lunch and ring in to Russell Street and see if anything’s come up on the girl while I finish this off?’

  After paying at the counter, Roberts left the cafe and walked across to a public phone box at the kerb near the parked Triumph. Berlin followed him outside a minute or two later and waited at the kerb by the Triumph. He noticed the cook from the cafe was leaning in the doorway in front of the multicoloured vertical strips of vinyl meant to keep flies out. The man appeared to be waiting, looking up the street to his right. Berlin turned around and saw Lauren coming out of the stairway entrance to the GEAR offices.

  The long skirt and peasant blouse had been replaced by tight satin shorts, a ribbed woollen top with a high collar, a big soft cotton cap and a leather shoulder bag. She had a wide studded belt around her middle, a long chain with a crucifix round her neck and a brown suede jacket that came down to mid-thigh. Matching suede boots came up to just below her knee and between the bottom of her very short shorts and the top of her boots there was nothing but leg. She smiled when she saw Berlin and walked over to the kerb.

  He smiled back. ‘I think my daughter might say that was fab gear.’

  ‘Thanks. We can’t wear stuff like this around Lance, unfortunately, he gets a bit too grabby. I don’t think he understands it’s just fashion.’

  Berlin took a business card from inside his suit coat pocket. ‘If you ever did want to give modelling a shot I know someone who could have a job for you.’

  Her smile was polite but Berlin saw disappointment in her eyes. So he was just another sleazy middle-aged man. ‘My wife is a photographer and I think she’d like to work with you.’

  The girl glanced at the card and then back at Berlin. There was a different look in her eyes now.

  ‘You’re married to Rebecca Green? Really? I saw some of her nudes in a group exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery last year, she’s groovy.’

  ‘I think she’s groovy too. You should give her a call.’

  ‘Thanks, I will.’ She gave him the V-sign with her right hand. ‘Peace.’

  Berlin smiled. ‘Always. You too.’

  The cook from the cafe was still leaning against the door. He watched the girl walk off down the road and smiled. It seemed like the whole street had stopped to watch her go. Peace would be nice, Berlin decided, along with a world full of pretty girls who had nothing to fear.

  She stopped after about a dozen paces, paused for a moment, then turned and walked back to Berlin. For several seconds she appeared to be a little uncertain about her next move.

  ‘Mr Berlin, can I tell you something?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Earlier, after you left the office, Lance made a phone call.’

  Berlin waited.

  ‘The people who print GEAR are the ones who put out the Truth, and Lance knows a lot of the journalists there, if you can call them that.’

  Truth was a weekly tabloid newspaper specialising in political and sexual scandals and dramatic exposés. It also had racing pages, and the racing tips and news articles were often of about equal veracity.

  ‘Lance is a bit of a shit but he does have a nose for a story, I have to give him that. He asked for a bloke named Warren and gave him a rundown on your visit.’

  Berlin knew Warren would be Warren Sunderland – Wozza or Sundo to his friends and drinking mates and ‘that turd Sunderland’ to anyone who had been the subject of one of his hit pieces. Rebecca had known Sunderland when he was a cadet reporter on The Argus and had said he was a nasty piece of work, even back then. She had summed him up as someone who, given the choice between fact and supposition, would choose the third option of just making stuff up and throwing in a bit of illicit sex or oblique hints of incest or bestiality to liven things up.

  From time to time, however, Sunderland would break a real story on the front page of the Truth, usually something scandalous and often embarrassing to the police or opposition politicians. It was generally accepted he had contacts at the upper levels of government who found him useful. Having someone like Sunderland poking about when a millionaire with political connections had a child missing could complicate things.

  ‘Thanks, Lauren, that’s good to know. Call my wife soon, eh? You can do better than working for someone like Lance.’

  Bob Roberts had left the phone box and walked across the footpath to join them.

  ‘You need a lift anyplace?’ he asked.

  Was Roberts planning on putting her in the cramped space behind the front seats Berlin wondered, or would he be a gentleman and offer her the passenger seat?

  The girl smiled and shook her head. ‘No thank you, Sergeant Roberts, I’m cool. We just put next week’s edition to bed so I’ve got the afternoon off and it’s such a lovely day, I’m happy to walk.’

  She gave them the peace sign again and walked off. Someone leaned out of a passing tram, let out a long wolf whistle and yelled, ‘Wild thing!’

  The girl turned, smiled and waved towards the tram.

  Whoever you are, mate, she’d bloody eat you alive, Berlin said to himself. And Roberts too, for that matter.

  The cook from the Greek cafe looked towards the two detectives and shook his hands slowly, like he was trying to flick water off them. Berlin didn’t know the gesture but he could take a good guess at what it meant. Hemlines were rising to impossible levels all over the city and those very short shorts were starting to pop up all over the place. To the young girls wearing them it really was just the latest fashion and they seemed to have no idea of the effect it was having on a generation of men who had grown up when women’s fashion was meant to conceal and not reveal.

  Berlin coughed to get Roberts’ attention. He finally managed to get his eyes off Lauren’s figure as it receded in the distance.

  ‘Anything new?’

  Roberts shook his head. ‘They’ve got half the force out looking now but no one really has any idea of where to start. We wouldn’t even be where we are right now if you hadn’t noticed that picture on Gudrun’s corkboard or spotted that the Marquet girl disappeared from her home and not a discotheque like the others. That’s good police work. That’s the kind of thing that gets noticed.’

  Getting himself noticed was not something that was high on Berlin’s agenda, not right at the moment. ‘The girl is still missing, Bob, so we’re a hell of a long way from patting ourselves on the back. We ought to get moving.’

  Berlin climbed into the passenger seat of the Triumph, while Roberts had to let a bright red Arnott’s Biscuits delivery truck go past before he could open his door. He slid into his seat and the engine on the Triumph rumbled into life.

  ‘So where are we off to?’ Roberts said, handing Berlin his folder.

  Inside the folder Lauren’s note was on top. She had elegant flowing handwriting, and under the address where they could find Derek Jones she had drawn a flower and a smiling sun.

  ‘Looks like we’re going to South Melbourne, Bob, to number 100 Albert Road, to be exact.’

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p; Roberts glanced into his side mirror. He gunned the engine and pulled out into the traffic quickly so they wouldn’t have to wait for the tram coming up behind them.

  Berlin checked his watch. Gudrun Scheiner had been gone for around sixty hours now and according to the lovely Lauren’s note tucked in Bob Roberts’ folder, the next destination on their search for her was the Lair of the Visual Beast.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Albert Road formed the bottom boundary of Albert Park at the opposite end of the lake to where they had found young Melinda Marquet’s body. The northern side of Albert Road was lined with two-storey terrace houses in mostly good condition, given their vintage. Berlin knew many of them were home to small creative businesses – photographers, graphic designers, photo retouchers. It was close to St Kilda Road, where mansions from the 1880s gold rush days were now filling up with a new gold rush of small advertising and marketing companies or being demolished and replaced with glass-fronted high-rise buildings housing international ad agencies.

  One hundred Albert Road was a white-painted two-storey mansion. Roberts did a quick U-turn through a gap in the palm tree–lined centre divider. There was a parking spot a couple of doors down from their destination and he backed the sports car into it with a little more speed than Berlin thought was necessary. A group of young girls standing outside number 100 turned when they saw the sports car pull up. Berlin put their ages at between ten and twelve.

  He heard someone squeal, ‘It’s Jim Keays from the Masters Apprentices!’ and the girls sprinted towards the car in a pack, a couple waving autograph books. They stopped when they saw Berlin and Roberts. The girl who’d led the rush looked to be very disappointed. She glanced back over her shoulder and shouted, ‘It’s not anybody, Charlene, just a couple of old blokes.’

  Was this his day to disappoint pretty young girls? Berlin wondered.

  ‘Don’t be a bloody goose all your life, Annie.’

  The voice came from the direction of number 100. The girl speaking was older and slightly taller than the others. She was wearing a high school uniform with a very short skirt. The white shirt under her blazer was unbuttoned just enough to show off hints of a black bra. She was lounging on the brick gatepost holding a packet of smokes in her right hand. Her left hand was holding a Sony transistor radio in its leather case against her ear. She watched as Berlin and Roberts climbed out of the car and walked across the footpath. Berlin stopped in front of the group.

  ‘Shouldn’t you lot be in school right now?’

  A couple of the younger ones looked down at their toes.

  ‘We’re all off sick today.’ It was the tall girl again. She put the transistor radio down on top of the gatepost. ‘We’ve all got our periods.’

  Some of the older girls giggled while the rest seemed embarrassed.

  ‘Why are you lot doing hanging about here anyway?’ Berlin asked.

  The one called Annie, the disappointed one, answered him. ‘It’s a recording place, inside, I mean. All the famous singers come here to make records. Do you know Hans Paulson? He was here yesterday, and that other bloke – what was his name, Judy?’ She nudged the girl standing next to her.

  The girl answered in a loud whisper. ‘That was Johnny Young. You thought he was Johnny Farnham.’ She looked up at Berlin, squinting in the bright sunlight. ‘Do you know anybody famous, mister?’

  Berlin shook his head. All the famous people he knew were famous for all the wrong reasons.

  ‘Is there a photo studio around here someplace?’

  The tall girl in the school uniform was lighting a cigarette with a match. ‘Why, are you an international model or something?’

  Berlin walked up to the girl. She had that look of someone who was thirteen or fourteen going on thirty. Their eyes locked and she held his gaze. He took the cigarette from her mouth and dropped it on the ground.

  ‘It’s Charlene, right? Don’t you know that smoking stunts your growth, Charlene?’

  The girl still held his gaze. ‘You’re not my dad.’

  ‘That’s right, lucky me. But I am a policeman and I don’t think your headmistress would really appreciate having a truant dragged into her office by the police. Now, about that photo studio.’

  Charlene tilted her head back over her left shoulder. ‘Up the driveway, at the end, up the stairs.’ She smirked. ‘Be careful you don’t fall off.’

  Berlin and Roberts had just gone in through the gateway when she called after them.

  ‘Hey mister, can you do us a favour?’ She was leaning back now, elbows supporting her on the gatepost. She had her chest and hips thrust forward, legs spread apart, skirt hiked up higher. Her short white socks and scuffed black Clarks school shoes made the pose even more disturbing. The fingers of her right hand toyed at opening even more buttons on her shirt while the tip of her tongue played lazily across her upper lip. ‘Give Derek a great big kiss for me, will ya? And slip him some tongue.’

  Now Berlin was really glad he wasn’t her father. ‘Anyone who’s still here when we come out is getting a free ride home in a police car and their mum and dad are going to get an earful.’

  There was no noise coming from the recording studio building as the two men walked past. Berlin assumed it was most probably soundproofed. The building at the end of the driveway was also two storeys high, brick with a sloping roof of moss-covered tiles. The structure was shabby, run-down, bricks well weathered with gaps in the crumbling mortar. Wide wooden double doors facing the driveway on ground level were chained shut. Berlin guessed the place had been built as a stable or a coach house but that was a long time back. He walked around to the side of the building. There were half a dozen windows and the dirt and grime thickly coating the glass panes made it impossible to look inside.

  The hinges on the doors at the front were thick with rust as was the chain and padlock that kept the door secure. Weeds had grown up across the front of the door almost as high as the chain and padlock. Fading and flaking paint on the wood indicated the ground floor had once been the premises of Billabong Confectionery and the home of the ‘World Famous Sherbet Bomb’. The milk bar near Berlin’s house still had big jars labelled ‘Billabong Confectionery’ on its shelves, so the company must still have been in business – just not here and not for a long time.

  To the right of the locked doors the word ‘Studio’ was roughly painted on the bricks in white with an arrow pointing upwards. A wooden staircase led up to a landing, then up to a second landing and what had to be the studio entrance. There was a pile of broken timber stacked beside the driveway, including an old door. The place where the lock would have been was splintered and broken. Berlin could see evidence of white ant activity in the door and the timber frame.

  Roberts led the way up the stairs. The wooden banisters were unsteady, rotted in places, but the door on the top landing and the wooden frame around it was brand new. An also new steel security door, bolted into the brickwork, stood wide open. If the downstairs part of the building was silent, upstairs was jumping. Fleetwood Mac was belting out as they got to the studio entrance and over the music Berlin could hear the sound of someone yelling. A brass plate was screwed into the brick wall to the right of the doorway. The engraving on the plate said they were about to enter the Lair of the Visual Beast.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The reception area inside the front door had wrinkled silver mylar pasted over the bricks. A low bench seat was built around the right-hand corner and led to a large desk. The bench was covered with green vinyl cushions and a sleek black Labrador was asleep in the corner. A wide corridor led off the reception area towards the back of the building. Somewhere down the corridor the music was blasting, and there was yelling in what sounded like an American accent, interspersed with short, bright bursts of flash lighting.

  Berlin and Roberts walked across to the reception desk. Roberts smiled at the girl sitting behind it. She had her arms folded and was sucking on a ballpoint pen. About twenty, Berlin guessed, olive-skinne
d with long, dark, almost black hair. She reminded him of an American Indian, and her tan suede jacket with leather fringing hanging down from the sleeves reinforced the image. She smiled back at Roberts. She had nice teeth.

  ‘Yair, how can I help youse?’

  The voice totally dispelled the American Indian image. Berlin let Roberts do the talking.

  ‘Is the owner in? And I guess by that I mean the Visual Beast.’

  The girl tapped the ballpoint pen against her lower lip. ‘And to what might this be in relationship to?’

  ‘We’re actually here to have a chat with Mr Beast’s assistant, Derek Jones. We’re police.’

  The girl smiled again. ‘Derek been a naughty boy, has he?’

  Roberts winked at the girl. ‘Just some questions about a photograph he took, love, nothing serious.’

  The girl stood up at a desk and leaned forward. She was wearing a black silk shirt under the suede cowboy jacket. She was short and slender with remarkably big breasts. And a big voice to go with them.

  ‘Beast, a couple of blokes out here need to come back.’

  Berlin winced and took a step back at the power of her voice. The American voice that had been doing the shouting down the hallway responded at a similar volume.

  ‘Bailiffs, are they?’

  ‘Nah, it’s a couple of coppers.’

  ‘And about goddamn time. Send them back if the sight of some bare tits won’t get me into trouble with the vice squad.’

  The two men walked down the corridor towards the noise and the flashing lights. Berlin felt a give in the floorboards underfoot several times. The boards were old and scuffed and had dried out, shrinking back in places over the years. In several spots the gaps were so wide that you could see the building’s crossbeams underneath and on down into the blackness of the old lolly factory below.