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‘So Bogey’s eighteen,’ Loulou said with glee, the wine making her yet more animated than usual, ‘and he’s driving a van full of bodies and a hearse, working for the Munsters’ bloody funeral home and getting tattooed by a bikie gang.
Awesome
,’ she said. ‘Makes
Six Feet Under
look like the
Brady Bunch.
’

Bogey gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘The family I worked for was a little strange, I have to admit. Some of those things stay with me,’ he said.

‘Yeah, like those tatts,’ Donkey quipped, laughing.

‘Yeah, like those.’

Mak had the feeling that Bogey had meant the dead people he had seen, not the bikie tattoos he’d been branded with. As Mak herself knew, seeing a dead body—
any
body—was an experience that stayed with you, but especially when you see someone who has had their life ended violently. Images like that stick with a person for life. They had driven Andy to drink, and Mak to insomnia at one point in her life. Everyone handles the trauma of being introduced to violent death differently. But Mak felt that the peacefully departed had a different impact to offer. She felt that it was healthy for a young person to see a dead body in the morgue or in a hospital as part of their learning about life. That was how it had happened to her: she had seen her
first dead body with her detective inspector father at the age of twelve. The impression she’d had, that the person lying on the slab was an empty shell and that some mysterious life force had very obviously moved on, had given her a belief in a spiritual realm that religion alone had not fully explained to her since. She’d seen that there was something there—something real and yet otherworldly.
Something.

There is no way to adequately describe death to someone who has never seen it.

‘Learning about death can teach us more about life,’ Mak whispered quietly for Bogey alone.

He turned to her and nodded. Their eyes connected again. It could be that they shared a common bond in death; maybe it was that which she had noticed in him earlier.

‘Anyway, I am a furniture-maker now,’ Bogey said, for the moment wrapping up his tales of life as a teenage taxidriver for the departed.

‘Yeah, he’s boring now,’ Donkey said, and downed his glass of wine.

Mak didn’t think he was boring at all, though. She found her eyes drifting down to his lips again, to that plump cupid’s bow, before she pulled herself back.

No, Mak. You don’t want to start looking at him like that.

Warwick O’Connor.

Luther recognised the name. When he’d last heard of him, Warwick was pushing drugs to kids at the preppy schools on Sydney’s north shore. It seemed his career had not evolved all that far since then. Luther found the house Warwick shared with his wife, exactly where his instructions indicated. According to his information, Warwick had no children and no known pets. That meant no barking dogs.

Good.

Luther Hand sat outside the house of Warwick O’Connor, watching and making plans. It was late, and Warwick’s wife, Madeline, was home. He saw her in her pink bathrobe as she pulled down the curtains and settled in for the evening, cigarette dangling from her lips. Warwick wouldn’t be going out; they were packing it in for the night.

The woman would die only if absolutely necessary.

Luther could pick the lock on the front door, make his way up the stairs and be in the
bedroom in minutes. The main target would then be eliminated. But he resisted. He would adhere to the plan. If he went in now he would need to kill them both, rough up the house to make it look like a botched robbery and get out again. The police would take somewhat more interest in a husband-and-wife dual homicide. There were better ways to eliminate someone like Warwick, and Luther guessed that that was why his client wanted him to wait until Warwick was outside his home. A person like Warwick had crossed so many people that the list of suspects with sufficient motive would be endless. As long as it looked messy, it would be assumed that a rival thug committed his murder.

Your days are numbered, my colleague.

Luther packed up his things and prepared to make his way to Surry Hills.

It was nearly time to execute his first hit.

By eleven Mak was preparing to make her exit from the party at Drayson and Maroon’s Elwood apartment. She stood and began collecting the plates to take to the kitchen.

‘Thanks for dinner. It was lovely.’

‘You’re a guest here. You don’t have to do that,’ Maroon said of Mak’s plate collecting.

Mak waved the comment away and kept stacking dishes. She moved around to the other side of the table, and when she took Donkey’s dirty plate she swore he looked straight down her top. ‘So you model, right?’ he said, sounding like he had downed one too many. After dinner he had moved onto a steady diet of beer. ‘You were a supermodel, right?’ he stated more than asked.

‘Supermodel? Noooo, I wouldn’t say that,’ Mak responded. ‘I modelled for a number of years. It paid me through uni, that’s all. I don’t really do it any more, though.’

Mak took the stack of plates into the kitchen, happy to disengage.

‘You look like you could still model,’ Donkey
called after her as she went. She could feel his eyes wander over her backside.
Nice.

When she returned he had not dropped the subject. ‘You could still model,’ he repeated, slurring his words slightly.

‘Thanks, but I’m much happier in my new career.’
Not that I’m practising yet, exactly.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘the fashion industry seems rather partial to the sixteen-year-old couture-waif look this particular decade. I’ll be thirty soon. That is ancient in modelling years, you see. It works a bit like dog years.’

There were a couple of laughs at the table.

Bogey stood and collected the napkins. When he passed her he said, ‘You are a beautiful woman and you will always look precisely the right age for who you are.’ He said the words in a low voice, meant only for her.

Mak grinned, but she didn’t know how to respond. Was he trying to flatter her? Because if he was, it was working. She felt a slight blush coming on.

‘Wow! You are 250 in dog years!’ Donkey blurted insensitively, breaking Mak’s train of thought.

She smiled despite him. ‘You mean 210, if I catch your drift,’ she retorted. ‘But no. I think that if I was to put it in numbers, models are actually closer to one-and-a-half years for every human year, not seven. Yes. I think that’s probably it,’ she decided. ‘A fifteen-year-old model
presents like a twenty-two-year-old. A twenty-year-old is a bit like a thirty-year-old, and so on.’

Maroon frowned. ‘That’s a scary theory.’

‘Not quite scientific,’ Mak said, ‘but I think it might have merit.’

‘That’s it. I hate fashion magazines,’ Maroon said bitterly. ‘They are a man’s conspiracy to keep women preoccupied with their appearance so that they can’t do anything more significant that might upset the status quo.’

‘That’s a good theory to a point, but everything I’ve seen tells me that women fuel fashion magazines, not men,’ Mak challenged. ‘Most men would rather look at any sexy woman than the androgenous teens modelling expensive couture in
Vogue.
They like pin-up curves or toned athleticism, neither of which particularly feature in fashion mags. It’s not about men. If it were, the models in men’s and women’s magazines would be the same shape. In my experience, most guys hardly care what a woman is dressed in or if she wears her hair in the latest style, so long as she is somewhat sexually attractive and, on a subconscious level, fertile-looking to them. Women tend to be much harder on other women than men are. There is a whole language of body shape, clothing styles and attitude for women.’

‘That totally sucks. We should be able to be ourselves.’

‘And no one is stopping us. When I see a fourteen-year-old in a skin-care ad I find it
farcical, not threatening. But I do wish sometimes that those magazines would allow their models to age. Look at Christie Brinkley—she’s gorgeous. And there must be lesser-known women out there who could be modelling into their forties, fifties and onwards, too.’

‘A lot of women have more character with age,’ Bogey said, putting in his two cents’ worth as he returned to the table to pick up the last of the cutlery.

What would Andy’s response be in a similar situation? He would probably stay out of it, knowing that emotions ran high among women when it came to body image. But Mak smiled at Bogey’s well-chosen comment, feeling she had found a co-conspirator at the table in this Elvis man who seemed far too sensitive to be a friend of a guy named Donkey.

Maroon still had some anger to vent. ‘Yeah, how come men are allowed to grow old and have “character”, when a woman just gets “wrinkles”?’

Donkey looked bored. ‘Just as long as they’re hot, go naked,’ he said.

Mak was no longer in the spirit of their little debate. She had other things on her mind.

Speaking of body images…

‘Hey, guys, sorry to change the subject, but does anyone know where Lonsdale Street is?’

‘Lonsdale Street? Sure,’ Maroon answered. ‘That’s where all the barristers and strip clubs are.
It’s about fifteen minutes by car. Is that where your hotel is?’

Strip clubs and barristers…an interesting mix.

‘No, it’s just a work thing.’

‘Mak’s a private eye,’ Loulou said proudly, making Mak sound like she should be wearing a fedora and smoking a cigarette. ‘Are you on trial?’

Mak smiled and shook her head. ‘Nah. I’m not on trial.’
Not this time.

She had been briefed in her investigators course on how to handle giving evidence in the witness box if the situation came up. Mak could probably have used some of those pointers when she’d taken the witness box in the Stiletto Murder trial. Perhaps that would have kept the tears from rolling down her cheeks while she was asked to recall every last gruesome detail of her abduction and attack. Most likely she wouldn’t need to get back in a witness box again until she was practising in psychology. That was, unless she got herself mixed up in something really messy with her investigation work.

‘I’m sorry to eat and run, but I do have to get going.’ Mak stood up. ‘It was really nice to meet you all. Thanks for dinner.’

‘Oh, sweetie! Stay for another drink!’ Loulou cried, clearly not wanting to let her friend go.

‘I have to go, really. It’s a school night for me. I have a big day ahead tomorrow.’

‘You have to stay over here next time, though,
okay? Promise me?’ Loulou urged. ‘We have a guest bedroom and it would be all yours.
Pleeeease?
’

Mak was amazed at how quickly Drayson and Loulou had shacked up together, and how quickly her friend was using the word ‘we’—‘
We
have a guest bedroom’. Loulou’s kamikaze relationship style was probably not the most successful, but still, Mak had to admire her openness. It took Mak much longer to trust anyone. Maybe it took her too long.

‘Okay,’ Mak agreed with some reluctance. ‘Next time I promise I’ll stay. But now I have to go.’

‘I have to head home, too,’ came a voice. It was Bogey. He had put on his leather jacket, having already cleaned up the kitchen while Loulou, Drayson and Maroon were busy drinking. He didn’t even live there and he cooked and cleaned the place.
Wow.
‘I have a project that needs delivering in two days,’ he explained, grabbing a big set of keys off the hall table. ‘I haven’t even begun the staining yet.’

‘Ohhh, now everyone is leaving!’ Loulou cried, obviously upset that the evening was coming to an end so soon.

‘I’m staying,’ Donkey muttered. ‘You’ve got more beer, right?’

Bogey and Mak descended the five flights of stairs in uncomfortable silence.

‘Would you like a lift?’ he asked as they reached street-level.

Oh boy.

Mak thought it might be safer, temptation-wise, to say no, but she didn’t have a car—and, in truth, she wanted to find out more about him.

‘Yeah. That would be great,’ she answered, not looking in his direction. ‘Is Lonsdale Street too far out of your way?’

‘No problem at all.’

If she had been single she would not have been able to resist asking him for a drink somewhere before she went off to work. But she was not single: she was what the Australian Immigration Department referred to as a ‘de facto spouse’. A spouse of any description was someone who was far from unattached and, furthermore, she was attached to a high-ranking homicide detective. Her live-in boyfriend had barely left the country.

A ride made sense, though.

When they reached the open street she saw that Bogey drove an immaculately restored late-sixties blue convertible Mustang. Not quite the enormous Cadillac she’d imagined, but close enough. And it was awfully close in body shape and appearance to Zhora, her beloved turquoise 1967 Dodge Dart Swinger, which she had reluctantly sold when she’d moved from Canada
to Australia. With the Australian roads geared to driving on the opposite side, it would have been an unnecessarily expensive and complicated proposition to ship it down and mutilate it for local driving.
Ah, Zhora.
Mak missed her. She had named her car after the ill-fated snake-carrying replicant in
Blade Runner.
She named all her vehicles. Her bike was
Theroux.

‘I’m sorry for boring you with those stories,’ Bogey said. ‘I don’t know why they made me tell you all that stuff.’

‘I found it interesting. Really. I’ve never met a coffin maker before.’

‘And I’ve never met a PI.’

Mak smiled as he opened the passenger-side door for her. She got in and buckled up, the seat making a soft hiss under her weight. The seats were leather—and beautifully kept—not like her Zhora, whose vinyl bucket seats had been in terrible shape from the day she bought her. Mak had never got around to fixing her up properly. But this man clearly loved his car, and was happy to sink time and money into restoring it.

‘Where to on Lonsdale Street?’ he asked as he started the engine. The car purred.

Mak told him the address and he looked puzzled.

‘I didn’t know there was a hotel around there,’ he said.

‘There isn’t.’