St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(57)
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.