St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(72)
As he turned to leave, the tip of his shoe caught a glass bottle resting against the wall and it rolled over. It didn’t break and Berlin picked it up. A milk bottle. There were two more on the floor, all washed clean. He put the bottle back with the others. Derek Jones might live in squalor but at least he washed his milk bottles before putting them out for collection.
There was silence when he walked back into the living room. Roberts glanced over at him and shook his head. He stood up.
‘We’re not done with you, Derek, you little shit. We’ll be back, you can count on that.’
Derek Jones looked exhausted. Berlin’s grandfather had once told him anyone could beat a confession out of a suspect but it took a real expert to do it without laying on a finger.
Berlin did one last sweep of the living room with his eyes. The bamboo blind over the window was resting on two nails hammered into the white-painted window frame. Berlin noticed that the top of the window frame was pitted with tiny holes. Perhaps a blanket or curtain had been pinned up there before the blind was put in. The record player on top of the trunk under the window was a Pye, the same brand Sarah had bought herself. There were brown stains on the floor matting by the trunk. God, this bloke really was a pig.
As they walked back to the car a skinny teenager in a bright floral mini dress and strappy sandals crossed the road to their side. The girl propositioned Roberts with the classic query, ‘You wanna go, mate?’
Roberts shook his head slowly in exasperation. ‘Jesus, love, how long have you been on the game? We’re police, how can you not bloody see that?’
The girl bit the corner of her lip. Berlin noticed her face was tanned as were her arms and legs. ‘Sorry, this is my first day, I didn’t know. I’ve just hitchhiked down from the country and I’m really hungry.’
Berlin almost smiled at the total lack of guile in the response. She might have been sixteen but maybe not. Not any older, that was for certain. She had bright eyes and clear skin and clean hair and Berlin knew that wouldn’t last. You could tell by the clothes that she was from the country, all right. Give it twenty-four hours and she’d have a pimp and hot pants and probably a black eye but that wouldn’t worry the punters; she was young and fresh and that was all that mattered. That was the truth and it left a sour taste in Berlin’s mouth that he knew it.
He took a dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘You can get a pie down round the corner there.’ He found another twenty cents. ‘You might want sauce. And watch yourself, eh? There are some not very nice people out there.’
The girl almost snatched the coin from his fingers. ‘Thanks mister, but I can look after myself. I might be from the bush but I’m not as green as I’m cabbagy looking.’
She turned and scurried away and Berlin watched her go. Before she reached the corner it looked like she was skipping. Jesus.
Roberts shook his head. ‘Getting to be a soft touch in your old age, Charlie?’
Berlin didn’t want to answer, so he changed the subject. ‘I don’t really know if our Derek did the missing girls, Bob, but he’s crossed paths with Gudrun on at least two occasions we know of and he’s definitely hiding something.’
‘I think you’re right; the little shit has something going on. You gave him quite a serve about those pictures of his, though, softened him up nicely. You really know about that stuff, the photography?’
‘Just things I’ve heard Rebecca saying, don’t know what most of it really means but it looks like neither did he.’
Roberts stopped the car on the corner of Princes Street, watching for a gap in the traffic. Berlin looked down the roadway, down towards the park and the lake. Half the coppers in town were looking for Gudrun Scheiner and they had just walked away from a teenaged girl who’d almost certainly be missing, dead or a junkie before six months had passed. Was there a dad in some country town just as frantic as Gerhardt Scheiner right now?
Berlin turned around, looking back along Burnett Street towards the place where the girl had been standing. There was no sign of her, just the empty street with its parked cars, dirty gutters and gatherings of rusting, battered and overflowing galvanised-iron rubbish bins waiting to be emptied by the local garbos. Fuck it was grim. Berlin’s thoughts went back to another time and another bleak roadway and another girl.
‘I will be your witness.’
‘What?’
Berlin glanced at Roberts.
‘I thought you said something Charlie. Something about a witness?’
‘Just thinking out loud, Bob, thinking about something else’
‘Too bad, I reckon we could really use a witness right about now.’
Berlin knew that was true.
Roberts gunned the engine and shot out into a gap in the traffic, ignoring the angry horn blasts from the cars on his right.
THIRTY-FOUR
Roberts dropped Berlin off on Collins Street outside Rebecca’s studio. Berlin planned on going through the box of proof sheets of Derek Jones’s GEAR magazine photographs again and Rebecca had the right kind of magnifying glasses for the tiny images. He knew it was a long shot but he was running out of ideas.
Roberts took off as soon as Berlin lifted the file box out of the Triumph’s boot and slammed it shut. The sports car had just turned the corner on to Spring Street and disappeared from view when the two men approached Berlin, the taller one offering to give him a hand with the box. It would be nice and safe in the boot of their car while they had a little chat, he explained. Berlin asked the shorter of the pair for some identification. The taller man he had already recognised from outside the pub opposite the record shop. Given that the judicial inquiry would be operating for a limited amount of time their identity documents were simply names and ranks typed on inquiry letterhead.