Merryll Manning: Beachfront "Holiday"

“I happen to be living here! Four months!” I was aggressive. I didn’t bother to call him, "sir". I wanted to hide my shock.

    “Johnny-on-the-spot?” mocked the inspector.

    “Not me!” I shouted. “I’m renting six floors up – on the other side of this glorious condominium! No holiday beach views on a police sergeant’s pay!”

    “Based where?”

    “Miami.”

    “Miami, Florida?”

    “Where else?”

    “So what are you doing in Australia?”

    “I told you! I’m on holiday.”

    “Some holiday, son! Miami, Florida, to Beachfront, New South Wales? Four months? Even Paradise would out-stay its appeal in four months. So what’s the four-monthly attraction for you in Beachfront?”

    I forced myself to point to Susan’s body. She lay on the carpet, between her velvety sofa and rosewood coffee table. I masked my face, but there was no need. My finger had told the inspector all he wanted to know. In this dim light, Susan seemed like a yogi in a trance. Suddenly, she would sit up!

    “No blood!” remarked the inspector sharply. I hadn’t disguised my fear at all well, but I knelt down beside the body and then looked back at him, straight in the eye. He inclined his head with a movement so slight it was barely perceptible. But it was enough to indicate a ghastly “permission granted”.

    Susan lay on her back, staring calmly at the ceiling, her piqued face surprisingly relaxed, midnight eyes forever open. With typical neatness, she had wrapped her slim figure in a towelly bath-robe of light pink, a perfect match for her fair complexion and straw-blonde hair. Only yesterday, I’d tried to say hello to her in the foyer. She’d cut me dead. Bitch!

    Yesterday now figured far in the past. A light green scarf knotted cruelly into Susan’s throat. An early evening breeze, weeping in through open balcony doors, fanned the scarf’s edges across the dark Berber carpet, lending her shoulders a shivering illusion of movement. She was the leading player in a nightmarish game of hide-and-seek.

    “I repeat my first question: How do you come to be here now, Manning? How’d you come to knock on the door? Miss Ford invite you?”

    “Miles Garrani, the janitor, told me.”

    “There’s always at least one loose mouth. But maybe he did us both a favor.” The inspector knelt down beside me. “Beautiful girl. A shame!” he whispered. A soft light, filtering through the shade of the table lamp, transformed his spectacles into surreal, silver tear-drops. “Know her well?”

    “She’s the only reason I’m here.”

    He glanced at me sharply. “Six floors away? On the other side of the building? A fellow American? She give you the air?”

    I nodded bleakly as I stood up. “A dual citizen. Her dad was American, her mother Australian. Like me. But I’ve spent just about all my life in the States. Far as I know, Susan’s spent only the last six or seven years. In Atlantic City and Miami.”

    “Where’d you meet her?”

    “Miami.”

    “What was doing there? Holidaying?”

    “Working as a secretary. She’s actually much older than she looks. I’d put her age at twenty-eight.”