"Me?"
Angie returned with coffee and vodka just as Kit took up banging her forehead on the bar.
"Jesus Jonno, what did you do to her?"
"Nothing. She's unbalanced, you know that."
"Angie, go press the fire alarm," Kit urged. "We need to clear the bar of these pesky cops, so you and I can drag that naked dead dude out into the middle of the main road."
"Why?"
"So none of us have to deal with Chucky Scumbag."
"And that would be... who, why?" Angie asked with a shrug.
"You don't want to know." Kit was emphatic.
"I do if I'm going to have to, Katy darling."
Kit straightened up and peered through the doorway into the dance room, or 'The Red' as it was commonly known, where the forensic pathologist was crouching and, for some reason, pulling faces at the corpse. The Doc snapped her fingers to get the police photographer to pay attention to her and not DSC Martin and a male detective, who were the only other people in that area of the crime scene. The Terpsichore seemed to be safely Parker-free - for now.
"What gives, Marek? He's got two crew in here, four outside and even you're here. So where's Chucky?"
"Good question," Marek noted. "He should've driven over with Crosby and Martin, but when she rang him about the job he said he was too far out to be picked up."
"Chucky Parker couldn't be far out if his life depended on it," Kit stated. "Unless he's on drugs now, which would only surprise me for a day." She did another visual sweep of the bar and turned to Angie. "You remember the last year I was on the job, I got caught up in that little hoo-ha over cops who were on the take over burglaries and insurance claims?"
Angie squinted. "You mean that horrible time when you had to testify against other officers? God Katy, that was serious shit not a little hoo-ha."
"Yeah, well two of those cops were completely innocent and proven so. But they'd been loaded up, along with three seriously-bent detectives, in order to make it look like the corruption went way further than it did."
"And that has what relevance to the dead dude in my disco?"
"None at all. But the man who is now Senior Sergeant Graham Charles Parker, and who will be heading the investigation into your dead dude, was then the Internal Affairs whip-dick who set-up a couple of extra cops to ensure his case against Jackson, Boxer, and Doghouse got enough attention to get him noticed. The bastard should not be around to tell the tale."
"Which of course he doesn't," Marek added. "Tell the tale, I mean. If he did, he'd have to admit to an impropriety that he denied at the time."
"Impropriety!" Kit snorted. "On top of all that Parker's a sexist bully-boy."
"Given her ex-cop status," Angie said, "it's okay that Katy is ranting about this guy, Jonno, but should you be verifying her gossip? What if your colleague has to interrogate me?"
Marek gazed at the ceiling for a moment, and then gave a wicked smile. "I trust your discretion, Angie. Also, given the circs, I figure you need to know where Charlie Parker is coming from. Besides, the Princess of Rant sometimes needs clarification."
"True," Angie said, acknowledging Kit's green-eyed who me? "So, how did this cop get away with all that stuff?"
"Coz back then," Kit sneered, "it was seldom a case of what you knew, but whose arse you were on intimate terms with. It certainly had zilch to do with how good, or bad, you were."
"As several coppers discovered the hard way," Marek stated.
"Chucky also had brownie points with..." Kit shrugged, "someone of the right-ranked brass, who conceded on his behalf that the end justified his completely despicable means. So what if a few reputations got sullied, the force managed to shed some bad-bad boys."
"But surely if you have a bent cop on..." Angie began.
"I don't have one," Marek insisted. "And besides Charlie's not bent, at least not that way; or your way either for that matter."
"Chucky is one of those dubious good guys," Kit explained. "A card-carrying member of the moral high-ground brigade who believes, absolutely, that he is always right, that his actions are always warranted and that his methods are logically defensible. His is a small mind cloaked in a mantle of righteousness that conceals a twisted pile of his own scary shit."
"What? Like a TV evangelist with boy scouts in his basement?" Angie suggested.
"Yeah, except Chucky's not religious; or a pervert. He's more your redneck, Guns-R-Us, rabidly ambitious, chauvinistic, bast..."
"Jeez you exaggerate, Kitty," Marek laughed. "He's an arsehole, but he's not that bad."
"Bite your tongue, Jonno. He is the Antichrist's podiatrist. And what's more, it was barely three weeks ago that you asked me why I hadn't shot him on behalf of the entire force before I left it to become a private citizen."
"Yeah, but..."
"What I'd like to know," Angie said, through clenched teeth, "is how you can sit around joking about irrelevancies, when there's a dead murder victim in my establishment?"
"A dead murder victim no less," Kit smiled.
"Kit tells me it's called gallows humour," Marek explained.
"No it isn't, Jonno," Kit contradicted. "What we are engaged in here is a diversionary tactic; we're trying to pretend there isn't a dead person within cooee of our irrelevant banter. Gallows humour is when you make amusing and tasteless remarks about the body itself, or the crime scene, in order to laugh loudly in the face of death so you don't scream or puke or go completely mental.
"Example. Under more blokey circumstances you might say: 'Wow, the first naked guy to get into Angie's infamous lesbian nightclub' - which in the yobbo mind illogically translates as hetero-male heaven - 'and the poor bastard couldn't get it up if his life depended on it'."
"I'd never say that," Marek objected. "Given that he's lying over a roasting pan posed like Vinnie Barbarino in Saturday Night Fever, I'm sure I could have come up with something far less blokey and much more clever."
"You're still doing it," Angie marvelled.
"Yeah," Kit nodded, "Marek always mixes his characters and movies."
"No, you're still bantering."
"Ah," Marek said sagely, or tried to. "This is because: a) O'Malley really doesn't need to see any more dead people; b) as this will not be my investigation, I can honestly say I'm here because I've always wanted to see inside Angie's infamous bar; and c) between us, Kitty and I are trying to keep your mind off your dead murder victim."
"It's not working," Angie stated. "And he's not mine."
"Why don't you ask her some important questions then, Marek," Kit suggested.
"Um, I don't want to know anything? Marek replied questioningly, because either he was aware it wasn't a good response for a homicide cop, or he was suddenly distracted.
Kit followed his line of sight and glanced over her shoulder at Angie's only other patrons, sitting in the booth furthest from the crime scene. Nothing strange there, so she turned back to Marek with a palms-up shrug. "But you'll be a better judge of the facts than Chu..."
"Parker will do the right thing," Marek interjected. "I'll make sure of that. But I can't take over. I would, however, like to know who they are, especially the one with the tape recorder."
Kit swivelled around on her stool and took inventory of the group who were sitting where they'd been told to sit and wait. When Angie had discovered the uninvited naked corpse in her disco, and had rung her friend the Private Investigator at home in an understandable panic three hours before, Kit had told her to make sure that anyone who was there stayed, and to let