Kit, who'd offered to drop Sal and Booty in Gertrude Street on her way home, pulled her car in behind a parked courier van to let them out - with silent relief. Usually intrigued by other people's response to unrelated to them real-life murder, Kit wished she'd forgone the previous ten minutes with the blow-by-blow repeat-queen of Fitzroy.
While Kit fully understood the macabre fascination embodied in finding a body, and knew it would give everyone involved at Angie's something to talk about for a long time, she was glad she recognised more of herself in Sal's reaction to the experience. Neither of them were revelling in the gruesome attention to detail that came with Booty's fifth recounting of their shared close encounter of the end kind.
But, unusual as it was, Kit wasn't going to hazard a guess as to why Sal was not as enthralled as Booty, because even her own lack of thrall had nothing to do with the latter's 'been there, done that, tick it off' diagnosis. Kit simply didn't dwell on it because she knew it wasn't good for her; but Sal only knew why Sal wasn't beside herself with interest.
Actually, Kit didn't know either woman well enough to be sure how honest their reactions were. Sal Armstrong might in truth be seething with curiosity but too polite to show it, or too worried about how she might come across; while Mary 'Booty' Jones could be in such a state of shock that all she could do was babble.
One thing Sal and Booty did have in common was that neither had arrived at the moment when the body became a person. The realisation that 'it' had been a 'him', with a life, was still to come; although, as they waved goodbye, Kit realised there was a chance that for them the two things might never connect. The dead guy they'd found might forever remain 'the body' - to keep it inanimate and away from them, to keep violent death at bay.
To Kit however, Gerry Anders - the body and the man - had to be one, and more than just a homicide victim. She could pretend, all she liked, to laugh Death right in his ugly old kisser, but if she suddenly found herself inured to the death of him, of Anders, then she'd have to question not only her reality but her purpose. Recognising the dead was the only way she could fight the consequences of the bad things in the world that kept nudging against her place in it.
Jeez, O'Malley! What's with the psychobabble? she wondered, turning left into Nicholson. Get a grip. You know that as far as you're concerned, shit just happens; and that from now on Sal and Booty's dinner-table yarns will begin 'we found him, you know, that dead gangster'.
Yeah, she argued. But that will only apply to the other Gerry Anders, the one they're about to discover through the media when the newspapers and TV run this story into a marathon.
Kit shuddered. Oh, and are they going to have a rave with this. It'll be the biggest beat-up of the year featuring intimate, gory, scandalous details of the late Gerry Anders, nephew of Queenie Riley, whose naked body - his not hers - was found in North Fitzroy's soon-to-be ultra-notorious lesbian vortex of sex, bloody rituals and other iniquitous goings-on.
And the rumours... Rife, rife, bloody-rife will be the speculation about gay-Melbourne's connection with every crook and criminal activity in town; while the triple-merde cherry at the top of every story will be the 'exposure' of the city's secret lesbian vampire cult.
"Think I'll go to New Zealand until this blows over," Kit told her dashboard, then remembered a nice distracting something she'd offered to do for Del. Instead of making a homeward left turn into the broad expanse of Victoria Parade, she continued straight on into the city centre grid, then hooked right into Lonsdale Street in an attempt to get near enough to Swanston Street for a quick walk to Slowglass Books.
This was not a simple process. It should have been simple, but it wasn't because there was never a parking space where needed in the city, all traffic everywhere was being diverted around and around the CBD for no reason whatsoever, and four-thirty in the arvo was an idiotic time to drive in Melbourne.
After circling several blocks herself, Kit finally gave up and parked at the north end of Swanston and jumped on a tram that took her back down past the green-domed State Library. Moments later she vented justifiable getting-off-a-tram rage towards the taxi-bastard who didn't think the huge green vehicle's STOP indicator applied to him and, as a consequence, scared her f/f-hormone into wailing fright by screeching to a halt one inch from her knees.
After regrouping - and vaguely wondering how, given there was only one of her - Kit ducked into the sf-fantasy shop as fast as humanly possible. She took just enough time to pick up the fifth novel in a trilogy for Del, but not nearly enough to be seduced into spending all her money on everything they had, that she didn't yet, but really wanted.
Kit took a tram back to her car and then swore at the traffic all the way home to Richmond; in between singing along badly to Roy, then Dusty, then the Pretenders, then the Doors - no, yuk, change the station. She finally turned off Swan and into her side street, pressed the button on her new garage door opener and felt ridiculously pleased at the perfectly timed door-up car-in manoeuvre. Parking at the bottom of the outside stairs to her apartment she noted, for the thirteenth time since its installation, that the thing her remote control opened was a misnomer incarnate, because there was no actual garage - just a door.
Small things and small minds, O'Malley! she observed, and then noticed the time.
"Bloody hell! Twenty minutes to drive 4.2 kilometres! What a serious waste of a lot of important things like...like time, oxygen, brain cells, petrol, life, Wednesday."
No, that was yesterday, O'Malley, she thought. Today be Thursday.
Kit glared at the challenge offered by the back stairs to her first-floor habitat and then, for the usual vertiginous reasons, turned her back on them in defeat. She had no choice. It would be so uncool for a grown woman, a professional woman, a private investigator no less, to freeze half-way up or down those evil planks, convinced that she could fall through - not off - but down through the gaps in the stairs.
That's so illogical and, like, impossible, she reminded herself. Again.
Katherine Frances O'Malley escorted herself out into the street, closed her not-garage door behind her, then shook her head as she was forced to concede: Okay, one person can regroup.
And, having done so, she strolled into Swan Street then stomped in through the front door of Aurora Press and just stood there, arms akimbo, as if she had a dramatic announcement.
"Whoa," remarked the ever-observant Brigit. "A trés-serious individual has arrived."
"Ah," Del mused, "but will this be a typical O'Malley gross-exaggeration of a minor event, or is the sky really falling in?"
"You have no idea, Del Fielding," Kit exclaimed, holding up her friend's book, "how close I came to cactus, by running this wee errand for you. I was an inch and a nanosecond away from being taxied-flat in Swanston Street."
"Oh darling, I'm sorry," Del mocked. "Do you have bruises?"
"No," Kit grinned. "But I do have the lowdown on a late-breaking scandal, ah, in exchange for a cuppa and one of those cakes I see over there."
Del's partner in love and business leapt to her feet with such agility that Kit imagined her ample body was made entirely of flummery. Brigie's rep as a gossip junkie meant that, given the right incentive, she was capable of motion lighter-than-air and faster-than-light.
"Speak," Brigit demanded, placing a mug of coffee and a pastry on a plate on the corner of Del's desk in the same moment that Kit took a seat in the arm chair next to it.
Kit obliged. "I have spent most of the afternoon at Angie's overseeing the consequences of our dear friend finding a naked, blood-drained bloke and ex-crook posed in a huge tray like," she flung her right arm up to demonstrate, "like ET on a feverish Saturday night."
Del was shaking her head to indicate something like...
"What, who? Where did she find what?"
...ah, confusion.
"Angie