Free Darlinghurst Road by T.C. Doust Page B

then kicked opened the door. As Max snapped the picture, the
wife ran past him screaming, pulled a knife out of her purse and
stabbed the other woman to death. The police couldn't figure out if
she actually intended to murder the girlfriend or whether it was
the sight of the naked woman in bed with her husband that sent her
off so, they gave her the benefit of the doubt and charged her with
manslaughter instead of murder. Max nearly lost his Detective
License and came close to being arrested himself. After that, he
never made the same mistake again. It cost one woman everything and
destroyed the life of another but still, it was a terrible mistake
that came from inexperience and one to be learned from. We all make
errors in judgment from time to time and Max had long ago accepted
that but I could tell from the way that his eyes glazed a little
when he told me the story that it still haunted him forty something
years later.
     
    Sophie
    Sophie once worked in an office but her real
passion was art and it was something that she surrounded herself
with. A visit to her small apartment was like a trip to an art
gallery; colorful books everywhere, reproductions of famous
paintings on the wall, art materials and her own work scattered
throughout the apartment. The office job was enough to support her
art habit but it certainly wasn't enough to provide for her other,
more secret habit of gambling. Sophie spent a lot of time in the
Sydney Casino and most of that time was spent on a slot machine
chasing her losses. The gambling ate away her life, Sophie needed
another source of income and she turned to prostitution.
    As hookers go, Sophie was unusual. She was
educated, had no interest in drugs and started in the life very
late. Most girls start selling their body in their teens, Sophie
was in her late twenties before she turned her first trick. She
worked as an escort for a few years then somehow, managed to kick
the gambling demon off her back and started her own agency.
    Within months, the Kings Cross protection
boys came knocking on her door with their hand out but she wanted
no part of the criminal side. Sophie took that as her cue to leave
The Cross and all its dramas, relocating to the relative peace of
the suburbs, where she could operate in a more up-market
setting.
    The last time that I saw her, she was still
operating her escort agency and doing very nicely. Sophie lives
very close to a famous Sydney beach, in a beautiful apartment
surrounded by her art. It was all she ever wanted.
     
    Tonia
    Americans have been drinking coffee with
their donuts forever but Australia really didn't discover coffee
until the nineties. I'm sure that will spark a debate but, it's
true. Let me clarify that statement, coffee has been in Australian
homes and probably the morning beverage of choice for a half dozen
generations but it was almost always the instant variety. A coffee
maker can be purchased at any chain store in America for peanuts,
up until the last few generations, most Australians wouldn't know
how to work one, let alone where to buy the contraption.
    When I first started working around The
Cross, coffee, when you could find it, sat around in stale pots and
was sold mainly as a hangover remedy on Saturday mornings. In the
city itself, it wasn't too hard to find little Italian restaurants
that had espresso machines and they often made a decent cup but you
had to go looking for it. The average Australian could probably
identify a cappuccino but that would be the extent of their coffee
knowledge. In the nineties, the new generations in Sydney embraced
coffee with a passion. The word barista entered the vocabulary and
the culture to the extent that there are now types of coffee
readily obtainable in Sydney that are unheard of in other parts of
the world. It's nice to have variety but for old guys like me, all
I want is a cup from that stale old pot that I remember so well but
it's impossible to find in modern day Sydney... Rest In