Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club

by Julian Leatherdale

  Bernice now turned her whole body away from Joan and still refused to speak.

  ‘I also talked to Paavo. He said you left Theo’s around ten-thirty last Saturday, just like you told the police—but he also told me you didn’t arrive until eight. Where were you before then?’

  Bernice had begun to shake now, her arms jerking, hands twitching. Joan was afraid she might have a full-blown episode. ‘Calm down, Bernie. I want to help you.’

  What would she do if Bernie attacked her? Arturo and Vincent had moved out of the flat next door yesterday; she did not know who was left in Bomora. If Joan screamed, who would come to her rescue? Not Mrs Moxham. The landlady would lock herself inside her flat and phone the cops.

  Bernice swung around, fists clenched, face flushed crimson and contorted almost beyond recognition. ‘You want to know the truth? I killed her! There! Now you know!’

  Christ! This was not what Joan wanted to hear. Her blood drummed in her chest and ears, her body stiffened, every sinew taut, ready for defence or flight. ‘What do you mean?’

  Words began to spill from Bernie’s mouth, gathering momentum like creek water gushing over a clifftop. ‘I was with Ellie that night. We went out for a drink. It was my last chance to change her mind, to persuade her not to go away with this man of hers. We drank a lot. We argued. It got very heated. I tried to kiss her after we left. She pushed me away. I hit her, okay? I HIT HER!’

  Bernice was crying now, her body racked with convulsive sobs.

  ‘I was out of my mind. I told her I had never loved anyone the way I loved her. I told her I was fighting for my life, that I would die without her. She stormed off in tears. I went to the brothel later to beg her forgiveness, though I didn’t deserve it. I am a monster, a selfish monster. Ellie had a child to look after and a mother. She made the only choice she could. This man had offered to support her, something I couldn’t do. What right did I have to stop her? But there was no guarantee he would look after her, of course. Men like him have their fun and move on, I told her. But she refused to listen.’ Deep shudders went through Bernice’s body. ‘I will never know what happened that night. She had a black eye—how could she explain that? Did she tell him about me? Did she expect his forgiveness, ask for his protection? Or did she change her mind and try to end it with him? Is that why he killed her?’

  Bernice was raving now, tearing at her hair and hitting herself with her fists. ‘It was all my fault. If I hadn’t made a fuss, he need never have known about us. She could even have come back to me once the affair was over. But I was the impatient one, the stupid one! The one who did not believe in the strength of our love! I was the one who pushed her into a corner! It’s because of me that she’s dead!’ ‘No, no, Bernie. It wasn’t your fault.’ Joan grabbed Bernie’s wrists to stop her hurting herself. What a wave of blessed relief surged through Joan to hear her closest friend’s confession; she might have hit Ellie, but she hadn’t killed her! ‘Listen to me. We are going to find out who this bastard is and nail him good and proper! Starting tomorrow night at the Ladies’ Bacchus Club.’

  ‘What makes you think we’ll find anything there?’

  Joan grabbed Bernice by the shoulders. ‘There’s a very good chance we will, Bernie. I went out to Tempe last Friday and talked to Ruby. I asked her about this man Ellie was involved with. She said that Ellie had only mentioned his name once or twice and at first she couldn’t remember it. But then, just as I was leaving, it came back to her.’

  Bernice stared at Joan, barely breathing.

  ‘Gordon. She said his name was Gordon.’

  It was well past midnight. Joan lay in her divan bed, silvered in moonlight, listening to the soft groaning of the cat asleep on her feet. In the other room, Bernice had finally settled after taking a powder to quell her nerves and her snoring could be heard through the bedroom door.

  Joan felt that one great burden had been lifted from her chest. She had followed the leads like a good detective should but in her heart she’d never been able to bring herself to believe Bernice capable of murder. Joan had chosen not to share the autopsy finding that Ellie had died of strangulation. Was any woman strong enough to do that? Perhaps. Her husband is a slaughterman and it is her regular custom to assist him in the skinning and cleaning of the beasts. She is not a muscular, masculine type of female either but feminine in appearance.

  Joan was deeply shocked, however, to have learned that her sister, her mentor, her friend, had punched Eleanor in a drunken rage and then lied to her to cover it up. Bernice was right to be afraid of the police. They would not be forgiving of two lesbians having a domestic while on the piss. It was the kind of thing that would make for a great courtroom drama and sleazy headlines. And given the general suspicion of women living alone, not to mention lesbians and prostitutes, it would be easy to secure a conviction for someone of Bernice’s dubious character. Playing a sex goddess at artists’ balls. Habitual cocaine user and partygoer. Multiple lovers, including refos and dagoes. Writer of erotic plays and trashy lurid novels. Mother of two abandoned sons. (‘It was a mercy that my mum took Angus and Philip,’ Bernie had confided in Joan one evening. ‘I was a terrible mother: self-absorbed, obsessive, moody. All good qualities in a writer, perhaps, but catastrophic in a mother.’ Her sons were the sacrifice Bernice had been forced to make to escape a loveless marriage and find the freedom to be a bohemian. Joan sometimes wondered if Bernice protested too much about her unfitness for motherhood: tears stole into her eyes and her voice cracked on the few occasions she talked about her boys. But there were times when Joan agreed that Bernice’s children were much better off without her.)

  Having made her confession, Bernice felt compelled to unburden herself. She and Joan had returned to their own flat and sat up for the next two hours talking feverishly over nips of sherry. While Gordon was almost certainly Ellie’s knight in shining armour, there was still no proof it was he who had killed her. And as Hugh had said, such men rarely pulled the trigger themselves when they committed crimes; they had people to do that for them. Had Gordon paid Frankie to do the job? The murder had all the hallmarks of Frankie’s psychotic violence.

  ‘Ruby said something that has been bothering me,’ Joan confided to Bernice. ‘She told me that Jess was no friend of Ellie’s. That she had stolen money from her.’

  Bernice sighed. ‘Yes, there’s some truth to that, I’m afraid. Jess was—is—no saint.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She got Ellie into the game in the first place. Looked out for her, taught her the ropes. Like a big sister. But then things changed. Ellie was so very beautiful!’ Bernie choked back her sobs again, took a quick sip from her sherry glass. ‘She started getting the better-paying clients, earning good money and big tips. A few of the other chromos got pretty ticked off, including Jess—though she was happy to go along for the ride when the money was flowing. Things went from bad to worse when Frankie started playing favourites. And then along comes this gentleman caller with deep pockets. Jess felt that Ellie owed her.’

  ‘So, she stole money from Ellie?’

  ‘Borrowed it at first and never paid it back. Demanded Ellie pay for lots of stuff as she earned more. And then Ellie thinks she started to pinch cash from her dresser. They had some ugly fights about it.’

  Poor Ellie! thought Joan. Punished for her beauty, exploited for her vulnerability. Everybody wanted something from her, even those who said they loved her. They all believed they were entitled: Ruby, Frankie, Gordon, Jessie, even Bernie.

  ‘Ruby said she told everyone about you and her.’

  ‘Yes, I think finding out about us was the last straw for Jess. She had given up on finding love with men. The closest thing she had to a relationship was her friendship with Ellie. The two of them against the world, sharing contempt for their male customers. And then Ellie goes and cheats by hitching up with a fancy man and then with a woman!’

  Joan and Bernie sat in the dark for a long moment, the only sound Be
rnie’s quiet weeping. At last Joan spoke. ‘So you’re saying Jess felt Ellie had abandoned her twice: with Gordon and with you. She must have been furious after everything she’d done for her.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Bernie, tell me: could we be looking for Ellie’s killer in the wrong place?’

  Bernice stared at Joan in disbelief. ‘You mean Jessie?’

  ‘Perhaps. I wonder if the police thought to check what time she left work that night.’

  Bernice was shaking her head at this insane notion. ‘Jess? Really? How could she … ?’

  ‘I don’t know. She could have dobbed on Ellie to Frankie, knowing how crazily possessive he can get. Maybe all she wanted was to give Ellie a scare, take her down a notch or two, but the whole thing got out of hand.’

  ‘But you saw Frankie tell Jess off—and carve up her face!’

  ‘That could all have been for show. Or maybe Frankie lost his nerve and thought Jessie had double-crossed him and spilled to the coppers?’

  Bernice sighed. ‘Yes, that’s possible.’

  ‘If she knows that Frankie is the killer, it gives her even more reason to go into hiding. She even told me herself when the morphine kicked in, “I saw … I know … I know who …”’

  ‘Jesus!’

  The two women had finally decided to turn in, drained by all the high emotion. Now Joan lay in bed, T.S. curled up on her feet asleep. She relished the cosy familiarity of this scene: the view of the flaking ceiling overhead, the dark room reflected in the mirror over the fireplace, the glow of neon lights seeping through the window blind and the ebb and flow of night-time sounds—traffic, sirens, voices on the street. Only a few days left before it all vanished.

  Bernice had visited the flat on Bayswater Road earlier today and liked it; it was fully furnished and had views over the Cross. Thankfully, Mrs Woolwich did not require a reference from their current landlady and seemed impressed they were both journalists with regular incomes (Joan, at least, was on a payroll and had a good character reference from Mr Lofting). They would have an answer tomorrow.

  Bernice’s confession shifted the story of Ellie’s murder in a whole new direction. There was no time to waste. Joan promised herself she would get up early tomorrow morning before work and get down the next chapter of her novel. Here she felt confident she knew what she was doing. The writing would help tease out the threads of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Her mind began to race, composing the lines of a new chapter:

  Lillian sat with Miss Becker over a cup of tea.

  ‘There are a few questions I have to ask, Miss Becker, if you don’t mind?’ So polite. And then the unexpected slap. ‘I’ve noticed a couple of inconsistencies in your statement that I hope you can clarify.’

  Miss Becker blanched and put down her teacup, hand trembling.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Miss Armfield deliberately looked down at her file and said nothing for a moment. As expected, Miss Becker fidgeted nervously and bit her lip.

  Lillian looked up suddenly. ‘Why did you not tell us that Mavis saw Ellie with a black eye when she came to the brothel?’

  Miss Becker was struck dumb and her face flushed red.

  It was such a relief to know that Bernice had not killed her lover, even if she had confessed to punching her. And it was a relief that Joan now had a potential colleague in her investigations. She felt frustrated by how little headway she had made so far. Was the real Lillian Armfield any further ahead? This detective caper was full of dead ends and setbacks and then surprising new possibilities: every time a door closed on one theoretical scenario, another one opened.

  But tomorrow night a door would open that not even the talented Lillian Armfield had managed to peek behind; a door into a world of intrigue and mystery, power and desire: the entrance to the secret world of the Ladies’ Goddess Club.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The proofs for ‘Between Ourselves’ were back from the printers. Joan sat with her trusty blue pencil doing the final mark-ups for this afternoon’s deadline.

  ‘Any luck finding new accommodation, Miss Linderman?’ Mr Lofting had enquired as he passed by her desk that morning.

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir. Thanks in large part to your glowing character reference!’ Joan had replied, expertly preening his ego. Bernice had rung the office with the good news ten minutes previously.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll be glad to move away from such … unpleasant memories.’

  What, Joan wondered, would her owlish boss make of the fact that since he last saw her on Friday morning she had pulled off a blackmail in disguise at the Hotel Australia, interviewed a murdered woman’s mother, discovered her boyfriend was a communist double agent spying on the New Guard, danced at Theo’s with a stranger she’d shagged a week ago, visited her impecunious family and saved them with money extorted from their rich relatives, watched a performance of The Bacchae at a Greek amphitheatre in the bush, and outed her flatmate as a jealous lesbian lover but not, thankfully, a murderer? Not to mention having written another three chapters of her murder mystery crime novel. All of this would be so alien to Mr Lofting’s neat little world, he would simply not believe it.

  And tonight, with the full moon keeping watch over the people of Sydney, pious and heathen alike, Joan and Bernice would go to Olympia and Gordon’s flat in Kingsmere at seven o’clock to draw back the veil on the Ladies’ Bacchus Club. Was it just a gathering of society ladies playing parlour games or did it have a more serious, possibly even sinister, intent?

  As Joan sipped her morning tea and dunked her gingernut, she ruminated on the little she did know about her aunt’s club. For a start, she knew that Olympia had ‘colleagues’ (as she liked to call them) in the ‘sex reform’ movement, including one of the most vocal and persistent, Mrs Marion Piddington, aunt to that other aspiring young writer, Eleanor Dark. Now in her sixties, Marion had made quite a name for herself with her ideas about ‘saving the white race from degeneracy’. In 1916 she had introduced the public to her controversial scheme of artificial insemination for unmarried women because the war had deprived so many of a husband and the chance to have a child. She called it ‘Scientific Motherhood’ but struggled to find support and abandoned the campaign in 1921. An unapologetic eugenicist, Marion then turned her attention to birth control, the sterilisation of the unfit, and frank sex education for the young with her book Tell Them! She advocated eliminating male masturbation (boys’ trousers should have no pockets) so that as adult men they would avoid promiscuity, prostitution and the scourge of venereal disease. Last year Marion had set up her own birth control clinic (with financial help from Olympia) where she and supporter Jean Devanny ran sex education classes. Just last week Joan had read one of Marion’s columns in Smith’s Weekly arguing for the sterilisation of the feeble-minded and delinquent.

  Joan knew that Aunt Olympia firmly believed that the future health and prosperity of Australia lay with its genetically fit women. It was one of her favourite dinner party topics, much to Gordon’s chagrin. Like Mrs Piddington, Olympia also believed in a woman’s right to sexual fulfilment within marriage. In fact, Olympia explained, happiness within marriage and sexual restraint without would guarantee genetic purity. At the dinner party at Kingsmere two years earlier, Olympia had told Joan that she’d founded her Ladies’ Bacchus Club on these principles: that women’s sexual desire must be nurtured, and that this would lead to a utopia in which women were both sexually satisfied and could fulfil their destiny as mothers of a robust nation.

  Of course, the Ladies’ Bacchus Club drew its inspiration from another source: ancient Greece and, more specifically, the cult of Dionysus. Olympia was not alone in this regard. Following the cataclysm of the Great War and loss of faith in Christian civilisation, a generation of Australian artists hungered for a cultural renaissance rooted in the remote and pagan past. Norman Lindsay, his son Jack and the poet Ken Slessor had published their magazine Vis
ion as a manifesto of sorts to reclaim the vigour and earthiness of the worship of Arcadia. Satyrs and fauns pranced lustily across its pages, while in one of Jack’s poems Aphrodite was reborn in Sydney Harbour and flew straight to Norman’s Olympian retreat in the Blue Mountains. Though she had little time for Jack, Bernice had been flattered when invited to contribute to the second issue of the magazine. Her pagan tale of elves, fauns and female centaurs, ‘Pan’s Feast’, was illustrated with naked women (wild-haired, busty, big-hipped) astride leaping dolphins or transformed into creatures half-mermaid, half-flying fish, drawn by the great Norman Lindsay himself.

  Nymphs, sirens, fauns, maenads, centaurs, gods and goddesses romped and roared through paintings, sculptures, poetry and plays all through the twenties. The Black Magician of the Order of the Evil Itchy, Frank Bennett, a self-styled mystic, had once sought Bernice’s help to summon the great god Pan. He wanted her to lie naked on an open-air altar he had built outside his Middle Harbour shack so that he could sacrifice a goat over her with a sword. Bernie had declined the opportunity (‘Out of pity for the goat’). What soon became clear to most female bohemians, however, was that this vision of an antipodean Arcadia recruited women in mostly supine roles as bare-breasted nymphs endlessly available for male pleasure and as muses for their creativity. What intrigued Joan about the Ladies’ Bacchus Club was that it was for women only, focused exclusively on female pleasure and, possibly, creativity.

  While Joan was consumed with curiosity about her aunt’s club, she was also terribly daunted. What on earth happened behind those closed doors? She hardly dared imagine. Could it be any more lurid than the Elizabeth Bay House parties with their drunken and drug-addled fumblings? Or was there something more bizarre and esoteric involved?

  Of course, the other source of her nervousness was her determination to find a material link between Ellie and Gordon somewhere in the flat. A love letter perhaps? A photo? A trinket? A perfumed glove? Men could become such sentimental idiots when they thought they were in love. Ruby seemed to think Ellie’s secret lover was a benign patron rather than a sugar daddy. Joan did not know her uncle well enough to imagine which was more probable. Nor was she prepared to completely abandon her theory that Ellie might be a victim of Aunt Olympia’s displeasure. Had Ellie demanded blackmail money from the Goddess Club? Or had Olympia found out about her husband’s grubby infidelity and decided to punish him? As far as Joan could see, the Fielding-Joneses were both ruthless, cold-blooded creatures when their peace and happiness was threatened.