Black Teeth

by Zane Lovitt

  What dazzles me is how gapingly analogue this is. What I’ve seen in the news, what I’ve seen in courts, is that cases are brought using emails and DNA and base-station pings. But track back to 1999 and it’s all about what the butler overheard and bloody footprints leading up to the door. It reads like Matlock fanfiction. This case belongs in a previous century.

  Tyan couldn’t explain why there was so much blood on the vase. If Piers had struck her only once, why should there have been any more than a few specks? His theory was that Piers had dropped it at the moment of the killing, whereby it was bloodied by the spreading pool, after which Piers retrieved it upon entering Sinister Plot Mode. But this was just a theory.

  Also, why did Piers point to the crime-scene photos and tell the police the vase was missing? Why hand them the rope to hang him with, not to mention the keys to his workshop? Tyan was asked that question when he took the stand.

  DETECTIVE TYAN (WITNESS): It’s clear to me that he wanted us to find it.

  LUMIS: To what end?

  DETECTIVE TYAN (WITNESS): I’m sorry?

  LUMIS: What did you think his objective was in wanting you to find the vase?

  DETECTIVE TYAN (WITNESS): To be caught. To end it.

  LUMIS: Doesn’t that jar with his plea of Not Guilty?

  DETECTIVE TYAN (WITNESS): He got a look at a long stretch in prison and said bugger that for a joke.

  [Laughter]

  Piers’s defence claimed the vase had been planted by the real murderer. But they couldn’t offer a single candidate. And how do you explain the mud tracked in by shoes of exactly his size? The neighbour hearing the fight and the shouting of Piers’s name? His failure to prove he was elsewhere?

  The case was strong enough that he wasn’t bailed prior to the trial. After the trial, the judge ordered him to serve at least another thirteen years.

  Throughout the proceedings were a series of interlocutory hearings, ones I don’t fully understand but which seemed to hinge on the possibility of a final witness giving evidence. His name was Kenneth Penn, but literally no further information is supplied. Piers’s lawyers initially wanted to have him called—it was Piers himself who shouted them down and Penn would remain excluded. The Crown’s only argument in these hearings appears to have been that the defence get their shit together.

  Attached to all of these records, right there at the bottom of the folder, is a file note. It says that Piers died on June third, 2012. It doesn’t list the cause of death, but the fact that June third, 2012 was six weeks ago seems to me to be the last veil in the dance, discarded now to expose the full amplitude of Glen Tyan’s predicament.

  Back on Google, I skim pictures and find a family portrait from before the fall: Piers, Cheryl and Rudy in 1996. The irony is as powerful as the layout editor hoped: a shiny, buoyant family on the eve of destruction. Cheryl Alamein is patrician, proud, wears a jacket with dramatic shoulder pads like her head is sticking up through a plank of wood. White teeth can just be glimpsed through a peculiar, fetching smile she has mastered.

  In front of her there’s Rudy, eleven years old, grinning with buck-toothed awkwardness and freckled youth, red hair clippered down to an eighth of an inch like a strange fungus growing across his scalp. He’s got the message that he should appear boyishly happy, but his attempts at such an imitation can’t conceal the detachment deep within the pupils of his eyes, the void where his love and hate should be. The same eyes as his father, standing above, an arm around Cheryl: a pin-up for white male prosperity, handsome despite his rounded shoulders and ruptured skin. The males’ dispassionate faces are strikingly similar and there in my intestines is a quease of jealousy.

  I lean away from the image, rub radiation from my eyes. My neck aches from my poor posture, the late hour. Is it really Rudy Alamein tormenting Tyan? Do the children of criminals really grow up to violently resent the coppers who locked up their parents? Why aren’t the streets then awash with youths stalking and attacking police officers?

  I stare into Rudy’s eleven-year-old eyes, try to glimpse the crackpot that lies in wait.

  It’s that face that makes me pick up my phone. I call Tyan again and this time I let that fucker ring.

  21

  How come Tyan didn’t answer his phone is: he was sleeping. Not murdered.

  ‘I heard it ring,’ he croaks. ‘I was hoping whoever it was would piss off.’

  Then he embarks upon the kind of coughing surge you get from being an arsehole too soon after waking up.

  ‘Do you recognise the name Piers Alamein?’

  A short silence. Then, ‘What?’

  ‘Piers Alamein.’

  He swallows twice, clears his throat.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘The green Volvo you saw belonged to him. Then it went to his son, Rudy. Then Rudy sold it to Elizabeth Cannon.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘She reckons Rudy might still have a key. And I believe her when she says she had nothing to do with Monday night.’

  ‘What? You talked to her?’

  ‘Ye—’ My voice catches. ‘Yeah…I went to her flat.’

  ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’

  ‘Because…’ Being grateful was too much to hope for? ‘Because I didn’t have any luck with my searches. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her anything.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to talk to her. You just had to find out who she was.’

  ‘Well…’ I consider mounting a defence. ‘Okay. Sorry.’

  Tyan sighs, grunts as if somehow exerting himself. In a moment of rustling I hear the click of a cigarette lighter, an inhale and a wheeze.

  ‘Rudy Alamein…’ He says it slowly, testing the sound. ‘What the fuck does he want?’

  ‘Perhaps he blames you for what happened to his father. Working up the courage to confront you.’

  ‘I put away plenty of blokes. Plenty of fathers. And it was years ago. Why wait so long?’

  ‘Piers Alamein died last month.’

  Silence on the phone.

  I’m like, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Piers Alamein is dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t know. All I know is his deceased date comes before his parole date. So he must have died in Severington prison.’

  I can’t tell if Tyan is distracted by that or by some other thought. A memory of thirteen years ago…

  ‘And you reckon Rudy’s got it in for me?’

  ‘Obviously, right? He tailed you, found out where you live. He wants payback.’

  Tyan sighs.

  ‘The man killed his wife.’

  ‘I know. I read about it.’ It wasn’t my job to do that either, so I skate over just how much reading I’ve done. ‘But if a crazy person is looking for someone to blame, I’m not sure if logic applies. What do you remember about Rudy?’

  ‘Just…He was fucked up with grief.’

  ‘Was he angry at you then, do you remember?’

  No answer. A light thud at the end of the line.

  ‘Tyan?’ It’s possible he’s fallen back to sleep. ‘Hello?’

  Silence. Maybe another grunt, distant.

  My spine cramps. Gooseflesh.

  ‘Tyan!’

  The creak of plastic. Someone handling the receiver.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tyan says. ‘I thought I heard something.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  My ears instinctively tune to my own outside world: tyres on the wet road, a car door, rain tickling the window.

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I need a picture.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘Rudy?’

  ‘You can get one with your computer.’

  ‘I had a look. The most recent is from 1996. He was, like, eleven.’

  ‘I need a picture.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need to fucking know who I’m looking out for! Why the fuck do you think?’
/>
  Tyan coughs, dredging up sputum from down deep. He takes a moment to base himself, then says, ‘I can’t remember anything. It was too long back.’

  ‘How am I supposed to get a picture?’

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘He’s still in the same house in Albert Park.’

  ‘So find him and take a photo. I’ll pay you.’

  ‘You’re already on the hook for two-fifty.’

  ‘Whatever. We’re talking about my life here.’

  I shake my head at my empty living room. ‘Surely we go to the police now. There’s nothing left to find out—’

  ‘Fuck that. There’s everything to find out. What’s this little prick planning? Is he trying to scare me or what? Why’s he picking on me?’

  The sound of the lighter again. Chain smoking.

  ‘Get me a picture, then we go to the next level, law enforcement or whatever. All right? So can you get it?’

  ‘I’m just not very comfortable taking pictures of people. I don’t even own a camera.’

  ‘Use your phone. I’m not that bloody daft. You’ve got a phone, I seen it.’

  It’s late. I feel my vulnerability like you feel a lump in your armpit.

  ‘Okay. I’ll get a picture. No extra fee. But you have to do something for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to come visit Mum with me. On Sunday.’

  22

  Rudy Alamein says, ‘I’m interested in ummm…How much is that? That…what you just said.’

  I’m seated behind him on the number 1 tram. We’re back to back, so if I raise my chin our heads will touch and I’m trying to avoid that as we trolley towards Kings Way because I don’t want to draw attention. Also because, in the five minutes since I clapped eyes on him, Rudy has presented as the kind of person to unwittingly carry a communicable skin disease.

  The two of us are crammed against the window, me with my legs shut tight and Rudy a throbbing presence behind, along with all the other presences. I don’t know what’s made the tram so crowded today but it’s the reason my balls ache. The dreadlocked stooge beside me doesn’t have this problem because his legs are entitled to as much space as they need.

  Rudy’s voice is uninhibited, gratingly nasal. When his phone buzzed and he started speaking, it seemed to me that he lacked any kind of school-tier education. But as I listen it seems more accurate to say that Rudy had once been getting an education and then it stopped, somewhere between learning all the words and learning how to string them together. Somewhere between the death of his mother and the incarceration of his father.

  ‘Yeah…Yeah…’ Rudy says. ‘The maximum. Whatever is the maximum…The maximum payment or whatever.’

  It was so cold outside Rudy’s house this morning that twice I started the car engine just to get the heat flowing, the feeling back in my hands. In those warmer moments I was able to properly absorb where I was: a street of snazballs homes with one glaring imperfection—a single bad tooth in a perfect, laser-whitened smile.

  Grand Street was wide and run through by a seam of tram tracks, like a zipper holding the bitumen together, that crooked left at Montague Street and continued all the way to the beach. Albert Park was baller country, for all the blandness of its name, thanks mostly to its placement between the CBD and the bay and its wide streets and historical homes. Someone dumped a mess of Commission flats on the east side of Ferrars Street and you could see suicide-prevention bars across each of the windows as they rose twenty storeys high. Because nothing makes poor people want to kill themselves like cars bigger than your home, pets better groomed than your girlfriend, teenagers pushing prams who are not mums but nannies.

  From there on it was fifteen blocks of middle-class paradise, beginning with a series of twelve terraces that even had a name written above in proud, concrete lettering: Montrose Row. And right in the middle was number 486, where a woman had been murdered thirteen years ago.

  Behind me, on the tram, Rudy says, ‘No, don’t smoke. I never smoke. Never smoked. But could you, like, say that bit again?’

  Beth had said the house was spooky and I suppose it was. All the paint was peeled away and nocturnal creatures appeared to have burrowed into the brickwork and made homes of pitch dark. There was a balcony running the width of the house but the ironwork had turned white with decay like a million pigeons all pooped on it at once; above it the drainpipe had come loose and one end was collapsed onto the deck, which surely must then flood at the first splash of rain. There was no door there but two large windows because a hundred years ago the trend had been to build these balconies with no thought of how someone might access them. They looked out from what was probably the master bedroom, where Cheryl had confronted her ex-husband, where they’d had the argument that ended so badly. The blinds were open but I couldn’t see inside.

  At ground level the front garden, too small for a lawn, had devolved into a single thatch of primeval weeds. From the front door to the street they hadn’t been trimmed back but merely trampled in such a way as to indicate that this was indeed how the resident transported himself from the ruin where he lived to the footpath.

  If the house had looked like this in 1999, you could believe that someone got murdered here. But you know it didn’t. You know that, back then, it was crafted and spruced and maintained.

  Just like the homes either side. Thin, protected dwellings where you imagined the children wore spotless school uniforms and the mothers spoke authoritatively to cleaners and gardeners who also wore uniforms. The pots for the pot plants were perfectly coordinated and the ceramic tiles along the porch perfectly uncracked. It was surely only the memory of what had happened at number 486 that kept these people from demanding their neighbour fix the garden, paint the house. Or maybe they did demand it, but he was such a user-interface disaster he never twitched.

  Rudy says, ‘Prime Life? Is that, like, is that the…Prime Life?’

  From my car I watched the sidewalks and the eucalypts and everybody going to work. After two hours it seemed that waiting for Rudy Alamein like this was way ambitious and the true burden of sitting forever turned my mood. When Tyan had assumed, as I had, that Rudy would surely leave the house on any given day, it was an assumption based on normal patterns of behaviour. Perhaps Rudy Alamein was not subject to normal patterns of behaviour. It was entirely possible, I thought as I switched to the passenger seat for the legroom, that Rudy hadn’t left the house since the last time he’d actively stalked Glen Tyan.

  So I noodled at my phone, updated my Steam but mostly I was getting hungry, thinking about slipping off to a bakery when the massive wooden door peeled open and a man scurried out.

  Behind me now, that same man says, ‘And if that’s what I get, what’s the…what does it…you know?’

  I wasn’t able to say at first if this was Rudy Alamein, the eleven-year-old in the only photo of him I’d ever seen. I’d thought the red hair would give him away but there was almost none to speak of, balding in his mid-twenties and what growth there was was cut short. But the roundness of his head and the quick, jerky movements of his body sealed it for me. This is the demeanour, I thought, of a numpty twentysomething wastrel bent on revenge.

  Rudy’s hands were buried deep in the pockets of his black jeans and his Goretex jacket was done up to the neck and he approached the street with a kind of stomp. At first the stomping seemed necessary, to navigate that insane front yard, but then Rudy prised open the wrought-iron gate and came onto the sidewalk and it was clear that this was how he rolled, killing bugs with every stride.

  I couldn’t very well follow leisurely in my car and so I was out, crossing the road, hiding my own hands from the cold. Rudy ran to catch a tram that trundled up from Montague Street and I ran too, hoping to seat myself opposite and to seem as though I was texting a friend when actually I’d be taking a picture, but Rudy moved swiftly to a seat beside an old-timer, forcing her to clear her shopping for him, blind to the inconvenience
this was, even accidentally kicking over a bag as he went, prompting her leathery face to pout and search the crowd for someone to validate her disbelief. There was no space in front of him, not even to stand, so I sat behind Rudy against the window. The carriage had barely taken off before his phone rang. Rudy answered it with, ‘Yes? Hello?’ and followed up with these timorous inquiries about whatever the fuck.

  The tram passes Kings Way and frees itself of traffic and picks up speed, really motors so even dreadlocks with his stone face and wide legs shoots an anxious glance out the window.

  Then Rudy says, in a voice that’s loud enough to demonstrate he doesn’t know how loud he is:

  ‘Right, so that’s, like…Does it matter if I go to jail?’

  23

  The words trigger an instinctive turn of my head and I confront Rudy’s reflection in the window, the phone held to his ear. A sharp voice warbles within, female perhaps. Then I see a mark on his hand that might be a trick of reflected light…

  A tattoo on the webbing. A crown, about an inch across, four stalactites poking up towards the gap between his thumb and forefinger, filled in with a weak black ink like a horizontal triforce. I strain to look closer but the hand pulls away—Rudy is out of his seat.

  Plunging down Swanston Street now, past the town hall into the city proper. I have time to casually stand and excuse my way to the front, steal a glance at Rudy who’s waiting at the centre doors with the phone still to his ear.

  Even from this far away: ‘Not now. Not now. Can I, yeah…Just, I don’t know, yeah.’

  We step into the bustle and throng of the Bourke Street Mall and instantly I regret my choice of the front exit because outside in the dimness and fog, fighting through crowds fighting to get onboard, Rudy has vanished like a magic trick.

  I wonder if he sensed a disturbance in the force and made a run for it, but there he is, stomping his way along the tile work, past the shivering buskers that have somehow drawn a crowd. Various hands hold mobile phones aloft to periscope the performance and it would be the perfect cover for photographing Rudy if only he would stop to watch. He doesn’t, hands dug into those pockets, his phone conversation finished. I fall in behind, don’t feel conspicuous because of all these other strangers. Also because Rudy moves with his head down, scared of other people or just not used to them.