by Zane Lovitt
‘That’s what you find chilling?’
The dirt path turns to mud, impacted and sloppy beneath our feet. Already cars return along the blacktop, attendees harried from the burial by the cold. In the thick of this altercation I’m still watching in case people can tell we’re arguing.
I raise my voice, bowed against the wind. ‘I’m not helping to do it. I don’t care if it does queer things for you and me.’
The cigarettes come out now. Tyan stops to light up, thwacks away at his plastic lighter but the elements are against him. He gives up, waves the white stick at me.
‘You should think about that.’
He continues to walk. I stay put.
‘I don’t need to think about it!’
Over his shoulder, without turning back, still holding the cigarette like he’s smoking it: ‘Think about that!’
I let him go. I’m parked in the other direction.
38
Beth is drinking cappuccino when I arrive. A chocolate moustache lines her top lip and either she knows about it, considers it hilarious, or she doesn’t know. Or maybe she wants me to see how she’s no less handsome for this new virility.
The Lunacy Café was her choice, so close to where she lives. Lunchtime it’s crowded with Brunswick people: as I enter a young woman in full kawaii cosplay throws me a sour look from this side of the drinks fridge, one to make me shut the door against the cold, which I do, then move to Beth’s table and she shows me her dimples and smiles that wide brown smile.
‘Hiya, toots.’
It holds nothing of the awkwardness of this morning and it’s a reminder of how not-Marnie she is, the thought of whom brings on a pang of guilt which I force down with a more powerful, somehow more acceptable, sense of shame—my father plans to kill someone.
I consider telling Beth exactly half of that, not sure I want to in such a crowded spot. Even as I sit there’s someone’s arse in my face, shimmying past.
‘Hello.’ You can’t help but grin at her.
‘God…’ She examines the markings on my face. ‘I can’t believe we…I should have taken you to the hospital.’
The nerve-endings have come back to life. Everything’s tight. My eye wants to close over.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Did Rudy really, like…punch you?’
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘He slapped me.’
‘That’s a slap?’
‘I was trying to get away from him. I fell and hit my head.’
‘Right…’
‘But it wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t so aggressive. Like, way aggressive.’
She nods with an urgent understanding. I hurt myself running away.
I’m like, ‘What have you been up to this morning?’
‘Just waiting for you, toots. How’s the fam?’
‘Fine.’
‘Was it like a birthday thing?’ She sips more coffee and wipes her mouth, sees the chocolate on her hand and finds a serviette.
‘Just a catch up with my dad.’
‘Cool,’ she says, her interest tapering.
‘I never knew him my whole life. We’ve only just now been in contact.’
My lord, that feeling when you finally tell someone.
‘Wow. How’s that going?’
‘Fine.’
I raise my head for a waiter. It’s less that I want to eat and more that I want to change the topic. My conversation with Tyan killed my appetite, buried it and left a tasteful plaque. Which is just as well, because I can’t tell which of these hipsters are waiters and which are patrons. Everyone has dreadlocks or tattoos and they all seem to have just finished having sex with each other.
‘Are you okay?’
Her question catches me out.
‘Why?’
‘You seem weird. Did something happen with your dad?’
‘No. It’s a long story. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Listen, I think you need to tell me what’s going on. Like, more about, like…’
‘What?’
‘Like, for one thing, who is this guy? The one Rudy’s got it in for?’
Toots, that is so not changing the subject.
I scan the café. Joyless gossiping twentysomethings mixed in with loners on their phones and laptops, but the dreamy ambient music is loud enough to keep most conversations private. I hold off as a dazed beard carries green juice in a jar past our table.
‘His name is Glen Tyan. A retired police detective. He put Rudy’s dad in prison.’
‘Okay…’ She scrunches her eyes, sympathetic and thoughtful.
‘Once upon a time, Rudy knew his dad was guilty, told it to a newspaper, but then his father took his own life and Rudy started to think that Piers was…framed.’
I feel stupid just saying that word.
‘He can’t explain how or why, because there is no how or why. How and why got buried underneath this revenge thing. He just blames the guy that arrested his father. But Beth…’
I raise my fist off the table, grapple with what I’m about to say. It’s time to make this particular fact clear to Rudy’s number one apologist.
‘Rudy wants to kill him.’
A weak twitch in her eye that makes her glasses shudder.
‘No way.’
‘He’s going to break in and murder Tyan in his sleep. At least, that’s what he was planning up until this.’ I draw a circle in the air around my face. ‘Since this I don’t know what he’s thinking.’
‘He told you all that last night?’
‘Sure,’ I say. Why not? ‘I pretended to have the tattoo to win his confidence. It really, like…worked.’
‘You’ve got to tell him.’ A hand flaps, frustrated. ‘Glen Tyan. You’ve got to tell him Rudy wants to—’
‘He knows.’
Her confusion seems to frustrate her and she scowls down at the table.
‘He knows?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he won’t go to the police?’
‘He will on the night. He’ll incapacitate Rudy and have him arrested. He’s the kind of guy who can do that.’
Only that’s not the plan anymore, is it Jason?
‘Why not, like, go to the police now?’
I sigh, slow. Eyebrows rise, cheeks puff.
‘Tyan says they’ll throw the book at him if he actually tries it. He’s hoping that’ll teach him a lesson.’
‘God…’
She takes off her glasses and massages her head. Eyes shut, she whimpers: ‘Do you think it would?’
‘What?’
‘Teach him a lesson.’
‘Nope.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t think he’s going there to kill Glen Tyan.’
She pokes her head forward.
‘But you just said—’
‘He told me that’s what he wants to do. Maybe he believes it himself, but…’
Without thinking I take hold of her coffee, drink from it. Just a sip to lubricate my throat.
‘I think his primary intention is to make Tyan act in self-defence. That’s the…the thing he’s going there to do. He can’t manage it himself, so he’s going to force a retired cop to do it for him.’
She gently sways back, eyes gently sway back, hands rub her knees like she’s staving off nausea. I’m expecting a concerted rebuttal, but instead she says, ‘Yeah.’
I wait for her to say more, or at least to open her eyes.
And she’s like, ‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’
39
The ordinary atmos of coffee drinking and trip-hop rises a notch. Someone wearing an actual apron stacks milk crates in the door to the kitchen. Someone else at a table nearby complains about their communications lecturer. I rub my shoulder.
‘I’m listening.’
‘A few days after his father died?’ She gazes at the tabletop, hands play with the waxy plant, the kind that adorns all the tables in
here. ‘He asked to borrow the car. I brought it round to him in the afternoon, then I came and got it back the next day.’
Someone behind the café counter, a skinny Asian girl showing her midriff in the middle of July, lets loose a great cackle of laughter. Beth waits for it to subside, edges closer.
‘When I came to pick it up, he was really scattered. Like, distressed? I asked if he was all right and he said he just needed to sleep because he’d been in the car all night. I asked where he’d gone but he didn’t want to say. So I just took the car and left.’
Now there comes a relentless beeping sound, begging for attention—some appliance the workers don’t have sufficient time or concern to shut off.
‘The thing is, though, the odometer wasn’t changed,’ Beth has to raise her voice. ‘Not even a kilometre? It was on the half-seven when I dropped it off. It was in the same place when I picked it up.’
‘So he hadn’t driven anywhere.’
‘But…’
That appliance, it’s a blender. Piercing. A jigsaw piece reversing into place. Beth leans closer; her voice softer but somehow more intense.
‘I gave it to him with a half tank of petrol. When I picked it up it was nearly empty.’
I try to make sense of this by peering at the air above her.
‘So…you think he…’
‘Yes.’
The blender goes silent. Someone has switched it off, leaving a vacuum of quiet and I almost whisper:
‘That’s it then. That’s what this is. He can’t go through with it himself, so he’s made himself believe this conspiracy crap about Glen Tyan. That’s why he got the insurance.’
She stiffens at that last word, turns as if to properly contemplate the mural on the café wall. A grief-filled sigh, adjusting to this new reality.
‘God, it’s so creepy…’ Her face falls, expressionless. ‘That policy makes me sick…But…you think…’
Fear comes to her eyes, verging on terror.
‘What?’
‘You think, if I didn’t take the money, if I gave it all away…Do you think we should stop him going through with it?’
‘You think we shouldn’t?’
‘What right do we have?’ She leans across the table. The blue in her eyes vibrates, as if frightened by the words she speaks. ‘It’s the right thing to do, right? To help him, like, escape? If that’s what he wants?’
‘I don’t—’
‘I won’t accept any of the money.’ She glares, begging to be believed. ‘I’ll give it away. I’ll give it to the shelter. But we have to think about what’s best for Rudy.’
I can’t assess what’s best for Rudy. Don’t even know the criteria. ‘We have to think about what’s best for us as well.’
‘For us?’
‘I’m not ready to just watch him make the last big mistake of his life. And I’m not ready yet to give up reasoning with him.’
‘You tried that.’ The strain in her eyes is extraordinary. I want to grab hold and comfort her, but not with all these people around. ‘Look what happened.’
Beth needs me to understand, even as she’s drenched in the shame at what she’s saying. To justify herself, she pleads:
‘I hate to think of him living in pain.’
I do understand. If I can feel pity for Rudy Alamein, what chance does a big heart like hers have?
‘What if his father didn’t do it?’ I offer this with as much optimism as I can generate. ‘What if we could prove that someone else killed Cheryl Alamein and framed Piers? He’d forget all about Glen Tyan. And exonerating his father would give him something to live for.’
It’s a reverse of the formula I’ve been applying, but it reaches the same result. Despite how unlikely we are to determine its variables.
Beth winces at my logic. But there’s hopefulness in her voice when she says, ‘You think someone else did it?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘But it’s possible, isn’t it?’
‘So…What? I mean…what do we do?’
Suddenly I’m hungry. Ravenous even. Again I search the room for a waiter. The half-stoned beard lingers by the counter, flirting with the Asian midriff. I wave and still they don’t see me. Then I yell: ‘Oi!’
Both of them hear me, look, move through the tables in my direction, synchronised.
I say to Beth: ‘We hope the real killer’s in a mood to confess.’
40
Suddenly the road is lined with eucalypts and the small-town quaintness of Sassafras gives way to a national park. Thick trunks drive into the forest canopy, bark hanging from their branches like spaghetti after a food fight while lichen cakes the pines and the white reflector poles and even the bus stops when we happen to pass one, lonely and forbidding among the green. There aren’t many other cars. Any other cars. Maybe it’s just us winding through the Dandenong Ranges. It feels like it.
Beth needs time so I’m not driving fast. Her fingers tap the tablet glass, flip from webpage to webpage. She’s quiet but for the occasional coo of interest.
To our left comes a break in the trees and I look out across an expanse of tree ferns, a sea of open umbrellas. Like the umbrellas at the graveyard this morning.
To distract myself from this thought I glance at the map on my phone. We’ve been driving for an hour, will arrive in less than ten minutes. Beth has been engrossed in her iPad for longer than I thought she’d need. I’m about to tell her that her time is up when she stirs.
‘Okay.’
‘You found something?’
‘I think so.’
‘Are you ready?’
‘Uh-huh.’
I expected her to be uncomfortable with this. The deception. The spycraft. But she’s come around to the idea and it’s her presence now that drives the car as much as the petrol in the tank, my foot on the throttle. Of all the lies I’ve told these past days, I’ve not had anyone to stand there and tell them with me.
Beth taps DIAL on my phone, then SPEAKER. It doesn’t take them long to answer.
‘Claireborne Views Residential, Erica speaking.’
‘Hello,’ says Beth. She doesn’t say anything else. I glance at her.
‘Hello?’
Beth finds her voice.
‘Hello. Ummm…I’m trying to contact Kenneth Penn?’
Not even a please. She’s that tense. It prompts Erica to abandon all courtesy as well: ‘Hold.’
A recording kicks in, mid-sentence. A smarmy voice like that airship in Bladerunner:
…the quality of a life spent among the stunning and gorgeous surrounds of one of Victoria’s most scenic and beautiful—
A delicate croak cuts it off.
‘Yes?’
I grab at Beth’s knee, try to make the act supportive, not condescending.
She says, ‘Ummm…Kenneth Penn?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Elizabeth Cannon.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Her voice rises, too loud: ‘Elizabeth Cannon…I’m a broker with Fredermons.’
I gesture with a flat palm. She lowers her voice.
‘I’m a broker with Fredermons. We have you listed as an authority in nineteenth-century French?’
Beth’s classic upward inflection, but this time posing it as a question, asking the silence on the other end of the line for confirmation.
For my part, I’ve never heard of Fredermons. Beth says it’s a boutique auction house with the kind of cachet that might keep Ken Penn on the line. According to the rudimentary search I did at Beth’s place, he used to be the kind of collections specialist that newspapers went to for commentary, whenever there were pages to fill about exhibitions or thefts or celebrity sales. Despite her reticence, Beth’s experience with antiques is the best hope we have of getting in the door.
Well, not just her expertise. Penn was born in 1931, which means he’s eighty-one, which means he was twenty-five years older than Cheryl when they hooked up. So maybe a pretty face can win him over.
‘What is this about?’
It’s a weedy voice, like he’s straining to grasp something just out of reach.
‘Ummm, as I said…’ Beth fumbles, leans in closer to the phone like that will help. ‘I’m a broker with Fredermons.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ummm…’ She looks to me for help but all I can do is drive encouragingly.
She reads from the iPad: ‘We’ve come upon a germain royal soup tureen we believe dates back to Napoleon Three, and we’re keen to have the item looked over. Am I correct in saying that French antiques is your area?’
The quaver in her voice probably isn’t audible over the phone.
‘I’m sorry, what?’
She doesn’t know what to say to that; her hesitation stinks of failure, and I’m wondering if there’s some way we can break in to the Claireborne facility. But then the voice croaks:
‘My understanding is that Napoleon Three silver was all melted down. To finance wars and orgies and such.’
He makes a grotesque sound which might be chuckling and Beth pushes on the seat belt, relieving the pressure from her torso.
‘I can’t comment on the provenance, Mister Penn. I can only tell you that we’re getting advice on authenticity with a view to putting the piece on the market.’
‘If you think the piece is genuine…’ comes the deathly wheeze from the phone, ‘my advice is to handcuff it to your wrist and fly it to Sotheby’s. No one in this country can sign it off. And no one over here’s going to fucking buy it!’
Another chuckle and a long inhale. That suggestion took the wind out of him.
‘Ummm…We were hoping we might visit with you to discuss it. Ummm…Today.’
Beth really pushes that seatbelt away like it’s a web she’s caught in.
‘What’s to discuss? I no longer have a client list. You understand where I am, don’t you?’
‘Yes, and we’re just a few minutes away. We’ve been displaying the item for a dealer in Olinda and we thought—’
‘Wait…’ His voice drops past its timbre, deepens into gravel. ‘You’ve got the item with you?’
