I'm Dying Here

by Damien Broderick

  “We put it in Cookie’s wardrobe wrapped up in canvas.” Eyes as big as saucers, surrounded by Goth-dark makeup. She was shaking, I could see that. “Where’s Cookie?”

  “Private hospital, I assume. She looked all right. See you in the morning, love.”

  I shoved the Esky in the wardrobe without opening it, next to the shotgun. Some questions tease at the mind but are too trivial to com­pete with sleep. I lay down, woke up an instant later with perfume in my clogged nostrils. Cookie’s pillows. I looked at my bare wrist.

  “Eleven-thirty, Dad.” Animal held out a mug of black Nescafé. “You should just be able to make noon divine service at St. Paul’s.”

  Sunday bloody Sunday, half gone. I took a swig of the filthy stuff and burnt the roof off my mouth. Microwave superheating. Ersatz every fucking where. Still, the caffeine kick-started my brain with a diffident, moccasin-clad suburban foot. I couldn’t understand why the rozzers hadn’t kicked down Animal’s door by now.

  “Got a paper?”

  “Jesus, Tom, it’s not a hotel.” But she was back a moment later with the Sunday Age, folded open at page 3. Financier and art collector found shot dead in his Balwyn home, police suspect in­terrupted robbery. Not much in it, nothing about the sorrowing widow Sharon Lesser or the kidnapped daughter of the deceased, let alone a premature hearse and a batch of wog bovver boys loi­tering with unplumbable intent. Certainly no hint of the well-shod footprints of Felix Culpepper of Toorak, 3142.

  I propped myself higher against Cookie’s fragrant pillows and opened the paper to the front page. Splash shot of a downed, mangled, somewhat burned chopper in a field. This story was also light-on in details, played ever so faintly for smiles if not laughs. A camel had been apprehended fleeing the scene, but then sadly shot dead by an over-eager constabulary. Maybe Vinnie had been wrong about the bus crash. Maybe the Church was covering it up, like all those child sex cases. Unconfirmed rumors of mysteri­ous wounds to its body, RSPCA officials promising an investiga­tion. No names I recognized, luckily including my own, although a mysterious doctor of veterinary science was mentioned. The Sheikh of Araby was nowhere to be seen in the report.

  I groaned a bit, and searched the pages for word on ravenous twin thugs found eating the bodies of the dead in an underground crypt at Fawkner Memorial Park, but that was missing too. You just can’t rely on the media these days, and anyway Culpepper would have released them by now. On page 21, I did find a hand­some photo of a noble visitor from an oil-rich realm and his lovely wives and daughters, masked in layers of silk and linen. Prince Abdul bin Sahal al Din, an honorable man, had been the honored guest with members of his family at a recent reception of honor hosted by the honorable governor of Victoria, the Right Honor­able— No doubt Culpepper and his respectable Toorak wife would have been in attendance, too, Felix dodging the cameras.

  I climbed out and pulled on my soiled and unironed clothes after I found them on the floor near the door. A larger portion of my wardrobe, or at least a selection from St. Vincent’s Op Shop, lay beneath rubble in Parkville, along with a minimal selection of my personal effects, just enough to convince the insurance adjust­ers not to adjust Mauricio’s policy into a hole in the ground, just enough to earn me a decent return from my own rather extrava­gant household policy. The rest had been moved piecemeal during the previous month into several Portable Self Storage Units now resident in a large warehouse in Melton, “Open 24/7, you have the key”.

  Thank god for night soil once more! No suspicious movement of furnishings in plain view of the neighbors a scant week prior to the terrible and unforeseeable Mack truck accident. Just a large storage unit or two delivered via the discretion of the cobbled lane to the rear entrance and all my earthlies minus a scam proportion spirited away to safety. In principle I could get the car from the cemetery, tool out to Melton, and grab a change of clothes, but it seemed easier to stay grubby for a while and borrow something from Chook. We were about the same size, and I could put up with the humiliation of wearing a crimplene shirt and a Suit from Sire’s With Free Matching Extra Pair of Trousers for a couple of days.

  The silence in the kitchen was unnerving. The young women were too shaken to fill the main room with awful noise from the surround sound system. I tossed the Age on the table, put my watch back on, retrieved my keys and billfold, stuck the shades on my nose, then quickly checked to see that my folding money and credit cards were intact. For a wonder, they were untouched. I nuked another horrible quasi-coffee, found a stale croissant and wolfed it down without a word, thinking gloomy thoughts. Then I said, “Vinnie around?”

  “He goes out to see his dogs on Sundays,” Animal said. Her borrowed grand dad owned the back end of a couple of grey­hounds. I suppose an interest is a good thing for those moving out of the silver age and toward the old crock’s home, but I was fairly sure he’d never got a penny back from the brace of them. They affected a Buddhist attitude of live and let live toward the fake rabbit on the rail. Vinnie craved the company of his old cronies, I suppose. As would I, if my old cronies hadn’t been the likes of Mauricio Cimino.

  I wondered how Share Lesser was getting on, in the depths of her grieving and abrupt widowhood. I wondered again whether she’d known about her husband and his younger daughter. Surely Share couldn’t have known. Yet surely she couldn’t have not known.

  “How long had it been going on?” I asked, taking another ap­palled sip.

  Animal looked at me, at Grime Grrl who tightened her lips and shook her head, back to me. She knew I knew. She didn’t know how I knew I knew, and neither did I, but I’ve been around this shithole of a world longer than she has.

  “After mum died. Cookie’s and mine.”

  “He tried it with you?” Succeeded, is what I wanted to know. “Only once. I said I’d cut his dick off.”

  “How old were you? Sorry, I have to ask.”

  “Twelve. Just getting tits.”

  “Shit. Sorry, Grime. And she’s had trouble getting around since—”

  Grime Grrl shook her head, lost in the void of the past.

  “Years.” Animal shuddered, and even in the dark of noon I could see two tears roll down her cheeks. “Stuck at home most of the time.”

  “And she loved him, too, in a way, I suppose,” I said carefully, trying to avoid an ideological outburst from Grime. I could feel an outburst of my own coming on. The bastard. I’d have blown his fucking head off myself.

  “He looked after her, see,” Grime said in a flat, flat voice. “I didn’t think he’d dare try it again. He bought her everything she wanted. Nothing was too much for dear old Rodolph. He’d even wash—” Her voice locked up, and she clutched at my daughter’s hands.

  “And when you saw the note you thought he’d had your sister abducted and murdered?”

  They stared up at me, shocked.

  “We would have told you,” Animal said crossly. “Do you think we’re stupid?”

  “No, sorry.” I rocked back on my heels, bum against the sink. “I know you’re not stupid, so I know neither of you pulled the trigger. I just hope you’ve made sure there’s no obvious trail back between you and whatever mad bloody vigilante vengeance sisterhood hit squad....” I shook my head. “Not that I blame you, or Cookie, for killing the evil shit. Not that I blame you for a moment.”

  Animal looked at me, streaks in her white-and-black makeup. “Well, good,” she said, finally.

  “The less I know the better,” I told them. “Give me the key to downstairs, Annabelle, I need to make a phone call.” Better not to let her know I had my own key.

  I was halfway down the stairs when I remembered the Esky and the shotgun. I had to dispose of one or both before the cops or Culpepper, in cahoots or independently, came breaking down the door to my daughter’s household. I trudged back up, marched past their dark sighs, reached into the wardrobe.

  Not there.

  I flung the doors open and rummaged harder. The gun was gone. And some bastard had ni
cked my stolen Esky.

  My stomach turned over, a sort of imagined terror of retribu­tion. Could Culpepper really have snuck into the room while I lay there snoring? No. Paranoia. Impossible. Well, someone had.

  I marched out again. “Who’s got them?”

  “Got what? Aren’t you going?”

  “The bloody gun. The bloody Esky.”

  “What Esky? Jeez Dad, are you turning into an alkie or some­thing?”

  “He brought an Esky in with him last night,” Grime told her. “I put it in Cookie’s wardrobe. There was also the shotgun you left there, wrapped up in canvas.”

  They carefully didn’t look guiltily at each other.

  “We’ve been out, see? For a couple of hours. At Grime’s ma­chine shop. Not that we were doing anything special, just hanging out. On a Sunday morning, it’s boring, you know? Could have been anyone.”

  “Christ, who else comes in here? That’s a god-damned murder weapon.”

  “Well, sound like it’s gone now.”

  They’d had someone drop by to collect it. The vengeance grrls, presumably. I hoped the grrls weren’t too disappointed to open the Esky and find half a dozen empty Foster’s cans. I hoped, too, that they didn’t find a few keys of prime heroin.

  Mauricio was at Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in East Mel­bourne with his sainted mother, just up the road from the Nippon Tuck. Dago answered the phone. It broke his mother’s heart that he was a declared unbeliever, but what can you do, these clever ones leap over the wall in their pride, like Juliet had done, the slut, you just have to pray and do novenas until the cows come home in the faith that the Virgin Mary will touch their hearts at the last moment, hopefully before a police bullet gets there first. I said I needed a cell phone and a lift out to collect my transport. He told me to fuckin go up the street and buy a new one from any of the hundred hole-in-wall shops in Sydney Road’s Magic Mile of Mobiles, then catch a number 19 tram all the way to the terminus followed by a brisk stroll to the bone yard. I reminded him that it was Sunday, the day of rest, all the shops were shut. He made in rejoinder the same general point about the day of rest, and won­dered where the fuck I’d been during the last decade and a half of market liberation from the binding constraints of No Sunday Trading superstition and restraint of trade? I said I’d spent a bit of it in an American jail surrounded by very large black dudes, exercising my civil rights and other muscles, and Dago agreed to come by in fifteen minutes with a spare Nokia that had fallen off a truck.

  §

  The Cobra was still in the cemetery car park, which was a wonder. The graf was a wonder too—four different colors with shadows. It ran all down the passenger side, from turning light to turning light. It took me three minutes to decipher it: I think it said SCRUBBER, but the letters were so deformed and intertwined that it might have read EAT AT JOE’S. It gave the crate a manly air, there was a touch of the freight train to it. One of the spray cans had been abandoned. It lay on the ground, perhaps the bearer of usable finger prints. Perhaps not, and anyway the police would not be sympathetic to my grievance. I left it where it was and drove away in the general direction of my stash of clean clothes. While I did so I keyed in Share’s home number.

  “Sharon Lesser,” the widow said.

  “Tom,” I said.

  “Who did it?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “The cops are useless. They won’t tell me a thing.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “I want to know who did it, Purdue.”

  “Yeah, well, I cashed in my private dick’s license years ago.”

  “Had it taken away for irregularities, is what I heard.”

  “Depends on your perspective,” I said.

  “They don’t let jailbirds hold a license, isn’t that right?”

  “Jailbird,” I said. “Have you been watching old Edward G. Robinson flicks on the midday movie?”

  “I know you did time in the States, and they won’t let crims back in there. I doubt the Australian authorities allow old cons to get a P.I. ticket, either.”

  True enough. So I was obliged to pursue the feng shui trade and other novelties not paying anything like Yank bucks.

  “That was Recherché D. T. Purdue,” I told her. “Good plain Tom is a different bloke entirely.”

  “Really. Changed your fingerprints, eh?”

  “Trickier now, admittedly, with the terrorism police on the job. Back then you just had to be very sincere. I can do sincere.”

  “I need to talk to you, Purdue.”

  “We’re talking now.”

  “Not on the fucking phone, you idiot.”

  The widow was in fine fettle and abruptly very businesslike. It occurred to me that she might be about to offer me another job, one that paid better than camel doping.

  “I’ll call you later about a meet,” I said and rang off.

  §

  As I drove to Melton, I pondered the pros and cons of gainful em­ploy in the service of Sharon Lesser: I needed money, I didn’t need any more excitement in my life. Mutually exclusive propositions as far as the widow was concerned. I deferred my decision.

  The U Store It facility skulked in a square kilometer of dubious light industry: glaziers, crash repair specialists, spray painters, alu­minum windows, spare parts all makes and models. You wouldn’t want to ask too many questions, but the glaziers were known to drink with the cops who attended home break-ins and if the spare parts boyos didn’t have what you needed, they knew someone who just happened to be wrecking the model in question. I stated my business to the ex-lifer on the gate and parked the Cobra out­side my particular concrete box. I had the key all right. Nothing so sophisticated as a digital keyboard for U Store It—the clients wouldn’t be able to remember their own names, half of them. They made up for it with their key. It was an elaborate thing with two parallel sets of irregular teeth—you could imagine a paleon­tologist unearthing it. You sure as hell couldn’t get a spare one cut at your local hardware.

  All my worldly possessions were present and correct. So were someone else’s.

  §

  I walked back to the gate house and had a yarn with the ex-lifer.

  The guy might have been the terror of Pentridge H block back in the sixties, but age had withered him and the years condemned.

  He had few teeth and fewer neurons. He knew nothing, as he was slow to tell me.

  “You’re the only one who has the key, Mr. Purdue.”

  “I don’t think so. Some other bugger has parked his stuff in my unit.”

  “Couldn’t happen, Mr. Purdue. Could not happen.”

  “But it has. There’s all this expensive gear in my unit.”

  “You must have loaned the key to a mate.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yours is the only key, Mr. Purdue. Besides, the only person

  I’ve seen here today was an old lady with a couple of fishing rods wrapped up real good in canvas. Very quiet Sunday.”

  “Funny time of year to be fishing,” I said.

  He laughed, rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but she was hopeful. Had an Esky.”

  “For keeping her fish cool?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed some more. “I told her not to go storing any fish. Right on the nose quick smart, that’d be.” He found this imagined prospect uproarious, and uproared.

  “She did, though,” I said. “She left it in my locker.”

  “Couldn’t of, not without your key.” It sobered him but not as much as it puzzled him.

  “Management must have a key.”

  “It would be in a safe, Mr. Purdue, locked up tight.”

  “So anything in that unit must be mine?”

  “Gotta be.” I took out my wallet and consulted the contents. But the ex-lifer wasn’t selling. “If I knew anything, I’d tell you, Mr. Purdue.”

  I gave up and walked back to the unit. The “fishing rods” in canvas was jammed up behind my own stuff. I didn’t touch it. The last t
hing I wanted was my fingerprints on a murder weapon. I carefully popped the tabs on the top of the Esky. No drugs. No empty beer cans. White fumes boiled out. I pulled my face away. Nothing toxic, but cold. Dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide, cupping something large and blue-gray and repulsive. I slapped the lid on at once to keep the day’s mild warmth out.

  §

  My new phone rang. Caller ID blocked. What was the point of having it, everyone did this shit now. I was about to announce myself when it occurred to me that no one knew the number of this borrowed phone from Dago. Probably a phone spammer. I disguised my voice and said, “Yo, bro, how dey hanging?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, sport.”

  “Who you be, boy?”

  “I know who you are, scumbag.”

  “Who I be?”

  “You’re the arsehole who stole my fucking best mobile and I’m coming round to your place to rip your ears off your head.”

  “My place has been bulldozed.”

  “That dyke’s den above Vinnie’s shop.”

  “Jesus, Mauricio, your brother—”

  “Bloody Dago, would he ask? Would he so much as say please? No. He needs a mobile to lend to some jerk who’s smashed up his own, so he grabs the nearest...just grabs the bastard.”

  “You’ll get your phone back, Mauricio.”

  “In one piece, Purdue.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “We need to talk about things.”

  “We are talking about things.”

  “I’d rather not run up my fucking phone bill.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll come round to your place later, Mauricio, we’ll have a heart to heart. Face to face.”

  “You do that, Tom. And, Tom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If the phone rings again...don’t answer it, you hear?”

  “Outgoings only,” I said.

  “And not too many of them either.”