by Phyllis King
‘Why?’
‘It’s a carrot. Fix the pay negotiations and any investigation will be done discreetly. Don’t cave in and by next week every eligible voter in Melbourne will be able to identify Arnold by his privates, they will have seen these pictures so often. Still, it gives us a head start in trying to get the bottom of this.
I looked blankly at him.
He sighed and saw that he would have to spell it out. ‘If it’s murder, there is a chance it’s work related. If it’s work related, chances are the killer’s a fellow comrade. Wants his seat, wants his Cabinet position, whatever. We want to find out first and put daylight between the incident and the Party. You can only spin something well if you know what happened in the first place, and finding that out is our job.’
I slouched back into my seat. For a minute I felt like getting out of the car, slamming the door, and never having to look at Gesink again. But then I remembered it was this or a return to maternity leave, so I pulled myself together, which I immediately demonstrated by knocking over my handbag. Personal belongings went flying all over the backseat. I hastily stuffed everything back into it and handed Gesink’s happy snaps back to him.
‘Alright, so what do we do now?’ I asked.
‘I think you need to find out what you can at Fleur de Lis,’ Gesink answered. ‘A woman will get more out of the girls. I happen to be acquainted with the manager, on a purely professional basis of course,’ he coloured slightly. ‘I’ll make you an appointment for tonight.’
About 6 pm I made my way to an alley just off Spring Street. Tom had been all sweetness and light when I phoned saying I was going to be home late. He promised to keep dinner warm for me. The perfect homemaker - damn it.
I felt ridiculous knocking on the very discrete door to which Gesink had directed me, as suits milled about on their way home from the office. It was opened by an enormous man who radiated danger like uranium. Without a word, he ushered me inside and locked the door. I followed him up a set of fire stairs into a bar. It was nice, if you like bordello red with dashes of gilt-edged erotic art. Surprisingly, I did.
A middle-aged woman, whose outfit had more elements than the periodic table, was sitting waiting for me.
‘Well you’re on time.’ She grimaced like a crocodile in shoulder pads and gold buttons. ‘You tell Stainless from me, that we’re square now. Dead men don’t tell tales and neither do successful entrepreneurs.’ She gave me a hard stare.
I must look as if I have ‘3LO’ as a nickname. ‘Discretion is my middle name,’ I assured her, which could sort of work with Valient.
‘Melissa was Vaughn’s regular service provider. She’s waiting for you in the lounge.’
Melissa was sitting at a table in the next room. Having been programmed to think hookers are either drugged out skanks or super model escorts, I was surprised to see she looked more like your average hairdresser. She was well groomed, made up and trim but looking a little tired.
‘I don’t quite know where to begin.’
She smiled. ‘How about I start. My speciality is listening,’ she said. ‘I get the blokes who want a sympathetic ear, those who aren’t sure if what they are doing is right, or who want to bitch about their wife, their kids, their boss. Most of the other girls can’t be bothered with the whinging. I don’t mind it. I find people interesting and I’m cheaper than a shrink, with a few extra tricks up my sleeve. So sure I had sex occasionally with Vaughn, but mostly he talked and I listened.’
‘How often did you see him?’
‘Every couple of weeks, more often when Parliament was sitting.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘He came in the night he died. He had just handed the Premier his resignation. He was heading off to the U.S. the next day.’
‘He resigned?’ I asked amazed.
‘He said he was tired of waiting around for a party that didn’t know talent when it saw it and he was off to start some joint venture in Silicon Valley that was going to make billions. So he was cutting all ties and going to sail off into the sunset.’
‘Was he...into, um, bondage at all?’
She did not blink an eyelid. ‘Yeah sometimes. That’s not me though; that’s Vanessa - she’s not in until eight o’clock.’
She yawned and then apologised. ‘Sorry, I didn’t get much sleep today. One of my kids was home from school.’
‘How many kids have you got?’ I asked.
‘Three. This winter has been a bugger with colds and the flu. How about you?’
‘Just one; she’s six months. I only went back to work this week.’
‘You coping? No tears in the bathroom, phone calls to childcare.’
‘It’s been okay. My partner’s at home with her, they’re going great.’
‘He sounds like a catch.’
He was a good guy, I thought to myself. Last night I’d come home to a beautiful dinner, clean house and happy baby. I was lucky. He was a better mother than I was.
I nodded at Melissa. She smiled again. ‘Got any photos with you? I love babies.’
Clearly this was why she earned the big bucks. No one had ever shown so much interest in me. I pulled out the photo pocket, gave it to her, and sat waiting to hear how gorgeous my girl was.
She looked slightly puzzled, flicked through the bunch, and then twisting her head, examined one photo again.
‘Don’t know if I’d be framing any of these.’
I glanced over and grimaced. They were the ones of Arnold. I must have handed the wrong ones back to Gesink in the car.
‘I don’t know if you are supposed to have seen these,’ I said nervously.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before and that’s including the corpse.’
She studied them all carefully. One, in particular, she looked at very closely.
‘Anything wrong?’ I asked, meaning anything other than the dead man with a rope around his neck and latex not covering all the bits you really don’t want to see.
‘See this knot here?’ She pointed to the one around his neck. ‘That’s standard, a hangman’s knot. But this one binding his hands isn’t.’
I was never a girl guide; it just looked like a knot to me.
‘In situations like this, the usual knot we use is the ‘grief’ knot; it’s a trick knot. Look’s like a real one, but it isn’t hard to get out of, if things start to go wrong.’
‘Isn’t that not playing by the bondage rules, using knots just for show?’
Melissa laughed. ‘He was a politician, it’s all for show!’ She looked at it again, ‘No, the one he’s got there is unusual. I’ve only ever seen sailors use that one.’
‘What were you in a former life, a magician’s assistant?’
‘No, first job was at a brothel in Port Melbourne. What’s the old saying - screw sailors, listen to a whole bunch of crap stories.’
‘So he wouldn’t have got out of that one.’
‘Not just that, he couldn’t have tied that one himself. Someone else did.’
It was beginning to sound less like an accidental death and more like murder.
Melissa looked at me, ‘You look like you need a drink.’
I nodded. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this kind of work.’
‘Well, you don’t want to get a drink from here, it costs a small fortune. You head home to your fella and babe.’
I got up to go.
‘Can I give you just one piece of advice?’ she said.
‘Sure,’ I answered.
‘The amount of guys who turn up in a brothel for the first time because their wives haven’t got time for sex because of the kids, you wouldn’t believe, so make sure you keep the flame burning. Get me?’
I nodded and left.
The next day I was in at West Melbourne early. I told it all to Gesink. He twitched at the wrong photos part, but said nothing. When I finished he went into his office and shut the door. It sounded like he was making
phone calls. To amuse myself I thought of Melissa’s advice and tried to remember the last time things had ‘hotted up’ at home and couldn’t. I suspected that wasn’t such a good sign.
After half an hour, Gesink came out of the office. We traded photos. ‘Turns out you were right. He did resign the night he died. Premier didn’t want it to be public knowledge in case it looked bad for his government.’ He gave me a broad smile.
‘That’s good news?’ I asked.
‘It’s better than hearing the Premier killed his Police Minister.’
‘Was that likely?’ I scoffed.
‘Clearly you don’t know the Premier that well. Come on, we’ve got to be somewhere else.’
Gesink drove us down past the docks and the refinery into Williamstown. ‘Willy’ was where Labor politicians can live in good conscience in million dollar homes but still be keeping it real in the Western suburbs. We headed down to the shoreline where the waves were choppy and the breeze stiff. A dozen or so yachts were moored there. Gesink walked along until he came to a particularly fine one with the name ‘Soak’ painted on the side. A woman was looking at us from the deck.
‘Hello,’ Gesink called out. ‘We’ve come for a chat.’
It was Arnold’s wife. She glared at us but climbed down from the boat.
‘Your indentured help told me you were here,’ Gesink said. ‘I saw a photo of the boat on the wall of your study the other day.’
‘What do you want?’
Without even hesitating Gesink asked, ‘To know why you murdered Vaughn.’
My jaw dropped with surprise.
Arnold’s wife was equally startled. She dissolved as if the stone solidity had been a mirage. ‘How did you know?’ she whispered.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Gesink replied. ‘Why’d you do it?’
‘He came home that night and said he was leaving me. I’d just been the start-up money and he was off to the States. He said he was selling up everything - the house, everything - and starting again. But it was when he said he was going to take the boat. He’d taken a liking to it; wanted to sail off into the sunset.
‘That was just to punish me. It wasn’t his to take. It’s like my baby. But he said he was going the next day. Any problems I had with it, I could talk his lawyers.’ She melted away into sobs.
‘So you,’ Gesink prompted.
‘I told him I wanted to part on good terms. Be civilised and discuss it over dinner. He’s such a pompous idiot he believed me. I put a sedative in the wine and when he was unconscious, I set him up so he strangled himself. He had all the gear in our house. I made it look like it was an accident but ensured that he’d be found out for the dirty perve he was.
‘If I had known the Party was going to cover it up, I wouldn’t have bothered with the bondage gear. I would have strangled him with my bare hands.’ She was turning to granite again, angry and unrepentant.
‘What happens now?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to tell the police?’
Gesink shook his head. ‘They might work it out themselves but it won’t come from me.’
Without a word, she turned away and climbed back on the boat. We walked off.
Gesink managed to find the one greasy spoon among all the tarted up cafes and ordered a couple of coffees. I was speechless with cold and also the turn of events. He took pity on me and began talking.
‘It started with the trophy I saw in the cabinet of the study. The Jane Tait Memorial Cup is awarded to the first boat across the line, skippered by a woman, each year in the Sydney to Hobart. I looked it up. She had won it three years running on that boat; that’s serious sailing.
‘Once you found out about the sailor’s knot and that it was unlikely he was a serious political threat anymore, all roads led home. I thought confronting her was worth a shot.’
‘How did you know she would tell you the truth?’
Gesink smirked. ‘Rich types aren’t used to upstarts asking impertinent questions. They expect to be kowtowed to. Confront them head on and they’ll fold quicker than an American private equity firm.’
I sat there, beginning to thaw. ‘But shouldn’t we go to the police? She did murder him.’
‘That’s not my job. I’m here to protect the party. It might be peopled by shysters, crooks, hacks and numbskulls but it is bigger than all of them. It’s bigger than you and me and its certainly bigger than Vegas. It’s striving for something better, the ‘greater happiness to the mass of the people’ as Chif said. I am not going to let it be blindsided by the death of a political runt like Arnold.’
I ruminated on that for a while. Gesink finished his coffee and then, while looking studiously out of the window, said, ‘You did good. You know when to ask questions and when to keep your mouth shut. Interested in sticking around a bit longer?’
I looked at him in surprise. ‘I’ll think about it.’
We sat there and watched the rain start.
I opened the door to the smell of dinner cooking.
‘Tom, I’m home.’ But to my surprise it was my mother who called back.
‘Ssh, you’ll wake the baby.’
I walked down the hall into our miniscule kitchen. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked astonished. My mother lived over an hour’s drive away and visits were planned well in advance, as were exits.
‘When I heard you were abandoning poor Tom with the baby, I offered to help. I’ve come each day this week. Cooked dinner, cleaned up. Let him have some time to himself
It all made sense.
‘Where’s Tom now?’ I asked through gritted teeth.
‘Oh, he’s out having a run at the moment. I’m glad you’re back as I’ll get home before peak hour. Dinner will be ready in about half an hour,’ she said and kissed me goodbye.
Two can play that game. I picked up the phone and rang Gesink. ‘I’ll take the job,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow.’
I was officially a smoke jumper.
Tom came in just after I had opened a bottle of wine and stirred the curry.
‘Sprung!’ I said, raising my glass to him.
He looked guilty. ‘She offered to help and I thought, well, why not.’
‘And all week, I’ve been feeling a failure because you were coping at home much better than I had been. Dinners cooked. House cleaned. Baby happy and all without a word of complaint. You’re a fraud.’
‘Actually, I do enjoy being at home,’ he admitted sheepishly. He put his arms around me.
That’s lucky, I thought, but still some softening up was in order.
‘Now the baby is asleep and dinner won’t be ready for at least 15 minutes.’ I raised an eyebrow coquettishly, ‘I got a few tips from a sex worker yesterday...’
‘Fifteen minutes, I’ll only need five.’ Tom was salivating.
‘Then remind me to tell you about something over dinner.’
<
The Write Place
Liz Filleul
‘I got a commendation in their last contest,’ Edwina told me smugly. ‘I thought you might like to enter the next one.’ She had printed out the details for the Write Place’s upcoming Winter contest.
I sipped my latte as I skimmed through the conditions: Maximum length: 3000 words. Closing date: 30 June. Entry fee: $25 per story.
‘Twenty-five bucks,’ I commented. ‘That’s a lot.’
‘The prize money’s good, though,’ Edwina pointed out. ‘A thousand bucks if you win, 500 if you’re second, 200 for third.’
I grunted. Edwina might well envisage herself becoming $1000 richer courtesy of The Write Place Winter Story Contest, but I figured I’d simply end up $25 poorer. I picked up the other short-story contest details and entry forms she’d brought along. The City of Kalinda Literary Contest, the Maxton Harrison Short Story Prize...
‘I’m entering both of those,’ Edwina told me. ‘You know that story I wrote about the woman who left her husband and went to live in the Outback; the one th
at placed third in the competition my local newspaper ran? Well, I’ve done a lot more work on it since then and I’m entering it for the Maxton Harrison.’
She smiled, as if victory was assured. Edwina was always confident; none of the self-doubt of the would-be writer for her.
I’d known Edwina for nine months now. We’d met last September when we’d both attended a weekend writing course in Daylesford. I’d sat next to her in the Saturday morning session on character development, then found myself one place behind her in the lunch queue.
