THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER

by Michael Smith

  The house was a disgrace. Much in the way you’d expect, given the conditions outside. The occupants seemingly hadn’t thrown anything away in a decade. Stacks of rubbish, old clothes, rotting food, and cat shit were piled as high as the taller of the two men. It was a hazard. The smell was sickening. They moved through a narrow walkway that had been carved into the mound of rubbish. They were careful as they stepped over broken needles and rotting filth. For all of Harris’ bluster and playing at being the common man, he felt uncomfortable. He was just as big a snob as Lescott, and at least on the face of things, Lescott was honest about it. Harris was full of shit.

  The front room was just as bad. They looked for somewhere to sit, there was nowhere. The room was dark, damp and dusty. Harris and Lescott looked at each other. They silently agreed that they had to be quick, this place was toxic. Spores of toxic mould fungus floated within the narrow shafts of light that squeezed through cracks in the window’s newspaper coverings. The place ought to have been condemned. It was a living illness

  Enzo Rosetti, a middle aged Aboriginal, slumped on an old sofa next to a woman, presumably Mrs Rosetti. They looked underweight and ill. Their respiratory systems were struggling. They didn’t breathe, they wheezed. They were constantly coughing. Their chins and lips were stained red. The colour of the blood that they’d been coughing up. In front of them lay heroin related paraphernalia. Wraps, tourniquets, syringes, and the like were scattered everywhere. They were so far gone they hadn’t even bothered trying to hide it from the visiting investigators. Lescott began to speak, “Mr Rosetti? We spoke on the phone.”

  “I’m Rosetti.” That rasping voice, it sounded pained. The woman next to Rosetti tried to sit up. It was no use. Her limbs were weak. She sank back into the rotting sofa. Harris cringed as he watched. Heroin destroys a person.

  “And is this Mrs Rosetti?”

  “No.” Rosetti cackled.

  Harris noticed a spoon and a belt lying between the pair. They’d used very recently. Harris felt ashamed. He could justify it any way he wanted. He could think of his tormented childhood. He could tell himself he’d seen the worst in men at war. But the fact remained, he shared a common illness with these people. They were carrying their own tragedies. He was one bad spell away from spiralling himself.

  “I’m not sure how much we’re going to get from them.” Harris nodded towards the drug-taking equipment to bring it to Lescott’s attention.

  “Harris.” Rosetti tried to look up at Harris, but his neck was weak and his head heavy. “The detective?”

  “Ex-detective, Mr Rosetti.” Harris corrected.

  “That’s why it has to be you.” Rosetti hissed in between sandpaper breaths.

  Harris looked at Lescott who looked nonplussed. “I don’t follow.”

  Such was the difficulty Rossetti was having breathing, it sounded like he was about to shuffle off the mortal coil with each laboured gasp. “Because they did this. And I might not know which way the wind’s blowing. But I know you’re not one of them.”

  “DS Lescott tells me your daughter was being followed by a Rolls Royce prior to her disappearance?” Harris’s manner was disinterested. He expected Rosetti to lose consciousness within seconds.

  “My daughter?” Rosetti’s eyes sharpened. The dull glaze that forms over the eyes of opiate abusers abruptly disappeared. The subject was clearly a sobering matter for him.

  “Could you tell me what you believe happened?” Harris frowned. “What you reported to the police at the time?”

  Rosetti looked like he had no idea where he was. “‘61. I was working at the hospital as a porter.” He stopped speaking, only to cough. Harris and Lescott could see the blood flecks as they flew from his mouth. The man had tuberculosis. They reached into their breast pockets and held their pocket squares over their mouths and noses. “St Vincent’s. I did days. Carla worked nights… She was a nurse.”

  “I was led to believe Carla was your daughter,” Harris continued.

  “My wife!” Rosetti shouted. “She was beautiful, inside and out, not like her.” Rosetti spat the words out to hurt his female companion. They didn’t land, she was drifting in and out of consciousness. Instead, he gave her a spiteful kick. She didn’t notice. “She looked after me and our daughter.”

  “Where is your daughter?” Lescott asked.

  “Isabella? She’s upstairs. She was only a baby at the time.”

  “She’s upstairs?” Harris looked over to Lescott, who nodded before slipping out of the room quietly.

  “Could you tell me a little about Carla’s disappearance?” Harris could sense the conversation would take some time. The thick, poisonous air felt like it was closing around him.

  “We just wanted to say goodbye. No one would listen. I need your help. I need to say goodbye.” The man was an emotional wreck, he began to cry uncontrollably.

  Lescott ascended the junk-covered stairs carefully. The place was a death trap. You’d have needed a far better understanding of contagious diseases to list the potential hazards lying amongst the refuse. The scurrying of rats was audible from somewhere within the pile.

  The first room he encountered was the bathroom. It was a foul. There were bloody needles in one end of the bath and a rubber duck in the other. The plumbing was broken, and the toilet was overflowing with putrid water. It was beyond belief as to how they had survived like this for any amount of time.

  Harris stared at the pair of addicts. He wondered if this was how he appeared when he was in the embrace of heroin. He told himself that he could have stopped before it got anywhere near that bad, but Harris had been addicted for two decades. At first it was morphine. Then when it became harder to convince doctors to prescribe the painkilling opioid, he began his romance with heroin. He’d tried to kick it a few times. The truth was, he’d never found a reason to live. He didn’t have the automatic programming that enables some people just to drift through life. He needed a purpose. He needed a higher calling. He found it in scoring and fixing.

  “In ‘61. They said Carla had consumption. She contracted it in winter. Then by the summer… She was gone. A couple of days in hospital… She was dead.”

  “I thought someone went missing?” Harris was becoming frustrated.

  Rosetti wheezed, “My wife. She went missing.”

  “Before she died?” Harris rubbed at his eyes. The atmosphere of the room was making them itch.

  “No.” Rosetti was becoming annoyed, as though he had explained himself clearly.

  “Can you take your time and start at the beginning? Please?”

  Lescott could hear the muffled sound of conversation from downstairs. He could hear Harris speaking slowly and loudly to make himself clear. He almost sounded like he knew what he was doing, like he’d read the detective’s handbook. Evidently, he hadn’t. Whatever it was he was saying, Rosetti’s tone was changing, he was becoming agitated.

  Lescott entered a bedroom. There he found a malnourished child playing with a discarded metal spoon. Isabella began to cry when he snatched her plaything from her tiny grasp. She was so small. A picture of neglect. He searched around the room for a clean garment in which he could wrap her. Anything would do, a towel, a bed sheet, anything. There was nothing. Everything he could get his hands on was soiled and rancid. He took off his jacket and wrapped her in it. He left the room with the crying child in his arms. He could feel her bones through his jacket. She was skeletal. Moving as quickly as he could through that precariously balanced mess, he carried her down the stairs, out the front door, down the street and over to his car. He placed her on the back seat and looked down at her. She was a tragic sight.

  Harris got into Lescott’s car and sat there for a moment. He reached into his jacket pocket and placed a cigarette to his lips. He watched as Lescott spoke to Child Protection Services, who had come to take Isabella Rosetti away. Enzo Rosetti had no idea, they’d told him, but he couldn’t understand what was going on. His brain was fried. His partner, she un
derstood. She wailed and she kicked up a stink. It took two men to hold her back. She clearly had a bond with the girl, but that didn’t change the fact that she was incapable of looking after her.

  When Lescott was done, he got into his car. “She’ll go into the system, bounce around foster homes for a while. If she’s lucky she’ll be adopted by people who’re halfway decent. That’s not likely. She’ll probably end up in a horrible group home when she hits her teenage years. I don’t want to think about what happens from there.” He too reached for the packet of cigarettes on the dashboard, it was empty. He scrunched up the card and tossed it at the window in anger.

  Harris handed his would-be partner his half-smoked cigarette. “And so the cycle continues. A new generation of the forgotten is born.”

  Lescott smoked the cigarette furiously.

  “Who knows, maybe those two clean up their acts…” In the pause that followed, Harris considered humankind’s ability to beat the drug that had enslaved him. The outlook wasn’t great.

  “Junkies are junkies,” Lescott spoke flatly. He’d forgotten Harris’ addiction. The moment he realised what he had said, and who he had said it to, he looked up apologetically. “Getting clean won’t help them now. She’s in the system. In the eyes of the institution, that’s it.” He needed a distraction. “Didn’t exactly look like an ‘Enzo Rosetti’ did he?”

  “Best case scenario, he was adopted by a nice immigrant couple who lovingly raised him in a traditional Italian home, cleansing him of his language, his name and his culture. It probably left him with a lifelong identity crisis. Coupled with his wife dying… No wonder he turned to smack.”

  “Did you get any sense out of him?”

  “His wife died of tuberculosis after a short stay in St Vincent’s in the summer of ‘61.” Harris answered dismissively.

  “I thought she went missing?”

  “For Carla Rosetti… Death was only the beginning of her mystery. It was her dead body that went missing. They realised at the funeral, when a mourner opened the coffin to say goodbye and it was some other stiff in there. If they hadn’t, no one would have ever known. The hospital said it must have been some sort of administrative error. They just lost the body, no paper trail; no one had any idea what had happened. Six months later they said she must have ended up cremated along with someone else when she obviously shouldn’t have been.”

  “A case of incompetence, I’d think. That doesn’t help us.” Lescott mulled over the story in his mind. “But he said the Rolls Royce had been following her around?”

  “They first spotted it at St Vincent’s where they both worked. I guess that goes down as coincidence. Then, he says, it used to follow her home from work and then her shifts at the hospital. I couldn’t ascertain how much was the truth, how much was the drugs. There was definitely a generous helping of nonsense mixed in.”

  “He didn’t know his arse from his fucking elbow.” Lescott watched as Rosetti staggered from inside the house. He stooped down and embraced his weeping partner. They were just normal people, who would mourn the loss of their child like anyone else. Lescott knew this better than anyone.

  “This religious imagery he’s creating…” Harris changed the topic while looking straight ahead, out the car window. “You think he’s involved with the church?”

  “Like a priest?” Lescott looked over at Harris, the Englishman’s question was loaded with bitterness. “I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’d be careful not to blame this on religion just yet. It could just be some loon using religion as a reason for his murderous deviancy.”

  Harris let out a soft laugh through his nose. “What do you think religion is?”

  Chapter 17

  When Lescott walked back into Darlinghurst Road, he did so with a renewed sense of purpose. He felt stimulated. For the first time in months, he was engaging with the world around him. He’d been so occupied that he hadn’t taken a drink in hours. He’d bought himself a coffee from a cart on Darlinghurst Road; it had been so long since he’d drank it, he’d forgotten the feel of that hot tangy tar. He enjoyed it so much, he allowed himself to feel a glimmer of hope. Perhaps he need not drink after all, perhaps there was a better way to live.

  But he was about to come unstuck. The thoughts in his conscious mind celebrated his apparent liberation from the poison that had enslaved him; his body was not. Every molecule of his physical being had come to rely on the toxicity that fuelled him while it slowly killed him.

  He’d come back to the station meaning to cross-reference the reports of the Death Car with the notes he’d made at the crime scene that morning, in the hope that something would turn up. “Get the duty coroner on the phone, please?” He asked the Desk Sergeant upon entering the building.

  “No problem.”

  “Who’s on?” Lescott asked as he played percussion on the desktop. He was invigorated. Energy was pouring from him.

  The Desk Sergeant paused and held the phone away from her ear to look at Lescott’s fast paced digital drumming, “Do you mind? I can’t hear myself fucking think…”

  “Sorry. I didn’t even realise.” Lescott stilled his hand.

  The woman looked through a directory that contained the names and extensions of those who worked in the building. Once she’d found the extension for the morgue, she dialled. “Ben Cook is on duty today.”

  Lescott didn’t hear. He was staring down at his hand. The moment he’d stopped tapping away, he’d noticed the shake in his hand. He’d experienced several occurrences of delirium tremens in the past. Neither time nor familiarity made the ordeal any easier. The sense of pride he’d felt at not drinking vanished. Maybe it was the time since his last drink. Maybe it was proximity to his jail at Darlinghurst Road, a place holding nothing but bad memories for him. A cold shiver ran down his spine. His skin felt clammy and too tight for his body. It began to itch, and no amount of scratching could soothe it.

  A dark veil had fallen upon him, and it had left his surroundings quite bleak and entirely desolate. As he stood there, surrounded by the busyness of the station, he was totally alone. No one, in that moment, was viewing what he was. The warmth had been sucked out of the daylight and he had been left in a world of blacks, whites and greys. Apart from a blood red streak that appeared in his periphery. He was manic as he scanned the lobby looking for the source of the burgundy torment, but as he chased that long, slender streak of claret it slid away and rested somewhere behind his eyes. The moment he stopped chasing it, t crept back into the corner of his sight.

  He was hallucinating. His enthusiasm had been stripped away. All that was left was a desperate, all-consuming and unquenchable thirst that warped his mind and ravaged his body. Addiction is not a pretty thing. Withdrawals are amongst the most hellish of torments.

  “DS Lescott…” A friendly voice spoke, but Fred Lescott couldn’t hear it, ashen-faced, he gripped on to the front desk to steady himself. “Detective Sergeant Lescott, I’m talking to you.”

  “I’m sorry. I was… Somewhere else.” Without looking up, Lescott took a short sharp breath to compose himself.

  “DS Lescott here heads the Missing Persons squad. He’s been out this morning tying up a few loose ends on a rather notorious case we’re currently working.” Still Lescott kept his eyes upon the floor. He recognised the warmth in the voice that spoke. It was quite fake. He looked up to see DCI Alan Livingstone looking back at him, smiling a peculiar smile. Coming back to his senses, it occurred to Lescott just how strange he must have looked, gripping the desk, breathing heavily, and tossing his head around looking for that damned red apparition.

  He shook the humiliation off, it was time to play the game, “Alan, are you not going to introduce us?” Lescott smiled at the men standing on Livingstone’s shoulder. They looked quite out of place, there in the lobby of Darlinghurst Road station. They’d have been more at home in the rich mahogany offices of Barings Bank or Parliament House.

  These men had money in a way you just didn’t see
in Darlinghurst. This wasn’t the kind of money that bought you a trophy wife in a nice house on Bellevue Hill, as well as a younger, better looking mistress in a Bondi penthouse. This was old money. The kind of money that opened the doors of the shadowy rooms in which the future is written.

  But for all of their money, power and influence, they looked quite stupid. They may have been dressed in finery fit for kings, but they were little better than tourists at the zoo. They’d come to gawk at the hoi polloi, at the plebs who unknowingly did their bidding. They’d come to see the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of pounds they poured into places like the NSW Police, every year.

  The force called them benefactors while reaching out with open palms, they called themselves philanthropists as they wrought their influence upon us all, and the papers called them the best humanity has to offer as they plastered them all over the front pages. Anyone with any sense called them corrupt, morally bankrupt ghouls. These men didn’t want to make a difference to the world for the common man. They did it for tax breaks, to help them accrue more zeroes in their bank accounts. Worse yet, they did it to get a police station named after them. Because what’s the point of having money if people aren’t going to hear about it for generations to come?

  And where did all that money go? Someone needed to pay for DCI Livingstone’s pursuit of political climbing. Influential friends are hard to come by. They need French food cooked by the best chefs. They need Cuban cigars rolled on the flesh of a virgin’s inner thighs. And they need bribes. That’s right. Livingstone took cash from the rich, to give it straight back.

  Lescott couldn’t help but feel impressed by Livingstone. He fitted right in amongst distinguished company. Watching him was like watching one of nature’s great imitators at work. It was poetry. His performance was seamless, deeply nuanced and utterly convincing. He drank in the right pubs. He ate in the right restaurants. He even cheated on his wife with waitresses at the right country club. Everything he did was entirely calculated and aimed at furthering his ambitions. In another life he’d have been someone, not just a pig.