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

by Michael Smith

  I never understood this. Harris insisted on clean needles like no junkie I had ever met. It was harder to keep up with his demand for needles than it was to keep him supplied with skag. He was, however, in luck. Just a few days earlier I’d beaten a degenerate gambler in a game of high-stakes poker. Such was his debt that he would likely never pay it off, but what with him being a doctor at St Vincent’s Hospital, well that opened a pipeline and a world of possibilities to me. I handed Harris several small black medical boxes which he placed into his bag. “I’ve also got antibiotics, prescription-strength painkillers and some really interesting schizophrenia pills. Antipsychotics I believe they call them, either way, crush them into a glass of vodka and watch the stars fall out the sky around you. I woke up naked on Tamarama beach this morning.”

  “No.”

  We shook hands and parted ways. That was about as in-depth as our conversations went. I wasn’t moved by the newspaper article, there just wasn’t any need for small talk. I knew he wasn’t a rat. Had he been a rat, I’d have been in a jail cell. The gay thing played on my mind, though. I wasn’t convinced that particular smoke had appeared without fire. He was always quoting poetry and philosophy, it was all a bit cultured for my liking.

  Last on Harris’ list of tasks wasn’t the most urgent, or life-and-death-defining, but it would prove to be the least comfortable. Stepping through the door to his hovel, he was met by a familiar juxtaposition. In that hideous room at the top of that horrible building, lay the most beautiful woman he had ever laid his eyes upon. She should never have been there. She should never have fallen into heroin’s snare. Harris had trampled on her.

  She was sprawled upon his spot on the deep window sill, looking out at Darlinghurst Road. She didn’t turn around when the door opened and shut behind Harris. She didn’t need Harris to know she was irate. She sucked on one of her long, thin, elegant cigarettes furiously. A copy of the Bulletin was lying at her feet.

  Being linked with one of those dangerous men who go bump in the night had been good for her image. She’d cultivated this bad girl singer-cum-femme-fatale thing which was just exquisite. She’d planted herself in the Sydney underworld like Rita Hayworth had in Buenos Aires in that old black and white film. You know the one; the one that caused all the commotion because she took her glove off. Simpler times.

  “Do you know how this makes me look?” She demanded an answer without looking in her direction.

  “I’m more worried about how it makes me look. You’re not even mentioned.” Harris cringed as he realised what he’d said.

  “What did you just say?” It was only now that she turned to Harris. He recognised her condition immediately. Clearly, she’d spent the day in crisis. Her eyes were darkened with tiredness, the hand she held her cigarette with shook as nervous energy ran through it, and she was irritated. She was strung out. She needed a fix.

  “This has put my life in danger. Your boyfriend George Watson is responsible for it. If anyone gets to be angry, it’s me,” Harris hissed quietly.

  “Can we not do this again, please?” Elsa was sick of hearing about George Watson.

  “All I’m saying… If you want to be angry, be angry at him.” Harris’ words did the trick. She lifted herself from the ledge and moved towards him slowly. As she did, Harris pulled away and began packing his possessions into his duffle bag. “I’ve got to get away for a few weeks.”

  “What?” Elsa lost her temper again. She was unstable. “You don’t leave me. I leave you.”

  “Then go.” Harris suggested as he moved around her stuffing guns, money and clothes into his bag.

  “You’re not leaving me.” Elsa ran around him as he made his way to the door. There she blocked his exit. When he went to move around her, she jabbed him straight in the nose. It was a hell of a shot, his nose pissed blood immediately.

  He dropped his bag and pushed her against a wall. “What’s all this about, eh? You said it yourself. I don’t own you. You don’t own me.”

  She glanced down at the black medical box on his windowsill, when she did, he followed her gaze. He understood her at once. Elsa hadn’t fallen in love with him. She wouldn’t miss him. She’d was fast becoming a closet junkie. Just like Harris. She’d fallen in love with heroin, and he was the one who brought it to her. She had never enjoyed the grimier side of drug taking. She didn’t like dealing with drug dealers. She wasn’t even fond of injecting herself. He would give her a fix and then himself. It seemed only fair, she seldom came first during sex.

  “Ok,” he said. “I’ll stay. We’ll figure something out.” He saw the weight drop from her shoulders. “Grab the box.”

  It was a shameful lie he told to smooth things over. He had no intention of sticking around to meet his fate. It weighed heavily on him as he cooked up her medicine, as he pushed plunger, and it didn’t subside as he watched over her in a comatose state of bliss. That had been the first time he had seen her vulnerable. It didn’t sit comfortably with him; when they met, she came and went as she pleased. But, like the nightingale in that tale of old, he had held that rose to his breast and crushed it. Soon enough he would feel its thorn piercing his heart.

  Chapter 24

  Harris didn’t bother heading up the driveway to Lescott’s house, instead he pulled over to the curb and kept the engine running. When he saw no sign of activity from inside the house, he gave the horn a short sharp blast. Still nothing. Well, not entirely nothing. Several of Lescott’s snooty neighbours peered through their lace curtains to inspect the disturbance. He could almost hear their thoughts. “When did the inner-city criminal element become able to afford drive through a place like this?”

  They thought they owned the land. Obviously, legally, they did. But our legal system is unnatural. One doesn’t own land. The land was there before we were. It will endure long after we have gone. Ownership is a funny idea like that, how can you place a claim on a piece of the earth? Because you have some money in your pocket? Currency is a wholly man-made concept; in reality it means nothing. It’s absurd. Nothing gives people the right to put up a fence around the land that is there for everyone, and everything.

  Countries struggle with the same principle, they draw imaginary borders and claim no one can pass them. Two children born ten metres apart on either side of a fence are taught they are different, that they’re superior to one another. It’s an idiotic principle meant to keep us bloodied and beaten-down by a world we have no say in.

  Harris, of course, didn’t really give a shit. When he saw them turn their noses up at him, he gave the horn several long, loud blasts and waved at the snobs in their silk robes. To further provoke the neighbours, the Darlinghurst ruffian flicked a lit cigarette butt out of the window onto a lawn. A little old lady looked as though she was about to physically faint as he did so. He had a wry smile to himself; it’s important to enjoy the simple things in life. Still nothing from inside Lescott’s home.

  Time was wasting. He didn’t need one of these elite types to call the great unwashed at the nearby police station. No doubt Watson was accumulating friends in the local constabulary. If Lescott wouldn’t come to him, he would go to Lescott. After the last time he entered the man’s home, he hadn’t wanted to do so again. As he walked along the garden path, he looked up to see a large mother possum crawling along a branch with a bairn on its back.

  Harris walked into the hall and called out for Lescott. There were old case files and filing boxes scattered everywhere. Harris had a quick poke through the nearest to hand, they were pertaining to missing children in Queensland. It appeared Lescott was suffering from a ravenous obsession for bringing the killer to justice. It manifested as a God-awful mess, everywhere. It had both a calming and a disturbing effect on Harris simultaneously. He didn’t know if Lescott was a liability or an asset.

  In the kitchen he found no sign of Lescott, but happening upon a pot of hot black coffee, he helped himself to a cup. The kitchen was covered in yet more files. They sat in stacks on th
e floor, on bench tops, in the sink; they were absolutely everywhere. They included most recent pictures of missing children and also adults, crime scene photos, mugshots of kidnappers, murderers and rapists. It was a shrine to the hellishness on earth. It reminded him of a line from The Tempest: “Hell is empty, all the devils are here.”

  Harris made his way upstairs and came upon the door that had been locked all those months ago. He peered around and saw the child’s nursery. It was the only room in the house that wasn’t covered in files. He ran his finger upon the cot rail as he passed it; it was covered in a thick layer of dust.

  On top of a set of drawers lay an assortment of framed pictures of Lescott, his wife, and his daughter. Harris picked up a photo and looked at it. He stared for a moment before he noticed Lescott in the reflection of the glass. He was sitting in silence on the other side of the room. Slouched against the wall. “I notice you’re wearing a wedding ring,” Harris said. “You never mentioned your family. I wasn’t sure…”

  “I don’t have a family. Not anymore.” Lescott got up and walked over, taking the picture from Harris. He looked down at them with a stony face. He didn’t harbour the affection for them that he once had. They had come to torment his every waking moment. “Charlotte and Emma. I’ve neither seen nor heard anything of them in a couple of years now.”

  “So that’s why you…” Harris mimed pouring a drink back.

  Lescott laughed sadly in response “No. I drink because I’m weak. I drank before they left. It’s the drugs I take because of them. I play a balancing act with uppers and downers. I took it up when I started seeing them on the street. Doctors tell me my grief manifests itself as bouts of psychosis. Their faces follow me around.”

  “They were, or are, a beautiful pair,” Harris cringed as he spoke. He wasn’t cut out for makeshift therapy sessions.

  “Charlotte, my wife, I could take her or leave her. It was never going to work out. But Emma. Sometimes the smallest thing can take up the most room in your heart, you know?” Lescott dabbed his sleeve to his nose and then to his eyes. “Coffee?”

  This was the first time Harris had seen Lescott sober.

  In the kitchen, Lescott poured himself a coffee and filled Harris’ cup. He lit a cigarette and threw the packet over to Harris. Harris could see Lescott had more to say, so he remained quiet.

  “It’s my fault,” Lescott lamented behind his cigarette. “If you can believe it. I didn’t report them missing for about three weeks. I was caught up in my work in internal affairs… I was building a pretty big case. I was going to make a difference. I’d been working long hours for years. I never took days off. I never saw Emma. I never spoke to Charlotte. The marriage was broken when it started. We were too young. One day they were gone. I presumed she’d gone home to her parents in Melbourne, or that maybe she’d met someone else…

  “So, being terminally drunk, I presumed they’d just left. I threw myself deeper and deeper into work. The more I dug, the more I found; until it got to the point where I didn’t know where to turn. Everyone was dirty… I turned to my Super, who seemed like a decent enough man. I hadn’t found anything to suggest he wasn’t. I handed him my reports, my evidence. Everything.” As Lescott spoke, he spoke with a peculiar kind of tone. Using the benefit of hindsight, he was judging himself as stupid.

  “He was dirty, wasn’t he?” Harris could see what was coming.

  Lescott blew air through his teeth. “More than that. He was the rotten apple that spoiled the whole barrel. Patient Zero. Typhoid Mary. But he was clever. So, he looked clean. He incinerated everything I gave him. One night he turned up at my house with one last loose end to tie up. He started asking questions and it all hit me.” Lescott paused as he thought back to the night he was describing. “He pulled, we struggled, I took one in the leg, he got one in the gut. He retired as a hero. He’s somewhere up north now, living the good life.

  “I was sent home to recover. While I was in the hospital I sobered up. One day, my sister-in-law calls and asks how Charlotte’s doing. She says the family hasn’t heard from her. I went into Charlotte’s wardrobe to see if I could find anything, evidence of an affair or something like that. She hadn’t taken a thing. It had been weeks since I’d seen them. That amount of time, in a Missing Persons investigation; it tends to mean one thing. They won’t be found alive.

  “Do you know how drunk you need to be to not notice your family has been missing for weeks?”

  “Begs the question…” Harris shook his head with something like sympathy, plus a little judgement mixed in. “Why are you still drinking?”

  “It’s all I’ve got.” Lescott dropped his cigarette into his coffee and looked up at Harris with a darkly humorous expression. “What’s the worst that can happen? I can’t lose them twice.”

  When Lescott got into the passenger seat of his car, he let out an ironic chuckle.

  “What?” Harris asked.

  “All those months ago in December, I didn’t see this coming. I thought Internal Affairs had sent you to finish me off. I still think they’ll send someone.”

  “That’s no way to live.” Harris started the engine of the BMW with his first effort, a feeling he wasn’t used to.

  “Live? I’m not alive. I died the moment I started digging around into corruption, it just hasn’t taken yet.”

  Harris smiled. It was a strange sort of thing to smile about, but he had a heroin addict’s sense of humour. He’d often thought the exact same thing about himself. Only his death had taken place in a field hospital in Egypt.

  Chapter 25

  Midnight came and went. The hippodrome remained quiet. Prince was losing money. That meant everybody was losing money. That article, true or not, had done irreversible damage. And criminals, greedy by nature, are impatient. They look for ever more deadly solutions to fiscal problems. People allowed Prince to lead the city because it had worked for everyone. Now it was working for no one. The underworld wasn’t a dictatorship like you might think, it was more the kind of democracy you’d find on a pirate ship. The moment your captain proves himself unworthy is the moment he shuffles the plank.

  A swing band was playing the standards in the middle of the casino floor. There being no customers on the floor, it meant they had no audience, so really it was more of a jam session. The music was stop-start and disjointed as various members of the band experimented where they saw fit. You could hear them discussing technique and timing as they went along. The Chairman of the Board type singer was barely trying, his collar unbuttoned and his bow tie undone. Instead of singing, he sipped a glass of whisky and smoked a cigarette. Every so often, he picked up the mic and drunkenly crooned. “Off comes the make-up, off comes the clown’s disguise, the curtain’s falling, the music softly dies.” The music was slow and mournful, it captured the atmosphere of the place perfectly. It wasn’t a casino at that moment, no dreams would be made that night.

  The singer removed the microphone from its stand and got to his feet. A couple of punters finished their drinks and headed for the door. Even the two men Harris had recognised as Watson’s crew had given up and gone home.

  “Mate, have you got a phone I can use?” One of the last two drunken men at the bar asked the bartender.

  “Make it quick, we’re closing up.” He pointed to a payphone at the end of the bar.

  “I hope you’re smiling, as you’re filing out the door. Cause as they say in this business, that’s all there is there isn’t any more.” The singer continued to sing.

  The drunk in a tuxedo staggered over to the phone. The barman recognised the stagger. It was a man who realised his night was over. He’d go through his little black book until he found a woman daft enough to oblige him at short notice.

  “We shared a moment and as the moment ends, I’ve got a funny feeling, we’re parting now as friends.” The barman whistled along to the crooning as he walked over to the front door and locked it; the night was indeed done. “You can stop playing now lads.” />
  The pianist looked over as if to say, “We’ll play this one out.”

  Ned, who had been watching from a balcony above, walked out of the office; he’d decided it was safe to come out now the doors were locked. It was just the band, the barman and a couple of harmless drunks. He breathed a sigh of relief and headed over to the bar where he would enjoy a well-earned Old Fashioned while he emptied the till.

  “Your cheers and laughter will linger after they have torn down the dusty walls. If I had this to do again, and the evening were new again, I would spend it with you again. But now… The curtain falls.” The singer sang, and the song approached its climax.

  “It’s time, lads.” Back at the bar, the bartender called out to the drunks who lifted their arms in protest. They seemed to go through the five stages of grief within seconds. Once they hit a sad kind of acceptance, the barman looked over to Ned, who directed a reluctant nod of encouragement his way. “One for the road then.”

  The drunks cheered boorishly. “Get one for the boss, too?” Ned took the drink and nodded to the men in silent appreciation. As that welcome syrupy blend of whisky, orange and bitters slid down his throat, he undid his own top button. It was time to relax and contemplate taking his talents into a more reputable industry.

  The band’s tune hit its crescendo. “Your cheers and laughter will linger after they have torn down these dusty walls, people say I was made for this, nothing else would I trade for this and just think I get paid for this…” Ned watched the singer pour out his soul on the stage.

  “Goodnight ladies and gentlemen…” The singer spoke quietly, and drunkenly, into the microphone. His inebriation got the better of him as he said goodnight. He tripped backwards and went crashing off the stage. The barman and the band rushed over to help.