The Midnight Promise: A Detective's Story in Ten Cases

by Zane Lovitt

  He waits, adjusts himself in the chair. Continues, but slower. ‘I’m telling you this because I don’t want you thinking I’m one of them fathers reckons no one’s good enough for his little girl. She’s…’ His head bobs side to side, dodging invisible bullets. ‘She’s not what you’d call a looker.’

  ‘And she’s never complained to you? Never mentioned a problem with Ben before?’

  ‘Nah…’ Phil stops, again searching for the words. ‘Some people only see what they want to see.’

  And I hardly hear him when he says it.

  But later today, and in days to come, when I look back on this strange little job, it will occur to me, the truth of what he said there, despite the quotable cuteness of it.

  Right now, I’m too busy ticking boxes on the briefing sheet.

  ‘If your instinct is wrong and I spend two weeks finding out nothing, you get an invoice from me anyway.’

  I hand the sheet to him to sign.

  ‘Yeah, no. I get that, mate.’

  ‘Have you got a recent photo of him? Something you can email me?’

  ‘Yeah, I brung one.’ From his crumbling wallet he draws out a glossy colour picture the size of a playing card. Ben is well dressed, sun-kissed, straight-toothed. It might just be the way the sun is hitting him, or the attractive gardens where the photo was taken, but he looks like an underwear model who just happened to be wearing clothes when this picture was taken. I put it in my pocket.

  ‘You do car rentals?’

  ‘How could you tell?’

  I point at the Avis logo on his shirt pocket.

  ‘Yeah. I’m on me way there now.’

  ‘You’re the manager?’

  ‘Yes, mate.’

  ‘Put your mobile number on that form. I’ll call you each day, let you know how things are going. Does anyone else ever answer your mobile?’

  ‘I suppose. Sometimes.’

  ‘If I get someone who isn’t you, or if it goes to voicemail, I’ll leave a message saying I’m John from Melbourne Premier Florists and you should call me back.’

  ‘I get it. So no one knows. Did your dad teach you that?’

  It’s a question only an unappreciated father would ask.

  ‘My dad died when I was very young. He never taught me anything.’

  Jessica gets to her feet. She takes some steps to the mantel and steadies herself, head hung, chin against her chest. ‘Well done, Dad. Finally you get to kick Ben in the balls.’

  Phil puts his hands up in surrender. ‘You’re blaming the wrong bloke here, sweetie…’

  ‘Oh? You’re not to blame?’ She glowers at him, winding herself up again. ‘Your grudge against Ben played…no role?’

  ‘Wait on, love. You can’t go saying—’

  ‘Let’s ask the private detective, shall we?’ She turns to me, arms crossed, much more comfortable when she’s on the attack. ‘What did my father say when you showed him these lovely pictures?’

  ‘Sweetie, you’re being—’

  ‘Shut up, Dad. Come on, Mister Whoever-You-Are, what did he say? Did he seem upset to you? Would you say he was devastated by what you’d found out?’

  She cocks her head with mock attentiveness.

  I rub at my shoulder. ‘He said you’d accuse him of trying to ruin your marriage.’

  ‘Liar.’

  Phil stands up from the couch.

  ‘Jessica, love. Listen to yourself. It’s your mate Ben who’s the problem, not me. Who would you rather crack it with, seriously? I’m doing you a favour here…’

  Hands on her hips, she raises her face to the ceiling. There are tears welling up through her body and she’s trying to breathe above the flood as it reaches her chin. She holds there for a long moment.

  ‘I know you are…’ she whispers to the roof.

  Water seeps from her eyes and her face dives, defeated, into her hands.

  Inside there she groans deeply. ‘I’m a silly old cow.’ I think that’s what she says.

  Phil goes to her, stands inches away, hesitates at the challenge of consoling her as she sobs. His hands go out and she slaps them away. He speaks but she only bawls louder. His hands go out again and though she struggles he manages to pull her to him and gets a handful of hair, restraining more than holding. Now she slumps into him and it’s only her father’s arms that keep her standing.

  I linger, awkward.

  The St Kilda Town Hall is the palatial kind of civic building you’d more likely find in the tropics, where the parliaments of very poor nations meet surrounded by exotic plants and green, green grass. Somewhere inside is the Right Honourable Alex Mills, Lord Mayor of the City of Port Phillip, no doubt fashioning new ways to lay off public servants and subsidise property developers. He’s about as different from Phil Haynes as a white man can be, but it’s people like Phil who vote people like Mills into office.

  I’m thinking about this, waiting to maybe catch a glimpse of Jessica’s husband on his lunch break, when a young woman appears in my rearview, striding purposefully along Carlisle Street, not recognising my car. Her face is awash with freckles, more even than when she and I were, what do you call it, engaged, and she appears generally more tropical now in this tropical setting: her hair a lighter brunette, her arms a deeper brown. She’s just as straight-backed and graceful as I remember, she still pulls off that fluffy seventies hairstyle and her outfit is a last-minute combination of bright colours. So she still loves colourful clothes.

  Annie Levitan could find a bright side to anything. She used to say that she loved my life-draining, shoebox apartment because you could vacuum the whole place from just one power point. She was always so positive. Right up to the day she stopped being positive.

  I adjust the mirror so I can see where she’s going, but she just heads right up Carlisle and then she’s gone and the whole thing feels more like a distant memory than something that just happened. It occurs to me that this is what break-ups are: glimpses on busy streets, emotional time travel, the sullen reminder that you are, what do you call it, unlovable. I don’t get to wallow in it though, because Ben Waltraub is suddenly here.

  He’s tall and he’s stunning, even from a distance. It’s as if there’s an invisible spotlight that follows him around. His suit is tailored to show off his body and his hair to show off his face, and he struts across the carpark eating a sandwich and he manages to do even that like a movie star. After two bites he drops the rest in a rubbish bin, slides two breath mints into his mouth, gets into a big car the colour of a rain cloud and turns onto Brighton Road, headed south.

  He doesn’t get far. Brighton Road at lunchtime is a snake of cars lined up like refugees for food. Ben can’t stop checking his reflection in his mirror. Either he’s this vain all the time, or where he’s going he wants to look good. Around us, the traffic isn’t moving.

  I’m in my Toyota Starlet, sky blue and tiny. If Phil could see the kind of car I drive, he’d wince.

  ‘The thing is,’ I’d tell him, ‘no one expects to be tailed by a Starlet.’

  We go nowhere for about twenty minutes, long enough to ruminate on how no one vacuums my apartment anymore, then Ben turns off at New Street and, after a moment, we’re on the Esplanade. The bay is big and still while everything else is small and rushing past, but Ben doesn’t slow to appreciate it. He’s moving quick, in a hurry, running late.

  When you’re tailing someone in a motor vehicle, the last thing you want them to do is turn down a cul-de-sac. Ben turns down a cul-de-sac, so I have to drive past, pull over and run casually to the corner, peek around.

  It’s a street of enormous white houses and carefully planted palm trees that must suffer in the winter. The road curves away and I can’t see Ben’s car so I run past all the trees to the bend, hope he hasn’t pulled into a garage.

  He hasn’t. His Range Rover is there in the driveway of the big white mansion where the road ends.

  I down-gear to a stroll, making sure not to look around, not to act
like I’ve never been here before. Across from the mansion, in his front yard, a man in a nylon tracksuit is watching me through his front gate. It’s not apparent what he’s doing and it’s possible he only came out to inspect this stranger on Affluent Boulevarde. A neighbourhood like this, they’ll just go ahead and taser you if you don’t look like you belong. I try to act like I’m expected as I waltz softly through the front gate of the white palace and into a minimalist Japanese garden.

  I hide behind the terracotta walls for ten seconds, then chance a look over the top: the tracksuit sifts through his mail, turns and goes back inside. Maybe he’s used to strange men waltzing in through this particular front gate. Or maybe he thinks that whoever lives here, Ben Waltraub’s mistress or his bookie or his masseuse, maybe they could do with a good robbery.

  I’m quiet as I pad past the garden that is really mostly raked gravel and I reach a pair of french doors that look into a living room the size of a cathedral. When I see what’s happening in there I take the camera from my pocket. My hands shake. They always shake when I do this.

  It’s never a surprise to find that the person I’m tailing is actually engaging in the extramarital affair my client suspects. In fact, I have never had a case where the person in question was not cheating. Never even once. But this scene I’ve crept up on, this is a surprise. Phil and his talk of ‘other birds’ was enough to put it in my head that that’s what I’d be coming across. But what does Phil know. Because right now Ben is bent over an off-white chaise longue and there’s another man behind him, making that familiar face. Their respective pants are bunched around their respective ankles and the other man’s shirt tails are flapping gently against his thighs like seagull wings. This guy, he’s in his sixties, white-haired, craggy, tanned, and given what he’s doing, the room he’s doing it in, I’m going to assume he lives here alone.

  They didn’t waste a moment. All that traffic has cut their time short.

  Doing this kind of job is the only time I think of my father. He specialised in matrimonial work like so many private inquiry agents did back then—crouching in ornate gardens and peering through windows was his bread and butter. In the days before no-fault divorce you had to have grounds to dissolve a marriage, and the most popular ground was adultery, which couldn’t merely be alleged, it had to be proven. So if you wanted a divorce before 1976, you needed a private investigator to kick down a door, flashbulbs blazing, ready to swing a punch if he had to. And boy, did he get paid. The conservatives of the era, the ones who saw the rise of no-fault divorce as a satanic conspiracy, they wanted the end of a marriage to be as expensive and traumatic as possible. Which was fine with people like my father. He made even more if he could sell the details to a scandal sheet like the Truth.

  Then along came ‘irreconcilable differences’ and a thousand private investigators were suddenly out of a job, my father included—for them it must have seemed like a whole other kind of satanic conspiracy. But for Albert Dorn the worst was yet to come. Because what else the new laws meant was that my mother could finally dump the guy who blew all his money at the racetrack, in pubs and brothels, who earned plenty but still couldn’t provide for his wife and his baby son.

  Two years after that, with me only four years old, my father drank himself to death in a Carlton flophouse.

  All I know about him is what my mother told me before she too went and died, and based on her stories, I think he would have loved this, what I’m doing here. I can picture him in a cheap suit like mine, huddled next to me, eyes twinkling at this new discovery, muffling giggles with his Stetson Stylemaster. He could have told you that back then ‘sodomy’ was its own grounds for divorce. He could have told you that, technology being what it was, there weren’t a lot of opportunities to take photos secretly in those days. And he could have told you what I’ve gleaned from years of this kind of work: black, white, fat, thin, rich, poor, straight, gay…When they’re doing what these two are doing, all men make the same face.

  For my father, this would have been the most ordinary kind of job.

  Phil says, ‘One way to look at it, love, is wouldn’t you rather know now?’

  Her face is wedged between her father’s back and the couch cushion, an arm slung mindlessly across his lap, blubbering noises muffled by the soft silk of the seat cover.

  Phil gently touches her hand and his mouth twitches. He says, ‘I mean, sweetie, isn’t it better to know now? Don’t you reckon it’s better than ten years from now?’

  That one isn’t the only couch made of silk. None of the furniture is cheap and Swedish, none of it was assembled by Jessica or her husband. The carpet is lush, the cabinets ornate, the shelves go all the way to the ceiling. Looking down into the speckled opaque glass of the coffee table is like looking down into the night sky itself. I think of my own office, the paint I’ve put on the walls.

  Phil lowers his tone. ‘If Ben is…you know…then fine. Whatever. I haven’t got any problem with those people, you know? But where I draw the line, sweetie, is he doesn’t have a right to lie to you about it all these years.’

  Jessica squeezes her father tighter, bawling into his clothes.

  Catching Phil’s eye, I point to myself, then jerk a thumb at the door. He stares at me but fails to see my gesture.

  ‘And don’t forget Mister Dorn. He’s our secret weapon. He can stand up in court and tell them he saw it all himself.’

  I scowl at these words, shake my head at Phil—he knows I can’t do that. Phil raises a palm, a request for me to stay, to be patient. He says to Jessica, ‘These kinds of pictures make a big difference in divorce proceedings.’

  Phil knows that isn’t true either.

  Jessica pulls her sticky face from the couch and drags clumps of matted hair from her eyes.

  ‘I don’t want a divorce,’ she moans, her voice like a violin in a horror movie. ‘I want a normal fucking husband.’

  Phil helps her clear the last strands. ‘I know, sweetie. I know.’

  She doesn’t turn to look at me, but her eyes dart across to the fireplace, just long enough to glimpse me in her peripheral vision. She leans in to her father’s ear, sniffles back more mucus and whispers something.

  Phil replies, ‘Nah, nah, nah. John is here to help us. He’s helping us, see?’

  Jessica slaps a hand against her thigh the way she must have when she was six. Her voice cracks and rises a full octave.

  ‘I want that pervert out of my house.’

  To make prints I go to a copy centre in the city because I pawned my printer last year. There’s a girl there, Kavneet, who knows what I do, what these photos are, so I pass the memory card to her with the usual guilty face, which is our signal for how no one else can see these images. The first time I came to her I had a card full of pictures of a man going in and out of his house, photographed from a hiding place across the street. That’s all they were, him coming and going, and then four pictures showing him dropping his keys, picking them up again. Kavneet guessed, using some gift I wasn’t born with and without even a hint from me, that he was claiming insurance payments for an injury at work. She guessed what it was I did for a living and she guessed that this guy’s payments were about to come to a sudden stop.

  The second time I came to Kavneet, they were pictures like the ones I have today. Adultery. Candid.

  I said, ‘I’ve come to you because you know I’m not a peeping Tom.’

  And Kavneet said back, like it was her only line in the movie and she’d been rehearsing for months, ‘John, maybe you don’t get off on these pictures, but you are a peeping Tom.’

  The real reason I go to her is that having a twenty-two-year-old do your prints at a copy centre in the city makes it all a little less creepy.

  So I get the pictures and they’re big and pretty and in colour and I hike back to Chinatown, politely navigate the throngs of lawyers emerging from boozy lunches, purchase some takeaway Singapore noodles at Leung Mai and return to the heavy vapours of my off
ice. From beneath a tangle of paint-spattered Explorer socks I unearth my laptop and get to shovelling food into my mouth as it boots up. I do a search on Ben’s friend who owns the big white house and whose name, according to the Registrar of Titles, is Charles Daschle.

  More Germans.

  What there is to know about Daschle depends on which website you read. He’s gay or he’s a confirmed bachelor. He made his money or it was bequeathed to him. He owns ten vineyards or three, and he produces Allingirra Drop, the kind of wine I’d need a bank loan to get a glass of. He may have been picked up for public indecency one time but if he was he was never charged. He owns between two and five apartments in the one complex on Beaconsfield Parade, as well as about a dozen other houses scattered around Melbourne. He contributed money to Alex Mills’s campaign for mayor, and the two are good friends. He may own a yacht that he has never sailed in.

  He drinks, he smokes, he gets laid a lot. The end.

  There’s less information available on Benjamin Waltraub. He was born to Gustav and Frederica Waltraub, a family of Lutherans in Mildura, then came to Melbourne to attend Monash University and, it seems, to rebel against his religious upbringing, largely by way of experimental theatre. He and his troupe focused on ‘performance art that exists to challenge outdated perceptions of love, sex and relationships’. At that time in his life I’m betting Benjamin was experimental with more than just theatre.

  Skip forward to his job at the City of Port Phillip, where he supervises Alex Mills’s Cultural Program. His staff profile tells me exactly nothing, so I turn to my mobile phone and dial a number.

  Leo Spaske picks up on the first ring.

  ‘John. How are you, dear sir?’

  ‘Fine, Leo. Have you got a second to run a check on somebody?’

  ‘For you, John, anything at all.’ You can hear his chair creak as he leans back into it. ‘When have you ever known me to refuse you a favour?’