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

by Zane Lovitt

‘It’s the only casino on the east coast I’ve never been to,’ he shrugs. ‘No one to recognise me.’

  ‘But to a casino. To somewhere as open as that…’

  ‘My money’s been frozen. I had to get cash somehow.’

  I blow a sigh at the obviousness of it. ‘Who’s Aaron Bernardo?’

  Benedict grins. ‘A lawyer with Linehan and Tillman. I swiped his wallet last week because I kind of look like him. I needed some ID to get me on the train.’

  ‘That’s how you got to Melbourne?’

  ‘Yeah. Is that how we’re getting back?’

  I don’t answer, think about that question. Draining my glass is the subtlest way of celebrating I can think of.

  I hold out my hand. ‘My name’s John.’

  But before Benedict can shake it, a phone rings somewhere. My mobile.

  Big says through it, in a loud and hollow voice, ‘How are you going?’

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘You?’

  ‘Good. Good. Shall I tell you about what I found out?’ He sounds more polite than usual.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So…Mush loses all his money to your boy, and there’s this clause in the small print that says ANR doesn’t have to pay it back because Benedict—’

  ‘Skip that part. I heard it already.’

  ‘Okay…His marriage breaks up, the bank turns down his loan, his wife gets a new boyfriend, nothing to live for, fuck the world, I’m going to kill Billy Benedict. So…he hires a private dick in Melbourne to find out where Benedict lives. He says this guy’s name is—’

  ‘Leo Spaske,’ I say, nodding at nothing in particular.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  There’s the shortest of silences. ‘Really?’

  I don’t know why this should surprise him. ‘Yeah. Tall. Nordic. Obsessed with knives. He was a standover for Lex Shortman once upon a time. Linehan offered him this job, but he turned it down. I guess now we know why.’

  ‘All right, well…’ Big hesitates. Seems to be gathering his thoughts. ‘Spaske called Rene this afternoon saying, “Benedict’s on his way to the Pioneer, just thought you might like to know… Nudge nudge.” So Rene gets plastered and hails a cab.’

  ‘All right. I’m coming up to see him—’

  ‘I can take care of Mush,’ Big clears his throat. ‘Help him see the error of his ways. I’ll get right up in his face.’

  ‘I’m going to give him back his gun. And we’ve got to find a way to keep him from telling anyone about this.’

  ‘You’ve got to get your bloke back to Sydney. Let me look after Mush,’ Big says. Then he says, ‘Trust me.’

  I’m squinting at the wall above Benedict, who’s sitting on the bed, squinting back at me. He can see that I can see something’s wrong.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask Big, turning away from Benedict.

  ‘Nothing,’ Big says quickly.

  ‘What’s…?’ Then there’s no point talking. I end the call.

  Holding Benedict’s dressing gown closed is a fluffy white rope. I wrench it loose and the gown falls open.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ Benedict goes into a panic again, which makes two of us.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, wrestling the rope free and winding it around Benedict’s hands and tying them to the bed post. ‘I won’t be gone long. I need you to wait here.’

  My whole body has a nervous energy shaking it up as I pull the bind tight, twisting Benedict’s wrists. ‘Fuck you, man,’ he says.

  I take his passkey from his wallet. Then I’m out the door.

  It seems an age before I reach the fifteenth floor. And all the while what I’m not thinking about is how nice it is to take the elevator this time.

  I knock hard on Mush’s door and call out Big’s name. He comes straight away, was waiting for me, pulls open the door slow and knowing. I push past him, don’t look him in the eye. There’s something he’s going to say but doesn’t because there’s nothing that’s going to stop me finding Mush.

  Where Mush is is in the bathroom. In the bathtub. On his back. Hands pinned behind him. A rubber shower hose extends from the tap in a rambling loop and ends on Mush’s chest where his cheap white shirt is wet through. The tap isn’t running, as far as I can tell.

  But Mush is dead. I can tell that.

  For a moment, like a fist to the face, I sense that I’m about to cry. I feel the sting rush up from my stomach to my eyes and pool there, ready to leap out, so I twist my face into a shape and force it down. Remembering that only minutes ago Mush tried to shoot me doesn’t help. The only thing that helps, staring down at him, is knowing that I shouldn’t be surprised. That really, when you think about it, John, really, there wasn’t any other way that this could end.

  At the trial, where Big was eventually sent down for killing Rene Mush, Big explained all about the crybaby technique. You restrain the subject and clamp the end of the hose into his mouth using bulldog clips or gaffer tape or just your hands will do. You run the tap fast, but not too fast, and at first the subject will swallow as much of it as they can. That’s why Willie and Mush both had so much water in their stomachs. Pretty soon, though, they can’t swallow any more and they hold their breath and that’s when you turn the tap on as hard as it will go so that water comes surging out their nose, ears, eyes. It’s clear, then, why they call it the crybaby.

  Among other things, what it does to the subject is it makes them feel like their head is exploding.

  The best part is, the crybaby doesn’t leave a mark.

  Except when the subject dies.

  Mush’s childlike features make him all the more hard to look at, but I keep looking. Patches of his clothes and his hair are soaked, his face is shiny green and his eyes are bugging out of his head, vaguely cross-eyed. Maybe he just went and choked on the shower hose before Big could get started. Or maybe this is another heart attack.

  The bathtub he’s lying in is where I hid about an hour ago, blood dripping from my hand onto the white porcelain, listening to Mush provoke himself. Somewhere beneath Mush’s body my blood is still there and my first instinct is to heave him aside and wash the blood away. But I don’t. I dig my hands into my pockets, keep looking at the dead man, like I’m in some way paying my respects. But that feels stupid because his fly is still undone.

  Terry Linehan came down from Sydney to pick up Benedict himself. He couldn’t get anyone to believe that Benedict always meant to go back to Sydney in time to meet the reporting condition, but he got Benedict’s excursion to Melbourne disallowed at the trial. By then, though, with the kind of attention that followed the death of Rene Mush, there was no way the jury didn’t know he’d made a run for it. Benedict was remanded in custody during the course of the trial, and on the third day, playing cards in a holding cell with another prisoner, an argument broke out. They were only playing for matchsticks, but still he was beaten unconscious and lost part of an ear and had a bite taken out of his nose. When he got up to give evidence, his head was swollen red like an apple.

  Benedict changed his plea and got a non-parole period of two years. His injuries weighed heavily at his sentencing.

  And Linehan got his million dollars back.

  Big comes to the doorway behind me, his hands in his pockets, too. ‘You should have gone. I could have taken care of this.’

  I don’t take my eyes off Mush, so it must look like I’m lashing out at a dead body. ‘How? My fingerprints are everywhere, not to mention my blood. The woman in the next room knows my name. How could you have taken care of this?’

  Big says nothing. I can’t look at him, but I imagine he’s biting his lip, trying to think of an answer that makes him sound more like a professional and less like a maniac.

  ‘Leo Spaske, I mean, it had to be a fake name, you know? I didn’t…I thought, if this bloke really existed, it had to be a fake name. So I wanted to know the real name, so…’ His voice cracks as he speaks. ‘I only wanted to give him a
scare. Just make him a little uncomfortable, you know? I just…It was unlucky. I was just unlucky.’

  I turn to look at him, to show him my disbelief. His head is such a sweaty ball of denial and fear that he is almost unrecognisable.

  He says, ‘Most of the time, you only have to turn the tap on and they—’

  ‘For your own sake, Neil, stop talking.’

  I saw Leo Spaske give evidence at Big’s trial but I never spoke to him directly. He denied selling Mush the gun, said he’d never owned or dealt in firearms in his life. No other theory was ever proposed for who provided it to Mush, but Spaske’s firearms charge was dropped for lack of evidence and, officially, the mystery of Mush’s thirty-eight Arnold goes unsolved.

  Up there on the stand, impossibly tall and blond and flashing enormous Scandinavian teeth, Spaske claimed that Mush had paid him ten thousand dollars to tap Benedict’s phone in Surry Hills. Mind you, the plan wasn’t that Mush should track down Benedict and kill him. Rather, Spaske said, they wanted to monitor Benedict in case he attempted to skip bail. It was all in the interest of justice, he said. They were going to listen in on Benedict’s phone calls to make sure he stayed in Sydney and then went to trial and then went to jail. Spaske had no idea of what Mush was planning. If you believe Spaske.

  When he heard Benedict make a reservation at the Pioneer Hotel under the name Bernardo, he called Mush. Spaske assumed Mush would dutifully call the police, didn’t worry for a moment that his wiretap was illegal, figured he’d earned his ten thousand dollars and forgot about the whole thing. There wasn’t enough evidence to prove that Spaske knew what Mush was planning or why he really called Mush that day. But he’d breached the Listening Devices Act, and if you break the law they can take your licence away. Which is what they did. To Spaske and to me.

  My evidence at Big’s trial was a marathon. Every possible thing about me and Big was a conversation subject, since I was the only person who knew all about what had happened at the Pioneer Hotel and was still alive and wasn’t on trial for murder. The prosecutor painted me as a cowboy with no sense of blah blah blah and I didn’t argue. By then my licence hearing had been and gone and I didn’t care enough to fight. I’d already lost what I had to lose.

  Scrawled on the summons to that hearing was unprofessional conduct of a serious nature and infamous conduct in a professional respect. But really, unlawful entry was their only card. The one rule for a private investigator is don’t break the law and that’s what I’d done; it didn’t matter that I hadn’t knowingly put Mush’s life in danger when I sent him off with Big. With the kind of attention I was getting in the press they had to take me down for something. The cowboy PI. The loose cannon. At the hearing the woman in the paisley dress, from the room next to Mush, got up and called me a parasite. I guess she was angry at me for what I’d said to her at the elevators. But I’d just found Mush’s body and I was overcome. I would have apologised but I never got the chance.

  At my hearing I told them what Linehan had hired me for and that giving Benedict a scare seemed like the best way to go about it, then I listened to them tell me all the reasons why it wasn’t. They didn’t even let me have a lawyer going in. Coming out I was unemployed.

  ‘I’m calling the police.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Big says. ‘Fuck it.’

  But both us keep standing there in the bathroom, staring down at Mush like he might come back to life. My mind is searching for angles, of which there are exactly none.

  ‘Could we…’ Big tries, ‘Could we tell them everything, only leave out your friend Benedict?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If people think Mush was here to shoot Miss Delaney, which remember is what you thought, then at least…’

  ‘At least you look like a hero.’

  ‘You take Benedict back to Sydney, nobody knows he ever left, and then…’

  ‘How do we explain my fingerprints?’

  ‘We tell it just how it happened, only without Benedict.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘The girl downstairs checked in a guy named Aaron Bernardo.

  You used your passkey to get into his room and ten minutes later Mush is dead. What happens when they can’t find Bernardo? The CCTV footage will show he looks a lot like William Benedict.’

  ‘We’ll figure out something to tell them. You said so yourself.’

  ‘What happens when they find out Mush is a former client of Benedict’s?’

  ‘Coincidence.’

  ‘What happens when they track down the real Aaron Bernardo, who turns out to be one of Benedict’s lawyers?’

  ‘That’s easy. We say—’

  ‘I’m not lying to the cops, Neil.’ I have to yell this to make him shut up. ‘Anyone who gets away with it is just lucky, and I don’t want to rely on luck when there’s a dead man in the bathtub.’

  I step past Big to the telephone by the bed, keep my eyes on my shoes.

  ‘If I were you I’d do up his fly before they get here.’

  I pick up the receiver, put it to my ear. But Big’s finger comes down on the phone prong.

  ‘Do you think…’ Big says softly. ‘Could we keep Miss Delaney’s name out of this?’

  I look at him. His eyes drop, glassy and bloodshot. After accidentally killing Mush he must have run his hands through his hair a thousand times before calling me. The stylishness is gone.

  I say, ‘No.’

  ‘She’ll be crucified in the press.’

  ‘She’ll love the publicity.’

  ‘But she’s getting married.’

  I don’t answer. Big leaps at the silence: ‘I won’t go down as the man who ruined Hannah Delaney’s wedding.’

  ‘You’ll go down as worse things than that.’

  Then Big hits me.

  His fist collides with my left eye in a final act of denial and I’m in no condition to take a punch so it sends me to the ground arse-first.

  Big puts his hands on his hips and walks away, maybe scared that if he doesn’t he’ll keep beating me. He reaches the window and runs his hand through his hair again, then sighs and says to the city at night, ‘I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.’

  My eye is numb but I feel it swelling. The pain in my ankle shoots up my leg. ‘Feel better?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  Delicately, I hook the telephone cord and draw the dangling receiver towards me, try to figure out how I’m going to dial without standing up.

  The Medical Examiner gave evidence that the cause of death was drowning, and Big’s prosecutor made the argument that although Big hadn’t intended to kill anybody, he was nonetheless a dangerous psychopath, out of practice in the ways of torturing subjects. Big himself agreed that he’d let the tap run a few seconds too long, and that that was all it took for Rene Mush. Mush’s ex-wife gave evidence too, which the prosecution snuck in there as a kind of victim impact statement, but about the kindest thing she had to say about Mush was that he only became a manic depressive after they lost their retirement fund. Then they divorced and she hadn’t seen Mush since the day they signed the papers. I’ve worked on a bunch of divorce proceedings for pathological gamblers—they’re usually over quickly because there are no assets left to divide. I guess the same goes for the defrauded victims of pathological gamblers.

  More than half the trial was devoted to the tale of Willie Somers, former bored teenager and newly reinstated poster boy for cop-haters all over the world. On the stand Big let it all hang out. He said he’d taken Willie outside and told him how he was going to use the garden hose and where. Willie was pinned down, the garden hose jammed in his mouth, but he hadn’t swallowed more than a few mouthfuls before he went into a kind of seizure and blacked out. Big spent precious minutes trying to revive the boy with slaps to the face and yelling in his ear, but none of that worked. Even if he’d tried regular CPR, with the kind of condition Willie had, the Medical Examiner said that that wouldn’t have worked either.

  His defence couns
el asked if the crybaby is what he’d been ordered to do. Big said no. Making him just another lone gunman. The Police Commissioner made a statement, said there was no culture of violence in law enforcement and the actions of one man shouldn’t be allowed to reflect badly on the police, in Moorabbin or anywhere else. Problem purged. We should all sleep better knowing he’s behind bars.

  He’ll be behind bars for twenty years with a minimum of fifteen.

  At the sentencing he wept, uninhibited, like he did that night on St Kilda pier. The press latched onto that and, with his unique method of torture already notorious, Big was written up as The Crybaby Killer, the label glued to him before he even left the dock. Forever, I guess.

  There was a lot of talk about whether Hannah Delaney would be called to give evidence. Big must have been relieved when she wasn’t. Her wedding to the football player went ahead as planned. Later they successfully sued a tabloid for publishing photos of the wedding when the wedding was supposed to be private. As a reprisal, that publication interviewed Big in his prison cell, then published it with the headline: Crybaby Killer Delaney’s No. 1 Fan.

  Dennis Burke was there for the sentencing, the first time I’d seen him in months. He took me outside so he could smoke a cigarette in the rain, away from the crowd.

  ‘You remember Sotiria?’ he asked me.

  ‘I remember the photograph.’

  Dennis took a drag and the wind whipped away a plume of smoke. ‘She left her hubby.’

  ‘He’s a cop too, right?’

  ‘Yeah. And a coke dealer. Total fucking arsehole.’

  Disgust showed on his face, then the wind whipped that away too. The rain stayed put.

  Dennis said, ‘When Big heard they’d split up, he called her. They were supposed to meet up for coffee, but then he pulled that shift at the Pioneer and postponed the meet. How about that, hey?’

  I blew a drip of water off the tip of my nose. ‘Are you seriously trying to make me feel sorry for Neil Bighuty?’

  Dennis seemed to think that was a fair question. He concentrated so as to answer properly.

  ‘Fifteen and twenty. That’s what they give to psychos who massacre their families. He’s not just a sick fuck, John. He’s not. I think you need to understand that more than anyone.’