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

by Zane Lovitt

  ‘Why me?’

  Dennis finished his cigarette and said, ‘Because he hated your guts.’

  He didn’t want to go on. His face showed embarrassment, which he shook off and then he laughed in that way he has.

  If I could have felt anything, I might have laughed too. But he did it for both of us, the rain on his jacket becoming a clean blanket of wet.

  ‘The police are on their way,’ I tell Big as I head for the door. ‘I’ve got to go bring Benedict up here.’

  His expression doesn’t change, like he’s wondering where I’m really going.

  I limp past the bathroom, which I don’t look inside, through the door and stagger as best I can along the hallway.

  My left hand, with the towel wrapped around it, I see it’s started bleeding again. I get hit in the face but it’s my hand that bleeds.

  Under my eye is red and sweaty, swelling at the point of impact. There’s dried blood on my clothes, my forehead. So when I reach the elevator and it opens, and there’s the paisley dress from 1503, she doesn’t know it’s me at first.

  After a moment, recognition.

  ‘Hello,’ she stammers.

  ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Goodness…What happened?’

  There’s no point in lying to her anymore. The police will talk to her. Tell her I’m a liar. That I don’t work for Hannah Delaney and I can’t get her an autograph. That I humiliated her. That she was duped and she let a stranger into her hotel room.

  I say, ‘There was an incident…’

  She’s suddenly horrified, comes to me, pinches my sleeve. ‘Is Hannah all right?’

  I hobble into the elevator, turn around, feel a trickle of blood behind my ear. Then I look at her with all the hate and blame of what happened today.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘She’s dead.’

  The woman puts a hand to her mouth, distraught.

  We keep those looks on our faces and I’m waiting for the elevator doors to close.

  The doors close.

  GRANDMA’S HOUSE

  OF ALL THE things they did to Joanna, the one I don’t stop thinking about is this:

  Nathan urinated into a plastic container, put the tip of a syringe into it, filled the syringe. They had these things just lying around, according to Joanna. She saw them shoot up at least twice in the five days she was held there, though what the stuff was she couldn’t say. Something that made them twitchy and wild-eyed—she wondered why they took the stuff when it made them so anxious. She couldn’t say if they were high when they did this.

  While Dale masturbated, Nathan injected Joanna with his urine. Into a vein in her arm. She was tied to the chair and there was a football sock stuffed in her mouth and taped in place. Nathan hesitated at first, let Dale work himself up and Joanna thought he wasn’t going to do it, that it was just the anticipation that was going to get Dale off. But he did it. Joanna doesn’t remember what happened after that.

  Doctor Richter said it was likely that, at this point, Joanna fell into a ‘malaise’.

  At that same sentencing hearing, another doctor said that Nathan Money had been physically abused by his father when he was a boy. Maybe the judge believed him, but he didn’t really care. He sentenced Nathan Money and Dale Craig to a non-parole period of sixteen years apiece.

  I don’t know what Joanna Maddur has planned for the next sixteen years. I’m happy not knowing. I’m happy for my imagination to fill that in.

  The taxi driver is an Indian man with a big turban and I ask him to wait. It’s all sunshine heat today and we drove for so long I fell asleep with the window open, the air drying out the sweat on my face. Where we’ve stopped is Ferntree Gully, at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges that watch over Melbourne. I take the envelope out of my jacket, leave my jacket on the seat and step out to a row of old, worthless homes.

  They aspired to more. Some of them are half-renovated, the skeletons of granny flats and extensions abandoned years ago, rotting in the sun. Some are half-painted, like the job was going well until they ran out of paint and they never got around to buying more. Some of the lawns are mown. There are people pushing prams who stop and look at me in the taxi. They don’t get a lot of taxis out here; this is car-driving territory. But I don’t have a car anymore.

  The house I’m walking to is at the bottom of the hill. The gully of Ferntree Gully. I’m wearing a shirt that has a stain on it and halfway to the house I regret leaving my jacket in the cab. I brought it with me today specifically so it would hide the stain on my shirt, but I don’t have the energy to turn back to the car, not in this heat. And I’m taking the day slow. I drank more than usual last night and my face wears that special look, like someone just whispered to me a story I found particularly boring. If this job takes more than ten seconds, I may need to sit down.

  After I lost my licence six months ago I guess I went a little funny for a while. Demetri found me holed up in my office, sitting around listening to the ringing in my ears, spying on the people out my window, drinking to make my dreams less vivid. He took pity and offered me work as a trumped-up errand boy. I like it about as much as I liked doing the old stuff, which doesn’t mean much. It pays less, but even if it paid the same or even more, I don’t do enough of it for that to make a difference. Demetri just wants to keep me busy until I can reapply for my licence a few months from now. I haven’t told him yet that I’m not going to do that. And until he finds out, whenever he needs someone in a suit to deliver an important piece of paper somewhere, this is me.

  The front yard is overgrown and the sign that says BEWARE OF THE DOG has also grown over. I prick up my ears anyway, listen for the sound of padding feet, but instead, well before I reach the front door, I hear a television, and before I knock I can tell the voice is speaking a thick Asian language. The Japanese TV news. I knock hard to be heard over those officious, sober tones.

  Demetri can’t have a lot of paying clients living on streets like this, in houses like this. But he gets a guilty twinge sometimes because he makes so much money keeping sociopaths and criminals out of prison. He compensates by working free of charge for sociopaths and criminals who otherwise can’t afford him. Every now and then the gamble pays off and one of them turns out to be innocent, or at least innocent of whatever they’re charged with. Their plights have become very public crusades at times, garnering for him social justice awards and a lot of television appearances. I remember I used to admire him for it.

  Demetri says I’ve become cynical.

  The door opens just an inch. With the brightness of the day outside it takes a while for me to see the old woman inside there, and in that time she doesn’t speak. She’s not remotely Japanese, despite the television blaring behind her. Through fat-rimmed glasses her eyes offer me all the fear that old people reserve for the outside world and probably she would have chained the door before opening it except that where the chain used to be there’s just a weathered patch of splintered wood. This door was kicked in a long time ago.

  ‘Hi…’ I say with an oaf’s smile. I fumble with the envelope, pull out the stapled document from inside and read the heading. It’s a summons for a sentencing hearing next week. I find the address.

  ‘This is 29 Weston Crescent? Is that right?’

  She has a tiny face, densely freckled, and her hair is like wild white straw but it’s maintained. There’s no Alzheimer’s in the way she examines me, no dementia in the clothes she wears or the ribbon pinned to her collar. She’s over eighty, but she can glare cautiously at a stranger like a woman half her age.

  She says, ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘I’m supposed to deliver this thing to…’ I check the name in the top corner of the summons. ‘Nathan Money.’

  Yeah. This is just the kind of street where a family called Money would live.

  Nathan and Dale knew Joanna from around the neighbourhood. Ferntree Gully is the kind of place people are constantly escaping from, so anyone who grows up there and doesn’t le
ave becomes a kind of legend, even young women barely out of their teens. She’d worked in the Belgrave Arcade instead of finishing her VCE, sold lipstick and eye shadow and rouge to single mums, got hooked on methylamphetamine somewhere along the way and then she got sacked. To pay for the habit she wound up selling drugs and that’s how Nathan and Dale got her into the car and all the way to the basement where they tied her up.

  That room, going by Joanna’s description, was my idea of a bogan hellpit. Essendon football posters coated the walls alongside explicit pornography printed off the internet and at least one picture of Nathan groping a german shepherd and laughing. Nathan’s favourite place to sit was his Pamela Anderson beanbag. Over the five days they didn’t eat often because of the drugs but when they did it was Kentucky Fried Chicken. Half their meal usually wound up smeared across Joanna’s face and body because the boys found it entertaining. There was a hatch leading up to a laneway where the boys went to the toilet and there was another door leading up to the house proper and the boys never ever went in there. At one point Dale tried, but Nathan stopped him and the pair fought violently. A razor blade was produced.

  When the plea was over, and when the judge announced their sentence, and when he asked Nathan and Dale if they understood their sentence, and when Nathan said, ‘Yeah,’ and Dale said nothing at all, Dale still had the scar across his face where Nathan had cut him.

  That fight is what first gave Joanna the idea that someone was living beyond that door.

  She looks at me blankly and I raise my voice. ‘Is Nathan at home?’

  She stares at me for another moment, then shakes her head urgently and disappears. While she’s gone the door relaxes open to reveal the typical living room in the typical old woman’s house. There’s a doily on a carved coffee table, a doona and pillow folded there on the couch and a collection of painted ceramic birds attached to the wall beside a small picture of the Virgin Mary. It’s dark and dusty and tidy.

  The television volume drops but it stays on. She comes back to the door and squints at me through those glasses.

  ‘What did you say? I didn’t hear you because of the television.’

  The way I’m feeling, I can’t stand up for much longer. I steady myself against the brickwork beside the door, wonder how long it’s going to take to have this simplest of conversations.

  ‘I work for Nathan’s solicitor. Is Nathan in?’

  ‘Oh no. Here’s not here now.’

  ‘But he lives here, is that right?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Does Nathan live here?’

  ‘Y-yes. You’re…um…?’

  ‘I work for Nathan’s solicitor. I have a summons for Nathan.’

  ‘Nathan is my grandson.’

  ‘Yes, and your grandson committed a crime of some kind and he’s getting sentenced, in a courtroom, next week. This piece of paper will tell him where to be and what happens if he’s not there. But I have to give it to him personally. Do you know when he’ll be home?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Do you know where he is? Who he might have gone out with?’

  ‘No…no.’

  Her eyes are way more intelligent than the words she’s speaking. It’s as though she’s waiting for me to ask another question, the one she’ll answer properly and in detail. I glance behind me to the street, turn back to her.

  ‘Is your name Mrs Money?’

  ‘Yes, I’m Mrs Money.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got a taxi waiting, and really…I don’t want to come back to Ferntree Gully unless I absolutely have to. Are you sure your grandson isn’t home?’

  ‘Well…I’ve got rheumatism, you see.’

  ‘Where does your grandson sleep?’ I point to the doona and pillow. ‘Does he sleep there on the couch?’

  ‘Oh, no. Sometimes I sleep out here. In the rumpus room. When my leg’s bad and I can’t get down the hall.’

  ‘Where does Nathan sleep?’

  Adjusting the glasses on her head, she slowly turns and indicates a closed wooden door in the corner of the rumpus room. ‘In the basement,’ she says.

  ‘He lives in the basement?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know if he’s there now.’

  ‘So he might be here.’

  ‘I don’t feel very well, you see. I’ve got rheumatism and I should be lying down.’

  ‘Do you think you could check to see if he’s here?’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘Or I could. I could knock on that door there…’

  ‘Um, well…He’s not there now.’

  ‘He’s not there?’

  ‘No…He went out earlier on.’

  ‘Right. You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  I roll my eyes as obviously as I can. I don’t know what Nathan’s done, but if I have to come back out to Ferntree Gully, I hope they throw the book at him.

  Nathan and Dale didn’t give evidence at the plea. Partly because that’s not the practice in sentencing hearings these days, and also because letting them speak for themselves would have done them more harm than good: they are not powerful intellects. For example, Dale wrote his name, DALE, in cigarette burns across Joanna’s left foot. This was useful when it came to identifying Joanna’s assailants. Another example is, they fell asleep and Joanna almost escaped. She told that story when she gave evidence herself, how for two days she’d watched the boys drink themselves into a funk, kept awake by the drugs they’d mainlined. Finally they passed out, drooling, face down on the threadbare carpet.

  It was like a furnace in that basement, and the sweat from Joanna’s body helped her to gradually work free of the cable ties that bound her to the chair and to creep slowly over the litter of junk food stained with tomato sauce and semen and blood. She made it to the stairs leading up to the laneway but the door was locked. She snuck across the room to the other door, also locked. She tapped gently against it.

  ‘Hello?’ She whispered. ‘Hello? Is anybody there?’

  An old woman’s voice said, ‘Pardon?’

  Joanna said, ‘Help me. Please help me.’

  The old woman said, ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Open the door. Quickly. Please please open the door.’

  ‘You leave me alone,’ came back the voice. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’

  Joanna began sobbing. She was sobbing in the courtroom also, as she told this story.

  ‘Please. They’re hurting me.’

  ‘No, they’re not. I can’t hear you.’

  ‘Please—’

  Suddenly there was a cracking of knuckles against the door.

  ‘Nathan!’ The old woman was shouting. ‘Nathan! Are you in there?’

  Nathan stirred. Joanna’s sobbing overwhelmed her.

  ‘Nathan! Are you awake?’

  Nathan grabbed Joanna and she screamed, which woke up Dale, and the two of them tied her back to the chair and got the football sock back into her mouth. Nathan yelled abuse at the door and the old woman went quiet.

  But the best example of how smart these boys were is that they let her go. As if, after five days, she’d just go home and sleep it off.

  It’s really the heat that decides for me. And the small waves of nausea as I slouch here. And the prospect of a bloody mary in front of the desk fan in my office. With a muted belch I push myself off the wall and shake my head.

  ‘Can you tell Nathan I’ll be back on Thursday afternoon? He really needs to be here to see me. Can you tell him that?’

  ‘I don’t hear anything, you see. I have the TV on.’

  ‘You have to give Nathan that message. Can you do that?’

  ‘On Thursday, yes.’

  She doesn’t seem to have trouble hearing me. God knows why she needs the TV so loud, even if she does speak Japanese.

  ‘I’ll be back on Thursday, in the afternoon. He needs to be here.’

  ‘Nathan doesn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Okay, but—’

  ‘He protects me, you see.’
<
br />   I stop what I was about to say. ‘He protects you?’

  ‘I have the TV on. I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Are you going to tell Nathan to be here Thursday afternoon?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll write it down.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry to disturb you, Mrs Money.’ I edge back towards the taxi.

  ‘That’s all right.’ She smiles. For the first time.

  The door closes.

  I pass back through the gate with its redundant dog warning and stop and turn and look at the house. I’m wondering if Nathan will peek through the window for a read on the stranger who came looking for him. There’s something about the house, like a white noise pitched too high for me to hear but that still makes my ears hurt. That gets louder the further I move away from it.

  I get in the car and the driver says, ‘Back now?’

  I’m about to answer but I don’t. I open the summons that’s folded up in my hand and search for the box that names the offence, the thing that Nathan did, that he’ll be sentenced for next week.

  It seems an eternity before I find it. I flip between the two pages a dozen times. But there it is, at the top of the first page.

  Offence: Possession of a small quantity of a controlled substance, being cannabis.

  I stare into the words like doing that might help me understand the old woman and my sense of unease. Possessing cannabis isn’t exactly high treason. A ‘small’ quantity means less than two hundred and fifty grams. There’s no mention of traffic or attempt to traffic. If Nathan doesn’t have any prior convictions then the judge probably won’t even record a conviction. Especially with Demetri on the job.

  Today is so bright and hot the sky seems more white than blue. I toss the summons onto the seat next to me and roll down the window.

  I say, ‘Yeah, back, thanks.’

  Goodbye, Ferntree Gully. See you again on Thursday. Maybe. Nathan won’t be here anyway and half my pay will go to the driver.

  We nose around the corner, headed west. I look forward to sleeping like I did on the way here.

  It was the Thursday morning and I was trying to get myself off the couch when Demetri called.