A Stranger in my Street

by Deborah Burrows

  ‘I don’t know him very well, but he’s a war hero and I like him.’

  Jimmy nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. That’s right. He’s an Aussie war hero.’ He seemed to brood over this. ‘Everyone thinks that Mr Luca killed Doreen. But it might have been someone else. It might have been an American.’ He was watching me closely. ‘Dad doesn’t like Americans, and I don’t like them either.’

  ‘Oh, Jimmy. Don’t be like that. I’ve met some lovely Americans. They’re just like us – some are nice, some not so nice.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said uncertainly, but the troubled look in his eyes remained. Then he threw me a cheeky smile. ‘Hey, Meg, what note in music makes a good soldier?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘A sharp major.’

  I laughed and we parted, but I was worried about how ill he seemed and wondered why he disliked the Americans so much.

  Betty Barwon was at the greengrocer’s. It was the first time I had seen her since the murder. A shortish, plump girl, about five years older than me, Betty had straight dark hair cut in a severe bob. She also seemed to have a perpetual cold; the area under her nose was always red and she seemed never to be without a handkerchief in her hand. Today, however, her eyes were red also, and I suspected that she had been crying. I got a brave little smile from her and a wave of her hankie as I arrived.

  I didn’t like Betty as much as I had liked Doreen. Doreen was fond of gossip, but she was never malicious. Betty’s stories often had a nasty edge to them. Still, I greeted her warmly and told her I was sorry about Doreen. The words seemed inadequate, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘How are you coping without her?’ I asked.

  She sniffed and touched the hankie to her nose. ‘It’s lonely. I really miss her. She was such good company.’

  ‘Perhaps you could find someone else to share the house.’

  ‘No. I couldn’t replace her that quickly. And my boyfriend will help out with the rent. He’s an American, so he can afford it.’

  We left the shop and turned down Kanimbla Road towards home.

  ‘People seem to think that Frank killed Doreen,’ I said. Tom wanted me to find out what the locals thought. Betty was a good place to start.

  She gave me a sharp look. ‘Oh, I’m sure he did. He hated the idea of her hanging around with the Yanks. And he’s Italian, of course. You know what they’re like.’

  ‘No, actually. What are they like?’ I said, my voice deceptively light.

  She seemed surprised at the question. ‘Hot-blooded. And they carry knives.’

  ‘So do most of the Americans.’

  She was clearly surprised. ‘You don’t think an American did it, do you?’

  ‘No. I’m just pointing out that there’s no evidence that Frank carried a knife. Not all Italians carry knives. And Frank’s Australian. Anyway, was he so hot-blooded? He seemed pretty meek and mild to me.’

  ‘He killed Doreen,’ she said in a decided tone.

  As we turned into Megalong Street she stopped and turned towards me. ‘You and Tom Lagrange found her, didn’t you? How do you know him?’

  ‘We only met that day, and it was an accident that he was with me when we found her. Do you know him?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He’s always hanging around the Americans. Some kind of liaison officer or something.’ She wrinkled her nose.

  ‘You don’t like him?’

  ‘I think he’s stuck-up.’

  I began to walk on. I wasn’t interested in Betty’s views of Tom.

  ‘Tom Lagrange is full of himself,’ she continued heatedly, following me. ‘Doreen adored him, but he was too high and mighty for someone like her.’

  I slowed my pace and turned to face her.

  ‘He’s engaged to be married,’ I said, speaking cautiously. ‘It would have been wrong of him to encourage her.’

  ‘That didn’t stop him seeing her a lot. He must have known how she felt. I hate people like him. The la-di-dah set.’ She spat out the words as if they left a bad taste in her mouth. ‘They take what they can from us, but we’ll never be good enough for them.’

  We were near her front path now, and her anger had subsided into tears. She was sobbing into her hankie and I couldn’t leave her like that. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She blew her nose. ‘Come in for a cup of tea, if you like. Please come in, Meg. It’s so lonely without Doreen. I hate going into the empty house.’

  The place was smaller than ours, and it looked uncared for. Obviously Betty hadn’t been in any mood for housekeeping in the days since Doreen’s death.

  ‘Her stuff is all still here,’ Betty said, gesturing towards the main bedroom as we passed it on the way to the kitchen. ‘I don’t know what to do about it. Her parents are dead and her sister lives in Victoria somewhere. Her daughter can’t take it.’

  She sat down heavily on a chair by the kitchen table and started to cry again. ‘It’s all so hard. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Perhaps you should just pack it up in boxes and keep it for a while. Paulette might want it later. I’ll help if you like.’

  ‘It’s not just the stuff. It’s everything.’ Her voice was flat, defeated. ‘I can’t stop thinking about Doreen. Poor Doreen. You know, she was crazy about Tom Lagrange. I hated to see her like that. Worrying if she looked good enough, spoke properly, knew enough. She would have done anything that man wanted, just so she could spend time with him.’ Betty glared at the table. ‘It was stupid. Any idiot could see she never stood a chance. Any idiot but Doreen.’

  Just what was Doreen’s relationship with Tom? It was peculiar that someone like Tom would want to spend a lot of time with someone like Doreen, even if she did give him information. I hoped I wasn’t being a snob, but what did Doreen have that would interest Tom, other than the obvious attractions of her body? Was I being naïve? Perhaps Joan had been right and he had been fooling around with Doreen. Detective Munsie hadn’t actually said so when he interviewed Tom, but the implication was there.

  My heart started to beat faster and I felt a little faint. Maybe Doreen had become an embarrassment to Tom, had wanted too much, had threatened his cosy future with Phyllis Gregory. If he hadn’t killed her himself, could he have arranged it?

  ‘What are you trying to say, Betty? Do you think Tom Lagrange killed her?’ My tone was sharper than I intended. The words had come out of nowhere. What did I really know about Tom Lagrange, other than that Peter had hero-worshipped him?

  Betty was looking at me in astonishment.

  ‘No, of course not. I told you, her wretched husband killed her, I’m sure of that. Tom Lagrange has an alibi. Detective Munsie told me.’

  It was an alibi that was based on the word of Tom’s fiancée and I suspected that Phyllis would be a good liar if she had to be. Still, it had to be more likely that Frank Luca had killed Doreen than Tom. I liked Tom. But nothing seemed to make sense to me at the moment, and I still didn’t know why Tom had spent so much time with Doreen.

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ I said, rising quickly and going over to the stove. Betty nodded dispiritedly.

  ‘I hate people like him, that’s all,’ she said. ‘They think they own the world, just because their family is rich.’

  ‘That’s unfair, Betty,’ I said. ‘I have to say, Captain Lagrange doesn’t seem like that to me.’

  ‘You have no idea, Meg; you’re not really working class,’ she said with a look of scorn. ‘My dad was a lumper at the Fremantle docks. In the 1919 wharf disputes he got stuck with a bayonet by our own police because he wanted a fair deal for the workers. Nothing fancy, just a fair deal. And who was the government looking out for, eh? The rich, that’s who. Always have, always will.’

  I poured the tea. I knew nothing about the rights and wrongs of the incident she was talking about. I wasn’t even born in 1919.

  She took a sip of tea. ‘After my dad got injured, life was a constant
struggle, just to survive. We never had enough to eat.’

  ‘You weren’t alone there, Betty,’ I said, with some heat. ‘We weren’t rich. Far from it. My family struggled too. Everybody did in the thirties. There was a depression on, remember? My mother was a widow. We were lucky to eat some days.’ I finished my tea and began to make a move towards leaving.

  She looked at me blankly. ‘You don’t understand. Often we didn’t eat. And I’ll tell you what, Meg, I’d do just about anything never to be hungry like that again.’ Her face hardened. ‘Don’t you fall for their tricks. The “upper classes”. No matter how bloody nice they talk, how polite they are to a pretty girl, they’re just bloody capitalists, looking out for themselves.’

  She lapsed into a brooding silence while I collected my things.

  ‘Thanks for the company,’ she said as I got up to leave. ‘I wish I was a better person. I know I’m not as nice as Doreen. She was always trying to be cheerful, always wanting to think the best about people. That’s why I hated to see her so miserable.’

  I walked into our kitchen to find that Joan was home from work and reading the paper. She shoved it at me.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You’re in the Mirror.’

  The headline read: NO SHELTER FROM DEATH. It was a full-page article about Doreen’s murder, complete with photographs. I was mentioned as the person who had discovered her body, along with Capt. Thomas Lagrange M.C. of Claremont. There was a photo of Tom in his uniform, but it must have been an old one from their files, because he looked younger and there was no scar on his face. I wasn’t sure I liked the notoriety, but Joan seemed thrilled. No doubt it was going straight into the scrapbook.

  Alone in my room I couldn’t shake off Betty’s fierce words about Tom. I wished I’d never heard them. I’d decided Tom Lagrange was a good man, that I had no reason not to trust him, and now I was confused again. How much of what Betty said was about class? She hated Tom, that was certain. But if I was going to judge Tom on the basis of having rich parents, I would be as bad as those willing to think Frank Luca was a murderer just because his parents were Italian.

  I knew it was impossible to really know another person, but I hoped I was a reasonable judge of character. Tom simply didn’t seem the type to have been having an affair with Doreen Luca. I had no doubt he treated her with the same degree of polite consideration he seemed to treat everyone and maybe she had misunderstood. If Tom was guilty of anything, perhaps it was no more than being oblivious of the fact that a young woman had a crush on him.

  Betty was right about one thing, though. Australia wasn’t a classless society. Your accent, the school you went to, who your people were – it all made a difference. Class was even present like a faint shadow between me and Nancy Gangemi, who I thought of as a friend. She insisted on calling me Miss Meg, no matter how much I begged her to drop the Miss. Eventually, after many attempts to persuade her, she blurted out in some distress, ‘It feels wrong in my mouth, not to say Miss.’ After that I dropped the subject.

  And I had put up with some nasty comments from Peter’s female friends, or worse, the innocent question with a barb attached. ‘You’re a typist? So what do you actually do? Apart from just typing, of course.’ When Peter took me to his lovely family home by the river to meet his parents, Mrs Lagrange had been frostily gracious. Mr Lagrange, who was tall and dark, like Tom, had been friendlier. He congratulated Peter on knowing how to pick a pretty girl and asked me about my family in a polite and interested way. But I got the feeling neither of them thought I made the grade.

  Peter had laughed when I told him this. He told me it was just their manner. ‘They liked you a lot, especially Dad. More importantly, I like you a lot. In fact, I love you. So stop worrying.’

  Chad was due to pick me up at seven o’clock. That would be good. Dancing would sweep away these difficult thoughts. At five-thirty I went outside to water the garden. I sprayed water onto the parched flowers, shrubs and small square of lawn that made up our front yard and let my thoughts wander. From all along the street came splashing sounds and the hiss of sprinklers and in the air was the scent of moist sand and greenery.

  Mrs Phoenix appeared by her gate, watering her prized blue hydrangeas. I moved across to her.

  ‘How is Mr Phoenix?’ I asked. Apparently the news about Doreen’s body being found in his air raid shelter had ‘given him quite a turn’ when he arrived back home on Monday.

  ‘Getting better. It was a terrible shock, though.’

  ‘It was a shock for everyone,’ Joan replied. She had come out to stand on the front porch. ‘I wish Frank Luca had chosen somewhere else to kill his wife.’

  I made a face at Joan. ‘We don’t know it was him,’ I said.

  ‘Well, who else could it have been?’ Marie McLean walked across the road to join us. ‘Stan and Jimmy keep making a fuss about it, insisting it might be an American. I think they’ve been listening to their dad because Cec can’t stand the Yanks. Mind you, Fred’s the complete opposite. He adores the men at the Catalina base; he’s always at them for lollies and they give them to him. They seem very nice to me and they’re very generous.’

  ‘It had to be Frank,’ Joan said in a voice that brooked no opposition. She stepped down from the porch and made her way gingerly across the wet lawn towards us. ‘The police think so, too. If he’s innocent, why’s he in hiding?’

  ‘We don’t know why he’s missing. Maybe somebody was after both of them,’ I said, squirting water on a rosebush. ‘Maybe he’s dead, as well.’

  ‘Oh come on, Meg, it was a crime of passion by a jealous and hot-blooded Italian,’ my sister said.

  ‘It’s attitudes like that – all Italians are hot-blooded; all Jews are profiteers – which lead to riots and to concentration camps. And wars.’

  ‘But Meg, Italians are hot-blooded. Everybody knows that.’

  I opened my mouth to refute this, when to my surprise, Mrs Phoenix entered the fray.

  ‘Meg is right. How can you say all Italians are the same? That’s just silly,’ she said.

  Joan scowled. ‘But everybody thinks so.’

  I was really angry now. ‘Joan, you must remember the anti-Italian riots in Kalgoorlie in 1934. I was only twelve, but I remember them vividly.’ I turned to Marie and Mrs Phoenix, ‘Three men died, many people were hurt, and there was a terrible lot of damage.’

  Mrs Phoenix nodded. ‘I remember. It was the miners, wasn’t it, angry about Italian men taking their jobs?’

  ‘It started with some miners, but it turned into a big mob of stupid, angry people. Italian hotels and boarding houses were blown up with gelignite; houses and shops that belonged to Italians were burned down. It was dreadful.’

  ‘Meg is sensitive about it because her friend’s family got caught up in the riots,’ Joan said.

  ‘Too right I am,’ I said. ‘My friend Angela’s father was badly beaten, their fruit shop was destroyed and their cottage was burned. The Valentis lost everything they had in the world. Everything!’

  I would never forget those days. Worried about my best friend and her family, I persuaded Uncle Wilf to pack up his truck with provisions scrounged from my mother and from neighbours who were horrified by what had happened. We joined a group of others looking for the Italian families who had fled from the rioters the day before. After driving around for hours we finally found about two hundred people huddled in the scrubby bush between Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. They had no food and no water, but they were too scared to come back to Kalgoorlie.

  Mrs Valenti said to us when we arrived, ‘My husband is naturalised Australian. My children are Australian. They go to school with Australian children. They look like Australians. They talk like Australians. Why should they suffer like this?’

  When I read about the Nazis looting and burning Jewish shops and houses in 1938, it had brought back vivid memories of that mob in Kalgoorlie, only four years before.

  I was still in touch with Angela. She had married a miner, J
im Carlucci, who was now fighting with the AIF. After the riots, her father had received some compensation from the government and opened another fruit shop, remaking a life for his family in Kalgoorlie, but Angela had written to tell me he was now interned as an enemy alien. So not much had changed, really. Maybe that was why I was so annoyed when people automatically assumed that ‘hot-blooded’ Frank Luca had killed Doreen.

  Joan looked contrite. ‘I’m sorry, Meg. I didn’t mean anything. But you have to admit, it does seem likely that Frank Luca killed Doreen.’

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down.

  When we were back inside Joan said to me, ‘What are you going to wear tonight? Would you help me decide what I’m going to wear?’

  Joan was going out for dinner and dancing with Major Wally Yeats. As she was perfectly capable of deciding on an outfit for herself, I suspected Joan was trying to make up for what she had said in the front yard.

  ‘Well,’ I said with a rueful smile, ‘I’ve only got one good outfit, so I’ll wear that. But I’d love to help you choose.’

  Joan made most of my clothes as she was a terrific seamstress, but with the rationing of material she had little to work with. My best frock was a knee-length floral silk, with a crocheted yoke and sleeves and as much skirt fullness as regulations allowed. Before the war only long evening gowns would have done if you were going to a nightclub or cabaret for dancing, but with clothes rationing had come a sense of informality and now it was fine to go out dancing in knee-length frocks as well.

  ‘Are you going to wear your blue gown?’ I asked her. Joan had a slinky full-length evening gown in ice-blue crepe that set off her silvery hair beautifully. ‘Or should you wait until you really want to “wow” him before that one comes out?’

  We wandered into her room, and she took out the blue crepe.

  ‘I think it’s a bit too formal for this evening,’ she said with a touch of reluctance. Reaching into the wardrobe she pulled out a knee-length black sheath dress that was cut low in the back and held together by shoestring shoulder straps. It was gorgeous. I sighed, wishing yet again that Joan was slimmer so I could borrow her clothes.