White Dog ji-4

by Peter Temple

  ‘This isn’t meant to be an interrogation,’ I said. ‘I’m assuming you didn’t kill him. I’m asking the questions other people will ask.’

  ‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘Do you know what it’s like to feel guilty even when you aren’t? My father has the capacity to do that to me.’

  I got on with it. ‘What was the state of Sophie’s relationship with Mickey?’

  ‘Not wonderful. She said he was manic one minute, everything coming good, then he’d go black and the next thing he was talking about suicide. Violent swings, you’d say. Sophie should know. Christ knows what it was like when their downers coincided.’

  ‘Did you know him to be like that?’

  ‘Not the suicide end of the pendulum. The highs, absolutely, that was Mickey. But I think things were going well in business when we… were together.’

  ‘And his wife. Do you know her?’

  ‘Wife isn’t the term that comes to mind, it wasn’t exactly a suburban marriage. But, yes. Corin Sleeman. She’s an architect, she commissioned a piece from me for a building.’

  ‘Something I could stop by and have a look at?’

  Sarah lit a cigarette, eyes on me. ‘It may not astonish you to hear that the developer rejected it,’ she said.

  ‘Unequal to the challenge,’ I said. ‘Did she know about you and Mickey?’

  ‘When she commissioned the piece? I didn’t think so then, like a fool.’

  ‘So she wasn’t necessarily indifferent?’

  Sarah tilted her head. ‘You’re knowledgeable in the areas of betrayal and revenge?’

  ‘An academic interest. Everything’s in books.’

  She touched her lips with a finger, the nail unvarnished. ‘Yes,’ she said, a nod and a smile. We sat, cups in hand, the scent of coffee, gossamer smoke in the sunlight.

  ‘Who found him?’ I said.

  ‘Apparently he didn’t ring Rick to be picked up. His mobile was on and he wasn’t answering, so Rick rang security at the building and they went in.’

  ‘The weapon,’ I said. ‘Did you tell anyone you had it?’

  ‘No. Just Sophie.’

  ‘Which leaves Mickey and Rick and whoever they told.’

  ‘I suppose so. I can’t imagine Mickey telling the world.’

  ‘What do you know about Rick?’

  She hung her head, closed her eyes in mock contrition. ‘I don’t even know his surname. He’s big, going bald, he’s polite.’

  ‘And now he’s an unemployed vegetarian, I presume.’

  Sarah shrugged.

  ‘The cops. When did they arrive? I haven’t been told that.’

  Only because I hadn’t asked.

  ‘Sunday morning,’ she said. ‘Just before nine. They asked me to come to the station. When we got there, they left me alone for about half an hour and then they came in with the gun. I told them about it and while I was doing that I realised I needed a lawyer.’

  ‘Many people don’t have that reaction.’

  Sarah gave me the child’s direct look. ‘I’ve seen the movies, mate. It’s not just the guilty who need a lawyer.’

  I nodded. ‘Sound attitude. Everyone needs a lawyer. And a couple in reserve.’

  ‘So I rang my father and Andrew came to the station. I thought I’d be leaving with him. The movies didn’t prepare me for a week in remand.’

  ‘Nothing in life would. What does Sophie do?’

  ‘As in, for a living?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Nothing. Cursed with artistic leanings, the Longmores. I was trying to paint so she wanted to be a painter. She fucked a lot of artists but that didn’t help with the actual painting.’

  She fetched another cigarette.

  ‘Pottery was next,’ she said, ‘but potters were too boring to fuck, plus she hated the feel of clay. Computer-generated crap, that went on for a while. Soph quite liked it but the men were worse than potters. Then she met Ernst, a photographer, a man who carried his telephoto lens in his underpants. That was my impression, anyway.’ She blew smoke. ‘She had a little falling out with Ernst and he took his long lens elsewhere. But she still takes photographs. Compulsively. Terrible photographs.’

  We sat silent for a while.

  ‘Will she be a prosecution witness?’ I said.

  ‘Against me?’ She closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘No, for Christ’s sake, she knows I didn’t do it, couldn’t do it, wouldn’t have any fucking reason for doing it, how can I get this over…’

  ‘Having a key to Mickey’s place? How does that work?’

  ‘I had it, I never gave it back, he never asked, I forgot I had it. I told the police that. Now that may be fucking dumb but it’s not exactly the act of a guilty person. Telling the police about your key to the victim’s apartment.’

  I didn’t comment. Guilty people had done stranger things. Time to go away and think of questions I should have asked. I finished the coffee.

  At the door, she touched my arm. I turned. No direct childlike look now, her gaze averted, her shoulders lowered.

  ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘I’m not a great client, but thanks.’

  I found myself awkward.

  ‘I’m trying to be tough,’ she said, still not looking at me. ‘Someone who can handle this kind of nightmare.’

  Resist the urge to offer comfort. I had learned that the painful way. In my time, they didn’t give you that advice at law school. Or perhaps they did, and on that day I woke with a gully-trap mouth, rose to fall again, buried guilt in sleep, missed the tutorial.

  ‘I think you are that someone,’ I said. ‘In a word or two, what was Mickey’s charm?’

  ‘He was funny, clever. And a dangerous feel. I’d never met anyone like him. He sparked you.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ I said.

  9

  I drove back to Fitzroy in a mood not far from gloomy. Federation Square didn’t help. It had an innocent awfulness, like the results of allowing small children to play at cooking. In Brunswick Street, luck delivered to me a space not too far from what would soon be the fashionable street’s newest eatery. On opening day, anyway. New cafes, bars, bistros opened regularly — places to hang out and exchange hilarious one-liners with your friends while sitting on old sofas and 1950s chairs. And they closed. This had started in the 1980s. For a long time before that little changed in the long shabby street of clanging trams, dangerous pubs, ethnic clubs, marginal shops, murky pool cafes, the offices of minor trade unions.

  Then young people began to appear. At first alone and shy as urban foxes, they grew in numbers, became bolder. Soon they were loitering in the laundromat, venturing into the pubs, daring to claim a table in the snooker dens. Places catering for their special needs — breakfast in mid-afternoon, for example — opened. Affiliation clusters developed, here dud musicians, here talentless artists, here the illiterate writers, here those who combined all these qualities in spades — the film people.

  The old inhabitants, like many original owners, thought the newcomers were simpletons but harmless. So when the speculators arrived and offered to buy their once unsaleable properties, they hid their smiles, took the money and ran for a new brick-veneer in the west.

  In the mid-1980s, on a spring Sunday morning, a Volvo stationwagon parked in Brunswick Street. A young couple got out. She was trim, blonded, tanned. He was already broadening in the midsection, sockless, short and hairy legs ending in boatshoes. From a restraining chair in the back seat, he unloaded a child, complaining, flailing. They took it into a cafe.

  They were going to have brunch.

  The old Brunswick Street was dead, Brunchwick Street born. There was no turning back.

  I thought about these things sitting in my car watching a signwriter at work on the window of Morris’s two-down, two-up building. It had once been the premises of C. K. Dovey, printer of personal and business stationery, advertising material, invitations to occasions of all kinds, calling cards. People passing would see Ken standing at the c
abinet, selecting each letter from its tray, placing it in the stick in his left hand, inserting spaces — en spaces, em spaces, line spaces. He put the metal down on his steel stone in a frame, a chase, cut decorative borders, mitred their corners, locked the assemblage up tight with quoins. Then he transferred it to the press bed and inked it with a roller.

  On Ken Dovey’s window, the painter had outlined the word Enzio’s in a fat italic hand and was working on the E in gold paint.

  I got out and crossed the street, made my way in the late-morning throng, young and youngish people mostly, modish, long-haired, hairless, the odd balding man with a small tuft sticking out of the back of his head like a vestige of tail, people in Melbourne black, people in Gold Coast white, people in saris, sarongs, the odd suit, the odd secondhand pink tracksuit, many naked midriffs, some not much wider than a grey-hound’s, some not much narrower than a 44-gallon drum but the colour of lard.

  ‘Going where I’m going?’ said a woman behind me.

  ‘In principle, I’m willing.’

  She came up beside me, brushed against me, you could feel the solidness of her arm, the muscle, not an unpleasant feeling.

  I didn’t have to look down to meet her eyes, slate eyes. She was letting her hair grow; it was almost army bootcamp height.

  ‘How’s business?’ I said.

  Her name was Boz. I’d done the work when she gave up being a film grip to buy a two-truck inner-city removal business with a line in carting works of art. The seller was an apparently exhausted man ready for a long rest. When I tried to ensure that he didn’t start up a week later under another name and pinch the goodwill he claimed to be selling, he had to be wrestled to the ground and sat on.

  ‘Excellent,’ she said. She licked her lower lip, showing a viper of pink tongue. ‘I may have to get another truck.’

  ‘Wait a while,’ I said. ‘Till you see it’s all flow and no ebb.’

  We walked. The oncomings seemed to part for us — well, for a six-feet-two woman, with a broken nose, in overalls.

  ‘Fussy bastard, this Enzio,’ she said. ‘We go to collect the gas stove he’s bought, it’s disgusting. It looks like it’s been in shearers’ quarters for fifty years, they fire up all eight burners and chuck on a dead sheep, turn it over at half-time in the footy. Just looking at the fucking thing makes you itch. Enzio makes me get the blankets and wrap it up like it’s a French antique.’ She shook her head. ‘Had to throw away the blankets. Good blankets.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he tells me it is a French antique. Chucked out in some refurbishment of the Melbourne Club.’

  We entered the stove’s new home. Enzio, scowling, his expression of choice, was on a ladder, painting a wall. He was wearing tracksuit pants and a singlet and he had sprinkled paint on his thinly covered scalp, his stubbled face, the exposed hairy parts of his body, on his garments.

  ‘Jack, Boz,’ he said. He pronounced her name Boss.

  ‘Good colour,’ I said. ‘Ancient nicotine. When’s opening day?’

  It couldn’t be soon enough for me. I’d had no home in Brunswick Street for months, not since Neil Willis, absentee owner, wedding-reception gouger, sold Meaker’s, my hangout of too many years, to some jewellery-hung wise boys looking for a place to run drug money through. They’d sacked the staff and accused Enzio, the cook, of stealing from the kitchen. It had taken some doing but I’d managed to wring the workers’ entitlements out of Willis, including Enzio’s superannuation, fourteen unpaid years of it. Meaker’s was now called Peccadillo. My hope was that when they nailed the new owners, it would be for some offence to which that term did not apply.

  ‘So?’ said Enzio to Boz. ‘Where my furniture?’

  I could see that being able to look down at her for once had empowered him.

  Boz gripped the stepladder with a big hand, gave it a little shake, an exploration. Enzio cried out. The balance of power had been redressed.

  ‘Waiting down the street, mate,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to make room out front. Two spaces.’

  ‘I got a plan for that,’ said Enzio. ‘Carmel!’

  Carmel the waif waitress sacked from Meaker’s appeared in the kitchen door, paintbrush in hand. She was wearing a skullcap and looked about twelve. She was thirty and knew much of men and the world.

  ‘Move the cars,’ said Enzio. ‘The furniture’s coming.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m not being paid for my time here.’

  ‘Please,’ said Enzio.

  ‘That’s a first,’ Carmel said. ‘That’s a personal best for you. Move them where?’

  ‘The lane. Two minutes.’

  ‘Keys?’

  ‘On the counter.’

  She went out.

  ‘Here’s your lease,’ I said. ‘You are now legally occupying this building. Rent’s due the last Friday of every month, paid straight into the bank. The account number’s written on the first page.’

  Enzio came down the ladder. He took the envelope, held it in both hands. He went over and put it on the counter, patted it. ‘Never thought,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Never thought.’

  ‘Yes, well. When?’

  He looked at me. I thought I saw a glint in the black eyes. He cleared his throat. ‘Monday,’ he said. ‘Monday we open. Six o’clock, we have a little drink, champagne. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. See you on Monday.’

  He followed me to the door, took my sleeve. ‘Jack,’ he said, barely audible, ‘listen, I want to say to you, I want to…’

  I said, ‘Enzio, don’t say anything. Monday, I’m having poached eggs with the lot. Soft. I’ve had it with hard poached eggs.’

  ‘I hold them in the boiling water,’ he said, showing me a cupped hand.

  ‘Ordinary cooking methods will be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a matter of the timing.’

  At the office, my two rooms, tailor’s table, two chairs and a framed degree certificate, I made a pot of tea and sat behind the tailor’s table to read the three-page report on Mickey Franklin.

  The work was by Simone Bendsten Associates, specialists in due diligence and the lice-combing of candidates for jobs with share options and performance bonuses and a company jet. Once the firm was just Simone, a Scandinavian-Australian refugee from the finance world working from home. Now it was three people in an office off Brunswick Street.

  ‘Jack,’ she’d written on a card, ‘the press clippings are attached. We haven’t been able to add much.’

  I read, marking bits, sat in thought for a while, trying to see Michael Franklin — funny, clever, dangerous-feeling Mickey Franklin. The report said he’d worked for MassiBild, the Massiani family construction company, for six years before going out on his own in 1995. It listed more than twenty inner-city residential developments he had been involved in, including the Serena apartment block in South Melbourne where he was murdered. Franklin’s most recent project, the $250 million Seaton Square complex in Brunswick, had been stalled for more than eighteen months. The tangled history of the project took up a page and a half, a case study in how not to deal with the neighbours’ concerns. There was a list of creditors, including a company called Glendarual Holdings. ‘Glendarual is Sir Colin Longmore’s investment vehicle,’ noted Simone.

  The report ended:

  Franklin had a reputation in the property and investment sectors as someone who did not linger in projects, accepting lower than possible returns in order to move on. Descriptions of him include: ‘tightrope act’; ‘not a person we’d want to be involved with’; ‘high-pain, low-gain operator’; ‘much too hurried for us’; ‘one-man bobsled team, no thanks’.

  Between them the Age and the Herald Sun had found four photographs. Two gave a good idea of what Mickey looked like. In one, he was in a dinner jacket, bow tie, in profile bending forward to kiss a much younger woman, a piece of hair falling. She was offering her mouth, no cheek kiss here, she wanted to kiss him. A birthday, perhaps a twenty-first, the woman had that shining look.
The second was taken at the opening of a gallery in the Serena building. He was photographed with his wife, Corin Sleeman, a slim woman with short fair hair that looked as if she’d finger-combed it straight out of the shower.

  I read the report again and then I set out for the city centre, walked up to Brunswick Street to catch a tram. Once tram rides from Fitzroy to the city were more or less free, it was only a few blocks, the connies knew you, looked the other way. That had come to an end too.

  10

  Drew waved at me from a table to the left of the door of a cavernous faux-Milano place on Little Collins Street where the staff fawned on regulars and made others feel like they’d gatecrashed a private function.

  I went over and sat on an uncomfortable chair. ‘Not proving easy,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing of worth in life is easy,’ said Drew. ‘Why is that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think.’ I looked around at the lunchtimers, mostly men in dark suits, hard voices, eyes that darted. ‘I’ll give you a why. This place?’

  ‘Convenience. I’m making a house call nearby on a colleague who finds himself in an awkward position. Drugwise.’

  ‘Not the colleague seen after midnight helping the staff of McDonald’s? Using the fat straws to vacuum a tabletop?’

  Drew ran a fingertip over his upper lip, appraised me. ‘Becoming more in touch with the world,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing.’

  ‘I agree. I liked the old naive me more. I plan to revert.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Drew, ‘naivete never comes back. Like virginity and that feeling of your first tongue kiss.’

  He caught a waiter’s eye before the man could look away and pointed at the menu. Insulted, the balded one slid over and took out his pad. We ordered from the fixed-price menu, two courses and a glass of wine. The man’s demeanour suggested that we were cheating, like rich tourists lining up with the homeless at a soup kitchen.