by Peter Temple
‘I can smoke fucking rope,’ she said.
Cam offered her the packet, lit her cigarette with a lighter. The car was suddenly full of pungent Gitane smoke, Donna’s perfume still there, like ermine edging on a goatskin cloak.
She coughed once, smothered another. ‘Fucking perve? Believe him? What took him so fucking long?’
‘Scared,’ I said. ‘Very scared. He’s got a conviction for it. Thought he might go inside, they like perves inside.’
I could hear her breathing.
‘You were the prosecution’s key witness, Donna. And you were committing perjury. Making a false statement, that’s always bad. But this, this could’ve led to wrongful conviction for murder. That’s terrible. Eight years a bloke got for that, minimum six to serve.’
Just the sound of Donna’s breathing, quick and deep. The dog made a yawning sound, its small jaw cracked. I looked around again. She released the dog and it walked up and down the seat, neat turns, sniffed the crack, something down there?
‘What do you want?’ said Donna. ‘I’m going to fucking confess to something? You think that? Think a-fucking-gain, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘That’s a nice building you live in,’ I said. ‘Unit’s in your name, is it? Got a vote on the body corporate?’
‘Where’s the fucking ashtray?’ Voice harsh now, not hoarse.
Cam put a hand back, took the butt from her, opened his window and shot out the stub, sent it a long way, despoiled the street.
‘We would think,’ I said, ‘that only a mad person would just come out and tell a lie like this. So that rules you out. Then we have to ask why you did. What’s in it for you? Do it for someone? Do eight years inside for someone?’
Silence.
‘Do it for someone?’ I said. ‘We’re giving you a chance, it won’t come twice, believe me. This is your chance, Donna.’
‘Eight years?’ she said. ‘Eight years? Well, eight years is a whole lot better than fucking dead, so why don’t you get out your fucking perve and charge me and go for your fucking lives.’
Donna had some trouble opening the door but she did it, tried to slam it behind her but it just thunked. She dropped the dog on the pavement, from too great a height, I thought. It looked up, offended. She walked, jerked the animal with her.
I brought down my window and shouted after her, ‘What happened to Janene, Donna? And Wayne?’
Donna stopped, turned, came back, pulling the dog. She wore a golden crucifix on a golden chain. The little cross was in the hollow of her throat. ‘What’s that mean?’ she said.
I said, ‘You know what it means. Want to reconsider your position?’
‘You’re no fucking cops,’ she said. ‘Piss off.’
She went. We sat. Cam looked at me.
‘I liked that dog,’ I said. ‘I never thought I’d say that about a small dog.’
‘You change,’ Cam said. ‘I never liked small women.’
He started the car. ‘Coffee, feel the need?’
‘Serious need.’
30
Cam dropped me in Brunswick Street to get my mail and I walked back to the office, sat at my desk, opened the letters, got out the files. I had been a neglectful solicitor and that was unforgivable. It would cease now. Wallowing in self-pity, the curse of the single male. Single male with interruptions, in my case. But single was the steady state: I always reverted to being alone, seldom of my own volition.
I didn’t get much done, thinking about Donna. Eight years in jail was better than dead, she said. The suggestion was that whoever got her to lie about seeing Sarah would have no qualms about killing her. I had no difficulty understanding why she thought that.
A knock on the door.
I got up and went to open it. Once I’d left it off the latch.
A big man in a suit, black-framed dark glasses, big bulges over his eyes, nose large and spread out.
‘Mr Irish?’ he said. His hands were on his hips.
‘Yes?’
‘Have a word?’
‘Come in.’
I stood back.
He took a step in, his left leg, and he hit me off his right leg, in the chest, just under the collarbone, my hands came up and he hit me again, in the chest again, his fist went between my forearms. He tried to hit me in the throat but my chin was down, then he hit me in the stomach, left hand, right hand. I was going down in a mist of pain.
He kicked me in the chest, I felt my head hit the desk behind me, bounce forward, I was on my knees, I was fainting, the light was dim, a terrible pain in my chest.
He gripped my head by my hair, held my head up by my hair in one hand.
He slapped my face. Over and over again. His palm and his knuckles. ‘Smart boy,’ he said. ‘Clever fucken boy.’
He let me go and I fell forward, lay in my pain and tears, my face on the old rug. I felt something warm on my head, in my ear, running down my face. The smell came to me, feral, salty.
He was pissing on me.
‘Don’t mess with this business anymore,’ he said. ‘Hear me, Irish? Next time I’ll bring someone round, and, when I’m finished, he’ll fuck you, okay?’
I heard his zip and I heard the door open and close. I heard a car rev and pull away. After a while, I got up and went home, stood under the shower for a long time, washed my hair three times. I dressed, found a plastic bag and put the clothes I had been wearing into it, tied the top, took it down to the big bin.
Upstairs, I poured a neat single malt, took the near-full bottle and sat in my chair. My hands were shaking, just a tremor, barely detectable. My face hurt, I could feel the puffiness, but I didn’t want to look in the mirror. I drank steadily, it grew dark. I didn’t put on the lights, sat in the dark drinking, and, at some point near the bottom of the bottle, I fell asleep.
I woke in my bed, clothed, shoes on, face stiff, hurting everywhere, dehydrated, the shame undiminished, the soiled feeling still upon me.
I showered until the hot water ran out, dressed, stood in the kitchen. It was past 10 am. I wasn’t hungry, I was still more than a quarter drunk.
A drink would take away the pains. Medicinal drink. Vodka. Linda liked vodka and orange juice sometimes. Vodka and vitamin C. The old VC, did more good than harm, a health drink.
I touched the tabletop, steadied myself, closed my eyes and said the mantra, not said even after the hospital. Then I drank a glass of milk, put on the heating, lay on the couch, arms folded across my chest. Hugging myself. Weak sunlight crossed the floor and lay upon me. We had often shared our couch, Isabel and I, lying as if in a bath, facing each other, feet in socks, legs enclosing legs, legs passing between legs, reading the papers, reading books, tweaking toes, tickling insteps, one thing leading to another, hands invading pants.
I drifted off and when I woke it was afternoon, the light thin, the day sliding away, most of a day gone, a day subtracted from the total, the wounded creature’s cave would soon be darkening again.
No.
I got up, unsteady, almost fell over, went to the bathroom. Now I looked in the mirror. There were welts on the bridge of my nose, on my cheekbones, down my face, dried blood in places.
He didn’t mind that I saw his face. He didn’t care or he wanted me to see his face.
Next time I’ll bring someone round, and, when I’m finished, he’ll fuck you, okay?
No.
No. No next time.
I took the toilet disinfectant, the chlorine, drove to the office, took the carpet by a corner, his piss was in it, my tears of humiliation. I dragged it across the street and threw it into McCoy’s skip, came back, sprayed the floor with chlorine, threw buckets of water over it, brushed it, brushed the water out of the front door. I was standing with the broom in my hand, feeling weak, eyes down, the door open.
‘I pay for that fucking skip,’ said McCoy. ‘Not a public facility for anybody to dump their junk.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Send me the bill.’ I turned my back on
him but I wasn’t quick enough.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Accident,’ I said.
McCoy blocked the door, the light. ‘Bullshit,’ he said, offended. ‘I know fucking fighting. You’re supposed to be a lawyer, what are you doing fighting?’
‘It wasn’t exactly a fight,’ I said. ‘I got king hit and the rest followed.’
‘Client?’
‘No. A bloke who knocked on the door. Never seen him before. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’
McCoy gave me a good staring. ‘For Christ’s sake, check who’s outside before you open the door,’ he said. ‘Give me a buzz, I’ll give them a fucking checking over.’
He left. From the window, I saw him remove my rug from the skip and take it inside. No doubt he would be wearing it when next I saw him.
Action. No more moping. I took Sophie’s photographs and the negatives to Vizionbanc in South Melbourne, parked the Stud outside in the loading zone. The woman looked at my face in a clinical way, not disguising her interest.
‘I’m hoping your magic will help with these,’ I said.
She looked at them. ‘Fucking awful.
In a hurry?’ ‘I cannot begin to tell you,’ I said.
Her plastic surgeon’s gaze played over my face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Have a seat, Jack.’
She went into the back. They didn’t keep office hours, these picture people.
I flipped a few photography magazines, including a big one full of nudes, women and men, some bound, some oiled, many cut off at the head. There was a picture of a man in a suit with what looked like a sea creature hanging out of his fly, the sort of blind pointed thing I imagined to be found at great depths, living off sulphur bubbles in the eternal dark.
I was at the window, hangover not abating, watching well-dressed people go into the pub across the street. It had been a bloodhouse in recent memory, scene of a famous fight between factions of the Painters amp; Dockers Union. I’d appeared for one of the accused, a near-homicidal man called Tully with fists the size of small cauliflowers. Thinking about his hands brought other hands into my mind, the rings on his fingers, seen through blood as he backhanded me, the…
No.
I thought about photographs, the number of photographs I’d peered at since I started taking assignments from Wootton, pictures of missing people, their wives, lovers, friends and relatives, their dogs, their cars, photographs taken outside courts, in clubs, on the beach, barbecuing meat, in pools, at weddings and twenty-first birthday parties, kissing people, even a homemade porn video featuring a man and two women, one dressed as an Ansett air hostess, complete with little hat and name tag. It occurred to me for the first time that she might have been a real Ansett hostess.
‘He says it’s the best he can do,’ said the woman.
I turned. She was holding up an A3 envelope.
‘The neg’s a bit better than the print,’ she said. ‘Want a look?’
I shook my head, gave her my business credit card, said my thanks for the service.
It was the wrong time to be on the streets, drizzle, evening peak hour, drive time. The woman with the Italian name was on the radio. She had a way with her, clever, bursting with cheek, a naughty laugh that could blow away the rain. I went up Lygon Street to King amp; Godfree. Thirsty, I needed two bottles of beer. Carlsberg, no other beer would do. I bought six bottles.
Behind the stripped oaks lay a warm dwelling. I’d forgotten to switch off the heating and I was glad of the oversight. I drew curtains, put on lights, put on music, didn’t agonise over the choice, put on Elvis, the greatest hits, he always made me feel better. In the kitchen, I removed the cap from a Carlsberg and drank three-quarters of the bottle straight off, flooded myself with Danish hangover medication, tears coming to my eyes.
To the sitting room with the bottle and another one.
I sat in my chair and took the four big laser prints out of the envelope. In the top two, the woman’s face was much clearer, a snub nose, but the angle was bad. I turned to the third picture.
The woman standing at the car. The car’s number plate was readable now.
You could also see the lower half of the face of the woman in the passenger seat. You could see the crucifix in the hollow of her throat.
I knew that crucifix.
And you could see the driver’s hands on the steering wheel.
You could see the rings on his fingers, big rings on big fingers.
I touched my face.
I knew the rings. I felt a joy.
31
Eric the Cybergoth rang back when I was halfway through the second bottle of beer. He coughed for a while, the man who put the hack into hacker.
‘Redmile Solutions, four vehicles, want them?’ he said, nasal and throaty and apparently speaking from beneath an eider-down.
‘Might as well.’ I wrote down details of four vehicles, the address in Abbotsford. It was just off Johnston Street, in the dip, not a great distance from where I sat. I said goodbye, reached for my book, found a number.
‘No, we never sleep,’ said Simone Bendsten. ‘We can’t afford to now that we are in fact we and not lonesome me calling myself we like Queen Victoria.’
I went to the kitchen and rinsed an arbitrary quantity of rice, put it in the rice pot, covered it with a certain amount of water, threw in two cubes of frozen chicken stock, put the container into the microwave and punched in an arbitrary cooking time.
It would turn out soggy, it would turn out as a hard rice cake. Or each grain would be perfect, moist, independent of its neighbours. There was no knowing.
And I didn’t care. I opened a can of tuna and went to the cupboard for the plum sauce from the Adelaide Hills. There could not possibly be enough tuna swimming around Thailand to supply every supermarket in the world with as much tuna as they needed. What was this stuff? Patagonian toothfish?
Capers, gherkins, where? The phone.
‘Jack,’ she said, ‘The Age carried a report on 12 June 1995 of two men accused of assaulting a building contractor called Darren Kluske in a parking lot in Melton. Kluske said he was working on a MassiBild site at the time and he’d seen the men on building sites before. He believed they worked for a company called Redmile that, quote, does Massi’s dirty work, unquote.’
‘Names?’
‘Brian Robert Grayling and Reece Stedman. Twenty-two June, charges withdrawn. A prosecution witness declined to testify. The name also shows up in the building industry royal commission a week ago.’
‘Yes?’
‘In Perth, a witness told the commission his job in 1998 was to distribute cash payments to workers on five sites. The money was given to him in plastic bags by, quote, different blokes from Redmile, unquote. He was asked about Redmile but he said all he knew was the name and that they were, quote, heavies, dangerous people, unquote.’
‘Can you run the two men?’
‘We’re ahead of you, Jack. Grayling’s dead, there’s a death notice in 1998. Stedman was a detective sergeant in the Victoria Police. On 17 May 1993, he was named in an internal affairs report on the drug squad leaked to the Herald Sun. He is known to, quote, associate with drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes, unquote. Two days later, 20 May, the paper carried a story saying the three drug-squad members named in the document had resigned from the force.’
‘Well done,’ I said. ‘You are as a dutiful child to a blind man.’
‘If I don’t get some exercise soon,’ she said, ‘only the less sighted will go out with me.’
‘My sight is reasonable and I will always go out with you.’
‘Starting when?’
‘Well, how does damn soon sound?’
‘Sounds fine, if vague. But you have my number.’
I ate my simple meal watching television and reading a two-day-old newspaper. In a report on the royal commission, a MassiBild employee denied any knowledge of the practice of contractors supplying subcontractors with cash to pay
workers.
All too complicated. Too many names, brain of dough. The bones of my face ached, my chest and stomach hurt where I’d been punched. I was also badly hung over.
I switched on the answering machine, turned the volume to nothing, kicked the wedges under the doors, went to bed. While I was trying to keep from thinking, sleep claimed me like quicksand.
32
I woke late, it was after nine, eastern sunlight on the curtains. In the bathroom, I looked. The swelling had almost gone from my cheeks, welts less livid, a few thin scabs formed.
Under the falling water, I thought about near-death experiences, people trying to kill me, beating me up, threatening me. Not what I’d had in mind when I took the decision to give up practising criminal law.
Dressing, I thought that, when this was over, I would tell Wootton I didn’t want any more jobs. Between leases and contracts and a bit of luck with the horses, I could get by. Selling the Stud would help. It was like owning a yacht, the cost per hour of use was shocking.
When this was over. When would that be? When I found out what had happened to Janene and Katelyn, the missing women? Dead women? My thoughts kept coming back to them. This matter began to take on its strange shape the night the car pulled up next to me outside the boot factory.
Mickey Franklin.
Yes?
I’ll give you a name.
A name?
Janene Ballich.
How do you spell that?
B-A-L–L-I–C-H.
Names are useful. Come in and see my collected phone books.
Jack, this is serious shit, mate. Goodnight.
Serious, indeed. Janene and Wayne. Dead Wayne, entrepreneur of the senses, one-stop Wayne. I put bread in the toaster, old but good bread in an old toaster with sides that opened, sat at the kitchen table in the sunlight, and remembered Popeye Costello’s words.
Girls, boys, micks, dicks, cock-frocks, fladgers, bondies, whatever. Customer-driven, that’s the ticket.
And Janene? On the menu?
I suppose.
