‘You in a hurry?’ the conductor scowled. She had a nose ring and was wearing acid-proof work boots with her green uniform skirt and blouse. ‘Ta!’ I said and began shouldering my way into the press of hot bodies, pursuing Spider towards the front of the carriage.
My fellow passengers parted before me like the Red Sea. And with good reason. My grime-streaked shirt-tails were hanging out. I was clutching my throbbing right shoulder with a swollen red hand. My half-healed ear had started bleeding again. I was panting heavily. And an aromatic wet patch extended down my trouser leg from crotch to knee. Apart from everything else that had happened in the preceding twenty minutes, I had evidently contrived to piss myself.
Spider had got as far as the front window. He was squeezed between a couple of strap-hanging white-collar types, doing his best to pretend he didn’t know me. ‘Piss off,’ he hissed, squaring his glasses on the bridge of his nose, smoothing his hair and twiddling his jewellery. I pushed myself right up against him. The salary-men cringed back and averted their eyes. ‘Persistent bastard, aren’t you?’ Spider muttered, craning over the heads of the seated passengers, monitoring the passing cars on the road outside.
‘You’d better believe it,’ I warned. ‘And until I get some answers, I’m sticking to you like shit to a blanket.’
Spider shrank back, but he started talking. ‘Eastlake’s been tickling the till,’ he said. ‘He syphoned Obelisk Trust funds into his own account and used them to play the stock market. It worked okay for a while. But when the crash happened in October ’87 he lost the lot. Ever since then, he’s been running a round-robin, paying Obelisk depositors their dividends out of their own capital. Karlcraft Developments was his only hope for a big win, a way to cover his losses. He lent the project every penny he could raise. As long as Karlin stayed afloat, he had a chance of survival. Now that Karlin’s folded, the whole Obelisk house of cards will fall over. Eastlake’s looking not only at personal financial ruin but prison time for fraud.’
‘He’s also been selling forged art,’ I said, not to be entirely outdone. ‘He’s been using a front called Austral Fine Art.’ The guy had just tried to kill me, so I was keen to sink the boot in.
Spider pushed my head aside, tracking a stream of passing cars. ‘We know all about Austral,’ he said. ‘That’s why we suspect he killed Taylor.’
Spider’s metamorphosis was happening a bit fast for me. ‘What do you mean “we”? Who’s “we”?’
The tram was hurtling down St Kilda Road at a steady clip, approaching the war memorial. The greenery of the parkland raced along beside us. It wasn’t the only thing. As we slowed to disgorge passengers one stop short of the turn into Domain Road, a blue Mercedes sped by, a grim-faced Lloyd Eastlake at the wheel. Spider began elbowing his way to the door, me right behind him. The conductor blocked our way. ‘Fez please.’
I fumbled in my pocket. Spider pulled out a wallet and flipped it in her face. She was looking at it sceptically when I reached past and dumped a fistful of change in her palm. ‘Two all-day travel cards, please,’ I said. The tram rounded the corner and accelerated up the slight incline of Domain Road. As the connie punched our tickets, I reached up and jerked the communication cord. The tram’s clicketty-clack crescendo reached its peak and it began to decelerate. The door slid open.
Eastlake’s Mercedes was pulled up on the park side of the road. It was empty, its boot open. Spider hit the bitumen running. Me too.
I ran around the back of the tram and narrowly beat a stream of oncoming traffic to the footpath in front of Lambert’s block of flats. When I looked back, Spider was still on the far side of the road. He’d thrown open the Merc’s driver-side door and was reaching across to the glove compartment.
Fiona Lambert was not a nice person. But if Eastlake did anything violent to her, it would be because of what I’d told him. I turned and started into the flats, almost colliding with the old chook with the schnauzer. ‘Well I never!’ she exclaimed, clutching the hapless pooch to her bosom.
‘Me neither,’ I said, and started running up the stairs.
The door of Fiona Lambert’s flat sat carelessly half-open. Behind it, bananas were being gone in no uncertain terms. The sound was coming from the direction of the bedroom. ‘Bitch!’ Eastlake’s voice was shrill with indignation. ‘To think that I killed for you.’
The spare key was in the lock. Fiona Lambert’s security consciousness was appalling. ‘You’re crazy,’ she was saying, over and over, sounding very convincing.
I was all ears, panting, imagining the scenario, figuring the options. Shivers were running up and down my spine. Eastlake had a lead of, what, five minutes. Time enough to burst in, launch into a truth and consequences confrontation, maybe get rough. A glass container shattered. Definitely get rough.
He was having a busy few days with the rough stuff, Chairman Lloyd. Getting quite a taste for it. The targets were easy. Marcus Taylor, drunk and emotional. Giles Aubrey, frail and disposable. And me. I’d gone to him like a lamb to the slaughter. He’d been showing me some public art and I’d gone too close to the edge. Dangerous places, building sites.
But the motive here was different. With Taylor and Aubrey and me, it had been about money and staying out of prison. This was personal. He’d called me a liar back there at the construction site, but he’d been quick to believe. The seeds of doubt must already have been there, waiting to flower. Deep-seated doubts about his true worth, perhaps. A self-esteem problem. Something to do with the business that transpires between rich men and expensive women.
Money, reputation, ego, sex. If he couldn’t have it any more, nobody would. No premeditation here, no calculating the odds. Now it was all just cataclysmic rage. ‘Take it, take it,’ Fiona was crying. ‘It’s yours. Take it.’
She’d folded, shown him the money. Bad move, sister. It wouldn’t satisfy him, only prove the point that the whole world was against him. The deck stacked. The game over.
A shoe box of petty cash wouldn’t fix anything. The raw sound of a slap came through the door.
Spider’s running footsteps echoed up the stairs towards me. Time for the Coalition Against Domestic Violence to start getting pro-active. I pushed the door open and entered the flat. An ornamental candlestick sat on the hall table, a drooping blob of burnished silver. I snatched it up and began down the hall. ‘Don’t. Please don’t,’ Fiona Lambert was begging.
I stepped into the bedroom doorway. What I saw is fixed forever in my mind.
Eastlake had his back to me. He was bending slightly at the waist, one arm thrust out rigidly in front of him. Fiona Lambert was beside the bed, one knee on the floor as if genuflecting. She’d been showering. Again. A very hygienic girl. Her hair was half-dried and she had a pale yellow towel wrapped around her body. One hand was clutching it closed. The other was raised to her cheek, touching a blazing red welt. Her eyes were as big as dinner plates and she was doing her effortless best to look tremendously contrite. A shattered jar oozed moisturising cream onto the carpet.
On the bed was the bright pink Karlcraft shoe box. Its lid was off. The money was back in its banded bundles, neatly stacked. Spread out beside the box was a painted canvas, the edge frayed from where it had been cut from its stretcher. A red-brick suburban dream home. Blue sky.
Eastlake jabbed his extended hand towards it. ‘Look at it!’ he ordered. ‘It’s perfect. You’d be a laughing stock if I hadn’t done what I did.’
But her eyes were turning towards the door. Eastlake spun around, his arm still extended. In his hand was a gun. The gun from the glove compartment of the Mercedes. He stuck it in my chest.
The gun had crossed my mind as I ran up the stairs. I thought Spider was reaching across to the glove compartment to get it. For some reason, Eastlake and the gun were an association I had simply not made. Guns were for bodyguards, bank robbers, cops. Committee-chairing, well-suited Melbourne businessmen didn’t go packing firepower. Not even homicidal ones. Wrong again, Murray.
As if to confirm that I was flesh and blood, he prodded me in the chest with the barrel of his Smith & Wesson. His Black & Decker. His Gulf & Western. Whatever the fuck it was, my Dali-esque candelabra had met its match. I let it slip to the floor.
Back at the Karlcraft Centre, Eastlake had been hyped-up and homicidal. But his actions had a certain logic. Criminal, but rational. He was disposing of a potential threat. Now, he’d come completely uncorked. The windows to his soul were wide open and the view was not a pleasant one. Like a tantrum-wracked child who could neither believe how far he’d gone nor conceive of how to get back, he was simultaneously thrilled and appalled by his own behaviour. A disconcerting combination of emotions in a man with a gun against your chest at point-blank range.
Even as Eastlake’s berserk eyes locked onto me, Fiona Lambert saw her opportunity. She began to come up off her bent knee, backing away. As she rose, she reached out to steady herself against the edge of the bed. Her towel slipped to the floor, exposing her nakedness. Instinctively, she snatched up the canvas from the bed and covered herself. It was an odd moment for modesty and there was an almost coquettish aspect to the gesture, as if she hoped that her vulnerability might offer her some defence.
It didn’t. Eastlake, reacting to her movement, swung the gun around. Fiona cowered back, raising the picture in front her body protectively, as if to shield herself from his sight. At exactly that moment, Eastlake fired.
An explosive crack reverberated through the confined space. The bullet punched a neat round hole straight through the front door of Our Home. Fiona Lambert staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, the painting draped over her face, covering her head. Her naked body twitched and went limp. It was stark white against the black sheets. Colour co-ordinated to the last.
Eastlake’s hand jerked at the recoil and I lunged forward. I caught him in mid-turn and the barrel of the gun twisted upwards. It went off again and blew the top off his head. Blood and brains went everywhere.
The two reports echoed in my ears. The smell of cordite filled my nostrils. Eastlake was still on his feet, the gun still in his hand. He sort of teetered. I was moving backwards, partly reeling from the scene before me, partly being dragged from behind. The gun hit the floor and Eastlake crumpled like a wet rag.
Then I was stumbling backwards down the passageway. Spider Webb was dragging me by the collar. ‘Far canal,’ he said. He didn’t hear any argument from me. Perhaps twenty seconds had elapsed since I’d entered the flat.
From the direction of the street came the wail of an approaching siren. Spider released me and ran into the living room. He looked out the window, cursed, then dashed out the front door. I drooped against the passage wall, shitless.
A low moan came wafting out of the bedroom. With my back pressed against the wall, I sidled up to the doorway and peeked around the corner. The gun came into sight, half covered by Eastlake’s inert torso. The moan happened again. It was coming from behind the painting. I stepped over Eastlake, flicked the gun away with the toe of my shoe and raised the punctured canvas.
A gory furrow started at the bridge of Fiona Lambert’s nose and ran the length of her forehead, parting her hairline. Her eyelids, caked with blood, fluttered. Her mouth goldfished. She moaned again. The bullet had only grazed her. She’d need a lot of aspirin and a very good cosmetic surgeon, but she’d live. She also had great tits. Pity she wasn’t my type.
Sliding an arm under her shoulder, I propped her limp white body upright. The shoe box lay beneath her. A hundred thousand dollars. It didn’t look like much any more. I propped Fiona up with a pillow, scooped up the box, dashed into the bathroom and dropped it into the laundry basket. ‘Noel,’ I called. ‘Come quick. She’s still alive.’
Footfalls thundered up the stairs. A small dog yapped germanically in the distance. I settled Fiona Lambert’s head in my pee-drenched lap and pressed the towel to her brow. Suddenly, the room was full of men, some of them in uniform. The one named Detective Constable Micaelis was calling Spider ‘sir’.
I sat in the living room on Fiona Lambert’s white sofa in my pissy pants and bloodied shirt and waited my turn, watching sundry coppers traipse through the front door and listening to their cryptic confabs. Apart from the odd glance, most of them paid me so little attention I might as well have been part of the furniture. A couple of classic plain-clothes types wandered in at one point and had a cursory sniff at the fittings and fixtures. ‘Now that’s what I call art,’ one of them said. He was looking at the Szabo above the mantel, young Fiona in the buff.
The real thing was in the bedroom being worked on by an ambulance crew. We’d propped her up and the bleeding had pretty well stopped by the time the paramedics arrived. She was in deep shock, they said. I wasn’t feeling too well myself.
I scrounged a coffin nail from one of the dicks and was just lighting up when Fiona was helped out the front door, held up by the armpits. They’d put a bandage around her head and got her into a bathrobe. She was almost walking, but she wasn’t talking and she didn’t look at all glamorous. Spider and Micaelis went downstairs with her, then came back inside a couple of minutes later. Micaelis did the talking.
‘How ya doing?’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll need a statement, eh? How about you accompany Detective Senior Sergeant Webb to the station, while I make sure Ms Lambert gets to the hospital, okay?’
‘Sure.’ It wasn’t like I had much choice. ‘But I need to call my son first.’ Red’s flight was at nine-twenty and it was already seven o’clock. Micaelis looked to Spider for confirmation. ‘I wouldn’t want to be done up for child neglect,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Webb.’
Spider pointed his chin towards the phone. ‘Make it quick.’
‘And I’d like to do something about this.’ I stood up and framed my crotch with open palms. ‘My thighs are starting to chafe.’ Micaelis didn’t think it necessary to refer that one up the chain of command. I smelled worse than the back of the grandstand at the Collingwood football ground. ‘Use the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Make it quick.’
Tarquin answered the phone at the Curnows’. ‘Something’s come up,’ I told Red when he eventually came on the line. ‘See if Leo can find the spare key to our place, pack your bag and wait for me. Sorry about this.’
‘No worries,’ Red said, the voice of experience. I’d been late before. We’d still managed to get to the airport on time. It was only forty-five minutes away. Thirty-five with a tail wind and a good run at the lights.
Leo came on the line and I repeated what I’d just told Red. ‘Can do,’ he said. Faye was still at work and he was feeding the kids. ‘You don’t happen to know where Faye keeps the lettuce, do you?’
I went down the hall and looked in the bedroom door. Eastlake was still on the floor. He wouldn’t have to worry about his bald patch any more. A woman cop was standing on the bed with a camera, getting an overhead shot. What with five detectives plus their reflections in the mirrored wardrobe door, it looked very crowded in there.
The bathroom was immediately opposite. Stripping off my pants and underpants, I turned on the tap and started sponging myself with one of Fiona’s fluffy towels. I could see the cops behind me in the mirror. Spider looked across and saw me standing there bare-arsed in my shirt-tails. ‘What is this?’ he said, reaching over to pull the door shut. ‘A fucking nudist colony?’
I grabbed the pink shoe box out of the laundry basket and stepped into the toilet cubicle. The box contained ten bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each about two and a half centimetres thick—an inch in the old dispensation. One thousand pictures of a man in a grey ski mask.
My jocks were in a pretty deplorable state. Pulling them back on was not a pleasant experience. I distributed the cash evenly around the waistband. It bulged a little,
but at least it was dry. I sucked in my breath, buttoned up my pants and left my shirt hanging out. When I checked the result in the bathroom mirror, I looked like a candidate for Weight Watchers. This would never work.
‘Here,’ said Spider, half-opening the door. A clean shirt sailed through the air and landed at my feet. ‘Found a dozen of these in the wardrobe. The owner won’t be needing them any more.’ Spider Webb was turning out to be a real gent.
Eastlake was two sizes bigger than me. His crisp white Yves St Laurent fell like a tent over the bulge at my midriff, perfectly concealing it. That’s why the rich look so good. It’s all in the tailoring. ‘Ready,’ I told the cops, wiping my face. With my cash assets concealed and my shirt hanging out, I could have been the President of the Philippines.
A small crowd had gathered at the front of the flats, so we went out the back way. A prowl car was waiting in the access lane with a uniformed constable behind the wheel. He was eleven, maybe twelve years old.
The money felt a little uncomfortable at first, but I got used to it. It’s extraordinary how much cash you can carry on your person, I thought. Almost as extraordinary as the number of times you put your hand in your pocket and find nothing at all. I got in the back seat and Detective Senior Sergeant Webb got in beside me.
The ride into town was almost nostalgic. The only other time I’d been driven to the station in the back of a police car was the trip from the Oulton Reserve to the Preston cop shop. As the major offender in the affray, I had the prestige vehicle. The Fletcher twins rode in the back of a brawler van. Geordie Fletcher was driven off to hospital blubbering about an unprovoked attack and calling the cops cunts. Spider, who’d managed to weasel his way out of the whole thing, had been sent home.
On the way to the station, they told me I’d be charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, going armed with an offensive weapon, possession of intoxicating liquor in a public place while a minor, assaulting police, hindering police, disorderly behaviour, offensive behaviour and resisting arrest. At fifteen, it sounded like a lot. I’m not 100 per cent on this point, but I think I may have burst into tears.
The Brush-Off Page 28
