As we looked out on the dam, I could just see three men tearing about on jet skis. I didn’t know you were allowed to jet ski on Wivenhoe. But there they were, throwing up plumes and larking about.
‘Idiots,’ was all Walt Whitman said.
When he’d gone, I sat in the gathering dusk and thought long and hard about the old man’s history lesson. Just when I thought I’d made connections in the case — if indeed it was a case, for it had clues and evidence so disparate and across generations that any self-respecting law enforcer wouldn’t go near it — the whole thing fell apart in my head.
But the name — Collison. It bothered me. It scratched against the furthest recesses of my memory. Where had I heard that name? Collison.
Blast. I needed to get hold of Walt Whitman again. I needed to bounce Collison off him, but by now his old Fairlane would be barrelling towards Brisbane.
I stood to leave then, and on impulse walked to the edge of the water. It was a decent walk, trust me. The dried-out plates of mud cracked under my loafers all the way to the miserable, tepid shoreline of the shrunken lake. I could hear a motor in the distance. It got louder and louder. In a flash one of the jet-ski men emerged from the gloom, slowed not far from me, stood up in the saddle, then turned in a wide arc and disappeared.
On its tail was a clearly legible sticker.
SAVE NOOSA.
~ * ~
11
When I was first promoted to detective in the sixties, one of my superiors handed me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s enduring classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. ‘Memorise it,’ my boss told me. ‘It might save your life one day.’
I couldn’t see how the persuasive techniques of Carnegie, a former Missouri farm boy who cut his teeth selling bacon and lard, could help me on the mean streets of Kings Cross, but I gather the boss’s intention was for me to learn how to talk my way out of tough scrapes, if need be.
Funnily, I used one of Carnegie’s techniques almost half a century later on the linen-clad multi-millionaire history-obsessed nut job who tried to freeze me to death in a storage freezer just outside Noosa. I utilised one of Dale’s methods on how to win people over to your way of thinking. Namely, and to paraphrase, Dramatise Your Ideas.
I found my Noosa friend on one of his early-morning beach walks, and with the help of a small handgun I had in my possession, I dramatised my idea of getting him to tell me what the hell was going on by placing the muzzle beneath his chin in the charming woodlands at the bottom of Hastings Street.
He appreciated this dramatisation quite readily, and promptly urinated in his knee-length designer shorts.
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he said in a childlike voice.
‘What?’
‘The freezer.’
I think he’d started to cry, but I wasn’t sure if he was gurgling or if it was a nearby bush turkey sitting proudly on its monstrous nest in the dappled shade of the forest.
‘Is it true this used to be a caravan park, this delightful glade?’ I asked him.
‘I ... I think so.’
‘Before your time, I guess. Then again, you wouldn’t be seen dead in a caravan, would you? Though, strangely, I have seen many dead people in caravan parks. Caravan parks are places of inordinate violence. There was a particularly gruesome homicide in Windsor…’
‘Please don’t hurt me.’
‘Dale Carnegie recommended several ways to persuade people to like you,’ I said, staring at the nails on my trigger hand and picking at them with my free hand. ‘One of those ways was to encourage other people to talk about themselves. Let me put it politely. I am now encouraging you to talk about yourself.’
‘I have money.’
‘I know that, my friend. I just want you to tell me some stories. Historica, for example. Your business card, found on a dead man’s fridge.’
‘I told you. It’s a hobby. An interest in history. A small group of us.’
‘Like knitting. Or bridge.’
‘Sort of.’
I pushed the gun hard into that soft, flabby, self-indulged turkey neck of his. ‘Another Carnegie gem is to arouse in people an urgent want. I WANT you to start talking. Are you feeling it too?’
‘I don’t want to diiiiiiiiie,’ he sobbed.
Even the turkey raised its head and looked quizzical.
‘For crying out loud.’
I marched him deeper into the woods. I could see the river through the trees. I sat his quivering body down and stood above him.
‘Let’s start again. The business card.’
The muzzle was now a foot in front of his face. It’s amazing the effect it can have, seeing the little unblinking eye at the end of a gun barrel.
‘I’m a Queenslander through and through. I love Queensland,’ he said.
‘Save it for your Queensland Day honours speech.’
‘I’m passionate about its history. It’s that — the history -that made us what we are today.’
‘And what is that?’ I kept in check my rising patriotism for New South Wales, despite being a relatively new Queensland citizen. I was a Blue through and through, but in my dotage, who knows? I might be persuaded to turn Maroon. As Dale advised, don’t criticise, condemn or complain.
‘Proud. Optimistic. Never say die.’ He glanced at me quickly when he said ‘die’, and did not linger on the word. ‘This state is booming. It’s the envy of the rest of the country. It’s finally becoming what we all knew it could be — economic powerhouse, cultural dynamo, the promised land. Our history made it that. And it’s our job, at Historica, to keep that history in check.’
‘How the hell do you keep history in check?’
‘We make sure it’s preserved. Laid out and etched in stone. These history wars that have been raging for the past few years. Were Aboriginals massacred, were they not? Can history become the instrument of government power and ideology?’
‘Are you asking me these questions, or being rhetorical?’
‘Changing history can be extremely damaging — to an economy, a society, to individual people. That’s my hobby. To keep history out of the present and where it belongs — in the past.’
I shook the gun in his face.
‘You’ve told me exactly nothing I needed to hear. The dead farmer. Explain.’
The millionaire lowered his head and seemed to stare at his now soiled Italian loafers. They were probably worth more than my annual pension.
‘He had come across something — a body — that just might have disrupted the history I was telling you about.’
‘I think I know that body. We had a few hours together in an icebox. What sort of body could possibly derail a state’s history?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know who it is. Was. I just got a call and was told to pick it up.’
‘Out near Wivenhoe. Decomposed. Vest and buttons. Big round window blown into the forehead.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who called you?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Can’t or won’t? Not very Queensland of you. I thought in the new Queensland there was no such word as “can’t”.’
‘Historica has been going for more than a century. It has deep roots. Most of the members don’t even know who the other members are. When you get told to do something, from someone in the Index, you do it.’
‘The Index?’
‘The upper tier. The inner chamber. Whatever you want to call it.’
‘History. Index. How cute. You get told by a stranger to murder a complete stranger and you don’t even question it?’
‘Of course I dooooooo.’ He was back to wailing again. ‘We went out there to the property. The man wasn’t cooperative. That was that. We left a card, in case he changed his mind. We had our sources. We knew he was sitting on something the Index was interested in. Late one night when the guy wasn’t there, we removed the old corpse. A little while later the guy turns up dead. It had nothing to do with us, honestly.’
<
br /> ‘Maybe the Index is feeding you a load of codswallop.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘Look it up in a book,’ I said. I was getting annoyed with him. ‘So where’s the old corpse now?’
‘It vanished, I swear to God.’
‘This is a very dexterous corpse.’
‘It was in the freezer, then it was gone.’
‘I don’t believe you. In fact, I’m finding your retelling of events historically inaccurate. Who’s Collison?’
‘I’ve never heard of a Collison.’
‘That geezer in the John Oxley Library, the Johnny Cash look-alike. Who’s he?’
‘Who?’
‘Come onnnn,’ I said. ‘Ringo Starr. Black bob. Likes a full-breasted jacket.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re telling me you’ve been a history aficionado since you were a kid; you’re in some secret society called Historica, which has an inner-sanctum called the Index; you’ve at one point had a human relic stashed in one of your restaurant freezers; and you don’t know who one of the primary patrons of the John Oxley Library — only Queensland’s most important historical receptacle — is? You’re pulling my bookmark here.’
It was then I pressed the gun hard against his forehead. So hard I could see the skin indent.
Tears sprang down his fake-tanned cheeks.
~ * ~
You can imagine my surprise two days later when I opened the local newspaper back home on the Gold Coast and read a story about the body of a Noosa millionaire who’d been found half-buried in sand at the end of that fabled beach. Drowning, they said, though a curious circular contusion had been discovered in the centre of his very dead forehead.
The Index, it seemed, had deep and violent roots indeed.
But it wasn’t half as surprising as his ultimate answer to my question about the identity of our man in black at the library. It continues to rattle about in my brain.
Who is it? I had asked.
And I thought he was being physically sick when he finally said. ‘Logan. I only know him as Logan.’
~ * ~
12
While Walt Whitman was inside the John Oxley Library on a special mission for me, I waddled across to the Gallery of Modern Art and spent some time with Andy Warhol.
What’s not to like about Andy? I was hip to Andy in the sixties when I, in fact, saw myself as hip. (Though I was far, far from hip.) I thought he was a big New York advertising executive who worked for Campbell’s Soup. What did I know, putting away jugs of VB at the South Sydney leagues club on a Friday and Saturday night? Perusing the GoMA exhibition I understood, as a retired old geezer now, that Andy the artist had become sort of quaint. His work, once so modem, had also aged along with the rest of us, and become of a period. Yet Andy never seemed to age. I guess he would have liked that.
While Whitman — who had become a friend of the John Oxley archivists, having spent many years pecking away at their collection in his quest for all references to the city’s water history — set about handwriting copies of certain pages of Captain Logan’s journal for me, I drowned myself in the Warhol exhibition.
Leaving the gallery, I wondered what sort of art Andy might have made if he’d lived in Brisbane, and not New York. What might he have done with tins of Golden Circle pineapple? (Far more interesting than Campbell’s soup cans.) Or the granite melon of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen? Instead of Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, might we have seen a huge, rouge-lipped print of Abigail or Sonia McMahon? I shuddered at the lost possibilities of Andy.
I waited and waited for Walt Whitman. I strolled all the way to the South Bank beach and the pools where the children thrashed about like a sardine shoal, and back to Tognini’s, where I enjoyed a coffee and a blueberry friand. I was beginning to think Walt Whitman had been diverted by his own research, that he’d found a previously unseen quote from Logan about the Brisbane River.
Eventually, as I was about to return to the gallery to take a closer look at Warhol’s death pictures, old Walt finally shuffled past the café with his little cracked leather briefcase over his shoulder.
‘Whitman,’ I called. ‘WHITMAN.’
He dropped down into the chair at my table.
‘You got it?’
‘Of course I got it, you idiot,’ he said in his usual charming manner.
‘Why did you take so long?’
‘You want it or don’t you? How long do you think it takes for these hands to copy out a lot of words like that? Take a look?’ He held up an arthritic right hand as gnarled as a dead tree.
‘You want a cup of coffee?’
‘What the hell do you think a cup of coffee will do to my ticker? Have you got any idea? I’ve got to get going.’
‘Just hold your horses, old timer,’ I said. ‘Tell me what they were like. The journal pages.’
‘I’ve wasted enough of my precious time already. You want more of it? You got to pay.’
‘What are you, some Los Angeles therapist that charges by the hour?’
‘What?’
‘Forget it.’ I tossed him a twenty-dollar note. ‘So?’
‘What do you think they were like? Old. Yellowed. Insect damage.’
‘Legible?’
‘Course they were bloody legible. What do you think I’ve been doing for the past two hours? Whittling?’
I tried to picture what Andy Warhol might have made of the warty, creased and scaly head of Walt Whitman, then shook my head and tried to break out of this bizarre train of thought. I knew at least what I was thinking. I’d like to see Walt in Andy’s electric-chair picture.
‘Here,’ he said, dropping a sheaf of papers on the table, ‘I’m off’
I ordered another coffee, settled back and read Walt Whitman’s transcript. I had to give it to him. He really did have beautiful penmanship, completely at odds with his ugly physical self. I could almost see him as a Queensland schoolboy, the playground tar outside his classroom boiling in the heat of a summer day as he sweated over his lovely copperplate.
And I also had to admire him for his research abilities. Walt Whitman stuck to his brief and cut to the chase.
The excerpts covered a couple of years leading up to Logan’s death in 1830. I wanted to skip straight to the final journal entries of his short, miserable life, but delayed my gratification.
Three years before his murder, he had led an expedition into the Fassifern Valley and determined that there was ‘no preparation requisite for the ploughshare’.
On 9 June 1827, he wrote: ‘shot two beautiful parrots, not hitherto found in the Colony’. How deliciously fitting of Logan, to tear down beauty when he saw it. Or was I just thinking with a twenty-first-century sensibility? ‘Approached Mount Dumaresq towards evening; the country now exceeded, in beauty and fertility, anything I had before seen’. There were references to him shooting emu and kangaroo, and how the shoes of his long-suffering expedition party had worn through.
I was no literary scholar, but Logan’s writings seemed to change in tone and pace through the excerpts. On one hand they were formal and dull, and on the other he reflected his personal thoughts and emotions. If I’d had to hazard a guess, I’d have said he wrote the official explorer’s journal at the end of the day, and the more emotional material after some rum at night by the fire, or in the early morning after a night of nightmares and paranoia. Tyrants of whatever description, I assumed, must have more troubled sleeps than the rest of us.
For example, on 2 September 1829 he recorded: ‘Collison has begun questioning orders; was forced to reprimand him for impertinence towards Mrs Logan. Have withheld favours accorded him on account of his changed disposition, and a short measure of lashes. He accepted punishment without complaint. His attitude aggrieves me.’
He would be aggrieved even further a few months later, on finding Collison wandering the settlement drunk and half-naked. When confronted, the two pushed and shoved before a gang of convicts and
the ‘show’ became a source of humiliation for Logan.
‘For as long as I have occupied this uniform I have never experienced such affrontry ... I personally took the leather to Collison and had him in irons for Christmas ... it has been suggested he be removed from my service and join the animals in the mill work, but despite all, I have an unexplained affection for him.’
The Toe Tag Quintet Page 13
