The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘Noooo!’ I said, a little too dramatically.

  ‘You didn’t do that?’

  ‘I never wore my beret in public!’ I resented being so transparent. I sulked for a short while. I wanted a therapist who couldn’t read me, went off on wild and amusing tangents about my inner life, gave me laughable remedies and sent me on my way. I wanted to feel superior. It was one of the reasons I was in therapy in the first place.

  Wasn’t it the late, great Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia who asked, why spend a hundred bucks on therapy when you could smoke a good cigar for twenty-five, and if your psychological problem came back, so what? Go smoke another cigar. Then again, hadn’t Raul died of stomach cancer? I didn’t want to get into that carcinogenic conundrum. But I would not be accused of wearing a beret in public.

  ‘See you next week,’ said My Analyst, glancing up at her clock.

  But it preyed on me, the question of God. I mulled it over. It grew bothersome. It was an itch that needed a back scratcher.

  I got home and double-checked the levels in the whisky and gin bottles and found the remote where the cleaners had hidden it, wedged down beside the couch cushions where I sat every night, and decided to go to confession for the first time in half a century, just to see if there was any life in the old dog yet.

  ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned,’ I said in the confessional box in Marilyn Monroe Drive, deep in a suburb that neither Peg nor my friends and associates would ever visit. I had to nut out this question of faith with complete anonymity.

  ‘It is,’ I went on, ‘it is ...’

  ‘Yes, my son.’

  ‘It is ...’

  ‘Yes, my son.’

  ‘It is ...’

  ‘A long time since your last confession?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘So what are your sins?’

  Now that’s not a question you hear every day. And it’s not a question any right-minded padre would be asking me, what with fifty years of credits in the sin department. Did this guy really know what he was getting into? It was like someone offering to help take your rubbish to the tip, then seeing a thousand dump trucks, filled to the gunnels with vile detritus, parked out the front of the house. With their motors idling. With crows pecking at the filth.

  ‘Er ...’ was all I could say.

  ‘Long time away, comrade?’ the priest asked.

  And at that very second I knew it was him. Father Dillon O’Shee. Prison chaplain. Long Bay. Sydney. Seventies. When I was working in 21 Division, the notorious vice squad, I’d crack heads and he’d bless them. We had a harmonious working relationship.

  ‘Father Dill?’ I asked.

  Later, we went out for beer at a nearby tavern in James Dean Boulevard (what was it about street names on the Gold Coast?) and he filled me in on his clerical career. He was due any month for retirement.

  ‘You look good,’ he said.

  ‘I look like a dog’s breakfast.’

  ‘Life’s treated you well.’

  ‘I have feet the colour of Italian sausage.’

  We slotted straight back into our old affection for each other, and as he drank his schooner I noted a little pinch of concern in his eyes.

  ‘Time for you to confess, Dill.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Out with it, Dill.’

  ‘Ah, comrade, it’s nothing ...’

  And after a few more beers — he could never hold his booze, Father Dill — he told me about how he’d gone from chaplain at Long Bay to Brisbane’s Boggo Road, then, when that place had shut its doors, to a little parish in South Brisbane, where he thought he’d see out his career, until just a few months ago, when he was abruptly ordered to Marilyn Monroe Drive. That’s when he told me about the little rusted tin box that had been brought to him by a concerned Christian who feared for its safety. That’s when he told me about Alan Beechnut, and the funeral of his mother, Mirabelle Beechnut.

  It was the first time I’d heard of the Beechnuts. And I couldn’t know that dear, kind, gentle Father Dill would be brutally murdered and lowered into the earth at his own funeral just a week later. That I would be standing by the grave. That I would look up and catch the malevolent, psychotic grin of Alan Beechnut. That I would, in the not-too-distant future, lock ferocious horns with this nut, on a beach.

  Life works in mysterious ways. I wish I’d patented that little cluster of words too.

  ~ * ~

  3

  ‘HOW DID HE DIE?’

  I was sitting in a small office at the Roma Street police headquarters, learning the fate of poor Father Dill. A little birdie in homicide had given me a tip-off and I’d headed directly to Brisbane in the old Kombi.

  I’d had plenty of time to contemplate my dear friend’s untimely death. I was due in the city at nine that morning, but limped into Roma Street close to ten-thirty.

  Brisbane traffic. I thought Sydney was bad. In just the few years I’d lived in south-east Queensland, its roads had gone haywire. Why? Where had everyone come from? Brisbane was the new Sydney, with one small twist. Brisbane people weren’t used to this sort of congestive mayhem. They didn’t know how to merge lanes at peak hour, because they’d never had to before. They weren’t au fait with the ‘thank you’ wave. They waved, more often than not, with their middle finger. They leaned on the horn and tailgated and cut in and out and screamed and spat and wailed and punched the air and brandished screwdrivers. And that was just the women drivers.

  If this city was a person, it was suffering serious, almost hospital-worthy indigestion. Brisbane, the ten-minute town where everything was just ten minutes away? Whoever kept saying that was blowing hot exhaust out of that place where the sun don’t shine.

  But the tunnels were coming. The Clem7. Australia’s longest tunnel, being burrowed through that unique granite known as Brisbane Tuff. Talk about tuff. Brisbane traffic was tuff. It made driving across Sydney look like a trip in the kiddies’ train at a shopping plaza.

  I’d unwittingly dashed into a space in the conga line of cars passing through Mount Gravatt, and the dopey teenager I’d inconvenienced had followed me all the way into the city and as I parked had pulled up beside me, given me the two-handed centre finger, then curled his right hand into a fist, slapped his left hand against his right forearm, raising the said fist, and screamed a very short sentence at me. The first word rhymed with ‘truck’, and the second was ‘orf. Then he sped away in a puff of carbon monoxide. Nice way to start the day.

  Anyway, I had learned, speaking with my police contact at Roma Street, that during that morning’s drive I had unwittingly passed the site where Father Dill’s body, or bits of it, had been found.

  ‘Gibbon Street shaft, the Gabba,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that, the name of a gang or something?’

  ‘Gibbon Street shaft. The giant vent. For the Clem7 tunnel. They found him in there. In six pieces. We have no idea how he got in there. Or why he was dumped there. Drained of blood. No prints. It’s a strange one.’

  ‘Six pieces of him?’

  ‘Head, arms, legs, all severed from the torso. Neatly stacked. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Chainsaw?’

  ‘No. We don’t know what was used.’

  ‘How can you not know? This is the homicide squad isn’t it? Haven’t you seen it all?’

  ‘The cuts weren’t clean. Whatever the killer used, it was blunt. And I mean blunt.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ I said. Not only was Father Dill’s manner of death shocking, but so was the creeping infiltration of religious references in my day-to-day speech.

  It had started after my belated confession in Marilyn Monroe Drive. That night, after a few beers with poor Father Dill, I’d gone home and asked Peg where the television remote was. The cleaners had been. But the ensuing debate didn’t unfold as it usually did. I said to Peg. ‘Thou shalt ask those cleaners where the ruddy thing is and why they keep moving it.’ And she said, aft
er a short pause. ‘Did you just say “thou shalt”?’ And I said. ‘Are you daft? Who in their right mind would use the words “thou shalt”?’ And she said, ‘You did. You just said “thou shalt”.’ I thought using the word ‘ruddy’ was more peculiar. (Could that have been our ex-prime minister’s nickname at school? Did they shout ‘Rudd-y, Rudd-y’ at him through the pineapple fields?)

  Anyway, I went and sulked on my camp stretcher in the garage.

  ‘We’ve seen similar cuts to the body,’ my police contact said, ‘on train suicides. The train wheels.’

  ‘So he was thrown under a train?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘There was no bruising, no cuts and abrasions, anywhere else on the body. And what train could dexterously carve off a man’s legs, arms and head in a single motion? Physically impossible.’ He scratched his head.

  ‘Good Lord,’ I repeated, scratching my own head.

  I gave my friend some background details on Father Dill. He didn’t really need them. But I needed to talk. I needed to vent, and that was not a pun on Gibbon Street.

  What I didn’t tell him was the discussion Dill and I had had in the tavern on James Dean Boulevard. About the mysterious tin box that had been entrusted to Dill. The confession he had taken, his last in Brisbane before being shafted (again, no pun intended) to the Gold Coast, which had chilled him to the bone.

  ‘What was it about?’ I’d asked Dill.

  ‘I’m sorry, comrade. I can’t reveal that.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘That’s sacred, brother.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Dill,’ I’d said. ‘How serious is it?’

  ‘It’s life and death, comrade,’ he’d said, tears welling in his eyes as he lifted his beer. ‘As serious as it gets.’

  Who had sought Dill for absolution? Who had slipped into the confessional and said something that made this saintly priest fear for his life? It didn’t take blind Freddy to conclude that the sinner would be worth questioning in light of Father Dill’s blunt and bloodless dismemberment.

  A few days after the tavern, I had telephoned him and his voice was thin down the line. The last thing he said to me was, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘Hezekiah stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon and brought it down to the city of David. And Hezekiah prospered in all his works. There’s fire in the tunnels this time, comrade. Fire in the tunnels.’

  Four days later someone turned him into a three-dimensional human jigsaw in the dark shafts of Brisbane. Who could he have met in the holy booth? Was he giving me a clue? The identity of his future killer?

  Finally he’d whispered: ‘Mary. Blessed Mary.’

  ‘Dill?’

  ‘O beloved Mary. Sweet Mary. Give me strength.’

  ‘Dill?’

  And the phone had gone dead.

  I rang again. No answer. So I took a quick swing by the chapel on Marilyn Monroe Drive and knocked at the back door.

  ‘Father Dillon?’ The office smelled of pine needles and incense and the colour purple. Yes, purple. For me the church, since I was a kid, had smelled of purple.

  I’d crept inside and found nothing. Then I’d opened the doors to the confessional. For no reason. It was how I always used to work as a detective. I’d snoop in places for no reason. I’d poke through kitty-litter trays, check refrigerator cheese boxes, prod away at sofa cushions. Colleagues would ask, what are you doing that for, Detective? No reason, I’d say. The reasoning of my non-reasoning had solved four murders during my spell in homicide. There was nothing in the good Father’s booth. Then, just as I was about to close the sinner’s door, I’d seen a little triangle of yellow in the shadows beneath the kneeling stool.

  I’d bent down low on my creaky knees, and retrieved the object.

  It was a small ticket. An old ticket. On one side was a numbered grid with B.C.C. Dept, of Transport printed across the top in small letters. On the other was a very crude picture of a kangaroo and the words ‘Hop Into! Trittons’.

  What the hell was this? And had the clerk who put the exclamation mark after ‘Into’ been given the heave-ho for poor grammar all those years ago? Was he drunk? Sloppy stuff.

  I’d pocketed the ticket, and had it in my wallet when I visited my contact at the Roma Street headquarters. I didn’t share it with him either.

  And I was flicking it with my thumbnail in the pocket of my old shiny suit trousers days later at Father Dill’s funeral. That’s when I caught Alan Beechnut’s gaze. That’s when the hairs on my neck bristled. And that’s when I decided to pay Mr Beechnut a quiet visit.

  ~ * ~

  4

  The problem with short, eccentric men with strange fetishes is that they have a taste for bringing about the end of the world.

  As my favourite television celebrity of all time, Professor Julius Sumner Miller, always said: ‘Why is it so?’

  I’ll tell you why, Julius — and you don’t have to know how to suck an egg into a milk bottle to get the gist of this. Unpredictability. Short megalomaniacs can be unpredictable, a quality that is the bane of a copper’s life.

  Julius had it. Unpredictability. Not an Armageddonesque unpredictability, though I’m sure his influence led to more childhood chemistry-set explosions than at any other time in history. The reason Julius’s unpredictability worked was that he knew his audience was a bunch of scientific halfwits. Everything he did was unpredictable to the dopey, cow-like masses who oohed and ahhed at Julius’s magic. I include myself in the herd.

  I remember his ‘Millergrams’, which were published in the daily newspaper, with the answer provided the next day. How tall a mirror do you need to see all of you? he asked. How can you measure out half a cup of hard, solid butter without melting it? Boy, Julius could be infuriating. Yet he was compulsive viewing, responsible for shaping an entire generation of eggheads. And getting that actual egg into the milk bottle. Watch it. Watch it! There it goes. Why is it so? Such an existential question, and one I used often, to the annoyance of my colleagues, when I arrived at a murder scene. Why is it so?

  The trouble with Alan Beechnut was that you knew, on sight, that he was the kind of man who would call out for his Mammy on his deathbed. In fact, you knew he was the kind of man who had spent his entire life living with his Mammy. And he had. Until she expired, and poor little Beechnut had to stay home alone.

  That’s where I found him one Saturday afternoon when I decided to pay a visit to his house in Scarborough, a pretty little bayside point north of Redcliffe, outside Brisbane. It had taken me almost three hours to get there, this time on the Gateway. A tomato truck had lost its load and the motorway had ground to a halt somewhere near Underwood. Brisbane traffic, again. I am not a fan of tomatoes. To be honest, I have a tomato phobia. It was something I had yet to discuss with My Analyst. I thought we’d get my religious conundrums out of the way before we moved on to fruit and vegetables. I was even less of a tomato fan that day. I’d got seeds on my mudflaps.

  Beechnut’s place was a little fibro fishing shack two streets back from the bay. I didn’t like the feel of it one bit. It was the type of house — the windows — all tightly shut, the grass long, the paint peeling off — I had seen before. These sorts of places had dead bodies in them, mummified corpses lying on beds while weeds towered over the yard, and free local newspapers rotting on the front path. Places like this had secrets.

  It was hot. I could smell briny water. I felt nauseous. But not half as bilious as I became when I knocked and Beechnut opened the door.

  What hit me was a wall of smell that told me a lot about Alan Beechnut. It was the odour of unwashed human beings in warm conditions that had accumulated over many years. It was the throat-constricting perfume of an old lady and her middle-aged boy existing quietly in a small house with no ventilation. Now it was just the boy, but the smell had a lot of dear, departed Mammy still in it. Oh dear me, yes. It was so foul, a hair in my nose coiled tight.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Beechnut asked me.

 
‘Cut the Little Lord Fauntleroy crap, Beechnut. We need to talk.’ I had cupped my hand over my nose and mouth.

  He was about five feet tall and sported a comb-over. At least, I guess it was a comb-over. In fact, his hair had probably not seen a comb since little Alan was potty-trained, which may have been last year by the smell of the house. And while it had been a long time since I’d had anything to do with babies, I think the man was still suffering from cradle cap. He also had two pieces of blood-stained toilet paper stuck to his face. Looked like he shaved with a chisel blade. His ears were spectacularly protuberant and not unlike small, fleshy seashells. I could imagine his classmates swinging off them in his schooldays. He wore a red and black checked flannelette shirt buttoned to the neck and at the wrists, though it was close to thirty-five degrees. He had narrow shoulders and baggy grey trousers. He wore — of course — navy-blue socks and plastic sandals. Alan Beechnut looked like a little old man, though he couldn’t have been more than fifty. At a hunch, he would have been an old-looking baby. Older than his Mammy and Pappy when he was born. Prune-faced and hunchbacked. I doubted there were many baby photos of little Alan framed throughout the house.