If the insane Beechnut had gotten his grubby mitts on the box, it might have halted the Clem7 tunnel and given his insane Millennium Tram Master Plan some more traction. But Father Dill and Barrie Barry were right. These relics could not be used for political purposes. Certainly not by some unhinged Scarborough missing link who only changed his Y-fronts once a week.
Why, then, was a slick, jet-setting Euro clubber and curvaceous assassin after a small, rusted tin box in Brisbane?
‘You kill Dill?’ I asked. It was time to get to the point.
‘Who Dill?’
‘The priest. My friend. Cut into tiny bits?’
‘Oh yeah. That’s what happen when you don’t hand over box.’
‘Why did you have to cut him up so ... so roughly? Without dignity or mercy?’
‘I test myself. Keep sharp. Sometimes I use just what’s at hand.’
‘What was at hand?’
‘Piece of sheet metal.’
Poor Dill, I thought.
‘Please, please explain to me why you want this box so badly. I’ve seen the contents. I know what’s in there. It was under the ground for almost 150 years. Why now?’
She puffed away on the cigar. It was getting shorter. So was my time to wriggle out of this pickle.
‘Zere is group, around long time, who don’t vant to see more saints. Naming of saints very political. Naming of saints offend lots of countries. Naming of saints upset governments and peoples. I paid to stop saints. I paid to destroy evidence. You get?’
I was agog. I no get. Whose sensibilities could the Blessed Mother offend? More than a century after her death? In Australia? At the bottom of the world?
I politely asked my assassin.
‘So many saints. Too many for my bosses to pick and choose, you understand? My bosses go after all saints. I hired. Is just job.’
‘To get to the evidence first?’
‘Now you understand.’
‘And kill anyone who gets in your way.’
‘Sure. Is nothing personal against this Meery. She good lady. Is only job for me. I like. I travel. Get paid lot of Euro. Is good. I do lot of southern-hemisphere saints. I working my way up. Top guys do China, important places. Very political, saints. You understand? Now where box?’
‘Why don’t you just ding-dong the Pope?’
‘Zere vill be another Pope.’
‘And there’ll always be saints,’ I said proudly.
She tapped a long nail on her wristwatch. ‘Time run out. Nearly time for ding-dong. No box, I turn clock back on. Peoples in Breesbane waiting for New Year clock, yes? For ding-dong.’
‘Why don’t you just use bang-bang and get it over with?’ I asked.
And at that precise moment I could have sworn that I heard a horse whinny echo up the clock tower. And I could have sworn I heard a deep, guttural, Texan-style yahoo that would have scared the britches off Tonto. And I could have sworn I heard the lift in the tower shaft stop and the old concertina cage doors open.
Seems Vampira the saint killer had heard it all too, because she let off a single shot from a tiny handgun. The muzzle flashed. The bullet ricocheted. I closed my eyes, waiting for a hit. I heard a bell sound a delicate ting, like someone tapping a champagne flute with a knife handle. Then, before I’d opened my eyes again, I heard an almighty crack, then a thud. I opened my eyes, and there below me was my lady killer, sprawled out and unconscious. Beside her was a chunk of sandstone the size of a large bread bap. It had cracked off part of the tower above her head. This beautiful, crumbling, deteriorating iconic landmark of the city of Brisbane had saved my life.
Tex Gallon appeared, unsteady on his feet with the plaster encasing his broken ankle. ‘Holy cactus, pardner! What you doin’ up there?’
I had to wait ten minutes for the blood to finally re-enter my feet. Then I had a New Year drink with Texaco Gallon and Bingo in the crowded press room while the cops took my little European killer friend away. (Tex would be arrested for DUI while riding Bingo home to Red Hill, I would discover the next day.)
I hopped into the Kombi, drove over several fresh lines of red paint around Edward Street. I was caught in some drag-racing-induced traffic jam at Yatala. I didn’t arrive on the Gold Coast until dawn. As the sun came up over the Pacific, and threw a veil of blush over the coast, I felt cleansed. Almost forgiven of my sins. It gave me added comfort to think of the precious little tin box I had stashed under the Kombi seat, and all the good it would bring to the world when I finally placed it in the right hands.
Peg was asleep. I hauled my sore and sorry self out to the back patio and eased into my faithful old banana lounge. I opened a warm beer I’d retrieved from the laundry tub full of melted ice water, and popped a small party hat on my head.
‘Happy New Year,’ I said to myself.
I fell asleep and, as Peg was to tell me later, my cracked tooth happily tweeted and twittered like a nightingale.
~ * ~
FIVE
THE GOOD
MURDER GUIDE
~ * ~
1
In all my long years as a homicide detective, there were few sadder murder scenes than the homes of middle-aged bachelors.
I’m not trying to be cute. I saw it all. Anything to do with children was tragic, your greatest nightmare — and believe me some of those cases still stalk the dark corners of my substantial skull.
And there was the usual gamut of horror — the revenge slaughterhouses, the messy suicides, the blood-drenched domestics, the gob-smacking intestine-draped altars of psychotic religious messengers. I studied death by gun, knife, vehicle, drug, fire, poison, wrench, paper spike, sword and, once, an expensive Mont Blanc rollerball pen.
When it comes to murder, I’ve been everywhere, man.
Perhaps it’s an ageing guy thing with the bachelors. The pitiful bachelors. Not tragic. Just sad. The older I became, the more I understood, and the more they got to me. Theirs — before death set them free, of course — were the parallel futures of all men. One misstep, a card not played right, and woeful bachelor country awaited all of us.
Some of these men were — to use a polite, old-fashioned newspaper euphemism — confirmed bachelors. Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that. I found, in my ceaseless snooping about the dwellings of the dead, that confirmed bachelors by and large kept a well-ordered house, and were beyond reproach when it came to tidiness, cleanliness, and their taste in, for example, obscure thirties West Midlands pottery.
No, the men I am recalling now, from the comfort of retirement and my sagging banana lounge on the Gold Coast, are those men who have savoured all the glories of family life, and for one reason or another have been cut adrift and cast onto the craggy, lonely shoals of late bachelorhood. The scant wardrobes with their profusion of ill-shaped wire hangers. The negligible toiletries in the bathroom. The bare refrigerators, uncleaned and stained with the sepia leakage of food long gone. The one, worn armchair in front of the television set.
I speak with authority. And while you may question this after several of my recent, and sadly well-publicised, adventures since putting up my feet on life’s pouffe here on the Glitter Strip, I can offer proof Proof, you might say, from the pouffe.
It is a little known fact that my dear wife Peg and I once separated for exactly twenty-seven days in the early years of our marriage. It was before Jack, and even he, bless him, remains unaware of this little moth-nibbled hole in his parents’ marital fabric.
But I am going to tell you all about it now because, having recently stood in the blood-spattered Surfers Paradise unit of a Mr Hubert Dunkle Junior, 53, it’s important to give you context.
What does this regrettable, but minor moment, in the domestic life of a tired, knee-weak, big-bellied former Sydney copper have to do with the late Hubert Dunkle Junior? All will be revealed.
Good detectives have their mentors. As a young man hoeing the mean streets of Surry Hills, Darlinghurst and Kings Cross in Sydney
, mine was a man we affectionately referred to as Old Bug Eyes, or Obe for short.
Obe was a great detective. His passion for detail unrivalled. We never worked out whether his monstrous black-rimmed spectacles and his almost daily orbital deterioration were the by-product of this innate passion for minutiae, or the source of it. He had huge eyes, did Obe, which the spectacles magnified to an even more frightening level. We’re talking grasshopper in a magnifying glass here.
Obe also had a large head, perhaps the largest head in the entire New South Wales police force, which was saying something back in the sixties. A quick glance at police academy photographs from that era might lead you to assume that head size was a requirement of induction. Big heads were very popular in the constabulary in the sixties, just like the Besser blocks they resembled.
Obe’s frame was slight. From a distance he looked like a pencil with a plum stuck on the top, if that plum had eyes, and if that plum’s eyes were swollen. His strength was deceptive. I once saw him deck, with a single punch, a Macleay Street nightclub bouncer called Girder. Girder was built not like your proverbial brick lavatory, but like a string of them, a cluster of them, enough of them to comfortably service the annual Christmas party of heavy-drinking allied nightclub bouncers with metal, brick or wood-related nicknames. And their families.
There was a lot of lead in Obe’s pencil.
Despite these juxtapositions, Obe had his acolytes, of which I was one. He prided himself on using his brain — accommodated amply in that box head — over brawn. Which put him in stark contrast with another more glamorous section of the force, led by the legendary hard-man detective Ray Kelly and, to a lesser extent, Freddy Krahe. Kelly was a superstar in the fifties and sixties — a smart, hardworking, fancy-suit-wearing killer cop who spoke with his gun. Kelly’s gun had a very loud mouth. Krahe’s wasn’t a shrinking violet either.
Obe was the antithesis of these hard men. But his brain could fell a criminal as effectively as a bullet.
As a greenhorn, I fancied I could take a bit of Kelly and a bit of Obe, and fashion myself as some new type of detective. The smart-tough guy. I figured this would make me very popular with all cliques in the force. I would be admired by men and women alike. I could solve complicated murders with the powers of my perception by lunch, clock a notorious gunman with the butt of my revolver before knock-off, and be whispered about in the city’s finest clubs and restaurants in the evening. I would join that elite class of officer who had a university degree under his belt, what with my passion for psychology. All in a day’s work.
The trouble with all this image-fashioning was that it took time. I was, in reality, running around whacking bad guys in the greasy laneways of the inner-city, racing to the lab and peering into microscopes, brushing up on forensic techniques, taking statements from drug-addled rats and ladies of the night, typing reports with swollen fingers (see ‘whacking bad guys’), checking toe tags and watching my back. I thought I was on the make, and to be made in the New South Wales police required considerable effort.
I was, too, newly married to my beloved Peg.
She quietly accepted a raincheck on our honeymoon. And she tolerated the long, lonely nights without me, half-sleeping with an ear out for the sound of the frontdoor latch.
But it was the suicide of Obe, in a toilet cubicle at the station, which sent her out of my life for twenty-seven interminable days, changed our marriage and halted my stellar trajectory in the police force.
She was fond of Obe, you see. She admired his big square brain. But she also knew that it was he, of the massive spectacles and magnified eyes, with his work ethic and passion for the truth, who kept her husband away from his wife.
When I heard the gunshot in the cubicle at police headquarters that day, and literally ran into my sidekick Greave, ordering him to secure the entire washroom, then kicked open the unlocked door of the receptacle and found Obe’s body, still warm, still issuing blood, curled awkwardly around the bowl, it was, Peg told me much later, as though I had crashed in on a version of a future, broken self.
She took it bad, did Peg. We both did. Overnight, she finally understood what she may have married into.
She went to the Blue Mountains to stay with her mother. I remained in our little house. I was given a week’s leave. And in that week I hurt the brain in my big fat head trawling through the past few weeks, then months, looking for any signs from Obe that he was about to end his own life. I ran a fine toothcomb across everything I could remember, looking for that singular piece of evidence, for that dog hair of truth, that would help explain Obe’s death. In that house, sitting in the dark, I was also revising my own life.
Obe’s family had a private funeral. No grand police exit. No thin blue line, epaulettes and trumpets. I was invited. I went alone, in civilian clothes.
We buried Obe that day in the cemetery by the sea.
I had been to many funerals — as guest, anonymous mourner, policeman, undercover agent — and after a while they all began to resemble one another.
But at Obe’s, around the grave by the sea, I never forgot the sight of his twelve-year-old son, standing there in his crisp white short-sleeved shirt and narrow tie, his baggy grey school shorts, and his long socks and school shoes. His head was large and square like his daddy’s, his face white, his eyes two unblinking black currants. He stood to attention, his hands by his sides, his fists clenched.
I can see that face now. It carried a look not of great grief, or of bottomless sorrow, but a sort of shock at events that his young mind, no matter how large, had yet to catch up with. This moment would hit him, later, with colossal force. But at that instance beside the grave and the lowered coffin of his father, he was merely a piece of blotting paper, absorbing the ink of tragedy. Only down the track would he see a pattern, and recognise it as they greatest loss of his life.
A steady breeze coming up over the slabs and headstones from the ocean played with a small twig of hair at the back of that big head, and it was this, the playfulness of the hair, wriggling about, that told you he was just a boy.
I never forgot him.
And I never forgot his father, Obe, or, as his gravestone correctly attested — Hubert Dunkle Senior.
At my age, nothing surprises me any more.
So when, all these decades later, the phone rang and a detective mate told me about the presumed murder of Obe’s little boy, now a lonely middle-aged bachelor living in a Gold Coast unit with too many wire hangers, a stained refrigerator, a worn armchair and blood thrown across the cream walls, I barely raised an eyebrow.
‘You sitting down?’ my mate told me, calling on his mobile from the scene.
‘Is that a joke?’ I said, wriggling in my sagging banana lounge, still sore from my embarrassing encounter with an Eastern European assassin in the old Brisbane City Hall building a full year before. ‘What you got?’
‘How well did you know Obe’s son, Junior?’
‘The last time I saw Junior was when a new sheet of Seven Seas Stamps got me all excited. Come on. What you got?’
‘You’re not going to believe this.’
‘Flummox me.’
‘We found, in the unit, an old New South Wales police diary from 1972. It’s got your name all over it.’
‘Waddya mean, it’s got my name all over it?’
‘I mean it’s got your name all over it. It’s your diary.’
‘What?’
‘Junior’s highlighted one entry. 21 July. “Obe dead. Single gunshot wound to head. 6.47 pm. Second cubicle. Basement. Not possible.” You know what that’s about?’
‘Yeah.’
‘See you in twenty minutes?’
‘Yeah.’
I didn’t move for what seemed like an eternity after that call. For the first time in thirty-eight years, the copper smell of Obe’s blood in that tiny stall came back and hit me in the back of the throat.
I just stared towards the water of the canal out back, unblinking, like a
boy at a funeral.
~ * ~
2
Funny thing, memory.
I recall reading somewhere that everything we ever see and hear is retained by the brain. That it’s filed away like old library cards or film negatives, or these gigabyte things they have today, and sits in the dark waiting for us to remember it and draw it back out into the light.
I don’t believe this. Sounds a bit too fancy-pants to me.
But I’ll never forget my dear old father’s last words, on his deathbed. He faced the end with great courage. A moment before he died, he called me closer and whispered: ‘Less sugar next time, Dad. Remember the war.’
The Toe Tag Quintet Page 25
