Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club

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Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club Page 3

by Julian Leatherdale


  There was no denying that Olympia Fielding-Jones was a force to be reckoned with; a cultured and magnetic personality, she was an outspoken champion of female independence. At the dinner party Joan had attended, Olympia had discoursed at length on the rights of the modern woman. After the men had retired to Gordon’s study for cigars and brandy, Olympia had explained to her female guests that she had allies in the so-called sex reform movement, which advocated a woman’s entitlement to sexual pleasure.

  Joan knew that Olympia’s interest in this subject went further than most. She had founded a covert women’s-only society inspired by the ancient cult of female worshippers of Bacchus, Greek god of grapes and wine, ritual madness and ecstasy. Its formal name was the Ladies’ Bacchus Club; Olympia was its high priestess and, with membership by invitation only, no more than a dozen or so women knew the details of its secret rituals except for the odd guest sworn to secrecy. High society gossips had come to call it the Ladies’ Goddess Club and speculated about the racy pagan parlour games indulged in by these shameless women. Olympia had told Joan she liked the nickname and rarely bothered to correct it. ‘Through the performance of our mysteries we become one with the god Bacchus. So, yes, we are transformed into goddesses.’ Aunt Olympia had also suggested that one day Joan might be willing to take part in their rituals and that she would be most welcome. ‘But only when you feel you’re ready. When the time is ripe.’ Joan did not know what to think about this invitation—should she be excited and curious about such a prospect, or intimidated and scandalised?

  By a peculiar turn of events, Joan’s flatmate Bernice had only recently stood on the threshold of Olympia’s opulent corner of the universe alongside a new recruit for the Ladies’ Goddess Club. Olympia had met Bernice at one of the city’s infamous artists’ balls, where the curious rich came to mingle with the scandalous artistic poor. Here, amid the licentious gaiety of half-masked and semi-naked men and women in all manner of fancy dress, Joan’s aunt had explained she was looking for a young initiate to tutor her bacchantes in the arts of sensuality. ‘She will be remunerated, of course,’ Olympia hastened to add.

  ‘I know just the person,’ Bernice had replied, adding one proviso: that eventually she, Bernice, be allowed to join the secret society. Olympia hadn’t hesitated. ‘Of course! You would make a perfect bacchante.’ And so Bernice persuaded Eleanor, the pretty whore from downstairs, to attend the next meeting of Olympia’s secret society. ‘It sounds a bit monkey-brained, I know, but there’ll be a fair whack of dosh in it for you.’ Eleanor was game and so Bernice introduced her to Olympia one evening in the foyer of the flat in Kingsmere and left the ladies to their fun.

  ‘What did Eleanor tell you?’ Joan asked Bernice later with undisguised eagerness. To her disappointment, Ellie did not have much to report, having taken an oath of secrecy. She did observe that ‘crazy or not, the ladies are good sorts really and generous to boot’. The Bacchae women had made her an honorary member of their club and invited her to join them again at some time in the future.

  Joan caught sight of her eccentric aunt in the Cross every now and then, out shopping or while Olympia waited in her limousine as her chauffeur queued at the delicatessen for a side of salmon or a jar of oysters while Joan ordered her humble can of sardines as a special treat. Such was the social kaleidoscope of Kings Cross, where barristers and gunmen, prostitutes and heiresses, office girls and socialites rubbed shoulders.

  While Joan had fallen in love with the atmosphere of danger and excitement in the Cross, if she was to be honest with herself, she had never felt totally at home in this morally murky world. Bernice Becker, on the other hand, was utterly at ease. It seemed nothing fazed her. She had befriended the whores, Eleanor and Jessie, and often joined them for a late-night drink or early breakfast after work. When she invited her flatmate to come along, Joan had hesitated. ‘Go on, don’t be so daft. What are you afraid of? They don’t bite! They’re just women like us, trying to make a fist of things. Ellie’s even got a little girl, Greta, living out at Tempe with her mother, Ruby. She goes out to visit her every second Sunday or so.’

  As it turned out, Joan had liked both prostitutes. Eleanor was thirty-one and still striking, copper-haired and angel-faced, even though the last two years of cocaine addiction had begun to take their toll. As one of Phil Jeffs’s most attractive whores, she had once earned good money; enough to keep a roof over Ruby and Greta’s heads while living it up with gambling, parties, liquor and drugs. Now that much of this money had been frittered away, and she was left with only one fur coat and a nice old radiogram, she and Jess made do in their seedy flat.

  Bernice was also on first-name terms with Albert and Merv, a pair of itinerant spielers and magsmen who worked scams on the country trains, defrauding out-of-town mugs in card games and get-rich-quick schemes. She had even dated Shark Jaws, one of Jeffs’s standover men, but ended the liaison when she found out he could only be sexually aroused by throttling her. She was afraid of nothing, ashamed of nothing, willing to try anything once—as long as it didn’t kill her. Joan didn’t mind admitting she was envious of Bernie’s courage.

  Joan returned to her desk and continued to work steadily until her eyes grew bleary and a glance at the clock told her it was past eleven. Rising, she stretched to ease the kinks in her back, then rinsed a tumbler and poured herself a finger of sherry. She had just replaced the bottle on the shelf when she was startled by a full-throated scream. It came not from the street outside but closer—inside the boarding house itself, she realised, her heart galloping in her chest. As the woman screamed again, Joan was struck by a shock of recognition. It was Bernice!

  Flinging open the door of her flat, she raced to the top of the stairs that ran down the centre of the boarding house, connecting both floors. All around her, doors were flying open to reveal faces wide-eyed with fear. ‘Bernie! Bernie! What is it? Are you okay?’ Joan hurtled down the staircase. In the corridor below, she found her flatmate outside the bedsit of Eleanor and Jessie. She was bent over, one hand clutching her face, the other clutching the handrail of the staircase. ‘Oh, dear God,’ she moaned. Her hands were covered in blood, bright and sticky, and so was her blouse.

  ‘What is it, Bernie? What in God’s name has happened?’

  Bernice pointed at the door opposite. It was wide open. Even from here, it was obvious there had been a struggle: a lamp had been knocked over, throwing a spooky ellipse of light onto the wallpaper; the bedsheets were torn back, exposing the blue-striped ticking of the cheap mattress; a cascade of objects had been swept from the dresser; two valises were kicked over and their contents, mostly clothing, spilled across the floor. Joan stepped through the doorway into what felt like the slow-motion flicker of a nightmare. Christ, it was like walking into one of Bill Jenkins’s crime scene photos, she thought. But this was real, this was solidly, sickeningly real, not sealed off in the black-and-white remoteness of a police file.

  Joan recoiled as she drew closer to the bedroom. Between the dresser and the bed, she saw a body slumped on the floor. It was poor Eleanor, unrecognisable except for the bright copper of her marcel-waved hair. Her face had been slashed repeatedly so that it was now no more than a mask of clotted blood and butchered flesh. The deepest gash was across her throat. Blood had sprayed everywhere. Her rucked-up dress was soaked with it and on either side of her body was a thick dark pool. Joan staggered back and retched onto the carpet.

  As she heard a siren in the distance, Joan’s thoughts ran in absurd directions: how Mrs Moxham would be mortified to have her boarding house invaded by police and its reputation destroyed in the tabloids by morning. Within minutes, a couple of patrol cops with filthy boots would tramp up the landlady’s lovingly polished and vacuumed stairs, followed shortly by a squad of plainclothes detectives, the official photographer, the fingerprints man and Bill Jenkins, crime reporter for Truth, who always managed to get an early tip-off when there’d been a murder.

  Joan’s head throbbed viol
ently. She felt disgusted with herself. All day she had sat at her typewriter, happily composing a murder scene for her novel. And now here she was, thrust without warning into the middle of a real one, the unspeakably gruesome death of someone she knew. Her clever words had not only failed utterly to capture the reality of this experience, they mocked her writerly arrogance to think she could even do so. Joan rose unsteadily to her feet, still dizzy from vomiting. Bill had been right after all. ‘Crime’s not a woman’s business, Joanie. It’s not a bloody game.’

  And then her eyes fell on something on Ellie’s nightstand. It was a square of creased paper with a telephone number written in ink and four words printed across the top in the style of letterhead: THE LADIES’ BACCHUS CLUB. Fine drops of blood still glistened along the bottom edge. ‘Fucking hell!’ Joan swore out loud. She snatched the note from the stand, folded it and shoved it inside her blouse. What in God’s name was she doing? This was madness, this was plain wrong. This was tampering with evidence at a crime scene. But for some reason still unclear to herself, Joanie felt a compulsion she had no will to resist.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘What did you just say, Miss Becker?’ barked Sergeant Chappell, his eyes as hard and dull as roofing nails.

  Joan looked from her grief-stricken friend to the beefy, red-faced copper. She knew this kind of man had little time or patience for females of any kind, victims or witnesses. To them, women were unreliable, hysterical creatures, difficult to interview, impossible to handle in court.

  ‘I know who did this,’ Bernice repeated hoarsely, then buried her face in her hands. Joan had known that her friend had a great affection for Ellie and her fragile beauty but now, recalling the utter despair on her face as Bernice had wailed, ‘Oh, God, not you! Not you, my sweet!’, it occurred to her that Bernice’s feelings for Ellie were nothing short of sisterly adoration. She wondered if Bernice herself had had a similar moment of realisation.

  As Ellie’s corpse was being photographed and bagged for the morgue, Joan and Bernice had been brought down to Central Police Station on George Street to provide witness statements. Bill Jenkins, in a surprising display of gallantry, had offered to accompany them, even though it would have meant missing his midnight deadline. ‘We’ll be right, Bill,’ Joan had told him. ‘You’ve still got twenty-five minutes to file your copy.’

  Over cups of lukewarm tea at Sergeant Chappell’s desk, Bernice explained how she had come to find Ellie’s body while the cop made heavy weather of recording her account with his sausage-fingered typing.

  That morning, she had arranged to have a bite to eat with Eleanor in the Cross when she had her meal break at 11 pm. Leaving Joan alone in the flat, Bernice had then gone out to a long liquid lunch of the Noble Order of the Evil Itchy at the Roma Café in Pitt Street and then moved on to more merrymaking at Theo’s Club near Chinatown. At around 10.30 pm, she had walked up William Street to meet Eleanor at the brothel on Darlinghurst Road. Mavis, one of Ellie’s co-workers, told Bernice, ‘I saw her around nine-thirty. Said she was too sick to work and was headed back to her flat.’ A strange chill had come over Bernice then and she ran to Bomora. Six minutes later, she found the door of the flat unlocked and Ellie’s mutilated body inside.

  ‘I know who killed Ellie,’ repeated Bernice, raising her head from her hands, her face grim. ‘It was that crazy bastard Frankie Goldman.’

  ‘And what evidence do you have for that, Miss Becker?’ asked the sergeant wearily.

  ‘You and I both know he’s the bully Jeffs put in charge of all his whores, to punish them if they step out of line and to keep the poor girls hooked on snow. Shit-quality snow at that. It’s no secret that Jeffs cuts his street stuff with boracic acid. God knows what he gives his working girls, in lieu of wages.’

  The sergeant sighed. ‘Yeah, yeah, we know how Mr Jeffs does business. But how does any of this prove that Goldman was the one to cut up this particular girl?’

  ‘Because he was playing around with Jeffs’s property,’ Bernice revealed. ‘Ellie told me so herself. Goldman liked to pick out a whore for his own casual use and tell her he would give her “special treatment”. If she threatened to squeal to Jeffs, he’d beat the crap out of her and warn her that next time he wouldn’t be so gentle. Then, when he was tired of her, he’d turn her out on the street. I know Ellie was scared of him. It looks like she had every reason to be.’

  ‘Still no proof, Miss Becker,’ said Chappell. ‘Just hearsay. Why would Goldman risk upsetting his boss by killing one of his girls? Makes no sense. Still, we’ll pull him in for questioning as a matter of routine. And if there’s a clean set of prints on the murder weapon, that’ll help too.’ A bloodied cut-throat razor had been retrieved from under Ellie’s bed; it had been bagged and taken away to be fingerprinted. ‘Thanks for your time.’

  Joan knew the police didn’t give a toss about dead prostitutes. They would shed no tears for Ellie, or for poor Jess, Ellie’s distraught roommate, who’d arrived on the crime scene only minutes after the police. Her screams at the sight of her dead friend still rang in Joan’s ears. The cops had quickly given up getting anything useful out of her that night, and she was now in Joan and Bernice’s flat on a cot bed borrowed from Iris and Velma—knocked out with a dose of veronal—while Velma kept vigil. They had promised to take her down to the station to make a statement first thing tomorrow morning.

  It was nearly one-thirty in the morning by the time a police car dropped Bernice and Joan back at the Cross. It had rained in their absence and the footpaths were glossy black and slick with shiny splashes of liquor-green and fiery red neon. A drunk staggered down Brougham Street, shouting obscenities at the stars, while deadbeats rummaged through the garbage bins in the alleyways.

  It was only when they were back in the privacy of their flat, hunched over cups of tea laced with sherry, that Bernice and Joan began to speak to each other in low, unsteady voices, both shaky now that the numbness brought on by shock had worn off. A few feet away Jess snored in a torpor on the cot bed, one arm slung over her face; there was no danger of her overhearing their conversation.

  Joan had been thinking. ‘Did you notice anything about the front door of the flat, Bernie?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘There were no signs of damage to the lock or the hinges. No splintering around the doorframe. Nor any marks on the door itself.’

  ‘You’re saying there was no forced entry?’

  ‘That’s right. Ellie let her attacker in. Or they had a key,’ said Joan. ‘And things were only knocked about in the bedroom, meaning the attack probably didn’t start at the front door.’

  ‘Jesus, well that’s it, then,’ said Bernice. ‘It had to be that fucking creep, Frankie.’

  ‘But why risk coming here, to a boarding house full of people who might see or hear him?’ Joan countered. ‘Much easier to do it in a quiet back street with no eyewitnesses.’

  ‘You have a point,’ conceded Bernie.

  ‘It could have been a client,’ Joan suggested. ‘Some of them are pretty nuts. He could have followed her home, talked his way into the flat.’

  ‘Ellie was always careful when it came to clients. She’s been in the game too long to make a basic mistake like that. I think the right answer’s nearly always the simplest. Frankie’s got a hunger for violence. It’s what he lives for.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Joan stared into her cup. There was another possibility that she left unspoken. That it could have been one of Ellie’s neighbours, a tenant of Bomora, was too horrible to contemplate.

  She looked up as Bernie choked on her last sip of sherry, fighting back a sob. Her hands shook a little and she gripped the teacup as if she wanted to hurl it against the wall.

  ‘What is it, love?’ Joan put her hand on her friend’s arm.

  ‘I just realised I’ll have to make the trip out to Tempe tomorrow morning to tell Ruby and poor Greta. We can’t let the coppers break that news.’

  ‘Oh, God
, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s a cruel bloody world, Joanie.’ Bernie poured another nip of the sherry into their cups then raised hers. ‘To Ellie.’

  Joan raised her own cup and touched it to Bernie’s. ‘To Ellie.’

  When they had drunk, the two women agreed to turn in and try to get a few hours’ sleep themselves, though both feared the onset of nightmares fresh from the horror downstairs.

  As Joan stripped off behind the Japonerie folding screen in the main room, she felt something scratch against her skin. It was the scrap of paper she had found in Ellie’s bedroom and stealthily slipped into the cup of her bra; she’d forgotten all about it.

  Now, in the pale light of the streetlamp outside the window, Joan furtively unfolded the paper. The fine spray of blood along the bottom edge had dried, but a few drops had stained her bra. Ellie’s blood. She would have to wash that out.

  There was no mistaking the letterhead printed in a classical font: THE LADIES’ BACCHUS CLUB. Was Ellie’s death in any way connected to this piece of paper? Joan could not imagine that her Aunt Olympia was capable of murder. And what reason would she have? By all accounts Eleanor’s evening with the members of the Ladies’ Goddess Club had been a great success.

  Joan knew one thing for sure: she must not show this scrap of paper to poor Bernice just yet; she didn’t want her friend to jump to conclusions and blame herself for Ellie’s gruesome fate. So she refolded it carefully, shoved it inside her pillowcase and resolved to find a better hiding place for it in the morning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  All three women were woken the following morning by an angry pounding on the front door.

  ‘Let me in, you shameless harridans,’ shouted an all-too-familiar voice. It was Mrs Moxham, whose obnoxious personality did nothing to challenge the general low opinion of landladies in the Cross.

 

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