Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club

by Julian Leatherdale

  Joan drained her beer and grabbed another one. The alcohol was starting to work its magic.

  She began to climb the spiral staircase, pushing up through the crush of sweaty bodies, glimpses of breast and belly, heads thrown back, mouths gaping, guffaws, eyes and then hands, unabashed, lascivious, craving buttocks, hips, thighs. She had lost track of time, with the gramophone jazz speeding everything up with its feverish, rocketing rhythms. A woman on the landing was doing handstands so that her skirt fell down, revealing long, stocking-less legs and lacey tap pants. Sometime later in the night, Bernice would show off her famous splits, her favourite party trick and part of her repertoire of acrobatic turns acquired during her brief theatre career in America.

  God, how lovely this grand colonial house must have been in its heyday, Joan thought, her eyes drifting upwards to the oval dome high overhead. Unexpectedly, it brought to mind the domed ceiling of the Hall of Silence in the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park. That ceiling was studded with stars, one for each man and woman who had served in the Great War. Under each of these exalted domes, Joan felt her heart lift, the wings of her soul unfold. Artists! It was always artists who were given the sacred duty to tell these stories, evoke these feelings. Paid for by rich men, patrons private and public. And what a fraught dance that was between the art men and the money men!

  Joan almost tripped on an empty beer bottle under her feet and lurched towards the balustrade. It was a miracle nobody had gone over and broken their neck yet, though there’d been plenty of episodes of drunks spewing over the side onto the heads of those below. Joan was pretty groggy herself; was this her third beer or her fourth?

  For a moment she thought she recognised the woman at the centre of a knot of men just across the way. Could it be German Annie, the true Queen of Bohemia, worshipped by every man in artistic Sydney? For years, she had worked as a prostitute in the Cross, telling anyone who cared to listen that she was the daughter of the brilliant academic, Professor Christopher Brennan. Shocking stories were whispered about her father’s unnatural fixation on Anne, his drunken jealous rages, their vitriolic fights. But this woman couldn’t possibly be Anne. Anne had died of TB four years ago, heartbroken after her husband had been taken by a shark at Bondi; a life of exuberant survival ending in tragic melodrama.

  She could remember the night she’d heard the news of Anne’s death and how she’d wept. It was the same feeling the night she heard about Jo Lynch, that gloomy but always funny Smith’s cartoonist, who fell (or was it jumped?) off the Mosman ferry, dragged down, they said, by his coat-pockets laden with beer. The riotous decade-long party that was Sydney Bohemia was starting to lose its innocence and charm. And there was going to be one hell of a hangover to pay for all the merriment when it was done.

  Dancing couples in the hallway were swaying slowly now to Ella Fitzgerald crooning about pansies and tough guys. Other couples were disappearing into the dark, musty studios upstairs or the maids’ quarters or the servants’ backstairs for a quick knee-trembler or a tumble on a dirty mattress. Joan was not oblivious to the grunts and moans of pleasure in the candlelit rooms all around her. She was the beggar at the feast, starved for sexual pleasure, her loins aching for a man, having done without for six months at least, God save her!

  And then, as if summoned by the strength of her desire, a beautiful older man, tipsy but not blotto, appeared before her like an angel of mercy in corduroys and a collarless shirt. She had never seen him before, this lovely fellow, did not know his name, did not care. Dark wavy hair, olive-skinned, thick eyebrows, clean-shaven jaw, coffee-brown eyes. An Italian maybe or a Croatian? Nothing would surprise Joan at parties like these. He grinned and nodded as if he could read her dirty thoughts. Without a word he began to caress her face with a broad, coarse hand (was he a sculptor, a painter?) and she did not resist but sighed deeply as he pulled her towards him. She could smell alcohol on his breath, Armagnac or cognac. She did not resist the first kiss or the second or third. He tasted good, felt good, pressed against her.

  Hugh hated all bohemians, had nothing but contempt for their unworldliness and lack of politics and morals, and he also hated the ‘wogs’ from Germany and Eastern Europe whom, he claimed, were intent on stealing the jobs of honest diggers.

  ‘Forgive me, Hugh’: this was Joan’s short, sharp prayer of penitence before the stranger hungrily kissed her neck and then her mouth and then cupped one of her breasts in his warm, rough hand and lowered his head to nuzzle her there and they both stumbled towards a niche of dark polished wood, an upstairs linen cupboard. Hugh need never know, Joan assured herself. It would change nothing. But, oh, how she had missed this …

  In the darkness of the cupboard she could barely make out her lover’s face and so she was immersed in this lovely, tense dance by touch and smell only as, with her green satin dress hitched high, the stranger held her firmly in his arms and made love to her. She moaned and her lover answered her moans with increasing urgency until they both cried out. Her whole body was flooded with the sweet absinthe of release, momentarily dissolving all her grief and fear.

  The man kissed her again, tenderly, and whispered, ‘Thank you.’ She was grateful he did not linger or insist on conversation. Perhaps he did not even speak that much English. Like one of Norman Lindsay’s satyrs he had carried her off into the forest, had his fun with her and galloped away to the music of panpipes. It was exactly what she wanted, exactly what she needed.

  She resented the twinge of guilt in her head, the thought that she had somehow betrayed her wounded warrior-poet. Nonsense, she told herself. None of this was planned. There was no deceit, no betrayal. I have no obligations to Hugh. I am free to do as I wish. But even buoyed up by cocaine and beer, Joan could not shake off a sense of dread that, whatever she told herself, there would be a kind of reckoning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was about one in the morning when Jess and Joan left the party with a well-shickered but still upright poet called Wally as escort. (‘You shouldn’t be wandering around the Cross by yourselves after dark. I live over on Victoria Street, so it’s no trouble.’) With the unscheduled freedom of the freelancer, Bernice had been left behind to party until dawn, but Joan was expected at work in the morning no later than nine.

  There had been one other unexpected encounter before Joan made her exit. Drifting downstairs in a dreamy post-coital trance, she had seen Bernice on the far side of the hallway in conversation with a younger woman, statuesque and with gleaming Carole Lombard hair down to her shoulders. Joan couldn’t be sure, given the dim light and the fact that she hadn’t seen the other girl for a couple of years, but it looked very much like her cousin Amelia, whose twelfth birthday party at Vaucluse Park remained an obscurely troubling memory.

  Her impression was confirmed when Bernice pushed through the throng to join her.

  ‘You look like the cat who’s got the bloody cream,’ Bernie observed. ‘Say, you’ll never guess who I just ran into, Joanie—your cousin. She remembered me from last year’s artists’ ball. That temple dancer outfit.’ Who would not remember that? ‘And guess what? Olympia has invited me to be an initiate in their secret club.’

  ‘Really? When?’ Joan could not disguise her excitement.

  ‘Soon. They’re having one of their ceremonies and they want me to attend.’

  ‘You have to do it!’ said Joan with such urgency that Bernie gave her a puzzled look. ‘You know how picky Aunt Olympia is about her club.’

  ‘You should come along too,’ Bernice suggested. ‘Why not? It could be interesting. Good material!’

  Joan blinked. It was true that Aunt Olympia had issued an invitation at the dinner party two years ago: ‘But only when you feel you’re ready. When the time is ripe.’ Joan found the prospect somewhat daunting—yet, as Bernice had said, what an opportunity! More than her flatmate could imagine.

  ‘I’m game,’ Joan said bravely. ‘Ask Amelia to talk to my aunt.’

  Bernice beamed. ‘You’ve got gut
s, Joanie, love.’ And she slipped back into the crowd.

  Now, as she and Jess and the poet climbed the steep slope of Greenknowe Avenue, Joan was still smiling to think that fate had so serendipitously delivered this chance for Bernice—and possibly even herself—to get a look inside the notorious Ladies’ Goddess Club. She had resigned herself to surrendering the potentially incriminating letterhead to the police or at least settling for using it as leverage in Hugh’s plan for blackmail. But here was this unlooked-for sign that maybe Joan should probe Ellie’s murder more deeply. Who else had the same incentive to find her killer? Not the police—except perhaps Sergeant Armfield. But what could Lillian Armfield do alone? Joan felt she owed Ellie—and Bernice, for that matter—the truth before the dead girl became just another shelved file down at Central Police Station.

  The trio crossed Macleay and cut down the narrow passageway of Hughes Street. The neon signs of many of the nearby shops still glowed and there were plenty of lights on in the looming brick towers of the Kingsmere, Franconia and Byron Hall flats.

  What were Olympia and Gordon up to that night? wondered Joan, gazing up at the steep facade of Kingsmere, balcony stacked on balcony, disappearing to a vanishing point in the starry abyss overhead. Dining with friends at Ambassadors, probably, and then on to Romano’s for dancing before the limo collected them for the ride home. It wasn’t hard to see why communists despised the rich; they were so easy to despise. Especially now as they lived well and made profits from the depressed wages which kept the rest of the country in penury. But Joan did not need the theories of Marx or Lenin to feel aggrieved about her aunt and uncle’s heartlessness. With her moral scruples shaken loose by drugs and alcohol, Joan was starting to see the merit in Hugh’s plans for blackmail. ‘The powerless never got anything from the rich playing by their rules,’ argued Hugh. ‘Only by breaking their laws and their heads.’

  So preoccupied was she with her thoughts that Joan didn’t even start when two men stepped out of the shadows. But that changed when she heard one of them raise his voice.

  ‘You in a hurry to get home, Jessie, love?’

  It was Frankie Goldman.

  Jess froze mid-stride. Frankie and the big slab of muscle that was his sidekick walked slowly towards her.

  ‘Can I help you gentlemen?’ squeaked poor Wally, looking pale and sweaty and so scared Joan thought he might actually piss himself.

  ‘Come on, Frankie, I done nothing wrong,’ Jess protested.

  With a nod of his head, Frankie signalled for his strongman to take care of Wally, which he did with a bone-cracking punch to the face that laid the poet out cold against the nearest wall. As for Joan, the effects of the night’s drinking evaporated instantly; her brain was now on high alert, alive to every nuance of the men’s faces and bodies.

  ‘Not what I heard.’ Frankie was now standing directly in front of Jess, chin tilted pugnaciously. ‘I hear youse been telling stories to the coppers, that Ellie was my sweetheart and we had a little lover’s tiff that got outta hand. That I was the one what carved her up. Is that what you told ’em, Jessie?’

  ‘That’s all lies! That’s not what I said, Frankie!’ Jess’s voice was high and frightened.

  Joan’s mind was buzzing with possible scenarios. Jessie might have said something like this to the police under duress, she thought. Maybe they had promised her things or threatened her; a prostitute did not have a lot of bargaining power. But, if so, who had leaked this to Jeffs or Goldman?

  ‘My boss don’t like it when one of his chromos gets herself killed—careless fucking bitch,’ growled Frankie. ‘And he really don’t like it when one of ’em goes about telling lies and making trouble for us with the cops.’

  Frankie was short but wide-shouldered, thickset with no neck and large hands: a man who could break bones and crush windpipes with barely any effort and even less remorse. When his face was not set in a deadpan killer’s mask, when he was relaxed and at ease, Frankie could be mistaken for handsome with his dimpled chin and sultry Douglas Fairbanks eyes. He was vain enough to dress smartly and oil and comb his hair into a quiff. No wonder Nellie Cameron had married him and Dulcie Markham had bedded him. But Frankie was rarely relaxed. Most often he had the air of a man who knew the world’s low opinion of his character and, while resenting it, he was willing to fulfil their expectations.

  ‘Please, Frankie, please—I never said anything like that,’ whimpered Jess.

  Frankie’s hand shot up and slapped her hard across the face.

  Jess cried out in shock and Joan did the same.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he barked. ‘The police do not get another word out of you, bitch—not a single fucking word, got it?’

  With the same hand that had just left a fiery red welt across Jess’s mouth, Frankie burrowed into his trouser pocket. He scooped out a handful of change and chucked it at her. ‘Here’s your back pay, sweetheart. You’re fired! I hear Tilly’s back from Blighty; maybe she and Jim’ll give you a job. See how much you like that.’ From the inside pocket of his jacket he produced a razor, its blade catching a gleam from the light in an upper window.

  ‘No, please,’ begged Jess, but Frankie was so practised and quick, the blade had sliced across her right cheek before she had time to duck or run.

  ‘Mr Jeffs’s character reference for your new employer,’ Frankie said with a cruel laugh.

  Jess staggered back, clutching her wounded face. Joan rushed to her side. Scared witless, she longed to flee the scene but she knew she would never forgive herself if she left Jess alone.

  ‘You stay out of it, you nosy bitch, or you’ll get yours. We know where you live with that madwoman Becker!’ Frankie snarled. He raised the razor again and both women cowered. ‘Consider this a warning. And count yourselves lucky Mr Jeffs don’t want no more fuss over the dead whore, or you’d both be sleeping in the morgue with her tonight. Now fuck off before I change my mind!’

  Then, message delivered, Frankie folded up his razor and he and his sidekick turned casually on their heels and walked back down the street.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After her second consecutive night of horrors, it was hardly surprising that Joan felt as if she were losing her mind. With Jess howling in agony and trying to hold the bloody gash in her cheek closed with both hands, Joan had managed to get her to the front doors of the Cairo Guesthouse a block away, where the night manager called an ambulance. Both Jess and Wally, who had remained knocked out cold back in Hughes Street with a broken nose, were then rushed to St Vincent’s. Despite the protests of the nurses and registrar on duty, who were obliged to report an assault to the police, Jessie and Joan had agreed not to identify their attacker and conveyed the wisdom of this course to poor chivalrous Wally.

  The gash in Jess’s cheek was stitched up but she was heavily sedated, and the doctor deemed it best that she be kept on the ward overnight for observation. Joan was about to take her leave when she heard a loud gasp. She turned back to see that Jess, who moments ago had been drifting off in a cloud of morphine, was now staring wide-eyed as if at an apparition in front of her. ‘I saw … I know … I know who …’ she gasped. But before she could finish the thought her eyelids fluttered shut and she fell silent, all the anguish in her pale face gone like a fleeting shadow.

  Joan stayed for several more minutes, hoping Jess might wake again. What had she meant? Had the drug triggered a memory? Eventually, when it became clear Jess was unlikely to rouse again, Joan—herself on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion—made her way home, determined to return to the hospital in the morning to try to prompt Jess’s memory.

  It was nearly 7 am when, after barely four hours of disturbed sleep, Joan heard the key in the front door and Bernie’s attempt at a stealthy entrance. ‘Bernie, wait. I’m awake.’ With a supreme effort of will, Joan rose from her bed and pulled on her flannel dressing-gown. Urging her flatmate to sit, she then recounted the whole grisly affair of last night’s ambush.

  It sou
nded even more terrifying in retrospect; Joan had had the time to reflect on how easily Frankie might have killed them both. The shock of this news on top of the calamity of the night before seemed to shake something loose in Bernice. She broke down and sobbed in great convulsions, hugging Joan tightly as if she feared that she could still be harmed.

  ‘I hate that fucker Frankie! To think I could have lost you while I was playing the fool with all those worthless men,’ cried Bernice between sobs. ‘Just like I lost Ellie.’

  Although she had promised Jess not to say a word about Bernice’s relationship with Ellie, in the face of her friend’s palpable grief Joan longed to confess she knew the truth and to reassure Bernice that she had nothing to reproach herself with.

  Eventually Bernice’s sobbing quietened and she wiped the tears from her face. ‘How bad is the scar, do you think?’

  ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘Poor Jess. She won’t be able to stay on the game with her face like that. At least she’s found somewhere else to live; a friend in Darlo has offered her a corner of her attic bedroom for a while.’ Bernice rose. ‘Just give me a moment to change, Joanie, then there’s something else I have to tell you.’

  Bernice retreated to her bedroom, emerging a few minutes later in her favourite kimono. There was a musical yowl as Rimbaud leaped through the open window and landed on Joan’s desk. Bernice took the remains of Joan’s uneaten rissole from Saturday night out of the ice chest and took a bite (‘You don’t want this do you?’) before putting the rest onto a chipped plate on the rug where Rimbaud got busy eating. She then poured herself a finger of sherry (‘Hair of the dog’) and resumed her seat on the end of Joan’s bed.