Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club

by Julian Leatherdale

  ‘I asked her straight up. “Who socked ya in the eye, love?” But she refused to say.’

  ‘And then Bernie shows up.’

  ‘Yep, just before eleven. She’s in a state too. Drunk. All weepy and carrying on. “Have you seen Ellie? I need to talk to Ellie urgently.” I told her what I’d seen and she leaves.’

  ‘Do you think something had happened between Bernie and Ellie?’

  ‘I have no idea. You’d have to ask her. She’s a strange one, that flatmate of yours.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Wild. Maybe a bit mad.’

  Mavis must have seen that Joan was upset by this remark and felt obliged to provide some evidence. ‘She came into the brothel one night a while back, drunk as a skunk, and started screaming at the customers, “Take your filthy hands off her!” Eleanor and Jess were white as sheets, begging her to calm down. Jesus, if it had got back to Jeffs! She was dragged out by one of Frankie’s standover guys, with her yelling and cursing and spouting all manner of malarkey! “I’ll cut off your cock and balls, you bastard! I’ll burn down the whole fucking place.” Did she never tell you? Goldman said he would kill her if she pulled a stunt like that again.’

  Joan was lost for words. She knew Bernie’s drinking and manic episodes sometimes got her into strife, but she had never heard this story.

  ‘Sorry, time’s up. Don’t know if what I told you is much use. I want the coppers to catch the bastard who killed Ellie as much as you do, but in this crazy shithouse world we all have to look out for ourselves, don’t we, love?’

  Mavis put on a good performance, but it was not hard to tell that behind the bravado there lurked real fear. The whore drained her whisky glass and put her hand out for the cash. Joan handed over the promised second pound and Mavis left.

  The rain had eased as Joan made her way back to Bomora, but the dark streets still shone with bright pools of neon light.

  Back at her desk, she sat smoking nervously, the tip of her cigarette glowing in the darkness. Rimbaud lay curled up half asleep in her lap, his soft body rising and falling gently under her hand. Now that the rain clouds had dispersed, the dark harbour and the steel arch of the new bridge that spanned it glinted under a full moon. The radium-painted hands of her alarm clock stood at quarter past ten.

  Bernie had no doubt gone on for a late supper after the rehearsal with the director and maybe one or two of the cast, so Joan had plenty of time alone to ruminate about her meeting with Mavis. Who had beaten Ellie and why? Was it possible that Bernie had known—or suspected—who had done it: Gordon, Frankie, the mysterious Mr X? Was that why she had been so upset and needed to talk to Ellie urgently? Because she knew Ellie was in danger?

  And then Jessie’s words from the party came back to Joan. She and Ellie had a fight. A really bad fight. If Bernie was so desperately in love with Ellie, was it possible that it was Bernie herself who had hit her that evening in a jealous rage? Joan had seen Bernie lose her temper before: hurl a plate of food against a wall, burn the manuscript of a failed novel on an impulse, slap the face of a drunk who refused to stop harassing her at Theo’s Club, even kick poor Rimbaud one night in anger when she was deep in her cups, drunken curses gushing from her lips. And then Joan recalled an evening late last year: Bernie staggering home with scratches on her face as if Rimbaud had lacerated her with his paws in self-defence.

  ‘Did you and Laszlo have a fight?’ Joan had asked, incredulous that a man would scratch rather than punch or slap. ‘It was an accident,’ Bernie had said lightly. Was it possible those scratches had been from a fight with Ellie? Mavis’s story about the scene at the brothel had rattled Joan. Were Bernie’s mad outbursts getting more violent and uninhibited?

  ‘Jesus, no,’ whispered Joan in the dark. For the thought then flashed across her mind that Bernie had not told the police the whole truth about that evening. She’d made no mention of Ellie’s black eye. Why not? Was Bernie hiding something? Had Bernice Becker, first on the crime scene, her hands and blouse bright with blood, fuelled by drunken fury or manic delusion, accidentally or—God forbid—deliberately killed her lover, Ellie?

  No. Never. Unthinkable.

  Joan continued to sit in the dark, grateful to have the sleeping cat in her lap as an excuse not to move. She had gone behind Bernie’s back tonight. The next step was obvious: to go through her friend’s private diary and the letters that were no doubt tucked away somewhere in her room. While the risk of being discovered was foremost in her mind, that was not the true reason for Joan’s reluctance: it was because she couldn’t bear to face the possibility that Bernie was a suspect. Yet, having once had that thought, she couldn’t banish it from her mind.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mr Lofting called Joan into his office on Tuesday morning soon after she arrived. It felt so comforting to slip into the familiar everyday routine of the Mirror’s offices again, a million miles from the horrors of the preceding days. Never did Joan imagine that she would ever be so grateful to be plunged back into the banality of ‘Between Ourselves’. Within minutes of her hanging up her coat and taking the dustcover off her typewriter, Vera had hastened to inform her that Olive (whom Joan secretly suspected of scheming to replace her) had done a ‘fabulous’ job of proofreading the final copy of her section.

  ‘It is admirable to see you back at work so soon, Miss Linderman,’ said Mr Lofting in a tone that never failed to smack of paternalism even when Joan suspected he was trying to be sincere. ‘Your colleague Miss Grey was kind enough to explain to me the horrific’—he paused as if in search of an appropriate euphemism—‘circumstances of your absence yesterday. Allow me to convey my deepest sympathies for the’—another hesitation—‘distress this event must have caused you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Lofting, I appreciate that,’ said Joan, thinking that he didn’t know the half of it, this owlish man who had dwelled all his years in the benign black-and-white world of print.

  ‘If you feel you need more time to recuperate, rest assured we will be more than happy to accommodate you. Olive has proved a most efficient factotum in your absence.’

  I bet she has, thought Joan. As the unemployment queues lengthened, Joan was not alone in her terror of losing her job. She had seen the huge crowds in the morning, milling about the Jobs Vacant boards outside the Fairfax Building down on O’Connell Street.

  ‘Thank you for your concern, Mr Lofting, but to be honest I think the best remedy is to throw myself back into my work.’

  Joan was grateful to Mr Lofting for his offer of more time off, and she might yet take advantage of this, depending on how things unfolded, but that morning she needed to immerse herself in normal life again—at least for a while—so that her mental state did not unravel. Her encounter with Mavis and the terrifying suspicions it provoked had made her question her sanity. She had barely slept a wink the night before and had even flinched in her bed when Bernie let herself into the flat in the wee hours. Out of fear, out of guilt? Joan was worried that her novelist’s imagination was running away with her. It was one thing to play God with characters on the page, but something altogether more daunting to question the motives of a real person.

  Bernice, her best friend and confidante of the last four years, as close to her as a sister, capable of murder? It was inconceivable. There had to be a reasonable explanation for what Mavis had told her, but Joan was not ready yet to confront Bernice with her questions. Once that door was opened, it could not easily be closed again, and it would surely destroy their friendship. And, anyway, there were some obvious steps she should take first.

  ‘Very well, Miss Linderman, if that’s what you think is best,’ said the editor, and he handed over a thick sheaf of readers’ contributions to be culled and edited for next week’s ‘Between Ourselves’.

  Joan retreated from Mr Lofting’s office and resumed her seat at her desk, settling into her well-sprung swivel chair for the initial read-through.

  From ‘Eunice’: Sti
ll more queer christenings. The baby in this case has been a great asset to the mother in these days of Depression. The plan is to take the child to various churches to be christened. The clergy, being sorry for the abject poverty of both child and mother, give money, food and clothing to the parent, and also make no charge for the service.

  ‘Doona’: The Mirror has many times instanced women doing jobs of which they might fairly be considered incapable, but the feat of a woman of my acquaintance will challenge comparison. Her husband is a slaughterman and it is her regular custom to assist him in the skinning and cleaning of the beasts. When her husband recently went down with flu, she did the whole job unaided for a week! And she is not a muscular, masculine type of female either but feminine in appearance.

  ‘Alexis’: A tale of courtesy—a lady of imposing stature and quite ducal dignity riding on the Toorak tram found herself without the necessary threepence …

  ‘Blue Eyes’: Walking into a draper’s shop recently I found it managed by foreigners and the woman who served me could not write English …

  About an hour later, a cheerful murmur rippled across the main room, heads turning, faces brightening as a familiar figure made her way through the maze of desks and filing cabinets. It was the poet and novelist Zora Cross, one of the Mirror’s longest-serving contributors under the pen name Bernice May. Zora had travelled down from the Blue Mountains on an early train and was dropping off the latest article for her long-running series of interviews with fellow women writers.

  Joan smiled with delight to see this welcome visitor. She had admired Zora for many years and for many reasons. Mourning the loss (or, rather, the never-ending absence) of her own brother, James, Joan had been deeply moved by Zora’s popular ‘Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy’, written in memory of her own soldier-brother, John.

  I only know you, brother of my blood,

  Have gone; and many a friend,

  Trampled and broken in the Flanders mud,

  Found Youth’s most bitter end.

  Only a couple of years earlier, Bernice had introduced Joan to the love sonnets of Zora’s two poetry collections, Songs of Love and Life and The Lilt of Life, which had been a huge success for her publisher, Angus & Robertson. Like many other readers, Joan had marvelled at Zora’s honesty as a poetess of eroticism. No longer were women the passive objects of male lust; in Zora Cross’s poems it was the woman who lusted and pursued and experienced the intense longings and depths of sexual fervour. In the hot, damp darkness of summer nights in her twenty-sixth year, Joan Linderman discovered words that called to her own forbidden feelings:

  He called me up to home

  Through joy-mists dim,

  Till all my being was a rainbow-fire,

  Lit with the ecstasy of such desire

  It made me one in promise with the stars.

  But Zora’s actual romantic life—as told to Joan in great detail by Bernice—struck her more as a cautionary tale for women writers. At the age of twenty-eight, Zora had moved into a cottage in Glenbrook, in the lower Blue Mountains, with her lover David McKee Wright, twenty-one years her senior, a respected Irish poet and literary editor of The Bulletin. The story went that David had been drawn to Zora for her ‘fast and loose disregard for ordinary decencies’. Their affair was the scandal of bohemian circles. But with a son from a previous affair and two daughters by David, Zora was soon overwhelmed by her duties as a wife and mother. Joan’s admiration for Zora was not diminished, but she did sometimes see her as a martyr who had sacrificed her own work to marriage and motherhood. It was instructive, thought Joan, to see how many of these male bohemians had wives tucked away in the suburbs to tend to their hearth and children. The performance of a rebel poet, free of the shackles of convention, could be sustained on the brash stage of Sydney as long as a devoted spouse, hidden in the wings, kept everyone washed and fed.

  Then, four years ago, David died suddenly of a heart attack. Bereft and impoverished, Zora continued to write to support her three children, struggling to make ends meet with a modest Literary Fund pension. Despite her travails, she maintained a cheerful demeanour with no trace of self-pity.

  ‘Hello, my dear. How is the writing going?’ Zora stopped by Joan’s desk to have a chat before she knocked on Lofting’s office door. Joan looked up at her lovely soulful face with its generous nose, sensuous mouth and flyaway fringe of brown hair. She was still a striking woman even at forty-two, thought Joan.

  ‘It’s going well, thank you. Seems to be taking on a life of its own.’ Joan could not begin to explain the strange symbiotic nature of her writing and her life at present.

  Zora was such a generous spirit when it came to other writers. This was abundantly clear in the monthly profiles she wrote for the Mirror about her fellow women authors and poets. Her own warm personality was evident in every piece and her interview subjects reciprocated with confidences about the challenges of the writer’s life: how some married authors struggled to find scraps of writing time in between childbirth, laundry, gardening and cooking, while others took a break until their children grew up. Some, like Joan, had day jobs as librarians, teachers, women’s page editors, working on a farm or in an office writing with one eye on the boss and the other on the clock. Joan found these frank portraits oddly heartening.

  ‘Is Reg Punch still going to take a look at it?’ Zora asked. When the poet had been in the office last month, Joan had been bursting with nervous excitement and pride at Punch’s offer to read her novel and had shared her secret with Zora over a cuppa in the tearoom.

  ‘Yes—if I deliver it by April. I’m feeling a bit anxious about the deadline to be honest,’ confessed Joan. ‘So many things seem to get in the way.’

  ‘Have you settled on a pen name yet for this masterpiece?’ asked Zora.

  Joan had confided that she was nervous about coming out as a woman crime writer just yet and so was considering a male pseudonym.

  ‘I’m thinking of Alec Foster.’

  ‘Mmm, very rugged and no-nonsense. I like it.’

  ‘You’re always so encouraging, Zora.’

  Zora patted Joan on the shoulder. ‘Well, my dear, I know for a fact you have the true soul of a writer. Nothing else matters, eh? Like you, I have no wish to travel, no love for expensive hats, frocks or shoes, don’t care a fig for race meetings or concerts by Madame Melba or the thrill of a Ford motor car. My most treasured possession is my Oxford Dictionary!’

  Joan laughed. It was always good to talk to Zora. It reminded her that the international reputation of Australian literature was, to a large degree, being carried on the shoulders of its women writers, despite all the challenges they faced. Today’s exchange was a tonic to her soul and made the possibility of a career as a novelist seem less remote.

  ‘If you and Bernie want to come up to Glenbrook sometime for lunch, please do. You might have to help me water the chooks and hang out the washing, though.’

  ‘We would love to come up. We both need a break from the city.’

  ‘Done!’ Zora offered Joan a handshake to seal the deal and then gave her a quick peck on the cheek. ‘Give my love to Bernie, won’t you? And all the best with the writing, my dear!’

  ‘You too!’ replied Joan as Zora headed into the editor’s office to deliver her article.

  Taking this serendipitous encounter with Zora (she could just as easily have come in yesterday or tomorrow) as a blessing, she settled back into her reading with renewed hope. She cherished the conviction that somehow, despite all the frightening complications of her life at the moment, her story would find its way to a meaningful conclusion.

  When lunchtime arrived she made excuses (‘Sorry, errands to run’) to avoid being interrogated by her colleagues and dashed along George Street. There was a phone call Joan had to make, preferably somewhere more discreet than the Mirror offices, and two letters that she had written last night to be posted. She worked her way through the throng flowing around the Cenotaph, competing cross-currents o
f bankers and insurance men in dark suits and grey trilbies and typists and ladies-who-lunched in bright dresses, shawls and autumn bonnets rushing through the granite and honeyed-sandstone canyon of Martin Place.

  ‘Paper!’ yelled an old wreck of a man by his newsstand bearing the headlines: TALK OF JAPAN LEAVING LEAGUE OF NATIONS and RANSOM DEMANDED FOR LINDBERGH BABY. The flower stalls parked outside the General Post Office glowed purple, white, yellow and pink with stock, sweet peas, dahlias, violets and chrysanthemums as the breeze ruffled the stalls’ canvas awnings and dispersed their flowers’ sweet perfume. Under the GPO’s dusky colonnade the beggars had lined up to ply their daily trade; veterans with stumps for legs and arms, still in uniform in the hope of eliciting sympathy. ‘Spare a deener for a war hero, love?’ croaked one fellow whose painted face mask was only obvious if you looked very closely. Joan had her coins ready and handed them out as she walked inside.

  First of all, the phone call. She found an empty booth at the far end of the GPO’s main room, packed with a frantic lunchtime crowd, but still cooler than outside thanks to all the marble. She crossed her fingers that Bill Jenkins would not have headed out for lunch yet. ‘Bill? Is that you?’

  ‘Hiya, Joanie. How ya doing, love?’

  Joan felt surprisingly relieved to hear his voice. Maybe it was because he was outside the tormenting puzzle that was playing in her head. He was not caught up—not yet at least—in her investigation.

  ‘I’m alright, I guess.’ Joan’s voice began to shake. She heard the quaver of fear in it for the first time herself. ‘It’s just that I need your help.’

  ‘You don’t sound too good, love. Must be stressful what with the death of that poor bloody woman in your boarding house. And now that other girl—Jocie? Jocelyn?—vanishing into thin air like that! Has the police well and truly stumped, I can tell you.’ Trust Bill to know everything that was going on. ‘So when are you and I gonna catch up for lunch? As long as that commie fella of yours doesn’t get too jealous.’