by Marele Day
Mrs Levack’s heart leapt at Eddy’s generosity. She wanted to give him a big hug and a kiss but was afraid that might put him off again.
‘Ray was only eighteen when it happened. His mother wanted him to leave it be. He never stopped wondering about it, though.
‘He told me his father had got a phone call to go fishing. When he wasn’t back after a few days Ray’s mother rang Greg Vaughan, who he was supposed to go fishing with. Ray remembered exactly what Greg said to his mother. He said . . .’ Eddy started stroking his chin, lost in thought.
What, thought Mrs Levack, what? Come on, Eddy, this is no time to lose the thread.
‘He said . . .’ Eddy stopped again. ‘Look, Mavis, I think it’s only fair to Ray to give it to you in his words. I won’t be a minute.’ Eddy heaved himself up off the chair and went into the spare room.
It had to be the locked drawer. Eddy was going to the locked drawer! Mrs Levack hardly dared breathe. One false move on her part and Eddy would clam up and the drawer would remain locked forever.
After a little while Eddy returned. ‘You look a little flushed, Mavis,’ he remarked. ‘You haven’t been holding your breath again, have you?’
‘Must be the champagne,’ she said, letting the air out in a rush. ‘I feel fine. Honestly.’
‘I wrote down what he said word for word.’ He offered her a couple of sheets of yellowing paper. ‘You’re not the only one with sharp powers of observation.’
Mrs Levack read Ray’s story:
When he wasn’t back after a few days my mother rang Greg Vaughan, who he was supposed to go fishing with. Greg said to Mum, ‘He wasn’t going fishing with me but Jimmy did come here before he went to Cronulla. He said he was taking a boat or something to Cronulla.’ Mum had already got a phone message saying he wouldn’t be home till Monday. That was on Saturday, 12th April. Mum had last seen him on the 8th.
On Anzac Day, just before dinner time, the shark at the Aquarium disgorged Dad’s arm. My uncle read about the boxers tattoo in the paper and said it must be Dad. You can imagine how we all felt. The police looked for the rest of the body at Port Hacking but found nothing. They reckoned the body must have been hacked up and put in a trunk—there wasn’t room for the arm so they attached it to the trunk with a rope.
Mrs Levack looked up. ‘Not very pleasant, is it?’ remarked Eddy. ‘It wasn’t easy for him to tell me all this. He faltered once or twice, especially when he got to the bit about the trunk.’
‘Actually, I was trying to picture it,’ said Mrs Levack. ‘Would it have looked like he was carrying the trunk under his arm or holding it in his hand like a schoolcase?’
Eddy sat there flabbergasted, not believing what he’d heard. ‘It’s nothing to joke about, woman. If you can’t treat Ray’s dad with a bit of respect I don’t think you should be reading his story.’ He reached over to retrieve it.
‘No, Eddy, it’s not like that,’ protested Mrs Levack. ‘I wouldn’t make jokes about those who are no longer with us. I was just trying to understand exactly what had happened. Can you pour me another little champagne, please, dear?’
Eddy finally obliged, pouring himself a glass as well.
With the storm in a teacup abated, Mrs Levack resumed reading:
A week later I get a note—‘Son, keep your mother quiet. I am in a jam. I plead it’s OK. Call the cops off. Tell your Mum I will have plenty and we will be alright. They want me. Something in town. Never mind, be a man for me.
your loving father
Jim Smith
destroy this
dated 1–5–35’
I showed it to the police. They reckon Brady forged it, so they trace him to a flat in Kirribilli and arrest him. The rest is history.
That was the end of Ray’s story.
But it wasn’t nearly enough. Mrs Levack wanted to know who Brady was for a start, and Ray’s story hadn’t mentioned the other chap, Holmes. She wanted more. She looked at Eddy, trying to gauge how he would react. It wasn’t just the murder mystery that set her nose a-quivering, it was the fact that finally she was getting an inkling of what was in the drawer. Could she go the whole way?
‘Eddy,’ she said as meekly as possible, and avoiding all reference to the drawer, ‘if you have any other information about all this, perhaps I could have a little look. You know, just to get a bit of background.’ She smiled her very best smile at him.
Eddy smiled back, a little the worse for wear but full of bonhomie. The champagne had finally worked its miracle. ‘OK, Mavis, you win. You can have the lot. I never did take you on that trip to Tasmania. As consolation prize you can have the drawer. Lock, stock and barrel.’
Once again he got up and went into the spare room, closing the door behind him. Mrs Levack thrilled at the momentousness of the occasion. She didn’t give two hoots about missing out on Tasmania. Tonight she was finally going to be privy to the contents of the drawer. It was all she could do not to go to the door and peep in. But no, she restrained herself. There had to be trust in a relationship.
Despite the thrill of the occasion, Mrs Levack felt a bit miffed that all those years ago Eddy had been carrying out investigations. After all, she was the one who was good at that kind of thing, she could have helped him. They could have been like Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man. Heavens above, over the years they’d probably put the drinking time into it already.
Eddy emerged from the spare room carrying the drawer. It was full of notes, newspaper clippings, a brochure from the Tasmanian Tourist Bureau, all showing signs of age. ‘Here it is, Mavis,’ he said, banging it down in front of her. ‘The drawer. Happy anniversary.’
Mrs Levack’s eyes were shiny with bliss. ‘Thank you, Eddy. It’s as nice a present as the Black and Decker.’
Then she got down to business. She read of Holmes, the star witness who’d been shot dead in his car; of Brady, the forger, who was James Smith’s mate, of James Smith himself. Occasionally she made comments—how handsome Clive Evatt was as a young man, how clever of him to get Brady off by saying the charge couldn’t be murder if there was no body. She followed the path of Brady, wanted for forgery in Tasmania, back to New South Wales under an alias, to Cronulla where he rented a cottage, ‘Cored Joy’ (probably some sort of code; who’d ever name a house ‘Cored Joy’?) where he and James Smith would meet.
‘You know what I think?’ She ploughed straight in now that she’d been given full rein. ‘I think Mr Brady had a crush on Mr Smith. You must admit that Mr Smith was a rather handsome man—tall, well-built and everything. They had a tryst down at Cored Joy. There was an argument and Brady went berserk with the knife. Just look at that photo—a shady-looking character if ever I saw one. I mean, can you really trust a man who wears a bow tie?’
‘You can’t hang a man on the strength of a bow tie,’ Eddy pointed out. ‘Brady would’ve come off the worst in any fisticuffs. Smith was a boxer, over six foot tall, whereas Brady was only five foot five and not all that fit.’ Eddy scratched his elbow and continued. ‘Besides, you’re forgetting the other blokes.’ He lay their names out like cards on a table. ‘Remember what I said about big fish and little fish? I reckon there was a bigger fish behind these tiddlers.
‘The year before, 1934, Holmes’s boat, The Pathfinder, had been used in a drug smuggling operation. A bloke known as The Director was in charge. The yacht went out to sea about eight miles off Norah Head and hove to. A little time before dawn a Japanese ship came by and dropped something. The Director ordered a dinghy to be lowered. He got into it and picked up a package wrapped in rubberised cloth.
‘What they fished for on those fishing trips was drugs. Smith scuttled the yacht for Holmes—an insurance job—but the smuggling continued. When Smith told his wife he was going on a fishing trip, they weren’t fishing for barramundi. When Smith’s arm turned up, the others knew what had happened, that he’d been killed and tossed overboard.
‘The pressure got to Holmes—he became a loose cannon careerin
g round the harbour with a gunshot wound to the head, the police after him. He had to be got rid of. So someone arranged that fateful rendezvous at Dawes Point. Brady was smart, he knew if he stepped out of line he’d be next.’
‘So who did it?’ asked Mrs Levack.
‘One of the Mr Bigs of the drug trade back then. You ever heard of Phil Jeffs? Phil the Jew?’
‘I know that name. He ran Oyster Bill’s club down at Tom Ugly’s bridge. A fine lot of carry-on went on there,’ said Mrs Levack with a slight amount of disapproval.
‘You never went to that club, did you, Mavis?’
‘Certainly not! But I heard.’
Eddy continued his line of pursuit. ‘Phil the Jew’s name was mentioned briefly in association with the Shark Arm Case, but then we never heard any more about him. He was in with the cops, he could have paid to stop the “loose rumours”.’
‘What happened to Greg Vaughan?’ asked Mrs Levack tenderly. She felt rather kindly towards Mr Vaughan. His suicide note was the loose thread that had unravelled the whole story, the key that had unlocked the drawer.
‘He lasted five years but couldn’t take the pressure. In January 1940 he checked into a Kings Cross residential and took an overdose of pills. He’d been taking narcotics for years. You know the name he registered under? Jones. Now don’t tell me that had no connection to Smith.’
‘Or someone made it look like suicide,’ suggested Mrs Levack.
Eddy was quiet for a while, then he said, ‘Maybe you’re right. It would have been much simpler if it had ended there. I told you why I started to investigate the case. I didn’t tell you why I stopped.’ Eddy looked away, as if he were somehow ashamed.
‘Ray was going to give me a loan of his car to go down and have a look at Cored Joy. It was December 1954. We come out of the pub, he hands me the keys and the next thing, up goes the car. Gelignite. I can tell you it sure put the wind up me. I could have been in the car. You would have been a widow, Mavis. You wouldn’t have got much as the widow of a tram driver. I couldn’t leave you like that.’ Eddy sighed. It looked very much to Mrs Levack like he had tears in his eyes. ‘So I locked it all away. For me it was case closed.’
Mrs Levack stroked her husband’s hand. ‘It’s all right, Eddy,’ she comforted him. ‘You did the right thing.’
Then she remembered something. ‘Phil the Jew died in 1945, Eddy. Couldn’t have been him that bombed the car.’
‘Well . . . well,’ said Eddy, ‘maybe it was one of his associates—Perc Galea or Sid Kelly.’
Mrs Levack was shocked. ‘Perc would never have done a thing like that! I think it was Brady all the time. He survived Vaughan, he survived Holmes, he even survived Phil the Jew. When you and Ray started snooping round twenty years later, he organised a little warning. Like I said, you can’t trust a man who wears a bow tie, can you?’
Mavis Levack’s One-Night Stand
Mrs Levack couldn’t remember ever feeling this bad. At her age she was grateful just to wake up in the morning, but this didn’t feel like a normal wake-up at all. It was as if she was in someone else’s body. The eyes were glued shut, she didn’t quite know what to do with the arms and legs, the head ached ferociously, and the mouth tasted as if it belonged in a bar room. Worst of all, through the nose she could smell stale cigarette smoke. God knows how she was going to get that out of the curtains.
She managed to prise open one eye. The first thing she saw was her false teeth grinning at her from the bedside table.
Sitting on top of the false teeth was something she couldn’t quite make out. She opened the other eye. A cigarette butt.
Eddy had gone too far this time. The occasional cigarette at the club was one thing, but smoking in the bedroom, not to mention using her dentures as an ashtray, was another thing altogether.
As usual he was hogging the bedclothes. ‘Eddy,’ she said, trying to wake her husband. The bulge in the bed beside her did not move an iota. She flopped down again, wondering whether it was worth the effort. What she would like to have done was to go back to sleep, but how could anyone sleep in a room that smelled like an ashtray?
‘Eddy Levack, you’re a pig,’ she said, sitting up again. Eddy Levack did not stir.
‘Eddy, wake up when I’m speaking to you.’ Still he did not stir.
‘Eddy,’ she said, her head aching more the louder her voice got. ‘I know you’re in there somewhere. Wake up!’ No reaction whatsoever; she may as well have been talking to the wall.
‘Right,’ she said, determined despite the headache. She grabbed the bedclothes and pulled them off him.
And that was as far as she went. She sat there staring. And staring. It was a dream, surely. She looked around the room. Yes, it was her bedroom. There was the wardrobe, the easy chair, the salmon-coloured curtains at the window. She looked at her hands. Yes, there were her hands, her wedding ring, the age spots, the slightly swollen joint on the index finger.
But the body in bed beside her wasn’t her husband. He was a lot younger than Eddy and had more hair. He looked vaguely familiar, although she couldn’t quite place him. But she could tell why she was having so much trouble waking him up.
He was dead. Very dead. A bullet hole in his chest. Blood down the front of him. And on the sheet.
She closed her eyes and counted to three before opening them again. It was all still there: the body, the bullet hole and the blood. It was just like television, except you couldn’t switch it off.
There was no way Mrs Levack was going to get back to sleep now.
She got out of bed, trying to keep her head as still as possible, and went out to the kitchen. She did what she always did when she went into the kitchen—put the kettle on. On the kitchen table she noticed another cigarette butt. There was a whisky bottle, almost empty. And two glasses. Did Eddy have a friend back last night? Perhaps it was an elaborate joke, a dummy not a body. If it was a joke it had gone too far.
‘Eddy, are you hiding somewhere?’ Then she remembered. Eddy was miles away. He and Bill were in Wagga for the bowls tournament. She had to face facts—there was a strange man in her bed. A strange dead man.
She closed her eyes. If only the high-pitched sound would go away. She opened them again and saw the steam from the whistling kettle. Everything would be clearer after a good cup of tea.
The boys had rung yesterday afternoon. They were doing well in the tournament. She and Freda had gone to the club last night to have a little celebration. Then that chap had bought them a drink. She remembered asking him if he played bowls. He’d said . . . what was it he’d said? Her memory had started to fade. Well, fade was probably too mild; more like it had been dropped in a bucket of bleach.
She went back and had another look at him. Yes, that was the gentleman from the club all right. His clothes were in a heap on the floor. All he was wearing was a pair of underpants. He was too young to be a bowler, looked more like a body builder. Very nice chest apart from the hole in it. A very nice body altogether.
She stood there looking at it much longer than necessary, a little smile beginning to creep to the corners of her lips. He and I must have . . . no, she dismissed the thought, surely I’d remember something like that.
Mrs Levack pulled herself together. She had a very awkward situation on her hands and she was going to have to do something about it. There in the bed where she had slept with Eddy for over forty years of married life was another man. A dead man. By and large Eddy was a tolerant person, but this was something even he wouldn’t swallow. She’d have to get everything back to normal before Eddy returned from Wagga. She’d have to get rid of the body. She took another look at him. She wasn’t going to be able to do this by herself.
‘Did you have to bring Flopsy?’ said Mrs Levack as the little white dog started yapping up her leg.
‘I normally bring Flopsy over,’ said Freda, a little dismayed.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Levack, ‘but I have something I want to discuss with you in private.’
‘You can trust Flopsy,’ Freda reminded her. ‘She never repeats anything she overhears. Ah, did you get home all right last night?’
If Mrs Levack hadn’t been feeling so far off the mark she would have pointed out to Freda that she was home, so she must have got home all right last night. But Mrs Levack didn’t even think of it because she had more pressing preoccupations.
‘Freda, about last night . . . could you refresh my memory?’
‘Which part in particular?’ asked Freda. She was beginning to enjoy this.
‘Any part at all,’ said Mrs Levack. ‘You know what? I think I’m finally getting that disease.’
‘I wouldn’t say that, Mavis. I think you just had too much to drink. I left early, but you didn’t want to come. Some of us know when we’ve had elegant sufficiency, some of us don’t,’ Freda added pointedly.
‘Some of us didn’t know we’d had enough the time we took Danny Weinburger home with us when Bill was in hospital for his hernia, did we?’ Mrs Levack reminded her.
Freda sighed. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your memory, Mavis.’
‘Have I ever mentioned that little incident to Bill?’ Mrs Levack asked somewhat rhetorically.
Freda sighed again. ‘All right, Mavis, so you brought that bloke home and you don’t want me to mention it to Eddy.’
Mrs Levack smiled. She knew she could rely on her old friend Freda.
But Freda’s brain was a little sharper than Mrs Levack’s was at that moment. ‘Hang on a minute, Mavis, I just told you I left the club before you did. If you hadn’t mentioned the Danny Weinburger incident I would have been none the wiser as to your movements last night. Is there something else or are you just gloating?’