I did on the way back to the lecture hall, after the Gooroo had promised he would spring for the grand for the computers. The professor, as you would expect, came up with a parable that I would have to sift through for an answer.
‘You know how a commercial painter’s houses is always in need of a paint job, and the pipes always groan in a plumber’s place?’ Lavinsky said. ‘Well, Dupont is the chair of our Ethics Committee. Our equivalent of the unkempt painter’s walls is making the morally bankrupt the head of an Ethics Committee.’
‘Cream may rise, but curdled cream is sure to surface,’ I said.
‘What he does,’ Lavinsky said, ‘is trade passing grades for sex with his students.’
‘I see,’ I replied, ‘and you don’t think that’s much chop.’
He swung it back on me. ‘Do you, Steele?’
I was unimpressed with the display of professorial indignation. I made a pretty good guess about Lavinsky’s own behaviour. ‘But what if a lecturer uses his image as the refined intellectual to help himself to the odd bit of extracurricular indoor sport? Wouldn’t that be pretty much the same?’
Lavinsky wouldn’t wear this. ‘You make the same logical mistake as so many of my callow students. To be truthful, Steele, that same sort of mistake is made by too many of my colleagues. You have not recognised degrees of behaviour. You can’t excuse a deplorable act by saying it is only taking another act to the nth degree.’
That sort of made sense. Kinda.
The second set of my gig was uneventful, except when Clarissa Dunne asked a question. Did I agree with Goffman that prisons should be seen as total institutions? I answered truthfully that I didn’t read the papers much and asked what Goffman was in for. Guffaws of laughter from some of the students woke those who had dozed off. I gave the laughers the benefit of the doubt that the mirth was with me and not at me.
Dunne explained Goffman was some Canadian bloke from the 1960s who wrote that prisons, and places like them, were total institutions. When the stiffs put you into these institutions, the screws went on with a little number Goffman called ‘mortification of the self”. The way Dunne told it, this Goffman must have taken his inspiration from that 50s sci-fi movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With this mortification number, the boss stiffs took away your personality or soul or self-concept or whatever, and replaced it with their own understanding of the world. There was more blah to Dunne’s explanation than that, but, to tell you the truth, I only half-listened.
If these kids were dredging the 1960s for inspiration, why didn’t they go to half-forgotten rock bands like the Kinks or the Who. It worked for me.
I didn’t even try to answer Dunne’s question. I told my audience it had been my so-far successful ambition to stay out of jail. I advised them to do the same. Crims were not glamorous, I said. The coinage of prison was violence, I said. And you don’t get much worthwhile change from that, I said. It got a few stray claps. But I swear some of them looked at me as if I was a goody-two-shoes who’d sneaked in with a false passport.
I left the argument with a horticultural analogy. The way I understood it, thirty years ago you went to jail because you didn’t have enough cabbage. Today, you went to jail because you had too many derivatives of the opium poppy. Clarissa Dunne smiled at that and left the room. I saw Professor Joseph Lavinsky follow her out after he had a quick conversation with a woman in her thirties. I found out afterwards Lavinsky had told her to wrap up the lecture.
Ten minutes later, questions over, I took my bows and found my way back to the postgraduate English students’ room. I was glad to see four youngsters still playing with their digitals. I introduced myself as Mark Caine from First Degree Computers. I’d come to replace four computers and a printer with new 486s. No one said anything, except for one young woman who asked if they could give me a hand. I said sure.
I was grateful that they let me carry the lightweight printer. The four able bodies and sound minds wound electrical tentacles around the computer screens, placed each screen on its rectangular box and awkwardly and slowly followed me down to the car park.
The plan hit an almighty snag when I went to open the driver’s door of the four-wheel drive to release the back door of the wagon. I quickly made some lame excuse about having to rearrange the boot, and asked the students to put the gear on the asphalt. Thank Buddha for unsuspicious minds. They did what I asked.
It shouldn’t have taken me what seemed half the night to put the computers in the wagon. But I kept jerking my head around in every direction, responding to imagined footsteps. With the task done and me in the driver’s seat, I felt better. Still not good.
And worse when the beautiful teenager Cassandra Russo rapped on the passenger-side window. I resisted the urge to drive off, groaned, threw the printer from the front seat to the back and opened the window.
‘How about a lift, seeing you’re obviously ProJoe’s favourite at the moment and he’s lent you his car?’ she asked brightly.
I stalled, making no movement towards the lock on the door. ‘Where’s your mother?’
She shrugged, saying she was not her mother’s keeper. Not wanting to stick around debating the issue, I unlocked the catch on the door. Cassandra’s handbag flew onto the floor of the cab and she jumped onto the seat beside me. I carefully reversed the four-wheel drive.
I only turned on the lights as we left the car park. The car park where lay the body of Professor Joseph Lavinsky. That body had at least four bullet holes where flesh and bone should have been. A hole in the head and a trio or more around the heart.
This dead professor was the same one who ripped me off to the tune of a promised grand. A fact department head and Cassandra’s Mum Jan Russo knew full well.
I was driving away in the dead professor’s top -of-the-range $70,000 car, loaded with stolen computer gear and Jan Russo’s teenage daughter.
12
I ONCE HEARD AN OLD DIGGER say there are no atheists in a fox hole, and I certainly called out the Lord’s name under my breath as I pondered how to get out of this hole that someone had dug for me.
Captured Panamanian president Manuel Noriega had only been a trifling few months of early 1990 in a Florida nick when he found the Lord. Manny wanted to be born again, immersed in the waters, baptised, call it what you like. The screws were considering the idea, but Manny’s own lawyers put the kybosh on the deal. They said their client’s new identity as the Redeemed was too much for a suspicious American audience to grasp only months after his headlining role as the Antichrist.
If the coppers caught me late at night in a murdered man’s car with an under-aged girl by my side, I would have nothing to look forward to but a judge’s vilification as one of the Antichrist’s low-life trainees. A judge’s self-righteous sermon I could stomach, but a fifteen-year sentence on top would be hard to swallow.
‘Where to?’ I said, asking myself as much as the teenager tearaway.
At a time when I should have become immune to surprises, her answer surprised me. ‘The Go Kat Klub, it’s in . . .’
I told her I knew where the club was. I drove straight towards Fortitude Valley, reckoning I’d ditch the girl fast. If she wished to go to a notorious dance club at 10:30 at night, as far as I was concerned, it was as appropriate as her having supper at her grandmother’s. I did ask her age though. She was fifteen.
As we turned into Wickham Street, I asked if she was still going to school. Of course she was. She was coming fifth in her class. She could be coming first, but it wasn’t worth being hassled as a braniac, so she put down some wrong answers. This was fun because she could tease her teachers, who couldn’t understand how she could be so dumb at times. As she opened the door to get out near the Go Kat Klub, I had to ask. I pointed towards the two Goliaths, standing on bouncer duty to illustrate the ambience of the place.
I looked at the teenager, too smart for her own good. ‘You remind me of a lad I saw years ago, forced to race at school against his will,’
I said. ‘He was a mile behind the rest of the field. Only you’re a mile ahead of the field.’
She didn’t appreciate my conversational drift and let fly with sarcasm. ‘And you’re the working class hero of the masses with nothing but a borrowed car and a pocketful of self-righteousness. It’s been fun, Steele, but I gotta go.’
She got out of the Landcruiser and walked towards the entrance of the Kit Kat Klub.
‘So what are you doing here, Cassandra?’
Cassandra Russo turned and replied casually. ‘I work here.’
‘You know the difference between the running lad and you?’
‘No, and I don’t care.’
‘He allowed himself to cry.’
Cassandra half-opened her mouth but said nothing. She turned her head and tottered off on her heels into the club.
I toyed with the idea of driving the Landcruiser to Sydney, selling it and splitting the country. I was picturing the passport in my bedside drawer. I’ve never used it, but they’ve never taken it from me.
Still, I’m a Brisbane boy. Two thirds of my life spent in an orphanage in this city could not take Brissie out of my soul. Nothing could.
Outside the professor’s unit, I swapped the computers over to my Holden ute. I still had the key to Lavinsky’s unit in my pocket, and I decided to have a quick poke around. How much deeper could I get into this hole? There were lot of photos inside – Lavinsky with a boy and a girl growing into woman and man, taken over a period of twenty or so years. None of a woman around the professor’s own age. Smells like divorce.
The first message on the answering machine simply said, ‘Get off my case, you bastard.’
I had heard that voice earlier that day, and it did not take me long to give it a name: Steven Dupont.
Message two was a reminder about a symposium Lavinsky was supposed to speak at. Unless the topic was spiritualism, the professor would not be contributing.
Message three was from Clarissa Dunne, apologising for her part in an argument they had had. She would see the professor, also sometimes known as darling, tomorrow. That was a longshot and if she did see him, unless she had killed him, she wouldn’t much like the shape he was in.
The next message started, ‘Hey, ProJoe, have you been avoiding me?’
We all know who that one was from.
‘Well, let me warn you . . .,’ continued Cassandra Russo. She hung up, without finishing the warning.
I wiped the answering machine, the front doorknob and the 4WD clean, posted all the corpse’s keys into his letterbox and pointed the EH towards the coast.
The Gooroo poured me a coffee, a port and ten hundred-dollar bills for the computers before I told him Lavinsky was dead. He didn’t flinch.
‘Murder seeks you out again, Steele Hill. Or am I wrong?’
I nodded grimly, and gave Gooroo a run-down of my evening.
The Gooroo considered for a moment and decided, ‘This Dupont, he’s the villain what done this dastardly deed.’ He continued, ‘Lavinsky and Dupont may have been competing lovers of the same woman. Or maybe Lavinsky was going to expose Dupont for his sexual blackmail of students.’
I was buying this. ‘So, Gooroo, I’ve got to nail Dupont.’
There wasn’t much percentage in my going back to the uni in the hope that the guilty party had been uncovered and I could strut the walk of a free and innocent man. But there was one place I could go. Where there was a smart girl who could have been top of her class, only she was too clever for that. I knew a girl who knew a lot, inside and outside of university. I apologised to Con Vitalis for leaving him to go back to the place I had just left. He understood and we unloaded the computer gear into his garage.
The Go Kat Klub is the sort of place where you go if you are eighteen to thirty, wear expensive clothes and have access to lots of spending money, either your own or someone else’s. It is open till 5 a.m. so I was fashionably lateish at two in the morning. Once inside, you danced a bit, socialised a lot and drank caffeine-saturated soft drinks and litres of water. If you can’t work out what else you took, you probably think clubbers are those nasty people who kill baby seals.
Ignoring the mirrors, flashing lights and pulsating noise, I checked out the inhabitants, about 300 of them. A good racket for somebody but no sign of Cassandra Russo.
‘Nice jacket, sweetie,’ said a voice in my ear.
He was a tall, thin, redheaded man in his early twenties.
‘Yair, I know,’ I said dryly. ‘And one of these years it’s going to come back into fashion, right?’
The snappily dressed redhead was hurt. ‘No, I meant it; I really like it,’ he said.
I apologised, as he picked up a glass from a plastic-and-steel table welded into a pillar. He had some stamp of authority, so I asked him if Cassandra Russo was in.
‘Who?’ he asked, in a voice that told me he knew the girl, but he was not the sort to meet and tell. ‘Excuse me, I have to serve some customers,’ he said and went over to a group of four young people, two of them men.
It wasn’t bar service, because the two blokes followed him to the male toilet. The transaction was brisk. By the time I had a glass of red in my hand, the blokes returned. The redhead went to chat with a monster in a white shirt and bow tie. They both looked in my direction, and I smiled back at them.
The redhead disappeared behind the bar, and the monster came over to me.
‘Mr Malone will see you now,’ he said softly, as if he was a diminutive office secretary.
‘He’s already seen me. Wasn’t much of an interview.’
‘That was Mr Franks you saw. Mr Malone will see you now.’
The penny dropped. ‘Oh, you mean that Mr Malone.’
That Mr Malone. Frank Malone was the one Irish name that cropped up among the mostly Italian monikers of Fortitude Valley’s night-life businessmen, men who the local press would call ‘colourful’. This was code for ‘crooked’, not a reference to their ties or silver jewellery, though there was plenty of that too. I had never met Malone, but I had seen his short, fat and fortyish body stalking the half-dozen or so Valley streets that were his playground.
I followed my huge guide behind the bar, through an empty kitchen and to a room with ‘no admittance’ on the door. I was admitted.
Four bar stools, covered in black vinyl, sat on one wall of the surprisingly large office. A big rectangular table was across one corner with enough room on either side for someone to get in and out. Behind the desk, a massive leather armchair bulged, and inside it sat the squat frame of Francis Malone.
He looked at me and I looked at the thick green carpet attached to all the walls, giving the place the appearance of a soundproofed recording studio.
‘Do I know you?’ asked Malone without rising from his chair.
‘You may have seen me around. I’m Steele Hill.’
Malone’s eyes were red and darting every which way in his head. He looked like he was having a stockbroker’s Christmas party all by himself. He was coked up to the max.
‘So what the fuck are you doing, coming into my club, asking questions?’
‘You mean questions about an under-aged girl who claims to work here.’
‘You say I’m running hookers from here. Listen, pal, I charge eight bucks to get in; I charge five dollars for a short nip of watered-down bourbon: what the fuck do I need with hookers?’
‘Strangely enough, though,’ I said, ‘not too many of your customers seem to fancy that bourbon.’
Malone sniffed and played with his nose as he got up from his armchair. ‘You stay right there. Don’t you fucking move!’
I was pleased to see him dart through a back door rather than out the front way, where the monster was on guard duty. He came back in a few minutes, but he had not fetched anything from the next room. I guessed he had gone for a snort, his version of a coffee break. He was a little calmer.
‘This is a dance club. All our customers are young. Some of the young bucks get lone
ly. So we have young girls they can talk to. They buy the girls drinks, only we don’t give the ones under eighteen any alcohol. And we tell them not to turn tricks, not even outside the club. I don’t know if you are a relative or a friend of this young girl you’re after. But there’s nothing in it, you see. So why don’t you just piss off?’
I answered him casually. ‘Well I might have, but Franks said you wanted to see me. He likes my jacket, apparently. Maybe he thought you would, too.’
Malone’s face went a shade deeper than its usual red. ‘Paul always tells me what’s going on. And now I’ve seen you. So get lost.’
Standing my ground, I asked, ‘Paul’s told you all about the deals he’s struck tonight? Or did he forget them in his rush to tell you about me?’
Malone jumped up from his chair, and this time he did go through the front door. I heard him bellow he wanted Paul Franks.
The redhead Franks shut the door behind him and flashed a big smile at Malone, who settled again behind his desk. I sat down on a bar stool against a side wall.
The redhead stopped in his tracks when he saw the expression on Malone’s face.
‘We were going to start selling later,’ the club owner yelled.
A hurt look creased the young man’s face, and he reached a hand into the inside pocket of his jacket. I smirked, looking around. There was a soft sound of a drawer opening, before four bullets ripped into the redhead’s body.
I sat there stunned, thinking the fat man could not have done that. But there was Malone, blubbering and bouncing his fat up and down, with a gun falling through his fingers to the table.
Tears were streaming down his face and he sniffled. ‘I loved him. Why did he rob me? Why?’ He stopped crying to snap at me. ‘You, see what he had in his pocket.’
I looked at the gun on the table and did what he asked. Only a folded manila envelope that had collected some of Franks’ blood came out of the pocket. I looked inside to see maybe $1500, neatly folded. A piece of paper with initials and amounts between $50 and $300 was behind the notes. Nothing more. Franks had been preparing a fully audited surprise for the boss. I showed Malone the contents of the dead man’s pocket and he started to cry again.
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