She sat down on the ergonomic computer chair, tapping her talons on the keyboard. She loved that sharp sound: click click click click. For something to do, she decided to check her e-mail: the whirr of the computer coming to life was such a turn-on. When she was in, there were only the usual messages: ‘FURRY NAKED BARNYARD FRIENDS!!!’, ‘GET THE DIRT ON ABSOLUTELY ANYONE!!!!!’, ‘UNDERAGE NASTY SLUTS SWALLOW CUM’, ‘BRITNEY TAKES IT UP THE ARSE’.
She switched off the machine. For a few moments she was transfixed by the intricate circuitry that was visible through the monitor’s transparent plastic shell. That was so cool. Stan/Satan was still blowing air. Sitting in the chair, she swivelled from side to side, casting her fish-eye contacts around the room: what next?
She picked up one of his exercise books with the red binding, and flipped through it. What was with all these friggin’ newspaper cuttings?
A headline jumped out at her:
Following the Trail of the Menendez Brothers
Yeah? She remembered the name Menendez from somewhere . . .
She started reading the piece. It was dated 11 March 1990.
‘. . . Los Angeles Homicide Detective Les Zoeller was up against it in his investigation of the murder of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion . . . Jose Menendez had many enemies and almost anyone could have done it.’
‘. . . A friend of the family said, “I have no basis for this, but I wonder if the boys did it.”’
‘. . . Police observed as Lyle and Erik went through a million dollars in the three months after the murders . . .’
Hmmm—now she had it. These were the two little charmers who murdered their friggin’ parents over in L.A.
‘. . . After watching “Billionaire Boys Club” on television, the boys were convinced their father planned to disinherit them. Inspired by the show, they resolved to kill Jose . . . They did not want to kill Kitty, but had no choice . . .’
‘. . . drove to San Diego to buy shotguns . . .’
‘. . . disposed of their bloody clothes and shoes, together with shell casings . . .’
‘. . . Erik, who had been having suicidal thoughts, told his psychotherapist: “We did it. We killed our parents.”’
What was all this reminding her of? Stan said a while ago, My parents are still dead, aren’t they? But . . . Stephanie was his stepmother, not his mother. It was a technicality, but in Suzen’s expanded state of consciousness the word parents rose from the page and loomed close-up like a revelation in front of her fish-eyes.
Anyhow, what was Stan doing saving a whole bunch of cuttings on the friggin’ Menendez murders? Shotguns . . . bloody clothes . . . shell casings . . .
She flipped through the pages: it went on and on.
Profiles of the Brothers: Their Luxury Lifestyle.
Erik: ‘I couldn’t shoot my mother . . . when she tried to get away,
Lyle shot her.’
Erik confesses to psychotherapist.
Lyle: ‘We’ve got to kill him and anyone associated with him.’
More of the same followed.
Wait. Waitone friggin’ minute. What was . . . She went back until she found what she wanted. There it was: Lyle: ‘We’ve got to kill him and anyone associated with him.’
Christ. Didn’t Stan say that—exactly that—when they were in bed that time?
Those words were originally spoken by Lyle friggin’ Menendez.
She fanned through several more books in the stack: more Menendez stuff. Police investigations, legal proceedings, expert witnesses, profiles of the victims, transcripts of the ‘secret tapes’, testimony, cross-examinations.
So it went on.
The remaining exercise books in the shelf seemed to deal with the Petrakos murders, and their aftermath: Mansion Break-in. Bloody Crime Scene. Rural Peace Shattered on a Sunny Wednesday.
Suzen flicked through, mainly scanning headlines and studying the accompanying photographs:
‘Death in the Afternoon.’
‘Curse of Petrakos Clan Has Roots in War.’
Life of Screen Goddess ‘Pointlessly Snuffed Out’.
Stephanie Petrakos ‘Was Unfaithful’.
Culprit: Arrest and Trial of Shaun Randall McCreadie.
. . . Promising police career ‘ends in disgrace and ignominy’.
QC: Shaun McCreadie ‘Only Surviving Gang Member’.
Verdict in Petrakos Kill Case.
Judge: ‘Despicable, callous crime.’
Parents: ‘No punishment can bring back our beautiful daughter.’
McCreadie: Life Without Parole.
Final McCreadie Appeal Turned Down.
A rustling sound came from the lounge room. The snoring had abruptly stopped. Suzen hurriedly shoved the books back, spilling a couple of them onto the floor in her haste. When she went out she saw that Stan had changed his position: he was now flat on his back with one arm flung across his eyes,shielding them from the light,with the other dangling onto the floor near the Smirnoff bottle. She watched and waited: he was still asleep.
She switched off the light. It was after two, and Suzen was suddenly very tired. Her depleted physical reserves could only fight sleep for so long when she was tripping. On the way to the bedroom she killed all the lights in the apartment, leaving on only a pair of wall lights on either side of the bed. They glowed with a yellow, foggy glimmer. With her brain still flashing she wriggled out of her velvet sheath and fishnet pantyhose, letting them both drop to the floor. She disconnected the silver chain from her earring and lip-ring and put it on the bedside table. When she crawled inside the sheets, under a featherweight doona, her eyes were already closing over the persistent images from the paper clippings. She curled into a foetal position and slid her hands under the pillow.
They came into contact with something: a hard, metal object.
Suzen slid it out.
Christ. It was a friggin’ gun . . . a shotgun, with the barrels sawn off, and the wooden stock shortened, so it could be held like a pistol.
The gun she’d seen him with the other night when he went out ‘to see a friend’.
Suzen gazed at the weapon with weary, doped-out eyes. It was heavy. What’s ’is friggin’ gun doin’ here?
She flashed onto a studio photo of Lyle and Erik Menendez: clean-cut, handsome college boys. Jose would be proud . . . Chemicals played over her synapses. Then she snored once: a sudden violent explosion in the back of her throat. Her eyes snapped open with a start. She realised she had dropped off to sleep with the gun still in her hand, resting across her chest on top of the doona.
‘Ugh.’ She hefted it onto the bedside table with her face chain.
When she shut her eyes again she dropped immediately into an underworld of horrid dreamscapes. She saw the naked body of a woman closely resembling Sharon Tate in a blood-spattered bathtub,wrapped in heavy ropes. Her eyes were empty sockets staring out of a blood-smeared face. There was a vertical slash in her stomach,under the ropes,from which heavily slicked birds slithered out into the bathtub. They tried to flutter their wings to get away but could not climb the slippery sides of the bathtub and repeatedly fell back into it. More and more birds appeared, desperately but unsuccessfully trying to escape from the bathtub. Then the body itself began to move . . .
Suzen gasped.
In a subconscious attempt to dislodge the image, she rolled over so that she faced the other way, her head buried under the pillow. When she’d descended again, however, grotesque pictures of repugnant animals ripping apart a man’s corpse rushed to fill her headspace. They were fighting each other over pieces of the cadaver the way jackals or hyenas do with the remnants of a beast left unattended by lions. As they growled and slavered over the flesh these ugly brutes sometimes swivelled around as if watchful for predators, throwing out sprays of blood and gout from their disgusting snouts as they did so . . .
Several nightmare sequences followed, including the one in which she—as a teenager—is thrown into the tr
unk of a car by a man without a face. In the dark, enclosed space she screams silently as the car speeds to its destination. When the trunk door opens the faceless man helps her out, and she sees she is on a desolate,windswept beach.Instinctively she recognises the place, just as she senses that the man without a face is her father. He has taken her to the end of the earth, but . . . why? Suzen’s father had never done anything to harm her. She walks towards the water, knowing she has to wade in and drown. At the shallows she turns to see that the faceless man and the car have disappeared, and she is alone. Waves crash over her. She is underwater, battling the undertow as it drags her far from land. Down she tumbles into the green water, seaweed entangling itself around her throat as she fights to hold her breath . . .
Suzen wakes up with a loud sob. She had been holding her breath. Her heart pounds so hard it hurts,and her body is slippery with perspiration. But there is no seaweed around her throat.
‘Oh,’ she sighs, and falls back onto the pillow—relieved beyond words, and utterly exhausted. ‘Oh.’
Suzen hated the beach. It was a bad place where people went to drown. Although she was too young to possibly remember it, she was rescued from the surf at Point Hicks, East Gippsland, one summer. She was only three years old at the time, but nevertheless the experience was embedded in her brain forever.
At least three times a week now she dreamed that dream. Strangely, it had only begun when she was in her late teens, after a gestation period of about sixteen years—from around the time when she became a serious drug user. Although she found it puzzling, Suzen was astute enough to know that every dream contained a full set of meanings, whether you grasped them or not. It was all encoded in there somewhere. Dreams stemmed from one’s fears and anxieties, and in her case that was a deep, irrational fear of death—at Manson’s hands.
Soon she was asleep again. One good thing about addiction: no matter how often she surfaced during the night, it was always only a minute or so before she was back under.
A man was coming towards her from far away. At first he was just a dot in the distance, then a tiny, shimmering human form. He was carrying something over his shoulder. Suzen couldn’t see who it was, but stood still, waiting for the figure to come properly into view. She started to recognise certain significant details, but the traveller’s identity remained hidden from her. She understood she had to wait for him—to turn and walk away was out of the question. Despite a feeling of growing apprehension she remained rooted to the spot as he drew ever closer. Now she could see it was a guitar slung over his shoulder, one with a beaded, hippie strap attached to it. Instinctively she knew who it was, and began to cry. When he was a short distance from her, the man stopped. His forearm was held across his face, as if to shield her from the awful truth, but then she realised he was only playing with her. He wore loose ragged robes, like sackcloth, a leather, studded bracelet on his wrist and Roman sandals on his dirty, battered feet. It seemed to Suzen he had travelled a long way through both time and space to reach her, and now the journey was over at last. She waited for him to lower the forearm from his face.
At the foot of the bed Suzen’s night visitor remained motionless for a long moment. Then, as the arm came down, the first thing she saw was the shaved, shiny skull; after that the swastika tattoo in the centre of his forehead glowed in the dull glimmer of the wall lights.
With his arms now outstretched towards her Manson’s face was overspread with his mischievous, seductive grin, revealing teeth that were as uneven and rotted as old tombstones. The evil, playful eyes glittered insanely, entrancing her and pinning her to the bed as he moved in closer, alongside the bed with his arms extended in an embracing gesture. Suzen clutched her throat and tried to scream, but as always the sound died before it was even born. The swastika glowed with a magical iridescence as the maniac’s bright, luminous face closed in; then, from somewhere inside his robes Charles Manson brandished a long-bladed, silver saber. The weapon glinted momentarily as she watched, horrified and unable to wrench herself from the grip of his spell. Suzen’s hand was on her chest, feeling the maddened thump of her fearful heart. Now I am in his thrall; now it comes . . .
Holding the saber in both hands Manson raised it high above his head. In a moment of clarity Suzen thought: Am I dreaming? No, no, it’s real. It’s happening. I’m going to be butchered, right now . . . have to friggin’ do something . . .
Savoring the occasion of his triumph, Manson held his position. Suzen pulled her eyes from the maniac’s glittering stare. She tore her right hand from her chest and flung it sideways, where it struck the bedside table and caused something on it to rattle heavily. Under the wall light she glimpsed the gun. In a reflex action she grabbed it, swung it around and grasped it in two hands. Aiming at Manson’s midsection, she clenched her eyes shut and pulled both triggers, hard. And screamed.
BOOM BOOM.
There was a brilliant flash; the gun bucked upwards as the kick from the simultaneous detonations of double-aught, 180-grain buckshot bounced her head hard against the plasterboard wall. An ear-splitting double-roar engulfed the whole world. Suzen’s scream rolled on and on, marrying with the unending reverberations around the room and inside her own head. When her eyes jolted open she glimpsed Charles Manson, his upper body a mess of bloody, shredded rags, being lifted clear off his feet and hurtled backwards into the mirrored wardrobe in an almighty explosion of shattered glass. After he had slid down to the floor, bloodied, sword-shaped glass slivers dropped onto him while he lay sprawled and motionless among the debris. Suzen’s scream ran its course, died, and then all was silence.
Suzen sat up straight. The gun was still in her trembling hands, her fingers curled around the two triggers. Smoke drifted from the barrel. There was a . . . sort of haze in the room. Putting down the weapon, Suzen crawled to the foot of the bed. With her hand over her mouth she gazed upon the wreckage. The huddled mess on the floor was not Charles Manson at all. He was not wearing sackcloth robes, and nor was there a guitar or silver saber. Instead she recognised Stan’s black and white track pants, which were partly blown off his legs. A vivid rash of pellet wounds peppered his exposed, hairy thighs. The main mass of his body was eviscerated: only reddish, splintered rib bones and strands of intestinal and other tissue showed through in the stomach cavity. Suzen was repelled and riveted by the horror of it. The shattered wardrobe and the ceiling wore a patterned spray of the victim’s shredded inner organs. What she could see of his bloodied head was stabbed and slashed with glass spears. It wasn’t possible to identify the face, but Suzen knew this was no bad trip, and nor was it a nightmare. She was quite serene about it as she came to terms with what she had done. Shock moved silently, inexorably through her nervous system, but just for the moment she could deal with this. She had killed Stan. Fine. She had blown him to bits with his own shotgun. Yeah.
In a minute or two the shock started to register. Soon she was shaking so violently she was sure she was having a heart attack. Her body racked and convulsed as the smell of burnt gunpowder and the appalling reek of the quivering, disembowelled corpse mingled in the air. Suzen got off the bed and ran. She ran into the lounge room, grabbed her head and hyperventilated. Her breath roared in her ears. Then she ran down the hallway, into the bathroom, and proceeded to vomit in the bathtub. Since there was little of substance inside her she only managed to bring up a string of brown material, but continued to retch uncontrollably until there was no strength left in her frail body. Pain burned with a scalding heat in her chest. In the end she sagged over the bathtub, sobbing hysterically as her bladder opened and a pool of urine spread around her knees.
24
Shaun parked the Land Rover in the street outside the Powlett Street house. Normally he drove around the back via the laneway and secured it in the garage, but he had formed the idea in the last half-hour that he and Jo would go somewhere for lunch on this perfect spring day. The sky was a clear-blue expanse, and the breeze—such as there was—blew in occasional
soft riffles from the northeast. It could’ve been the first day of summer. He’d been to a post office, where he’d dispatched copies of the taped conversation at the Unicorn Hotel to Brent Wollansky and Dave Wrigley, with a covering note to Dave explaining what it was all about.
The previous evening Wes Ford had phoned to inform him that he would be domiciled in the downtown Sofitel for as long as his funds held out, which he estimated to be five or six days. Would that be long enough? Shaun told him not to worry about it, that he would take care of the bill, since this was his idea. Wes was silent for maybe a second or two—from surprise rather than indecision, probably—before graciously accepting his offer. He was also gratified to learn that Bill Simmonds remained on the missing list. It was a case of ‘so far, so good’.
It was now 11.30 am Friday when Shaun turned the key in the front door. When he’d left an hour earlier, Jo had been on the receiving end of a heavy-sounding phone call from her distinguished father-in-law, Hugh Steer, who was urging her to ‘cool off ’,‘come to her senses’, and ‘consider everyone’s best interests’. From her responses he understood that he was offering to act as intermediary, and do whatever she required to ‘sort out this spat’ and ‘get the marriage back in shape.’ She had rolled her eyes at Shaun as he went out, gaily waving him off as the High Court judge subjected her to the benefit of his wisdom on the subject of reconciliation. Despite her cavalier attitude, she would have to be strong to resist his weighty influence and whatever else the Steer family came up with to try and get her back onside. This was what they did every day, and they were very good at it.
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