White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  The chimp hair! she thought. They want to know if I know about the chimp hair on Carolyn’s T-shirt.

  It was still only Sunday morning on the west coast of America, but perhaps somebody would be at work at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Lab in Oregon.

  The telephone was answered after a few rings by a cheerful woman. Diana introduced herself. “Has a letter from me with some hair in it, suspected chimpanzee, arrived?” she asked. It had, the woman said, and they were already examining it with a scanning electron microscope. They could confirm it was from a chimpanzee and in a few days would be able to tell her the animal’s sex, approximate age, whether it was wild or captive-bred, and, if captive, its likely provenance.

  “We’ll fax you,” the woman said.

  Diana removed the PRO file and transferred to the screen her notes on the chimpanzees in the circus that had stopped in Kalunga ten days earlier. There had been three of them, all castrated males. The hair I sent to Oregon must be from a gelding, she thought, or else … A spasm shook her from her feet to her head. Or else, Diana thought, Carolyn found another chimp the night they murdered her.

  Around dawn, she finally went back to sleep.

  Billy and Tom were the first to bring news of Jason’s death to the Aboriginal end of town. Early on Monday morning, after their aviary maintenance job at Diana’s house, they came pedaling wildly across the potholes of their street and ran in at the front door, shouting, “Grandma! Somebody else is dead!”

  When Grace was tired, her hearing diminished. “Why aren’t you at school?” she demanded. She was weary this morning and had not quite heard what they said.

  “The vet’s dead!” Tom shouted. “He killed that lady! He left a suicide note on his computer. Can we have a computer?”

  Grace subsided onto the mangy brown velveteen of the settee. Two days ago, Saturday afternoon, she had given Jason tea and hot scones in the kitchen at Fig Tree Gully Road. He had just returned from Sydney and had come to see how the eagle was getting on. When she urged him to take home some tomato soup for his supper, he said, “I’m meant to avoid acid foods—but what the hell? And I will have butter on my scone.” His face was flushed, as if he were excited about something, but his colors were turning gray. It gave her an ache in her heart to see such a young man dying.

  He had a present for Diana, a CD he had bought in Sydney. “Sorry I’ve been so uptight,” he said. Diana read the card he had written and kissed his cheek. Then they went down to the aviary together.

  At five o’clock, a tourist bus had unloaded its Japanese passengers, and Grace was run off her feet until almost six, when they left, carrying away seven hundred dollars’ worth of small items—dilly bags, boomerangs, hunting sticks, and greeting cards. She had been delighted. Diana, however, was subdued. Grace thought Jason might have discovered something wrong with the eagle, but Diana said, “No, she’s perfect. Another fortnight and I can start work with her.”

  “So what’s wrong?”

  “He’s in trouble,” Diana muttered. “He admitted he’s told me and everyone else dozens of lies .…” Her expression was bewildered and angry. “He apologized,” she said. “He said, ‘I’ve done something for which you’ll never forgive me, and I apologize. But it’s all finished now. I’m going to put it right.’”

  Grace caught hold of Billy, who was not so quick as his younger brother, and pulled him to sit beside her on the settee.

  “Who told you about the vet?” she asked.

  “Everybody! There are policemen at his house, and nobody is allowed inside.” He shook himself like a hooked fish. “Let go!”

  “Where were you last night?” she growled.

  “Let go! You’re hurting me.”

  “You tell me where you two were last night.” She had hold of his arm the way she held a goanna and was pressing a nerve in his hand. “I woke up last night and went into your bedroom to see you two were properly covered up. But you weren’t there. Where were you?”

  “Nowhere! Let go.” The slightest movement shot fire through his wrist.

  “I don’t let go until you tell me.”

  Tears sprang to Billy’s eyes, and he turned desperately to his younger brother. Tom was shifting from foot to foot, inventing something.

  “Grandma, Grandma—don’t be cross,” Tom burst out. “We were looking for bush tucker. Real black-fella stuff.” Black-fella stuff? Every time she mentioned initiation to them, they jeered, “We don’t want black-fella stuff!” The thought of them growing up uninitiated filled her with weariness. I’m old and tired, she thought.

  “Bush tucker? At night? What bush tucker?” she said.

  Tom began bravely. “There’s a big tree over near the railway station, with special ants in it, and at night…,” but his courage failed under his grandmother’s gaze. She knew every tree within fifty kilometers. “We were just mucking about,” he added lamely.

  “Where?”

  “Just… about.”

  She had waited for hours for them to come home, but she must have dozed off, for at some stage they had crept back into the house and, finding her lying on Billy’s bed, had gone to sleep in her room.

  Billy felt her grip on his wrist loosen slightly, and with a sudden jerk he freed himself. He rubbed his arm resentfully.

  “You know there is a murderer on the loose?” Grace said. “If he murdered a woman, he won’t mind murdering a couple of kids.”

  “But, Grandma,” they cried. “He’s dead! He confessed, and then he killed himself.”

  “You’re not to go wandering around at night,” she grumbled. “Now off you go to school.”

  Grace kept some Rhode Island Red hens and a long-legged rooster in an enclosure in the backyard. When she appeared later that morning with the kitchen scraps in a plastic pail, crooning, “Here, chooky-chooky,” the hens came running. The rooster paced forward with a stately gait, each foot lifted high, pecking the hens out of his way. While they ate, Grace went to the nesting boxes. There was an egg in each one. She gathered them up and was about to leave, when she noticed that a square of corrugated iron she had fixed over a hole in the wire at one end had been shifted sideways. Those kids! she thought. She had placed the iron so its corrugations ran horizontally. If a black snake or a big lizard got through the hole, it would be unable to wriggle past the corrugations and get at the eggs. But now the iron was standing with its lines running vertically. A snake could slide straight up a corrugation and, scratching its belly a bit, slide over the top into the henhouse.

  She put down the pail holding the eggs and with both hands yanked the square of iron away from the wire fence. As it lifted she gave a cry of pain. A piece of metal hidden behind the iron had fallen on the instep of her foot. Grace lifted it off and saw it was a sign, like a metal road sign, but printed with red interlocking broken circles on a white background. The word BIOHAZARD was underneath. On the dusty ground outside the chookhouse wire, in a spot that was normally hidden by the corrugated iron, she saw a metal cash box. She squatted down and counted the dollar, two-dollar, and twenty-cent coins. It came to thirty-five dollars and twenty cents. For some moments she stared at it, her heart jumping with fright. Thieves! She had let them become thieves. The police would take them away to reform school. Then it would be juvenile detention .…

  She was still in a daze when Diana arrived, wheeling a suitcase over the uneven concrete path from the front gate, calling, “Yoo-hoo! Gracie! Are you home, Grace?”

  “Thank God!” Diana said as she heaved the suitcase in the front door. She was unusually agitated and distracted. “I thought I’d missed you,” she added.

  She hasn’t heard about Jason, Grace realized.

  “Somebody got into the house last night,” Diana rushed on. “You remember a few days ago when I thought Archie had wandered in? Now I’m sure it wasn’t Archie. Anyway, they’ve been in my study, so I’ve put all the confidential files in here, and backup disks. Can they go in your big trunk? Nobody will th
ink of—” Suddenly she stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  When Diana drove home that morning after calling by Jason’s house, she thought of all the strange, feverish things he had said to her in the three years she had known him. She had always discounted them, and now she wondered why. His fetish about cleanliness and hygiene during surgery had seemed funny. A nick with a scalpel turned into a drama. He would almost faint at the sight of his own blood. One day when they were out bird-watching, his nose began to bleed and he rushed back to his car, calling, “I’m going to get ice! I need ice!” Wimp, she’d thought.

  The question of why she had never treated him seriously niggled at her. Suddenly she realized that part of the answer was that she had never found him threatening, the way that at some obscure level a woman recognizes a threat in men, as a bird, seeing tapered wings, hears a voice cry “Falcon!” How can they accuse him of raping Carolyn? she asked herself. She felt the skin on the back of her neck prickle.

  Chapter Twelve

  The detectives who searched Jason Nichols’s computer on Monday morning found that the word processing program on which he had typed his last sentence had been cleared out.

  In a drawer in the clinic, several large hypodermic syringes, of the type used to murder Carolyn Williams, were discovered. There was an Oxy Viva pump and mask, Mettzenbaum scissors, and a laryngoscope, all the tools necessary to cut vocal cords. There was, of course, a large supply of Pentothal and the short-term muscle relaxant Scoline (traces of both had been found in Williams’s body) and dozens of pairs of disposable latex gloves.

  Everything in the clinic was in its proper place and perfectly clean. The forensic team vacuumed the house and the car, hoping to gather fibers from the clothes Carolyn had been wearing the night she died, for there was little chance of finding her blood or skin on any of the surgical instruments. A search of the Porsche, the house, and the clinic failed to uncover Carolyn’s gold ring.

  On Monday morning, in the Kalunga police station, Margaret McLeod had a nervous breakdown.

  • • •

  Rumor reached the Research by lunchtime that the murder was solved. By late afternoon it was known that when detectives began questioning Nichols’s receptionist, she blurted, “It’s my fault! I made the collage letters!” and burst into tears, becoming so distraught the doctor had to be called. When she had calmed down she told police that she had been jealous when Jason sent Valentine’s Day cards to some girls who worked in the rabbit house. “I wanted them to leave him alone,” she said.

  That night at the Research, there was a party beside the swimming pool. The director of finance, dressed in suit and tie, dived in and managed to swim a few strokes before younger men came to his rescue. Administration wore a pointed green hat and ran around pinching girls’ bottoms. John Parker took the opportunity to kiss Lek in the Big Lab, in front of the boys. She staggered back, dazed, with a glance behind her. Steve, Phil, and Freddie pretended to have seen nothing. Meanwhile, Sonja was distraught. She had never found the right moment to tell John that, long before the police knew, she had worked out that Margaret had sent the collage letters. At the staff party, after a gin and tonic, she confided to her secretary and some other young women that Margaret had tricked her. “She begged me to teach her decoupage,” Sonja said. “It never occurred to me she’d use what I taught her …” She swallowed a sob. “Everybody I trust …,” she murmured, and turned away.

  In town, rumors about Jason Nichols began to circulate. People remembered that certain animals had disappeared in the past few years, including the dry cleaner’s goat. There was the death of the news agent’s cat following a visit to Nichols’s clinic. “But I was never given Sox’s body, was I?” the news agent’s wife said. Someone vandalized Jason’s Donald Duck letter box on Wednesday night.

  Joe Miller called a special directors’ meeting for a confidential briefing. At the end of his description of how police believed Carolyn Williams’s murder had taken place, the director of finance rolled his eyes. “Christ, man! You’ve talked for an hour and told us nothing!”

  Miller gave an affable smile.

  “You’ve not informed us what Carolyn died of, or where, or why. We don’t know if she was strangled, or suffocated, or why you’re so sure Nichols is the swine who did it.”

  “That’s right,” Sonja interjected. “What did she die of? All you’ve told us is that she left the duck shooters, rang Jason, and asked him to drive her home. Then, you say, he killed her somehow, drove into the Research using her card to open the front gate, went on past the airfield, opened the northwest gate with her keys, and dumped her body near the mountain.” She looked along the table. “There’s nothing reassuring about any of that as far as the female staff are concerned. If anything, it makes a girl feel she’s in more danger out here, where nobody can hear a cry for help, than in the city.”

  Along the table, the directors’ expressions said they expected better than what Miller had given them.

  “Why didn’t anybody hear her calling for help from Jason’s house?” Sonja persisted. “Kerry Larnach lives only two doors away. Was he home that Saturday night? Why didn’t he hear anything?”

  “I’m sorry,” Joe replied. “Until the coronor’s inquest I can’t tell you anything more. Even if I knew more.”

  “Of course he knows more,” Sonja muttered to Administration beside the tea urn. Her face was pointy with irritation. “I don’t believe poor Jason did it. Do you?” Her eyes fixed accusingly on the vulnerable pink leaf of lips inside Administration’s beard.

  “Well—hard to say.” He stroked the beard thoughtfully, a habitual gesture that set Sonja’s teeth on edge. “You had dinner with him that night. Did he seem to have murder in mind?”

  “Of course not! There are a lot of men here with more reason to murder Carolyn Williams than Jason ever had.” She jigged her tea bag, then moved her gaze onto the director of finance.

  Administration gave a pained smile. A week earlier, he had courageously gone along the top-floor corridor to Joe Miller’s office to admit that he had had an affair with Williams, which had ended some months ago when he arrived at her condo one night and found Finance’s plump white body stretched on the living room floor while Carolyn played with his feet. Joe happened to know this already. “I was furious, but I didn’t kill her! You’ve got to believe me!” Administration said. Momentarily his legs bent, as if he were about to go down on his knees before the director of security.

  “They’re accusing Jason because he’s dead,” Sonja added. “It’s the easy way out.”

  Her colleague gave a melancholy nod. In fact he was delighted to hear that Nichols was the murderer. Incautiously, he added, “But it makes life simpler for us to be able to assure the staff that the crime’s been solved.”

  “It has not been solved!” Sonja objected. “Whoever did this murder is much too smart for Joe Miller and the Homicide Squad. I don’t find that a relief, and I don’t think other people will either.”

  But most people did accept that the vet had murdered Carolyn Williams. In Kalunga, neighbors who had feuded for thirty years were speaking again; grudges had vanished over beers in the Arms; at the Research, the backbiting was less savage. But as tension relaxed, kindness ebbed too, and soon people returned to their cheerful habits of scorn and self-righteousness. When Margaret McLeod left the hospital, a contingent of women called on her to suggest that she sell her cottage and return to Sydney. “You’re really a city person,” said the leader, who spoke from the pulpit of the Kalunga Uniting Church on Sunday mornings and had, as she pointed out, the good of the whole community in mind. Margaret rang Sonja, whom she had not spoken to in more than a week, but the director of personnel was in meetings all day, her secretary said.

  An urge to erase the town’s shame took hold of the Shire Council, which decided to hold a “Kalunga Pride Week” in March 1994. Kerry Larnach, who was preparing to go to Saigon for a holiday, found time to arrange for two return airfares to
Cairns as first prize in the Kalunga Week lottery. Diana agreed to contribute by leading ornithological tours of the lake.

  Her anxiety over what had really happened to Carolyn and Jason Nichols increased. When she told the Homicide Squad detective that she was sure Jason had been gay, he looked polite but bored and went on supervising the packing of the clinic. One of the boxes he labeled JASON NICHOLS: APPLE MACINTOSH COMPUTER, PLUS CONTAINER OF 15 BACKUP DISKS.

  “He had no motive to kill Carolyn—or himself!” Diana reiterated, but even as she spoke, doubts assailed her: what was the unforgivable thing Jason had done?

  The detective bit off a piece of tape with his teeth. “A motive depends on a secret, and Nichols had a secret. He was a closet queen, eh?”

  She nodded.

  “And Carolyn was just the sort of girl to find out—and she’d tell the world, wouldn’t she? She made people admit things about themselves they didn’t want to admit. She wouldn’t allow anybody any decency. If you told her you had a corn, she’d stamp on it, right? She was a bitch.” Diana nodded but knew that somewhere there was a trick in what the detective was saying.