Bones of Contention

by Jeanne Matthews

  “Of course. There is no cause to search private vehicles.”

  She said, “A friend of mine thinks that Hambrick may have taken a boat from Black Point.”

  “There are no boat rentals. He could have met someone there who had a boat.”

  She seemed to have garnered all the info Bill had to offer and was wondering how to politely send him on his way. There was one last question and she could think of no way to couch it that didn’t risk giving offense. Substance abuse was the bête noire of every Aboriginal culture the world over, but if anybody in Jabiru could parry an embarrassing question, it was this dude.

  “Bill, has there been any scuttlebutt in the community about drug smuggling?”

  “Drugs?” His smile flattened.

  Uh-oh. “I’m sure the people of Arnhem Land aren’t involved, but I have reason to believe that Black Point is a port of call for something illegal.”

  “Black Point would hardly rank as a port.”

  “Drop site then. Maybe it’s not drugs. It could be weapons or currency. Any type of contraband. It’s possible that Bryce Hambrick uncovered the operation by accident while reporting another story or,” she hadn’t thought of this before, “he could have been one of the smugglers and there was a falling-out among thieves.” She pulled out the obituary of Desmond Fisher and showed Bill his picture. “I think this man was one of the smugglers.”

  Bill’s forehead corrugated in thought, making the scars bulge. “He wore a sun hat with flaps that covered the sides of his face, but yes. This man was here.”

  Dinah’s toes twinged. “Sixtyish, salt-and-pepper hair and beard, safari jacket? He’s kind of an Ernest Hemingway lookalike?”

  “Yes. Desmond Fisher. He gave me his name. He talked to me about making a living will.”

  This was too good to be true, wasn’t it? “When was this?”

  “About two weeks ago. He ate here at the Social Club with a tour guide named Zachariah. The two conducted themselves as if they were, how shall I say, up to no good.” He smiled at his colloquialism.

  “What did they do that struck you wrong?”

  “Their slyness, their deportment.”

  Deportment? Dinah made a special effort not to throttle him. Was he spinning her some kind of an intrigue in order to get his name in the paper? With his jones for attention, he wasn’t above spinning. She pressed him for particulars. “Did Fisher say where they were going? Did you hear anything about their plans?”

  “They had bought camping supplies. Dr. Fisher said they were going to hunt pig. Zachariah owns a four-wheel-drive vehicle. They were loading it with propane tanks, ice chests, and so forth. They could have gone on to Black Point. It’s about a six hour drive from the East Alligator crossing. Perhaps they had someone with a boat waiting for them there.”

  Dinah was used to coincidences. Coincidences rained cats and dogs in her world. Why should she shy away from this one? Jabiru was a small town, Fisher was a big gasbag, and Bill was a disinterested witness. There were probably other witnesses whom Jacko would find when he brought his investigative team to Jabiru.

  Bill said, “I have a friend who works in the Visitor Center at Black Point. He has a good memory for faces. He will know if Hambrick or Fisher boarded a boat from his dock. I’ll speak to him in the morning and arrange a meeting so you can show him the photos.”

  Her skin tickled. This was the classic had-I-but-known scenario. A guy has a vital clue and promises to reveal all, but he can’t talk right now. He’ll do it tomorrow. Inevitably, he’s dead as a mackerel by sunrise. “Can’t we talk to him tonight?”

  “I can try to reach him if he is in town. Where are you staying, Mallory?”

  “The Crocodile.”

  In her excitement, she’d forgotten to eat. She asked the waiter for a doggy bag and told Bill to call her the instant he got hold of his friend. “And tell him to be extra careful.”

  “No worries, Mallory.” He showed her a toothy smile.

  She flashed to the croc masquerading as a log and asked him to walk her to her car.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The Crocodile was lit up like a Star Wars set. Before getting out of the car, she looked around carefully for any sign of the tan car or the shaven-headed man. She kept a hand on the Glock inside her tote as she walked from her car into the hotel. The dazzlingly bright lobby was empty, which heightened her heebie-jeebies. She ran up the Croc’s left front leg to the second floor, and down the backbone into the safety of her room.

  Once inside, she locked and chained the door and buttressed the desk chair under the knob. The room was cold as Siberia. The dials on the air conditioner wouldn’t budge and she left the sliding glass balcony door open to let in some warm air. The courtyard below appeared deserted. Strange ferns billowed in a dry breeze and threw eerie shadows across the pond. The rooms on the other side were dark behind their heavy drapes, but somebody had left his balcony door open and a TV gunfight resounded through the night. Across the courtyard catty-cornered from her room, a red ember caught her eye. Somebody was standing on his balcony smoking a cigarette. Smoking and watching.

  She closed and locked the door and pulled the drapes. A large moth of a particularly repulsive type followed her inside and she grabbed the room service menu and went after it. She lost it under the bedside table where she discovered a hole in the drywall with a stubble of wires poking through. It was an unfinished electrical socket. Anarctic temperatures, live wires, loathsome insects. It almost made her homesick for Crow Hill. Almost.

  She lost the moth under the bed and could only hope that he fried on a hot wire or froze to death before lights out. Freezing, herself, she snatched the bedspread off the bed, wrapped it around her shoulders, and paced. The same TV shoot-’em-up was blasting through the wall from her next-door neighbor’s room. Probably some international spin-off of Law and Order. In a fit of recidivism, she thought of Nick. If she didn’t hate him so comprehensively, he’d be the perfect person to talk to right now.

  There had to be something constructive she could do while waiting for Bill’s Black Point friend to weigh in. She reread the Darwin Star’s account of Hambrick’s murder. The body was discovered by Tiwi fishermen who notified the territorial police. The remains had been exposed to the elements for several days and the exact time of death could not be determined. There was the requisite rundown of blood and guts; a quote from the police about the dearth of suspects; an overview of Hambrick’s career; a summary of the articles he’d written while on assignment Down Under and their possible relevance to his murder; and at the very bottom of the inverted pyramid of facts, the announcement of a wake to be held by the deceased’s mates at the Ducks Nuts Bar & Grill in Darwin.

  Only in Oz, thought Dinah. If his wake was held at the Ducks Nuts, Hambrick was evidently a regular. Maybe he’d confided something juicy to one or more of his fellow elbow-benders. The wake was a week ago, but maybe one of them was enjoying a brew there right now. Q and A over the telephone would be a crap shoot, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  She was on hold for a long time, during which she considered what story would get the most bang for the bull. She could pose as a reporter from London or some faraway place, but the Ducks Nuts was probably a watering hole for reporters like Hambrick. His murder was their scoop and they’d be none too keen to share it.

  She could pose as a detective. Just a few more questions if you don’t mind. But even if she could pull off a credible Aussie accent, Jacko would’ve left his calling card and anyway, impersonating a cop was a prosecutable offense pretty much everywhere.

  Hambrick wasn’t married and in the photo he looked unkempt enough to chance that he wasn’t gay. What about an old girlfriend come to town for a visit who’s just heard the sad news?

  “Nuts. You want somebody paged?” The voice was irascible.

  “Yes, please. Bryce Hambrick’s best friend.”

  There was a pause. “Who�
��s this?”

  “A friend from the U.S. He told me he hung out at the bar when he wasn’t working and I…Please, I only just found out…” she embellished her ruse with a small, dry sob, “I have to talk to somebody who loved him as much as I did.”

  “Bloody hell.” There was a thunk. Over the sounds of the crowd, she heard, “Hey, Sam! Some sheila says…”

  Gay after all? Dinah wished she knew anything at all about Bryce Hambrick’s life, but then that was the point of this phone call.

  “Is that you, Mary Ann?” It was a woman, whiskey-voiced, brusque. “If I’d known your last name or your address, I’d have written you a letter.”

  Could it be she was unacquainted with Mary Ann? Dinah finessed it. “Bryce and I were supposed to meet in Darwin and take a trip into Kakadu National Park, but I arrived and, well, you know.”

  “I do know,” said the woman. “I know that you’re a liar and you’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve. Who are you and what do you want?”

  The penny dropped. “There isn’t a Mary Ann, is there?”

  “I’m Mary Ann and if he had anything on the side, I’d have murdered Bryce, myself.”

  “You and he were more than friends, then?”

  “Who wants to know and why?”

  Stumped for another lie, Dinah fell back on the truth. “My name’s Dinah Pelerin and I…”

  “You’re staying at the lodge where Desmond Fisher died.”

  “That’s right. How’d you know that?”

  “Friends where they count. Why’d you lie?”

  “Because I think I know who’s behind his murder, but I need some corroborating facts.”

  “And I’d need to know how you come into the business before I’d give you the time of day.”

  “I was dragged into the business because my family is under suspicion for Hambrick’s murder and Fisher’s, too. If you can tell me anything he may have said about the story he was working on or his itinerary or the people he talked to or planned to talk to…”

  “Fisher was murdered?”

  Dinah felt blindsided. First bitten by a lie, then by the truth. “Are you a reporter, Mary Ann?”

  “Mary Ann Becker of the Star. The police aren’t calling it murder. What do you know?”

  “Nothing yet. But I think I’m onto something important in Jabiru and if you’ll help me out, maybe I can get you an exclusive.”

  “You think the two murders are connected?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it you want and what do you have to barter?”

  Omitting names and specifics that might boomerang on her in three hundred point boldface in tomorrow’s headlines, Dinah bartered. “I think Bryce stumbled onto a drug smuggling operation.”

  “Drugs? Why haven’t the police homed in on this?”

  “They haven’t seen what I’ve seen,” answered Dinah.

  “Okay. Here’s the poop on Bryce. He was a political heretic, always looking for a pet cause to debunk or a pious halo to knock cock-a-hoop. The party line, anybody’s party line, he took as a personal challenge, a balloon he just had to pop. He twice won the Pringle for excellence in journalism, but he wasn’t a snob and he never was…” she broke off with a frog in her throat.

  Until now, Hambrick had been for Dinah an abstraction, the faceless victim of a ghastly murder, devoid of personality. Mary Ann’s little eulogy humanized him. She said, “It must be hard for you to talk about him.”

  “No use getting mawkish. But he would’ve hated to die like a character in a bloody Crocodile Dundee flick.” She laughed. “Although he did wear one of those hats with croc teeth on the hatband. At five feet four, he looked as if the croc had bitten off the top half and corked the rest for later, but Bryce thought it made him look less of a Pommie.”

  Endearing, but not the kind of poop Dinah had hoped to get. “And Bryce never mentioned anything or anyone that he might have been investigating in Arnhem Land?”

  “Not to me. He was there a couple of months ago doing a story on white poachers harvesting prime didgeridoo timber for mass production by non-Aborigines. Evidently, there’s quite a burgeoning global market. He came back complaining about Nigerian hustlers harassing the tourists. He said anyone not from Australia wouldn’t realize they weren’t Aborigines and might be taken in.”

  Dinah felt ill. “How did he know the hustlers were Nigerian?”

  “Oh, he’d spent a lot of time in Nigeria. He recognized the ritual scars of some tribe or other. Yoruba, I think it was.”

  Chapter Forty

  Had. Again. This time by a Nigerian. I must be setting some kind of a record, thought Dinah. She should’ve spotted Bill for a ringer. Too tall. Too gregarious. Too slick. And festooned with weird scars which should have been a dead giveaway. But no. She’d been so all-fired intent on proving her theory of the crime. All he had to do was bait the trap with an eyewitness and she walked right into it. Oh, yes, Bill. I’m staying at the Crocodile. Jerusalem, would she never learn?

  Who was he and what did he want from her? Was he just an opportunistic, unaffiliated con man attracted by her please-lie-to-me pheromones? One can arbitrage from the back of beyond. Ugh! But what was his racket? Was he selling bogus securities? Hawking faked Aboriginal art? Or was he Wendell’s henchman sent to retrieve the flash drive? And who was the man who’d followed her from Pine Creek? Were he and Bill in league?

  She laid the folded-up luggage rack sideways in the track of the sliding glass door to the balcony. The rack wasn’t quite long enough. She dismantled it, cutting the cloth with her nifty Swiss Army knife. The slats still weren’t quite long enough, but they would prevent the door being opened more than a few inches. She double-checked the main door chain and anchored the chair under the knob a little tighter. This, she lashed herself, this is what comes of not waiting. Of not going to Jacko when she had the chance.

  Should she call him right now, this instant, tell him she was scared and throw herself on his mercy? Maybe she should call the local police. Maybe she should call Wendell and tell him she’d already given the police his Flash Voyager. Once it was out of her hands, he had no reason to come after her.

  The shoot-em-up in the next-door room raged on. Each pop ricocheted through her nervous system until she felt as if she would jump out of her skin. She poured a gin and tonic, turned on her TV to drown out the sound, and surfed until she found the news. A mobile phone mogul had dropped dead on his morning walk in Melbourne. Australian Idol judge “Dicko” Dickson had made a disparaging remark to a contestant. A high-speed car chase in the Top End ended when two men hurled a stingray-barbed spear through the door of another car.

  She shuddered and killed the TV. Maybe if she read for a while…She felt the presence of her mother’s letter to Cleon almost like a physical ache. Why did she so dread knowing the truth? Wasn’t it what she’d wanted all along? Wasn’t the truth what everyone said they wanted? Yet now that it was within her grasp, Dinah wasn’t so sure. If the letter confirmed that her mother had been a party to Cleon’s crimes, could she still love her? Or would she feel forever estranged, the way she’d felt estranged from her father all these years?

  The shootout raged on. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, changed into her boxing croc nightshirt, and crammed cotton balls into her ears. Still waffling, she drifted over to the desk and took the letter out of the Manila envelope. Just holding it made her feel icky. Like a voyeur. She stuffed it back in the envelope and, by default, picked up K.D.’s journal and turned to the section on Wendell.

  Harbour Hotel, June 5th. He binges on potato chips when he thinks no one sees him and bites his fingernails to the quick. He went all misty when Daddy told us he didn’t want any sanctimonious words said over him. Later, I heard Daddy ask Mother if maybe Wendell’s having a breakdown. Mother said he’s just sad to be losing Daddy.

  Dinah gave a little salute to Cleon with her gin. He certainly knew how to tweak the lovers’ no
ses and make them squirm. She wondered if, in addition to cutting Wendell out of his will, he had opposed his takeover of the drug business. If he didn’t think Wen had the gumption to pull a fire alarm without a memo, maybe control of the operation had been supposed to pass to Fisher. But then, he thought Fisher had lost his rudder, too. Maybe he was bringing Seth on board to take the helm.

  June 6th. Sandra Faye called Wendell in the middle of dinner. She is a cliché, a total shrew of a wife. Wendell stepped away from the table, but we could all hear her bitching at him. I could see that Mother felt sorry for him. She wears her heart on her sleeve. I think she’ll depend on Wendell to help her manage Thad when Daddy’s gone. Wendell bribes him with expensive toys and tries to “relate,” but it only makes Thad act all the more off the Richter to get more out of him. I’m the only one who knows that Thad’s ADD is totally pseudo. He cons everybody, even his shrink. My brother will make Wendell his tool. Poor Wen. He’s pathetic.

  Dinah finished her gin, closed the book, and switched off the light. She lay wide awake in the dark for a long time. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed she was in a jet boat bounding across a stormy sea while being shot at by pirates. The shots that woke her whacked into the headboard a scant twelve inches from her right ear.

  Chapter Forty-one

  “Somebody shot me at me! Call the cops!”

  Quaking like a leaf, she hung up the phone, jumped into her clothes and edged around the room. The sliding glass door had been jimmied and opened about three inches. The shooter must have shinnied up one of the support posts under the balcony. The courtyard looked as eerily empty at 3:00 a.m. as it had at 10:00 p.m.

  She tried to light a cigarette, but her hands trembled too uncontrollably to work the lighter. She gave it up and turned on the TV. A man was talking about sheep shearing.