“Such is the life of crime,” I said ruefully. “Okay, last one there’s a bare-arsed monkey’s uncle.”
Juliet gave a derisive snort and bounded backwards out of the parking lot with a shriek of burning rubber. Clean in mind and body, but a fiend behind the wheel. I was glad I had my own ride, even though the snooty nouveaux riches of Williamstown would look down their long noses at my graffed side panels.
§
I wondered if we should stop at the house anyway to pick up beach towels. I fished out the phone and thought of calling Juliet on her mobile, but couldn’t remember the number. Since it was Mauricio’s mobile phone he’d surely have her number in his directory, but I tried JUL and nothing came up. I spelled it out completely, thumb jumping; nothing. What the hell was his childhood pet name for her? Dolly? Doolly? Nothing worked. I threw the damned thing back in the glove box with the Split Enz’ Gold Collection CD, mint fresheners and Kleenexes.
We veered left into the long, increasingly prosperous curve of The Strand. Speed bumps slowed us a bit. At the far end, past the fishing boats and Sunday strollers on the grass, her Holden swung off the road into a parking lot above Shelley Beach with a stand of discreet bushes and a pair of handsome pebble-encrusted public amenities. Not so much changing rooms as undressing rooms. Unlike my poor Cobra, the walls of the men’s block were surprisingly free of graffiti.
We walked side by side past the rock pools and broken shells, and the handful of naturists reading fat blockbusters and the Sunday Age carefully failed to look at us. Nakedness was simply too ordinary to these jaded folks, you could tell. Well, except for one skinny teenager who blushed an improbable red all down his shoulders and chest when I stared fiercely at him for ogling Juliet. You couldn’t blame him. I had to hold my shirt wadded in front of me as we crabbed down the crab grass to the crushed shells, cigarette butts and mild lapping waves. No surf here except when a storm whipped things up. I dropped the clothes and ran as fast as I could into the water, bellyflopping and getting salty water up my nose.
The thing in the portable cooler, resting in a Ziploc plastic baggie on fuming dry ice, was a severed tongue. A camel’s tongue, I was fairly sure.
Someone had found the poor brute by the side of the road and hacked out its tongue. And then the prick had persuaded Maeve to hide the disgusting thing in my U Store It locker.
I spat salt water, fuming myself, and slammed butterfly through the low waves until my head rang with exertion and my blood pounded. When my anger ebbed, I turned and looked back a long way to the white and green shore. A condom floated past me, bobbing like some primitive life form. Anti-life form in fact. Ah well. I held my breath and swam back toward my beautiful naked childless wife.
§
I sipped at my martini, gazing west across water turned bloody and golden in alternating ripples. A cool breeze was rising over Port Phillip Bay, coming pretty much straight up from Antarctica and across the mass of Tasmania before being diverted left around the corner at Point Gellibrand. That was enough to take its chill off, but it was still a reminder that winter was not so many months away. In Seattle it was probably cooler and danker, even with summer up ahead hot on the heels of spring. But then my memories of Seattle were not that cheerful.
A polite waiter hovered. “Your table is ready, sir.”
I offered Juliet my arm and we went inside, where lots of gleaming golden timber held intimate tables clad in clean white heavy tablecloths. Large wine glasses waited for us, also gleaming modestly. I could smell food, and the smell was good. So was the salty smell of my wife’s sun-dried hair. I tried to ignore that.
A gilded youth brought us crusty warm bread and small bowls of dips. I absently shoveled dip into my face and opened the menu. “My god, this is the first proper thing I’ve eaten since last night.”
“You’re getting a bit tubby anyway,” Juliet said.
I sucked in my gut, outraged. “Me? I can do fifty Turkish pushups with one arm. I can hold a bridge for—”
“You’re allowed,” she told me placidly. “It’s like my reading glasses. The long slow slide down mortality’s hill has begun. Part of nature’s order.”
I muttered mutinously and gestured the waiter over. “For starters I’ll have a dozen Coffin Bay oysters, and so will she. Kilpatrick. Then we’ll share the mixed seafood plate, with the crab.” Good Christ, what was I thinking? That was a hundred and fifty bucks for the main course. Oh well, what the fuck, it was just paper. Or plastic. A man had to eat.
“My husband may eat what he wishes,” Juliet told the waiter. “I shall have the Barramundi fillet, and a green salad. And a bottle of chilled Perrier water.”
The bumptious little prat said, “Sorry, sir, so for your main course that will be—?”
“Just bring me a bloody steak.”
“A very rare steak, yes, sir.”
“No, you nitwit. I’ll have a bloody standard Australian medium-rare steak, with roast potatoes and beans and a bottle of tomato sauce.”
The waiter blenched, wrote the order with a trembling hand, and stalked back to the kitchen.
“You’re so beautiful when you’re angry,” Juliet told me. “You’re not really going to eat it with ketchup are you?”
“Oh shut up.” I stared at my clenched fists. “You’re going to help me work this out, Jules. My kid’s mixed up in something horrible, and bad bastards are fucking with my life from three different directions, someone mutilated a fucking innocent camel for Christ’s sake, by the side of the highway, and, and—”
She nodded in an understanding way. “Your personal feng shui is shot to shit.”
I took a deep breath, opened my mouth, choked deep at the back of my throat, and started to laugh. I couldn’t stop. It rolled out of me in waves. Tears poured down my cheeks. After a second or two Juliet started up as well, her high peals ringing in the ceiling of Pelicans Landing. The other couples and small groups of patrons stared at us with evident mixed feelings, a few frowning, more smiling, a couple of contagious giggles. The waiter moved toward us. A fat jowly man in the far corner started to guffaw, watching Juliet with bright liquid blue eyes, face red with apoplectic laughter. He held his fork with its tined white fish tight in his grip, elbow propped on the tablecloth, and roared.
It subsided in fits and starts throughout the restaurant. After awhile I blew my nose with a stertorous snort. Juliet went away to the women’s room to repair her face. I beckoned the waiter. “Sorry about that, old son. It’s been a day.”
“Not a worry, mate.”
I decided on a larger tip than usual.
“Steak’s on its way. Would you care to see the wine list?”
“You’re a champion. Let’s throw caution to the winds,” I said, and ordered a bottle of chilled Wolf Blass Gold label chardonnay for the oysters and fillet, and to accompany my honest beef a nicely warmed and breathing bottle of 1920s’ Block shiraz from Bailey of Glenrowan. Another hundred bucks, near enough, and well worth it.
§
As I sawed through my meat, late afternoon light fell through the red wine like...well, like the charged blood of a sugar-laden and doomed camel. Laughter exhausted, my mouth quirked in guilt, despite myself. I hadn’t explained to Juliet about the camel. I hadn’t told her about Share, either. Not that there was any reason to. Our marriage didn’t work that way.
No. Be honest. Our marriage just plain didn’t work.
“Glenrowan,” I said, nodding at the shiraz. “Sure you won’t have a glass?”
“Just half a glass of the white.”
Was I meant to hang about for the waiter to do it? Bugger that. I glugged her glass to the three-quarters point. “I was headed out that way yesterday before I got diverted into a cemetery, as one does. Cheers, my dear.”
We clinked our glasses.
“Good health and plenty of it. Kelly country?”
“Bushranger country. Makes me proud to be a criminal.”
My pa
l the waiter came back after a time with the dessert card. “We’ll have the Macadamia Nut Tart,” I decided. “Lashings of ice cream and whipped cream. This red’s damned good. My compliments to the sommelier.”
“He’ll have that,” Juliet said pleasantly. “None at all for me today, thank you.”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
She gave him a dazzling smile in recompense. “We poor women-folk have to keep an eye on our figure, you know.”
“You’re doing very nicely at it.”
My mood hardened again. Pushing your luck, chum, I thought but did not say. Juliet found me lovable but crass. She had always found me crass, even when I tried my damnedest to adopt the smooth bullshit and contrived claptrap her adopted class went in for. Apparently their rules had been handed down from God Almighty or someone similarly placed rather than, as you might think, from some clique of indolent wankers with nothing better to do. It was one reason we no longer lived together. Damn, damn, damn.
“Shall we take a turn along the foreshore,” I asked her in my most debonair manner, signing a name on the check and adding a sizeable tip. When I was a kid that was still un-Australian, tipping. The custom seems to have spread here from the United States where the poor buggers are paid starvation wages and make up the difference in gratuities if they’re lucky or pretty or deft at their job. Not that I knew this from experience. They’d grabbed me at the airport, I went to jail without passing go, and then got flown home a year and a half later pretty much the same way. The waiter beamed. In less friendly places he’d have curled his lip anyway and marched off in an attitude of lordly hauteur.
§
Juliet came downstairs at John Street in ravishing white silk pajamas and clip-clopping flip-flops. Those one-toed rubber items used to be called thongs in Australia, until the term acquired a naughtier meaning overnight. Movies. MTV. DVDs. It’s a global village all right. I hear they’re thinking of changing the name of this State from Victoria to Victoria’s Secret.
I sat at the living room table where she’d jacked the laptop into a cable socket and fed a transformer power line from a wall point so I didn’t run Cookie’s battery down. I’d been jotting notes on the back of defaced paper from the fax machine that had been hijacked as usual by spam advertisers. Why do they bother, the dumb fucks? Don’t they know it drives you mad with resentment? You wake up to find your in-tray full of their shit, printed on your paper with your ink at your expense. Meanwhile it leaves the machine useless for the one real message you’ve been waiting for. Yeah, right, I’ll be sure to rush and buy my insurance and electronic wheel balancing from you jackasses.
I bit the end of the biro and nodded to my unattainable wife.
“Just going for a last glass of milk before I clean my teeth and get some shut-eye,” she said brightly. “Can I bring you anything from the kitchen?”
“I’ll make myself some coffee later, sweetie. Unless it’s decaf.”
“It’s decaf.”
“Damn. Do you want me to come up and tuck you in?” She frowned just a little. “You’re not going to be difficult.”
“Certainly not.” I flung up my hands, and the biro flew across the room over my shoulder. I let it lie on the polished floorboards where it fell. “A gentleman never forces his intentions.”
“Attentions,” she said. “I trust.”
“That’s what I meant.”
The screen held three opened windows, none of them my rap sheets. Two were Excel spreadsheets Cookie had prepared for Vinnie, row upon rank of the names and starting prices of three-legged nags. Well, not all of them were spavined dogmeat waiting to be canned, some at least could canter across the finishing line in third, second or even first position. But those horses tended to be the favorites and would earn little more than the punters had laid out. So they were not greatly favored by Vinnie’s sporting men and women, who preferred some edge in their investment. Linked to that tedious flood of data entries were the names and phone details of the sporting men and women foolish enough to have a flutter on their promise and dubious enough not to wish to place their bets with the official totalizator service at Taberet. Mostly it was the same few names, Vinnie’s established and aging clientele. I had decided to work my way doggedly through them anyway, see if anything of a cluelike nature might be secreted away in the records.
So far no luck.
“What the hell’s this thing doing here?”
“What thing?”
“The Esky in my kitchen. Have you got to the stage where you need to lug a dozen cold beer cans wherever you go?”
Was I putting her in danger, having it here? But who knew I was in Williamstown, other than Jules herself?
“It’s not beer,” I said. “Just shove it back under the bench for the moment, will you? Don’t open it, there’s dry ice in it.”
The third window was more interesting. Betting on the camel races in Dubai and Jenadriyah is strictly forbidden by Islamic law, although Google told me there were ways around that for those attending the festivities. Door prizes, for one thing. You could drive home in a new BMW to go with your other BMWs and Hummers. The animals themselves were worth decent dough, a hundred kay wasn’t unusual for a good racing camel, and they raced a whole lot of them at once on their twelve-mile track. But of course, human nature being what it is, the blessed injunctions of the Prophet sometimes fell on deaf ears as long as the wicked could cover themselves with the anonymizing cloak of the global Internet.
Cookie had got herself into the black gambling scene in a big way. Nor was she the first.
I clicked through some more pages, winding my way into the maze. I hardly noticed Juliet pad by with her mug of warm milk and that’s saying something for my concentration. I did notice when she paused, bent down, kissed me quickly on the cheek.
“Goodnight, Lochinvar. Try to get some sleep.”
“The decaf should do the trick.”
Amused, she hummed in my ear, withdrew. “I’m off first thing in the morning, I’ll leave you the spare key. Don’t forget to take your mysterious Esky away with you, it’s lowering the tone.”
I grunted and turned but she was away already and up the stairs. With a sigh I went back to the nest of snakes on the screen. Our friend Felix Culpepper and his associates were evidently in play, and in a big way, if you read between the lines. Probably I wouldn’t have seen anything between the lines except bland white pixels if it hadn’t been for Culpepper’s ham-fisted kidnapping of his youthful and unwieldy new-technology rival. Anxiety and greed can make people do truly stupid things. Look at me and Seattle.
I went to the kitchen and drank two long glasses of water from the jug in the fridge. It tasted faintly of its floating slice of lemon. My head was whirring a little from the bottle and a half of excellent wine. Bottle and two thirds. Well, minus the half glass Juliet had sipped, two full bottles. But I have the constitution of a horse, and not the sort Vinnie’s punters favor. I put my head under the sink faucet for a time. It washed the salt out of my hair and left it fresh and manageable. There was no hand towel handy so I scrubbed my skull with a Flopsy Bunny tea towel, and threw it in the corner. God damn. I badly needed help. I went upstairs and knocked on Jules’ door.
“Oh Christ, Tom.” She didn’t open it, so I snicked it an inch. It was dark inside. “If you insist on acting the goat, you can bloody well just fuck off.”
“Julie,” I said through the crack, “it’s not that. Scout’s honor and hope to die.”
After a long moment I heard her smother a laugh and sit up. “Oh for God’s sake, come in. You’re such a child sometimes.”
“I was deprived of childhood,” I explained, and sat on the end of the bed chastely at a distance from my wife. “I was denied the breast.”
“You’re denied it now.”
“I know, I know. Jules, I have to talk to somebody about this. It’s beyond the power of my small and brain-damaged mind.”
“How flattering.” She flicked o
n the bedside lamp, hitched an embroidered pillow behind her. “If you’d been staying at Mum’s place, I suppose you’d have crept into her room for a chinwag at midnight.”
“Your sainted mother would not understand my problem,” I said. “If she did understand, she would not approve.”
“My sainted mother does not approve of anything, but you and bloody Mauricio and the other two morons don’t make it easy for her to expand her mental horizons. Tell me about the camel.”
“How did you know about the camel?”
“Well, Master Sherlock, I was listening to the news yesterday, and besides you mentioned the poor thing during your meltdown at dinner.”
“Oh. Yes. All right.” I told her about Sharon Lesser and loading up poor Nile Fever with sugar and the flying Saudi prince and his crashing machine. I told her about the kidnapping of Share’s step-daughter and the threat to her life and limb—
“Oh, it’s Share, is it?”
“That’s what she calls herself, Jules. What am I, the name police?”
“Is she a good fuck?”
“I can’t remember. Anyway, that’s not your business any more, is it?” I was thrilled that she cared, and maintained an attitude of lofty indifference to throw her off the trail.
“You can’t remember? Tom, you’re such a romantic.”
“Are you playing or not?”
“‘You Be the Detective’? Or ‘You Be the Race Doper’?” “Either should do the trick. I do hope I’m not trampling on your ethics, Juliet.”
“Shut up, you. Now.” She settled back against the cushion, adopted a thoughtful expression. I knew she had the brain for it. The question was whether she had the stomach. I wasn’t sure I had. “Let’s work backwards. How did Share, that middle-class minx, know about your doping expertise? Answer: Annabelle told her.”
“I certainly hope so. Either that or Vinnie, or Vinnie’s squeeze Mrs. Murphy, who we can’t rule out because Maeve’s the one who carried the murder weap—”
“Slow down, Euclid. Step by step.” She glanced at the clock and gritted her white perfect teeth. “I hope we can crack the case in time for me to get to sleep before one o’bloody clock.”
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