'Was it?' He scratched his head, picked up the empties and went to get another couple of stubbies. I thought about my own question. What had Sean done? He could be dealing in steroids and so on, I supposed, but I do not know of it. He was the gayest gay guy I knew. All the damning information about him that I personally have, started today. Yet he wouldn't be the first Jekyll and Hyde I've known. The only other incident was seeing him at the police station. Phil returned with the cold de-capped bottles.
'Games,' he stated. 'Games with our glorious youth.'
'I didn't know anything about it,' I lied with measured indignation.
'Yep. Paedophile rings, according to my boss,' the detective constable confided. 'International conspiracy.'
'Oh come on? Harmless dress-ups?' I showed incredulity. 'Anyway, I thought the Crank was the Drug War Specialist!'
'That is his reputation. But he is not fond of gays,' continued Philippoussis. 'I can assure you, no one where I work rearranged your trainer's features.' He clinked my drink with his own. I nodded and frowned, then looked up.
'You know an individual with the moniker Tiger Cat?' Which of the three of us had he been watching?
He stared at me, asked. 'What does she do?'
'Good question. Mischief-making is a bit of a specialty. But not well enough herself to have done it,' I suggested. 'Who else?'
'Actually, I have no identification on this one, but there is a freelance spook about the place. Federal I think, but could be an overseas agency. All very hush-hush.'
'The Cat is not your subtle type,' I murmured. He must have interviewed her along with the others at the barbecue. 'Did you see her this afternoon? In the carpark?'
'Big girl is she? Big mane?' The DC smiled.
'Curls, fair from the bottle, and yeah, I wouldn't call her small. Has she any contact with the Crank or your DI?' I asked, and added, 'Changed her hair colour today. Actually.'
He rubbed his face from cheek to eyebrow, forehead, other eyebrow, down to cheek, then squeezed his nose and mouth, a cogitative procedure. After it, he looked at me with deep brown eyes which could express either intense self-interest or ideological passion. 'It could have been her who did him over. Your trainer and her? I'm not sexist in this regard. I think they hurt each other in a little fisticuffs.'
Unconvinced, I shook my head, 'My money's on Sean.' I grinned, 'She is, indeed the victim of a bashing. But it doesn't relate.'
We were not exactly in a secure enough environment for me to share details of Maria's wake, but I didn't have to as he said, 'The Crank is getting me to drag the bucket on our dead boys. I wonder why.'
'Curious,' I commented. Had he seen the note on the door, and waited?
'Considering his vendetta on paedophilia, it is strange. The other death was just crazy teenage playing chicken with danger and not winning. I had another look at the site. The yellow Charger was travelling.'
'Was he licensed?' I asked, noting he had changed the focus, incidentally conveying that it was Sean in his sights.
'Yep. P plate. I am not so sure about him. Bit of a petunia in an onion patch. Went off the rails after his mother died. She topped herself, just one of your ordinary sad stories. Constable McKewan said, motherhood killed her. Maybe he wanted to die.' If my man was going to talk like this, I was going to buy him another drink. I went to the bar meditating on the change in Philippoussis. Previously he thought at least two of the three deaths were linked. Now Phil was separating them into units with altogether different motives, causes.
'McKewen, let me guess, is a woman,' I said as I put the beers on the table and sat down. 'Don't you think something else was going on any more?'
'Of course!' he flipped back into the Pip I knew. The dog on a scent, trusting hunches. 'Of course, there is more going on.'
'I meant to give you this,' I said as I dug in my bag. I placed the homoeopathic jar between us. 'Nux vomica. Don't go telling me there was no autopsy of my friend, Maria.'
He pocketed the medicine.
'Strychnine. Routine in a suspected drug overdose. They've sent hers down to Sydney. It's in the queue.' He pulled down the corners of his mouth. 'Results in a couple of weeks.'
'An OD? After I gave you the kettle and everything?' I thought I'd got the police off Maria's case.
He laughed. 'Yeah, well, analysis might be interesting, but it's hard to beat cane toads and such.'
Not sure what to make of him, I asked, 'Will there be an inquest? On either or both of the boys?'
'Has to be. But when?' He swilled his drink. 'Vital facts. Reports from chemistry unaccountably gone missing. Plus other stuff.'
'Like what?' I could imagine, videos of the crime scene, forensic bits and pieces, whatever other detectives working on the case discovered, records of interview.
DC Philippoussis was not in the inner circle of the boys' club. I could see that now. He was lonely.
He mused, 'There is always your regular, everyday disrespect of the individual, murder by a hundred cuts and all that. He was a mate of your neighbour's son, Hugh. Lucky Sunshine wasn't in the car with him. They were, apparently, together earlier in the evening. Car was stolen. Responsibility scattered by the fan, but the shit don't stick. On the other hand, someone could have killed Neil Waughan.'
'Is that what the Crank's trying to suppress? The forensic pharmacist is a cop, right?' He was losing me.
'Don't know if it's suppression. Or whether they actually can't identify the substance. I would like to be assigned to the deputy coroner, see if there is a case for bunching the deaths together. Depends on what magistrate they get. Whether we have a full and fair inquiry, or a cover-up. Got to dance around in the ring for a while,' he said decisively.
'What do the medical certificates give as primary cause? Primary, secondary, related? Toxicology report?' I felt I was his partner, slipping into old ways. How long was he going to keep playing this game with me? Perversely, I did not mention the material I'd printed from Neil's computer.
'That is just it,' he said. 'Secondary cause, related conditions don't add up. You know fifty per cent of death certificates don't tally with how the person died. Primary cause, natural, heart stopped,'
Philippoussis gathered up the empties, and asked, 'One for the road?'
I nodded. We were both drinking more than was sensible, but why not?
'Where are the drugs on the list?' I queried conversationally as he sat down and we attended to the next beer.
'My own questions exactly. But, leave it son, go down to the marina, get lists on arrivals, departures, locals,' he quoted his boss. 'What is this guy on about? Paperwork disappearing. Putting me on wild goose chases after mariners. Do you know how many boats are moored in this harbour?'
'No, but I would be interested if you found anything odd.'
He shrugged, 'I could have done it by phone.' Indicating both keyboard and the Yellow Pages with his fingers walking and tapping on the table, he continued, 'The coroner's inquiry is the best bet for digging out the truth. I want to investigate, but unless I can work with the lawyers, there is no chance of an independent investigation.'
'What is the Crank's problem?' I asked rhetorically. 'Anyone better than you for the job? Working with the deputy coroner I mean?'
He sighed. 'They like to go with someone who has done it before. Maybe I look too ambitious. I need a homicide investigation under my belt. He knows that.'
'Too ambitious,' I repeated and raised my eyebrows. 'You don't want to give your senior officer any indication of your suspicions?'
'About him? Are you kidding?' The young detective constable was in a dicky position.
'No, I know what slime is like. You step in it. You smell it. But it slides away,' I reasoned. 'Once you know someone's shifty, you don't want to give them facts they can twist around and about to make their fabrications believable.'
'In a nutshell. If I can get onto the inquest team I owe my allegiance to the justice system. The pathologist is paid by the Health D
epartment. If he smells a rat and the corruption can be traced to bigwigs in—' he paused. 'We could have an independent assessment here.'
I drank along with him, 'You want the magistrate to recommend suspicious circumstances?'
Encouraged, he agreed, 'I want the beaks interested. They were, after all, "accidental" deaths. The mortuary guys are bloody slack. They faxed the cause to the station. Do you know where I got it?'
'Nope,' I replied, feeling slightly drunk.
'Out of the fucking wastepaper basket,' he swore.
'And?'
'The doctors at that hospital are so damned tired, they're guessing. Blame the kids. These particular kids, who's going to look at malpractice?'
'You didn't believe the report? The death certificates?' I rode along with his indignation, his idealism.
'On the button. And I don't know why exactly. Related conditions, narcotics. Primary cause, bang on the head, crushed chest, secondary car accident. Primary cause for the Waughan boy, systems failure, sugar shock, secondary drugs, no diabetes et cetera in related conditions. Heart attack. Blah de blah, scribble.'
'Alcohol?' I gestured with my bottle.
'The scapegoat. Neither boy was drunk.' Philippoussis was now talking freely. 'My hope is the legal investigator is worth his salt.'
'Or her salt,' I corrected. 'Who is the deputy coroner?'
'It hasn't happened. The bodies are lying there in the mortuary and nothing is happening. If I can bring up the possibility of suicide, the magistrate has to be involved. That's my angle at the moment.' He finished his drink. 'Right Margot, got to go. You ready?'
I shook my head, 'No, mate, I'll walk back to my car. Clear my head. Get back to me, and hey, Phil, I'm a tomb. Let me know when you're on to it full-time.'
'Yeah. Intelligence-based policing, ain't it a joke?' he said as he left me sitting there.
With a sick smile, I waved him off. I hadn't told Philippoussis about the word, 'murderer', written in lipstick, being washed off by Sean Dark, but that could wait. And he hadn't picked up on my interest in the yachties.
The phone at the edge of the bar had caught my eye and I knew I wanted to ring Chandra as soon as possible. She was home. Some kind of amber light was flashing in the street map of my brain. Instinctive caution. I still felt queasy. Harbour news. Dates. I asked her if she could print out all the boat-stuff Alison sent from Neil's computer to hers. It would be interesting to see the material Philippoussis collected on the Crank's orders, but I did not want to help the Commander in case Phil's hunch was right and he was sending him off on a parallel scent that would lead nowhere but look good in court.
Ants climb into the butter again. Coming home from work, Cybil finds they have dug a hole in the fresh bread roll as well. Tiny, miserable brown ants, hunting around the griller, even in the oven, tracking like coolies along the landscape of walls and benches, appear as if born on the spot. Armies of conscientious creatures doing her cleaning for her are Cybil's enemy. Her flat is as grotty as inside her car, a shiny garbage bin on wheels. She feels a repugnance for herself, a shame. About the only thing which relieves this feeling is washing and polishing the duco. Generally after that she is too weary to attack the less glamorous task. Even if she would spend money on a cleaner she won't bring in someone who will judge her. Her bed is four-posted with genuine feather mattress and pillows, silken sheets and a mosquito tent. Her scented focus. The habit of cleaning is not ingrained; rather, for Cybil, it is a rare hysterical exercise in which lots of stuff is chucked out and flowers are bought to top it off.
Relationships with women confuse Cybil Crabbe. She wants an assistant. Mummy was Daddy's servant, or vice versa, depending on the job. Her parents, she suddenly realises, related by ordering each other around all the time. The measure of love equals the measure of compliance. Cybil had a happy childhood: she ordered harshly or she sweetly complied. All the family agrees on the importance of money and themselves as having a right to it, by fair means or foul, for instance, evading tax. Thus conversation in the one-child adult home is often of loopholes. Mummy and Daddy are partners in business, Crabbe & Crabbe, which was not a shop, a factory or an office. It bought property and ran at a loss. Daddy worked daily for a firm in the City and Mummy never went there. Cybil was not spoilt. Mummy and Daddy were strict, understanding the emotional dangers in her being an only child. Parents should not over-compensate with too many toys. Presents were rewards. Obedience was rewarded. The whole domestic structure was a balance of power relations.
Mummy, Cybil remembers, did have household help, a very old woman who was given a gift at Christmas, who, otherwise, discreetly came and went on a Wednesday when Cybil was at school and Mummy having her hair done before going to her bridge afternoon. As for herself, Mrs Crabbe flicked around the living areas with a feather-duster, screamed 'Take those things to your room!' and invested in a freezer, dish-washer, microwave as soon as they came onto the market. Cybil cannot remember seeing her operate the vacuum cleaner. The stronger recall is the make, Electrolux, and what the shares were worth. All a happy ordered life where the ledgers and the journals neatly tallied matched totals and god was in his heaven, until Cybil's secondary sex characteristics began to appear. At first Mummy was overjoyed by her little breasts and her early periods. After a couple of years, she began and kept mentioning how thick her knees and ankles were, and would always be. Cybil's legs are tree trunks. Nothing could have repulsed Mrs Crabbe more because it would never matter how slim her daughter kept herself, shapeless was shapeless. She had inherited her father's legs, but it was of no consequence on a man. In Mummy's moments of husband-hatred, she blamed herself for marrying him. As it happened, Cybil did not keep herself thin, she developed a big bottom and a certain coarse cheek to go with it. She ate chocolate when she was depressed.
Right now Cybil wishes that there was someone she could scream at about the mess. She has the words. She has the passion. She is, at heart, a perfectionist. She wouldn't mind rewarding later in the big soft bed with all the sexy wiles at her finger-tips and measured enthusiasm timed to mutual consummation. Cybil needs someone to talk to. She shoves a few things aside and finds her phone. She rings Mummy. They go through the litany of petty disasters that happen in the general course of events. 'Daddy is going senile, he left his milk boiling until the whole stove was a massive job and the saucepan had to be thrown out.'
'Is he really?' Cybil makes room on the lounge for Puddles, and lies back.
'Well, he is still catching the train at eight forty-three a.m. But they don't need him at the firm,' her mother's voice drips with contempt.
Mummy has a few sharp words to say about her bridge companions, especially the scorer who will never give up the pad even though she has to hang about four sets of spectacles around her neck and tries each of them on before she finds her reading glasses. Cybil has a rich laugh. Her mother amuses her. She will never be like her, god forbid. She responds with the catastrophes that have befallen her at work, and mentions in passing that a young lad had been murdered just after she had been speaking to him. Not that she knows it's murder, she just has to make it awful for Mummy to groan, to comment, to express her prejudices, so Cybil can be reassured that she is not like her mother. She tells her that he was dressed in girl's clothes. As Cybil recalls the hard surprise and the delicious climax she experienced rubbing the tip of his penis on her wet clitoris, her mother goes on about the teenagers in her local shopping mall staring at her waiting to bag-snatch her purse and how untrustworthy the Vietnamese and Turkish ones are.
'How do you know they're Turkish? Why not Lebanese?' Cybil herself does not feel racism. She grew up in a multicultural urban Australia. It is the nature of the nation and the food is the best in the world. You could choose any ethnic dish you liked and in the cities all you have to do is go out and have the real people cook it for you. She can tell the difference between a Korean and Chinese face. Listening to her mother makes her nostalgic for city-living. She says she ha
s to go now.
Love-hate is the taste in her mouth as she replaces the receiver. At times when she feels the most passion for her, she hates Virginia. The Achilles heel of her sensitive heart, the uncompromisingly long fit limbs of her youthful fifty-year-old body, the foreign female independence, the lack of convention in her thinking, constantly surprises her, not always pleasantly. Combined with her pathetic need for affirmation, probably a class thing, or for support in her creative endeavours, which Cybil sees as a waste of time, the vulnerability is complete in itself, not for trade, does not fit in the tit and tat of rewards and punishments. It sits up like a victim and says, kick me, which Cybil did. Fuck me.
Which she does, with small satisfaction, because it doesn't alter the transaction. Virginia is not vindictive. Cybil gave her so much reason to be and she surrendered her pride. She wants Virginia to punish her. She says to her poodle, 'How can she when she doesn't know?' Cybil feels she has blown it with Virginia. If not now, later. The grapevine will put her with the dead boy, eventually. The joy of breaking taboos in clandestine secrecy deserts her. Cybil cannot imagine Virginia forgiving her. Virginia's righteousness would identify the transgression piteously.
Cybil, eyeing her phone, considers ringing Margot Gorman. Confession was always fun, sitting back watching the consequences, the drama of disaster. Instead of thinking about the fate of the lad, Cybil talks out her confusion to her dog.
'Bugger Virginia. Why she does love me? It is too pure, too idealistic. It makes me puke now that I turned myself inside out trying to hide my real self and think up words that sounded smart. Virginia's artwork is insanity. My mind was saying as my eyes were straying, where's the money in that? It is so remote even the land lesbians haven't seen it. She is wonderful. She is older. She has a tight bum and every muscle in her body stands out a little bit. She exists on cloud fucking nine. Doing a sculpture that no one will see, on a filthy black log the loggers left to rot. She showed it to me as if it were a beautiful thing, and it repulsed me. I just looked and shrugged and pretended I couldn't see as I wondered how my legs were going to carry me through the horrendous dripping jungle out of there. She blushed. Dig that! Blushed. She did not disclaim her work, which was what I was angling for, she cast those fucking deep eyes at me and shook her head. Then shepherded me down the hill, holding my hand when I stumbled over rocks and cooked me a great dinner. I could only be horrible. I can't control my fate. Does she know I am scared when I put a power look in my eyes that says, you dare? I don't believe she can still love me. Me? I mean it's the big league. That's what attracted me at the start, big league separatism, what was it about. At the party at the beach I could romance this sweet young thing into the bushes and do it. None of us knew her sex. What a fuck! But Virginia will call a spade a spade.' Cybil hates goody-goody stuff, and wonders if Virginia will ever ask her. 'Had I taken the young trannie into the bushes and done it? Where is the fun in that? If only he hadn't died afterwards!'
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