I stepped into the bedroom doorway. What I saw is fixed forever in my mind.
Eastlake had his back to me. He was bending slightly at the waist, one arm thrust out rigidly in front of him. Fiona Lambert was beside the bed, one knee on the floor as if genuflecting. She’d been showering. Again. A very hygienic girl. Her hair was half-dried and she had a pale yellow towel wrapped around her body. One hand was clutching it closed. The other was raised to her cheek, touching a blazing red welt. Her eyes were as big as dinner plates and she was doing her effortless best to look tremendously contrite. A shattered jar oozed moisturising cream onto the carpet.
On the bed was the bright pink Karlcraft shoe box. Its lid was off. The money was back in its banded bundles, neatly stacked. Spread out beside the box was a painted canvas, the edge frayed from where it had been cut from its stretcher. A red-brick suburban dream home. Blue sky.
Eastlake jabbed his extended hand towards it. ‘Look at it!’ he ordered. ‘It’s perfect. You’d be a laughing stock if I hadn’t done what I did.’
But her eyes were turning towards the door. Eastlake spun around, his arm still extended. In his hand was a gun. The gun from the glove compartment of the Mercedes. He stuck it in my chest.
The gun had crossed my mind as I ran up the stairs. I thought Spider was reaching across to the glove compartment to get it. For some reason, Eastlake and the gun were an association I had simply not made. Guns were for bodyguards, bank robbers, cops. Committee-chairing, well-suited Melbourne businessmen didn’t go packing firepower. Not even homicidal ones. Wrong again, Murray.
‘You!’ accused Eastlake. Me, the guy who kept turning up like a bad penny. Me, the interfering busybody he’d last seen disappearing over a second-storey balcony. He looked at me like I was an apparition. ‘You.’
As if to confirm that I was flesh and blood, he prodded me in the chest with the barrel of his Smith amp; Wesson. His Black amp; Decker. His Gulf amp; Western. Whatever the fuck it was, my Dali-esque candelabra had met its match. I let it slip to the floor.
Back at the Karlcraft Centre, Eastlake had been hyped-up and homicidal. But his actions had a certain logic. Criminal, but rational. He was disposing of a potential threat. Now, he’d come completely uncorked. The windows to his soul were wide open and the view was not a pleasant one. Like a tantrum-wracked child who could neither believe how far he’d gone nor conceive of how to get back, he was simultaneously thrilled and appalled by his own behaviour. A disconcerting combination of emotions in a man with a gun against your chest at point-blank range.
Even as Eastlake’s berserk eyes locked onto me, Fiona Lambert saw her opportunity. She began to come up off her bent knee, backing away. As she rose, she reached out to steady herself against the edge of the bed. Her towel slipped to the floor, exposing her nakedness. Instinctively, she snatched up the canvas from the bed and covered herself. It was an odd moment for modesty and there was an almost coquettish aspect to the gesture, as if she hoped that her vulnerability might offer her some defence.
It didn’t. Eastlake, reacting to her movement, swung the gun around. Fiona cowered back, raising the picture in front her body protectively, as if to shield herself from his sight. At exactly that moment, Eastlake fired.
An explosive crack reverberated through the confined space. The bullet punched a neat round hole straight through the front door of Our Home. Fiona Lambert staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, the painting draped over her face, covering her head. Her naked body twitched and went limp. It was stark white against the black sheets. Colour co-ordinated to the last.
Eastlake’s hand jerked at the recoil and I lunged forward. I caught him in mid-turn and the barrel of the gun twisted upwards. It went off again and blew the top off his head. Blood and brains went everywhere.
The two reports echoed in my ears. The smell of cordite filled my nostrils. Eastlake was still on his feet, the gun still in his hand. He sort of teetered. I was moving backwards, partly reeling from the scene before me, partly being dragged from behind. The gun hit the floor and Eastlake crumpled like a wet rag.
Then I was stumbling backwards down the passageway. Spider Webb was dragging me by the collar. ‘Far canal,’ he said. He didn’t hear any argument from me. Perhaps twenty seconds had elapsed since I’d entered the flat.
From the direction of the street came the wail of an approaching siren. Spider released me and ran into the living room. He looked out the window, cursed, then dashed out the front door. I drooped against the passage wall, shitless.
A low moan came wafting out of the bedroom. With my back pressed against the wall, I sidled up to the doorway and peeked around the corner. The gun came into sight, half covered by Eastlake’s inert torso. The moan happened again. It was coming from behind the painting. I stepped over Eastlake, flicked the gun away with the toe of my shoe and raised the punctured canvas.
A gory furrow started at the bridge of Fiona Lambert’s nose and ran the length of her forehead, parting her hairline. Her eyelids, caked with blood, fluttered. Her mouth goldfished. She moaned again. The bullet had only grazed her. She’d need a lot of aspirin and a very good cosmetic surgeon, but she’d live. She also had great tits. Pity she wasn’t my type.
Sliding an arm under her shoulder, I propped her limp white body upright. The shoe box lay beneath her. A hundred thousand dollars. It didn’t look like much any more. I propped Fiona up with a pillow, scooped up the box, dashed into the bathroom and dropped it into the laundry basket. ‘Noel,’ I called. ‘Come quick. She’s still alive.’
Footfalls thundered up the stairs. A small dog yapped germanically in the distance. I settled Fiona Lambert’s head in my pee-drenched lap and pressed the towel to her brow. Suddenly, the room was full of men, some of them in uniform. The one named Detective Constable Micaelis was calling Spider ‘sir’.
I sat in the living room on Fiona Lambert’s white sofa in my pissy pants and bloodied shirt and waited my turn, watching sundry coppers traipse through the front door and listening to their cryptic confabs. Apart from the odd glance, most of them paid me so little attention I might as well have been part of the furniture. A couple of classic plain-clothes types wandered in at one point and had a cursory sniff at the fittings and fixtures. ‘Now that’s what I call art,’ one of them said. He was looking at the Szabo above the mantel, young Fiona in the buff.
The real thing was in the bedroom being worked on by an ambulance crew. We’d propped her up and the bleeding had pretty well stopped by the time the paramedics arrived. She was in deep shock, they said. I wasn’t feeling too well myself.
I scrounged a coffin nail from one of the dicks and was just lighting up when Fiona was helped out the front door, held up by the armpits. They’d put a bandage around her head and got her into a bathrobe. She was almost walking, but she wasn’t talking and she didn’t look at all glamorous. Spider and Micaelis went downstairs with her, then came back inside a couple of minutes later. Micaelis did the talking.
‘How ya doing?’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll need a statement, eh? How about you accompany Detective Senior Sergeant Webb to the station, while I make sure Ms Lambert gets to the hospital, okay?’
‘Sure.’ It wasn’t like I had much choice. ‘But I need to call my son first.’ Red’s flight was at nine-twenty and it was already seven o’clock. Micaelis looked to Spider for confirmation. ‘I wouldn’t want to be done up for child neglect,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Webb.’
Spider pointed his chin towards the phone. ‘Make it quick.’
‘And I’d like to do something about this.’ I stood up and framed my crotch with open palms. ‘My thighs are starting to chafe.’ Micaelis didn’t think it necessary to refer that one up the chain of command. I smelled worse than the back of the grandstand at the Collingwood football ground. ‘Use the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Make it quick.’
Tarquin answered the phone at the Curnows’. ‘Something’s come up,’ I told Red when he eventually came on the line. ‘See if L
eo can find the spare key to our place, pack your bag and wait for me. Sorry about this.’
‘No worries,’ Red said, the voice of experience. I’d been late before. We’d still managed to get to the airport on time. It was only forty-five minutes away. Thirty-five with a tail wind and a good run at the lights.
Leo came on the line and I repeated what I’d just told Red. ‘Can do,’ he said. Faye was still at work and he was feeding the kids. ‘You don’t happen to know where Faye keeps the lettuce, do you?’
I went down the hall and looked in the bedroom door. Eastlake was still on the floor. He wouldn’t have to worry about his bald patch any more. A woman cop was standing on the bed with a camera, getting an overhead shot. What with five detectives plus their reflections in the mirrored wardrobe door, it looked very crowded in there.
The bathroom was immediately opposite. Stripping off my pants and underpants, I turned on the tap and started sponging myself with one of Fiona’s fluffy towels. I could see the cops behind me in the mirror. Spider looked across and saw me standing there bare-arsed in my shirt-tails. ‘What is this?’ he said, reaching over to pull the door shut. ‘A fucking nudist colony?’
I grabbed the pink shoe box out of the laundry basket and stepped into the toilet cubicle. The box contained ten bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each about two and a half centimetres thick-an inch in the old dispensation. One thousand pictures of a man in a grey ski mask.
My jocks were in a pretty deplorable state. Pulling them back on was not a pleasant experience. I distributed the cash evenly around the waistband. It bulged a little, but at least it was dry. I sucked in my breath, buttoned up my pants and left my shirt hanging out. When I checked the result in the bathroom mirror, I looked like a candidate for Weight Watchers. This would never work.
‘Here,’ said Spider, half-opening the door. A clean shirt sailed through the air and landed at my feet. ‘Found a dozen of these in the wardrobe. The owner won’t be needing them any more.’ Spider Webb was turning out to be a real gent.
Eastlake was two sizes bigger than me. His crisp white Yves St Laurent fell like a tent over the bulge at my midriff, perfectly concealing it. That’s why the rich look so good. It’s all in the tailoring. ‘Ready,’ I told the cops, wiping my face. With my cash assets concealed and my shirt hanging out, I could have been the President of the Philippines.
A small crowd had gathered at the front of the flats, so we went out the back way. A prowl car was waiting in the access lane with a uniformed constable behind the wheel. He was eleven, maybe twelve years old.
The money felt a little uncomfortable at first, but I got used to it. It’s extraordinary how much cash you can carry on your person, I thought. Almost as extraordinary as the number of times you put your hand in your pocket and find nothing at all. I got in the back seat and Detective Senior Sergeant Webb got in beside me.
The ride into town was almost nostalgic. The only other time I’d been driven to the station in the back of a police car was the trip from the Oulton Reserve to the Preston cop shop. As the major offender in the affray, I had the prestige vehicle. The Fletcher twins rode in the back of a brawler van. Geordie Fletcher was driven off to hospital blubbering about an unprovoked attack and calling the cops cunts. Spider, who’d managed to weasel his way out of the whole thing, had been sent home.
On the way to the station, they told me I’d be charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, going armed with an offensive weapon, possession of intoxicating liquor in a public place while a minor, assaulting police, hindering police, disorderly behaviour, offensive behaviour and resisting arrest. At fifteen, it sounded like a lot. I’m not 100 per cent on this point, but I think I may have burst into tears.
But nothing the cops said was as demoralising as the look on my father’s face. After an hour’s solitary in the lockup, I was ready for anger. What I got was silent, unanswerable disappointment. It wasn’t the brawling. That was bad but not unprecedented for a boy my age. It was the liquor. The bourbon could only have come from one place. And that meant guile and deceit.
‘I ought to give you a hiding,’ Dad said when we got home. I wished he had. There was no getting out of the Brothers, though. I was back at St Joey’s before you could say muscular discipline. It was either that or boarding school, so I considered myself lucky. From then on, my rebellious instincts were channelled into joining Young Labor and handing out how-to-vote cards at council elections. The police, needless to say, were never heard from again. This was less out of mercy for me, I concluded, than consideration for the tribulations of a recently bereaved publican. Either that or Geordie Fletcher-guided by some sharpie code of omerta -had refused to make a formal complaint. I never saw him or his brothers again.
Spider Webb’s mind must have been turning over similar ground. He sat there for a while, chewing his cud and practising his thousand-yard stare. Then, as we passed the Arts Centre, he spoke. ‘So,’ he said, as if making a commonplace observation for no other purpose than to break the silence. ‘Still a fuckwit after all these years.’
The money was sticking into my bottom rib. I straightened up a little and hoped that it didn’t look like a summoning of my dignity.
‘Remember that night in the park when you tore that Fletcher kid’s pants with a piece of broken glass?’ said Spider, smiling to himself at the memory. ‘Him and his brothers were just fooling around, having a bit of fun, stirring you. All of a sudden, you went ballistic. Tried to take them all on. I’ll never forget the look on Geordie Fletcher’s face when you ripped his precious strides. If they hadn’t been so baggy, you’d probably have cut him.’
You’d think a detective sergeant would have more highly developed powers of recall. ‘I did cut him,’ I said. ‘There was blood everywhere.’
‘Yeah,’ said Spider. ‘Yours. You gave yourself a blood nose when you fell on the ground. You always were a loose cannon.’
‘Yeah?’ I jerked my thumb back over my shoulder, back the way we’d come. I didn’t remember any blood nose. ‘I suppose all that was my fault? I suppose it was my fault that Eastlake tried to push me off a balcony?’ Actually, it was. I’d practically begged him to do it. But Noel Webb wasn’t to know that.
‘If you hadn’t stopped me talking to the Fleet woman yesterday,’ he said, ‘there’s a fair chance that we’d have questioned Eastlake by today. Possibly even charged him. I doubt if he’d have tried anything under those circumstances. Even if you’d given him the chance.’
Now I was being taken to task for my gallantry. ‘How was I supposed to know you were a cop? The way you were coming the heavy, flashing that gun of yours. I thought you were up to no good.’
‘If I remember correctly,’ said Spider, remembering correctly, ‘you were the one throwing your weight about. I merely suggested that you refrain from involving yourself in matters outside your authority. When you refused to take the hint, I emphasised my point by showing you Eastlake’s gun.’
‘I thought it was your gun.’
‘What would a chauffeur be doing with a pistol?’
‘Why would I assume it was Eastlake’s gun? I thought you were his bodyguard.’
‘It’s not all that uncommon for rich men to own a weapon,’ said Spider, like he was stating a self-evident truth. ‘Eastlake had three. All licensed, of course. But he always kept them at home. When I found that one in the Mercedes on Saturday morning, it was unusual enough to make me think he might be getting unstable.’
We were crossing Princes Bridge. A pair of sculls came gliding out from beneath the pilings and raced each other upstream in the direction of the Botanic Gardens, the water flashing at every dip of the oars. I turned my head and followed the rowers’ progress until a truck in the next lane blocked my view. ‘I thought you were working some sort of scam on Eastlake,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’ Spider shifted his gum from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘What gave you that idea?’
‘That,’ I admitted, ‘is a ve
ry good question.’
We rode the rest of the way in silence. It was preferable to having Noel Webb tell me how many ways wrong I’d been. As the car pulled up in front of police headquarters, Salina Fleet was coming down the steps. She was back in her serious costume. Beside her was a balding middle-aged man in a dark suit carrying a briefcase. They didn’t look like they’d just won Tattslotto.
I got out of the police car, fluffed up my kaftan and wondered what Salina and I might say to each other this time around. We didn’t say anything. Salina’s mouth was just starting to open when Noel Webb stepped onto the footpath behind me. Salina’s jaw snapped shut like a trap. She and her companion executed an almost perfect left turn and the two of them wheeled off down the footpath together.
‘You were always wasting your time there,’ said Webb. ‘I could have told you that all along.’
If I hadn’t been standing in front of police headquarters, I might have made some appropriate reply. As we entered the building, Spider stuck his sunglasses in his shirt pocket, screwed off his pinky ring and spat his gum into a fire bucket. His ears seemed less prominent.
‘Wait here for the present,’ I was told. The present was a long time coming. I waited ten minutes. I waited fifteen minutes. Seven-thirty came and went and it still hadn’t arrived. I began to entertain serious doubts that I’d get Red to the airport in time, even with a force-nine gale behind me.
‘Here’ was an interview room on the fifth floor. It had a little window in the door, a narrow laminex table fixed to the wall, a tape recorder and two plastic chairs. For some reason, I half-expected the door to be locked. Maybe all that padding around my waist was weighing on my conscience.
Next to the interview room was a sort of open-plan office. The sign on the door said Fraud Squad. It was deserted. Except for the tireless DSS Webb and his Hellenic sidekick, the bunco team was clearly a nine-to-five sort of outfit. I picked up a phone. Nobody jumped out of a waste paper basket and demanded to know what I thought I was doing.
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