The Midnight Promise: A Detective's Story in Ten Cases

by Zane Lovitt

  ‘Gary’s got a record and he doesn’t imagine the police will be too happy to hear from him. Also, he thinks it’s a practical joke. He’s a new apprentice so surely this is some kind of initiation prank. That’s understandable, isn’t it? He doesn’t want to come across as a wuss who calls the cops at the first sign of a gun. What he does instead is he takes it upstairs and hides it in his sock drawer. Whoever pulled the prank will reveal themselves eventually and meanwhile he’s got to be Mister Super Cool.’

  ‘This is the story he told you?’ Demetri asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there’s no one to corroborate?’

  ‘No witnesses of any kind. He didn’t even tell his father.’

  ‘And you believe him?’

  ‘If you heard him tell it, you’d believe him too. So. He comes home from work that same day and finds a point-three-eight self-loading Glock in the mailbox.’

  Slowly, Demetri comes to a stop. He tries to give me a doubtful, even offended, look but the wind picks up and stings his eyes and he flinches, blinking.

  ‘Come on,’ he says with a defensive step back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s my sixtieth coming up…That’s what this is about, right? You’re keeping me occupied so my wife can build a gazebo or something…’

  I don’t answer, meet his eyes with patience, which only frustrates him more.

  He says, ‘Where the fuck are we going?’

  I nod in the direction we’ve been walking. ‘It’s one more block,’ I say. ‘The scene of the crime.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I think you need to see.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got a problem. Because I don’t go in for bullshit stories. Even if you do.’

  And standing there, he folds his arms.

  It’s not like Demetri isn’t familiar with the traipse through these run-down, frigid neighbourhoods. A lot of his clients come from places like this, and he’s always on the lookout for another Jim Yedda. I think it’s fair to say that Jim Yedda changed Demetri’s life. I think Demetri would say that he did.

  What happened to Yedda was he got drunk and fell asleep in St Vincent Place, a lush green park in South Melbourne which is open to the public but exclusive enough that the locals call the police when someone’s asleep in there. Two uniforms attended the scene and reported that Yedda was in an ‘agitated’ state, though they said this might have been the result of the kicks to the knees they administered to wake him up. Turning out his pockets they found seven or eight small scraps of paper that they assumed to be tabs of LSD, and when they asked him what they were he replied, slurring and blinking, that he didn’t know. The two policemen promptly drew the conclusion that Yedda was, at that moment, tripping on acid, and they placed him under arrest.

  During the interview at the South Melbourne police station, Jim Yedda was charged with possession. Typically, if you’re charged with possessing a small quantity of something, the first thing that happens is you’re offered a bail application. But Yedda had no fixed address, so even if he could rustle up the money, he could never meet the bail conditions. They told him to sit and wait in Ravenhall, overnight, for the paper to be tested. There’s nothing unusual about that for homeless people on remand.

  What was unusual was that the cross-eyed, overworked prosecutor who landed the job forgot to tick a box. On the form that goes to the forensic laboratory, there’s a box you’re supposed to tick when the suspect is in custody—it fast-tracks the tests. If that box isn’t ticked, well, the lab has a million more urgent tests to do.

  It was two months before the tests came back, and they came back negative. Not LSD, just ordinary scraps of paper.

  In those two months, Jim Yedda was sexually assaulted more than once. He witnessed a murder and he lost a finger in an attempt on his own life.

  Finally he was released and immediately hospitalised and Demetri took up the case, banged the drum with the press and successfully sued the Director of Public Prosecutions for negligence. Soon there were activists clamouring for the DPP to resign. Even talkback radio seemed to sympathise with Yedda’s story. No one minds how awful our jails are, so long as everyone in there is supposed to be in there. And just when the news media was moving on to other scandals, a local musician wrote a popular song called ‘Scraps of a Life’ about Jim Yedda, and the story became front page news all over again. Demetri did the morning shows. It was a public relations nightmare for the DPP, and it cemented Demetri’s reputation as a legal white knight.

  You can bet he didn’t get paid for that job.

  So Demetri’s not really annoyed because I’m dragging him through the western suburbs on the crappiest day of the year, and he’s not annoyed because he’s old or because his shoes are getting ruined. He’s done more for people who appear more guilty.

  Why he’s annoyed is because, it seems to him, some low-life has taken advantage of his friend.

  I say, ‘Why would Gary beg me to help him if it wasn’t true?’

  Eagerly, Demetri counts off the answers on his fingers. ‘To give him the appearance of innocence. So that you might find something that throws the jury or something that makes the cops look bad—’

  ‘He’s not that smart.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve said that about a client and been wrong. Criminals in the western suburbs aren’t as dumb as people think.’

  ‘I told you I’ve got something amazing to show you. Do you want to see it or not?’

  ‘He’s already got a lawyer, right?’

  ‘Yeah, but we need you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re Demetri Sfakiakopoulos, champion of the lost cause.’

  He smiles. It’s too cold for him to blush.

  ‘In future, the causes don’t need to be this lost.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ I say, edging on along the pavement, tempting him to follow. ‘I think they need to be exactly this lost.’

  Demetri turns to the sky again, looking partly for rain but also maybe to God for guidance. Up there a passenger airline glides by, unhelpful. On windy days they change the flight path so that planes headed for the airport make their approach over Footscray, low and loud and self-conscious. Demetri deflates, gives me a look, swallows, pushes his hands deeper into his pockets and trudges past me, leading the way. ‘So he put the Glock in his sock drawer too?’

  ‘The two guns won’t fit in his sock drawer now,’ I say, skipping to catch up. ‘He sticks them under his bed.’

  ‘Was it loaded?’

  ‘No, but the next one was.’

  ‘Christ. The next one.’

  Ahead of us there’s a small shingle that protrudes from the second storey of a shaky brick edifice rising over a thin laneway. On the shingle are some faded words: The Prince Leopold.

  I point at it as we approach.

  ‘This happened the following weekend. He goes to the pub and comes home at three o’clock in the morning and there’s an old-fashioned police service revolver on the porch.’

  ‘A cop’s gun?’

  ‘Three bullets in it.’

  ‘He’s plastered, I assume.’

  ‘Yeah, I think he probably was.’

  As we reach the Prince Leopold we step around a discreet puddle of last night’s dried sick. Through the tinted window there’s the silhouette of a man reading the newspaper, a coffee mug on the bar beside him. He’s the only person inside and the chairs are stacked on the tables and the lights are off and the doors are shut. Demetri and I stop to consider him.

  ‘The owner knows Gary, says he was there that night, watching the rugby World Cup on the TV. Says Gary’s a harmless pom who wants to be liked and wouldn’t have any use for a handgun.’

  The publican turns the page. I keep walking. Demetri follows.

  ‘Great,’ he says. ‘The bartender can vouch for him. Gary’s English?’

  ‘He doesn’t have an accent. He and his dad emigrated when Gary was little. He’s still pre
tty passionate about the old country, though. Can’t you tell?’

  I point.

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Four doors on from the Prince Leopold is a path made of broken bricks that staggers through a garden of white ivy and up two steps to a porch. The floor planks are warped and stained, the tiny house itself is flaking white paint and showing a sickly shade of white underneath. Out of the corrugated roof two red-brick chimneys rise like infections, one at the front, another at the rear, the one at the rear being almost completely caved in and seemingly a nest for something. Gary’s bedroom is on the upper storey, though that’s more of an attic than a storey, and the view of the house from the street is dominated by a St George Cross flag the size of a beach towel. It completely fills Gary’s bedroom window, stretched out and pinned in place. Those red crosshairs are where they’ll aim the missile when they finally decide to bring down this ruin and replace it with yet another block of flats.

  ‘Right,’ says Demetri. ‘Not ashamed of being poms, are they?’

  ‘Number twenty-nine,’ I say, and point to the number wrought from a single strip of rusted iron and prominently mounted beside the ground-floor window. Though the house number means nothing to Demetri. Not yet.

  ‘So he’s got three guns…’ Demetri says.

  ‘He’s got three guns, and he’s starting to get the idea that this is a kind of threat, like a symbolically futile attempt to arm Gary before someone comes and shoots him in the head. He’s known some scumbags in his time, but no one who he thinks would actually want to hurt him. He starts carrying the loaded revolver with him when he goes out. Also, he changes the locks on the front door.’

  Through the old-fashioned flywire door, where the screen has been partially shredded, there’s the shiny glint of a new lock plug.

  Demetri looks at me sideways. ‘The old man lives here too, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s in a wheelchair?’

  ‘Yep. He’s kind of a shut-in.’

  The path leading up to the house is so crooked and unstable that even if Gary Senior wanted to go out there’s no way he could ever roll from the front door and down the porch steps and all the way to the street.

  Demetri smirks. ‘If we knock and ask the old man, what do you bet he says it was his idea to change the locks because in his condition he’s vulnerable to burglars and psychopaths?’

  ‘I’ve been here twice and rung the bell. The old man never answers the door. You’re welcome to try.’

  He exhales through his nose, shrugs. ‘I assume, then, that what Gary wants us to believe is that the party responsible for leaving the guns is the same party that tipped off the police.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘His father called the police.’

  Demetri blinks at me. ‘His father dobbed him in?’

  ‘Gary didn’t think his father ever went upstairs, given how he can’t, given how he’s in a wheelchair. But his father does go upstairs—’

  ‘Did you see that?’ Demetri’s voice is an urgent whisper. He’s staring at the ground-floor window.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The curtain moved.’

  The lace curtains are drawn and we can’t see beyond them. They’ve only ever been drawn the times I’ve been here. I expect they’re never open.

  ‘He must have heard our voices.’

  We watch for some other movement or even for the front door to open. Nothing happens.

  Demetri says, ‘Let’s go. Loitering makes me uncomfortable.’

  He turns wearily and moves slowly in the direction of my flat, expecting me to follow.

  ‘This way,’ I call to him. He stops and turns. Stares at me.

  I say, ‘We’re not finished. We have to go to the Movie Hut. It’s just around the corner.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘I can’t really explain. You have to see it. It’s not far. It’s where the amazing thing is.’

  From somewhere far away comes a roll of thunder.

  Together, Demetri and I walk the stretch of Farrel Street. It hadn’t seemed possible but it’s grown darker and spirals of dead leaves dance around our feet in miniature tornados, breathlessly coordinated. Demetri turns the collar up on his coat.

  I say, ‘It turns out that sometimes, when Gary Junior goes out, Gary Senior climbs up the stairs using just his arms. Crawls up, I guess. Then he rolls around Gary’s bedroom, going through his things. Gary knew the old man opened his mail and listened in on his phone calls, but he didn’t know his dad could get up the friggin’ stairs.’

  ‘Right…He’s one of those fathers.’

  ‘Yep. Blames Gary’s mother for Gary being a bit slow. Reckons she babied him. Blames her, though she died when Gary was six.’

  ‘And he called the cops?’

  ‘That was the deal they made. Two years ago, after Gary got out of jail the first time, his dad wanted to throw him out. Gary begged him to let him stay, promised his father he’d never run with crooks again, and there were tears, and his father let him stay. So now, Dad finds the guns, and that night when the two of them should be sitting up watching England win the World Cup, instead the police come and search the place and haul Gary away and his dad’s yelling something about it being for his own good. How he needs hardening up.’

  I was staring out my office window, wondering how to drum up some work and thinking about Japanese food for lunch, when my phone rang and it was a man with a voice pitched so high he might have been a child. He said Anton Goldberg had given him this number and he was calling from Ravenhall, then he spewed out his story and the squeal of his voice meant I sometimes had to pull the phone from my ear.

  ‘Mate, I swear to you, I got no idea how them guns got there. Someone’s having a laugh, you know? Playing a trick. The cops don’t believe me and me dad won’t pay my bail.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to talk to him,’ I said, searching my desk for my wallet. I’d need at least fifteen dollars if I wanted gyoza as well as soba noodles. ‘Tell him you’re sorry. Tell him if he posts bail you’ll have a chance to meet with a lawyer and the three of you can hash something—’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ Gary said. ‘If Dad reckons I can’t hack it in here, he’ll just want me to stay longer. He’s got this idea in his head, like, if it’s bad, then it’s good, you know?’

  The phone lines at Ravenhall are scratchy and full of hiss, so maybe that’s why I thought his voice was breaking, why it sounded like he was trying to stop himself from crying.

  ‘But, you know…’ Gary cleared his throat. ‘He doesn’t know what it’s like…’

  Even then, I was still thinking of food. Forty per cent of the people who call me, they cry. Not necessarily because of what they’ve been through, just because someone is finally listening. But now I was about to speak. I was about to pull the string on the talking doll that says I’d love to help but I’m flat out with another case, when softly he said, ‘Don’t know how long I can last. Didn’t last long last time.’

  ‘What happened last time?’

  ‘Just…’ Silence. Gary seemed to fight with the words in his head. ‘One of the screws, he knows me from last time I was in here. He said I should stop showering, stop brushing my teeth and that, because…’ His voice cracked, his throat clenched shut. ‘Because if I’m, like, unhygienic and that, the other blokes won’t be interested.’

  ‘You can request protection.’

  ‘I did already. They said I can’t get protection if I’m just scared of everybody.’

  Weeks of anticipation might be worse for Gary than the thing itself. His Mickey Mouse voice would only make him more of a target.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go over this again. But slow.’

  As we reach the corner of Farrel Street and Stanley Avenue, I point up at the street sign.

  ‘Farrel Street. That’s the street we’ve been on. That’s where they live.’

  Demetri gives the rusted street s
ign a lingering look because he isn’t wearing his glasses, then we head along Stanley Avenue, another strip of battered houses, towards the traffic on Glenmaddox.

  I say, ‘So that’s the end of the story. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened. Where the guns came from. It’s been baffling…’

  Demetri looks at me now, his head partly bowed against the wind, hands in his jacket pockets and collar turned up like a gangster taking me somewhere quiet to whack me.

  ‘What’s baffling is that you’ve been sucked in by Gary’s bullshit.’

  ‘I haven’t been sucked anywhere.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ He was hoping I’d say that. ‘Coming to the house to see his father, getting a value on that Beretta, interviewing the bartender…For goodness sake—’

  ‘This is what I do for a living.’

  ‘For a living. Exactly. Would I be saying this if Gary were likely to pay even your modest fee?’

  ‘The only difference between what I do and what you do is I don’t give it a fancy name like pro bono.’

  ‘Wrong. The difference is that I work pro bono when there’s a genuine need.’

  ‘There’s a need here.’

  ‘Come on…’ Demetri growls, letting his Greekness creep into that second, elongated vowel. When he’s frustrated and when he’s drunk are the only times his ancestry shows in his voice. ‘Gary was collecting firearms for himself or for some criminal acquaintance—either way he had a specifically nefarious purpose in mind, one which we would most likely have seen re-enacted on Australia’s Most Wanted. They secreted the guns in Gary’s room because they assumed, incorrectly, that no one else had access to that space. And should the day have come whereupon they retrieved those weapons from their hiding place in order to commit a crime, one of those bullets in that police revolver might have finished up lodged in your skull, John, or the skull of some other innocent. A pregnant woman, or a grandmother.’

  I’ve been waiting for this part, where Demetri explains why Gary is more like Anton Goldberg and less like Jim Yedda. He continues, ‘And furthermore, to spin you a yarn like he’s been doing, claiming that the guns magically appeared at his home and he was inexplicably compelled to stockpile them…’