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

by Zane Lovitt

  ‘It wasn’t inexplicable. I told you—’

  ‘…is nothing short of deceitful, if not criminal, in and of itself. What’s likely is that, far from being the emotional tyrant his son depicts him to be, his father is a witless, frail old man with no idea that Gary is out in the world blaming him for everything. And from someone as allergic to even the vaguest whiff of insincerity as you, John, to be frank, I expected more.’

  Demetri should have been a barrister. In fact, as he composes himself and his fingertips gently patrol his chin for saliva, I bet that’s what he’s thinking.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, holding my hands up. ‘Save your scolding for after we’ve been to the Movie Hut.’

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you off…’ he says, balancing his tone. ‘But I’ve met some practised liars, John. Geniuses. Sociopaths who could make you doubt your own…’

  As we reach Glenmaddox Road another truck rockets past and I can’t hear how Demetri finishes. So I look at him. When I do he stops walking and tugs on my elbow, which makes me stop. Then he drives that pale, frosted hand back into his jacket pocket and says, ‘I don’t want to see anyone make a fool of you, that’s all.’

  ‘I know. I know that’s what you’re worried about.’

  His lips are cracked from the cold and they twitch as though he has more to say. But he stops himself. I draw him back from the cliff edge with a jerk of my elbow.

  ‘Come on. We’re almost there.’

  Another long rattle of thunder echoes from the south, louder than before. We have to slalom single file through the oncoming locals who are rushing to get their shopping done before the rain reaches us. I lead him past the Asian groceries and the Arab haberdasheries and the post office, and Demetri has to shout over the heads of the rest of these pedestrians.

  ‘I’m not saying I won’t help,’ he says. ‘I’m just saying, he’s got to come clean about where the guns came from. Maybe he doesn’t want to dob people in. That’s fine. But you have to tell him, John. You have to tell him that he’s a liar and he has to stop being a liar if he wants to get out of jail.’

  We reach the entrance of the Movie Hut and a short man with dreadlocks and a bag of DVDs exits, looks fearfully up at the sky. The fluoros that illuminate the shelves of movie titles are blinding compared with the dimness of the daylight. I stop at the entrance while Demetri catches up.

  Calmly, he says, ‘You know I’m right, don’t you?’

  There are notices on display to the left of the Movie Hut sliding door, attached on the inside of the store so that you can read them through the glass. One is for a lost dog that answers to the name Puppy. Another is for a rabbit that doesn’t seem to have a name. The third is a community notice from Victoria Police that, through the glass, doesn’t look too old but really it’s been up here for months.

  Demetri says, ‘Go on,’ urging me into the warmth of the store.

  I linger and nod at the police notice. ‘Have a look,’ I say.

  Demetri squints. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You have to read it.’

  With a sigh of victimhood Demetri takes a pair of spectacles from his suit pocket and leans in to read, just as the first drops of rain fall onto the glass.

  VICTORIA POLICE

  REDUCTION OF WEAPONS IN YOUR COMMUNITY

  **GUN AMNESTY**

  New laws in the State of Victoria will increase penalties for firearms possession.

  Between the dates of February 12 and April 30, you may attend the Footscray Police Station at 300 Paisley Street, Footscray (open 24 hours) to surrender unregistered firearms.

  You may also surrender weapons at:

  The Reach-Out Accommodation Centre,

  166 Crescent Road, Newport

  St Christopher’s Church,

  Paisley Street, Footscray

  The Red Cross Relief Service,

  29 Farryl Street, Footscray

  You will not be prosecuted if surrendering firearms or ammunition for destruction. Weapons may be submitted in person or left anonymously.

  The new laws will come into force on May 1.

  If you have any questions contact:

  Officer in Charge

  Footscray Police 9689 9999

  Demetri’s eyes skim the page. He shrugs, takes his glasses off and dries them. ‘It’s a weapons amnesty. They do these all the time. And the commissioner always hails them as a big success, no matter how successful they are.’

  ‘People submit guns. Anonymously.’

  ‘That’s right. Believe it or not, it’s hard to get rid of a gun. You don’t just toss one in the rubbish. So what are you saying? People submitted the guns to Gary?’

  Demetri smirks.

  I say, ‘Take a look at that last address.’

  Demetri holds the reading glasses back up to his eyes: ‘Twenty-nine Farryl Street.’ He scowls. ‘But it’s spelled differently…’

  ‘I called that telephone number, spoke to a Sergeant Malkin. I asked him where else the notice had been displayed. I tracked down as many as he could give me. And I found this.’

  I take out the folded newspaper that’s been sitting in my jacket pocket, waiting for me to take it out. On page three the same notice is printed among the advertisements.

  I point to the typing error, where ‘Farryl’ has been misspelled.

  Demetri squints at the newspaper, then back at the notice in the window, then back at the newspaper. It’s raining steadily now, on our heads and jackets and pooling at our feet. Demetri seems to hold his breath and he looks at me.

  ‘Are criminals in the western suburbs really that stupid?’

  ‘Stupid enough to mistake a St George’s Cross for the Red Cross? What do you think?’

  Demetri thinks hard, can’t seem to reach a conclusion. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I think it’s a massive miscarriage of justice with the rights of freedom for corruption and victims, innocent, travesty, persecution, outrage, more justice and then injustice.’

  Demetri nods softly. ‘Who else have you told?’

  ‘I only figured it out this morning.’

  ‘You haven’t telephoned Gary’s solicitor?’

  ‘What’s he going to do? He’s a year out of law school with a thousand clients and even if he wasn’t it’d take him weeks to get Gary actually released. And there’s always the chance some hotshot junior prosecutor would want to take it to trial anyway, which means Gary stays on remand for six more months. A really good lawyer might have Gary home in a fortnight. But there’s only one criminal law solicitor I can think of with the clout to get Gary released today.’

  Demetri rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t try to sweet-talk me, you’ll ruin all your hard work. You should know that there’s probably not much I can achieve on a Sunday.’

  I shrug. ‘I called the DPP’s office this morning, spoke to an intern, pretended I was you. I said I had something really important to speak with the director about. They said she’ll be in her office all day.’

  He bites his lip to hide the smile.

  ‘Righto. You thought this through, didn’t you…’

  ‘You have to tell her this is another Jim Yedda waiting to happen, and that a negligence suit is one thing, but wrongful imprisonment based on laws that she lobbied for is something else altogether, the very year she wants to win a seat in Parliament. You can say Gary’s locked up with psychopaths and sex offenders, so if he isn’t released today then any injury he sustains will be on her head, and they’ll be lining up to write a song about it. Or else I can tell her that. You can be the good cop.’

  Demetri bows his head, shakes it with a little laugh.

  ‘No,’ he says, looking back at me, then up at the rain. ‘If anyone else is there she might bristle, try to prove she can’t be pushed around. Better I go alone.’

  I fold up the newspaper, hold it out. He takes it, giggles again.

  I laugh back. ‘What?’
<
br />   ‘I’ll do it on one condition. That this is the last job you ever do free of charge.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  He nods. ‘It was worth a try.’

  Demetri looks out at the road, a new shine in his eyes. ‘Okay. I need a taxi.’

  This little walk with Demetri, one day I’ll remember this as a kind of apogee. I’ll regret that I didn’t stop to soak it up, watching Demetri climb into that cab and drive away. But at the time you think that this is your life, that days like this are normal. You don’t know a high-water mark until you’ve seen a lot of low water.

  AN ORDINARY JOB

  JESSICA LOOKS AT the pictures the way a husband does.

  She sits on the front edge of the living-room couch, her feet tucked under her in a way that, if she were a man, would be uncomfortable. What she’s doing is she’s going through the photographs, one by one, wearing a face to show how unhappy the task is, while Phil and I just wait and watch and look sideways at each other.

  She reaches the last and starts back with the first, that face unchanged by the shuffling of each print, each piece of bad news. And what occurs to me is that Jessica isn’t a man, you’d never mistake her for a man, but she looks at the pictures the way a man does.

  A wife, usually her eyes drift across a page or two and then she waves them away, scared of something, choosing not to see.

  A husband needs to see. He sucks the detail from each photo like a prison inmate with a pornographic magazine. And what there aren’t pictures of, he imagines—the drunken flirting, the whiff of pheromones, the slipping sound of her underwear. He imagines which of her friends know about it, which of them feel pity for him. And he’ll be nervous like it’s a job interview, only he’s asking me the questions: what I saw, what order things happened, how long it lasted.

  ‘When was this?’ Jessica says, not looking up.

  ‘This’d be lunchtime today,’ Phil says. ‘And I’m sorry to say it, sweetie, but you can see…he didn’t use a johnny.’

  ‘A what?’ She looks up now, enough disgust in her voice to make Phil flinch.

  ‘A…a condom, you know?’

  She’s not a handsome woman, which Phil says is one of the reasons I’m here. He probably means her pimply skin, her proud nostrils, her size. But what’s actually unattractive about Jessica Waltraub has crept up in just these last moments, a coldness that descended when her father gave her the pictures, when she realised why we’ve come.

  ‘Wow, Dad. You must be happy now.’ A ball in her throat making it hard to talk.

  ‘Nah. I’m not, love.’

  She pushes through the ball.

  ‘You must be fucking ecstatic.’

  The pictures frisbee across Jessica’s living room and slap against the television, a massive flat screen, blank and unmoved.

  That TV, that’s another clue. Probably there have been a thousand clues over the length of the day, staring at me and then shrugging like they didn’t care if the private investigator noticed them or not.

  I trawl my memory, the long day it’s been, wondering whether the sordid truth about this job was ever as obvious as it is right now. If the clues were there, they were subtle. Like the way Jessica looks at the photographs. Like that big TV. But this morning, when Phil first came to my office, when I first heard the names Ben and Jessica Waltraub, I couldn’t have guessed what would be revealed. It didn’t occur to me that there would be clues to watch out for.

  This began as an ordinary job.

  My ad in the Yellow Pages says my office hours start at nine, so when someone knocks on the door at eight twenty-eight I don’t take it to be a client. Usually when this happens, someone’s got the wrong door and they don’t know that a white guy works here who only speaks English. Usually, they’ve climbed the stairs to the third floor looking for an acupuncturist named Chen Lei, whose rooms are down the hall and open at five in the morning. Usually, I point to Chen Lei’s door and tell the person to follow the smell of burnt pine cones. Usually, I’m polite.

  But today I’m up a ladder.

  And I’ve almost finished painting the office walls, which I thought would take most of Saturday afternoon but instead took all of the weekend and here I am on Monday morning, still up a ladder. There’s Swan Egg Matte in my hair and under my fingernails and my shoulder blades are screaming. Whoever-it-is knocks on my door a second time and I answer with a bilious ‘Ni zou ba,’ which means ‘Go away’ in Mandarin and is exactly half of what I’ve learned of that language since I first leased this third-floor office in Chinatown.

  A man’s voice shouts through the door, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes?’

  The door knob rattles. If he could see my face he wouldn’t be trying to get in.

  I yell, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Then he clears his throat and yells, in an accent so broad he might be rounding up sheep: ‘I think me daughter’s husband’s doing the dirty on her.’

  And I guess you don’t see an acupuncturist for that.

  Two months ago a potential client in the hallway would have rushed me to the door with beverages, biscuits, charm. But summer has been good, thanks mostly to a retired psychiatrist who came to me in tears because she couldn’t remember where she’d parked her car. Two days earlier she’d driven into town for a show at the Regent Theatre and when it was over she’d walked the city for hours, trying to trigger her memory. I found the car not far from here, on Little Bourke Street, stretched across the driveway of a place that used to be a grocery store and now isn’t anything; it didn’t have so much as a parking ticket though it had been there for four days. The psychiatrist gave me an extra thousand dollars to never tell anyone what had happened. I told her I didn’t think she and I moved in the same circles. But stigma runs deep.

  And DISCREET AND CONFIDENTIAL is something else it says in my Yellow Pages ad.

  So that’s how come I can afford to finally paint these office walls. Another big job and I’ll buy some nice furniture, a printer, one of those tall lamps, maybe something to stop the street noise from pouring in through the edges of the windows. Though really, I like the noise. The sound of Chinatown is soothing when there’s no work and nothing else to do but listen.

  I yell, ‘Could you come back at nine?’

  I climb off the ladder, drag it aside and regard the wall.

  ‘It’s just…’ the voice offers, ‘I’m on me way to work.’

  At head height the colour is thick and lovingly applied. Towards the ceiling it thins out, in one corner shamefully. The fumes are strong, but an eight-year-old could snort raw heroin and paint my walls more competently than this.

  I tray the roller with disgust. The furniture is blanketed with old clothes because I didn’t have a drop sheet, and the clothes are blanketed by a weekend’s worth of takeaway containers. I tip the mess off one of the three wooden school chairs and go to the door.

  He’s got a drinker’s nose, swollen and textured like the moon through a telescope. Under his ragged Kmart jacket is a shiny red shirt and his left hand is missing half its pinkie—I would guess a factory accident. Once he’s inside and seated, after I’ve apologised for the condition of the office and after he’s politely edged the chair closer to the window and the merciful fresh air, Phil tells me that his daughter married a spoilt little rich kid from a family of German immigrants.

  ‘There’s this superiority about him,’ Phil says in his kookaburra twang. ‘You know what krauts are like.’

  My father was born in Stuttgart. I don’t mention that.

  ‘So the two of you don’t get along.’

  ‘Well, what I come for is I want to find out if he’s seeing other birds. And I want proof. Something I can show to Jessie.’

  ‘She doesn’t know you’re here?’

  ‘Nah, mate.’

  ‘You think they’re having problems?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I just r
eckon if she’s married to a prick she’s got a right to know. Is this the sort of thing you do?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What’s it going to set me back?’

  ‘I’m two-fifty a day.’

  ‘How many days you reckon?’

  ‘Until he fools around again.’

  Phil nods, keeps thinking.

  ‘How do you…I mean…’

  ‘I’ll follow him around, see where he goes, try to get photographs.’

  ‘He won’t catch on?’

  ‘I hope not. If he does, there’s no way for him to link me to you.’

  ‘Right then,’ he says decisively, pressing his fists into his knees. ‘So what do we do now?’

  I pick up a pen, search my desk for a blank briefing sheet. I have to sift through clothes and takeaway containers, used plastic cutlery as well as puddles of dried paint. Phil takes now as an opportunity to stop churning through his dislike for his son-in-law and have a good look at this office, at this person he’s retaining.

  ‘How come you call yourself a private inquiry agent?’ He says, his voice more relaxed and noticeably higher pitched. Perhaps the deep voice is just how he establishes credibility.

  ‘It’s the same as a private detective.’ I unearth a briefing sheet from beneath a pair of boxer shorts.

  ‘So why don’t you call yourself that?’

  ‘My father was a Private Inquiry Agent.’

  ‘Fair dinkum? I supposed he’s retired.’

  ‘No. He’s dead.’ With my pen poised, I ask, ‘How do you spell your son-in-law’s name?’

  ‘W-A-L-T-R-A-U-B. Benjamin Waltraub.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He does, like…art stuff for the Port Phillip Council.’ His big cratered nose flares like it smells something foul. ‘Buys paintings for the mayor. You know…organises art prizes. He rakes it in. You wouldn’t believe what he gets paid.’

  ‘Has he been unfaithful to Jessica before?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How do you know he is now?’

  ‘It’s sort of a…instinct.’

  ‘Jessica never mentioned anything to you?’

  Phil shakes his head, smiling softly. ‘Mate, Jessica’s mad for him. He’s got charm, you know? He’s handsome, got money. I guess that’s part of why I wonder about him. I mean…the thing about Jessie is…’