by Marele Day
MARELE DAY is an award-winning novelist who grew up in Sydney and graduated from Sydney University with BA (Hons). She has travelled extensively, lived in Italy, France and Ireland, and survived near shipwreck in the Java Sea. She now resides on the New South Wales north coast.
A contributor to numerous anthologies, Marele is the editor of How to Write Crime and has written a guide, Successful Promotion for Writers. Her novels include the Claudia Valentine mysteries: The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender (1988), The Case of the Chinese Boxes (1990), The Last Tango of Dolores Delgado (1992), which won the American Shamus Crime Fiction Award, and The Disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi (1994). In 1997, her bestselling literary novel, Lambs of God, was published to acclaim in Australia and overseas, with translations into German, Dutch, Italian and Japanese, and film rights have been sold to Twentieth Century Fox.
Mavis Levack, P.I.
MARELE DAY
ALLEN & UNWIN
This collection first published in 2000
Copyright © Marele Day 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Day, Marele.
Mavis Levack, P.I.
ISBN 978 1 86508 381 0
eISBN 978 1 74269 512 9
I. Title.
A823.3
Set in 12/15 pt Bembo by DOCUPRO, Sydney
Contents
Back Window
The One That Didn’t Get Away
Mavis Levack’s One-Night Stand
Mrs Levack and the Egyptian Goddess
Marple Syrup
Unpleasantness at the Big Boys Club
Emoh Ruo
A Helping Hand
I Can’t Take Any More
The Case of the Disappearing Detectives
Credits
Back Window
(In which Mavis Levack meets Claudia Valentine)
‘I think I know who did it,’ Mavis Levack announced to her husband.
‘Yes, dear?’ said Eddy from the depths of the newspaper. He had lost interest in Murder, She Wrote after the first ad and was now ensconced in the weather page.
‘It’s the nephew,’ Mrs Levack continued. ‘I think he’s wearing mascara.’
‘Yes, dear. Thirty-two millimetres of rain at Cootamundra yesterday.’
‘Have a look at the nephew, Eddy. I mean, a grown man wearing mascara.’
‘The chance of local heavy falls and squally winds clearing from the west.’
‘He’s written a note and slipped it under the door. What do you think that could be?’
Eddy was saved by the bell. Or at least the buzzer. They both looked up, Eddy from the newspaper, Mavis from the television. Neither of them was expecting anyone. Perhaps it was Freda on her evening stroll with the dog. Just popping in to say hello.
Mrs Levack pressed the button that opened the outside door of the block of flats.
‘Who was it, dear?’
‘Probably Freda.’
‘Probably? Didn’t you check? We could be letting in a murderer for all we know. You can’t be too careful nowadays.’
Mrs Levack knew her husband was right, but she didn’t like to admit that she hadn’t quite caught the name. It was a woman’s voice, so it probably wasn’t a murderer.
It must have been someone fit because in next to no time there was a knock on the door of the flat. Freda couldn’t have got up the stairs in that time, especially with Flopsy in tow. Mrs Levack was curious, very curious.
She opened the door to a tall, attractive woman with red hair, wearing a black leather jacket, black leather pants and black spiky high heels. She reminded Mrs Levack of someone—Modesty Blaise, only not so bosomy. That woman from The Avengers? Perhaps she was a friend of Lisa and Sharon next door and had pressed the Levack buzzer by mistake.
‘Good evening, Mrs Levack, I’m Claudia Valentine, private investigator.’
Mrs Levack stood there stunned. Here was adventure knocking on her very door. A real live private investigator! Who knew her name!
‘Oh, do come in!’ invited Mrs Levack, excited as a schoolgirl. ‘Fancy that, I was just watching that show on the television and then in you come. What a coincidence!’
Claudia Valentine strode into the room. Mrs Levack would never be able to walk in those high heels. What confidence, what ease!
Mrs Levack tried to share this special moment with her husband but he wasn’t anywhere near as impressed. He didn’t look up from his newspaper but he did extend a hand in the direction of the visitor, a hand that stayed there even after she had shaken it.
‘No, not that. I want to see your card, proof of identity.’
Mrs Levack blushed right up to her hair rollers. As if there could be any doubt about her being who she said she was. Mrs Levack knew instinctively.
The private investigator handed Eddy her card. He looked at the card and he looked at Claudia Valentine. For quite a long time, it seemed to Mrs Levack.
‘Carry on,’ said Eddy, and went back to reading the newspaper.
Claudia’s eyes flicked around the room and finally settled on the back window. ‘Do you mind if I take a peek, Mrs Levack?’
Mrs Levack knew they had an instant rapport. Despite all the fuss with Eddy wanting to see the ID, the private investigator had addressed Mavis, not Eddy. She knew which side her bread was buttered on.
‘Oh no, go right ahead. Someone following you, dear?’ Mrs Levack ventured.
‘No,’ said Ms Valentine. Mrs Levack was sure she’d be a Ms. ‘Not right at this moment, anyway.’
The P.I. went over to the venetian blinds and looked straight into the flat of that poor young boy who’d died so suddenly. Well, she couldn’t actually see into the flat because since that fateful day the curtains had been drawn, as Mrs Levack knew only too well.
Eddy sat there with his nose in the paper, not the least bit interested, as if all this was happening somewhere else.
Ms Valentine walked briskly back to the lounge. ‘I’ll come straight to the point, Mrs Levack. I’m investigating the death of Mark Bannister, who lived over there in that flat.’
‘Oh yes, terrible business, wasn’t it? Fancy a young one like that dying of a heart attack.’
‘You knew him then, did you?’
‘Oh no, dear, we read it in the paper.’
From out of the depths of the newspaper, Eddy spoke: ‘It was as good as if she knew him, the way she kept her eye on him.’
‘Well, Eddy, it’s just as well someone is keeping an eye out. The way things are nowadays, you could be lying dead in the street and no-one would lift a finger to help.’
Eddy grunted and turned the page. But Mrs Levack had a more willing listener. ‘Isn’t that right, Claudia? You don’t mind me calling you by your first name do you, dear?’
>
Claudia gave her a smile. Call me anything you like, that smile seemed to say.
‘What is it you want to know, Claudia?’ Mrs Levack perched herself on the edge of the lounge, ready to reveal all.
‘Anything, Mrs Levack, anything you think might help us with our enquiries.’ Oh, enquiries. Mrs Levack loved all those police words. Claudia certainly was a professional. ‘His habits,’ Claudia continued, ‘whether he had visitors . . .’
Mrs Levack stood up, the centre of attention, and clasped her hands together as if she were about to recite a poem. ‘Well,’ she started, ‘he looked to me like the studious type. Not that he wore glasses or any of that, but he spent a lot of time near the window writing or typing. I couldn’t see the typewriter but just by the way he sat I guessed that’s what he was doing. Habits: well, he drank a lot of coffee, twelve cups a day.’
This seemed to impress Claudia because she raised her eyebrows, which encouraged Mrs Levack to continue with the subject. ‘Sometimes when he brought a cup back from the kitchen—actually it was more of a mug than a cup—he’d stand by that very window looking out—I suppose he got sick of the studying—and you know,’ Mrs Levack embellished, ‘I could have sworn he was looking straight at me.’
‘Yeah, but you, of course, were behind the venetian blind, so how could he see you? I’ve told you, Mavis, if you’re going to look in people’s windows, let them see you doing it. At least that gives them a fighting chance.’
‘Oh, Eddy, then they’d think I was a busybody.’
‘Well?’ sneered Mr Levack triumphantly.
‘What else have I got to do, you with your head in the paper all day every day? That’s as much a busybody, isn’t it, only you read about it, I get it first-hand.’
‘Humph!’ retorted Mr Levack. ‘What I read about in the newspapers is important. How many cups of coffee a person drinks a day isn’t important.’
Mrs Levack turned back to the P.I., who was tucking a renegade lock of hair behind her ear. ‘It is, isn’t it, Claudia?’
Claudia shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. The high heels were probably getting to her. Mrs Levack should have invited her to sit down but it was too late in the piece for that.
As it happened, Claudia sat down anyway, on the edge of the lounge Mrs Levack had recently vacated. She was more at Mrs Levack’s eye-level, much better for a woman-to-woman discussion. ‘It could be important, Mrs Levack,’ Claudia admitted. ‘At this stage we don’t have much to go on, so anything you can tell us might be helpful. Did he have any visitors?’ she continued, not at all perturbed by Eddy noisily turning another page.
‘Only that girl, really, with the hair like a lion’s mane. I don’t think she was a very good influence, though, because whenever she came he’d stop the studying straightaway.’
Claudia Valentine’s eyebrows swam together like twin tadpoles. ‘Mrs Levack, how can you be so precise about what you saw? Surely through curtains you’d only be able to see vague shadows.’
‘She had her binoculars trained on him,’ snorted Eddy.
‘They’re your binoculars,’ Mrs Levack threw back at him. She turned to Claudia: ‘His racing binoculars. Only he doesn’t go to the races any more and if it wasn’t for me they’d just hang there gathering dust. Shame to waste them, really. If you’ve got a thing use it, I always say. Anyway,’ she said, rubbing her hands down her dressing gown, ‘it wasn’t through the curtains, it was straight through the window. The curtains were always open, even at night. He was the fresh air type. In fact the first time they were closed I saw him do it. Not the young man. It was an older one that closed the curtains. I remember thinking at the time, that’s strange—’
‘You’re always thinking “that’s strange”,’ Eddy piped up. ‘If he hadn’t had his first cup of coffee by nine in the morning she’d be saying, “That’s strange, he usually has it earlier than this”.’
Mrs Levack cleared her throat and glared at her husband. ‘As I was saying,’ she said loudly and emphatically, ‘I thought at the time it was the police, but he wasn’t dressed like the police, and Eddy said it was probably those other ones, you know, plainclothes like yourself.’
‘Private,’ said Eddy brusquely. ‘She’s private.’ For someone feigning disinterest he was certainly keeping track of things.
‘When was this, Mrs Levack?’
‘It was then, it was when he died. I didn’t get a good look at the man because he pulled the curtains across, so I only really saw the arm and the glove.’
Claudia Valentine was really paying attention now. ‘So did you see this man before or after Mark Bannister died?’
‘Oh, after. It was a Thursday because normally at that time I’d go down and cash the pension cheque. But there was that strike on and they were late, which was just as well, wasn’t it, because otherwise I would’ve missed it.’
‘You don’t miss anything,’ commented Eddy.
‘Well, it’s just as well, isn’t it, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to help Miss Valentine with her investigations.’ Mrs Levack winced. She’d gone and called this modern young woman ‘Miss’. She couldn’t help herself. She was concentrating more on the police word ‘investigations’ and Miss just popped out. Anyway, Ms sounded like a bee buzzing round your name.
Claudia Valentine paid no attention to the gaffe, so Mrs Levack strode boldly on. ‘See, the young man came and sat at the desk and was typing or something. Then he kind of went rigid and stared. Just stared. Then he stood up, well, not properly up, kind of bent. He was most upset.’
Mrs Levack leaned towards Claudia in a confidential manner. ‘He was using bad language. I could tell by the way his mouth was moving. That “f” word,’ she whispered. ‘He put his hand to his heart, then up more, near the shoulder, and sort of thumped it like this.’ Mrs Levack acted it out. ‘And looked at me. Looked straight at me like he was begging for help,’ she embroidered. ‘Next thing I knew, he disappeared. Just plopped over.’
Mrs Levack shook her head at the pity of it all. ‘I was going to ring the ambulance, but then the girl came in—’
‘What girl?’
‘That girl that’s always there. She just stood staring too, her mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. She went into the bathroom, then came back and bent down out of sight. She was probably trying to revive him with smelling salts or something.’
‘Gawd, Mavis, smelling salts! No-one’s used smelling salts since Cocky was an egg. Anyway, that’s for fainting, not a bloody heart attack.’
‘Well, she was probably trying to help him with pills or something, you know, like those pills Reggie had for his heart.’
‘That was for blood pressure, not his heart.’
Claudia Valentine had been patiently watching the to and fro. ‘Ahem. Mrs Levack, what happened after the girl bent down?’
‘She stood up again. And she picked up the phone and started to speak, using her hands as well. Then her head jerked round and she ran away. She must have gone to open the door because next thing that plainclothes was there. And he closed the curtains.’ The show was over.
‘Did you see or hear anything after that?’
‘No, dear, we went to bowls then. It was Thursday.’
‘Yeah, but we did see that police car, Mavis.’ Eddy had finally got sucked into it. ‘On the way home from bowls.’ He turned to Ms Valentine. ‘Had the devil’s own job trying to tear her away from the window in the first place.’
‘Well, we should’ve stayed, shouldn’t we? I might have been able to solve the mystery, mightn’t I?’
‘Look, Mavis, there was no mystery. He just died of a heart attack. “No suspicious circumstances”, that’s what the papers said.’
‘You can’t believe everything you read in the papers, Eddy.’
Several times Claudia Valentine tried to interrupt to say goodbye, but they were so engrossed in their argument she left them to it. Eventually they stopped for breath and noticed that their vi
sitor had gone.
‘Well,’ said Eddy into the silence, ‘I could do with a Milo and whisky. What about you?’
Had a real live private investigator actually been here or had Mrs Levack dozed off in front of the television and dreamt the whole thing?
‘I say, Mavis,’ Eddy bellowed as if she were deaf. ‘Do you want a whisky and Milo?’
She nodded her head.
While Eddy was in the kitchen mumbling quietly to himself, or singing—Eddy’s mumbling and singing sounded identical—Mrs Levack espied the card that Claudia Valentine had left. She hadn’t dreamt it after all. She sat staring at that card, her ticket to thrills and spills, to all the things she had never done.
What she wanted more than anything in the world was to have a card like that, with her name on it. She’d start up her own agency, learn lip reading.
Eddy came back in and put the hot drinks down on the coffee table. But not before Mrs Levack had popped the card into her dressing-gown pocket.
‘Just going for a walk, Eddy,’ said Mrs Levack. She had her joggers on, tracksuit pants and her new purchase of a baseball cap.
‘Hang on, I’ll come with you.’ Eddy rarely went on walks. He’d walk to the library, to the bowls club, somewhere that had a destination at the end of it, but not a walk for its own sake.
‘Ah, well . . .’ Under other circumstances she would love to have had him along, a nice romantic stroll along the beach, some time together, not that they were short of that, but Mrs Levack had a hunch that this was a walk she’d better take on her own. ‘What about tomorrow, first thing? You’ll miss the evening news if you go now.’
‘That’s all right, I can catch the later bulletin.’ He was already getting up, putting shoes on.
‘Actually, Eddy,’ said Mrs Levack as nicely as she could, ‘I’m not going for a stroll. It’s the exercise.’
‘I could do with the exercise too.’ That was certainly true. Bowls was OK but it didn’t really get the heart pumping.
‘But I’ll be in the zone,’ said Mrs Levack.