An Iron Rose (18 page)

Further out, on bigger blocks, windswept, treeless, beyond mowing, stand exhausted weatherboards, at the end of their histories, all hope gone, boards sprung, stumps rotten, roofs rusted.

Melanie Pavitt’s weatherboard house stood in a sea of long yellow grass, leaning with the prevailing wind, bright junk mail blowing around. The brick chimney on the right was bulging at the bottom and swaying inwards at the top. The windows’ sashcords had disintegrated and pieces of weatherboard fallen off the side of the house held up the top panes. I felt the verandah boards, grey, eroded like Ethiopian hillsides, sag under my weight. Next door was a work in progress, a long brick-veneer train carriage of a house with two window openings blocked with plywood and the end wall half-built. Silver insulation foil caught the light. Behind the house was a huge shed, more factory than garage. A newish red Nissan, dusty, stood at the end of a paved section of driveway facing the shed across a riverbed of bluestone dust.

There was no response to my knocks. Inside a radio was on at full volume. Country and western. I thought of going around the back, then a vertical blind in the unfinished house moved. I went over and knocked on the unpainted front door. It opened instantly, on a chain. A woman in her forties, pretty face, plump, long dyed auburn hair, sleep in her eyes, lipstick a little smudged, said, ‘Yes.’

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Melanie Pavitt. Does she still live next door?’

There was a wary silence. Finally, she said, ‘Police?’

‘No. I’m not selling and I’m not collecting either. It’s a personal matter.’

She put a finger to the corner of her right eye, pulled the skin back. ‘Yeah, she’s next door.’

‘She doesn’t seem to be home. Any idea when she might be back?’

The woman closed the door briefly to take off the chain. She was wearing a purple dressing gown. ‘Didn’t hear her go,’ she said. ‘The car makes a helluva noise, exhaust shot. She might be in the back. Let me put something on, I’ll come with you.’

I waited on the verandah. It was quiet here, just a faraway hum of traffic. The woman came out wearing tight jeans, a fluffy blue mohair-like top with three-quarter sleeves and black pumps. She had repaired her make-up. She walked ahead of me, buttocks jiggling.

‘Doesn’t go out much, Mel,’ she said. ‘Not since the boyfriend moved in. Nice bloke. Used to be in and out of my place. Not anymore.’

We tried knocking again. Nothing. Just the music.

‘Try the back,’ said the woman. ‘By the way, my name’s Lee-Anne, two words with a hyphen.’

‘John,’ I said. We walked down the car tracks beside the house. The kitchen was a lean-to at the back, younger than the main house.

Lee-Anne knocked on the back door. The music was louder here. ‘Stand by Your Man’.

‘Won’t hear anything over that racket,’ Lee-Anne said. She tried the doorknob. The door opened. She took a step inside.

‘Mel? You there? Someone for you.’

Nothing. Just the music.

Lee-Anne took another step in. I followed. The kitchen was neat, a smell in the air of something burnt. ‘Mel!’ Lee-Anne shouted. ‘Barry!’

The door to the rest of the house was closed. Lee-Anne opened it and called out again.

We went down a short, dark passage, past a door on the left, towards a closed door and the music. At the door, Lee-Anne paused, turned to me. ‘You go first,’ she said. She bit her lower lip.

I opened the door.

It was a sitting room, also dark, curtains drawn, old blond-wood furniture, a big television, radio on top of it. A fairground barker’s voice was saying, ‘Wangaratta Ford. Where the best deals are waiting for you.’ The burnt smell was gone now. Replaced by something else.

I knew what it was. Before I saw the man.

Lee-Anne came in behind me and screamed.

He was sitting in the chair facing the television. A big part of his face was missing, a black, congealing cavity, and his whole chest was dark with dried blood. Behind his head what looked like a gallon of blood had seeped into the chair upholstery.

That was the other smell: the salty, sickening slaughterhouse smell of blood.

I stepped forward for a closer look at the man. He was holding a revolver in his right hand.

‘Barry?’ I said.

Lee-Anne nodded, face chalk-white, lipstick startling against it.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ I said.

Two other doors, closed, led from the room. I opened the left-hand one: a small bedroom, empty.

I turned. Lee-Anne was looking at the floor. ‘Through there?’ I said, pointing.

‘Mel’s bedroom,’ she said softly, without looking up.

I opened the door. Double bed, made. Wardrobe, dresser. No-one there.

I went back, down the dark passage, to the other door.

‘Bathroom,’ said Lee-Anne from close behind me.

I opened the door.

The bath was directly in front of me. A woman was in it, naked, floating in dark water. Shot once, through the left eye. She had been sitting upright and the bullet had sprayed the contents of her head over the wall behind and beside her.

‘Don’t look,’ I said. ‘Call the cops from your place.’

I heard her run down the passage. Then I had a look around. An old suitcase was on top of the wardrobe in Melanie’s bedroom. I took it down, gripping the handle in a tissue from the dressing table, and opened it on the bed: perhaps a dozen letters, an empty perfume bottle, a pair of gold high heels, a gold chain belt, three packets of photographs, a bead purse with some Fijian coins, a small velvet box that had held a ring, a black-covered book.

I opened the book. On the first page was written large:
My Life. By Melanie Loreen Pavitt
.

I put the letters, the photographs and the book into my shirt, replaced the suitcase, left the house. At the car, I made sure Lee-Anne wasn’t watching and put the stolen goods under the front seat. Then I drove the car into Lee-Anne’s yard, over the bluestone dust and parked behind the house. I found the emergency cigarettes and went round the front and sat on the front step.

‘Get a smoke off you?’ she said from behind me, voice tremulous. ‘I’m shakin.’

‘Natural,’ I said, offering her the packet and the matches. She lit up and sat down beside me. We sat there smoking, not saying anything, waiting for the sirens and the police. When I heard the first wail, I said, ‘Inside’s better. There’ll be television people and other journos coming. They tip them off.’

We went in and stood at the breakfast bar in Lee-Anne’s kitchen. This room was finished, all pale gleaming wood and stainless steel.

‘Nice room,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ll explain afterwards but I’m going to arrange it with the cops that they tell them the bodies were found by a neighbour. They’ll want you on camera. You want to do that? It’ll get rid of them.’

She nodded. The idea didn’t displease her.

‘Okay. Don’t say anything about what you saw. Don’t mention me. Just say something like, “I’ve lost a good friend and neighbour and I’d appreciate being left alone to grieve”.’

She nodded again, eyes brighter. Then the cops knocked.

I was lucky. I got an intelligent plainclothes cop straight off. He listened to me, wrote down my name and the number I gave him to ring, rang his station commander, gave him the number. The superior rang back inside five minutes, they exchanged a few words, the cop came over.

‘That’ll be in order, Mr Faraday. Mrs Vinovic’s giving a statement in the sitting room. I’ll take yours here.’

We heard the sound of a helicopter. ‘Vultures here,’ the man said. I looked out of the window. The helicopter was above Melanie’s house, camera protruding like a gun.

It was dark before the circus was over. We stood in the sitting room. ‘Helluva way to spend an afternoon,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s over. Time to get moving.’

‘A drink,’ she said. ‘Have a drink.’ The high colour brought on by the television appearances was fading. She tried out the name. ‘John.’

‘I’ve got a long way to go.’

‘Just a drink. One drink. What d’ya drink? Beer? I’ve got beer. Wine? Lots of wine. Bobo didn’t drink anything except wine. All kinds of wine. There’s a cellar y’know. Proper cellar. Bobo had to have a cellar.’

‘Beer would be good.’

‘Beer. I’ll have a beer too. Don’t often drink beer. Fattening. What the fuck.’

At six thirty, we watched the news on television. Melanie’s house from the air, the voice-over. ‘A thirty-two-year-old Shepparton woman and her de facto husband were found dead of gunshot wounds in their house outside the town today.’ We saw a lot of police coming and going and a young male reporter with receding hair identified the dead man as Barry James Field, twenty-seven, an unemployed building worker. Lee-Anne came on and said her dignified piece. The camera liked her.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Just right.’

‘Police are treating the deaths as a murder–suicide,’ the reporter said.

At eight o’clock, I rang Lew. ‘I’m held up here,’ I said. ‘Back tomorrow.’

Lee-Anne came into the kitchen with a bottle of champagne. The heating was on high, she’d taken off the fluffy top to reveal a Club Med T-shirt strained to its limits, her colour was back. ‘Perrier Something,’ she said. ‘Fucking case of it down there. All right, y’reckon?’

‘I reckon.’

I opened it gently. I’d have to get a cab to a motel.

‘Bobo had the cleaning contract at my work,’ Lee-Anne said. ‘Clean, clean, clean, it was like a religion. First place we lived in, rental, you won’t believe this, he used to get in the roof with this industrial vacuum. Huge fucking thing, noise like a Boeing, suck a rat out of a drain.’

I poured. Lee-Anne drank half a glass.

‘Dust in the ceiling. Couldn’t bear the idea. Can you credit that? I mean, who cares you don’t even know it’s there? Mind you, look at this place now. Bobo’ll be spinning.’

‘Looks fine,’ I said. Somehow I’d forgotten that we were twenty metres from a house where we’d found two people dead.

‘Light’s too bright.’ She went to the door and turned a knob. ‘Better. Dimmers in every room. Toilet, even. I thought dimmers were about bloody romance. Shouldn’t talk like this about Bobo. Drove the ute under a semi outside Wang. Horror crash, the paper said. Could’ve posted it. What I want to know is what the fuck he’s doing outside Wang when he tells me he’s in Bendigo overnight, big cleaning contract coming up?’

Lee-Anne came back to her seat opposite me. She put her elbows on the counter, held out her glass and looked into my eyes. She was looking startlingly attractive. ‘Bobo was number two. First was Steve. Don’t even think about him. Photographer. Just a kid when I met him. Coburg girl. Very strict family. My God, strict. You don’t know strict. You have to be Coburg Lebanese to know strict.’

I filled her glass, added Perrier Jouet to mine. Very good drop. Howard James Lefroy liked Perrier Jouet. Not the drink you’d expect to be having outside Shepparton on a freezing night in June, wind coming up outside, silver foil insulation on the unfinished wall vibrating like a drum skin, blood still on the tiles in the shaky weatherboard next door.

‘Not that it kept you fucking pure,’ said Lee-Anne. She put her hands on the counter. They were good hands, long fingers, nails not painted. ‘Not when you met a photographer. Called himself a photographer. Not what a lot of people called him.’

Lee-Anne put an arm up her T-shirt to adjust her bra. I was hypnotised.

‘Wedding pictures. Half the time they didn’t come out. Whole fuckin weddings, excuse me. Vanished like they never happened. Steve was always on the run from fathers, brothers, uncles. I donta wanta my money back, I wanta my daughter’s pictures, watta fuck you do with them? Not a street he could walk in safety, Steve, that many people lookin for him.’

We opened another bottle of the French. It seemed to last five minutes.

‘Listen, Lee-Anne,’ I said. ‘Reckon we can get a taxi out here? Take me to a motel?’

She put her glass down, got up, took off her T-shirt, threw it over her shoulder, put her hand behind her back, unclipped her virgin-white bra, tossed it away. It landed in the sink.

‘I don’t suppose you’d have a spare bed,’ I said, mouth dry.

‘It’s been four years,’ she said, coming around the counter. ‘I’ve still got Bobo’s condoms.’

In the night, she woke me and asked, ‘You seen dead people before?’

What do you say?

I left before dawn, kissed her on the mouth.

The title of Melanie Pavitt’s handwritten autobiography promised more than it delivered. It didn’t go beyond the age of thirteen. She stopped in the middle of a page with the words:
I did not see Mum again. I herd she went to Perth with a man but I dont no if its true. She never loved me so it dosent matter.

All the letters except one were from a man called Kevin, written from Darwin and Kalgoorlie, never more than a page: weather, job, miss you, love. The most recent one was five years old.

The other letter was brief, too, in a sloping female hand, signed by someone called Gaby, dated 12 July 1995
.
No address. It read:

Mel!!! You rememberd my Mums adress!!! She sent the letter to me here in Cairns. Im living here with a man called Otto, hes a German mechanic and very nice and kind altho a bit old. Still you cant have everything can you. I was really shocked to see the things you wrote. The barstards shoud be locked up!!! You are pretty lucky to be alive I reckon, its like those backpackers mudered near Sydney, Otto new one of them, a girl. Id never have said that Ken woud do something like that, they are people you are suposed to be abel to trust!!!I suppose they think there money makes it alrite. Now you now where I am come and stay, theres lots of room. Otto wont mind. Its hot all year here. To warm a lot. Write soon.