White Dog (24 page)

He left. From the window, I saw him remove my rug from the skip and take it inside. No doubt he would be wearing it when next I saw him.

Action. No more moping. I took Sophie’s photographs and the negatives to Vizionbanc in South Melbourne, parked the Stud outside in the loading zone. The woman looked at my face in a clinical way, not disguising her interest.

‘I’m hoping your magic will help with these,’ I said.

She looked at them. ‘Fucking awful.

In a hurry?’ ‘I cannot begin to tell you,’ I said.

Her plastic surgeon’s gaze played over my face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Have a seat, Jack.’

She went into the back. They didn’t keep office hours, these picture people.

I flipped a few photography magazines, including a big one full of nudes, women and men, some bound, some oiled, many cut off at the head. There was a picture of a man in a suit with what looked like a sea creature hanging out of his fly, the sort of blind pointed thing I imagined to be found at great depths, living off sulphur bubbles in the eternal dark.

I was at the window, hangover not abating, watching well-dressed people go into the pub across the street. It had been a bloodhouse in recent memory, scene of a famous fight between factions of the Painters & Dockers Union. I’d appeared for one of the accused, a near-homicidal man called Tully with fists the size of small cauliflowers. Thinking about his hands brought other hands into my mind, the rings on his fingers, seen through blood as he backhanded me, the …

No.

I thought about photographs, the number of photographs I’d peered at since I started taking assignments from Wootton, pictures of missing people, their wives, lovers, friends and relatives, their dogs, their cars, photographs taken outside courts, in clubs, on the beach, barbecuing meat, in pools, at weddings and twenty-first birthday parties, kissing people, even a homemade porn video featuring a man and two women, one dressed as an Ansett air hostess, complete with little hat and name tag. It occurred to me for the first time that she might have been a real Ansett hostess.

‘He says it’s the best he can do,’ said the woman.

I turned. She was holding up an A3 envelope.

‘The neg’s a bit better than the print,’ she said. ‘Want a look?’

I shook my head, gave her my business credit card, said my thanks for the service.

It was the wrong time to be on the streets, drizzle, evening peak hour, drive time. The woman with the Italian name was on the radio. She had a way with her, clever, bursting with cheek, a naughty laugh that could blow away the rain. I went up Lygon Street to King & Godfree. Thirsty, I needed two bottles of beer. Carlsberg, no other beer would do. I bought six bottles.

Behind the stripped oaks lay a warm dwelling. I’d forgotten to switch off the heating and I was glad of the oversight. I drew curtains, put on lights, put on music, didn’t agonise over the choice, put on Elvis, the greatest hits, he always made me feel better. In the kitchen, I removed the cap from a Carlsberg and drank three-quarters of the bottle straight off, flooded myself with Danish hangover medication, tears coming to my eyes.

To the sitting room with the bottle and another one.

I sat in my chair and took the four big laser prints out of the envelope. In the top two, the woman’s face was much clearer, a snub nose, but the angle was bad. I turned to the third picture.

The woman standing at the car. The car’s number plate was readable now.

You could also see the lower half of the face of the woman in the passenger seat. You could see the crucifix in the hollow of her throat.

I knew that crucifix.

And you could see the driver’s hands on the steering wheel.

You could see the rings on his fingers, big rings on big fingers.

I touched my face.

I knew the rings. I felt a joy.

Eric the Cybergoth rang back when I was halfway through the second bottle of beer. He coughed for a while, the man who put the hack into hacker.

‘Redmile Solutions, four vehicles, want them?’ he said, nasal and throaty and apparently speaking from beneath an eider-down.

‘Might as well.’ I wrote down details of four vehicles, the address in Abbotsford. It was just off Johnston Street, in the dip, not a great distance from where I sat. I said goodbye, reached for my book, found a number.

‘No, we never sleep,’ said Simone Bendsten. ‘We can’t afford to now that we are in fact we and not lonesome me calling myself we like Queen Victoria.’

I went to the kitchen and rinsed an arbitrary quantity of rice, put it in the rice pot, covered it with a certain amount of water, threw in two cubes of frozen chicken stock, put the container into the microwave and punched in an arbitrary cooking time.

It would turn out soggy, it would turn out as a hard rice cake. Or each grain would be perfect, moist, independent of its neighbours. There was no knowing.

And I didn’t care. I opened a can of tuna and went to the cupboard for the plum sauce from the Adelaide Hills. There could not possibly be enough tuna swimming around Thailand to supply every supermarket in the world with as much tuna as they needed. What was this stuff? Patagonian toothfish?

Capers, gherkins, where? The phone.

‘Jack,’ she said, ‘The
Age
carried a report on 12 June 1995 of two men accused of assaulting a building contractor called Darren Kluske in a parking lot in Melton. Kluske said he was working on a MassiBild site at the time and he’d seen the men on building sites before. He believed they worked for a company called Redmile that, quote, does Massi’s dirty work, unquote.’

‘Names?’

‘Brian Robert Grayling and Reece Stedman. Twenty-two June, charges withdrawn. A prosecution witness declined to testify. The name also shows up in the building industry royal commission a week ago.’

‘Yes?’

‘In Perth, a witness told the commission his job in 1998 was to distribute cash payments to workers on five sites. The money was given to him in plastic bags by, quote, different blokes from Redmile, unquote. He was asked about Redmile but he said all he knew was the name and that they were, quote, heavies, dangerous people, unquote.’

‘Can you run the two men?’

‘We’re ahead of you, Jack. Grayling’s dead, there’s a death notice in 1998. Stedman was a detective sergeant in the Victoria Police. On 17 May 1993, he was named in an internal affairs report on the drug squad leaked to the
Herald Sun
. He is known to, quote, associate with drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes, unquote. Two days later, 20 May, the paper carried a story saying the three drug-squad members named in the document had resigned from the force.’

‘Well done,’ I said. ‘You are as a dutiful child to a blind man.’

‘If I don’t get some exercise soon,’ she said, ‘only the less sighted will go out with me.’

‘My sight is reasonable and I will always go out with you.’

‘Starting when?’

‘Well, how does damn soon sound?’

‘Sounds fine, if vague. But you have my number.’

I ate my simple meal watching television and reading a two-day-old newspaper. In a report on the royal commission, a MassiBild employee denied any knowledge of the practice of contractors supplying subcontractors with cash to pay workers.

All too complicated. Too many names, brain of dough. The bones of my face ached, my chest and stomach hurt where I’d been punched. I was also badly hung over.

I switched on the answering machine, turned the volume to nothing, kicked the wedges under the doors, went to bed. While I was trying to keep from thinking, sleep claimed me like quicksand.

I woke late, it was after nine, eastern sunlight on the curtains. In the bathroom, I looked. The swelling had almost gone from my cheeks, welts less livid, a few thin scabs formed.

Under the falling water, I thought about near-death experiences, people trying to kill me, beating me up, threatening me. Not what I’d had in mind when I took the decision to give up practising criminal law.

Dressing, I thought that, when this was over, I would tell Wootton I didn’t want any more jobs. Between leases and contracts and a bit of luck with the horses, I could get by. Selling the Stud would help. It was like owning a yacht, the cost per hour of use was shocking.

When this was over. When would that be? When I found out what had happened to Janene and Katelyn, the missing women? Dead women? My thoughts kept coming back to them. This matter began to take on its strange shape the night the car pulled up next to me outside the boot factory.

Mickey Franklin.

Yes?

I’ll give you a name.

A name?

Janene Ballich.

How do you spell that?

B-A-L-L-I-C-H.

Names are useful. Come in and see my collected phone books.

Jack, this is serious shit, mate. Goodnight.

Serious, indeed. Janene and Wayne. Dead Wayne, entrepreneur of the senses, one-stop Wayne. I put bread in the toaster, old but good bread in an old toaster with sides that opened, sat at the kitchen table in the sunlight, and remembered Popeye Costello’s words.

Girls, boys, micks, dicks, cock-frocks, fladgers, bondies, whatever. Customer-driven, that’s the ticket.

And Janene? On the menu?

I suppose.

Tea. I emptied the kettle, refilled, put a teabag into the teapot, empty and clean. When did I do that? Thinking about Wayne Dilthey, cocky Wayne standing between Janene and Katelyn in the photograph. That would have been close to the highwater mark, lovely young spunks on either side, his bottom touching the Porsche.

Wayne Dilthey. Like a sex-and-drugs supermarket that did home deliveries. Was that how it worked? Where was Wayne going when fate caught up with him in Kaniva? Mileages to buggery in South Australia written on his road map, said Barry Tregear.

The toast was smouldering. I turned it over. At the time, you often failed to understand the significance of what people were telling you. Your mind was usually ahead, thinking of the next question. What set great cross-examiners apart was that they listened to witnesses’ answers, never got ahead of themselves, stayed with a topic until it was flat as a bunny ironed by several roadtrains. That was the way you nudged the witness beyond the rehearsed answers, edged them into the ad-lib zone, Drew’s term.

Wayne was on the run, clearly. Something happened and he ran. Did something happen to Wayne and Janene and Katelyn at the same time? A merchant and his stock. Merchants didn’t get attached to their stock, they didn’t collect it, they dealt in it, that was what trade was about.

Smoke of toast. Caught just in time, a little scraping would remove the toxic black bits. I put on the second round, spread butter and the mysterious black substance, Australia’s soy sauce. Since when were malt and yeast vegetables? Why wasn’t it called Maltemite? Yeastamite?

Kettle boiling. I poured water into the teapot and grated parmesan onto the Vegemite. Very good with parmesan was the mite. Bugger cheese and onion, they should make parmesan and Vegemite potato chips, now that would be fusion cuisine: Parmemite.

Detective Sergeant Reece Stedman, disgraced cop, worked for Redmile in 1994. The man in the Redmile car to whom the woman watching Sarah reported was the man who attacked me. Was that Reece Stedman sitting in the car with Donna Filipovic?

Why should it be?

Toast-turning time. Perhaps marmalade with this round? There was also a good French blueberry jam. The marmalade came from somewhere rural, bought by Linda. Tooling around the countryside in her Alfa, stopping to buy produce from desperate roadside rustics.

Tooling alone? I had done no rural tooling with her. City tooling, yes.

How could these things come into my mind? In the midst of very serious shit, body hurting, face battered, I felt a flicker, no, a flame, of sexual suspicion and resentment involving someone who was probably gone for good.

Going to South Australia. Wayne.

He had no reason to go. He could have been going further, to Western Australia, you had to get over South Australia to get there. It stood in the way, a hot and waterless piece of ground in the main, an obstacle.

Why would Wayne be going to WA? Because it was a long, long way from Melbourne?

He wouldn’t have known the way. You’d pull up at some place on the highway that offered food, go inside, you’d be eating a fat-saturated piece of fried something and looking at the map. Christ, it’s a long way, you’d say to yourself, and the stomach acid would burn in the oesophagus even before you’d finished eating.

Take out a pen, write down the distances in the map’s margin, add them up, estimate how far you could get that day. Write down the mileages from where you were to buggery in South Australia.

It wasn’t that your destination was buggery in South Australia, it was because that was the end of a stage. Because the map stopped there.

I left the table and went to the sitting room and rang Bendsten Associates, gave my name to the brisk person, Simone came on.

‘Don’t tell me this is the damn-soon call?’ she said.

‘Not just yet.’

I gave the name Dilthey in Brisbane. It took very little time.

‘Just the one,’ she said. ‘K. J. Dilthey. You do know that you can find out this kind of information yourself by asking directory inquiries? I have to charge you.’

‘I prefer your voice recognition software,’ I said. ‘Number?’

I rang it. A woman answered. I asked for Mr Dilthey.

‘He’s not really up to it,’ she said. ‘I’m the day nurse.’

‘I’m ringing from the probate office of the Supreme Court in Melbourne,’ I said, lying without effort. ‘It’s about his son’s estate. Our understanding is that Mr Dilthey is Wayne’s sole heir but we’ve had an inquiry from someone else. You don’t happen to know whether there are other relatives, do you?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but hang on, I’ll ask the lady next door, she knows everything, been there for yonks.’

‘I’ll hold,’ I said.

I drank the last of the tea. There was a sparrow on the windowsill, pecking hopefully. I should put out crumbs. Isabel always emptied the breadboard tray onto the windowsill. Surely this bird could not remember that?