White Dog (8 page)

‘Excellent,’ she said. She licked her lower lip, showing a viper of pink tongue. ‘I may have to get another truck.’

‘Wait a while,’ I said. ‘Till you see it’s all flow and no ebb.’

We walked. The oncomings seemed to part for us – well, for a six-feet-two woman, with a broken nose, in overalls.

‘Fussy bastard, this Enzio,’ she said. ‘We go to collect the gas stove he’s bought, it’s disgusting. It looks like it’s been in shearers’ quarters for fifty years, they fire up all eight burners and chuck on a dead sheep, turn it over at half-time in the footy. Just looking at the fucking thing makes you itch. Enzio makes me get the blankets and wrap it up like it’s a French antique.’ She shook her head. ‘Had to throw away the blankets. Good blankets.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘he tells me it
is
a French antique. Chucked out in some refurbishment of the Melbourne Club.’

We entered the stove’s new home. Enzio, scowling, his expression of choice, was on a ladder, painting a wall. He was wearing tracksuit pants and a singlet and he had sprinkled paint on his thinly covered scalp, his stubbled face, the exposed hairy parts of his body, on his garments.

‘Jack, Boz,’ he said. He pronounced her name Boss.

‘Good colour,’ I said. ‘Ancient nicotine. When’s opening day?’

It couldn’t be soon enough for me. I’d had no home in Brunswick Street for months, not since Neil Willis, absentee owner, wedding-reception gouger, sold Meaker’s, my hangout of too many years, to some jewellery-hung wise boys looking for a place to run drug money through. They’d sacked the staff and accused Enzio, the cook, of stealing from the kitchen. It had taken some doing but I’d managed to wring the workers’ entitlements out of Willis, including Enzio’s superannuation, fourteen unpaid years of it. Meaker’s was now called Peccadillo. My hope was that when they nailed the new owners, it would be for some offence to which that term did not apply.

‘So?’ said Enzio to Boz. ‘Where my furniture?’

I could see that being able to look down at her for once had empowered him.

Boz gripped the stepladder with a big hand, gave it a little shake, an exploration. Enzio cried out. The balance of power had been redressed.

‘Waiting down the street, mate,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to make room out front. Two spaces.’

‘I got a plan for that,’ said Enzio. ‘Carmel!’

Carmel the waif waitress sacked from Meaker’s appeared in the kitchen door, paintbrush in hand. She was wearing a skullcap and looked about twelve. She was thirty and knew much of men and the world.

‘Move the cars,’ said Enzio. ‘The furniture’s coming.’

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m not being paid for my time here.’

‘Please,’ said Enzio.

‘That’s a first,’ Carmel said. ‘That’s a personal best for you. Move them where?’

‘The lane. Two minutes.’

‘Keys?’

‘On the counter.’

She went out.

‘Here’s your lease,’ I said. ‘You are now legally occupying this building. Rent’s due the last Friday of every month, paid straight into the bank. The account number’s written on the first page.’

Enzio came down the ladder. He took the envelope, held it in both hands. He went over and put it on the counter, patted it. ‘Never thought,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Never thought.’

‘Yes, well. When?’

He looked at me. I thought I saw a glint in the black eyes. He cleared his throat. ‘Monday,’ he said. ‘Monday we open. Six o’clock, we have a little drink, champagne. Okay?’

‘Okay. See you on Monday.’

He followed me to the door, took my sleeve. ‘Jack,’ he said, barely audible, ‘listen, I want to say to you, I want to …’

I said, ‘Enzio, don’t say anything. Monday, I’m having poached eggs with the lot. Soft. I’ve had it with hard poached eggs.’

‘I hold them in the boiling water,’ he said, showing me a cupped hand.

‘Ordinary cooking methods will be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a matter of the timing.’

At the office, my two rooms, tailor’s table, two chairs and a framed degree certificate, I made a pot of tea and sat behind the tailor’s table to read the three-page report on Mickey Franklin.

The work was by Simone Bendsten Associates, specialists in due diligence and the lice-combing of candidates for jobs with share options and performance bonuses and a company jet. Once the firm was just Simone, a Scandinavian-Australian refugee from the finance world working from home. Now it was three people in an office off Brunswick Street.

‘Jack,’ she’d written on a card, ‘the press clippings are attached. We haven’t been able to add much.’

I read, marking bits, sat in thought for a while, trying to see Michael Franklin – funny, clever, dangerous-feeling Mickey Franklin. The report said he’d worked for MassiBild, the Massiani family construction company, for six years before going out on his own in 1995. It listed more than twenty inner-city residential developments he had been involved in, including the Serena apartment block in South Melbourne where he was murdered. Franklin’s most recent project, the $250 million Seaton Square complex in Brunswick, had been stalled for more than eighteen months. The tangled history of the project took up a page and a half, a case study in how not to deal with the neighbours’ concerns. There was a list of creditors, including a company called Glendarual Holdings. ‘Glendarual is Sir Colin Longmore’s investment vehicle,’ noted Simone.

The report ended:

Franklin had a reputation in the property and investment sectors as someone who did not linger in projects, accepting lower than possible returns in order to move on. Descriptions of him include: ‘tightrope act’; ‘not a person we’d want to be involved with’; ‘high-pain, low-gain operator’; ‘much too hurried for us’; ‘one-man bobsled team, no thanks’.

Between them the
Age
and the
Herald Sun
had found four photographs. Two gave a good idea of what Mickey looked like. In one, he was in a dinner jacket, bow tie, in profile bending forward to kiss a much younger woman, a piece of hair falling. She was offering her mouth, no cheek kiss here, she wanted to kiss him. A birthday, perhaps a twenty-first, the woman had that shining look. The second was taken at the opening of a gallery in the Serena building. He was photographed with his wife, Corin Sleeman, a slim woman with short fair hair that looked as if she’d finger-combed it straight out of the shower.

I read the report again and then I set out for the city centre, walked up to Brunswick Street to catch a tram. Once tram rides from Fitzroy to the city were more or less free, it was only a few blocks, the connies knew you, looked the other way. That had come to an end too.

Drew waved at me from a table to the left of the door of a cavernous faux-Milano place on Little Collins Street where the staff fawned on regulars and made others feel like they’d gatecrashed a private function.

I went over and sat on an uncomfortable chair. ‘Not proving easy,’ I said.

‘Nothing of worth in life is easy,’ said Drew. ‘Why is that, do you think?’

‘I don’t think.’ I looked around at the lunchtimers, mostly men in dark suits, hard voices, eyes that darted. ‘I’ll give you a why. This place?’

‘Convenience. I’m making a house call nearby on a colleague who finds himself in an awkward position. Drugwise.’

‘Not the colleague seen after midnight helping the staff of McDonald’s? Using the fat straws to vacuum a tabletop?’

Drew ran a fingertip over his upper lip, appraised me. ‘Becoming more in touch with the world,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing.’

‘I agree. I liked the old naive me more. I plan to revert.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Drew, ‘naivete never comes back. Like virginity and that feeling of your first tongue kiss.’

He caught a waiter’s eye before the man could look away and pointed at the menu. Insulted, the balded one slid over and took out his pad. We ordered from the fixed-price menu, two courses and a glass of wine. The man’s demeanour suggested that we were cheating, like rich tourists lining up with the homeless at a soup kitchen.

‘And the red,’ said Drew. ‘Recommend it?’

The waiter shrugged. ‘It’s red, it’s wine,’ he said. His eyes were elsewhere.

‘That good? My. Two glasses, please.’

We watched him go. He was pear-shaped, a big backside, something unobjectionable in people who hadn’t given offence but capable of arousing a violent urge.

‘Once the aim was to earn a lavish tip by grovelling,’ said Drew. ‘Now they want you to grovel. You saw her?’

‘What do the jacks say about the gun?’

‘Found in the course of a routine search of the area around Mickey’s building.’

‘Following a tip-off is what I’m told.’

Drew cocked his long head. ‘That’s good for a fit-up yarn.’

‘If admitted. Also good for a dobbed-in-by-unknown-accomplice, unfortunately.’

‘Someone betting she’s willing to go down alone? No. Accords better with weapon planted by the person who shot Mick five times through two folds of towel.’

‘Thick Egyptian cotton towel, no doubt. If there was a tip, it makes this very difficult.’

The waiter arrived, clicked down two glasses of red wine. He was leaving when Drew said, crisply, ‘Waiter.’

Pearbum stopped, turned like someone with a bad back.

‘I haven’t accepted this wine,’ said Drew.

Pearbum took in air, you could see the inflation of the midsection.

Drew sniffed his glass, one deep sniff, and put it down. ‘Oxidised,’ he said, his eyes on Pearbum. ‘Wine from a new bottle, please.’

Pearbum’s chin and eyebrows went up. Drew gave him the stare, the unblinking, sceptical look used for cross-examining hard-arsed police witnesses.

Pearbum looked back, but he was basically soft-arsed and looking into Drew’s eyes reminded him of this. He lowered chin and eyebrows. ‘Certainly, sir,’ he said. He gathered the glasses.

‘Masterly,’ I said. ‘Now we get the eyedrops in the food.’

‘If they dare,’ said Drew. ‘They dare only against the weak. What else?’

‘Not much. It seems the feds were asked but they were busy.’

‘Asked what?’

I shrugged. ‘Sarah thinks she was being watched.’

‘I’m not surprised. I’d watch her. What’s
thinks
mean?’

‘She kept seeing the same woman in the street.’

Drew shook his head. ‘Anyone to back that up?’

‘Only her sister and the deceased. Then there’s the actual property invasion and the suspected one.’

‘I know about them,’ said Drew. ‘Unreported is the problem.’

‘What about Rick the driver?’

‘I was going to ask about Rick.’

Pearbum’s replacement arrived, a slim youth carrying a bottle and new glasses. He uncorked the bottle and poured a splash for Drew, who gave it a cursory sniff and nodded.

‘As two blokes having lunch,’ said Drew. ‘What?’

‘She probably did it,’ I said, ‘but she presents well. No visible twitches, engaging candour, scorns angry jilted lover angle, says little sister Sophie was always saying give me your toy.’

I tried the wine. Pearbum had captured its essence: wine, red. ‘Sophie’s a hope. She may be able to point the finger somewhere else, vaguely point, there’s a chance.’

‘We’ll have to talk to her,’ said Drew. ‘Our mutual friend say anything about her?’

‘No. I don’t think she’s on their team.’

‘We’ll find out in due course. The old boy says she’s staying with friends.’

‘Mickey worked for the Massianis for six years,’ I said. ‘I read they’re on this building royal commission’s playlist.’

Drew put a finger to the outer corner of an eye, took on a strange Asian-Caucasian look. ‘My instinctive reaction,’ he said, ‘is that if Mickey could’ve hurt the Massianis, he’d have long been part of the structural underpinning of a prestigious office tower.’

‘I’ll ask him about that,’ I said.

‘Do that,’ said Drew. ‘Ask him. He went to Monash, Steven Massiani, tell him you went to Melbourne. He’s probably haunted by feelings of inferiority like all Monash graduates. Law and engineering, first-class honours. For what that’s worth.’

Drew looked up at the painted ceiling, at the badly painted fat nudes and cherubs and bowls of fruit. ‘I wonder why they don’t combine law and transgender studies,’ he said. ‘What about law and hairdressing. Law and podiatry. Law and Hopi Indian ear candle therapy, law and …’

The youth arrived with our first course: slices of chicken breast stacked with things in between. Standing in a puddle of balsamic vinegar sauce.

‘They used to fan the food around the plate,’ Drew said. ‘Now they give you mounds, you have no idea what to do.’

‘Wreck it,’ I said.

We wrecked, we ate.

‘Plus,’ said Drew, ‘I’ve never seen the point of pine nuts.’

‘It’s about texture,’ I said. ‘Get you to the footy this week?’

He put his head to one side, gave me the sympathy look designed to lull prosecution witnesses. ‘Saints play Carlton,’ he said. ‘For the Saints, I have nothing but contempt. For Carlton, I reserve a special loathing.’

‘You wouldn’t care to umpire the game?’ I said.

Walking up Collins Street to a tramstop, a cab pulled in ahead of me to discharge a passenger. A business lunch, I thought. Transport to and from would be billable.

‘Smith Street, Collingwood,’ I said to the driver, whose hairs were arranged across his scalp like swimming lanes. He was writing something on a pad. ‘Know where that is?’ I said, gently.

‘Think I’m off the fuckin boat, mate?’

‘I assume nothing,’ I said.

‘Fuckin Smith Street,’ he said. ‘Talkin to an Abbotsford boy, mate. Born and bred.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘So you’ll have a rough idea.’

The driver sulked until the Spring Street lights, when he said, ‘So. What’s your team?’

‘Saints,’ I said.

‘You poor cunt,’ he said, immensely cheered. ‘Still, Carlton on Satdee, even your girls got a chance. Poofs Carlton.’

‘Carlton,’ I said. ‘Possibly.’

I passed the leaden afternoon in paperwork, attending to legal matters, writing letters of inquiry and impotent threat, itemising bills for small services performed. In the dusk, the air cold and damp, I walked to the post office, a place now without a hint of gravitas, and consigned my missives to the steel bin, no doubt the only lawyer in the country who posted his own letters.