I'm Dying Here Page 12

  “Be generous, Mauricio. Think family. My phone is your phone, that sort of thing.”

  “See you real soon, Purdue.”

  I wondered if Mauricio was about to offer me employment.

  Two possible opportunities in a single day. A man needs clients.

  §

  “Girls in, Vin?”

  “Dunno. Poor Jonquil’s having a lie-down in the best suite at the John Fawkner.”

  That gave me a start until I remembered that it was the big pri­vate hospital on Moreland Road hill, nothing to do with Fawkner Crematorium. Old Fawkner must have had his hand in a number of adjacent and lucrative pies, if it was the same man, in this case one hand shuffling its failures to the other. Enough to put you off visiting the quack. Vinnie, back from ministering to his grey­hounds, was surrounded by a blizzard of paper: small slips in vari­ous hues, like a scene from some awful old ABC television serial about SP bookies, in disarray. He peered shortsightedly, scribbled a notation in a large ledger, groaned, put it aside, clutched his head. “You couldn’t give a bloke a hand?”

  “Computers down?”

  “It’s all a mystery to me, Tom. Leave it to the girl. I used to have two women in the back room handling the phones and the books, then young Jonquil went through like a...what do they say on that ad?”

  “A dose of salts?”

  “A white tornado. Automated the whole thing. What am I meant to do now?”

  “Hire a twelve-year-old,” I said. I looked over his shoulder at the desk. On the small TV set, small figures mouthed at each other. It was true, he’d lost his craft. Fall off, climb straight back on, you get it back, they say, but Vinnie hadn’t been that successful of late, business had been dropping away with the rise and rise of Taberet and all the pokie machine in the pubs, it was wonder to me that Cookie had found enough to do. But here were the slips to prove that starting price gambling retained its lure. I couldn’t see any­thing that looked like big money wagered on a camel.

  “You still got that shotgun, Vinnie?”

  He said nothing, but his mouth tightened.

  “I suppose it’s been cleaned and disposed of?”

  “Dunno what you’re talking about. Handed it in during the am­nesty, I reckon. Cost me eight hundred fuckin bucks, shoulda sold it to your mate Mauricio.”

  “Yeah.” I unkinked. “Going upstairs to wait for Annabelle, anyone asks.”

  “They don’t like people messing about up there.”

  “I’ll leave them a note and drive over to the hospital.”

  “Take her some flowers,” Vinnie said. “Woulda gone myself, but I have all this—” He gestured in despair at the midden of bet­ting slips.

  §

  Sappho the cat met me on the stairs, twining herself around my legs and making hungry sounds.

  “I’m the last person to ask,” I told the cat. “I assume the girls are still out, then?”

  “Mmmmrrp,” Sappho said. After I opened the door with the key Animal didn’t know I owned, I found a can of Cat-O-Meat and the cat opener, spooned a mound of the smelly stuff into her saucer. She set to, casting me a wary glance.

  “Never eat it,” I reassured her. “Well, there was that one week.”

  I went into Cookie’s empty bedroom, clicked the desk lamp. The computer sat on the desk, lifeless without her authorizing codes. Inside her robe, where I’d left the Esky next to the shotgun before falling into the sleep of the damned, I found robes: com­modious, ample, overflowing black Goth robes with embroidery in deep scarlet and deeper blue metallic thread, just the thing for the lifestyle challenged fattie. On the floor of the robe, a laptop computer lay in an inexpensive leather or faux-leather case. I took the computer to the bed and powered it up.

  On my lap the laptop showed a desktop picture of Rembrandt’s wife. Not only a powerfully decorated Goth, young Cookie, a cul­ture freak as well. I ran my thumb over the pad and finally got the arrow onto the hard drive icon. I tapped the pad and Rembrandt’s wife was half replaced by a list of the laptop’s contents. The usual suspects: word processing, internet access, email, spreadsheet, ex­ecutive games for long flights and a list of documents with little icons of keys next to them. I ran my eye down the list of sub-di­rectories. PURDUE caught my eye. Just for the form of the thing I clicked on it. Secure directory. Enter password. No kidding. Same obstacle course as the machine on the desk. Unless I was greatly mistaken, it was Cookie’s password I needed, and for that I’d have to pay a visit to my wife Juliet who was probably up to her elbows in molten metal.

  I sighed, wondering what quid pro quo would be required to secure access to the laptop’s secrets.

  Or I could just ask Cookie, maybe she would like to employ me in some capacity as recompense for my Galahad rescue. If the poor cow was up to it. Probably she’d still be recuperating in the Faw­kner hospital for a few days. I wondered if she and her sister had come into some money from the daughter-molester with no cra­nium, or if Share had bagged the lot. I sat on the bed and sighed. I didn’t wish to impose myself on Jules. The move of choice, the obvious move really, was to pop up the road to the John Fawkner and have a word with the brutalized orca. Assuming the cops let me see her. Well, they had no cause not to. They could hardly in­tend to charge her with her father’s death, or the death of a hyped-up, sugar-maddened and allegedly UFO-mutilated camel for that matter. Assuming UFO aliens carried Eskys on board.

  I rubbed the bristles on my face. Good Christ, had that only been yesterday? It felt like a month. Sappho sashayed in and jumped up beside me, stropping the bedcovers with her claws and making con­crete-churning sounds. I stroked her from the top of her head to her tail, and she settled down happily. When Mauricio’s phone rang I thought twice, but answered it anyway. No caller ID on the screen.

  “Yep.”

  “They let me in at Melton?” A pause. The woman was nervous. “Well, now what?”

  “Eh.”

  “I put that piece of meat in with the gun?” I knew the voice from somewhere, fucked if I could pin it down. An older woman, querulous. Presumably she’d been ready to pass herself off as my mother or elderly aunt or something, better than offering money, but good old Thick-as-a-brick had just waved her through with no more than a snigger at her fishing exploits. Mauricio was the only one who knew about the U Store It hoard except for me. Thanks a fucking lot, pal. What was the madman up to?

  The silence lengthened.

  “Should I go up and see him?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Oh dear, I don’t know. I’m just across the street now, in Ivy’s.”

  Good Christ, it was Maeve Murphy. “Nngg,” I said, and dis­connected.

  Mauricio would stop at nothing, use anyone, family, friends, stray little old ladies. Mauricio, Mauricio, I swore to myself. Your machinations beggar the imagination of lesser men and Lesser women, and they will bring you undone one day, you little shit.

  I rang Telstra, got put through to admissions at Fawkner. “I’m enquiring about a young woman who was brought in very early this morning, Jonquil Lesser’s her name, is she still—”

  The woman on the desk did her computer checking, while a man in the office told her or someone else gloatingly about the bundle he’d made yesterday on Brute Force.

  “She was released at noon, sir.”

  “Someone picked her up? Jonquil has trouble getting around, you see.”

  “Oh yes, the very overweight— Um, a family member arranged her transport.”

  “Thanks.”

  I went out again to the car, nodding to Vinnie. The Cobra was parked in Sydney Road just up from the shop, probably illegally, although on a Sunday afternoon the rules of the clearway were too Byzantine for me to grasp. Leaning into the luggage hold, I retrieved the horrid thing in its white casing, then came back the round-about way along the alley to avoid running into Maeve and giving her a heart attack. I left the Esky and its gruesome contents once more in Cookie’s room, inside the same wardrobe wh
ere the cat couldn’t play with it, and took Sappho out to the kitchen for some milk, saw to it that her kitty litter tray was reasonably wholesome, then let myself out into the shop with a click. Vinnie was poring through his slips of paper with a certain resolute des­peration, aided by Mrs. Murphy. If the powers of reincarnation could be brought to bear on his task, she was the woman to save his day.

  “Hello, Maeve,” I said. “Can I get you both a cuppa? I think the girls must be on their way back,” I told Vinnie. “The hospital reckons Cookie’s fighting fit.”

  “Needs to lose a few pounds,” he said gloomily. “I’ll take mine with milk and two, Mrs. Murphy the same.”

  “None for me, dearie,” Maeve said. “I’ve just had a nice pot of tea and a Cambodian crumpet with the girl over the road. It’s not really a crumpet?”

  “In that case, Vinnie,” I said, “I’ll leave you to make your own swill. Top of the morning to you, Madam Cleopatra.”

  “I feel the Czarina upon me today,” she said. “I can’t say I ap­prove of the decorations on your motor car.”

  “It’s all the rage in Melton,” I said. She flinched, developed an interest in sorting the betting tickets. I jotted down the borrowed cellphone number on the back of one, tucked it into Vinnie’s top pocket. “Tell Animal she can reach me on that number.”

  Three or four barely teenaged hoons on BMX bikes, stack hats hanging from their handle bars, propped on the footpath admiring the artwork on the Cobra. Their well-heeled parents probably re­sided in affluent comfort in Pentridge bloody Village. One held an enamel paint can, perhaps to add a small contribution of his own, perhaps to elevate his mood with a snort. I took it away from him with the hand that wasn’t holding the laptop and lobbed it into the back of a passing ute. When I pulled into the traffic, I couldn’t be sure if their hoots were jeering catcalls or cries of admiration. I prefer to think it was the latter.

  “Share,” I said, driving one handed.

  “I’m not going to discuss this over the phone.” She sounded exasperated. “I’ve just got the child back from—”

  “I’m coming over. I’m enthralled by the mysterious case of Nile

  Fever’s mutilation and would like an in-depth—”

  “What the fuck do you know about that? Purdue, if this is one of your hare-brained scam—”

  “Pure guesswork, sweetheart, and keen attention to trash televi­sion rumors and the tireless press. Strike that.” A tram rumbled past backwards as I put my foot to the floor. “Sheer dogged detec­tive work. Put some lunch on, would you, I’m starving.”

  “Lunch was two hours ago.”

  “Make it afternoon tea. A pot of Darjeeling, cucumber sand­wiches. Mind you cut the crusts off of the sandwiches. And a meat pie or two. Lashings of tomato sauce.”

  “Why should I feed you, you bastard?”

  That sounded genuinely indignant. Scratch one theory. “If Grime’s there, put her on.”

  “You mean Animal.”

  “I mean your step-daughter, Share. Fetch her to the phone, it would be a kindness, and your karma will be adjusted by three points to offset what you did to that poor camel.”

  She hollered into the void. “Ruby!”

  I waited, thinking hard. In the distance, I heard a whine. “Wha-a-a-t?”

  “You have an admirer on the phone.”

  “Tell her to.... Oh, fuck.” Heavy Doc Maartens boots clumped along the polished floorboards. “What do you want now, Gracie? I told you it’s over.”

  “I found the shotgun in the U Store It,” I told her. Presumably Grime or Animal had coolly nicked my keys while I snored the sleep of the up-way-too-late-and-cop-pestered, and had them cop­ied. Could you do that on a Sunday morning? Probably the clever little bitch had some laser cutting tool at work that did it in a trice. They must have been moving like greased pigs, though. And whose bright idea was that? Oh, I thought. Who else but Mauri­cio? “And the Esky, of course,” I added.

  “Bullshit,” Ruby Lesser said hopefully.

  “You and Mauricio placed your faith in a weak reed,” I said. “Maeve’s away with the pixies. One hard stare and she gave it up.”

  “Oh shit, you prick, if you’ve hurt that poor old lady—” “You’ll have the top of my head blown off? That would look suspicious, Grime, don’t you think?” A van load of Maori rugby players pulled past me in the wrong lane, jeering at the graffiti job, showing me their tattooed tongues. I saluted them with the mobile, put it back against my ear just in time to monitor the end of a stream of futile obscenity.

  “Look, hold your tongue for once, Ruby.” To my surprise that worked. In the grudging quiet, I said, “I need to know if Cookie’s up to some conversation. I have her laptop with me.”

  “Don’t you dare to—”

  “For Christ’s sake put a sock in it, Grime. Is she awake and lucid.”

  “No.”

  “Sleeping, or something the quacks gave her?”

  “Some narcotic shit. Those bastards at the hospital—”

  Good god, was I about to have a Just Say No tirade inflicted on me by a bolt-tongued Goth? The thought of a mutilated tongue made me shudder briefly.

  “All right, Grime, my plans have changed. Tell your mother—”

  “She’s not my fucking mother!”

  “Tell Sharon I’m taking a rain check on the tea and scones. I want her to call me at this number the moment Cookie wakes up. Have you got a pencil or pen or something?”

  “I’ve got an eidetic memory.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t forget shit.”

  “Okay, good for you.” I told her the number of Mauricio’s mobile, and put it back in my pocket, concentrated on swinging around the next corner. Fairly soon I parked askew next to the smelly Dumpster, raced up the steps. It only took a minutes to re­trieve the Esky, which was more likely not to disappear if I kept it close than if I left it there for the grrls to trip over again, assuming they ever went home, or for Maeve to reclaim. I groaned to myself. Life is just so damned complicated sometimes.

  PART 5

  I gunned my streetwise artwork ride toward the Tullamarine toll road, then south over the Yarra river as it headed for freedom into Hobson’s Bay, and looped onto the Westgate Freeway. The great bridge took me high into the air with the city’s commerce all phallic mirrored glass and Victorian remnants to one side and low slung industry on the other, with water glimpses like burnished steel between them. I ripped through the Sunday afternoon traffic headed for the insalubrious boundary of Laverton North and Sun­shine West where my wife has her iron foundry and works her will upon the materials of the earth in ways that draw applause and large amounts of money from home renovators throughout the continent. And they call what I do a scam.

  I met Juliet Cimino first and her siblings later, so she knew me initially as a grieving widower with a soulful gaze and only later as a scam artist with a modest criminal record, like her older brother Mauricio but rather less so.

  In those days she was a high-powered and power-dressed pub­lisher for Pen Inc, one of the black-clad young band of super­women who had remade the local book industry in the image of their sensitive but tough, laconic but knowing, tasteful but market-savvy feminist souls. Juliet went on to make heaps of money for the global conglomerate with fat novels about colonial criminals and their brutalized womenfolk, fat cookbooks promis­ing the abolition of fat, slender improving rants in large typeface that showed fat to be a postfeminist issue, and an entire line of bogus but terrifying autobiographies by contemporary criminals who wished they were Chopper Read, the gunman who had his ears hacked off in jail to make a point. I met Chopper a few times, when I couldn’t avoid it, and have gone out of my way to avoid the occasion since.

  Juliet migrated out of publishing and into her current trade by an interesting chance. She was flying home from the biennial Ad­elaide Arts Festival, a sunny cultural gathering under large open tents beneath a grassy knoll not far from the center of the
city of churches. The event is washed with fine wines of the region and excellent food if you’re a publisher or one of the high fliers in the fat, fat-free or near-criminal genres.

  Poor Juliet had sparkled relentlessly for five days, and was jad­ed. The beefy man in the narrow seat next to her explained that he was an important executive for one of the steel giants that under­girded the national economy for a time. He was fascinated to learn that she was in publishing, or perhaps by her beautiful breasts and delicately flavored Italian accent. She’d picked up more than art history at Deakin university. Mauricio had gone there, too, for a year of Economics and Law, before shifting gear and moving his accent in the other direction.

  “So you’re in publishing? Fascinating! Do you know,” the busi­nessman told her in a reflective tone, “I’ve always thought that when I retire from the steel business I might open a small publish­ing house.”

  Juliet gazed at him, I’m certain, with her ferocious Italian long­lashed gaze and said thoughtfully, “Now that’s really an extraor­dinary coincidence.”

  “Oh?” The tycoon was baffled, and sipped at his Cabernet Sau­vignon with a frown.

  “Yes, I’ve always thought that when I retire from publishing I’d like to open a small iron foundry.”

  Sprayed red wine does not leave an especially visible mark on black, so it was lucky that Jules was a publisher at the time. But the jesting idea, whimsical and ad hoc as it was, stuck somehow in her mind. She fancied herself the distant daughter of Benvenuto Cellini and couldn’t help noticing how real estate prices were rising dizzy­ingly and the demand for wrought iron lacework with them.

  Lace iron had first come to Australia as ballast in the bottoms of cargo ships, and the supply had been pretty much exhausted by the 1980s. In the ’90s you couldn’t find any for love or money, so everyone wanted it. Aluminum was cheaper and lighter but it had a fatally ersatz lightness and cheapness. Iron struck from the soil of the land, that was the thing. Iron crushed and melted and poured bright white into moulds shaped with fleurs des lys and little doggies’ faces and vine leaves and sunbursts and God knows what all. Noble iron lions standing atop pillars of iron, and gryphons wrapped in writhing snakes with iron scales and frozen flickering iron tongues. There was money in it, and art, of a sort. Juliet resigned from Pen with a nice bonus and bought up a fail­ing foundry in a sunless portion of Sunshine, not all that far from where she’d grown up in Footscray when that was still a working class suburb. Her sainted mother was scandalized. Not as scandal­ized, it’s true, as when Jules married me.