Dead Point

4

I woke before daylight without need of an alarm, splashed my face, put on the saggy old grey tracksuit and went shuffling through the park, around the streets. In Delbridge Street, an insane Jack Russell terrier threw himself against his front gate with a hideous bark-shriek, catching me by heart-stopping surprise for the fiftieth time. The dog would have to die. There was no other way.

Back home, I lay in the huge cast-iron bath for an hour, drinking tea, tapping off cold water, running in hot, reading the Age, ruminating on creeping flab and aching knees and other matters of the corpus. Then I dressed in sober business clothing and drove to Meaker’s in Brunswick Street for breakfast. Meaker’s had been the writing on the wall for working-class Brunswick Street when it opened in the late 1970s, serving breakfast at all hours to people with vague artistic leanings who didn’t know what time it was and couldn’t afford to eat at home because of the infrastructure required. Now the whole street provided that service and lots, lots more.

‘The look I like,’ said Carmel, the newest waiter. Despite having the appearance of a fourteen-year-old waif, she had been married twice and now, sensibly, had retired from dud men, any men, and was the companion of a sleek home-wares buyer for a shop called Noir. I knew this because she had told me, unbidden and unencouraged, when we met by chance early one evening soon after her debut at Meaker’s. Much has been learned, not all of it life-affirming, at the Brunswick Street laundromat. Something about the place — its tropical warmth, the sullen chugging of the machines, the way the newly cleansed garments swirl and flirt and twine in the perforated stainless-steel drums — encourages intimate revelations.

Down there on the left bank of the river Brunswick, Carmel spoke freely about her life and aspirations. Then her companion arrived to fetch her, a severely edited person, nothing more could be subtracted from her dress or manner or speech without her being rendered partially unclothed or immobile or incomprehensible.

‘Good tie that,’ said Carmel now.

I said thank you.

‘My first only ever used his ties to tie me up,’ said Carmel. ‘Mind you, they were school ties, greasy, ballpoint marks and bits of food on them. He went to Wesley.’

‘That’s really the only use for old Wesley ties,’ I said. ‘Melbourne Grammar boys sometimes tie theirs around their waists when they’re naked or use them to commit suicide.’

Carmel nodded. ‘Or for scarfing,’ she said. ‘Like that singer. What can I get you?’

‘Just toast and tea,’ I said. ‘Italian breakfast tea.’

‘One latte,’ she said.

Afterwards, I caught a tram into the city, stood all the way to Collins Street with the barely awake and the glowing pre-dawn joggers, the perfectly made up and the bloodily shaven, the hanging out and the merely hungry.

Offloaded, I took myself up the stairs of the stone building to face Mrs Davenport. I found the bureau chief to Cyril Wootton, CEO of Belvedere Investments, in her usual rigid position behind a desk in the firm’s panelled reception room.

‘Corporal Wootton fronted yet?’ I asked. I’d known the man when he was a redistributor of military stores, an illegal wholesaler of Vegemite and Tim Tams and Tooheys beer, a saboteur of the war effort in Vietnam.

The silver-haired exemplar drew breath and it pinched her nostrils. Nothing else ever moved. There was no knowing her age; she had mummified her face through discipline. ‘I’m afraid Mr Wootton’s engaged,’ she said. ‘Would you like to wait indefinitely or make an appointment?’

Mrs Davenport knew precisely how dubious Wootton was, how thin and swaying was the rope he walked, and yet she had no difficulty in presenting herself as if she were Moralist-in-Residence at the Centre for Applied Ethics.

‘The former,’ I said, ‘I’ll just sit down and look at you and puzzle over how a person so coldly beautiful can also be so warm and caring.’

She left the room, came back inside ten seconds and said, ‘Mr Wootton will see you.’

Wootton was behind his big oak desk, palms on the top, every centimetre the bank manager of the 1950s, essence of jovial probity, careful with the bank’s money but decent and understanding, a man who never failed to count that air shot on the golf course that no-one saw. He pointed to the client’s chair.

‘Early for you. Reforming your habits?’

I didn’t sit down. I went close to the desk, loomed over him.

‘Cynthia.’

He frowned. ‘Yes?’

‘Cam thinks you might be the one.’

Wootton’s hand went to his collar, fingers inserted above the tie knot, four fingers, not much room there.

‘Fuck, Jack,’ he said, ‘are you…?’

I didn’t say anything, just kept looking into the brown eyes of Corporal Wootton, a corporal of stores. There wasn’t much to see.

‘Jesus,’ he said, emotion in his voice, ‘he can’t be bloody serious. Jesus, Jack, he’s not serious? Don’t tell me Harry…’

‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘if you are the one, say so now. I’ll give you two hours to arrange to give the money back, plus a hundred and fifty grand for Cynthia’s pain and suffering. And that’s letting you off lightly. You then disappear. Forever. I’ll try to keep Cam from coming after you. Try, that’s all I can do.’

He looked at me in despair, mouth opening and closing. ‘No, Jack,’ he said, ‘no, no, no. You can kill me but no, never, I don’t know anything about it, she’s a friend of mine. I would never… Cam’s mad, I’d never ever do anything…’

He tailed off, closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, shook his head like a dog with a grass seed in an ear.

‘Say so now, Cyril. You don’t want to wait for other circumstances. Hanged through the Achilles tendon from a meat hook, those circumstances.’

‘I swear. I swear. No. Jesus, no.’

I sat down. ‘I’ll take your word on that,’ I said. ‘I hope that’s not a foolish thing to do.’

Cyril opened his eyes, blinked rapidly, straightened his pinstriped shoulders, regained some composure. ‘Don’t take my word,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to take my word. Tell Cam to check me out, every last thing.’

‘I’ll tell him I believe you when you say you had nothing to do with it.’

Cyril looked away, stroked his tie, a regimental tie, though certainly not the tie of his regiment. ‘Do you?’ he said.

‘For the moment.’

His head turned. ‘I should bloody well hope so,’ he said in a cub-lion growling tone, recovering rapidly. ‘This your idea of fun?’

‘Of kindness, more,’ I said. ‘It was me or Cam. Or worse. Both. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy your snivelling.’

‘Christ,’ he said, sniffed, ‘threatening me, you’re supposed to be a lawyer.’

‘Things not always incompatible. I’m going to tell Cam I don’t think you need shaking. That’s an act of faith. If I’m wrong, Cyril, I’ll be there to see you dropped into that compactor in Hopper’s Crossing. They say it makes a noise like a dog chewing chicken bones.’

‘Jack.’ He cocked his head in pain.

‘Moving on then. I can’t look for this Colburne prick on what you’ve given me. What’s the story?’

Cyril composed himself in an instant. ‘In that matter, your services are no longer required.’

I shook my head. ‘What’s this, revenge? Don’t be petulant, Cyril.’

He pointed to a copy of the Herald Sun on his desk. ‘Page five,’ he said, an expression of distaste on his face.

I opened the paper at the page. The first item in a single-column collection of briefs had the headline: Body in garage.

The story said: A man was yesterday found dead in a car in a garage in Rintail Street, Abbotsford. Police identified him as Robert Gregory Colburne, 26, a casual barman.

The story went on to say that police were treating the death as accidental but were keen to talk to anyone who had seen Colburne recently.

‘There endeth the lesson,’ said Wootton, cold as the widow’s lips. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have matters to attend to. People depend upon my understanding the concept of urgency.’

I saw no reason to prolong this encounter or to say goodbye. Time would heal. Or not. At the door, turning the big fluted brass knob, I heard Wootton clear his throat.

‘In his own vehicle,’ he said, ‘in his own garage.’

I continued on my way. As I passed Mrs Davenport in the anteroom, her nostrils contracted fractionally. ‘This has been prepared for you, Mr Irish,’ she said.

I stopped. She held out a hand, pearl-coloured nails, perfect ovals, and young hands, hands far too young. What secrets had this woman learned during her long stint in the pay of a specialist in sexually transmitted diseases? I shuddered inwardly, took the envelope she was offering and left the premises.

On the tram, enjoying the presence of a few teenage drug dealers heading for Fitzroy, I opened Mrs Davenport’s envelope: a cheque for three days’ work at the usual rate.

Out loud, I said, ‘Cyril, oh Cyril.’

One of the adolescent drugporteurs not on his mobile heard my utterance, misunderstood completely, turned, made the selling signal.

I gave him the look and the continental flicking fuck-off sign. Although he was probably untravelled, he got the message.

As I had received Cyril Wootton’s message. That he behaved honourably even when I did not.