White Dog

32

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?

‘You there?’

‘I am.’

‘She says there’s a daughter. Teresa. She’s Wayne’s twin. She got pregnant and had a big fight with her dad and she left. She says she thinks she married him, he was a local bloke, a brickie. They left Brissie.’

‘Did she say his name?’

‘Hang on, I’ll ask.’

The sky was clouding over, platoons of puffs moving north.

‘There?’

‘Yes.’

‘His name’s Paul Milder,’ the nurse said.

I went back to Bendsten Research. ‘Paul and Teresa Milder in South Australia and WA,’ I said.

‘Hold on.’

It took Simone about two minutes. ‘There’s a P. and T. Milder in Dunsborough, Western Australia,’ she said. ‘Nothing in SA.’

I wrote down the number and the address, said thank you again. The sunlight was gone, the puff-clouds banked up, the room darker. My feeling of recovery was waning.

You don’t need to know, Barry Tregear had said. Never mind fucken certain, you don’t need to know anything.

He was right. Of course, he was right. The man slapped me at will, then he pissed on me. His piss ran through my hair, down my cheeks. I tasted it.

I couldn’t live with that. That couldn’t be the end of something.