‘Don’t ring too early,’ she said. ‘My husband likes to sleep in.’
I stood, embarrassed and confused at the door to the plane. Then she winked. ‘It’s my mother, actually. She enjoys a good lie-in. Goodbye.’
As I walked across the boiling Brisbane tarmac I looked back at the plane and couldn’t see her. I had never experienced such humidity. Just walking through it was like trying to swim in your clothes.
I checked into my room at Lennon’s — no expense spared for the 21 Division — and took a quick walk around town, just to familiarise myself. I was looking forward to riding on a tram but was told they’d stopped running two years before. I went up into the clocktower of the City Hall to further orientate myself. Nice. I liked Brisbane, and its brown snake of a river. In a city with a river like that, you’re going to get a lot of deception, crooks and conmen. And corrupt police. These were thoughts left over from my meagre days as a student of psychology and its multitudinous and infuriating subtexts.
I didn’t learn too much about poor Legs. She’d been murdered for certain. The local cops were keeping things pretty close to their chests. But they were just a little too jumpy and tight-lipped for the supposed overdose of a known madam. It was the way they didn’t care about her run-of-the-mill death that made me think they cared very much about it.
I had a sandwich at the Cubana Café with a young local officer I befriended.
‘You’re pretty famous up here, you know, you boys of the 21 Division,’ he said.
‘Is that so?’
‘Got a bit of a reputation, you have. We got some tough guys up here too, but they don’t go and give themselves a name, like the 21 Division.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Don’t know why you’re asking questions about Legs. She was done out of Sydney, is what I’ve heard. You probably share a desk with the killer, right?’
This was humour, Queensland-style. The punchlines to jokes also had something a little peculiar about them, a little creepy. I could have told him that I shared a desk with a man called Greaves. Straight. Honest. With horn-rimmed spectacles and ears like tiny pieces of shell pasta. And with one of the keenest, most humourless minds in the business. But why bother?
The young officer laughed. I laughed just to be polite. I had no idea what he was talking about. Had I been sent here on some wild-goose chase? Was I being set up for something?
I telephoned my inspector and told him what I’d learned, which wasn’t much. He told me to relax, take a day off, go ride around town on a tram. They don’t have trams here any more, I said. I couldn’t care less, Dusty, he said.
On the morning I flew back to Sydney, I sat in the crappy little airport terminal and thought of Peg. Would she be on the flight? Would I be lucky enough to have her spill an entire meal down my shirt front? Then I’d have to ring her twice.
It turned out Legs might have been murdered by a Sydney police officer who was so vile, so feared, so terrifying that just to mention his name was dangerous and possible grounds for extinction. Legs had known a lot. Now the girl from Atherton had been returned to anonymity.
I read the local paper while I waited for my plane. There was a small item on page seven about a body being pulled from the Brisbane River over near some place called the New Farm Powerhouse. The body was suspected to be that of a missing art dealer from West End. He was missing two toes and a finger, as well as his life.
Peg wasn’t on the plane. As a result, I resented the other hostesses and landed in Sydney without a single stain on my apparel.
As we disembarked, I noticed a very well-dressed gentleman strolling towards the terminal. I noticed him because he had the head of a criminal but was wearing a suit befitting professional gentlemen you might find at the Stock Exchange, or before the Bar.
I noticed him because I had seen him before, in Kings Cross. He ran a small antiques store in Macleay Street, an establishment suspected of nurturing a little casino upstairs.
He would become known to me, in a very short period of time, as the Boltcutter.
~ * ~
3
So when I saw the foul Boltcutter again on my morning stroll in Main Beach, things remembered, and quite a significant few that I would have preferred to forget, rained in on my splendour. I knew it was him immediately, despite his tremendous increase in physical volume, the disappearance of anything resembling a neck, the great laval descent of flesh about his head and shoulders. He looked like someone had filled him with air and slowly melted him.
I picked up my newspaper that day and returned directly to my rented caravan not far from the surf club. I checked over my shoulder repeatedly during the short walk. I took mental notes of vehicle numberplates. I surreptitiously observed high-rise car-park entranceways, building enclaves and any other potential nooks and roosts for a possible assassin. On that single walk, which I’d taken many times in the past few weeks, I noticed at least six general security cameras. I had not had to look for them before.
My van, too, suddenly felt exposed. Not just to the weather. On a couple of nights I had been woken by a vicious onshore breeze shaking and rattling my little temporary aluminium home. There was a line of pine trees at the back of the park, and a handful of unidentified flora on the southern boundary, but nothing I would consider good cover. I guess families on holidays on the Gold Coast don’t have much of a need for good cover against gunmen from their past. I began to feel very alone.
I telephoned Peg from the caravan park.
‘You won’t believe who I saw in the street today,’ I said to Peg.
‘Elvis.’
‘It’s going to take you a while to settle in here I’m afraid, Peg.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘If you knew the Gold Coast half as well as I’m coming to — and I’m way ahead of you already — there are more Elvis impersonators here than Las Vegas. So any joke you care to offer about Elvis on the Gold Coast is almost guaranteed not to produce a laugh.’
‘I liked you better when you were a cop. You spoke more economically. The offender decamped ... the person of interest is helping police with inquiries ... that sort of stuff. Now you have, as our son would say, a little too much air in the mattress.’
‘That used to be the standard criticism of my physique.’
‘Your big belly.’
‘If you want to put it that way, yes, my big belly. I think I might join a gym.’
‘What were you saying?’
‘Thank you for your interest. Today I ran into a ghost from the past.’
‘I’m glad you’re making friends.’
‘A gangster, Peg. One of the more ruthless sadists from the old days up at the Cross.’ I didn’t even want to mention his name.
‘He must be an old retired gent now, like you.’