The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender Read online

  Jez Smith

  Marele Day grew up in Sydney and graduated from Sydney University with BA (Hons). Her work experience ranges from fruit picking to academic teaching and she has travelled extensively, taking up temporary residence in Italy, France and Ireland.

  The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender (1988) was Marele Day’s first thriller, followed by The Case of the Chinese Boxes (1990), The Last Tango of Dolores Delgado (1992) which won the 1993 Shamus Crime Fiction Award, and The Disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi (1994). In 1996, Day was the general editor of and contributor to How to Write Crime. And in 1997, Day published her bestselling literary novel, Lambs of God, to acclaim in Australia and overseas.

  Marele Day

  THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HARRY LAVENDER

  All characters in this book are entirely fictitious, and no reference is intended to any real person, living or deceased.

  Copyright © Marele Day 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in 1988

  reprinted 11 times

  This edition published in 1998 by

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax:(61 2) 9906 2218

  Email:[email protected]

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 86448 772 5.

  eISBN 978 1 74 269 512 9

  Contents

  The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender

  I WOKE UP feeling like death. Ironically appropriate, given what the day held in store. White light poured in, even before I opened my eyes and a variety of sounds, all too loud. Someone was pounding my brain like a two year old who’s just discovered a hammer. In between blows I managed to prise open the eyes. Close by the bed was a bottle of Jack Daniels: empty. And an ash tray: full. Clothes were strewn all over the place and through the french doors roared the sights and sounds of Sydney. As I got out of bed I realised I wasn’t the only one in it. There was a good looking blond in there as well. I didn’t recall issuing the invitation but I must have. No-one gets into my room, let alone my bed, without one.

  Out in the kitchen the naked light bulb bravely competed with the glare of the day. There was another ash tray full of butts, two glasses and a bowl of olives and cockroaches, sardonic little reminders of the night before. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts I managed to light the gas under the coffee and, closing the stable door after the horse had bolted, crammed a handful of vitamins down my throat.

  The coffee revived me a little, a hot then cold shower even more. The blond slept on, unperturbed by my rummaging through the clothes on the floor looking for something suitable to wear. Thank God the black suit was hanging in the wardrobe neatly pressed. The black shoes were where I’d apparently left them the night before — one in the waste paper bin and the other on the mantelpiece. I dressed and took a long hard look at myself in the mirror. As long as I didn’t start haemorrhaging from the eyes things would be all right. I grabbed the dark glasses. Just in case.

  ‘Time to go sweetheart.’ I whispered into the blond’s aural orifice. Not a flicker of an eyelid or a murmur. Next time I shook him. ‘C’mon mate, wake up. I’ve got to go to a funeral.’

  WE were at Taylor Square before I remembered the flowers.

  ‘Just stop here a minute,’ I instructed the driver as the cab swung round into Flinders Street. My heels clattered across the street and stopped on the safe ground of the median strip while my finger jabbed uselessly at the pedestrian button. The deroes who frequented that small triangle of threadbare green had neatly folded up their newspapers and had started in on their liquid breakfasts. I scanned their faces as I always did, looking for a face I would no longer recognise, one that would no longer recognise mine. They didn’t look twice. I was part of the other world, though this morning I felt decidedly part of theirs. Perhaps they had the answer: never get sober.

  The flower shop was near Kinselas, an elegant night spot that used to be a funeral parlour but where people now ate devilled kidneys and crumbed brains in the former chapel and afterwards went upstairs for the show. My own brain being in the state it was that morning I didn’t even think about Kinselas’ former status till I noticed the flower shop so conveniently close by. Memories are short in this city and facades change all the time. It was not the first time I’d visited that particular florist: once, seven years ago, I bought flowers there. For my own wedding, if you can call a five minute session at the Registry Office a wedding.

  I pointed to a bunch of violets and held out a ten dollar note. Somehow the colour of violets seemed appropriate.

  ‘Card?’ the same woman asked, her social patter down to a bare minimum.

  ‘No,’ I replied, matching her word for word. And walked back to the cab where the meter was clocking up the day’s expenses.

  I’D met the departed a couple of times. He was Marilyn Bannister’s young brother. I had not seen Marilyn since school and indeed it was another school friend who’d given her my number. I was glad to know the old girls’ network was still is force though Sydney is pretty much like that anyway. Not what you know but who you know. Without contacts in this city you’d be dead. And sometimes dead even with them.

  So Marilyn contacted me. I was in a slack period, doing insurance surveillance and boring the pants off myself. I had enough self control to let the phone ring six times before answering.

  ‘Claudia Valentine speaking.’

  The caller identified herself as Marilyn Edwards. The name meant nothing. Then she told me we’d been at school together and gave another surname: Bannister.

  My mind flicked through the past and dragged Marilyn Bannister out. The girl no-one had wanted to sit next to, the girl without the Colgate ring of confidence.

  ‘Marilyn! How are you?’

  She didn’t want to talk about her health, she wanted to meet me.

  ‘Just a minute, I’ll check with my secretary.’ Silently I counted to ten then spoke into the phone again. ‘It seems to be all right for later on this afternoon, Marilyn.’ . . . ‘The Regent? Five-thirty? Fine. I’ll meet you in the foyer.’

  MEN in uniform with gold braid directed cabs and stretched limos in and out of the curved driveway. The automatic doors opened and I was suitably impressed with the thirteenth best hotel in the world. No other Australian hotel even made it to the top fifty. I wondered whether it wasn’t some international joke ranking the only Australian hotel in the top fifty thirteenth. Because of the superstition in the industry most hotels don’t even have a thirteenth floor.

  The clientele was well heeled and well coiffed, the Americans well heeled and the Japanese well coiffed. The foyer was a large open plan affair with lounge chairs specifically designed for fat cats. I curled myself up in one of them, more cat-like than fat, and waited. But not for long. At 5.30 precisely a woman in an expensive linen suit entered and made a beeline towards me.

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ she said.

  She had. Considerably. She’d lost about 10 kilos, the braces were gone, and a lot of money had been spent on grooming. But beneath the make-up the face was taut and drawn. People rarely came to private investigators with good news.

  ‘Shall we go upstairs?’ she said crisply indicating the mezzanine. />
  Above the greenery dripping copiously from the mezzanine was a row of tables with black glass tops and chairs even more spacious than the ones in the foyer. A waiter silently appeared and presented us with a cocktail menu. In the centre of the table was a large goblet of mixed unsalted nuts. Marilyn’s exterior was as cool as her white dress but in the lap of that dress she was shredding up Kleenex.

  ‘Do you remember my brother Mark?’

  ‘Sure I do. Is he in trouble?’

  She swallowed quite a large quantity of air and extended her palms in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘He’s . . . he’s . . .’

  I knew the word she couldn’t speak and leant across and touched her arm.

  ‘The police say it was natural causes.’

  ‘But you don’t think so.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly.

  OF all the roads that converged on Taylor Square, Flinders Street was the quickest way out of the city to the slow sprawl of suburbs. It was also the road to the cemetery. The old terrace houses built for workers when this was the outskirts of Sydney Town gave way to playing fields, beyond that the Showground and Cricket Ground, and closer, right on the road, the twin schools: Sydney Girls’ High and Sydney Boys’ High. It was ten minutes to lunchtime and the schools were quiet at this time of day, the girls in brown and yellow furiously studying science in the new wing and Latin in the old, the boys in brown and blue doing the same.

  I remembered that little blond kid in brown and blue standing at the bus stop mucking around with his mates, remembered Marilyn whispering that he had come top of English in his first exam, whispering because being good at English meant being a wimp, though the word then was sissy.

  Now he was dead.

  The lights changed and the taxi driver honked his horn.

  ‘C’mon mate,’ he shouted at the car in front, ‘they’re not going to get any greener!’

  Along this road to the cemetery my life unravelled. After the high school the next landmark was the university where I spent four years getting an Arts degree. With honours. It didn’t mean much in the real world but it had at least taught me how to do research. It was not unlike what I was doing now except it had been behind a desk instead of a steering wheel and the library had expanded to take in the whole city. The campus had still not acquired ‘character’, and remained a hodgepodge of buildings, ‘landscaped’ with the mean type of vegetation that thrives on sandy soil.

  Further down the road, past impersonal shopping centres and red roofed houses, was my primary school. It was lunchtime now and the playground was alive with squeals and banana sandwiches. I saw the child I used to be, the girl too tall for her age, the girl with no father, beg me with the sad eyes of childhood. I turned away from the memory and instead watched for Mark’s funeral procession. There was none. Like choko and passionfruit vines, funeral processions have disappeared from the streets of Sydney.

  MARK had been found dead on the floor beside his computer table. The autopsy report had given the cause of death as cardiac arrest. The pacemaker had missed a few beats.

  A pacemaker? In a young guy like that?

  ‘It’s not unheard of,’ said Marilyn. ‘We knew of someone else Mark’s age, an Iron Man. He . . . he also died.’

  A spanner in the works. The hi-tech heart spasming out of control.

  ‘I don’t know if I can help, Marilyn, I’m an investigator, not a doctor.’

  ‘I’ve been to the doctor. What I came to see you about, Claudia, is this.’

  She handed me an envelope, lightweight and neatly sliced open. It was addressed to Marilyn and inside was a card, which simply said in thick black letters:

  TERMINAL ILLNESS

  WE drove through the double gates and the cab crunched to a halt. There were a couple of chapels and one step closer to heaven was the red brick chimney of the crematorium. A crowd had gathered already: one group consisted of sunburnt boys in dark suits and sneakers, the other of artistically garbed young men and women trying to convince each other, with bursts of conversation that dropped to the ground like pebbles, that they were all still immortal.

  At the centre of this group was a face that could launch ships. A luxuriant mane of black hair overshadowed the face as white as porcelain, the only spot of colour a blood red cupid’s bow mouth. Sporadically she burst into tears and waved away arms that went round her shoulders in sympathy.

  Tough and histrionic.

  Another group consisted of Marilyn, a grey haired couple and two small boys making train tracks in the pebbles with sticks. In the parking lot two guys sat dumbly in an unmarked BMW. They looked like cops. Or hired muscle. I took note of the registration number and walked over to Marilyn.

  ‘Claudia, this is my mother and father.’ The grey haired man shook my hand vigorously. ‘Claudia is . . . an old school friend.’

  ‘Glad you could come, dear,’ said her mother.

  I bent down to the two boys playing in the gravel. They were about the same age as my own two kids.

  ‘Oh, these are my boys, Mark and Jeremy.’

  ‘Hi!’ I said.

  ‘Whatta you got them flowers for?’ asked the smaller one.

  ‘They’re for your Uncle Mark.’

  ‘He’s dead. He got dead in an accident.’

  The innocent mouths of babes.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘It’s sad isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Do you wanna play trains with us?’

  I placed my wilting bunch of violets up the front with the other flowers arranged in wreaths or bunches. There were roses and carnations. And there was lavender.

  The surfer boys carried the coffin past the rows of family and friends. The BMW guys had not entered the chapel.

  The ceremony was brief. Someone said a few complimentary things about the deceased, a promising talent whose death would leave a blank page in the book of Australian Literature. There were a few soft moans about the metaphor but nothing compared to Mrs Bannister’s uncontrollable sobbing when the organist played Mark’s favourite song.

  It was Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”.

  When we came out into the sunlight the BMW was gone. Marilyn bundled her kids into the car then headed towards me.

  ‘Thanks, Claudia, Mum and Dad appreciated your coming. I don’t think they were overly impressed with the rest of the gathering.’

  There might never be another occasion to have all Mark’s friends together in one place.

  ‘I don’t suppose by any chance your parents have invited them back for wake, have they?’

  ‘No,’ she said shortly, ‘Apparently they’re all going to the Imperial for a drink.’

  ‘You going?’

  ‘I’ve got to get the boys back. I’m passing by that way if you want a lift.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, getting into the car. ‘Did you happen to notice those two men in the BMW?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, swinging the car out onto Bunnerong Road.

  ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘No. Never seen them before. They don’t look like the sort of people Mark would know but then . . .’

  ‘Could have been cops. They usually come for a look if it’s homicide.’

  Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. Then I remembered: as far as the cops were concerned Mark died of natural causes.

  THE Imperial was by no means imperial even with the renovations that had taken place since I’d last seen it aeons ago. It had a carpet now and the lights were dim. The pool tables were gone and in their place were games machines and a video juke-box. Above the bar an inaudible TV provided some diverting flickers of light. A few gentlemen in shorts and navy blue singlets stood at the bar, hangovers from the days when most pubs looked and smelled like public lavatories in all their tiled glory. The sunburnt boys all sat at one table and Mark’s trendier set of friends at another.

  I walked up to the bar and ordered a Scotch.

  ‘Make that two.’ I turned to see one of the surfer
boys grinning at me. I grinned back.

  ‘I’m Robbie.’

  ‘Claudia.’

  He only came up to my shoulder but so do most people.

  ‘You a relative?’

  ‘No. A friend of the family. I knew Mark when he was a kid.’

  ‘He was a good bloke.’

  Robbie steered me over to his table and introduced me around. Johnno, Thommo, they all seemed to have names ending in o. Most of the ties were off now and stuffed into top pockets.

  ‘Well old Mark finally went down the pipeline.’

  ‘Yeah, he was good bloke.’

  ‘What was he like?’ I ventured.

  ‘He was a good bloke.’

  I rephrased the question so as to get an answer that consisted of more than just ‘good’ and ‘bloke’.

  ‘What sort of things was he into?’

  One of them sniggered and tossed his head in the direction of the ship launcher. But his voice said something different.

  ‘Surfing. Like us.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Video games. He played them at home.’

  Now it was my turn to toss my head.

  ‘He had machines like that at home?’

  The tough nut doing all the talking looked at me as if I was a moron.

  ‘Naa, he played games on his computer.’

  ‘He was onto a goldmine there,’ said another member of the party, ‘Did yez check out the sound system? Pretty neat stuff, eh? Wish I had a sugar-daddy giving me presents like that.’

  ‘Wonder what the payoff was. Wonder if he had to . . .’

  Robbie had had enough. ‘Will you guys shut up! You know it wasn’t like that, it was just payment for writing a book.’

  ‘Mark never told us he was writing a book,’ someone mumbled.

  ‘I’m not surprised, the way you guys carry on. Just because you’re writing a book doesn’t mean you’re a poofter!’

  That shut them up. The silence was full of youthful nonchalance. Dedicated hedonists, all so cool, unaware that sooner or later the debt collector would be around, knocking hard on their bodies.