The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender Page 2

  But I wanted them to keep talking.

  ‘You guys play video games?’

  ‘Yeah, we play sometimes, when there’s no surf.’

  There was a communal snigger. I’d stumbled across an in-joke.

  ‘Anyone like a game now?’

  ‘I’m game,’ said Robbie quick as a flash.

  The rest of them sat there grinning at me. I guessed they didn’t know too many women who weren’t blond and who were over twenty five and still alive.

  We put our money in the slot and the bright little shapes of spaceships appeared on the screen. Robbie went first. It seemed the little red thing had to explode as many of the multicoloured shapes as it could before the little white flecks of light exploded the red thing.

  ‘OK, your turn,’ said Robbie confidently.

  The targets came up on the screen and I took the red knobbed handle in one hand and started jabbing at the button with the other.

  ‘Who was Mark writing this book for?’ I asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t have a clue. He didn’t talk about that kind of stuff with the guys. All he told me was that someone was paying him to write a book and that he’d given him a computer.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Mark?’

  ‘About a month ago. We went round to his place, hadn’t seen him at the beach so we thought we’d drop in on him. He seemed a bit paranoid. You know, kinda looking over his shoulder all the time. See, there was this knock on the door and he jumped. I mean his arse physically left the chair. Then he goes, “Who is it?” Like he’s expecting the Mafia or something. But it was only Sally, forgotten her keys.’

  ‘Sally?’

  ‘Over there. His girlfriend, Sally Villos. You must have noticed her, she has a way of drawing attention to herself. By the way,’ he said, looking at the screen, ‘you’ve bombed out.’

  ‘You can’t win them all,’ I said, emulating the youthful nonchalance. ‘How well do you know her?’

  ‘As well as I want to. She didn’t hang out with us. She’s at NIDA or art college or something. A bit up herself.’

  ‘I’d like to meet her.’

  ‘COME and join the party!’ said Sally once the informal formalities were over. ‘Here’s to Mark,’ and she downed yet another Tequila Sunrise.

  Her friends looked a little uncomfortable but she kept on drinking. So did I. I was working on the hair of the dog theory and my little dog was the long-haired type. Besides, there was something about Sally that made you want to drink. She had the nerve-buckling quality of the neurotic. Flashing out beta waves that sucked at your force field. She was bereaved. Of course. And she was making sure everyone knew it. Centre stage now, her head turned to the light, eyes open wide so the tears wouldn’t spill out onto the make-up. She had an audience around her who all ‘understood’.

  ‘Why? . . . Why?’ Her eyes clutched at my face but there was no answer there. Not yet anyway.

  ‘It wasn’t the stuff, it was safe, he said it was, he didn’t want to die, he wanted to live, to . . . to . . . do everything . . .’ I think I knew what ‘stuff’ she was talking about and apparently I wasn’t the only one.

  One of the beautiful young men stood up and took her drink away: ‘C’mon Sally, it’s time to go.’

  ‘Just where do you get off, Justin?’ she said, fixing him with those beautiful castrating eyes.

  Her arm, young as a child’s, reached across the table towards the Tequila Sunrise and made contact with the glass. But the contact was too brusque and the Sunrise spread blood red along the horizon of the table.

  She watched the dripping colours die, her eyes widening with horror. Slowly, slowly it began, the dawning realisation. Up, up it came, till it reached its peak.

  ‘Nooooooo!’ she howled.

  The ‘wake’ was over.

  Do you remember my brother Mark? Sure I do. Is he in trouble? He’s . . . he’s . . . The police say it was natural causes. But you don’t think so. No. What was the official cause of death? Cardiac arrest. Did he have problems with his heart? Yes. He had a pacemaker. It’s not unheard of. We knew of someone else Mark’s age, an Iron Man. He . . . he also died. What was actually wrong with his heart? It was congenital: a hole in the heart. 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. I already felt . . . you see as well as the heart the autopsy . . . there was heroin. They found heroin in the bloodstream. Not enough to kill him but . . . We had no idea, no idea, that’s why I felt . . . if there was that what else was there, what else was there about my brother . . . When was the last time you saw him? A few months ago. He didn’t keep in touch much. Specially lately. Dad was always on at him about getting a job and suddenly he announces he has one. Commissioned to write ‘the best seller of the century’ as he put it. Who commissioned him? Yes, well we asked him that and he became quite cryptic. ‘You’ll see when it comes out.’ And that was all? That was all. What about the heroin, what did the police have to say about that? They asked us about it but of course we couldn’t tell them anything. I don’t know if they made further enquiries but the eventual finding was no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death.

  I pressed the stop button. I didn’t know when I bought it that this little pocket cassette recorder would be so handy. You could even switch it on by remote control as long as the control wasn’t too remote. A little something I’d picked up in the States where I’d spent some time licking my wounds after The Divorce and sleepwalking my way through a number of self defence programs ranging from tai chi to karate. It was through karate I’d met Wali and Kemal, otherwise known as Sol and Ken. They were born again Sufis at night and ‘efficiency experts’ during the day. What this meant was that they were spies for the hotel industry. With the go-ahead of the management they would book into a large hotel as guests. They’d watch what was going on, get into casual conversation with other guests and hotel staff, nodding, smiling, agreeing, and all the time their little pocket cassettes would be recording and recording. Like a native with beads, I was impressed as hell with this little gadget. In those days when the future fanned out in front of me, I was going to use it to write a book. But here I was, just like Ken and Sol, recording conversations in hotels. They saw nothing incongruous about their daytime lives as Sol and Ken and their Sufi lives as Wali and Kemal. This was San Francisco in the early eighties still trying to live the dreams of the sixties and seventies. Back in Sydney I saw nothing incongruous about nights of boozing and days of workouts. Sydney was like San Francisco in many ways except that in Sydney the weirdos didn’t carry guns.

  There was a knock on the door. Jack.

  ‘This came for you today, one of those Interflora deliveries.’

  It was a potplant.

  ‘Coming down for a drink?’

  ‘No thanks, Jack, I’ve got a bottle under the bed in a brown paper bag.’

  ‘OK, see you in the morning.’

  It was a potplant of lavender. Wrapped in purple tissue paper with thin shiny ribbon. With a card: ‘To my Valentine.’

  I glowed inside. Then the glow turned to smoulder. It was not February 14, it was not even February.

  Then the glow came back again, gently lifting the corners of my mouth. Last night’s blond. He’d remembered my name even if I couldn’t remember his.

  I sat out on the balcony and listened to the night. Downstairs in the public bar was the faint clunk of Jack putting the chairs up. There was wind in the trees and the occasional swish of a car. Once I heard the putt putt of a boat crossing the harbour. In between times I made a mental list of things to do tomorrow. It was a beautiful night, the kind of night when lovers walk in the park by the water and grow limpid as the shimmering lights. It was a dangerous night to be on your own.

  I closed the french doors and got into bed. The last thing I remember before drifting to sleep was the drowsy smell of lavender.

  I DREAM OF funerals. My own. It i
s a state occasion and I am laid out in the open box moving slowly through the streets of Sydney. The buildings are tall reflective glass. It is my image that is reflected in that glass.

  I am famous, a legend in my time. All of Sydney has turned out to pay homage, I have done so much for so many. I smile. Idle curiosity passes for homage in the press. The people hold sprigs of lavender, like rosemary on Anzac Day. Rosemary for remembrance, lavender for . . . me. They will remember me. At the going down of the city’s son and in the mourning they will remember.

  Police hold the crowds back, allowing the entourage smooth passage. I smile. In death as in life the police allow me smooth passage. I can see everything. The Premier is there and all my friends. Even my enemies are friends now. The media too, filming faces in the crowd, members of the entourage respectfully lowering their heads or adjusting their hats with face-obscuring gestures. Strange bedfellows will be framed in those photographs, to be later indulged in by the press. A blackmailer would have a field day.

  Collier takes notes, for the obituary. The End of an Era. It is already on the newsstands, my name in thick purple letters. Not black. Purple. There is no mistake. In the dream I can smell it.

  I wake from this dream with the same coffin smile.

  Then there is the other dream I wake from suffocating, drowning in rubble. But it is my body crumbling, not the city. It can never be destroyed, it will grow and spread exactly as I have planned it. They will remember me. Oh yes, they will remember.

  ‘BERNIE? IT’S CLAUDIA’

  I waited while Bernie went through his routine.

  ‘Shut up, Bernie. I’ve got one for you: a BMW.’ I gave him the registration number.

  ‘Busy! How can you be busy? You’re a public servant, aren’t you?’ . . . ‘OK. This afternoon. Leave it on the answering machine if I’m not there, all right?’ . . . ‘Thought you’d be used to talking to machines by now. See ya later, Bernie, and have a nice day,’ I added in my best American accent.

  I heard the inevitable cop-you-later and sighed. One of these days he was going to use that disgusting excuse for a pun on someone who’d punch his head in. Probably wouldn’t stop him though. Bernie was irrepressible.

  I could easily have got to the Motor Registry Office through the front door. Anyone can get access to the names cars are registered in as long as they have a good reason and three weeks to wait. I didn’t have either. But I did have Bernie.

  I took the bus into the city. The Daimler was being tuned and I welcomed the opportunity to take a ten minute ride with no worries about parking. Besides, I spent so much time watching and waiting in the car it sometimes felt like I lived in it.

  The bus was nearly empty apart from a few odd people who, like me, live outside the nine to five routine — a couple of old girls with shopping bags and tightly permed blue hair, a young mum with toddlers and a group of old blokes who got on fumbling with their concession passes. ‘Eh, Charlie, down the back,’ called one of them. And they all went down the back, grinning like truant schoolboys.

  We passed the Glebe Island Container Terminal.

  Terminal illness. Terminal. Term in an illness. The combinations and permutations. I was on my way to investigate one of them right now. And here was another one.

  Rows of containers, a giant’s building blocks, innocuous in their uniformity. Terminal illness. Terminal containers. I’d seen one yesterday: Mark’s coffin. Transported from this world into the next. I wondered about the contents of these huge containers, wondered how many kilos of heroin were down there right this minute. Life-terminating containers. Police estimate the amount of drugs apprehended is only 10 per cent of the whole. Not counting the amount that sticks to their greasy palms. Too wide yet but not to be dismissed. Start with what’s close. First the terminal. Then the illness. The closest thing to Mark’s dead body was the computer. And closer still, in the dead heart of the body, was the pacemaker.

  We wound through Pyrmont, then suddenly: the city. The tall blocks of buildings, the centre pole of Sydney Tower that dazzled the city with fool’s gold at sunset but was somewhat sallow at this time of day. Not quite the metropolis of New York but still it took your breath away, so much of it, so suddenly. Now we were on the Expressway over Darling Harbour where buildings with the eyes gouged out had been demolished to make way for ‘development’, for the men of power to build monoliths to themselves. Some days the city looked like a huge building site. The present annihilating the past and sweet-talking the future. We ducked under the Monorail, that stealthy snake-like creature that had lately insinuated itself into the city, passed docks and piers and luxury launches with names like The Great Gatsby, Sea Princess, Sea Empress, and the old warehouses that reminded you that Sydney was, after all, a port. Then the row of brick buildings, the back of them at least, that my eye always followed, with outside metal stairs zigzagging across them like the ones you saw in old movies where cops chased robbers. Instead of the cops and robbers here a banana palm grew.

  The bus turned off the Expressway and up into the city’s pulsing heart.

  I walked along York Street towards the computer shop. At night along here there were cockroaches big as rats but now they were lulled to sleep in their subterranean beds by the metal-and-flesh traffic.

  ‘Is Otto in today?’ I asked the three eager young men in schoolboy ties and brilliant white shirts.

  ‘Sure. Otto!’

  Otto came out from the back with a cup of coffee in one hand and a ham and cheese croissant in the other. He was chewing and there were little bits of flaky pastry caught in his beard.

  ‘Claudia!’ he said, pronouncing my name like a cloud.

  ‘Can we talk?’ There were no customers and besides, Otto rarely dealt with customers, or clients as he was continually correcting me. He was the technical expert and talked to machines.

  ‘Of course. Come to my office.’

  I took a bite of his croissant and accepted the offer of coffee.

  ‘You know the joke about the computer operator who died of a terminal illness? Well it’s not a joke any more.’

  I showed him the card, and filled him in on the circumstances of the death, including the pacemaker. I didn’t mention the heroin, it wasn’t Otto’s department. But computers were.

  ‘Hmm, the pacemaker,’ he said narrowing his eyes. ‘I don’t know, it’s not my department. As far as I know they are absolutely reliable. Perhaps in the connection to the heart . . .’

  Ah yes, the slender thread between the fallible and the infallible.

  I’m going to pay a visit to his flat tonight. Check out the scene of the crime, you might say, particularly the computer. Interested?’

  MY appointment with Dr Mackintosh was at 2 pm. The surgery was up the driveway of a neat little cottage built sometime in the thirties, as was most of Maroubra. There were racks of National Geographic and New Idea, and a box of toys that a sniffly kid was rummaging in. I looked at the people waiting and wondered what was wrong with them, as they were no doubt wondering about me. None of them looked like abortion candidates, or drug addicts either, though I knew at least one of Dr Mackintosh’s patients had done heroin. I wondered if Dr Mackintosh knew.

  The door opened and a tall gentleman wearing glasses appeared. ‘Mrs Loukakis?’ ‘Costas, come,’ said the mother of the sniffly kid. ‘Put it back in the box.’ The child’s mouth turned down at the corners and his bottom lip bulged. ‘It’s all right, Mrs Loukakis, he can bring it in with him.’ Costas rearranged his mouth and beamed at the nice doctor who ushered them in and closed the door.

  I picked the one New Idea that didn’t have royalty on the cover and flicked idly through the well worn pages. There was a half done crossword that I proceeded to finish. I preferred cryptic crosswords but there was nothing cryptic about New Idea. I liked the way cryptics made your mind jump sideways, the lovely puns that developed. Best of all I liked the way they revealed the mind that created them. As soon as you understood the way the crossword ma
ker’s mind worked, the answers were easy. The ones I did regularly were devised by someone with a great sense of humour and an avid interest in cricket. I wondered what he would have done with Terminal Illness and whether it was the question or the answer. I doodled on the side of the page.

  Thirteen unlucky letters for one down. Mark Bannister: one down. How many more were there to go?

  Costas didn’t take long. A pat on the head and a bottle of cough mixture would fix his troubles.

  ‘Claudia Valentine?’ said Dr Mackintosh, looking at the only unfamiliar face in the waiting room. I put the New Idea back in the rack and entered the inner sanctum.

  Dr Mackintosh sat with pen ready to fill in the blank card that had my name on top, a little weary now after a lifetime of looking at tonsils and listening to hearts.

  ‘I haven’t come as a patient, I’m an insurance investigator. I have a few routine questions I’d like to ask about one of your patients: Mark Bannister.’

  He sighed. ‘Ah yes, poor Mark. I’ve known him since he was this high.’

  ‘What exactly was wrong with his heart?’

  ‘Arrhythmia. Result of a malformed heart.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Arrhythmia,’ he said, shifting in his chair and unbuttoning his cardigan. ‘Effectively it’s an abnormal rhythm of the heartbeat. Do you know how the heart works?’

  In ways unfathomable. ‘Ventricles is all I remember from school Biology.’

  ‘Well,’ he said drawing a heart on my card, ‘the heart is made up of chambers: the atria, or upper chambers here, and the ventricles, or lower chambers. Now the upper chambers contract and push blood into the lower ones which pump the blood around the body. This,’ he said, scribbling in a circle, ‘is the sino-atrial node, which transmits electrical impulses to a mid-point junction here and then on through the ventricles. The sino-atrial node is in fact the natural pacemaker, which controls the rhythmical contractions you know as heartbeats. In Mark’s case—I won’t bore you with a full medical explanation—there was a gap here which resulted in abnormal rhythm.’