confrontation, maybe get rough. A glass container shattered. Definitely get rough.
He was having a busy few days with the rough stuff, Chairman Lloyd. Getting quite a taste for it. The targets were easy. Marcus Taylor, drunk and emotional. Giles Aubrey, frail and disposable. And me. I’d gone to him like a lamb to the slaughter. He’d been showing me some public art and I’d gone too close to the edge. Dangerous places, building sites.
But the motive here was different. With Taylor and Aubrey and me, it had been about money and staying out of prison. This was personal. He’d called me a liar back there at the construction site, but he’d been quick to believe. The seeds of doubt must already have been there, waiting to flower. Deep-seated doubts about his true worth, perhaps. A self-esteem problem. Something to do with the business that transpires between rich men and expensive women.
Money, reputation, ego, sex. If he couldn’t have it any more, nobody would. No premeditation here, no calculating the odds. Now it was all just cataclysmic rage. ‘Take it, take it,’ Fiona was crying. ‘It’s yours. Take it.’
She’d folded, shown him the money. Bad move, sister. It wouldn’t satisfy him, only prove the point that the whole world was against him. The deck stacked. The game over.
A shoe box of petty cash wouldn’t fix anything. The raw sound of a slap came through the door.
Spider’s running footsteps echoed up the stairs towards me. Time for the Coalition Against Domestic Violence to start getting pro-active. I pushed the door open and entered the flat. An ornamental candlestick sat on the hall table, a drooping blob of burnished silver. I snatched it up and began down the hall. ‘Don’t. Please don’t,’ Fiona Lambert was begging.
I stepped into the bedroom doorway. What I saw is fixed forever in my mind.
Eastlake had his back to me. He was bending slightly at the waist, one arm thrust out rigidly in front of him. Fiona Lambert was beside the bed, one knee on the floor as if genuflecting. She’d been showering. Again. A very hygienic girl. Her hair was half-dried and she had a pale yellow towel wrapped around her body. One hand was clutching it closed. The other was raised to her cheek, touching a blazing red welt. Her eyes were as big as dinner plates and she was doing her effortless best to look tremendously contrite. A shattered jar oozed moisturising cream onto the carpet.
On the bed was the bright pink Karlcraft shoe box. Its lid was off. The money was back in its banded bundles, neatly stacked. Spread out beside the box was a painted canvas, the edge frayed from where it had been cut from its stretcher. A red-brick suburban dream home. Blue sky.
Eastlake jabbed his extended hand towards it. ‘Look at it!’ he ordered. ‘It’s perfect. You’d be a laughing stock if I hadn’t done what I did.’
But her eyes were turning towards the door. Eastlake spun around, his arm still extended. In his hand was a gun. The gun from the glove compartment of the Mercedes. He stuck it in my chest.
The gun had crossed my mind as I ran up the stairs. I thought Spider was reaching across to the glove compartment to get it. For some reason, Eastlake and the gun were an association I had simply not made. Guns were for bodyguards, bank robbers, cops. Committee-chairing, well-suited Melbourne businessmen didn’t go packing firepower. Not even homicidal ones. Wrong again, Murray.
‘You!’ accused Eastlake. Me, the guy who kept turning up like a bad penny. Me, the interfering busybody he’d last seen disappearing over a second-storey balcony. He looked at me like I was an apparition. ‘You.’
As if to confirm that I was flesh and blood, he prodded me in the chest with the barrel of his Smith amp; Wesson. His Black amp; Decker. His Gulf amp; Western. Whatever the fuck it was, my Dali-esque candelabra had met its match. I let it slip to the floor.
Back at the Karlcraft Centre, Eastlake had been hyped-up and homicidal. But his actions had a certain logic. Criminal, but rational. He was disposing of a potential threat. Now, he’d come completely uncorked. The windows to his soul were wide open and the view was not a pleasant one. Like a tantrum-wracked child who could neither believe how far he’d gone nor conceive of how to get back, he was simultaneously thrilled and appalled by his own behaviour. A disconcerting combination of emotions in a man with a gun against your chest at point-blank range.
Even as Eastlake’s berserk eyes locked onto me, Fiona Lambert saw her opportunity. She began to come up off her bent knee, backing away. As she rose, she reached out to steady herself against the edge of the bed. Her towel slipped to the floor, exposing her nakedness. Instinctively, she snatched up the canvas from the bed and covered herself. It was an odd moment for modesty and there was an almost coquettish aspect to the gesture, as if she hoped that her vulnerability might offer her some defence.
It didn’t. Eastlake, reacting to her movement, swung the gun around. Fiona cowered back, raising the picture in front her body protectively, as if to shield herself from his sight. At exactly that moment, Eastlake fired.
An explosive crack reverberated through the confined space. The bullet punched a neat round hole straight through the front door of Our Home. Fiona Lambert staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, the painting draped over her face, covering her head. Her naked body twitched and went limp. It was stark white against the black sheets. Colour co-ordinated to the last.
Eastlake’s hand jerked at the recoil and I lunged forward. I caught him in mid-turn and the barrel of the gun twisted upwards. It went off again and blew the top off his head. Blood and brains went everywhere.
The two reports echoed in my ears. The smell of cordite filled my nostrils. Eastlake was still on his feet, the gun still in his hand. He sort of teetered. I was moving backwards, partly reeling from the scene before me, partly being dragged from behind. The gun hit the floor and Eastlake crumpled like a wet rag.
Then I was stumbling backwards down the passageway. Spider Webb was dragging me by the collar. ‘Far canal,’ he said. He didn’t hear any argument from me. Perhaps twenty seconds had elapsed since I’d entered the flat.
From the direction of the street came the wail of an approaching siren. Spider released me and ran into the living room. He looked out the window, cursed, then dashed out the front door. I drooped against the passage wall, shitless.
A low moan came wafting out of the bedroom. With my back pressed against the wall, I sidled up to the doorway and peeked around the corner. The gun came into sight, half covered by Eastlake’s inert torso. The moan happened again. It was coming from behind the painting. I stepped over Eastlake, flicked the gun away with the toe of my shoe and raised the punctured canvas.
A gory furrow started at the bridge of Fiona Lambert’s nose and ran the length of her forehead, parting her hairline. Her eyelids, caked with blood, fluttered. Her mouth goldfished. She moaned again. The bullet had only grazed her. She’d need a lot of aspirin and a very good cosmetic surgeon, but she’d live. She also had great tits. Pity she wasn’t my type.
Sliding an arm under her shoulder, I propped her limp white body upright. The shoe box lay beneath her. A hundred thousand dollars. It didn’t look like much any more. I propped Fiona up with a pillow, scooped up the box, dashed into the bathroom and dropped it into the laundry basket. ‘Noel,’ I called. ‘Come quick. She’s still alive.’
Footfalls thundered up the stairs. A small dog yapped germanically in the distance. I settled Fiona Lambert’s head in my pee-drenched lap and pressed the towel to her brow. Suddenly, the room was full of men, some of them in uniform. The one named Detective Constable Micaelis was calling Spider ‘sir’.
I sat in the living room on Fiona Lambert’s white sofa in my pissy pants and bloodied shirt and waited my turn, watching sundry coppers traipse through the front door and listening to their cryptic confabs. Apart from the odd glance, most of them paid me so little attention I might as well have been part of the furniture. A couple of classic plain-clothes types wandered in at one point and had a cursory sniff at the fittings and fixtures. ‘Now that’s what I call art,’ one of them said. He was looking at the Szabo above the mantel, young Fiona in the buff.
The real thing was in the bedroom being worked on by an ambulance crew. We’d propped her up and the bleeding had pretty well stopped by the time the paramedics arrived. She was in deep shock, they said. I wasn’t feeling too well myself.
I scrounged a coffin nail from one of the dicks and was just lighting up when Fiona was helped out the front door, held up by the armpits. They’d put a bandage around her head and got her into a bathrobe. She was almost walking, but she wasn’t talking and she didn’t look at all glamorous. Spider and Micaelis went downstairs with her, then came back inside a couple of minutes later. Micaelis did the talking.
‘How ya doing?’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll need a statement, eh? How about you accompany Detective Senior Sergeant Webb to the station, while I make sure Ms Lambert gets to the hospital, okay?’
