St Kilda Blues Page 8

  ‘And we have absolutely no witnesses? No one parked watching the submarine races out on the lake?’

  Roberts smiled. ‘The uniforms who did the earlier sweep didn’t report seeing anyone and they’re both good blokes, they keep their eyes open. Besides, late-night submarine racing went out when the drive-in double features started. All the smart young Romeos have their panel vans fitted out with mattresses these days. They can watch the pictures in comfort and get their leg over before they send the lucky girls off at interval for pies and hot dogs from the snack bar.’

  Berlin gestured for the clipboard again and went back to the autopsy report. There were multiple glass fragments from the headlight in Melinda Marquet’s left hip where the car had struck her. She also had a dislocated right shoulder. Berlin tried to recreate the moment of impact in his mind. She was running in the dark, panicked, terrified, running away from the bright lights of Fitzroy Street and what was back there, running into the imagined safety of darkness.

  He thought about the commercial buildings lining Fitzroy Street and the big houses and the blocks of red-brick, tile-roofed flats behind them. It was a bloody rabbit warren, he decided, and then corrected himself; it was a rat’s nest.

  ‘How many flats and cellars and lock-up garages and boiler rooms out there, do you reckon?’

  ‘Too bloody many to search in under a month, Charlie, even if we had the time – and the men to do it, which we’re never going to get no matter how much pull the girl’s father has.’

  He was right and Berlin knew it. St Kilda had too many places for a man to hide, or to hide things, and too many people who looked on the police as the enemy and knew how to keep their mouth shut.

  On the other side of the suburb, closer to the Bay, were the more wholesome amusements: a nice skating rink, the Palais Theatre for dancing and concerts, and Luna Park with its rickety wooden roller-coaster, merry-go-rounds and carnival sideshows. Beyond that was Acland Street with its continental cake shops and, beyond that, Cafe Budapest and Lazlo Horvay.

  Berlin knew he was going to make a phone call at some stage and, like so many things in his life now, it was something he really didn’t want to do. But given the current circumstances, maybe it was something best out of the way as soon as possible. Lazlo might know what to do about the other thing, how to make inquiries, who to contact. Lazlo knew about a lot of things but would tracking down a ghost be one of them?

  TEN

  Trains leaving Flinders Street Station heading for Spencer Street and the northern line pass over a brick viaduct running parallel to Flinders Street. The arches under the viaduct had been turned into shops and storage areas, and Roberts parked the Triumph at the kerb outside one of the shops. The sign over the window read ‘Newsagent’, and in smaller letters ‘Books, Magazines, Newspapers, Smokes, Etc.’. Berlin knew the place by reputation and it was the ‘Etc.’ that gave it that reputation.

  Roberts killed the engine and left the key in the ignition. ‘I’ll just be a tick, Charlie, you might as well wait in the car. Just need to grab a packet of smokes.’

  As Roberts walked away Berlin opened the Triumph’s glove compartment. There were four packets of Craven A cigarettes inside, still sealed in their shiny cellophane wrapping. He closed the glove compartment and climbed out of the sports car, following Roberts into the shop. A small bell mounted over the doorway rattled as the two men entered. The shop was small and cramped, dully lit by a half-dozen fly-specked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

  It always amazed Berlin that so many of the so-called raincoat brigade actually did wear raincoats. There were two or three of them browsing amongst the racks – frail, nervous men, pale-skinned and skittish, looking like a harsh word or sudden loud noise might frighten them to death. There was also a schoolboy, perhaps fifteen, in a blazer and shorts and battered school shoes, school tie loose and grey socks bunched around the ankles of his skinny legs.

  The men in raincoats were looking at paperbacks with lurid covers or copies of Sun & Health and other imported European naturist magazines. The magazines featured photographs of laughing, naked girls playing volleyball and table tennis beside lakes or in forest clearings. The schoolboy was looking at one of the cheaply printed local magazines. Over his shoulder Berlin could see a full-page black and white picture of a nude girl smiling for the camera. Besides lacking clothes, the girl was also missing nipples and pubic hair. This airbrushing allowed the publication and dozens like it to skate past the obscenity laws. Berlin always wondered how confusing it must be when the young blokes who bought these magazines finally managed to get the clothes off a real live girl.

  At the rear of the shop a man wearing a grey dustcoat over his suit was standing behind the counter. You didn’t see shopkeepers in grey dustcoats much any more, Berlin thought. He’d looked up when Roberts entered, reached down under the counter in front of him and straightened up with a thick, buff-coloured envelope in his right hand. Berlin was just behind Roberts and saw the detective’s head moving gently from side to side when he realised Berlin had followed him into the shop. The shopkeeper’s eyes left Roberts’ face and fixed on Berlin. The envelope went back under the counter and the shopkeeper gave the two men an uncomfortable smile.

  ‘How can I be of help this morning, gentlemen? I’m always ready to do whatever I can to assist the police.’

  The shopkeeper said the word ‘police’ with a little more volume than was strictly necessary. There was a flurry of books and magazines being replaced on shelves and a strange, almost whistling sound of nylon against nylon as raincoat-wearing customers brushed against each other on their way out through the narrow doorway. The schoolboy, apparently frozen to the spot, was staring at Berlin, his eyes wide open and unblinking. The crest on his blazer pocket was from a leading boys school and a metal badge on his lapel said he was a prefect.

  Berlin took the magazine from his hands. ‘Don’t you have some place you should be, sonny Jim?’

  The boy nodded but didn’t move.

  ‘Then you should be there, shouldn’t you?’

  The boy nodded again. Berlin pointed to the shop doorway. The boy turned and walked to the door, stopping only to pick up a vinyl schoolbag at the entrance.

  Berlin turned back to where Roberts and the shopkeeper were looking at each other.

  ‘Can I have a pack of twenty Craven A?’

  The shopkeeper took the cigarettes from the shelf behind him.

  ‘That’ll be three shillings and sixpence, I mean thirty-eight cents. This bloody decimal currency is a pain in the arse.’

  Roberts handed over one of the recently introduced pink five-dollar notes. The government had been smart enough to make the different colours of the new money match the old bank notes to try to cut down on confusion. The one-dollar note was brown like the old ten-bob note, two dollars was green like a quid and the old blue fiver was now a blue ten-dollar bill. But it still wasn’t the money Berlin had grown up with, and the shopkeeper was right – it was a pain in the arse.

  There was a pile of tabloid newspapers tied up with string on the floor in front of the counter. The paper on top had a photograph of pop star Normie Rowe on the cover. Berlin knew the face because there were stories on the news that the popular young singer might be called up for national service and could eventually wind up in Vietnam.

  ‘Those all music newspapers? For kids, youngsters?’

  The shopkeeper nodded. ‘From the last couple of weeks. I’m just about to send them back. The distributors make me take them. Waste of bloody space, we don’t get a lot of teenagers in here.’

  ‘Not if the little buggers know what’s good for them, anyway.’

  The shopkeeper looked over at Roberts and then back at Berlin. ‘You can’t talk to me like that, even if you are a copper. I run a decent business here.’

  Berlin stared back across the counter. ‘No you bloody don’t and we both know it. And I’m taking these newspapers, if you don’t have any objections.’r />
  ‘I do as a matter of . . .’

  The shopkeeper stopped mid-sentence. Berlin was standing next to Roberts now and from the corner of his eye he saw the detective’s head moving from side to side again. The shopkeeper shut up and handed Roberts his change.

  ‘You wanna grab those newspapers, Bob? You’re younger than me.’

  ‘And I’m better looking too, Charlie.’ Roberts put the packet of cigarettes into his pocket before bending down and picking up the bundle of newspapers.

  Berlin walked around behind the counter, reached underneath and pulled out the buff-coloured envelope. He slipped it into his suit coat’s left-side pocket.

  ‘Now just a minute, mate.’

  Berlin leaned in very close to the shopkeeper and spoke slowly. ‘First of all, sunshine, I’m not your mate, and if you really want to make this a big deal then we can. I can have a rummage around under your counter and see what else I can turn up. Of course, with me being a policeman I’d be forced to confiscate anything of a pornographic nature I might come across and then put you under arrest. But since I really, really don’t want to put my hand back under there if I can help it, why don’t we just call it quits? What do you say – that sound fair?’

  The shopkeeper nodded slowly, keeping his mouth tightly closed.

  Back at the car, Roberts dumped the bundle of newspapers behind the front seats and looked across at Berlin. ‘Okay, what do we do now?’

  Is he asking about the missing girls or the envelope? Berlin wondered.

  The expression on Roberts’ face wasn’t giving anything away, that was for sure. Berlin was reminded of Peter’s impassive face when he had come to collect him from the South Melbourne police station lock-up that awful night. The boy had fallen into bad company, was the way the magistrate had put it. Would a magistrate one day sum up Bob Roberts’ situation the same way? And for both Peter and Bob, was it his doing somehow?

  Berlin reached down for the passenger side door handle. ‘Why don’t we go take a look at this Buddha’s Belly joint, see if we can rustle up anybody. And maybe take a trip around to the other places the girls went dancing. After that you can drop me at home with the files on all the missing girls so I can go through them. There’s probably more than enough people out beating the bushes for young Gudrun right at the moment.’

  In the cramped space of the passenger seat the Triumph’s door pressed against Berlin’s hip and he could feel the bulk of the envelope in his pocket. In his twenty some years on the force he’d seen enough unmarked buff envelopes changing hands to know what was going on. He really hadn’t wanted to believe the rumours about Bob Roberts and he really didn’t want to ask about the envelope and hear the lie or open it up and see the truth.

  He looked at his watch. Sarah had saved up and bought it for him after his old air force–issue watch had finally given up the ghost. Usually the watch made him think of her and that always made him smile. Right now all the watch did was tell him that it was just past midday on a Monday and he was already exhausted. And Gudrun Scheiner had been gone for forty hours.

  THE MISSION

  Brother Brian’s table was nearer to the front. Beyond it another half-dozen tables were occupied by men in the same brown robes, and a raised stage at the far end of the room held two smaller tables with tablecloths and chairs rather than benches. The brothers at the tables up on the stage were older and they were laughing amongst themselves. The boy saw wine bottles on the table and there were glasses and plates – real glasses and plates rather than the chipped enamel mugs and rough wooden bowls that sat in front of each occupant of the lower tables.

  There were two empty spaces at Brother Brian’s table. Brother Brian took one and the boy took the space next to him. The other boys at the table were all about the same age. The greetings were sombre, mostly nods from the others as he was introduced. They all seemed very tired, and though they must have washed their hands at the sinks outside the dining room, there was dirt in most of the creases of their knuckles and under their fingernails. Several boys were fidgeting and rubbing their bottoms against the hard wood of the benches.

  Brother Brian smiled at him and patted his hand. ‘You will be at my table here for meals from now on and I feel we are going to be the best of pals. At least, I hope so.’

  There was a murmur as the doors to the kitchen opened and a voice from the top table ordered silence. A line of dark-skinned girls came out of the kitchen, each with a galvanised iron bucket in either hand. They were wearing short shift dresses and their feet were bare. A girl stopped at the end of each table and one of the older boys helped lift the buckets up and place them in front of the brother who was supervising. Steam was coming from one of the buckets on his table and water lapped over the edge of the other when it was bumped. He followed the example of the other boys, passing his mug to be filled with water by Brother Brian and then passed his wooden bowl to have some sort of stew ladled into it.

  When the bowl was returned to him he reached for his spoon but put it down again when his eye caught the shaking head of the boy opposite him. It was some hours since they had last stopped on the road for sandwiches and he was hungry. So were those around him, judging from the stomachs he could hear rumbling and the mouths that hung open with tongues flicking or tracing their way around flaky, dried lips. All eyes at the table were on the stew in the bowls – chunks of grey meat in a runny gravy that already seemed to be congealing despite the heat of the dining room.

  At the head table up on the stage several somewhat older Aboriginal girls had brought in covered bowls that were placed on the table, and then a larger platter holding a roasted leg of lamb. The boy knew what a leg of lamb looked like and how it tasted. When the farmer’s paratrooper son had come home on leave after Arnhem the two men had slaughtered a sheep, breaking the rationing regulations. They’d kept the leg for a homecoming dinner and sold the rest of the carcass on the black market. The sheep was hung upside down from a tree branch and there had been a lot of blood, the boy remembered, smiling. The sheep didn’t seem to enjoy dying more than any other animal.

  One of the brothers was called upon to say grace and Brother Brian showed the boy how to fold his hands and lower his head. At the end of the prayer everyone in the dining room said ‘amen’ and the boy followed their example.

  ‘You may begin.’

  The order came from the head table and the room was suddenly alive with the sound of spoons scraping against the bottom of wooden bowls, slurping and strange growling noises. The boy began to eat. The meat had a strange taste and the gravy was cloying and thick on his tongue.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever eaten kangaroo before, have you?’ Brother Brian said.

  The boy shook his head and took a drink of water from his mug. The water had a strange taste and smelled like the cordial Bother Brian had given him on the trip out to the mission. When he put his water down and went back to his stew he saw that the others at the table had already finished theirs and were staring at what remained in his bowl. He finished it off quickly. If they eat fast you eat fast. Don’t do anything they don’t do, don’t do anything that makes you stand out, don’t be different, that’s the rule to live by.

  When his bowl was empty he glanced up at the head table. One of the brothers was spooning out the last of the contents of the now uncovered bowls and he could see potatoes and peas and cauliflower. There was a large loaf of crusty brown bread at one end the table and the brother nearest to it was cutting off thick slices and coating them with butter. He looked around the dining room. Every boy at every table had his eyes fixed on the bowls at the head table, on the bread and on the lamb. The lamb had been reduced to just a bone by this stage. So that was what you found if you cut a sheep’s leg open. There must be something similar inside a human leg, he realised.

  ELEVEN

  The Buddha’s Belly was located in a two-storey stone building at the western end of Little La Trobe Street. They left the Triumph in a no-standin
g zone opposite the entrance. Berlin locked the missing persons files in the boot, along with the bundle of music papers. The two men crossed the narrow roadway, working their way between trucks loaded with bolts of fabric or racks of finished garments on hangers. The building had heavy double wooden doors, which Berlin guessed were left over from the days when the place was either a factory or warehouse.

  The front of the bluestone building was painted with garishly coloured images, like some of those he’d seen in the music papers. He knew the style was called psychedelic and had something to do with the drug LSD. The centrepiece illustration was a 20-foot-high image of a seated, rotund, smiling Asian bloke, who had to be the Buddha. The entrance doorway was in the middle of his belly.

  ‘Kids call it the smiling Chink,’ Roberts said. ‘The picture is probably offensive to Buddhists but it’s not as though they’re going to do anything about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Roberts looked at Berlin and smiled. ‘Because they’re non-violent, Charlie.’

  The tone in his voice suggested that Berlin was supposed to know this. He didn’t, but he was pleased to hear it anyway. If Melbourne could up its percentage of Buddhists amongst the town’s hard men it would be a good thing all round.

  The warehouse doors were locked tight but after a couple of minutes of vigorous hammering by Roberts, they heard the rasping sound of bolts being slid open. There was an outrush of a brownish haze when the door opened and Berlin’s nose picked up the scent of incense, patchouli, marijuana and stale toasted cheese. It was dark inside the building and the girl in the doorway squinted and blinked at the two men standing outside in the daylight.