Peter Temple - White Dog

Carmel the waif waitress sacked from Meaker’s appeared in the kitchen door, paintbrush in hand. She was wearing a skullcap and looked about twelve. She was thirty and knew much of men and the world.

‘Move the cars,’ said Enzio. ‘The furniture’s coming.’

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m not being paid for my time here.’

‘Please,’ said Enzio.

‘That’s a first,’ Carmel said. ‘That’s a personal best for you. Move them where?’

‘The lane. Two minutes.’

‘Keys?’

‘On the counter.’

She went out.

‘Here’s your lease,’ I said. ‘You are now legally occupying this building. Rent’s due the last Friday of every month, paid straight into the bank. The account number’s written on the first page.’

Enzio came down the ladder. He took the envelope, held it in both hands. He went over and put it on the counter, patted it. ‘Never thought,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Never thought.’

‘Yes, well. When?’

He looked at me. I thought I saw a glint in the black eyes. He cleared his throat. ‘Monday,’ he said. ‘Monday we open. Six o’clock, we have a little drink, champagne. Okay?’

‘Okay. See you on Monday.’

He followed me to the door, took my sleeve. ‘Jack,’ he said, barely audible, ‘listen, I want to say to you, I want to…’

I said, ‘Enzio, don’t say anything. Monday, I’m having poached eggs with the lot. Soft. I’ve had it with hard poached eggs.’

‘I hold them in the boiling water,’ he said, showing me a cupped hand.

‘Ordinary cooking methods will be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a matter of the timing.’

At the office, my two rooms, tailor’s table, two chairs and a framed degree certificate, I made a pot of tea and sat behind the tailor’s table to read the three-page report on Mickey Franklin.

The work was by Simone Bendsten Associates, specialists in due diligence and the lice-combing of candidates for jobs with share options and performance bonuses and a company jet. Once the firm was just Simone, a Scandinavian-Australian refugee from the finance world working from home. Now it was three people in an office off Brunswick Street.

‘Jack,’ she’d written on a card, ‘the press clippings are attached. We haven’t been able to add much.’

I read, marking bits, sat in thought for a while, trying to see Michael Franklin — funny, clever, dangerous-feeling Mickey Franklin. The report said he’d worked for MassiBild, the Massiani family construction company, for six years before going out on his own in 1995. It listed more than twenty inner-city residential developments he had been involved in, including the Serena apartment block in South Melbourne where he was murdered. Franklin’s most recent project, the $250 million Seaton Square complex in Brunswick, had been stalled for more than eighteen months. The tangled history of the project took up a page and a half, a case study in how not to deal with the neighbours’ concerns. There was a list of creditors, including a company called Glendarual Holdings. ‘Glendarual is Sir Colin Longmore’s investment vehicle,’ noted Simone.

The report ended:

Franklin had a reputation in the property and investment sectors as someone who did not linger in projects, accepting lower than possible returns in order to move on. Descriptions of him include: ‘tightrope act’; ‘not a person we’d want to be involved with’; ‘high-pain, low-gain operator’; ‘much too hurried for us’; ‘one-man bobsled team, no thanks’.

Between them the Age and the Herald Sun had found four photographs. Two gave a good idea of what Mickey looked like. In one, he was in a dinner jacket, bow tie, in profile bending forward to kiss a much younger woman, a piece of hair falling. She was offering her mouth, no cheek kiss here, she wanted to kiss him. A birthday, perhaps a twenty-first, the woman had that shining look. The second was taken at the opening of a gallery in the Serena building. He was photographed with his wife, Corin Sleeman, a slim woman with short fair hair that looked as if she’d finger-combed it straight out of the shower.

I read the report again and then I set out for the city centre, walked up to Brunswick Street to catch a tram. Once tram rides from Fitzroy to the city were more or less free, it was only a few blocks, the connies knew you, looked the other way. That had come to an end too.

Drew waved at me from a table to the left of the door of a cavernous faux-Milano place on Little Collins Street where the staff fawned on regulars and made others feel like they’d gatecrashed a private function.

I went over and sat on an uncomfortable chair. ‘Not proving easy,’ I said.

‘Nothing of worth in life is easy,’ said Drew. ‘Why is that, do you think?’

‘I don’t think.’ I looked around at the lunchtimers, mostly men in dark suits, hard voices, eyes that darted. ‘I’ll give you a why. This place?’

‘Convenience. I’m making a house call nearby on a colleague who finds himself in an awkward position. Drugwise.’

‘Not the colleague seen after midnight helping the staff of McDonald’s? Using the fat straws to vacuum a tabletop?’

Drew ran a fingertip over his upper lip, appraised me. ‘Becoming more in touch with the world,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing.’

‘I agree. I liked the old naive me more. I plan to revert.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Drew, ‘naivete never comes back. Like virginity and that feeling of your first tongue kiss.’

He caught a waiter’s eye before the man could look away and pointed at the menu. Insulted, the balded one slid over and took out his pad. We ordered from the fixed-price menu, two courses and a glass of wine. The man’s demeanour suggested that we were cheating, like rich tourists lining up with the homeless at a soup kitchen.

‘And the red,’ said Drew. ‘Recommend it?’

The waiter shrugged. ‘It’s red, it’s wine,’ he said. His eyes were elsewhere.

‘That good? My. Two glasses, please.’

We watched him go. He was pear-shaped, a big backside, something unobjectionable in people who hadn’t given offence but capable of arousing a violent urge.

‘Once the aim was to earn a lavish tip by grovelling,’ said Drew. ‘Now they want you to grovel. You saw her?’

‘What do the jacks say about the gun?’

‘Found in the course of a routine search of the area around Mickey’s building.’

‘Following a tip-off is what I’m told.’

Drew cocked his long head. ‘That’s good for a fit-up yarn.’

‘If admitted. Also good for a dobbed-in-by-unknown-accomplice, unfortunately.’

‘Someone betting she’s willing to go down alone? No. Accords better with weapon planted by the person who shot Mick five times through two folds of towel.’

‘Thick Egyptian cotton towel, no doubt. If there was a tip, it makes this very difficult.’

The waiter arrived, clicked down two glasses of red wine. He was leaving when Drew said, crisply, ‘Waiter.’

Pearbum stopped, turned like someone with a bad back.

‘I haven’t accepted this wine,’ said Drew.

Pearbum took in air, you could see the inflation of the midsection.

Drew sniffed his glass, one deep sniff, and put it down. ‘Oxidised,’ he said, his eyes on Pearbum. ‘Wine from a new bottle, please.’

Pearbum’s chin and eyebrows went up. Drew gave him the stare, the unblinking, sceptical look used for cross-examining hard-arsed police witnesses.

Pearbum looked back, but he was basically soft-arsed and looking into Drew’s eyes reminded him of this. He lowered chin and eyebrows. ‘Certainly, sir,’ he said. He gathered the glasses.