Shane Maloney - The Brush-Off

‘He’s also been selling forged art,’ I said, not to be entirely outdone. ‘He’s been using a front called Austral Fine Art.’ The guy had just tried to kill me, so I was keen to sink the boot in.

Spider pushed my head aside, tracking a stream of passing cars. ‘We know all about Austral,’ he said. ‘That’s why we suspect he killed Taylor.’

Spider’s metamorphosis was happening a bit fast for me. ‘What do you mean “we”? Who’s “we”?’

The tram was hurtling down St Kilda Road at a steady clip, approaching the war memorial. The greenery of the parkland raced along beside us. It wasn’t the only thing. As we slowed to disgorge passengers one stop short of the turn into Domain Road, a blue Mercedes sped by, a grim-faced Lloyd Eastlake at the wheel. Spider began elbowing his way to the door, me right behind him. The conductor blocked our way. ‘Fez please.’

I fumbled in my pocket. Spider pulled out a wallet and flipped it in her face. She was looking at it sceptically when I reached past and dumped a fistful of change in her palm. ‘Two all-day travel cards, please,’ I said. The tram rounded the corner and accelerated up the slight incline of Domain Road. As the connie punched our tickets, I reached up and jerked the communication cord. The tram’s clicketty-clack crescendo reached its peak and it began to decelerate. The door slid open.

Eastlake’s Mercedes was pulled up on the park side of the road. It was empty, its boot open. Spider hit the bitumen running. Me too.

I ran around the back of the tram and narrowly beat a stream of oncoming traffic to the footpath in front of Lambert’s block of flats. When I looked back, Spider was still on the far side of the road. He’d thrown open the Merc’s driver-side door and was reaching across to the glove compartment.

Fiona Lambert was not a nice person. But if Eastlake did anything violent to her, it would be because of what I’d told him. I turned and started into the flats, almost colliding with the old chook with the schnauzer. ‘Well I never!’ she exclaimed, clutching the hapless pooch to her bosom.

‘Me neither,’ I said, and started running up the stairs.

The door of Fiona Lambert’s flat sat carelessly half-open. Behind it, bananas were being gone in no uncertain terms. The sound was coming from the direction of the bedroom. ‘Bitch!’ Eastlake’s voice was shrill with indignation. ‘To think that I killed for you.’

The spare key was in the lock. Fiona Lambert’s security consciousness was appalling. ‘You’re crazy,’ she was saying, over and over, sounding very convincing.

I was all ears, panting, imagining the scenario, figuring the options. Shivers were running up and down my spine. Eastlake had a lead of, what, five minutes. Time enough to burst in, launch into a truth and consequences 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.