Pete and Jo-Jo had lived in a small flat adjoining the main house. What had once been a quiet suburban refuge had now come to disturb them so much that they preferred to enter the inner city where they were both known to the cops.
When he heard about the body something inside Eddie went very tight and began to reverberate very fast. A thought so outrageous that it terrified him to consider it. An impossible thought, but the more he was frightened of it the more he knew he had to do it. Not for the money, although the money would be incredible. But … because …
But for now he was relieved that Jo-Jo had brought a subject for conversation along with him. Jo-Jo’s silences were somehow like threats. Now while he talked to them about the old lady he managed not to feel so fucking straight. Smack freaks always made him nervous. They were so private, so exclusive, living in their own dangerous world which he would never have the courage or foolishness to enter.
Even now he felt their curious ambivalence towards him, their envy of his success, and also their contempt for it. Pete didn’t say much. He went off to the windowless dunny where he shot up and splattered blood over the door. He came back rubbing his arm and smiling secretively to Jo-Jo.
Eddie said, “She hasn’t rotted or anything?” He’d never seen a dead body. He wondered about it.
No, she hadn’t even … started … to decompose. She was like (grimace) perfect. Nothing was happening. That’s what was freaking them.
Eddie wanted to be sure they hadn’t told anyone.
Pete curled his lips. Who in the fuck’re we going to tell? The cops?
Jo-Jo nodded. They were waiting for some … stuff … and they were going to take the truck up to Queensland maybe tomorrow. They were waiting for a … delivery. They were going to Queensland to stay with … relatives.
The “relatives” were somehow a big joke. Eddie grinned with them and then felt stupid when he saw how they looked at him. They’d caught him out. They rubbed his nose in his own fraud. They knew he didn’t know the joke about relatives. Fucking smack freaks, always talking in code.
He told them he wanted to see the old lady and Jo-Jo told him the address although Pete told him not to. Pete was mumbling. Eddie wished they’d get out of his shop but when they asked if they could stay at his place for a night he couldn’t bring himself to say no.
3.
They moved in that night and began to fuck up his record collection as soon as they arrived. Eddie followed after them, putting records back in their plastic sleeves and placing ashtrays in strategic positions while Daphne, bright-eyed, talked to them about Queensland. Eddie didn’t know she’d been to Queensland. But she had. She’d lived there for nearly a year.
“You know Cairns?” she asked Pete.
“Yeah.”
“Cairns is a groove.”
“Holloway Beach.”
“Oh Christ yeah, Holloway Beach.” Pete exchanged some look with Jo-Jo that could have meant anything.
Eddie nearly asked, what’s Holloway Beach, but he stopped himself. He’d never seen Pete hold a human conversation with anyone. He would rather that it wasn’t happening here.
“You ever go to Martin’s caravan?”
“Oh yes,” Daphne smiled, a very large warm smile.
“He got busted.”
“Yeah I know.” Daphne smiled like she knew a lot about Martin and his caravan. It was a quite explicit smile which made her look a little soft and sentimental round the eyes.
Pete nodded, “You knew Martin.” He laughed.
Eddie sat on the floor and grinned good-naturedly. He remembered Daphne telling him once how she’d lived in a caravan.
“Martin was a good guy,” said Jo-Jo. “When he got busted his mum flew up from Lismore and bailed him out. You ever meet his mum?”
“Yeah,” Daphne giggled. “He took me down to Lismore once to see his mum.”
“The Golden Wattle Café …” grinned Pete.
“Yeah, The Golden Wattle Café, and she looked me up and down and everything. It wasn’t very cool. I had to sleep in a room out the back. That’s when I pissed off from Martin. His mum came in one morning and said, Daphne what do you think of Martin? I don’t know what she wanted me to say. But I said, well Mrs Clements he’s certainly a good fuck.”
“What’d she do?”
“She didn’t do anything. She just pretended she hadn’t heard. I got a bus.”
Eddie waited for them to start talking about drugs. Sooner or later it’d come up. He hadn’t told her they were smack freaks. Now, sometime, the hypodermic would come out and no one needed to go and hide in the dunny to do the job. And then. And then, Daphne would want to try it. Anything once, she’d say, anything once. And leave Eddie standing like a shag on a rock.
They made him feel so fucking straight. He would have loved to have kicked them out but that would have made him feel even more straight. And when they began to shit in his red plastic rubbish bin he didn’t complain.
4.
Eddie went down to the shop the next morning to make a few private phone calls and found Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the vice squad waiting for him. Eddie knew Detective Sergeant Mulligan from the days when he’d managed the Brown Paper Book Shop in the Metropole Arcade. When he saw Mulligan he knew what had happened: his High Street friends had lodged an official complaint.
Eddie parked the Porsche behind Mulligan’s unmarked Holden and waved to the dapper man in the suit and suede waistcoat who stood waiting patiently outside the shop. Mulligan looked more like a used-car salesman than a cop. He had a seedy handsome face and favoured big cufflinks and interesting tie-pins.
He was going to be busted. He didn’t mind. Finally it’d be good for business.
“You’re a dirty bastard,” said Mulligan. “This is Constable Fisher.”
Fisher looked like a farmer. He gazed solemnly at Eddie like a child looking at a dangerous snake in the zoo.
Eddie opened the shop for them and they wandered around getting a better look at the photographs. “You know who this is?” Mulligan tapped a man lying on what seemed to be a kitchen floor.
“No.”
“Name’s Hogan. His wife’s in Fairlea now, the silly bitch. You mind telling me where you got these?”
“From the North Melbourne tip.”
“You found them at the North Melbourne tip. Just wandering through were you?”
“A friend.”
“You’re a bit sick in the head, Eddie.”
“Do you think?” Eddie smiled. He found it ironic that he was being busted for possessing the art of the police force.
Constable Fisher watched one, then the other, like a man watching a game of tennis.
“Corrupt and deprave.”
“I’m what?”
“These,” Mulligan indicated the photographs, “are likely to corrupt and deprave.” He grinned. “So I’ll have to give you a receipt.”
Eddie thumped his forehead with his fist. “They’ve got their clothes on.”
“How many photographs?”
Fisher counted them twice. “Sixteen.”
“Listen,” said Eddie, “there’s no pricks, no genitals, they’ve got their clothes on.”
“Sixteen … photo … graphs,” wrote Mulligan, “size?”
Fisher guessed: “Ten by eight?”
“They’ve got their clothes on. They’re just dead people with their clothes on.”