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?’
‘Sure.’ It wasn’t like I had much choice. ‘But I need to call my son first.’ Red’s flight was at nine-twenty and it was already seven o’clock. Micaelis looked to Spider for confirmation. ‘I wouldn’t want to be done up for child neglect,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Webb.’
Spider pointed his chin towards the phone. ‘Make it quick.’
‘And I’d like to do something about this.’ I stood up and framed my crotch with open palms. ‘My thighs are starting to chafe.’ Micaelis didn’t think it necessary to refer that one up the chain of command. I smelled worse than the back of the grandstand at the Collingwood football ground. ‘Use the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Make it quick.’
Tarquin answered the phone at the Curnows’. ‘Something’s come up,’ I told Red when he eventually came on the line. ‘See if Leo can find the spare key to our place, pack your bag and wait for me. Sorry about this.’