‘I want to see where he died,’ I said. ‘Zim.’
The blond-haired man stood, smashed out his cigarette in a large glass ashtray and walked to the door. As he left he said, without turning to face me, ‘Children should never play with firearms. They could meet with a nasty accident.’
I sat up in the settee and observed my arms and legs. The hair transplant had brought the glass of leeches up to his face and was watching them with a little too much excitement for my liking.
‘Herr Doctor,’ I said. ‘Can I go?’
‘Nobody’s keeping you,’ he said, relishing the writhing annelids.
I hobbled out to the vestibule, then down the stairs to the driveway. The Kombi was parked exactly where I’d left it, but the driver’s door was unlocked. I didn’t wait to warm the motor and gave her a little rev on the way out, kicking up some gravel.
As soon as I hit the tarred bitumen outside the creepy gates of Ertrinken Estate, the sun burst through a phalanx of clouds. The world was a sunny vineyard again.
I opened the glove box, retrieved my mobile and listened to a message. It was from an old contact in forensics in Brisbane. ‘Your mate Westchester’s results are in. Poisoned. Very sophisticated. Thought you’d like to know.’
I knew I had to get back to Zim’s apartment as soon as I could. I also knew, halfway down the range, that I was being followed. By a black split-screen Kombi, as big as a hearse.
With dread, I slapped my belt and pictured my beautiful Beretta sinking to the centre of the earth in that infinite rainforest pool, picking up legions of leeches as it disappeared forever.
I remembered that in Groundhog Day the lead character tries, time and again, to kill himself, but wakes every morning to a new and interminable day. I was beginning to know how he felt.
~ * ~
8
I’m not a big motor-racing fan. It just doesn’t do it for me, all the noise and fumes and lap after tedious lap. As a television spectacle it is incomprehensible to my feeble mind. I’d rather watch a film on the grazing habits of Tibetan yaks. Did you know they have bigger hearts and lungs than your garden variety bovine? All the better for munching at high altitude.
Oh, I could go on about yaks. But motor racing. I had it in mind that afternoon I left the Gold Coast vineyard and made a beeline for Westchester Zim’s apartment because I was hurtling down the range in my Kombi being followed by a black split-screen Kombi that could only have been driven by villains, but very dumb villains. Why would smart villains announce their villainry in a villainous black car? Also, the moment we hit the Pacific Highway to Brisbane, I got involved in the third car chase of my life.
The first was at the Sydney Easter Show when I was eight and my brother, Stanley, was five. We were riding the dodgem cars. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say a chase ensued and poor Stanley ended up with a fractured skull and a lifelong fear of motorised vehicular transport. He will still not ride with me in a car — any car.
The second happened when I was a cop in Sydney and was in a high-speed pursuit with a Leyland P76 Coupe. It ended up head-butting a streetlight. Its bonnet flew off and landed on the windshield of my police vehicle. My car collided with another streetlight. The coupe driver and I were both rushed to hospital in the same ambulance.
Now I was in another, and if you know unmodified Kombis, you’ll know that this particular chase resembled my ding-dong dodgem battle with little Stanley, though possibly at a lower level of velocity.
At the high point of the chase, just as we were passing the Logan Hyperdome, we must have hit the clipping sonic speed of just under 80 km an hour, full throttle. Considering it was a 100 km zone, it’s a miracle we weren’t both pulled over by the highway patrol for going too slowly. Nevertheless, the chase was on, and we clicked and clacked all the way to the city like two snails racing for a freshly detected puddle of beer. (Snails, if you didn’t know, are very much like a large proportion of the Australian male population. They adore beer, throw it down, get promptly drunk and invariably drown in it. Not a bad way to go.)
As we hit the cross-city tunnel roadworks to the south of the CBD, I still had my persistent tail, but she was coughing a bit of smoke. With some crafty manoeuvring I knew I could hold out for a full engine blow. But Splittie drivers are persistent — they carry an air of superiority over us common Bay Window Kombi owners, and though she belched out a fair bit of blue stuff, I couldn’t lose her.
The villains got so close to my tail at one point that I realised they were driving not just any old Splittie, but a multi-windowed Samba, which was top-notch, arguably the Queen of Kombis. But as I slipped up the Margaret Street exit, this final turn was the Samba’s undoing. She erupted in a pyre of delicious smoke and came to an unceremonious halt, and I slipped into the anonymity of the city.
I still had the key to Zim’s apartment, but out of courtesy I rang the janitor’s bell. He did not appear. By the time I got to Zim’s door, I knew I was too late. The door was half-open and inside it looked as though a herd of yaks had passed through en route to some choice grazing on Mount Coot-tha.
Everything had been upturned and routed. Zim’s pristine kitchen had been soiled, possibly for the first time. His framed Cézanne’s on the wall were cock-eyed. On the kitchen bench I found several bottles of wine that had been opened and drained. They’d raided Zim’s fridge and savoured a particular sticky that might have accounted for their monthly wages, if indeed henchmen were on salary. They knew not what they had drunk.
I went straight to Zim’s office and found it similarly trashed. The drawers to his index-card filing cabinet were all open, but incredibly none of the cards had been disturbed. This made sense. In my experience, when lug-headed moronic petty criminals whose reading experiences stopped with The Little Engine That Could are faced with any sort of laborious paperwork or sheer weight of wordage — and trust me, Zim had neatly filed many thousands of those pocket-sized cards — a small wire in their heads almost instantly disconnects from the brain’s mainframe and they move on to something else. (A very similar process to when I witness motor racing.) I could be thankful for small mercies.
For the remainder of the afternoon, before I reported the burglary to police, I sat down with a glass of the only wine left in the house — a Stanthorpe Merlot that put lead in my weary pencil — and made a few phone calls.
My newfound friend Mr Johann Flick was, it turned out, no stranger to the local police authorities, nor was he entirely unknown to the Crime and Misconduct Commission. He was, as one source told me, on his way to becoming ‘the biggest and most ruthless developer in southeast Queensland’, and if an aerial map of Brisbane city’s newest developments was ever drawn up, Flick’s portfolio would include neat parcels of fevered construction at either end of the city’s anticipated north—south tunnel. Herr Flick, I also learned, had a strong interest in the city’s water grid, specifically the Southern Regional Water Pipeline. Flick was scrambling for any patch of dirt that the pipeline abutted or passed through. He was also influential in the emerging satellite cities of Ipswich and the Sunshine Coast.
For no reason, I immediately thought of a very old phrase — ‘and He turned water into wine’.