Four days later someone turned him into a three-dimensional human jigsaw in the dark shafts of Brisbane. Who could he have met in the holy booth? Was he giving me a clue? The identity of his future killer?
Finally he’d whispered: ‘Mary. Blessed Mary.’
‘Dill?’
‘O beloved Mary. Sweet Mary. Give me strength.’
‘Dill?’
And the phone had gone dead.
I rang again. No answer. So I took a quick swing by the chapel on Marilyn Monroe Drive and knocked at the back door.
‘Father Dillon?’ The office smelled of pine needles and incense and the colour purple. Yes, purple. For me the church, since I was a kid, had smelled of purple.
I’d crept inside and found nothing. Then I’d opened the doors to the confessional. For no reason. It was how I always used to work as a detective. I’d snoop in places for no reason. I’d poke through kitty-litter trays, check refrigerator cheese boxes, prod away at sofa cushions. Colleagues would ask, what are you doing that for, Detective? No reason, I’d say. The reasoning of my non-reasoning had solved four murders during my spell in homicide. There was nothing in the good Father’s booth. Then, just as I was about to close the sinner’s door, I’d seen a little triangle of yellow in the shadows beneath the kneeling stool.
I’d bent down low on my creaky knees, and retrieved the object.
It was a small ticket. An old ticket. On one side was a numbered grid with B.C.C. Dept, of Transport printed across the top in small letters. On the other was a very crude picture of a kangaroo and the words ‘Hop Into! Trittons’.
What the hell was this? And had the clerk who put the exclamation mark after ‘Into’ been given the heave-ho for poor grammar all those years ago? Was he drunk? Sloppy stuff.
I’d pocketed the ticket, and had it in my wallet when I visited my contact at the Roma Street headquarters. I didn’t share it with him either.
And I was flicking it with my thumbnail in the pocket of my old shiny suit trousers days later at Father Dill’s funeral. That’s when I caught Alan Beechnut’s gaze. That’s when the hairs on my neck bristled. And that’s when I decided to pay Mr Beechnut a quiet visit.
~ * ~
4
The problem with short, eccentric men with strange fetishes is that they have a taste for bringing about the end of the world.
As my favourite television celebrity of all time, Professor Julius Sumner Miller, always said: ‘Why is it so?’
I’ll tell you why, Julius — and you don’t have to know how to suck an egg into a milk bottle to get the gist of this. Unpredictability. Short megalomaniacs can be unpredictable, a quality that is the bane of a copper’s life.
Julius had it. Unpredictability. Not an Armageddonesque unpredictability, though I’m sure his influence led to more childhood chemistry-set explosions than at any other time in history. The reason Julius’s unpredictability worked was that he knew his audience was a bunch of scientific halfwits. Everything he did was unpredictable to the dopey, cow-like masses who oohed and ahhed at Julius’s magic. I include myself in the herd.
I remember his ‘Millergrams’, which were published in the daily newspaper, with the answer provided the next day. How tall a mirror do you need to see all of you? he asked. How can you measure out half a cup of hard, solid butter without melting it? Boy, Julius could be infuriating. Yet he was compulsive viewing, responsible for shaping an entire generation of eggheads. And getting that actual egg into the milk bottle. Watch it. Watch it! There it goes. Why is it so? Such an existential question, and one I used often, to the annoyance of my colleagues, when I arrived at a murder scene. Why is it so?
The trouble with Alan Beechnut was that you knew, on sight, that he was the kind of man who would call out for his Mammy on his deathbed. In fact, you knew he was the kind of man who had spent his entire life living with his Mammy. And he had. Until she expired, and poor little Beechnut had to stay home alone.
That’s where I found him one Saturday afternoon when I decided to pay a visit to his house in Scarborough, a pretty little bayside point north of Redcliffe, outside Brisbane. It had taken me almost three hours to get there, this time on the Gateway. A tomato truck had lost its load and the motorway had ground to a halt somewhere near Underwood. Brisbane traffic, again. I am not a fan of tomatoes. To be honest, I have a tomato phobia. It was something I had yet to discuss with My Analyst. I thought we’d get my religious conundrums out of the way before we moved on to fruit and vegetables. I was even less of a tomato fan that day. I’d got seeds on my mudflaps.
Beechnut’s place was a little fibro fishing shack two streets back from the bay. I didn’t like the feel of it one bit. It was the type of house — the windows — all tightly shut, the grass long, the paint peeling off — I had seen before. These sorts of places had dead bodies in them, mummified corpses lying on beds while weeds towered over the yard, and free local newspapers rotting on the front path. Places like this had secrets.
It was hot. I could smell briny water. I felt nauseous. But not half as bilious as I became when I knocked and Beechnut opened the door.
What hit me was a wall of smell that told me a lot about Alan Beechnut. It was the odour of unwashed human beings in warm conditions that had accumulated over many years. It was the throat-constricting perfume of an old lady and her middle-aged boy existing quietly in a small house with no ventilation. Now it was just the boy, but the smell had a lot of dear, departed Mammy still in it. Oh dear me, yes. It was so foul, a hair in my nose coiled tight.
‘Can I help you?’ Beechnut asked me.
‘Cut the Little Lord Fauntleroy crap, Beechnut. We need to talk.’ I had cupped my hand over my nose and mouth.
He was about five feet tall and sported a comb-over. At least, I guess it was a comb-over. In fact, his hair had probably not seen a comb since little Alan was potty-trained, which may have been last year by the smell of the house. And while it had been a long time since I’d had anything to do with babies, I think the man was still suffering from cradle cap. He also had two pieces of blood-stained toilet paper stuck to his face. Looked like he shaved with a chisel blade. His ears were spectacularly protuberant and not unlike small, fleshy seashells. I could imagine his classmates swinging off them in his schooldays. He wore a red and black checked flannelette shirt buttoned to the neck and at the wrists, though it was close to thirty-five degrees. He had narrow shoulders and baggy grey trousers. He wore — of course — navy-blue socks and plastic sandals. Alan Beechnut looked like a little old man, though he couldn’t have been more than fifty. At a hunch, he would have been an old-looking baby. Older than his Mammy and Pappy when he was born. Prune-faced and hunchbacked. I doubted there were many baby photos of little Alan framed throughout the house.
The disturbing thing about Alan — apart from the fact that his eyes seemed to be looking in two different directions, he was rank, had cradle cap and enough plaque on his teeth to make, well, a plaque to poor dental hygiene — was the malevolence he carried about his eyes and mouth.
He had the look of a boy who’d just set fire to the local church and was wetting his Y-fronts waiting for the fire truck to arrive. Wee-wah, wee-wah! And his eyelashes were very dark and very thick, as if they’d been drawn on with a child’s crayon. Both top and bottom lashes were of equal length. I had met men whose eyes were totally framed by thick eyelashes. They were invariably arsonists, or scam artists, or animal torturers, or had a future in cross-dressing. Or they were murderers.