At my age, nothing surprises me any more.
So when, all these decades later, the phone rang and a detective mate told me about the presumed murder of Obe’s little boy, now a lonely middle-aged bachelor living in a Gold Coast unit with too many wire hangers, a stained refrigerator, a worn armchair and blood thrown across the cream walls, I barely raised an eyebrow.
‘You sitting down?’ my mate told me, calling on his mobile from the scene.
‘Is that a joke?’ I said, wriggling in my sagging banana lounge, still sore from my embarrassing encounter with an Eastern European assassin in the old Brisbane City Hall building a full year before. ‘What you got?’
‘How well did you know Obe’s son, Junior?’
‘The last time I saw Junior was when a new sheet of Seven Seas Stamps got me all excited. Come on. What you got?’
‘You’re not going to believe this.’
‘Flummox me.’
‘We found, in the unit, an old New South Wales police diary from 1972. It’s got your name all over it.’
‘Waddya mean, it’s got my name all over it?’
‘I mean it’s got your name all over it. It’s your diary.’
‘What?’
‘Junior’s highlighted one entry. 21 July. “Obe dead. Single gunshot wound to head. 6.47 pm. Second cubicle. Basement. Not possible.” You know what that’s about?’
‘Yeah.’
‘See you in twenty minutes?’
‘Yeah.’
I didn’t move for what seemed like an eternity after that call. For the first time in thirty-eight years, the copper smell of Obe’s blood in that tiny stall came back and hit me in the back of the throat.
I just stared towards the water of the canal out back, unblinking, like a boy at a funeral.
~ * ~
2
Funny thing, memory.
I recall reading somewhere that everything we ever see and hear is retained by the brain. That it’s filed away like old library cards or film negatives, or these gigabyte things they have today, and sits in the dark waiting for us to remember it and draw it back out into the light.
I don’t believe this. Sounds a bit too fancy-pants to me.
But I’ll never forget my dear old father’s last words, on his deathbed. He faced the end with great courage. A moment before he died, he called me closer and whispered: ‘Less sugar next time, Dad. Remember the war.’
I knew exactly what this meant. He was living at home in Surry Hills with his parents at the start of the Second World War. Everyone was edgy. Windows were blacked out. Australia waited to be attacked.
Then, in the early hours of a crisp spring morning, the street came under fire. Was it a machine gun? A fighter plane? Shells lobbed in from the harbour off an enemy warship?
No, it was Grandpa’s stash of home-brewed beer going off in the back shed. It was the day the blitz came to a narrow street in the inner-city, albeit under a fusillade of sugar, yeast and tin caps.
That’s what my father remembered with clarity, the moment before he left this world.
Why did he retrieve that particular card from his life file? And how, sitting in the car outside the Surfers Paradise apartment building of the late Hubert Dunkle Junior, did I know that I had seen this place before? Not in situ. And not the exact building that now occupied the address — a gleaming twenty-one-storey superstructure, hardly five years old. But the street, and the gnarled old pandanus trees up and down the footpath, and the saggy fibro beach shack to the left of the modern apartment building, its walls moulded, the points of its spiky, rusted television aerial decorated by some drunken wags with empty beer stubbies?
Where have I seen you? I asked myself in the car. How do I know you?
My detective mate was waiting in the posh foyer, beside a little trickling fountain.
He flicked his head for me to follow, and once we were in the lift he pressed the button for the nineteenth floor.
The lift carriage was mirrored on three sides. Big, fat, red, scarred coppers’ mugs stretching back to the dawn of time. We were not one of the world’s more attractive professions.
‘You retired how long ago?’ he asked me.
‘About four years,’ I said.
‘From Sydney, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thought you’d come up here, catch a bit of sun?’
‘You got it.’
‘Throw in a lazy line?’
‘Spot on.’
‘And that was you last year, right? Nearly got your head blown off at City Hall?’
‘I’m the man.’
‘And the year before? Got thrown out of a high-rise office building in Brisbane?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Now you’re linked to a murder scene by a forty-year-old diary?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘You got a funny way of retiring. ‘
‘Side-splitting, innit?’ I said.
The elevator door opened. ‘Second on your left,’ the detective said.
I was fumbling for my sunglasses on that short walk to Hubert Dunkle Junior’s apartment. What was it with these new Gold Coast buildings? It was as sunny inside them as out, all glass and blinding white surfaces and brushed metal.
One of the nineteenth-floor residents, a painfully thin old lady in crisp leopard-spotted knickerbockers, a head scarf and sunglasses the size of saucers you might fill with milk for your kitty-cat, scurried past towards the lifts, busy as an over-tanned hen, all cluck and clack on the tiled floor. In the glare she had almost completely dissolved, a blur of wrinkled alligator skin and gold. She left trailing behind her the faint aroma of burned hair.
I stepped into Junior’s abode and the moment I crossed the threshold I got that old, tingling feeling that detectives never lose. The thrill. The exhilaration of a fresh crime; struggling against the pity of it all. The rush of seeing, and then really seeing. The perversely enjoyable effort of decoding the perverse human brain. Stepping through the immediate dimension. The ordinary suddenly extraordinary. The commonplace a priceless treasure. You gotta be there.
I didn’t even notice the uniform copper standing guard just inside the door.
‘Who you?’ he grunted.
‘Who me?’ I said, brushing past him. ‘Screw you.’ I could be terribly adolescent at times.
‘Oi,’ he said, in the way that so many males on the Gold Coast aged between ten and forty said ‘Oi.’
I ignored him.
I stood at the entrance to the lounge room and took in the scene. My mate quietly joined me.
‘Waddya reckon?’ he said, hands on hips.
I lamented the days of old Obe, and the power of silence in detective work. Nothing today seemed to happen without ceaseless noise, chatter, music, aimless discussion, moronic pleasantries and twaddle. I despised twaddle. I was twaddle’s number one public enemy.