What if nothing had anything to do with anything, and I already had half a foot in the Land of Ga Ga?
‘Talk to me, Obe,’ I said into the dark study, and the chair beneath me issued a long, mournful creak.
‘I’m going to call the police,’ a dry voice said.
‘Obe? Is that a joke?’ I asked of nobody.
‘No, it’s not a joke. I’m going to call the police.’
I swivelled around in the chair, and there was the human alligator handbag, the neighbour, Madame Mutton, who I’d seen in the corridor earlier in the day.
‘Pipe down,’ I said. ‘I am the police.’
‘You don’t look like the police.’
‘And you don’t look like Sophia Loren.’
‘Are you always this rude?’
‘Always. Even when I’m asleep.’
‘You might want to get up off your backside then and find that lovely boy.’
‘Junior?’
‘He was a good boy.’
Junior had been fifty-three, so for this super-tanned Dolly Varden to call him a ‘boy’ just showed you how old she was.
‘How long you know him?’ I asked.
‘He’d only been here six weeks. Real neighbourly, he was. Not like the rest of them in here. All fillum people in here. In and out. Naked parties in the spa. The drugs and all.’
‘Did you say fillum?’
‘Fillum. The cinema. I can’t keep track. But Mr Dunkle was a real gentleman.’
I caught her looking over my shoulder at a photograph in a frame on the desk. It was a shot of Senior and Junior, in happier days. Days when both of them were alive.
Obe was dressed in his uniform. And little Junior was attired in his own specially made policeman’s outfit. It must have been taken just months before Obe died. Junior had that little twig of hair in the picture, too.
In the picture Obe’s eyes were, of course, huge behind the spectacles. They were kind eyes. Sharp as razors, but kind. There was love there too, with little Junior by his side. These were not the eyes of a man about to blow his brains out.
But I didn’t share any of that with Dolly.
‘He have any visitors lately?’
‘He kept to himself from what I could see.’
‘No lady friends? Gents?’
‘He cooked me dinner twice. Lovely it was. Made the pasta himself Not many young men these days who bother to make their own pasta.’
‘Or make their own beds,’ I said, nodding.
I got up to leave. The swivel chair seemed to issue a groan of relief as I rose to my feet. I slipped the diary into the large pockets of my cargo pants. Little Dolly seemed to have fallen into a quiet reverie. She had made in Junior a new friend here in the gulag of her apartment building, and he had just as quickly been snatched from her. Poor Dolly.
‘Time to lock up,’ I said, turning her brittle shoulders around, nudging her to the door. She still smelled of burned hair. Something glittered between the furrows of her old neck.
She stood and waited in the hallway while I locked up.
‘You take care, then,’ I said.
‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’ she asked quietly, her voice a fragile breath of breeze in the lonely corridor. I had forgotten about all the bachelorettes out there in the world.
‘Maybe some other time,’ I said.
I thought of sad Dolly for about three seconds as the lift descended. I had greater riddles to solve in this crazy universe of ours.
I had to get to my storage cage in Nerang out the back of the Coast to see if anyone had helped themselves to my once-secret, now very public, police diary archive, down amongst the silverfishes.
~ * ~
4
This is how well my wife Peg knows me, how familiar she is with my louche habits, general all-round grubbiness, forgetfulness and, quite clearly, my dreary predictability. I was an ever-expanding continent that she had traced and mapped many, many times, and there was no nook and cranny of me she hadn’t, sometimes disgustingly, come across.
I sat in the car outside the Ali Baba Self Storage facilities in an industrial estate in Nerang and phoned her on my mobile. She answered after one ring.
‘Just promise me you won’t get shot, bound, gagged, thrown from a window or tossed from a boat tonight. ‘
‘I could be ringing to see if you need milk and bread.’
‘You have never phoned to ask if I need milk or bread.’
‘I could be in hospital having suffered a heart attack.’
‘You have not suffered a heart attack and you are nowhere near a hospital. You are investigating a murder, someone called Carbunkle. I saw you on the news.’
‘It’s Dunkle. Junior. You saw me on the news?’
‘I saw your belly on the news.’
‘My belly?’
‘They showed some police standing outside an apartment building and your belly was poking into the frame.’
‘You recognised me by my belly?’
‘Just keep out of trouble.’
Good woman, Peg. The belly was a worry, though. I had spent much of my early career immersed in the underbelly of life. Now I was all belly and no under.
I gathered my thoughts in that dark street. I could see the faint outline of Ali Baba’s cheesy grin on the unilluminated sign outside the storage facility. He too had a spherical belly. I didn’t understand why a storage facility, meant to keep your chattels safe in this dangerous world, would name itself after a legendary thief. Never mind. Nothing made much sense to me in the twenty-first century.
I took the old diary from my pocket. I could feel its dry cover and spine in my dry old hands.
Someone, be it Junior or his assassin, had shown tremendous interest in this prehistoric volume. It mentioned Obe’s death, but just in passing. Nothing dramatic.
What was it that had driven someone to break into cage 143 at Ali Baba’s, rifle through some battered book cartons, remove the volume, study it, and place it at the scene of a murder?
It took me back, the diary — just holding it in the cabin of the car late at night. It returned me to my fake walnut desk at Sydney police headquarters, a magic carpet I thought would deliver me all the way to the rank of commissioner. Then Obe died, and everything changed.
I continued to turn up at that tatty desk. But from that day onward, I felt untethered, vulnerable.
I never shared my theory about Obe’s death with anybody. I was young. Wet behind the ears. I still didn’t know who to trust — besides Obe — in the great labyrinthine machine that is any police force. While I was watching all of them, they were watching me. Was this young detective one of us? Would he have our back? Would he keep his mouth shut when he had to? Avert his eyes when necessary?
On some nights Obe and I used to catch a quick meal in a noodle house down in Chinatown. It was there, over green tea and duck pancakes, that he took me under his wing and gave me a few survival tips.