ThornyDevils (10 page)

‘Do you need your pills, Slugger?’

‘They can wait,’ he replied in a nervous staccato. ‘There’s too much to do. Too much. Way too much.’

‘How about a cup of coffee?’ Peter asked as he headed towards the kitchen. ‘I’m going to make one. How about a bite to eat?’

‘All right,’ came the snappy reply. ‘But I have to tell you something first.’

Peter turned on his heel and sat on the couch, next to Slugger. ‘Oh yes? And what’s that? What do you want to tell me?’

‘It was a bloody bad day today.’ Slugger was shaking. Hard to tell if it was from shock, or if he was just missing his meds.

‘Certainly was,’ Peter replied. ‘That’s an understatement.’

‘I saw you there. Didn’t have time to talk.’

‘I know.’

‘Did you know? Pat O’Leary’s dead,’ Slugger sighed with grief. ‘And his son, Mickey. Good boy was Mickey.’ He lowered his eyes.

‘I heard.’ Peter wiped the last, crusty vestiges of sleep from his eyes. ‘They had a lot of blood on them.’

‘Ivy’s devastated,’ Slugger continued. ‘She’s a good woman.’

‘Who’s Ivy?’

‘You saw her. She was there.’ He wiped the trickle of tears, running down his face. ‘That was her husband and son that died.’

‘How do you know her?’

‘Too many questions, Jack. I don’t know if I can keep up.’

Okay, Peter thought, I’ll try a different approach.

‘You’re talking to me different now. Like I’m on the TV. Talk to me like you were me mate, Jack.’

‘Sounds like you were a good friend of hers, Slugger,’ Peter remarked after a long pause.

‘We go back a long way. I got an eye out for her when I’m up and about. Haven’t been well enough to do that lately. She’s a good woman,’ his voice trailed off.

‘Is she a relative?’

‘She’s family. That’s all I’m going to say.’

Blocked again. Can’t you just break down and tell me?
‘So why haven’t you mentioned the O’Learys before? How do you know them?’

‘It was none of your business,’ Slugger returned curtly. ‘You’re a good bloke but you’re still a reporter. The O’Learys are good people. They really are.’

‘At least you think I’m a good bloke,’ Peter quipped. ‘But I didn’t think good people got shot like that, Slugger. I just don’t get it.’

‘You probably think it’s your business to find out?’

‘Well, I’ve sent a story to press with my fucking by-line on it. I’ve had Pat O’Leary’s blood all over me and, before today, I didn’t know him from Adam,’ he replied. ‘I’d like to think it is my business now.’

‘I don’t want Ivy upset by the papers hanging around. She’s always been pretty fragile. Now with the killings and the papers, I don’t know how she’ll handle it. It could put her over the edge.’

‘The thing is, Slugger, the press are going to be swarming all over this. They love these kinds of stories. Do you want all these journos coming after Ivy like a pack of dogs?’

‘Of course not,’ he shot back. ‘And I don’t want her boys thrown into it either. They’re good people.’

It was interesting, Peter thought, that Slugger had to keep telling him that the O’Learys were good people. It was starting to arouse his suspicions. ‘Or do you want me asking the questions? That’ll keep them off Ivy. It’s an offer. You know me. Good bloke. Good journalist.’

‘I didn’t think of it that way,’ Slugger replied. ‘I wish I could get
all the reporters to stay away, but you’d be the best one to deal with, I suppose. You wouldn’t upset Ivy and the boys too much.’

‘I don’t want to upset anyone, Slugger. I just want to get behind the truth before the vultures start making up their own. And that’s what’s going to happen.’

‘But you won’t ask Ivy lots of hard questions and make her cry?’ Slugger asked. ‘They always make people cry on the TV.’

‘It’ll be like a gentle conversation,’ he assured Slugger. ‘I promise you.’ He found the word interview made people defensive.

‘If you do, I’ll get upset,’ he added as he clenched his left hand.

The famous Slugger left hook,
Peter thought.
It’d probably still put me in hospital
. ‘So I’ll see you tomorrow?’ he asked as he headed to the kitchen to make the long overdue coffee. ‘First thing tomorrow we go and see Ivy?’

‘Has to be now, Jack,’ Slugger insisted. ‘Or you won’t get another chance.’

‘Now?’ Peter checked his watch, ‘It’s eleven. Will she still be up? What about her boys?’

‘I’ve just come from being with her. This is the only time.’

‘I guess I’d better forget about the coffee, then.’

With Slugger sitting in the Stag’s passenger seat and Peter in the early stages of caffeine withdrawal, they soon arrived at Slugger’s flat. Slugger smiled when he noticed the quizzical look on Peter’s face. The ancient lift had a sign, written in wonky, fat, red Texta letters, which Peter immediately recognised as Slugger’s:
Lift Brocken Down
.

Slugger led Peter to the urine-soaked staircase adjacent and galloped up the stairs, taking some of them two at a time, while Peter huffed up behind him, struggling to keep up. A small, yellow light illuminated the front door. Instead of letting himself in with his key, Slugger rang the bell. Twice. Peter cautiously hung back in the shadows ready to scarper in the event of trouble. Was Slugger trying to set him up? Was Slugger having a hallucination? The door opened before he had time to run every scenario through his head.

‘Did you bring him, Slugger?’ Ivy slurred expectantly, as she ushered him in. From a distance, Ivy didn’t seem as grey as she been the last time Peter had seen her. Maybe she had found the time to go to the hairdresser, although that was unlikely. Most possibly she was wearing a well-fitting wig.

She was still a looker for a woman in her sixties; her face seemed devoid of the ravages of aging. Peter surmised that was thanks to a good plastic surgeon. She was still wearing the same tracksuit of that morning, but zipped up to the neck now.

Slugger grabbed Peter by the arm. ‘I’ve got him,’ he responded as he pulled Peter out of the gloom. He was propelled over the threshold and greeted with an air kiss from Ivy.
The old dear’s had too much Valium, too many brandies, and way too much trauma
, he thought.

‘I should thank you,’ Ivy smiled faintly as she planted another kiss on Peter.

‘What for?’ He looked to Slugger for help. Slugger responded by slapping Peter on the back.

‘I told you,’ said Slugger.

‘For trying to save Pat’s life today.’ She took hold of Peter’s hand and led him past a punching bag dangling from the ceiling and into Slugger’s tiny lounge room to a gold and burgundy brocade sofa. Slugger’s taste in interior decoration evidently stretched from sixties chic all the way to baroque.

‘I don’t know if I was able to do much,’ Peter replied.

Slugger followed closely behind. A pug dog came from nowhere and latched its teeth onto Peter’s pants. Ivy kicked away the dog.

‘Get away, Pugsley,’ she chastised.

As if in protest, the pug squatted and urinated on the rug near the sofa. Peter felt he was the only one noticing. The dog headed to a corner of the room to sulk and scowl at him. Ivy took her seat in an adjacent recliner next to a table covered with bottles of medications and a half empty bottle of brandy. She indicated for Peter to sit on the sofa next to her. Slugger chose to stand in the other corner, in front of an enormous framed picture celebrating his boxing career in photographs.

‘At least you tried,’ Ivy sighed. ‘You might be a reporter but you still have a beating heart. I didn’t think you people had hearts at all.’

‘How are you feeling now?’ Peter asked. He looked to Slugger for reassurance. Slugger gave a thumbs up sign.

‘Oh, you know. Just managing to hold it together,’ she said as she bit back tears. She reached for a glass of brandy and took a sip. ‘Don’t usually drink but it’s calming my nerves. Not easy to see your husband and son die like that.’

‘Or any way, I imagine. What do you think happened today, Ivy?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied vaguely. ‘It’s like a dream. I just keep seeing blood everywhere. It’s surreal.’

Peter cringed when the word
surreal
came out of her mouth. He hated the word. That and ‘literally’. He could see Slugger giving him another thumbs up sign from the corner of his eye.
So far so good
.

‘Do you have any idea who might have done this?’ Peter said cautiously. He had thrown the cat among the pigeons now. Slugger stepped forward.

‘Don’t upset her too much, Jack,’ he warned as he leant into Peter’s ear.

Peter shook his head with annoyance and waved Slugger aside. ‘Why did you want me to come here tonight?’

‘To tell my side of the story and to thank you,’ Ivy replied after taking another sip. ‘Slugger said you could be trusted with telling the right version, not a made up one.’

‘But you haven’t really told me anything yet, Ivy. You must know something. Give me something.’

‘All I know is that Pat and Mickey have been shot,’ she cried. Slugger rushed forward to comfort her. He sat on the armrest and folded his arm around Ivy. He then kissed her on the head. She continued, ‘And I really don’t know why or who.’

‘They’re dead for some reason. Was it to do with Pat’s reappearance?’

‘The coppers keep asking me if they had enemies. I don’t know,’ Ivy replied despondently. ‘I thought Pat was dead. And my boys and me, we’re just hard working people. We have no enemies.’

‘She doesn’t know,’ Slugger said angrily. ‘That’s what you have to put in the paper.’

‘I’m really confused right now. You asked me to come here and you don’t tell me anything?’

‘I’m an honest woman,’ she wept, ‘and now you’re picking on me.’

‘Answer me one question, then’ Peter began. ‘Where did Pat go to for two years when it was assumed he was dead?’

‘He went away on business to South East Asia,’ she stammered, her eyes flicking around the room. She picked up the brandy glass and drained it. Peter had one of the best inbuilt bullshit meters in the business and it was off the scale.

‘That’s it, Jack,’ Slugger jumped out of the corner and stomped
towards Peter. Pugsley saw it as an opportune time to start tearing at Peter’s pants again. Slugger kicked the dog away and grabbed Peter by the arm, pulling him off the sofa.

‘Do you believe that, Ivy?’ Peter managed as Slugger dragged him by the shirt collar through the lounge. He thought briefly of resisting but Slugger, even in his advanced years, was stronger than he. ‘Are you towing the party line, Ivy?’ he continued as grabbed hold of the punching bag and held on tightly with both hands. Slugger had finally run out of puff and was having trouble dislodging him. Ivy responded by pouring herself another drink and avoiding eye contact. Peter held on firmly. ‘What about you, Slugger?’ Peter turned to face him.

‘I don’t want to hit you, Jack,’ he said with a hint of sadness. ‘Don’t force me.’

‘Fine.’ Peter released his grip on the bag and continued walking through the lounge room, ‘I’m not getting hurt to get a story.’

Slugger followed Peter all the way back to the Stag. ‘Wait, Jack,’ Slugger said finally, as Peter was opening the car door. ‘We need to talk.’

Peter stopped. ‘I thought we’d already done that—or tried to.’

‘This is off the record,’ he said. ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘Of course I fucking know what that means. You’re going to tell me what really happened and I can’t use it. Like taking a beautiful woman to bed and finding out she has an extra appendage.’

‘Ivy doesn’t know anything,’ Slugger began. ‘The boys always kept her in the dark.’

‘Where did she think Pat went for two years?’

‘She thought he was living with two Thai women in a beach villa in Phuket. He was having a mid-life crisis.’ Slugger stopped for breath. ‘Or that’s what she was told.’

‘Lucky him,’ Peter replied. ‘So why did he come back if his every need was being attended to in Thailand? Sounds like he’d already died and gone to heaven, except he comes back here to die. This time for real.’

Slugger began to shift uneasily on his feet. ‘Not saying anymore,’ he blurted. ‘I’ve helped you enough.’

‘You know,’ Peter began, slamming the car door behind him and drawing nearer to Slugger. ‘I’m starting to get this.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You bring me here tonight on the pretext that Ivy is going to tell me everything, when you know she knows stuff all.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘I write a sympathetic story about the O’Leary widow and the filthy press leave her alone. Maybe everyone will leave the family alone. You’re thinking like a lucid man all of a sudden.’

‘You should be a bloody writer. Talk about fantasy land.’

‘Was that your plan? Why are you protecting her, Slugger?’

‘I’m going inside.’

Slugger walked away, over the lawned frontage of the high rise. Peter followed.

‘Why are you protecting her? Off the record. You worked for them on the docks, didn’t you? You were the standover merchant?’

‘Leave me alone,’ Slugger cried as he spun around and pushed Peter to the ground.

Peter fell onto the soft grass and lay there, winded momentarily. Slugger rushed over to him and pulled him up by one arm into a sitting position. ‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ he whined. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you. I don’t hurt mates.’ He squatted down next to Peter.

‘Part of the game, I guess,’ Peter croaked, shaking his head. He pulled a blade of grass out of his mouth.

‘Ivy’s my lover,’ Slugger gushed. ‘That’s why I look after her.’

‘Say again?’ Peter shook his head with disbelief.

‘Promise you won’t publish this?’

‘Okay,’ Peter agreed reluctantly. ‘It’s just between you and me.’

‘Ivy and me became an item not long after she married Pat. When I was the best boxer in Australia and she was the best looking sheila in Melbourne. Not that anyone knew we were seeing each other. Pat was always at work and I had an unhappy marriage. We sort of found each other.’ Slugger chuckled at the memory. ‘Ivy and me would meet at the Windsor every Friday for a bit of a cuddle. I had money in those days. Our afternoon delight, we called it. You know. If Pat had found out—whew! He would’ve…’ He took a deep breath, ‘But we loved each other so much that we were planning to run away. I wanted to go to the States and fight. Make some really big money.’ He paused, brow wrinkled. ‘Then Ivy fell pregnant. Just before the big fight with the Yank.’