Moonlight Downs (21 page)

Looking down the barrel

THAT AFTERNOON set the pattern for the next couple of days, which we spent enthusiastically slipping in and out of each other’s beds and bodies. On the morning of the third day, however, Jojo was due to go out bush. We spent the night in at my place.

I woke up at first light, heard him pottering around the room.

‘Do you have to go?’ I asked him.

‘It’s my job.’

‘When’ll you be back.’

‘Few days.’

‘Can I get in touch with you?’

‘I’ll try to give you a call. If you need to get me you can try the Emergency Services frequency.’

He came and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘How long you got?’ I asked.

‘Half an hour.’

‘Just time for breakfast.’

‘What’s for breakfast.’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll like it,’ I grinned, dragging him back to bed.

Forty minutes later he was running out the front door, a piece of burnt toast in one hand, a pair of boots in the other. I turned over, settled down into a pleasantly post-coital sleep, and was still there a few hours later when the phone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said, or tried to say, but whoever was on the other end of the line probably didn’t hear much more than a discombobulated groan.

‘Emily?’

‘Tom?’

‘Just calling to say good-bye.’

‘Shit!’ I woke up in a rush. ‘Not the Gunbarrel Highway?’

‘Worse. Darwin. Staff Development Course, they’re calling it. Re-education Camp, more like it.’ Tom had done a stint in Vietnam. ‘Re-educate me not to fuck with the cattle kings.’

‘You interviewed Marsh?’

‘Yeah, and your man Massie, too, who read me the riot act and told me that whatever dealings his department had with Carbine Creek were “commercial-in-confidence” and of no bearing whatsoever upon any murder. By the time I got back from Carbine there was a message telling me to get me miserable arse up to Darwin, post haste.’

‘Which of them was responsible?’

‘Both of em, I imagine. Proper gang bang.’

‘What about Marsh? Did you get anything out of him?’

‘I got everything out of him except his breakfast. He’s in the clear.’

Shit. That only left Blakie, and how the hell was I going to catch him? But then McGillivray went on, ‘Far as I can tell. Which probably isn’t far enough for you, but there’s a limit to how far you can stick your bib in round here without getting it bit off.’

‘What’d he have to say for himself?’

‘It wasn’t so much what he had to say as what his men had to say. When I went out there Marsh was in the stock camp, cutting and branding bulls. With half a dozen blokes who swore he was doing the same thing the day Lincoln died.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s what?’

‘I mean they would, wouldn’t they?’

‘Would what?’

‘Say that. He’s their boss, Tom. They’re hardly going to say he was out doing a spot of recreational strangling. Besides which, we’re talking Carbine cowboys, right? IQ lower than a bull’s balls?’

‘These bulls didn’t have any balls. Not by the time Marsh was finished with em. I was lucky I did myself.’

I wasn’t going to let him off that easily.

‘I’d still find it hard to believe your Carbine stockman could remember what he was doing five minutes ago, much less five weeks ago. I’ve
met
those boys, Tom. Seen em in the bar. Flotsam from the shallow end of the gene pool if ever I saw it.’

He was a step ahead of me.

‘Emily, Lincoln was killed the day after the Edge River Races. And they remember it because they were pissed off with Earl Marsh for dragging em outer their swags before dawn when all they wanted to do was curl up and die.’

‘Well, if they were so pissed how do they know what he was up to while they were asleep?’

His reply was a positive bark.

‘Oh Jesus, give it a rest, will you, Emily! You already got me in enough shit. Marsh was camping with a mob of blokes, and one of em would have heard him drive away, and they couldn’t all be bullshittin me. Just give it a bloody rest! If you want a fishing expedition go to the Gulf—you got nothing on the man except you don’t like him. Right now I don’t like him much myself, but being an arsehole isn’t a hanging offence round here. If it was, the trees’d be full of arseholes.’

‘Wish you hadn’t put it like that, Tom. Not at this hour of the morning.’

‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ he said suspiciously. ‘What have you been up to?’

‘Minding my own business.’

‘That’ll be the day,’ he responded. ‘And by the way, the Edge River connection explains Freddy Ah Fong as well.’

‘Freddy Ah Fong?’ I repeated slowly. I was having trouble tearing myself away from the horrible image of a bunch of arseholes hanging from the trees.

‘This contract. I agree, it isn’t worth a gecko’s goolies. Except in so far as it pisses you lot off.’

‘Well it does that all right.’

‘Which is what it was intended to do,’ Tom explained patiently. ‘Marsh is chairman of the race committee and he was in the process of having Freddy thrown off the property for being in his usual state of smashed as a bottle, when Lance Massie tells him the feller he’s maulin is part-owner for Moonlight Downs.’ Massie again, I thought. This cat’s got its paws all over the cage. ‘Marsh didn’t get to where he is by being a man to let a chance go by: half an hour later he’s got Freddy’s piss in his pocket and his X on a piece of paper. Says he just wanted a bit of extra feed for the Dry. But my take on it is that he was trying to cause a bit of family friction, you know? Stirrin the possum. It’s the way things work out there, part of the general…cut and thrust. Dunno if you could call it ethical, but you couldn’t call it criminal neither.’

‘Depends on who’s being cut and what’s being thrust. What about the foot prints and tyre marks at the camp?’

There was a pause from Tom’s end of the line, a pause which told me I’d hit a tender point. ‘Not enough left of the foot prints to tie em to anything. Too old. Too worn. Could have been made by anybody.’

‘And the tyre tracks…?’

‘I took a techie with me to check em out. Might have been a car parked there. Probably was. About the right time, too. But there wasn’t enough to make a positive ID, nothing to tie to a particular vehicle.’

‘I could see that for myself, but at least you could measure the wheel span. Get an idea of what was parked there.’

‘Yeah, we measured the wheel span, but if they are tyre tracks, which I’m not saying they are, they could have come from any one of half a dozen different makes and models—which I’m not saying they did.’

I drummed the bedside table, waiting for him to finish.

‘Well?’ I prompted him, when it became apparent that he thought he had.

‘Well what?’

‘The half a dozen different makes and models. Was one of them an F100?’

‘Jeez, you never give up, do you?’

‘Somebody killed a friend of mine, Tom. If that red-nosed bloody redneck had anything to do with it I want to know.’

‘Emily, the bloke’s got a half a dozen witnesses who put him fifty k’s away at the time of the killing.’

‘Tom, getting answers out of you is like trying to pull teeth. Out of a chook.’

‘Okay, okay.’ I heard him take a deep breath. I could just about hear his eyes rolling. ‘Yes, Emily, the tyre marks could have come from an F100.’

‘So what now?’

‘Whadderye mean “what now?”? I get dressed up and go to Darwin for a dressing down, and you go back to mopping vomit, or whatever it is you do down at the Dog. There’s nothing in it, Emily. You’re pissing in the wind. And by the way…’

‘Yes?’

‘I wouldn’t go near Marsh for a while if I were you. Not just now. He’s bloody ropeable. By the time I caught up with him he’d already spoken to Massie. Seems to think you might have been poking around his office. While you were his house guest, perhaps?’

‘Fuck him.’

‘Thank you for that, Emily. I’ll bear your constructive attitude in mind when I’m getting strips torn off me by the Commissioner.’

I wasn’t satisfied, but I could see I wasn’t going to get anything more out of the wallopers, not until I put a bit more flesh onto the bones of the body of evidence.

‘I truly am sorry about Darwin, Tom. Anything I can do for you?’

‘You could try keeping yer nose outer police business.’

‘Goes without saying, Tom.’

Goes without doing, too, I thought as I hung up the phone.

Dropping the rods

I GOT out of bed, did an hour of yoga—the legacy of a six-month stint in a shared house in Fitzroy—then undid whatever good I’d done with a continental breakfast: a coffee and a smoke.

I sat out on the porch, staring at the bottom of the cup and feeling guilty.

While I’d been cavorting around the countryside with my new feller, I’d allowed myself to be distracted—as I’d done so often in my life. Lincoln had never shown me anything other than unconditional love and friendship, and I’d forgotten about him; he was one of the most decent human beings I’d ever encountered, and I’d let some bastard break his neck and done nothing about it.

Nor could I shake the feeling that I was in a peculiarly unique position to discover the truth: I had a foot in both camps, so to speak. For much of my life, that had been a disadvantage: I felt like a white woman in the black world, and a black woman in the white one. Now, perhaps, I had the opportunity to use my knowledge of both worlds, inadequate though it might be, to do something decent. And I had one other vital qualification: I cared. Others cared for him too, of course: Hazel and the rest of his family, for starters, but the whitefeller world was one that would be forever foreign to them.

I flicked the dregs of my coffee out into the grass and climbed to my feet, a renewed determination to do at least one decent thing in my life—to find out who’d killed him—smouldering in my breast.

What to do? Ideas skimmed through my head like the flock of ducks I startled once when I was out hunting at the Bullet Holes. And my problem now was the same as I faced then: which one to pick?

Blakie was still my number one contender. Although, after the debacle of my last attempted arrest, I was just about ready to put him down as an act of God. When he was out there, on his own country, he was virtually untouchable.

I wondered how much of my determination to track down Blakie was due to sheer jealousy. And how did things stand between Hazel and me anyway? Maybe it was time one of us attempted a reconciliation.

But Marsh’s big black hat was still in the ring, whatever McGillivray reckoned. I had a stack of unanswered questions about the Carbine manager and his dealings with Moonlight Downs. Not the least of which was, given that he’d had McGillivray carpeted for asking a few simple questions, what did he have to hide?

But how to get at the bastard? I needed facts, information, proof. And to get them I needed an entrée into that surly, self-satisfied world of hats and cattle.

What were my options? Go sniffing around the station? I’d tried that once, and what had I achieved? Bugger all.

Maybe I could tackle some of the bit players. But who were the bit players? Fidel, the old mechanic? Pull the other one. The other Carbine station hands? Forget it.

What else was on offer? Fencing contractors? Stock inspectors? The local roads blokes? What the hell would any of them know about Marsh and his malefactions? Unless they’d been involved in them, in which case poking my nose in could be a risky business.

My trouble was that I didn’t have any status. I wasn’t a bookie or a bouncer, I wasn’t a cop. I couldn’t go round putting the squeeze on people. I was just a member of the public.

Okay, so where was the logical place for a member of the public to begin? With the servants, of course. The public servants. One public servant in particular. What could be more straightforward than that?

Almost anything; I wasn’t that naïve. But Lance Massie’s name had been breaking out all over the place of late. And if I did pay him a visit, even if he was in cahoots with Marsh, at least he wasn’t likely to strangle me in the office. Even Northern Territory public servants didn’t do that.

Lance Massie. How had Kenny described him? The Territory Government’s bagman. Area Manager for the Department of Regional Development.

What the hell was ‘regional development’, anyway? It sounded like something that could cover a lot of dirty underwear, especially when it was being worn by the Territory Government. The only things developing in the Bluebush region were melanomas and salt pans.

The mine that had been the town’s raison d’etre for forty years was down to the dregs. Small businesses were folding. Saturday morning was auction time: you’d see some poor mournful bastard huddled against the back fence while a hundred hungry bargain-hunters rummaged through the detritus of his life. Even out at the meatworks things were looking lean.

Maybe Massie wanted a few runs on the board. If there was anything untoward going on between Moonlight and Marsh—or any of the neighbours—something told me he’d be up to his Territory Government tie-pin in it.

But how was I going to get anything out of him? He knew who I was, for a start. Presumably Marsh had told him something about me, but how much? Did he even know what I looked like? And why did I find myself treading round the name so warily? I’d never even seen the guy, much less had any dealings with him. Or had I? The name had sounded familiar when Kenny first mentioned it to me. Unpleasantly familiar. Where had I come across it before?

I put on a Slim Dusty tape, parked myself out on the front porch, painted my toenails purple and watched Bluebush go about its morning ablutions. Didn’t do that for long. Bluebush going about its morning ablutions was not a pretty sight, and the sounds were even worse: Griffo sounded like he was washing out his nostrils with a fire hose.

I went back in and sat at the kitchen table, humming along with Slim, who was yodelling his way through ‘When the Rain Tumbles Down in July’. The classic early recording. He’d worn his Y-fronts tight in those days.

Lance Massie. He was something out of the old days as well, I was sure of it. The old Moonlight days. Something to do with my old man, perhaps? Lance bloody Massie. I rolled the name round my mouth, hit it with different accents and associations. It refused to give up its secrets, but the smell wouldn’t go away.

I glanced at the books on the table:
Gouging the Witwatersrand
had worked its way to the top of the pile, as it tended to do
.
I studied a fading photograph: a line of chaps in long white socks and pith helmets standing around a hole in the ground; in the background, the poor bastards who’d dug it. The Bushveld, circa 1928. It reminded me of some of the primitive early shows my old man and I had worked.

My father. Why did he keep bobbing up whenever I thought of Massie? Was he the connection?

Another unpleasant feeling arose from somewhere south of my stomach, worked its way up to my head and down to my fingers. They—the fingers—trembled as they dialled Jack’s satellite phone. I’d had a sudden insight into where I might have met the bastard.

‘Dad, a quick question…’ I could hear heavy machinery roaring away in the background.

‘Better make it a very quick one, Emmy. I’m perched on top of a thirty foot tower with a wrench in one hand and a hundred yards of drill rod in the other.’

‘What are you holding the phone with?’

‘You wouldn’t want to know. Shoot.’

‘Remember when Brick threw us off Moonlight?’

‘Careful…’

‘The government feller involved, don’t suppose he had a name?’

‘Aw…jeez, Emily!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘You just made me drop the fuckin rods! Why’d you have to go and remind me of that jumped-up little piece of shit? Sure he had a name. Still got one. See him sneakin round the traps in his lemon-scented limo. Sir Lancelot bloody Massie.’

‘Thanks, Dad.’

Thanks a lot, I brooded as I hung up the phone. Public servant or not, I could scratch Lance Massie from my list of helpful resources. He and the Tempests had a history.

I’d only seen the man once. Once was enough. He’d been sitting out on the veranda of the Moonlight Homestead, Akubra hat jammed onto one end of him, RM Williams boots onto the other, cigar in between. Trying to out-cowboy the cowboy sitting next to him. The cowboy, Brick Sivvier, was a pig of the first order, to be sure, but at least his porcinity wasn’t an affectation. Throwing us off the station came natural to him. It was a Queensland thing: he was just cleaning out the deadwood.

Massie was something else. Even at fourteen, and with a single glance at my disposal, I’d been able to see that. He was a sleek, slippery individual, a walking Hall of Mirrors. If he’d ever had a self, it had long since disappeared under a dozen different layers and accretions. He was an impersonation of an impersonation, a natural-born apparatchik who’d slithered out of the womb and sniffed to see which way the wind was blowing. If, by some miracle, Kenny Trigger’s revolution ever did come about, Massie would be the one strutting about in the Mao jacket and the Stalinesque moustache.

I replayed the veranda scene in my mind.

Jack had come to pick up his termination pay, and discovered that the Warlpuju were being terminated as well. We’d met them on the road to Bluebush, and Lincoln had given us the story. Sivvier had told them to pack up and piss off, and he’d followed his words with actions: he’d bulldozed the humpies, shot the dogs, shut the store, hunted the nurses, clobbered a few fellers who got in his way. When the shiny-pants government feller arrived Lincoln had complained, sought some kind of official redress, only to have Massie tell them it was a matter of private property, nothing to do with him. Indeed, should they continue to trespass, Sivvier would have every right to call in the cops.

Now the blokes responsible were relaxing on the veranda in front of us. Jack gave them a cheerful wave. ‘That’s Sir Lancelot,’ he muttered, ‘the little government greaser.’ Sivvier maintained his usual Easter Island demeanour—whoever christened him ‘Brick’ knew what they were about—but Massie responded with a brief, starchy wave. The sort of thing the Queen trots out for the tour of Botswana.

When we went round to the pay office, Jack spotted Sivvier’s Range Rover and a flash government four wheel drive parked under the magnificent banyan tree. Five minutes and a nifty bit of winch-work later we were on our way, Jack extending another salute to the blokes on the veranda.

When Massie and Sivvier returned to the carpark, they found their vehicles dangling like a pair of fluffy dice, twenty foot up the tree.

Tom McGillivray told us that a warrant for Jack’s arrest had come out from the highest levels, but that the lowest levels—he and his colleagues—were so busy pissing themselves laughing they couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be charging him with. Word was that Massie had been gunning for Jack ever since, his only restraint being the fact that any move he made was sure to revive memories of an event he’d rather have forgotten.

Lance Massie. Not likely to be particularly co-operative when he heard my name on the phone.

But what if he heard somebody else’s?