Moonlight Downs (23 page)

I took off my shoes, walked back to my car, my feet breathing sighs of relief. As I drove away, I glanced back at Massie: he was standing beside his overblown motorcar, his fat face fuming, his fists clenched.

And as I looked at him, another face rose to the surface of my memory: a toddler’s face, this one. A toddler who’d ascended my leg at a basketball game and turned on a similar exhibition when his mother wouldn’t give him a boiled lolly.

The director’s cut

I WAS lying on the couch that night, licking a Paddle-pop and my wounds, when the telephone rang and a husky voice came down the wire.

‘Hi, Emily.’

‘Candy! Well I fucked that one up good and proper, didn’t I?’

‘Yeah, I’d skip the Mata Hari bit if I were you. That’s what I was trying to warn you about: Massie knew you were back in town. We had Earl Marsh in here grumbling about you just the other day. It was fuckin Emily Tempest this an fuckin Emily Tempest that.’

‘Bastard doesn’t talk like that when his wife’s around. I have heard I’m not Earl’s favourite person; now I suppose I’ll have to add Massie to the list. Needless to say, you didn’t fess up to knowing me?’

‘I value my job more than that. You had little Arseholes fooled for a while with the Country Party tart thing, but even he can put two and two together if you give him a calculator and hit him on the head with it.’

‘’Specially if he’s got Freddy Ah Fong on the team.’

‘Ah, Freddy…’ she sighed. ‘He’s a bit of a regular round here.’

‘What are you doing working there, Candy?’

‘Well, it’s a job, honey. And in case you haven’t noticed, there aren’t that many round here that don’t leave you over-exposed to the sun or the sack. More to the point, though, what the hell are you up to?’

I considered my options for a moment or two, then settled back on the couch, rearranged the cushions and gave her the director’s cut. An old friend in whom I could confide was something I’d been sorely missing of late, particularly in light of my troubled relationship with Hazel.

‘Well, why didn’t you just ask me?’ she exclaimed when I finished. ‘I had a lot of time for old Lincoln.’

‘Candy, I didn’t even know you were working there.’

‘So you really think Marsh could be involved in Lincoln’s death?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell trying to find out.’

‘He and Massie are thick as a meat worker’s dick…’

‘Why Ms Wilson!’

‘…but I’d be surprised if they were up to anything you could call illegal. Massie’s quite a stickler for the rules, actually.’

‘We’re talking murder here, Candy. I imagine it tends to operate by a different set of rules.’

‘Maybe. You still at Toyota Towers?’

‘Yep. Number 6.’

‘Gimme a day or two. I’ll see what I can rustle up.’

Late the next afternoon she appeared on my doorstep with a wary expression on her face and a fat envelope in her hand. I invited her in, offered her a beer.

‘Just the one,’ she replied as she settled onto the sofa. ‘Gotta get Teisha’s fish fingers on. Anyway, more than me job’s worth getting sprung with the likes of you.’ She tapped the package. ‘Especially if anybody saw me giving you this.’

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Everything I could find in the department’s records that had anything to do with Moonlight Downs. When you’re finished with it, destroy it, okay? Every page.’

‘No worries, Candy.’ I gave her a hug. ‘I don’t know how to repay you.’

‘You’ve already repaid me, Em.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘Life was never boring with you around.’

As I got the drinks and flopped down on a chair opposite her, we chatted and filled in the gaps in our respective resumes: her father was managing a station out at Saddler’s Well, she’d had half a dozen different fellers, none of whom had had the sense to stay around. Like me, Candy had done time down south—Sydney, in her case—and never fitted in. She’d been back in Bluebush for a couple of years, and had begun working as a receptionist for the Department of Regional Development a year ago.

While we talked, I was scouting around for a chance to put the question that was on my mind, but it wasn’t until she raised the topic of her employer that I saw an opening.

‘Candy, do you mind if I ask you a rather…delicate question?’

‘Delicate? Emily, you wouldn’t know the meaning of the word.’

‘What can you tell me about your boss’s sex life?’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘See what I mean?’ She tilted her head back, took a swig of her drink. ‘Okay: Massie’s sex life. Two things come to mind straightaway. One, there’s not as much of it as he’d like there to be, and two, I’m not part of it. Thank Christ.’

‘Do you remember Flora?’

Candy said nothing, but looked suddenly discomfited.

‘Hazel’s little sister,’ I prompted her.

‘Yeah, I remember Flora. Never know if she remembers me, though.’

‘She wouldn’t perchance be part of it, would she? His sex life, I mean.’

Candy cradled her face in her hands, made a long, involved study of her glass.

‘You’re looking particularly thoughtful there, Candy.’

‘It’s like this, Emily. From what I can gather, Massie’d fuck a dog chained to a tree, or try to. Whether he had it off with Flora, I’ve got no idea. Her little boy is, what, one or two years old? Whatever happened was before my time. But, er…’

‘Ye-es?’

‘Well…you aren’t the first person to raise that possibility.’

‘Who was the other one?’

She paused, drained her glass and looked at me. ‘Lincoln,’ she said at last.

‘What!’

‘Couple of weeks before he died.’

I leaned forward. ‘Tell me more.’

‘It was one of the stranger meetings I’ve seen in my time there. Couldn’t exactly call it a meeting, I suppose: more of a whistle-stop encounter. Lincoln wandered in, unannounced, wanted to speak to Massie. Wasn’t accusing him of anything; just had a rather unusual request.’

‘Which was?’

‘He’d seen one of those heavy-duty prams, four wheel drive jobs. Apparently Flora’s living rough in one of the camps…he wanted to know if Massie would buy her one, that was all. Said— this made as much sense as everything else in the discussion—said he’d give Marsh the water if he bought her the pram.’

‘What water?’

‘Buggered if I know.’

‘How did Massie react?’

‘In his usual high-powered, senior executive manner: died in the arse.’

‘I can well imagine. Changes colour quicker than a chameleon, your boss.’

‘Lincoln didn’t even get past the front desk, actually. Massie looked at him like he was a raving maniac, suddenly remembered a meeting he had to attend and hit the road running.’

‘What did Lincoln do?’

‘You know Lincoln: he was his usual even-tempered self. Just shook his head, said to say hello to my old man for him and wandered out.’

We sat there in silence as the implications of what I’d just been told ran around my head.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Candy asked.

‘I know what I’d like to do: get drunk, stoned, rooted and as far away from this mess as possible. But I don’t suppose any of those things are likely to happen. Look, Candy, why don’t you leave it with me for now? You’ve got a lot more to lose than I have—a job, for starters. I’ll have a look through this stuff.’ I patted the paperwork. ‘See if I can make any sense out of it. In the meantime, keep your eyes open; let me know if you spot anything. I’ll call you in a day or two.’

‘Okay. If you’re happy with that, so am I. Must admit, it’d be a disaster for me to lose my job right now—they’re like the Mafia, this mob. Get em off-side and you end up at the bottom of the billabong in concrete gumboots.’

She stood up and I gave her a farewell kiss.

‘We’ll catch up when I’m not odour of the month.’

‘I’d like that.’

When she’d gone, I ripped the envelope open and examined its contents: a folder full of photocopied documents and computer printouts. I looked at the first page: a letter from Massie to his masters in Darwin. The ‘Re’ was ‘Moonlight Downs’.

There were a lot more: letters, memos, planning applications, mineral exploration leases, business plans.

Candy had been busy. So, by the look of things, had Lance Massie.

Sun Tzu out of Chicken Soup by The Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People

AN HOUR later I shoved the folder into my backpack and headed down to the boozer. I pulled up at the corner, uncertain of where to go. Tonight felt more like a Black Dog night. I needed something rugged to wash Massie out of my system.

It wasn’t his evil deeds that were troubling me as much as his evil prose. The motivational gurus on his bookshelves had trickled down into his computer and you couldn’t read a line without bumping into a core value, a hypervision or a mission statement. His Collected Works had more windows of opportunity than a Hamburg whorehouse, more cutting edges than a combine harvester, more benchmarks than a drunk’s forehead. For a bloke who’d spent twenty years with his snout in the public trough, Massie had an amazing grasp of the language of private enterprise. His conceptualisation ranged from blue sky to black hole, his strategies from eagle to seagull. He dared to dream, and when he’d done dreaming it was time to walk the talk and churn white water.

All of this, I reflected, from some pathetic fuck shuffl ing taxpayers’ money around a quarter of a million square kilometers of spinifex?

I ordered a glass of the Black’s black-market bourbon, repelled a couple of drunken boarders and took my wad of papers out to a quiet corner of the beer garden.

Okay, I decided. Somewhere in this lexical septic tank there must be some hard information. I pulled out a notebook and scrolled through the folder. Whenever I came across an actual fact—a date, a location, a person, a meeting held, a deal done—I jotted it down. Out of those disparate bits and pieces a pattern—if such a thing existed—must surely emerge. At the very least, I hoped to find some speck of an insight into what was going on at Moonlight Downs.

I worked rapidly and in half an hour I’d finished.

I took a swig of the bourbon and studied my notes. What did they tell me?

Not much, but that may have just been the bourbon, which had a kick like a one-armed bouncer.

The main function of the Department of Regional Development in regard to Moonlight Downs, it appeared, was to milk the land claim for all it was worth. This meant recruiting to the cause every disgruntled neighbour with a ground axe or a disjointed nose, every local entrepreneur who could dream up some detrimental effect of the land going back to the blacks. There was, it appeared, the possibility of Commonwealth Government compensation for lost earnings.

Massie’s operation had the feel of an office assembly-line; there’d been a lot of cutting and pasting, a lot of inserting names and dates, but it was all more or less to the same end: squeezing the teats of the Canberra cash-cow. That was regional development, Territory-style. That was your rugged, outback individual: these days the Akubra was off the head and in the outstretched hand.

Tour operators, miners, roadhouses, retailers, they were all there, looking for a cut. Mick Czaplinski, for example, the proprietor of Micky’s Menswear, had done his bit for the cause, his call for compensation based on a loss of income due to the disappearance of your well-accoutred white stockman. That was about the general level of argument.

While the department was thus busily raising scrounging to an art form, it was also sounding out and revving up potential investors who thought they might be able to make a quid out of doing business with Moonlight Downs. Here they were being encouraged to avail themselves of the Commonwealth Government’s Regional Business Initiatives Scheme. I was astonished to realise that these were often the same people. Mick Czaplinski, for example, was seeking a government grant for what sounded like an on-line version of the old hawker’s van he had trundling around the bush twenty years ago.

I added them up. Jesus! Flogging a dead horse they might have been, but there was no shortage of jockeys ready to jump aboard. More than forty local businesses—storekeepers and miners, fencers, contractors, stock agents, neighbouring stations—had registered a commercial interest in the Moonlight Downs Land Claim. I hadn’t known there
were
that many local businesses.

I ran my eyes down the list, searching for anything that could be in any way relevant to Lincoln’s death:

Gillcutter and Co. Harkness and Sons. North Siding Pty Ltd.

Winch, West and Chambers. Impala Productions. Annie Downs.

Sundowner Transport Industries. Barber and Partners

On it went. Some I knew by name, others by reputation. Sam Barber was a local roads contractor-cum-thief whom Jack had seen, years before, spluttering his innocence as the cops dug up a load of stolen equipment from his yard. Sundowner Transport Industries: that’d be Freddy Whittle and his old Kenworth. Annie Downs was Mallee O’Toole’s threadbare station out on the Stark River. Winch West and Chambers sounded like a top-drawer law firm, but was, in fact, a trio of old reprobates who’d been struggling for years to get their backblocks horse abattoirs out of the red and had thus far done little more than feed themselves and their dogs.

The rest looked like the usual outback assortment, the hopeful and the hopeless, the parasitic and the paralytic, the mired fly-by-nights and the failed fortune-hunters who wake up one morning somewhere out in the browner parts of this big brown land and realise they’ve been stuck in a shit-hole like Bluebush for twenty years.

For each registration of interest there’d been a meeting, and for each meeting Massie had efficiently noted everyone involved. The half dozen references to Carbine were accompanied by the words Marsh, E. In May, I noted with interest, Marsh had brought a friend: Wiezbicki, O.

Wiezbicki, O.? Wiezbicki, O.…

What sort of a name was that? Wiezbicki, O. Sounded like a new super-breakfast. But once again, it rang bells.

Wiezbicki, O. Where had I heard the name before? Had Marsh come packing a lawyer? Or was it a station employee, one of the dickheads I’d come across at the pub? Maybe somebody I knew from the old days?

I went back to the original document, and only then did I notice what I’d missed the first time: also present at the meeting had been one Flinders, L.

I looked up, my head spinning. What the hell had the four of them been meeting about?

I needed a breather. I rose to my feet, stretched my back, walked into the main bar. Stilsons, the alcoholic labrador after whom the pub was named, was sleeping it off under a pool table. Meg, the alcoholic cook who named it, was sleeping it off at the kitchen bench. She stirred herself, rattled the cutlery, found a chopper and began slamming away at a slab of meat. What day was it? Thursday. That’d be the Vienna schnitzel special. Or the dreaded Hungarian goulash/chocolate pudding double, which sounded better but tasted like both courses had been cooked simultaneously in the same dish.

The Black Dog’s kitchen hours tended towards the haphazard— generally they lasted about as long as Meg did—but the food was popular. The diners were lined up along the bar, and a gruesome spectacle they made. I was surprised how many of them I knew. Unfaithful bastards; I’d thought they were regulars at my own establishment, but they must have been spreading their favours around. Old Bob the Dog, who looked like a bearded egg, was furiously shovelling in the spag bol. Tommy Russell, sitting next to him, had taken off his glasses; presumably you needed windscreen wipers when you were sitting in the vicinity of Bob and a bowl of spaghetti. Andrea Bolt had stuffed herself into something chiffon and was glaring at her battered flake as if it were a personal enemy.

Even my Toyota Towers neighbours were represented: I spotted Camel, hunched up against a window, yapping into his mobile phone and pointedly ignoring me.

I bought a stubby, and as I returned to my seat paused at the side gate to take in the scenic wonders of the Bluebush night. You name it—gravelly waste lots, broken bottles, bullet-riddled forty-fours, acres of acned bitumen bathed in a pale fluorescent wash—Bluebush had it.

I went back down to my table, took a long swig of the beer and a longer swig of the Massie. It was like wading through fresh vomit, something I’d been doing too much of lately.

Any of the documents, with the right sort of massage and manipulation, could possibly give me a hint as to what was going on out at Moonlight, but that massage and manipulation was beyond me. I felt as if I’d found the key, but lost the door.

I plodded on for another half an hour, but nothing emerged, neither clue nor insight nor indication of what, if anything, was going on at Moonlight Downs. Marsh and Lincoln had met at least once, in the company of Massie and this mysterious Wiezbicki, but what they were discussing I had no idea. In the end I threw the package into my backpack and headed home, frustrated, weary, not a little pissed off.

I took the alleyway home. The Alsatian was strangely silent— must have been his day off—but when I reached my back entrance I got a surprise of another kind.

There was a light burning in the living room.

Had I left it on? No way. Maybe it was time I got a dog myself.

I flung the gate open, ran up the path and opened the door. I wasn’t the first person to do so tonight: the newly replaced lock had been ripped off. I stood in the doorway, aghast.

The Sandhill Gang had returned: they’d left their calling card sprayed across the kitchen wall in letters three foot high.

And this time they’d completely trashed the place.