10

Autumn, May 1990, in Brisbane

SIPPING CLARET AT THE BAR of the Beat nightclub, I was wondering whether the dancer enjoyed his job.

He was covered from toe to tip in oil and not much else – one leather-and-feather anklet, a G-string and a cowboy hat.

The Beat’s moniker pretty much tells the story: a gay nightclub in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.

My Cucumber Natalie believes that gays bear sole responsibility for the evolution of Madonna, Japanese restaurants in Australia, and twentieth-century drama, all of which she holds very dear. Nat feels obliged to participate in the gay social scene on an irregular basis. I could not get Nat to any my cultural shrines, the major metropolitan racetracks on Australia’s east coast, before I was barred from them all. But, somehow, I have to tag along with her for the occasional evening of disco music accompanied by the smell of amyl nitrate. I tried to spot her in the thick, heaving Friday night crowd. Nat likes talking with strangers. I noticed a bloke watching me.

I turned my attention back to the television above my head. Queensland Treasurer Keith De Lacey was announcing that the social-democratic Labor Party would honour some of the financial promises of defeated conservative National Party Treasurer Mike Ahern. Labor was elected in December, mainly as a result of the police corruption uncovered by the Fitzgerald Inquiry. Tax relief for religious organisations and religious education were two of Ahern’s budgetary measures that Labor would keep. I was kind of getting the gist of his concession through the din, with Treasurer De Lacey chanting some mantra about education being sacred, as Queensland was becoming the Smart State.

A voice, belonging to the bloke who had been eyeing me off, spoke close to my ear.

‘Hello,’ he said.

He was about fifty, grey suit, greying hair, thin furrowed greying face, medium build. What Americans might call distinguished. As far as I know, distinguished people are like eccentrics; we don’t have any in Australia.

‘Gooday,’ I said, nodding.

‘I’m not looking to pick you up,’ he said. ‘My name is Joseph Lavinsky.’

I gave my name as Steele Hill, as I do most of the time.

‘I’m a professor at the university,’ Lavinsky said. He also said which university, but to protect the innocent, I won’t repeat it. The guilty don’t need protecting, as they usually have a mob of lawyers on retainer.

Oh, all right then. It was the University of Queensland, which I believe is the State’s oldest. You might have guessed, anyway, as there are not many unis in Brisbane. The way the professor was referring to it as the university, it looks like its academics think of it as the only fair-dinkum one. I suppose if you can’t have snobbery in places of higher learning, where does it belong?

Lavinsky asked what I was drinking, and I tapped the last pickings of my red grape. It looked like his tale was to unfold leisurely.

‘I’m worried about my students,’ the prof began.

‘Who isn’t? They tell me the three Rs are up to ess.’

Lavinsky either didn’t know or didn’t care I was taking the piss. ‘They are so sheltered these days, my students,’ he continued.

He turned away from me when a barman approached, and he ordered a bottle of the club’s best red. The barman said they sold wine by the glass.

‘Fine,’ replied the professor. ‘I’ll have five and a one fifth glasses of wine. In the bottle. Thank you.’

The barman went to consult with another bloke, and Lavinsky began to sing in a harsh Irish accent while he awaited the decision.

Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the human heart.

The barman returned with a bottle of red, from which Lavinsky poured a glass for me and a thimbleful for himself.

‘Driving,’ he muttered.

I asked him if the song he had sung was from the Irish folk-rock band The Pogues, because he sang it in the rough and ragged style of the band’s lead singer Shane MacGowan.

‘William Butler Yeats,’ Lavinsky said. ‘Great poet. As far as I know, he was never in a popular musical group.’

The professor changed the subject. ‘I’m looking for someone like you, somewhat representative of the underclass. I hope you are not offended by that term. I find “underclass” less patronising than “lower working class”.’ He opened his eyes wide and nodded three times at me. ‘Do you agree?’

‘Very much so,’ I answered. Always agree with whackos: first rule of life on the streets.

‘From looking at you, I feel you fit to a tee,’ he decided. ‘Sharp, inquisitive, but wary, looking out for the next obstacle in your path.’

I took a swig of my wine and thought the well could dry up with my next comment. ‘Look, Mr Lavinsky, I don’t know what two-legged lab mouse you want for your students, or what that mouse is supposed to do, but you’re knocking on the wrong maze here.’

On cue to my maze metaphor, the Beat’s speaker system pumped out the chorus of the Go-Betweens’ Your Town.

Round and round, up and down

Through the streets of your town.

Every day I make my way

Through the streets of your town.

The rumours of the previous summer proved right. The Go-Betweens did announce their break-up in the first half of 1990. Everyone said it was a shame. By everyone, I mean the small fraction of the Australian population who had heard of them.

‘Sorry,’ said Lavinsky. I had clearly declined his offer and he moved his chair back, as you would when you’re leaving.

Only, he was just making himself more comfortable. ‘I did not even tell you what I teach. It’s Cultural Studies.’

‘Yogurt?’ I asked, which puzzled him till the penny dropped. Then he laughed more heartily than the quip deserved.

I continued. ‘I don’t know what Cultural Studies is; I don’t know what an underclass is, and it’s odds-on I won’t know whatever else it is you have to tell me.’

I guess you need persistence to end up as a professor. ‘That’s just it, Steele. You speak a different language to my students. All I want you to do is to talk them through your lifestyle.’

‘You don’t even know me, Joseph. I might be an accountant in a bank.’ I stood up and started to walk away, to find My Cucumber.

‘As a guest speaker, you could earn probably $500, maybe a thousand.’

Now he had sparked my intellectual curiosity. ‘Can you write down all the details, and tell me if I need to wear a silly cap?’

It turned out that Joseph Lavinsky wasn’t a bad style of bloke. All he wanted was for some youngish, street-smart person, with a few run-ins with the coppers, to lay it on thick for his students. He told me this in a lot of big words, but I figured, if the truth were known, he was boring his students shitless with his enriched brain fodder. All he wanted from me was a few half-lies to keep them awake for an hour or two. I could do that.

To show I was giving value for money, I told him about the subsequently defrocked nun from the orphanage where I was raised. She insisted I was John Lennon’s lovechild. I added I did not believe it myself but shrugged my shoulders to suggest it could be true. It was an old routine of mine and it worked best out on the street when I could raise my granny sunglasses to reveal my honest eyes as I also raised my shoulders to indicate impartial scepticism. The bit had a reasonable indoor strike rate as well.

Lavinsky looked closely into my face. ‘Your disbelief is wise,’ he said. ‘You look nothing like John Lennon.’

I quickly changed the subject, or, more precisely, I allowed Lavinsky to leap from topic to topic. Then I made a mistake. During one of his raves, I said he was wasting all his philosophical musings on me; that he should talk to my SP bookie mate, the Gooroo. The professor perked up.

He wanted to know whether the Gooroo was a convert to Hinduism. I told him I had given Gooroo the moniker, derived from an Aboriginal word for ‘deep place’ or something like that. Lavinsky wanted Gooroo’s phone number. I thought I had just talked myself out of the gig, but Lavinsky assured me that I was still the pea for the job.

When I told Nat about my uni gig, she was keen on the notion of my placing myself in a room full of students. I think she hoped some of that erudition might rub off on me. She said she would take the day off work to sneak into the lecture but I made her promise not to do that.

11

THE NOTE WAS STUCK TO THE DOOR of Lavinsky’s unit in the middle-class suburb. It told me the keys to the professor’s unit and four-wheel-drive wagon were in the letterbox. What a trusting fellow. The professor had ridden his pushbike to uni and I could take the 4WD, if I liked. I liked, and slid into the driver’s seat of the green Toyota Landcruiser V8, leaving the ancient EH ute to fend for itself in this rich people’s street.

I wonder what the poor greenies are doing this evening, I thought. Evening it was, 6:30 on a Tuesday. The greenies would be tucking into their lentil soup, as I gunned the 4WD to meet my date.

With murder.

‘He’s got a killer smile,’ said Clarissa Dunne, as we stood outside the lecture theatre at ten to seven.

No one else was around to hear the teenager’s appreciation of Professor Lavinsky’s mouth. My guest appearance was scheduled for seven and I had checked with Dunne, a pale-skinned attractive redhead, that I was at the right place.

I pondered how a woman some eight years my junior had come to notice the fatal smile of a professor some thirty years my senior. I prompted Clarissa to expand on her appreciation of the professor.

‘Do you really understand what he’s on about?’ I asked.

‘Sort of. It’s only my first year at uni. I’m still learning the ropes.’

I persisted, displaying all the commercial savvy half a working life on the dole imparts to you. ‘But what good is this Cultural Studies stuff going to do you?’

‘I’m studying arts-law.’

I volleyed. ‘I’ve never met any lawyers with ’arts.’

‘Aven’t you?’ she replied. It’s great to talk to educated folks who can appreciate a bad pun.

Joseph Lavinsky hurtled around the corner of the corridor and lent us his killer smile. ‘Clarissa. And you have met Mr Steele Hill, our guest lecturer for tonight.’

I raised my eyebrows at being made a lecturer without so much as having to cut out an application form for a dodgy correspondence school.

‘I have, Joe,’ she replied. ‘And I’m sure he is going to be witty, incisive and thought-provoking.’

‘Or your money back,’ I added. ‘But then you don’t pay fees, do you?’

Dunne and Lavinsky looked at each other to see if I was making a cryptic joke. It was plain I had said something stupid.

‘I thought tertiary education was free in Australia,’ I defended myself.

‘It was,’ Lavinsky replied, embarrassed by my stupidity. ‘For a little while, but we are now in the era of “user pays”.’

His student steered the subject away from my ignorance. ‘What’s your lecture about, Mr Hill?’ asked Clarissa Dunne.

‘I’m glad you asked,’ I said, and I was. It was about time for me to think about that. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought.’

Totally untrue, but I couldn’t tell the young woman that the lecture was about five hundred to a thousand dollars. I got in some practice for winging it. ‘Part of it is about the question, if we citizens are supposed to intuitively understand our rights and obligations under law, then why do we pay lawyers hundreds of thousands a year to interpret laws for us?’

Lavinsky was pleased. ‘I told you last week, Clarissa, we were in for a treat tonight.’

I was pretty pleased myself. I didn’t understand what I had said, but it sounded good. Excusing us both to Clarissa, Joseph Lavinsky tugged my arm towards a corner. ‘I feel bad about this,’ he said.

I all but groaned. That had to be the straight man’s opening to my punchline: ‘not half as bad as I’m going to feel’. Sure enough, I was about to be stiffed.

‘Not even $500,’ I moaned.

Lavinsky shook his head.

‘$250?’

Shake of the head. The cultural studies department of the university with a multi-million dollar budget was giving me an expenses allowance of fifty dollars.

I had to vent a protest, though I knew it would be useless. ‘But you said . . . I mean, that can’t be right . . . look, you’re the professor of this whole show, you should be able to fix it.’

Lavinsky joined in the bluster, defending himself. ‘But I’m not head of department; it rotates, and Jan Russo’s got it at the moment. I’m not even sure that Jan could have got you anywhere near the payment we talked about. Still, it’s my fault. I was complaining about my kids being naive. I don’t even know how the university works anymore, let alone how to get around those workings to make it morally accountable.’

I was deflated and beyond further protest. ‘Let’s just do it, professor. Every rock band in the world has been stiffed on more than one occasion. I’ll put it down to entertainment that won’t cost me anything.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ he said.

Yair, I thought, the spirit is willing, but the wallet is weak.

About 100 bodies trundled into the lecture theatre. How many minds and spirits were attached to those bodies, I couldn’t guess. I knew one of the bodies at least had an active mind, as I saw Jane ‘Bub’ Applebee settling into a corner of the last row of seats. I knew that Bub had transferred from Kelvin Grove campus of the Brisbane College of Advanced Education to the University of Queensland after the unfortunate death of Suzanne Lu at La Boite Theatre. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be doing a Cultural Studies unit as well as drama.

Or that she might have given me up to Lavinsky as the kind of underclass representative he wanted. The Professor probably thought his young student was currying favour, but this was another of Bub’s sick jokes. She knew Nat and I were going to the Beat that night; she probably suggested the professor would profit from being there as well. In the distance, Jane’s right hand protruded above the bench in front of her seat and she waved her fingers up and down. I did my best to ignore her, but couldn’t stop myself from shaking my head in her direction.

The professor introduced me as a hybrid of the Kellys – bushranger Ned and folk-rock singer Paul – grafted on to the mean streets of Brisbane. Without a word of a lie, he used the words ‘mean streets’.

I opened with the line that, as I hung about Chinatown, they would have to be ‘chow mean’ streets. I dredged for sympathy by mentioning my upbringing in an orphanage. Most stared up at me like cattle. I didn’t know if I was doing well or slowly dying. So I pictured the Gooroo sitting there in the middle of it all, with a mug of tea in his hand, in his comfortable armchair. That made the bullshit flow more easily.

I was about to tell them how I had changed my name by deed poll to Steele Hill after the billboard I saw when I left the orphanage. But I wondered if these hip teenagers would think I had done a daggy deed. For similar reasons, I did not say my best mate was a sixty-year-old illegal bookmaker, called Gooroo, after an Aboriginal word for deep place or something like that.

Leaving out my being told I was John Lennon’s lovechild was the hardest. I figured the odds were, only a fraction of the class would believe me even when I added the ambiguous clincher I did not quite believe it myself. Quickly weighing up the odds, I decided to ditch the Lennon bit, but it was a photo-finish decision. If a few students sought me out for a post-gig discussion, I would bring Lennon out then.

I told the students of my love for horse racing, and how I was unjustly barred from all Australian racetracks for life. For simply doing my job, placing a few bets – well okay, a lot of bets – on a rank outsider.

I’m a good spieler, even if I do say so myself, once I get warmed up, and forty minutes flew by. When Lavinsky called for a break, sighs of protest preceded much applause for my efforts. I was quite surprised at that, because I had told only as much of the truth as I felt you should give a bunch of stiffs without sacrificing your self-respect.

Lavinsky said the break would be fifteen minutes, and we would play the second part by ear, as a question-and-answer session, letting it run until all concerned had had enough or wished to retire to the nearby Royal Exchange Hotel for port, cigars and more bullshit. Well, okay, Lavinsky did not say the pub part, but I figured enough kindred spirits in the audience would join me in the hotel and some city haunts to while away the night. My lousy $50 fee would cover a few wines and the taxi fares after I handed Lavinsky the keys to his Landcruiser

The professor indicated for me to follow him up a flight of stairs, and down a corridor. He stuck his head in after opening a door. The nameplate read Postgraduate English Students.

‘I hope you’re looking after those computers,’ Lavinsky said to no one in particular of the four students hunched over keyboards.

His head popped back out the door as quickly as it had invaded the room.

As we walked on down the corridor, I asked him what that was about. The English students were getting new 486 computers, he told me, and Cultural Studies would inherit the hand-me-downs from that room. Just on spec, I looked back to take in the room number.

We came to an office bearing Lavinsky’s name and designation, but scurried past it and into a staff room. Four people sat about, three of them drinking alcohol: two glasses of red wine and one scotch. The fourth was a cola.

One of the red wines I had already met – the vibrant Clarissa Dunne, who had beaten us there from the lecture. Then again, I suspected her as a fast mover. The other red wine was a woman in her early forties, thin, glasses, wrinkles, and a face that hinted at a history of beauty savaged by late nights doing whatever. The scotch was her male alter ego – also thin, mid-forties, ravaged.

The cola was a drop-dead-gorgeous teenage girl, obviously too young to be a uni student. She was the first to speak, as we entered the room. ‘ProJoe,’ she said to Lavinsky. ‘You made it.’

I noticed the female forty-something red wine wince.

‘Of course, Cassandra. But shouldn’t you be studying Greek mythology, if that is still your latest fancy?’ Lavinsky teased.

Cassandra did not get a chance to answer, as the professor wheeled on the older woman to introduce me. ‘Jan, this is Steele Hill, our lecture guest. Steele, this is Jan Russo, our head of department. Precocious Cassandra here is Jan’s daughter.’

We exchanged nods and mutters, and Lavinsky turned to the scotch – Steven Dupont, senior lecturer, though Lavinsky said senior lecher, a pretty lame joke, even by liberal academic standards.

Lavinsky’s weak jibe offended Dupont. ‘At least I don’t cavort in a 4WD,’ he retorted, ‘the fuck truck of the middle-aged Aussie male.’

Was I detecting a bucketful of hostility here? You bet.

I took the glass of red I was offered, as it seemed a useful prop. But I really needed to do a deal before I went back for the second half of the lecture. I downed the wine and excused myself.

I tried a few of the keys Lavinsky had left for me and opened the door to his office. No surprises: wall-to-wall books lined two shelves of the cramped cubicle; papers were strewn over the desk, and a telephone sat on top of a book called Eros Revisited. I leafed through the thick pages, containing scholarly text above and below obscene drawings, etchings and paintings. Porno for Pundits would have been a suitable subtitle. I put the book back under the phone and dialled.

The Gooroo answered the phone from his unit. I told him the computers were not hot; they were payment for a job I was doing. I said he could have the lot for a grand. He should enter the twentieth century, when we were so close to the twenty-first. The Gooroo still wasn’t quite sold. He wanted to know for whom I did the job. I was mildly offended at the inference that I might be trying to pass off dodgy goods, but I gave Lavinsky’s name, thinking it couldn’t do any harm.

Not such a good idea.

‘Joseph? Why didn’t you say so? We had quite a yak the other night. Three hours yarning. We talked about everything from semiotics to sex.’

‘You’re slipping, Gooroo. I thought you would say “everything from aardvark to zoon”. But what’s this about Lavinsky and sex? Do you reckon he could be a pants man, Gooroo?’

‘I’d say so, Steele. Didn’t you get that impression?’

‘Kinda,’ I admitted. ‘But he struck me more of an eleven-letter word man than a four-letter one.’

Silence at the other end suggested the bookie was doing some calculations.

‘Like fornication,’ countered the Gooroo.

I laughed and conceded the point. I asked Gooroo if Clarissa Dunne, Jan and Cassandra Russo or Steven Dupont had cropped up in his conversation with Lavinsky. Dupont, Gooroo remembered.

‘Lot of bad blood there,’ he said, obviously meaning between the two academics.

When I asked for more info, all the bookie would say was I should ask Lavinsky.

I did on the way back to the lecture hall, after the Gooroo had promised he would spring for the grand for the computers. The professor, as you would expect, came up with a parable that I would have to sift through for an answer.

‘You know how a commercial painter’s houses is always in need of a paint job, and the pipes always groan in a plumber’s place?’ Lavinsky said. ‘Well, Dupont is the chair of our Ethics Committee. Our equivalent of the unkempt painter’s walls is making the morally bankrupt the head of an Ethics Committee.’

‘Cream may rise, but curdled cream is sure to surface,’ I said.

‘What he does,’ Lavinsky said, ‘is trade passing grades for sex with his students.’

‘I see,’ I replied, ‘and you don’t think that’s much chop.’

He swung it back on me. ‘Do you, Steele?’

I was unimpressed with the display of professorial indignation. I made a pretty good guess about Lavinsky’s own behaviour. ‘But what if a lecturer uses his image as the refined intellectual to help himself to the odd bit of extracurricular indoor sport? Wouldn’t that be pretty much the same?’

Lavinsky wouldn’t wear this. ‘You make the same logical mistake as so many of my callow students. To be truthful, Steele, that same sort of mistake is made by too many of my colleagues. You have not recognised degrees of behaviour. You can’t excuse a deplorable act by saying it is only taking another act to the nth degree.’

That sort of made sense. Kinda.

The second set of my gig was uneventful, except when Clarissa Dunne asked a question. Did I agree with Goffman that prisons should be seen as total institutions? I answered truthfully that I didn’t read the papers much and asked what Goffman was in for. Guffaws of laughter from some of the students woke those who had dozed off. I gave the laughers the benefit of the doubt that the mirth was with me and not at me.

Dunne explained Goffman was some Canadian bloke from the 1960s who wrote that prisons, and places like them, were total institutions. When the stiffs put you into these institutions, the screws went on with a little number Goffman called ‘mortification of the self”. The way Dunne told it, this Goffman must have taken his inspiration from that 50s sci-fi movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With this mortification number, the boss stiffs took away your personality or soul or self-concept or whatever, and replaced it with their own understanding of the world. There was more blah to Dunne’s explanation than that, but, to tell you the truth, I only half-listened.

If these kids were dredging the 1960s for inspiration, why didn’t they go to half-forgotten rock bands like the Kinks or the Who. It worked for me.

I didn’t even try to answer Dunne’s question. I told my audience it had been my so-far successful ambition to stay out of jail. I advised them to do the same. Crims were not glamorous, I said. The coinage of prison was violence, I said. And you don’t get much worthwhile change from that, I said. It got a few stray claps. But I swear some of them looked at me as if I was a goody-two-shoes who’d sneaked in with a false passport.

I left the argument with a horticultural analogy. The way I understood it, thirty years ago you went to jail because you didn’t have enough cabbage. Today, you went to jail because you had too many derivatives of the opium poppy. Clarissa Dunne smiled at that and left the room. I saw Professor Joseph Lavinsky follow her out after he had a quick conversation with a woman in her thirties. I found out afterwards Lavinsky had told her to wrap up the lecture.

Ten minutes later, questions over, I took my bows and found my way back to the postgraduate English students’ room. I was glad to see four youngsters still playing with their digitals. I introduced myself as Mark Caine from First Degree Computers. I’d come to replace four computers and a printer with new 486s. No one said anything, except for one young woman who asked if they could give me a hand. I said sure.

I was grateful that they let me carry the lightweight printer. The four able bodies and sound minds wound electrical tentacles around the computer screens, placed each screen on its rectangular box and awkwardly and slowly followed me down to the car park.

The plan hit an almighty snag when I went to open the driver’s door of the four-wheel drive to release the back door of the wagon. I quickly made some lame excuse about having to rearrange the boot, and asked the students to put the gear on the asphalt. Thank Buddha for unsuspicious minds. They did what I asked.

It shouldn’t have taken me what seemed half the night to put the computers in the wagon. But I kept jerking my head around in every direction, responding to imagined footsteps. With the task done and me in the driver’s seat, I felt better. Still not good.

And worse when the beautiful teenager Cassandra Russo rapped on the passenger-side window. I resisted the urge to drive off, groaned, threw the printer from the front seat to the back and opened the window.

‘How about a lift, seeing you’re obviously ProJoe’s favourite at the moment and he’s lent you his car?’ she asked brightly.

I stalled, making no movement towards the lock on the door. ‘Where’s your mother?’

She shrugged, saying she was not her mother’s keeper. Not wanting to stick around debating the issue, I unlocked the catch on the door. Cassandra’s handbag flew onto the floor of the cab and she jumped onto the seat beside me. I carefully reversed the four-wheel drive.

I only turned on the lights as we left the car park. The car park where lay the body of Professor Joseph Lavinsky. That body had at least four bullet holes where flesh and bone should have been. A hole in the head and a trio or more around the heart.

This dead professor was the same one who ripped me off to the tune of a promised grand. A fact department head and Cassandra’s Mum Jan Russo knew full well.

I was driving away in the dead professor’s top -of-the-range $70,000 car, loaded with stolen computer gear and Jan Russo’s teenage daughter.

12

I ONCE HEARD AN OLD DIGGER say there are no atheists in a fox hole, and I certainly called out the Lord’s name under my breath as I pondered how to get out of this hole that someone had dug for me.

Captured Panamanian president Manuel Noriega had only been a trifling few months of early 1990 in a Florida nick when he found the Lord. Manny wanted to be born again, immersed in the waters, baptised, call it what you like. The screws were considering the idea, but Manny’s own lawyers put the kybosh on the deal. They said their client’s new identity as the Redeemed was too much for a suspicious American audience to grasp only months after his headlining role as the Antichrist.

If the coppers caught me late at night in a murdered man’s car with an under-aged girl by my side, I would have nothing to look forward to but a judge’s vilification as one of the Antichrist’s low-life trainees. A judge’s self-righteous sermon I could stomach, but a fifteen-year sentence on top would be hard to swallow.

‘Where to?’ I said, asking myself as much as the teenager tearaway.

At a time when I should have become immune to surprises, her answer surprised me. ‘The Go Kat Klub, it’s in . . .’

I told her I knew where the club was. I drove straight towards Fortitude Valley, reckoning I’d ditch the girl fast. If she wished to go to a notorious dance club at 10:30 at night, as far as I was concerned, it was as appropriate as her having supper at her grandmother’s. I did ask her age though. She was fifteen.

As we turned into Wickham Street, I asked if she was still going to school. Of course she was. She was coming fifth in her class. She could be coming first, but it wasn’t worth being hassled as a braniac, so she put down some wrong answers. This was fun because she could tease her teachers, who couldn’t understand how she could be so dumb at times. As she opened the door to get out near the Go Kat Klub, I had to ask. I pointed towards the two Goliaths, standing on bouncer duty to illustrate the ambience of the place.

I looked at the teenager, too smart for her own good. ‘You remind me of a lad I saw years ago, forced to race at school against his will,’ I said. ‘He was a mile behind the rest of the field. Only you’re a mile ahead of the field.’

She didn’t appreciate my conversational drift and let fly with sarcasm. ‘And you’re the working class hero of the masses with nothing but a borrowed car and a pocketful of self-righteousness. It’s been fun, Steele, but I gotta go.’

She got out of the Landcruiser and walked towards the entrance of the Kit Kat Klub.

‘So what are you doing here, Cassandra?’

Cassandra Russo turned and replied casually. ‘I work here.’

‘You know the difference between the running lad and you?’

‘No, and I don’t care.’

‘He allowed himself to cry.’

Cassandra half-opened her mouth but said nothing. She turned her head and tottered off on her heels into the club.

I toyed with the idea of driving the Landcruiser to Sydney, selling it and splitting the country. I was picturing the passport in my bedside drawer. I’ve never used it, but they’ve never taken it from me.

Still, I’m a Brisbane boy. Two thirds of my life spent in an orphanage in this city could not take Brissie out of my soul. Nothing could.

Outside the professor’s unit, I swapped the computers over to my Holden ute. I still had the key to Lavinsky’s unit in my pocket, and I decided to have a quick poke around. How much deeper could I get into this hole? There were lot of photos inside – Lavinsky with a boy and a girl growing into woman and man, taken over a period of twenty or so years. None of a woman around the professor’s own age. Smells like divorce.

The first message on the answering machine simply said, ‘Get off my case, you bastard.’

I had heard that voice earlier that day, and it did not take me long to give it a name: Steven Dupont.

Message two was a reminder about a symposium Lavinsky was supposed to speak at. Unless the topic was spiritualism, the professor would not be contributing.

Message three was from Clarissa Dunne, apologising for her part in an argument they had had. She would see the professor, also sometimes known as darling, tomorrow. That was a longshot and if she did see him, unless she had killed him, she wouldn’t much like the shape he was in.

The next message started, ‘Hey, ProJoe, have you been avoiding me?’

We all know who that one was from.

‘Well, let me warn you . . .,’ continued Cassandra Russo. She hung up, without finishing the warning.

I wiped the answering machine, the front doorknob and the 4WD clean, posted all the corpse’s keys into his letterbox and pointed the EH towards the coast.

The Gooroo poured me a coffee, a port and ten hundred-dollar bills for the computers before I told him Lavinsky was dead. He didn’t flinch.

‘Murder seeks you out again, Steele Hill. Or am I wrong?’

I nodded grimly, and gave Gooroo a run-down of my evening.

The Gooroo considered for a moment and decided, ‘This Dupont, he’s the villain what done this dastardly deed.’ He continued, ‘Lavinsky and Dupont may have been competing lovers of the same woman. Or maybe Lavinsky was going to expose Dupont for his sexual blackmail of students.’

I was buying this. ‘So, Gooroo, I’ve got to nail Dupont.’

There wasn’t much percentage in my going back to the uni in the hope that the guilty party had been uncovered and I could strut the walk of a free and innocent man. But there was one place I could go. Where there was a smart girl who could have been top of her class, only she was too clever for that. I knew a girl who knew a lot, inside and outside of university. I apologised to Con Vitalis for leaving him to go back to the place I had just left. He understood and we unloaded the computer gear into his garage.

The Go Kat Klub is the sort of place where you go if you are eighteen to thirty, wear expensive clothes and have access to lots of spending money, either your own or someone else’s. It is open till 5 a.m. so I was fashionably lateish at two in the morning. Once inside, you danced a bit, socialised a lot and drank caffeine-saturated soft drinks and litres of water. If you can’t work out what else you took, you probably think clubbers are those nasty people who kill baby seals.

Ignoring the mirrors, flashing lights and pulsating noise, I checked out the inhabitants, about 300 of them. A good racket for somebody but no sign of Cassandra Russo.

‘Nice jacket, sweetie,’ said a voice in my ear.

He was a tall, thin, redheaded man in his early twenties.

‘Yair, I know,’ I said dryly. ‘And one of these years it’s going to come back into fashion, right?’

The snappily dressed redhead was hurt. ‘No, I meant it; I really like it,’ he said.

I apologised, as he picked up a glass from a plastic-and-steel table welded into a pillar. He had some stamp of authority, so I asked him if Cassandra Russo was in.

‘Who?’ he asked, in a voice that told me he knew the girl, but he was not the sort to meet and tell. ‘Excuse me, I have to serve some customers,’ he said and went over to a group of four young people, two of them men.

It wasn’t bar service, because the two blokes followed him to the male toilet. The transaction was brisk. By the time I had a glass of red in my hand, the blokes returned. The redhead went to chat with a monster in a white shirt and bow tie. They both looked in my direction, and I smiled back at them.

The redhead disappeared behind the bar, and the monster came over to me.

‘Mr Malone will see you now,’ he said softly, as if he was a diminutive office secretary.

‘He’s already seen me. Wasn’t much of an interview.’

‘That was Mr Franks you saw. Mr Malone will see you now.’

The penny dropped. ‘Oh, you mean that Mr Malone.’

That Mr Malone. Frank Malone was the one Irish name that cropped up among the mostly Italian monikers of Fortitude Valley’s night-life businessmen, men who the local press would call ‘colourful’. This was code for ‘crooked’, not a reference to their ties or silver jewellery, though there was plenty of that too. I had never met Malone, but I had seen his short, fat and fortyish body stalking the half-dozen or so Valley streets that were his playground.

I followed my huge guide behind the bar, through an empty kitchen and to a room with ‘no admittance’ on the door. I was admitted.

Four bar stools, covered in black vinyl, sat on one wall of the surprisingly large office. A big rectangular table was across one corner with enough room on either side for someone to get in and out. Behind the desk, a massive leather armchair bulged, and inside it sat the squat frame of Francis Malone.

He looked at me and I looked at the thick green carpet attached to all the walls, giving the place the appearance of a soundproofed recording studio.

‘Do I know you?’ asked Malone without rising from his chair.

‘You may have seen me around. I’m Steele Hill.’

Malone’s eyes were red and darting every which way in his head. He looked like he was having a stockbroker’s Christmas party all by himself. He was coked up to the max.

‘So what the fuck are you doing, coming into my club, asking questions?’

‘You mean questions about an under-aged girl who claims to work here.’

‘You say I’m running hookers from here. Listen, pal, I charge eight bucks to get in; I charge five dollars for a short nip of watered-down bourbon: what the fuck do I need with hookers?’

‘Strangely enough, though,’ I said, ‘not too many of your customers seem to fancy that bourbon.’

Malone sniffed and played with his nose as he got up from his armchair. ‘You stay right there. Don’t you fucking move!’

I was pleased to see him dart through a back door rather than out the front way, where the monster was on guard duty. He came back in a few minutes, but he had not fetched anything from the next room. I guessed he had gone for a snort, his version of a coffee break. He was a little calmer.

‘This is a dance club. All our customers are young. Some of the young bucks get lonely. So we have young girls they can talk to. They buy the girls drinks, only we don’t give the ones under eighteen any alcohol. And we tell them not to turn tricks, not even outside the club. I don’t know if you are a relative or a friend of this young girl you’re after. But there’s nothing in it, you see. So why don’t you just piss off?’

I answered him casually. ‘Well I might have, but Franks said you wanted to see me. He likes my jacket, apparently. Maybe he thought you would, too.’

Malone’s face went a shade deeper than its usual red. ‘Paul always tells me what’s going on. And now I’ve seen you. So get lost.’

Standing my ground, I asked, ‘Paul’s told you all about the deals he’s struck tonight? Or did he forget them in his rush to tell you about me?’

Malone jumped up from his chair, and this time he did go through the front door. I heard him bellow he wanted Paul Franks.

The redhead Franks shut the door behind him and flashed a big smile at Malone, who settled again behind his desk. I sat down on a bar stool against a side wall.

The redhead stopped in his tracks when he saw the expression on Malone’s face.

‘We were going to start selling later,’ the club owner yelled.

A hurt look creased the young man’s face, and he reached a hand into the inside pocket of his jacket. I smirked, looking around. There was a soft sound of a drawer opening, before four bullets ripped into the redhead’s body.

I sat there stunned, thinking the fat man could not have done that. But there was Malone, blubbering and bouncing his fat up and down, with a gun falling through his fingers to the table.

Tears were streaming down his face and he sniffled. ‘I loved him. Why did he rob me? Why?’ He stopped crying to snap at me. ‘You, see what he had in his pocket.’

I looked at the gun on the table and did what he asked. Only a folded manila envelope that had collected some of Franks’ blood came out of the pocket. I looked inside to see maybe $1500, neatly folded. A piece of paper with initials and amounts between $50 and $300 was behind the notes. Nothing more. Franks had been preparing a fully audited surprise for the boss. I showed Malone the contents of the dead man’s pocket and he started to cry again.

‘But I loved him,’ he squealed.

‘You know what Wilde said,’ I reminded him. ‘Wilde said, “You’ll never be so wrong”. I know it’s not much of a comfort, but what can you expect from Kim Wilde?’

It was not a comfort, because he turned on me. ‘You did this. I’m going to kill you.’

‘You’re not going to kill me,’ I said casually, though there was a fair chance he would.

But he didn’t. Malone told me to go, and take the bloody money with me. Some industries seem to consider a bullet and a bribe to be bills of exchange of equal value. I put the dough in my pocket. Malone opened the door for me, told me one last time that he loved Franks, and watched to make sure I had free passage out of the Go Kat Klub.

Cassandra Russo was hopping out of a taxi, just as I reached the bottom step.

‘You don’t want to go back in there,’ I said. ‘There’s a dead body inside.’

She said, ‘You killed someone.’

I shook my head and grabbed her elbow, urging her down the street.

An Aboriginal man asked me for a dollar. As I fished into my pocket, he upped the request to two dollars. I gave him all the money from the envelope.

‘It’s got blood all over it,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

The EH found the car park of the nearest suburban hotel that had late-night music. I turned the engine off, and asked Cassandra what was the connection between her, Lavinsky and the Go Kat Klub. She said there was none. Lavinsky wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like the Kat.

‘Was someone really dead in the club?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I just wanted to find out what you knew about Lavinsky’s murder.’

Her lips quivered and her eyes reddened, but she overcame her momentary grief. ‘ProJoe’s dead? You killed him, Steele.’

‘I never killed anyone,’ I said, wondering if I had just played a part in Paul Franks’ death, when all I had wanted to do was create tension to loosen lips.

I looked hard at the girl. ‘I reckon Steven Dupont killed Lavinsky, and I reckon you know all about it.’

‘Me?’ said Cassandra Russo, soft and wide-eyed.

She turned her knees towards me, across the one-piece front seat of my car. She lowered her head and tilted it to one side to look up at me. Then she twisted some strands of her hair around an index finger. Cassandra was having some fun, trying to bury her grief over a dead man who had been close to her when closeness was something she feared.

It was time to catch her off-guard. ‘What were you warning Lavinsky about on his answering machine?’

My aim was poor. She shook her head from side to side and smiled, as if I was an amusing little boy. At least she stopped twirling her hair. ‘It was a joke, Steele. Cassandra, get it? I am named after a character from Greek mythology. She was cursed with always having to tell the truth and no one would believe her.’

I didn’t believe her.

‘ProJoe and I used to share jokes like that,’ she continued.

‘Were you and Lavinsky lovers?’

‘Of course not,’ she said, like I was that little boy again. ‘We just had sex a few times.’

That one, I had to think about.

‘And you and Steven Dupont?’

‘Yuk,’ was her only answer.

‘And your mother?’

‘I’ve never slept with my mother. Though I shouldn’t say that categorically, should I, till I’ve had regression therapy.’

‘Come on, Cassandra, you don’t have to prove you are cleverer than me. I went to grade ten at an orphanage. My life’s ambition is to back the program one day at Eagle Farm racetrack. And I’m being hunted for murder because I accepted a $50 job that I was supposed to get a grand for. Buddha, I’m dumber than Harpo Marx – don’t ask who that is. Just help me nail Lavinsky’s killer and you can go on pursuing your future, which I’m sure will sparkle with wit and wealth.

Cassandra sat up straight in the car seat. ‘You know what really scares me. What really really scares me. I’m afraid the dumb kids will pick on me all my life. That I’ll be working for the dumb kids all my life.’

‘You mean they won’t all go into pop music. Answer my question and I’ll protect you from the dumb kids. Did your mother have a relationship with either Lavinsky or Dupont?’

You could see her conquer the urge to say something smart. ‘I don’t know,’ she said instead.

‘Did Clarissa Dunne have a relationship with either of them? And it’s not your mother I’m talking about.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s helpful,’ I said. ‘That Greek Cassandra might have saved herself a lot of grief with a few don’t-knows, but they’re not doing much for me.’

‘Why don’t we ask Dupont?’ Cassandra said cheerily.

‘Yair, right, later on today, I’ll ask the coppers swarming all over the uni whether I might have a chat with Dupont.’

‘We can go to his unit.’

‘You know where he lives?’

‘Yes. My mother took me to a cocktail party to watch the Academy Awards on television. You wouldn’t believe it; they were all dressed up in formal gear, and arguing over who was the best actor of all time. I stole a bottle of Chivas Regal and split. But I can find the place again. For sure.’