Read Bones of Contention Online
Authors: Jeanne Matthews
Tags: #Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
Had. Again. This time by a Nigerian. I must be setting some kind of a record, thought Dinah. She should’ve spotted Bill for a ringer. Too tall. Too gregarious. Too slick. And festooned with weird scars which should have been a dead giveaway. But no. She’d been so all-fired intent on proving her theory of the crime. All he had to do was bait the trap with an eyewitness and she walked right into it. Oh, yes, Bill. I’m staying at the Crocodile. Jerusalem, would she never learn?
Who was he and what did he want from her? Was he just an opportunistic, unaffiliated con man attracted by her please-lie-to-me pheromones?
One can arbitrage from the back of beyond
. Ugh! But what was his racket? Was he selling bogus securities? Hawking faked Aboriginal art? Or was he Wendell’s henchman sent to retrieve the flash drive? And who was the man who’d followed her from Pine Creek? Were he and Bill in league?
She laid the folded-up luggage rack sideways in the track of the sliding glass door to the balcony. The rack wasn’t quite long enough. She dismantled it, cutting the cloth with her nifty Swiss Army knife. The slats still weren’t quite long enough, but they would prevent the door being opened more than a few inches. She double-checked the main door chain and anchored the chair under the knob a little tighter. This, she lashed herself, this is what comes of not waiting. Of not going to Jacko when she had the chance.
Should she call him right now, this instant, tell him she was scared and throw herself on his mercy? Maybe she should call the local police. Maybe she should call Wendell and tell him she’d already given the police his Flash Voyager. Once it was out of her hands, he had no reason to come after her.
The shoot-em-up in the next-door room raged on. Each pop ricocheted through her nervous system until she felt as if she would jump out of her skin. She poured a gin and tonic, turned on her TV to drown out the sound, and surfed until she found the news. A mobile phone mogul had dropped dead on his morning walk in Melbourne. Australian Idol judge “Dicko” Dickson had made a disparaging remark to a contestant. A high-speed car chase in the Top End ended when two men hurled a stingray-barbed spear through the door of another car.
She shuddered and killed the TV. Maybe if she read for a while…She felt the presence of her mother’s letter to Cleon almost like a physical ache. Why did she so dread knowing the truth? Wasn’t it what she’d wanted all along? Wasn’t the truth what everyone said they wanted? Yet now that it was within her grasp, Dinah wasn’t so sure. If the letter confirmed that her mother had been a party to Cleon’s crimes, could she still love her? Or would she feel forever estranged, the way she’d felt estranged from her father all these years?
The shootout raged on. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, changed into her boxing croc nightshirt, and crammed cotton balls into her ears. Still waffling, she drifted over to the desk and took the letter out of the Manila envelope. Just holding it made her feel icky. Like a voyeur. She stuffed it back in the envelope and, by default, picked up K.D.’s journal and turned to the section on Wendell.
Harbour Hotel, June 5th. He binges on potato chips when he thinks no one sees him and bites his fingernails to the quick. He went all misty when Daddy told us he didn’t want any sanctimonious words said over him. Later, I heard Daddy ask Mother if maybe Wendell’s having a breakdown. Mother said he’s just sad to be losing Daddy.
Dinah gave a little salute to Cleon with her gin. He certainly knew how to tweak the lovers’ noses and make them squirm. She wondered if, in addition to cutting Wendell out of his will, he had opposed his takeover of the drug business. If he didn’t think Wen had the gumption to pull a fire alarm without a memo, maybe control of the operation had been supposed to pass to Fisher. But then, he thought Fisher had lost his rudder, too. Maybe he was bringing Seth on board to take the helm.
June 6th. Sandra Faye called Wendell in the middle of dinner. She is a cliché, a total shrew of a wife. Wendell stepped away from the table, but we could all hear her bitching at him. I could see that Mother felt sorry for him. She wears her heart on her sleeve. I think she’ll depend on Wendell to help her manage Thad when Daddy’s gone. Wendell bribes him with expensive toys and tries to “relate,” but it only makes Thad act all the more off the Richter to get more out of him. I’m the only one who knows that Thad’s ADD is totally pseudo. He cons everybody, even his shrink. My brother will make Wendell his tool. Poor Wen. He’s pathetic.
Dinah finished her gin, closed the book, and switched off the light. She lay wide awake in the dark for a long time. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed she was in a jet boat bounding across a stormy sea while being shot at by pirates. The shots that woke her whacked into the headboard a scant twelve inches from her right ear.
“Somebody shot me at me! Call the cops!”
Quaking like a leaf, she hung up the phone, jumped into her clothes and edged around the room. The sliding glass door had been jimmied and opened about three inches. The shooter must have shinnied up one of the support posts under the balcony. The courtyard looked as eerily empty at 3:00 a.m. as it had at 10:00 p.m.
She tried to light a cigarette, but her hands trembled too uncontrollably to work the lighter. She gave it up and turned on the TV. A man was talking about sheep shearing.
Somebody banged on the door. She grabbed Seth’s gun, moved the chair, cracked the door to the length of the chain and peeped out. It was the bearded man in the turban who’d checked her in. She unfastened the chain and let him in.
“What happened?”
She showed him the bullet hole in the bed.
He said, “This is unprecedented.”
What the hell was she supposed to say to that? Were there hotels where getting shot at was precedented? She said, “He jimmied open the sliding door and shot at me through the gap.”
“Who?” His eyes were riveted on the Glock.
She put it back in her tote. “I don’t know who.” It could have been Bill or Wendell or the man with the shaven head who’d tailed her from Pine Creek or the man-shaped shadow across the billabong. “Did you call the police?”
A woman with wild dark hair and a disheveled sari appeared in the door. “What’s wrong, Sandhu? What is that smell? Did someone set off a firecracker?”
“I don’t know. Go unlock the lobby door for Koolatong.”
He stood in the door as if to prevent Dinah from escaping and the woman broomsticked down the hall.
“I have called the police,” said Mr. Sandhu. “We shall see.”
Why were they sore at her? Did they think she’d asked to be shot at? Did they think she got off on bullets singeing her hair?
A burly black man in a crisply ironed uniform shouldered through the door and introduced himself as Sgt. Koolatong of the local police. His brow was scarless, she was relieved to note, but deeply lined, as though the burden of keeping the peace in Jabiru weighed heavily on him.
“What happened?” he asked.
She showed him the hole in the headboard.
He leaned over the bed and inspected it minutely.
Mr. Sandhu said, “This has never happened before. This is a first.”
There were times when the screaming-meemies seemed the only logical response. With near-superhuman effort, she fought the urge. “Will you give me a light, Sergeant?”
Sandhu wagged his finger. “This is a non-smoking room. That is the rule.”
This was the thanks she got for stifling a screaming fit she was perfectly entitled to have? This was what she got for being considerate of the other guests? “I thought this was a non-shooting hotel, but your rinkydink door didn’t stop it from happening.”
The sergeant took her lighter and lit her cigarette.
Sandhu picked up the pieces of the luggage rack she’d laid in the door track. “You are a troublesome person. I will add this damage and the hole in the bed to your room bill.”
“Mr. Sandhu, you cannot fathom how troublesome I will become if you add one cent to my bill.”
“We shall see,” he said and marched off in a pet.
“Sue me,” she fumed under her breath.
The man on TV said that shearers who shear more than 200 sheep per day are called gun shearers.
Sgt. Koolatong said, “I know who you are, Miss Pelerin. Inspector Jacko Newby asked me to assist his man to watch out for your safety.”
“He…what? He has someone watching me?”
“As well as the Community Police. This shouldn’t have happened. I am responsible. The Inspector will be very unhappy.”
“What does the Inspector’s man look like, Sergeant?”
“White, brown hair, late twenties.”
“How about your man?”
“Black, sturdy build, late thirties.” He slipped on latex gloves and began digging the bullet out of the headboard.
“No facial scars?”
“No, why?”
“I seem to have more tails than a trick kite.” She should have known she couldn’t give Jacko the slip that easily, but if the skinhead who’d been bird-dogging her wasn’t his man and Bill wasn’t Koolatong’s man, who were they?
The opening bars of
Night Fever
detonated from the sergeant’s cell phone. Disco. The incongruities in the Top End just wouldn’t quit. She felt as if she’d been beamed onto another planet where the life forms and the language were vaguely reminiscent of Earth, but the total effect was insane.
“Yes, sir. Yes, she’s unhurt. I realize that, sir. No. No, I won’t let it happen again. Here she is.” He handed his phone to Dinah. “Inspector Newby.”
Jacko was going to be hacked off that she’d run away and gotten herself shot at, not to mention costing manpower that could be used to better purpose. And when she told him about the stolen flash drive, he’d go apeshit. Well, she deserved it.
She took the phone. “Hi.”
“The sergeant informs me you’ve had a fright.”
“Yes.”
“I know you’re spooked, luv, but are you all right? No large-bore holes in your chassis?”
She laughed. She hadn’t expected kindness. It pulled the rug out. She sat down on the bed and almost choked up. “No. I haven’t looked in the mirror to see if my hair’s turned white, but otherwise I’m okay except for a bad case of the shakes.”
“Who wouldn’t go quivery in the knees after such a close call? But I hadn’t thought you’d be attacked or I’d have had you in protective custody.”
“Why did you have me tailed then?”
“You’re too much of a chancer, luv. I don’t know what you think you’re about up there, but your rellies are all of a twitter since you left. They seem a bit narked with you. What did you do to get on the outers? Didn’t suss one of them for murder, did you?”
“Maybe. I took a computer memory stick out of Wendell’s briefcase. It contains files that make it look like Wendell’s and the doctor’s fish processing business was a front for a drug-running operation. I think they’re using Black Point as a drop site. Somehow Bryce Hambrick must have caught on to their scheme and they had him killed.”
“So drug-trafficking was their lurk.” He made it sound as if all of a sudden everything clicked. “But wasn’t your Uncle Cleon the one who touched the doc to bring Wendell into the bizzo? Drew up the partnership agreement, as I understand it. Surprising a man as shrewd as Cleon wouldn’t tumble to their criminal doings.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Surprising if a man as shrewd as Cleon wasn’t the mastermind and ur-trafficker. But she wasn’t ready to hear it out loud. The ramifications were too painful. “I’m sorry if I’ve caused trouble by running off with the evidence, Jacko.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For the nonce, I’ve pinched Wendell for Fisher’s murder.”
“But why? On what evidence?”
“His fingerprints came up clear as a rubber stamp on the filleting knife. And if his take under Fisher’s will weren’t motive enough, six weeks ago he took out a two million dollar life insurance policy on the doctor naming himself the sole beneficiary.”
Dinah rubbed her head. Something didn’t square. Wendell wouldn’t make that blatant a mistake, would he?
Sgt. Koolatong extracted one of the slugs from the headboard and held it up to the light in a pair of needle-nose pliers. She felt scared and vulnerable. All she wanted was to curl up in a fetal ball and hibernate.
Jacko kept his voice calm and low-key. “Anything you can tell me about the bloke who took a shot at you, luv?”
“No. But I think a man with a shaved head has been following me and a Nigerian named Bill singled me out for some kind of a scam.”
“You’ll be all right, Dinah. I’ll hive off and be there in a couple of hours. Sgt. Koolatong will stand guard until then. Does that work for you?”
“Yes,” she said. “That works for me.” How could it not? She’d dodged a bullet and now the pros were taking over. Once she relinquished Wendell’s memory stick, she’d be hors de combat, a civilian, no longer the bumbling amateur making believe she was V.I. Warshawski. “Jacko…?”
“Ay?”
“How are the others…the rest of the family taking Wendell’s arrest?”
“It’s crueled the party for one and all, luv. But we’ll yack about the rellies over brekkie.”
Sgt. Koolatong bagged the bullet, dusted the glass door for prints, stationed a uniformed sentry outside her door, and went back to his office.
Dinah tried to collect herself. She brewed a pot of coffee and sat down to wait for Jacko and brekkie. The sheepathon was still going on. Who knew there was so much to know about sheep peeling? In 1892, a man named Jackie Howe had peeled 1,437 sheep in 44 hours and 30 minutes and one week later, 321 sheep in 7 hours and 40 minutes using hand-shears. His record lasted for 58 years until another man using machine-shears outgunned him.
She drank coffee and paced and tried to get some traction under her slippery thoughts. If Jacko had found her so easily, maybe Wendell had, too. Maybe before Jacko pinched him, he’d placed a call to his accomplice in Jabiru and ordered him to kill her and get back the flash drive. If the information it contained incriminated the other members of the gang, they’d want it regardless of what happened to Wendell. But why hadn’t they just robbed her as she was leaving the restaurant? Trying to shoot her while she slept was sadistic. And pointless. For all their meanness, they hadn’t gotten what they were after.
Job’s tears! Suppose they came back and tried again before Jacko arrived? Suppose they overpowered her guard and came through the door shooting? But that made no sense. The people who wanted the flash drive wouldn’t shoot her until after they found it, which meant that somebody else was gunning for her. Who? Why? Her brain felt as if it were flopping around loose inside her cranium. She rubbed her temples and ran her eyes around the room. At least she could make sure Wendell’s crowd didn’t find the flash drive.
She grabbed her tote and ran her hand across the bottom. The flash drive was small, but it made a conspicuous bump. She scrabbled through her cosmetic bag for tweezers and tweezered the stick through the hole in the lining. Where wouldn’t they look? It would almost fit into the hole made by the bullet, but that was no good. Inside the overhead light? Inside the toilet tank? She could tape it to the underside of the desk. Too easy.
Where then? The electrical outlet with the exposed wires. She moved the bedside table and got down on her hands and knees. How to wiggle the stick through the hole without losing it in the interstices of the sheetrock and insulation, and how to do it without being electrocuted in the process?
Dinah Pelerin, wannabe interpreter of ancient cultures and conservator of Native American myths, fried by a hot wire while secreting stolen evidence.
She got up, took a roll of adhesive tape out of her bag, cut a longish strip, and went back on her knees. Keeping clear of the loose wires, she winkled the stick through the hole with her index finger and with a piece of tape stuck to her middle finger, she affixed the stick out of sight on the other side of the wall. No one would think to look there and, if they did, they wouldn’t see anything but an unfinished electrical socket. Feeling pleased with herself, she got up and started to dust off her jeans.
Shit! She’d found the missing moth smushed on her right knee.
There was a knock on the door. “Miss Pelerin, it’s Sergeant Koolatong.”
She grabbed a towel out of the bathroom and was scrubbing the pus-colored moth innards off her knee as she swung open the door. “Ser…”
A gassy rag clapped over her face. She clawed at the rock-hard hands that held her. Her lungs burned. She had no feet, no bones, and then there was nothing.