Davo's Little Something (36 page)

The two on Friday night were easy. They were drunk and he got them having a piss; they scarcely knew what hit them. The three on Saturday night he had to take from behind and they were a little more difficult. One even managed to give Davo a kick in the shins so after stunning him with a punch in the solar plexus he held both his arms out and broke them at the elbows, before pounding his head almost to jelly.

Davo was expecting the headlines in the Saturday papers and he relished them as he read them over and over before cutting them out and placing them in the drawer with the others. Gangs Strike Again. Skinhead Killings Continue. Terror in the Streets. What a hoot this is he laughed, over his muesli and prunes.

But he wasn't quite prepared for the headlines that literally screamed out of the
Sunday Telegraph
the following morning, causing him to splutter coffee all over his poached eggs on toast.

WHO IS THE MIDNIGHT RAMBLER MURDERER . . . LONE KILLER SUSPECT IN ALLEGED SKINHEAD GANG KILLINGS . . . A special report by Joe Davenport.

 

‘Jesus Christ,' Davo almost shouted, as he stared at the headlines. ‘How the bloody hell did they find out.'

He then didn't just read the article, he devoured it, scarcely able to get the words in quick enough; then almost in a panic he read it again.

Davenport stated that reliable sources in the coroner's office had forensic proof that it was only one person doing all the killings and that the police were suppressing this information. The killer was a gay who had at one time been assaulted himself and who was now a martial arts expert bent on revenge. The killer had brain damage which the police knew about but were hiding. The killer was a huge man and immensely powerful. That was about it; the rest was just padding to fill up the two pages inside—on gay assaults, skinheads, the Cross, Oxford
Street etcetera and a list of all the victims the Midnight Rambler had killed so far and where they came from.

Davo sucked in a deep breath, snorted it out and starting to feel a little panicky. He rose from the table and went over to the kitchen window to stare grim-faced out across Waverley Oval. So they're on to me already he thought. How? He stared out the window for a while longer till he started to settle down, then over a fresh cup of coffee he read Davenport's article again; slower this time and reading in between the lines.

It was a bit of a beat-up really. All Davenport had to go on was a rumour from the coroner's office and he'd elaborated from there. He was clever. He'd done his homework and what he'd written made sense but there was still an element of doubt and the police strenuously denied his claims. Davo began to feel a little better. Besides, even if the cops do go on this they're going to be looking for a monstrous gay with brain damage. And what am I? Just an inoffensive cripple getting round on a walking stick. The last person they'll come looking for is me. If they ever come at all. But just to be on the safe side he'd have to be extremely careful from now on. Walking stick and shuffling along slowly all the time he was out and extreme care in choosing his victims and his killing grounds.

His killing grounds. Did that mean he was going to continue killing, even after all the headlines and the Joe Davenport article? He took a sip of coffee and grinned menacingly down at the
Sunday Telegraph
spread open in front of him.

‘Like the guy said—You ain't seen nothin' yet, Davenport.' He added a slightly demented chuckle.

‘You've both seen this I imagine. Just what we bloody well need isn't it?' Divisional Inspector Burgess stabbed his finger viciously at the newspaper on his desk and with suspicion all over his florid face glared at the two detectives seated impassively in front of him. ‘And just who gave bloody Davenport his . . . his so called bloody story?' The Divisional Inspector continued to glare at the two detectives.

Detective Middleton twisted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Sir, I happen to know this Davenport.'

‘So do I. And he's a proper bastard.'

‘But he is a good journalist,' ventured Detective Blackburn.

‘And he knows more people in this town than you, or I, could imagine,' said Detective Middleton. ‘You can bet your life he's paying someone in the cornoner's office for these tips.'

Inspector Burgess drummed his fingers irritably on his desk. ‘I wouldn't be surprised if it was that bloody Joyce himself, with his warped sense of humour.'

‘No, sir. I doubt that very much,' said Detective Blackburn. ‘Although this theory was Ozzie's idea in the first place, he swore he wouldn't say anything to anyone about it. Not out of his office. And especially not the papers.'

‘But you can bet your life someone in his department has overheard something or seen something,' added Detective Middleton. ‘And for a leak like this you can also bet Davenport's paid plenty.'

‘Mmphh!' Inspector Burgess snorted loudly as he continued to glare at the
Sunday Telegraph
and began running his finger along the headlines. ‘Just had a look at some of this rubbish. Midnight Rambler Murderer. The Avenging Angel of Gay Martyrdom. Killer's bloodlust a ray of happiness in the gay community. It could be an ex-police officer, says a spokesman. If it is, it would be the only co-operation we ever get from the police, says another. Bloody poofters. They give me the shits. Hold on. It gets better. Killer rumoured to be an AIDS sufferer with nothing to lose. Morgue attendants refuse to handle bodies of skinhead victims in case the killer has deliberately contaminated them.' Burgess ran his huge hands over his face and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Fair dinkum, where does he get this utter bloody bullshit from?'

‘Joe's certainly got a way with words hasn't he,' said Detective Middleton, trying to hide his amusement at all the discomfort this was causing his superior.

Inspector Burgess gave him a mirthless smile. ‘In the meantime you'll both continue to deny this rubbish. Right?'

‘Yessir. Whatever you say, sir.'

‘I'll still be giving out the press releases. I might even give this Davenport a ring and tell him to pull his horns in a bit. Not that it would do any good. Probably only exacerbate things.'

The Divisional Inspector continued to stare at the two
detectives in silence for a few moments while behind them the noise of the traffic in the street below could be heard faintly over the hum of the airconditioner propped in the window.

‘Anyway,' he said finally, ‘have you got any new theories since the last time you were in here?'

Detective Middleton cleared his throat. ‘One or two, sir,' he coughed gently.

‘Righto. Let's hear them.'

By halfway through the week the article in the
Sunday Telegraph
had ceased to bother Davo at all and, if anything, he thought it was a bit of a hoot. In fact he even bought another copy and pinned it on the wall of the garage; the other one he'd previously cut out and added to the steadily increasing collection in the kitchen drawer. The only thing that did worry him slightly was the thought of what might happen if somehow—unlikely as it was—he was to lose the gloves. It would certainly stuff things up a bit. There wasn't much chance of this happening but on a trip to the junction on Wednesday Davo noticed the disposal store had another two pairs in the window so he bought one, plus another two small sheets of stainless steel and did them up the following day, he didn't bother to test them on another wardrobe, they looked and felt alright, and rather than have two pairs in the flat he left them on the workbench in the garage right underneath the article from the
Sunday Telegraph
. He was almost tempted to try them out when he went killing on the weekend but took the original ones instead.

Although Davenport's article had ceased to worry him his own common sense and animal cunning told him not to be lurking around the back alleys of Oxford Street and the Cross for too long; get in and get the job over with, he could gloat about it when he got home. But maybe the skinheads were more worried about the article than Davo because there didn't seem to be a great many of them around. He managed to get a couple on Friday night in a lane near Clapton Place but Saturday night he had to settle for three punks in Ward Avenue not far from Fitzroy Gardens; and one of them was a girl.

Davo wasn't to know. They all looked mean enough when they came up behind him in the shadows in the alley and their
intentions were obvious. Davo had spotted them earlier and was rolling around putting on a drunk act but watching them out of the corner of his eye at the same time. He was leaning over a garbage bin, pretending to be sick when they came at him: two with bottles in their hands. They didn't know what hit them when Davo leapt up like an enraged panther and started smashing them to pieces, and Davo didn't know one was a girl until instead of a curse or a moan of pain she let out an ear-splitting scream of terror that seemed to echo off every building within half a kilometre. Davo got just as much of a shock as what she did. He stood there looking at her as she screamed her head off, almost paralysed with fright, her friends broken and bleeding at her feet and never having hit a woman before he didn't quite know what to do. But he couldn't leave any witnesses, and although for just a brief second he felt a modicum of remorse he pivoted at the waist and threw a short but lethal right that caught her on the point of the jaw and snapped her neck like a pencil. The screaming stopped as abruptly as someone pulling the needle off a record and she sprawled down next to her friends in the blood and the broken glass from the bottles they'd intended using on Davo. Davo rolled her over with his foot and as he raised his fist to give her his ‘coup de grace' he noticed that along with all the red and orange blush she had painted around her eyes, she was wearing jet-black lipstick; before long her face and the faces of her two companions resembled pretty much the same colour of her lipstick.

Although he always felt good after a killing Davo was still feeling slight pangs of remorse when, an hour later, he sat back in his flat sipping a cup of coffee with Lou Reed's New Sensations bopping steadily on 2MMM in the background. He'd never hit a woman before let alone killed one and it did bother him a little. But then again this was now the era of women's liberation and equality of the sexes and all that so really he'd only done the right thing. He nodded his head and smiled at himself in the framed mirror on the loungeroom wall. Yes, if the men were going to be killed there was no reason why the women shouldn't be killed as well. He smiled and nodded his head in approval again. Yeah.
At least now they can't accuse the Midnight Rambler of being chauvinistic he chuckled.

Detectives Blackburn and Middleton silently faced each other across the paperstrewn desk in the detectives' room, each quietly sipping a mug of coffee. They were the only ones in the large partitioned-off room filled with desks and typewriters, and neither man was in a particularly good mood. Whereas in the beginning the skinhead killings had almost had a funny side—if only because of their unparalleled brutality and the fact that they had Divisional Inspector Burgess squirming—the bodies were starting to pile up with too much regularity now and the added ferocious murder of the seventeen-year-old girl and her two punk companions on Saturday night had cast a whole new perspective on the killings. Whereas before the murders could possibly be interpreted as straight-out revenge and the murderer more than likely a gay as stated in the Davenport article, it was now becoming clear that a brutal psychopath was on the loose, killing indiscriminately and with an increasing bloodlust. What could have started off as revenge had now switched to thrill killings. A police psychiatrist had verified this and these were the worst, most dangerous and most unpredictable kind.

The two detectives were sitting there mulling over something a detective on another case had told them. He'd been in a large inner city gymnasium, taking a statement from the proprietor about a break-in, and had noticed a group of gays in there pumping iron with a vengeance. The four men were obviously as gay as carnival time in Rio but each one was built like a rugby front-row forward and lifting incredible weights. What Davenport had said in his article about the so called Midnight Rambler being a gay martial arts expert was starting to look like a distinct possibility.

Detective Middleton took another sip of coffee from his chipped blue mug while he drummed the fingers of his left hand on the desk. He stared absently at his partner for a moment before placing his coffee back on the desk separating them. He was still trying to maintain his sense of humour through this extraordinary macabre case but after seeing what was left of
the young girl's face as she lay on the slab in the morgue on Monday morning it wasn't getting any easier. But he was trying.

‘Well, what do you reckon, Ray?' he finally said. ‘I think what Billy Minto said about those jokers in that gymnasium is starting to make a lot of sense. You agree?'

Detective Blackburn nodded his head slowly. ‘Yep.'

‘It's definitely some big poof out for a square-up that's doing this. I can't see it being anything else. Can you?'

Detective Blackburn shook his head this time. ‘No. But we've been through every gay assault on record and not one of those blokes has weighed over fifty kilos.'

Detective Middleton made a gesture with his hands. ‘Yeah, but what about the ones that never get reported. Or one could've had a lover that got killed.'

Detective Blackburn nodded and took another sip of coffee. ‘Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that.'

‘So I reckon it's about time we went up and had a word with all the horse's hoofs.'

‘What exactly do you mean?'

‘Up at that gay newspaper place in Crown Street. I reckon those bloody little queens up there know what's going on and they're keeping quiet about it. I reckon they'd half-pie know who it is too.'