Black Teeth (32 page)

‘Nina Chiancelli.'

‘Nina,' I say. ‘This is Rudy Alamein.'

Nothing from her.

‘Do you remember me?'

A shuffling on her desk, like I've caught her watching porn. Then calm.

‘Sure, I remember you, Rudy. How are you?'

‘Okay.' I soften my voice as best I can. For all my success at lying, I've never been much of a mimic. But she's got nothing more than a memory of thirteen years ago to compare me to.

‘It's been a long time,' she gruffs, too friendly. ‘What…what have you been up to, darl? I was sorry to hear about your father.'

‘I'm just calling,' I cup the receiver to talk even more softly. Even more like Rudy. ‘Because I have something to…I want to tell you.'

‘Of course.'

The background noise cuts off. She's shut her office door.

‘I just wanted to say that I thought it was unfair. How you treated me.'

‘Hey?'

‘You put me on the newspaper, on the front page. Saying that my dad should confess.'

‘Mmm-hmm…'

‘I never said that. I mean, you told me to say that.'

‘I'm not sure if I did, darl.'

‘You told me what to say and you knew I wasn't…couldn't argue.'

‘Now, that's not fair. If I helped you put into words—'

‘It is fair. It
is
fair.'

‘Nobody put a gun to your head, Rudy.'

‘Fuck you,' I say. In those words I am more myself than Rudy. ‘I was susceptible. You suscepted…suscepted me.'

‘Yeah, all right…I'm sorry you feel that way.'

‘But there's something else I've got to say.'

Silence now. Standing by.

‘What happens on Friday night is justice. Don't…I don't want you to think it's because I'm crazy.'

‘What's going to happen on Friday night?'

‘You'll see.'

I let the drama of that hang in the air, then:

‘Just remember that I do this of my own volition.'
Not
a Rudy word. ‘I mean, like, on purpose. Not because of
drugs
. Not because I've been
tricked
into anything the way you tricked me. What happens on Friday is…is important.'

‘You have to tell me more, darl. I don't know what you're on about.'

‘You'll know. After Friday. A toothbrush can be…can change everything.'

I roll my eyes. Was that a step too far?

‘Is this about the rumours I've heard, Rudy?'

My ear goes cold.

‘What…What rumours?'

‘About your mother's death.'

‘What about it?'

‘I heard on the grapevine that there's some kind of evidence? Relating to her murder?' She's trying to prompt me. ‘Something that's yet to come to light. Or at least, the police haven't found it yet. Does that sound right to you?'

‘What do you mean? Like…'

‘That's all I know. It's come to me kind of obliquely, but maybe it's true. Is it true?'

Is this a bluff? An attempt to get Rudy talking?

‘What kind of evidence?'

‘I'm saying I don't know—'

‘Does it prove that…What does it prove?'

‘I don't know. I thought you might know. It's just a rumour I heard—'

‘Tell me
exactly
what you heard.'

‘Just that there's something out there, darl. Supposedly hidden. Why don't you and I meet up and talk—'

‘Just remember what I said about Friday.'

I hang up.

My ear hurts from pushing the receiver too hard against my head.

Whatever sunshine there's been is gone for good and the wind picks up and the house groans like an old man mewling for sympathy. I drop my head in my hands to think.

What the fuck was that about? It's half impossible to know and half definitely proof that Rudy killed his mother. Did he
tell
someone years ago? Leave a bloody fingerprint behind? How does it take thirteen years to come up?

Or Piers said something. To someone inside before he died. But that wasn't
evidence
. It wasn't a
thing
yet to be
discovered
. Did Piers have proof before he went on trial? Was he hiding
more
crap in his workshop? Maybe Ken Penn has something squirrelled away in that tiny room where he lives, something that explains how certain he is of Rudy's guilt. But then why not share it with the world?

And there's Beth. She might have pried the truth out of Rudy if she ever cared what the truth was, hung onto it until whatever grift she was running required Rudy to be imprisoned.

Or maybe it's the standard Nina Chiancelli line that keeps her sources on the hook.

But among all the possibilities that swirl and shiver in the dank of the kitchen, watching me slump and glower at them, the one verging on self-evident is that it's Rudy himself. Concrete proof that he killed his mother and he keeps it under his bed because he's Rudy and he's crazy and somehow the word's got out and no one's cared enough to follow up. Because he's Rudy and he's crazy.

My eyes scan the kitchen, come to rest on the sideboard and I'm out of the chair, darting to it, pulling on the drawers and the cabinet doors: crockery mostly, silver-yellow cutlery and water jugs. One drawer is crammed with hundreds, maybe thousands of lacker bands, strung together in a single rubbery rope. A rope that could wrench me out of a million panic attacks. Rudy with thirteen years to kill.

I run out the back door and into the yard, run the path to Rudy's bungalow.

Its door is wood and frosted glass, not locked and when it opens I reel at the pong of the bedroom. My old bedroom at Mum's used to have this smell and she used to pinch her nose whenever she came in, remark with that nasal voice how she could think of

nothing better than Empty Nest Syndrome. All that's here is a single bed and a dresser that's unused. There are no clothes, hardly some belongings. After a discreet ransack I'm left with the conclusion that Rudy's stuff is upstairs.

Before going there I open a rear door to reveal a bluestone laneway, overseen by the bubbled windows of apartments crowded together, accessed to my left where it curves around the houses of Montrose
Row; to my right it's a dead end. This is where Rudy brought the Volvo, if Beth's story is true. This is where Rudy came the closest so far to joining his father in that big tapas bar in the sky. White cloud doesn't drift by but holds entirely still.

I climb the narrow stairs to a second floor the size of a living room, furnished with a single pile of junk, all the way to the ceiling, to the small skylight in its centre. Mostly clothes, that awkward smell again, items just damaged enough to be useless: a skateboard missing a wheel, a graffitied street sign, a deformed plastic Christmas tree. A mountain of shit as disorderly as Rudy's brain.

I pick through the mess like a homeless man picking through a dumpster: food-spattered curtains, cardboard boxes filled with door handles, ladder rungs without the ladder. Eventually I return a broken tiki torch and use it to rummage, saving me the anxiety of
touching
Rudy's things. At first I'm reluctant to leave any sign I've been here and I'm prudent, even careful. Then I determine it's impossible for me to leave such a sign—there's simply nothing
recog
nisable
in how this trash is compiled—and my actions become more forceful as I become more frustrated.

From the top of the window frame a solitary cockroach watches on, its feelers whirring, wondering who this new guy is.

With no concept of what I'm looking for, my digging becomes half-hearted. The light from the skylight is plentiful, I can see everything fine, but the mess is too dense. Rudy has never discarded a single possession, has merely set it all here as an indoor monument to lunacy.

The thing that's been eating at me ever since the phone call only now makes itself apparent, stops my searching, makes me gaze up at the skylight, then at the frosted window as if I could see out of it to the house. Then I toss the tiki torch and head downstairs, back across the garden.

Surely the most likely way for anything to remain undiscovered for thirteen years is for it to be located in a place where no human has been for thirteen years.

The house seems cooler when I come inside, the ground floor shrouded in a darkness I'd forgotten while hunting through the
comparative sunshine of the bungalow. At the base of the stairs I look up, analyse each step like it might collapse beneath my feet.

The front door is shut. Rudy isn't home. It must be a long walk to the DVD store. Maybe I have time.

I start climbing.

55

A different odour. Foetid. Almost solid. I haven't even reached the twist in the stairs before I notice. A musty decay, not the fresh kind in the kitchen. The power of it itches my nose.

Around the turn is a wooden gate and the first-floor landing, barren but for the caramel carpet. Surprising how bright it is: I expected this to be the gloomiest part of the house, but Rudy seems to have reserved that for himself below.

I consider the gate. Someone has closed it and secured it with a small latch. Thirteen-year-old Rudy, knowing he'd never be back.

I undo the bolt, half-wondering if it will come off in my hands, but it snaps open easily, squeaks as I move through it, stays intact. To my right is the living room: a big couch, lots of books on shelves and a long collection of items I don't recognise until I do recognise them and they're compact discs. An old box television—not a flat-screen but an enormous CRT like a bakers oven—faces out from the sideboard along the south wall. A phase of light through the lace blind catches the silt in the air like tear gas and I put my hand to my mouth, partly to keep myself from sneezing, partly to shut my nose against the smell. Tastefully arranged on the wall are baby photos, infant Rudy wrapped in cotton, entirely indistinguishable from every other baby ever born, the hope in his eyes glimmering with irony. Lining the hall is a quality bench table, handsome wood enamel and sturdy and adorned with a single framed pic of Cheryl as a young girl, taken in the sixties going by the hairstyle and the discolouration. She appears to have been ambushed by the
photographer, all naive gawk and big lashes, as unconcerned about the veil of time as newborn Rudy.

I walk through to the master bedroom.

Maybe I expected the roof to be collapsed or wild animals to be moved in, a coven of witches dancing around a cauldron. But it's just a stillness in here beneath a membrane of dust. The air doesn't seem to carry sound: I can't hear my heartbeat but I feel its frantic pump of blood in my head.

A section of carpet the size of an Xbox has been cut out and the chocolate underlay is mangled. The wall beside it features a fake fireplace in a marble frame: how they pimped out master bedrooms a hundred years ago. Piled on the mantel is all the boring real life stuff that no longer has any meaning: receipts, business cards, photos and frames left in a bundle by Cheryl under the strain of divorce, or by some zero-fucks-given investigative officer:
I'm not an interior decorator, mate
.

On the wall above it as well as on the door I see tiny spatters of black blood, circled with pencil and marked with alphanumeric codes: TM1, GH3…I tilt my head, consider them, try to decipher them, but there's no point and I have to keep moving. Past the mantel stands a chest of drawers where the fateful vase once stood. I expect to see a circular mark to indicate its position, but of course all of this dust has settled in the years since that derpy milk bottle was taken from its spot and never returned.

A couple of tasteful paintings hang on the walls and there are built-in robes and another dresser, Cheryl's, between the two windows that look out over Grand Street. It's hers because of the make-up, the jewellery box, the undergarments in the top drawer that's slightly open, that reminds me of how pointless what I'm doing is. If there was evidence up here then the police found it. Glen Tyan found it. There'd have been no hurry back then: Tyan had all the time he wanted. And he would not have spent it terrified that Rudy might discover him here.

I peer through the window, past the putrid disassembly of the balcony to the same old street, now partially obscured by pyramid trees. Flashes of colour motor by. A family packs prams
and children into a people mover and one of the children is in meltdown, cherry-faced and screaming.
Don't go into the bedroom
, she cries.
There's a ghost that lives in there.

The blood spatters and the carpet cut-out are enough to render it haunted, but the lifelessness helps too. I picture Cheryl coming home, up the stairs and in through that doorway, discovering Rudy. Did she surprise him? What was he doing? Or was she here first, flopped on the mattress and weighing up her future with the flaky Kenneth Penn when Rudy got home from school, inflamed already by a scrap in the schoolyard. He was surprised to see her, didn't react well. An unkind exchange. Another. Cheryl told him he was the brick wall between her and happiness. He triggered. She didn't know yet how dangerous he was…