The Serpent's Sting (20 page)

‘He's a very nice man, your brother,' Cloris said, and I tried not to hear in this a distinction she was making between us.

‘Is there a lot of drug use among theatre people?'

I felt oddly goaded by this question, as though Cloris was casting an aspersion upon my profession that was unjustified and personally offensive.

‘I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Cloris, but we haven't established yet which way the traffic went.'

‘What do you mean?' Her voice acquired a sudden, hard edge.

‘Well, I'm not sure it's safe to assume that Geraldine was bringing heroin to John, rather than the other way around.'

She took this rather better than that hardness in her voice had led me to think she would.

‘Yes, I see. But from where would John get a supply of heroin to sell to other people?'

‘The same question could be applied to Geraldine.'

‘Of course. I was assuming when I was thinking about this that Geraldine was Gerald. Now that I know she's a woman, that does rather change things.'

I didn't know whether this level of naïveté was charming, frustrating, disingenuous, or just plain phoney — phoney being one of those rare Americanisms that I'd become fond of, and which I'd taken to using in everyday speech.

‘But you haven't answered my question, Will. Do theatre people use drugs?'

I wanted her to stop using the expression ‘theatre people' as though it was interchangeable with ‘circus people' or ‘socially unacceptable people'.

‘I wouldn't think actors and actresses use drugs any more frequently than, say, the sons of lawyers.'

I regretted saying this almost before it had left my lips, and its effect on Cloris was to offend her into monosyllables.

‘I see,' she said, with ominous calm.

I apologised immediately, but the damage had been done, and although she nodded, she made no further comment. This resulted in an awkward thirty seconds of silence before Brian came in bearing a tray with the tea things on it. Cloris gave no indication in the ensuing half-hour that anything untoward had passed between us. I tried to demonstrate that I was an ally, not an enemy, by being witty and by laughing easily at anything she said that was even vaguely humorous — not that there was much of this, and Brian didn't help in keeping the conversation light by asking when John's body would be released to the family so that a funeral could be held. Cloris said that she wasn't sure, and that she and Peter hadn't yet discussed what form John's funeral would take. If the coroner ruled his death as a suicide, a Catholic burial would be impossible. Not that John would have opted for a Catholic burial if he'd been making the choice himself. Peter Gilbert, however, was conscious of his family's position, and a service at St Patrick's cathedral, where his wife had been sent off, would have been his automatic preference. This, despite his adultery, and his living in sin. The flexibility of the Catholic mind on such matters always astonished me.

Cloris said that she needed to get back to Drummond Street, and, perhaps to disguise the strangeness of the early-morning visit, she asked Brian if he might walk her home. He agreed, and when he looked at me he drew his eyebrows together fleetingly to signal puzzlement. I opened my eyes more widely, just for a moment, to let him know that I was ahead of him. Cloris noticed neither movement.

There were still several hours free before I needed to leave for the theatre. I had the house to myself, but its enclosed spaces seemed too restrictive to allow me to think clearly about what Cloris had told and shown me. I left the house, and crossed into Princes Park. It was too early for there to be any organised activities on the oval — recently, American servicemen had staged baseball games there — and there was no one about.

I sat on a bench and tried to consider coolly the appalling and stomach-churning information that Geraldine Buchanan had had sexual relations with both John Gilbert and me. To say that I experienced a curdling of my feelings for Geraldine is an understatement. The thought that both John Gilbert and I had heard the same endearments, and touched the same skin, made my own skin crawl. I felt foolish, easily duped, and humiliatingly naïve. I couldn't believe that Geraldine had been peddling drugs to John Gilbert. If she had been, surely she'd have tried to do the same with me. There hadn't been the faintest hint of such a proposition.

There was a way to find out, and it was my responsibility to do so. This was something I couldn't deputise to Brian. I'd have to interrogate members of the
Mother Goose
company, and as I didn't know them well, this promised to be fraught. How do you approach people with whom you are expected to work closely, and on whom you depend for cues and feeds, and ask firstly if they use heroin, and secondly, who supplies them with the drug? It wasn't as though it was opium, though. Still, it was a personal question, and a little more personal than asking what brand of soap a person used. I'd detected no hint of drug use among the cast, but I wasn't certain what heroin use looked like. I'd seen the effect of cocaine, and I was fairly certain that if cocaine was being used, it was discreet and very much after hours. I'd know if a person went on stage in a coked-up state.

Pondering what approach I'd take had the advantage of taking my mind off Geraldine's sexually indiscriminate choices. I was so immersed in my thoughts that when the subject of them sat beside me, it took a moment to register her presence. When I say ‘her' presence, I mean that it took a moment to register the presence of a person sitting beside me. She sat at the far end of the bench, and made no sound. When I noticed a shape in my peripheral vision, I turned to see who it was, and had the peculiar reaction of being unsurprised, as if we'd simply made an appointment, and now here we were. She was staring across the oval, waiting for me to speak. With so many questions needing to be asked, I chose a truly ridiculous one.

‘Will you be coming to the theatre this afternoon? Sophie really is a dreadful actress.'

Geraldine didn't move her head when she said, ‘No, Will. I won't be coming back to
Mother Goose
. I wouldn't be welcome, and things have gone too far anyway for that to be possible.'

‘Too far?'

She turned to look at me then, and I could tell that she'd noted my black eye.

‘Yes, Will. Too far.'

‘Are you referring to John Gilbert?'

‘That name is not familiar to me.'

I experienced a sudden spike of anger.

‘Oh, you know him all right. I've seen your sketches of him.'

‘Stage-door Johnnies never give their real name, Will — not if they want to protect their respectable, private lives. An awful lot of them have wives.'

‘John Gilbert didn't have a wife. What he did have was a drug habit, and now he's dead.'

Her face didn't change.

‘It always ends that way, doesn't it?' she said, with shocking blandness.

‘Does it, Geraldine? I wouldn't know.'

The conversation wasn't going in any useful direction. I was aware that I was allowing my feelings to derail it, and that I needed to follow the advice I'd given Brian about questioning Cloris. I'd told him that he needed to remember at all times, regardless of his feelings, that she was a suspect. Geraldine was now unequivocally a suspect.

‘Will you help me, Will?'

The question was weirdly mechanical. Whatever desperation was behind it had perhaps been dulled by a drug, or by repetition to God knew how many other lovers. Before answering the question, I said, ‘You were at my mother's house last night.'

‘Was I?' she said.

This was a mistake. I knew now that this was an act. I didn't know much about drugs in general, or heroin in particular, but I knew that Geraldine was sufficiently
compos mentis
last night to know precisely where she was.

‘You're lying to me,' I said. ‘This drug-induced amnesia is a lie, and so is this staring into space, and talking like an automaton. Stop it. If you need my help, if you really need my help, stop treating me like a fucking moron.'

Geraldine began laughing.

‘Oh, Will. I'm so sorry. I've played this all wrong, haven't I?'

Her face was suddenly as mobile as it had been when I'd introduced myself to her in her dressing room.

‘Played?'

She looked comically apologetic.

‘All right,' she said. ‘No more acting. I do need your help. You see, I've killed someone.'

She said this in a manner that was so neutral in tone that she might have been telling me about having lost the heel of a stiletto shoe. It made judging a response difficult. Was she joking?

‘Are you confessing to the murder of John Gilbert?'

‘I don't know anyone of that name. I do know the name of the man I killed.'

I had no option but to play along.

‘Will you tell me his name?'

‘Private Anthony Dervian.'

‘You murdered an American soldier?'

‘Not murdered — killed.'

Her eyes welled with tears. I couldn't keep up with the cavalcade of emotions she was playing out before me. Were these tears real? She seemed embarrassed by them, in that she turned her face way from me, and straightened her shoulders as if to suggest that she was determined to keep tears at bay, determined to maintain the impression that she was in control. I'd seen Bette Davis do this in a picture. I hadn't seen enough of Geraldine Buchanan on stage to gauge whether or not she was capable of this subtlety of performance. To keep my sympathy in check, I recalled her sketch of John Gilbert, languid, spread-eagled, and naked among Geraldine's sheets.

‘I don't think I can trust a single thing you do or say.'

She sniffed bravely, and marshalled her emotions.

‘That isn't fair, Will. You have to be betrayed by someone before you lose trust. I've never betrayed you.'

‘That might just be because we barely know one another. What were you planning to do with those pornographic sketches you made of me?'

She looked genuinely shocked.

‘You've seen those?'

‘The police have them.'

I don't think you can consciously make blood drain away from the face. Geraldine became a few shades lighter, but she rallied.

‘I was planning to blackmail you.'

I actually gasped. I thought people only gasped in movies.

‘I had an inkling as soon as I saw you that management might try to do something with you. I thought those drawings might be a sort of insurance. I could use them against you if you ever became famous. Now you know what sort of person I am.'

‘You have an unusual way of building trust.'

‘At least you know I'm not trying to deceive you. That should encourage a level of trust in me.'

‘I suppose you'd call that a kind of dark logic.'

‘You make me sound like a witch. I'm just an actress who's in a bit of a jam. There's a dead American soldier in the front room of Mrs Ferrell's boarding house.'

‘The front room is Mrs Ferrell's room — the termagant, the one who doesn't like gentlemen callers.'

‘She likes them even less when they're dead. Will you come with me to Fitzgibbon Street?'

This was so astonishingly bold that I said, ‘Yes, but I can't miss this afternoon's performance.' It was as if we were discussing an inconveniently positioned piano or chaise longue. It was something in Geraldine's demeanour that muted the ghastly truth of what she was saying. I fell for it, and I think I did so because a naïve part of me can't quite accept that women are capable of great criminality. The ugliest parts of human nature are the preserve of men. I still find this notion difficult to shake off, despite personal knowledge to the contrary. Whatever had happened, had happened to Geraldine. Somehow her confession that she'd intended to blackmail me became lost in the more immediate crisis of the dead American.

‘You know the Americans will want to see me hanged, Will.' Her eyes opened wide to underline the seriousness of this. ‘That Eddie Leonski business has made everyone jumpy.'

For those of you reading this at some distance from the events described, I should perhaps briefly outline the facts about Private Eddie Leonski. It might help you understand why Geraldine's concerns about the Americans were compelling. Not many months prior to this meeting with Geraldine, there had been a series of murders in Melbourne, and they had created hysteria among the public. This was largely the fault of the press, of course, which printed headlines that screamed ‘Ripper on the loose!' Three women had been brutally, savagely dispatched in inner Melbourne, and the city had never had its complacency so comprehensively disturbed.

It turned out that the killer was an American soldier named Eddie Leonski. He emerged from Camp Pell to commit his hideous crimes, and then retreated to the safe anonymity of his 30,000 companions. When he was exposed, tensions began to surface between civilians and their American visitors. This was thought to be an unhelpful turn of events. A long investigation and trial were out of the question. The matter had to be swept away as swiftly and cleanly as possible. Private Leonski, who may have been mentally incompetent, was given no opportunity to demonstrate this. He was hanged with unseemly dispatch on 9 November. Very little fanfare attended his execution. It was done. It was over.