ThornyDevils (3 page)

He nodded. ‘Hard to imagine. I thought only pollies liked doing that,’ he commented vaguely, wondering where the conversation was headed. He knew the champagne was already headed to his brain. He wondered for a moment whether the champagne might be going to Concheetah’s head as well. It was mother’s milk to her. She could handle this stuff. VB, on the other hand, was harmless compared to this.

Concheetah poured herself another glass and continued. ‘They came in here the other night. Two detectives from St Kilda. The senior one had nice wavy hair, a moustache and blue eyes. Looked a bit like Tom Selleck, if you ask me. Can’t remember the other one. You can always pick a pig. Big macho cocks in ill-fitting, cheap suits. They sat and watched the show with their guests.’

Peter could hear the guitarist playing on the stage. It sounded like a dramatic Spanish Flamenco tune right up until it was interrupted by the sound of soft tapping. Ted was rehearsing his
piece de annoyance
.

‘Not too loud, Teddles,’ Concheetah roared, ‘I have an important meeting going on here.’

The guitar and the tapping softened.

‘That man,’ she whispered, ‘He tells me after he woke up from his last overdose that he feels like a neglected artist.
You get all the attention
, he says.
I was once a star of television
. He’s so deluded. Anyhow, I suppose Ted wants his time in the spotlight.’ Concheetah shook her head and rolled her eyes in one motion then threw the reminder of her champagne down her throat. ‘It’s going to look tragic. Hopefully the audience will toss rotten tomatoes at him. Why did I agree? Why?’

‘You said two detectives came in here the other night?’ Peter asked, returning to the subject.

‘And guests,’ she added curtly. ‘Didn’t you want to know who they were? Isn’t it your job to ask the questions?’

‘Okay. Who?’

‘That Italian guy you did the story on recently.’ Concheetah crossed
her legs in Peter’s direction and whispered, ‘I recognised him from the paper. You know. He was caught in a pool with a starlet from that soap show. By the look of the photos he was giving her swimming lessons: breaststroke.’

‘Him,’ Peter laughed. ‘Tony Donarto.’

‘All of them were very chummy.’

‘He’s Deputy Mayor of Melbourne and a successful businessman. Though I think he will soon be the former Deputy Mayor of Melbourne. I’m sure he mixes in wide circles.’

‘Aren’t you going to ask me what happened next?’

‘Okay. What happened?’ Peter sighed. He was losing interest.

‘I went over to greet them in my usual hostess style. You know. Be friendly and get them drinking more,’ she began slowly, tears welling in her eyes. ‘As I was standing there saying my spiel that slime Donarto…’ She stopped to wipe the tears away with a tissue pulled from inside her bra.

‘He hit you?’ Peter attempted to guess.

‘No,’ Concheetah cried. ‘He grabbed my crotch! The bastard! I wanted to hit him but with two cops there…’

‘Did he hurt you?’ Peter’s eyes widened.

‘No. He couldn’t grab hold,’ she murmured. ‘I’m strapped into the cockpit, darling.’

‘Yes. Of course.’ Peter blushed. ‘I should have known. What happened then?’

‘I pulled away. I think I said something like you
wouldn’t be able to handle it
.

‘And? Any other developments? He’d tried having sex with you?’

Concheetah shook her head.

Peter nodded, closed his notebook and put his pen on the table. Interview terminated.

‘Did you find my tale of woe boring, my dear?’ Concheetah sounded miffed. She poured another glass of champagne. In the background Ted was still tapping as the guitar droned away.

‘Look, Concheetah,’ Peter sighed, ‘I don’t know if I can make a story out of this. This is St Kilda. I’m sure patrons attempt this all the time.’

‘But these are men of authority,’ she said tearfully. ‘I thought you could help me. This is police harassment, Peter.’

‘I want to help you, but the cops didn’t do it.’ He found himself
patting her shoulder sympathetically. ‘There isn’t enough to work on at this stage.’

‘The cop bastards were laughing. I was humiliated,’ she paused. ‘Oh dear. I have to put this beautiful body of mine on the line so you’ll have your scoop.
Rape me please, Mister Donarto
. Fuck you, Peter Clancy.’

Concheetah flicked a finger at Peter, stood up and started to drift towards the stage. Peter followed, feeling uncomfortable that he had hurt the diva. Ted was holding a walking stick with one hand, waving the other in the air and dancing around it as if it was a maypole, like a possessed Morris dancer. The guitarist strummed a series of chords in a flurry of unbridled passion. The guitar stopped and Ted fell dramatically to the ground like Torvill minus Dean. It was an operatic tragedy without the opera.

‘Come on, Concheetah,’ Peter retorted defensively above the music. ‘My editor won’t even touch it.’ Ted lay motionless. Peter looked him over with a small element of concern, hoping the old dear hadn’t carked it on stage. Then again, that could be turned into a story.

‘Use your creative licence. Your rag is renowned for that.’

‘It’s not enough. If they’d taken it…’

‘When I’m lying on a hospital trolley at the Alfred, raped beyond recognition, I’ll remember that.’ Concheetah stood at the stage with arms akimbo, watching Ted rise slowly to his feet.
Interview terminated.
Peter decided it was an appropriate moment to exit this melodrama. He slowly tiptoed towards the door just as an argument erupted between Concheetah and Ted. He stopped at the doorway to watch the unfolding fracas.

‘Ted, all I said was it’s not your best. It needs a lot of work,’ she screeched.

‘You give me no praise,’ Ted shrieked back, throwing his glittering hat like a Frisbee. It curved high into the air and fell heavily onto a table, sending a bottle crashing to the floor. If Ted could do that every night, Peter thought, then maybe he’d have something.

‘You treat me like I’m a common whore. You’d be nothing without me. I should never have left Captain Capers to further your career.’ The walking stick clattered to the stage and Ted stormed off, his tap shoes sounding like small explosions with every step.

‘Ted, come back,’ Concheetah pleaded. ‘Stop being so bloody sensitive.’

Poor Ted, Peter thought, poor Concheetah.
It looks like another overdose waiting in the wings.
A modern day Romeo and Juliet. Concheetah turned and glared at Peter.

‘Got your story now? Famous drag queen in lover’s tiff. Lover threatens suicide.’

Peter thought it over back in the Shag. It was tempting to use the argument as a story. He should have taken Mad Dog. Deadline was tomorrow and still he had no story. Well, there was that lead he had been given about the Collingwood player and a politician’s wife. That was sinking low. He did have some ethics.
Never betray your footy team.
That was like betraying your family. He was glad Bob understood, especially since Bob sat on the Collingwood committee.

When Peter returned a little before eleven o’clock, Shazza was not at her desk and the other journalists were out. Maybe she had crawled off to some darkened corner to die like a poisoned dingo. The others were probably trawling through Melbourne’s dirty knickers to find that titillating story that
The Truth
was renowned for. Reg Whitlock would probably be at Moonee Valley today. The rest of them would be scouring the pubs, clubs, brothels and gutters, mostly based on titbits of information supplied to them by Joe and Joan Public. In Peter’s experience, that information was usually unreliable and largely distorted by whatever mental illness Joe or Joan had been most recently diagnosed with.

Peter rarely dealt with the great unwashed these days: he had his own sources, or
puppies
, as he liked to call them. He had painstakingly built up his puppy farm over the years. When he first met them, some of them smelt and only a few were housetrained, but they were his puppies. When you had reached the top of your game you had your own sources, all carefully cultivated, manicured, fed and watered, and lovingly paid for out of his expense account. Listed as postage and sundries on the company accounts. No more said.

Over the years, puppies had come and gone. Where once he had had a virtual lost dog shelter full of them, over recent years, it had reduced to a mere handful as they had been progressively murdered, found a conscience or retired. Or began dogging to more lucrative media outlets. At the peak, Peter had a puppy at Russell Street police headquarters, another at Parliament House and a third who was a madam at a prominent St Kilda brothel.
Kitty
. Kitty had been a great
source until she had discovered religion and taken up a missionary position somewhere in Africa.
And then there’s the frigging commercial television stations!
They paid far more than Peter could ever afford. TV had cornered the market and made sleaze stories ever harder to get for the paper. Headlines like
S&M Dungeon Discovered at Celebrity Singer’s House
or
Mass Orgy Weekend Planned in Boy’s Boarding School
were drying up.
The Truth
was peddling more petty suburban tattletales, neighbourhood disputes and alien abductions these days, although why they always happened to folk in rural Healesville instead of toffy Toorak remained a mystery. The puppies were finding greener pastures to frolic in.

Peter fell into his chair and mustered all his energies towards generating a lead story. The argument between Concheetah and Tapping Ted would have made a great front cover story, something
The Truth
readers expected:
Celebrity Drag Queen and Boyfriend in Violent Confrontation
. Pity he hadn’t taken Mad Dog to capture the action. Concheetah would never speak to him again but that’s journalism: headlines before emotions. Concheetah was becoming an unreliable puppy anyway. It would be no loss. He would just have to avoid that end of town for a while, in case he got attacked by a stiletto or a flying handbag.
Then again
.

The deadline was the event that all journalists lived by and were controlled by. They didn’t live from day to day—
not tonight, darl, I’m having a deadline
—they lived from deadline to deadline, and each one of them had his or her own way of dealing with the impending event. Some faced it down like an enemy assault, while others tried to distract themselves with idle chatter with colleagues, or cups of coffee and chain smoking. Like death and taxes, a deadline was a certainty. There was no escaping it.

How did Peter Clancy deal with a deadline? Face it down, meet it head on, but only after having another cup of strong coffee, shuffling through files, talking to colleagues, having another cup of coffee and listening to Bob yelling from his office:
You’d better pull your finger out, Clancy!
It always worked. That’s what great editors were. Part martinets, part psychologists. Forget girlfriends, best friends, parents, lovers; the greatest relationship a journo would have ever have would be with a great editor. Robert Damien Xavier Connolly was such an editor.

Peter was dealing with those thoughts and just mapping out his story on the word processor when the door of Bob’s office flew open and a familiar rasping bellow blasted out of it like a sand blasting machine scouring rusted metal.

‘Peter!’ Bob stood in the doorway, or rather blocked it with his ample girth: ‘Get your arse in here.’

‘What the?’ Peter retorted. ‘I’m on a deadline. I’m working my arse off here.’

‘This won’t take long.’

Peter stood up and noticed that Bob was wearing a tie. Bob wearing a tie only meant one thing: he had had a meeting with the owner of the paper.
The office rumours were true.
He was walking slowly towards Bob’s office when a chill suddenly came over him.
The wind of change
.

He should have been filled with trepidation when he entered Bob’s office but he and Bob had a good relationship. They had never had a cross word—strong differences of opinion occasionally, but never a full-on argument. They had a matey banter with each other that had developed out of mutual respect. It was a marriage made in journalistic heaven.

Bob had a cigarette in his mouth and another lit in an overflowing ashtray when Peter entered the smoky office. He squashed into his chair, a ream of documents on the desk in front of him. He loosened his tie but Peter still felt nervous. The Owner was a faceless man who seemed to reside on another planet. You never saw him but his presence was always at the paper. He only thought of the circulation figures, the advertising, not the stories or the people who wrote them. Peter had noted that Bob had been to more meetings of late than normal. From office rumour, he knew that circulation and advertising had dropped off.

‘You look nervous,’ Bob observed as he watched Peter shuffling his feet.

‘You’ve been to another Owner’s meeting. Should we be worried?’ Peter smiled weakly.

‘Why don’t you take a seat,’ Bob replied. ‘You’re making me as nervous as a nun in a brothel.’

Peter eased himself into a rickety chair and sat with his arms folded across his chest.

‘Will you relax?’ Bob guffawed, grabbing a Jameson’s whiskey
bottle from a desk drawer and two glasses. He poured out the whiskey until it nearly reached the brim of the glasses and handed one to Peter.

‘
Slainte
,’ Bob held up his glass and threw back most of the whiskey. Soon after which his bloated face turned a deep crimson.

Peter unfolded his arms. ‘
Slainte
.’ He followed suit, although he raised his glass carefully and took a slow sip.
Champagne and whiskey.
He didn’t want to be too hammered before he hit the Tote after work and became reacquainted with his bed companion.

‘It’s cause for a celebration, mate.’ Bob smiled as he polished off the contents of the glass. He poured himself a refill then waved the bottle over Peter’s glass. Peter covered the glass with his hand.

‘But the Owner?’ he mumbled. ‘Aren’t we in the shit at the moment?’ ‘Not really. Business has been a little slow lately,’ Bob explained. ‘The paper just needs revamping.’