Prophets and Loss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery)

Chapter One

Forgiveness is the most attractive of the virtues. Until you actually have someone to forgive.

When a young detective with bad breath and acne told Melissa Stonelea that her born-again Christian husband Grant had been found strangled in the bondage room of the city’s classiest brothel, his hands trussed with S & M leathers and a page of the Bible stuffed in his mouth, she didn’t need to hear any more of the pastor’s sermons on the healing powers of forgiveness and reconciliation.

She needed revenge.

I’ll kill them, she was sobbing as I let myself into her house, the only brick veneer in a tree-fringed lane of aging weatherboards in Melbourne’s east. I’ll kill them.

From the hallway I could see her standing in the living room, her back to me. Marriage to Grant had gotten her off the pills and into eating at least two good meals a day, but she was still as skinny as an Olympics high jumper. A red floral blouse was half-tucked into a pair of tight blue jeans. Her silky brown hair, normally fashion-model smooth, looked as if it had been trapped in a Qantas 747 downdraft.

She half-turned, and I saw that her long, oval face was etched with dark lines, like wavy creek-bed patterns on parched soil. Her brown eyes were bloodshot. I’ll kill them, she cried again.

Killing solves nothing, Mel, I wanted to say. You just end up filled with hate and bitterness and snake-like demons, and wanting to kill more. I knew that from my own experience.

But I couldn’t tell her. Right now Melissa was in no state to listen to a homily. She hadn’t even noticed me. She seemed to be seeking solace in the living room wall, trying to bury her face in the golden houndstooth patterning.

I hesitated. Should I wait until she was all cried out? No. Melissa was a woman capable of a lot of crying.

As I walked into the living room the sobs turned into a plaintive kitteny whimper. Then without warning she spiraled to the floor with a slow-motion crash, her arms flailing, like a ballerina enacting the dying of a flower.

I hadn’t noticed the uniformed policewoman on guard by the kitchen door. She strode over to help. She was a towering, broad-shouldered woman, taller even than Melissa, a blonde Xena Warrior Princess.

Doctor’s on the way, sweetheart, said the policewoman, as she manipulated Melissa into a sitting posture on the carpet. Just a few more minutes.

A wiry young man in a trim blue suit walked out from the kitchen, a cell phone clutched to his ear. He surveyed the scene.

She’s okay, muttered the woman. Without a word the man slipped back through the doorway.

The policewoman abruptly looked up at me, her eyes glowing with the affection normally reserved for those garden slugs that have crawled up the drainpipe into your shower cabinet on cold mornings, seeking warmth. You’re her friend?

I nodded.

Melissa lifted her head, and for the first time she realized that I had arrived.

Johnny! she called. Johnny! Her voice was raspy and choked. It sounded as if she were trying to cry some more, but couldn’t. I knelt down beside her and we embraced. I held her tight, and it seemed to put a little energy into her.

It was him, Johnny, she said.

It was who? I had no idea what she meant. I waited.

It was him.

The policewoman spoke: We’ve just been to the morgue to identify her husband.

It was Grant, said Melissa. It was him. He’s dead.

Now she really was sobbing again. I stroked her hair.

They wanted to take me to the police station to answer lots of questions, she cried. But I told them to bring me here. Even in her grief she instinctively reacted against authority.

She stood up unaided, walked to the wall, banged on it twice with a fist and then slumped on the sofa. New torrents of tears arrived. The policewoman sat beside her and held her hand.

I wished I could be anywhere but in this house with an Amazonian policewoman and the pimply-faced young man in the kitchen who was almost certainly a detective. But Melissa had distressingly few friends left after Grant did his time in prison. She needed me.

I made a big pretence of examining all the pictures in the living room. They were everywhere. The place looked like a gallery. I’d seen them many times of course, but until now hadn’t fully grasped that I featured in so many. Another indication of how few friends had remained.

Melissa had arranged everything into neat, thematic groups. That was typical. She was always putting everything into categories. Apparently all part of her attempt to gain some control over her existence. So why did everything in her life keep falling apart?

I knew little about her past. She’d been a revue dancer once. Long legs don’t hinder your progress in that profession. I’d even spotted her one time in a high-kicking line-up of girls, in a late-night TV rerun of Countdown with Molly Meldrum. She was still a teenager, and she was great: tall, energetic, full of natural rhythm and a winning smile. Trouble was, so were all the other girls.

So she spent a lot of time between jobs.

As far as I could see, the only thing that had gone right for her was marriage to Grant. And now he was lying in the police morgue, his organs about to be prodded and dissected by the coroner.

In pride of place above the unused fireplace were framed snaps of Grant and Melissa, from their wedding a few years earlier. Big beefy Grant, his round, expectant eyes sparkling, like a kid just offered the newest Nintendo game, and a grin so wide you were almost blinded by the dazzle from his teeth. And Melissa, nearly as tall, clutching Grant’s muscular arm, a smile of defiance on her face only slightly undermined by a pair of nervous eyes.

On a side wall was a collection of photos she’d found in an envelope in my apartment one day. There I was, more than two decades earlier, looking so young and small, standing in my battle fatigues in the mountains and waving aloft my M16 semi-automatic. And there I was once more, ten years later, still optimistic, smiling and linking arms with a group of compatriots, not one of whom had escaped the brutal Indonesian army death squads.

I think it’s very romantic that you used to be an East Timorese freedom fighter, Melissa once told me.

Mel, if only you knew.

I gazed at the ripped Fretilin rebel flag - a present from me - over on the other wall by the kitchen. I’d carried that flag through scores of confrontations with the Indonesian invaders. The colors were faded, and it looked more like a cleaning rag than a battle standard. For some reason it was part of the religious theme zone, next to a gaudy picture of Jesus dying on the cross, that Mel had hung there after Grant’s dramatic prison conversion. Melissa, in her stop-start manner, might have followed Grant into church, but often it seemed that for her religion was little more than a design motif.

I glanced at her. The crying jag had subsided and she was sipping from a glass of water.

The slender young man in the kitchen had apparently finished his conversation. He emerged, slipping the cell phone into one pocket and, from another pocket, substituting a notebook and pen. He came straight to me.

Gotta ask some questions, he said. I have your name from Mrs Stonelea as Johnny Raveen. That correct? He was short for a cop, no bigger than me. I wondered if the force had lowered their height requirements. His black hair was neatly slicked back. His thin eyes were earnest and enquiring. He could have been working at the local bank branch, taking details of my mortgage application.

He was looking intently at his notebook, as if it were the stationery itself that was required to answer. I noticed he had the spelling wrong. It was Ravine, not Raveen. Yeah, sounds right, I answered. That wasn’t a lie.

You’re not a relative of Mrs Stonelea?

No.

Mrs Stonelea asked us to call you. You’re a friend of her and her late husband?

Yeah. Both of them. I walked around the room a little and looked at my watch. When the policewoman phoned me she said it looked like someone killed Grant?

He scribbled something, then looked at me with his lean eyes. I don’t have further detail. There’ll be an autopsy. But my information is that a girl at the establishment, a working girl, was together in the room with him, went away and came back to find him dead.

Hands tied behind his back.

As far as I know.

Kinky games? I tilted my head in a knowing fashion, but the cop was all business.

There’ll be an autopsy. Can I have your occupation please.

I handed the guy my card.

Father & Son Investigations

Johnny Ravine

Private Investigator

Missing Persons a Specialty

He looked at it and smirked. Idealistic young detectives regarded PIs like me in the same way journalism school graduates thought of PR consultants: worn-out hacks who had taken the money and done the hundred-meter dash. They didn’t know that some of their older colleagues were asking if I knew of any job vacancies.

Ravine with an ‘i’, he said and altered his notes. He was quick. A lot of the young ones are. Chasing ambulances, are we? He lowered his voice so Melissa wouldn’t hear. You won’t have much trouble finding this missing person. He’s in the morgue. He grinned like a hyena at his own joke, his eyes narrowing to the point where they almost disappeared.

I tried to restrain my annoyance. And I certainly wasn’t going to let on that it was actually a pleasant change to live in a country where policemen made jokes. I’m a family friend.

He was still smiling. How long have you known Mr and Mrs Stonelea?

Another leading question. BC or AD? Before the clink, or after deliverance?

It was his time behind bars that helped turn Grant into a tub-thumping, born-again Christian. Until then he had been shadier than an Amazon rainforest.

He had been notorious. Want some money laundered? Ask Grant Stonelea. A bit of dodgy share trading? Grant again. Visiting businessman requests a woman escort or two for personal services. Grant will fix you up. Indonesians need smuggling into Australia? Done, complete with elaborate sets of phony identification papers.

All accomplished with a slap on the back and that trademark grin. Life was a game for Grant. One victimless crime after another. So his murder had to be related to those days.

I met Grant in Indonesia, I answered. In Jakarta. About a year ago.

The interrogation was halted by a ring of the doorbell. The policewoman opened the door and let in a middle-aged man with gristly white hair and weary eyes. He was clutching one of those black, crinkled, box-like leather cases that only doctors are allowed to carry.

The two police officers held a whispered consultation with the medico in the center of the room, and then he sat beside Melissa on the sofa. He took her pulse and blood pressure, asked her some quiet questions and administered an injection.

I could do nothing more. The sedative would soon take effect. It was time to leave, before the police questions became too probing. I needed to think. They could catch up with me later.

But Melissa wasn’t asleep yet. She still had fight in her. In front of our nervous gaze she stood. Her hands were trembling, her face was taut. She walked slowly to the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was a shiny Jesus statuette, the size of my hand. I recognized it as a present to Grant from a local group of Timorese refugees. She grasped the figurine, raised it high in the air and then hurled it against the wall. We all ducked as chips of porcelain splintered about the room.

And then with a fury that seemed unreal Melissa let loose a piercing scream: I hate you God. The policewoman caught her as she fell.

As I slipped out the front door I thought to myself: I know how you feel, Mel. I know how you feel.

Chapter Two

A mild early-autumn breeze had changed to a sullen southerly. It was cold and gloomy, even at 6:30 in the evening.

From Grant and Melissa’s house to my apartment was just an eight-minute hobble, back down the lane, onto the Maroondah Highway and then a short cut through the smash repair’s. Actually, it wasn’t really a hobble. More a gentle swaying movement. Shrapnel does that to a foot.

Hulking green garbage bins were lined up along the footpath like rows of miniature bathing sheds, waiting for the next morning’s rubbish collection. The wind had blown a bag of food scraps from one of the bins onto the street, and a couple of stray crows were pecking at these. Under the flat glare of the streetlamps they seemed as big as hens. I paused, then made a mock lunge, but they held their ground. In the mountains of East Timor a pair of plump, sluggish birds like these would quickly become dinner for four.

What was going to happen to Melissa? I’d known her for only the year that I’d been living in Australia, but I had heard the stories. The pills, the men, the abortions, the drugs. She was as fragile as a supermodel’s ego. Only marriage to Grant held her life together.

And Grant. It occurred to me that I had been so concerned with Melissa that I had hardly thought about him.

Dead.

He had been so full of life. So on fire. The lovable larrikin. Everybody’s best mate. Mine, and Melissa’s too. Yet not with a lot of true friends.

It was Grant who smuggled me into Australia, with sixty other Indonesians, in a converted minesweeper that was meant to accommodate ten. Grant, ever hands-on, actually captained the boat himself, rather than hiring a cheap crew. We landed somewhere in a remote part of Northern Queensland - don’t mind crocodiles, I hope, hah, hah, hah - and when he discovered I spoke fluent English he urged me to join him in his business ventures.

I reflected on death. I had lost virtually all my friends in the mountains of East Timor, shot, napalmed and tortured by the Indonesian army death squads. They had murdered my mother, and my wife as well. Death was a constant of my life.

Now, an illegal refugee in Melbourne, I was mourning the death of my only real friend in the bondage room of a local whorehouse. I had come to Australia seeking a new life. Was it any wonder I sometimes felt dazed and confused?

* * *

My home was what the posh Southbank real estate agents would call a studio suite. But you wouldn’t get away with that in Box Hill, so it was just a one-room apartment. It was enough. A living room with a sofa and a bed, and a small kitchen that overlooked the smash repair’s. All day long I could hear the banging of the panel beating hammers, the hissing of the spray-painting hoses and the noisy arguments over price.

I unlocked the front door and went back to the dinner that I had been eating when the policewoman phoned with the news about Grant. Leftover rice didn’t taste much different from having been left on the plate for another hour.

I was nearly done when someone knocked at the door. Who was coming to my place unannounced at night? I had fewer friends than Grant and Melissa. Surely it wasn’t the police already? I took a nervous glance out the kitchen window, and was relieved to see the shuffling figure of Pastor Ron Thomas, no doubt here to talk about Grant.

The pastor was a tall, angular man of seventy or more. He reminded me of an illustration in one of the picture books the nuns used for teaching basic English back home in Dili, antique volumes from Portugal, probably recycled from Angola, via Mozambique, via Goa. It was a book of nursery rhymes.

There was a crooked man, and he had a crooked dog. The cartoon next to the text portrayed an elderly man, his body twisted at all angles like a contortionist. That was the image that came back every time I encountered the pastor. If you saw him standing in the distance in the mist you’d wonder if you were looking at a person or at one of those stark, denuded trees in a Sidney Nolan painting of the Australian outback.

Though of course he hadn’t been too happy when I told him he reminded me of a crooked man. In English, as in life in modern-day Melbourne, nuance is everything,

I opened the door. He nodded and then wordlessly walked in and subsided into my sofa. He was wearing a baggy blue suit, probably purchased from the local charity shop, and a thin green tie. Even seated he couldn’t keep straight. He looked at me with his shoulders slumped and his head jutting out, like an eagle on a cliff ledge surveying its territory. It seemed he might at any moment soar into the kitchen and start pecking at the remains of my rice.

Grant; dead in a brothel, he said in his gravely voice.

I waited.

Not good, he pronounced. Not good at all.

There were two reasons why I appreciated Pastor Thomas. The first was that he always got straight to the point.

The other reason, ironically, was that he sometimes scared me.

After I came to Australia, bored and lonely and bitter, I’d started tentatively attending church. Most of the reverends I met - even a couple of women ministers - were far too matey. They’d say G’day and slap you on the back and ask after your relatives, and each Sunday after church when they engaged you in small talk they always seemed to remember precisely three things about you.

Pastor Thomas wasn’t like that. He didn’t care about your relatives. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He cared about them, but they came about number eighteen on any list of things that concerned him. Right at the top was your spiritual progress.

Life is a journey, he sometimes growled at me. It’s all about your spiritual growth.

So where does torture by the Indonesian military fit? I had asked him.

Read your Bible. Look at Saint Paul. He was tortured. Didn’t do his spiritual development any harm.

My wife. Jacinta. They murdered her. Not to mention my mother.

And that’s why you hate God? Think what would have happened if you didn’t believe in God at all. You’d have gone crazy.

I did go crazy. After Jacinta died I shot up every Indonesian soldier I could find.

You’d have shot yourself if you hadn’t had God to blame.

And so he worked on me, always keeping me off-guard, always one step ahead, always leaving me not quite sure whether it was the pastor or God Himself who was speaking to me.

Occasionally I even believed him. Often enough at least to be an irregular member of his congregation. And when Grant went to prison I asked the pastor to visit him there and counsel him. He did and won his conversion with his power and sincerity.

In technical parlance, Grant had been saved. And it really was a three-octave, multi-syllabled sa-a-a-a-a-a-ved hallelu-u-u-u-jah, just like one of those performances by the American televangelists, with flowing tears and heaps of repentance. Then, newly released from prison, and not being one to let pass a chance for the dramatic gesture, Grant had insisted on being baptized in the Yarra River, with the church choir standing on the riverbank singing Amazing Grace.

He was a model for our church, Pastor Thomas was saying. He was a new man. He paused. I’ve just been to the house. Mel’s out cold. The doctor reckons she’ll sleep until tomorrow. The police said a private investigator named Johnny Ravine was the first to visit her, but suddenly disappeared.

I shrugged my shoulders and waited for him to speak again.

With his twisted, tramp-like appearance, his growling voice and the long pauses he employed between sentences, Pastor Thomas sometimes appeared senile.

It was an effective disguise - whether deliberate or not I never knew - for the fact