Murder was da case he lost...

As I entered the office I strode up to the metal pole in the middle of our open-plan workspace to read the roster for the next fortnight. I knew before I even looked that I would have been, without fail, rostered on for both Sundays, taking my unbroken Sunday run to nine.

"It's meant to be one in two, Mahoney," I shouted across the office at the Deputy Editor.

"Swings and roundabouts, Steve, swings and roundabouts," he called as he leant back in his reclining leather office chair, picking at the gold bar securing his tie to his "yes, I am doing well, thanks" blue shirt with white cuffs and collar.

The Sunday rostering system was my chief annoyance at the Advertiser. When I was hired Mahoney told me I would have to work roughly every second Sunday. What he meant was that he would ask the senior staff on Thursdays, then roster the youngest people on after the established journos told him to piss off. He would then restore "balance" to the system by vocally pointing out every time you weren't rostered on for Sunday, as if one weekend off a quarter was an industrial relations breakthrough on par with the 40-hour week.

As I stood quietly fuming in front of the roster, something else caught my eye. In the photographers' section of the new roster, one row consisted almost entirely of question marks. I pondered this irregularity for a second, recalling for some reason Jim Carrey's subtly-nuanced portrayal of The Riddler in the classic Batman Forever, before I realised why there was confusion surrounding this particular photographer and his work availability.

"So Stu fronts the court this week," I asked Dane in a way that made placing a question mark at the end of the sentence almost impossible. I mean, it was definitely a question, but it was very well disguised as a statement- no upward inflexion etc- if you were there there'd be no mistaking it, but on paper it doesn't look right, so that's why I'm telling you. It was a question.

"Yep, he's there on Monday," Dane answered (see?).

"What do you reckon?"

"After all this time, to be honest I'd feel a bit cheated if he didn't go to jail. It'd be like someone telling a joke for two years and then walking away before telling you the punchline," Dane said.

"You blokes talking about Stu?" Les had overheard our conversation and the cruel glint in his eye suggested he had something to say on the topic. He rolled himself across the linoleum floor on his chair to where we were standing. "If that bloke isn't as guilty as sin I'll sit in Rossco's lap for the next week."***

In fact, Stu's guilt was not in doubt. He'd already pleaded guilty to "Inflicting Grievous Bodily Harm With The Intent To Kill" some months earlier, and had been awaiting sentence since then. In fact, ever since I joined the esteemed ranks of the Advertiser, Stu had been awaiting something or other. The Stu Saga had been going for years now, with seemingly interminable delays between each step of the legal process- from the charge, to the committal, to the plea, to the plea bargain, to the sentencing had taken three-and-a-half years.

I first stumbled across the story on my second day in the job, when Dane had asked me which photographer I was going out on a job with. When he heard it was Stu, he just said: "Ask him about when he tried to kill his wife." Needless to say I didn't. Instead we made small talk. I was about to write "the usual small talk", but with Stu, no conversation could be covered by an adjective like "usual". Just 10 minutes into our 70 minute journey, Stu turned to me with a knowing grin and asked:

"A young guy like you must do pretty well with the girls."

"Not really", I said, as I was still only fresh out of boarding school, and thus still wore terror of the opposite sex as cologne.

Stu then fixed me with an altogether different type of grin, one I would become too familiar with over time. With his eyes leering left at me as he drove, his tongue peeked out the right side of his mouth. This was a bad look, not only because it meant you were about to hear a perverted story, but because it highlighted Stu's mole-like looks. He was short, fat and balding, in his mid-30s and wore small round glasses. He would invariably wear a blue felt Akubra to work, in winter accompanied by a long grey trenchcoat, apparently in an attempt to clear up any confusion as to whether you would let your children near him or not.

"Tell you what you should do, mate," he said, his fat little face lighting up, "get on the internet. There are so many sluts around Wagga, you wouldn't believe it. They just sit around their houses on the computer waiting for someone, then they jump on it. Take last night, for example..."

"You can keep it," I thought, but I was well and truly a rabbit in the headlights by this time.

"I had just put the boys to bed, and was on the computer, and I found this skank out at Glenfield (a very young family dominated area of town) and started talking to her. Half an hour later mate, she's at my place going down on me, and before you know it we're doing it. She was an animal, she loved it. Unbelievable."

"Really?" I asked, trying to make my internal horror appear on my face as a look of ice-cool interest.

"Yeah mate, a young bloke like you would kill it," he said in his soft, weaselly voice, followed by a high-pitched giggle.

"What was she like?"

"Like I said mate, an animal..."

"No, I meant, what did she look like."

"Oh, she was a bit heavy mate, but I don't care, you gotta take what you can get, and baby, was I gettin' it."

From there on the rest of the trip consisted of Stu recounting every internet encounter he'd ever had, including a few he would have liked to have had, while I contemplated leaping from a car going 110kmh and whether the likely consequences of such an action would outweigh the costs of hearing stories that included phrases like "her finger up my date". On the ride home Stu put the sex stories away and told me his life story, which mostly dealt with his two young sons, one of whom had Muscular Dystrophy. (This will be the last mention of them, because they make it too depressing. Let's pretend they're not there.) There was no mention of his court case. I had to wait until Car Trip Number Two for that one.

I returned to the office after the first trip a trifle shaken, and reeking of meatballs. The meatball scent was due to the foot-long Subway meatball sub that had been festering in the sun in the back of the car during our two-and-a-bit-hour trip. Stu printed off the photo for the story we had covered and I took it to Juz the chief sub-editor, who wanted to see it.

"Is this it?" she shouted, looking horrified. I hadn't looked at it yet. "Didn't you tell him it was for the front page?" I had. "It's almost kiddie porn!"

The photo was an unnerving close up of a young girl shoving a sauce-covered sausage into her mouth.

"We can't run this on the front page. We'll have to shuffle the stories around. F--- he's useless. He's a f---in' sicko." As you can see, bad language in the workplace transcends gender lines in the news business. I walked back to my desk, feeling a bit annoyed that my story wasn't going to be on the front anymore, just because Stu took a sexually suggestive photo of a young girl.

"How was it?" Dane asked me.

"Interesting," I said, already repressing the memory of Stu telling me how much a certain woman liked a certain thing in a certain place. "What's with the sub in the car?" I asked.

Dane filled me in. Apparently Stu was, like Bake******, a tightarse of Bradmanesque proportions. Caltex was constantly running a "get a free sub with your petrol" deal, and Stu, eyeing off the company's car fleet, insisted on refilling all the cars each day, thereby pocketing up to six feet of free salad roll. He would then take the free rolls home and freeze them as dinner for his kids. I later experienced countless examples of Stu's thriftiness firsthand. Often Stu would arrive to take pictures of an event, say for example a Country Women's Association bake sale, and help himself to scones, pies, slices that had been set aside for judging, or for a lunch that was still hours away. If the aforementioned scones/pies/slices were not out in the open, Stu would just approach the nearest organiser and say something like "I'm from the paper, can I just have some of the food." It could be embarrassing at official functions, when you (as a diligent professional) had organised and set up a photo only to turn around and see that Stu had left to find the free food. "You've got to take what you can get, mate. If they offer it, take as much as you can, and if they don't, take even more," was his mantra, he explained to me on a ride back from a house where Stu had walked up to the family's fridge, opened it, and helped himself. Stu had once taken his stinginess too far and been convicted of insurance fraud, after he pushed his old car into the Murrumbidgee River. Apparently the insurance company sensed something was wrong when the car contained absolutely no personal possessions.

Speaking of convictions, the first time Stu mentioned his ongoing legal troubles was on our second ever car trip together.

"I suppose you've heard about the court case," he asked me.

"Yeah, I've heard a bit," I said, casually trying to sound like I hadn't been asking everyone except him about it all morning.

"It's all bullshit mate. The ex-wife reckons I tried to kill her, but I don't even remember it happening. It's the only time I've ever drunk, and I don't remember any of it, so she's just telling everyone whatever she wants. Reckons I drugged her and locked us in the garage with the car running. So now I've been charged with attempted murder. Bullshit. She's a psycho."

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah mate, she's a nutcase. If I'd known that I wouldn't have stolen her off my mate."

"What?"

"Yeah, he was hitting her, and I started looking after her, and one thing led to another. She was a maniac mate, but had the best body. A little gymnast. So tidy, you wouldn't believe it. And the sex... Oh, mate, she was a maniac there as well. Get this, I'd wake up in the morning and she'd set the alarm early so we could do it, then on my lunch break we'd do it twice, then at least twice that night, that's about 35-40 times a week mate. She wore me out mate, you see me now, I used to be about 10 kilos lighter, just from all the sex, she was so..." At this point I zoned out, because I could tell, now that his tongue was poking through the corner of his mouth, that I was about to get details I didn't want or need. I zoned back in again at... "so she started telling people I was hitting her, which no one believed, and then she legged it to Tasmania with some bloke and she doesn't want anything to do with the kids, but every now and then she turns up and tries to take them."

About 12 months and 140 sickening internet dalliances after this conversation took place, Stu told us all that he'd pleaded guilty to the lesser charge mentioned at the start of the story, but "only because it means I won't go to jail." At this statement, there were a few disappointed sighs. In the relatively white bread world of journalism, I think quite a few people were looking forward to telling people they knew someone who was in jail. However, Chief Photographer Les made a prediction that day that he would spend the rest of his career reminding people of at the pub.

"He's a f---in' idiot. They've got him. I bet when it's actually sorted out, the fact that he's admitted to doing something will mean they'll jack the charge up on him at the last minute, and he'll be touching his toes in the shower in no time."

I was still arguing with Mahoney about the Sunday roster when we got the call from Stu's mum.

"Five years, 18 months good behaviour. They jacked the charge up on him at the last minute. He'll be touching his toes in the shower in no time."

Dane picked up a permanent marker, walked up to the roster and replaced the question marks with thick black bars.

Sports Editor Les broke the silence.

"Toodle pip, Stu, don't come back."


Epilogue: Two weeks after Stu went to jail, Fred the maintenance guy was cleaning out one of the cars. He popped the glove box open and discovered a three-week old turkey foot-long jammed in it, accompanied by a Caltex fuel voucher.

*** To understand this reference, read the entry titled "I hate the smell of Rossco in the morning...". I've started making these entries intertextual in an attempt to force people into reading them all.

****** See "Can I have another piece of chocolate cake..."