Witness Protection Trophy Wives

Eddie and I sat down on the couch while Maria threw herself into an armchair opposite in a highly dramatic way, appropriate as she should have had the words 'Drama Queen' inscribed on her tee-shirt. We were fixed by glares by the indignant young Eastern European.

It was Eddie who spoke up first. "So Maria, what's the problem this morning?"

Maria was her usual smart-ass self. "You two are supposed to be detectives, but as you not smart enough to work it out for yourselves, I tell you. I am pissed off, because I am locked up like criminal and babysat by idiots. You do not supply me with enough toilet paper and when I need to go to toilet you keep me waiting for more toilet paper because you watch video of silly old man driving car too slowly, then you laugh and do jokes about me making smell when I finally get to sit on toilet and have poo. Dmitry and his brothers Alexie and Ivan get things better than I do. I want out of this hell-hole."

As was often the case, Maria folded her arms, sulking and petulant and generally behaving like a spoiled child who hadn't gotten her own way for once.

"Maria, we have been through this plenty of times in the past," I said, trying to keep patient. "Your husband Dmitry and his brothers want you dead for handing over that information to the police and to stop you testifying in court, as do a lot of their associates. You have to stay here to keep you safe, under our protection. And your husband and his brothers are on remand in prison awaiting trial, so you can't say they have it worse than you."

"Here is stupid and boring, and I even have to ask for toilet paper to wipe my bottom," complained Maria, obviously not letting this morning's events go. "There is nothing to do, I have to eat crap food and play stupid video games, or watch dumb TV and DVD's and talk to idiots and cannot go anywhere."

"Maria, of course you can't go anywhere," said Eddie. "We've told you a hundred times, your husband wants you dead. We've got him banged up in jail at the moment along with Alexie and Ivan, but they've still got plenty of connections and contacts outside of prison. There's a big price-tag on your head, and lots of dangerous people want you dead before you can testify in court."

"It's not just the Russian crime syndicate your husband is involved in," I said. "Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan have plenty of business dealings with the Italian Mafia, Asian Triads, high level drug dealers and outlaw motorcycle gangs both in Australia and New Zealand. You think they want you giving evidence in court? I don't think so. Plus your husband and those brothers of his are dangerous enough inside prison. If they get bail -- and they've got high-priced lawyers working on that every day -- imagine what is going to happen?"

"You're like the jackpot prize on a quiz show," Eddie pointed out to Maria. "The big prize at the end that everybody wants to win but few take the risk."

"'Quiz' not 'quz' and 'big' not 'bug'," snapped Maria, taunting Eddie's New Zealand accent. "You Kiwis sound so stupid. You say pig not pug, pug is small dog, you say fish not 'fush', what the fuck is a fush? And that thing in kitchen that keep food cold is a fridge not a frudge. I speak better English than you, and I born and raised in Russia."

"Don't test my patience Maria, just don't test me," Eddie warned.

"There nothing you can do about it, I way too important to your bosses, and you have to be nice to me and protect me at any cost," Maria shot back.

"Maria, you have to cooperate with us so we can protect you from Dmitry," I said. "Your husband is a dangerous man with a lot of dangerous contacts."

"Of course I know, I married to Dmitry, I know what he is like," spat Maria. "And his stupid brothers, knowing Alexie and Ivan make me glad I am an only child."

"Yes, they aren't exactly nice people," said Eddie. "Especially younger brother Ivan, he's nuttier than a fruitcake. Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan consider murder a means of running a successful business. Without us here to protect you, you will be fished out of Port Phillip Bay or found dead in a wheelie bin."

"Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan are on serious charges, but not one of them up for murder," Maria pointed out. "I give you information about drug trafficking, racketeering, horse race fixing and money laundering, but I know nothing of any murders."

"Our colleagues are working at the moment to get a murder charge to stick against them," I said. "We understand you don't know of any murders your husband and his brothers either committed in person or ordered. But we know they are responsible for at least six deaths."

"Well, if you so sure they commit murders, charge them," snapped Maria.

"There's teams of detectives working around the clock trying to get the evidence that will make the murder charges stick in court and then Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan will be going away for life with no parole," I said.

Maria sneered at me. "That never happen, police in Australia too useless."

I could see Eddie was losing patience, and he had hold of his laptop, holding up the screen where there were six squares showing six different faces, five men and one woman. "Look at these faces Maria, these are the six people we know that your ex and his brothers had killed in recent years."

Maria regarded the laptop and Eddie with contempt in equal measures. Eddie pointed at the first face, a scrawny man aged in his mid-20s with a scruffy, ill-kempt appearance.

"This is Rodney Phillips, a street level criminal, drug user, lowest on the food chain," said Eddie. "His job was a courier, delivering things around Melbourne for your husband's crime network. Until the day he fucked up, and was caught by the police throwing an envelope containing 50 grand in cash into a bin on the St Kilda foreshore after the cops chased him for a traffic violation."

"Lucky for Rodney, he got a good legal aid lawyer, this guy here, Mark Morgan," I said, pointing to the slim red-haired young man in the next square. "Very left-wing, very ambitious, full of social justice warrior ambition. He was able to help Rodney spin some tale about finding the cash and thinking about keeping it to pay off some gambling debts, then panicking when the police chased him, and to tell him to answer no comment to everything else. This story couldn't be disproved, so Rodney was released without charge."

"So what happened to Rodney?" Eddie asked rhetorically. "Well, that very night he was found dead in an alley in Fitzroy with a blunt, dirty needle in his arm, a hot shot of pure heroin, enough to kill an elephant."

"I don't think your husband nor your brothers in law were too happy about him losing 50 grand of illegal cash before it could be safely laundered," I said. "But they don't really have an HR department that has a formal warning system in their organization."

"He was junkie, probably just overdosed," said Maria.

"Except heroin wasn't his usual drug of choice, and criminals on his level on the food chain could not get hold of drugs that pure," said Eddie. "Plus the post mortem of the body showed he had been beaten up prior to death, very brutally. Who did that?"

"And that night in an amazing coincidence the legal aid lawyer who got Rodney off died too, in a house fire," I said. "Clearly he knew too much for Dmitry and Alexie's liking."

"Or it just coincidence, house fire do happen," Maria pointed out.

"And another amazing coincidence is that Ivan is an electrician, that the fire was caused by somebody fooling around with the electrics and a post mortem on Mark Morgan's body seemed to indicate he was already unconscious when the fire started," said Eddie.

"So, I don't care, dead junkie and dead do-gooder lawyer not my problem," said Maria.

"If you think that your husband and his family wouldn't hurt a woman, think again Maria," I said. I pointed at a picture of the only woman on the list, a woman aged about 40 with brown bobbed hair and glasses.

"This is Rose Wilson," I said. "An ex union lawyer turned politician who saw communism as an ideal form of government. So who better to donate to her campaign for re-election than three charming brothers from Russia, the home of communism?"

"What happened to Rose Wilson?" Eddie asked, knowing full well Maria knew the answer. "Well, she found out the hard way that doing business with your husband has strings attached. When she didn't get Dmitry and Alexie what they wanted, she vanished and two weeks later her badly decomposed body was found floating in Port Phillip Bay, strangled by her pantyhose and missing a leg courtesy of a shark."

"This all happen before Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan arrested, they in prison now," said Maria, sighing and shrugging her shoulders.

Eddie laughed sardonically. "If you think they can't get to people from behind bars, think again Maria." He pointed at another face, this a skinny middle-aged man with a weathered face. "This is Nick Smith, he runs a dive shop down near Frankston on the Mornington Peninsula. Correction, he used to run a dive shop."

"He was very useful to your husband," I said to Maria. "Not only could he go out into the ocean at night and retrieve packages of drugs dropped by boats, he could also help him launder money through his business."

"Yes, the number of people learning to scuba dive was incredible," said Eddie. "We approached Nick Smith when Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan were arrested, and offered him witness protection in return for testifying against them, and he refused. Told us to fuck off. But he knew too much, so what happened to him? Found beaten to death a week later by your husband's associates on the outside, his neck broken and the body thrown into a wheelie bin."

"This other guy did agree to testify," I said, pointing at the fourth of the five men, a grotesquely obese man with a pony-tail. "Graham Tyler, a panel shop owner, useful to your husband and your brothers-in-law by importing drugs in car panels and laundering money. Well, he didn't have much choice about giving evidence considering the sickening images we found on his computer, he was going to be spending a long time with the rock spiders anyway."

"Yeah, I already know about him, he commit suicide in prison," said Maria. "Lots of pedophiles commit suicide, it should be encouraged."

"Maria, if he hanged himself then everything we know about the laws of physics is wrong," said Eddie. "He was in protective custody in the nonce unit with all the pedos and perverts, but Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan still managed to get to him and have him murdered and the scene dressed up to look like suicide."

"Blah, blah, blah, dead child molester, cry me fucking river," sneered Maria. "And if you want to find out who did it, look for guy with hernia because lifting up that fat asshole to put noose around neck would injure anyone."

"Maria, our point is that if your husband and his brothers got a witness in a secure prison unit that houses pedophiles murdered, they will have even less problem murdering you if they find out where you are. That's why you need to cooperate with us, and follow our instructions. Otherwise you'll end up dead like your cousin Leon." I pointed at the sixth photo on the page, a blonde man several years younger than Maria.

"Leon not murdered, Leon is missing," said Maria. "Get your facts right."

"Exactly, Leon is missing," said Eddie. "Why do you think Leon is missing, and nobody has seen or heard of him since the last confirmed sighting of him at Altona Beach in September 2009?"

"Lots of people go missing," said Maria. "There could be 100 reasons why Leon vanished."

I shook my head. "Come on Maria, what are you? Naïve? I don't think so. Your cousin is missing because your husband and his brothers made him disappear."

"You don't know that," said Maria.

"Your cousin stupidly boasted about his affiliations on his My Space page and other social media," said Eddie. "Thought of himself as a gangster. I think that would have pissed off Dmitry and those brothers of his no end."

"Still it doesn't prove that Dmitry, Alexie or Ivan killed Leon," said Maria. "Or that they paid somebody else to do it. Leon is missing person, not murdered person."

"Maria, what do you think happens to missing people?" I asked. "Do you think that Leon was walking down the street one day minding his own business and a UFO came down and abducted him and took him away to another planet? Do you think he got sucked into another dimension?"

"How should I know?" Maria spat. "Maybe he did." She shrugged her shoulders and glared at us.

Eddie laughed ironically and shook his head. "Yes, that big alternate dimension where all the missing people end up. Maybe right now Leon is enjoying a round of golf with Lord Lucan, Jimmy Hoffa and Judge Crater? Or perhaps he's gone to the beach for a surf with Harold Holt?"

"Yes," I agreed, taking some amusement in the sour look on the young Russian woman's pretty face. "After Harold Holt and Leon have finished their surf perhaps they can go out sailing with Donald Crowhurst on the Marie Celeste, or enjoy a spot of scuba diving with Buster Crabb? Not that there's a shortage of interesting things to do in that alternate dimension full of missing people. Tomorrow when Leon wakes up in the house where he rents a room from the Springfield Three, he'll probably be meeting his girlfriend Dorothy Arnold and they will go hiking in the hills with her friends Paula Welden and Maura Murray."

"And the next day, Leon will be meeting his good friends Glenn Miller and DB Cooper, and they will be taking their flying lesson taught by Amelia Earhart and the crew of Flight 19," said Eddie. "Then he will go riding on his horse Shergar."

"I don't know who half those people are, but I presume they people who vanish and you talk about them to piss me off," snapped Maria. "And you succeed, you make me so pissed off that I wish I could vanish too."

"I wouldn't say that too loud," I warned her. "Your ex, his brothers and their associates would be only too happy to grant that wish."

"I hate it here, it sucks," said Maria, folding her arms in her usual petulant way.

"Well just think Maria, after you've testified and put your husband and his brothers away for life, you will be starting a new life under a new identity," said Eddie.

"I want to go somewhere interesting like New York, London or Paris," snapped Maria. "Do not try sending me to another Australian city like Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth or Darwin. And I most definitely do not want to go and live in New Zealand with people like you."

"That isn't up to us or to you," I reminded Maria. "But for now you just have to be patient."

"Patient, patient, patient, I tired of being patient," whined Maria. "It is so boring."

"Maria, we've given you a treadmill and we know you like using it," said Eddie. "If you're feeling bored or upset, how about you go and have a run on it and work out your frustrations?"

Maria glared at him. "I feel like mouse or rat running on wheel when I on that machine."

I handed Maria a box of DVD's. "Well if you don't feel like going on your treadmill, I'm sure there's a DVD in here you might like to watch."

Maria glared at me with her blue eyes, took the box and started going through it. "Stupid, stupid, boring, depressing, confusing, crap, for kids, too stupid for spastics and mongoloids, even more stupid film made for retards." As she picked up each DVD, she threw it over her shoulder onto the floor for Eddie and I to pick up, before she picked up one but didn't comment, and looked at the cover.

"Do you like that movie Maria?" I asked hopefully.

She looked at Eddie and I, a sneering smile on her face. "When I go to toilet to have a shit this morning, this movie is like what came out of my ass and what was smeared on my toilet paper I use to wipe my bottom."

With that, Maria threw the DVD onto the floor with the others and stormed out of the living room on her bare feet, cursing and swearing in Russian. All Eddie and I could do was stare at each other, shake our heads, and pick up the DVDs while waiting for our shifts to end.

*

Eddie and I were understandably glad to finish our shift of watching overgrown spoiled brat Maria and keeping her safe, and our replacement officers were Harry and Cassie. Harry was a tall thin man aged in his mid-50s, with a stern expression like a judge or high school principal. Cassie was a reasonably attractive woman aged in her late 30s with her blonde hair in a pixie bob. However while a nice person in looks and personality her only sexual interest was in people with two X chromosomes like herself. If you had a Y chromosome, you were out.

"So how is Maria this morning?" Cassie asked, as she and Harry completed handover with Eddie and I.

"On a bitch scale of 1 to 10, 11, maybe even a 12," said Eddie. "Put these words into a sentence -- spoiled, Maria, a, is, brat."

"Yeah, she's acting like a complete spoiled brat as usual," I said. "When I was a kid, my sister had a friend who was an only child from a rich family. I thought she was spoiled, but she's no match for Maria."

Cassie laughed. "I thought my brother was spoiled. You know how he still lives at home with our parents studying one useless university degree after another, never had a full time job and Mum still does his washing and ironing despite the fact that he is nearly 40-years-old."

"When I was younger I was assigned to escorting an overseas diplomat, his wife and his two teenage daughters around Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra on an official tour," said Harry. "I thought I would never meet anybody more spoiled than those two daughters. But then I met Maria, and that theory got blown out of the water."

The four of us went into the hallway, where we encountered Maria, the tall barefoot blonde glaring at all of us. "Oh great," she sneered. "Now I have the grumpy old prick and the dyke to watch me rather than the nerd and the Kiwi."

*

I was relieved to be away from Maria until my next shift, and I kept thinking about how she had called me a 'nerd'. I had copped worse from Maria and her sharp tongue and foul mouth in the past, but this expression did describe my overall appearance.

Tall and skinny with light brown hair and glasses and fairly non-descript, I did have a nerd-like appearance and one would expect me to be an IT worker, a computer programmer, an accountant or maybe a financial planner rather than a police officer. It was this that helped me blend into the background and be a very effective detective. Nobody thought I was a detective because I didn't look anything like a cop. Even though my current assignment was being a glorified babysitter for a spoiled bitch trophy wife.

Over the next week, it was the same as usual. I would take shifts with Harry, Eddie, Cassie, Tony and Angie watching Maria, and she would give all of us a hard time, or act like she was a princess and we were the peasants. She certainly had her share of personality clashes with the strict, no-nonsense veteran detective Harry.

While all this was going on Dmitry, Alexie and Ivan's high-priced lawyers were trying no end of tricks to get their clients out of remand and back into the community on bail, and to get charges dropped. Prosecution lawyers were arguing equally hard to keep the brothers in prison and to make sure the charges were not dropped, while teams of detectives were working hard to get the evidence to make murder charges against the trio stick, so they would be going to prison for life.

Sometimes I wished I was working round the clock on the team investigating the homicides rather than watching the star witness, and I would dread going out to the anonymous little witness protection house to watch her. If I came to work from Melbourne, I would pace along the Yarra River at Southbank, looking at Melbourne's tall buildings either side of the river, at the Princes Bridge and Flinders Street Station, bracing myself for what was to come. One time I nearly walked into the path of a Swanston Street tram heading for St Kilda Road because I was so distracted.