Sergeant Skip Baille had lobbed me the low-down. Some broad had called up to report an attempted murder. A low-life was out to kill her. Said she was being poisoned. Toxic tahini in her tapas. Chemical compounds in her clogs. Volatile vapours in her villa. Baille’s hightailing it to Vanuatu to avoid a payola investigation so he flicks me the case. My take is she’s a pill-popping paranoid princess. I call her. She says she’ll meet me at Dipstick’s Diner at midday. Her name’s Madame Gaia.

Dipstick’s is only around the corner but I take the Police Pontiac. I like to hear those 16 cylinders burbling. I take a booth. She walks in. I suck my cigarette down to a cinder. She’s sensational. Her legs go all the way up to her thighs. Green eyes. White face, big black shadows under her eyes. I pop a puddle of sweat but don’t act it.

She coughs blood into a lace handkerchief as she talks. Every day she feels sicker. Doctors say she’s being poisoned. She shows me the quack’s report. I quiz her about enemies. An exasperated ex or a creepy colleague? Hostile husband after life insurance? She’s negative. No man in the picture. No recent ex. Works from home in a cooperative network in the eco-services game. She’s scared. I agree to tail her.

After three weeks I had diddly-squat. I’d watched her pad day and night. No-one went in and out except her. She walked everywhere. The Pontiac didn’t like those slow trips. At least the air conditioning had time to kick in. I’d followed her to De Void’s Drugstore and interrogated old man De Void for thirty-six hours straight. Like he said, he knew nothing. I’d scanned the salami at her delicatessen. It was clean. I’d hidden in a bush in the park and watched her feed the ducks. Nothing. But every day she was walking slower and coughing more. The quack did more tests. Levels of lead, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds were up. Oxygen was down. I was no biochemist but I knew this was a case of poisoning. Some punk was pumping pathogens into this poppet. But who? Why? How? It was cryptic, confusing and confronting. I dipped into Diabolo’s Bar across from her pad to drown my sorrows.

Staring out the window I tried to put it together. This town was big, bad and beautiful. It was full of losers who could get their kicks from hurting women. Every third person was a crackhead, con-artist, cowboy, corset-stealer or conniver. On the face of it, you were lucky if at least one sad-sack scumbag wasn’t trying to murder you.

My phone beeped. "They were here . . . just now . . . toxins . . .ran off . . " She gave a soft moan. I looked over the road. Suddenly I saw it. A trail of great big footprints leading away from her pad. Seriously large. Bigger than any I’d ever seen. Had I missed something? I tossed the phone, tossed back my tequila and gave chase. The Pontiac got stuck in the first footprint. I lost the muffler climbing out but gunned it anyway. I raised rubber all the way uptown following those huge prints. They led to the Grand National Bank. I raced in. Only the manager and the accountant were there. The manager claimed he’d been busy stacking up profits and investing in exciting natural resource exploitation opportunities and hadn’t seen anything. Ditto the accountant. He’d had his head down thinking up new ways to encourage spending.

The monster footprints continued up Avarice Street. They went through Luscious Lou’s Luxury Car Yard across to the new Frigalistic Whitegoods Bonanza franchise and upstairs to the Stock Exchange. I fumed feverishly as I followed them up a fire escape. At the top I heard someone gasping. A pair of hands clung to the balcony rail. It was a small-time environmentalist, Boo Yong. A cadaverous conservationist with a caustic contempt of consumerism. It looked like this time he’d got in over his head.

I leaned over. "Who owns the footprints, Boo?"

His eyes bulged with fear.

"Gree . . . gree . . gr … g . . . "

His hands let go and he plummeted to the ground.

I turned away. There was nothing I could do for him. He was doomed to be a terminally tenderised tree-hugger. But what had he been trying to tell me? I high-tailed it to the library and quizzed the dictionary under Gree. I made a list of suspects. Greece. Greenland. Greengrocers.

But there was something eerily familiar about those footprints. I took a cast of the tread to Footwear Forensics. It was a common shoe style in all affluent countries. The tracks cris-crossed the city. They passed through houses and shops and factories and offices. They left town and ran over quarries, farmland, logged forest, water supply dams and power stations. Those footprints were everywhere. They were the monstrous mark of a malevolent megalomaniac. I drove past Boo Yong’s shack by the rail-yards. His mailbox was bulging. I tugged out his letters. There was a Clarence Environment Centre newsletter from Spring 2001. On the front cover was the mug-shot of a footprint. Inside, an article called Ecological Footprint. "Ecological footprint analysis assesses the per person material and energy requirements of a given population. It converts those requirements into hectares of land needed. It then compares the land which is required to the land which is available. This gives us a picture of the carrying capacity of the Earth, and the extent to which we are reaching it or exceeding it." I read on. There it was. "Human greed – the urge to take more than we need – is making our ecological footprint ever larger. It can only damage Gaia – the living systems of life and the environment which we call earth."

So. It was a wise-guy with a will to wallop the world.

The dead-end has its upside. Guilty people divulge information. Compliant people wise up to the people who exploit them. Tired people fold and betray their secrets. Detectives wait and lurk. Did I bring him in?

Sure I brought him in. But he walked. He walked. He was big-league with big feet and big barristers. The judge and jury bought his story. I was the only lamebrain who believed the dame.

Madame Gaia’s on medication to slow the progress of the toxins. She likes my organic eggs. I’ve converted the Pontiac into a chook-house. I prowl everywhere now. I tell people about the footprint flake. Some of them get it. Others never will. I just picked up a new book called Radical Resource Reduction. You gotta have something to read while you’re rolling with the punches.

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